The Daredevils. Gary Amdahl

eyes were in no way diminished by the shadow of his great slouch hat. He was shivering in the wretched cold of the peninsula’s summer, but all he could think to say to his young hero was that his dinner disagreed with him; he was digesting it poorly—belly inflated like a medicine ball and shooting fireworks at the back of his throat—and could not think straight. His breath was unbearably laden with garlic and deeper evidence of the indigestion, and Charles leaned away. That Sir Edwin could not think straight, and yet was up to admitting it, this was a confusing sign in his experience: too much steam building up in a kind of self-conscious engine already starting to shake and rattle its bolts. Sir Edwin claimed to be a futurist, but Charles was hard pressed to understand what such an identity entailed. More specifically, but even less clearly, he was a vorticist—that was to say, not Italian, but something “like a futurist” from “the vortex of London.” He preferred “found sound” to composed and performed music—but was an acknowledged influence of the Second Viennese School—and was very much in favor of the war: war was “the one great art,” and the only way civilization had to remove the more “festering and stinking of humankind’s many gangrenous limbs.”

      Charles and Sir Edwin watched the rehearsal, its director absent but lurking, disintegrate: acrobatic silliness, exaggerated, mask-like mimicry of primary emotional states in ridiculous contexts, and the kind of mincing mock-violence that had actors chasing each other around tables with very small steps, furiously waving their arms and puffing their cheeks out, not knowing what to do once, for instance, one character succeeded in getting his hands around the neck of another character, whom he ostensibly wished to throttle to death. The plumber’s sons broke off their swordplay, and Sir Edwin suggested to Charles that even the children found it all unbearably childish.

      “I would rather you tried, all of you, really tried to hurt each other. This waggling of fingers and chasing someone whom you clearly do not want to catch—it’s appalling! Don’t you think so, Charles? I mean, really. It’s insulting unless your audience are children eating birthday cake. You know how to use a sword.” It was true that he was able to fence dramatically well; and while fencers perforce show each other the slenderest profile, Charles often found it possible to drop the point of his foil to the floor and advance, spine straight and shoulders square, one, two, even three long arrogant strides directly into his opponent’s range. “Go down there,” commanded Sir Edwin, “and shove it up someone’s arse, why don’t you.”

      “My position, Sir Edwin, is that somersaults and comic faces are delightful.”

      “They make me want to vomit.”

      “The thought of attempting to wound someone—”

      “Yes, but that’s just it! The thought of the attempt—precisely!”

      “—to wound a brother or a sister is abominable, maestro.”

      “Stop and think a moment while your fluttering little heart becomes a piece of pumping meat again.”

      “I find it directly opposed to the nature of the theatrical enterprise.”

      “That is not only sentimental horseshit but the foundation of everything that is infantile in the arts.”

      “Maestro, this may in fact not be a heaven fit for heroes, but I find I do not much care. I wish only to examine the nature of the real via actions of obscure delight.” Charles had done a great deal of debating in the course of his superb education—and was uncomfortably aware that he did not actually know how he felt. He was uncomfortable as well with his facility in the face of such an absence or ignorance.

      “You’re simply naïve,” said Sir Edwin, apparently able to read minds.

      “Maybe I am,” Charles admitted.

      “You are wrong.”

      “Maybe I am.”

      “You could not be more wrong. That actors should feel delight at behavior so remote from actuality, from consequentiality, from truth, is almost unforgivably wrong. The urge to wound, to really and truly wound, is the only force that can actually animate lifeless words and weary gestures—the only force, at least, that an audience will sit still for.”

      “They seem to be willing to sit through just about anything.” Charles surprised himself with this remark: Was it a truer self at last beginning to emerge?

      “Do not confuse desire with pleasure.” Edwin spoke with muted passion.

      “I must beg your pardon, maestro. Your meaning is obscure.”

      Both of them were acting, not altogether happily, but evidently unwilling or unable to leave off, to break into sincerity and earnestness.

      “Do not confuse desire, I tell you, with pleasure.” It was possible Sir Edwin was frustrated, annoyed. His vehemence was pitched uncertainly. He was either in the grip of something, or pretending to be. As he was a drunkard, it would never be certain.

      “Having still no actionable clue as to what you are talking about, I will nevertheless promise you that if it is ever within the scope of my immature intellect to distinguish the two, I will do so. I will attempt to do so, at any rate—for no other reason than that you have said so with such clear strength of feeling.”

      “Goddamn you.” Suddenly Sir Edwin was no longer acting. It was a gift.

      “Goddamn me.”

      “Goddamn you.”

      “All right then,” Charles said, still game, but inwardly beginning to shy. “Goddamn me.”

      Sir Edwin turned away in disgust and Charles saw that though he had not exactly missed the man’s inscrutable and alcoholic signs and crucial but murky inflections, he had, once again, ignored them, and was now, consequently, imperiled. Sir Edwin was panting with stifled rage.

      “I tell you to go down there and act like a man, to grab those infants by the scruffs of their necks and shake them until it’s clear they are no longer in their playpens—and you simper like the rich parlor fucking smart ass that you incontrovertibly are and will always be. I tell you it’s nauseating and you become a pale imitation of Oscar Wilde. I CAN’T STAND IT ANYMORE!” The last was a shriek and he was now very nearly in tears. “Over and over and over again—do you not, do you really not, are you incapable, completely FUCKING INCAPABLE of understanding what we are struggling against? Conformation to the etiquette of the stage, to its infantile rules and bourgeois complacencies—it’s like fucking a corpse. It’s loathsome. Or it would be if it were real. It is merely ridiculous, merely embarrassing.”

      Sir Edwin sat down and pulled his cloak around him so that not even his eyes could be seen. He hunched forward and appeared to be weeping, but made no sound. After a short while, he seemed to relax. He sat back and the cloak fell away from his face. He breathed deeply and evenly.

      “And so,” Charles said, “just to make sure I understand you, I am to not confuse desire with pleasure. Was that it?”

      Sir Edwin refused to look at him.

      “Was that fucking it?” Charles demanded.

      Sir Edwin was weary now, and wise. “I meant only to suggest that there are layers and layers of desire for pleasure. We actors revel quite rightly in these superficial desires, in the gratification of these superficial desires—that is what we are paid to do. Still, the corpse is a corpse and her cunt is full of maggots. I’m not trying to be outrageous—you know this as well as I do. We all know. What you may not know is that beneath all those layers of pleasures is a primary desire. We may think of it as an original desire. We may think of it as a primal desire. You must show us, if you can, what it is to want food, to want sex, to want to brain another man so you can have his food and his women—but you are exhibiting the superfice. You may bring something to life if you are successful. And that is the great desire you must not confuse with pleasure: simply to be alive.”

      He began weeping again, loudly, with a kind of abandoned happiness, and Charles descended to the stage.

      The