The Republic of Nothing

by Lesley Choyce

  There was a second of silence and then, “Sure, Ian. I’d like that. I’m kinda bored around here and would love to have a reason to escape. Be right over.”

  The phone found its own way back into its cradle and I let out a sigh. I was determined to tell her once and for all that I was in love with her. I wanted her to be more than a friend.

  When Gwen arrived she wasn’t wearing a coat even though it was a cold evening. Frost was growing up from the ground like crystalline flowers, planted there by the damp air. She was wearing an old flannel shirt several sizes too big and a pair of patched and faded blue jeans. The moon was behind her in the doorway and I was rendered speechless. Her cheeks were slightly blushed from the cold and her hair was long, straight and soft as the sound of a whisper erased by the blowing of sand. And something else, something metallic and shiny was dangling from her ears, tangled in her fly-away hair and begging my attention.

  Gwen noticed I was staring at them. “Oh these?” She pulled back her hair like it was the curtain of a waterfall. “Do you like them?”

  “Wow,” I said, vocabulary reduced to a monosyllabic cliche. Two bronze medallions hung from her earlobes. Two peace symbols, that unmistakeable triad inside a circle, these of the slimmest threads of bronze but each large as a sand dollar. As I stared at her earrings, I remembered my first gift to this strange and beautiful girl. Hants Buckler’s earlobe. I wanted to say something, to explain the connection, but I desisted. I had clear intentions and I did not want to be unnerved by idle chatter. She had her math and her biology book with her, but I took them and set them down on the kitchen table. “I’d like to just talk for a while,” I said, the mute coming back to the world of language, “if it’s okay with you.”

  “Sure.” She sat down at the table and tucked a leg beneath her. I sat down across from her.

  “How’s your father doing with his work?” I asked, deciding that the evening was not ready for me to blurt out deep and passionate and eternal love. I would come at it tangentially after all.

  “I think it’s great that you’ve always been interested in my father’s work. He misses working with the other men, but I think that in some ways life here has allowed him to be even more creative than before. It’s been good for him. He’s changed. We all have. He’s sick of what’s been done with his research — the new bombs, where it’s all gone. He admits he was wrong. He says, ‘Before, all I had was a brain. Now I have a spine.’ It has to do with standing up for what is right, not just doing research. He’s figured out how to isolate a single electron in a perfect vacuum and track it. They were never able to do that before. He says he could do it tomorrow if he only had twenty-five million dollars worth of equipment.”

  “Hard to come by on Whalebone Island,” I said.

  Gwen laughed and tossed her hair back, revealing again her peace earrings. “He says he’s unlocking secrets but he might not ever reveal them to anyone. He’s afraid they’ll be used for war.”

  I detected something in the way she said that last word. I wanted desperately to shake myself free of my old self — the one I was at school. I wanted some magic to bring us closer, mind and soul. My mother and Ben came into my mind just then and the idea of that intuitive skill they were learning to share. I jumped. “You’ve been thinking about the war, haven’t you? About Vietnam.”

  Now she looked at me with her wide open brown eyes. “Yes. How did you know?”

  “You’ve mentioned it. And then… your earrings. I’ve seen that symbol on the demonstrators on TV. The Americans.” There, it had not been intuitive at all.

  “I’m an American,” she said. “I was born there. I think I need to go back some day. Right now, Americans are killing men, women and children in Southeast Asia. I want to go back home to get out on the streets with those others — the hip-pies, the draft dodgers, the protesters. I want to go back and stop the war. I want to stop all wars.”

  Coming from Gwen, I knew that this was not a foolish whim. It was the sort of thing one believed, something that made perfect logical sense. All at once I realized that she shared something with my father — my old father at least. They both believed they could change the world, that one person could make the difference.

  “What would you do if you were an American and you were drafted?” she asked.

  I had never thought about it. I’d watched TV like Gwen. I’d seen the American kids protesting, seen the bloody war, but it always seemed like something made up for TV, nothing real. “I wouldn’t go,” I said, knowing it was what she wanted me to say.

  “Even if they threatened to put you in jail?”

  “Even then,” I insisted.

  Gwen smiled, touched me on the back of my neck with her hand. “My father says that if he had the twenty-five million, he could perfect his electron isolation device, that he could create a machine that could project a concentrated beam of highly charged electrons into space, bounce it off a satellite or maybe even the moon and direct it precisely to a target anywhere on earth.”

  “But then it would be another weapon, right?”

  “No. He says it could be so precise as to destroy only other weapons. People could be standing right alongside, say, a missile, and they wouldn’t get hurt.”

  “If he knew the locations, he could destroy all the nuclear arsenal and he could even stop the war in Vietnam by taking out all the weapons.”

  “Precisely. Only I tell him it will never work because weapons always fall into the wrong hands whoever creates them. Did you know he met Einstein once?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Yeah. In Princeton. Einstein was walking down a side-walk, stooped over to pick up a caterpillar. He was talking to it.”

  “What did he say?”

  “My father doesn’t know. It was German. But he did stop to talk to Einstein who told my father that all research that leads to anything useful is probably a mistake because someone will use it the wrong way. The more we perfect our ability to create, the more likely it is we will destroy ourselves, he said, and then let the caterpillar go into the hedge where it could not be walked on by a university student. Einstein told my father that all research should be purely hypothetical.”

  “Then why does your father continue what he is doing?”

  “Because it’s what keeps him alive. He’s made a promise to us though that he will write nothing down and will tell no one what he learns.”

  “But now he’s told you and you’ve told me.”

  “That’s because you are you. There’s no one like you. You are like some kind of saint. I don’t know what the quality is, but there is this kindness inside of you. That’s why I’ll always need you as a friend.”

  There, she’d said that stupid word. I heard Casey turn off the TV and go to her room. I stood up and said the only thing I could think of. “Let’s watch television.” A little baffled, Gwen followed me into the living room. It was the CBC with world news. Planes were dropping bombs on North Vietnam. There was jungle fighting, villages being levelled, women and children running from the flames, some of them with blood dripping from wounds.

  “It’s called Napalm,” she said. “The stuff is sticking to their skin and burning it off. Developed by a researcher at an American chemical plant — Du Pont, I think.”

  The context was all wrong but I felt I had no choice. Say it or be stuck in sainthood forever. “Gwen, I don’t want to be your friend,” I told her.

  She turned away from the TV screen and looked at me with utter confusion in her face.

  “I’m in love with you. It’s too hard to be just your friend.”

  I had to leave the room. I didn’t know what she would do. How could this surprise her? Couldn’t she read my mind just a little? Couldn’t she see the other me inside the outer skin? A bomb had just gone off inside me. I was trying to burn off my outer skin, my shell, and show her who I really was and that I really did love her and needed her more than anything in the world. I would have gone to war for
her, or fought against war for her or done anything she wanted if it meant that she would love me.

  I walked outside into the cool, clean night air. I walked over thin, delicate shelves of ice that collapsed into sparkling frost as I stepped across the yard. Gwen followed me. “Wait,” she said. “Ian, where are you going?”

  Now that I had said it, I felt like nothing could ever be the same. Had I ruined everything? Would she reject me outright how? Because I knew she was interested in Burnet, ten times as handsome as I was and slick, worldly, seemingly knowledgeable. Had I ruined my chance to remain a close ally, intimate friend, necessary saint for Gwen? I was walking. Walking towards the bridge, I discovered, walking towards the only route off the island. But I heard her running behind me. When she was right on my heels, I stopped, wheeled around. Gwen was there, panting. It was her move. I wouldn’t say another word. And then a miracle happened; she put her arms around me and pulled herself to me. I could feel her warm breasts up against me, I could smell the soft scent of her hair against my face and feel the startling cold metallic nudge of her earring on my neck. “Hold me,” she said. “Just hold me.”

  We stood there embracing in the cold night air. What was she trying to tell me? I leaped to conclusions of eternal love and happiness, retreated to a potential realization that this was only pity; I wandered up and down avenues from ecstasy to despair but never once opened my mouth to ask what it was she felt. I had come this far and, for me, it had taken as much courage as that of some poor fool soldier, brainwashed and walking towards his death at the trip of a land mine or booby trap. And like him, I was not ready to ask what I had gotten myself into.

  She let go, took my hand, walked me back to my house and inside. Then she picked up her books and walked off home alone into the night. In the morning, on the bus, she acted as if nothing at all had happened. I got up the courage to pass her a note in English class: “I meant what I said. I love you. I can’t live without you.” It was ultimate, desperate and absolute. Something other than my own free will had command over me and there was little I could do but follow orders.

  A note was returned to me, dropped on my tray at lunch, but she did not look at me as she delivered it. “Love is the most important thing in the world,” it said, a cryptic, all too generic message. I decided this was abstract but good news. We had established a new footing. We were no longer just intellectual buddies. I was no longer just the weird kid who had retrieved her grandfather from the insane asylum in New York. But I would not push it. Over the next two months our relationship was an odd one. Usually we would talk as if nothing had changed, but our conversations grew full of serious issues. We spoke mostly about war and injustice and were even beginning to plot how we could do something useful, however small, to try and alter the course of world events. But when it came to the subject of us, she backed off.

  And then there was this other Gwen who I viewed, always from a distance, the one who sidled up to Burnet, the one who was able to divert his attention from a dozen other young ladies vying for his favour as they leaned against his locker and flirted with him. No one could flirt with Burnet as Gwen did. But Gwen seemed never to be around when Burnet occasion-ally flew off the handle. I saw him one day smash a fist so hard into his locker that the metal crumpled. I saw him go home and, as his father yelled some obscene insult at him, kick one of the dogs halfway across the yard.

  I would not talk to Gwen about Burnet. I could not bring myself to tell her that Burnet was one of the destroyers. He was stuck with the violence his father had instilled in him. He still got into fights on Friday nights with big punks from Sheet Harbour. He bloodied noses and injured without feeling anything but satisfaction. It was all so illogical, I wanted to say. Gwen, the devout pacifist, should not be attracted to someone like Burnet. Beneath the practised veneer, it was violence and cruelty that made Burnet tick, and you could see it best on those moments when we’d be in the gym locker room and he’d go picking on some easily injured kid like Victor Far-thing. Victor, who was wimpish at his most courageous moments, could not take it when the valiant Burnet Jr. stole his towel, picked him up butt naked and asked everyone to “Take a good look at the how tiny Victor’s noodle is.” That was the heart and soul of Burnet, and you could tell that humiliating another human meant more to him than all the attention he drew from the girls or the success he had garnered on the sports fields. That was the real Burnet.

  But Gwen was never around to see him then. Burnet called her “his little hippie chick” to other guys when she wasn’t around. It was a phrase he would not use when he realized I was in earshot because Burnet still considered himself my friend and, despite my feeling towards him, we were locked into some permanent, necessary arrangement although even my sainthood could no longer grant the word friendship to it.

  There were few of us who were shocked when Burnet announced one Monday that he would not finish the school year, that he had enlisted in the Canadian Armed Forces and was planning on joining a small group of Canadian soldiers who were volunteering to go to Vietnam and fight side by side with the Americans, under their command. What did I feel there in the cafeteria as he announced it? Was I sickened that he was so ignorant as to go and participate in an unjust war and become himself a perpetrator of some horrific violence to innocents? Was I afraid of losing an old friend at the hands of the Viet Cong, afraid that he’d return in a body bag? Did I try and deter him?

  No, I think I was secretly quite pleased. I knew now that Gwendolyn would see him for what he truly was, a creep who thrived on violence and pain and desired to inflict injury. And more than that, I was ecstatic that he would not be there to draw from me the attention of the girl I loved. Me, a fading saint, a dedicated lover who had nothing to show for all his passion but intense loyalty, a greater social awareness and a commitment to world peace. If Burnet was expecting to hear a speech from me against his decision, he might have been shocked when I said, “It takes a lot of guts to make a move like this, Burnet, a lot of guts.”

  27

  After Burnet left, I thought Gwen and I would become closer, but a strange silence crept between us again, this time worse than before. I kept asking her, “What’s wrong?” but she wouldn’t answer except to say that it wasn’t me. It didn’t have anything to do with me. I invited her over many times, invited myself over to her house, but it was always no. She was pushing me further and further away and I didn’t know why. She had also begun to miss school which was very unusual for her. I figured it had something to do with Burnet, and something to do with the war. Word had come back that Burnet, after training in Canada, would be shipped down to the States for further work with a unit in South Carolina, and then it would be off to Southeast Asia. The crazy bastard was going to have his chance to kill after all. I wanted to explain it all to Gwen, to tell her what Burnet was really like, that maybe it wasn’t his fault but that he was a born destroyer. But every time I talked to her, every time I launched into a one-sided conversation with her, I never once mentioned Burnet.

  May arrived and the sun reappeared, warming the cold stones, melting the last of the ice. The lifeblood began to flow in the veins and gulleys of the land. I was out walking the perimeter of the island again at night. Ian, alone. A familiar portrait. Seventeen was a no man’s land. I felt like I had somehow lost the fun of being a kid but couldn’t figure out how to grow up into something that was worth growing into. There were powerful tides in my life and I had no control over anything. Other forces, too omnipotent and too distant, held gravitational sway over my being. I wanted to fucking scream.

  Then I saw her. I was on the lee side of the island, near the small crescent beach that my mom used to take us to when we were young. The moon was behind her as she was looking straight out into the water, down that shimmering silver path that my mother called the highway of the moon. The highway danced over the bay. My heart leaped into my throat. It was Gwen. I dropped low and sank to my knees behind a clump of sea oats. She took off a j
acket, undid her blouse and stepped out of her skirt. I had only a silhouette to go by, but it was enough to make my lungs forget their evolutionary training. She was light upon the sand, and I watched as she walked into the cold bay water in a straight line centred upon the highway of the moon.

  I was, in those days, a dreamer of many dreams; this one seemed closer to imagination than to the fact, so I could not bring myself to waken. Instead, I almost believed I was sleeping the best of sleeps. The water was up to her neck, her throat, up to her lovely nose and eyes but she was not about to swim. How can I describe the way she moved forward, her long brown hair now floating like feathered seaweed behind her, the moon still shining down like cold steel fire?

  What happened inside me must certainly have been directed by the moon. Some volcanic thing happened in my blood, something less than the deathburst of a fatal star but larger than the forging of a planet. In a split second, the dream was gone; I was fully alive, no longer a child, forever the next thing to come and sprinting down the sandy beach and into the water.

  The water was cold. I sloshed through the shallows and dove forward, tackling Gwen beneath the darkness of the bay. She had no idea what had taken her and she hit me hard in the stomach. I pushed her to the surface and tried to hold onto her hand but she was scratching at my face with her nails. There was nothing to do but hang onto her and pull her shoreward. I felt cruel when at last we were out of the water and I heaved her on the sand, only to watch her fall face down where she sobbed and heaved like some sea thing deprived of its natural environment.

  To say it happened like this will seem false, but the truth is I knew then and there that I would never be the same. What I felt could never be described as anything less than awareness and arrival. Gwen was crying and I had no idea what to say. Too many thoughts were racing, too much was ready to spill from my mouth. I found her jacket and put it around her shoulders, then stepped back and found myself kneeling in the wet sand.