Chapter 11: St. Augustine’s Day
“Through reversed, the images in a mirror show the bodily form of things.” Things were moving forward. The show of Communist paintings had moved to Moscow in November. Fred had been taken on to crate and uncrate the pictures. “But water does better, because it reveals the universal form of things.” Fred looked down at the water from the prow of the Chinese ship, as the Progress steamed past mid-Atlantic, making its way west. It was July the fourth. “And the sage does even better, because he knows the universal character of things.” Fred, thinking like a Chinaman, was feeling like a new man again. “The sage can do so, because he views things as things view themselves.” Fred glanced at the water and saw the sky reflected. He had stopped looking for himself. The boat was crashing toward America, nothing but water between them. There was nothing at all between the boat and Fred.
In December things had reversed themselves. It was then that Mi Tu had given Fred a copy of the little red book. The show, under her direction, had left Moscow on Christmas Day. Still, as they marched forward into the future, Fred had a sinking sensation. “That’s because we’re headed west,” Mi Tu explained. In Leningrad he couldn’t avoid St. Petersburg. “When we get past Washington,” she said, “things will reverse themselves again.” Nonetheless, Fred had the feeling things were slipping away. On New Year’s Day they left the Soviet Union for Europe. By February they’d installed the show in Berlin. By March the entourage was speaking nostalgically of Russia, as they set up again in Milan. In April it was Vienna, in Frankfurt it was May. By June they found themselves passing again through France, headed for England.
“Well, here we are,” said Fred, collecting his thoughts again at sea. It was July 14. “Fête Nation” (Feast of the Nation). He’d picked up a French calendar with a name for every day of the year. Tomorrow they were to be in Washington. “St. Donald’s Day,” said the calendar. At the National Gallery Fred uncrated the pictures, and Mi Tu put them up. Afterwards they toured all the monuments: the Lincoln, the Jefferson, the Washington. They looked at the Capitol Building and walked through the White House. They even made a pilgrimage to Mt. Vernon. There they saw the key to the Bastille, which General Lafayette had presented to the first president.
By August 5 (St. Abel’s Day), the Washington show was over. Mi Tu and Fred had seen all they could of the capital, Washington all it could of China. On August 6 (Feast of the Transfiguration), they boarded their ship for Havana. It was a three-day sail. On the evening of August 9 (Cupid’s Day), the Progress anchored off Cuba. As he and Mi Tu sat on the deck under a full moon, Fred thought of J.F.K. and the Cuban missile crisis.
“I love you,” said Fred, reaching for Mi Tu’s hand. But she withdrew it, pointing to the moon.
“Idealism and metaphysics,” she began in a chilly voice, “are the easiest things in the world, because people can talk as much nonsense as they like without basing it on objective reality.” She had let Fred know she was not going to kiss him again until he had the book by heart. “On the other hand” – she gestured with the book to remind him – “materialism and dialectics need effort. They must be based on and tested by objective reality. Unless one makes the effort, one is liable to slip into moonshine.” Fred was staring at the man in the moon, whose fat face, he thought, bore a resemblance to the chairman. In Paris he’d fallen in love with Mi Tu; off the coast of Cuba he was falling in love with Mao. There seemed to be no other way.
The next morning (it was St. Lawrence’s Day) Fred and Mi Tu paid homage to Che Guevara and set up the show in the Museo Nacional. It was the anniversary of the “second revolution” (August 10, 1792), a day that Robespierre said “passed in importance even July 14, 1789.” As Mi Tu had predicted, they were moving forward again. There’s more than one way to get to China,” Fred observed. By August 24 they’d set out again. They were to make only one more stop before Peking. In memory of November 22, 1963, Mao himself had offered Dallas a look at the pictures. (Personal contact with Oswald had made the difference.) After an early morning session of Kung Fu, Fred retired to Mi Tu’s cabin for his lesson in dialectics. It was St. Bartholomew’s Day.
By the following afternoon, the ship stood off Galveston, Texas. They would have to get the pictures up to Dallas somehow; the problem fell on Fred’s shoulders. Using the captain’s phone, he called ahead and made arrangements for a U-Haul truck. It was August 25, St. Louis’s Day. This was to be the second American landing. Fred thought of the great king, captured in Palestine by Egyptians; building the Holy Chapel, the Sorbonne, a hospital for the blind; dead of the plague, as he set foot in Carthage. But that was the past. “This is the present,” said Fred. That night, under a new moon, he dreamt of his mother, seated at the wheel of the family car, a green Citroën. A clergyman was painting the vehicle black. Citizens of Lorient lowered it into an open grave.
As the passengers slept, the captain negotiated the channel into Galveston Bay, past Port Bolivar, past Texas City. Silently in the night the Progress slipped by the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center into its berth at La Porte. At the break of dawn Mi Tu shook Fred by the shoulder and pointed out the porthole toward a waiting U-Haul. Skirting Houston, they headed for Dallas on an empty stomach.
Mi Tu was feeling heroic (it was St. Natasha’s Day). “Make trouble, fail,” she said to Fred, “make trouble again, fail again. That’s the logic of reactionaries the world over. When they deal with the people, they never go against this logic.” Fred looked out the window at the beautiful tall pine forests of East Texas. “I was thinking . . .” he said. “It’s a Marxist law,” Mi Tu interrupted. “When we say ‘imperialism is ferocious,’ we mean that its nature will never change, that the imperialists will never change, that they will never lay down their butcher knives, that they will never become Buddhas till their doom.” Feeling a little paranoid, Fred took out his red book again.
Checking the gas gauge (Mi Tu was at the wheel), Fred motioned her into a filling station. “Put a tiger in your tank,” read the sign. “Look,” said Mi Tu, pointing at the ad, “Were these not real tigers once? Now they have changed into paper tigers, bean curd tigers.” Fred imagined a car running on soy sauce. He brushed aside his earlier anxiety and quoted the chairman again: “All reactionaries are paper tigers.” An old boy from Madisonville filled up the tank, chomping on a lighted cigar. “The atom bomb itself is a paper tiger,” Mi Tu said in agreement. “The U.S. reactionaries use it to scare people.” The attendant frowned at the mixed couple, as he gave them their change. Leaving the station, Fred breathed a sign of relief.
When they had reached the big D, they headed straight for the Art Museum, which stood at the heart of a working-class slum. Fred uncrated the pictures, but, as usual, left the hanging to Mi Tu. He wanted to send a postcard of Dallas to his mother. Passing up the art cards at the museum desk, he found a People’s Drug Store across the street and picked a card off the rack: “President John F. Kennedy’s Assassination.” Over a photograph of the site an artist had superimposed a reenactment. Under a red “Hertz” sign atop the building he had designated the sniper’s perch. Beneath the building three automobiles were passing: red, white and blue. Three lines had been drawn, indicating the first three shots, as they entered the cars. Enclosed in an oval at the center of the card was a picture of the president, his skin a little yellow.
Fred turned the card over to dash off a note, and the caption caught his eye: “The entire would was stunned by the bullets fired from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Two struck President Kennedy, one Governor Connally, who rode in the jump seat. However, Mrs. Kennedy, riding beside her husband, wasn’t shot.” “Bons baisers de Texas, X X,” Fred scrawled hastily.
By the time he rejoined Mi Tu, she had the pictures up and was engaged in a heated conversation with a tall, good-looking professor type who had somehow managed to get in before the start of the show. “Dialectics,” she was saying, “is the study of contradiction in the very essence of objects.” Apparently the prof had been intent on scoring some philosophical point about the pictures. “Lenin called this law the kernel of dialectics,” she said with a military mien. The professor explained that he himself had Marxist leanings. At this Mi Tu went straight for the jugular: “You liberals consider Marxism abstract dogma.” Hoping to reconcile the conflict, the professor made a gesture of approval. “You approve Marxism, but you’re not prepared to practice it.” She’d begun to hit the side of her hand against her palm. The professor took another step backwards. “Everything reactionary’s the same,” she said, turning to Fred for support. “If you don’t hit them, they won’t fall, right?” the professor was doing his best to smile: he found her very attractive, in spite of her politics. Fred picked up a broom and began to sweep the floor, but the handle turned out to be too short. “These people talk Marxism,” Mi Tu continued, “but it’s liberalism they practice.” Fred put the broom aside and knelt to sweep up the dirt.
As he was making a pile with his hands, he heard a woman’s voice. Apparently she was the wife of that professor. In preparation for the pictures, she was reading one of the historical placards: “Unity was replaced by civil war,” it said, “democracy by dictatorship, and a China full of brightness by a China covered in darkness.” Determined to pursue her prey, Mi Tu had accepted Donald’s invitation for a Coke, leaving Fred alone with Linda. “But the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese People” – Fred picked up the refuse and threw it in a barrel – “were neither cowed nor conquered. They picked themselves up, wiped off the blood, and went back into battle.” Linda paused to glance at Fred, who, having risen from his hands and knees, was standing at attention. “They rose in armed resistance,” she continued to read, “and over the vastness of China set up peoples’ governments, built a people’s army, and expanded the revolutionary forces.” Fred tentatively stepped to Linda’s side, volunteering assistance. Linda smiled. “However much,” said Fred, returning her smile, “however much the paper tigers try to hold back the wheel of history, sooner or later the revolution will succeed.” Linda stared at this odd bird with a combination of sympathy and amusement.
“Take the ideas of the masses and concentrate them. Then, go to the masses and explain these ideas, until the masses embrace them as their own. Then, translate them into action. That’s the Marxist theory of knowledge.”
“I see,” said Linda. She was sitting next to Fred. They were headed for Corpus Christi on a U.S. Navy bus. “And what is the Marxist philosophy?” she inquired absent-mindedly. She was thinking about Donald and wondering where he’d gone.
“Marxist philosophy” – Fred seized the opportunity – “holds that the law of the unity of opposites is fundamental to the universe. Between the opposites there is at once unity and struggle, and this is what makes for change. But the struggle of opposites is absolute.”
“But what does that mean in practical terms?” asked Linda.
“To begin with,” Fred began, “the Marxist regards man’s productive activity as the most fundamental, the determinant of all other activities.” Linda realized she’d let herself in for it now, but there seemed to be no turning back. “Through productive activity” – Fred was speaking like a catechist – “man gradually acquires knowledge. Now the Marxist holds that productive activity develops step by step from a lower to a higher level. Consequently, man’s knowledge, whether of nature or society, also develops step by step from a lower to a higher level, that is, from the superficial to the deep, from the one–sided to the many sided.” Linda seemed to have heard it all before. Do you suppose Donald had gone off with that Chinese woman, she wondered. “Marxist philosophy” – Fred glanced to see if Linda was still listening – “i.e., dialectical materialism, has two most outstanding characteristics; one is its class nature, the other its practicality. Practice, you see, is the foundation of theory, which in turn serves practice.”
“It seems circular,” said Linda. She felt as though she were half asleep. What had gotten into her? She had no idea why she’d ever agreed to let this Frenchman come home with her for the weekend.
“The Marxist holds that man’s social practice alone determines the truth or falsity of his knowledge.” Fred had no intention of letting up. I suppose he seduced me, Linda mused, is that possible? She didn’t know what to make of him. “Whoever wants to know a thing has no way of doing so except by coming into contact with it. By ‘coming into contact with it’ we mean living or practicing in its environment.” As Fred went on, Linda took an apple out of her purse and started to munch on it. “If you want knowledge,” said Fred, “you must take part in the practice of changing reality. If, for example, you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself.” Linda thought of an anecdote about St. Augustine but instead asked a question:
“You mean, if you want to know the theory and methods of revolution, you have to take part in the revolution?”
“Yes,” said Fred. He looked at her with surprise.
“All genuine knowledge, then, must come from direct experience?”
“Yes!” said Fred. “How did you know that?”
“I don’t know. I guess it must be something I picked up,” Linda replied. (Donald was always talking about Marxism.) The bus had pulled into the Navy Terminal in downtown Corpus Christi.
“Hi, sweetie,” It was Mrs. Finley.
“Hi, Mom.” Linda looked at her mother nervously. She had called home from Dallas, but she hadn’t mentioned that Fred would be along. “This,” she said, putting her arm around his shoulder, “is Alfred Raymond.”
“Pleased to meet you, I’m sure,” said Mrs. Finley. She was togged out in white sandals, green stretch pants and a white tank top. Her hair had been recently frosted. “It’s hot as blazes,” she said cheerfully. “Let’s get in the car.” Though the sun had begun to set, it was still 103. Luckily, the Finley’s new rotary-engine Mazda had air conditioning.
“Well,” said Mrs. Finley, as she looked across at her daughter and glanced at her guest in the back seat, where Linda had put him.
“Is it all right if Monsieur Raymond sleeps on the hide-a-bed?”
“I don’t see why not,” said Mrs. Finley. She turned again and looked at Linda, this time smiling broadly.
Fred woke up at 6:00 am in Beeville, Texas. It was Saturday, August 28 (St. Augustine’s Day). Someone had turned on the TV in the family room, where Fred had been sleeping. Raising himself on his left elbow, he looked out through one eye. “The eye is the light of the body,” said a voice, clothing the words in heavy rhetoric. “If, therefore, thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” It was “Sunrise Prayer.” Mrs. Finley had tuned on the set and was wheeling her husband into the room on a hospital bed.
Dressed in nothing but knit under shorts, Linda’s father took his place opposite the set on the east side of the room. As Mrs. Finley glanced at Fred, he shut his eye, pretending to be asleep on one elbow. “The eye is the positive element,” the voice continued, “whereas the rest of the body is negative.” It was a hip liberal minister giving a Taoist gloss to the Biblical text. Fred looked over at Colonel Finley, U.S. Navy, retired. Fifty-nine years old, he was bedfast with dropsy of the legs and abdomen. The air conditioning on the blink, it was 88 degrees in the house. “Every being entering into the ineffable sanctuary of its own nature” –the minister continued to speak of the mystical life – “finds there the symbol of the Father of All.” Linda’s dad groaned, as Mrs. Finley covered his tumescent belly with a wet sheet. Raising himself on his right elbow, he reached for a bedpan and voided in dribbles. His urine had the consistency of thick, dark molasses. Leaving the room, Mrs. Finley had turned down the TV in order not to wake up Fred. However, the pressure of fluid in the colonel’s abdomen caused him to breathe so wheezily that he couldn’t hear the program. “Helen,” he called out into the kitchen. “Where’s the remote control?” Mrs. Finley reappeared, bearing a large syringe, turned up the volume, and put the remote control switch on the bed. Then she inserted the needle in the colonel’s belly, connected it to a tube, and began to drain the ascetic fluid into a huge basin.
By 7:00 am three or four gallons of pus had dripped from the tube into the basin. The wall of Colonel Finley’s stomach was so flabby you could see the outline of bowels and inner organs. Linda entered the room in her mother’s housecoat. As she bent over to kiss her father, she could make out his liver. It was the size of a large orange: hard, nodular, and intensely cirrhotic.
“Good morning, Dad,” she said.
“Good morning, sugar,” he replied. Linda glanced at Fred to see if he was awake yet. Feeling a little sick to his stomach, he had turned his face to the wall and dozed off. Linda shook him by the shoulder and pointed out the window toward the rising sun. She took a seat next to him in a Lay-Z-Boy rocker-recliner. It had a massage apparatus which the colonel had brought for his legs. As the smell of breakfast issued forth from the kitchen, Mrs. Finley’s head poked around the corner. “Come and get it,” she said, smiling at Fred, who had propped himself up against the wall and was staring at the television set.
“Can’t he have it in here?” asked Linda. “There’s an interesting program on.” Dressed in a string tie and loud plaid jacket, a professor of Western U.S. History and Art was talking about “American Indian Sand Paintings of the Southwest.” They had filled the screen with a circle and a cross. The mandala pattern fascinated Linda, who, each evening before she fell asleep, had been reading The Secret of the Golden Flower. Last night she’d dreamt she was painting a circular mural, filled with the flags and athletes of all the Olympic nations. Speaking in terms of comparative anthropology, the professor continued. “By strange coincidence we can see,” he said, “in the native art of the Native American profound connections with the fine arts of the Far East, Islam, and Europe. From ancient Egypt to modern Tibet a constant pattern emerges.” In illustration two images appeared, superimposed: the Emerald Table of Hermes Trismegistus and the Dharmachakra, or Eight-fold Wheel of the Law. Something made the picture flutter.
As Linda arose to adjust the set, Mrs. Finley entered the room. In one hand she bore a raku plate of quick-frozen waffles; in the other a coil-work ceramic goblet of grape juice. Having taken up pottery, she’d completely replaced her trousseau of china and glassware. Her own work had an earthy, molten-chocolate quality. She brought in another plate for her daughter, but Linda declined, recalling Dr. Adkins. (Donald had given her The Diet Revolution for her birthday.)
By 8:00 o’clock Fred, who was famished, had devoured a mountain of waffles. Colonel Finley, who had finished off a bowl of stewed fruit, was sound asleep. When the lecture reached its conclusion, the channel (due to inadequate funding) reverted to the ETV test pattern. It looked like a windmill inside a windmill, enclosed in the square picture tube. As Fred took up his little red book for some after-breakfast study, Linda, engaged in her Yoga, stared at the test pattern. With everyone else pre-occupied, Mrs. Findley picked up a large piece of macramé, which she’d designed with a hole in the middle, so she could weave and watch TV. “Honey, you’re not doing anything,” she said. “Why don’t you finish this?” She scooted the frame on which the macramé was stretched over in front of Linda. Linda said nothing. Instead she continued gazing out in space. A crescent seemed to appear before her eyes. She thought of her life with Donald. As the crescent receded, a triangle made its presence felt. She thought of her life without Donald. What difference did it make? She wondered. Next she studied the circle at the center of the test pattern; her stomach grumbled. The frame of the set seemed to pulsate with energy; she grew conscious of a buzzing sound. Fred had left the room to shave.
Linda continued to concentrate. She felt at the moment more satisfied than she had in several years. As she stared out, cosmic forces seemed to channel themselves through the television’s eye. At the center of the pattern a circle burned red; against a black background a lotus defined itself in yellow, opening out into four petals, or portals. For the first time in her life Linda felt herself liberated from ignorance and jealousy, pride, lust and hatred. Demons went streaming out from her pores; all the good forces of the universe came rushing in to take their place. At the moment of completion Linda felt an identity between her body and the elements. Rivers flowed in her arteries; her bones were the earth; her breath, the air. Something seemed alive and burning within her.
Something was also burning in the house! Rushing into the kitchen, Linda found a potholder in flames on the stove. Dousing it in the sink, she cursed her mother under her breath. “Piss! Shit! Fuck!” she exclaimed. Relieved, she returned to the family room, flicked off the TV and sat down again in the easy chair. Gazing through the hole in the macramé, she hoped her new mood had not been completely dissipated. Colonel Finley continued to snore gently. From the bathroom she heard the sound of running water: Fred was taking a bath. Apparently Mrs. Finley had left to do the grocery shopping. Once more Linda turned to the macramé, now discerning the pattern: a tree, filled with flowers, butterflies in its branches, circled the opening at the center. The emptiness of the hole gave Linda satisfaction, but it also cried out to be filled. Suddenly she saw what her mother had intended: from the topmost branch of the tree a single thread descended. Linda imagined a tiny spider, hanging by its belly, as it wove a beautiful web to fill the void.
Fred opened the door of the steaming bathroom and stepped into the family room clad in a bright red terrycloth robe. Rivulets of water dripped from his legs onto the asphalt floor. “Let’s go see the town,” he suggested. “Actually, why not?” Linda replied. Together they took a look at everything in Beeville: its shady streets and downtown shopping district; its mobile home park, municipal pool and parched Little League field. At the center of town they gazed up at the community water tower, painted with the enormous image of a bee. The whole thing left Fred speechless. For Linda it evoked memories we needn’t go into.
When they got back home, Linda found she was hungrier than she’d thought. Since her mother hadn’t returned from the supermarket, she decided she might as well fix lunch herself. As she and Fred stood side by side in the kitchen, Linda opened the pantry door and asked him what he’d like to eat. Fred looked at the shelf and pointed to some Franco-American spaghetti. Linda was really in the mood for lasagna. What the hell, she thought, spaghetti’s like lasagna – rolled up, with less cheese. Remembering her diet, she fixed the spaghetti for Fred (who ate no meat) and settled herself for “ants on a log” (a celery stick filled with peanut butter and topped off with raisins).
“A revolution is not the same as fixing lunch or doing embroidery,” said Fred. Linda was leaning over a hot stove to stir his spaghetti. “It can’t be so refined, leisurely and gentle.” Linda glanced at him ironically. “No, a revolution’s an insurrection, an act of violence; it is not a painting.” All of a sudden gunfire broke out in the next room. With horror Linda recalled her father’s collection of rifles, which filled one whole wall of the family room. Awakening, Colonel Finley had rolled over accidentally onto his remote control, turning on the 12:00 o’clock news. Bullets ricocheted through the streets of Beruit. When the food was ready, Fred and Linda joined her father. “Strategically,” said Fred, picking up his little red book, “strategically, we take the eating of a meal lightly – we know we can finish it.” He sniffed peckishly at the plate of canned food. “But actually we eat it mouthful by mouthful. It is impossible to swallow an entire banquet in one gulp.” The colonel, who had turned down the volume, was flipping through the August Reader’s Digest, trying to find an anecdote. “Here’s one you kids might like,” he said. “It’s from ‘Life in These United States’: On a sweltering day,” the text began, “the air-conditioning man rejected my invitation to sit down while I wrote a check for his work, preferring to stand in the current of cool air that he had just restored. ‘When I get where I’m needed,’ he explained, ‘there isn’t any air conditioning. And when I get it going, it’s time to leave for the next place.’” Fred missed the humor but chuckled politely. Over the fireplace a large thermometer had just reached 98.6. There was no sign yet of the air-conditioning man.
“War,” said Fred, still reading from the book, “is the highest form of struggle for resolving contradictions.” Linda’s father, who’d begun to take a liking to this young man, nodded in agreement. “Actually,” said Fred, “we are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war.” The colonel raised his eyebrows. “But war can only be abolished,” Fred continued, “through war, and to get rid of the gun we must first take up the gun.” The colonel nodded again. Linda’s mother, back from shopping, was starting a roast in the oven. Fred unbuttoned the top eyelets of his blue jacket, revealing a bright red lining. “Our country wants peace,” he said. “The ones who crave war are those who depend on aggression for their living.” Linda frowned at Fred, glancing toward her father, but he kept on going. “Today two mountains lie like a dead weight upon us.” The colonel shifted uneasily in bed. “Capitalism is one, imperialism the other. We have long made up our minds to dig them up.”
“You and who else?” asked the colonel, straining as he lifted himself to an upright position. Fred took off his jacket, revealing a Mao Tse-tung tee shirt underneath. Apparently the heat was getting to him. “We must persevere,” he resumed, “and work unceasingly; we, too, will touch God’s heart.”
“God’s heart?” said Linda’s mother. She opened a window on the east and returned to the kitchen.
“Our God,” Fred answered, “is none other than the masses of the Chinese people.” Linda, who’d begun to show genuine concern, took a seat beside Fred on the couch. She was about to feel his forehead, when Fred stood up. “If they fight,” he shouted, “we will wipe them out!” The colonel glanced behind him at the rifles. Looking the colonel straight in the eye, Fred took a step toward the bed. “This is the way things are,” he said. Gently restraining him, Linda wiped the beads of sweat from his forehead. “Wipe out more, more satisfaction,” Fred said. “Wipe out completely, complete satisfaction.”
“Helen!” yelled the colonel. “Get me a gun!”
“China’s problems today,” Fred continued, “are complex.”
“Oh, Hector,” Mrs. Finley said from the kitchen, “don’t be silly.”
“Therefore,” Fred concluded, “our brains must also be complex.” Linda put the back of her hand to his forehead. It was glowing red. Suddenly she had a burst of inspiration.
“Comrade,” she said, picking up the book, “Victory requires a long march.” Fred looked at her and instantly calmed down. “Here, have a seat,” she added. “The revolution is great, but we must rest before the journey begins.” As Fred sat back down on the couch, Linda quickly stepped to the bathroom to look for a thermometer. As she returned, Fred was shouting again: “Workers of the world, unite and defeat the U.S. Aggressors.” The colonel began to struggle out of bed. Fred stood up and grabbled an ashtray. Rushing at him, Linda tackled Fred and threw him onto the couch. As the colonel left his bed, his legs collapsed beneath him. Admitting tactical defeat, he reached up and retrieved the remote controls. At least he could drown out this idiot. “And finally” – it was the voice of an anchorman – “a bizarre item in the news. Late Friday afternoon three men, bearing torches and dressed in the robes of the Ku Klux Klan, entered a show of Chinese Communist paintings at the Dallas Art Museum. Before guards could halt them, they had set fire to all the canvasses.”
“Oh, goodness sakes alive!” said Mrs. Finley, returning to the family room to find her husband on the floor and her daughter sprawled on the couch atop Fred. “The international situation” – Linda continued to quote Mao in hopes of appeasing Fred – “has now reached a crisis.” She looked up at her mother in despair. With one hand she was holding the thermometer in Fred’s mouth; with the other, the little red book. “The East Wind and the West Wind are the two winds,” she read.
“Either the East Wind prevails or the West Wind prevails” Fred responded.
“Keep that under your tongue,” said Linda. Mrs. Finley, having managed to get the colonel back in bed, smiled at her daughter reassuringly. Linda was sitting up to read the temperature.
“My, it’s warm in here,” said Mrs. Finley.
“A hundred and seven!” said Linda in amazement. Fred had collapsed. It was food poisoning.
“‘Oh God, thou hast made us for thyself, and our hearts are restless, until they find rest in thee.’ Do you know who said that, son?” On the way to Galveston Fred had thumbed a ride with a minister, who graciously took him all the way to La Porte. His fever had broken at midnight. Linda tried to persuade him to stay; but, having heard the bad news, Fred felt he must return to the ship. As he left the Finley’s house, Linda opened a kitchen drawer full of green apples and pears. Reaching for an apple, Fred had gone off with a pear instead.
The Progress as yet had no word of Mi Tu’s whereabouts. By mid-afternoon the captain was forced to conclude that she had defected. No one had seen her since the opening day of the show. Contacting Peking by radio, he was ordered to ready the ship and cast off anchor at once. At sundown they were well underway. Sitting on the deck, Fred glanced at a brochure the minister had pressed in his hands. “Oh Truth,” read the last quotation, “how inwardly even then did the marrow of my soul pant after thee.” Fred munched on his pear. “Frequently, and in numerous books, they sounded out thy name, though it was but a voice.” He wondered if he would get to see Angela. “I hungered and thirsted not even after those first works of thine, but after thee thyself, Oh Truth. Yet still in those dishes they served up glowing fantasies. It were better to love this very sun than those illusions which deceive the mind through the eye.” Fred tossed the piece of paper overboard. The sun, a burning ball of fire, had half set in the west. Its reflection in the water created a perfect circle.