“Now you’re just being stupid,” I told him.
“Why do you say that, Chris? Afraid you might use it? Afraid it might get used on you?”
“Of course I’m afraid.”
“He’s right,” said Anna. “Enough macho bullshit. It’s not going to help anything.”
But no one made a move to take the thing away, so it sat there on the rug and we stared at it until Anna told Leo she didn’t think he really believed in building the revolution and Leo defended himself and made a counteraccusation and gradually we were all drawn in, pointing, shouting, putting one another to the question, everyone an inquisitor, a Dzherzhinsky, a Beria strutting about in our psychedelic Lubyanka basement. I don’t remember much about what happened, except that it was frightening and sometimes physical and all night the gun sat there in the middle of the floor, radiating malevolent potential. We ruthlessly hunted down every molecule of Fascism and Imperialism in one another until at last it was daylight and we were all exhausted, shaking as we came down, finally convinced there were no traitors, that we were all committed and prepared to carry on. Claire made strong sweet tea and it tasted like life itself. I remember looking out of the window, feeling scoured, purified, my hands trembling as I held the mug.
That afternoon we went out walking across the hills, following a ridgeline high above the scribble of stone walls and sheepfolds around the farmhouse. I was beside Anna, the others straggling out ahead of us, making for a cairn of stones marking a nearby peak. We’d said very little, each lost in thought. On impulse I asked
her the question that kept echoing back to me. Miles’s question in the cells at Bow Street.
“What do you think it will look like?”
“What?”
“After the revolution. What kind of place will this be?”
“That’s not for us to know.”
“What do you mean, not for us to know? That just sounds like mysticism.”
“Not mysticism, historical process. It doesn’t matter what we think, because the future will be determined by the will of the masses, not a few individuals.”
“Sure, but you must think about it. What do you imagine, when you imagine it?”
“I don’t, Chris.”
“Why not?”
“Because I won’t see it, and thinking about it would make me sad.”
A couple of months later, we got a letter from Helen, postmarked Frankfurt, West Germany. It said she and Matthias had moved there to live in a Sponti commune. She was involved with a Kinderladen and Matthias was working for a magazine. They wanted us to know that in their opinion we’d started to reproduce all the worst forms of hegemonic domination in our conditioning. We should reconnect with the working class or risk succumbing to our latent group Fascism. Helen also wrote that she was pregnant. She hoped her child would be brought up in an atmosphere free of nihilism, safe from our perverse fascination with horror.
Pigs, I thought. Traitors.
* * *
The more the worker expends himself in work, the more powerful becomes the world of objects, which he creates in the face of himself, and the poorer he himself becomes in his inner life, the less he belongs to himself. Anna and I stand in an elevator on our way up the tallest building in Britain. It’s five hundred and eighty feet high. The elevator is traveling at a thousand feet a minute. I know a great deal about this building, the Post Office Tower. I know about the TV and telephone traffic it routes through powerful microwave transmitters. I know about the radar aerial at the top, designed for short-range weather forecasting. I know something about the layout of the upper floors, where this elevator is taking us. If I stare straight forward, my view of the steel elevator doors is barred at the periphery by the unfamiliar black plastic frames of a pair of glasses. I can see my reflection in the polished metal, not clearly, but as a kind of fuzzy impressionistic blur. The dyed reddish-brown hair, the gray smudge of my suit. Beside me Anna shifts from foot to foot, uncomfortable in her high heels. Her face is obscured by her wig, a curtain of long blond hair cut into a severe, unfashionable bob.
We have a dinner reservation at the Top-of-the-Tower revolving restaurant. Name of Beresford. I’ve eaten there once before. I’ve been to the viewing gallery and the cocktail bar. I’ve seen the arc of tables on the revolve next to the plate-glass windows, the three-tiered buffet displays in the center, stacked with dramatically lit piles of fruit and crudités. I know the location of the bathrooms and the emergency stairs. I know that this is the restaurant’s busiest night of the week.
The elevator stops at the thirty-fourth floor and we step out
onto an expanse of lurid blue and red carpet, woven with the restaurant’s logo. The whole place is blue and red. Red vinyl banquettes. Blue curtains. Blue tablecloths with red borders. We’re shown to our table by a man with a phoney French accent who introduces himself as Gustav. The menu is also phoney and French, snobbishly printed without translation. Screw you if you don’t know the difference between consommé au paillettes and créme d la reine. All the luxuries can be had at the top of the tower. Oysters and caviar. Sole in a champagne and lobster sauce.
The waiter hands me the wine list and does fussy things with the napkins. Anna looks out of the window. She’s wearing heavy makeup. Lots of blue eye shadow and burgundy lips, a face to match the décor.
We sit in silence, revolving slowly over Fitzrovia. The sun has gone down and the buildings are constellations of lighted windows, a vertical column of lights marking Centre Point, a black void the open space of Regent’s Park. Remembering how we’re supposed to be behaving, I take out my camera and click the shutter pointlessly into the darkness outside. Then, impulsively, I take a picture of Anna.
“Don’t do that,” she snaps. The waiter comes back, pours the wine for me to taste, takes our order. We do our best to appear animated, the young married couple from the suburbs, up in London for a special night out. We’re good at it. I almost believe in us. What, I wonder, if we were what we appear to be? What if we could just sit here and hold hands, toasting each other and looking out over London?
“I’m going to do it now,” she says. Without waiting for me to reply, she slides her bag from its position under the table, picks it up and heads in the direction of the toilet. I try not to stare. I don’t want anyone to follow my eyeline. I sit, looking fixedly out of the window. One full revolution takes twenty-two minutes. I have completed an arc of perhaps a hundred and twenty degrees when Anna returns, still carrying the bag.
“It’s locked,” she says. At that moment the waiter returns,
carrying two bowls of clear soup. We fall silent as he pours more wine into our glasses.
I wait until he’s out of earshot again. “It shouldn’t be.”
“Well, it is.”
“Did you try the observation deck?”
“We don’t know anything about who’s down there.”
“It’ll be empty.”
“We don’t know that for certain.”
“I tell you, there’s no one there, not at this time. I’ll go, if you won’t.”
This is bad. We’re not doing it properly. The Beresfords shouldn’t be arguing with each other over their romantic dinner. Near the toilets, behind a thick blue curtain, there’s a fire door opening onto a narrow set of concrete stairs that leads to the observation deck and from there to floor thirty-two, where there’s a storeroom right beside the emergency exit. On thirty-two there’s also a lot of switching equipment: a bomb placed there could shut down phone service for the whole of London. But they’ve locked the door. They’ve locked the door, which was supposed to be open.