John D. MacDonald Quotes

Cinnamon Skin (1982)

From the Travis McGee Series

There are no hundred percent heroes. Every man can be broken when things happen to him in a certain order, with a momentum and an intensity that awaken ancient fears in the back of his mind. He knows what he must do, but suddenly the body will not obey the mind. Panic becomes like an unbearably shrill sound.
So today in that aircraft I took a longer steadier look at myself. I saw my face reflected in the window beside me. One can become weary of shame, self-revulsion, self-knowledge. I am an academic, damn it. I was not intended to become some sort of squatty superman, some soldier of misfortune. It was not intended that I should be unafraid of sudden death. Curiously, I am not afraid of the prospect of my own demise. Plainly I shall die, as will you and everyone we know, and I do not think that a fact worth my resentment. Life is unfair, clearly. One must hope that the final chapter will be without too much pain. It was his terrible eyes and those four barrels on that strange handgun he had. Something inside me broke into mush, into tears and pee and ineptitude. But it does not signify!"
We've discussed what he calls the Shah of Iran paradox. When you crush a rebellion by killing people who are trying to overthrow your government and install their own, at what point are you violating their human rights, and at what point are they violating yours? The Shah let Khomeni escape to Paris. And Batista let Castro leave the country. At what point on the scale are people dissidents, and at what point does it become armed rebellion?
Never knew what hit them. Hell of a phrase, isn't it? Nothing can happen so fast that there is not a micro-instant of realization. Each nerve cell in the brain can make contact with three hundred thousand other cells, using its hundreds of branches, each branch with hundred of terminals, and with electrical impulses linking cell to cell. Ten trillion cells, Travis, exchanging coded information every instant. The brain has time to release the news of its own dissolution, time to factor a few questions about why, what, who ... and what is happening to me? Perhaps a month of mortal illness is condensed into one thousandth of a second, insofar as self-realization is concerned. We're each expert in our own death.
Even when a missing person is reported, nothing much happens. Local police forces have higher priorities. Nobody would report Pogo, and I saw no reason why I should. There would be a lot of interviews, a lot of forms to fill out. Transients flow back and forth across the country, and up and down the coasts. They are of little moment. They become the unidentified bones in abandoned orchards. Dumb, dreary, runaway girls are hustled into the dark woods, and their dental-work pictures go into the files. As the years to their work, shallow graves become deep graves, and the very few of the thousands upon thousands are ever discovered. Burial with the box, with the marker, hasty dirt packed down onto the ghastliness of the ultimate grin.
It made me wish my life had been different and I'd had some sons. Sure, McGee. What you want are the full-grown variety, big and sturdy and loyal and true. But you never wanted what came in between: diapers and shots, PTA and homework, yard mowing, retirement programs, Christmas lists, mortgage interest, car payments, dental bills, and college tuition. You made your choices, fellow, and you live with the results. And if in the end there is nobody to give a single particular damn when you die, that too is part of the bargain you make with life.
Meyer said it was going to get up to a hundred and five again by midafternoon. It was the fourth day of the heat wave. A lot of old people were dying, he said. They didn't dare leave windows open because the feral children would climb in, terrorize them, and take anything hockable. Their windows were nailed shut. They sat in heat of a hundred and twenty with their bare feet in pans of water, fanning themselves, collapsing, dying. They couldn't afford the cost of air conditioning or, in many cases, the cost of running an electric fan. From where they died, from anywhere in the city the giant office towers of the seven sisters of the oil industry were invisible.
Walking back through the mall to the exit nearest our part of the parking lot, we passed one shop which sold computers, printers, software, and games. It was packed with teenagers, the kind who wear wire rims and know what the new world is about. The clerks were indulgent, letting them program the computers. Two hundred yards away, near the six movie houses, a different kind of teenager shoved quarters into the space-war games, tensing over the triggers, releasing the eerie sounds of extraterrestrial combat. Any kid back in the computer store could have told the combatants that because there is no atmosphere in space, there is absolutely no sound at all. Perfect distribution: the future managers and the future managed ones. Twenty in the computer store, two hundred in the arcade.

The future managers have run on past us into the thickets of CP/M, M-Basic, Cobol, Fortran, Z-80, Apples, and Worms. Soon the bosses of the microcomputer revolution will sell us preprogrammed units for each household which will provide entertainment, print out news, purvey mail-order goods, pay bills, balance accounts, keep track of expenses, and compute taxes. But by then the future managers will be over on the far side of the thickets, dealing with bubble memories, machines that design machines, projects so esoteric our pedestrian minds cannot comprehend them. It will be the biggest revolution of all, bigger than the wheel, bigger than Franklin's kite, bigger than paper towels.
We all think of the inconvenience of making an effort. We're all going to do the right things a little later on. Soon. But soon slides by so easily. Then we vow we'll try to do better. We all carry that little oppressive weight around in the back of our mind -- that we should be living better, trying harder, but we're not. We're all living just about as well as we can at any given moment. But that doesn't stop the wishing.

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