Indecision (31 page)

“Who elected him?”

“—I would ask that you all think of what change, analogous in happiness, and with a psychological concomitant, to losing your hair, if you really feel you’re really too hairy, might happen to
you
to make
you
satisfied with
your
decisions. Because it seems to me that we, in this room, for reasons of cruel and unusual socioeconomic conditions, have an especially big range of decisions we could make, and so there is a particular burden. So without further ado—”

“Too much ado!”

“Speech! More speech!” I could hear loyal Ford yelling.

“I would only say, in overdue conclusion, that the weird thing about freedom to choose would seem to be that no one knows what to do with it unless they give it to others. Which I think was a large factor in the horrible confusion that until recently I selflessly took it upon myself to exemplify. Until the bobohuariza, and the love, and the democratic socialism.”

“What?”

“On behalf of which ideology I mean to say that only when other people have the same freedom which we have devoted ourselves to squandering—only then will we really finally know what we should have done with ours in the first place. So let us remain faithful to those privileged kids we were by seeking to honor and cancel our condition by making it general throughout the world.”

“Wilmerding is insane!”

“He’s
inane . . .
”

“He’s a child of God!” Who was the person saying that?

“He’s exactly the same.”

“He’s totally changed.”

“Make him shut the fuck up!”

I clambered off from the table, while a few people apprehensively clapped. Others had taken up my name as a chant: “Dwight Bell Wilmerding! Dwight Bell Wilmerding!” And still others were trying to drown this chant out with the more familiar “U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!”

Before sitting down I raised my voice a final time and addressed the crowd: “I want to conclude with some vacuous statement we can all agree on. Whether or not we are jingoistic shouters who respond to the promise of democratic socialism with patriotic non sequiturs. Well anyway, thank you all for coming! You’re all beautiful! Maybe not morally. But mostly so well groomed!”

People starting cheering, clinking glasses, or else muttering darkly against me.

“Thank
you,
Dwight!”

“And thank
you.
” I pointed to Martin Groman, who had thanked me, and was a screenwriter in LA, “and you, and you, and you!” I began pointing wildly all around. “Thank you for coming! Thank you for listening! Thank you for having elected me ten years ago! That’s what you get for democracy. Good night!” I bowed, with maybe two-fifths of the room applauding as a flung tomato sailed by.

The tomato nicked my chin as I sat down on Brigid’s lap, and at that moment an idea shot into my mind like it was already there, and as surely as I felt Brigid’s thighs through her dress I felt that I should write this book. I wanted to write a memoir that would do a better job than my reunion address of convincing susceptible and unformed young people to campaign for those better economic arrangements and that fairer disbursal of freedom which, for the sake of efficient reference and inevitable misunderstanding, I had taken to calling
democratic socialism.
Furthermore I wanted readers to keep an open mind about foreigners and visit Latin America. And then by the late end of the night I’d added another hope.

So that—or this—is the book that I have now written after several weeks of intense effort expended mostly at night, sitting here at my desk in this cold furnished apartment that I rent on a hillside in Cochabamba, Bolivia, a city of some four hundred thousand souls where a few months ago I also began my work on behalf of Bolivian—why not?—economic rights. I’m trying to complete the book by tomorrow, dawn of the summer solstice—up in the North the year’s shortest day—since without arbitrary goals, fervently chosen, I don’t know what I’d do with myself.

Right now it’s totally dark here except for the desk lamp and, as it’s early in the morning, practically as quiet as your breathing. In half an hour or so the sun will come up and the dogs of Cochabamba will bark like they’ve never seen it before. Meanwhile I feel alone as if lost, though I’m not lost and am in fact pretty happy, albeit in a painful pining way, given that Brigid isn’t here.

Bridge is living in Buenos Aires these days, working as a stringer for a French newspaper. The economic collapse is ongoing, and I guess she couldn’t stay away.

Meanwhile I console myself with the thought that at least I still have in my head the vision we combined to see in Ecuador, in which commodities disclose their history to the touch and in one huge epidemic of empathy we start repairing the world. Yet said vision remains so far from realization that I could figure out no immediate way of conscripting myself into its troops. Therefore because I wanted all the same to have some larger purpose practiced through me, and was eager to return to South America, I took up a suggestion of Brigid’s—namely, that with her help I sucker the director and only other employee of the Bolivian Action Node, here in Cochabamba, into hiring me as an assistant, a position once held by Brigid.

Ely is the director of the Bolivian Action Node. He too is a gringo, or sort of—he is Canadian, saying
aboot
for
about.
He also has two dogs, a baby, a wife, all of them cute and pleasant, and a serious commitment to our work here, which in a minute I’ll describe. Ely’s Spanish sounds excellent, the more of it that I learn, and he’s got some Quechua too. As his assistant I sweep the office and fetch his lunch and coffee with a frantic alacrity. However my main task is writing press releases on the—as of December 2002—worsening situation down here. Fortunately I am allowed to compose these in what he tells me is idiosyncratic English.

The news is not great. People have been cultivating coca in the nearby Chapare region since they showed up approximately eight thousand years ago. Locally they chew the dried leaves—particularly the tin miners, since it suppresses appetite and thirst and possibly makes them feel somewhat better about their poverty and likely deaths, if not from injuries sustained underground, then from silicosis of the lungs (occupational hazard) before reaching twenty-nine. That is my age now, and I can testify that it does creep up. Anyway: the American government doesn’t want the coca grown and has got the Bolivian one to crack down. Helping out in this process is the Expeditionary Task Force, whose members draw their salaries from the local US embassy and then go out to burn down farmers’ coca.

The farmers have been protesting this. Many of them have amenably tried growing legal crops like pineapple and passion fruit and so forth. But infrastructure here is so sub-Ecuadorian that the campesinos can’t get their produce to market before everything spoils. They prefer coca because it’s resistant to rotting and disease and fetches enough bolivianos that mostly you can feed your family. (This isn’t the place, unless everywhere is, to discuss the mixture of unstable commodity prices and first-world agricultural protectionism that characterizes the current order of things.) Lately the rotting fruits have been dumped along the roadsides in protest against the shutting down of one of the until-now legal coca markets and just generally against the whole policy—under which you can grow what doesn’t pay, and can’t grow what does—of the national government and its American patron.

The Expeditionary Task Force has sometimes beaten or shot and killed farmers. Most of the protesters received into hospitals have been discovered to be suffering from malnutrition. The big question is whether the government will keep shutting down coca markets, sparking more carnage, or what.

My job is to publicize this and et cetera. Meanwhile I let myself hope that to publish this memoir on the growth of my mind may bring these issues more notice than our press releases attract. But I don’t mean to bring you down as a reader, and one main effort of my life is to try not to spoil my own mood. Currently the party line I give myself, and do in part believe, is that what’s happiest is just to be alive and sensitive when it comes to feeling the world, and if what your senses, honed beyond usefulness, end up registering is so much suffering out there that you become light-headed with it at times—well, those senses can still be used for extracting pleasures from fruits, nuts, beverages of all kinds, words on a page, a loved mammal in your arms, music (including sad kinds), and anyway this is only the tip of a list anyone could assemble. I know my list is basic but maybe to utter banalities is a type of solidarity in these lonelifying times?

Don’t imagine, though, that I have no wish to be a better and more erudite spokesman for things. I do! But what is the premise or promise of democracy except the full intellectual competence of even the confused and half-baked mind? Any movement failing to recruit ignoramuses or turning its nose up at fools can never succeed. Democracy is the better route, and everyone likes it, except usually those claiming to. So: democratic socialism! (Democracy and socialism being reinforcing tendencies.) That’s my idea, and in having it I inherit problems that have been piling up for centuries. Though I can’t deal with these problems, that is what I do, and only now that my problems aren’t exclusively my own do I really feel, in a last-minute twist, that they are.

Not that I don’t have doubts. Have Ely and I helped at all? Or will policy go on being made in Washington and La Paz the same as if we didn’t exist? And not that I’m not also somewhat embarrassed by my existence. For instance which of the formless souls that Plato talks about milling around in the afterlife would ever say, on reflection, that what it, this soul, would like most of all, is to take up residence in the hairy body of Dwight B. Wilmerding (having no more bobohuariza, his hair has come back in force), given that someday he will live as I live, work as I work, writing at night in this headlong way, in the dusty city of Cochabamba, where I’ve just now heard the first rooster starting up?

Most mornings I’m asleep now. Then I get up and stretch and yawn and drink café con leche, sometimes feeling as good as if I’ll never sicken or die. The feeling is often different when at night I go out on the balcony and look up at the stars—
way
more of them down here than in the northern hemisphere.

Definitely I miss her. I feel I would like to corrupt her pure spirit with my own . . . I even toy seriously with the thought of children. But then the relationship between inputs and outcomes would seem to be particularly unpredictable where parents and their kids are concerned (an impression mom and dad have both recently if separately conveyed). Plus Brigid is hesitant, needing to know me better, etc. Therefore I transcribe portions of the journal I’m keeping, and post them to her via email:

November 28, 2002

Dogs barking. Annoying me. Yet this is the 3rd world. So dogs bark. Get used to this.

(1 pm) Fucking dogs.

December 1, 2002

Hot December, a first for me. Dreamed last night of taking off pants in public. Somehow not ashamed. Others follow suit.

Hard time wrapping my mind around Kondratiev periodicity, aka the long waves of capitalist expansion. Formerly mentally dealt with shorter increments.

December 3, 2002

Patience and mortality—how to reconcile?

December 4, 2002

Number of injured unknown. Serious foreboding it seems in the market, on the streets.

What I’m doing: right thing, but for wrong reasons? But what do I know about reasons?

Evening spent reading. Lonesome. Also flatulent. Too flatulent to marry?

December 5, 2002

Began memoir today. How fast I write! As easy as talking.

December 15, 2002

Pornographic/utopian thoughts of Brigid. We should live together slowly, making most of time even while world speeds up and distances collapse. Snowballing conviction.

Brigid likes being sent these notes—“I am becoming addicted somewhat,” she wrote from Buenos Aires the other day—but so far her answer to me hasn’t changed since the night of the reunion.

After toasts got proposed and scattered goodbyes said, after email addresses were exchanged and compliments made and wishes for future life expressed, and once I’d been avoided or embraced or just ignored by my departing Formmates—going off to motels or hotels or tents pitched on the Freaky Fields—some of us went to hang out near the dam by Long Pond. Everyone was skinny-dipping and a fat joint was circling round. Long-haired Earth First!er Ramsay Fondaras was playing old Dead tunes on his acoustic guitar, and—with one arm around Natasha’s wet shoulder and the other draped over Brigid’s—I joined in, singing, “Sometimes the light’s all shinin on me—” I tapped my foot three times. “Other times I can barely—see—”

“What do the two of you plan to do now?” Natasha asked after a while.

Brigid shrugged. “We live the good life.”

Ford was there too. “But what do socialists
do
for a living?”

“Not
that
good life,” I said, “the other one. The more like ethical one.” Still, that was a good question Ford had asked—one that had been weighing on my mind.