Bob, Bobby, her man, he let go, let loose, went for it, tore a picture off the wall and smashed it repeatedly against an armchair, glass shattering-flying, frame splintering. He dropped the ruined picture and picked up the chair, the big chair—such strength, such power—and threw it, just threw the chair into a freestanding set of bookshelves, and the shelves toppled and the books spilled across the floor. He snatched up a book and tore it apart and threw it away and snatched up another, ripped off the dust jacket, ripped off the boards, ripped with the animal glee of a predator rending its prey. His face wrenched with rage, yet she thought he might be laughing, delighting in both his fury and the destruction.
She understood, she did, how all this clutter of humanity could infuriate, the way they lived, their pretension, so many things all around, too many things. The voice screaming in her whispering room was calling her to something better, to something pure, calling her to break free of this humdrum existence, to shuck off the bonds of bullshit civilization, admit to her true essence, which was animal, to stop striving for the sake of striving, to cast off the burden that millions of years of change had layered on her kind until it crushed her animal spirit.
He, the man, he ripped the shade off a floor lamp, picked the lamp up by its pole, swung it like a hammer, the heavy base smashing several porcelain figures, ladies in fine gowns. It was so exciting to see the fancy bitches’ hands torn from their glossy arms, their arms from their bodies, exhilarating to see their bodies shattered and headless on the floor. The man sweating and red-faced and so powerful. She couldn’t remember his name. Her own name eluded her, didn’t matter, any name was a burden, like a brand on cattle, the hateful slave mark society burned onto you.
He looked at her, the man, the male, he looked. She could feel his wild delight, joy, rapture in throwing off all restraints. There was a thing on the desk before her—the word computer passed through her mind but meant nothing to her—and she picked it up, raised it high, threw it. Tethered to the wall by cords of some kind, it took brief flight, came to a sudden stop in midair, and ripped free of the wall with a spurt of sparks. It crashed to the floor, and the sound of the impact shivered through her, untying knots that she’d never known existed. She began to come loose and free.
3
EGON GOTTFREY CHECKS into a hotel in Beaumont to take time to discern what the script expects of him. The hotel is so lacking in character that he feels as though he has taken a room in the mere concept of a hotel—which, given his radical philosophical nihilism, is exactly what he’s done.
Nevertheless, because food and drink have taste and effect even if they are unreal, he goes downstairs for lunch, to have a sandwich and a drink or two at the hotel bar. A pressed-copper ceiling, walls and floor and booths and tables and chairs of dark wood, and red-vinyl upholstery are reflected in a long back-bar mirror, so the place seems immense and even lonelier than it is.
The bartender is a tall guy with big hair and a bigger gut. But with a cold stare and a grim expression, Gottfrey turns the man from a hearty-Texas-howdy type into a quiet, efficient server.
He is sipping his second Scotch when his bacon cheeseburger is served, and he’s two bites into the sandwich when a fussy-looking professorial type sits at the bar with one stool between them.
This obvious walk-on character has unkempt white hair and white eyebrows that haven’t been trimmed since the turn of the millennium. He’s wearing a black onyx stud in one ear, wire-rimmed half-lens glasses, a bow tie, a plaid shirt, a classic tweed sport coat, brown wool pants, and white athletic socks with moccasin-style loafers. The man is so detailed and so not Texan that Gottfrey realizes the Unknown Playwright is using the professor as an avatar, stepping into the play to deliver a message that must not be ignored.
The professor orders the same Scotch that Gottfrey is drinking, which is another sign of his importance to the story. While the man waits for his drink, he opens a thick paperback and sits reading, as if unaware that another customer watches from one stool removed.
Gottfrey understands the Playwright’s narrative structure well enough to know that the book matters. In fact, it seems to glow in the faux professor’s hands. In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson. Judging by the cover, it’s a work of nonfiction set in Nazi Germany.
Gottfrey finishes half his burger before he says, “Good book?”
Pretending to be surprised that anyone shares the bar with him, the professor pulls his reading glasses farther down his nose and peers over them at Gottfrey. “It’s brilliant, actually. A chilling depiction of an entire society descending from normalcy into almost universal madness in just a year or so. I feel a disturbing parallel to our own times and that long-ago Nazi ascendancy.”
Gottfrey says, “The National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Hitler and that ragtag crew around him—they seemed to be such a bunch of clowns, though I guess they couldn’t have been just that.”
This observation inspires a sense of intellectual brotherhood in the professor. He swivels on his barstool to more directly face Gottfrey, puts aside the book, and grips his Scotch glass in an age-spotted fist. “They were precisely what you say—a cabal of clowns, foolish misfits and geeks and thugs, pretenders to philosophical depth, ignorant know-nothings who fancied themselves intellectuals.”
Gottfrey nods thoughtfully. “Yet they led an entire nation into a war and genocide that killed tens of millions.”
“Our own time, sir, is infested with their ilk.”
“But how,” Gottfrey wonders. “How could they so easily lead a rational nation into ruin?”
“Yes, how? Look at them. Goering had a soft baby face. Horst Wessel was a chinless wonder. Had he been an actor, Martin Bormann would’ve been typecast as a gangster. Himmler, a sexless nebbish. Hess really looked like a Neanderthal! But they understood the power of symbols—swastika, Nazi flag—the power of rituals and costumes. Those Nazi uniforms, the SS especially. Hitler in trench coats and battle jackets! A bunch of dishrags made glamorous with costumes. They were pretenders, actors, assigning to themselves leadership roles and giving stellar performances … for a while. Beware actors who can become anyone they wish to be; they are in fact no one at all, cold and empty, though they can be pied pipers to the masses.”
The professor drains his Scotch. The bartender delivers a fresh glass of whisky even as his customer finishes the first.
Thinking about Vince Penn and Rupert Baldwin and Janis Dern, and so many others, Gottfrey says, “But for a conspiracy of clowns to take power and crush all adversaries, they must have something more than an understanding of symbols, rituals, and costumes.”
“Passion!” the professor declares. “They had more passion than those who resisted them. A passion to rule, to tear down society and remake it more to their liking, a passion to silence all dissent and to make a world in which they wouldn’t have to hear an opinion at variance with their own. The passion for destruction always has more appeal to more people than does the passion to preserve and build. It’s an ugly truth of human nature. Passion, sir. The kind of raw passion that breeds ruthlessness.”
Gottfrey nods. “They so believed in the rightness of their cause that they could kill without compunction. If you can kill without remorse, then you can slaughter your way to absolute power.”
“Sad to say, but yes.”
“If you want to be a leader,” Gottfrey continues, “embrace the role. Don’t just go along for the ride. Symbols, costumes, glamour, and passion can make even clowns appear to be godlike. The least likely among us can triumph.”
“How true,” says the professor. “How dismal but how true.”
Although his companion has not finished the second Scotch, Egon Gottfrey says, “I was depressed when I sat down here, but you have so lifted my spirits that I want to buy you a drink, if I may.”
“Sir, I never decline the kindness of strangers. But how peculiar that such a dark subject should lift your spirits.”
“Not at all,” says Egon Gottfrey. “You have helped me with a personal dilemma, and I am in your debt.”
4