“It was an odd way to learn to love your country, I guess. But that’s how it happened for me. All those pictures. Those faces of the doomed. They looked out at you, and you could see they knew they were doomed, that in a day or a week they would be dead. And I kept thinking that they must have felt about themselves, about their own lives, just as I did about mine—that there was nothing else, that they were it, everything, the whole ball of wax. And yet they knew someone was going to tell them to advance in the next few days or hours, and they would do it. They would move ahead. And they would die. In a stupid war, maybe. Maybe they defended nothing. But they gave—they gave everything they had. And all I could think of then was that when I grew up, when I became a man, I’d want to do all I could, any way I could, to make this country worthy of their sacrifice.”

Like a dropped lightbulb, the youth’s laughter exploded in the dusty attic. “You are so pitiful,” he said. “So full of shit.”

That seemed to get through to Douglas. For a time, he just stood there looking foggily at the youth, like a drugged bull about to drop. “Why?” he asked finally. “Why is that?”

“Because you are, that’s all.”

“No. Explain it.”

The youth, grinning, wagged his head. “Well, just being here tonight, man—you know, back to the womb and all that shit. That’s weird enough. And now you come on with all this militarist, patriotic shit. You’re pathetic, that’s all.”

“Militarist, patriotic shit?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Then you don’t know me very well, friend. I’m Jack Douglas, for Christ sake—the Democratic candidate for Congress. A liberal, you jackass. Why listen, I been fighting against Vietnam and militarism in this country since before you were in grade school.”

But the youth was still grinning. “Jack Douglas—the liberal. You just getting in deeper, man. More pathetic by the minute.”

Now Douglas seemed to gain some perspective on his predicament, some understanding of his foe. He smiled too, miming the youth’s contempt. “What are you? One of those sad circa nineteen-seventy neo-anarchists? You gonna burn it all down, so you can start fresh, build clean?”

“Something like that, old man.”

“So we’re old at thirty-seven now, huh?”

“You called it.”

“The whole system stinks, right? No reason at all to work within it, change it with the tools the founding fathers gave us?”

The youth, who had brought a bottle of Chablis with him to the attic, was taking a long pull as Douglas said this last, and he wound up choking on it, coughing, as he laughed. “Founding fathers!” he got out. “You are unbelievable, you know that?”

“Why? Because I believe in the past? And in people? Instead of bombs and blood?”

Again the youth shook his head. “Just ’cause you’re unbelievable, that’s all.”

Douglas advanced on him, as if he were contemplating throwing a punch at him. “No, answer me,” he insisted. “Come on. Name me one good thing, one decent free society ever created by creeps like you. Who ever created anything by throwing bombs?”