Class Warfare (18 page)

And an hour later, in his room, door closed, Jamie discovers the bed and collapses at once into the sleep of the damned.

The sky warned of rain, the day he left, but no rain came down. The wind was sullen. Traffic moved randomly below the windows of the Heartbreak Hotel; in one of the cars, a radio was playing the Verdi “Requiem
,”
at full volume. It penetrated briefly into Jamie's sleep, dislodging a dream in which a grateful populace was about to reward him for a lifetime of public service and minimal corruption. Cheap ironies, he thought: all my life I've been hounded by cheap ironies. The chords resound out of a darkness … The dream abandoned him; the music moved on toward the next stoplight. It was hard to haul himself out of the mattress, into the world. The floor was cold. “It's not too late, is it?” Jamie said to the mirror. “Unlimited opportunities wait for the industrious, don't they?” The mirror said nothing, but it looked dubious. “I'm worried about my growth potential,” Jamie continued. “I want to participate in meaningful awareness-expansion. I can't find my centre, and I'm not sure I even have one. My head hurts, too.” He puked magnificently into the sink.

Agnes wasn't there. Isobel wasn't there. To commemorate them, to pass the time before leaving Lonesome Town, Jamie masturbated into a towel. He kept his eyes open. What he saw, at climax, was precisely the ceiling light, a plain 60-watt bulb, unshaded. It wasn't intelligible. Someone's voice seemed to echo through the plumbing: “The world is intelligible only to those who make no effort to live in it.”
Cheap ironies
… “Thanks a lot,” Jamie said. Seeing the light bulb had reminded him of something; he got up, flicked the switch; nothing happened.
Have to speak to the management about that.
He'd never been very efficient at dealing with the petty business of life.

After he'd dressed, he composed the first lines of a letter to Isobel, the one she'd mark
Addressee Unknown
if she found it in her mailbox. “My dear,” he wrote, “please don't think I've been neglecting our mutual interests. The economy is collapsing. Runaway inflation is running away with the country. Are you at peace with yourself? Every word I write means exactly what you think it means. Will you still love me tomorrow?”

No good. Jamie struck a match, and watched with interest as the paper burned: the combustion of cellulose was never the same twice. He observed the bottle of whisky, on the floor beside the bed; it wasn't as empty as he'd expected. Ahhhhh … The little dogs on the label looked at him alertly. “Woofwoof,” he said. “Wowwow. Will you still love me tomorrow?”

“McIvor? You in there?”

“Arrrgh.”

“Telephone.”

“I wanted to tell you,” Isobel said, “that I won't be here any more. There are other things to do. I've found … someone. Someone nice. He's got a regular job, and he bathes every day. He has a deep appreciation of investment capital and the ramifications thereof. And he keeps himself in shape; he jogs a mile every morning. It's a refreshing change … I'm sorry. I'm sorry.”

“Oh, it's
you
,” Jamie said. “I should have known you'd call. I was just writing to you, but I burned the letter. I'm leaving Lonesome Town today.”

“He has very well-developed pectorals, and all the major credit cards, and …”

Jamie sneezed, wiped his nose on his knuckles, and took a swallow of whisky. “What's the word from Andromeda? I've been gone so long they won't transmit to me now. Nothing comes through. The receivers won't receive. People in high places laugh at me, when I complain. The pure of spirit have fled away, and I can't find them. That's right: I can't find the pure of spirit when I need them, in this age of crisis and widespread discontent. Is it
you
I'm talking to?”

“It isn't the Singing Nun,” Isobel said. “I called to say I'm leaving you. Everything is flux.
I had an old dog, and his name was Flux / Well he never barked, but he gave good fucks.
You see what I mean. You'll have to contend with it. Change and decay, gratuitous incursions of weeping, that sort of thing.” Jamie thought he heard, in the background, the abuse of a medium-range sound system.

Isobel. Everyone … oh hell, it wasn't worth naming the names. The whisky wasn't bad, but the water he'd poured on top of it was greasy. The telephone was humming.

“I'm a lost battle, I think you said once. Did you remember to feed the guppies?”

“They all died,” Isobel said. “They just rolled over and died, the poor little things. There's something weird about the cat, too.”

“I can't involve myself in domestic disorders, practically speaking.”

He'd loved her. She'd raised her flesh up to him, he'd laid his down on top of it, in the time-honoured custom of men and women.
Isobel.
They'd been terrorists together, in the old days. “Where did we … go wrong?” Jamie said. His suitcase leaned against the door. “You can answer that another time, I guess. I have to be on my way.”

“There won't be another time,” Isobel said.

The room clerk grinned as he settled Jamie's account. “Hurry back soon,” he said. “Practice personal hygiene at every opportunity. You'll get a better deal when you feel real.”

There were few people in the streets. Umbrellas went past, occasionally, with tourists underneath them: the expectation of rain is very nearly as wet as the rain itself. Bermuda shorts went past, with legs inside them. The activity was sparse. Jamie thought:
I can't stand it any more.
It was going to be a long walk to the bus depot. Distances were immeasurably greater than they'd been when he arrived; in the interim, distances had become more … distant. Itinerant musicians played guitars, banjos, spoons, at every corner:

 

New York Ted

New York Ted

Put a microphone

in his head

You'll never forget

what his cortex said

New York Ted
…

 

Jamie paused long enough to shiver, long enough to grope for a smoke, light it, compose himself for departure. He'd become attached to Lonesome Town, after all; he could feel it as a weight heavier than his suitcase, as strenuous hands grabbing at his feet. “It's a two-bit honky-tonk tourist trap,” Isobel had warned him. On billboards and hoardings, painted exhortations seemed to confirm her analysis:
ACT NOW! Don't miss this special offer. Thrill to lifelike displays, realistic duplications, reasonable facsimiles
… “Hey you,” someone said, leaning into Jamie's face, “can you spare some bread to feed our brothers and sisters?”

Our brothering cistern.
Would he never be rid of these voices, these strangers who mocked and muddled him? He had to walk faster, had to run, past all the guaranteed attractions and the lines of gaudy, quarrelsome people waiting to view them, past the Tourist Bureau, past the concessions, the souvenir racks, the beads and candles and whoopee cushions strung out for sale, past the hawkers of every sort of redemption … every fraudulent vision. As he loped across an intersection, he thought he saw a small, brown-bearded man watching him wryly, waving him on; it was almost a gesture of encouragement. He thought he heard: “Who am I to deny a man his daily encouragement? I dreamed about a flood, the night I fell down the cliff. Floods are among the proven techniques for population control, and they require very little human assistance to work effectively. Black water was rising beside a highway, spilling over the edges, blurring the distinctions. An exodus of some kind was in progress. The water reflected flaming and falling aircraft; the sky was full of them, dropping like giant mutant butterflies. Refugees lurched along through the floodwaters, dragging charred remnants of baggage, things that must have meant something to them, in some earlier life. In recollection, dreams lose their specificity. I have more to say to you, but it will have to await more … advantageous … circumstances. For now, good luck in your travels.”

Was there to be, then, somewhere down the line, the emergence of a pattern, a real live Design? Would it suddenly appear clean and glossy before him, like an aerial photograph hung on the great opaque wall of the world? Jamie suspected it would not. “You poor fool,” his mind said to him. “You poor, dismal fool.” He told his mind what it could do with itself. He said to his mind, in passing: “Are these illusions? Do I presume too much when I ask of faith such prodigies in a century still corrupted by skepticism, among men who are the slaves of
self,
who love little and quickly forget, who are troubled in soul, and heed only the calculations of egotism, and the sensations of the hour?” No, his mind replied, you don't presume too much. Nor do I.

Good luck.
In Lonesome Town, the streets seemed full of water (they weren't, of course; how could they be on this rainless day?), the black water of a dreamed flood. Passage was difficult. Passage was becoming more difficult all the time.
Isobel, I knew from the beginning what you were trying to tell me, I swear I did. It was a knowledge I was too proud, too crazed, to use
…
Oh shit.
The bus depot was just ahead. Jamie slowed his pace. There might still be a chance, if he wanted it fiercely enough, to take another direction; negotiation wasn't utterly out of the question. Hadn't he been wished “good” luck? Couldn't that be construed as a portent, a promise? Words floated past his ears, as he hesitated: “The survivors had sallow, ivory faces, the burnt-out eyes of children in a dimestore painting. The backdrop would have been black velvet, if life were art. Forgive me, the survivors said as they went past, forgive me. The water was phosphorescent around them. Aircraft shrieked and carolled in the sky, flames shot out of them, down they went
kathwhoomp,
into the water.
Kathwhoomp.
I didn't know what was expected of me, what action was required by the situation …”

DON'T MISS THIS UNIQUE OPPORTUNITY! ACT NOW!

The bus is waiting, revving up, as buses will. The driver is wearing a brass helmet, goggles, an aviator jacket (brown leather, with insignia in an unheard-of language), a knowing grin. Advertisements pasted to the side of the bus recommend special offers.
Steady, steady.
Jamie will pass up the unique opportunity, the special offers, the promises of futurity sold in handy wallet-sized packs, in Lonesome Town …
Can't go on with this, can't find a way out of it, you've heard the story before. When, where, did the world
…
just … go … away?

The bus is waiting. The driver is wearing a clean blue uniform. A calm voice, professionally sexless, is reading messages over a loudspeaker: “May I have your attention, please,” the voice says, without inflection. “Thank you. Will Mrs J. Gaspard kindly report to Travellers' Aid. Lost children have been sighted in several areas. We regret any inconvenience to our customers and friends. For the benefit of those who missed the previous announcement …”

Elsewhere, where Jamie is going, the usual protocols will still apply. Good friends will shake his hand, lend him money, tease him gently for his pretensions, his continuing and mostly unwelcome love. He will tell stories about Lonesome Town, trade anecdotes, compare notes, exaggerate everything. Days will pass in this fashion, and nights, and seasons. Overhead, aircraft will go to and fro, without falling. The government will survive, narrowly, a crisis of confidence. “Jamie,” Isobel will say when they meet for coffee, for old times' sake, in an Austrian pastry shop, “our lives have signally failed to achieve the impact we wanted them to have. Truth is, our lives have achieved no impact at all. We could stand in the middle of the street, and the traffic would pass through us without slowing down.” Jamie, beleaguered, will probably agree. At most, he'll put up only a token resistance.

Another day, he'll feel an urge (which he may or may not suppress) to say to her: “Listen. I was tired often enough, but it wasn't always feasible to lie down. I couldn't just flop on the sidewalk, after all. A man has his dignity, his self-esteem. What if the inhalator came and took me off to the hospital, and my underwear was dirty? Personal stains. What then, eh? What then? It's a matter of … well, call it integrity. One has to preserve one's integrity.”

“It's a little after the fact for that, isn't it?” Isobel will say. “But I still love you, anyway.”

(No. He's dreaming now. That is not in the least what Isobel will say, and he knows it. Isobel is in fact married, competently, to a rising television producer, an erstwhile
wunderkind;
they have a moderately precocious daughter whose first complete articulate utterance, pronounced last night in the presence of Darryl, the babysitter, was: “Paws off, you creep.” They have invested in a modest bungalow and a somewhat less modest condominium at a popular ski resort. Isobel is working, part-time, in a recreation centre for the incorrigibly sociopathic. For a hobby, she raises tropical fish and writes romantic short stories, under a pseudonym, for the major women's magazines. She also writes articles; the latest is called “Why I Renounced Communism and Went Bourgeois.” Jamie is blamed, indirectly. For his part, he is in love, in love, in love, with a walking wonder named Big Deb, who is eminently worthy of his affections, and who dances like a demon. Or is this another dream? Most likely …)

It goes on and on.
The bus driver leans possessively on the steering wheel.
And one day no longer goes on
… Jamie puts his suitcase in the appropriate receptacle, lights a cigarette, flips the match away in the manner of rugged men. In his pocket—under the lump of hoarded pennies, under the pitiful balls of wadded Kleenex that mysteriously accumulate, the ordinary pocket-fluff, the admission stubs from movies he doesn't remember having seen—down there, if he hasn't lost it, is his ticket. He finds it, of course.