"Two Well-Dressed Men"

 In October 1986, television news anchor Dan Rather suffered a bizarre tragedy that has become the stuff of urban legend. Walking through New York City, he was set upon by two strangers, whom he described at the time as "well-dressed men." The two men started badgering him, repeating the mysterious phrase: "What is the frequency, Kenneth?" Or: "Kenneth, what is the frequency?" Rather explained that they must have him confused with someone else. They refused to listen to him, instead repeating the same question and chasing him down the street. Eventually, they started hitting him. Rather was only saved, after a brutal beating, by the intervention of a building superintendent in the place he had sought shelter. 

The story is a sad and frightening one, but in at least one sense hardly unusual. Since the era of de-institutionalization—when the enlightened public in its wisdom decided that instead of forcibly incarcerating the mentally ill, it would lurch wildly along a different vector of inhumanity and simply turn people out on the street to fend for themselves—since then, I say, the fate of being accosted on the street by strangers muttering incoherencies is unfortunately not uncommon, in any of our great American cities. 

Nonetheless, the Rather story has other elements that elevate it above the typical street crime and place it firmly into the realm of the uncanny. If the attack—and the inscrutable question that accompanied it—was the product simply of a schizophrenic episode, after all, why were there two assailants? They can't both have been suffering from the exact same delusion at the same time, can they? And then there's that eerie detail of the two men being "well-dressed." They don't fit the mental image we have—fairly or otherwise—of the kind of people suffering from mental illness that the incoherent phrase "What is the frequency?" would otherwise call to mind. The incident seems inexplicable. 

In the decades since the attack, the mystery behind it has apparently been "solved," to the satisfaction of the police. The answer they came up with does not concern me here, however, and I will not dwell upon it—the details can be found elsewhere online through the simplest Google search. 

What interests me instead is the rival theory forwarded by Paul Limbert Allman, in the December 2001 issue of Harper's—from which I derive the rough sketch of the details of the attack I outlined above (including this business of the two well-dressed men). Allman begins by reviewing the history of the attack and the impact it had on Rather and his nation of followers. He then pivots, unexpectedly, to a highly Six Foot Turkey-esque autobiographical account of how he happened to be reading a book recently that ended up relating to this topical matter in a surprising way. The book in question was Donald Barthelme's classic compendium of his earlier fiction, Sixty Stories. 

Barthelme's connection to Dan Rather's attack is, as I say, not obvious. And Allman no doubt did not originally dip into Sixty Stories expecting to find such a nexus. But, as he reads, odd details begin to catch his notice. There is a character appearing in multiple stories named Kenneth (Barthelme resorts to the same names time and again, one observes: Hilda is another favorite of his). This is perhaps just a banal coincidence, however, so Allman moves on. Then he finds the phrase "What is the frequency?"—uttered in the midst of one of Barthelme's absurdist dialogues. But this is not all. Allman reads on, until he comes to a story featuring a tyrannical figure in the news media, an "editor-king" called, astoundingly, "Mr. Lather."

By the end of this litany, one is serio-comically convinced already of what becomes Allman's inevitable conclusion: one of the two men who assailed Dan Rather on that October day in 1986 must have been Donald Barthelme himself; or else, the pair were henchmen acting on Barthelme's behalf. Oh, and I almost forgot the most damning circumstantial evidence that Allman finds: Barthelme and Rather were not connected only by odd phrases in one of the former's books: rather (ahem), they both started their careers in Houston. They both came up through Houston local media as journalists. They were both drafted into the military around the same time and are roughly the same age: it all fits!

In case it wasn't already clear by now, Allman's essay is a joke. More precisely, it is itself an exercise in Barthelmean wit and irony that would make the master proud. Indeed, the author even describes it for this reason as a "story," rather than an essay. It is not meant to be taken too seriously. 

Of course, this has not stopped the internet. Examples can be found online of people arguing with Allman as if he intended it all quite literally, with his tongue nowhere near his cheek. And perhaps that just proves his point. After all, the story—to the extent it has a point beyond itself—is a satire upon our need to make meaning out of bizarre and inexplicable tragedy; it is a commentary on our ability to extract such a meaning out of whatever material happens to be at hand, however seemingly unrelated and unpromising. 

It is this impulse to make meaning that underlies the abundant human capacity for inventing conspiracy theories in general. Kennedy was assassinated? So grave a loss must mean more, we reason, than simply the misguided actions of a troubled soul. We must find connections somewhere; spot coincidences, or "synchronicities," as the New-Agers would call them (they firmly believe, and are fond of repeating, alongside the Q-Anoners, with whom they all too often overlap these days, that "there are no coincidences")... in short, get out the red yarn and start pinning photos to the wall. "Kenneth" leads to "Frequency" leads to "Lather" leads to "Houston." And so on.  

It's absurd, of course: why would Barthelme want to plot the beating of Dan Rather? Why would he smuggle clues about this conspiracy into a book he published five years before the incident occurred? And yet... it can't be denied that it's fun to spot the coincidences. It also helps us turn an incomprehensible random act of cruelty into something from which we can draw meaning and even the sublime pleasure of cracking a difficult case. 

But then, once one has started, it becomes very difficult to stop. What once was irony can congeal into something more menacing; and one risks forgetting to see the joke oneself. I was reading Barthelme's earlier novel, The Dead Father, this week (a snippet of which can also be found in Sixty Stories), for instance—and suddenly I am seeing new pins and bits of red yarn to add to the map of our evolving conspiracy. 

The book, like most Barthelme fiction, resists easy encapsulation. I suppose it describes the hauling of a "dead" (but still highly voluble and opinionated—and horny) father-figure across a quasi-medieval countryside, accompanied by his son (forced like all the father's sons to wear the motley colors and humiliating cap of a fool), the son's lover, and a team of workmen tasked with the muscular labor of moving the dead father by cable. Like most Barthelme fiction, it is also full of absurdist dialogues, inexplicable incidents, and surreal non sequiturs. 

Lest all of this sound like a pretentious postmodern drag (no pun intended), let me assure you it is not. What no summary of a Barthelme story can convey in the abstract is how richly, wickedly entertaining it all is. Like his other fiction, it's witty; it's hilarious; and ultimately, when the "dead" father finally reaches the end of his journey, and discovers that instead of finding the Golden Fleece he was promised, his children have merely led him to his grave, the novel is even surprisingly touching and poignant. It can also be seen as synthesizing some of the core themes of Barthelme's other stories: here is the confrontation with the father; the guilt of fatherhood and sonship; the Oedipal struggle between postmodernism and modernism (rehearsed in Barthelme's own biography), and so on. 

The quality and thematic coherence of the novel being unrelated to its forensic utility in identifying Rather's attackers, however, let us shift gears. One of the aforementioned non sequiturs in the tale occurs when the son Thomas is asked to regale his traveling companions with a story from his experience. He relates a story-within-a-story about an encounter with another vicious metaphor for domineering paternity: a monster known as the "Great Father Serpent." Thomas's story of his mysterious victimization at the hands of the serpent's minions begins on what is by now an eerily familiar note: "One day in a wild place far from the city," he says, "four men in dark suits with shirts and ties and attaché cases containing Uzi submachine guns seized me."

What could these men be, other than the premonition of Rather's assailants? Are we not here dealing with another set of "well-dressed men"? Are they not sporting suits and ties? Admittedly, they have doubled in number. Perhaps Barthelme ran out of the money needed to hire four hitmen, when it came time to carry out his nefarious scheme, and had to cut corners to save costs. But do the four well-dressed men not remind us nevertheless of the two well-dressed men, in duplicate? 

What do these well-dressed men in the Dead Father proceed to do to Thomas? Much what the two well-dressed men did to Rather. "They hurt me," summarizes Thomas. Do they ask him "What is the frequency?" Do they call him "Kenneth"? Well, no. That would be Barthelme showing his hand a little too plainly. He smuggled in these clues to his future schemes more subtly than that, so that they would elude more casual investigators than Allman and me. Not convinced? Well, do you know what two words appear approximately fifty pages later in the novel? That's right: there it is on page 116 of the Farrar, Straus and Giroux Classics edition: "the frequency."

Perhaps, somehow, after all this, you still don't believe us? You still discount the most logical explanation of Rather's attack, namely, that it was planned and orchestrated decades in advance by resentful postmodern novelist and short story writer Donald Barthelme, who was so pleased with his plot to carry out the perfect crime that he dribbled breadcrumbs throughout his works of fiction published in the preceding decades so that diligent sleuths like us would one day uncover the terrible truth? You may be thinking something like what the Dead Father asserts after listening to Thomas's tale of his encounter with the Great Father Serpent:

That is a tall tale, said the Dead Father. I don't believe it ever happened.

To which we can only reply as Thomas does:

No tale ever happened in the way we tell it, said Thomas, but the moral is always correct.