J. B. Thompson

A whispered “Hello. Guten tag.”

“Who is this?” — as if I didn’t know.

It is K., my reclusive, one might say paranoid, dear friend. He uses an encrypted cellphone, no number showing, no possibility of tracing.

“Freedom. Freiheit. It is to laugh.”

K. has been close to me, the Authorial Rabbit, for years, decades, in fact more than a century, since his first published works displaying the puzzlement of our various species’ limited minds.

“You are well?” I am sorry about the word even as I ask.

“Well? I’m double vaxxed, masked, distanced. I’m always distanced. But well? No.”

No surprise there.

K.’s voice is like a certain note, mote, in the ear, as when air pressure changes, in airplanes or on mountains. “You’ve seen them marching, the ‘freedom fighters,’ against vaccines, masked, distancing, science, governments, medical professionals, mandates. Blocking pathways to hospitals. Spitting and jeering.”

“Yes.”

K., for of course, he is the Writer, has written much about the befuddlers, “those,” he breathes, “who have fallen down holes, claim they battle down there for us, say — some of them — they love us, are taking up God’s banner on our behalf, they know what we cannot, we have been duped, not they.”

“They speak of tyranny.”

“It is to weep. And how they love to march in groups.”

“Good people, sane people, sympathetic, compassionate people march in groups too,” I suggest, thinking BLM, protecting the old growth, wanting no pollution, abhorring the prideful residential schools that incarcerated aboriginal children.

“Do they know about Muriel Gardiner?”

“Unlikely.”

“Do they know about Sophie Scholl and the White Rose?” K.’s silent laughter.

The line goes dead.

The AR calls another friend, the ever-patient M. A. Titmarsh, that illustrator of the vanity of all human wishes.

“K. just called.”

“Oh, oh.”

“He’s on about the anti-vaxx protesters and the PPC, the 800,000 in peaceful Canada, worried again, as always, about the rise of the fascists.”

“He’s right to worry. These people emerge from the sewers during crises because they are fearful; and their predisposition in fearful times, this small but noisy population, unlike those who turn in their fear to love and support others, is to hate and ride the high horse.”

I tell Titmarsh I’d recently read in a small city newspaper about freedom without responsibility as an adolescent concept, lifelong adolescence, the writer a columnist named Geoff Johnson.

“And your friend Cicero,” Titmarsh reminds me, “his emphasis to achieve the good life on clear thinking, on the understanding of consequences and the value of compassionate cooperation.”

“And we know what happened to poor Marcus Tullius,” I pine, thinking of his head and hands.

“They are dying grotesquely now. The karma is engaged.” Titmarsh points me to the story of the dead Floridian father, Robby Walker, emblematic of so many others whose families are left pleading after their loved ones’ deaths for people to get vaccinated and not leave behind wives, husbands, children, friends. “And remember the maiming and deaths by bleach and lately the de-worming drug Ivermectin.”

I say I read a story in the New York Times about the Moorish Sovereign Citizen Movement: a black woman who buys a house and arrives to find the locks changed and a man inside claiming the house is his, because American laws didn’t apply to him, he and his colleagues are above all that.

“Yes,” said Titmarsh, his laugh painful. “Like Canada’s Freemen on the Land. I love their legal chicanery, its elaborate adornments. And the followers who are drawn to them, who stop paying their taxes on their counsel and find themselves in jail when a judge is not impressed with their defence of themselves, their elaborate title scrolls used to flummox the gullible.”

“Such madness, such cruelty. Why?”

“Good TV series called 1864,” mentions my friend, about the delusion of the Danes in the nineteenth century, not without its Shakespearean references, in this case the old men and women sending the young men off to war against the Prussians and Otto von Bismarck, to claim the German territory of Schleswig-Hostein, to make it part of a greater Denmark. “Madness, madness, madness.”

“Why?” I repeat.

“You know why. Fear of death,” cries Titmarsh. “Death and sickness. They wait for us, there is no escape, and we know it even when we don’t know it. And so we deny, we pretend, we divert. And we hate those who do not join us in our fantasies. Impose our fantasies on them even if we have to kill them to make them believers.”

I shudder as I listen to the pause on the line.

“Time for my yoga.”

“Followed by forest bathing.”

“Take care, my friend.”

“And you.”