Class Warfare (10 page)

We will not be taken alive.

—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

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 hydro 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.

“Well, I'm not going with you,” Isobel said presently, lighting up what appeared to be a joint but was actually a noxious herbal compound guaranteed (falsely) to ease nicotine withdrawal. Her right hand strayed toward the whisky sours, and prudently withdrew; her mouth contracted. In recent weeks she had been seeking professional help, and finding it. “I said I'm not, not, going with you. To this Lonesome Town, or wherever. I'm a real person in my own right, and I have a mind of my own, too. Lonesome Town just isn't my thing, if you grasp my meaning.” Jamie grasped her meaning, held it tightly. “I didn't expect you to come with me,” he told her. “Did you ever hear me invite you?”

“Did you ever hear me accept?” Isobel said.

The telephone rang once, diabolically. “Yes?” Jamie enquired of it. “Yes? YES?” Somewhere down the line a thin, infantile voice giggled. Somewhere else—in the next apartment—the young marrieds who lived there achieved simultaneous orgasm, to a fanfare of bedsprings. Jamie lit a Running Dog cigarette imported from the People's Republic of China; the smoke was redolent of honest toil, upward striving. “This has been going on too long,” he advised the telephone. “Perhaps it was interesting in its way, at the beginning, at least an amusing diversion for us both, an unforeseen metaphysical link to the Great World, in a manner of speaking. There was a certain novelty in that. But there is no novelty left in it now, and I'm getting impatient. I want information, content, and it is not coming through. Wherever the Great World may be, I think it is not at the other end of this wire. That's all. Goodbye.” The connection at once went dead. Isobel clapped listlessly. “When are you planning to leave?” she asked. It was, for her, an entirely rhetorical question.

Soon.
It was summer, after all, a season of little urgency. Cocaine sparkled on the table; a minor Third World demagogue beamed benignly from the wall. Jamie poured himself a whisky sour, downed it, poured another, looked at it critically, licked his moustache.
This has been going on too long.
Ah, it had to be laughable, this reckoning. He had been warned, often enough, that it would someday come upon him, just like this, and he'd only said,
Sure, let it come, I can handle it.
He'd supposed himself prepared for it, armed against it, indifferent, but here suddenly was the thing itself happening, defying all preparation. It was awful. He looked at Isobel Monadnock, marvellously arrayed on a chaise longue, and thought:
I can't stand it anymore.
He thought:
This life must be some kind of advertisement for something, but I've forgotten the name of the product, the reason for buying it.
“It's basically a matter of estrangement,” he said, recollecting a seminar he'd attended at college: Applied Social Psychology in Contemporary Industrial Relations. He'd always liked that word, “estrangement,” appreciated the sound, the resonances of it; he'd only been waiting for an opportunity to use it. “Estrangement derangement,” Isobel said. Her eyes drifted to the cocaine, and away again. “The general well-being,” she continued, “is definitely at an all-time low ebb.” Jamie waggled his head.

He was making an effort to think about his vacation, to deal concretely with the worldly logistics of going to Lonesome Town: what to pack (and what to pack it in), what to wear, where to stay, whether to make a reservation. What's there to do, he wondered, to pass the time in such a place? Is there live entertainment? Will there be shortages of beer, staple commodities, energy? Will there be a crisis? What will I find to take snapshots of, to preserve my memories forever? Many people harbour these thoughts, at the onset of their holidays. “That place is nothing but a cheapo tourist trap,” Isobel muttered, watching him. “A lot of garbanzo rigged up to gull the proles. You ought to know better.” It had been an excessively hot day, and two people had dropped dead in the department store where, occasionally, she worked. It had happened in
her
department. One respiratory ailment, one cardiac arrest. The inhalator attendants had seemed to blame Isobel personally. The floor manager, whose name was Adrian Agostini, had fed her librium and lemon tea in his office; she'd noticed, reviving, that he had deplorable taste in shirts. “In the kingdom of perfect love,” she explained, “everything is always in good taste.” She fanned herself irritably with a back issue of
Strength and Health.
“In the kingdom of perfect love, there are no unseemly incidents.”

Soon, soon.
He'd take with him the minimum of everything, all dispensable, disposable things. He'd risk finding a hotel, a room, after he arrived. Let the timid make plans. Let the anally fixated organize their lives. He, Jamie McIvor, would play it by ear. The tenor sang:

 

With hapless fancies am I bur-urdened

derry-derry-nonny-ho.

When shall mine errant heart be par-ardoned?

When free at last where shall it go?

 

“Fuck off,” Jamie said to the stereo. There would be time enough for sad songs when he reached Lonesome Town; what he needed now was uplift, inspiration. He rolled up a dollar bill, inserted it experimentally in his nose, drew in air. At such moments he was always nervous; he had few vices, and he was inept at all of them. “Is that really how you do it?” Isobel asked, eyeing the glittering mound of expensive powder. “What happens if you sneeze?”
You don't sneeze.
But the power of mental suggestion is formidable: a word, ill-timed, can trigger an earthquake.
Don't sneeze.
Jamie felt it coming and managed, for an instant, to aim a look of cosmic malevolence in Isobel's direction. Then he sneezed. As the pale dust settled, ruinously, on the carpet, it occurred to him that his vacation was swiftly becoming overdue. He decided to leave the next day. “Lonesome Town,” he said, “here I come.”

Subsequently, for reasons he confided to no one, Jamie found excuses for postponing his departure. “It's all right,” he said vaguely, when Isobel nagged him. “It's nothing to worry about.” Something seemed to be deteriorating; he was losing weight again; he was thinking, obscurely, of getting a job. “Procrastination,” Isobel said one day, “is the thief of you-know-what.” Jamie said nothing; he was reading a long, serious novel about the medical profession. Dr Mallory was about to lose a patient. Things were tense in the operating room. “Normally,” Isobel said, “I admire resolution in a man.
Spunk.
Many women are attracted to spunk, and repelled by the lack of it. Do you follow me?” An odour of curried shrimp wafted through the apartment. The patient expired, tersely, in a paragraph. “Life,” Jamie said, “frequently begins at birth and continues, more or less consecutively, until death. One doesn't have to be a philosopher, or a poet, to see the ramifications of
that,
” He sighed, for the sadness of it all. Dr Mallory was delivering a stirring peroration on the brevity of our mortal span, how like a penny match our little flame is soon snuffed out. Isobel put an album of cowboy songs on the stereo. “Sometimes,” she said, “I think you're a lost battle.” In the kitchen, Scarface mewed.

A lost battle. Well, that was possible—but what had he been fighting? What prize, what kingdom, had he unaccountably failed to claim? As he busied himself with these reflections, Isobel busied herself with ordinary living, buying fake emeralds at a garage sale, trying out elaborate recipes, reading her horoscope and finding it unsatisfactory. “Someone close to you will suffer fits of indecision,” the horoscope said. Another day it said, “Accept loss forever.” One night, when Jamie was deep in thought, she went to bed with Adrian Agostini; he turned out to be a leather freak with strong S & M predilections. Occasionally, she went to the zoo to commiserate with the Lesser Panda, condemned by an accident of zoological history to be always the
lesser.
“You and me, buddy,” she told the Lesser Panda, “we're in the same boat. The same cage, I mean.” It was scant consolation, for either of them. Looking for clean underwear, on a morning of heat-haze and exhaust fumes, Jamie found a raunchy letter from Agostini to Isobel; he had it photocopied, and sent the copy to the department store. That was the end of that. “We're just going through a rough time,” he explained at parties. “Everyone knows how it is.”

Everyone knew how it was. The newspapers were full of madness, signs of decay, outbreaks of disintegration, incursions of reality. Jamie had his hair cut, inexpertly, by a high school sweetheart who wanted to learn a trade. He acquired a quantity of hashish, smoked most of it in a single night, and stayed in bed for three days thereafter, mumbling a recitative that included references to trace elements, lunar modules, Paul Tillich, the national priorities, the crisis of confidence, Luigi Pirandello, urban sprawl, animal husbandry, the sinking of the
Lusitania,
the sinking of his hopes. Isobel brought him Scotch broth, refused him cigarettes. “You were probably right,” she wrote to her mother. “Jamie
is
an unstable personality. He can't seem to adjust to things.” Her mother immediately came to town and took Isobel off to an ornate, vulgar hotel, where they wept for a week.

Jamie bought a ticket to Lonesome Town, and carried it around with him, in his wallet, as a kind of talisman. He felt, at odd moments, random stabs of disquiet, a sense of purpose somehow dislocated, misplaced, dusted over with unfinished business. There were things to do, things to arrange for, things to put in order, before he went down to Lonesome Town. There were friends to get drunk with (just one more time), relatives to write to (just one more letter), deals and suchlike to consummate, goodbyes to say. All this required concentration; it demanded a measure of organization that Jamie, heat-doped, wasn't sure he could summon up. People began to suspect, and to whisper among themselves, that his talk of going to Lonesome Town had been a bluff from the beginning: a ploy of some kind, a pretext. To what end? From what motive? Who could say?