Lydy's Anarchist Revival Meeting

Conversations

The first time Violet heard a dead person talk, it was in the quiet of her living room, in the early afternoon.  If it had been late at night when she was in bed trying to sleep, or walking down the street worried about traffic and strangers, it would have been alarming.  But it was just her grandmother, making an acerbic comment about Dr. Oz, who was on in the background.  It was nothing she hadn't heard her grandmother say before, although it was odd to hear Granny’s lower-class Boston accent in Violet’s third floor Chicago flat.  As in life, Granny's voice was a bit nasal, with dropped Rs and the occasional additional R as if to make up for the losses elsewhere.  Granny had been a nurse, and her opinions about doctors were always a treat, at least if you were a cynic.  Violet was studying history and economics, and rapidly becoming at least as cynical as Granny.  She missed her grandmother, five years dead, and Granny’s voice that afternoon was comforting, not alarming.  

The next dead person she heard was Mark Twain.  He sounded exactly like Hal Holbrook, which reassured her that the dead voices were just a complicated hallucination.  She was a bit startled when it happened in the middle of a conversation with her professor.  Then Granny said something particularly scathing about men thinking they were smarter than they actually were.  It was an effort not to laugh in her professor's face.

She grew used to the company of the dead, or at least, the company of the voices of the dead.  After a particularly horrible argument with her boyfriend, George, Frank Herbert recited the Litany Against Fear, and she thought that it was very kind of Herbert.  It wasn't as helpful to her as it was to the characters in Dune, but it was better than chasing her own fears down a rabbit hole.  When she kicked George out, two weeks later, Betty Friedan had a couple of useful observations.  

She was surprised when the dead people started having conversations.  Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi had a wide-ranging argument about the acquisition and use of political power.  She was very disappointed with the way Karl Marx and Peter Kropotkin kept talking past each other, rather than talking to each other, and was vastly relieved when Emma Goldman turned up to call them both fools.  She was alternately fascinated and appalled to hear her grandmother and Abraham Lincoln discuss “the Negro race.”  She had forgotten, or perhaps had just ignored, how racist her grandmother was.  She hadn't really thought too much about Lincoln's views on the subject, either, and the whole conversation was both discomfiting and illuminating.  The day that Christopher Hitchens and Mother Teresa got into it, she put on a Ramones album very, very loud, to drown them out.  Her downstairs neighbor complained.  Robert A. Heinlein made a rude observation about her neighbor, which made her giggle.

Grad school was horrific and wondrous, in roughly equal measures.  The dead were now constant companions.  Occasionally they said things that were so smart and helpful she would incorporate those insights into her lectures.  Her grandmother's wry commentary was invaluable during departmental meetings.  She got a cat and named it Pushkin, but the furry beast refused to recite poetry.  It would, however, sit on her head in the morning and purr.  T. S. Eliot informed her that she should have named him Mungojerrie or Rumpelteazer.  She ignored Eliot.

She was unsurprised, when working on her dissertation, that Harriet Tubman and Thomas Jefferson showed up in the quiet hours of the night while she tapped on her keyboard.  “On Unpaid Labor as a Necessary Foundation of Capitalism: How Ending Slavery and Monetizing Women's Labor Affect the Structures of Capitalism” was, pretty obviously, something both of them would have opinions about.  She was taken aback, however, when Saint Augustine kept on showing up and commenting.  She tried to convince him to go argue with Kierkegaard or Knox or Luther, but he wasn't interested.  Augustine kept insisting that unpaid labor and original sin were connected.  Eventually, Violet decided that he had an interesting point, but one that didn't really support her central thesis.  Augustine made a snide comment about the intellectual capacity of women.  Violet was disappointed that Plato didn't show up to dispute that claim.

On the day of her defense, George Orwell made comments about fascism while she did her hair, and Ursula K. Le Guin said wise things about bravery while she put on lipstick.  Heinlein was spectacularly unhelpful with a series of aphorisms which didn't seem to apply, but Granny shooed everyone away, and said, “I love you, Boo.  Go show 'em what you're made of.”  

The voices of the dead became the soundtrack of her life.  They cheered her on when she got a tenured professorship, they suggested new and interesting lines of research, they chided her when she failed to do well by her students, and made ribald comments about Willis, whom she eventually married.  

Losing her best friend Dacia to a car crash was very hard;  Dacia's posthumous comments of support were no substitute.  Violet desperately missed sitting on Dacia's couch, drinking wine and complaining about the administration, or listening to Dacia excoriate the latest city planning nonsense.  Still, having Dacia's voice in her head was better than not having Dacia at all, though there were days when it just made Dacia's absence harder.  Dacia never got to meet Violet's son, Darren.  Violet always thought that they would have liked each other.  

The day Darren died, the voices went away.  Darren was 23, and was killed fighting a wildfire in New Mexico.  

Violet continued to work; she researched, published, and taught.  She was no longer brilliant, merely competent.  When her colleagues thought she couldn’t hear them, they would talk about how academics do their best work in their early years, reduced to refining their early novel insights in their later years.  Violet knew that this was hogwash, and could prove that with statistics, but it was true in her case.

Willis started keeping company with a lovely woman with two grown daughters.  Violet knew she hadn't been present in their marriage for years; not since Darren died.  She went to lunch with the two of them to discuss details.  Amelia was a delightful person, and Violet was happy for Willis.  In the end, what made sense was for Willis to move into Amelia's house, and for Violet and Willis to sell their house and split the proceeds. 

Violet bought a condo close to campus, a very modern building with no history, and no dead.  She wondered what Dacia would have said about it.  Dacia had been an architect, and had had decided and frequently scathing opinions about modern buildings.  Crossly, Violet thought that if Dacia really wanted her to know, Dacia could just tell her.  Darren would have wanted her to put up pictures, he loved vivid colors and striking images. But the blank white walls seemed to suit Violet.  Besides, there were bookshelves to break up the void, and Dacia and Darren were dead to her.

As much because she was bored as any other reason, she agreed to audit Gordon...Professor Whitcliff's course “The History of Work, the Last 3,000 Years.”  She rather liked Gordon; he was young and energetic, and insisted that her dissertation had changed his life.  Violet was not immune to flattery, but she also thought that he meant it.  At very least, he had read it, and much of her later work.  He was almost the same age that Darren would have been, had he lived, and she had to make an effort to think of Gordon as a full professor, rather than a student.  

She thought that the topic was a bit too ambitious, but Professor Whitcliff was asking interesting questions.   Much of the material was familiar, but he was making novel use of it.  He was drawing out interesting contrasts between the extremely different ways in which people envisioned the role of workers and the motivation for that work with the fact that the nature of the work itself remained, through all ages, the same.  

Late at night, Violet was reading the letters of an Irish woman who had entered into service in the Edwardian era.  The young woman's concerns were both alien and familiar, and Violet was fascinated by the way in which this girl, probably not more than sixteen, understood her work and her place in society.  While Violet was puzzling away at exactly what Bridget understood to be the role of the barrister who employed her, and how Bridget understood her relationship to the other members of his household, Violet heard Darren whisper, “Mommy, tell me a story.”

Violet dropped her book, and sat very still.  Dacia muttered, “Honestly, you might just as well have bought a crackerbox to live in, for all the character this has.”  And Darren said, “I like the story of the busy bee.  Can you tell me that one?”  It was some time before Violet was done crying.

The next day, after class, she and Gordon went for coffee.  She had a new line of research that she wanted  to pursue.  He was excited, and they sketched out a grant proposal over the next few days.  “How do you manage to pull together so many threads from so many places?”

Violet smiled.  “Life is just a conversation with the past.  And I’m a very good listener.”  Granny chuckled, and Catullus made a rude pun.