by Gary Amdahl
“We’ve been taking drugs,” said one earnestly.
“Well, yeah!” said Vera. “But which ones?”
The woman who had looked earnest changed her look to bland and turned to her friend, for corroboration, Vera thought, or maybe just to see if she was still there. “We came across a bit of cocaine, and the boys took that, they’re so excited they’re boring, and we have been experimenting with opium dreaming for some time now.”
“I see,” said Vera. “Why aren’t you dreaming?”
“Do you want to try it? Or don’t you approve?”
“Oh, I have tried it, I have certainly tried it!”
“Are you addicted?” asked the second woman, who was staring at herself in the dirty, spotted mirror.
“Well, I don’t know, I suppose I was, still am, in a way, on some level. I started . . . very young. It was given to me as part of a plan to keep me quiet. If I was crying too much, they’d slip me some laudanum and lock me in a closet. I don’t know if you ladies are familiar with Iowa button mills or Connecticut thread mills . . .? They had discounts on bulk purchases in the company store—of laudanum, I mean. Folks would work their eighty hours, or sixty-eight if they’d just had a successful strike, limp home, and relax with ten or twenty drops of the stuff. Or they’d take it in the morning before work to relieve the tension at work. It was either that or run shrieking out of there. And if you dreamed, as you say, your way into a crushed limb or perforated organ, that was better than starving to death, which is what would happen if you shrieked and ran. Always better to dream yourself to death, we said around the dinner table. That’s the title of a chapter, by the way, in my forthcoming autobiography, I Don’t Know Why I’m Surprised. When I was little, when my parents were still alive, we lived in Willimantic. I mean Muscatine. Poppa had been employed for several years as a—oh, never mind—and he went to pieces. Of course, with the new laws, the new drug laws—LAWS LAWS LAWS. GOD, AREN’T YOU SICK TO FUCKING DEATH OF LAWS? Poor people now have to drink themselves to death. The opium was judged to be far too pleasant a way to die—and it cut into profitability. But I suppose I was high too, when Poppa went to pieces. I wandered about the town and eventually adopted a talking squirrel.”
They walked back to the long table. “Returning to the new drug laws,” said Vera. “The most recent figures indicate, um, say, what’s wrong with your friend there?”
“She’ll be all right,” said the first woman. “You were saying.”
“I was saying health and safety? Next person who talks to me about health and safety . . .! It’s control that matters! Control and productivity and predictability. Whatever the problem is, the solution will always be to clamp down on the pleasures of poor people. You got some vast burner putting up clouds of coal smoke, you can’t go out for a ride in the carriage without choking half to death, why, you just pass a bill that outlaws candles in the home! Any poor person caught using a candle will be hustled into jail. Health and safety, my eye. I don’t know why I’m surprised.”
“Right . . .” said the first woman. Her friend giggled. “Carol Kennicott! Stop looking like that. Stop giggling! You’re giving us the creeps!”
“Ditto that,” said Vera.
“I’m sorry,” giggled Carol. “It’s just, you know, a speech like that, there in the ladies’ room,” and here her giggling changed key, “as if it were possible to change anything at this late date!” She seemed now on the verge of hysteria. “I am afraid if I move, my face will stay the way it was painted on the mirror.” She clapped her hand to her mouth. “But my mouth is moving and I can feel it moving, so all must be well.” She swiveled her eyes at her friend and Vera and Daisy, blinking at each in turn as if they were the mirror. “What we ought to do is get as much opium as we can and go to Belgium. Or are they just in France now? If we ever came back, we could . . . we could speak with legitimacy of the end of time. We could be the final witnesses. Like the Black Death. Wander across fields of corpses, trees blooming with severed heads, somnambulists and magicians, metallic chattering of guns, bombs instead of thunder, children staring at clouds of poison gas and saying they see a ducky or a kitten, homes with no doors or windows or roofs but you walk in anyway, right? As if there were?” Vera nodded in such a way that Carol was forced to pause and consider herself for a while in the mirror of Vera’s face. “You walk in and there’s someone sitting there in the dark staring at a pot of water, they don’t even say hello, generals writing their memoirs, but they can’t come up with the right word because they are actually as stupid as the day is long, and, and you’re right, poor people being battered to death for lighting a candle. I keep seeing these children, can you see them . . .? They’re trying to play a game. They’re standing in a circle, blood on the ground, smoke in the air, and they can’t figure out what the rules are, or what the . . . what the . . . what the fuck the point is.”
Vera’s eyes had been locked with Carol’s for the entire length of the speech. Now Carol turned away and it was as if lightning had indeed struck and transformed them where they stood.
“The game,” said Vera at last, “is hide-and-seek.”
They were, she thought, the counterweight to mystic speculators in the grain trade, weird people trying to call chemical clouds together in the hope that peace might rain down upon them, as lost to the world of protest, negotiation, and reconciliation as the speculators were to altruism, philanthropy, and food grown and cooked with their own tired hands.
It was seductive, but she wanted to stay in the trench. A friend of hers, she told the women, someone very close to her, was addicted to narcotics, and so she saw things in a little different light. Without warning, she collapsed in a chair, held her face in her hands, and began to cry.
“More prisons, more police, more mobs, more lynching,” said Vera. They had returned to the table. The men looked like they’d been sobbing too. The women sat down and ignored what the men were trying passionately to say. Vera lost her train of thought and the first woman, Louise, asked her again if she felt she had been addicted to the opium she’d been given as a child. Vera again began to cry. Louise had meant to introduce the topic as a subject for group discussion, but now didn’t know what to do. She raised and lowered her palms several times. Vera stopped crying as quickly and surely as if she’d been faking it.
“Certainly I was sick and crazy as a child, and I can say now just as certainly that I felt something in me call out for it, daydream about it without saying its name, imagine circumstances, maybe other worlds, maybe an ideal world, ominously enough, prophetically enough, in which I might indulge myself in this nameless desire . . . but I tell you, my friends, what makes me burst out in tears of grief and loneliness is the knowledge that I have gone on for so long feeling free, acting as if I were free, only to find out that I am not. Oh, it’s a question I can’t answer! I can tell you I resisted it, that I resisted all gross pleasures and extreme pursuits. Alcohol and tobacco and firearms. Meat. I thought purity was called for. Purity of limb and thought. It may have been an elaborate disguise for a fear that I was in some way being controlled, but how can I think of something as artificial as rectitude when the world is upside down? How can I be pure when I can see with my own eyes that there is nothing pure, that there has been nothing pure in the history of creation! And is not the seeking of purity, friends and neighbors, just an elaborate disguise for terror? What do you miss when you seek purity? Poetry from your life and passion from your politics? I mean real passion, not the costumes and soliloquies and power. Oh, ladies and gentlemen, I lived in New York once, for a very little while, and I knew the bliss of art, the peace that it brings. So yes, I say, opium yes, and whiskey yes, and cigarettes and pistols and Coleridge and Baudelaire and and and Edgar Allen Poe! I am twenty-one years old and I lecture, mostly to myself now, like some pompous magister-cum-tyrant in a gown, of freedom, but—” and she began to cry again, because she was quoting someone who was dead, more or less verbatim, “but the truth, ha ha
, is that I am a slave to a world of simple objects and superficial perception and mechanical thought and naïve ideals. If I’m not a terrorist it’s because I’m a coward.”
As if she’d not made her extraordinary speech, the man who had been so insistent about King Umberto said, “Don’t give up your ideals. God, this cocaine is wearing off already!”
“Oh, the world is rich and strange and horrifying and mute and I have confined myself to newsprint in the tiniest of fonts,” Vera continued to rave, as if the man who’d interrupted her had not spoken after all. “Doctrine and frankly bourgeois comforts. I want the revolution to be like the fall of Nineveh, the feast of Belshazzar, strong red wine in heavy golden goblets, clothes of scarlet silk, a spectral hand writing on the walls of the homes of these vicious assholes: GOD HATH NUMBERED THY KINGDOM AND FINISHED IT, THOU ART WEIGHED IN THE BALANCE AND FOUND WANTING, THY KINGDOM IS DIVIDED AND GIVEN TO THE INDUSTRIAL WORKERS OF THE WORLD!”
Everybody in the big back room of the Oregon House applauded and whistled and cheered. “I am either a block of lead, friends and neighbors and citizens, or a nervous bird and I am tired of it. I want to hear music in every waterfall. I want to see time going backward as well as forward: ‘the dark backward and abysm of time,’ I want that, I want that badly! I want the past, the present, the future! Life, as we have lived it, comrades, is meaningless. It is a life that has been recommended to us, forced upon us when we balked, by people who do not care if we are happy or even alive, so long as there are others in line behind us. Therefore and in conclusion: opium, whiskey, pistols, and dynamite!”
It was not her last speech of the night.
Charles was braced in a cone of yellow light over a large relief map of Minnesota, the Dakotas to the river, Wisconsin, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Vera threw open the door and it came back at her, knocking her sideways a good distance. The doorway jumped to the left and jumped to the right, but she made her way in, only to have the spring-loaded floor fly up and slap her in the face. Later, he told her that she tried to speak, but I hadn’t been able to make out the language. “You were slick and pale and but looked, somehow, contented and amused.”
“I made great speeches at the Oregon House,” she said blearily but proudly.
“And then you vomited.”
“When was this?”
“Just a bit ago. I was there and then I came here.”
Charles cleaned her up with looming movements and sounds and tucked her in bed. The next day he told her that because of the slapstick theatrics of her entry, she probably hadn’t noticed Daisy sleeping on the couch.
“No, no,” said Vera. “I saw her.”
“She says she has the job.”
“Job?”
“Traveling. Speaking. It’s planned and waiting to happen.”
“Oh no . . . .”
‘“Oh no’?”
“This is what everybody’s been waiting for.”
“As I said. Why ‘oh no’?”
“Because I am unwell.”
“Who is everybody?”
“What kind of question is that? I’ve got a headache. Leave me alone.”
“Everybody must include me. What have I been waiting for?”
“Once again a terrific question that I cannot help you with.”
“Vera, please, you are mistaking me for one of your pinheaded nihilists. Just because I don’t think any of this is real doesn’t mean I am indifferent to things everybody is waiting for. I am not apolitical or amoral. I am my father’s son in more ways than I am not. I think I have demonstrated as much pretty persuasively in the last few months. Have I not? Vera? Have I not?”
“Charles, I love you. Don’t you understand what that means?”
“No, not at all.”
“I couldn’t love, wouldn’t love you, if I didn’t know what was in your heart.”
“What’s in my heart?”
“Love.”
“Whatever you call it, it’s as illusory as everything else.”
“If you say so.”
“Well, how can I not and remain honest?”
“I don’t know.”
“I can’t.”
“If you say so.”
“Well, you must. Please.”
“I tell you my head hurts horribly and—”
“Head hurts horribly, hurry home.”
“—and you insist on metaphysics.”
“Daisy travels and speaks. The roads are now hard and dry enough for her to do so. Why is everyone waiting for these speeches? Are they new speeches?”
“Charles Minot asks me if a speech is new?”
“All right.”
“All right is right.”
“Let me see if I understand.”
“You do understand.”
Some dreary weeks later, two men, Wobblies Vera knew from a short visit to Los Angeles—one of the times Charles had been unable to find her—had come to visit her once in the machine shop where she’d briefly lived, in the Andersonville section of north Chicago, before coming to Charles and Saint Paul. They caught her in the middle of a very dark wood. It was a deep, black, fugal consideration of her life, not unlike ordinary narcoses, but very much more resigned to self-evident truths, and consequently, serene in a clear way not usually afforded by drugs. The questions, the rhetorical questions she posed herself, all received clear, peaceful, inarguable answers. Her life was over. She had failed to maintain the beautiful, the magnificent arc of her trajectory. It was possible that the godlike archer who had released her had done so imperfectly, but if that was so, it mattered not at all to the arrow. She had been struck by some harrier, some raptor, stripped of fletching and point, deflected, nearly stopped dead in midair, hairline cracks fissuring her length—and was tumbling back to earth. She would not finish her flight. The greatness of her daring, her willingness, her nonchalant ability to draw breathtakingly near death and flaunt her life—had come to nothing. There was no shame in this knowledge, no resentment—the thing had simply not ended as it had begun. So when the Wobblies wondered at her relations with Daisy Gluek, she said she felt nothing but affection and admiration for her. Daisy reminded her of Rosemary. Who seemed so far away and so close—she could hold her, as it were, in her heart, and let the gulf between them widen and widen until she too was dead. In no way did this sense of herself, as spent and falling, failing, dying, interfere with her devotion to saintly Rosemary—and by unavoidable but faulty extension, Daisy—her love of her. The thought of the way she had made her way in the world pleased and satisfied Vera. The way she had learned, her method—it was a thing of beauty because she expected so little of it. Her rejection of power—or was it fear? It did not matter, because she was afraid in such a graceful way. She had been so from the beginning, long before they’d met. . . .
“We see each other once a week,” Vera told the Wobblies. “I am helping her with certain aspects of her autobiography.”
“We have entered into a kind of association with the Nonpartisan League,” said one of the Wobblies. They were just coming into individual focus for Vera. The speaker, whose name she had already forgotten, had thick wavy gray hair, bushy gray eyebrows, spectacles, and a bristling gray moustache. He looked a little, she thought, like Mark Twain, but had a deep somnolent voice, occasionally garbled with phlegm. An old man, probably older than he looked, but fit. The second man was much younger, younger even than herself—and suddenly she remembered him. His name was Joe and he had ridden around Los Angeles with Jules when they’d been tailing scabs and scab organizers and detectives and councilmen to their homes.
“Joe!” she shouted and got unsteadily to her feet. “I knew I should know you—can you forgive me?”
“It’s great to see you again, Vera,” said Joe. His eyes had filled with tears. They embraced, and because Vera was weak and high, she began to weep unconstrainedly, causing the emotional, young, and politically sincere Joe to shudder with a sob or two as well. When they released each
other, they were grinning and brusquely wiping away tears. The older man appeared unmoved. Once Joe and Vera were again seated, he resumed his brief. They wanted Vera to join the speaking tour with Daisy, who had already gone west from the Twin Cities to the Dakota border, north through mostly wheat-farming communities, and was about to angle southeast through Big Timber.
“Is Big Timber a town . . .?” asked Vera, careful to seem to know nothing.
“We refer to the industry,” said the older man.
“Two of our boys up there have disappeared,” said Joe.
“‘Disappeared,’” Vera repeated. This she genuinely did not know.
“Two weeks, no word,” said Joe.
“And this is the tour Daisy has been, um, alluding to for . . .? She’s going on a speaking tour through . . . through . . .”
“Big Timber, yes,” said the older man.
“Big Wheat and Big Timber,” said Vera, not only getting the hang of things but beginning to feel heavy with fear. She could hear her heart in her throat and she felt as if she might have trouble breathing and speaking. “Oh, I am dead already,” she thought, but apparently said aloud. “I was dead before this, but I am very, very dead if this is what I have come to. The delicate but virtuosic balance of immense forces was life, and awkward heaviness is death. Perhaps true death will be a condition of light and balance again, but dying is clumsy and sodden.”
“What would you say to be acting,” continued the older man, “as a kind of companion, and why not say it, bodyguard, for Miss Gluek.”
“I am not violent in the least,” said Vera.
“We understand that. No one who knows you could fail to feel sympathy for any aversion you might feel for . . . for violence. But perhaps you will do things other people are . . . afraid to do.”
“Yes,” said Joe. “That’s the main thing we wanted to say to you.”
“And if something should happen to Miss Gluek, you would be there . . . to take her place.”
“Ah,” said Vera. Did they know that that had been the plan, or were they suggesting it in all innocence?
