Sometimes we still can’t believe it all happened. Maybe that’s why we decided to write an account: so that we’d believe it again. Because it doesn’t make any sense for us to have been there. Well, obviously some people will say we want to wax nostalgic for those days forever, because we have nothing else. That’s both true and untrue: we don’t have anything else, but that doesn’t mean we’re interested in nostalgia. People don’t believe that sometimes we’d rather not remember, because every memory brings a bundle of little gestures belonging to the people who died—a smile, a wink, fingers running through hair, a slight stutter, a slice of bread kneaded into a ball: the motions of life. When the dead surface in your memory, frozen like statues, there is something logical about their death. Neatly packaged bereavement. But when the dead keep moving inside your memory, their motion rips acceptance into shreds, and the pain attacks you.
Sometimes the dead would compete for our attention. We’d talk about one of them, and another would spray memories on us, and then we’d talk about him for a bit, ’cause we didn’t want to be unfair, and then another one would flicker while the others got a bit dull. Bottom line, we’d sit around together, each talking about a different dead person, and no one would listen, we just mumbled shit, and each one had the dead people they were devoted to. In the end we stopped because we realized there was nothing comforting about it. On the contrary: when we’re together and our minds are split up between different dead people, it heightens the recognition that each of us carries his dead alone. Maybe we shouldn’t meet at all. Every time we do, the spaces between us become more concrete than our bodies. This might sound extreme, but it’s clear to us that for the rest of our lives, every time we say “we,” we will mean all the people who lay on the grass in the village all those mornings. That is the most complete picture we have, and it will always be attached to every picture of the present.
There are a few good reasons to write this account. The dead—that’s a good reason, ostensibly. We don’t mean all the dead, we mean our dead, the people we knew, the ones who were with us at the butcher’s, in County Clare, in the Liverpool flat, in the Overton Road flat. We mean the people we loved. We know it’s accidental that they died and we lived on, and that we don’t owe them anything—we did the exact same things and ended up a bit luckier. We got life and they got history. But in some sense we are equal—we are all defined by one act alone, and there will never be anything else. All of us, the living and the dead, will always be the people from the worldwide strike. We have no illusions that life will hand us anything bigger. We’re not totally naïve. Or rather—not anymore.
The dead? Well, we gradually understood that they don’t need this account. That might sound like an odd thing to say, but the dead have not been wronged. Not only because they’re dead, but because they have lots of disciples—“agents of memory,” someone called them, and we liked that term. There are lots of people who love them, although of course there are even more people who vilify them. They are controversial. But we don’t have disciples and we’re not controversial. On us, there is rare accord among all parties; for us, everyone has contempt.
Maybe that’s fair. We’re not claiming we deserve special treatment. We understand the role the world assigned us—we are the superfluous remnants of the strike, and the more pathetic we are, the greater the post-strike sobriety. Now people can say: Look at those doormats! How could they have inspired anyone? And there’s a lesson for the future, too: Remember them when someone else turns up; remember how you believed in a gang of hooligans who sold you stories about a better world; seeing them now, you’re ashamed, aren’t you?
Lots of people say that the forces who tried to stop the strike make fun of us now because they’re afraid, because they understand that nothing is over. We lit fires all over the world. You can’t always see them, but they’re still smoldering. Every day new groups get together and make declarations. Some vanish quickly, others hang around, but the point is that everyone knows it’s going to happen: the winds that will fan those flames are coming together now; in fact, they’re already here. We just happened to be the harbingers of the inevitable. That’s what they say.
Well, we have no idea whether or not that’s true. We’re not here to interpret current affairs. Besides, everyone has their own opinion. This document is actually a compromise between several opinions, several consciousnesses, several memories.
People don’t believe us when we insist we don’t want to remember. They think it’s just another trick to become famous, a desperate ruse so we can play the meager cards we have left for just a while longer. Everyone suspected we wanted to be celebrities, and when it didn’t happen they decided we wanted to come back as celebrities of a different kind. Despicable types always believe everyone else is at least as despicable as they are. Lots of sources even accused us of killing David after we found out about his deal with the New York production company. It doesn’t matter that there’s credible evidence that he was lying on the ground in Trafalgar Square with a tennis-ball-sized hole in his head, the kind of hole that a baton makes after a hundred blows. And it doesn’t matter that we didn’t know anything about the movie deal until the company issued a press release expressing their sorrow over the untimely death of their scriptwriter. Then they claimed there was a binding contract and demanded that we give them whatever David had written. We found twenty pages and burned them without reading a word. We came to regret doing that. Elizabeth said there was something we didn’t understand about the whole worldwide-strike story, which was that people are scum, and they deserve the existing order—after all, they created it. Maybe the world we live in is the obvious conclusion of human nature.
But the spaces between us, which mark the place where the dead used to be, they’re not even the biggest spaces. In fact, “space” isn’t exactly the right word. “The region that froze,” we call it. They keep asking us: Did you really believe it would happen? Worldwide strike, one billion strikers, international congress? They mockingly point out all sorts of calculations we should have made—governments, unions, media, ethnic identities, part-time workers, the fact that no one had ever done it before—things that might sound reasonable today, but for us, at the time, they were nothing more than the rustling of leaves. Here is the best description of our mood: something was simmering inside us, and we can’t explain how it happened or how much it had to do with the strike, with the lives we led before we met, with the way we clung to each other, with our loathing of this world, but we slowly came to feel a strange warmth in our ribs, our belly, our legs, our temples. We don’t like the newspapers’ terms for it—“messianic,” “group ecstasy,” “brainwashed”—but our faith in the idea, in the group that came together? Nothing could stand up to that. It finished off doubts, crushed obstacles, instilled hopes, and if a dozen of them shattered it instilled new ones. It gave us something to hold on to. Not all the time, of course, and sometimes there were doubts. As we’ve said before, nothing moves in one single direction all the time in the human mind. Sometimes one of us felt the warmth dissipating, but then he stuck to the group and it recharged him, because without that warmth, everything (the storeroom, the village, our ideas, the people around us) loses meaning, and you don’t understand how you ended up here.
The thing is that back then we didn’t feel especially passionate, and we couldn’t define the feeling in words. We understood the warmth later, when that region inside us started getting cold and we were full of dread and uncertainty, and every motion seemed useless. It’s as if someone sucks out the source of warmth that motivated you and that region inside you gradually cools down until it freezes. It seems illogical that the passage of time, and not much of it, could have effected such a profound change. And this is the crux of the fundamental flaw in our account: it was written from inside a region that froze. We slid on it, we kicked it, we dug into it with our hands, we injected it with memories, and maybe for a few flickering moments, we felt something of the warmth that used to be there, but no more than that. So we can describe events and discussions and secrets, even certain feelings, and we can tell a lot of stories about the events that led to the greatest worldwide strike in history (whenever you mock us, remember that). But at the end of the day, even if we want to believe otherwise, we can’t really describe the people we were and the spirit that engulfed those people, and we can’t see the world through their eyes. We have no access to that place. It’s like we said: we wrote this from inside a region that froze.