Class Warfare by D. M. Fraser Read Free Book Online Page B

nights …
    But here, she remembers more than the porridge that she was forced to eat, as a child, the grey viscous stuff in the spoon, the duty to transfer it, at any cost to dignity or digestion, into her mouth. To swallow it. (To spit it out was only a venial sin, as she understood it, but it was nonetheless a sin, one she was all too often caught at.)
Arrrgh.
And the relief, of a sort: thank God that’s over with. Father?
Daddy?
    Marie Tyrell goes down
.
    First confession: I have forgotten everything. The Joyful Mysteries, the Sorrowful, and the other kind, the Stations of the Cross, that endless railway line leading to nowhere, even that, forgotten. It is not true, as they claim, that these things stay with you forever, however fiercely you struggle to reject them. Nothing stays with you forever. Except possibly hatred, which lives on in the details you didn’t realize you were noticing: the smell of incense and old varnished wood, the clamminess of steam heat that never entirely defeated the cold … that cold which was above all else the chill of terror, what you couldn’t keep from feeling when, around some forbidden corner, you were favoured with your very own, very special, glimpse of mortality. Just one of the little treats the world has for rebellious children—make of it what you will. I made a life of it, after that.
    I remember nothing
.
    Father Reagan is thinking:
poor lost soul
. Or that is what he is trying to think, but other notions, heretical as any Marie Tyrell ever uttered, keep sneaking in. What, precisely, is he rendering unto Caesar here, in this prison?
There may be many shapes of mystery
… He is not uneducated, for what that’s worth. He is not, professional obligations aside, unsympathetic. This woman knows something he doesn’t, something he set himself apart from, long ago, exiled to some Siberia of consciousness, past an armed frontier no errant regret would ever presume to cross. We are dealing in finalities, eschatologies, here.
    Second confession: there won’t be one.
    There isn’t much he can do; if there were, he might for some perversely undoctrinal reason decline to do it. She is looking at him now, alert, contained, adamant.
Libera me domine
… This is mechanical. Useless. If she won’t bend, he can’t compel her. Or absolve. Peace, this time, will be withheld. Father Reagan gets up. “You won’t reconsider?”
    Marie Tyrell goes down
.
    â€œI will not,” she says.
    BETTER LIVING THROUGH TECHNOLOGY
    The struggle is just beginning.
    â€œRepeat ten times.”
    Â 
    The struggle is just beginning.
    The struggle is just beginning.
    The struggle is just beginning.
    The struggle is just beginning.
    The struggle is just beginning.
    The struggle is just beginning.
    The struggle is just beginning.
    The struggle is just beginning.
    The struggle is just beginning.
    The struggle is just beginning.
    The struggle is just beginning.
    The struggle is just beginning.
    The struggle is just beginning.
    Â 
    The struggle has just begun.
THE LIFE OF THE MIND
    â€¦ last night I dreamed I was thrown out of the University of New Jerusalem for reading aloud standing up in the brown-brick high-rise library, & in the same dream we were always getting off a train to welcome ourselves officially to wherever we were (& it was always some version of New Jerusalem, all brown brick and coastal fog, blast furnaces on the horizon); but at the last you refused to get off the train to welcome anybody, you were being untypically firm about that, so I said Fuck You & went off alone, & rode up & down the hills of New Jerusalem in a 1952 Austin Princess convertible looking for love & a place to live, which I didn’t find. That was when I went into the Library & got thrown out, I was reading about the military-industrial complex, & crying, & you kept coming in to interrupt me, you said you were ashamed of me & my childishness, as you called it.