Why these thoughts – which, by the way, predated September 2001?…In 2010 or thereabouts (long after the phase had passed), he arrived at an explanation, partly trivial, partly universal (perhaps), and almost insultingly obvious.
He was fifty-two and he stood on a lowered drawbridge held flat and taut by burnished steel chains, smoking, and waiting for his wife. Ah, here she was…
Shock and Awe
‘The novel is more capacious,’ Jed Slot was saying. ‘The short story, on the other hand, is more uh, more confined.’
‘But yes,’ said Jed’s interviewer, a nervous, hard-living redhead of his own age, who tremblingly brandished a foot-long cigarette-holder and a tasselled rosary. ‘The short story can be plus pur, no?…Uh, more purer. The reality uh, reality, is atomisé, no? Granulaire. Et deffracté. So is the short story somehow less compromis? Less uh, compromised than the novel?’
Slot pounced. ‘The story is less comprehensive than the novel. In a short story you’re more aware of limitations of space. So the story provides fewer…’
I paid the extras on the bill and went upstairs for the bag, into which Elena was forcing stray pairs of shoes. I said,
‘It’s a good job Jed brought his thesaurus with him from Buffalo. He might get through the whole six weeks without saying shorter or longer.’
‘Don’t be mean. We’ve got to say our fondest farewells to poor dear Jed.’
‘You know that little nook to the side downstairs? They’ve got your book in there and my book, and the complete Jed Slot – in French and English. I did some browsing while you were having your massage. And there’s no difference at all except the stories are shorter than the novels.’
‘And the novels are longer than the stories.’
‘And I’ll tell you why he made you uneasy. Physically uneasy. He’s a woman-hater, El. Whenever a chick walks in, his whole tone goes weird. He coolly “sees through her”, he thinks, but it’s all fantasy and paranoia. Very striking.’
She said, ‘I don’t think he’s a woman-hater. More like a resenter. He’s just sexually unlucky…Well things should perk up for him now. Now he’s taken seriously.’
‘Maybe. Yeah, maybe they will a bit.’
‘But not by much. The trouble is he’s still queasy and bitter. I booked our cab.’
‘That’s why he’s sick enough to please the French. They don’t mind writers being aggressive about women. Odd, when you think that political correctness was born and raised in France. They don’t mind Beckett saying So I kicked her in the cunt. When’s it coming, our cab?’
‘Not till twelve.’
‘Hitch must be on pins.’
‘Why particularly?’
‘It’s almost upon us, Pulc. Six hours to go. Shock and Awe.’
—————
Shock and Awe was the nickname of the doctrine officially entitled Rapid Dominance. The idea, according to military philosophers, military poets, and military dreamers, was to induce in the enemy a state of hysterical disorientation. High-tech ‘precision engagement’ would minimise civilian casualties while inflicting ‘nearly incomprehensible levels of mass destruction’; US forces should also be ready to shut down communications, transport, food production, and water supply, in which case the Shock part of it would be ‘national’.
‘Given all that,’ he said to his wife, ‘at what point are they supposed to feel like dancing in the street?’
‘They may do. No more Saddam. We’ll see.’
Certain locations in Baghdad were being bombarded on March 19. March 20 saw boots on the ground and Running Start. On March 21 it would be the turn of Shock and Awe, scheduled for 17.00 GMT.
And March 21 was today.
‘Did you ring the Jews?’
‘Yes,’ said Elena.
‘And they’re all right?’
‘They’re fine.’ The Jews were their daughters (and they were full Jews too, by the ancient law of matrilinearity, and could simply walk into Israel as full citizens). Eliza and Inez were also known as the rats, the poems, the fools, and the flowers. ‘Right. Allons.’
It would’ve made a better – and slightly longer – short story if the Hôtel Méridien was a citadel of swinish luxury; in fact it was a modest three-star (representing a 1950s vision of modernity: their room looked like the guest quarters of a Sussex polytechnic). But he for one was taking his leave with a heavy regret, lightened only by this dependable truth: being away from home makes home seem exotic (and at this stage the little girls seemed almost other-worldly). He wanted to get back to his house and his desk – but not to his silences and his circling thoughts…
While Elena was making her final inspection he opened the window and stuck his head out of it: under one vast and lonely cloud (as wispily flotational as an elderly combover), in freakish sunshine, little figures paddling, splashing, jumping, running…He remembered being a boy and running as fast as he could across sand;*4 a year or two ago he was able to remember this with his whole body, but now he just pictured it or half-imagined it. That boy was further away from him than he used to be, running across sand, running away from him across sand…
Looking out, he listened. ‘The distant bathers’ weak protesting trebles’; and he silently recited the closing lines of the poem:
If the worst
Of flawless weather is our falling short,
It may be that through habit these do best,
Coming to water clumsily undressed
Yearly; teaching their children by a sort
Of clowning; helping the old, too, as they ought.
Those last seven words. When he first read them (in the collection High Windows in 1979), he was thirty; and he considered it a right-minded and dignified conclusion; in March 2003 he saw their grim duteousness – and his eye kept straying left to the word clowning. The old fools, the old clowns. That would be years away. But it was limping ever closer…
What you see here is a man in his fifties. Your fifties – the Crap Decade.
‘Now today we’re going to have to have a change of heart.’
‘Oh?’ she
