There were many visions in the land, all fragments of the exploded dream, and some of the darkest of these visions were those processed in triplicate by our generals and industrialists—the manganese empires, the super-sophisticated gunnery, the consortiums and privileges. Something else was left over for the rest of us, or some of the rest of us, and it was the dream of the good life, innocent enough, simple enough on the surface, beginning for me as soon as I could read and continuing through the era of the early astronauts, the red carpet welcome on the aircraft carrier as the band played on. It encompassed all those things which all people are said to want, materials and objects and the shadows they cast, and yet the dream had its complexities, its edges of illusion and self-deception, an implication of serio-comic death. To achieve an existence almost totally symbolic is less simple than mining the buried metals of other countries or sending the pilots of your squadron to hang their bombs over some illiterate village. And so purity of intention, simplicity and all its harvests, these were with the mightiest of the visionaries, those strong enough to confront the larger madness. For the rest of us, the true sons of the dream, there was only complexity. The dream made no allowance for the truth beneath the symbols, for the interlinear notes, the presence of something black (and somehow very funny) at the mirror rim of one’s awareness. This was difficult at times. But as a boy, and even later, quite a bit later, I believed all of it, the institutional messages, the psalms and placards, the pictures, the words. Better living through chemistry. The Sears, Roebuck catalog. Aunt Jemima. All the impulses of all the media were fed into the circuitry of my dreams. One thinks of echoes. One thinks of an image made in the image and likeness of images. It was that complex.

That summer, with my father’s consent, I got a junior driver’s license. He owned an MG at the time and we went driving almost every weekend. One night he agreed to lend me the car even though I wasn’t supposed to drive after dark. I told him that a friend of mine from Larchmont, a classmate, had just died of amnesia, and this was the last night of the wake. I had spent a long time working out the minor details of the lie but he gave me the keys without asking questions. There was a movie I had to see.

I sat through it twice. During the intermission an usher came around with a tin can for the heart fund. It was even better the second time. There was an immensity to Burt which transcended plot, action, characterization. In my mind he would be forever caught in that peculiar gray silveriness of the movie screen, his body radiating a slight visual static. I saw him in person once at Yankee Stadium and even then, before he left in the fourth inning because the autograph hunters would not leave him alone, even then, in civvies and dark shades, Burt was the supreme topkick, inseparable from the noisy destinies of 1941. I was glad I had not asked anyone to come to the movies with me. This was religion and it needed privacy. I drove home slowly. My father followed me up to my room. I was sitting on the bed, one shoe just off, still in my hand, when he entered.

“How could anybody die of amnesia?” he said.

“Amnesia? I thought I said anemia.”

“You said amnesia, sport. I didn’t realize it till you left. But even granting you meant anemia, the question still goes. Who dies of anemia today? Didn’t this friend of yours get enough to eat?”

At the table my mother usually talked about food. When she was riding in a car, her conversation centered around cars and driving. Knitting, she talked about clothes; sweeping, about the virtues of cleanliness; watching television, about watching television.

When she was feeling well, we became absorbed in her, grateful for every simple moment. But she was rarely well. There was no pattern to her illness, none that we could discern anyway. Each break in the bad weather gave us hope and my father would put off until another time the necessary task of seeking professional help. He understood nothing and therefore did nothing. She was not a photograph that could be retouched. The maimed child could not be cropped out of the picture. She was not an advertising campaign and so he did not know what to do about her. When she was well, he lived within latitudes defined by her intelligence and grace, as we all did, lovingly. The rest of the time we did our best to pretend she was not there.

[...] Leonard was a fat and lonely boy with furious purple inflammations all over the back of his neck. People spoke to him only when necessary and even the faculty tried to ignore him. His obesity, his poor complexion, his heavy ghetto clothing seemed tragically out of place in the sleek setting of southern California. Leonard spent a good deal of time in the library. He and I got along well. With his help I felt I could develop my mind into a fine cutting instrument. Kinch. The knife-blade. Leonard was generous with his time and ideas. It wasn’t long before I began to imagine him as a brilliant satirist and social critic, a personage of Swiftian eminence, a post-Renaissance phenomenon, a bonfire around which we would all huddle for lessons and warmth. To me, at eighteen, there was a certain attraction to Leonard’s kind of life. Chronic boils and obesity eliminate all possible illusions; snuggle up to loneliness and make the library your womb-home and chapel. Then it all crumbled. Leonard told me he was in love with Page Talbot. She was a Kansas girl with long blond hair, the kind of woman who looks absolutely stunning at a distance of ten feet; within closer range, however, Page’s green eyes seemed washed out, her skin sallow, and the lack of expression on her face suggested lifelong bereavement over the death of a pet rabbit. But coming toward you or moving along in front with a barely manageable sway, in salt-bleached blue jeans and faded blue farmgirl shirt, Page could make you feel she was worth following, on foot, all the way back to Kansas City. In the library one day Leonard told me about his fantasies. He imagined making love to her underwater, on horseback, on top of professors’ desks, inside phone booths. Then he said he wanted to be like me; he would give anything, he said, to be like me, trim, good-looking, popular. His confession forced some strange shift in the sheer balances of my mind. That night I visited Page Talbot in her room. I wore tan chinos, the closest I could come to the fresh creased suntans of the United States Army. I stood in the doorway and thought of Burt Lancaster standing in the rain waiting for Deborah Kerr to open the door. My career as an intellectual was over.

In junior year I met Ken Wild. I left my room one morning, late for class, and was going down the stairs, past the second floor, when I heard music, the deep bounce of a tenor saxophone. I stood there a moment, listening, then went down the corridor. The sound was coming from a record player turned up to what seemed full volume. A husky young man was sitting on the edge of the bed, forearms on knees, head faintly nodding. He was wearing red and black boxer’s trunks, an Everlast trademark across the elastic band. He looked up briefly, cracking open a big grin, and waved me to a chair. About ten minutes later the record ended and the tone arm swung back.

“Coltrane,” he said.

Wild was from Chicago, an ex-marine. We spent the rest of the morning listening to his records. I felt this music had been in me all along, the smoky blue smell of it, mornings in Paris and cat intestines spilled on Lenox Avenue. I pleased myself by thinking, as white men will do, that some Afro-instinct burned in an early part of my being.

America, then as later, was a sanitarium for every kind of statistic. We took care of them. We tried to understand them. We did what we could to make them well. Numbers were important because whatever fears we might have had concerning the shattering of our minds were largely dispelled by the satisfaction of knowing precisely how we were being driven mad, at what decibel rating, what mach-ratio, what force of aerodynamic drag. So there was a transferred madness, a doubling, between the numbers themselves and those who made them and cared for them. We needed them badly; there is no arguing that point. With numbers we were able to conceal doubt. Numbers rendered the present day endurable, heralded the impressive excesses of the future and stocked with a fine deceptive configuration our memories, such as they were, of the past. We were all natural scientists. War or peace, we thrived on the body-count.

Mary was not a pretty girl. But there was an animation to her face, an intelligence, which nullified her plainness. She read her favorite authors in curiously appropriate ways—Proust supinely, Faulkner with bourbon, O’Casey wearing my father’s turtleneck. She was a fine swimmer and tennis player, although at times there seemed a touch of condescension in her attitude toward sport; it was all so easy, so predictable in outcome. She treated the family almost the same way she might treat her tennis racket, with rough affection and a charming lighthearted contempt. The latter did not extend to me, however. Her kid brother. I think she loved me very much. Almost everything my father said was received by Mary in a spirit of high delight. “Daddy,” she used to say, “you’re almost as funny as Eisenhower.” But he was not delighted by her as much as bewildered. I think she made my father question the structure of his own nature, for to him it was surely apparent that only the rebel mischief of his seed could have produced this stray comedienne.

Wild, of course, had yet to meet Meredith. Miss Dairy Products USA was a name of my own making and Wild was merely repeating my own bad joke. I had known, as junior year drew to a close, that I would ask her to marry me. I also knew, pending her acceptance, that we would return together to Leighton Gage for my final year. My classmates in their evolving worldliness would consider Merry too pure, too naive, too inexperienced to be let loose outside of Disneyland. So I tried to prepare them—a joke here, an anecdote there, an occasional nervous quip. And as I said these things I would often think of her, in a London park or square, on a bench beneath some granite admiral, and she’d be so pretty, nodding as the pigeons nodded, pouting at the pouting children in their prams, so pretty and white, those thrifty breasts, salvation of Western man, furling a yellow umbrella. Some good-bad nights I spent, loving my self-hatred. I was trying to prepare them, that’s all; take the glint off their eager scalpels. I punished myself by going for long underwater swims in the artificial lake, coming up gasping, the sky regarding me through misty spectacles, quite curiously. And still I tried to prepare them. These are the things men do when they have orchestrated their lives to the rumble of public opinion. Merry arrived with me on campus the following autumn. They all said she was a nice girl and seven of us took a mass touchless shower.

The study of dead Englishmen flourished in the afternoon. We looked forward to them, sons of Bread Street and Aid-winkle Rectory. It was May of my senior year at Leighton Gage and on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons we sat in an air-conditioned hourglass and savored our own total incomprehension as an assistant professor charted the poems of Dryden, Lovelace, Fanshawe and Suckling. They were all so incomparably dead, the Penguin poets, and we loved them because their lines meant less to us than the dark side of the moon. It was the best kind of class to have in the afternoon, an exercise in almost pure language, demanding nothing more than fractional consciousness since there wasn’t the slightest hope of understanding what those poems were all about, and we drowsed and smiled, happy in our own little angel-infancy, snug in our Thamesian punt, and when the sonic belch of experimental jets went ripping across the desert we came close to applauding the symbolism; but a trembling applause it would have been, for we knew that it signaled the death of our drowsy England and the beginning of a new mortality, just months away now, the start of job, mate, child, desk, drink, sit, squat, quiver, die. Afternoon was for political science or dead Englishmen. That’s why Monday afternoons were so terrible. Monday meant Zen.

Summer in a small town can be deadly, even worse in a way than slum summers or the deep wet summers of gulf ports. It isn’t the deadliness of filth or despair and it doesn’t afflict everyone. But there are days when a terrible message seems to be passing from sunlight to shadow at the edge of a striped afternoon in the returning fathoms of time. Summer unfolds slowly, a carpeted silence rolling out across expanding steel, and the days begin to rhyme, distance swelling with the bridges, heat bending the air, small breaks in the pavement, those days when nothing seems to live on the earth but butterflies, the tranquilized mantis, the spider scaling the length of the mudcaked broken rake inside the dark garage. A scream seems imminent at every window. The menace of the history of quiet lives is that when the moment comes, the slow opened motion of the mouth, the sound which erupts will shatter everything that moves for miles around. The threat is at its worst in summer, in the wide rows of sunlight, as old people cross the lawns, humming like insects, as they sit in the painted gray stillness of spare rooms, breezing themselves with magazines about Siam and bare-breasted Zanzibar, as they stand on porches trying to gather in the shade, as they eat ice cream in the drugstore, two spinsters revolving on their stools beneath the halted fans, and all will come apart when the moment arrives. It is not felt every day and only some people can feel it. It may not be as violent as slums, tar melting on rooftops and boys wailing their hate at white helmets, but in the very silence and craft of its rhyming days summer in a small town can invert one’s emotions with the speed of insanity.