Class Warfare (19 page)

 

Say farewell to the high-steppin' ladies

Say goodbye to the high-livin' men

No more time for the good-lookin' ladies

No more time for the hard-workin' men
…

 

Easy now: there's still a moment, a warp he can huddle in for a quick smoke, an abbreviated thought. It's important, however, that the thought be complete, that it be self-sufficient, so that he can leave it on its own, to fend for itself, in Lonesome Town.
If you wanted to tell everybody everything, what would you say?
His audience is gathering; he hadn't realized they'd all been invited. They stand in a deepening semi-circle around him: old women in splendid hats, men in military greatcoats, children in the prim uniforms of respected schools. Beautiful girls. Convicted dope dealers. Used-car salesmen. The publisher of small, exquisitely crafted volumes of erotic verse. The mayor and aldermen of Lonesome Town. Old friends, new friends, people not necessarily on speaking terms with one another. It seems presumptuous to address them. But it seems to be, right now, what he has to do.

“I was advised to expect some reward,” he says, “a leavening of the spirit, or at least a purging of it, here. That was promised. It was, of course, a false promise. I understood soon enough that there was to be no leavening, no effective purge. That was one of many deceptions, and perhaps not the most remarkable. But I came down, anyway, to Lonesome Town, as people will. I did some of the things that visitors in Lonesome Town are encouraged to do, and neglected to do others. I did not, for example, cry my troubles away: that seemed rather excessive, for a man of my character. I sent off a great number of postcards, depicting the orthodox scenes, expressing the orthodox sentiments. I walked around in the streets, tracing routes—many of them circular—that seemed more familiar than they ought to have been to a stranger like me. Others, also strangers, were wandering up and down, clutching small radios, looking distraught, as if lost, as they may well have been. Many of us have been lost on one occasion or another. I thought steadily, and as charitably as possible, about my life, that odd parenthesis. I concluded that it made sense. I thought of everyone I had left, the brave and merry friends, the patient lovers, the ones who now never will be lovers. They appeared to parade around me, garbed in the gaily patterned costumes of emerging nations. They smiled and beckoned, but it quickly became evident that these gestures, so stylized and pure, were merely a charade. But how dearly I loved them! On a hoarding I passed, someone had written:
End the War.
And in another handwriting I saw, below it,
The Hour is Nigh.
In a public square a band was playing, voices were singing. I couldn't make out the words, but something invaded me and I began to snivel. My troubles didn't go away. How courageous, I thought, how sad, these efforts to wake and warn us. And how little we heed them! If you must know why I came here, why I came down to Lonesome Town, it was only to study futility.”

 

Say farewell, all you dreamers and darers

Say goodbye, say a mantra for me

If you live you can be my pallbearers

If you die you'll be buried at sea
…

 

There's a rattle of applause, a swift return to mubble. Jamie needs a megaphone, a commanding personality, a podium. He needs a rest. In the Kingdom of Perfect Love, in Lonesome Town, speech is an extravagance.
All this foolishness is, as you surely know, only a way to stave off what must come. This foolishness has no choice but to persist, while it can, against the hard metallic logic of the world. A frail battlement, gaily painted with pagan symbols, with rash slogans, improbable incitements, the calligraphy of Gratified Desire. It caves in slowly, without a sound, in soft focus. The heart must break. The story must end somewhere. The struggle must begin somewhere. Here?

Jamie, spendthrift, will compose himself for another effort. Small aircraft pass overhead; one of them may, for the hell of it, fall into the sea. If it were to happen, that could easily be the end of the story: a moan of engines, a silence, a displacement of water somewhere off the coast. Meanwhile, with a fine sense of the opportunity, someone in the audience is playing a harmonica; the song is “Lucky Old Sun,” it's “Show Me the Way to Go Home,” it's—what else?—“Lonesome Town.” There's a clown in every crowd. In Jamie's (uninvited) opinion, this guy is overdoing it. Next there'll be a mandolin, a fiddle … it's not fair.

 

Say farewell to the luminous ladies

Give godspeed to the
…

 

Not fair, indeed. “I can't stand it any more,” Jamie said “The story isn't finished; it's just that I'm losing my way in it, can't carry on with it for a while. At some point the heart must break. There never was a language to tell you. I couldn't simply hold you, in mind or arms, when there was nothing else I wanted more to do. In extreme love, in rage and foolishness, only the music was ever loud enough to sustain us, the music lifted us and took us as though on a stretcher, away …”

(… to an island, it may have been: a rocky wooded place, away from all the metallic world. I wanted to stay forever. I could have loved you perfectly there, forever. All through one night I watched the fire we'd built from driftwood and paper plates; you fell asleep; it would have been allowable, if I'd had the words, to say everything then. I didn't have the words. The occasion floated away, out to sea. I woke in a rubble of bottles, butts, food scraps, glossy magazines, sighing ash, under trees I no longer recognized …).

In extreme love.
There are worse things than to take a holiday, once in a lifetime. “It will go on and on, until finally one of us notices—until I notice—that it's no longer going on. That it's … over.”
Ladies and Gentlemen, we are now preparing to depart from Lonesome Town. We hope you have enjoyed
…

It comes down to something as simple as this. The story may not be finished, but it's painless enough just to stumble aboard the bus, find a seat, lean back, light a smoke in defiance of regulations … The bus is crowded; bodies collide in the aisles, strain together on the narrow seats; the air is rich with the smells of old plastic, diesel fumes, disinfectant. The man next to Jamie has soaked himself with manly deodorant, to no effect. He says now, tentatively, “Goin' home?” Later, after dark, his hand will fall (not quite accidentally) to Jamie's thigh, and it will stay there, taking no further liberty, for the rest of the journey. “Yup, goin' home.” Then an afterthought: “In a manner of speaking.” The man nods, understanding afterthoughts. “Name's Harvey, call me Harve, I'm in textiles. The old man's gig, y'know?” The bus engine rumbles, groans, turning over without alacrity. Jamie closes his eyes.

Say goodbye
…

Oh, forget it. Harve, I want you to listen carefully to this, with your cat's smile and nicely trimmed whiskers, I want you to remember my words when you get back to the world, back there with your textiles and your grooming aids, your Mercedes-Benz, the black lace panties you wear on weekends. I want you to engrave on the interstices of your mind everything I'm going to tell you from now on: the sound advice, the reasoned dialectic, the poems I'll recite for you, the songs, the final peroration. Everything …

Now the last houses, the last murky streets of Lonesome Town, go by at a pace that's too much, almost, for the eye to comprehend. The stuccoed suburbs are a blur, a shadow on the window.

Harve? What I want you to do, right now, is tear your eyes from that sceniscopic window and look at me, and open your ears, because you'll never hear the likes of this again, and you'll never hear it precisely this way, ever again. Pay attention, now …

What is the sign of the Father in you? … a movement, and a rest
.

This is the end of the story. Somewhere along the road, a few miles out of Lonesome Town, or perhaps farther, perhaps almost within sight of its intended destination, the bus fails to negotiate a curve, spins out, keeps spinning, in widening circles, until at last it's over the edge of the cliff that's bound to be there, an abyss incalculably deep. That's one explanation, as good as any, for the enduring absence of Jamie McIvor, hereafter. Another theory is that he has, for reasons of his own, “gone underground.” That is plausible enough, on a number of levels … Isobel Monadnock keeps her own counsel, avoids former friends, is rumoured to have taken up witchcraft. There have been no bulletins, recently, from Lonesome Town.

Or have there been? In a drawer of unanswered correspondence, unpaid bills, unfinished stories, a few scraps of mouldy paper turn up by chance; the handwriting is unaccountably shaky: “What has become of us? J. died. I went to the funeral, stood there scruffy and embarrassed in a borrowed suit too large for me, while a clergyman neither of us had ever known recited words J. had never pretended to believe in. It was a duty to be done, to be there, and I felt only the sticky heat of the afternoon, the smell of sea-salt and fishmeal heavy in the air, and my own strangeness, the distance I'd come. The service was elaborate and it went on for a cruelly long time: I had to watch the others to know when to bow my head, when to stand, when to sit down. When everyone else moved lips, made gestures, I followed. I had to remind myself:
They're burying him;
it didn't register. I was thinking: you've wrecked everything, done everything wrong, you haven't a clue how to make it better now.
You've asked for it.
The music, in which I might have taken comfort, was tinny and remote. No one wept. The mother looked angry—at J., for having gone bad as all her children had, and at the world, for having been helpless to rescue him. It was only another hardship, another disappointment to be dealt with, gone through, paid for. It would be over. Christ would be asked for mercy, and mercy, as always, would be withheld … Hadn't we always lived on the layaway plan? Death was a costly nuisance, but at least it got the future out of the way; J. could be disposed of. For the occasion they'd cut his hair, shaved him clean, dressed him in sober clothes such as he hadn't worn for years; dead, he looked like someone I might have been, or he might have been, if we hadn't left home when the world was changing. Cosmetics and embalming fluid had taken the madness out of him. It was a mistake to have gone back …”

“I am among friends, doing the work I want to do. Coming to the end of the story, the one I hadn't set out to tell, I sit hunched over this desk in a slummy downtown office, in the middle of the night, grateful for whatever has led me here, guided me,
me,
this unworthy vessel. There's nowhere else now.”

It may signify nothing. It may be a message. The long skinny hand of coincidence reaches in here, tightens at the throat, makes any number of interpretations likely.

This is what has become of us, then.
This.
Messages do arrive, from Lonesome Town and elsewhere: laments,
compleynts,
calls to action. Who knows how they get through? “There survives … something … out of all this … a desire I knew the name of once … before I began to lose the names of things … The feeling continues, can't be shaken off … as if, waking one morning in perfect sunlight, on the forest floor, you were to remember all the words you always loved … all the stories … the times long gone and far away … the friends who drowned, went crazy, married dull men or shrewish women, made money … any song that ever crawled out of the radio to clutch at you … all this absurd radiance, your life, gathering unseen around you while you slept … a protective circle, enclosing your frailty, under the quick light … all this, all this … What more do you need?”

In Lonesome Town, any moment now, the bus will start to pull out, away from the depot, picking up speed. People will wave goodbye, and go about their business.
It may not
be too late.
Someone said: The struggle is just beginning. Someone else said: I will hang in … This is the end of the story, the end, the end, the end, the end.

A movement, and a rest.

SOURCES for assorted plagiarized matter in this book, some of it quoted verbatim, some of it misquoted, almost all of it taken out of context, include: Friedrich Nietzsche,
Gesammelte Werke;
Clara Beers Blashfield,
Worship Training for Primary Children
(The Methodist Book Concern, 1929); Wallace Stevens, “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” from the
Collected Poems;
Bob Dylan, “Too Much of Nothing” (song, from a bootleg album,
circa
1967); the Department of English, University of British Columbia, for various memoranda; G.R.S. Mead,
The Doctrine of the Subtle Body in Western Tradition
(London, 1920);
The Letters of Abraham Lincoln;
Johann Pachelbel, Canon in D for Strings and Continuo; Aimé Césaire,
Cahier d'un retour au pays natal;
Baker Knight, “Lonesome Town” (song, 1958); Gustavo Sainz, “Self-Portrait with Friends”
(Triquarterly 13/14,
Fall/Winter 1968–69); The Gospel According to Thomas; Norman O. Brown,
Love's Body
(Vintage Books);
Cony-Catchers and Bawdy Baskets,
ed. Gamini Salgado (Penguin Books);
Curious Articles from the Gentleman's Magazine
(Volume IV, 1811);
Sydney Smith's Essays;
Joseph Mazzini,
The Duties of Man
(Everyman's Library, 1907); and no doubt other items now forgotten and probably untraceable.

This being the Second Edition, a few stray remarks may be in order, if only to preserve the illusion of the book as a document (not, after all, a “fiction”) shared among friends. The first printed text named and thanked those persons who, against formidable and often unpredictable odds, laboured and produced it, because it seemed and still seems to me that the actual human manufacture of a book is at least as important, as honourable an activity, as the composition of the words out of which it is made. This imaginary “Fraser” gets to have his name on the cover; the others do not. They know, or some of them know, or should know, who they are. So this time I will not name them; there are too many. Let the epigraph to “Lonesome Town” stand for the book as a whole, as for all of my work hereafter.

—DMF