* * *

Still a prisoner of the restraints imposed by my eclectic morality after I sent you my previous letter, I stayed away from Pat for over a week. Twice I visited the occupied office machine plant a few blocks from the commune. I stayed away from the council office except on days when I knew Pat wouldn’t be there. During that week I attended meetings of striking postal workers, newspaper printers, taxi drivers. The discussions in which I took part were the most stimulating discussions I’ve experienced. In a historical fraction of a second, people here have appropriated the entire history of revolution. Everything human beings in struggle ever reached for is being sought here and now.

I ran into Pat in the council office, more or less by chance, a week ago. I described to him what I’d been doing. He described meetings he’d been attending; he spoke with contagious enthusiasm.

“It’s just fantastic; the entire so-called intellectual community is committing suicide!” he exclaimed. “In one after another session, the experts themselves are denouncing their own special fields as illegitimate, as cut off from the rest of social life: philosophers, teachers, even medical students, though I haven’t heard any doctors yet.”

I was fascinated and asked when the next such meeting would be held. Pat told me architects were to meet that night. His enthusiasm wasn’t exaggerated. At that meeting, held in a large auditorium, one after another architect, not merely students but practicing architects, described themselves as usurpers and their profession as an illegitimate monopoly over the individual’s and the community’s life activity: the creation of one’s physical surroundings, the shaping of one’s environment.

At the end of the meeting, with an enthusiasm equaling Pat’s, I nudged him and said, “Imagine the experts themselves denouncing their own expertize as a usurpation!”

Pat’s response was: “You really amaze me, Sophia! Very few people grasp the implications of what we’ve just heard.”

My immediate reaction was to smile; I felt flattered! But then something like an electric shock went through me. I remembered his having said, “You’re really good,” the day we had talked to several office machine workers in the restaurant across the street from their plant. He was impressed by the apparent presence of wit and intelligence comparable to his own in a person with breasts! And I was flattered! I swallowed my smile and tried to stare through him, but he was totally unconscious of his arrogance. During the next few days he confirmed my new view of him; he demonstrated beyond a doubt that he’s absolutely convinced he and his friends, all young men until Tina joined them “as an equal,” which I suppose means as a young man, have an absolute monopoly over all human knowledge, wit and insight.

At the end of the architects’ meeting I limited myself to staring at him. We left our seats together and followed the crowd out of the auditorium. The hall outside was lined with literature tables. Every conceivable political sect was displaying all its wares to the intellectual community on the eve of its self-destruction.

Behind one of the tables I recognized a person I hadn’t seen in ages. I ran toward her shouting, “Rhea Morphen!” We embraced as if we had been best friends. Pat ran after me. I introduced Rhea as my roommate during my first year in college.

Pat picked up one of the books on her table and asked, “How much do they pay you to peddle this stuff?” Only then did I glance at the publications on. the table: celebrations of state-worship and glorifications of the most tyrannical dictatorships in history.

Rhea answered politely, “No one pays me, I volunteer my time.”

With a sweeping glance at the table’s contents, Pat asked, “How about the Political Thought of Adolph Hitler? Is it sold out?”

“What do you mean by that?” Rhea asked, growing hostile.

“You’ve got the collected and selected works of all the other Fuehrers! How about —”

Rhea turned her back to Pat and asked me contemptuously, “Is that the type of politics you’re into now, Sophie?”

“That’s the politics I’ve always been into, Rhea. Have you forgotten we didn’t part on the best of terms?”

“Are you referring to your clique’s excluding me from that underground paper?”

“No, Rhea, I’m referring to your voting to evict me from the co-op —”

A customer who looked like a professor interrupted our conversation. He picked out two books: a compilation of the “essential thoughts” of a dictator, and a diatribe on “petty bourgeois deviations in the workers’ movement.”

Pat commented, “Anticipation ends boredom for some. It creates fear in others.”

“Are you talking to me?” the customer asked.

Pat picked up copies of the same two books, leafed through one, and said, “We must see what the authorities say before we take any false steps.”

“Do you have something against these books?” the customer asked.

“I don’t have anything against the books,” Pat said, “I’m just curious about the mentality of those who read them.”

The customer slammed his money down on the table and walked away saying, “These, works are condensations of the historical experience of the international workers’ movement.”

“They’re the ravings of megalomaniacs!” Pat shouted after him.

Rhea turned to me angrily. “Would you mind taking your boyfriend somewhere else?”

Whispering, “Let’s go, Pat,” I wrapped my arm around my “boyfriend,” proudly displaying to Rhea not only my “type of politics” but also my “decadent immorality” — it’s ironic that I wanted to display the latter quality a week before I got your letter.

But Rhea didn’t let us get away; she shouted after us, “Whenever workers regain consciousness and again turn to their organization, petty bourgeois intellectuals try to poison them with their philosophy of despair.”

I rushed back to the table and hissed, “The thought of your party’s goons running the army and the police makes me despair all right! It sends shivers down my back! It gives me the creeps! Don’t you know what they did to Lem?”

It turned out that Rhea did “know”; her organization apparently had a whole “line” about what had happened to her one-time comrade. “Don’t tell me your lies about Lem!” she shouted. “I know your stepfather Alberts and his friends tortured him and then paid him to spy on and poison his former comrades. He turned Debbie Mathews into an alcoholic —” Rhea started whispering because another customer was buying the condensed thoughts of another dictator.

I decided to try my turn. “May I ask why you’re buying this book?”

“I think we’re living in a revolutionary period,” she answered, “and I want to learn what someone experienced in revolution had to say.”

It was fun to go on. “You mean an expert on revolution, on how to fight your own battles and live your own life? Did you attend the meeting?”

“Yes, and I agree with most of what was said. We architects have done nothing but serve the interests of the capitalist class, and that raises the question of the legitimacy —”

“How about the architects who served the interests of the dictator whose work you just picked up? Is that service legitimate?” I shouted.

Rhea told the customer, “She’s being paid to heckle at my table.” The woman paid for the book and walked away.

I turned furiously at Rhea. “All you’re expert in is lying! The rule of your organization is the rule of liars, the reign of the big lies! But the day of your glorious victories is gone! Everyone except a few idiots is on to you now! You’re nothing but a carcass!”

Rhea smiled viciously. “Don’t count us out too soon, Sophie. Half a century ago everyone said we’d never win, and we won! Today we’ve got nearly half the world on our side, and our power is still growing. We sold more literature during the past week than during the previous ten years!”

Pat shouted, “You’re growing all right — like a cancer! All the life-destroying political sects are growing. You’re not growing because you carry life, but because some people have been dead so long they’re afraid of life. You offer them death, that’s why they turn to you! You rescue them from a void that calls for creativity and imagination and you give them back their lost boredom and routine; you save them from the leap into the unknown and channel them back to the known. You’re gravediggers of revolutions and murderers of revolutionaries. You’re the cancer of a revolutionary period!”

Rhea’s grin didn’t leave her face, “Do you think you’ll ever get workers to follow your petty-bourgeois philosophy of despair?”

I shouted, “You can’t even imagine people doing anything other than follow! Free human beings are inconceivable to you!”

Rhea still remained calm. “Workers will be free when they become conscious of their need for their organization and their leaders.”

“Said Hitler!” Pat shouted.

“Who hired you to come here and heckle?” Rhea asked me.

I smiled and answered politely, “No one hired us, Rhea. We volunteered our time.” I took Pat’s hand and we walked away from her. As soon as we were out of the building, I let go of Pat’s hand. I was depressed. I recognized something of myself in Rhea. Not the commitment to the organization or to the state. The life-destroying function of the puppeteers and manipulators is perfectly clear to me now. Maybe it wasn’t that clear to me twenty years ago; I was only fifteen. Your letters have made me extremely sensitive to the self-elected “vanguards,” the petty despots parading as the world’s greatest rebels, sucking blood out of beings who’ve just come to life, the organizers and politicians waiting to pounce on the slaves only just freed from masters. To all of them the mere suggestion that human beings might be free and creative through their own efforts is an expression of despair. It’s Rhea herself who is driven to despair. The possibility that people might do without her bureaucratic organization and its despotic central committee is what makes her despair, just as the possibility that people might do without unions makes Luisa despair: “What are we left with?”

Thanking Pat for telling me about the architects’ meeting, I ran off to my bed in the “dormitory.” I was depressed by Rhea’s lifelong dependence on authority to guide her life’s activity because I recognized a similar dependence in myself. Only instead of taking a ruler, a megalomaniac, to borrow Pat’s word, as my life’s guide, I took Nachalo, Luisa, you. I was wrong some time ago when I wrote you that my activity on the university newspaper staff had nothing in common with Rhea’s. If her articles reflected, not her own practice and thought but her authority’s, so did mine. Whatever I wrote, I kept my “community” and my “models” in front of me as my guides. If Rhea didn’t communicate thoughts but merely transmitted them, I did no more. I transmitted Luisa’s thoughts and what I took to be your thoughts. I didn’t leave any more room for the mutual invention of projects than Rhea did. Only my authorities weren’t among the world’s great rulers, and therefore ray dependence wasn’t noticed, even by me.

I remained depressed for two or three days, although I continued to be stimulated by the activities and unending debates taking place around me. I couldn’t get Rhea out of my mind — nor Pat — and I again avoided contacts with him. It was Tina who knocked me out of my sour mood. One morning she woke me at sunrise and literally pulled me out of bed.

“Nothing here can possibly be more exciting than the place Heft last night, and I’d feel like a criminal if I didn’t push you to go there,” Tina told me. “Last night I returned from the occupied research center. Sabina and Tissie are both part of the new crew, and they’re just dying to show the place off to you. Ted is going back there today and he’ll be glad to take you along.”

I hadn’t seen Ted since I’d left the garage; I had even avoided going into the print shop the day I came to the commune; my first response to the prospect of seeing him again was fright. Ted’s nightly visits to Tina’s room, my desperately violent attempt to pull him out of my bed, his conviction that I had intended to ravage Tina, all flashed through my mind. I told Tina, “I’d love to go — but couldn’t I go whenever you go back there?”

“I just spent a week there; it was fabulous and I intend to go back. But I want to help clean up some of the mess in the print shop, and I’d like to learn to use some of the things people brought. I know what you’re thinking, Sophia. Before you ever left the garage Ted figured out he’d been wrong about you. You were just as wrong about Ted. He’s willing to forget; why aren’t you? Why are you so unfair?”

“Is that why you woke me, Tina? To convince me to make up with Ted?”

“Gosh, Sophia, you’re just like a baby! No, I’m not trying to force you into anything. I genuinely thought you’d want to see that place and to see what Sabina is doing!” Tina started to walk away from me.

“Wait!” I shouted; “I’ll go if Pat agrees to go with me.”

In less than half an hour Tina returned to my dorm room with Pat. “If Tina thinks no one should miss it, then it must really be worth visiting,” Pat said to me. “And on the way there I’ll be able to ask the printer about some problems I’ve been having with the camera.”

Pat and I went to have a quick breakfast while Tina returned to the print shop to tell Ted to meet us at the corner of the campus. After breakfast I ran up for my purse and toothbrush, and we were off. Pat recognized Ted when he honked the car horn; I didn’t. I ran to the back seat; Pat sat in front. Ted greeted Pat, and then extended his hand to me, looking sadly into my eyes. I put my hand in his, but could think of nothing to say to him. I felt relieved when, soon after we started, Pat asked Ted some technical questions about printing.

Ted took us to a fantasy world I didn’t know existed:, an immense factory building set in landscaped gardens and surrounded by a park. The entrance walls were covered by slogans, similar to those at the former university, but the rest of the environment was an electronic wonderland. Ted told us Tissie and Sabina were working with a crew developing, a vehicle that would transport a person to any part of the world in a few minutes. He led us to a large room, full of computers and electronically operated machine tools; the walls were covered with diagrams and photographs of vehicles. I immediately, saw Sabina with a group of people studying a complex wiring chart. Sabina turned, grinned, and nudged the young woman next to her.

I couldn’t believe my eyes when Tissie jumped and ran toward me. “Hi, sis! I thought I’d never see you again,” she shouted as she threw her arms around me. “You look great! Isn’t this place something?”

“Tissie! You look so happy, so healthy! I, didn’t recognize you!”

Dancing proudly in front of me, Tissie told me, “Three weeks with Sabina plus some new clothes was all it took, sis!”

“Let me look at you, Tissie! You look younger than you did ten years ago! You’re beautiful!” I couldn’t get over her vigor; she wasn’t at all the person I had known in the garage.

Tissie hugged Sabina and shouted proudly, “Hey, listen to the compliments I’m getting, and listen to who’s giving them!” Then she ran to me, turned me around, and exclaimed, “Holy Mary mother of god, Sabina, do you actually keep this jewel all to yourself all year round?”

I blushed and started to cry. “Thank you for being so nice to me, Tissie; I wasn’t very nice to you.”

Tissie returned to me, pressed me tightly against her and whispered, “You were a gem, sis.”

I pecked her lips and whispered, “You’re lying. You’re the gem.”

Tissie pulled Sabina toward me. “How about giving sis a tour of the place? This vehicle won’t go anywhere for a while yet. Hey Ted, come on!”

I remembered Pat. “Wait, Tissie, I haven’t introduced my friend.”

“Did he come with you?” Tissie asked, turning to Pat. “Sorry there, I didn’t see you.”

I pulled Pat’s hand toward Tissie’s. “This is Pat Clesec. He’s helped me understand a great deal of what’s been happening.” Then I introduced Pat to “my two best friends, Sabina Nachalo and Tissie Avis.”

Pat shook Tissie’s hand, then Sabina’s, and asked, “Another Nachalo? Is it the name of a sect, an order or some kind of sorority?”

Tissie tried to help him. “One of them is the other’s aunt, though I can’t remember which. Are you the aunt, Sabina?”

Sabina answered, “I’m my own mother, Tissie, so I can’t very well be the aunt, can I?”

Tissie told Pat, “Just act as if they’re sisters; have you ever seen two more gorgeous sisters?”

Displaying Tissie to Pat, Sabina said, “Look at who’s talking. Would you believe she was released from a prison hospital only three weeks ago?”

Ted added, “When she came out she looked like a corpse. Incurable dope addict, they called her. A week after she was out she was just like a kid, all cured.”

Tissie pulled Ted’s beard. “Sure I got cured, ‘cause I had an old man like you to take care of me.”

I was hypnotized by Tissie. She really was like a child. Her enthusiasm, her energy, her rebirth were every bit as fantastic to me as the strikes and occupations. Maybe what’s happening is that we’re all becoming children again. Our rigid roles and characters are dropping off like dried skin. We’re fascinating to each other because each one of our acts might be a total surprise, at any instant our personalities might change completely. Like children, we’re not exhausted by what we’ve been and are; life is ahead of us; we’re no longer dead.

Tissie announced, “If no one’s got any more compliments, let’s start!, But if anyone has more nice things to say about me, I’ll stay all day! I love it!”

Sabina kneeled in front of Tissie, kissed Tissie’s hand and quoted, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate —”

Tissie danced around Sabina and laughed. “Oh, but my eyes are nothing like the sun,: music makes, a much more pleasing sound, and when I walk I always stay on the: ground.” Raising Sabina off the ground, she asked her gypsy tutor ”if I get it right?”

“Word for word, Tissie. Next week, when the whole world becomes our toy, everyone will speak in verse — their own verse.”

Tissie sandwiched herself between Sabina and me, Pat and Ted trailed behind, and the tour began. Sabina was like a guide to a foreign delegation, and I was as much of a tourist as I had been and had continued to be in the garage. Yet I wasn’t as much of a tourist as Pat. Sabina, Tissie, and the place itself were more than his all-encompassing intellect could absorb. He was completely at sea.

The tour began in the room in which we stood. Sabina pointed at pictures and diagrams and spoke of vehicles that would transform human beings into birds. She described the group’s current project: a vehicle, not much larger than an individual, which would respond to verbal instructions, stand still in the air or fly several times faster than sound. She spoke of houses with entrances on their roofs, all. ground being used up by gardens and fields in which to walk and play. She said such vehicles could almost be built now, but all research on them was being suppressed. “The way they suppress the thing is to hire all so-called geniuses on the verge of designing it and bury them in this room. Here they’re allowed to play out their schemes on paper. Why are they suppressing it? Because this little vehicle lasts a lifetime, uses no steel and little plastic, burns no gas, and can be built by anyone once the principles are known. It would mean the virtual end of assembly lines, road building, oil production.” Then, as if anticipating objections I didn’t dream of making, she explained, “A central computer keeps track of every standing and moving vehicle. At any instant an infinity of positions and paths is available, so there’s never a crash or a bottleneck. Central computer breakdowns are monitored by any number of computers located elsewhere and ready to take over. The sole function of the computers is to prevent crashes and bottlenecks. No one controls the computers. In circumstances where such vehicles would be possible, power over the transportation computers would be as outlandish as power over the world’s supply of air.”

On the way to our next marvel, Sabina walked between Tissie and me. Squeezing me, she said, “You look so lost, Sophia, and so frightened! You’re really something! You have no facade! All your feelings show on your face. I’m all facade. I’m pretending that I love everything that’s happening here. No doubts or reservations will ever show on my face! But half the things that can be done here scare the hell out of me!” We entered a room with subdued light, dark curtains and various strange plastic objects. Sabina continued, “I can understand vehicles, but watch this!” She operated a switch and a cup appeared on a table. “Grab it! Your hand will go right through it. There’s nothing there. This is a way for someone to go anywhere not in minutes, but instantly. Only the person who goes is no more real than this cup. It’s called a hologram. You can stay in your bed while your hologram travels all over the world. You could be standing in front of me looking as real as life until I tried to embrace you — my arms would go through air: you’d be nothing but a projection of light. Isn’t that awful? It’s part of the same package as the vehicles. When you write Yarostan tell him I’m not as sure of myself as I once was.”

Tissie observed, “These things would sure make life in prison more bearable! I could at least think you were right there with me.”

Pat opened his mouth for the first time. “I’d thought they were only into transportation research at; this place.”

“They’re into everything they can turn into merchandise,” Sabina told him. “They’d have an orgasm department if someone invented an orgasm machine that contained a ton of steel and used a barrel of oil every time it got you excited. Next they’d have two such machines getting each other excited while the. rest of us lay in prison hospitals chatting with holograms. I rejected Jan Sedlak’s attitude of technology all my life, Sophia, but I can no longer convince myself —”

“Hey what’s all this?” Tissie shouted. “For three weeks you’ve been teaching me about it, telling me how great it all is!”

Sabina swung Tissie and me around and pulled us out of the hologram room. “You’re right, Tissie. It is great. I was only raising interesting questions. Ted, let’s show off your hangout.”

We entered another computer-filled room. Sabina had me sit. at a desk-and press one of the buttons below the word “Quantity,”’and then told me to speak into a microphone. As soon as I’d spoken three words Ted handed me five slips of paper with the words “I’m completely lost” printed on them. This time. I was the one with doubts and reservations. “I’m enough of an environmentalist to know that with such a gadget every megalomaniac would make millions of copies of his ravings, since he’d no longer have to bother writing them down, and forests would all be depleted in a day.”

“In this department they’ve already moved far beyond that objection, probably because the forests are already depleted,” Sabina told me. “All the world’s writings would exist nowhere except in a computer library. There’d be no more book collections, libraries, bookstores or files. Everyone would have a fairly small computer. Whenever she wants a book or a work of art, the computer produces it for her, in a few seconds. She can study it, take notes on it, keep it around. When she’s through with it, she deposits it into a paper disposal unit instead of a shelf or a drawer. The same small quantity of paper circulates among all the users of all printed works. If she’s devoted to bookshelves, she can have holograms of them along every wall — it’s the only positive use I can think of for holograms — but when she wants a book, she doesn’t reach into the shelf but into the computer. When she’s through she deposits the book in the disposal and its hologram into the shelf. There’s nothing wrong with this department; they would even introduce it into the present system if steel or concrete or oil or some other large interests were involved,”

“But it takes all the fun out of printing,” Ted commented; “the computer does it all.”

“That’s the point of the whole place,” Sabina added. “The computer does it all. But let’s go eat! There’s a good restaurant, and there are no computers to do the eating for you.”

When we sat down to eat I asked Pat what his impressions were. He announced, “The slogans on the walls are fantastic: They reflect the most revolutionary acquisitions of the proletariat to date, anywhere.”

“Slogans?” Tissie asked. “I never noticed them.”

“That’s because you’re not a professor, Tissie,” Sabina told her. “Professors don’t notice anything else.”

Pat was offended. “Slogans are often a concise expression of the theory that informs the proletariat’s practice.”

“You must have been part of the student demonstration that came here the day after the occupation,” Sabina said to him.

Pat grew increasingly offended. “I stay away from demonstrations, that pseudo-activity organized by politicians.”

I asked Sabina about the demonstration. She told me thousands of people had marched toward the newly-occupied research center with flags and placards; “The gates were wide open, and everyone here thought they’d all come inside and turn this place into a popular playground. But would you believe it? All those thousands stopped in front of a sound truck and listened to slogans broadcast to them over loudspeakers. No one and nothing held them there. When the sloganeering ended they all dispersed; the open gate remained an impassable barrier to them.”

“Afraid to touch what they said they wanted,” Tissie added.

Pat tried to explain, “Those people were vendors of political ideologies and their customers. The slogans I liked here aren’t expressions of ideology, but of theory; they subject revolutionary practice to demystifying scrutiny-”

But Sabina insisted, “Slogans, professor, are what that demonstration was about; the renunciation of the world for the sake of the word.”

Pat stuck to his point. “If the proletariat doesn’t regain its revolutionary perspective the revolution will be stillborn and practical needs will find no genuine revolutionary form!”

“Professor —” Sabina began.

“I’m not a professor and I don’t aspire to be one!” Pat shouted.

“Don’t be sore,” Tissie told Pat. “Whenever anyone uses words as big as she does, she calls them a professor.”

But Pat remained sore through the rest of the meal and for the remainder of the evening. I was very tired soon after supper. and Sabina showed Pat and me to “our bedroom,” telling us she and Tissie slept across the hall, in case we needed anything. Our room was a former executive suite; its soft carpet made me think of a room Sabina had once described to me, a room with a wall-to-wall mattress. The carpet seemed clean enough, but I didn’t avail myself of this luxury; I fell on a large couch next to the wall. Pat sulked in a corner of the room, next to a lamp, and read a book he had brought along. I had nothing to say to him. He had been out-argued by a woman, and he couldn’t accept that. In the morning he told me he wanted to return to the occupied university. When I insisted on spending at least one more day in the research center, he told me he wouldn’t accompany me or my “know-nothing friends,” but would tour the place on his own, or with “the printer.”

Tissie knocked when we were about to leave our room. “It’s my turn to give you two a tour.” I told her Pat was intimidated by women and would tour by himself. Tissie excitedly squeezed my hand and whispered, “Good, I want you all to myself, sis. I wanted you for years. Scared?”

As we walked away from Pat’s and my bedroom, I put my arm tightly around Tissie’s waist and told her, “I’m frightened out of my wits!”

“But you’ll come anyway?”

“To the end of the world, Tissie. I’m all yours, all day long.”

It was an unimaginably beautiful summer day. The sky was clear, the air was clean, there was a slight breeze. Tissie, the “incurable dope addict,” led me to Ted’s car. After a five-minute drive, she parked by the entrance of what looked like a vast estate. “I wanted to show you what the other half used to do during their breaks and lunch hours,” she told me. We walked into a fabulous park with covered walks surrounded by thick forest; the morning sun only reached the tops of the trees. “There are several streams, a pool, a large lake. I went wild the first time Sabina and I came here. Imagine me, after spending all those years in prison, and then in that ward!” Suddenly shouting, “Watch this!” she dove right through a seemingly solid hedge. “Come on through!” she shouted. I followed her through the hedge and found myself in a grass-carpeted “room” completely surrounded by trees. Lying on the grass in a sunlit corner of the “room,” Tissie told me, “Sabina and I found this place by accident. Isn’t it great? I’d come here with her every sunny day if she wasn’t so busy with her vehicle.” I lay down alongside her. Tissie rested her head on my stomach and asked, “You mind?”

“No, Tissie. I don’t mind.” Tears came to my eyes as I ran my fingers through her hair. “I’m sorry about what I did to you, Tissie.”

Tissie pulled my hand to her mouth. “You’re not the one that should be sorry, Sophie.” It was the first time she’d called me by my name. “I’m the one that’s sorry.”

“You mean about getting me to your room by telling me you were scared? You knew I wouldn’t have gone if you’d told me what you wanted.”

“About that too but I’m a lot sorrier about other things. I had you all wrong. I had everything all wrong. I thought you were just like Sabina and me. Seth wanted you and Tina in the bar, and I wanted those shots more than I wanted anyone or anything. I tried to get you for myself and for Seth at the same time, and I thought you were just pretending you didn’t want me. I wag sure Jose and Ted had told you I just wanted you for Seth, and I hated both of them; Jose kept me from you and Ted kept me from Tina —”

A shock went through me; we both sat up. “Ted kept you from Tina,?”

“Don’t tell me you still think he wanted Tina for himself!” Tissie exclaimed. “Ted was just like her father!”

“Tina’s father?” I asked stupidly.

“Mine too!” she added. “You sure had him figured out all wrong. Ted’s the only father I ever had; I couldn’t ever stand him but I always loved him ever since I was little. I never had a real father; I hardly even had a mother. The woman who bore me was a drunkard and a prostitute. I Was eight when I had my first sex; it was with one of my mother’s girlfriends. I spent most days and nights on the street. That’s where I met Ted. He was the best car thief in the neighborhood. He let me move into the garage where he lived. One day we were both caught in a stolen car and sent to reform school. That was where I got the rest of my sexual education. One of the girls I met was a prostitute to rich women. That’s what I did when I came out. But I missed Ted. He was the only person I knew who didn’t treat me as a monkey or a rubber doll. He’d always talked to me as if I understood; he’d tried to teach me things. Some neighborhood kids told me he was out of reform school and was running the garage by himself. I asked him if he still had room for me. He couldn’t believe I actually wanted to stay with him. ‘Well I ain’t got no other home,’ I told him. He soon figured out how I made my money, but he didn’t mind. Ted didn’t mind anything until I started taking heroin. That only happened after Seth bought the garage and Sabina and Jose moved in with us and started fixing up the house. I went wild over Sabina the first time I saw her. I know you can’t understand that, sis. Being in the same house with her, day after day, drove me crazy. I wasn’t a monkey to her but a person, the way I was for Ted, but I wanted to be more than that to her. She became my goddess. All I wanted in the world was to become her slave. She wanted the house first, and then all the machines. And above all else she wanted her precious independence. That was why I started taking heroin. That was why I started doing Seth’s bidding. I thought I was showing Sabina what kind of independence I wanted, but I didn’t show anyone anything. I just got all messed up. I started hating everyone. I tried to drag Tina to the bar and once I even tried to get her on heroin; that was the only time Ted ever hit me. When you came I wanted to do the same thing to you.” Tissie was crying. “I wanted you bad, sis, real bad. But I wanted that heroin worse, and there was nothing I wasn’t willing to do for Seth; I thought he was so good tome! I dragged you to the bar; I would have let them take that pretty body of yours and —”

I placed my hand over her mouth and pleaded, “Don’t, Tissie. That’s all over, and we’re both so different now.”

Tissie pushed me down to the ground, placed her lips right above mine and whispered, “I haven’t changed any, Sophie. I still want you as bad as I did then.” Suddenly she burst out laughing. “You haven’t changed either, sis’! You’re shaking!”

“I’m sorry, Tissie!”

“Don’t be sorry! You’re just hungry, that’s all!” She had brought a bag along, and started unpacking sandwiches, a bottle of wine, cake. “After lunch I’ll take you to another gorgeous spot.”

She took me to a sandy beach at a crystal clear lake. She ran into the water naked, perfectly unselfconscious. I followed her. The only previous time I swam in the nude was nineteen years ago, when Ron took me to a lake by a farm. Tissie and I raced, splashed each other, and then lay on the grass in the sun, our bodies touching. Tissie fell asleep. I found myself looking at her as if I were looking into a mirror. Beneath the seeming energy and determination lay the same passivity, the same longing for dependence. She wanted to be Sabina’s slave. What did I want to be to you, to Jose, to Hugh? When she felt rejected and alone, she took heroin; I drifted and stared at blank walls.

It was nearly dark when Tissie drove me back to the research center. We had supper by ourselves in the restaurant. “It was a beautiful day, Tissie, every minute of it. I don’t deserve to be treated so grandly, not by you.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself, Sophie, or on Ted either. I’m the one that messed everything up in the garage. I haven’t told you everything. I don’t even dare tell Sabina; I wouldn’t have any friends left.”

“I’ll be your friend, Tissie, always, even if you don’t ever tell me anything.”

“When you talk like that, sis, you make my insides jump around. If you and Sabina and I were on an island far away from everything ... Come on, I’ll walk you to your room.”

Pat was already in the room, reading. I felt happy . I kissed his forehead and asked if he’d spent the day enjoyably. All he told me was, “I asked the printer if he could give us a ride back tomorrow. He said he’d be glad to.”

I lay down on the couch and fell asleep immediately. I woke up with a weight on my chest. I pushed Pat’s head away from me and sat up. He started to cry. “I’m sorry, Sophia. I didn’t want to take advantage of you like this. I — I think I’m in love with you. Ever since we went to talk to the office machine workers. The second time we went, my hand almost touched yours, I felt something funny, I wanted to be close to you. Then you stayed away from me, I thought you knew I wanted to make advances, and you didn’t want me to. But a few nights ago, after the argument with your former roommate, you squeezed my hand and —”

I felt sorry for him and held his head in my hands; I started to kiss him, but he went on, “Then you wanted me to come here, with you, and we’re alone in the same room at night. I heard you breathing. You were so close, Sophia. You’re so beautiful, so intelligent.”

I dropped my hands from his face and froze. I was so intelligent — for a woman. Sabina was far too intelligent; she intimidated him. But I was just intelligent enough to make him lose his head. I lay back down and turned my back to him. I heard him lie down on the carpet next to the couch. I felt sorry for him again, and tried to stroke his cheek with my hand, but quickly regretted doing that He took my hand in both of his, pressed it to his lips, and apparently intended to spend the night in that position. I quickly got a cramp in my shoulder and pulled my hand away.

When I woke up the next morning, Pat was pacing, impatient to leave. I left our door open, and as soon as I saw Sabina come out of her room I told her I’d go back to the council office with Pat.

“Running out on us so soon?” Sabina asked.

I was stung by the way she put it. “That’s mean, Sabina. I ran out on you and Ron and went to the university. Are you referring to that? Or to the time I ran out on Jose?”

“I’m sorry, Sophia. It was a mean way to put it I thought you’d stay with us. Tissie and I both want you close to us. It was my way of saying I’d feel even better about being here if you were here with me.”

I was crying on Sabina’s shoulder. “I can’t. My mind is all fogged. In the commune and the council, in the midst of leaflets and arguments and news of strikes, I know who I am. But I’m lost here. I don’t know who I am or what I want. Tissie told me about Ted, about herself. I haven’t had time to absorb it, any of it. I’ll come back, maybe even tomorrow, but I’ve got to know why I’m coming back, what I want.”

Just then Tissie came running toward us. “I’m leaving, Tissie, but I promise to come back.”

“Aw, sis, we both thought you were here, to stay! Is it because of me?”

“No, Tissie, please don’t ever think that, Before I came here, I was convinced that what I was doing was very important, very meaningful to me. I’m no longer sure. I’d like to find out before I come back.”

Sabina jumped on Pat as soon as he came out of our room. “So you’ve had your fill of practice and it’s time for theory again.”

Pat said calmly, “I recognize the revolutionary character of the appropriation that took place here, but the point is not to appropriate a single enterprise but the whole world.”

“Is that what you’re going back to do?”

“That’s what I’m going to take part in. Revolution will be made when all, and not just some of the victims of the market’s tyranny throw off their shackles.”

“That’s well put. And just how do you intend to take part in all that?” Sabina asked him.

“By keeping abreast of reality. A radical critique of the modern world must have the totality as its objective.”

Sabina walked away from him and went to look for Ted.

On the return trip I rode in the front seat, between Ted and Pat. I thought of what Tissie had told me about Ted. I didn’t know how to begin undoing my gross misunderstanding, my brutal injustice. I whispered to him awkwardly, “Yesterday Tissie told me, about everything... I’m sorry, Ted, terribly sorry. I was closed-minded and mean.”

He turned a very sad face toward me. “I wasn’t so open either, Sophie, I saw Seth’s hand behind everyone and everything. I made you suspicious of me. And then the day Jose was released you couldn’t, be there to see him because he came to my house, and you, wouldn’t have come there. He might not have gotten killed if you’d been there.’!

“Please don’t tell me that, Ted.”

I was crying. I hadn’t run out on Jose only when I left the garage. I had run out on him again when he was in prison. On my third or fourth visit to the prison, Jose had talked enthusiastically about the books I had brought him. He talked about liberation struggles, about the need for the oppressed to arm themselves. I realized that while I was carrying bags full of books to Jose, books describing wars of liberation and revolutionary uprisings, I was dragging myself to a factory job every day except Sunday. The contradiction between the subjects of those books and my own mindless drift became unbearable to me. I couldn’t face another conversation with Jose. I longed to do something, anything at all, that would associate me in some way with the subjects of those books. On the day I had accompanied Sabina and Tina to Debbie Matthews’ house, Lem Icel had mentioned the peace movement, and I had asked Tina if she knew anything about it. Although Tina had contemptuously dismissed the peace movement, she remembered my question and brought me a leaflet about a demonstration; the bottom of the leaflet said “Volunteers Welcome” and gave an address. On a Sunday (my only day off) I went to the address on the leaflet, ready to “do something.” In the “peace center” I found a room where several people were working at a large table. I asked how I could “join the peace movement.” A woman pulled an empty chair up to the table, and I spent the rest of the day stuffing envelopes. I didn’t get glass in my lungs, but the drudgery was the same as in the fiberglass factory. The activity was what I imagined office work to be: numerous women stuffing, sealing and stamping envelopes, a few important-looking men walking in and out of the room. But this drudgery had a justification: it was service and sacrifice for others. There were eight or nine women at the stuffing table, and one bearded man. The women were all middle-aged; the man was my age. I sat across the table from him. His name was Art Sinich; he introduced himself to me later that day; They stuffed envelopes right through the lunch hour. No one mentioned food. The mailing got done late in the afternoon. No one thanked me, obviously; I hadn’t helped them, I had helped the movement. People started to disperse. They were all going to see each other again at a lecture which I couldn’t attend because of my job. I asked if more work would be done the following Sunday. Art told me he would be there. I returned to the peace center the following Sunday. Art and two or three women were stuffing pamphlets into brown envelopes. The women weren’t the ones who had been there a week earlier. Art introduced me to them; I was already a full-fledged member of the movement. The pamphlet stuffing didn’t take long and everyone except Art and I left. I asked him what was done in the peace center other than envelope stuffing. He took me to the literature room. I leafed absently through some books and pamphlets. All of them dealt with the same subject: death. Death by nuclear holocaust, by chemical warfare, by radiation from atomic tests. Then Art took me to the peace center’s print shop and introduced me to the printer. It was in the basement. A large man my age was operating a small printing machine in a space large enough for one small person; he looked like a giant trapped in a cave. (What a contrast to Ted’s well-lit and spacious print shop! That building should have been called the sacrifice center!) Finally Art took me to the “reception room.” He showed me photographs in the “movement scrapbook,” pointing to himself at a “vigil,” at a chemical warfare plant, in a rowboat “resisting” a nuclear submarine, “sitting in” at a government atomic energy building. He told me proudly that he’d been arrested at every one of those “actions.” I returned again the following week. Announcements of a major demonstration several weeks away were being sent out. The demonstrators were to block the entrance gate of a military base about to receive missiles that could depopulate half the world. I told Art I wouldn’t be able to attend the demonstration because of my job. He looked at me as if I were one of “them,” the wrongdoers, the warmongers. I already knew that behind the modest, self-sacrificing servant of humanity stood a hardened holy man who towered above ordinary mortals. I didn’t have the nerve to tell him I only supported myself; I felt guilty for putting my “selfish material interests” above goodness and peace. For Art that selfishness was at the root of all war, all destruction. I stayed away from the envelope stuffing for a week, intimidated by the righteousness. But that only put me back into the situation I had tried to leave behind. I decided to take part in the demonstration and to skip work. I was extremely nervous on the day of the demonstration. I rode with five or six other people to a military sign that said, “No public access beyond this point.” Several other cars were already parked by the sign. People began to sit across the roadway, about twenty in all, with various home-made signs. It was spring, but the temperature was freezing. I couldn’t stop shivering. At last a huge truck approached. I was stupefied by fear; I was sure we’d all be run over. But the truck stopped and one of the demonstrators told the driver he was transporting death in the back of his truck. Other trucks came, and drivers gathered at the side of the road and made various comments to the “nuts” sitting in the roadway. I knew at the time that all the hatred of the people sitting in that roadway was concentrated on the drivers of the trucks. Twenty righteous people were making themselves an example to the murderers who drove trucks and worked in factories. I also knew that all the “peace literature” appealed to the “moral sense” of government officials and the “humanity” of the rich. When I heard sirens I clung to Art with mortal fear. (At the trial I was charged with linking arms to resist arrest.) I was nearly unconscious with fear when I was carried to the police wagon. I had been arrested only once before: at the carton plant. After a day and a half in jail I was released on bail put up by the peace organization. The date of the trial was set. When I got home I called the fiberglass factory and told the foreman I’d been arrested at a peace demonstration. He told me not to bother returning to work. I had succeeded in transforming my situation: I was a full-time political activist. I described my act to Sabina and tried to tell her how “worthwhile” it had been. I described Art to her and tried to tell her how “wonderful and good” he was. Sabina made no effort to hide her disgust. We shared the house, but we no longer shared anything else. I was jobless and alone. I wasn’t able to defend myself from Sabina’s and Tina’s hostility. I couldn’t bear to face Jose’s questions about liberation, armed struggle, revolutionary wars. I knew that my “act” had nothing to do with the subjects of the books I had taken to Jose. I knew that I had joined a tiny group of “God’s witnesses on earth,” sent from heaven to stimulate guilt in workers and move the hearts of rulers. I knew I had joined the martyrs of the age, the saints who stood witness to humanity’s final cannibalistic act and kept their souls pure. When I saw Art again he showed me newspaper clippings about our arrest, and he was proud; the arrest was a sign of his personal worth, if not in the eyes of the “rabble” for whom he only felt contempt, then in the eyes of God and “good” members of the ruling class. I knew that my “act” had no relation to Hugh’s “project house” where the oppressed were to become independent by their own efforts; my new friends found only one quality in the oppressed: guilt. All initiative, all change, had to come from the top, from those who rule. But instead of turning my back on Art and his friends, I turned against Sabina, Tina and Jose. I looked forward to the trial alongside my modest, bearded codefendant. On the first day of the trial I told Tina not to expect me home that night. The trial wasn’t about missiles or nuclear weapons or wax. It was about whether or not we had locked arms when the police had announced we would be arrested (which they hadn’t actually announced). Afterwards I drifted to Art’s apartment house. He invited me up to his tiny room, part of a subdivided apartment with a common kitchen. The room contained every book and pamphlet I had seen in the peace center; He had apparently read them all; there were notes in all the margins. In addition to the pamphlets there was a single bed, and that was all. He asked if I wanted to stay. I had nothing better to do with myself. For a few nights we both slept in his single bed; then I bought a cot. He insisted on sleeping on the cot; he was determined to bear the greater sacrifice. The trial dragged on for two and a half months. Every session was the same: had we locked arms before the announcement? Had there been an announcement? When Art wasn’t stuffing envelopes or demonstrating, he read. I read four or five of his books and pamphlets; each one of them made the same points in exactly the same way; only the names and dates were different. After a few weeks. I stopped accompanying him to the stuffing sessions. I tidied and swept his room, got book ends for his literature. Art didn’t see the difference; he was neither pleased nor annoyed; it didn’t matter to him: I was a crass materialist for occupying myself with such things. I made up the beds, shopped, cooked, washed the dishes. He didn’t once tell me he’d liked one of the meals I’d prepared. He was a vegetarian; before I had come he had eaten mainly boiled eggs. I learned that he had never worked because his father, who owned a clothing store and whom Art considered a crass materialist, gave him a monthly allowance. When the trial finally ended (we were all let off on “probation,” whatever that meant; I never reported to anyone), I bought a bottle of wine to celebrate. Weeks earlier I had bought a vegetarian cookbook, and I spent several hours preparing a delicacy. I set a cloth on the floor and put candles on it. Art sat down as usual, gulped down my meal as if it were a boiled egg, and turned back to the pamphlet he had been reading. Late that night I tiptoed out of his room. I left him the cot, so as to decrease the discomfort of his next guest. In the kitchen I looked into the phone book and scribbled him a note: “Get yourself a maid. Maid Service phone number: — “ I slipped the note under his door and called a taxi. I didn’t hear from Art again until I saw him, as Well as Luisa, after the riot last year, engaged in envelope stuffing. I was back home with Sabina and Tina — jobless, projectless, aimless. They didn’t ask questions; I couldn’t have answered any. Gradually one of my former interests revived: my interest in reading. I made frequent trips to the library and rummaged through bookstores. I hadn’t read; anything other than a few peace pamphlets since I’d left-the garage. Now I spent most of my days reading. Subjects that had rarely been treated when I was a student were now explored in one study after another. In the bookstores there were entire sections of literature devoted to revolutionary theory, liberation struggles, even philosophical analyzes of social and psychological repression. The more I read, the more indignant I became about the narrowness of Art’s interests. Whenever I found a book particularly exciting, I set it on the living room table. Tina read them. I hoped she’d take them to Jose, but she only returned them to the table. One day she told me she was going to visit Jose, but didn’t want to go alone and Sabina didn’t want to accompany her. She trapped me into visiting Jose again. i packed all the books I’d set aside and” went with her. in the visiting room she stood some distance away from Jose and me. He had probably begged her to bring me, one way or another. I gave him the books, but I didn’t have the nerve to tell him about my peace movement “actions” or “friends.” I visited Jose one more time before his release, by myself. It was on that visit I noticed just how much he had been affected by the books I had brought him. I don’t want to exaggerate my share. Probably the solitude in which he read the books, as well as conversations he must have had with fellow prisoners, had also contributed their share. I did know that the intentions he expressed, as well as the words he used, came out of the books, since I had just read them. He talked about his intention to take part in the uprising of the oppressed. I was excited at first; I thought he was describing something like Hugh’s “project house.” But the more he talked, the more frightened I grew. The project house turned into a band of armed guerrillas. Jose lectured to me about the need of the oppressed to arm themselves, to defend themselves with knives, rifles, even machine guns. When I had read the accounts of the guerrilla movements, I had been excited by the knowledge that law and order were collapsing everywhere, that people were responding to arms with arms — elsewhere, far away from me. I hadn’t for a second imagined myself stealing a truck full of weapons, shooting at police, or pulling the ring of a hand grenade. Before leaving Jose I tried to tell him I thought activities appropriate elsewhere might not be so appropriate here, but I don’t think he heard me. I never saw him again. As the day of his release approached my fears grew. It had been so easy to carry books to him. I wasn’t able to live up to those books, to Jose, to his new commitment. On the day of his release Sabina told me he didn’t want us to meet him at the prison. Several days later Sabina burst into my room crying. Jose had been shot in the back. “The police picked him up just like a dog — dead, in the street,” she told me. “If they hadn’t arrested Ted as a suspect, I wouldn’t even have known!” Then she added, “He had wanted to be someone you could admire.” I fell on Sabina wailing. “He was my whole life, everything I loved! I’m nothing compared to him, Sabina; I couldn’t have given him anything, I’d only have dragged him down and made his life ugly! He couldn’t have died because he wanted to live up to me, Sabina. You’re wrong. You have to be wrong!”

I cried during the rest of the trip from the research center to the commune. Ted confirmed what Sabina had told me three years earlier, what I still didn’t want to believe. Jose had wanted to be ready for me, he had wanted to live up to me, he had mistakenly associated me with the fearless revolutionaries described in the books I had taken him. I was completely oblivious to Pat, sitting silently on my right, humiliated by his two encounters with Sabina. All I saw was Ted, the person whose house I wouldn’t have entered, even to be with Jose, because of my “suspicions.” When we reached the corner where Ted had picked us up, he stretched his hand toward me again and said, almost pleading, “When Jose told me you had nothing to do with Seth, I tried to become your Mend, Sophie. But it was too late then. I’d like to try again.” I squeezed his hand and told him, “I’d like to try too, Ted.”

I saw Ted again the following day, when Pat and Luisa used the print shop to print Pat’s leaflet on the loudspeakers; that was the first time I entered Ted’s house. I told him I might accompany him back to the research center when he returned there. But first I had to do what I’d told Sabina and Tissie I wanted to do: I had to find out who I was and what I wanted. Your letter gave me an enormous clue. It convinced me that I no longer wanted to be what I had been; it filled me with a desire to shatter my past self. Luisa, Pat and Daman provided me with a perfect setting. I formulated my strategy while riding next to Pat in the back seat of Daman’s car, on route from the picket, line at Luisa’s assembly plant to the “revolutionary festival” at Luisa’s house.