Why? In case it’s a woman.
The parallaxes of the stockyards shift and quake. Industry is coming to the city. Gas is cheap. Things move faster than they used to. The insane have been taken off the street; we don’t ask where they’ve disappeared to. Never ask. It’s better if you never ask. No longer the nomads, the nightrunners . . . Instead there is a burly altruism abroad. People all have jobs now, at the steel mill and the auto plant. They wash the wind. Just as they clean up all the trash and litter, they also clean up the earth and the sky, transmogrifying cars, turning tools, parts, weapons, bolts, into carbon and iron. They’ve really got to grips with their environmental problems, facing them squarely, with common purpose. Time for talk is over. There is no talk. Just action. To total sickness you bring total cure. Now there’s less room for thought and for feeling, and it seems a great tiredness is good for keeping people steady. Work liberates: Friday evenings, as they move off toward it, how they laugh and shout and roll their shoulders.
Tod loves crowds. In crowds you can be a leader without anyone noticing. Like with the flared pants. He’s been sporting those flares of his for quite some time and now everyone is into them. Also the flower shirts and the unctuous neckerchiefs, and that caftan or dhoti he dons at weekends—white, and similar in cut to his surgical smock, but with different associations. It’s disgusting at his age, I agree, but old people do it and no young people say they can’t. Fashion is crowds. Tod wears the red armband too, along with everybody else. Crowds make me paranoid and claustrophobic but Tod seeks and loves the company of crowds. With rapture and relief he elides with the larger unit, the glowing mass. He sheds the thing he often can’t seem to bear: his identity, his quiddity, lost in the crowd’s promiscuity. My presence is never tinier. But it’s the same story. Render up your soul, and gain power.
Under thunderheads, beneath cloudcover like a coated tongue with a doctor’s penlight playing on it, as in a dark carnival, we protest the Vietnam War, with vivified, uplifted faces, with the press of bodies all moving the same way, and with that sense of being both lost and right, lost and right. We’re half a mile long and young and old and white and black and girl and boy, looking for a monster to kill or create. Signs and banners say the usual things about peace, about war, together with more particular demands like END DE FACTO SEGREGATION and FIRE MRS. AINTREY. Tod Stares at FIRE MRS. AINTREY. He doesn’t want to fire Mrs. Aintrey. He probably wants to find Mrs. Aintrey—and love her up. He certainly couldn’t give two shits about the Vietnam War. Neither is he here, in fairness, just to get women. On the contrary: he’s here to get rid of them, to lose them, to drift away from them in the heat and safety of the crowd.
There is another war coming. Oh, yes, we do know that. A big war, a world war, which will roll through villages. It wearies me to imagine the preparations that will prove necessary, what dismantlings and shovelings, what wounds worked open for the sudden closure. . . . There’s exactly twenty-five years to go before it starts. That’s how come there’s so much stuff about it everywhere you look: even everywhere Tod looks. I thought for a while that the information would just go on accumulating from here on in, but thank God it’s already begun dropping off.
For Tod is highly sensitive to this material. It affects him like a smell, like a chime. Too late . . . There is the same kind of trigger when he hears that other language, not such a rare occurrence now, especially in Roxbury, where he wanders on those Sundays; it is a language in which machines might converse when no human being is around to listen. A third thing makes the trigger slip: nail-clipping. It’s the odor the sallow rinds give off, as they cook and crackle in the fire. . . .