Invisible man

            When I got back to the district a small group of youth members stopped their joking to welcome me, but I couldn't break the news. I went through to the office with only a nod, shutting the door upon their voices and sat staring out through the trees. The once fresh green of the trees was dark and drying now and somewhere down below a clothesline peddler clanged his bell and called. Then, as I fought against it, the scene came back -- not of the death, but of the dolls. Why had I lost my head and spat upon the doll, I wondered. What had Clifton felt when he saw me? He must have hated me behind his spiel, yet he'd ignored me. Yes, and been amused by my political stupidity. I had blown up and acted personally instead of denouncing the significance of the dolls, him, the obscene idea, and seizing the opportunity to educate the crowd. We lost no opportunity to educate, and I had failed. All I'd done was to make them laugh all the louder . . . I had aided and abetted social backwardness . . . The scene changed -- he lay in the sun and this time I saw a trail of smoke left by a sky-writing plane lingering in the sky, a large woman in a kelly-green dress stood near me saying, "Oh, Oh!" . . .

            I turned and faced the map, removing the doll from my pocket and tossing it upon the desk. My stomach surged. To die for such a thing! I picked it up with an unclean feeling, looked at the frilled paper. The joined cardboard feet hung down, pulling the paper legs in elastic folds, a construction of tissue, cardboard and glue. And yet I felt a hatred as for something alive. What had made it seem to dance? Its cardboard hands were doubled into fists, the fingers outlined in orange paint, and I noticed that it had two faces, one on either side of the disk of cardboard, and both grinning. Clifton's voice came to me as he spieled his directions for making it dance, and I held it by the feet and stretched its neck, seeing it crumple and slide forward. I tried again, turning its other face around. It gave a tired bounce, shook itself and fell in a heap.

            "Go on, entertain me," I said, giving it a stretch. "You entertained the crowd." I turned it around. One face grinned as broadly as the other. It had grinned back at Clifton as it grinned forward at the crowd, and their entertainment had been his death. It had still grinned when I played the tool and spat upon it, and it was still grinning when Clifton ignored me. Then I saw a fine black thread and pulled it from the trilled paper. There was a loop tied in the end. I slipped it over my finger and stood stretching it taut. And this time it danced. Clifton had been making it dance all the time and the black thread had been invisible.

            Why didn't you hit him? I asked myself; try to break his jaw? Why didn't you hurt him and save him? You might have started a fight and both of you would have been arrested with no shooting . . . But why had he resisted the cop anyway? He'd been arrested before; he knew how far to go with a cop. What had the cop said to make him angry enough to lose his head? And suddenly it occurred to me that he might have been angry before he resisted, before he'd even seen the cop. My breath became short; I felt myself go weak. What if he believed I'd sold out? It was a sickening thought. I sat holding myself as though I might break. For a moment I weighed the idea, but it was too big for me. I could only accept responsibility for the living, not for the dead. My mind backed away from the notion. The incident was political. I looked at the doll, thinking, The political equivalent of such entertainment is death. But that's too broad a definition. Its economic meaning? That the lite of a man is worth the sale of a two-bit paper doll . . . But that didn't kill the idea that my anger helped speed him on to death. And still my mind fought against it. For what had I to do with the crisis that had broken his integrity? What had I to do with his selling the dolls in the first place? And finally I had to give that up too. I was no detective, and, politically, individuals were without meaning. The shooting was all that was left of him now, Clifton had chosen to plunge out of history and, except for the picture it made in my mind's eye, only the plunge was recorded, and that was the only important thing.