by D. M. Fraser
For our part, we do not treat him badly. The food, if less than elegant, is wholesome and plentiful; there is no lack of beer and wine, within moderation. He has an adequate mattress, blankets, unrestricted use of the bathroom, no scarcity of reading matter to peruse if he wishes. Discipline is not harsh. There is, inevitably, some slight discomfort, a measure of deprivation, a nagging anxiety about the future course of the operation (which we ourselves cannot predict), but on the whole we are scrupulously observing the articles of the Geneva Convention which pertain to prisoners of war. We have performed no atrocities, this time.
The radio keeps us in touch, hourly, with the progress of the manhunt; it is making no progress. People are being detained, searched, questioned, released on their own recognizance, revealing nothing usable. The police are annoyed; there is dissension between civil and military authorities; the public is fascinated. Our friends have remained loyal. There have been countless diversionary actions: gratuitous robberies, shootings, bombings, anonymous letters, fake phone calls. The press is ecstatic. It pleases us to hear that so many of our brothers and sisters have been out sowing confusion and panic in our name. They are welcome to the name; if they use it well, it is theirs. Whoever does the work we do must be our ally; there are no more splendid words than these: We are with you. Alex said it better once, before an audience of the innocent. “Every disruption of the entrenched order, every crime,” he said, leaning into the microphone as though it had leaped erect from his beloved’s navel, “every discomfort inflicted upon the comfortable, every assault, every ambush, every raid, every strike, every act of war against the powerful and propertied, everything that cannot be comprehended, works to our ends. Every man who dies of hunger feeds us. Every woman who fights for her life gives birth to us. Everyone who stumbles and stands up again, who refuses to lie down, carries us forward. We are all one force, and you will never be rid of us, you will never prevail.”
I was in the crowd, listening, hearing his voice—with the regional twang it had never completely lost—ricochet off the concrete and steel walls around us. His hair flapped; his eyes were aimed straight out at a horizon only he saw. It was one of his better speeches.
It is reasonable to assume, for the present, that we will not be discovered; if we are, we will not hesitate to defend ourselves. Our arsenal is adequate. We have no wish to kill the prisoner, whom we would prefer to rehabilitate, but we are not yet unwilling to do it if we must. Only one of us is squeamish, but he is very likely thinking of Alex, about whom we have all had second thoughts. We can trust him to come around, if the situation compels it.
Between bulletins, the radio plays songs of disgruntled love, pain, the familiar grievances. Between commercials (for pizza joints, rental agencies, popular causes), the announcer has forgotten to switch off his mike. “Listen to me,” he shouts across acres of tiled studio space. “Listen to me. It’s my job to send my voice out into the dark, from here, to be retrieved by someone else’s receiver. It’s my job to be listened to. I’m paid money by the purveyors of shit to convince the would-be purchasers of shit that they should purchase the particular shit I’m being paid to purvey. No one loves me for it, for what I do. The softer I speak, the gentler I make my voice sound, the more they buy. Sheets and towels, lawn furniture, soap, appliances. Home delivery. And some of them phone me up in the middle of the night; they say things like, Hey, big boy, how’re you hung? What’s happenin’ when yer shift ends? Usually I just laugh, when that happens …”
Alex loved the battle itself, for its poetry, its pyrotechnics. He loved the music he heard, the drums and whistles in his head, when we went out adventuring. He was often in the vanguard of our undertakings, in the early days, with his transcendental smile and demon’s laughter, his characteristic mane of fiery hair. His beauty was dangerous to us, but we followed it like a lodestar, in the early days. Those days are gone now, and when we understood that they were gone, that the gay music had finally turned sombre and purposeful, we executed him. I will concede it was a mistake, at least a failure of imagination, but it taught us what we needed to know. The next time, it will not be a mistake. Alex understood that, I think. We are different now, other: we have come—through years of indecision, years of indifference, acquiescence, oppression, years of futility—we have come to know our terms and to set them, to accept nothing less, permit no compromise. To say, meaning it: Give us what is ours, or we will take it away from you.
Alex said, in one of the speeches he made before he went underground: “Give us what we ask for, that infinitesimal fraction of what you owe us by your greed, your rapacity, or it will be extracted from you in another currency: your children, your estates, your miserable lives. The hostages we take are your own, not ours.” It seemed hyperbolic. The audience was nervous, unsettled by the fury in his voice. Did he comprehend what he was saying? Had he meant to say it? Was he … sincere?
Your hostages, not ours. We have taken one captive, one only. The exchange is still unequal.
It appears, from the latest reports, that our project may have run into difficulties. This is not positively clear. (It may be a tactic to divide and unnerve us.) The money has been promised, but not the arms, and there has been no word at all on amnesty or the release of our comrades. There is always the risk, which we have tried not to think about, that we were actually observed at some point during the abduction, and followed afterward. That danger was the original weak point in our plan; now, there seem to have been others. Nothing is definite. Morale, for the first time, is low. We have noticed movements, shadows, in the house across the street, supposedly vacant. Our deadline expires tomorrow at midnight, and we disagree among ourselves on the possibility of an extension. The prisoner is eager to join forces with us, but we are less than eager to have him. He could break, easily. We are tired, dirty, irritable. There are decisions to be made, but no one wishes to initiate the business of making them. No one knows what is going to happen …
Undeniably, we would prefer to be doing other things, enjoying the mundane pleasures, dining and dancing in velvet palaces, making love on expensive mattresses, watching contact sports on television—everything that had to be given up, expelled from mind, from the territory of hope. We would have slept forever, if it had been possible: but it was not possible. The noise of gunfire woke us. The siren in the street, the crack of truncheon on skull, the groaning of muscle and crashing of blood, in all the unrewarded labours of the world, woke us. The shouts of the dying penetrated into that sleep, dragged us half-blind and staggering out of the lovely dreams, the sheltered nests we thought were ours by right, into this wakefulness, this cold and unforgiving daylight. There was no choice. It was Alex saying, When are you going to wake the fuck up? and knowing, This is the time. Now. You can’t pretend he’s not talking to you. To you. There was no choice. Necessity came to the door, knocked once politely, and getting no answer smashed through … There wasn’t time to gather together keepsakes. There wasn’t time to say, Sorry, you’ve come to the wrong place, it isn’t me you want. It would have done no good to say it. There was no choice.
There is no romance in this venture now, no glamour, none. It is a job like any other, a matter of seeing the task at hand (straining the eyes to see it) and doing it. The object of the exercise is to do it well. Efficiently. There are many things still to be overcome, left behind. Among them, there is this habit of mind, my own, which persists in language, a crippling attachment to the merely rhetorical. We realize it, I especially realize it, even as we remain in bondage to it. Of all the lessons I have had forced upon me, this has been the hardest to assimilate: that our words themselves, the very cadences of our speech, are the property of others. A poet wrote: “My tongue shall serve those miseries which have no tongue.” But I am not doing it yet. I am not doing it. My tongue is too much, still, the servant of those masters I would otherwise resist, the ones whose sole hunger is to be amused, diverted, lulled … Even these few paragraphs, scrawled in the dead sp
ace of our three days’ entombment here, even these lines that must be burned and scattered before we leave, are an indulgence, a frivolity allowable only because there is nothing else, immediately, to do. Beware, even in thought …
It is no hardship, or very little, to give up the material toys and trappings of the ordinary world, the impedimenta of accumulated objects, wasteful loves, money, safety: those things fall away like dead skin, a welcome riddance. But it is painful, a continual rending, to detach oneself from the sound of one’s own voice, the rhythms and modalities of a lifetime’s speaking, writing, thinking … this addiction, the last, always, to be shed. And I have not yet managed to shed it, and may never. Precisely as Alex was unable to quit the theatre in which his life was staged, I cannot bring myself to flee the story in which mine is written. One day I must, or betray everything—our people, our intentions, everything we collectively strive for. One day I will have to acknowledge that the only story is the world, and action the only language in which to tell it.
The task is to purge, permanently, the elements of Style: to obliterate personality itself, in effect to disappear. All this affectation, this posing, this strutting selfhood, must go. It serves no function. It must be forsaken as remorselessly, as irretrievably, as we were called to leave all the overstuffed baggage of that other life, that sleep …
Midnight now, twenty-four hours to the deadline. In the streets, loud voices, a howling of tires, car doors slamming, metallic sounds. The radio reports that we have been traced to “a house in the East End”; that is a lie. We have not been traced, and we are not in the East End. Someone outside is playing a mandolin. In a special broadcast from his home, the prisoner’s father pleads for clemency, in a voice close to breaking. It is not specified to whom the clemency ought to be extended. There have been other abductions: a minor government clerk, a vice-consul from one of the colonial powers, the wife of an oil-company executive; the pattern is more or less haphazard. Here a hijacking, there a plastic bomb. It will continue. A famous evangelist has recommended summary execution for all “enemies of mankind.” At least it remains possible to smile.
That is one of many things I had not foreseen, when I embarked on this course.
For there are, oddly enough, compensations we had not looked for, satisfactions that have, as we receive them, nothing directly to do with our historical situation, our stated goals. It may be improper to dwell on these things; it may be no more than self-delusion; it may illuminate nothing. But it is present, felt, in each of us: the concealed weapon, the one that can never be confiscated.
There are compensations. Here in this room, as I write, here, where we are together, it is permissible for a moment to forget, for this duration, the burden of what we set out to do, what we will yet have to do. Just now we are in suspended animation. Late-night traffic growls inoffensively in the street, outside, where it ought to be. Kids in muscle cars, prom princesses superlatively coiffed, going home. And a lone woeful baritone cracking into song:
I’ve given up expecting trains
to take me anywhere,
I’ve had enough of looking for
a friendly place to be,
I’ve had a lifetime going places
finding nothing for me there,
It means nothing any more.
I’ve had enough of travelling in this company.
The radio plays on, drowning out the singer. The news is predictable, the commentary typically inept, typically jejune. A shoot-on-sight order has been issued for us; there have been complaints, from liberal quarters, that such measures are unusual, that they set a distressing precedent. “Democracy” is said to be hanging by its fingernails. The world continues, entranced. Somewhere—in another zone, another theatre of operations—an evacuation is proceeding, approximately on schedule; public servants address audiences, to applause; negotiations collapse; steps are taken to deal with crises. Someone seizes power, crying Emergency, and is not opposed. The Loyal Opposition is grateful. A spokesman for the regime summons men of good will to create a United Front Against Terror. It is not being created. A Vivaldi concerto comes on, the slow movement: it seems to us, listening, that the solo violinist is unsure of his part—or he may, for all we know, be under some unspecified duress. Many people are, these days.
The prisoner is behaving normally, sleeping or feigning sleep. He looks sublimely guiltless. Spaghetti bubbles on the stove, untended.
Before he died, Alex tried to say, quoting Mao: “To die for the people is heavier than Mount Tai, but to work for the fascists and die for the exploiters and oppressors is lighter than a feather.” He faced us calmly, stolidly, unassertive for once. It was unmistakable then, how much he loved us. But he would have his ironies, to the end—as we, awaiting the deadline, have ours. He smiled and waved, like a child going off on a vacation, in the moment it took the bullets to reach him. If it was a performance, it was a good one. We perceived, as he fell, that we might have made a mistake.
Time is running out. The deadline is approaching. We have reached a decision: there will be no extensions. The radio signs off with the National Anthem; behind it, somewhere surprisingly close, a walkie-talkie crackles, footsteps sound.
We will not be taken alive.
LONESOME TOWN
LONESOME TOWN
—for Johnny Tens
Goin’ down to …
—popular song
Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular letter to the friends of him who writes it. They alone take his meaning; they find private messages, assurances of love and expressions of gratitude, dropped for them in every corner. The public is but a generous patron who defrays the postage. Yet though the letter is directed to all, we have an old and kindly custom of addressing it on the outside to one. Of what shall a man be proud, if he is not proud of his friends? —R.L. Stevenson
I. Prolegomena
Jamie McIvor went down to Lonesome Town in the dead of summer. “It has to happen,” he told Isobel Monadnock beforehand, fingering the pitcher of lukewarm whisky sours. Routinely, he coughed. Routinely, Isobel looked up from her needlepoint. “The name of the game is inevitability.” They were speaking quietly, reasonably, as reasonable people speak among themselves, without passion. Lately their conversations had been tending to take on this tone, a tone Jamie likened, in his secret heart, to the flavour of pasteurized yoghurt. It was not wholly objectionable. “We really ought to have a serious talk,” Jamie said. “We ought to iron out our differences.” He was thinking: The glow is gone. The afterglow is dimming out fast. No one knows, or especially cares, that I suffer from night-blindness. A wisp of something like melancholy, not at all unpleasant, wafted into the room and settled in the vicinity of the coffee table. The chrysanthemums shuddered. “Real life,” Isobel said, “is a pain in the ass.”
It was an ordinary night of the week, probably Thursday; somewhere they’d lost count of the days. Possibly it was Tuesday, or Saturday, or both. Once, on an impulse, they’d bought a calendar at the local art gallery, abundantly illustrated with representative graphics by Native people; now they seldom looked at it. It hung, ceremonially, on the dining-room wall, among framed photographs of happy couples, tasteful reproductions, assorted ancestral portraits. “Time goes on,” Jamie said, remembering the calendar and how young they’d been, how sweetly innocent, the day they brought it home. “It’s reassuring to know that something goes on like that, reliably, year after year.”
“Once upon a time,” Isobel said, “you didn’t ask for reassurance. You didn’t need it, then.” They’d had this dialogue, these monologues, a hundred times. The night before, for old times’ sake, they’d tried to sabotage a more or less strategic chemical factory, out in the suburbs. It had been a markedly futile exercise: even the guards had declined to take them seriously. Run along now, the guards had said, with much thigh-slapping and chortling. Run along and stay out of mischief. They ran along. Out of mischief. It was still humiliating. Tonight’s project, a hyd
ro substation, had been scrapped pending a renewal of zeal, which seemed unlikely to occur. Zeal was in short supply.
Jamie, for his part, had other things on his mind, graver things. “You can think of it as a vacation, if you like,” he said generously. “You can tell people I’ve gone away to get myself together. That sort of thing does happen, you know. People do it all the time.” His voice sounded, to him, like a pre-recorded message. He thought rapidly: She isn’t paying attention, as usual, she imagines I’m throwing a snit, whereas in fact I am not throwing a snit, I am announcing a major and even terminal decision, but if this non-attention continues I shall indeed throw a snit and it will not be a small one, it will not be inconsequential. Already he felt drained. They were listening to a recording of Renaissance madrigals, variations—minute variations—on a theme of thwarted desire. Oh I am so unha-ha-py, a tenor quavered, plucking his lute. Mine so-oul with ah-gon-eee is fill-ed. Virginals trilled. Isobel looked annoyed when Jamie laughed, as he invariably did. Their mutual cat, Scarface, detached himself from the kitty litter and snarled at the invisible enemy.