“I’m aware there’s a world of people, Alice. I’m more aware of it than you are.”
“There’s a world of history, too,” Alice said. “History is marching on whether you choose to acknowledge it or not. History is not on the side of this place and the people in it—people like you.”
It was a measure of the extent of the radical change that had taken place since Mark DeAvecca collapsed in Hayes House that Philip was tempted, even if only for a moment, to deliver a lecture on “people like” himself, a lecture so detailed and explicit that even Alice Makepeace would have no way of misinterpreting it. He stopped himself just in time, but he couldn’t deny that he’d tapped a vein of recklessness in himself that he’d thought he’d exorcized forever a very long time ago. His cigarettes were on the table next to the gun, two kinds of coffin nails huddled together for warmth in the icy moralistic air of a progressive school. He stuck a cigarette in his mouth and lit it with the plain blue plastic Bic lighter he kept next to the ashtray. He had Bic lighters all over the house. They were the only kind he used.
“You know,” he said, “there are people out there, people in this country, who take revolution seriously. They’re not playing a game, and they don’t deal in concepts like ’false consciousness.’ They just do what they do. They’re very dangerous. You wouldn’t like them much. You’d approve even less.”
“I want to know if anybody saw me talking to Mark last night in the cafeteria.”
“People like Timothy McVeigh,” Philip said.
Alice turned away from the mirror. She looked like she was forcing herself. “Leave it to you to call a fascist like that a revolutionary.”
“He was a revolutionary, Alice. He was a homegrown, working-class American revolutionary. If the proletariat of the United States ever rises up to overthrow the capitalist hegemony, that’s what they’re going to look like: Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph. Take your pick. And you do. Take your pick, I mean. You picked Michael Feyre because he had no interest in revolution at all.”
“I picked Michael Feyre because he was one of the most intelligent and tortured souls I’d ever met.”
“And the one last year? Alex Cowby. He was an intelligent and tortured soul, too. Until he became too obviously disappointing.”
“You can’t save everybody,” Alice said. “They’re so damaged by the time they get here, saving them isn’t always possible. They buy into the whole thing, into the big corporate lie. Into the idea that having things and making money are what they should be after.”
“Alice, for God’s sake. We’ve got a Socialist Club and a Communist Youth League. We’ve also got a nice little sprinkling of working-class kids on scholarship. Not one of them wants anything to do with—”
“Why are we going into this again?” Alice said. “What’s your point, Philip? Is there some reason that this is all you can ever talk about? I asked you a question. I asked if you’d heard anybody say they saw me in the cafeteria with Mark last night.”
He took a deep drag on his cigarette and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “Why? Were you trying to seduce him, too?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Then why?”
“Because I want to know,” Alice said, “that’s all. Because I want to know. There’ve been rumors all day about the caffeine, about caffeine pills or tablets or whatever you call them. Maybe he took them last night while I was there, and I just didn’t notice. Maybe something. I don’t know. I want to know.”
“All right.” The cigarette was nearly out. Philip put it down in the ashtray and got another. He rarely chainsmoked; it made his lungs hurt. Now he found he wanted his lungs to hurt, if only because the sensation would have a reality to it that he could not make come clear in this room. He had always found Alice ephemeral in some odd way. He’d never been able to accept her as solid. She seemed to him to be a mass of affect and confusion: that electric red hair, that way of carrying her body that showed she had always known that men admired it—and women too, that mass of drivel that poured out of her mouth every time she talked. Freud had once asked: “What do women want?” Philip was willing to bet that if he’d ever met Alice, he would have been completely stumped.
“You’re not going to tell me what I want to know,” she said, coming to sit down on the edge of the chair across from him.
“I don’t know the answer to the question you’ve asked. Nobody has said anything to me about it. That’s the best I can do.”