Police Actions

BARRY N. MALZBERG

Y

OU COUNTRYMEN,” the general said, “so goodhearted, so sincere, so convinced of your righteousness, so clumsy and devoted in all of your duties and for these reasons the most wicked and dangerous nation who ever worked out a policy.” He took a sip of wine, motioned to the waiter for a check, smoothed lint from his fatigues (retired, he still came to our café in combat gear, prepared for the destabilization which might occur at any time), sighed. “It is not so much that self-righteousness that makes you such a complicated and mesmerizing factor,” he said, “for that, we must address your love of pornography and the censor alike, of damnation and religious revivals, of urban retrieval and urban destruction, those marvelous contradictions embedded in your history and responses that you work out so catastrophically on helpless subjects like ourselves.” He sighted an imaginary pistol, pulled the trigger with insouciant grace. Boom! “Someday I would like to come to your country, see your enclaves, harass your women,” the general said. “Of course someday I would like to ski Switzerland, learn Esperanto, foment a true revolution of the spirit overseas. We do not get what we want, n‘est-ce pas?” The waiter leaned to whisper confidentially while, politely, we looked away although we could sense the urgent sibilance of information dutifully given. “Of course, of course,” the general said, “these warnings are unnecessary. My good friends here know I am merely speculating, talking idly, the ravings of a peculiar old man in the sun-spattered café of an occupied and defeated country. Is that not so?” He grinned. We made conciliatory, noncomplicitous gestures. In the square, the birds lofted as if in response to rifle fire.

It is difficult to sort out matters in the midst of self-protection.

But the general was only one of the many counselors and advisors we met in our wanderings that year. It was a restless time, a time to seek some balance, some vaulting perspective that might protect us against the strange new times at home. It was not that we were in flight, we assured ourselves, not flight so much as a search for accommodation with those urgent, millennial versions of ourselves that were coming. The general was one of the curiosa, one of the exhibits of the tour, and he struck us, as perhaps he knew, as being a kind of bad example, a representation of an embittered general in a defeated country overrun and humiliated by our superior firepower. But unlike most of the defeated, he retained his insouciance, not to say a certain style which we found illuminating.

Afterward, later this was, when we had obtained some kind of control over the situation and our emotions, our waiter recognized us on the street and sprinted over. All those months since he had served us and yet his recall was perfect. Out of uniform, he seemed both taller and undefined, a set of features in search of attitude. “Do let me apologize for the general,” he said, seizing one of us by the elbows in a gesture combining obsequiousness and insistence in a peculiar way. He is not himself. He is a poor representation of the man he was; he has not been well for many years. He dreams of the invasion, takes responsibility for its outcome, feels that had he performed differently, commanded firmly, showed determination in the eyes of the enemy there would have been a different outcome. The poor man takes no note of ordnance, of superior firepower. He is quite mad, do you understand? There is no other way to explain this.”

Standing there, shouting these explanations so fervently, the waiter-in-mufti seemed to be an emblem of what we must have sought on these tours, some proof then that the world was so disordered, so filled with private grief and misapprehension that we simply were not responsible. We bore no blame for what had happened, let alone for the future. But none of this enabled us to deal better with the waiter, who at last had to be dragged off by security monitors, his voice having become enormous, threatening, appalling. Dragged away at high speed by loyal troops, he gesticulated wildly, gestures oddly those of a man displaying handfuls of silverware, plates of appetizer, he seemed motivated in ways both unique and characteristic. But this of course was not for us to meditate on; darkness came to the city, and instructions were issued that we should be in the hotel long before that hammer of dusk struck. The country is under control and yet there is no way of accounting for the private treacheries of the irresponsible in the unpatrolled corridors of their city.

The “we” is not a narrative device, not a provincialism. It is a literal expression. At this post-millennial time, we had come together in the first true shock of purpose and had come to understand that not only was there preservation in our number but that individual identity was dangerous. Identity, that curious and reflexive advancement of the self, had proved again and again to be the source of so much of our trouble; with the assertion of individual demands came exposure, flight, desire, entrapment and sometimes dreadful retaliation. It was the collective we that would bear salvation, and so our little group had massed that spring to bury our histories and idiosyncrasies in a shared, compassionate circumstance. We would go through the continents as a conglomerate and show our enemies that there was a different kind of countryman, a humble and quasi-autonomous collective rather than the prideful and dangerous adventurers cursed by the general. We is not to be construed as I; there is for the intent of these memoirs no I at all, and it is surely this reserve, this calm and dedicated ascendancy of the group that matters. We are not like the others. We are the post-millennial example of the New Country, and it is in that spirit that we went forth, put up with abominable hotels, insolent agents, rifle fire at dusk, obscene and terrifying notes left in our quarters and other paraphernalia and exemplification of the brutal state of our world.

Earlier, before his denunciation, the general had led us on a tour of his beloved city, his own quarters, the markets which until recently had been so colorful and filled with pulsing energy, now closed by the obdurate curfew. “This is what you have done,” the general said, “you must take responsibility for this. No one else can be blamed.” His gestures were forceful, enormous, determined; this was at a time when we had not yet quite taken him for mad and gave credence to his bearing, his thunderous denunciations. “Some admission, some partial confession might have saved a lot of trouble,” he pointed out.

There was nothing to say to this. We had been under strict orders from embarkation. No prolonged contact, no real conversations with the populace. We could not be prevented from traveling nor assuming a collective identity, but we were under close orders. Do not jeopardize our reputation. Even among ourselves, conversation was brief, and what relationships we had were furtive, cursed with hostility, impotence and real fear. Meant to cling, we found ourselves atomized at this time, the need for a composite self driving us further into inner cells of necessity.

“You sicken me,” the general said. “I dismiss, I denounce, I renounce you utterly.” He made a threatening gesture, yet from his eye darted a complicitous wink. “I am only playing,” that wink said, “I am acting the role of a disaffected military leader of a defeated country in order to enhance your tour of what you regard as some back lot of reality. At any moment, I am prepared to tell dirty stories of my people.”

Or were we reading too much into that tic? It is difficult to tell at such distance. We find our way these days into recollection even more laboriously than we forge for a future; pinned amongst absolutes we become ever more cautious with the accumulation of time. This is my theory.

“And such is my renunciation,” the general added. He saluted. Impelled by some larger perspective of my own, I winked in return. The general appeared startled.

“Come, come,” the tour guide said. Our guide, native in all cases and indigenous to the culture, is that anomaly: a credible outsider permitted by agencies to take responsibility for our lives. “Enough of this. Let us go on.” We wandered toward the boarded marketplace. There seemed to have been much implied by this exchange, but at such a distance it is hard to sort any of it out.

“We must avoid at all costs the delusion that we are the occupying force,” I cautioned my companions during one of our few unsupervised moments on tour. “We are not our government, we are not responsible for its acts. In fact, we are in flight from our government, we are a neutral, observing force seeking independence from our leaders. We reject guilt. We are not the conquerors. None of this was our decision, none of it was of our making; we have no connection to it at all.” I could see their disbelief. The speech was not going over well. In every eye too I could see the image of complicity, in every curious and attending feature, a slash of recrimination. In the hammering of the engines drawing us toward the gate, I could hear grenades. “None of this is our fault,” I said, but my voice sounded flat and unconvincing, sounded that shrill and defensive tone which I had heard in official addresses and which made it impossible, no matter how fast and determined our flight, to escape identification.

In the lobby, we gathered around our guide. “I must tell you to watch for ordnance, for sudden attack,” he said. “You must keep to yourselves and remain alert at all times. There are threats; I cannot be more specific than that, but you would be advised, well advised, to stay indoors. We are arranging for a flight to the capital and from there direct to the southernmost part of the continent; this will be best for you, best for all of us. “There are problems,” he said, “which cannot be disregarded, and we are trying to save the situation if possible. For the moment, we advise you to stay indoors, although civil authority cannot force you.”

There were murmurs not so much of fear but outrage, then the babbling questions. Why, why? Why were they focused upon us? We were, if anything, delegates in contravention of the ugly policies they hated. “I am not authorized to answer,” the guide said, “but I can tell you that there are some who have found aspects of your statements to be altogether defensive, and in their defensiveness they confirm a sense of outrage. No one can account for the responses of a large population, a difficult, subordinate and defeated country such as this, but there is, I must tell you, a good deal of anger and it is felt that it might go out of control.”

There might have been a good deal more—our guide was well launched and his pleasant, pedagogical features seemed to be adjusting toward an ever more detailed explanation despite his claimed reluctance to analyze —but it was at that moment that the appalling flashes of heat and light began. The artificial plants in the lobby liquified. This disconcerted the clerks, and the ceiling collapse which followed seemed somehow implied by their disorder; the collapse was of such stunning and flabbergasting force as to make further exchanges, even of the most knowledgeable kind, impossible.

Of the aftermath, of the shocks and disasters that sped some of us more deeply into the times ahead while hastening others so quickly out of the new millennium, there is little to report; our own awareness is necessarily dim, comes back only in small fragments and hints of recovery. But it has been handled so well, laid out with such documentary insistence by the journalists that none of this should be at all necessary.

No, none of that. We merely felt that you would appreciate a report from the interior, a report from a survivor who can claim to have tried so fervently—if with so little appreciation—to give a different impression of a country that has been so severely misunderstood and whose latter days I now suspect are going to be filled with such difficulty.

I did the best I could to tell the tale.

II

This was the year of Polar Star. Polar Star was the emblem under which the divided city would be made whole again, the under-and overclasses stitched into a pleasing tapestry of bright and concordant hue in which the infrastructure would bring its own renewed spaces to bind. Polar Star was the accord toward which all of us had struggled for these decades, and now, at last, the restoration would begin.

Oh yes, this was the year of glowing and ambient parties filled with the sound of theremin, heavy percussion, the whisk of invisible dancers. How we stared from the secluded and heavily guarded roofs of the structures which had been safe, how we stared upon the city! How we watched the stars wink and dazzle, the beams of apparatus casting sullen light into the hidden spaces. How long could this polarization continue? we wondered. Sleek in their hidden places, the breasts of privileged women would jounce and bounce while we turned our tortured, more concernedly academic perspective to the teeming, unknown places beneath and said, “Unless there is some attempt to bind these enclaves, we are doomed. We will no longer be able to afford our lives.” That was the year Polar Star was to make its first administrative conceptualizations under the Federal banner.

And was then delayed. The new President announced a “moratorium” to consider all Federal agenda. (Although we knew what he really had in mind, the real focus of the delay.) That was the year that Polar Star was to swing open the gates that partitioned us, but instead the hearings disclosed a massive, almost uncontrollable diversion of funds away from Polar Star and into the tributaries of the contractors. Protection, the integrity of the process demanded that the project be put on hold until all corruption had been isolated and controlled, or so the President announced. This was wise thinking, good politics, and all of us—liberal, conservative, reconstructionist and rebellious alike—could do nothing other than accept the agenda. Some were fervid, others were reluctant. Some were highly qualified. A few abstained, fearing the effects of delay. But our sympathies throughout remained with the aims, the ideal of Polar Star. It was only the practice that had sparked those fires of division.

That was the time in which we at last abandoned the idea of “underclass.” The sociology of our generation, the fury and anguish surrounding the millennium had purged us of such stereotypes. “There is no underclass,” we said to one another. “The ‘underclass’ is a myth; the term ‘underclass’ was invented to rationalize oppression.” There were, we agreed, only various versions of ourselves, trapped in contesting versions of our own lives, some of them seemingly with no end of travail, others with means of flight or assimilation. Assimilation was our goal under Polar Star. “There will be no ‘underclass,’ “ the manifestos and curricula had stated. “There will be no ‘overclass’ either. There will be no ‘ruling class.’ There will be the leveling of difference, the accession of opportunity.”

The plans were elaborate, blueprinted; model cities soared into history at the Exposition under the Polar Star banner. We were committed to that goal. It was only the means that defied us, the means by which the old squalor of corruption and kickback, leverage and connection were influential. Under the circumstances, that moratorium was inevitable. We congratulated ourselves upon our willingness to accept the hard and heavy truths of the situation. After our abandonment of stereotypes, after our willingness to accept shared humanity, renewed responsibility, nothing seemed beyond us. The delay of Polar Star was worrisome. There was no question about this. But that delay was only in the interests of a smooth and proficient, an incorruptible and smoothly functioning operation. We were sure of this. We had confidence in our leaders. Newly elected, newly installed, departing the dock of the millennium into the strange and dangerous waters ahead, the President was our coxswain, his gallant associates, the crew and we, we were the landscape toward which they so energetically moved.

That was the year of the easy lay, the quick seduction, the restoking and reassembly of desire, the quick surfacing of new possibilities. Polar Star had made us fluid, had made us come to understand that soon enough all would be entitled to the pursuit of happiness, that barriers outside would fall and, responsively, the barriers of limitation would fall within. Sexual transmission of disease was no longer a factor: all who were going to die had done so, studies assured us. Would soon enough assure us. Reassured then by the most respectable journals of medicine, we were out for a good time. In that year, bouncing and neatly jouncing at our parties, moving our pieces of paper, assigning LED codes at our functional spaces, we had the feeling of being on the lip of massive resolution, of participating in the last period of human strife before true accord. We held breasts tentatively to our lips and made intelligent, concerned sounds as nipples slowly pursed. Cocks and cunts intertwined gracefully in the arbors patrolled by respectful silent security and automatic dogs. A hundred virgins a night fell to the swords of desire.

That was the year Dora became pregnant as an expression of affirmation, as a statement of hope for the metropolis itself. “I will raise my child in Clifton,” she said, “I will put her on hobbyhorses in the playground, nurse her openly in Central Park, teach her to read from the graffiti in public facilities. She will be a child of the city and she will flourish.” Dora’s husband, a sculptor and solemn bureaucrat in the Western division of Polar Star, grinned. In his little eyes glistened querulousness, then panic, then—as we stared—a kind of numbed assent, this being after all the reaction so many had at that time. Numbed assent was what we felt in that year as we huffed and puffed, humped and jumped, played and wooed at our protected parties, waiting for the walls to come down, waiting for the winds of the metropolis to blow across while knowing at the same time that these enclosures were perhaps the best of all spaces we could inherit and Polar Star, which held such promise, also held a kind of portent with which even the most imaginative of us could barely contend.

That was the year before the full extent of the scandals was known. At that time it seemed they were localized, contained, that Polar Star essentially lay intact and that it was only the modus operandi that corrupt elements had compromised. Little did we know the dimensions of the difficulty, or that in the months following how the extent of debasement and venery would be displayed from every basement, every fax, every sideways ticker. In our essential innocence, and it is important to note that we were innocent, that it was not malevolent, that even our seductions, our sexual pledges, our lies and misgroupings were only a function at worst of immaturity and unwillingness to grasp the consequences, we thought that the structure was reparable, that there were ways in which it could be made to last and that it was possible for the process to work.

We were good people. We were not, we felt, malevolent. If Dora was stupid, she certainly wished the throngs beyond the security gates no harm. If she romanticized what she could not see, she did not have the heart of an assassin. We all felt this way, that we were good people, that Polar Star was the expression of our goodness and health and decency. In those months before the full extent of misdeed had been exposed, we still believed in the possibility of concord because it came from that belief in ourselves. We had been born that way, educated toward that end all our lives.

How could we have known otherwise?

And that was the year too of odd premonitions. Gliding against one another in the huge and glowing heart of those parties, listening to the distant sounds, watching the tongues of flame to the north and south of us, we would feel the thickening waters of remorse and morning apprehension, feel that slow, clamping stir in the gut which signaled our mortality. Smile as we might, commit ourselves as we could to the coxswain, there were moments for all of us on those rooftops and later in the thick enclosures of our bedrooms when we saw another vision of the metropolis, when we struggled from dreams in which Polar Star had been obliterated, done in by its own sentimentality and manipulation, and we had nothing, nothing to stand between us and the disaster but the certainty and purity of our hearts. We had good hearts. We had been raised to be good people. We knew we were good. We knew that the others for whom Polar Star had been conceived were good also, and that was why we would no longer use that pejorative term, “underclass.” We knew that our motives and theirs were confluent and benign, but we could not nonetheless keep that clamp from the gut, the fold from the unspeaking heart.

For we knew. We must have known. We could not forever shield our plans from our plans. But how we tried! We tried and tried. We were good people. We had the larger interests of the country at heart.

*

That was the year before the year in which the gunfire and the huge lights winked and blazed, roared and stumbled, the year before that time when parties became hopeless and we were forced to consider the unavailing manner of all options.

It was the time before that clangorous summer when Dora said to any of us who would listen, “We lied and lied, we talked our way around everything. We all knew, but we never said even to ourselves what Polar Star was.” How could that be, though? How could we have known what Polar Star was? It was urban retrieval gone wrong, that was all, the best of motives, leading only to the worst of outcome. None of this had been planned. Desperate measures led to desperate responses, but this was not the coxswain’s original intention.

“Murderers,” Dora said, “we’re all killers, we set this up, we pulled this lousy job.” But that was after the miscarriage and its pathetic aftermath, and by this time Dora was clearly not sane. It was possible to discount everything she said. It was, in fact, necessary to make that discount.

And so we did. We ignored her. We were polite, tolerant, we did not wish to ostracize, but at the same time we were firm. “Listen,” we said, “we are decent, we are good, we are sensible people.” Our voices were firm, our faces judicious and tolerant. “We had no choice, no control,” we added. “Besides, the word ‘underclass’ remains out of our lexicon.” And so it did. We were not pejorative. We were kind people. We had full awareness.

So we were good to Dora, as good as could be under the circumstances, and we protected her as best we could from her own self-destructiveness. We looked forward to the time when Polar Star would permit us to take down the gates and reclaim all of our city. Our city.

“Killers,” Dora screamed. But the sculptor had left her, all of us, in exhaustion, had left her, really. She was almost impossible to tolerate, and no matter how great our ingestion of palliatives, she still appeared ugly.

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