the wars? Are they damned fools?' She asked this very politely, truly inquisitively.
'I don't know. In a way, it doesn't really matter in my story whether or not they're fools. The fact was my death wasn't going to change anything for them. It would have been gratuitous, utterly personal, the price of the sport.' She nodded, slowly, her gaze moving past me over the deck and the distant banks of the river, the low, olive drab swampland falling right into the brown water, the swift panorama of the gliding clouds. 'This was after you did Beirut: Twenty-four Hours?' she asked. 'Yes. And I didn't do any Twenty-four Hours in El Salvador.' When she turned to me again she was as serious as I'd ever seen her, unselfconscious, completely absorbed. 'But after what you'd seen,' she said, 'of real suffering, real violence -- if it did mean something to you for whatever reason -- how could you stand the scenarios at Martin's?' She hesitated. 'How could you stand the rituals of The Club? I mean how did you make this transition?' 'Are you kidding me?' I asked. I took another swallow of Scotch. 'You're asking me that?' She looked genuinely confused by the question. 'You saw people who were really being tormented,' she said. She was picking her words slowly. 'People who were, as you said, immersed in literal violence. How could you justify what we do after that? Why weren't we obscene to you, decadent, an insult to what you'd witnessed? The guy getting put into the truck ...' 'I thought I understood what you were asking,' I said. 'Nevertheless I'm amazed.' I took another little drink, thinking about how to approach the answer. Whether to take it slowly or to come right out. 'Do you think that the people on this planet who are fighting literal war are superior to us?' I asked. 'I don't know what you mean.' 'Do you think that people who do literal violence, either defensively or aggressively, are better than those of us who work out the same drives symbolically?'
'No, but God, I mean there are those who are swept up in it for whom the suffering is inescapable ...' 'Yes, I know. They're swept up in something that is as ghastly and destructive as it was two thousand years ago when it was fought with swords and spears. It is not too different from what was happening five thousand years before that with rocks and clubs. Now why does something that primitive, that ugly, that horrible, make what we do at The Club obscene?' She understood me, I knew she did, but she didn't commit herself. 'Seems to me it's the other way around,' I said. 'I have been there and I assure you it is the other way around. There is nothing obscene about two people in a bedroom trying to find in sado-masochistic sex the symbolic solution to their sexual aggressions. The obscenity is those who literally rape, literally kill, literally strafe whole villages, blow up busloads of innocent people, literally and relentlessly destroy.' I could almost feel her thinking as I watched her face.
Her hair had fallen down over her shoulders, and against the whiteness of her dress, it made me think of her little joke last night about the nunnery, it made me think of a nun's veil. 'You know the difference between the symbolic and the literal,' I said. 'You know what we do at The Club is play. And you know the origins of that play are deep, deep inside us in a tangle of chemical and cerebral components that defy competent analysis.' She nodded. 'Well, so are the origins of the human impulse to make war so far as I'm concerned. When you strip away the current politics, the 'who did what to whom first' of every small and great crisis, what you have is the same mystery, the same urgency, the same complexity that underlies sexual aggression. And it has as much to do with the sexual desire to dominate and/or submit as the rituals we play at The Club. For all I know, it is all sexual aggression.' Again, she didn't answer. But it was like she was listening out loud. 'No, The Club is no obscenity compared to what I've seen,' I said. 'And I thought you more than anyone else would know that.' She was looking out at the river. 'That is what I believe,' she said finally. 'But I wasn't sure