The Great Perhaps: A Novel
Page 5
AMELIA GETS HIVES whenever she’s nervous or afraid. The hives—which are medically known as urticaria—can occur at almost any time, but they most often appear whenever she has to give an oral report in school. On paper, she can say whatever she wants, the words are as familiar, as trustworthy as her hands and arms and feet. But in front of her peers, in front of the drooling stares of her troglodyte classmates and her ineffectual teachers, she will instantly break out in a formidable rash, the skin of her neck and forearms and stomach popping with bright red blisters. As an agent of agitprop, as a high school editorial-page dissident, she thinks she is amazing. As a Patty Hearst, as a Fred Hampton, in front of a cluster of imaginary microphones and a disinterested crowd, she is totally unconfident, a zero, an absolute no one.
AMELIA IS MAKING an anticapitalist movie for her history class. It begins like this:
EXT. BATTLEFIELD—DAY
A film clip from The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936) featuring Errol Flynn shooting a turbaned Thuggee.
NARRATOR V/O:
We are at war, whether you know it or not. Armies of factory workers have totally lost control over their lives and the products they produce.
CUT TO:
EXT. BATTLEFIELD—DAY
An F-4 Phantom jet drops a payload of bombs on a small Vietnamese village.
CUT TO:
EXT. WAL-MART—NIGHT
NARRATOR V/O:
These people are only cogs, expendable parts in the great capitalist machine. They have become totally alienated from their true natures and their relationships with each other. Human beings are not being allowed to be human beings. So none of us are truly free.
CUT TO:
EXT. DESERT—NIGHT
A hydrogen bomb explodes in the distance, shadowing the desert with its enormous gray cloud.
NARRATOR V/O:
How can we free another nation when we are imprisoned ourselves? Capitalism has to be destroyed if our society’s liberation is to be real. While tyranny oppresses its people with politics, capitalism oppresses its people economically.
CUT TO:
INT. WHITE HOUSE—DAY
President Bush stands before the press corps, answering questions.
NARRATOR V/O:
If capitalism is the answer, if capitalism is so great, why is the world so miserable? Why are there still thousands and thousands of wars? Why are people still suffering all over the world? Why do we allow ourselves to be controlled by corporate interests? Why don’t we do something to fight back?
CUT TO:
INT. MALL—DAY
People walk around shopping happily.
NARRATOR:
Because people are totally weak and dumb. Because most people are too ignorant to even notice. Everyone is still shopping and eating and going to movies and driving their cars everywhere like they don’t even care that people are being killed all over the world right now.
CUT TO:
EXT. PARK—DAY
A close-up of a statue of President Lincoln.
NARRATOR:
The only way to establish peace in this world is to create a society that isn’t totally based on capitalism, even if it’s by force. Because as long as there are people who have a lot of money and other people who don’t, there’s always going to be wars.
CUT TO:
INT. MALL—DAY
Clip from Dawn of the Dead. Zombies attack mall visitors, amid screaming and shouting.
NARRATOR:
We need to revolt now! Everybody free yourselves from the chain of capitalism and learn to be happy! Let the revolution begin!
CUT TO:
TEXT flashing on-screen: CAPITALISM IS LAME…CAPITALISM IS LAME…CAPITALISM IS LAME…GEORGE BUSH IS A TERRORIST…GEORGE BUSH IS A TERRORIST
Amelia, sitting in her room, stares at the computer screen happily. She adds the last piece of text to the editing program and then figures out how to make the text look like it’s flashing. Then she starts the movie again from the beginning. She imagines the look on Mr. Anson’s face and nods to herself, proudly, adjusting the beret on the top of her head.
AMELIA WEARS THE black beret everywhere, even to school, where kids think she is uptight and a lesbo and a bitch. Her mother warns her that wearing that beret all the time might cause her to go bald but she doesn’t really care. She prefers to get to school one hour early. As the editor-in-chief of the school paper, the Midway, she has keys to the newspaper office. Mr. Wick is sometimes there by then, sitting behind his diminutive desk, in his dirty white dress shirt and yellow tie, his nose sniffling, quickly editing the last page of copy before handing it to Brice Jackson, a lanky senior in charge of getting the copy to the printer. The Midway does one issue a week, and Amelia must edit her fellow writers’ work as well as contribute to the Campus Politics page. Here her main duty is to report on the student council’s meetings and activities. She loathes the student council; she believes they are all incompetent babies whose only concern is racking up extracurricular activities for their lackluster college applications. The ideas of truth, of justice, of revolution, mean nothing to these kids. Amelia is not afraid to voice her disdain. Mr. Wick, the faculty advisor for the school paper, an old leftist himself, refuses to censor her, and takes a certain amount of joy in seeing the principal and other members of the administration criticized. Most of the time her columns are more than a simple report from the student council’s last meeting; usually she issues strongly worded threats to William Banning, the effete, spineless student council president, such as:
Why do we need another walk-a-thon? Why do we need another car wash? What exactly does the student council plan on doing with this money they raise? Do they simply do it because last year’s student council had a walk-a-thon and a car wash? Are they, like the awful student council administration before them, only raising funds for a student council end of year party with pizza and balloons, which only the student council kids get to enjoy? Who does the student council president, William Banning, think he is? Dick Cheney? President Nixon? When will other student voices rise up to demand a moratorium on student fundraisers that do not, in the end, serve the school itself? Who will exorcise the demons of these self-serving, teenage, capitalist politicians?
DURING LUNCH, AMELIA does not usually eat. Instead, she sets up a folding table protesting the lack of vegetarian options, the school’s uncaring administration, and American imperialism in general. She has made a different pamphlet for each cause she is championing. The pamphlet about the lack of vegetarian options is green, the one criticizing the school’s administration is purple, and the one describing the horrors of imperialism is red. At lunch, two seniors, passing a football back and forth between each other, look at Amelia—short, dark-haired, wearing her black beret—and call her a fag.
“I’m a woman,” Amelia says, sighing. “I know it’s hard for you two Cro-Magnons to understand, but it’s not physically possible for me to be a fag.”
“Whatever, fag,” they say, laughing, walking away.
IF AMELIA SEES her younger sister, Thisbe, walking down the hallway of their high school between classes, Amelia will ignore her. If someone asks if she has a little sister in the freshman class, Amelia will say no without thinking.
AMELIA HAS NOT shaved her armpits in three months. The hair there is dark and wiry. Both of her legs are also covered in dark, wiry fuzz.
AMELIA IS INSULTED that a Starbucks has opened so close to their house. She has many, many different ideas about how and when she will blow it up.
AMELIA’S ONLY FRIENDS happen to work for the school newspaper as well. They are also honorary members of clubs that Amelia has started—Young Environmentalists Club, Young Socialists Club, Young Atheists Club. They do not actually attend any of the meetings because Amelia has elected herself president of each and would rather handle the business of these clubs herself. Amelia sometimes gets high with these friends from the school paper—Max and Heather—after school, hiding in th
e darkroom of the photo lab. Max is an eighteen-year-old white kid with long black dreadlocks who is planning on going to Yale next fall. Max wears a different Bob Marley shirt every day. He is the music and sports editor for the school paper. He supplies the marijuana, which he gets from his father, an entertainment lawyer. Heather may or may not be a lesbian, no one really knows. She wears overalls all the time and has been trying to start a Gay/Lesbian/Bi Club at the school for two years, but no one seems interested in joining. Her hair is red and short and she wears sandals throughout the winter months.
Amelia and her two friends sneak into the darkroom—ignoring the many signs warning of hazardous, combustible chemicals—to get high. Max is the first to speak, handing the joint to Amelia, who holds it like a princess, her pinky raised. She lights it using Max’s stupid pot-leaf Zippo lighter, the spark a quick flickering of light reflected in all of their eyes.
“I heard they’re cutting off people’s heads in Iraq,” Max says.
“What?” Amelia asks, coughing.
“I heard they’re kidnapping people, like aid workers, and cutting their heads off. On videotape.”
“They’re being occupied by the world’s largest and most powerful military force,” Amelia hisses. “It’s all they can do, trying to frighten their oppressors.”
“Fuck that noise,” Max said. “I can’t sympathize with people who cut off other people’s heads.”
“Sometimes violence is the only answer,” Amelia whispers.
“What?” Heather coughs, her white face turning red.
“Think of like all the great revolutions in history. They were all violent.”
“What about the civil rights marches?” Heather asks.
“Besides those. Like the Revolutionary War and all those other ones.”
“Gandhi. He wasn’t violent,” Max says.
“Besides him.”
“Like who?” Max asks.
“Like I dunno, like the revolution in Cuba. Or like Malcolm X.”
“Malcolm X got shot,” Heather whispers, taking another drag.
“I think it’s totally naïve to think that you can accomplish something that big, that important, without hurting other people.”
“Wow,” Max mumbles. “That’s some serious shit.”
“It’s because people are like so afraid to wake up and see what’s going on in the rest of world. It’s like everyone is in total denial. That’s why people take pharmaceutical drugs and everything. Everybody is like in this total fog. The opiate of the people. Except it’s like actually like opium.”
“I hear that,” Max says, exhaling, laughing hard, his voice echoing from an empty cavern in his chest.
“Violence is like, it’s like the only thing that frightens people anymore. It’s like the only way to motivate people to change. Because everyone is totally comfortable with like rich white men being in charge of everything.”
“Hey, what’s wrong with white men?” Max asks, still laughing.
“White men have like ruined everything on the planet. They’re responsible for everything bad that’s ever happened. Like pollution and genocide, everything that’s wrong in Africa. White men are totally the problem.”
“Too bad we’re all white,” Heather says, sadly smirking.
“Well, I’m not,” Amelia says proudly, taking the joint and then inhaling.
“Yeah, right,” Max mumbles.
“No, I’m serious. I’m part Native American.”
“Sure you are.”
“No, for real. On my mother’s side. I’m like one-eighth Cherokee,” she says, completely and utterly lying.
“So?”
“So what? So nothing,” Amelia says with a frown.
“So what does that mean? You’re one-eighth Cherokee. Big deal.”
“It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just my heritage. One day people of color are going to rise up and overthrow the white power machine. And I’m going to be part of it. And we’ll create a new world, with one flag that represents everybody, in like total harmony.”
“Except white men,” Max says, smiling.
“Yeah. Except them.”
AMELIA HAS ALMOST had sex three times with three different boys. Each time, she changed her mind just before the act itself. The last time was with Max, in his parents’ enormous Lincoln Park home, while they were away for the weekend at some wedding, and at the last possible moment, when Max ran up to his parents’ room looking for a condom, Amelia, lying with her black skirt shoved hastily up around her waist, decided she would rather not. She decided to give each of the three disappointed young men blowjobs instead. She did not let them cum in her mouth. She forced the first one to ejaculate on his pants, the second onto the car seat, and Max onto a bedspread. For some reason, Amelia believes giving someone a blowjob is less intimate than actually having sex, and also more mature, more grown-up. She imagines hardworking feminist journalists all over the world giving their lovers blowjobs. This is what she tries to tell herself. Amelia does not know why, but she just wants to get her first time over with. She wants it to be with someone she never has to see again. Ever.
ONE DAY, AMELIA writes a column in the newspaper about how stupid the American flag is and why every flag in the country ought to be burned. The next week, in her editorial, she states, Anyone who shops at Wal-Mart is a coward. Principal Stuart stares at the pulpy pages of the Midway in disbelief. He calls to his secretary, Angie, a cheery, overweight assistant with at least four different pens stuck in her red curly hair, shaking his head. “Tell Wick to get his ass down here. And pronto.” He sits behind his desk and almost has a heart attack when he flips to an editorial page from last month, where, in black and white, Amelia Casper writes, Historically, white men are the cause of most of the trouble in the world.
AMELIA, STANDING BESIDE Mr. Wick, who is pale and shivering with sweat, agrees to print a retraction in regards to the white-men-are-the-cause-of-trouble piece. She does not argue. She stares down at her dark black shoes, unafraid. She decides for next week’s paper to take up a new cause: the cafeteria workers’ unjust treatment.
TODAY, WEDNESDAY, the thirteenth, Amelia is finally suspended from school for trying to incite the cafeteria workers to strike. In her latest school newspaper column, she has written:
Why are all the cafeteria workers in this school black? Or Hispanic (Maribel)? What message is the school trying to send to its students? That privileged people should be waited on by people of color? I say to the cafeteria workers, who prepare our lunches with such care, such attentiveness, the time for a change has come! Demand better hours, better pay, new uniforms, and an end to class segregation!
When Amelia steps out of Principal Stuart’s office, the suspension a yellow piece of paper clamped in her hand, she expects the students in the crowded hallway to begin clapping. She imagines Heather and Max will have constructed a banner celebrating her bravery. But no, no one has even noticed. No one. Amelia watches the students hurrying through the hallway and when she finally spots Max and Heather, they stare at her, their heads down, slightly embarrassed for her. A girl, some poor freshman with a purple headband, accidentally bumps into Amelia. The girl stumbles, tripping over her own feet, and tumbles to the floor. The girl instinctively calls Amelia a bitch. Immediately Amelia begins shouting. “You are all savages! Why don’t you go home and plug your brains into your stupid computers and do whatever MTV tells you to do!” She collects her things and is forced to wait in the lobby of the principal’s office while he makes a big deal out of calling her folks. Her neck has begun to blister, a swell of red hives running up and down her throat.
WHILE SHE IS WAITING for what seems like a century, Amelia notices a silver digital wristwatch resting atop the receptionist’s vacant desk. Its segmented band is coiled beneath its blank-looking face as it sparkles desperately. Free me, the watch quietly whimpers. Free me. Amelia stands, pretends to be wandering around the tiny lobby, glancing over at the principal’s diplomas,
which have been framed along the far wall, and then lunges for the tortured object, feeling its cold heft in her hand. Quickly, she slips it into her purse and returns to her seat with an enormous, self-satisfied smile.
MADELINE GETS A CALL on her cell phone from Amelia’s school about her suspension. It’s just after lunch and she still has another few hours to go, observing the birds’ reaction to predatory stimuli, which are, after all, only a few tape recordings and a plastic owl. Madeline hears her cell phone ringing and quickly steps out of the enclosure to answer it. She does not receive the news of Amelia’s suspension very well. She immediately calls home, and after the fifth ring, Jonathan answers distractedly.
“Jonathan. I need you to go get Amelia from school. She’s in trouble for something.”
“Oh, hell, what happened?”
“I don’t know. They wouldn’t say. I think she insulted the principal or something.”