Exit to Eden (33 page)

No desire to recapture the pure white tension of that moment, the stink of real danger, the absolute helplessness of not knowing what to do, to move, to talk, to remain still, when the slightest change of facial expression might have been fatal. And then the rage, pure rage, that follows that helplessness.

"Well, anyway," I said. I took out a cigarette and packed it lightly on my knee. "He and the other guy he was with got into an argument, all the time the kid was aiming this gun straight at us, and something happened at that moment, like a truck appeared, and they were supposed to go, and they both looked at us, and we didn't move or say anything. I mean frozen, man."

I lit the cigarette.

"It was about two seconds there, and we knew what they were thinking about, at least it seemed again that they were going to shoot us. And to this moment I can't tell if it was true, not true, and if it was true, why they didn't. But they took the Salvadoran with them. They took him right in the truck while we stood there and did nothing. And we'd been in his mother's house all night talking politics, mind you. And we did nothing."

She sucked in her breath with a scorched sound.

"Christ," she whispered. "Did they kill him?"

"Yeah, they did. But we didn't find that out until we were back in California."

She murmured something under her breath, prayer, curse, something like that.

"Exactly," I said. "And you understand, I mean we did not even argue with them," I said. This was why I did not want to talk about this, did not, absolutely did not want to talk about it.

"But you don't think you should have argued…" she said.

I shook my head. "I have no idea whether I should have or not. I mean if I had had an M-16, you know, it would have been different." I took a draw on the cigarette. The smoke vanished in the river breeze and the cigarette, for that reason, seemed tasteless. "I got the fucking hell out of El Salvador immediately."

She gave a little nod.

"And that's when you started thinking."

"Well, I think for the first week or so, I just kept telling people the story. I kept going over it in my mind, what happened, and thinking what if, what if, what if, you know this guy had just let go with the M-16 and we were another couple of dead American newsmen. I mean one half-inch column in the
New York Times
or something, and then it was over. It was like the damn thing kept happening. It was a fucking tape loop in my mind. I couldn't get rid of it."

"Naturally," she said.

"And what became clear to me, really clear, was that I had been doing all kinds of dangerous things. That I'd been walking through these countries like they were Disneyland rides, like I was, you know, asking for assignments to get in where the action was, and I didn't have the faintest notion what I was doing. I was using these people. I was using their wars. I was using everything-that was happening."

"How do you mean using them?"

"Honey, I didn't give a damn about any of them. It was talk. Berkeley liberal talk. Inside here, it was all a three ring circus for me."

"You didn't care about them… the people in
Beirut: Twenty-four Hours
?"

"Oh, yeah, I
cared
about them," I said. "They ripped me apart. I mean I wasn't some stupid shutterbug just photographing these things as if they didn't mean anything. In fact the agony was the way the photographs cooled everything down, abstracted everything. You just cannot get it on camera. You can't get it on video. But in a very real way, I didn't give a damn about it all. I had no intention of ever doing anything about it, what was going on! I was riding these experiences, like they were the roller coaster. I was skiing downhill. I was, in my heart of hearts, glad the war and the violence and the suffering were there so that I could experience them. That's the truth!"

She stared at me for a second. Then slowly, she nodded.

"Yes, you understand," I said. "Like when you're standing by the track at Laguna Seca and you think, well, if there's going to be a car crash, well I hope it's right here so I can see it."

"Yes," she said. "I know."

"But even that was not enough," I said. "I was one step from getting involved in the action itself. And not because I gave a damn or thought I could change anything in this world, but because it would have been a perfectly legal license to… do things I couldn't do otherwise."

"Kill people."

"Yeah. Maybe," I said. "In fact, that was exactly what was coming and going through my head. War as sport. Didn't matter what cause, really, except, you know, they should be the good guys, what we liberals call the good guys, but it really didn't matter finally. Fighting for the Israelis, fighting in El Salvador, what the hell." I shrugged. "Pick a cause, any cause."

She nodded again in that same slow way, like she was thinking it through.

"Now if you get to be my age, and somebody has to stick an M-16 rifle right in your face for you to know what death really is, for all this to come home, well, I think you're a pretty hard-headed individual, frankly, the kind of literalist who just might be dangerous."

She was puzzling this.

"Well, I had to think about it. Why was I seeking it out, literal death, literal warfare, literal suffering and starvation, and grooving on the pure reality of it, as if it were merely symbolic, the way people groove on a film."

"But the act of reporting, getting the story…"

"Ah," I waved that away, "I was a beginner. There are too many others."

"And what did you conclude about it all?"

"That I was a pretty destructive guy. That I was a kind of a doomed person."

I took a swallow of my drink.

"That I was a damned fool," I said. "That's what I concluded."

"What about the people who
were
fighting in these places? I don't mean the soldiers of fortune or the mercenaries. I mean the people who believe in the wars? Are they damned fools?" She asked this very politely, truly inquisitively.

"I don't know. In a way, it doesn't really matter in my story whether or not they're fools. The fact was my death wasn't going to change anything for them. It would have been gratuitous, utterly personal, the price of the sport."

She nodded, slowly, her gaze moving past me over the deck and the distant banks of the river, the low, olive drab swampland falling right into the brown water, the swift panorama of the gliding clouds.

"This was after you did
Beirut: Twenty-four Hours
?" she asked.

"Yes. And I didn't do any
Twenty-four Hours in El Salvador
."

When she turned to me again she was as serious as I'd ever seen her, unselfconscious, completely absorbed.

"But after what you'd seen," she said, "of real suffering, real violence—if it did mean something to you for whatever reason— how could you stand the scenarios at Martin's?" She hesitated. "How could you stand the rituals of The Club? I mean how did you make this transition?"

"Are you kidding me?" I asked. I took another swallow of Scotch. "
You're
asking me that?"

She looked genuinely confused by the question.

"You saw people who were really being tormented," she said. She was picking her words slowly. "People who were, as you said, immersed in literal violence. How could you justify what we do after that? Why weren't we obscene to you, decadent, an insult to what you'd witnessed? The guy getting put into the truck

"I thought I understood what you were asking," I said. "Nevertheless I'm amazed." I took another little drink, thinking about how to approach the answer. Whether to take it slowly or to come right out.

"Do you think that the people on this planet who are fighting literal war are superior to us?" I asked.

"I don't know what you mean."

"Do you think that people who do literal violence, either defensively or aggressively, are better than those of us who work out the same drives symbolically?"

"No, but God, I mean there are those who are swept up in it for whom the suffering is inescapable…"

"Yes, I know. They're swept up in something that is as ghastly and destructive as it was two thousand years ago when it was fought with swords and spears. It is not too different from what was happening five thousand years before that with rocks and clubs. Now why does something that primitive, that ugly, that horrible, make what we do at The Club obscene?"

She understood me, I knew she did, but she didn't commit herself.

"Seems to me it's the other away around," I said. "I have been there and I assure you it is the other way around. There is nothing obscene about two people in a bedroom trying to find in sado-masochistic sex the symbolic solution to their sexual aggressions. The obscenity is those who literally rape, literally kill, literally strafe whole villages, blow up busloads of innocent people, literally and relentlessly destroy."

I could almost feel her thinking as I watched her face. Her hair had fallen down over her shoulders, and against the whiteness of her dress, it made me think of her little joke last night about the nunnery, it made me think of a nun's veil.

"You know the difference between the symbolic and the literal," I said. "You know what we do at The Club is play. And you know the origins of that play are deep, deep inside us in a tangle of chemical and cerebral components that defy competent analysis."

She nodded.

"Well, so are the origins of the human impulse to make war as far as I'm concerned. When you strip away the current politics, the 'who did what to whom first' of every small and great crisis, what you have is the same mystery, the same urgency, the same complexity that underlies sexual aggression. And it has as much to do with the sexual desire to dominate and/or submit as the rituals we play at The Club. For all I know, it is
all
sexual aggression."

Again, she didn't answer. But it was like she was listening out loud.

"No, The Club is no obscenity compared to what I've seen," I said. "And I thought you more than anyone else would know that."

She was looking out at the river.

"That is what I believe," she said finally. "But I wasn't sure that someone who had been in Beirut and El Salvador would believe it."

"Maybe somebody that has had that kind of war done to them, somebody who has been ground under by it for years and years, maybe they would have no use for our rituals. Theirs is a different life than anything you or I have ever known. But that does not mean that what has happened to them is superior, either in origin or effect finally. If it makes saints out of them, that's wonderful. But how often can the horror of war be counted upon to do that? I don't think anybody on the planet anymore really believes war is ennobling, or that it has any value."

"Is The Club ennobling?"

"I don't know. But for my money, it certainly has value."

Her eyes seemed to brighten a little at that, but whatever she was really feeling was deep inside her.

"You came there to work it out symbolically," she said.

"Of course. To explore it, to work it out, without getting my head blown off or blowing off somebody else's. You know this. You must know it. How could you create this intricate island paradise if you didn't?"

"I told you. I believe it, but I've never lived in any other way," she said. "My life's been too much of a self-created vocation. And there are times when I think I have done everything in the name of defiance."

"That's not what you said last night. Do you remember what you said? About feeling no disgust for anything that two consenting individuals could do together, that it had always been innocent to you? You know as well as I do that if we can work out our violent feelings within bedroom walls where no one is hurt—no one really frightened, no one unwilling—then we just might be able after all to save the world."

"Save the world! That's a tall order," she said.

"Well, save our own souls anyway. But there isn't any other way to save the world now, except to create arenas to work out symbolically the urges that we've taken literally in the past. Sex isn't going to go away, and neither are the destructive urges wound up in it. So if there was a Club on every street corner, if there were a million safe places in which people could act out their fantasies, no matter how primitive or repulsive, then who knows what the world would be? Real violence might become for everybody a vulgarity, an obscenity."

"Yes, that was the idea of it all, the idea." Her brows came together, and she seemed lost for a moment, and strangely agitated. I wanted to kiss her.

"And it still is the idea," I said. "People say S&M is all about childhood experiences, the battles with dominance and submission we fought when we were little that we are doomed to reenact. I don't think it's that simple. I never have. One of the things that has always fascinated me about sado-masochistic fantasies, long before I ever dreamed of acting them out, was that they are full of paraphernalia that none of us ever saw in childhood."

I took another drink, finishing the glass.

"You know," I went on, "racks and whips, and harnesses and chains. Gloves, corsets. Were you ever threatened with a rack when you were a kid? Did anybody ever make you wear a pair of handcuffs? I was never even slapped. These things don't come from childhood; they come from our historic past. They come from our racial past. The whole bloody lineage that embraces violence since time immemorial. They are the seductive and terrifying symbols of cruelties that were routine right up through the eighteenth century."