Algren at Sea by Nelson Algren Page B

stirred their hearts.
    A line of small black hearses circled endlessly, and the driver of each had a peanut face. Down Regent Street I saw a throng, an international multitude of peanut faces. All Earth’s peanut-faced people came thronging, begging me, pleading with me—
    â€œSink the Bismarck! Sink the Bismarck!”
    It was up to me.
    Beside me on the bed the number on my key read “918.” I was in the wrong room. Someone tapped the pane.
    John was on his way down.
    I got up and switched on the light. Someone had placed the room card against the mirror: DO NOT DISTURB. I turned it about: STEP INSIDE. SEE THE MAN WHO LOST HIS WEIGHT, it said. Again the warning tap against the pane.
    Someone was trying to tell me that, unless I came awake, I would never get my weight back. I woke up waving my arms as if trying to push off an oncoming sea.
    It was raining in Piccadilly. It was raining in Soho. It was raining in Wales. It was all new and green in Ireland, I felt sure—it was all green, all sun and white-blue clouds in Dublin.
    My watch began ticking as if trying to get my attention: 11:00 p.m. They would be bringing dustbins down from joyless rooms above a neon sign reading:
    Casino de Paris
    â€œThe Captain will let you know when to fasten your seat belts by lighting up the sign ‘Fasten Seat Belts,’” read the pamphlet I picked up off the BEA seat the following morning just before taking off. I was willing enough to fasten my own seat belt, but I had hoped the Captain would come down and ask me himself. I covered my disappointment bravely.
    â€œIn the event of an emergency landing, the Captain will first of all announce ‘Prepare for an emergency landing.’ In this event please keep calm
and carry out the following instructions: Loosen neckwear, remove glasses, dentures, and high-heeled shoes, and empty pockets of sharp objects. When you hear a whistle blast lean forward, cradling your head in folded arms. Be prepared for more than one impact.” If it was the stewardess’s arms that were going to cradle my head I was ready for several impacts.
    I loosened my tie but decided to wait for the first whistle blast before removing the bridge with the two powerful molars attached lest it frighten her off.
    Somehow the old boy who had asked me to tie his shoe returned to my mind. It came to me that the reason the English think so little of asking kindness of total strangers is that they think so little of granting such kindness themselves. If I am to believe my own sightline, these are the only people on the face of the earth who actually believe in kindness.
    Not believing, as we do in the States, that we believe in it by attending a movie about Kindness certain to gross a million dollars. The English legislate it into their daily lives.
    The spectacle of a great country, such as our own, demonstrating greater concern for the profits attached to the illegal drug traffic than for its victims is abhorrent to the English. Yet it is sufficiently plain that, if our concern for human beings was as large as that for investments in heroin, we surely would not assign its solution to men whose only qualification is a capacity to carry out orders. While the English use their medical men to rehabilitate addicts, we hand them over to policemen whose duty, as they conceive it, is to drive all offenders into the underworld.
    What was that the sixteen-year-old Puerto Rican told the arresting officers? “Put me in the electric chair; my mother can watch me burn.”
    The plane’s doors locked, the big zoom lifted me. I felt myself losing weight and began to smell oranges. After struggling since the twenty-eighth day of March, nineteen hundred and nine, to get a semblance of dignity into my existence, all my good work was undone.
    At 60,000 feet I struggled against the seat belt, resolved not to be a Zero-G Gravity man. “My weight is my own!” I cried out in my mind, clenching