Darling Clementine (21 page)

I get as far as “The great beast dies,” when the gambler finally manages to blink and say “Hey!” at the same moment—but that's okay, writing this down is enough to let me know: it's coming, all of it, and I've got to get home.

I hail a cab and collapse into the back with a sigh of relief: cabbies always carry pencils to keep their trip sheets with, and I am safe till we get home. Again, with the pressure lifted, the first lines of the poem just sort of float there on the surface of my mind like the first risen timber of a sunken ship. We sputter through the thick lunch hour traffic until we get to Park and then we breeze uptown.

I have been holding back, but as we turn onto 81st Street, I let myself go and am paying the man as I get—always going back to the beginning to make sure I haven't left anything behind:

The great beast dies

And vestal whores, their bare breasts lifted

To the holocaust skies,

Extend their arms

For the fragments of his body's empire,

Falling and falling.

I am in the tortured throes of the realization that I am going to have to move the period back to empire and use falling and falling as the transition into my next thought or be caught in the prologue forever, when I step out of the cab and look up to see three—count 'em—three police cars with flashers swirling, crowded together in the space before the awning of my building. My muse—no fragile darling and generally startled into speech—is startled into silence as I run forward to investigate.

I have always, in these instances, an immediate assumption that whatever is happening has something to do with me which usually vanishes as common sense prevails. Common sense is prevailing when the doorman turns and sees me and shouts to the army of cops at die elevator, “Here she is.”

I am surrounded by our men in blue and am between beginning to fear that Arthur is dead and becoming absolutely positive that Arthur is dead when one of them says,

“Are you Samantha Clementine?”

I'm positive. “Yes,” I plead.

“Do you know a man who calls himself God?”

My mind snaps clear: The great beast falls … “Yes.”

“Would you come with us please?”

“Of course,” I say firmly: Falling and falling until this eye, this shattered eye …

I am in the back of the patrol car and off we zip, sirens blaring. I have never been in a police car before, let alone with sirens. It is fun.

“What's happened?” I call to the two men in front: dark-haired, heavy-bearded veterans both. This shattered eye has sprinkled on the grass.

The cop in the passenger seat calls back to me: “This guy God walked into a daycare center an hour ago with a high-powered rifle and started screaming. He's got two teachers and nineteen two and three-year-old kids in there, and he says he's gonna kill 'em if he doesn't talk to you.”

The cop driving shouts back: “He says he's gonna kill 'em after he talks to you, too.”

I think: Has sprinkled on the grass, yet nothing is in fragments that we knew … I think: Oh, shut up.

“You got my name through Lifeline?”

“Yeah,” says passenger cop. Traffic is stopping for us and we are speeding across the 59th Street Bridge toward Queens with a cop car before us and one in back for escort. It is quite thrilling. “Hey,” he says, “you're not Andy Clementine's wife, are you, in the D.A.'s office?”

“Yes,” I shout. “Arthur.”

“Yeah, right, Arthur,” he says, and smirks at his partner who smirks back.

In my hyper-attuned state, I somehow understand this joke at once—with the same sense of excitement and clarity I felt when halfway through
The Ambassadors
I realized that Lambert Strether was so named because he was a proxy Christ and the two Mary's and his selfless mission and everything all fell into place and, anyway, the point is that if Arthur is Andy, Jones is Amos, and this is New York's finest's revenge for their work in indicting their grandma-killing confrère. When the thrill of revelation dies—fast—gloom descends: I am in hostile territory, among dangerous men. Arthur is traveling from meeting to meeting. Elizabeth is waiting in the airport for the three o'clock flight to Geneva. I am alone.

Belligerently, I jut my chin and think:

The great beast dies,

And vestal whores, their bare breasts lifted

To the holocaust skies,

Extend their arms

For the fragments of his body's empire,

And ceremonies will begin at noon

To obscure the faded thrill

Of his falling and falling.

This eye, this shattered eye,

Has sprinkled on the grass,

Yet nothing is in fragments that we knew,

And where his phallus fell,

There grows a naked tree,

And you and I, we scrambled to the top like monkeys …

We are in Queens: I do not know where we are. All Queens is divided into one part to me: two-family brick houses with little yards and laundry fluttering on the lines between one woman's daydreams and another's despair. But then, we are on a Main Street, a long business district. I am struck for some reason by a store that sells Indian saris and home appliances. And then, we turn a corner, and there are four million police cars, and policemen and women in uniforms and plainclothes crouching behind the cars, and many of them are pointing rifles at a little white two-storied barracks across the street that has a large picture window on the second story, and a door on the first with a rainbow painted on the sign above it and the words, “Rainbow Daycare Center” in different colored letters.

Everything happens very fast. I get out of the car and am whisked in a squadron of policemen toward a small grocery store across the street from the center that is apparently being used as command central. I see the faces of women—the mothers—drawn and sorrowful, skim past me. Then I have only time to feel the heaviness of fear sink down on top of me as I pass close by all those guns: pistols and rifles. There is something very substantial—untheoretical—weighty—and fatal—about a gun.

I am in the grocery store—swept through the door—and a man is introducing himself as Captain Cerone. He is short for a man, about two inches taller than me: a substantial piece of black suit with close-cropped hair and worried eyes, and the scratchy jaw that seems to be a requirement for joining the force. Something, come to think of it, about all these men—men everywhere—big, burly men—with guns no less—is beginning to make me feel very beardless.

I brace myself by checking on my poem: it is still there. The captain has me by the elbow and is guiding me with a sort of weary chivalry past the tomatoes and the dairy freezer to the deli counter behind which is the phone. He is giving me instructions but at this point I am in a daze—depressed, frightened, girlishly inadequate, frightened, teary, frightened, frightened—and can't make sense of them. Cerone is reassuring me and I hate him for it, but then he calls me Mrs. Clementine and I feel reassured. I try to think if I have heard any of his instructions: I remember I am not supposed to promise God anything and to keep him calm, but that sounds like the Old Testament to me. Then—too quickly, far too quickly—someone is putting the telephone receiver—and the lives of nineteen babies—into my hand.

I hold the phone to my ear. Someone guides me to a stool and I sit down behind the butcher's block. There are yellow legal-size papers scattered before me and a few pens. I eye the pens hungrily and lick my lips.

“Hello?” I say.

There is a long silence. I see men's faces intent all around me—bodiless, floating, judging. Then: “Sam?”

I feel myself relax at once. There is only the phone—the darkness of the phone and voices—there is only me and God. I am on familiar ground.

“God,” I say, trying to take on my usual tone of control, “Sweetie, what are you doing?”

“Well,” he says, “what I thought is I figured I'm going to first kill all these kids and these two teachers and then myself.”

I fight off the urge to scream something sensible like “What?” and say: “Okay. Why are you going to do that?”

“It's just time,” he says—and there is an authority, a self-assurance in his voice that I have never heard before. That and the fact that I do not hear any children crying in the background turn my heart into an anvil. “It's just time to stop all this nonsense,” he says, “and do the job. She shouldn't have hurt me and the missiles and I'm going to stop it and bring it back.”

Paralyzed, I'm brilliant. “You sound very upset,” I say.

“No. The world's a daisy. Don't pull that Lifeline shit on me, Sam.”

I do not apologize. We are battling for control of the situation, he and I, and I care about God, and if he wins, he loses.

“All right,” I say, “then why do you want to talk to me?”

“Well, if you don't want to, hang up.”

We both wait a bit, and then I say firmly: “Why do you want to talk to me?”

And another beat, more dangerous. If he answers my question, he cedes a little authority to me. I half expect to hear the shots go off. I sit there like a statue.

“I wanted to say goodbye,” he says.

“I think maybe you want me to forgive you,” I answer.

“I don't want to die alone, Samantha.”

“I don't want you to die at all.”

He yells—but it is a yell of anguish, which I take to be a good sign. He yells: “I can't! I can't! I have to! I have to!”

I don't know what this means—perhaps, in the stress of the situation, I have forgotten—and in the absence of an answer, I think: Brimstone vapors pluming from the gaping lips and curling through the canyons of the ear that lies there on its side …

“Sam?” he says softly.

Reflexively, I reach for a pen and begin to snap its point in and out with my thumb.

“Yes,” I say.

“I think I have to go now,” he says.

“I think the first thing we have to do,” I say quickly, “is get those kids out of there.”

He is silent.

“Okay?” I say. “They have nothing to do with this, God.”

“Oh, Sam.” His voice breaks. “I'm sorry. Forgive me, okay?”

“I'm your friend, God.”

“You're my only friend.”

“We have to get those children out of there before they get hurt.”

He yells again, crying now: “That's all you care about. What is that, the fucking maternal instinct?”

“Well—” I say steadily, “do you think it's right to kill children?”

And I realize by the swiftness of his answer, by its tone of rehearsal, that this is what he's been waiting for, this is the crux of his self-justification. “It is when God does it,” he says.

My own stupidity, and the petty pleasure he gets out of catching me up, makes me mad. “Damn it,” I say, “I'm not so thrilled when He does it, and you're not God.”

Cerone's eyes expand to the size of Frisbees and he gestures at me with both hands to calm down. To hell with Cerone.

But he's right. I have blown it. The situation falls apart in my hands like a mouldy rose. God starts ranting: “The rage of Marcodel released … The triumph of Death … Now is the moment …”

And, panicked, I am fighting to stop thinking: … the canyons of the ear that lies there on its side, have poisoned several of the parks, and yet the hideous thunders …

God has worked himself up to a fever pitch. Cerone's eyes are pleading with me. All around the grocery, men's eyes are turning to the picture window across the street, waiting, waiting …

“God,” I shout, “stop this right now!”

He stops. The entire room is a held breath. We are all now waiting, our eyes on nothing, our ears pricking, waiting for the shots.

I take a big swallow. “Look,” I say, “it's time to come out. Come out to me.”

I hear God crying, fighting for air. “Why should I?”

“Because I'm your friend …”

“Oh yeah.”

“And I love you. I'm your friend and I love you,” and I am and I do, “that's why.”

Grimly, finally, he answers: “I don't know you, Samantha.”

“That's not true, God. That's not true and you know it isn't.”

“I don't even know what you look like.”

“Come out, then, and see.”

“I don't even know what you look like.”

“You know what I
am
like.”

He screams, raging, crying: “I don't even know what you
look
like!”

I am about to describe myself when I am suddenly as sure as if it were the written thing that if I do, the massacre will begin.

Instead, I say, “If I show you, will you come out?”

And, like a sulky child, he answers: “Show me.”

“Hold on,” I say.

I put the phone on hold and set it down.

“What?” says Cerone.

I am staring at the paper on the butcher block, clicking the pen in and out in my hand. Should I write down what I have beforehand, just in case? Does it matter? When I have fears that I might cease to be …

Somebody calls quietly from further down the deli counter: “He wants her to go out there,” and I realize, with a sense of violation, that someone else has been listening to the call.

“I have to show him my face,” I tell Cerone.

“No,” says Cerone.

“There is no no.”

“There is no, and it's my no and it's no,” says Cerone. “Talk to him some more.”

I look up from the paper. “I can't reach him. He's gone beyond me. I have to show him my face.”

“No,” says Cerone.

“He's about to start,” I tell him. “I know him. He's about to start. Methodically. Calmly. He's not even upset anymore. I could talk to him when he was upset. He's calm now—I calmed him down. Now, he's going to kill them.”

Cerone turns to another plainclothesman. “Get them ready to go in.”