Indecision: A Novel Read online

  I was laughing, just kind of cosmically shaking my ruined head.

  “—or like a waterfall or a pig or a swan—”

  “I love you Brigid.” Oops: was I not supposed to say that yet? “But I’m insane!”

  “But you love me? Now I don’t think you are insane.”

  “But Alice—Alice—how is Alice—how—”

  “She gave the picture for proof. Don’t you believe me? I was her student in New York. She advised my thesis—also advised me to end it. Don’t you see?”

  My astonishment somehow stayed level as my sanity returned. Reaching inside my boxers and fondling and stroking me for a moment, then fortunately forgetting about it, since this was my sister she was talking about, Brigid explained that as soon as Alice heard how I might come to Ecuador to see Natasha—“A very pleasant woman,” Brigid interrupted herself. “Now I think we are friends”—she, this was Alice, had come up with the idea of putting me together with her, this was Brigid, who was in Ecuador already and had just abandoned her doomed dissertation. “And it was not so difficult for Natasha to accord with this, because frankly she was alarmed that you should really visit. Of course there were inconveniences, such as we must pack up Natasha’s apartment so you will believe she has left, and you mustn’t suspect—oh, yes, I am very sorry, there was no abortion, Natasha is not pregnant, not that I know. But I couldn’t let you rush to the airport. Perhaps there is not even a flight to Holland that day. At any rate, Alice insisted that you are a very trusting person, very ready to believe, and you don’t know Spanish. You do have a fantastic woman for your sister.”

  “Treacherous too.” I could hardly believe it.

  Brigid ministered to me a little and then semi-shamefacedly smiled. “You are not too angry?”

  Above us there were soft cornices of chalky soil mirroring the ones on the opposite side of the valley. And flowing beneath the pale cornices or cliffs was all this tassely grass, green nearby but getting more and more purplish the farther it spread away. Brigid touched me in the time-honored style as all the bending grass brushed as one in loose obedience to the breeze’s course. “Ah,” I said, lying down on my back. The sun was flaying all sorts of light from Bridge’s dark, dark hair; and off to the right of her head I caught sight of the tilting plane of a hawk on an updraft. He was really sailing, or she was. So apparently I was the object of a friendly conspiracy of remarkable women. The discovery had me feeling pretty blessed, and I sat up and began slipping Brigid out of her shirt. “No, I’m not mad.” Her bra seemed as unnecessary as eye patches over perfectly healthy eyes, and I took it off too. The bare shuddering breasts made me laugh, and Brigid said, “But you must promise you will be less silly when you age.”

  “I promise. I’ll be somber. Later.” I distinctly felt I would be.

  For the time being however I alternated blessing-style kisses on the top of her head with some intense Belgian-style lip action, and lots of lambent tonguing of the alert budding nipples. Brigid was making the first of those awesome female sounds that can eventually portend a crisis of pleasure. Yet out of respect to Mademoiselle or Señorita Brigid Lerman I want at this point to execute a temporary narrative fade-out and just content the reader with the suggestion that for two curious and mutually attracted young socialists without a condom between them to swap oral sex 69-style on the soft grass of a picturesque equatorial hillside while they more or less peak on an intensely sensitizing drug trip can really boost their relations to a great new stage, especially when, in an epileptic fit of an orgasm, the woman finally comes above the young man who, as it happens, is ejaculating like a garden hose, and I’d definitely recommend these activities.

  Afterwards we lay down beside ourselves on the grass. Omne animal post coitum triste est? No way! Now that I was a socialist fucking made me joyous, and I wanted to do it again right away.

  “So that was the fruit, huh? Now I’m on to you, Bridge. You’re the fruit!”

  She looked a little triste, maybe, at the mention of the fruit with its overtones of expulsion from nice places. Nevertheless I busted out our tomates de árbol. I wanted to eat one while my hard-on revived, and offered her the other. I figured actual fruit might replace the more troublesome symbolical kind and include no penalty for eating it then. Using my Swiss Army knife I peeled the tomate de árbol until it was nothing but facets of wet flesh, then I sank my teeth in.

  “These damn tree tomatoes are so fucking good. They’re like the marriage of peach and apple—but superior to either. Can’t this be our fruit? I promise I won’t try to patent it.” The stuff seemed to smack in its sweet grain of our anomalous romance.

  “In fact I had thought of a different fruit—a very difficult, a dangerous—”

  “All right.” Now that I was a brave person I supposed I had to be one all the time. “Tell me about this dangerous fruit. I eat what you eat. Mi casa, su casa or whatever.”

  Around this time I felt the first tug of sunset and noticed a certain taint of gold decay slipping a few parts per thousand into the still-strong light.

  “A fruit. Or it could be a drug. Ça m’est égal.” I didn’t know those words. “But what I imagined before is a fruit which simply to eat will cause an enormous change in the world. You eat it, yes, and it tastes very great, but then a change takes place.”

  “That’s exactly the behavior that’ll get you expelled!”

  She shrugged—pretty recklessly, in my opinion. “When you eat from this fruit then whenever you put your hand on a product, a commodity, an article, then, at the moment of your touch, how this commodity came into your hands becomes plainly evident to you. Now there is no more mystification of labor, no more of a world in which the object arrives by magic—scrubbed, clean, no past, all of its history washed away. Do you see? Once we eat this fruit or drug—”

  As now we’d done—that was the alarming part.

  “—now whenever we touch something that was grown or made we will sense how it was grown or made.”

  It was terrible, it was wonderful, I had met someone as philosophical as me.

  “We will feel it,” she was saying of the drug which we could perhaps dump into America’s water supply, “like a shock from the door handle. And of course if there was pain involved in the making of the product, the provision of a service, we will feel this. Of course it would be a difficult world to bear with this drug. And so then—changes.”

  “But I feel so bad for all the poor consumers.”

  “But you say you are a socialist.”

  “I guess I did say that.” I reflected. “But all the people in the West—in the North—in the rich countries—everyone will start wearing gloves whenever they touch anything.”

  I had the other tomate de árbol in my hand. Gently I started peeling it. “Ah fuck, how will we ever be happy again, Brigid? I was afraid of this happening.” I sliced the skin off the fruit in red-yellow-green scabs. But this was only on autopilot and beneath or through the careless actions of my hands I was looking at something else. It was like flying over water and then when you looked down to the ocean the skim of mirror was yanked off, so that the water became transparent, and there the sea was, filled with what you knew had always been there: the rubbery gardens and drowned mountains, the creatures from plankton up to nekton, the swimming bodies and the unburied skeletons, and now you—or I—I saw it all at once. And so in this fucked-up San Pedrified way the entire world system of neoliberal capitalism disclosed itself to me, and I felt somewhat grim.

  I looked at Brigid, who was saying, “I want you to be happy. But I also want you to be with me in your mind. That is why I invented the fruit. Which doesn’t exist! Isn’t this so strange?”

  Now I was tearful too, feeling definitely a little apprehensive about the hard study of political economy that I would have to do to confirm my undeniable intuition. But I wanted to go ahead anyway, not only for sake of truth, but also because Brigid struck me as a very attractive being even in the ways that she was
n’t yet. And where she wasn’t yet beautiful, maybe she would become more so once her life was more consistently brightened by my consistently more enlightened company. “Here.” I’d cut the fruit in segments and was offering her some.

  “But you have cut yourself.”

  It was true—blood from my index stained the mango-colored flesh. Nevertheless she took the sullied piece from my hand and ate it. “I hope you don’t have AIDS,” she said before sucking the blood off my thumb.

  Things were maybe getting cheesy. But at least they possessed the dignity of taking place.

  I pulled Brigid up to her feet. And then we were walking back laterally across the hillside, following a ditch that we had reason to believe would convey us back to the pensión/spa.

  “It would feel wrong—” I began.

  “To go back the same way? I agree.”

  It remained necessary to watch out for spiders. But for me the creatures had returned to their mere nature and I forgave them for what they couldn’t help being. Humans like me were different, I reasoned: they could help almost anything.

  We walked along in silence, hand in hand when we could manage, until at length we came to a path that descended toward the hostel. Moving down it single file, we also seemed to come down in our minds, the drug subsiding in time with the light, and at last at the end of the path we were standing before the grounds of the spa, some of the cottages already lit up against the duskiness falling everywhere.

  I turned around and kissed Brigid again, and the moist operation definitely had an us-two-kissing-each-other-in-a-quickly-darkening-world kind of feeling—an accurate feeling, given the condition of the sky.

  I stepped semi-symbolically out of what felt still like the narrow path, onto the grassy lawn of the spa. “I guess this is hour one of my new life—hour one, year zero.”

  “Don’t say this.”

  “What? Come on, Day One! Year Zero!”

  Then she told me how the Khmer Rouge after taking Phnom Penh in 1975 had declared Year Zero and begun to massacre and starve their fellow Cambodians to the tune of one or two million people. “Be careful with your socialism,” she told me as we walked down toward the cottages.

  “Point taken,” I assured her.

  Amira was coming up the stone path in a bathing suit with a towel slung across her shoulders. “Oh,” she said with this big complicitous smile. “You must be insane by now. Isn’t it so intense!”

  “It was very good,” Brigid said, “—except for spiders.”

  “I became a socialist,” I announced.

  “Democratic socialist,” Bridge reminded me.

  “That’s right. A democratic socialist. We would never sink to coercion.”

  “Ah yes,” Amira said. “We also were happy, crazy, tripping super-hard. Then someone, he mentions the Palesteenyans. So for a few minutes we all have a bad trip.” She shrugged in the more usual, less Brigidesque way of the gesture. “Not a good idea to talk politics on this drug.”

  “No it’s cool,” I said. “We’re democratic socialists, so we can handle it.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  I woke up sober as ever, afraid that nothing would have stuck. But when I wandered out onto the balcony in my boxers I could somehow tell that yesterday was portable and therefore here to stay.

  I looked around me at the mist burning off of the valley, and I did one of those awesome sun salutations the yoga people do. Some poppies planted along the terrace were tipping a little in the slight morning breeze, indeed the whole pale sky seemed to be tolling weakly like a little bell, yet I did feel sober as ever. I turned around and looked through the door to where Brigid was sitting up naked in bed. “Democratic socialism!” I shouted. “Only more democratic, and more socialistic, than ever before!”

  “What have I done?” She pulled the sheets over her head and lay back down. But I knew she was kidding, and she knew I wasn’treally.

  Various sex acts were performed while I had her regale me with tales of neocolonial dependency, the ruthlessness of metropolitan power, and the corruption of local elites. “You’re kidding!”I would interject. “Really?!” I’d ejaculate. “Those evil fuckers!” I’d snarl.

  Lying still beside her an old question recurred to me. “How come businesses have no trouble with the unions in Colombia?”

  “Easy—because the trade unionists are often murdered by paramilitaries. But now”—she curled into me—“now I don’t want to talk about politics. We have to talk about everything else.”

  Everything else was the principal subject of conversation as we walked into the town of Cuncalbamba itself, talking the whole way.

  We both needed to check our email and went to the local emailería. The first thing I looked at was an email from Alice. But all it was was this sarcastic bulletin forwarded from the Sackett Street Coalition for Global Justice:

  Important, long-overdue changes in the judicial system and surveillance culture of the United States are taking place. While for the most part these changes have been made without public consultation, many good citizens would nevertheless like to help out Attorney General Ashcroft’s Department of Justice in any way possible. One quick and easy way is to cc all of your emails to our protector. The Attorney General may then peruse your communications for any indication that any of you are in need of being detained without charges, without a trial, and without access to legal counsel. It may be that such steps are overdue.

  Please cc all electronic communications to the address supplied below.

  So to Alice and the Attorney General I wrote:

  FROM: [email protected]

  TO: [email protected]

  CC: [email protected]

  One of these days, Alice— But actually I am not angry and never really was, with you or anyone. But now this has changed! I am VERY ANGRY not with you but with the architects of neoliberal globalization and neoconservative reaction and I want to do something about this. What to do I’m still working on but nevertheless I have settled various things and will inform you of even more of them on my return.

  Meanwhile I’m flattered that you cared enough to launch your conspiracy. So thanks. Its a secret unrecognized dream of everybody, dont you think?—that some fantastic conspiracy will be arranged against us so that the otherwise senselessness of life can be temporarily defeated by deceitful love?

  I dont know what will happen with me and Bridge. It seems wrong having too much hope or anxiety in advance of data yet to come.Also it could be I would make a weird husband if chosen as one. But we’re glad to know each other, so—actually I’m not going to be able to thank you enough so I won’t try.

  How about you? What are you doing? Reading? (I mean I know you are right now but . . .) The other day with concern I envisioned you as lonely. Always, Dwight

  And before dealing with the rest of my inbox I dashed off the following communiqué to the enormous Listserv of fellow Formmates, plus the Attorney General:

  Hello St. Jerome’s Form of 1992!!! And with a special shout-out to Attorney Ashcroft!

  Just a reminder that the countdown continues, at T minus five days. Soon we will be reunited and it will feel so good.

  Hope you have all worked up a good tolerance for alcohol and if need be booked rooms. The rest can pass out near the dam or finally act upon age-old crushes and fall into bed with—not with me. I am taken. Want to hear more? Or learn of my exciting trip to tropical yet mountainous Ecuador? Or would you like to know of a great new mind-curing drug soon to be available from your doctor, if you have benefits, and health insurance, and *have* a doctor? Or else live in Canada?

  I havent done much since seeing most of you—and yet important things have happened even to me. So if even I am so fascinating, think what others must be, and please come.

  D. Wilmerding, Form Agent

  And to dad and mom in their separate accounts, and as always Attorney General Ashcroft, I wrote:

  Dear mom and dad, divorced now but forever
united in my mind,

  I write to you from Cuncalbamba Ecuador with good news which I hope will strike you that way.

  I have met a girl and amazingly, but too complicated to explain, this girl or at 30 really a full-fledged woman, also Belgian, albeit originally Argentine, is a friend of Alice’s. Alice is a devious person as we know. So it will surprise you less if I say that Brigid, the girl/woman, has convinced me to become a socialist! But dont worry, the democratic kind. (We’re anti-violence, although I guess we’re not above the occasional ruse.)

  Since you will want to know how this happened and I am a bad liar I admit that my conversion experience took place while we were *fucked up* as you (dad) and I say on a physically more or less harmless but powerfully deranging local hallucinogen.

  Yet I am happy to tell you though that my insights withstand sobriety.

  You (esp. mom) will also be happy to know that—except at my upcoming reunion where peer pressure is bound to prevail—I plan from now on to live a reasonably abstemious life. I also plan to help bring about another possible world, and in this I somehow hope to make enough money to afford necessities as well as sometimes new CDs that no one I know has a copy of to burn me. Therefore any monetary help you (plural) can give will be met with great but probably insufficient thanks.

  Meanwhile rest assured that I have no intention of waging class warfare against *you* (dad), who are just one of many rightwing voters, therefore negligible as such. Whereas you are my one and only father and thus bulk correspondingly large to me in the father dept.

  How are the dogs, dad? Are you unfathomably lonely as I sometimes suspect? And mom with your birds—you? Myself I am very happy to have gone on Abulinix, the indecision-curing drug which I confessed about to you, dad, and which, mom, sorry, in my shame, I never breathed a word—but the thing is, it works! it really does! and presumptuous as it may be to say so, both of you might benefit from taking some when to all appearances you live your post-marital lives in suspension (read: indecision) and would love to be helped out of that, and sharpened, shaped— Anyway go on this stuff and youll see what I mean and can never quite say.