Indecision (29 page)

I turned around and kissed Brigid again, and the moist operation definitely had an us-two-kissing-each-other-in-a-quickly-darkening-world kind of feeling—an accurate feeling, given the condition of the sky.

I stepped semi-symbolically out of what felt still like the narrow path, onto the grassy lawn of the spa. “I guess this is hour one of my new life—hour one, year zero.”

“Don’t say this.”

“What? Come on, Day One! Year Zero!”

Then she told me how the Khmer Rouge after taking Phnom Penh in 1975 had declared Year Zero and begun to massacre and starve their fellow Cambodians to the tune of one or two million people. “Be careful with your socialism,” she told me as we walked down toward the cottages.

“Point taken,” I assured her.

Amira was coming up the stone path in a bathing suit with a towel slung across her shoulders. “Oh,” she said with this big complicitous smile. “You must be insane by now. Isn’t it so intense!”

“It was very good,” Brigid said, “—except for spiders.”

“I became a socialist,” I announced.

“
Democratic
socialist,” Bridge reminded me.

“That’s right. A democratic socialist. We would never sink to coercion.”

“Ah yes,” Amira said. “We also were happy, crazy, tripping super-hard. Then someone, he mentions the Palesteenyans. So for a few minutes we all have a bad trip.” She shrugged in the more usual, less Brigidesque way of the gesture. “Not a good idea to talk politics on this drug.”

“No it’s cool,” I said. “We’re democratic socialists, so we can handle it.”

TWENTY-FOUR

I woke up sober as ever, afraid that nothing would have stuck. But when I wandered out onto the balcony in my boxers I could somehow tell that yesterday was portable and therefore here to stay.

I looked around me at the mist burning off of the valley, and I did one of those awesome sun salutations the yoga people do. Some poppies planted along the terrace were tipping a little in the slight morning breeze, indeed the whole pale sky seemed to be tolling weakly like a little bell, yet I did feel sober as ever. I turned around and looked through the door to where Brigid was sitting up naked in bed. “Democratic socialism!” I shouted. “Only more democratic, and more socialistic, than ever before!”

“What have I done?” She pulled the sheets over her head and lay back down. But I knew she was kidding, and she knew I wasn’treally.

Various sex acts were performed while I had her regale me with tales of neocolonial dependency, the ruthlessness of metropolitan power, and the corruption of local elites. “You’re kidding!”I would interject. “Really?!” I’d ejaculate. “Those evil fuckers!” I’d snarl.

Lying still beside her an old question recurred to me. “How come businesses have no trouble with the unions in Colombia?”

“Easy—because the trade unionists are often murdered by paramilitaries. But now”—she curled into me—“now I don’t want to talk about politics. We have to talk about everything else.”

Everything else was the principal subject of conversation as we walked into the town of Cuncalbamba itself, talking the whole way.

We both needed to check our email and went to the local emailería. The first thing I looked at was an email from Alice. But all it was was this sarcastic bulletin forwarded from the Sackett Street Coalition for Global Justice:

Important, long-overdue changes in the judicial system and surveillance culture of the United States are taking place. While for the most part these changes have been made without public consultation, many good citizens would nevertheless like to help out Attorney General Ashcroft’s Department of Justice in any way possible. One quick and easy way is to cc all of your emails to our protector. The Attorney General may then peruse your communications for any indication that any of you are in need of being detained without charges, without a trial, and without access to legal counsel. It may be that such steps are overdue.

Please cc all electronic communications to the address supplied below.

So to Alice and the Attorney General I wrote:

FROM: [email protected]
TO: [email protected]
CC: [email protected]

One of these days, Alice— But actually I am not angry and never really was, with you or anyone. But now this has changed! I am VERY ANGRY not with you but with the architects of neoliberal globalization and neoconservative reaction and I want to do something about this. What to do I’m still working on but nevertheless I have settled various things and will inform you of even more of them on my return.

Meanwhile I’m flattered that you cared enough to launch your conspiracy. So thanks. Its a secret unrecognized dream of everybody, dont you think?—that some fantastic conspiracy will be arranged against us so that the otherwise senselessness of life can be temporarily defeated by deceitful love?

I dont know what will happen with me and Bridge. It seems wrong having too much hope or anxiety in advance of data yet to come.Also it could be I would make a weird husband if chosen as one. But we’re glad to know each other, so—actually I’m not going to be able to thank you enough so I won’t try.

How about you? What are you doing? Reading? (I mean I know you are right now but . . .) The other day with concern I envisioned you as lonely. Always, Dwight

And before dealing with the rest of my inbox I dashed off the following communiqué to the enormous Listserv of fellow Formmates, plus the Attorney General:

Hello St. Jerome’s Form of 1992!!! And with a special shout-out to Attorney Ashcroft!

Just a reminder that the countdown continues, at T minus five days. Soon we will be reunited and it will feel so good.

Hope you have all worked up a good tolerance for alcohol and if need be booked rooms. The rest can pass out near the dam or finally act upon age-old crushes and fall into bed with—not with me. I am taken. Want to hear more? Or learn of my exciting trip to tropical yet mountainous Ecuador? Or would you like to know of a great new mind-curing drug soon to be available from your doctor, if you have benefits, and health insurance, and *have* a doctor? Or else live in Canada?

I havent done much since seeing most of you—and yet important things have happened even to me. So if even I am so fascinating, think what others must be, and please come.

D. Wilmerding, Form Agent

And to dad and mom in their separate accounts, and as always Attorney General Ashcroft, I wrote:

Dear mom and dad, divorced now but forever united in my mind,

I write to you from Cuncalbamba Ecuador with good news which I hope will strike you that way.

I have met a girl and amazingly, but too complicated to explain, this girl or at 30 really a full-fledged woman, also Belgian, albeit originally Argentine, is a friend of Alice’s. Alice is a devious person as we know. So it will surprise you less if I say that Brigid, the girl/woman, has convinced me to become a socialist! But dont worry, the democratic kind. (We’re anti-violence, although I guess we’re not above the occasional ruse.)

Since you will want to know how this happened and I am a bad liar I admit that my conversion experience took place while we were *fucked up* as you (dad) and I say on a physically more or less harmless but powerfully deranging local hallucinogen.

Yet I am happy to tell you though that my insights withstand sobriety.

You (esp. mom) will also be happy to know that—except at my upcoming reunion where peer pressure is bound to prevail—I plan from now on to live a reasonably abstemious life. I also plan to help bring about another possible world, and in this I somehow hope to make enough money to afford necessities as well as sometimes new CDs that no one I know has a copy of to burn me. Therefore any monetary help you (plural) can give will be met with great but probably insufficient thanks.

Meanwhile rest assured that I have no intention of waging class warfare against *you* (dad), who are just one of many rightwing voters, therefore negligible as such. Whereas you are my one and only father and thus bulk correspondingly large to me in the father dept.

How are the dogs, dad? Are you unfathomably lonely as I sometimes suspect? And mom with your birds—you? Myself I am very happy to have gone on Abulinix, the indecision-curing drug which I confessed about to you, dad, and which, mom, sorry, in my shame, I never breathed a word—but the thing is, it works! it really does! and presumptuous as it may be to say so, both of you might benefit from taking some when to all appearances you live your post-marital lives in suspension (read: indecision) and would love to be helped out of that, and sharpened, shaped— Anyway go on this stuff and youll see what I mean and can never quite say.

I want at this time to thank you both for your laissez-faire parenting style which hasnt at all times seemed ideal to me, but now I realize that for you (plural) to have criticized me more often would only have made me defensive, and I probably would have been even *slower* in coming around.

Dad, so you know, I think about you and the dogs very often and—though you are my father and therefore semi-enemy, owing to human nature—I do this with outstanding love. Mom, I bear the same love to you, or more, though it is tempered with respect since you are a person with standards and have disapproved of me up to now, understandably.

Much love from your own son, cured by Abulinix at 28, and somehow glad of his life in this fairly terrible world,

Dwight Bell Wilmerding

PS Sorry that both children are leftists. Medicine is so advanced these days that why not have some more?

I have already said I was somewhat well-known in my North American life, and won’t list all the emails in my inbox. But for the purposes of this winding-down story it’s obligatory to reproduce one more, the last one I read that day:

FROM: [email protected]
TO: [email protected]
SUBJECT: re [none]

Suicidal ideation? That’s not good, Dwight.

I hope you’re reading this and not dead. I promise that if you are dead I will throw your memory a big party such as we used to have in the 1997–2001 period.

MEANWHILE: DO NOT KILL YOURSELF! You’re right about Abulinix. Thoughts of suicide, not to speak of acts, have been found to be fairly frequent in experimental subjects. I guess to be or not to be *is* the question. No one had counted on this. But apparently the decision to end it all is the first important decision some people make. Naturally also the last.

But the strange thing in light of your suicidal ideation, is that YOU ARE NOT ON ABULINIX! I’m sorry. Really. Really sorry. I just found out the other day.

The batch I stole your bottle from—all placebos. It didnt say so on the labels for obvious reasons. You could only tell from the Rx #. I wasnt thinking. Didnt check.

I feel bad about your bad time. I know you arranged this trip in part—in whole?—because for whatever reason you wanted the Big Effect to happen in Ecuador. (You’ll have to tell me how it’s been there, with Natasha. Here it has sucked, btw. I continue to study with fascination the diverse hydraulics of things sucking.)

Anyway its possible that you’ve been thinking of offing yourself because you expected the Big Effect and obviously it didnt come. Again, sorry. I might be able to get you on a legit trial when you come back. Which is when?

Mild anxiety over your welfare,

Dan

PS I take it the placebo hasn’t caused you to realize you are gay.

I sent off a note to the effect that I was alive and well and heterosexual, if perhaps a little bi-curious, and swiveled around in the chair. “On y va?” Brigid said. She’d finished emailing and had paid the attendant. I stood up and looked at him, a stoop-shouldered student type, thin in the cheeks and lips, but romantic in the eyes and the swept-back hair. “Cuánto?” I asked, and handed him a small sheaf of filthy cotton-soft singles. Then I went out to the street with my change.

Across the street was the empty town square with its sad dry fountain. Brigid had grabbed my hand. She was asking me what the matter was. An old man in a straw hat and dirty suit sat on a bench picking his teeth and watching us with as mild a form of interest as is any interest at all.

I looked at Brigid. “You know what a placebo is?”

“Yes, for a control of the experiment?”

I nodded.

“So? Yes? Dwight, are you all right?”

“I am, actually.” I could see in her eyes that she could hear that I was. “I’m fine.”

EPILOGUE