“We’re going to go back out,” Rusty was saying, an index driven into the flat of his palm. “We’ve got to make a statement.” Susan was looking at Vincent as though she might soon take his temperature, send him back to bed.
“Go ahead,” he answered. “Free country.” He crossed his legs at his ankles, his position clear.
“Is this not real to you,” Rusty said. “Is there a fucking thing on fire that would matter to you?”
He didn’t rush getting up, remembering his yellow cardigan, his package of mints on the vanity. There was a side exit down the hall, the door minor characters passed through after speaking one line, and he took it.
EVEN HE COULD SEE THAT the photo was unfortunate. The security guards reaching from either side toward the boy in the mask, a fist already at the collar, Vincent’s wrist bent up high like someone keeping a treat from an unruly dog. The band of water not yet broken by the hidden face. WHO’S AFRAID OF A LITTLE MONKEY? read a headline.
Two weeks after this came a call at home, the red phone that had almost stopped ringing. Elise was watching tennis, bare feet tucked under, a thumbnail in her mouth. He heard the grunts of the players as the president’s voice came through, saying something about POWs. Would he do a tour in support of them.
“I will have to consider this,” he said, which meant he would not.
Elise read the piece, when it came in the paper, section C, and left it folded back on the table—Rusty’s smile the same next to the young men in wheelchairs as it had been next to aging queens. Vincent did not read that article about the war, or any others.
13.
Wright woke up to his bags packed, even the stones he had collected cleared from the dresser, and traveled to the airport in pajamas in protest. Fay hadn’t told him sooner, she said on the plane to San Francisco, because she wanted him to absorb all the things he loved about his life in a sincere way, unfiltered by worry about the future. He knew that was the smallest part of the answer, and spent the line in the airport thirsty because he was sobbing, sobbing because he was thirsty. The heft came, he was sure, from Randy, who had sent more mail in their last month there than he had in the last six, whose general agitated personality seemed to have sharpened, clarified. Their last night at the inn, unable to sleep, Wright had heard Randy in the courtyard, reading to Fay, a clipped chain of words that changed his voice and substituted the anger there for certainty. He had known they were words on a page because he had never heard Randy speak that way, without interruption or angry discursion, without a fuck or a sigh. Make no mistake. The wealth of the United States of America is the blunt consequence of its imperialist relations with other quote-unquote less developed countries, of the labor and natural resources we have stolen or abused. The Pan Am jet you rode to visit your aunt, your angora cardigan with the pearled buttons, the television you worship, the bananas you pack in your children’s lunches, the tires on your family sedan and the oil that makes it go—all of these things are not, have never been, will never be yours. They were made in and are the rightful property of the rest of the world, of Venezuela and Vietnam and the Philippines, of all the lives you the American public have conveniently forgotten.
The illuminated icon of a seat belt had just gone off and Randy was walking the aisle, grabbing headrests with his right and left hands, breathing in an audible way. Before him the soda he had emptied and peanuts he’d devoured, Wright could hardly bear to look down the foot-wide stretch of carpet. Randy had stopped, had placed his left fingers on a seat a foot in front of him and kicked his right leg back and up. His right hand met his right ankle as he leaned farther forward, his eyes closed in what Wright knew was the Dancer. It was a position he had watched his mother take for long minutes in the middle of the jungle he already missed, calling out nat-a-ra-ja-sa-na, hinging at her hip, flying a flexed arm before her.
People had begun to notice, to look to and from Randy, to their seat partners and the people across the aisle. Fay, in the middle seat, read a book and ruffled Wright’s hair and smiled benignly, unmoved. He had just pressed his hot forehead to the ovular window when he heard a flight attendant begin to speak, using another voice than she had when offering Cola juice coffee tea liquor? Cola juice coffee tea liquor?
“Sir, I’m going to ask you to return to your seat now.”
“Why’s that.”
“What you’re doing is unsafe for you and your fellow passengers.”
“Why’s that.”
Wright could tell, by the tightness of Randy’s speech, that he was still in the posture.
“Should there be any turbulence, you could injure yourself and others. I need you to return to your seat, sir.”
“The sign’s off. The announcement said ‘feel free to stretch your legs.’ What am I doing here but that, do you think? Is it possible that you’re just a little uncomfortable with how I’ve chosen to express myself here? Is it possible that some honesty might do both of us a favor here, ma’am? Betty?”
For reasons he didn’t understand, because he wanted to mainline shame, Wright tore himself from the window and sat up on his knees to watch. He could see that Randy had released the pose and was standing on both feet.
“If you don’t return to your seat now, I’m going to have to report this to the pilot, sir, and he’ll—”
“No need for that, Betty. It’s a beautiful country we live in, the US of A, don’t you think?”
When he returned to them he kissed Fay with force, a hand slipped under the far side of her neck, and then he brought the metal tooth on his lap into its buckle.
“Better tighten those seat belts, folks,” he said, loud enough that the three heads in front of them, white and blond and brown, turned.
IN THE BEGINNING THE COUNTRY—HIS country—was beautiful to him, and they saw so much of it, the purple sand on the beaches of Big Sur, the eaves of Victorians in Syracuse piled with snow. Somehow Randy and Fay had returned to America with so many friends, people who hugged them at the door and brought them into rooms where there were countless others, smiling and waving. They napped like puppies on floors where cushions had been placed like puzzle pieces, Wright pressed against his mother and pushed to sleep by the sounds of fifteen people breathing. Sometimes the houses were bigger, and the three of them had a door they could close, and others he was banished to play in yards that were barely that, anemic patches of grass bordered by warped chain-link fences. There was that word again, the one Randy had spoken like a rule so often at the end of their time at the inn, everywhere. Shelter.
A kid named Ocean explained it to Wright, what it was their parents were doing, what the maps spread on the floors indicated, what the shopping bags they were always bringing were full with if not food. He was ten and more freckled than not, his hair cardinal red and unbrushed down his back, his teeth all at war with each other. He stole his mother’s Salems and kept them behind his translucent ear.
“My mother wouldn’t bomb anything,” Wright said. It was late November, somewhere in upstate New York, the sky a deep and undifferentiated gray, and all he had on was a wool cardigan Lucinda had knitted him, a loose weave that did nothing to protect him from the weather. They had been at this house a week, long enough to suggest they would probably be here another. If there were something on the ground he could have kicked he would have, but there was nothing of any weight, some colorless twigs, the linked plastic rings of a six-pack.
“Sure she would. What do you think she brought you to a whole other continent for? To see the White House?”
“In the summer we’re going to—”
“Grand Canyon? Niagara Falls?”
Unaccustomed to being mocked, the only response he could fashion was silence. On the cuff of his long-sleeve shirt there was a patterning like lace where he had chewed it, and he put it in his mouth again, tasting the spit from yesterday trapped there.
Ocean kept his shoulders close to each other, his lips open only as much as was necessary to get the words o
ut. The few other children were undecided about him, sometimes seeking his approval about things they made or found, lanyards or foreign coins, sometimes leaving whichever unheated room he had entered in his deteriorating blue parka, its bits of polyester filling escaping in tufts. All Wright wanted, on that miserable patch of dead grass and concrete, was some leaves. The world without any green felt acutely unsafe, a place where rest and privacy were impossible.
“What are they bombing,” he said, his eyes on the maroon Saucony sneakers Fay had bought him during their layover in the Miami airport, his first brand-name shoes. He asked the question with a kind of insouciance he was just learning, a behavioral experiment of the many that made up his life now, pushing the syllables out of his mouth like they didn’t mean anything. Profanity he tested when he thought he was out of earshot, while he was on the toilet. Fuck you, he would say, then Fuck me—something he’d heard his mother exclaim in bad traffic, her hand smeared down the gearshift.
“What are they bombing?”
“You name it, anyplace that belongs to the politicians and the pigs. Police stations. Courthouses.” In Ocean’s phrasing, in the guttural way that he said pigs, there was the voice of his mother. Annabelle made soap of ash and butter, and she wore a braid that she often held curled around her fist as she spoke from a door frame, and the stories about her were like a perfume she wore, invasive once you were close enough. She had a law degree from Columbia and had once performed an abortion in the back of a moving van. His mother had mentioned these bits of her biography to him the first time they’d met, her voice low down in the thrill of it.
“Why.” The question was too simple, that of a child much younger, and Wright was finding it harder to keep up the posture of someone who didn’t care, given the wind coming in the loose weave of the sweater, the pit bull barking on the other side of the leaning fence. His English had an accent that got in the way of him, and the late afternoon in winter in the Northeast looked to him completely incorrect, like the world had been shaken of all that was good about it.
The other five children were moving closer to the conversation, and seeing this Ocean pulled a match from his parka, dragged it across the bottom of his shoe, put a Salem in his mouth, and started to smoke it. Today he held it between his middle and ring fingers, an affect he was trying on.
“There are about as many reasons as there are people in New York City, which is six-point-five million, which I know because I was born there. Why because the government doesn’t care about other cultures and it makes our teenage boys go off and die and it’s poisoning Vietnam’s natural resources.” Ocean was playing at conviction, Wright could sense that, and he could feel that he was going to push back, as he did against his mother, work him until he ran out of rehearsed answers. The way he was angry had started to become the way he was.
“But why bomb if bombing is what they’re doing? Isn’t that like saying it’s all right, to, to—” He looked for the word. “To ruin?”
“No, idiot. It’s saying what you’re doing is not going unwatched! It’s saying that destroying others will lead to others destroying you! It’s saying—”
“That we’re not any smarter. That we couldn’t come up with anything better.” He felt his shoulder blades spreading as he said so, his body opening to the argument. His breath reached all the way back. Then his head hit the ground. Before the pain settled he was almost happy for the warmth it provided, every cell inside rushing to alert him to what had just happened, embracing him in that way. He knew Ocean was hissing over him, Wright’s wrist in his hand, and then he felt it, the real heat making its way inside him, the Salem deep in the pad of his palm.
Later, as they sat in a room upstairs on the only square foot that was not stacked with mimeographed papers, his mother treated and bandaged his hand. Fay told him how sorry she was, that the burn would become a scar, that Ocean was a smart kid but not blessed with any patience, that eventually it would fade, but Wright would fixate on it for months after, the wound his opinion had gotten him. He would check it like a clock.
14.
NEWBURGH, NEW YORK, 1970
The other people with children had peeled off, vanished like the soft part of a body during some season of trauma, revealing only the mangy thing beneath. He and Ocean were the only ones who remained, and Wright kept as far from him as possible, pretending sleep in situations where it was inconceivable. Their positions on their mothers, their feelings about the movement that kept them in places like this, two-by-fours nailed over the windows, cockroaches so fearless and reliable you could name them, could not have been more different. Ocean had the look of someone waiting to be let in, a person underdressed and anxious at the door. He begged to attend the meetings.
All day Wright read, whatever he could, mildewed brochures on woodworking he found in the basements of the empty houses where they slept, paperback mysteries he stole from the drugstores where the adults bought saltines and batteries, Trollope and Austen he took from the shelves of libraries. He was ten. The more he populated his thinking with other text, he believed, the less he was vulnerable to the ideas of Shelter. He would hear one of those phrases they repeated so often, Destroy to rebuild, and mentally counter it with something he’d read, the more innocuous and benign the better, Joinery first requires common sense and reliable tools, picturing the phrase word by word in his mind until the angry spoken thing was gone.
In the privacy of his sleeping bag he fashioned a kind of helmet to keep out sound. Around his thickest socks he wrapped duct tape, pilfered from the collective supply closet, warping and massaging them until they resembled cups. They fit around his earlobes, connected by bands of tape, doubled for strength, which crossed his crown and circled his forehead. Over this went a knit cap, powder blue and bearing the monogram of a parochial school in Ohio. The absurdity of it, the bulkiness, made him look as removed as he felt. He owned few things and guarded them with all his energy, a pamphlet on the state parks of California he had long since memorized, a three-inch bureau that belonged to a dollhouse he’d never seen.
It was a certain type of meeting—louder than the rest and identifiable by peaks and lulls in which the members of Shelter slingshotted insults and reeled from those dealt them—that he had fashioned the contraption to avoid. They had named these sessions, called them Group Criticism. He had seen one first in Syracuse, from a landing on the stairs, his head pushed through the space left by a missing baluster. In the room below they had pushed everything to the borders, forming a crater of gapped wood flooring rimmed by books and folding chairs and piles of papers. Fay had stepped forward from the circle their bodies made, dressed as she had begun to in a thin suede jacket that obscured the beauty of her shoulders.
“Society cunt,” they said, “little queenie, are you gagging from that silver spoon.”
“Would you have gotten here without your daddy’s money in your pocket.”
“Without Randy’s cock in your mouth.”
“Think because you’re a grade-A fuck you’ll be exempt.”
“Think this is a rough game your parents will hear about.”
“Think because you’re a mother you deserve some other treatment.”
Watching it, the greatest wonder to him was how she took it, nodding sometimes, her biggest movement to bite off a crescent of pinky nail, her face like someone in the audience of a film, turned to something bigger than her, ready to feel what she had paid to. Finally she was absorbed back into the circle, and into the middle high-stepped Randy, his T-shirt worn to a kind of perforation, his sunglasses shadowing his face though there was not a lamp on in the squat.
“Here he is.”
“Such a hero for shooting off his finger.”
“What’d you shoot before that, how many kids.”
“Were you a good soldier. Rape some women for the hell of it.”
“Already burned their houses anyway.”
“Even if you didn’t you watched.”
“
Does being here make up for your time as a cog in the imperialist mechanism.”
“Such a revolutionary. Such a freethinker.”
“Never mind at the end of the day you want some woman to worship you. How’s it feel to be fucking a woman smarter than you.”
“How long until she says no more.”
“Two months.”
“A month.”
“How do you even get it up.”
Randy received it with his head tucked and his hands in the back pockets of his jeans, noiseless, but the way the wings of his hair moved betrayed him, how they twitched irregularly with the violent intake of his nostrils.
It was a way of systematically deconstructing the ego, his mother said, when she came to Wright later, a shape around his body sometime after midnight that woke him. Freeing it of its comfortable lies, so that the individual could recede and the revolutionary could step forward. He had not asked, had not even acknowledged the presence of her on the mattress except to scoot to its edge, and he hated the rehearsed way she had begun to speak, the built-in gravity of a perfected phrase. There were strings of days when he slept alone and others when her breath in his hair was like weather, and he didn’t know why, though he suspected it had something to do with Randy, how their relationship had changed.
A fight had raged for a week in the boarded-up house, which was heated only by the detritus burned in a cracked granite fireplace. Wright watched the splintered legs of end tables disappear into ash, cheap sneakers curl like dead leaves. The argument had begun with his mother and Randy and spread outward, sides drawn along gender lines and then dissolving in shame once that was apparent.
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