Still haven’t. Can’t tear this page out, though, or years from now I’ll wonder what I had to hide from myself.
Trying to be honest: the bitterness is a predictable refraction of thankfulness, indebtedness that can never be discharged. I could have gone through life a eunuch. She gave me new life and all I can do is amuse her.
(She does laugh well. Last night I caught her off guard, juggling two of her shoes and a piece of candy. When I got them going good and fast I told her “Watch closely… I’m going to eat one of these.”)
Maybe there’s no room in my life right now for poetry, dominated as it is on one side by this nervous passion for Marianne, and on the other side by ever more complicated politics. I have felt for some time that the Grapeseed Revenge was more than simply a watering hole for hairy grumblers. Now I know for sure.
There’s been a great deal of angry rhetoric over the Lobbies’ boycott of the Worlds. As if the threat of starvation were not a time-honored aspect of American foreign trade policy. I got so weary of hearing the same things shouted over and over that I began playing devil’s advocate, defending the Senate’s righteous actions against those piratical colonies (that’s not a popular word at the Grapeseed). Marianne was entertained by my ranting, but we had to make a hasty exit, or leave aerially.
Throughout my act, the strange fellow who calls himself Will—that’s metonymy, not contraction—sat impassively, with a tired smile. Later that night he called. He said he had enjoyed my bit of comedy, and from it had deduced that I might be one who preferred action to empty argumentation. If so, would I meet him and some friends at such-and-so corner; please repeat it and don’t write it down.
It happens that I do prefer words to action, of course, but I couldn’t help being intrigued. I went to the place at the time specified. After waiting twenty minutes I gave up and walked away. A woman I’d never seen before caught up with me and asked me to follow her. After a confusing subway ride, we wound up on the other side of town. She left me at the door of a tenement and asked me to wait a few minutes, then knock. She left. I was beginning to enjoy it, the comic-opera aspect, but almost walked away myself; if they had a realistic reason for all the mystery, I would just as soon not get involved. Some great poetry has been written in prison, but I don’t think I want to put my own skills to that test.
Before I could knock or not-knock, the door opened of its own accord. A soft voice bade me come in. It was a large room with only one person in it, standing behind the door. He (I say for convenience) led me wordlessly to a table in the middle of the room. He was hooded and wore shapeless black fatigues. His tenor voice could have been male or female. He sat me down on a hard chair and sat himself across from me, then from a drawer took a polygraph plate and a clipboard. Did I mind being asked a few questions? I asked him what would happen if I gave the wrong answers. He said I’d given him one already. I was suddenly comforted by the weight of the knife on my belt; glad I’d unsnapped the retaining strap when we’d gone down to the subway.
I put my hand on the plate and he asked me a number of remarkable questions, to calibrate it. They all had to do with my private life over the past couple of days: trivial things like what I’d had for lunch, whom I’d met when, and so forth. So I’d been under surveillance.
Then he quizzed me about possible government affiliation (except for a couple of months in the Boy Scouts, I was clean) and then about my political beliefs. I don’t think he liked all of my answers; he wanted a reflex radical.
After a few minutes of this he got up and led me—reluctantly, I thought—up a flight of stairs, where he rapped on a door and left without a word.
The man who answered the door startled me. He was blind, with a bugeye prosthesis. Not many people are born blind and rich. He asked me if I was Benny, and shook hands, smiling.
There were three other people inside, all about my age, sitting around on shabby hotel furniture. The blind man said his name was James, and he introduced the others: Katherine, Damon, and Ray. Offered me tea. When I asked where Will was, he stiffened and said that some of these people didn’t know Will.
We talked for a while about generalities, uncomfortably, people pointedly avoiding any talk that had to do with their personal lives. James noticed my puzzlement and said they were waiting for one more.
There was a knock at the door and James sat for a few seconds, then got up and answered it. It was Marianne….
20. Welcome to the Party
After the absurd questioning downstairs, and the hide-and-go-seek nonsense that preceded it, I was ready to tell Will he could stick it, and leave. Then I got two sudden shocks.
The man who opened the door was blind, with huge surgically implanted lenses set in his eye sockets. I’d read about them, but of course had never seen any, not in New New.
The second shock was Benny. When I saw him sitting there, I thought for a moment that it was all an elaborate joke. Nobody was laughing, though. The blind man introduced me to everybody, saying “You know Benny, of course.” Benny gave me a funny look and I gave him one back, I guess.
The blind man, James, fixed me a cup of tea. “For the benefit of the two new people, let me outline what we do here.”
“Does this outfit have a name?” Benny asked.
“No.” Since the lenses were fixed in place, James had to turn his whole head to look at you. The effect was riveting, machinelike. “We use various names for various purposes. Sugar?”
“No, thanks.” He stared at the teacup as he brought it over to me.
“It all sounds very mysterious, I know. Let me try to put your minds at ease.” He sat down and looked at Benny. “We do nothing illegal, at least not beyond the level of misdemeanor.”
“I once got arrested for littering,” the woman, Katherine, said.
James nodded slightly. “Handbills. We are a pressure organization, Benny. We write letters, organize rallies, use cube time, and so forth. On another level, we gather information about the government and analyze it, in hopes of eventually building an accurate picture of the country’s actual power structure.”
“Then why all the secrecy?” I said. “It seems to me you’d want publicity instead.”
“Mostly insurance. It’s true that we could operate in the open now, though we could expect a certain amount of harassment. Conditions may change, though—the government becoming more oppressive or, perhaps, our tactics becoming more extreme.
“In essence, we do have a public side, since many of our members belong to other organizations with ambitions similar to ours. We are not shy of using them.
“We cover a rather wide ideological spectrum, but we are basically libertarian and humanitarian. We believe that the government exercises too much control over individual freedom, and does it in ways that most people are powerless to resist. We want eventually to establish a truly representative form of government, with strong controls on its use of the broadcast media as tools for mass conditioning.”
That struck a chord. The commercials on the shows that preceded the Worlds boycott referendum were scary. Subtle and powerful.
“But why me? I’m not even a citizen of this planet.”
“That’s exactly why. Your objectivity, and experience with other political systems. For your own part, you might consider it a trade; I understand that you plan on politics as a career, once you leave Earth. What you learn here, helping us with our analysis, can only help you later on. Also, the people you meet might prove valuable contacts, eventually.”