commanding. A figure of absolute being. This is crucial, Bill. In societies struggling to remake themselves, total politics, total authority, total being.'
'Even if I could see the need for absolute authority, my work would draw me away. The experience of my own consciousness tells me how autocracy fails, how total control wrecks the spirit, how my characters deny my efforts to own them completely, how I need internal dissent, self-argument, how the world squashes me the minute I think it's mine.'
He shook out a match and held it.
'Do you know why I believe in the novel? It's a democratic shout. Anybody can write a great novel, one great novel, almost any amateur off the street. I believe this, George. Some nameless drudge, some desperado with barely a nurtured dream can sit down and find his voice and luck out and do it. Something so angelic it makes your jaw hang open. The spray of talent, the spray of ideas. One thing unlike another, one voice unlike the next. Ambiguities, contradictions, whispers, hints. And this is what you want to destroy.'
He found he was angry, unexpectedly.
'And when the novelist loses his talent, he dies democratically, there it is for everyone to see, wide open to the world, the shitpile of hopeless prose.'
There was no more medication. Ingested and absorbed. He decided so what, don't need it anymore, and he didn't bother finding out what was available over the counter in the pharmacy near the hotel. He wondered if he could get away with charging hotel and meals to Charlie's conglomerate even though he'd severed connections. It was for the good of mankind after all.
You have to climb hills to get a drink.
He kept an eye out for priests and spent half a minute in an ancient church so small it was wedged between columns of a modern tower, a one-man refuge from the rumble of time, candles burning in the cool gloom.
He was often lost. He got lost in the hotel every time he walked out of his room and turned left to get to the elevator, which was consistently to the right. Once he forgot what city he was in and saw an honor guard of four men marching toward him on the sidewalk, going from their guard duty to their barracks, and they carried rifles with fixed bayonets and wore embroidered tunics, pleated skirts and pompom slippers and he knew he wasn't in Milwaukee.
He climbed a hill to a taverna and ordered by pointing at dishes on three other tables. It wasn't that no one spoke English. He forgot they did or preferred not to speak himself. Maybe he liked the idea of pointing. You could get to depend on pointing as a kind of self-enforced loneliness that helps you advance in moral rigor. And he was near the point where he wanted to eliminate things that no longer mattered, things that still mattered, all excess and all necessity, and why not begin with words.
But he tried to write about the hostage. It was the only way he knew to think deeply in a subject. He missed his typewriter for the first time since leaving home. It was the hand tool of memory and patient thought, the mark-making thing that contained his life experience. He could see the words better in type, construct sentences that entered the character-world at once, free of his own disfiguring hand. He had to settle for pencil and pad, working in his hotel room through the long mornings, slowly building chains of thought, letting the words lead him into that basement room.
Find the places where you converge with him.
Read his poems again.
See his face and hands in words.
The foam mat he lives on is one deep stain, a lifetime's convincing stink. The air is dead and swarms with particles, plaster dust lifted off the walls when the shelling is intense. He tastes the air, he feels it settle in his eyes and ears. They forget to untie his wrist from the water pipe and he can't get to the toilet to urinate. The ache in his kidneys is time-binding, it beats with time, it speaks of the ways in which time contrives to pass ever slower. The person they send to feed him is not allowed to talk.
Who do they send? What does he wear?
The prisoner perceives his own wan image in the world and knows he's been granted the low-status sainthood of people whose suffering makes everyone ashamed.
Keep it simple, Bill.
George cranked open the wooden shutters. Light and noise filled the room and Bill poured another drink. He realized he'd been clear of symptoms ever since he stopped gobbling pills.
'I'm still convinced you ought to get one. Instant corrections,' George said. 'The text is lightweight, malleable. It doesn't restrict or inhibit. If you're having any trouble with the book you're doing, a word processor can make a vast difference.'
'Is your man coming here or not?'
'I'm doing what I can.'
'Because I can talk to him there as well as here. Doesn't matter to me.'
'Trust me. It matters.'
'You put a man in a room and lock the door. There's something serenely pure here. Let's destroy the mind that makes words and sentences.'
'I have to remind you. There are different ways in which words are sacred. The precious line of poetry often sits in ignorance of conditions surrounding it. Poor people, young people, anything can be written on them. Mao said this. And he wrote and he wrote. He became the history of China written on the masses. And his words became immortal. Studied, repeated, memorized by an entire nation.'
'Incantations. People chanting formulas and slogans.'
'In Mao's China a man walking along with a book in his hand was not seeking pleasure or distraction. He was binding himself to all Chinese. What book? Mao's book. The Little Red Book of Quotations. The book was the faith that people carried everywhere. They recited from it, brandished it, they displayed it constantly. People undoubtedly made love with the book in their hands.'
'Bad sex. Rote, rote, rote.'
'Of course. I'm surprised to hear you offer these trite responses. Of course rote. We memorize works that serve as guides to conducting a struggle. In committing a work to memory we make it safe from decay. It stands untouched. Children memorize parts of stories their parents tell them. They want the same story again and again. Don't change a word or they get terribly upset. This is the unchanged narrative every culture needs in order to survive. In China the narrative belonged to Mao. People memorized it and recited it to assert the destiny of their revolution. So the experience of Mao became uncorruptible by outside forces. It became the living memory of hundreds of millions of people. The cult of Mao was the cult of the book. It was a call to unity, a summoning of crowds where everyone dressed alike and thought alike. Don't you see the beauty in this? Isn't there beauty and power in the repetition of certain words and phrases? You go into a room to read a book. These people came out of their rooms. They became a book-waving crowd. Mao said, 'Our god is none other than the masses of the Chinese people.' And this is what you fear, that history is passing into the hands of the crowd.'
'I'm not a great big visionary, George. I'm a sentence-maker, like a donut-maker only slower. Don't talk to me about history.'
'Mao was a poet, a classless man dependent on the masses in important ways but also an absolute being. Bill the sentence-maker. I can see you living there actually, wearing the wide cotton trousers, the cotton shirt, riding the bicycle, living in one small room. You could have been a Maoist, Bill. You would have done it better than I. I've read your books carefully and we've spent many hours talking and I can easily see you blending into that great mass of blue-and-white cotton. You would have written what the culture needed in order to see itself. And you would have seen the need for an absolute being, a way out of weakness and confusion. This is what I want to see reborn in the rat warrens of Beirut.'
George's wife came in with coffee and sweets on a tray.
'The question you have to ask is, How many dead? How many dead during the Cultural Revolution? How many dead after the Great Leap Forward? And how well did he hide his dead? This is the other question. What do these men do with the millions they kill?'
'The killing is going to happen. Mass killing asserts itself always. Great death, unnumbered dead, this is never more than a question of time and place. The leader only interprets the forces.'
'The point of every closed state is now you know how to hide your dead. This is the setup. You predict many dead if your vision of the truth isn't realized. Then you kill them. Then you hide the fact of the killing and the bodies
