Class Warfare Read Online Free PDF Page B

end, a note of strain, of obscure vexation, creeping into the familiar laughter; a handful of his intimates may have guessed, as Christmases rolled by with disheartening frequency, however more reluctantly he girded himself, year after year, for the long night journey. But to the world at large he betrayed no sign of despair, no hint of deepening disillusionment. No one can confirm, and many would deny, the legend that in his last years he had come to despise children, enduring their cloying company, their demands, only as a final reflexive gesture toward public relations.
    After his retirement, he wasted little time upon nostalgia, but it is said that he felt, and occasionally expressed, bitter disappointment at the indifference with which his departure was greeted. He was, after all, human, and in his way as hungry as any man for the honey of recognition; he had hoped for a Nobel Prize, or at least a gold wristwatch. That may, indeed, be the reason why, after leaving the Arctic, he undertook at once to erase all marks of his former identity; in this he was, by all accounts, remarkably successful. He lives today, unrecognizably slim, clean-shaven, sporting a stylish black hairpiece and tailored clothes from Joe’s of Hollywood, in an attractive mobile home in Sunset Village, near Tucson, where he pursues the customary enjoyments of the aged: golf, bridge, speculation in real estate. Normally reticent about his affairs, he recently confided to newsmen, however, that he and his present wife, onetime starlet Peggy Pringle, are both registered Republicans, “and damned proud of it.”

MARIE TYRELL
    â€”for Joe Gluck
    â€œ
But she (sc. nature, matter’s mistress) holds our agreement as a mystic secret bond; and even if we decide to be off as though freemen, she claims we are fugitives, and tries to bring us back, again, and has us seized as runaways, quoting her document against [us]
.”
    â€”Synesius
    MARIE TYRELL AND Gerard Macklewain, her lover, were waiting for the police. They sat together in Gerard’s room, above a bakery, in the commercial district; the air smelled of bread. They shared a cigarette, her last, watching the smoke drift like coastal fog across the rental furniture. When the police came, Marie Tyrell picked up her knapsack, without haste, and walked to the door. Two policemen were standing there, and a woman in plain clothes; very little was said, nothing that matters. It would have been redundant, at that point, to have said goodbye.
THE REVOLT OF THE LIBIDO
    Toward the end, she dreamed architecture, massive constructions in the New Brutalism, grey and brown, splayed out upon soft hillsides, institutional, guarded. The wind was blowing continually, from the east. She was allowed newspapers, carefully censored: in one of them she read that the government had fallen, in another that it didn’t matter, the military were pledged to keep order.
    Order was kept. A National Day of Mourning was declared, and duly observed. It was not clear to her what was being mourned, or whom. In her dreams Marie Tyrell paced up and down concrete corridors, under bare lights, reciting libertarian slogans in several languages. Awake, she thought extensively about God. Sometimes she thought about Gerard Macklewain, and summoned him to lie with her on the thin mattress, to be silent with her in the cold cell. In this time she began many letters, never finished, to people whose whereabouts she had long since forgotten. She wrote, “What would you do in my position? Would you drop the war where it is, or would you prosecute it in future with elder-stalk squirts charged with rose-water? Would you deal lighter blows rather than heavier ones? Would you give up the contest, leaving any available means untried?” She wrote, “I shall do nothing in malice. What I deal with is too vast for malicious dealing.”
A SOUNDING PANTHEON
    From a letter found among the papers of Marie Tyrell, after her