The Republic of Nothing

by Lesley Choyce

  “Sign here please.” I took the pen and signed my name and Gwen’s name, then put our address: Whalebone Island, Nova Scotia.

  The clerk looked at what I had written. “My father was a worker on a ship once. It was a very bad company and they treated the men badly. When the ship came into port in Halifax, he complained to the authorities and the captain was arrested. A very bad ship, a bad man. In Nova Scotia, my father told me, you will find real people. That’s what he called them. Real people. He visited ports all over the world and he said there were only a handful of places where he found real people. Are you real people?”

  I wasn’t expecting the litany to my home province. “Yes,” I said. “And those are our real names.” I wasn’t sure if he was playing a game, accusing us like so many who had probably come here before, checking in without using their real names.

  “Are you married?” he asked. I had been ready for this question but there was not a trace of accusation in his voice.

  “No,” Gwen said. “But we’ve known each other for a long time. We belong together.” She said it as if in a dream. I felt suddenly so proud, so happy. I looked the clerk right in the eye and there was no judgement. His eyes sparkled with a distant fire.

  “Of course you do. You are real people. Real people be-long together. Here is your key. Top floor.”

  We took the ancient elevator to the top floor and I led Gwen down the hallway to our room. It was an old, run-down but surprisingly clean hotel. Cheap, but somehow honest. A surprise. And then an even greater surprise. When I opened the door to our room, I saw that it was some sort of large, well lit suite of rooms with a magnificent view of the park below. Gwen yawned and looked around with a sleepy angelic smile on her face. “It’s beautiful,” she said. And it really was. Everything was perfectly old. My guess would be 1930s. Things were shabby but neat, authentic but not improved. Gwen zeroed in on the bed and waltzed like a somnambulist to it and collapsed. She was exhausted and her body needed rest.

  I closed the door, walked to the bed and lay down beside her. She was in a near fetal position as I tucked up around her, feeling her warmth, meditating on her soft, childlike breathing. I hugged her and she squirmed in a most comfortable way, and despite the strangeness of our day and the less than romantic nature of our circumstances, everything now seemed perfect. We were together, alone. I loved her very much. We were boyfriend and girlfriend, husband and wife; we were two people who needed each other very badly and had found our way to ourselves.

  As I closed my eyes on the impossibly neat but tattered 1930s suite, I fell asleep and travelled far into some deep warm mysterious universe where nothing was tangible but light and voices. I recognized at once that this was some place familiar, a place of spirits, a domain that was one my mother must have known well. It was her other world. I was, for some reason, being given a glimpse into it. Voices were speaking; I could not understand the words. It was all indistinct, but I understood the nature of what I was being told; I had found, maybe for the first time in my life, a perfect moment. With Gwen I had found peace and contentment through love. The spirits around me were suggesting it would not last but the echo, the reverberation of that feeling, would linger with me forever. Then a solitary voice was asking me to look down.

  I hadn’t even realized that I was “up.” I looked down and saw my own body pressed against Gwen; we were lying there, cupped together, fully clothed on the bed, and I could read the message on my face: perfect peace. But where was I? Was I dreaming? Was I dead? No, definitely not, someone answered more distinctly now. The voice was decidedly Nova Scotian in accent but I didn’t recognize it. I wasn’t even sure if it was a woman or a man. As I looked down on us sleeping, I suddenly grew frightened. I felt as if I might fall from my height, but a hand reached out and steadied me. Am I about to be punished? I asked. I remembered the abortion and how we had come to the decision, that in the end it seemed like the right and logical thing to do. But was I wrong? Had we performed some grievous sin and was I now about to be penalized? No, came the answer. Nothing like that. Nothing is ever lost. Everything goes on and on. The way it should. Only actions made without thought, without compassion, do any harm.

  I was still looking down at myself asleep. The fear was gone and I had been returned to a mild euphoria tinged with what I had felt before. I looked up to find the voice again, but as I did, I felt myself falling like a rock and then I hit the bed. I bounced. Not high, but I bounced. Gwen pulled away slightly and tugged at the bed cover, pulling it up over her shoulder. I sat up and looked around. I shook my head, looked for the lights, listened for the voices. Nothing. A dream, I decided. An important dream, perhaps, but a dream. Nothing more. I covered Gwen more fully with a blanket and went into the bathroom to splash some water on my face.

  I looked at myself in the mirror. The afternoon light was warm and yellow. In the mirror, I did not look like me. I remembered a boy there once. I remembered the face of a confused, excited, nervous little kid who expected miracles each day and often found them. Now there was this: a young man who needed a shave, the mug of a skinny but tough looking fisherman. It was the face of a stranger, but after a brief study, it became likeable, agreeable. I looked for the fear, because that fear, lurking in the corner of the eye and in the corner of the mouth was what had made me turn away from mirrors so often in recent years. Fear and doubt and an aura of impending doom. It had been the face of some poor kid who was just about to receive bad news from a stranger. That was the old face. This one was different. Unsophisticated perhaps, the face of an island kid now too big for his old boots, but it had, I decided, character. I sat in an old overstuffed chair by Gwen and watched her sleep as the sun set over the tall buildings. As it grew dark, I saw bright lights turned on below in the park. I saw a gathering of young men and women. There were placards and a guy with a megaphone talking about the war. I heard shouts of anger and outrage and saw people thrusting fists into the air. There was a war on the other side of the world and outside the protestors were performing some sort of anxious ritual in an attempt to stop it. Gwen heard the guy yelling on the megaphone and woke up. She rubbed her hand across her stomach and came to stand by the window with me. I held her as we watched the pageant below. So much anger down there behind all the good intentions.

  This was almost like watching TV or a movie. Clearly, it couldn’t be real. How could there really be a war on? How could men be killing women and children, burning villages, dying of sniper wounds, falling into human traps or stepping on land mines, burning jungles and pouring living fire of Na-palm on families while I stood by a window with Gwen, feeling so peaceful and so full of love? Such things could not be. I can’t remember if we said anything just then. There were syllables, there was the syntax of lips kissing, of shared breathing, of the soft rustle of hair, of the slide of her hand across my sandpaper chin. After a while, the outrage outside subsided and the crowds dispersed. I had hoped that the protestors concluded that a war could not possibly be raging on a night like this, a night so full of love for clearly, I had enough love in me right then to overwhelm any living soul within a six-mile radius. Then Gwen and I went to bed and fell asleep. No dreams returned save the vision of a warm dark sea lapping at the shore of Back Bay in the moonlight on the warmest night of the year.

  When I woke the next morning, Gwen was already up and dressed. Someone had just slipped a newspaper under our door and she picked it up. I watched with one eye half open as she sat down and began to read. For a second I felt very adult, very old. I had just slept the night with Gwen. We were here together, like man and wife on a honeymoon in the strange old-fashioned honeymoon suite (that was my theory) and it all felt so right. I was lying there trying to think of something really romantic to say to Gwen to start the new day, and our new “life,” but my brain was fuzzy. She beat me to the punch and it wasn’t what I was expecting.

  “Nixon’s bombing Hanoi again,” she said, holding the news-paper headline up for me to see. “It
’s one of the heaviest bombings yet. Right on the city. He’s escalating the war.”

  I rubbed my eyes, felt more than a little puzzled. The spell was broken. “How are you feeling?” I asked.

  “I’m a little sore. But I’m okay. There’s going to be a march today from Harvard to the Federal Courthouse. It starts in about an hour. I’d like to be in it.”

  Downstairs, checking out, I asked the man about our room.

  “Belonged to a big guy in the crime syndicate. Louis Longines was his name. You probably never heard of him. He killed lots of people, but he had a heart of gold. Kept his girl-friend there and treated her like a princess until she died in the flu epidemic. After that he paid the rent on the room for the next hundred years. Said all the owner of the hotel had to do was change nothing, keep it clean and, you know, special and every once in a while let it out to a nice couple that looks like maybe they deserve something extra nice.”

  “Wow,” I said, handing over the money I figured I owed.

  The clerk pushed back my hand. “It’s okay. Compliments of Louis Longines. How was everything? Okay?”

  “It was perfect,” Gwen answered. “Just perfect. Thanks.”

  “What became of Louis Longines?” I asked. “He end up in prison or something?”

  “Nab. Somebody shot him.”

  “Oh,” I said. I suddenly felt a bond to this invisible, kindhearted criminal.

  “Killed in World War Two by a German bullet. He was a major at the time. Go figure. It was the war that got him, not the crime. But he was a good guy. Real people. Like you two.”

  “Yeah. Well, thanks.”

  After a massive breakfast in a little coffee shop that only charged ninety-nine cents for the whoppingest breakfast I ever had, we walked on to Harvard and saw thousands of people, mostly our own age, rallying around the steps of a building. There was the feeling in the air of something about to explode.

  32

  Nothing I’d ever known on Whalebone Island in the Republic of Nothing had prepared me for this. “Gwen, are you sure you want to get involved in this? Are you sure you’re okay?” She had just been through a heck of a lot and, to tell you the truth, I didn’t trust this crowd. All around us people were holding up placards against the war and shouting, “No War!” or “Impeach Nixon!” They were loud and they were angry.

  “I’m okay. Ian, I’m really glad we’re here for this. I’m tired of watching the protests on TV and we’re here now. We can finally do something, let the world know that we want the war stopped.

  Somebody was starting up a chant of, “Ho Ho, Ho Chi Minh. If he can’t do it, no one can.” It was like a cheer from a soccer game back at high school.

  Gwen was leading me now towards a table where a couple of long-hair freaks were handing out placards. I held onto Gwen’s hand, afraid I’d lose her in this mob and never see her again. If I could have had my way, I would have told Gwen that we had to leave. It looked like trouble to me. We’d been through enough in Boston. Couldn’t we just go to a museum as planned, or even a Boston Red Sox game? I liked those lies we threw around and wanted to go home having done something that I could say was true. We weren’t scheduled to be on the plane until 6:30. We could just take a nice easy day, get out to the airport in time and be home, asleep in our beds, ready for school tomorrow. It could be that easy.

  “Where you from?” the guy handing out protest signs asked. “Who do you represent?” The guy was maybe a couple of years older than us. With his long hair he looked so much like the paintings of Jesus Christ in my Bible back home that I did a double take.

  “We’re from Canada,” Gwen said. “We want to march with you.

  “Right on,” Jesus said. He pulled out a massive magic marker and began to produce a masterfully psychedelic scripted message on the posterboard reading, “Canadians Against the War!” He handed it to Gwen. I could hear the guy with the megaphone trying to get people to line up for the march and everyone began to shuffle in that direction. “We don’t have an official permit for this march,” said the voice, “because the pigs wouldn’t give us one. They said they won’t recognize our march as legitimate.”

  Everyone booed.

  “That means that they might come and try to bust a few heads. But they can’t stop us because we are here to end the war. People all across America are out on the streets today. We might not do it today, we might not do it tomorrow, but we’re gonna get this thing stopped and nothing can push us back!”

  A cheer went up. We were moving now. I felt like a cell in a blood stream. Thousands of people around us. We were moving in the middle of a mass of Americans out exercising their right of free speech, only something in the bureaucracy wasn’t quite right and we were all part of an illegal march. People began to sing, “We shall overcome,” and I suddenly thought I was going to cry. It’s funny how just then I was thinking of Burnet. Would he be in Nam yet? Probably still in training. I began to realize that the guy on the horn was telling the truth. How could a war continue if a tide of protest like this was going on across the country, if it was happening week after week? I truly didn’t want Burnet to come home in a body bag. I think at that moment, tagging along with Gwen whose face was radiant with the passion of a righteous cause, I still felt a hatred for Burnet for seducing Gwen, for getting her pregnant; and then I hated him because he had gone off to be a soldier, to fight for the Americans. He was the perfect sucker for a government that had to preach and package hate in order to create and prolong a war that nobody would have other-wise wanted. It would always be so easy to sell hate.

  But most of all, I can now admit, I wanted the war to end because I didn’t want to see Burnet come home a hero. I didn’t want to believe that you could go away from home, maim and kill and destroy in the name of a patriotic cause and then come back a winner. The irony of Gwen falling for a guy who craved going to war still haunted me. Sure, I knew that Gwen’s motives of protest were pure. How could they be otherwise? But now I knew that mine were different. I wanted the war to end quickly so Burnet would never have a chance to fight, never have a chance to come home and gloat and probably get his way for the rest of his life. I wanted to save his stupid ass so he couldn’t be a stupid hero, dead or alive. I took the placard from Gwen and held it high in the air. Then I joined her in singing, “We shall overcome some day.” We both had our back packs and I didn’t want her to have to carry anything else.

  “This is beautiful,” Gwen said. “I think we should stay here in Boston and work for the peace movement.”

  I pretended I didn’t hear her over the chanting of the crowd. She did it again; she just scared me to death. We had to go back to school. We couldn’t throw that away. I decided I would say nothing. Once again, Gwen had made a leap I was not ready for. How could I ever hold her back? How could I hold onto her? I couldn’t live in Boston. I couldn’t give up my family and my island. I knew that I had to be sure she was on that plane with me today, no matter what.

  Our island seemed so far away as we walked toward the centre of the city and the buildings grew taller all around. Marchers shouted slogans for peace or against war and, as we passed each side street, I saw groups of policemen. They had on helmets and were carrying wooden clubs. I heard their bull horns telling us this was an illegal march and that we should disperse, but not one person was intimidated. I tried to glimpse forward and back to see how many people were actually marching, but I could tell nothing except the fact that there was a flood of protesters as far forward and as far back as I could see. The immensity of the crowd scared me, but if I looked sideways at a stranger who gave me eye contact I would receive a flash of the two-finger V and a warm smile.

  There was a division in the street ahead where a small park interrupted the normal flow of the traffic. We were pretty far back from the lead; I could see that the crowd was divided into two now as it streamed around the little triangular park. At the centre was a monument to war and it was being guarded by a group of maybe twenty
cops. I saw the hippie with the megaphone try to walk up onto the steps of the monument. At first the police looked like they were going to let him through, but then one of the troopers decided to stop him. The war memorial was surrounded now on all sides by the marchers, thousands of them.

  Our leader, still wielding the megaphone, turned back to the crowd and said, “Remember, whatever happens, we are messengers of peace. No violence. No fighting. Passive resistance will stop this war. Peace above all things.” With that a night stick came down with a hard crack on his head. He slumped onto the steps of the war memorial. A roar went up from the crowd, and all at once, as if a giant living thing, it began to press in towards the centre. The cops left in the middle protecting the monument looked as if they could be crushed. They held up plexiglass shields and began to wave their clubs blindly at anyone who came near.

  Gwen was craning her neck, trying to get a look. “What’s happening?” she asked.

  I tried to edge us away from the centre of the crowd. Already I was feeling as if we were being compressed, packed tight by the hundreds of people surging forward. It was very scary. Up at the monument I heard a pop and saw two small clouds of smoke. “Tear gas,” I said. “I have to get you out of here.” Then I heard women screaming and I heard the pounding of horse’s hooves on pavement. The police were trying to get in to rescue their fellow cops who were trapped inside the mob. They were charging through the streets, scattering the marchers into smaller groups. I heard another pop and saw another cloud.

  Pure white terror went through me as people began to drop their signs and try to run. A new batch of uniforms on horses stationed themselves several yards away from us in a line. They had on helmets with dark plexiglass shields so you couldn’t see their faces. They carried long wooden clubs and I could see that the numbers on their badges were taped over. I dropped my sign, held tightly onto Gwen’s hand and tried to squeeze us out of the crowd. But there was nowhere to go. One young woman reached up to grab the bridle of one of the horses and she was immediately cracked on the head with a stick. I could see blood on her face as she fell to the ground. Four protesters grabbed the cop and pulled him off the horse onto the street. All around I could hear people screaming and crying. I could hear police shouting orders to disperse. But for us there was no place to go.