Gary Amdahl - The Daredevils

“Okay,” said Vera slowly, “it goes like this. Say, you know what? Things really jump, don’t they, in the Peace League? Am I missing something, because you don’t seem all that peaceful to me. Never mind. Malatesta is lecturing in West, I don’t know, Hoboken, I think, West Hoboken. Guy name of, uh, Domenico Scarlatti or what was it, Scarlatti, yeah, I think that was it, Scarlatti pulls out a pistol and shoots Malatesta at the podium. Ooo, got me, right in the podium! Nobody knows why. Not then, not now. Main theory seems to center on the idea that the Italians, hey, they know how to cook. But Malatesta is seriously wounded by the gunshot. Scarlatti, no, wait, what am I thinking, the guy’s name was Pazzaglia, Pete Pazzaglia, he looks like maybe he wants to finish the job, but this other guy, can’t think of his name, either, jeez, Provenzale, Legrenzi. Leonardo Leonardi.? Bresci! Gaetano Bresci, he tackles him and subdues him. Malatesta refuses to press charges against Pazzo because he is a brother anarchist, and Bresci meanwhile is hailed as a man of peace and temperance and justice. A year later, he turns up at Monza, not infamous anarchist Malatesta, not trigger-happy Pazzo, but Bresci, and he guns down the good King Umberto.”

“Maybe Bresci tackled the other guy to get the gun, ” said one of the men.

The women rose to go to the ladies’ room. “What is it with you folks?” Vera asked.

“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.