Polyamorous Love Song

by Jacob Wren

  And then there was the incredibly stupid part. We were in Japan, lost, deep in the countryside. We had no map. We were travelling by bicycle. The bicycles were of course stolen. We might as well have still been wearing the fucking outfits for all the good their sudden absence did us, since we were the only white people for miles and therefore painfully conspicuous in every way. I had said that bicycles were an extremely slow and laborious way to escape. She had said that it would seem more like we were tourists and that no one would be looking for a happy couple riding bicycles through the countryside. I liked that she called us a couple. I liked the idea of tourism as a disguise. I liked any idea that could take my mind off what had just happened and what we had done. I was excited by what we had done and didn’t want to admit it to myself. I was appalled by my own excitement and this condition only served to make the excitement more palpable. I was pedalling calmly and smoothly, every downward pressure on the pedal an announcement to the world: Please don’t pay any attention, everything is fine and calm. She was pedalling just slightly ahead of me and I watched the back of her head, feeling the warmest feelings imaginable. I wondered if tonight we would once again sleep in the same bed.

  The landscape was green and lush and calm. It was a landscape that could not believe or take in what had just happened to us, or what we had done, as we bicycled through and alongside it. We had no destination but didn’t want to be caught. We knew only what we didn’t want, and knew that without some positive goal, a goal that we were able to formulate and then activate, the situation would remain deeply impossible.

  We were not the only approach, not the only endeavour. There were different approaches, different endeavours. And much like stubborn individuals, each approach employed strikingly different means, frameworks and strategies. Our approach was relatively straightforward: We were persecuted and would fight back.

  As I biked, a few feet behind her, I once again considered the diagnosis and wondered how much longer I had to live, wondered if I should tell her, when I should tell her, how she would react. The diagnosis had given me newfound courage in our revolutionary fight. If I was going to die anyway, and sooner rather than later, why not go down in a blaze of world-changing flames. How much violence is it acceptable to utilize in service of a revolutionary cause? Were we only reacting against the violence being done to us? And if you are only reacting against something, as opposed to fighting for something, does this in some sense make the endeavour more suspect? Without the outfits, with the outfits in the trash, burned away, all these questions took on a new lucidity.

  I had worn the mascot almost constantly for the past twenty years. There were very few moments when I was without it, or at least without having it close by, ready to return to my flesh like a second skin. Of course, that was not how it seemed to me at the time. I never thought of ‘outfits.’ As far as I was concerned, at any given moment, I was Mascot. And with the outfit gone, on this bicycle, so far away from home, suddenly I had to face the possibility that I was not. Or not only. That if I were to survive, the life ahead of me might be something else. But why did I still imagine I might survive. I was thinking only of the police, not of the disease, unsure which was a more immediate danger.

  I watched her back, her legs, as she pedalled a few feet ahead of me. She was stronger than me, not prone to such constant doubts. For her the basic premise was clear, unshakable. Even questions of strategy did not faze her. We must fight bravely and without mercy. We were vastly outnumbered but the impossible could happen and we might still prevail. I had never been so deeply in love with anyone as I was now with her and knew I would most likely never be again. There had been moments in the past, moments of weakness, when I no longer cared whether we won or lost, when all I wanted was for her not to die, not to be killed. She had many other lovers, men and women – I had no conception of the details, and at times it had bothered me, but right now, bicycling along this path, on the run, with no one we knew for miles, I couldn’t have cared less. For now she was mine, whether she knew it or not.

  I remembered reading: Man should not have thrown himself into this amazing adventure that is history. Everything that he does turns against him because he wasn’t made to do something, he was made solely to look and to live as the animals and the trees do.

  And this: I feared that the animals regarded man as a creature of their own kind which had in a highly dangerous fashion lost its healthy animal reason – as the mad animal, as the laughing animal, as the weeping animal, as the unhappy animal.

  Of course we were not animals, but we related to animals most. We were man-made animals, artificial, synthetic. When we fought, we fought with the savagery of beasts who fight not to acquire or pump themselves up with worldly pride, but only for survival. We related to animals because more than anything we wanted to survive, survive on our own terms and with the nobility of natural selection. But I now had to admit to myself that I, personally, would not survive. And I wondered if there was still any way to utilize my demise, to make it productive for our cause.

  I watched her legs as they pedalled smoothly and easily. She had many other lovers, but so had I. I’d had my outbursts of severe jealousy over the years, but so had she. There had been periods when we were sleeping together and other periods during which we were not, but never had there been a time, from the moment I first met her, when I was not in love. Why were we in Japan? How did we end up here? I knew that I ended up here because of her.

  Often the idea of survival is mentioned in relation to capitalism, as in the phrase ‘economic survival’ or the thought ‘I need to earn money to survive.’ However, in our endeavour we hoped to sever survival from economy, striving for a purer form of modernized surviving. Our fight would be a fight for survival and the fighting itself would be our life, not in the sense of employment but in the sense of a full reality with all of the inherent risk, complexity and completion that living implies. And not only in fighting, but also in the joys of love, of danger, of moving in unison, undifferentiated from one another within the pleasure of our Mascot second skins, side by side, together within the pack.

  The Japanese landscape spread around us as we pedalled. We didn’t see another soul and this was something of a relief since it also meant that no one had seen us. She turned down a dirt road and I followed. We had no idea where we were or where we were going, so one path was as valid as the next. I believe she chose this one because it seemed thin, obscure, leading away from civilization and into the woods. We had stolen good, sturdy bikes and, if we had to break away from roads and paths altogether, the bikes would serve us well.

  There had been only a single instance, and this was many years ago, when I honestly questioned the possibility of our ongoing love, a moment when she was entranced by the man chained to the radiator. Jealousy is a terrible savagery and I tried to experience my own with as much generosity as possible. I liked the man chained to the radiator. He was fascinated by us and, in turn, we were equally fascinated by him. I wondered where he was now. We had scattered everywhere and scattered was exactly how I felt. I wondered if she also wondered where he was. I never knew to what extent she loved him. For a while it was her job to watch over him and that was what she did. Maybe that was all, but what did it matter now? They spoke together with such a deep complicity. I had never asked her if the man chained to the radiator changed anything between us, though of course at times I feared he did. Was there any pretext I could arrive at for asking her now? He was the only one of us that never wore the outfit and yet, by the end, there was no question he was one of us.

  She stopped just ahead of me as I pulled up beside her. I realized it was time to eat. We laid our bikes against a tree and spread out a picnic. The picnic seemed quaint when compared to the violence of just a few hours ago. Was it really only a few hours ago? I looked at my wrist, but was no longer wearing a watch. I hadn’t been paying attention, wasn’t sure how long we had been biking. Maybe for most of a day. It wasn’t
starting to get dark, but it stayed light until quite late this time of year. As we ate I tried to calculate how much food we had stolen and how long it would last. If we were careful I thought we’d be all right for the next couple of days. We ate in silence. We often spent our time together in silence. We had said so much already, knew each other so well, often already knowing what the other would say. In battle this silent complicity had time and again served us well.

  But now there was something she didn’t know. Or maybe she already sensed it. I wondered if there was any point in telling her. Would it make our remaining time more precious or would it only make it sad? How would she react? I knew how she would react to almost anything, everything, but suddenly I felt unsure how she would react to this. How do animals care for their dying? We rarely had time for such dilemmas. Most often we were killed in battle: surviving our wounds or dying off fast. I feared mine would be a slower, more painful, journey.

  After we finished eating we quickly made love on the blanket before getting back on our bicycles, setting off once again. I knew if I was willing she would ride all night, but also that sooner or later I would suggest we sleep. The point was to get as far away from the crime scene as possible. To ride all night would be exhausting but satisfying. I wanted this satisfaction, but was concerned that, later, if we were to find ourselves under attack, we should not be too exhausted, that we should rest now, while we could, conserve our energy for when we might need it the most. But, if I were honest with myself, that was not my main concern. More than anything I wanted to curl up beside her and sleep through the night, intertwined, as we had done so many times before, in the drowsy comfort that the future might continue to exist.

  In the distance, just coming into view, we could see a building, a temple. I believe I saw it first, maybe she did, but neither of us commented on the fact. Soon we could hear the first wisp of chanting in the distance. She was a few feet ahead of me, so I found it difficult to intuit her reaction, but for me the sounds had a striking, divisive effect. On the one hand I found them calming, magical. On the other I felt a surge of fear that we would be spotted, conspicuous, that our presence calmly bicycling past the temple would allow our pursuers to close in. But as we drew closer, as the chanting increased in proximity, its steadiness washed over me and my fears decreased. For a moment I wanted to stop, join in, though I realized this was completely out of the question. Maybe the diagnosis had added a touch of mysticism to my character. They say that happens when you have evidence you will soon die. For all I knew that was the first, perhaps only, reason for the existence of religion. Moments later the voices had already peaked and were receding.

  As they faded into the distance, now confident that we had passed without notice, I wondered about those inside. They were following a tradition that had been in effect for thousands of years. Ours was a much younger endeavour, but we hoped against hope it would last just as long. What might Mascots look like one thousand, two thousand, three thousand years from now? It was insanity to even wonder about such things, but as we biked there was little distraction from such vague wonderings. I wasn’t part of the first generation, but all members of the first generation who had not been killed in battle, remained. You could talk to them: about their reasons, about what it had been like. How would it be when such reasons were thousands of years in the past?

  I believed, desired, that there would be Mascots deep into the future. Our idea was too strong, the courage behind it too ferocious, for us to ever completely disappear. I was part of the second generation. But already the third, fourth and fifth were finding new ways, weapons, strategies. They killed silently, quickly, planned ahead in great detail, more swiftly escaped. Watching them in battle, fighting alongside them, more and more, I realized something previously invisible: that my generation had thrived on the fierce spectacle of confrontation, our outfits splattered in blood, out in the open, outnumbered with nowhere to hide. That was when we discovered how the pack could fucking surge, when the insanity of our endeavour exploded into violence, into glory, in all directions, though no one would have said so at the time. It’s only in watching the new ones, how they’ve learned from our mistakes, that the facts become clear. That our pleasure in open battle was also the weakness crippling us, our most intense reasons for existing drawing out, line by line, the story of our demise. So much has changed since then. This evening I am calmly bicycling across Japan. Others are in Venezuela, Portugal, Russia, Switzerland. There is no central command and no way to trace us. We are everywhere and nowhere. Outfits are abandoned, flights are booked, and later new outfits are found – an act considered unthinkable by the first generation and blasphemous for my own. But we will fight and in fighting we change and in changing we will survive.

  I could still hear the faintest of chanting far behind us, peaceful as a memory, and watching her back I could feel that she held on to it as well. Twenty minutes ago were unseen monks chanting within their temple and much further back was a street full of bodies that we had injured and killed. The peacefulness of one blotted out the violence of the other. I had never before killed large numbers of civilians. I had only shot soldiers and police. This felt different, but then again not so different. The people you killed were gone, regret would not bring them back. They were gone and soon, perhaps sooner than I could imagine, I would be gone as well. But when I died someone else would wear my outfit and when he died someone else would do the same and in this way Mascots would last forever and through them, in some sense, I would persevere as well.

  My legs were starting to feel tired. I tried to remember the last time I had been on a bicycle, maybe when I was a child or teenager. I remembered almost nothing of my childhood, our struggle had beaten all memories out of me. But as I stared at her back I began to remember something about her childhood, something she had once told me, shortly after we first met. I have no idea why I remembered this, but she was young, maybe seven or eight, and her father had taken her to the zoo. She wasn’t sure how but believed, even then, she had already heard of the Mascots, maybe some children at school had said something. And she was staring at the animals when she said to her father, thinking the words as they came out of her mouth: “It’s not right, they shouldn’t be in cages like that,” and her father, a kind man, a bit of a philosopher, had replied, without giving it a second thought: “One way or another we’re all in cages, what we need to do is learn how to fly within them.”

  That moment had always stayed with her. She thought it was what she was still trying to do, find some way to live that didn’t feel caged. When she told me the story I remember replying that I didn’t think those were my reasons. I didn’t know what my reasons were, but those didn’t feel like them. And she smiled.

  It was starting to get dark now, finally, and also cold. After a while we stopped to put on warmer clothes, but then immediately resumed biking. What were my reasons, my motives? When you do something for a long time, eventually, it becomes your life. Reasons become irrelevant. But the outfits were gone, we were lost, the future was uncertain in every possible aspect and all of these questions were, once again, thrashing through my mind. Maybe my reasons had mainly been to stop such questions from thrashing. When you were fighting for your life, when any moment a bullet might tear through you, there was no time to wonder. The fear was addictive, the wanting to survive, to prevail. Every small victory infused new recruits, and every Mascot added was one step away from extinction. The goals were immediate and clear. I needed that. I believed in that immediacy. It was the immediacy of being animal.

  I was tired but felt the longer I held out, the more reasonable it would seem when I eventually suggested we stop for the night. It was a little game we were playing, with each other, with our survival. To go to the point of complete exhaustion might mean to save ourselves, but also to place ourselves in greater danger. I thought this might be our last stand but had felt this way so many times before. The thought passed through my mind like a mild anno
yance. There was still much need for courage, since tonight, when we finally stopped to rest, I would tell her about the diagnosis. There was no point in hiding it any longer.

  9. Polyamorous Love Song

  The most effective lie is always the one closest to the truth. The closer the better. A dream is not true but is never a lie. There are various approaches for understanding dreams: as evidence of some deeper psychological truth, as alternate realities, as subtle yet surreal mental reprocessings of our daily lives, as experiences equally valid to those had while awake. Due to the acuity of their strangeness, dreams practically call out for interpretation. However, since we don’t accurately know what consciousness is, since we don’t know precisely what or how we experience being awake, why would we be able to know what happens when we dream? There are also various approaches one might use for understanding a lie. But one aspect generally agreed upon is that to tell the complete truth, and only the complete truth, at all times, is a disaster. There are different ways of being honest.

  This is a dream about the day Paul decided to start writing down his thoughts. Prior to that moment he had felt there was no point. Thinking was an end in itself. There was no need for it to be recorded or glorified. But then, suddenly, he was writing books, publishing them. For a moment this shift felt like a betrayal, like he was betraying his former self, but then, at the same time, it felt positive, like a positive shift in his life. What is this concept of selling out? Is it better to hold fast to one’s former ideas, or to be open to new ways of thinking about oneself and the world? If I am working as an activist to protect the environment, and a large corporation offers me a job with a generous salary to do things that will essentially harm the environment, then the situation feels rather clear. But if I believe in not making art and then, later, change my mind, the parameters of the compromise are somewhat more ambiguous. Art complicates everything.