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confiar no senhor americano . You love liberty, né? ”
    Love liberty? Who knew anymore? What was liberty? Being free to make a buck? The Russians had been smart enough to know that if they let Americans make money, they really didn’t give a damn which language the government was speaking. And, in fact, the government spoke English anyway.
    The propaganda that they had been feeding him wasn’t funny. It was too true. The United States had never been so peaceful. It was more prosperous than it had been since the Vietnam War boom thirty years before. And the lazy, complacent American people were going about business as usual, as if pictures of Lenin on buildings and billboards were just what they had always wanted.
    I was no different, he reminded himself. I sent in my work application, complete with oath of allegiance. I accepted it meekly when they opted me out for a tutorial with a high Party official. I even taught his damnable little children for three years in Rio.
    When I should have been writing plays.
    But what do I write about? Why not a comedy— The Yankee and the Commissar , a load of laughs about a woman commissar who marries an American blue blood who manufactures typewriters. There are no women commissars, of course, but one must maintain the illusion of a free and equal society.
    â€œBruce, my dear,” says the commissar in a thick but sexy Russian accent, “your typewriter company is suspiciously close to making a profit.”
    â€œAnd if it were running at a loss, you’d turn me in, yes, my little noodle?” (Riotous laughs from the Russians in the audience; the Americans are not amused, but then, they speak English fluently and don’t need broad humor. Besides, the reviews are all approved by the Party, so we don’t have to worry about the critics. Keep the Russians happy, and screw the American audience.) Dialogue continues:
    â€œAll for the sake of Mother Russia.”
    â€œScrew Mother Russia.”
    â€œPlease do,” says Natasha. “Regard me as her personal incarnation.”
    Oh, but the Russians do love onstage sex. Forbidden in Russia, of course, but Americans are supposed to be decadent.
    I might as well have been a ride designer for Disneyland, Jerry thought. Might as well have written shtick for vaudeville. Might as well go stick my head in an oven. But with my luck, it would be electric.
    He may have slept. He wasn’t sure. But the door opened, and he opened his eyes with no memory of having heard footsteps approach. The calm before the storm: and now, the storm.
    The soldiers were young, but un Slavic. Slavish, but definitely American. Slaves to the Slavs. Put that in a protest poem sometime, he decided, if only there were someone who wanted to read a protest poem.
    The young American soldiers (But the uniforms were wrong. I’m not old enough to remember the old ones, but these are not made for American bodies.) escorted him down corridors, up stairs, through doors, until they were outside and they put him into a heavily armored van. What did they think, he was part of a conspiracy and his fellows would come to save him? Didn’t they know that a man in his position would have no friends by now?
    Jerry had seen it at Yale. Dr. Swick had been very popular. Best damn professor in the department. He could take the worst drivel and turn it into a play , take terrible actors and make them look good, take apathetic audiences and make them, of all things, enthusiastic and hopeful. And then one day the police had broken into his home and found Swick with four actors putting on a play for a group of maybe a score of friends. What was it— Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Jerry remembered. A sad script. A despairing script. But a sharp one, nonetheless, one that showed despair as being an ugly, destructive thing, one that showed lies as suicide, one that, in short, made the audience feel that, by God, something was wrong with