Letters Read Online Free PDF Page B

the Light Brigade at Balaklava, 1651st of the beheading of the twin saints Crispin and Crispian, 142nd of Commodore Decatur’s defeat of H.M.S. Macedonia off the Azores, 1st of Renée Morgan’s death by aspiration of regurgitated sauerkraut under anesthesia during abortion—the Doctor’s new Seneca Indian assistant performed upon you at your Suggestion a bilateral vasectomy to render you sterile: a doctored male. In the evening of October 4, 1955, two years before Sputnik, happy birthday Frederic Remington, as an exercise in Scriptotherapy you Began an account of your Immobility, Remobilization, and Relapse, entitled What I Did Until the Doctor Came. By means that you have not yet Discovered (your Manuscript was lost, with certain of the Doctor’s files, in the move from Pennsylvania to New York), this account became the basis of a slight novel called The End of the Road (1958), which ten years later inspired a film, same title, as false to the novel as was the novel to your Account and your Account to the actual Horner-Morgan-Morgan triangle as it might have been observed from either other vertex.
    Not long after first publication of that book, its narrative mainspring, coiled like the Chambered Nautilus or Lippes Loop, was rendered quaint as Clarissa Harlowe’ s by the development, legalization, and general use of oral contraceptive pills, together with the liberalization of U.S. abortion laws. Rennie Morgan, however, and her unborn child, perhaps legitimate, remained dead.
    Of the subsequent history of Joseph Morgan you Had No Inkling; of your Own there was none, virtually, in the fifteen years between 1954 and this evening. South Vietnamese Premier Ky walked out of the Paris peace conference to protest “the bombardment of his nation’s cities by North Vietnamese artillery”; U.S. Astronaut Schweickart took a space walk from the orbiting Apollo-9 vehicle; at the State University of New York at Buffalo a protest “teach-in” against U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia continued, but most classes went on as usual. You had Prepared your almanac card for the day and were Rocking in your Chair on the porch of the Remobilization Farm after dinner, along with Pocahontas, Monsieur Casteene, Bibi, and other of the patients, Regarding the foul rush of Lake Erie from under the ice toward Niagara, when Tombo X, the Doctor’s Chief Medical Assistant (and son) announced the arrival of a new patient: middleaged mothafuckin paleface hippie look like Tim Leary after a bad trip, two mothafuckin honky cats with him, go tell um get they paleface asses back to the U.S.M.F.A. As the Doctor’s Administrative Assistant, you Went to the Reception Room, accompanied by M. Casteene.
    Tressed and beaded, buckskinned, sere, Joe Morgan regarded you with manic calm.
    “You’re going to Rewrite History, Horner,” he declared: the same clear, still voice that had terminated your Last Conversation with him, in 1953. “You’re going to Change the Past. You’re going to Bring Rennie Back to Life.”
    As before, you Could Not Reply. Gracious, ubiquitous Monsieur Casteene, frowning Tombo X, and the two impassive young men—Morgan’s sons, dear God!—led him off toward the Progress and Advice Room for his preadmission interview, and you Returned here to the porch to Write this letter.
    Tomorrow, Luther Burbank Day, Madame de Staël will flee Paris to Coppet, her Swiss estate, before Napoleon’s advance. Franco will bomb Barcelona, killing 1,000. The Germans, in violation of the Locarno Pact, will occupy the Rhineland, and U.S. troops will cross the Rhine at Remagen Bridge. Jacob Horner, you Like to Imagine, will Step into the poisoned river and Sweep beneath the flaking bridge; past the poisonous plants of Ford and the intakes of the sources of their power; down the cold rapids by Goat Island; over the crumbling, tumbling American Falls at last.
    Good riddance.
D: A. B. Cook IV to his unborn child. The origins of the Castines, Cookes, and