But then, if that is the standard, how many more events might one implicate the Wintry in? How about the waste station that was recently compromised in one of our less affluent neighborhoods? And what of these beaten escorts, the community of sex workers? Would they not make as good a target, even if they are not yet politically organized? A preemptive strike of sorts? How different are they from Celano’s great unwashed? Some of them work legally too, after all, in the adult film industry.
I wonder, then, when Celano does surface, whether he also will face greater suspicion, in his case for the profaning of the museum and our fundraiser. I suppose I don’t wonder but know. The evidence there paints an even more damning picture, though it is still nothing so strong as conclusive, the very idea of which—conclusive evidence—has receded lately, hasn’t it, into a sea of probabilities. It will be, as they say, something for the police to decide. (I hope, of course, it turns out he has little to do with this, if his thinking is as probing as I hope it is, going by some of his prognostications.)
The forced fact, whatever the truth, is that both of us are now under surveillance. The government’s license implicitly expands. So one wonders, again, about the origins of both attacks. It is hard not to notice that though the materials involved differ—small guerilla charges in the museum, a single sophisticated leveling device in the pool hall, one that could incinerate the place without causing a hint of structural damage (the buildings on either side have been virtually undisturbed)—the manner of their deployment is eerily on a par. The elegance and economy. The practiced precision. There is the perfection of performance here, so perfect one doubts any private organization could manage it.
One can’t help but observe these unities. Who gains from Celano and I being locked in a conflict that can only be internecine? In some sense, many do. The Christians and Muslims. The libertarians. But they have their own waves of crises. It’s just not their turn. So, in the largest sense, who gains—who is strengthened—by the sight of so much strife between all of these rivals, as we head toward elections? We may say this much, I hope, without danger: these clashes can only imbue the elections themselves, along with the government responsible for holding them, with greater authority. Very likely the government will win them too, if they are seen to bring stability now. Conveniently, they can probably choose whatever means they please in bringing it. In a state of emergency, the people grow eager for a heavy hand.
In any case, Jenko’s hall is being rebuilt, and the insurance has not even been necessary (though that will come). He’s said that donations have streamed in. Some have been quite large, we understand. He will not name the donors, which is wise, not least because of the misunderstandings every revelation, even the innocent ones, seems to generate.
Now, this financial support cannot be assumed to be an endorsement of those labor meetings transpiring within, which represent only a fraction of the activity of the hall. It might really just be support for him, Jenko, given his broader business interests, which extend now, from his beginnings in this pool hall—a London import—deep into construction, much of it conducted jointly with Celano’s father and a network of other developers. A threat to Jenko threatens much else.
We owe to them the reconstruction of the waterfront of southwest Halsley, destroyed last fall by those twin hurricanes that swept through in succession, John and Mark. And equally we owe the quiet rise of that little island in the river as a residential and commercial force.
What these donors make of Jenko’s staging of Celano’s meetings, I cannot say. Perhaps it’s considered an eccentricity of his, or his philanthropic side, and through him, their philanthropic side. We do know their friendship, Jenko and Celano’s, goes quite a ways back, not just in time, but in distance, to Europe. And by all accounts, Jenko’s convictions about the needs of the workers are genuine. Many of his developments compensate them in unusually generous ways, shall we say.
Perhaps the donations coming in to Jenko are just a kindness, as one of Halsley’s burgeoning landlords. (His tax revenue is appreciated by the city, I’m sure.) The halls are only one small dimension of his concerns. But this hall, it will be better than before, more modern, and more secure. Everything, it’s said, will be indestructible.
Will Celano’s meetings return as quickly, though. One fears there may be a point where the destruction of property, vicious as it is, is not quite the end of it. Why should that barrier remain unbreached? On all sides, actually, the tumult, this thousand-sided Möbius strip of a conflict, has remained below this threshold. What does it say about the operative forces here that it has? Perhaps we are meant to think there are limits.
Celano’s position has always been obscure. Sometimes it appears to be simply about mobilizing votes. Sometimes there is a sense that something greater is at stake, and it is this that has made things more complicated. But there is something unstateable about the position. It seems to require the provision of a language that is either dead or unborn.
Certainly it is not a classical socialism. Is it possibly antidemocratic even? Does it require a silencing of the reigning masters? Or is it rather a call for a different form, a more perfect vehicle for our original national principles? Some of his essays, attributed and not, suggest this. But welding these arguments together, the strategies they recommend, seems impossible. The elements will not jell, not yet anyway.
Are they, though, meant to lie discretely, as a series of piecemeal, even inconsistent interventions in our political life? Can justice really be schizophrenic in this way? Or is that a characterization from a point of view he wants to explode? Even still: can justice be a disruption? Can it exist as a kind of negation? Or is that only a clearing of a space, a prelude to something more well formed?
It is just this disunity of approach, together with his capacity to effect certain sorts of change, indeed massive change, through his diffuse allies, that makes it possible to impute such an array of motives and actions to Celano, and impossible to cross his name off any list. He can apparently explain almost any eventuality, micro or macro. The Wintry too has a varied program, but then, we aren’t articulating or defending any single position, though many claim the opposite. In any case, haziness, I hope, is not a basic quality of anything we do.
But the ease with which Celano can be invoked, it has made him less predictable, not more. Is that, finally, what he is after? A blurring?
So, the museum: on its surface, yes, the building, the Wintry gathering, can seem natural objects of his animus. Targets. Given that his own meeting ground was destroyed just prior, motives line up nicely. Or they can seem to. That’s the trouble. It depends on which pronouncements of his we take most seriously: the ones about the corrosive social properties of wealth, say, or the ones about its capacity to emancipate, in which case, we are not opposed.
Firm conclusions, then, aren’t possible, not unless and until his doctrine jells. This is a recipe for self-implication, martyrdom even, of a certain sort. I’m sometimes of the mind that he owes it to his followers, and to the broader collective, to make his views cohere; and other times of the mind that, so long as he is listening carefully, and is cautious about making assumptions of the other actors, especially the ones that are nearest to hand, that he might more effectively maintain a certain kind of public scrutiny, that he might sharpen all of our eyes, by remaining in the shadows. Sometimes it is the veil that keeps the attention where one wants it, and where, I agree, it is needed.
I hope, personally, that he does not, and never did, assume the destruction of his hall, Jenko’s hall, must somehow issue from wealth—private wealth, anyway (the state is another matter). In fact, as I say, I hope to find that he sees no necessary moral divide between his causes and the notions we proposed that night.
We must wait, I suppose, for events to unfold.
■■■
Stagg replaced the magazine within a rectangle of clear floor. All around his desk, the ground was covered in papers, set at odd angles, bu
t never more than one or two layers thick. He’d put the first documents down with no regard, hurriedly tossing them onto any empty area while he carried on with his research. But as their number grew and space contracted, the articles and legal pads and printouts had to be wedged between what was already in place there. Sometimes this wasn’t enough, and to make room, papers would have to be resettled, like people, shunted to one side or the other, or pushed up against others.
Sometimes even this wasn’t enough, and he was forced to layer, offsetting the top document from the one beneath, like a pair of cards. That way, everything remained surveyable from the point from which his work radiated: his old chair.
Squat and hard-backed, extracted from his childhood home—he’d not thought of the place, out in L.A., since it had been sold off, almost fifteen years ago now—he’d done all his grade-school homework in this chair. It seemed the homework never finished.
Stagg leaned back and felt the chair cradle him. In the present apartment, with the present desk, it came up short—it was in no sense adjustable—leaving him to type upward, with his hands held out across from his chest rather than his stomach. Once he’d thought to get a lower-set desk; but then, it had come with the apartment, and it was attached to the bookcase.
Getting a taller chair would have been simpler. But the over-constructed original, made of too many planks, had decayed unrepeatably. It was something he’d never been able to replicate. The weakening of its joints, the legs and back, the wood itself: the chair seemed never to resist him, compensating for the tiniest shift of weight or pressure with a bend or a twist.
At first, the pliancy made him feel as though the chair would collapse beneath him. But it had remained that way for at least a decade now, perpetually on the brink. Somehow this was its most stable state, and what he’d first apprehended as weakness proved instead to be a kind of peculiar responsiveness.
Responsiveness to him, anyway. The proportions of anyone else’s body might destroy it. Sometimes he put clothes on it to discourage Renna from using it. Sometimes she sat on top of the clothes. Other times she would sit on top of him while he was in it, and they would both feel sure they would collapse in a pile of wood. It never worried her. He’d shoo her away then with a smile, or lift her up and set her on the bed.
He leaned back still further in the chair and wondered where she was. He hadn’t seen her for a couple of days now, since that night at Larent’s, with Ravan, where they’d all given up their minds to various substances. He’d taken her home in a cab and she slept all the way. He woke in the morning and she was somewhere else already. She’d texted a few times since then as she scampered around town, working, schmoozing. He’d dutifully responded. But she’d said nothing concrete about meeting and he wasn’t going to be the one to do it again.
The only woman he should have been calling was Jen. In some ways she might need him more than Renna. Anyway it was his job to follow up. He wondered where she was now, and what exactly she was doing, or what Roman she was reading. Lucretius maybe. It’s what he was reading. He still had nothing to tell her, really, so he’d wait until he did.
He let the front legs of the chair come down and opened his eyes. Now that he had it here with him, he found it hard to work, or rather to think, without it. His most probing ruminations seemed to occur in its arms, leaning back away from the desk, with his eyes falling on an empty wall.
It was the only furniture that felt necessary. A duvet on the floor could suffice, and his computer was a laptop. It would be easier to bring everything else in the room in line with the chair than the reverse.
Ultimately, though, he changed nothing. The comfort that was good for thinking was not, it turned out, good for writing. Between the chair and the desk there was a useful mismatch. The slight but continuous strain it caused brought Stagg a greater consciousness of the act of writing, and this awareness seemed to produce sharper, more definite lines of prose. It was as if, given the extra effort involved, he didn’t want to have to spend anymore time typing than he had to, so he would try to get it right the first time, or nearly so. Typewriters, he understood, had the same effect. Perhaps the pen as well. The costs they imposed concentrated the hand and the mind. His essays, or whatever they were, had benefitted. The roots seemed stronger.
He stood and just as quickly sank face first onto the bed a short yard from the desk. Penerin had emailed him a link to this same piece by Kames, but he’d had the magazine itself handy. Probably it could only be published under Kames’s name, and in the Wintry’s own monthly, Lebenswelt, it was so loose, so oddly voiced and full of circling repetitions.
Kames’s intellectual pedigree was irreproachable, though. His doctorate in political theory, begun at Princeton and finished at Chicago, won him a fellowship year and then a tenure-track post at Berkeley. But rather than revise his dissertation, Paradoxes in Voting, into a book, he shelved it, along with the formal apparatus he’d developed that put a new complexion on decision theory.
He turned instead to composing a commentary on The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, by the notorious and brilliant Weimar (and then Nazi) legal theorist Carl Schmitt. Schmitt had written of the possibility of democratic dictatorship, and Kames was trying to see what he could do with the idea, stretch it, break it even if that’s what it took to see oneself through to a viable state. He was also seeking a fresh conception of demos, and like Leo Strauss, he was reaching back to the Greeks, to Athens, to find it.
The result of his labors, fully intelligible only to a few Schmitt scholars, was as keen in its critique of liberal democracy as it was troubling in its positive proposals. The essence of it was simple. Kames thought there might be ways of bolstering democracy—or salvaging it, it was not always clear—that traded on a notion already of great currency. Selves, it was almost common sense now, were something formed, acquired, not natively endowed, even if certain endowments might form preconditions on selfhood. But if that is what identity simpliciter was, it was only custom, and probably cowardice, that made an exception of political identity. One’s political significance, like any other, was a matter of what one did, the forms of life one participated in, the know-how one acquired and deployed, the moral and political character one developed. It wasn’t merely what one was, as a brute biological matter: a creature falling under a certain genus and species.
Political selfhood was a kind of second nature; unlike first nature, it was necessarily always up for grabs, accessible to, and losable by, all. It was an achievement. Which meant, among other things, that it was perfectly possible to exist biologically and not politically. At most, Kames thought, biology guaranteed only the most rudimentary form of political citizenship, nothing like an equal hand in steering the ship that was society.
He married this to the thought that commerce could abrade character, that in some cases it could make one unsuitable for politics. Stagg felt closest to Kames on this point: A contractual approach to politics had catastrophic social and cultural consequences. Some read this as a dangerously reactionary stance. But it felt natural to them both, and seemed now to them, at this point in history, like a new kind of progressivism.
In any case, it was with this proto-position in hand, and a growing frustration with the limits of the seminar room and his colleagues walking in lockstep, that he founded his research center, naming it after the fount of wealth necessary to do so, his great grandfather, Franklin Wintry, the British zinc baron whose sons would settle in the New World.
Kames couldn’t stand to hear it called a think tank. The phrase smacked of something shallow, intellectually second class, and depth was at the core of the project, though it was inflected in a new way. It had brought him notoriety, as he and his colleagues injected ideas, like this essay, at once incisive and ambiguous, into settings where they might make contact with ripe circumstances.
With help from friends like Leo Eldern, Kames had transformed the Institute into a national force. At this point, he had to be heard. So
publishers obliged, pushing aside their normal concerns, sometimes of clarity, always of length. But this piece was unusual, even for him. It seemed more of an artful jotting, a pretty ramble, fit more for a good blog. It might have been pride alone that prevented Kames from publishing it that way, what made it necessary that it appear in the print issue.
But then it might also be that the note was not a note at all, with its suggestion of incompleteness and approximation, but the finished version of a form Stagg failed to recognize as such. The essay’s apparent imprecisions might actually be a set of carefully inscribed double- and triple-entendres and, indeed, occasionally, red herrings. And why not? These days, if you were to flourish or even survive, everyday life seemed to demand the most subtle exegesis. Why then shouldn’t actual texts? Which meant, Stagg thought, that Kames’s article might well be as perfect for what it was, and what it was meant to be, as Madame Bovary was a novel, what its author had hoped for it, and for her, Emma.
This struck Stagg as more likely, knowing the value Kames placed on rigor. Anyway it had been a while now since one worried about a prestige gap between print and digital. Even Kames, in his mid-60s now, was not so antiquated. In some ways, he was seeming as modern as could be. Probably more than Stagg himself, who seemed more interested in the past than the future.
Stagg slept with the lights on, in his clothes. It was cold and the heat was unpredictable, so this was not only easy but practical. He left the thinking for the morning, when there would be two of them, he and Penerin.
■■■
The same essay, printed out on paper that had been wet at some point and had dried wrinkled and stiff, was sitting on the desk when Stagg came into the office. A Venn diagram of coffee rings marked it along the margin, and it was turned around, as if he should read it. He picked it up. There were only a couple of underlines, most of which seemed not to correspond to anything of outstanding importance: “museum,” “plain clothes,” “a fine speaker.” They must have been stray markings as Penerin followed along with his pen. But then they seemed too definite for that; they showed through on the reverse side of the pages.
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