Thirteen Crucifixions 23

                                                              1984

 

 

            The sleeping medication that Suzanne had given Carol was potent indeed. Depending on the cab driver she would be at least ten minutes late for the rally.  She had never missed a peace march before, but she still would be able to deliver her keynote address.  In the back seat of the cab she held like a cat on her lap her briefcase.  Sixteen hours she had slept.  Carol seldom needed to sleep for even six hours.   Richard, her only love, was dead.  Blown to bits by a landmine.  A finger here, a foot over there.  And his head. Whither his beautiful head?  Suicide!  Not suicide.  Not Richard.  The rear view mirror showed Carol that her hair looked fine.  No make-up, as usual.  “Telegenic” was the word that Derek Merkeley had used to describe her.  “Doyen of the Peace Moment.”  Carol a doyen?  Like an aging debutante?  She was flattered.  She would likely be back on t. v. today.  She was circumspectly dressed in a black turtleneck and blue denim skirt.  Black stockings, and sensible black loafers.  She thought that she looked like a librarian.

            She paid the driver, who was Iranian, a handsome refugee from the Ayatollah’s wrath.  His English seemed adequate, though he had nothing to say to Carol, who hadn’t much to offer this time in the way of small talk. She might have sat with him in the front seat, but not this time.  She had to prepare for her speech.  Richard was dead, his beautiful body scattered across the mountains of Nicaragua.  Carol, in her medicated state, felt unable to reach this stranger in the driver’s seat.  He had grown up in a culture that hates women.  Did he hate Carol, who was a woman?  She nearly did climb into the front seat with him, but he gave her such a look of warning and thinly veiled menace that Carol went immediately to the back.  She had long prided herself in her ability to reach people across cultural barriers.  Today, she felt like a miserable failure. 

            Carol made her way through the assembled mob to the stage where a locally famous singer was bleating out lyrics of justice and peace.  She waved to Doris, who smiled back, then climbed onto the stage.  As the applause faded Carol introduced herself.

 

            “I am standing in today for Jim Larson, the renowned nuclear physicist from Berkeley.  Jim was a young man when he was on the team, known as the “Manhattan Project”, that developed the bombs that fell on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.  As well as that of the nuclear fallout that destroyed and devastated two cities and hundreds of thousands of human lives, Jim has also had to live with the moral fallout that for many years devastated his life.  He recovered from the loss of his family, and two breakdowns, and spent the later half of the fifties devoting his efforts to exploring possibilities for the peaceful use of nuclear technology.  Gathering evidence of the resulting environmental hazards soon brought his work to a halt.  Being just about the only person in the industry with sufficient integrity to address these issues, regardless of the personal consequences, he soon made himself many enemies.  He gave it all up, and went into exile.  Incognito, he travelled the world, eventually focussing his attention on the indigenous peoples of some of the most remote regions of the earth: the Jivaro of the Amazon Basin, the Penang of Borneo, as well as tribes in New Guinea and the Kalahari: staying among these peoples, who technologically live in the Stone Age, he was deeply impressed by their profound spirituality and their reverence for the Earth that sustained them.  Mr. Larson was among the first post war scholars to accurately document the destruction of such entire cultures by the benevolence of modernism.  He also, in his subsequent writings, eloquently recorded these people’s messages to our planet.  It is a message of warning, laced throughout with the greatest hope and the deepest despair: that our failure to live in harmony and in humble submission to the forces of nature may ultimately result in the extinction of our species and the destruction of much of the intact biosphere; that we have fallaciously presumed to live outside of and in control of nature, and that our only salvation, for ourselves and the planet, will be in our re-occupying our position of being a part of the natural order, and to see again our lives and communities become re-integrated into the earth’s beautiful and complex web of existence.

            “When Mr. Larsen returned to the United States he promptly immersed himself in working against the war in Vietnam, as well as the nuclear arms race.  These activities quickly made him a target of suspicion, investigation and perpetual harassment by the American government.  He is known, hated and feared by the Pentagon.  He has cumulatively served more than three years of jail time.  His phone is tapped, his mail, if it gets to him, has usually been already opened and read.  He is followed and spied on everywhere. While on his way to speak here at this Walk for Peace, he was intercepted and turned back at the border.  Then, when he telephoned one of my colleagues the line went inexplicably dead.

            “This all goes to show us that, especially as the Reagan Administration has brought the Cold War to its most chilling intensity since the Cuban Missile Crisis, we still have a long uphill battle ahead of us before we can ensure that, once and for all, this planet will be rid of all the nuclear weapons before the nuclear weapons have a chance to rid this planet of us.”

            As the crowd cheered, Carol spied Derek Merkeley standing near the front, taking notes.

            “I can see here one very encouraging trend: it is this huge massive turnout of public opposition against nuclear war.  I just heard that here, today, there are nearly two hundred thousand of us standing out here, today, one for each of the two hundred thousand children, and women and men who perished in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  That is so amazing.  That is so fantastic.  And this show of strength and solidarity is happening all over the world: in Britain, in Western Europe, and even in the U. S. A.  You people are just amazing!  You’re awesome!  You’re beautiful!  Keep it up.  Not just for one Saturday at the end of April, but constantly.  All the time.  Keep on organizing, keep on mobilizing.  When the people lead, the leaders will follow.”

            Carol couldn’t keep her eyes off Derek Merekely.  Something took hold of her.  He caught her gaze.

            “As many of you know, I was detained in police custody Thursday night, along with thirty fellow activists.  We’d been demonstrating against the visit here of the U. S. Secretary of State.  The women, myself among them, were strip-searched.  Only the women.  I came home the next morning, harassed and pestered by journalists, one of who is today standing here among us, this very moment.  His name is Derek Merkeley, and he has written quite extensively about me for the Sun.  There he is, near the front.  Say hi to the nice people, Derek.”  As soon as the laughter died out, she said, “And now that we all know who you are, Derek, maybe you’ll start taking a little more care with the quality of your journalism.  Have you thought of writing for the National Enquirer?” There was more laughter.

            “Yesterday, in the afternoon, I actually invited Derek up to my place for an interview.  He had been waiting for me in front of my house.  His second time that day.  So, we went up to my apartment, and just as soon as we were going to proceed with the interview over a nice cup of tea, I get a phone call from Nicaragua, of all places, from a colleague of a dear friend of mine, Dr. Richard Bertholdt.  Richard devoted many years working among our poorest and most destitute citizens in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.  Moved to tremendous compassion by the effects of the brutal civil war on the people of Nicaragua, particularly the indigenous and the campesinos, he went there three years ago to help relieve their misery.  He married a young woman there by whom he has an infant daughter, who is going to grow up without a father, because Richard Bertholdt has just lost his life to a landmine.”

            The words began to flow through Carol, unbidden, uninvented.  She knew what was happening.  This had occurred, when that torrent of wisdom came pouring out of her mouth as the police were landing her into the paddy wagon.  Only now, unlike the previous occasions, was she conscious of what was occurring.  This time, for the first time, she would hear herself speak, she would not forget what she was saying, what was being spoken through her: “I am telling you this by way of illustrating that getting rid of nuclear weapons is but one of many steps that we are going to have to take in order to bring peace to this planet.  It isn’t only nuclear weapons, or any other kind of murderous technology, be it conventional or nuclear.  These evil technologies are but the material manifestations of the very real evil that we, as technologically advanced beings, have bought into.  We must face this evil—we must face it, and we must reject it.  It is our own human warlikeness, our tendency towards violence, and all the greed, evil and fear that resides in our human natures that sows the seeds of war, murder and destruction.  Like that landmine that killed Richard.  One casualty among thousands, all over the world.  This is the time, now, more than any other time in the history of our humanity, that we must learn the ways of peace.  To learn and live peace, we must—it is within all our capacity as human beings, here at Sunset Beach in Vancouver, and equally so in Washington and in the Kremlin.  It begins here.  It begins now.  It begins with us.  It begins with me.  It begins here.”

            She raised her fist in the air.  “My sisters and brothers, I am tremendously moved to see all of you here.  We come from so many walks of life.  Here on these grounds are two hundred thousand lives, stories, individual histories.  Together, let us be strong, let us work together to bring peace into our lives, into our communities, and the nations together will sing in triumph the anthems of peace and reconciliation.  Over the ruins of rusted missiles and warheads shall the lion and the lamb lay down together in peace, harmony and mutual love, as the Dove of the Holy Spirit descends upon a renewed humanity in overflowing goodness and blessing.  Together let us be strong, together let us resist, together let us prepare in the face of the nations the way of life, reconciliation, and peace.”

 

            “You were wonderful, dear”, Doris said, embracing Carol while the applause died down.  “Now, please go home.”

            “There’s someone I need to see, first.”

            “Not that journalist.”

            “I think he’s left.  Glen.”

            “Oh, hello, Glen”, Doris said to Alice McIntyre’s son, who was standing together with a balding man in a black trench coat and a slender woman in a black sweater.  Glen also wore black.

            “Hi Doris”, Glen said.  “Carol, that was a fantastic speech.”

            “Thank you.”

            Glen introduced Bryan and Margery to Doris and Carol. Bryan, Carol found detached, officious.  Almost churlish.  She thought she could smell on him alcohol.  She didn’t care for his sinister, campy affectation.

            “Touche, Carol”  It was Derek Markeley, who gave her his card.  “Call me.”

            “For an interview?”

            “That too.”  He disappeared into the crowd.  She kept staring at his card in her hand. Almost she let it fall to the ground.  Carol instead dropped Derek’s card into her briefcase.  She knew that she really ought to heed Doris’ advice and go home.  Even after sixteen hours of medicated slumber she still wanted more sleep.  Carol also was craving solitude.  She was just managing to dodge whoever wanted to comment on her speech.  She didn’t want to have people around.  But she needed them?  Glen?  And this girlfriend of his, or whoever the hell she was.  Margery?  Who had just looked at Carol as though seeing through her.  But they liked each other.  This was already evident.  Bryan she could do without.  He seemed to have some sort of power over Glen.  She really wished that he would go away.  And why did she accept Derek Merkeley’s card?  She should not have addressed him like that during her speech.  Why such tit for tat?  This revenge wasn’t sweet, it tasted bitter.  So what if he’d so crassly misrepresented her in one of the city’s dailies?  Now what would he be writing about her next?  Carol knew all about media accuracy.  It seldom was.  This tendency towards misrepresentation of facts ran with the grain.  Not even the most rigorously honest, objective journalist could be expected to get it right, to report accurately without distortion or embellishment.  There was truth.  Carol believed this passionately.  She had always been passionate about the truth.  But truth-telling?  Truthful and accurate truth-telling. Try as she might, she could never quite accurately say what was, in such a way that it would be heard and received as truth by truthful ears.  She wondered, sometimes, if we were all liars, that not even Diogenes prowling the streets of ancient Athens with his lamp could be so blessed as to encounter one honest man. And was Diogenes true?

            Carol recognized Glen and Margery as true authentic souls.  But not Bryan.  Derek Merkeley?  A venal shit to the very marrow.  She had better toss his card.  Fast.  Richard was true.  Stan and Suzanne?  Don’t be ridiculous.  Nice, enormously kind and generous they were.  But thoroughly lacking in ethics or values.  To Carol’s chagrin she had become very attached both to her ex-husband and to his common-law wife.  She now perceived them as a matched set—like bookends, or salt and pepper shakers.  Sometimes Carol wanted to blame Stan and Suzanne for her feeling stranded in that house.  

             She was giving Bryan but a courtesy of her attention, as in the most supercilious accents he bored her about the inner workings of the Good Shepherd.  Carol’s mind was wandering, nor could she really focus on the other speakers, nor the next singer which was a shame given that she was a famous soprano with a legendary voice.  And then it was Doris Goldberg’s turn:

            “I would like to thank you, all of you, for having turned out here on this fine day.  This solidarity, this presence of so many people here today is a fulfillment of the vision that so many of us have held longingly since the anti-nuclear movement was in its infancy.  I only wish that my husband, Sam, who had devoted his life to the cause of world peace, could be here to witness this glorious spectacle of all of you being here.  He unfortunately passed away nine months ago from untreatable thyroid cancer.

            “My husband’s life has been a testimony to peace, to the barbarism and brutality of the twentieth century, and to the longings and aspirations of women and men everywhere for a better life, a better earth, and a nobler humanity to pass on to our children, our children’s children, and to our children’s children’s children.  Sam was born in Vienna in 1918, November 11, the same day that the Armistice was signed.  During the Second World War he survived for four ghastly years in the Nazi extermination camps.  When they were liberated in the early spring of 1945, Sam and the other emaciated starving prisoners broke into the officers’ barracks and their kitchen where they encountered massive quantities of food.  Real food, good tasty and nutritious food such as they had never tasted, smelled or seen in all of the horrible years of their confinement.  Suddenly, after years of privation, of moldy bread, rotten potatoes and thin cabbage soup, they had for themselves the finest schnitzel, sausage, eggs, cheese, vegetables and fruits.  In horror, he looked on as some of his comrades literally ate themselves to death before his eyes.  Amid such unexpected plenty they had completely forgotten themselves.  Liberation, and sudden, unforeseen abundance, became their death sentence. For Sam this was a foreshadowing, a prophetic warning about the unprecedented plenty and prosperity that has since inundated the West; such unrestrained material abundance, freedom, and technological progress as has strangled and spiritually suffocated us.  It has filled us, bloated us, and now it threatens to undermine and destroy us, because it is making us forget and remain oblivious to the higher position and calling of our humanity.  This horrible reality, of course, found its ultimate consummation on August 6, 1945 when the first atomic bomb was dropped on the people of Hiroshima, in a nanosecond obliterating an entire city and tens of thousands of human lives.  Then came the nuclear arms race, and the bitter enmity between the two wartime allies—the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, causing a most bitter arsenal of nuclear weapons and mutual propaganda and sabre rattling that, thanks to the current bellicose rantings coming from the White House and the Pentagon under the Reagan Administration, has pushed forward the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock to just three minutes before midnight, thus imperiling to an unprecedented degree all of our diverse humanity, cultures and languages, along with the rich and interconnected biodiversity of the earth.

            “My husband and I first met each other in 1948 in Palestine, where, as a foreign correspondent for the Times of London, I was covering the violent and bloody birth of the modern state of Israel.  Sam had been fighting under David Ben-Gurion with the notorious Stern Gang.  Had he been a Palestinian Arab doing the same thing he would have been a terrorist.  We fell in love and were soon married.  We both became horrified to witness that, perhaps at a lesser intensity, we were treating the Palestinians much as the Nazis had treated us Jews.  We were expected to despise our conscience and to tolerate, or worse, to accept and endorse this kind of wholesale barbarism.  Neither am I prepared to white-wash the Palestinian atrocities against the Israelis.  No people is immune to the stupidity of violence.  We emigrated from Israel to the United States, in reverse to many of our Jewish compatriots.  We settled in a small town in Nevada with the full intention of observing the nuclear weapons being openly tested almost in our back garden.  Our house soon became an unlisted tourist attraction as gormless visitors from all over the continent came to witness the spectacle.  Living in the shadow of the Mushroom Cloud in those days, we remained for the greater part innocent and blissfully ignorant of the impact of what we were being subjected to.  People still believed everything their governments told them.  Not Sam.  He would lock us both indoors, sealing shut the windows.  They thought of us as cranks and spoilsports.  But we knew that our health and our environment were being seriously jeopardized.  We became Quakers, then we returned to Israel where till they expelled us five years later we attempted to build bridges of reconciliation between Jews and Arabs.  I am still barred from that country.  We moved here to Canada where we expected to encounter an environment that would better foster our ideals of peace, community and international co-operation.  This country has been very good to us.

            “In 1976 Sam was first diagnosed with cancer.  We already knew that it was from the nuclear contamination we’d been previously exposed to in Nevada.  The following year, in a less advanced stage, I was given the same diagnosis.  In my case, the cancer has remained in remission.  My husband was not so fortunate.  Like many others we launched  lawsuits against the American government.  They still remain in full denial, total

impunity.

            “The infamous White Train is one of the nuclear weapon’s industry’s dirtier state secrets.   From Alamogordo in New Mexico all the way to the Trident Base in Bangor Washington just across from the border here, this train has been carrying its murderous cargo of nuclear warheads.  For my husband this was particularly traumatic.  Ever since he was crammed into one of the cattle cars that were shipping the Jews and other, er, undesirables, off to D--, he has refused to travel anywhere by train.  “Now we are carrying bombs instead of Jews”, he would say, “And now they’re going to destroy everyone.”  Sam was already too sick to do anything, so I went alone where I joined with others where we held vigil together in Washington State against the White Train and its horrific cargo.  In silence, last November, two hundred of us were gathered on the tracks, where we fell to our knees, right in the path of the oncoming White Train.  While we expected that it would stop, each one of us was prepared to give up our lives, to see this nuclear cargo stopped.  The state police rounded us up, detained us overnight, then expelled us the following day.  Twice I have held vigil against the White Train and I expect to return there again and again and again, where we will continue to hold vigil, until every white train bearing such lethal cargo is permanently stopped, and every sword and nuclear weapon is dismantled and beaten into the ploughshares of peace.”

 

 

 

            In the Pitstop, following the Walk for Peace, they sat together on a stage in the back.  Their table held three brass candelabras festooned with grisly looking bright red tapers.  Bryan sat next to Carol, who felt stranded with him, and Margery, who she already liked, sat to her right.  Randall, a friend of Glen’s who’d suddenly appeared, occupied the head of the table.  Glen was seated across from Carol, flanked by Dwight and Stephen.  In Victoria, Carol almost lost her virginity to Randall.

            Stephen was scowling into his coffee, resisting every one of Glen’s gentle overtures of conversation.  He had created an entire space around himself, his own personal microclimate.  To Carol he appeared rather to be surrounded by a forcefield, or minefield.  She did not want to think about minefields, nor of Richard’s far-flung body parts—in the crotch of a mahogany rested the hand that once so tenderly caressed her perfect breasts.  And that beautiful head? Whither now my beloved’s head, severed and tossed across the mountains of Central America?  Dwight she found particularly interesting.  His glasses lent him a certain bookishness.  A playwright?  And what was Margery’s connection with him?  There was a likeness there, a certain saturnine energy.  And Margery?  Carol couldn’t put her finger on it.  She had the wary grace of a wild exotic creature that had just stepped out of the forest.  An arresting, unconventionally beautiful woman.  Stephen and Bryan alone appeared to be miserable.  Bitter.  Friends of Glen, who was certainly not in the least bitter.  The complete opposite to bitter. His sister had just left.  They didn’t look at all alike.  One of them was adopted?  Nervy woman.  Just the type of tarted-up trailer trash party slut that Carol had always shunned.  Marlene, Glen’s sister, managed this café, this gay establishment, though she herself surely wasn’t a lesbian.  Still, she wasn’t sure if she could tell. “Gay” was perhaps a misnomer?  Almost anyone here might make themselves welcome among this diverse and eclectic clientele.  The mad, funky and eclectic décor resembled much of the clutter that Carol had crammed into the apartment when she was married to Stan.  The candelabras—three of them with four tines each, just so, with Art Nouveau serpents coiled around the stems, and the tines were all serpentine, sensuous twists, and the brass was just so.  Carol had picked them up second-hand, nearly six years ago at an upscale garage sale.  Such a coincidence.  To Bryan she did give a token of her attention, which was marginally better than having to make conversation with Randall, whom she hadn’t seen in nearly a decade. He had lavishly complimented Carol on her speech and she was flattered.  He was still handsome.  Still irritating.

            Bryan was on about his childhood in Oshawa—no, Ottawa.  They were both cities in Ontario, and for different reasons, neither place held any interest for Carol.  Bryan had attended a private school, had one or two or three thousand awards for his academic excellence, and now he was wasting his career and his life taking care of the less fortunate, when he could be finishing the novel he had begun writing while in his early twenties.  Having a PhD in English, he regarded literature as his only true vocation.  He had written his doctoral thesis on the gnostic influences in Milton’s Paradise Lost.

            When he overheard Margery describing to Glen how her own experience of being sexually assaulted had motivated her into participating in the founding of a shelter and advocacy service for battered and sexually exploited women Bryan said in a tone that Carol did not like, “So then, Margery, would you still consider yourself a radical femin-IST?”

            “I don’t consider myself a radical anything these days.”

            “Do you still approve of a-BORTION?”

            “This is an inquisition?”

            “I’d like to know.”

            “I don’t have to tell you anything.”

            “You murdered both your children, Margery.”

            “Don’t start with me, Bryan.”  In her left hand she was clutching onto a serviette.

            “Tell all these good people, Margery, from where you and I owe the pleasure of knowing each other.”

            Dwight said, “Let’s give it a rest, eh, Bryan?”

            “I’m not talking to YOU!” he shrilled.

            “I think I can handle this, Dwight”, Margery said.  “Hey everybody.  I have something to say, and I want all of you to listen, please.  Glen, Randall.  Stephen, you too.  Listen, all of you.  Okay?  Do I have everyone’s attention?  Thank you.  Now, Bryan, I am going to talk about the House of Unconditional Love.  This was the name given to a therapeutic community, rather like a Christian transition house for ex-mental patients.  I had been misdiagnosed with schizophrenia, following a devastating breakdown and suicide attempts six years ago.  I had been the less than willing participant in having an abortion that my lover at the time—a woman—had pressured me into.  The father of the child, with whom I’d had a six month fling, returned to England, as ignorant of the fact as I was that I was carrying his child.  When I found out, I told Megan, who couldn’t digest the fact of my loving a man as much as I loved her.  I stupidly yielded to her pressure.

            “The women in our collective—we were all lesbians—assured me, after I had the abortion, that I’d done the right thing.  I tried to agree with them.  You know, it was like being part of a religious cult.  Radical lesbian feminists, like any other in-group, have their own unique dogma, and one simply agrees with it because that’s the atmosphere into which one becomes submerged.  But the dogma doesn’t necessarily reflect reality.  And the reality was, that I loved that child I was carrying.  I wanted that child.  But Megan and the women’s collective had this incredible power over me.  With Warren, my English lover, I almost broke free.  But then he left, and I had inside me this wonderful remnant of our love together, who would soon emerge as our child.  But I was again vulnerable, fragile, alone.  I began again to lean hard on Megan and the other women for support.  I fantasized that together Megan and I would raise the child.  That he would be ours.  Together.

            “Well, Megan thought differently.  I wanted to please her.  I didn’t want to lose her support.  I was afraid of falling into a bottomless chasm without having her, or somebody, to help bear me up.  So, I had the abortion.  My second.  The first happened when I was seventeen, the result of rape.

            “They told me I’d be just fine, that I had done the right thing.  The depression was devastating.  I couldn’t get out of bed, I became terrified of people.  I wanted to die. Megan refused to accept the legitimacy of my depression.  She thought that she could shock me out of it by springing on me an exhibit of paintings that depicted aborted fetuses.  She didn’t even tell me where we were going.  But she was used to getting her way, since no one would dare stand up to her.  So, I obediently followed Megan into the art gallery.  That was my breaking point.  I walked away from her. I bought some sleeping pills at the pharmacy, then I checked myself into the Sylvia Hotel for a little suicide-by-the-sea.

            “I went from the psyche ward to the House of Unconditional Love.  Bryan became my Svengali, and while I was dosed on medications, I did his bidding.  Whatever he wanted.  He was Pygmalion.  He reconstructed my life for me.  In his own image.  I was too drugged out passive to fight, resist, or even care.  His intentions were unimpeachable.  He was slowly killing me.  Not that I’m complaining.  He did get me into that nursing program, and now I have a good, if difficult job because of him.  It was a trade-off.  Whoever I was, I wasn’t myself.  I had turned into a pliant, obedient zombie.

            “Everything changed when I quit taking my meds.  It was like being reborn.  I was assigned to a new psychiatrist, who declared that my diagnosis was bogus.

            “Bryan, I’m sorry.  I’m truly and deeply sorry that things didn’t turn out as you’d expected. And you have helped me.  But I also needed to know when it was time to detach from you, to reclaim my autonomy.  You were like a wounded healer.  I couldn’t for ever be your damaged little rose petal.  I felt like an extension of you, I felt like your satellite.  That you were Jupiter and I was one of your moons. 

            “When I left the House of Unconditional Love I married Peter.  Like you Bryan, he is an alcoholic.  He was like a homeopathic dose for freeing me from your control   I’m divorced now, even though I’m living with him again.  But seeing you now Bryan for the first time in almost five years I realize that I haven’t yet set you free from me.  And right now I want to do that.  So Bryan I’m setting you free.  I forgive you everything.    And please forgive me for my lack of gratitude.  Forgive me, Bryan.”

            Slowly, Margery’s left hand released the seviette which tumbled, a crumpled origami sphere onto the table.  As tears streamed down her face, the sphere began to loosen and become undone.  In spite of the surrounding noise, crowd and chaos, a tight attentive silence had overtaken everyone at the table, isolating them like a tiny island surrounded by churning water.  Bryan without replying without saying a word without even looking at Margery nor at anyone else at the table got up, produced his wallet out of which he fumbled for his share of the bill, setting the money under his plate.  As though concealing himself in a protective darkness he shrouded himself in his trench coat, wrapping it tight around his body and briskly walked out of the Pitstop.