There was no problem in believing that the man in the moon was an actual man.
At the same time, it seemed perfectly credible that a cow could jump over the moon. And that a dish could run away with a spoon.
When someone tried to explain to you that the earth was a sphere, a planet orbiting the sun with eight other planets in something called a solar system, you couldn’t grasp what the older boy was saying.
Stars, on the other hand, were inexplicable.
… you are convinced they are real, that these raggedly drawn black-and-white figures are no less alive than you are.
… squirrels were the animals you admired most—their speed! their death-defying jumps through the branches of the oaks overhead!
… every year for the twenty-six and a half years that remained of his life, your father spent his summers cultivating tomatoes …
… low-budget Westerns from the thirties and forties, Hopalong Cassidy, Gabby Hayes, Buster Crabbe … clunky old shoot-’em-ups in which the heroes wore white hats and the villains had black mustaches …
… the colors felt more vivid than any colors you had seen before, so lustrous, so clear, so intense that your eyes ached.
… spaceships landed out of the night sky …
In the face of evil, God was as helpless as the most helpless man …
… you live in dread of the morning when the cup will slip out of your hand and break.
… a vast collection of biographies with stark black silhouette illustrations interspersed among the pages of text.
… games that always ended with a last-second touchdown pass …
Poe was … too florid and complex a writer for your nine-year-old brain to grasp …
The following year, you wrote your first poem, directly inspired by Stevenson …
Holmes and Watson, the dear companions of your solitary hours …
But best of all, most important of all, the thing that solidified your bond with Edison to the point of profoundest kinship, was the discovery that the man who cut your hair had once been Edison’s personal barber.
… mock battles in your suburban backyards, pretending to be fighting in Europe (against the Nazis) or on some island in the Pacific (against the Japanese) …
She began telling you about frostbite, the intolerable cold of the Korean winters and the inadequate boots worn by the American soldiers …
… inviting Cleveland Browns quarterback Otto Graham … to attend your upcoming birthday party in New Jersey.
… a short message for the kid …
… you weren’t sure if you were shaking Whitey Ford’s hand or the hand of someone else.
What possessed you to attack that old Philco, to eviscerate it and render it useless, to annihilate it?
The Calumet can was red, you recall, with a splendid portrait of an Indian chief …
… as if every boy at some point in his childhood were destined to cut down a tree for the pure pleasure of cutting down a tree …
… but then, of course, George Washington was the father of his country, of your country …
… this white colonial mansion was the heart of America itself, the very seat of Columbia’s glory …
Politics was a nasty sport, you now realized, a free-for-all of bitter, unending conflict …
… the Great Spirit they believed in struck you as a warm and welcoming deity, unlike the vengeful God of your imagination …
Lone Ranger: Well, Tonto, it looks like we’re surrounded.
Tonto: What do you mean we?
The Cold War was in full bloom then …
… the Red Scare had entered its most poisonous phase …
… the only noise from the zeitgeist loud enough for you to hear was the bass drum sounding the alarm that the Communists were out to destroy America.
… the supersonic jets roaring across the blue skies of summer …
… a flash of silver glinting briefly in the light …
… the great detonation of blasting air that signified the sound barrier had been broken yet again.
You never worried that bombs or rockets would fall on you …
That was fear. Not bombs or a nuclear attack, but polio.
… your father’s mother, an alien presence who still spoke and read mostly in Yiddish …
… no Sabbath meals on Friday night, no lighting of candles …
… the incarnation of a monstrous evil …
… an anti-human force of global destruction …
… your dreams were populated by gangs of Nazi infantrymen …
… and the three notables from the land of baseball (Hank Greenberg, Al Rosen, and Sandy Koufax, who broke in with the Dodgers in 1955), but they were such flagrant exceptions to the norm that they qualified as demographic flukes, mere statistical aberrations.
George Burns had been Nathan Birnbaum.
Emanuel Goldenberg was transformed into Edward G. Robinson.
Hedwig Kiesler was reborn as Hedy Lamarr.
… studying the principal stories of the Old Testament, most of which horrified you to the core …
Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, and the Everly Brothers … stacking the little 45s on their fat spindle and blasting up the volume when no one was around …
… it was the sight of a roomful of teenagers dancing to the music that kept you watching …
… the selected stories of O. Henry, and for a time you reveled in those brittle, ingenious tales with their surprise endings and narrative jolts …
… now that Doctor Zhivago had been translated into English, you went out and bought a copy for yourself … confident that this was most assuredly literature of the first rank …
… Carey and his wife, Louise, are sunning themselves on the deck of a cabin cruiser.
… Dr. Bramson … no longer smiling and confident …
… Carey sitting in what appears to be the largest armchair in the world.
… you are amazed … by the immensity of the telephone receiver he holds in his hand …
On October seventeenth, he is down to thirty-six and a half inches and weighs fifty-two pounds.
Because he is living in a dollhouse. Because he is no more than three inches tall.
… reduced to the size of a mouse …
… a thumb-sized man running for his life …
… making do with whatever objects and nourishment are at hand in that dank suburban basement …
… a man stripped bare, thrown back on himself …
… a minute Odysseus or Robinson Crusoe living by the force of his wit, his courage, his resourcefulness …
… the Freedom Riders traveling through the South on long-distance buses were beaten by mobs of white men …
… the Bonus Army was camped out on the Anacostia Flats …
Against Eisenhower’s advice (I told that dumb son of a bitch that he had no business going down there), MacArthur took charge …
… pushing out the interlopers at gunpoint as dozens of shacks burned to the ground.
Then, everything suddenly goes wrong.
The prisoners are no better off than slaves.
… they are rousted from their beds at four in the morning and work steadily until eight at night …
… smashing rocks with sledgehammers in a broiling, barren landscape …
… no one is allowed to talk back …
… the nightly ritual of arbitrary punishments …
If not a perfect scheme, Allen nevertheless has a plan …
The tact and grace of a fallen woman talking to a fallen man.
… trapped for the rest of his life …
Then, with another bundle of dynamite, he blows up a bridge and ends the chase.
… the riots in Newark … the spontaneous outbreak of race warfare between the black population and the white police force that killed more than twenty people, injured more than seven hundred, led to fifteen hundred arrests, burned buildings to the ground …
“I smoke ‘Parisiennes.’ You buy them for 18 centimes in tiny blue wrappers of four…”
“… begging is not much fun.”
… living across the street from a campus that would become a battleground of sit-ins, protests, and police interventions by the end of April …
“A desolation peopled with sleepless perverts, the decay of what is not yet old…”
“We ate hot dogs and clams at Nathan’s, a fluorescent receptacle of weary insomniacs.”
“Perhaps you understand the peculiar nature of the subterranean attitude. It is absolutely uncaring, absolutely ready to meet any challenge, to suffer any consequences. It is beyond worry, beyond exhilaration, beyond boredom.”
“… so we finish off the misadventure with sandwiches at Ratner’s.”