Class Warfare (14 page)

“I'm not sure I'm going to enjoy that,” Jamie said.

“The object of the exercise is not enjoyment. Anyone, any asshole, can toast weenies around a fire, sing favourite songs, with forgetful flesh keep the dark at bay. I'm not paid to tell you about
that.”

“What
are
you paid to tell me?”

“We were talking about the weeping, which you say you've heard, which you say you won't enjoy. Ha-ha, I say. The sound carries across the water, louder than the wake of ships. You, on the shore, will persuade yourself it's mermaids or whales, some form of exhibitionistic nautical life, but you'll be wrong. You'll throw another log on the fire, you'll talk to yourself to keep warm, you'll stumble and crash face-down on the nearest log, thinking it's a friend you can throw your arms around, and hold … your last friend in the world. The wind will come up as you lie there, and you won't feel it, you won't turn as it scatters the ashes …
Enjoyment,
you want.”

Jamie shook himself; why couldn't he have been born a dog, with nothing more arduous to do than digest livestock by-products? “If I've touched a nerve or something,” he said, “I apologize.”

“I haven't finished,” the small man said. “You tourists are all the same, you want to cut me off in mid-hysteria. The theme, the subject-matter of this diatribe, is enjoyment. Yours, for example, which you seem unwilling to relinquish. Oh, I reckon you'll enjoy yourself, for a while, at the edge of the sea. It's traditional to take pleasure in things like that. The weeping will rise and fall, in your ears, like a soprano in heat; it will play harmonics no woofer or tweeter has range to register … I'm only trying to answer your questions.”

“Thanks,” Jamie said.

“You're welcome. Let's take it from the top, there's folks waiting. What have
they
to enjoy, those lost and weeping?
They
die every day, in droves. They die in typhoons, in tidal waves, earthquakes, changes of government. Fires sweep through sleeping hotels, through public housing, in deep night. Plagues crawl out of gutters, tropical pests prowl the supermarkets, rats swim placidly in cisterns, biding the inexorable hour … Gas leaks from a broken main; someone is bound to need a smoke, light a match … Name it, chum, it happens. My best friend was shot by mistake, during an insurrection; he died, as friends notoriously die, in my arms. He was heavy, and I could only think of how my arms ached, supporting his weight. I felt an obligation to hear his last words, but I couldn't catch them; he was talking, as usual, with his mouth closed. It's safe to assume, anyway, that his last words weren't very interesting. Many of us strive for some definitive utterance, before we die, but not all of us achieve it. Something frequently interrupts the flow of speech, the planned cadences, the faultlessly rhomboid thought.
Something fails.
You, Jamie McIvor, should know what I'm talking about.”

“Maybe I do, maybe I don't.” The sound of his own name, pronounced by this sly and solemn personage, was more than he'd asked to hear. He looked around; the line-up was lengthening behind him; he couldn't see the end of it. The walls of the Tourist Bureau exuded, now, a yellowish lustre, as though the words spoken within had deposited themselves, like spittle, on the tiles. The mirrors reflected distressed eyebrows, faces tensely set, glistening with desire. “I suffer principally,” Jamie said, “from insomnia. It's an orthodox condition, but the orthodox cures have been taken off the market, as potentially injurious to youth. When I went to the edge of the sea, and built a fire, and sat there like an outcropping of native rock beside the black water, insomnia wasn't a serious issue; the wind raved over the straits, small boats went by on their aimless errands, aircraft described circles in the sky. It was pleasant to sit there, watching the pageant. There was no question of insomnia.”

“The trouble with tourists,” the small man grumbled, “is that they insist on relating everything to their own two-bit neuroses.”

“That's as may be,” Jamie said. “Toward the end, it got harder and harder to sleep. Eventually, I gave up trying. I went for the prescribed long walks, muttering to myself, repeating the wisdom of the masters. The streets were full of mubble. Everywhere I looked I saw ordinary life, ordinary travail, assembly lines of men, women, little children, all of them doing what was there to be done. Whatever they were doing, they were absorbed in it, as spilled fluids are absorbed, soaked up, by commercial tissues. I couldn't speak to them … My friends fell away, one by one: some to wives, some to jails, asylums, the stringencies of the working world. They made their excuses and went. At the farewell parties, the best of them blushed and grinned, promised an early return … but who's returned, and from what? Eh? … One day I alone remained, awake and frightened, in a universe of strangeness. I'd missed the boat. I heard the weeping then, louder than ever, and I knew it was aimed at me. It was a summons. Summoning me
here,
perhaps. To this, to you. I should never have asked you to help me.”

The small man sighed hugely. “Listen,” he said, “I haven't got forever. You have. In the long run, the subjective analysis breaks down, because it lacks verifiable referents, in the external world, so-called. You may have noticed the crowds, as you came in here; you may have noticed that the Tourist Bureau does a roaring business in Lonesome Town. Ponder
that
in your heart, if you've nothing better to do. As for me, I fell off a cliff last night, and woke up without a scratch, a bruise, a torn ligament, a thought. You've got me working overtime, and there's no reward, no compensation. The Tourist Bureau doesn't care what I fell off, or why, or when, just as long as I didn't do it on
their
time.”

“I've imposed on you,” Jamie said. “I hadn't planned to do that.”

“Plans.” The small man stared past Jamie to the next in line, whose problems were manifestly of a different order. “I can do without plans, thanks just the same. Hell, I could be hauling coal, if they demote me.
This,
what I'm doing now… it provides an occupation for those of us who are otherwise unemployable. It gives us a focus, of a kind. If you mean to stick around, you might consider applying for a job here yourself.”

“I'm not sticking around,” Jamie said, “if I can help it. I'm a tourist like the others. Passing through …” He straightened up, composed himself to leave, put together the appropriate parting words, and separated them before the glue had set. In the silence that ensued, someone in the line-up farted. “I guess I should thank you,” Jamie said, making a stab at objectivity, “but I wish I knew what for.”

“So do I,” the small man said. “Next, please.”

How easily we're dismissed, when it's time for dismissal. We just wander on
… Jamie had to jostle his way past shoulders, hips, unforgiving biceps, as he made his way out of the Tourist Bureau. Babes in arms shrieked at him; the human condition, they said in a number of languages, is not supportable. “You think you're so goddamned original,” Jamie snarled. Everyone winced. The tiles glistened, the mirrors winked after the fashion of Tourist Bureau mirrors everywhere, as Jamie took his leave.

His feet will find their way, through the maze of Lonesome Town, toward the Licensed Premises, the local watering hole. What's served there isn't water. The room—past doors that creak and sing as they close behind him—is full of dishevelled lyricism, yearning bodies, the electronically amplified sounds of Gladys Gorman & the Gamins, bopping. Conversations wax and wane on all sides. Murder awaits its out, behind opaque eyelids. Jamie finds an empty table, contentedly embraces it. Beer arrives. Even in Lonesome Town, the amenities are supplied (albeit unpredictably), the proprieties observed. Grace is extended to the hopeless, even here, in the sweaty reaches of the Licensed Premises. The waiters are attentive; the glances they give him are tolerant, the glasses full. The music is in C, F and G7, with periodic incursions of A-minor, that loneliest of chords. The songs speak of highways long travelled, of high-rollin' trucks and faithless lovers, of gun-totin' sheriffs, the crimes of history, the patient gallows. Gladys Gorman vocalizes:

 

I didn't cry the day you said

that it was time to go,

I thought I wanted to drop dead

but you would never know,

I had to keep my wounded pride

all locked up tight inside,

and never let a bit of heartbreak show.

 

The conversations are about everything. “The sleep of reason,” someone nearby is saying, “brings forth monsters. Goya said that. Do you know Goya?” “Not intimately.” Jamie's mind ambles away, toward a passing vision, blonde and radiant. “Do you mentally undress every woman you see?” the vision enquires, in transit. She's wearing a yellow T-shirt with FREE MARIE TYRELL printed in block letters on the back. Who's Marie Tyrell? “Nice ass on that one, eh what?” says a man in a lumberjack shirt, at the next table. Jamie nods, disconsolate. Gladys Gorman builds up to her chorus, her finale, with a spectacular intake of breath:

 

But last night, makin' dinner for one

with the radio turned on

Listenin' to our fav'rit Nashville group,

I found that I was missin' the fun

and the fuckin' since you're gone,

And one little tear,

one little tear,

Yes, one little tear

splashed in the soup.

 

“You look like an intellectual,” someone is saying over Jamie's shoulder. “Are you a knee-jerk liberal?”
Oh, probably.
His assailant has wire-rimmed glasses, a crewcut, a piratical beard, the face of an emaciated Trotskyite. “How much are you ready to sacrifice?”
Everything. There's not much choice about that, is there?
“Existentialist,” the stranger murmurs. “The woods are full of 'em. No discipline. No appreciation of the fine points …” He saunters off, toward a party of clean-cut young people. The lumberjack shirt brushes Jamie's shoulder. “Funny world, eh what? You get all kinds.” “Oh, hilarious,” Jamie says, stroking his glass; if it were a kitten, it would do something kittenish at this moment.

Jamie wills himself to relax, takes two or three major swallows of beer, settles back to watch the knife fight that's just beginning to shape up at the pool table. Everything is very quiet. In this perilous lull, a freckled woman in second-hand combat fatigues stands up; she wants to create a diversion. “I am a writer,” she says, “and I want you all to hear the latest thing I've written. I wrote it this morning, on mescaline, and it's dedicated to the one I love. I call it

 

IN CONDOMINIA

Only this morning, your name came up again. Someone was wondering where you'd been. The innocent can ask such things, without anxiety. I wanted to explain, to say: What happened was happenstance, just that, an unintended collision. No need to be alarmed. Most likely, you're at work now, or asleep, or off somewhere getting drunk. You'll have forgotten it. Or perhaps you didn't notice; people often don't. I know you didn't say anything at the time. It could have been dangerous, but it wasn't, then. It could have been difficult for both of us. Here, we get by as best we can. What I remember is chiefly a way of speaking, a hesitant rhythm, accidental pressures. It goes on constantly, everywhere. It's not important.

In Condominia, the children are demanding breakfast, the goodwives are rising to the occasion. The light is kindly. I haven't a word of anything you ever said to invoke you. At least one of us is young enough to go mad. I saw the risk long ago and put aside hope. I'm not saying anyone deceived me.

Are you getting the message? The sleep of Prospero continues, undisturbed. In Condominia, in dancing class, the little girls lift their legs; they spin; they fall down laughing, laughing and laughing. One of us might have spoken. Today, all I can do is glance through
Great Historic Places of Europe:
pictures of architecture, far away and stony. And I won't apologize for drinking whisky before noon.

You'd have to love me for this, if it meant something. Wouldn't you? These obliquities we steer among, untenanted rocks in a placid strait … You'll never guess. In Condominia, the fireplaces burn clean, the appliances glisten, the little girls dance mazurkas. The price of everything is sailing skywards. The seizure may not be permanent. If you walked in right now I'd say, Where have you been?

In Condominia, you'd answer. Where the lawns grow sprightly and the wind is mild. Where the little girls go home for lunch, at last, to sit at placemats imprinted with homilies.
Dearly Beloved, we are gathered together.
In Condominia. Traffic moves sluggishly past the petrochemical plants. I haven't learned, yet, to dream of you. We may both escape. Nothing is resolved.

These obliquities, these indeterminate resistances, yourself elsewhere hereafter, the streets bright with rain. You told me what I needed to know, a long time ago. In a happier world, it wouldn't matter.

Your name keeps coming up. Do me one kindness, before I die.”

 

The diversion has been successful, temporarily. A posse of waiters encloses the freckled woman, propelling her away, gracefully, without apparent effort. The knife fight has, for once, ended in a truce: a few unserious scratches, a mumbled
Aw shit, we was just playin' around.
There's more beer at Jamie's table. Gladys Gorman is taking a break, taking requests; the Gamins are ogling a tableful of bikers who've just installed themselves, with a maximum of flourish, within spitting distance of the stage. The jukebox fills the void: