So. What.
You ever know a kid who says he’s in love, and then a little time passes, maybe even a lot of time, and he tells you he’s fallen out of love? Instead of just saying, “Look, I thought I was in love, but it turns out I was wrong,” this kid twists the whole thing around. Because you can’t fall out of love, right? You fall in love forever. Any kid who says otherwise — he’s either a fool or a snake. He’s misunderstanding the meaning of the word, or twisting the meaning deliberately. I think usually the latter, he’s usually a snake. Either way, his word is worthless. And I don’t want to be that kid. I don’t want to be anything like that kid. You don’t either. I know you that well, at least. We’re alike in that way.
With loyalty, it’s different, though. You and I, I mean. We’re different on that. Loyalty’s as permanent as being in love for me. Not so for you, which is probably one reason why none of my imaginary speeches to imaginary Gurions were able to get across what needed getting across.
This morning, in C-hall, I asked you what would happen if a friend of yours got into a fight with someone you had given your loyalty but not your friendship. Your answer came fast and easy. You said you’d side with your friend.
I don’t get that, though. For me, if you give your loyalty to someone once, you’ve given it forever. For me, in order to be truly loyal, you have to be loyal despite preference and hardship — even despite betrayal by the person you’ve given your loyalty to. Which means you can’t let your heart govern your loyalties, right? Your heart’s the first thing you have to lock down. Because your heart’s what bucks the hardest against the loyalties that are hardest to maintain; and those loyalties — the ones that are the hardest to maintain — their maintenance is the only real measure of your loyalty.
So then how do I decide, right? How do I decide, if a friend of mine gets into a fight with someone who has my loyalty but not my friendship — how do I decide who to side with? I can answer just as quickly and easily as you. I decide by duration — by the loyalties’ ages. That’s the only way. It’s a heartless way, but that’s why it’s reliable; that’s why it’s consistent. I solved the whole problem when I was nine years old and I had to choose who to live with. I liked my father better. He was a sober marine who taught me to curse and to swim, but I chose my mom, who was always screaming and falling down. I didn’t want to choose, because to choose was to betray one of them, but I had to choose so I chose her because she’d carried me, and that’s what I told the both of them. I’d been with her longer and that was that. This solution’s a good one, because it’s so simple. You can’t really fuck with it. You side with the one you’ve been loyal to longer because time is an absolute. Time isn’t subject to the whims of your heart. It can’t be interpreted, and therefore it can’t be misinterpreted, willfully or un-. Can you see where this is going yet? Probably you can, so before I get there, I need to go somewhere else.
What happened in Nurse Clyde’s during Lunch today had no part in the choice I made once we were in the two-hill field, but I know you’ve got your hypotheses, Gurion, you always have your hypotheses, and I don’t want you to think I was in possession of motives unknown to me, so here:
Yes, Slokum and I were best friends until he betrayed me for a blood loyalty — everyone knows that. And yes, lately you’ve been my best friend, and — in Nurse Clyde’s office — I found out you’d betrayed me for a tribal loyalty. And yes, despite your betrayal being far smaller than Slokum’s, it gave me flashes of Slokum’s, and I thought of Jelly, and I thought of what you’d said to me in the library on Tuesday about conversion and Israelites, and I worried you and I would soon become enemies. But no, that was not a lasting worry at all. I pulled the fire alarm, the moments proceeded slowly, as my most anguished moments always do, and by the time everyone got outside, I was over it. “Gurion’s not Slokum,” I thought. I thought: “His Israelites aren’t Geoff Claymore… He isn’t ditching me… He just has to get his loyalties straight…” Etcetera. I saw I didn’t have to get fucked up just because you were. I’m not the one in love with a girl his own people won’t accept — you are. I’m not the one whose own people fear and shun him. That guy is you. And I don’t see why anyone — let alone anyone you’ve never actually met — should have your loyalty just because they share some distant ancestry with you. Maybe that’s because I don’t really have people, just a couple friends and a mom, but either way, when it comes to Jelly: I love her, and I don’t care so much what you or anyone else think about that, as long as you don’t try to interfere. And you hadn’t and haven’t tried to interfere, and you haven’t given any sign that you would. And by the time we were out in the field, I was all sorted out.
By the time we were out in the field, I was ready to laugh with you about pulling the alarm, how I knew I’d get away with it (I went straight to Miss Pinge and said “Is this a drill?” and Pinge said it wasn’t, and I said, “Miss Pinge. I don’t wanna die. I don’t wanna!”). But then you were in the air, in the hands of my arch-enemy. And I did nothing to help you. And in a certain light — certainly a very certain light (I’m not trying to get off the hook on a technicality) — I betrayed you.
I need to explain about Bam now, my original best friend Bam, my first friend ever, the one who claims, though never out loud, my third-oldest loyalty (apart from my parents, I can’t remember anyone before kindergarten, which is when Bam and I became friends), the one who held you helpless in the air.
I am loyal to Bam Slokum because at the age of five I claimed to be, and if I were to now side against him with anyone other than my own parents, it seems to me that all other loyalties I have ever claimed would become dubious. Dubious in FACT, even if not in my heart. I would be no better than that kid who says he’s fallen out of love. And I would be the snake variety of that kid, because I would know what I was doing. To side with anyone other than my parents against Bam Slokum would make me a worthless snake, Gurion.
And let me be clear on this: I’m not scared of Bam. He knows it, too. SLOKUM DIES FRIDAY — on his locker, on the walls, the floor, desks. I write it and everyone sees it, and they know it’s me who wrote it because Bam tells them. But THEY don’t matter to me. What matters to me is that BAM sees it, SLOKUM DIES FRIDAY, and when he sees it, he knows how I despise him, but he also knows that I’m loyal despite his betrayal, that his betrayal lost him the friendship of a truly loyal human being; a guy whose loyalty is able to tolerate his own hatred of its very object. Or maybe not. Maybe he doesn’t see that. I don’t know. That all seems a little crazy when I see it written down, but that’s what I hope, or at least what I’ve hoped.
In either case, SLOKUM DIES FRIDAY is both a provocation to fight and an expression of loyalty. If I weren’t loyal to him, I would write something other than SLOKUM DIES FRIDAY. And he knows exactly what I would write — how easy it would be for me to just add the one word — and he doesn’t want it written, and that is the provocation, that is the threat: that I could write that word if I wanted to. But still I don’t write that word. I don’t write it for the same reason I don’t disclose it here and for the same reason I don’t swing on him when we pass in the halclass="underline" because as long as I am not being assaulted by him, I have to protect him — loyalty demands it. I think he knows that, too, although, again, writing it down makes it seem a little crazy——
But that’s not as important, whether he knows I’m loyal. What’s important is I know. What’s important is you know.