The Old Man and Mr. Smith Read online

  ‘You always see the positive side,’ grumbled Mr Smith. ‘I suppose it’s normal. Virtue is somehow tied to optimism. The vocational beatitude of priests is its trademark, and it drives me down a pole. But in all this, can there be no thought for how vice has become degraded? Mechanical and cold? I shall never forget that bulbous whore with her vulgar catalogue of pleasures, catering for the preselected delights of dull man. What is the point of carnality if it is not the result of a kind of burning folly, something uncontrollable and yet, in the act, controlled? If whip you must, whip like the divine Marquis de Sade, right up to the gates of death. If you must suffer, suffer like a martyr. If screw you must, screw like Casanova—’

  ‘He only wrote about it—’

  ‘So I chose a bad example. You know what I mean. There is no price for passion except the gift of oneself. Only tarnished illusions can be for sale, and they are so far from the truth they are as counterfeit as your money, and yet the commerce of the body is legal tender.’

  ‘As long as it is paid for in legal dollars,’ added the Old Man with a twinkle, and then he went on, in a different tone, ‘You know, we have found out so little thus far, there is really not much point in exchanging impressions. Admittedly you know more than I do, since you keep reading your soiled newspapers so assiduously. But there must be a quicker way by now to place a finger on the public pulse.’

  ‘There is,’ said Mr Smith, pointing to a small cube.

  ‘That? What is it?’

  ‘Television. I saw a child fiddling with one at the airport. The father was intent on watching some kind of ball game. The child kept turning the knob to glimpse other channels. I don’t know who won. I had to run for my shuttle.’

  ‘How does it work?’

  Mr Smith, despite his pleas for passion, was good with technical things, far better than the Old Man, whose plane was loftier and less down to earth. In a trice the set was switched on, and revealed a group of middle-aged men with long hair and curious headgear shooting indiscriminately in a supermarket with all manner of firearms. One woman shopper had her head literally blown off by machine-gun fire. A man loaded with supplies was punctured, red holes appearing in his back, charred ones in the supplies. The whole exercise went into slow motion in a hideous choreography of death, blood splashed like milk in a wild exaggeration of factual possibility, while on the soundtrack, besides the obligatory screams of panic, there was an infuriating little tune played by a reduced jazz combo, with a piano as calculatedly out of tune as the events it illustrated.

  Once the carnage was over, and staff and shoppers lay strewn in every alleyway like broken toys, the intruders began to load up the supermarket carts with supplies, and then found, to their evident annoyance, and amid bouts of filthy language and wild hoots and indistinguishable dialogue, that it was tough work lifting the full carts over the dead bodies.

  The Old Man and Mr Smith watched the horror with stony faces until the end, or rather, till just before the end, since by the end Mr Smith was asleep again.

  The film was apparently called Return from Strawberry Bunker, and was advertised in the guide which the hotel had placed on the TV set as a serious drama about the disenfranchised men back from the nightmare of Vietnam faced with both a hostile homecoming and supermarkets swollen with goodies. It said, gratuitously, ‘This is a film which no thinking and feeling American can afford to miss.’

  The Old Man nudged Mr Smith, who woke with a start.

  ‘What happened in the end?’ he asked, but then modified his eagerness. ‘No, don’t tell me, I don’t give a shit.’

  ‘Your language is influenced by what you heard.’

  ‘That could be, and I apologize. There is nothing I would less like to be influenced by than that film.’

  ‘Is that what it was, a film?’

  ‘Yes, and it succeeded in putting me to sleep – twice in twelve hours! It’s a disgrace.’

  ‘I failed to understand the film, although I succeeded in staying awake. So, be reassured, you have missed nothing. It says in the little book that the film’s rating is PG. And then, in an explanatory note, it further states that PG stands for Parental Guidance. Can you envisage a parent worthy of the name actually advising his child to witness such a mindless carnage?’

  ‘To keep the little bastards out of mischief, some parents will choose almost any solution.’

  ‘Even watching this?’

  ‘Listen,’ said Mr Smith, ‘in some less developed parts of this world the sight of their parents copulating goes under the name of children’s entertainment, and there is far more reason to label such activity as PG, since, in a very real sense, it is educational.’

  The Old Man was saddened by this revelation, and fiddled disconsolately with the knobs. The Mayor of Albany appeared briefly to explain why trashcans were sometimes collected by non-union labour, and a hall full of women exchanged confidential information about the sexual shortcomings of alcoholic husbands. On yet another of the innumerable channels, three rabbis argued about what constituted Jewishness. They were, of course, not in agreement, and were, moreover, impervious to compromise in any form. There was a man selling used cars with the help of an Old English Sheepdog, who had been trained to leap onto the roof of the cars and bark. There was a woman explaining the latest natural disaster, a flood in Utah, to the Portuguese community. And, at last, another film, in which five policemen, recognizable as such, though walking with the hesitant gait of robots, or with artificial limbs all round, limped down a street, taking up all the sidewalk. Their eyes were glazed, their features stiff; only their trigger-fingers seemed to have the sensibility required by a full life.

  Before them, a handful of evident gangsters stumbled over each other trying to get away. There was the inevitable black man in a knitted tam-o’-shanter and dark glasses, who expressed his fear in high coloratura shrieks. The leader of the mob, a white sweatband round his hair, mean eighteenth-century glasses and a cigarette in a holder, seemed less inclined to flight than the others, only retreating grudgingly. He was wrong, for the shooting began on a signal from a zombie in an armoured command car.

  The policemen began shooting in a wild cacophony, their eyes even more glazed than before. It seemed as though they were lousy shots since only one gangster was mortally wounded, leaping high in the air, diving over a parapet, and landing in a cement mixer in a building-site crater, some forty feet lower than the level of the street.

  ‘Re-load,’ instructed the zombie in the command car, his face expressing a kind of vacant satisfaction. The uniformed puppets did as they were told, as though by numbers.

  It was time for the gangsters to fire back. Some bits of uniform were charred, but the police were evidently bulletproof.

  ‘Fire,’ said the zombie, and once again the police let loose a blinding, ear-splitting barrage, once again only managing to kill one more gangster, who was blown through the glass of a shop window, ending up dead in the arms of a manikin in evening dress.

  Since there were upwards of a dozen gangsters, and the police could apparently only manage to kill one per five magazines, this butchery took quite a time, and only terminated when the chief, who was, of course, chased over rooftops as the end of the film approached, in order to have further to fall, laughed insanely at the irony of fate. The noise attracted the attention of one of the mechanical police, who lifted his eyes upwards, unlike the others who were still awaiting instructions. A twitch indicated a subtle return to a degree of humanity. His gaze switched from the glazed to an expression which suggested that he was recapturing the horrors of past events. With a terrific effort of concentration he aimed his pistol, and with a great cry of, ‘That’s for my dead buddies!’, shot the chief at a range of three hundred yards.

  The chief swayed, and then launched himself into space, falling at the foot of a pump in a gas station. The expression on his face was beatific considering the extent of his fall, and to match this miracle with one even more impressive, the cigarette in the holder was still alight, clenched between locked jaws.

  The last embers fell into a pool of petrol, and the screen blew up in a fitting coda for such a story, a blaze huge enough to devour all questions and all answers, all details and all broad story lines, all credibility, everything.

  ‘What was all that about?’ asked Mr Smith.

  The Old Man looked it up in the brochure. ‘It was called Phantom Precinct, and it was the story of dead policemen resuscitated by a dead sergeant who had found a way of bringing them all, including himself, back to a sort of half-life. They existed as automatons, bent on nothing but vengeance. The sergeant, being a sergeant, had a superior half-life to the men, able to take limited initiatives. In the end, Patrolman O’Mara rises to the rank of semi-posthumous sergeant by shaking himself free from the constraints of blind obedience. He wrenches himself back to a fuller consciousness by shouting, “That’s for my dead buddies!” as he topples the arch-villain from the roof with a single shot, a feat which speaks volumes about the rigorous training at the Police Academy. It once again ends with the claim that no American family can afford to miss this inspiring story of courage and refusal to accept death as a final answer. And I don’t have to tell you the rating.’

  ‘PG?’

  ‘PG.’

  * * *

  They watched movies unrelievedly from five thirty in the morning until half past three in the afternoon. Every hour or so an irritating maid tapped her keys on the door with a sing-song call of ‘Just checking,’ but apart from that there was no interruption to the spate of lunatic senators and the chiefs of secret government laboratories eager to seize power for themselves in the name of patriotism, democracy and the rest, only to be thwarted in the nick of time by the initiative, vision, or special power
s of an individual.

  ‘The desire for immortality is everywhere evident, and it is most disturbing,’ said the Old Man, as he lay on the bed exhausted by ten hours of crossfire with virtually nothing to engage the mind. ‘Suppose they really find a way not to die? It will be too expensive at first for most people, and so only the idiots with inherited wealth or the criminals with new wealth will survive to give the immortal world its standards. The poor fools. Don’t they realize that it is mortality which gives the world its yardstick of quality? If Beethoven had been immortal, there would have been hundreds of symphonies, infinitely repetitive, and eventually indistinguishable from each other even in degrees of mediocrity. In such a world senility would be as contagious as the common cold, and births of children would be rarer and rarer, each one being eventually heralded by a national holiday, while civilization, all that man has painstakingly built for himself, which went by the name of progress, would be frittered away in the growing darkness of incapacity, toothless grins, rivulets of saliva from the corners of the mouth, mucus moving like ice-cold lava from the encumbered nostrils being the last signs of life of my most happy daydream.’

  The Old Man’s eyes were moist with tears.

  Mr Smith spoke compassionately, but still with a pinch of self-deprecating irony. ‘You need no eloquence, my dear,’ he said. ‘As an argument against immortality, need you look further than you and I?’

  The Old Man grabbed Mr Smith’s extended hand and gripped it tightly, closing his eyes and assuming an air of majestic gravity.

  After a moment, Mr Smith wanted his hand back, but could not think how to engineer this. ‘I don’t see why any of the murderous stuff we have observed is commercial,’ he said, trying to change the subject. The Old Man failed to reply, so Mr Smith went on, ‘Do people pay good money to be scared out of their wits, deafened to a point of utter stultification, dazzled, bullied, and bastinadoed into submission? Is what we have seen entertainment?’

  The Old Man opened his eyes without releasing Mr Smith’s hand. ‘It’s like the old arguments of the Jesuits. Admittedly, Cesare Borgia and the Sacred Inquisition were reprehensible moments in a sublime history, but what a religion to be able to survive such moments, and emerge the stronger for them! America sees itself as a society so infinitely desirable and indomitably powerful that it is capable of encouraging every challenge to what it imagines to be its moral supremacy, and still come out on top. All the films we have seen express the same absurd optimism, in which the dice are loaded in favour of the righteous, while giving the impression until the denouement of being loaded in favour of the corrupt. In any case, there’s one thing you can count on, that the dice are loaded. And the moral posture is inflexible, even if vice seems to be rampant and dishonesty rewarded. But it’s always a photo finish. Always. That, I suppose, is where entertainment must come in. Although right must win through (that is statutory), the risk must be made to seem enormous, even opposed to the law of averages, unfair. The ultimate glory is all the greater.’

  ‘Strange to hear you refer to optimism as absurd. It is what I have sometimes called yours. Stranger still to hear you refer to the inheritors of old wealth as idiots and the creators of new wealth as criminals. Those are overstatements worthy of me. Uncharacteristically, you took the words right out of my mouth.’

  ‘We cannot avoid influencing one another,’ said the Old Man emotionally, tightening his grip on Mr Smith’s hand.

  Mr Smith continued, ‘I think, you see, that in this country the pervasive corruption alleged by the films we have seen is a necessary and indeed flattering adjunct to its immense wealth. Without such wealth, such opportunity for wealth, there would be no reason for corruption, no reason for poverty, no reason for practically everyone to carry guns. Did you notice in the films, as danger approached, several times a hand would slide open a drawer to make sure the gun was still in place? In practically all the films we saw this happened at least once. And yet we saw none of the poverty we could notice out of the corner of an eye as we rode through the city – the derelicts asleep, or drunk, or drugged, or dead, on the sidewalk, the tenements with broken glass in many windows, the streets as playgrounds. I suspect there is a reason for this.’ And his eyes narrowed as he searched for the right words.

  ‘I have read and heard much about the American Dream. Nobody defines it. Nobody dares. It sits, an ectoplasmic presence as hard to crystallize as your obscure invention, the Holy Ghost, on the altar of American consciousness. It is, by definition, unattainable, and yet no effort must be spared to attempt the impossible. At its most tangible, it is an extension of the hopes and prayers of the Founding Fathers, adapted by endless amendments to the constantly changing conditions of the modern world. At its most irritating it is a glow, silhouetting gothic shapes, and vibrating with voices singing in unison. But, you see, I think it already exists, this dream, or compendium of dreams, in a form both nefarious and deeply destructive.’

  ‘Oh, where?’ asked the Old Man, slightly nervous.

  ‘Here,’ replied Mr Smith, tapping the television affectionately, as though it were the head of a child.

  ‘The television? The television is a means, not an end. Like the telephone, or the aeroplane. You can’t blame the wretched instruments for the uses to which men have put them!’

  ‘The end is served by such means. My whole point. The American Dream is an ongoing fantasy, as they would say, an endless parade of notions too advanced for others to have, but with solutions too simple for others to countenance. The dreams are contained in half-hour, hour, sometimes two-hour segments. Their message is that bullets settle arguments, that faith is not so much simple as simple-minded, and that whereas men are free, they are expected to submit themselves to the dictatorship of righteousness as spelled out in the Bible. It is not only entertainment which has to obey these pious strictures, but politics is also a branch of what is known as show business. And, without wishing to shock you, so is religion.’

  ‘You do shock me. Of course you do. But what a relief and an inspiration it is to have a serious conversation with you. I will go as far as to say, one can learn a great deal by disagreeing with you,’ said the Old Man, cozily.

  Mr Smith turned on the television.

  ‘Oh no, I don’t want to see any more television, not just yet,’ the Old Man cried.

  ‘You don’t believe me. There are upwards of forty channels. There must be something religious going on somewhere.’ He switched from one channel to another with growing impatience. Suddenly the screen filled with a face of a man who seemed to be in the last throes of agony, tears mingling with perspiration, vibrating on his cheeks and forehead like tapioca.

  ‘This looks like religion,’ muttered Mr Smith.

  ‘It could be delirium tremens,’ suggested the Old Man coyly. Just then, the man found a voice, a poor cracked organ pushed beyond its normal capacity by sheer will-power.