Nostalgia by M.G. Vassanji Page B

nice to have
you
here to share your insights with us, Pete. Thank you for coming. Now, shall I begin by asking—
    —Please do.
    —You’ve seen that tableau we just showed, I dare say.
    —Yes, I have—half a dozen times at least!
    —Yes—lest we forget! Consider this, Peter Crawford. Over
There
, in Barbaria, if I may so call that foul region, they
eat
people. Here we fear proximity—no, wait a minute, don’t we go about shielded by clouds of protective vapour, and creams and sheaths and gloves…we don’t actually even
touch
each other. Is this the price or gain of civilization? We shoot from far, clinically, they hack at each other until the blood spurts out and hits them in the eye…ugh.
    Peter Crawford, smiling knowledgeably, replies,—There’s something to be said for civilization and order, and a sense of privacy and decorum. Surely we are happy not to be going around leaving foul fumes in our wake.
    There is laughter, and Bill Goode takes a comical sniff at both his jacket sleeves before holding up his hand to silence the audience.—Okay, right—no foul fumes in our wake, but is there a danger we lose our perspective—our moral bearing if we don’t—
    —See the blood squirting out.
    Laughter. It appears that Peter, a veteran of such shows, has stolen the thunder from Bill, who waits with a smile before continuing.
    —Yes. Very droll, Pete—and I thought I was the comedian! But my point is this, Peter: we have moved away, as we agree, yet we are still so intimately connected to that savage disorder that rules over a good portion of the habitable earth. Explain that connection.
    Bill Goode stands back and waits in the manner of having thrown out a challenge. Peter Crawford takes it on.
    —Well, simply put, it is the yang to our yin. The id to our ego. The dark side of the same moon.
    —It is the source of our raw materials, you mean; and even though we can replicate climatic conditions at will almost, we still feel the need to visit there for the real experience, though at considerable risk. And we let a few of the Barbarians leak in through the Border every year, because we have to replenish our populations and gene balances andimmune systems. And we need their organs. Is that what you mean by yin and yang, Peter?
    Peter smiles broadly.—That’s a mouthful, Bill. But yes, that’s what I mean if you allow for the fact that we also
give.
We send assistance there, tons of; and to those who come here we give a better life, longevity—immortality, or the possibility of. They need us as much as we need them.
    —And so we are stuck with this uneasy relationship.
    —I’m afraid so. Some of us may wish to emigrate into exclusive space suburbs. But those of us who stay on this earth, and that’s most of us, can’t live in isolation from other populations. We can look away and smile in the sunshine, but they are there, Maskinia exists and festers, and once in a while an incident like this one happens.
    And so one more discussion recedes into the white noise of background chatter. The anchors and their experts must be aware that by going on so much about an issue, squeezing every novelty out of it, they leave it dead to the public’s sympathies. It’s just another horror, far away, about which most of us can do nothing, though governments will try. But Holly Chu’s fate somehow had done the trick on me; that scene playing out was not just another horror. It was
the
horror.
    —
    Long ago as a college student I did make my little visit there, behind the Border—to a corner of that region that’s not even a continuous stretch. (Why do we even call it the Long Border? Someone from Homeland with a topologicalmind thought it up, perhaps, seeing connections that escape the rest of us.) It was trendy to visit there, to complete your education, become aware of the less fortunate places of the world and at the same time be with friends on a holiday. It was spring break, and we had opted to miss March