The Book of Daniel (40 page)

There is a line in one of her last letters to him.
The gambler has no rights.
It is a non sequitur. It is a line that makes no other sense. Its context is one of those miserable conversations they were allowed to have through the wire mesh once a week, a marital spat, low-voiced, urgent, full of fever and humiliation
and nausea; as he tried to get her approval for what he had done alone, for the complicity he had forced upon them, for the defense they had offered, for the gamble of her life and his. She suspended all communication with him after the third appeal failed. This is usually attributed to her well-known mental problems, the court having supplied a psychologist once a week for therapy.
They want me to adjust to the idea of dying
, she wrote Ascher. But she would not write Paul the last month of their lives, and it is not clear if they saw each other the night before their execution although it is commonly believed they did. And possibly they did, for a dance before death, a reconciliation in heat and love and terror, while the jailers fled the corridor and the stones groaned and the bars rattled; and they rippled and spasmed and shook and trembled as if electrocution was something people did together.

“You’re out of your mind,” Linda Mindish said. Furiously she stabbed the cigarette into the ashtray. “I feel sorry for you. Is that why you want to see my father?” She laughed. “Oh my God, oh my God.” She stood up and smoothed her blouse and skirt.

“You don’t buy it.”

“You poor tormented boy. I knew that’s what he wanted. Some way of squirming out of it. Can you imagine?” She has turned to Dale. “Have you ever heard such a tenuous, fragile piece of nonsense? My God. Listen Danny, you’ll get no satisfaction from my father. My God, the more I think about it! Let me tell you something, because I’ve got to go. I’ve wasted enough of my time. And keep in mind I’m not afraid of you or what embarrassment you can cause me. We’re established here—you start something and you’ll be sorry. Papa didn’t tell the half of it. They were into all sorts of things that never came up at the trial. They had their hooks into space research and missiles and germ warfare—everything. Your parents were the head of a whole network. They ran the show. They planned things and they paid people off. Lasers—years before anybody heard of lasers. Everything. So don’t come to me with this worm’s-eye view and tell me my father sacrificed them. Or that my father was in a position to sacrifice anybody. You can’t squirm out of it that easily. Your parents were what
they were and nothing you can do can change that. Another couple. My God, that’s pathetic.”

“Linda, I’ve just come three thousand miles. I want more than the family line. That’s the whole point. Can I have a drink of water?” I stood up. “Just tell me where the kitchen is and I’ll get it myself.”

“You stay right there,” she said. “I’ll get it. And then I want you on your way.”

When she was out of the room I said to the lawyer, “Where’s Selig?”

He looked at me and said nothing, as if without her hand in his back he was just a piece of wood. “Selig!” I shouted. “Selig Mindish, are you here!”

Linda came back with a glass of water in a plastic green tumbler. “You’re wasting your breath.” The lawyer stood up and they both watched me drink the water,

“Ah Linda,” I said, feeling as if we were standing close quarters at a crowded party, “what has happened to you? You’re not the little hipster I used to know. When the Russians got the bomb, what happened? There were changes, right? The situation stabilized, the superpowers cooled it, and that gave the rest of us a little time. And the bomb took Russia out of the revolution. She was dragging it down, man. She was dumping on it. So that was a good thing too. A whole new possibility of action, the guerrilla, guerrilla warfare, the restoration of ancient revolutionary possibilities—that’s what happened, man. The revolution went back to the people. And look at the world today. It is aroused to its own education. It is aroused, man, the whole world is sticking up like a hard-on. Now if my own parents did their thing in their day, and that is the result of the thing they did—do you really think I’d be trying to talk myself out of it?”

She was shaking her head. “There’s something the matter with you.”

“No, Linda. You’ve turned your back on history. Look at this.” I spread my arms to indicate the house, “This isn’t the chick I knew. I am aghast, really aghast. I mean even if this is a cover it’s in bad taste. Your father really go along with this shit?”

“Dale, I want him out of here.”

“Are you really a dentist—I mean with a chair and everything?”

“It’s a put-on. That’s what they call it.”

“Please, Dale, he’s crazy.”

“It’s time to leave,” Dale said. “If you don’t remove yourself from these premises I’m going to call the police.”

“Don’t do that, Dale. Just tell me where the old man is. I’m not going to hurt him. Is he really not here?”

“No.”

“You see, Linda, look at Dale with his nice expensive suit and tie. Look at his haircut. If they were
his
parents he’d want it to be another couple. But they’re my parents. And do I look like Dale? Look at me. You see what it is now? I have to hear from Selig what you just told me. I want to know the guys he put the finger on were the guys who did it. I want to hear it from him, that’s all.”

At this moment it probably occurred to Linda that I was truly dangerous. I smiled and toasted them with the water glass. The Daniel she called pathetic was her Daniel. If her own assumptions had betrayed her, who in fact was I? And what did I really want? If you change your life you lose the connection. If you take a stand you lose touch. She became frightened. Possibly we can give her this as long as we don’t ask her to act on it: all she has accomplished is to fortify her fear. One sharp poke of the finger and the fortifications totter.

I’m familiar with the phenomenon—Susan, tell her your brother who lives in the library knew at this moment what the daughter of Selig Mindish was going through. If she was now without confidence in her judgment, she was safe only in assuming the worst. And I could see it in her face, the recognition, at last, that I had come here to wipe out her family.

“I’ve got rights too, don’t I, Linda? Think about it. Isn’t anything coming to me? Not even a minute to talk to your dad. Think about it.”

“Danny, I swear to you it won’t do any good.”

“It’ll make me feel good. And then I’ll leave and you’ll never see me again. I have a plane out of here this afternoon.”

“He’s an old man. He’s not what he was. I honestly don’t think he can help you.”

“Let me decide that.”

She looked at me. I can only speculate on her reasoning. Perhaps I had set off some fuse of recklessness; perhaps we all live with the desire for destruction, Linda no less than my sister and I. Perhaps she hated her father as well as she loved him and in some weird way was only persuaded of our community of interest in the sudden sharp perception of personal danger. If I was insane and killed Selig Mindish, would that not free her for the rest of time from all inherited guilt? She was so controlled, this Linda. What an urge to let go is in such control. Or perhaps she wished that what I said was true; so that she could discover herself as the daughter of no disgraced informer, but of an architect whose cunning had not only taken the measure of the arrogant Isaacsons but had also fooled the eye of the most powerful government in the world.

Or perhaps she only realized the vulnerability of my radical affections and thought the final cruelty would be hers.

She called her office, canceled her appointments, and with Dale at the wheel of his Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight, and Linda in the middle, and me next to her, thigh to thigh, they drove me to Anaheim, a town somewhere between Buchenwald and Belsen, where Dr. and Mrs. Selig Mindish were spending the day at Disneyland.

DISNEYLAND AT CHRISTMAS

    This famous amusement park is shaped like a womb. It is situated in a flatland of servicing motels, restaurants, gas stations, bowling alleys and other places of fun, and abuts on its own giant parking lot. A monorail darts along its periphery, in a loop that carries to the Disneyland Hotel. A replica 19th-century railroad line, the Sante Fe and Disneyland, complete with stations, conductors, steam engine and surrey type cars, delineates its circumference. Within the park itself five
major amusement areas are laid out on different themes: the American West, called Frontierland; current technology, which is called Tomorrowland; nursery literature, called Fantasyland; and Adventureland, which proposes colonialist exploration of wild jungles of big game and native villages. Customers are invited to explore each area and its delights according to their whim. In the center of the park, where all the areas converge, there is a plaza; and the fifth thematic area, an avenue called Main Street USA, a romantic rendering of small-town living at the turn of the century, leads like the birth canal from the plaza to the entrance to the park.

As in all amusement parks the featured experience is the ride, or trip. The notability of Disneyland is its elaboration of this simple pleasure. You will not find the ordinary roller coaster or Ferris wheel except disguised as a bobsled ride down a plastic Matterhorn, or a “people mover.” In toy submarines with real hatches, the customer experiences a simulated dive underwater, as bubbles rise past the portholes and rubber fish wag their tails. The submarines are said to be nuclear and bear the names of ships of the American nuclear fleet. Disneyland invites the customer not merely to experience the controlled thrills of a carny ride, but to participate in mythic rituals of the culture. Your boat ride is a Mississippi sternwheeler. Your pony ride is a string of pack mules going over the mountains to where the gold is. The value of the experience is not the ride itself but its vicariousness.

Two problems arise in the customer’s efforts to fulfill Disneyland’s expectations of him. The first is that for some reason while the machinery of the rides is impressively real—that is to say, technologically perfect and historically accurate—the simulated plant and animal and geological surroundings are unreal. When you take the jungle river cruise the plants and animals on the banks betray their plastic being and electronic motivation. The rocks of the painted desert or grand canyon cannot sustain the illusion of even the least sophisticated. The second difficulty is that Disneyland is usually swarming with people. People are all over the place in Disneyland. Thus the customers on the Mark Twain Mississippi steamboat look into the hills and see the customers
on the mule pack train looking down at them. There is a constant feedback of human multiplicity, one’s own efforts of vicarious participation constantly thwarted by the mirror of others’ eyes.

Within the thematic unities of Disneyland, there are numbers of references, usually in the form of rides, exhibits or stores, to figures or works of our literary heritage. Some of these are Alice in Wonderland (Mad Hatter’s Teacup Ride), Peter Pan (Peter Pan Flight), Life on the Mississippi (Mark Twain River-boat), Wind in the Willows (Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride), Swiss Family Robinson (Swiss Family Tree House), and Tom Sawyer (Tom Sawyer’s Island Rafts). In addition there are implications of proprietary relationships with various figures of history, myth and legend such as King Arthur, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Casey Jones, Mike Fink, Jean Lafitte, and Abraham Lincoln. It is hard to find a pattern in the selection of these particular figures. Most of them have passed through a previous process of film or film animation and are made to recall the preemptive powers of the Disney organization with regard to Western culture. But beyond that no principle of selection is obvious. It is interesting to note, however, that Walt Disney’s early achievements in his original medium, the animated cartoon, employed animal characters of his own devising. The animated cartoon itself, except for Disney’s subsequent climb into the respectability of public domain literature, came to express the collective unconsciousness of the community of the American Naïve. A study today of the products of the animated cartoon industry of the twenties, thirties and forties would yield the following theology: 1. People are animals. 2. The body is mortal and subject to incredible pain. 3. Life is antagonistic to the living. 4. The flesh can be sawed, crushed, frozen, stretched, burned, bombed, and plucked for music 5. The dumb are abused by the smart and the smart destroyed by their own cunning. 6. The small are tortured by the large and the large destroyed by their own momentum. 7. We are able to walk on air, but only as long as our illusion supports us. It is possible to interpret the Disney organization’s relentless program of adaptation of literature, myth and legend, as an attempt to escape these dark and rowdy conclusions of the genre—in the same way a tenement
kid from the Lower East Side might have grown up with the ambition of building himself a mansion on Fifth Avenue. Yet, ironically, many of the stories and characters chosen by Disney for their cultural respectability are just as dark and just as rowdy. The original
Alice in Wonderland
is a symbolic and surreal work by a benign deviate genius. Mark Twain was an atheist and a pornographer, and his great work,
Huckleberry Finn
, is a nightmare of childhood in confrontation with American social reality. In this light it is possible to understand the aesthetics of cartoon adaptation as totalitarian in nature.

It is clear that few of the children who ride in the Mad Hatter’s Teacup have read or even will read
Alice
, let alone the works of Mark Twain. Most of them will only know Alice’s story through the Disney film, if at all. And that suggests a separation of two ontological degrees between the Disneyland customer and the cultural artifacts he is presumed upon to treasure in his visit. The Mad Hatter’s Teacup Ride is emblematic of the Disney animated film, which is itself a drastic revision in form and content of a subtle dreamwork created out of the English language. And even to an adult who dimly remembers reading the original
Alice
, and whose complicated response to this powerfully symbolic work has long since been incorporated into the psychic constructs of his life, what is being offered does not suggest the resonance of the original work, but is only a sentimental compression of something that is itself already a lie.