So it began, the kidnapping, the love affair, the making love, the life of Lix’s second child.
AS IT HAPPENED, theirs was little more than flirting talk at this stage. RoCoCo was not truly dangerous, any more than the Laxity was truly a revolution. It was only striking poses in the names of Liberty and Love, with no more consciousness of the consequences than a T-shirt has for its silk-screened slogans. RoCoCo’s members were soft and inoffensive youngsters, essentially, freshly baked survivors of their teens, trying to sound less mild and dreary than they really were, and only wanting to be a part of this great city’s quest for romance and advancement. They could alarm nobody but themselves. RoCoCo walking down the street, all nineteen of them in a gang, despite their voices and hair, their leather belts and wallet chains, would not cause anyone to step aside. A bunch is no more chilling than a single grape.
Theirs was the sort of reckless moment, then, that could not hope to flourish in maturer company. A wiser group would quickly audit all the pros and cons and realize that kidnapping could only backfire on the kidnappers. The headlines would be roasting. Their protest would bear bitter fruit. The only lasting victims would be themselves. So the prudent ones at the meeting sank into their chairs, voted to support the “action,” but did not volunteer themselves. They sat with faces like a Chinese Monday hoping not to catch sweet Freda’s eye. They knew how prevailing she was, and how seductive just a glance from her could be. And dangerous. A kidnapping, even if it were short-lived and justified, could put them all in jail, despite the Melt, or jeopardize their academic grades or disappoint their lecturers. Their parents would not sympathize. Not all their parents could afford to buy them out. Their job prospects would be undermined. Travel visas would be denied them, long after the events. Anyway, they were not sure (though silent on this matter in such company) if kidnapping was “right.”
So in the end, in this most skittish time, there were just four from RoCoCo prepared to spread their wings beyond a picket line and stand with Freda: a glumly cute gay woman from the Language School (who wanted more than anything to disappoint her lecturers and undermine her job prospects), two tall and overweight post-Maoist anarchists from Freda’s science faculty, and Lix, all of whom it was soon apparent aspired to more than comradely contact with their dazzling colleague. They were the four comrades most unhinged by her and most ardent for her approval. The heart controls the head and makes us mad and brave and radical. The revolution rides the lustiest of mares.
Five volunteers would never be enough for the swarming ambush that Freda had in mind at first, her show of force, her mighty kick against the pricks. She’d seen the glorious newsreels from 1968, the year of barricades, with the columns of police rebuffed by mobs of students, armed only with their banners and some cobblestones. Never by as few as five. Again the city had let her down, she felt. Only thirteen years previously, Peking, Paris, Prague, Chicago, Santiago, Rome had all been pulled apart by people less than thirty years of age. It must have seemed to Freda that Youth could be truly powerful in every corner of the world, excepting ours. She kept a press photo from 1968 in her wallet: a Czech, wild-haired and young and biblically beautiful, his jacket pushed back on his shoulders, his shirt pulled open, was baring his chest, his rack of ribs, a centimeter from the barrel of a Russian gun in a gesture that, for Freda, was sensual and thrilling. It always made her think of The Fox’s Lament, “Stop me, shoot me, if you dare / For I’m too far and fast to care.”
She wondered sometimes if he was still alive, this seminaked man. Was he still a radical? He looked, she thought, a bit like Lix. She’d noticed it when he’d been standing up so pompously and so theatrically at the RoCoCo meeting. That birthmark, certainly, made his face seem challenging. She’d wondered what his ribs were like and how his hair would look if ruffled up a bit by her. Would it look more like the Czech’s? What could she do to make him look more Czech?
IT WAS at that moment, peering across the room at Lix, his eagerness to please, she decided she’d accept him as a lover for a while and even that she would allow herself a period of being in love. She had not flushed like he had flushed for her. Her pulse had not increased for him. Her feelings were not bodily She was calmly concentrated on the chance that Lix had offered her of pushing back the jacket, pulling open the shirt, and making politics with kisses on a comrade’s rack of ribs. Freda always needed someone in her bed when the optimistic ghost of 1968 invaded her. Her body and her spirit demanded company But not just yet. She’d let his role intensify as all the action of the coming weeks intensified, as they prepared to pull the cobbles loose and press their chests against the police and MeisterCorps. She’d save their best encounter for the aftermath of Marin Scholla’s kidnapping. She would defeat him on his bed. That was her long-term urgency.
Time to begin. Freda followed blushing Lix out of the meeting room and made him talk to her as they walked across the campus to their almost neighboring Academies of Human Science and Theater Studies for their evening lectures. She was, she said, again in her soft, fiercely reasonable voice, “irretrievably disillusioned” with RoCoCo. Marin Scholla was being virtually delivered into their hands. And they could only muster five. “Some throng.” They’d need twenty-five at the very least to rush the chairman off his feet, she said. They could not expect the head of a leviathan like MeisterCorps to stride into their university unaccompanied, like some delivery boy There would be the usual dignitaries and luminaries surrounding him, men and women in their best clothes who would be easy to intimidate. There’d be private guards as well. Americans were paranoid whenever they left home. They moved around in skittish flocks, “like trigger finches,” never trusting anyone. “Americans are terrified of streets,” she said. And there’d be armed police, perhaps, despite the recent ruling that the campuses were off limits to any unauthorized civic forces. There’d be the television and the press, of course, and beefy businessmen from MeisterCorps who maybe, emboldened by their lunch and their genetic hatred of the young and studious, would be quick and eager to deploy their shoes and fists.
Besides, even if RoCoCo had volunteered en masse and were a hundred strong, Scholla would avoid a crowd. He’d steer clear of anybody seeming faintly aggressive. Anyone approaching him would have to look absolutely safe. He had his share of enemies who would be glad to land a punch on his old Yankee chin, or splash an egg across his suit. (Making “garbage that didn’t last and enemies that did,” she joked, was MeisterCorps’s contribution to the world.) She’d heard that men like Scholla never walked closer than five meters to a building in case some demonstrator on the seventh floor was standing by an open window on a chair, ready to spit or urinate. “Or dump,” suggested Lix. They laughed together for their first time.
“We need,” Lix said, already seeking ways of reining in his Mad Idea, but reining in, as well, the female of his dreams, “a strategy that’s more in keeping with the Melt.”
She snorted in reply and stretched her neck and shook her hair. A frisky thoroughbred. “The Melt’s a cheap diversion. They’ll let you change your clothes, but just you try changing anything that matters.”