The Three Sisters (41 page)

These discoveries had come too late for Coito, for in a matter of days she would be dead, and despite her recent change of heart, K could not tell a soul what she felt. To admit that her cynical outlook on life had been wrong (“I at last became cynical about cynicism,” the metacynical Coito admitted) would only comfort her critics and confirm their own
simple-minded beliefs.

It was at this point that contemplative K saw the irony of her situation. For the first time since leaving the convent she had begun to look at the world in a different light, to think that she might have been wrong, to question her own beliefs and not just those of others, to consider that until then her actions had been directionless. Now that she had found a new way to look at life, her
hubris
prevented her from telling anyone. Consequently, she would have to play the role of the cynic for another two weeks and never reveal the thoughts which she would carry to
her grave.

Coito spent the final week before the Festivities trying to solve her mental dilemmas, hoping against hope that she might by chance resolve the problems she faced without revealing her disillusion to the self-righteous Christians of the world. Were she to reveal her change, her new ideas had to be perfect. No loophole in her thinking which others could use to argue against her past could be allowed to exist, but such an intellectual position was impossible without creating another dogmatic set of beliefs. Catch-
22
,
K concluded.

In the final days before the Festivities, an un-Coito-like calm replaced K’s bitter cynicism, though no one took time to notice. She and she alone knew that she had discovered the driving force behind her rebellion, its faults, and how it might be overcome if only she had enough time to think out her new ideas. It was as if she had won a final personal victory against the world which had sentenced her to die, and this was enough to sustain her until the end. She had won the final battle with the society around her, a battle which had begun the day she was born and was to end on
December
25
.

Coito’s unusual period of contemplation had come about because Theodora and Regina paid Coito very little attention. Theodora was too busy writing her book which she had to finish by December
25
or leave behind for some hack editor to trivialize.

“I’d rather have destroyed the manuscript than let someone else finish it. I had Victor’s word that the manuscript, if completed, would be published unedited, though I often wondered if he would stick to his word after the crucifixion.”

Though the manuscript was less than two hundred pages, Theodora filled it with the thoughts and ideas which had come to her since her arrest in May and combined them with the ideas she had been forming during her life. All the ideas which had been lying dormant within her during the previous ten years flooded onto the written page as if channeled from her inner self to the typewriter she pounded away on, with her hands little more than part of an automaton to transfer the ideas of her soul through the thoughts of her brain to the pages of the paper. Theodora had always been fascinated by the past, and it was the conflict between past and present that became the preoccupation of
her philosophizing.

Theodora’s book was divided into four parts. The thesis of the first section was the paradox of the twentieth century: the tremendous economic and scientific progress of the century, unprecedented in human history, had been accompanied by a concomitant social regress. Even though people were materially better off, the importance of personal relationships had decreased and the alienation of individuals
was omnipresent.

Theodora admitted her idea was not new and repeated the thoughts of Stendhal, Marx, Henry Adams, Arnold Toynbee, Alfred North Whitehead, and others who had pursued this theme. Using their ideas and her own, she showed why scientific and economic progress too often resulted in societal regress.

In the Egypt and Mesopotamia of five thousand years ago, progress had first provided an aristocracy with the ability to rule dictatorially over millions. The second great quantum leap of progress, known as the industrial revolution, had been accompanied by the growth in power and size of the middle class which remained content as long as its economic position was not undermined. As complacency set in, personal relationships were replaced by group relationships, for though it was difficult to blame your problems on someone you knew, it was easy to blame them on someone you didn’t know. This alienation, combined with the increase in the ability of one group to control another, produced the massive tragedies which this century had endured. Though Theodora admitted that history knew many examples of tyranny, it was the scale of the oppression made possible by this century’s scientific and economic progress which appalled her
and others.

Why Theodora so faulted the twentieth century for its shortcomings was that the western world had finally achieved the economic levels of production requisite for the well-being of all of society’s members. At last mankind had reached a stage where everyone could be provided for, but no matter how wealthy society was as a whole, the average person would always want to live as the rich lived. Economic progress was relative, and any threats to the existing standard of living resulted in unnecessary repression or rebellion whenever the middle class or the poor sought scapegoats for their falling
economic fortunes

No matter how wealthy people were today, or a thousand years hence, even the relatively well-off would always demand more for themselves, and the middle classes and poor would fail to appreciate that they enjoyed more technological wonders and a higher standard of living than the rich a century before could ever have conceived of. Theodora referred to this as the Paradox of Prosperity. Scientific and economic progress had not resulted in social progress because the average person only looked at her position relative to the rich or to her peers, not relative to past generations. Only when people realized this, sought a better sense of history, and were willing to act in the interests of all, not just themselves, would scientific and economic progress be accompanied by
social progress.

The thesis of the second section was the triumph of dogmatism over reason in the twentieth century. Though rationality may win in the long run, she argued, whenever society’s suspicion of reason had evinced itself and allowed a single set of ideas to achieve a victory over free thought, the results had been untold suffering for millions. As the world had grown more complicated, too complicated for one person to understand, the average person more readily put her faith in simplistic explanations of the universe and society so she would not have to worry about the world around her. The desire for economic security was accompanied by the desire for intellectual complacency.

Not only had scientific and economic progress given people more opportunities for amusement and less for thinking about life, but the ready availability of frivolous entertainment made people demand immediate gratification. To meet this need, simplified explanations and superficial ideas had multiplied like rabbits because people looked at the conclusions (as a dogmatist does) to see if they coincided with their own goals instead of looking at the underlying causes and ideas (as a rationalist does).

Today, ideas were a commodity like anything else, a fact Victor would have quickly pointed out. Whether it were in the field of art, religion, politics, or academia, new ideas had a built-in obsolescence which made them outmoded as soon as a new fad or fashion appeared. New ideas were forever being considered and old ones were forever being thrown away. Because of this confusion and the proliferation of ideas, people never had time to consider them all closely, and instead chose the simplest set of beliefs or those others recommended. This made it easier for someone with a simplistic view of the world to convince others of his or her ideas, and therein lay the dogmatisms of
this century.

In the third section, Theodora championed a more cogent consideration of the past, both of its events and of its thinkers, in order to purge society of the prejudices of the present. Looking at each individual’s economic position relative to the past instead of looking at those who were rich today would provide the social progress which had escaped this century until now. Studying the past would make society more cognizant of the varieties of human experience and show everyone the follies of simplistic sets
of ideas.

Theodora admitted to some of the problems with her argument. The past had not always been as thoughtful as she supposed, and probably had been even less thoughtful than our own century. She also realized that to expect everyone to suddenly start studying the past, reject simplified explanations, stop trying to “keep up with the Joneses,” or think less highly of immediate gratifications because she recommended it, was pure folly. People had not done so in the past and probably would not do so in the future.

Yet, was the world not richer in ideas and in differences of opinion than ever? Had not the lot of the ordinary person improved? Had not this century seen significant social progress as well? Theodora admitted all this, but maintained that this century had fallen far short of what it could have accomplished for exactly the reasons she had mentioned above. Once the world realized what it could achieve and studied the past to bring this about, social progress would replace
social regress.

The final section briefly showed how the social regress which she had described had evinced itself in her own life by recalling her own experiences, especially those which had occurred since her arrest in May. She scored all forms of dogmatism and gave examples of people she knew who dismissed ideas which contradicted their own, particularly Coito, Detective Hole, and Victor.

She also detailed the economic side of the Festivities and here faulted herself as well as everyone else who had tried to profit from the three sisters. Though the Festivities could not approach the scale of this century’s worst crimes, it remained symptomatic of the disease. Her life was over, she concluded, but this century was not. Social progress was still possible, but the world would have to change if it were to
achieve it.

On December
22
, Theodora finished her manuscript. She had wanted more time to complete it, to try and resolve some of the problems she found in her essay, but she did not have the time to do so. She had to settle for the work she had done, and hope that its message
outlived her.

Regina spent her last weeks on the military base neither thinking about the fact that she would soon be
Playboy
’s first posthumous centerfold, contemplating her own place in life, nor reviewing her life, but occupied herself with the lives of others by taking in as much of the culture she had thrived on as she could.

As if she were an Egyptian pharaoh who could take the objects of this world with her into the next, she spent all of her waking time watching the movies and TV shows which she remembered most fondly, and reviewing the fashions and fads of the past by rereading books and magazines. “Every movie, TV show, book, or style I reviewed reminded me of some part of my life and made me nostalgically happy. I was too busy thinking about all the good times to worry about
the Festivities.”

Victor had gotten Regina’s videotape machine and her tapes from her house and had brought them to the cell. There, for almost twelve hours a day, Regina sat in front of her TV with her headphones on, watching the movies and TV shows she wanted to see one last time. Mainly, she watched movies from the thirties and forties—classic comedies like
The Awful Truth
or
Bringing Up Baby
, the musicals of Astaire and Rogers, Deanna Durbin, and Judy Garland, epics like
Gone With the Wind
, more serious films such as
The Magnificent Ambersons
or
Casablanca
, pre-code Warner Brothers films,
The Adventures of Robin Hood
and other swashbucklers, the movies of Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn, fantasies such as
The Wizard of Oz,
or old episodes of
You Bet Your Life
. “The secret word
is ‘crucifixion.’”

“This was what I had enjoyed most out of life, and that’s what I wanted to remember when the end came. Actually, we were lucky. We knew when and how we were going to die. We had two months to prepare for the Festivities and each of us took advantage of that time. By December
25
, though none of us wanted to die, we
were ready.”

With most people off the air force base partying and planning, time slipped by quickly, and suddenly Festivities Eve, December
24
, was upon the nation. More than one visitor to Washington, D.C. hoped that December
24
would somehow recede into the distance and wait another few months before arriving so he or she could continue his or her pleasures. So soon the fateful day had come, and the magical world created for the nonce would soon evaporate from before the visitors, leaving a world filled with normalcy to haunt them.

Once the crucifixion was over with, heads of state would have to return to disgruntled citizens, rebellious militaries, stolid bureaucracies, and foreign pressures. Visitors would have to return to jobs designed to bore them, and the news media would have to search for some new crisis to waste the public’s time with. The President’s and Congress’s positions in the opinion polls would once again slip, and the Supreme Court would have to continue taking arguments from lifeless lawyers. Winter would settle in upon the United States, and the normalcy which most people loathed
would return.