by D. M. Fraser
We are listening now, fitfully, to the radio. The news is unenlightening: we are believed to be hiding in another city, in the south. A house there—the home of a known sympathizer—was raided, firebombed, in expectation of flushing us out, but we were not there to be flushed. Several persons are dead, several others wounded; it seems they were having a birthday party, for one of their children, at the time. At a nearby commune a quantity of weaponry was seized, arrests were made, witnesses were interrogated. The operation was organized and carried out along the lines of a game-plan first tested, and perfected, during the recent Asian war. Now, the search is reportedly being intensified; anyone with information is urged to relay it, immediately, to the nearest authorities. We have been seen in the east, in the midwest, in Algeria, Cuba, and Mexico, in a Canadian border town, entering a famous bordello in Reno, eating lasagna in an underworld café in New Orleans, boarding flights for London, Damascus, Lisbon, and Hanoi. We have allies everywhere.
At the beginning, to be truthful, I had reservations about our project. It was a matter of readiness, chiefly: I was not convinced that we had the means, or the stamina, to sustain an act of war. We had had, up to then, only rather haphazard experience of praxis. A few isolated experiments in shoplifting, armed robbery, random bombing—routine guerrilla offensives—did not seem to me, then, adequate preparation for the kind of activity we were contemplating. And it was far from clear, too, whether abduction had ever been wholly efficacious, as a tactic. I think a number of us entertained these doubts, and others like them, but at that stage of our development we tended to identify our qualms with cowardice, or at least quietism, and consequently were reluctant to voice them. That may have been a mistake. In certain instances the correct policy does not automatically present itself: killing Alex, for instance, may also in retrospect appear to have been a mistake, and it is too late now to undo it. We will learn, as we learn everything, through hindsight.
The prisoner is a young man, good-looking in an unformed way, the son of a prominent and inordinately admired political figure; to ensure our security, and his, we have assigned him the code-name Dionysius. Recorded messages have been supplied to the media, defining our position, our objectives. We are demanding a variety of small arms and munitions, $1 million in unmarked bills of low denomination, and unconditional amnesty in the event of our capture. We are demanding, further, the release from jail of our brothers Eduardo Donaro, Eugene Lilienthal, Gerard Macklewain, and Constantin Stavros, and our sister Marie Tyrell. We are confident that our terms will be met, in full, before the deadline.
It is necessary to correct the popular misapprehensions about our motives and actions. We are not conscienceless. In the newspapers we are most often portrayed, falsely, as a band of savages, heartless adventurers, nihilists, wanton lovers of destruction and death. Pulp novelists write inflammatory thrillers in which we invariably appear as soul-less robots, the puppets of foreign malefactors. That is merely propaganda, devised to titillate the gullible and deceive the masses. Terrorists, we are called, time and again; but the real Terror is not of our making. It is true that on occasion we have acted rashly, in desperation or haste; it is equally true that we have committed ourselves, irrevocably, to the eradication of our enemies—as they, with their superior numbers and sophisticated gadgetry, have pledged themselves to eradicate us. The enterprise is permanent, and continually self-renewing. We may, in the end, be more evenly matched than they suspect: they are powerful, but we are clever. We have routes, redoubts, they know nothing of. And our mission is just, as theirs is not.
Alex was shot cleanly, knowing our reasons, the logic by which it became essential, as we thought, to remove him. It may have been less than essential; we might have found another solution, less drastic, if we had known where to look for it. There were, in his case, aspects we were actually unaware of; our original intelligence (that he was an infiltrator, an informer and provocateur) seems to have been inaccurate, or wildly exaggerated. In the last analysis, above all else it was his attitude that condemned him: he was, we felt, an anomaly within the collective, a cyst to be cut away before, malignant, it infected the healthy organs. The metaphor was unfortunate. Interestingly, Alex made no protest. His defence was listless, perfunctory (Do as you see fit, you will anyway); had he argued, had he only resisted us, we would have found it easier to spare him. But he left us no choice. He appeared genuinely to believe, as we all did then, that when the will of the collective manifests itself it must prevail, even in error. Or perhaps he saw his execution as the one fitting resolution of the melodrama in which, long ago, he had assigned himself the starring role. There could be many explanations, most of them unacceptable. But we are more careful now.
The trial, which we had all dreaded, which more than once we had voted to postpone (“pending further investigation”), was brief and purely mechanical, a formality we felt constrained to observe. Alex already knew what we had in mind, what we had decided in the conferences from which—at first to his bewilderment—we had excluded him. “Let’s just get it over with,” he said. “It will only be worse if it drags on.” I was delegated to read the list of charges, because I had known Alex longer than the others had, because I had brought him into the cell, and because—having grown up friends in the same town, and having fled it together—we were that much more deeply implicated in each other’s actions. And I myself was not above suspicion: my own weaknesses, my divided allegiances, were not unknown to the collective. It was painful, reading the charges, seeing as I did so the glint of mockery, of knowledge, behind his set and stoic face. “In the name of the collective,” I read, “in the name of our brothers and sisters in struggle everywhere”—who had written THAT bullshit?—“it is my duty to condemn you, expel you from this cell, and by the authority of my comrades sentence you …” The words were ridiculous; I had the impulse, which I’d frequently felt as a child, at funerals and other solemn gatherings, to break into laughter. “Do you accept the verdict of your peers?” I managed to finish. “It doesn’t look as though I have much choice,” Alex said. The room was very quiet.
I was also appointed to guard him, afterwards. I was given a knife and a small automatic, to use at my discretion in the event of trouble; there was no trouble. It was early in the afternoon, and nothing was scheduled to happen before dark. We sat in the loft of a warehouse to which, through an employee of the company that owned it, we had unlimited access in those days. Even in the bright sunlight, the room seemed nocturnal. I was remembering unimportant things, scenes from an age I was trying to outgrow, leave behind forever: the girls we’d shared, not always equably, the small acts of delinquency we’d committed, not always boldly, the night we’d driven my father’s car, in high drunkenness and glee, into the ocean. (“Why did you do it?” Isobel Monadnock wailed. “Oh, oh, oh, why did you have to do it?” Alex and I were hooting, holding each other’s shoulders and raging with laughter. “I had a merciless vision of banality,” he said, when he was able to speak.) The loft stank of fish by-products, containers of which, chemically treated, were stored downstairs. “You must have loved me,” Alex said after a while. “There must have been an instant, sometime, a split second you probably weren’t even capable of noticing while it happened, when you loved me. Why else would you have done what you did? You had to teach me everything you knew, everything I know now, your language, the things the words mean, all the fictions you insist on living by, all the stories everyone has told again and again ever since the world began. The same old shit, the same delusions, every turd you were ever fed and swallowed like a baby, all of it, you put into me. And expected me to take it for my own. You almost convinced me, you almost got away with it, because in some hopeless way I loved you, I wanted the rubbish you were selling. It was a way out, the easiest way, the one I didn’t have to work for. The poor grow up fatalistic; they know that at best there’s exactly one chance, if that, to get the hell out, and if they botch that they’re stuck with the botch forever after.
It’s a matter of hanging on where you are, wherever you’re able to haul yourself up or down to, or else just staying in the same black hole for the rest of your life. You lured me out of that—to this. I was poor, you never were. Thanks to you, I broke loose, or thought I did; I thought I was being utterly happy, that I was living through the happiest time of my life, that I was free. You persuaded me that everything everywhere was weighted with the most extraordinary significance ever signified, and that some bright day I’d remember it, and know exactly what it meant, and tell all the sentient world about it, and just like magic the Revolution would rise up like the grand finale of some overproduced musical comedy. You still think it’s going to be like that. You’re dreaming and you love it, you dance in it like crazy every time they play the music, you can hardly wait to weep over me when they shoot me. When you shoot me. Weep all you like; I won’t. I hate and despise you, and everything you claim to be. You taught me the words, and I’ll use them, every last bloody one of them, before I die. You loved me because I was weird, because I was the deserving poor, because you never had guts enough to get out on your own, you had to take someone inferior with you. Away from the prospect of ordinary life, that perpetual dead end you thought you were born to escape from, and I to live in. Does it astonish you that I speak your language now? That I can even do it better than you can? It shouldn’t astonish you. After all, you only loved me, tempted me, in order to close all the doors opening back, back there …”
For strategic purposes, it was considered advisable to shoot him at night. Our best marksman was nervous: it was the first time we had had to act against one of our own. There was a farm, some distance from the city, where we were welcome and felt secure; for the execution we chose the field farthest from the highway. The moon was brilliant, the dew glossy as sweat on a lover’s flanks. The women had brought along sandwiches and beer, potato salad, barbecued chicken in a hamper. No one was hungry; we’d eat later, when accomplishment had made us hilarious. Someone played a harmonica, without conviction. We walked slowly, almost a cortege, across the field. Alex refused the blindfold, accepted a cigarette, a mouthful of beer. Then he spoke briefly, before anyone could silence him: “And most of all beware, even in thought, of assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of griefs is not a proscenium, a man who wails is not a dancing bear.” I recognized the passage as one from an African poem; long before, in a comradely gesture, Alex had given me the book with those words underlined. Was he addressing them, now, to me? He had always had a taste for irony, the bastard … We were going to have to proceed. I led Alex to a slight rise in the field, where he could be seen clearly. He stood there uncertainly, looking confused. “I don’t think I believe this,” he whispered. “What if I make a break for it?” “Where would you go?” He grinned, scraped his feet against the dirt. “Where am I going now?” “Would you like anything?” “Nothing I can think of.” A hundred yards distant, the others stood restlessly, resenting this privacy, this intrusion of subjectivism. I went back to join them; as I left him, Alex began to speak again: “To die for the people …” Two shots were required; the first one went astray.
On the way home we drove slowly, alert for police. The car radio played country music. Toward midnight, thirsty after our exertions, we stopped at a suburban tavern where we were unknown. But the atmosphere was grim, and we soon left.
The prisoner is describing his childhood, from which he is not far removed. “It was boring, most of the time, because I was always expected to be on my best behaviour. That meant being quiet, it meant never just buggering off and having fun. There wasn’t anyone to have fun with. No one I liked was ever considered suitable, and I didn’t meet anyone suitable that I could like. I was in public, I was watched, I was told I had to set an example. You can imagine what I must have been an example of. There were stories about me in the women’s magazines, and photographs too. In one of them, I was falling off a horse; the whole country thought that was so cute, so … so typical. Shit, if I’d ever grown up enough to get into trouble, it would have ruined my father. Or so he and his advisors kept telling me. Other people’s kids got into trouble, the disadvantaged were always getting into trouble; our kind didn’t know what trouble was. I wonder when I saw through it, all that crap. Something must have happened. Maybe I did something bad and enjoyed doing it, really got off on it. I don’t remember. Maybe it was gradual, like coming off a long bad trip. But I guess being here is part of it, I know that much, I suppose I was waiting for something like this. Any excuse to get away. Even to a place like this, which isn’t a lot like what I’ve been used to. It could be worse. I remember the lies I had to tell, to keep them off my back, so I could sneak out for a joyride now and then. We were warned, you see, we were told there’d probably be some hassle … oh, they didn’t exactly go into the details, but we knew we were on somebody’s list. We were prime targets. Maybe you were keeping a list, and they knew about it; they had ways to get that sort of information. But I’d always been guarded, it was nothing new when they got paranoid about you guys. It was only more exciting, because I was old enough to understand it. Like living in a movie, with an honest-to-god plot, for a change. Nothing had ever happened before. It was just that dismal house and the dismal people who came to it with their bodyguards and their chauffeurs, and a whole series of dismal schools where you couldn’t piss after lights out, trips in the summer to dismal hotels I was never allowed to leave by myself, and the talk about money and politics—not your kind of politics—and rules. More rules than the government ever dreamed of, if it could dream. Everyone was frightened of everything; it seemed strange, because they were all so powerful. They had everything going for them, and they were scared. My father even hired rent-a-cops these last few weeks, at his own expense. I don’t know where he got them—some agency, most likely. The one he gave me was called Geoffrey, he was okay, he liked to talk, tell stories. I used to bribe him to take lots of time off, go meet his woman or his buddies, go anywhere but where I was … That’s what I did the night you came.”
We listen amiably enough to this chatter. The prisoner’s past, his psychological disabilities, are no concern of ours. He fancies himself to be a victim of circumstance. He may be. But the prospects for re-education are, I should say, excellent.
Locally, a manhunt is underway, but it has so far achieved no more than the ordinary harassment of civilians. We are occupying an unexceptional stucco house in a pleasant middle-income district of stucco houses where our presence is well-established, our rather reclusive lifestyle taken for granted. We have gone to some trouble to establish amicable relations with our neighbours, who think of us as colourful but harmless, well-bred, no threat to property values. We are suspected of nothing untoward. Even the elderly and anxious lady from whom we rent this house has displayed no curiosity about us, because we have done nothing unusual to arouse it. It is unthinkable that we could have taken part in anything as forceful, as unacceptable, as an abduction.
The police have been unable to make anything like a positive identification; our names and origins are recorded nowhere. Alex did not, as things turned out, inform on us. No one has betrayed us, yet. There are a great many groups like ours, and we could be any one of them.
In the tapes we released, the prisoner reported only the truth, without coercion: he said, correctly, that he has not been tortured or otherwise harmed, that he is being treated hospitably, and that we are absolutely serious in our demands. He said that we are not receptive to offers of compromise, and that we have the means at our disposal to back up our statements. Voice-prints have established that it was, unquestionably, the prisoner speaking. The published speculations that we extorted these tapes from him under duress are, like most gossip about our movements and methods, unfounded. We have our own means of persuasion. Alex was in many respects a charlatan and a poseur, but he said one thing we all remember, and strive to apply: “Each of us must carry at all times a concealed
weapon—his mind.”
The father has already communicated a willingness to negotiate. We have informed him that our position is, and will continue to be, non-negotiable.
On this third day of Operation Dionysius, it is apparent that the prisoner is in fact preparing himself, by degrees, to co-operate with us. He apologizes often for his ignorance, his “childishness,” as he calls it. He has indicated, covertly but unmistakably, that he is not himself wholly unsympathetic toward our intentions, and that we should not confuse his own ideological stance with that of his parents, and his parents’ class in general. He has begun to refer to them, more naturally, as they. That is a promising beginning. Moreover, remarkably, he demonstrates a keen—if as yet immature—theoretical mind, an unexpected grasp of dialectics, a sensitivity to tactical subtleties. Several of his passing suggestions have been found useful. He talks, now, of joining up with us (if we’ll have him), repudiating his family and former friends, sharing our cause, whatever the outcome of this present business. Vulnerable as we are, we have no sure way to determine whether he is speaking out of self-interest, in an understandable effort to ingratiate himself with us, or genuinely out of an evolving solidarity with our aims. We will have to test him. One of the women has proposed that we include him (in, of course, a relatively insignificant role) in our next action, but just now we have no specific actions planned. One will presumably present itself to us, at the right time.
