SOURCE: "Demon Number: Damon and the Dice," in Robert Coover's Fiction, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986, pp. 35-58.

[Cope is an American critic and educator. In the following excerpt, Cope examines the significance of names and numbers in The Universal Baseball Association.]

[Coover] knows that baseball is America's religion, and that it is so because it is America's special reaction to its own wildness, dream (or nightmare) of a lack of limits: It is the play that can be reduced to number. Or almost so. The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. is a meditation upon this paradox.

J. Henry Waugh, a fifty-six-year-old bachelor and petty accountant has invented a baseball game played with dice and charts, a double metonymy, a game substituted for a game. He is a genius at games, a mathematical genius who once invented "Intermonop," "a variation on Monopoly, using twelve, sixteen, or twenty-four boards at once and an unlimited number of players, which opened up the possibility of wars run by industrial giants with investments on several boards at once … strikes and rebellions by the slumdwellers between 'Go' and 'Jail.'" But his gameplaying originated in and ultimately returned to baseball. For a short time in his life he had gone to the ball park: "The first game I saw … the league's best pitcher that year threw a three-hit shutout. His own team got only four hits, but three were in one inning, and they won, 2-0. Fantastic game, and I nearly fell asleep … at home I would pick up my scoreboard. Suddenly, what was dead had life, what was wearisome became stirring,… unbelievably real … I found out the scorecards were enough. I didn't need the games." This "reality" is "the records, the statistics, the peculiar balances between individual and team … no other activity in the world had so precise and comprehensive a history." And, as Henry remarks to his one friend, Lou Engel, "History. Amazing, how we love it. And … without numbers or measurements, there probably wouldn't be any history." "Reality" is defined, rationalized, indeed, created by a history that is number. And in its "game" aspect, that is, the superimposition of limit by rule, reality is controlled by number. An accountant is the precisely correct metaphor for a Platonic God who made the world by weight and measure.

But number has another side, mysterious, a pattern beyond the pattern, a will to its own symmetries for which there is no rational accounting. As one player in the Association says: "Numerology. Lot of revealing work in that field lately." And Henry marvels at length about the unconscious but compelling patterns that make it impossible to alter the structure of his league: "Seven—the number of opponents each team now had—was central to baseball. Of course, nine, as the square of three, was also important: nine innings, nine players, three strikes and four balls … four bases."

This doubleness of number is reflected in baseball's own doubleness. If it epitomizes statistical balance and comprehensive history, the ultimate rationality of codification, baseball paradoxically "at the same time" involves, as Henry says, "so much ultimate mystery." It was this something discernible yet inscrutable, which Henry felt when he was attending ball parks: "I felt like I was part of something there, you know, like in church, except it was more real than any church … for a while I even had the funny idea that ball stadiums and not European churches were the real American holy places. Formulas for energy configurations where city boys came to see their country origins dramatized, some old lost fabric of unity."

The double realization of baseball as game and as mystery rite lies behind a remark by Henry that lies behind the complicated allegories that begin with the forgivable puns in the novel's title, concluding that the "prop" of the university is JHW: "Everywhere he looked he saw names. His head was full of them. Bus stop. Whistlestop. Whistlestop Busby, second base … Henry was always careful about names, for they were what gave the league its sense of fulfilment … the dice and charts … were only the mechanics of the drama, not the drama itself." Like Adam, like his own prototype Jehovah, he knows that "the basic stuff is already there. In the name. Or rather: in the naming."

Let us look at the names, then, in the several "eras" of the novel, the "realities" that mediate, repeat, absorb one another. First, there is what can be labeled the "continuous era," in which J. Henry Waugh is an accountant. "Continuous," because in it Henry's employer is the German Zifferblatt ("clock dial"), the personification of "Ziffer" ("number") and its application to time. In this era Henry watches Zifferblatt and his clock, hastens out from work early, arrives late. He has lost all interest in his job, makes accounting blunders with ledger entries (which terrify him only because he might tragically miscalculate something in the annals of his baseball league), and plays a self-invented horse-race game surreptitiously at his desk. He talks to himself, drinks far into the night, rushes home to the baseball game on his kitchen table, and generally worries his fat, shy fellow-accountant Lou Engel, whom, in this Germanic context, one must presumably translate "Lucifer Angel." When he leaves the universe on his kitchen table, it is to abandon pastrami and beer and the labor of the game for brandy at Pete's Bar (where Pete has been renamed Jake because Henry recognized in him Jake Bradley, retired second baseman of the Pastimers). Here he has a hearty friendship with a saggily aging B-girl, Hettie Irden—presumably Gea-Tellus, the earth mother ("she's everybody's type"). Once Henry brings the celibate Lou to Pete's and offers to fix him up with Hettie, but in the end himself takes her home. Once also he makes the great decision to share his secret game with Lou, but the latter's misunderstanding of the spirit of probability and reality, plus his spastic clumsiness, almost wrecks the Association, and Henry drives him out of his life and restores order—but only at the point where he must institute ritual in place of game. In this era it seems clear that Jehovah offers participation to Lucifer, wrests from him the woman in the duel for the earth, repairs the ruins of his universe inflicted by Satan (by the sacrificial death of a player preposterously named to combine the baseball and fertility and Christian myths, Jock Casey).

But in this era, too, the allegory presses least upon our attention, its obviousness buried in the comic actions and reactions of J. Henry Waugh, picaresque accountant. Let us remember truisms for a moment to explain and place the function of the comic absurd in The Universal Baseball Association, Inc.

"What terrible game will you play with us?" asks the narrator at the close of "The Leper's Helix." But he has surely learned in the brief but total revisions of his role that game is the opposite of play. Game implies an "end," a victory sought as the result of obeyed formulae with all of the statistics that Henry leans upon, the prop's props. Play is endless because pointless, mimesis of or escape from the unpredictable openness of causality. Plays are defined formally as unexpectedness: The "peripeteia," the untangling of comic and tragic patterns is, however often repeated, a recipe for the incalculable. There are so statistics for drama or child's play. Play denies the otherness even of that which it may mimic: There are no body counts at cowboys and Indians, no sickness in playing doctor, no funeral or finality at the end of Lear. We are gamesters and game, hunters and hunted, and as such we are deprived of that make-believe trying on of selves, masks, new starts that constitute the freedom of play. Even our freedom to make up the rules of the game turns into another measure of containment. These are the polarities between which Coover's creatures struggle toward definition or—that favorite word—fulfilment.

When he goes to Pete's (Jake's—old "Pastimer" he) Bar to relax from his game or to celebrate its triumphs, Henry is playful. He has imposed not only upon Pete but also upon Hettie and himself the names and images of his game. But he goes there as a "player" in every sense. And the players, unlike the statistics, the games, are names. Adopting the name of his favorite, an improbably successful rookie pitcher, letting that projected personality reproject into his own, Henry the aging recluse has a lavishly successful night of sexual play with Hettie.

"The greatest pitcher in the history of baseball," he whispered. "Call me … Damon."

"Damon," she whispered, unbuckling his pants … unzipping his fly … "Play ball" cried the umpire. And the catcher, stripped of mask and guard, revealed as the pitcher Damon Rutherford, whipped the uniform off the first lady ballplayer in Association history … then … they … pounded into first, slid into second heels high, somersaulted over third, shot home standing up, then into the box once more,… and "Damon!" she cried, and "Damon!"

Nothing could seem more mediated, and yet this is one of two unmediated moments in the novel. Coover here permits the Germanic allegory of the continuous (and comic) era, to accept and to absorb into its sex play the metonymic baseball metaphor of the game. "Irden," Gea-Tellus, "had invented her own magic version, stretching out as the field, left hand as first base." When Hettie and Henry play ball it is to accept the metaphor of baseball, that merely "mythic or historical form" that Coover's "prólogo" said literature must simultaneously build upon and transcend. Learning Henry's mythic game vocabulary, she absorbs its geometrical limits into the unlimited world of play, offers him the recognition that the magic in names, words, is their limitless possibilities (was he not, after all, the one who "everywhere he looked … saw names"?) for freedom from any source they may have had: "I got it, Henry, I got it! come on! come on! keep it up! Behind his butt she clapped her cold soles to cheer him on … And here he comes … he's bolting for home, spurting past, sliding in—POW!… Oh, that's a game, Henry! That's really a great old game!"

But the allegory turns upon its source. On the night before introducing Lou to his Association, Henry has his second bout with Hettie, this time in the role of another player, Damon's rival, the veteran pitcher Swanee Law. As they leave the bar to go home, he thinks, "Earthy … Won't be the same, he realized. No magic." And the following morning he is edging dangerously close to a fatal, Quijotelike awakening:

Not once, in the Universal Baseball Association's fifty-six long seasons of play, had its proprietor plunged so close to self-disgust, felt so much like giving it up,… an old man playing with a child's toy; he felt somehow like an adolescent caught masturbating.

With this mood upon Henry, Hettie discovers the imaginary nature of his enterprise, and it is with total silence that he rejects her humane understanding as she tries to reassure him of her affection. "Suddenly, astonishingly, she burst into tears. 'Ah, go to hell, you loony bastard!'… He heard her heels smacking down the wooden stairs and … out into the world." That same night Lou Engel physically and psychically all but destroys the Association, and Henry sends him out of his haven into hell with the appropriate curse: "You clumsy goddamn idiot!" Lou's last communication is a call from the office to inform Henry of his dismissal by Zifferblatt, a call highlighted by the final anguished and outraged cry of Zifferblatt, which sums up his, ours, and Henry's own attitude toward the strange conduct of J. Henry Waugh: "(WHAT THE HELL DOES THIS MEAN—!!)" And, finally, on this same tragic day the dice decree the death of the veteran Jake Bradley, Pete's player counterpart, so that Pete's Bar, too, must be given up forever.

Without the spirit of unmediated play which was only once possible in that magic night game between Hettie and Henry-cum-Damon, the old Pastimer's paradisal bar has no further function. All is gone, all lost now.

In the original days of the Association there began a breakdown into two political parties interested in capturing the chancellorship in the Association elections held every four years. One was the Bogglers, individualists led by the original chancellor, Barnaby North. The other was the Legalists, the party of Swanee Law, the star pitcher whom Damon Rutherford was about to transcend at his tragic death. Play is over, as Henry looks upon play, upon playing with oneself, as disgusting. J. Henry Waugh has joined the Legalists, as his assumption of Law's persona for his love games told us. He is an angry God of the Old Testament whose Pyrrhic victory now reverses the apparent reading of the German allegory. Hettie goes, like Eve, exiled out into the world of time; the world in which Lou the clumsy angel works for old clock face, Zifferblatt. And with Lou's call, Jehovah is exiled from that world, our world, into the solipsism imaged by his masturbating simile. Hettie's parting words ring prophetic: "Ah, go to hell, you loony bastard!" He did, by staying home. This is the novel's first version of, to borrow a phrase, the disappearance of God.

But with the world in shambles it does not end. And here begins the second and more complicated era of allegories: the era in which J. Henry Waugh is Proprietor of, and in closest touch with, the Universal Baseball Association. It is the "new Rutherford era," exciting and yet somehow melancholy. "Maybe it was only because this was Year LVI: he and the Association were the same age, though, of course, their 'years' were reckoned differently. He saw two time lines crossing in space at a point marked '56.' Was it the vital moment?" Numbers are having their mystic way again, to remind us that there are within Henry's Association the double aspect of rationalized history and of "ultimate mystery," which Henry found in baseball itself, mysteries ultimately hidden even from the Proprietor.

Let us recall the history of the Association. Under Barnaby North's chancellorship, the first truly great crop of rookies came up in Year XIX, the greatest being the Pioneers' pitcher Brock Rutherford; indeed, the glorious XXs became known as "the Brock Rutherford era." Now Brock, also fifty-six-years-old in Year LVI, had sired a second son (an earlier one only partially successful), Damon, the magic pitcher who might transcend the father, who pitches a perfect game, who overshadows veteran ace Swanee Law. But as Damon is pitching on Henry's complex Extraordinary Occurrences Chart a three-dice throw shows 1-1-1: "Batter struck fatally by beanball." The pitcher, innocent of intent, was the Knickerbockers' Jock Casey. Brock's former teammate Barney Bancroft, now manager of the Pioneers, and so of the fated Damon, carries on the season; so does J. Henry Waugh.

When Lou Engel is permitted to become the only other ever to share in Henry's game, it is at a point in the season when Jock Casey is once again to pitch against the Pioneers. Lou plays to win, and he wins against all logic, all averages, wildly. Henry has been playing the season through since Damon's death without keeping records, throwing and throwing the dice. He has lost imaginative contact with his players (but this is the first instance in which the contact is lost not by Henry's disengagement, but by that of his creatures): "It was strangely as though they were running from him afraid of his plan, seeing it for what it was: the stupid mania of a sentimental old fool." The "plan" becomes clear when Lou's rolls of the dice suddenly bring Jock Casey the killer into jeopardy upon the Extraordinary Occurrences Chart. Henry tenses in anticipation of order, throws the retributional dice, and sees "2-6-6, a lot less than he'd hoped for." At this moment Lou spills beer over the Association records and is cast out. After Lou's departure, Henry stands in terror at his crossroads: "Damon Rutherford … it was just a little too much, and it wrecked the whole league … He smiled wryly, savoring the irony of it. Might save the game at that. How would they see it? Pretty peculiar. He trembles … Now, stop and think, he cautioned himself. Do you really want to save it?… Yes, if you killed that boy out there, then you couldn't quit, could you? No, that's a real commitment, you'd be hung up for good, they wouldn't let you go." Casey stands ready to pitch: "Why waiting? Patient … Enduring … Casey played the game, heart and soul. Played it like nobody had ever played it before." Waiting Casey stands "alone": "Sometimes Casey glanced up at him—only a glance, split-second pain, a pleading." St. Mark reminds us that "at the ninth hour Jesus cried … My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" And then the agony is over. Henry picks up the dice: "I'm sorry, boy,' he whispered, and then … he set them down carefully … One by one. Six. Six … Six." The number of the beast: pitcher killed by line drive.

One allegory cries out for attention. UBA, USA. Rutherford for Ruth, certainly, but also for rue. The Rutherfords, leaders of the Pioneers (read New Frontier) are special: "Maybe it was just the name that had ennobled them, for in a way … they were … the association's first real aristocrats." The Kennedy myth of national renewal aborted is reflected in a series of killings following upon Henry's assassination of Jock after the death of Damon. Barney Bancroft—the latter-day echo of Barnaby North—eventually becomes chancellor and is assassinated, bringing on a revolt of the Universalists. The chancellor in Year LVI is, like Henry, a Legalist, and like LBJ, a paradox: "He looked old-fashioned, but he had an abiding passion for innovation. He was the most restless activist ever to take office … He was coldly calculating, yet supremely loyal to old comrades." And when the season continues in an unprecedentedly gloomy and unpopular course, like Henry he must say: "And there's not a goddamn thing I can do about it." His heir and alter ego is that grand southerner Swanee Law. Again, allegory by metonymy. We are directed to read through the layer of the accountant Jehovah to the history of the USA in the sixties, to see the sacrifice of Casey, the consequent helpless commitment of Henry and the chancellor as Vietnam, to hear the surge of revolution rolling in from the future. Politics and war are, after all, the great American games.

But if Swanee Law, in his symbiotic relationship with the current Legalist chancellor, focuses analogy upon LBJ, he can show us an even darker layer of the allegorical palimpsest. Nothing will come of nothing. The mystery of history is the regress of its sources, each carefully measured effect having its cause until we arrive at the Zenonian paradox inverted, infinity the ineffable first cause. "To be good," Henry once thought, "a chess player, too, had to convert his field to the entire universe, himself the ruler of that private enclosure—though from a pawn's-eye view, of course, it wasn't an enclosure at all, but, infinitely, all there was." Theologically, it is safest to assume that the first cause is the will of God; as the chess passage suggests, associationalogically it seems safe to assume that the first cause is the will of J. Henry Waugh. There it began, properly, precisely, in Year I. Or did it? Does that "beginning" only raise the question of inscrutability again, hint at another history, a mirrorcorridor in which JHW is only some middle term? The question worries him: "The abrupt beginning had its disadvantages. It was, in a sense, too arbitrary, too inexplicable. In spite of the … warmth he felt toward those first ballplayers, it always troubled him that their life histories were so unavailable to him: what had a great player already in his thirties been doing for the previous ten years?." Nothing can come of nothing. "It was, in fact, when the last Year I player had retired that Henry felt the Association had come of age, and when, a couple of years ago, the last veteran of Year I, old ex-chancellor Barnaby North, had died, he had felt an odd sense of relief: the touch with the deep past was now purely 'historic,' its ambiguity only natural."

"The basic stuff is already there. In the name." What then of the name, the, to Henry, always ambiguous nature, of Barnaby North, first chancellor and so first projection of the Proprietor himself within the Association; or, if JHW is only a middle term, perhaps the prototype of the prop himself? What this name tells us in conjunction with the rise of Swanee Law is that the Association's history has moved from North to South, a steady fall on any map.

The major portion of Coover's novel takes place in the critical Year LVI, the "new Rutherford era" in the Association. And the allegory is obviously written over the New Testament. It confuses because Damon Rutherford is so clearly the life-bringer; Jock Casey, his killer, is so clearly the Christ. But it is nonetheless obviously written over the new Testament, in which Matthew told of the Wise Men "saying … we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him" (Matt. 2:2). And it is in this sacred geography that one can place Henry's baserunner: "Out of the east, into the north, push out to the west, then march through the south back home again; like a baserunner on the paths, alone in a hostile cosmos, the stars out there in their places,… he interposed himself heroically to defy the holy condition … not knowing his defiance was merely a part of it."

The sun rises in the East; as runner he moves at once toward the North. Lucifer, too, who said in his heart, "I will exalt my throne above the stars of God [Swanee Law is a Star, Damon only a Rookie]: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north … I will be like the Most High" (Isa. 14:13-14). Is he, Barnaby North, original or image of the creator of the Universal Baseball Association? Or neither? Is he the founder because (infinite inscrutability of beginnings, or, mystery that denies beginnings) he is not the father but the son (remembering that, should this be so, the paradox is enacted twice over. Barney Bancroft, the Pioneer manager and future chancellor, being his namesake, whose assassination set off the revolution). So he seems when we recall, from the Acts of the Apostles, "Barnabas (which is being interpreted, the son of consolation)" (4:36).

Scripture speaks parables against the South (Ezek. 20:45-49), as does American politics, but we must return to the basic metaphors. Like JHW, the southerner is Law—the law of average, the opposite of Damon Rutherford who breaks them. "Law knew what he had going for himself: whenever sportswriters interviewed him, they were shown large charts he kept tacked to his wall, indicating his own game-by-game progress … ['Pappy'] Rooney [his manager] had to laugh at Law's prostrating himself before the dirty feet of history." Swanee Law the Legalist set against Barney Bancroft and his prototype, Barnaby North, founder of the opposed free party. The rationalization of history, number, the averages are where Henry, Jehovah, and the Association seem to be going, and we remember that it was Swanee who replaced Damon so tragically in Hettie's favors. But there is a countercurrent within the Association as there is within J. Henry Waugh. Damon Rutherford the son is dead, but Barney Bancroft—manager, elder father figure to Damon but nominally son to Barnaby North, the child (and yet the mysterious elder) of J. Henry Waugh—knows the limits of Henry's and Swanee Law's history. "Bancroft, the rationalist, disbelieved in reason. It was the beast's son, after all, not the father, and if it had a way of sometimes getting out of hand, there was always limits … Re: back again, the primitive condition, the nonreflective operating thing: res. His son."

When Damon was struck down, "the Proprietor of the Universal Baseball Association … brought utterly to grief, buried his face in the heap of papers on his kitchen table and cried for long bad time." Well he might, victim of his own laws: "Even though he'd set his own rules,… and though he could change whenever he wished, nevertheless he and his players were committed to the turns of the mindless and unpredictable—one might even say, irresponsible—dice." When Damon's fate is rolled, the players press around him crying "Do something! But do what? The dice were rolled." And yet, after this time of weeping Henry goes out into the accountant's world, and he carries into it his sense of deity: "Feeling sour. Undiscoverable sun at four o'clock in the hazy sky. But a kind of glow in the streets, mocking him. Later, he'd have it rain." God has not disappeared. He is a loony bastard, who thinks he controls the universe. But he has become mad because he has become a Legalist, lost contact with Barney Bancroft's, Barnaby North's boggling world, forgotten the paradox that he once had been able to apply to chess: "Henry enjoyed chess, but found it finally too Euclidean, too militant, ultimately irrational." Chess is game without the magic, without play; he found it, "in spite of its precision, formless really—nameless motion."

Names not numbers are the drama, that which defies the predestinarian, "irresponsible" dice to turn formulaic number into mythic formulae. That is what happened to the Universal Baseball Association when JHW did something about it and tipped the die that killed Casey. The consequences were cosmic: He ceased to have connection with Hettie, Lou, Zifferblatt, but with his commitment he paradoxically also ceased to have conjunction with his players.

Here we must notice a principal narrative technique: After Damon's death, while Henry is gradually withdrawing himself from his accountant's world, he inversely projects himself into the players to the extent that the interior monologue of Henry, which seems the chief device of the earlier sections as he imagines activities in his Association, becomes a series of interior monologues on the part of individual players through which Henry's direct persona emerges less and less often until the day with Lou and Hettie, when he surfaces to almost give up his universe.

Yet one important example of Henry's absorption into his players both bears out and immensely modifies this general truth. It demonstrates Coover's technique of creating unbroken chains of interillumination between Henry's life world and his created universe. And it does so at the crucial point of choice, the point at which Damon dead, he can go on by the rules, quit the game, or sacrifice Jock Casey.

Henry, sleepless and broken by the death, visits the puzzled Lou's apartment (unable to be alone) to "imagine" / attend Damon's funeral. He seeks out a recording of Mozart's Archduke, drinks; the alarmed friend listens to his jumbled talk, assuming, of course, that the death has been that of a close friend. His innocent question, "Did he leave any … family?" gives Henry the first suggestion for how he could continue: To himself he muses "A son? Yes, he could have, he could have at that, and his name …?" There is nothing in the previous image, imagings of Damon, of this golden child athlete, young hero, to make such a history probable, and Henry realizes it implicitly in his next move; fleeing Lou's apartment for Jake's Bar, he creates a wake, a death-drunk of all the Old Timers reflecting his own manic grief. Before it begins, he accounts for all who are not in attendance, including Damon's older brother, a failed second-class player from a few seasons earlier. But he had been a ballplayer, had his moment of history with the league, and bore the magic name. So Henry imagines through him a more plausible, if indirect route to continuities:

He'd bolted for home the minute the burial was over, dragging his missus behind him, and there, pressed by an inexplicable urgency, had heisted her black skirts, and without even taking time to drop his pants, had shot her full of seed: yes, caught it! she said, and even he felt that germ strike home.

They were right. Later, horny and half-drunk in a restaurant, Henry gazes on a waitress, a young frump, and thinks about her as the possible mother of this new potential: "Young Brock was handsome, elegant in his way, but it was easy to see that in a real ball game he just didn't have it. Something vital was missing. How would this son—Henry assumed it would be a boy—turn out?… Might be worth twenty more seasons just to find out." But clearly his heart was not in it, for Henry has already remade an improbable history on the little cue offered by Lou's innocent query.

Probably the oldest and most cynical of Henry's avatars among the Old Timers who gather for the wake at Jake's is Rags Rooney, whose idea it had been. Sycamore Flynn, the manager of the pitcher who had killed Damon, attends but leaves very early, and Rooney laments that "Sick Flynn was gone, he'd had a few more things he'd like to jab him with. Like shotgunning poor Damon for jumping his virgin daughter." While the wake is in progress, but before this remark, Hettie, unaware of the imaginary crowd at Jake's, approaches Henry in hopes of another great old game pitched at her by Damon:

He hadn't noticed her there before. She winked cheaply and asked: "How's Damon's pitching arm tonight?"

"He's dead."

"Hunh?"

"Damon Rutherford is dead."

It was as though he'd struck her in the face … When he looked up again, she was gone.

The incident merges with a reaction the others have to Sycamore Flynn, himself merging with Henry: "It was funny abou Sic'em: they all loved the bastard, pure gold the man's heart, yet this night they couldn't get close to him. Wasn't his fault. Yet something was happening." Then Flynn emerges from Henry, having left the bar. He is on a train, "his mind in trouble pitched here and there, rocked by the wheels' pa-clockety-knock, jogged loose from the continuum … the sons and the fathers, the sons and the fathers." There are three rationales for Flynn's parental concern. One is his emergence from Henry. A second is his long rivalry through his stellar playing years with Damon's father, Brock Rutherford. The two greats of their era, now known as the Brock Rutherford Era: "Brock the Great. Oh yes, damn it, damn him, he was?". The last is his own paternity, the guilt and the loss when his daughter, too, accepts some version (before or after the act) of Rooney's barb about Flynn having killed Damon out of a father's jealousy. When he killed Damon as her Damon lover before Hettie's face in Jake's, she had fled Henry. Now we learn the name of Flynn's daughter, fled like Hettie from the man who robbed her of Damon's young sexuality once, maybe twice:

His daughter had disappeared. She'd left no note. Hadn't been necessary. he knew what she was telling him and there was nothing he could do about it, nothing he could do that would bring her back. Harriet was as dead to him now as her Damon was to Brock. Even more so, because Damon died and left no hate behind. In a way, Flynn envied Brock. No, that wasn't true. You're just trying to smooth it over, ease the guilt.

It is an immense inner narrative developed in a few strokes by Henry's imagination. This is not surprising, in any of its aspects but one. He has been working fast with the idea of Damon having an heir; he has dismissed Henrietta by discarding his Damon avatar brutally, as Flynn has lost Harriet. But Flynn is Henry's alter ago, and so neither intentionally beaned Damon—that was the mindlessness of the dice. What then, and it is crucial at this juncture, is Flynn's "guilt"?

He descends from the train near the ball park, a short walk to his hotel, and enters us into one of the most successful and eerie of those deliriums, which are not quite dreams, that punctuate Coover's work, but especially in the psychic life of Richard Nixon in The Public Burning.

It begins on this problem of "guilt." Flynn is in Damon's hometown; he might be recognized and harassed, so he walks, choosing "the dark streets. What was hounding him? That he didn't feel guilty enough?" He passes the stadium, which "bulked, unlit in the dark night, like a massive ruin, exuding a black odor of death and corruption" (one remembers that Henry thinks that these now bare quires, "ball stadiums and not European churches were the real American holy places"). But Flynn's experience goes beyond this: the Pioneers' Park has become unfamiliar. "No, no gates. Not even the hinges for one. And inside: it shouldn't be that black in there." He feels about the walls of the suddenly unfamiliar passageways to the dugout, to the field. He discerns ghosts, he retreats, he finds himself disoriented. On the darkened ball field he feels the presence of all his players around him in the dark, Jock Casey, most poignantly, on the mound behind him. It is a ghost field because Casey is there: "'That you, Jock?' Turn around and look, you ass. Can't. Sorry, just can't … Flynn was near tears. Behind him, he realized, past Casey, past home plate, there was an exit. Maybe it was a way out, maybe it wasn't."

Flynn has absorbed Henry, Henry's grief, taken Henry home into the old ball park of his lonely spooky apartment full of the deaths of all these paper heroes. "Maybe it was a way out, maybe it wasn't. But he'd never make it. He couldn't even turn around. And besides, he wasn't even sure what he'd find at home plate on the way. 'I quit,' he said. But then the lights came on." In Henry's apartment. And when they did, he had given up the notion of quitting or continuing the Rutherford myth on the sheerness of chance of those dice, those numbers he had for so long thought of as order. Out of that dark dream, Henry had decided to intervene.

When young Damon is about to pitch in the fatal game succeeding his perfect performance, Henry's imagination works overtime: "'Go out and win one for the old man, son.' Who said that? Why old Brock! Yes, there he was, sitting in a special box … In fact, Henry realized suddenly, 'it must be Brock Rutherford Day at Pioneer Park.'" That "it must be" takes on a redimensioning ambiguity analogous to the ambiguous status of Barnaby North, when, observing the wake for Damon, Henry's consciousness is expressed through that of successive participants in the festivities until it emerges as that of the chancellor: "Brock Rutherford Day had been Fenn's own idea. The whole UBA was suddenly bathed in light and excitement and enthusiasm. Fenn had foreseen an election sweep … The Guildsmen [at the time it was written read Gold-waterites] couldn't find a candidate. Total mandate. And then that pitch. He wasn't sure what he could do about it … The only conceivable forms of meaningful action at a time like this were all illegal." But "illegality," breaking of the rules and the substitution of sacrifice for chance, commitment for causality, predestination for percentages—these are phrases to describe Henry's deliberate killing of Jock Casey with the number of the beast from the Book of Revelation: And we might here remind ourselves that Coover's "prólogo" speaks of fiction as the use of "familiar forms to combat the content of those forms,… to conduct the reader … away from magic to maturity, away from mystery to revelation." The mediation is so intensified that we are led to search for answers to impossible questions, those that haunt Henry's sense of history: Is the chancellor Henry's "persona," or Henry the chancellor's? A familiar gambit, echo of the doubleness of Barnaby North, of Montaigne's puzzle about his playful cat. Until we arrive at the mythic era with which the novel concludes, "Damonsday CLVII."

Now JHW is gone; this the second, the defining disappearance of the god of the game. The world has become a ritual because he sacrificed Jock Casey to save his universe, not man's. The Christian myth is reenacted as a myth of the Beast who is anti-Christ. In this era, "some writers even argue that Rutherford and Casey never existed—nothing more than another of the ancient myths of the sun, symbolized as a victim slaughtered by the monster or force of darkness." The New Testament sources of Coover's allegories, like the Old Testament sources, are turned back upon themselves.

There is no narrative interaction now between Henry and his players—they have absorbed his consciousness both in narrative style and in literal fact: One player named Raspberry Schultz "has turned … to the folklore of game theory, and plays himself some device with dice." J. Henry Waugh reduced to a Bronx cheer. He exists only in the tangled confusions of skepticism and ignorance with which the players attempt to understand the meaning of the political parties that in a ritual world have become theological sects, attempts to wring some meaning out of the annual reenactment of the game in which Damon Rutherford was killed, the games of "Damonsday." The sun dominates the players and the imagery on this mythic day that closes the novel, and the old interaction between the two levels of phenomena mediated by Henry's consciousness is allowed to appear in reverse just once in a player's joke: "'Pull the switch on that thing, man!' Gringo hollers up to the sun … 'Yeah,' 'What does it say?' '100 Watt.'" They are all gone as though they never existed: JHW, Rutherford, and Casey. Only Damon remains.

The cynical rookie chosen for the role resents and fears it, lives in a surrealistic shadowland where an apparitional boy demands an autograph, where women surround him and tear at his fly as he struggles through an Orphic threat. He reviews the theological debate upon the meaning of the Parable of the Duel, which is about to be reenacted and rejects it all, all but one thing: "Damon the man, legend or no." "Just remember," he tells himself as he dresses for the Duel, "how you love the guy, that second son who pitched such great ball, and died so young" (read JFK).

Dressed, he stands on the mound as Damon feeling the mark of the Beast. He "flexes his fist, staring curiously at it,… thinking he's got something special there today," feeling that mark "in the right hand," as before and after "in the forehead" that is the Beast's (Rev. 13:6; 2:4). The doubter who must enact the catcher walks toward him. "He has read all he can find on the Association's history, and he knows he is nothing"; "His despair is too complex for plain speech … He is afraid. Not only of what he must do. But of everything." "He stares at the sky, beyond which there is more sky, overwhelming in its enormity. He,… is utterly absorbed in it, entirely disappears, is nothing at all." Perhaps Henry has heard Gringo's joking command and turned out the light over the table, for as the doubter contemplates his terror, he realizes that "it's coming, Yes, now, today, here in the blackening sun." And then he arrives at the mound. It is the second unmediated moment in the novel. He confronts Damon and sees that "it's all there is." And Damon sees, too, but inverts the sense of the vision. The joke of the 100-watt sun echoes an image from Henry's consciousness at the very beginning, when he realizes that sometimes his game is just dead statistics to him, no names: "just a distant echo … But then … someone like Damon Rutherford came along to flip the switch, turn things on." Damon sees, and gives light and life again: "He says: 'Hey, wait, buddy! You love this game, don't you?'… Damon grins. Lights up the whole goddamn world. 'Then don't be afraid' … he says. And the black clouds break up,… and his [Trench's, the battery mate's] own oppressed heart leaps alive to give it one last try." "'It's not a trial,' says Damon, glove tucked in his armpit, hands working the new ball … 'It's not even a lesson. It's just what it is.' Damon holds the baseball up between them. It is hard and white and alive in the sun."

Two young friends together in a numerical, Platonic world that defies cynicism. Damon, the Pythagorean who offered himself for Pithias in the name of friendship to save them both by love. To save them from death imposed by a tyrant.

Paul Trench's unmediated moment of life, like Henry's, is given through Damon. Both are moments in which the tyranny of game is converted into the improbability of play: "You love this game," he affirms for Trench; "That's really a great old game," affirms Hettie. The relationship of J. Henry Waugh and Jock Casey, Coover's God and Jesus Christ, had inverted the Christian myth upon which it was founded. But the third person of Coover's trinity rights it again, or rather rewrites it, with the central holy pun. J. Henry Waugh is inspired, as is his Association, by the presence of Damon, that holy name whose Greek original meant not only the inevitable divine power mediating between gods and men but also those souls of the dead whom we honor, especially, explains the OED, "deified heroes." As Henry said, "The basic stuff is already there. In the name. Or rather: in the naming." By naming, Coover converts the dark parable of our insane culture into an affirmation that salvation is still possible through that daemonic sense of play with which we are so richly endowed.

Let us now reconsider The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. (for that is what it is, Lou's flood of beer and Henry's rainbow wiping out the carefully penned box-scores and histories of a world gone wrong) under a different rubric; let us consider it as a sophisticated metafiction, a novel in the tradition of writings about writings. It has been examined in this context, and it is reasonable that it should be. It narrates a history perfectly separated from the ambiguities and impossibilities that separate the historical, even the least historical, novel—one mimetic only of a generalized place, time, space—from the text. Because here the history is of a text, a history that claims existence only in ink. A novel about a man, or a god, or a madman who substituted writing for life. And then, within that writing there were all those groups, the Bogglers and Legalists, conservatives and radicals, mythologists and rational demystifiers, who interpret the first seven chapters in the eighth. And we are left to play out our own critical fantasies in the missing ninth inning, chapter, life of the cat (is not Coover's story "The Cat in the Hat for President," like this novel, about a book that comes into independent life?). And none of this is true to our reading. John Barth's Chimera is about the telling of stories, about the impossibility of it. The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. is not. Or rather, it uses the notion of authorship and its authority to tell a story, a history, a historia just as the Quijote does. As the author of the association is drawn into his game of chance measured against balance (is the book we read, after all, perhaps Barney Bancroft's history of the UBA in the Balance?), we are drawn with him into the names, not the numbers. The argument of "writing" becomes the vehicle of a larger argument. In this larger argument, characters may argue the ontology of their self-existence, as did Raspberry Schultz, Paul Trench, and others on "Damonsday CLVII," but we do not argue their existence, we embrace it as the function of narrative. The writer's vehicle is always the reader's tenor: This collusion makes a story seem a history. And that is what makes the novel novel: It always purveys news of a new life.