Class Warfare Read online

  “The second occasion was witnessed the following day, shortly after the termination of Recreational Therapy. Provocation may have been a question asked by an attendant [D-604-263-8352], who is reported to have enquired of the subject, quote, Are we feeling all tuckered out, dear? Unquote. The question was answered by an outburst of hysterical ‘laughter,’ during which we were summoned to the subject’s quarters. Her behaviour was sufficiently violent to warrant, in our opinion, the administration of a sedative, despite departmental directives to the contrary [cf. Memo #121-3408-444]. We preferred to remain, however, in our role as ‘disinterested’ observers. After 5.6 minutes, the hysteria abated somewhat, and the subject began to sing what could have been either a Negro ‘spiritual,’ so-called, or an insurrectionary ‘anthem.’ We had not heard it before, and in any event we are not qualified musicologists; we deduced, tentatively, that the quality of the ‘singing’ was somewhat below normative professional standards. Due to a malfunction in our recording device, we were prevented from making a full transcription of the song, but we believe the following paraphrase to be representative of its content, and we include it here for whatever clinical value it may have:

  Some say the street will take us,

  Some say the jungle deep,

  When laws conspire to break us,

  Who has the time to sleep, Lord?

  Who has the time to sleep?

  At the end of this curious performance, the subject went to her bed, sat on it, and began to sway back and forth in a ‘rocking’ motion, moaning loudly and (in our judgment) unintelligibly. We propose that this behaviour-pattern indicates a state of self-induced excitation, probably sexual, associated with the ‘political’ delusional system referred to above.

  “This being an interim evaluation, we respectfully submit that a more detailed examination be conducted prior to termination of the subject.”

  REVOLUTIONARY ADVENTURISM

  Perhaps it’s true, Gerard Macklewain thought, composing his sentences carefully, perhaps it is true (there may be someone, a cosmic Stenographer, noting all this, marking it down for the Confidential File) that somewhere, in the caverns of the city, there are others like me, who have not inherited the earth. Who love obscurely, wantonly, murmuring seditious things late at night, in small voices. Surely there are these others who wait, tiredly as I, for the Revolution, who long ago ceased to lay up treasure anywhere, heaven or earth. Who are resigned to living as I live now, treasonably, in a world of brown brick and coastal fog. Where are they? Where will they be when the bells sound, and the guns rage, and all our friends are dead? I can’t fail to wish them well. I can’t help but dream of them, when I sleep. There is such a thing as heartbreak, and we have all at least once seen the flaming sword, and nothing beyond. And how many of us have lived off the glory of it, fattening, telling the tale again and again, trading it for regrets we’d thought we were immune to …

  One night in 1968 we were all together in a park, at the edge of a prosperous city; there were troops and tanks massed against us—us?—not far away. A number of us had already been gassed and clubbed, others had managed to run away, others to find hiding-places. We were proud of our wounds, who had them. Mine were superficial. I lay down beside a woman whose face was bruised, bleeding; I was cold; we could see flashlights moving in the trees; we could hear the dogs barking, coming closer. I was scared shitless, and this woman—whom I’d never seen before—put a blanket over me, with appropriate contempt. It was certain, by then, that we were going to be arrested: that certainty was as comforting as any other. I wanted only to sleep, and I wasn’t comforted. I knew that I would dream that night of the city in flames, the brown-brick towers falling, caving in on themselves (in slow motion, great clouds of burning dust), proud lights flickering out, psssffft, all the messages going dark one by one. Christ, I wanted that. It was better than being dragged off to jail, as we would be, hauled away to questions I’d have to remind myself not to answer. It was better than the night wind off the water, the damp grass we lay on, awake, under the trees. What else had I expected? This was supposed to be the people’s war, and they were all elsewhere; they were watching us on television. Desist, in the name of the People. Something was dying. The woman beside me stared stony-faced into the dark, into the approaching lights, devoted, while I pretended to bleed. We’d talked, for a while, about the familiar things: abortions, dope, the historical failure of liberalism, the prospect of a swift and honourable death. It passed the time. Before the police came I heard her singing, in a harsh experienced voice, the verse of We Shall Overcome that begins: We are not afraid, we are not afraid. It was the last time I heard anyone singing that, in any of our battles.

  There is such a thing as heartbreak, after all. We live on, savouring ancient grudges, collecting memorabilia, talking. I don’t know what will happen next. All these days I have been holding back tears.

  MARIE TYRELL’S DIARY (1960)

  Saturday, January 2nd. The second day of the New Year has passed—a day just like any other. I took a laxative last night, and haven’t left the house since. We dismantled the Christmas tree last night, a rather wearisome task to put it mildly. Mother cried. I made an attempt to straighten up the mess my room is in, but once again I failed miserably. Mother and Daddy went out later, they went to Susie MacGregor’s. I am alone as I write this, and the stars are shining.

  The weather today was just so-so. Most of the afternoon was dark and cloudy, but there were a few sunny intervals. I made my own lunch and nibbled at it most of the evening. It’s supposed to rain or snow tomorrow, or something. And now it is late, and I have to go to bed. I wish we had a television. Goodnight my Someone—goodnight!

  Thursday, January 14th. Another horrible day. O 1960, is this what you hold for me? Please, Year of Years, let more joy enter my existence. Maybe, let us hope, it is only the weather. I wrote a science test this morning, and undoubtedly failed. Beastly. This afternoon, a Latin test was only slightly better. After school I went down to Susie MacGregor’s to watch the opening of Parliament on television. I really wanted to watch Jerry S. bowling, but Miss Matheson our civics teacher made it clear that where duty lies I goes or dies, so I went. Parliament was very boring. It was very educational though, and I have made a lot of notes for civics. I did my lessons tonight. I have a feeling that Mr Driscoll did not appreciate my magnificent Composition which I handed in today. I think Mr Driscoll is a drip! Oh, well, such is life. Still, I have confidence in the future and “in spite of everything, I still believe that people really are good at heart.”

  Saturday, January 16th. Today has been dull. I slept till noon this morning, and did nothing exciting all day. After lunch Mother took me next door to see Mrs Eliot’s new sewing machine. So what. It must have been very expensive, and everyone knows they haven’t a penny. Afterwards, we went out to poor Nellie Jamieson’s who’s got cancer, for a while. Dull, and not very interesting, but it passed the time. Daddy said a prayer with her, I guessed it helped. Then we went for a drive out the highway, and that was the best part of the day. We passed Jerry S. on the corner of Dominion Street, and my heart skipped not just one beat, but two! This evening I played records and did some homework.

  It poured rain today, and a less inspiring day couldn’t be imagined.

  I didn’t do too much else today, and I am glad to have it behind me. Tonight at midnight is supposed to be the end of the world. Isn’t it strange that God would tell the Catholics and not the Protestants or Jews? At least I think it was the Catholics he told. Jerry S. is Jewish, and Mother says when he grows up he won’t be interested in me for that reason. The whole thing is crazy, if you ask me. Now I shall bring this to an end, as I am darn near exhausted.

  Tuesday, January 19th. I could kill myself. I wish I were dead. I never want to speak to my mother again. I thought anti-Semitism was confined to the Germans. Jerry called to say he couldn’t take me out tonight, he had to work in the store, but that he’d see me tomorrow instead. Th
en Mother made a dirty nasty speech about Jerry being a lousy Jew who wouldn’t put himself out for me, while I’d do anything for him. Oh! I could have smacked her. I want to run away. I wish the world had ended. I don’t want to say anything else.

  P.S. We both got over it, I guess.

  Friday, January 29th. Friday—another day, and what a day! I feel gloomy, depressed, and generally miserable. Everything happens at once, and it’s not my fault. Somehow my French book is missing, and I can’t find it anywhere, and there’s a test coming up. Lorna told me I’m not her best friend any more, Isabel is, just because of that horrible party last weekend. Then Jerry said he couldn’t take me out tonight, after I told everyone we had a date. Oh, woe is me! He said he might meet me tomorrow night at the bowling alley, but I’m not allowed to go there because of you-know-what. Mother’s going to Toronto tomorrow. This morning I wrote a science test. After school we rehearsed the operetta—it’s going all right, but Kathy J. is so conceited she makes me sick to my stomach! I went down to the rink after that to watch Jerry play Hockey, but I was too late. This evening I puttered around the house.

  Saturday, January 30. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. There. I’ve finally said it. FUCK.

  DEATH TO THE OPPRESSORS!

  Et c’est la fin pour quoi sommes ensemble. And this is the end for which we are together.

  DIES MIRABILIS

  Of course, they provide a priest; his name is Father Reagan. She finds that amusing. She thinks: he might have been handsome (Irish movie-priest handsome, Bing Crosby uplifting the multitudes) if love had ever heated him, expanded him; as it is, he looks like a TV dinner, immaculate under cellophane, frozen. His eyes are grey. The walls of Cell 3B-17 are grey. “My daughter,” he says, “my dear child.” It’s a beginning, of a kind. Your what? Marie Tyrell says. She has not refused to meet him.

  “You may send me away, if you wish.”

  “What for?”

  There are pictures on the walls, watercolours, women with mad eyes staring past bowls of flowers, unlit candles, pagan icons, through barred and leaded windows. The Unknown seems to be out there, waiting, looking in unseen. Father Reagan is thinking, among other things: She should have been an artist, it would have given her a useful vocation. He asks, politely, “Is there anything you want to tell me?” (Bless me Father for I have sinned … No. You’re not getting that one out of me, not yet.) He has done this so often, it’s his Calling, it should be automatic. Somehow it isn’t, quite. The method is automatic, something else is not, cannot be. There are things they don’t tell you about, prepare you for, in the Seminary. He wants to say, “Young woman, your soul is in mortal peril.” To say that would be a duty done, the warning properly issued, responsibility discharged: pray for us in our futility. But he won’t say it; he’s sure she’ll laugh, blaspheme, and he’s probably right. He ministers daily to the dying, the condemned to die, most of them pathetically grateful for his comfort, reproof, penance, absolution, so eager to undo the sad threads of vainglorious lifetimes; it must signify—well, we know what it’s supposed to signify. He suspects it may mean something else to Marie Tyrell. (One day, years from now, he’ll write a book called The Psychology of the Damned; it will enjoy a considerable success in liberal Catholic circles; the chapter on Marie Tyrell will be widely praised for its “compassionate objectivity.”) In fact, she reminds him uncomfortably of Bernadette, his sister, before she died. The same proud mouth, unrepentant eyes, the same heresies flickering back there in the mind’s hollows, cave-fires he foolishly never found it in his heart to extinguish. Presently, in beneficent middle age, he will resign himself to these failures, these unaccountable lapses of conviction. Now, they’re painful. He knows: Good Christ, yes, people really do die young. For all the wicked, prideful reasons. And are not necessarily welcomed into Heaven. It happens in books, magazine fiction; it happens. Father Reagan smiles at Marie Tyrell, nervously; can it be that he’s afraid of her? This disobedient orphan? It can be. These people are dangerous, he can’t help muttering to himself.

  “The Glory of God,” Marie Tyrell says. She is watching the floor, studying it, tracing a mandala of thin lines, cracks in the concrete. “Aren’t you going to tell me about the Glory of God?”

  What about that?

  The assumption evidently is that man is perfectible, or in any event improvable. The Kingdom of Heaven is nothing if not a meritocracy. “What are you doing, storing up Kingdom Credits?” one of her lovers said, when she was being more than usually righteous. Now he’s 4,000 miles away, working for a loan company, bringing up children. And Gerard Macklewain, no doubt, is out somewhere getting drunk, inventing his own version of history for the entertainment of his bold companions, talking: “I did love her … It was enough to see, in our own bodies, the configuration of the death we’d come to, each day’s depletion, always less and less of everything, all the time; it was enough to have that knowledge, if only to turn from it, into her arms, her generous arms …” She summons all her will, to banish the vision. Now it’s just Father Reagan here, a composition in grey and black, in this room, this Cell. Interesting that we referred to our group as a “cell.” Interesting that we met, most of the time, in bars, or behind them. God, it’s lonely. To see the world in a grain of sand, eh, Father …

  Father? (Any voice is better than none at all, any answer will redeem the question.) He is sitting on the bed, legs crossed, hands folded in the prescribed manner, eyes uneasy. She is standing, vulnerable. Hang in there, babe. No. Historical inevitability decrees that she won’t hang in, won’t be allowed to. There was a message she still receives, scratched that first time in chalk on a schoolyard wall: MARIE TYRELL GOES DOWN. In a way, it was true enough: you had to do what you could to redeem the bleakness, or push it away. After the dances (St. Anne’s gym, reeking sweat and repression, loud hot music, the purposeful rubbing of guilty bodies), after that, who didn’t go down? At least she had the strength to lie, not to say: I have committed impurities. Or whatever word they had for what she was doing, those many Saturday nights …

  But here, she remembers more than the porridge that she was forced to eat, as a child, the grey viscous stuff in the spoon, the duty to transfer it, at any cost to dignity or digestion, into her mouth. To swallow it. (To spit it out was only a venial sin, as she understood it, but it was nonetheless a sin, one she was all too often caught at.) Arrrgh. And the relief, of a sort: thank God that’s over with. Father? Daddy?

  Marie Tyrell goes down.

  First confession: I have forgotten everything. The Joyful Mysteries, the Sorrowful, and the other kind, the Stations of the Cross, that endless railway line leading to nowhere, even that, forgotten. It is not true, as they claim, that these things stay with you forever, however fiercely you struggle to reject them. Nothing stays with you forever. Except possibly hatred, which lives on in the details you didn’t realize you were noticing: the smell of incense and old varnished wood, the clamminess of steam heat that never entirely defeated the cold … that cold which was above all else the chill of terror, what you couldn’t keep from feeling when, around some forbidden corner, you were favoured with your very own, very special, glimpse of mortality. Just one of the little treats the world has for rebellious children—make of it what you will. I made a life of it, after that.

  I remember nothing.

  Father Reagan is thinking: poor lost soul. Or that is what he is trying to think, but other notions, heretical as any Marie Tyrell ever uttered, keep sneaking in. What, precisely, is he rendering unto Caesar here, in this prison? There may be many shapes of mystery … He is not uneducated, for what that’s worth. He is not, professional obligations aside, unsympathetic. This woman knows something he doesn’t, something he set himself apart from, long ago, exiled to some Siberia of consciousness, past an armed frontier no errant regret would ever presume to cross. We are dealing in finalities, eschatologies, here.

  Second confession: there won’t be one.

  There isn’t much he ca
n do; if there were, he might for some perversely undoctrinal reason decline to do it. She is looking at him now, alert, contained, adamant. Libera me domine … This is mechanical. Useless. If she won’t bend, he can’t compel her. Or absolve. Peace, this time, will be withheld. Father Reagan gets up. “You won’t reconsider?”

  Marie Tyrell goes down.

  “I will not,” she says.

  BETTER LIVING THROUGH TECHNOLOGY

  The struggle is just beginning.

  “Repeat ten times.”

  The struggle is just beginning.

  The struggle is just beginning.

  The struggle is just beginning.

  The struggle is just beginning.