Straight Man

I’ve not imagined.
    As I’m surveying the protesters, it occurs to me that they aren’t all strangers. I recognize one thin, balding young fellow from facultymeetings, though I have no idea what department he’s in. He notices me at the very moment I notice him, and he points me out to two youngish women at his elbow. They observe me through narrowed eyes, pass the information along to the others. You can actually trace the progress of dubious knowledge among their ranks. Some have to be convinced that I’m the same man as the more youthful one pictured on their signs.
    “The jig’s up,” the sound man warns. “You better split.”
    Missy, with no cool truck to lean on here, is massaging her temples with the ball end of her microphone. “Could someone ask them to chant more softly?”
    “Quit fucking with the mike,” her sound guy says. “How can I get a level with you doing that?”
    Missy turns toward him, rubs the microphone vigorously on the seat of her tweed skirt, causing the man to remove his headset hastily.
    I point to one of the protesters who’s carrying a STOP THE SLAUGHTER sign. “You’re too young to remember,” I tell Missy, “but I used to carry a sign like that during Vietnam.”
    “Some things never change,” she says. She actually thinks she’s agreeing with me.
    Her comment, more than any fear for my personal safety, convinces me that it is probably time for me to leave. The protesters have begun to link arms, forming a semicircle around the ducks and geese, daring evil to approach. They’ve altered their chant, and now they’re shouting directly at me: STOP DEVEREAUX. STOP THE SLAUGHTER . Finny (the goose, not the man), perhaps made claustrophobic by so much protection, breaks through the line of defense and trumpets loudly and off key.
    “There,” the sound man says, confident he’s got his level. “We’re ready.”
    At the far edge of the crowd, which has now swelled to about a hundred and fifty people, I spot Dickie Pope and Lou Steinmetz. Lou looks grim but prepared for action if things get out of hand. Dickie is grinning at me, for some reason. In fact, he’s pointing with his index finger at the sky. When I look up, I half-expect to see buzzards, but it’s not that. In the forty-five minutes since I left his office, the sky has darkened. The clouds directly overhead look positively ominous.
    •     •     •
    Alone in the men’s room down the hall from my office, I have a lot to think about and plenty of time. Picture it, a fifty-year-old man with a purple nose, his heavy, limp dick in hand, and, it must be confessed, a rather heavy heart as well. What’s he thinking there at the urinal? He is thinking, in truth, about himself. About William Henry Devereaux, Jr. There are other things a man like me might think about, but at this moment I am unavoidably the subject of my own dubious contemplation, and I’ve got my reasons. I have myself in hand, as it were. And yet here, I’m also surrounded by me in the numerous, merciless men’s room mirrors. The drawn and settled William Henry Devereaux, Jr., who looks back at me invites comparison with the light, bouncing Prince Hal nailed to sticks outside and waved angrily at the duck pond. If all this me weren’t enough, I am also in my own pocket, in the sense that my book is there, the one I stole from Dickie Pope’s office. Me, me, and more me. So much me. And so little.
    Standing here, I become aware of a low, droning sound, like a far-off vacuum cleaner, and I feel a distant tingling in the extremities. I can’t help wondering if the brief temporal ellipses I’ve been suffering these past few days are a sign of approaching illness, but I remind myself that they aren’t all that different from the sort of thing that used to happen all the time when I was working on the book that now occupies my jacket pocket. Lily, whenever she noticed that I’d disappeared during a conversation at the dinner table, used to chide me for being physically present but emotionally absent without leave. And my daughter Karen told me years later that she could always tell by looking at me whether I was really there or off in some other world, revising fictional reality. If it’s not illness, could it be that there’s another book nagging at me? Would I even recognize one now, after so long? If a new book
were
clamoring for attention, what should I do? I am no longer, if indeed I ever was, a romantic with respect