Dissident Gardens

by Jonathan Lethem

  “Discipline, Lenny.”

  He shrugged, arched his Fuller Brushes, beckoned heaven with an upraised palm, evoking the full worldliness of a Yiddish stage ham’s rendition of Hamlet or Oedipus. “Then I’ll have to jerk in the foyer, where you can’t see.”

  Miriam flipped him the bird. “We’ve got a date with an astrologer, Lenny. I’ll see you another time.”

  “Wait.” With the same hand that had phantom-jerked, he now, horrifyingly, dug in his pants pocket. “Here.” He pressed something cool into Cicero’s hand. A zinc U.S. penny. Rose’s almighty Lincoln, rendered in tinfoil. Cousin Lenny lowered his voice. “Study that coin. If you persist you’ll find in it the whole secret law of history. The death of the United States of America rests there in your hand, kid. You can listen to it whisper if you hold your head close.”

  “I need to use the restroom,” said Cicero.

  Miriam took Cicero downstairs to the toilet, and then out of the chess shop, that library of souls, that grave of time. Onto the sidewalks of Greenwich Village, where 1969 was permitted to reassert itself, resume its animation and flow. Though as much a confabulation, surely, as that thickened portion of time trapped behind the chess mezzanine’s window, the present had the advantage of being still open to negotiation. Cicero had heard that all sorts of people lived in Greenwich Village. The thirteen-year-old secret faggot was ready to meet them.

  “I hope you weren’t scandalized by that jackass.”

  Cicero said nothing. Did scandalized include how, in the chess shop’s tragic minuscule restroom, his dick was surprisingly hard before he drained it? Crummy, scummy Cousin Lenny—a subject for his fixations? Maybe just the matter-of-fact mimicry Lenny had performed with his hand. Maybe the way he’d wrenched Cicero from his hiding place of chess, reinstalling him in the perplexity of the adult world. That of filthy Lenny and gorgeous Miriam and their unstable relation, and that of Miriam’s expectations for Cicero, this day in her Manhattan precincts, this day of something unseen coming. Nowhere in chess, that was the phrase Lenin Angrush used, in an action with a result as sudden as pressing a James Bond ejection-seat button. Cicero knew plenty of nowhere, on Queens Boulevard, on Skillman or Jackson or Greenpoint Avenue, in Rose’s company or surrounded by streaming schoolchildren, or alone, which added up to the same thing. Nowhere, nothing, nohow: Cicero was still at home only in himself. There, barely. To Lenny’s verdict, Cicero now added a vow: Black pieces or white, he’d never touch chessmen again. He fingered the zinc penny, deep in his pocket. American money was a lie. The Mets, a crime scene. Lenny thrilled Cicero by his allusions to secret knowledge, history as a drama of lies. Perhaps it was this that had bestowed Cicero’s hard-on.

  Miriam’s missionary zeal was hardly damaged: her fortune-teller would uncork Cicero’s destiny. He’d been born on January 20, 1956, at 1:22 in the morning, a fact inscribed on his birth certificate, the double-folded black photostat that Miriam had instructed Cicero to bring along and which that morning he’d palmed into his pants pocket, after slipping it from his mother’s drawer of baby keepsakes, rather than try to explain to Diane Lookins her son’s multiple errands this day. As they’d gone up the dusty loft-building stairwell to be welcomed inside by Sylvia de Grace, Miriam’s heavily perfumed, wizened, and silk-scarfed French (or, possibly, “French”) astrologer, both he and Miriam believed Cicero to be an Aquarius. Now came the day’s second shock of refusal: When Sylvia de Grace presented Cicero’s chart accurately drawn, he was revealed as nothing more than a flat-out Capricorn.

  “Still, isn’t he on the cusp?” Miriam demanded of Sylvia de Grace, reluctant to surrender the Aquarian delusion on Cicero’s behalf. Here in the hot, radiator-clanking loft, Miriam had removed her coat, revealing her hippie garb in full. That costume of hers, as much as Sylvia de Grace’s, seemed to argue for a belief in talismans, hoodoo, sacred monsters. Being on the cusp might be even more special, Miriam quickly explained, seeing as how it would combine aspects of two adjoining signs—Cicero’s would be a stealth sign, then, a spy in the nation of destiny.

  But the astrologer only rattled her own elaborate jade earrings and stole Miriam’s hopes. Cusps, she explained, were a phenomenon popular with amateurs; for serious astrologers like herself they didn’t exist. Worse: Not only was Cicero a dull earth sign rather than one of those transcendent slippery Aquarians, whose age the planet was now entering, but all his subsidiary details were, so far as Cicero could follow them, disheartening: planetary rulerships in disarray, each in houses that signified, according to the increasingly severe Madame de Grace, only to that planet’s detriment. “Nothing dignified anywhere?” pleaded Miriam on Cicero’s behalf. The word dignified apparently held special value here. But Sylvia shook her head. “Not well dignified, no. His moon’s in Cancer, but in the twelfth house. We call that accidental dignity.”

  “Accidental dignity?” repeated Miriam anxiously.

  “Placement within this house circumscribes the moon’s opportunities to express its benevolence.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that.”

  To Miriam these facts were important, perhaps even dire; to Cicero not particularly so. Cicero knew his obvious features defined him absolutely in others’ eyes. Further definitions—limitations on the moon’s benevolence, say—were fictions imposed from without. Definitions unmistakably in error but with which he saw no strategic reason (as yet) to differ. Cicero was still in the information-gathering phase of his life on this planet. Thus everything Miriam revealed to him was good information. The chess shop, Lenny’s cipher allusions and black and gold molars, had been good information, even at the price of Cicero’s chess vanity. This fake-Frenchwoman’s salon, squirreled into the brick warehouse full of painters’ lofts, was full of good information, a cavern of exotica, patchouli pretenses of sophisticated adulthood he could use to fill in the picture he would eventually be fitting himself into. No hurry, though.

  Anyway, and more simply, Cicero had never been able to take any mystical shit like astrology seriously for a second. This was true for Cicero even before Rose’s influence had reached him. Rose’s materialist worldview, against which he supposed Miriam’s gestures in the faintly pagan direction of astrology were directed as protest. Cicero felt he’d been born under a bad sign having nothing to do with any rams or fish or bearers of water. He didn’t need another layer to his identity.

  Astrology fell into the class of a fake lie, one many of its own exponents actively disbelieved—not only Miriam, obviously, but most likely Sylvia de Grace herself—and not worth the efforts of the debunking engine Cicero had been born with in place of a brain. Cicero’s capacities were reserved for the lies that mattered. Ideology, though that word was as yet unknown to him: the veil of sustaining fiction that drove the world, what people needed to believe. This, Cicero wished to unmask and unmake, to decry and destroy. Only, not yet.

  Lies of that kind were strewn everywhere. Cicero had strewn a few himself, like adopting the Mets warm-up jacket. For, if a grown-up hippie in 1969 had to care what their sign was, a minimally functional verging-on-teenage male at Sunnyside Intermediate, whether black or white, had to choose from two other constellations of gods. Quick: Who was your favorite Met? And who your favorite Apollo astronaut? Cicero had his answers ready, even if they were for the wrong reasons. Tom Seaver had beautiful thighs and an oversize ass, for a white man. In Cicero’s study, starting pitchers often had the proportions he relished. The fetishy analysis of a pitcher’s windup and delivery justified many hours of active lascivious fantasy on Cicero’s part, hidden in the plain sight of the consideration of his father’s Herald Tribune sports pages, or the exchange of baseball cards with his classmates, or the viewing of Tom Terrific’s starts on Rose’s prize color television. Seaver was celebrated for the length of his stride, the dip of his knee to the dirt at his delivery’s utmost point, the mound-smudged clue left behind on his uniform. Cicero liked to imagine himself in place of the mound when the pitcher’s thighs b
owed earthward.

  Though their costumes were not nearly so flattering, Cicero’s taste in astronauts—Buzz Aldrin—oriented along similar lines.

  “Screw it, let’s go get your fortune told the right way,” said Miriam, once they’d delivered themselves from the patchouli fog of disappointment and stood in the hustle of the midday Chinatown sidewalk. “Anyway, I’m starving—you like dim sum?”

  “Sure,” Cicero lied. Whatever global doubts the secretive boy entertained, Cicero felt seduced into awe and gratitude at Miriam Gogan’s attentions. “What’s the right way?”

  “By means of chicken. C’mon. But first we’ll eat.”

  Miriam yanked Cicero by the hand into Chinatown, splendidly impatient to move him like a pawn across the mental chessboard of her city. The operation wasn’t so different from Rose’s, dragging her chubby black ward through her block-watcher’s rounds in Sunnyside. Mother and daughter each made a version of Carroll’s Red Queen, running to stay in place. Each marked urban spaces like a pinball bouncing under glass, trying to light every bumper before gravity drew them into the trap waiting below. Only Miriam’s rounds were animated by exultation, the outer-borough kid’s connoisseurship of a Greenwich Village culture that was her inheritance if she demanded it be. Rose, paranoia her precinct, stalked Sunnyside like it was a zoo’s cage. Rose kept score. Burned grudges for fuel.

  Cicero was already a connoisseur, too, of styles of female power.

  Dim sum, at least as Miriam unveiled it to Cicero this afternoon, was merely Chinese soul food. Miriam passed over the trays full of the fussier-looking delicacies, pink pods like saltwater taffy, shrimp in glistening translucent wrappers, in favor of a grease-stained white bag loaded with what turned out to be shreds of pork barbecue, hidden in doughy white buns the size and tenderness and deliciousness of Cicero’s mother’s own biscuits. Each bun also concealed a delicious squirt of barbecue sauce, secret incentive to gobble it entire; this was barbecue such as the Apollo astronauts might carry on their voyage. Together, reaching into the white bag again and again as if it might be bottomless, Miriam and Cicero threaded sidewalks narrowed by vendors’ stands full of unrecognizable vegetables and cross-eyed fish in tanks, sidestepped the Tom Thumb women with carts. Miriam chewed and talked. Cicero chewed and listened. When they’d emptied the bag, gummed their back molars with dough and threads of pork, Miriam located a dusty Jewish deli hidden somehow in the midst of the exotica and purchased two Orange Crushes in beaded bottles so they could rinse it all down.

  Somewhere in this feasting, the dam broke, the last of Cicero’s reserve swept away. He fell in love. Cicero didn’t find women sexy, but Miriam was the exception, not for her bodily self but for her appetite: She devoured the ripe fruit of the world. He fell in love with the efflorescence of Miriam’s details. Cicero’s sudden idol had a knack for making what he’d never heard of until that instant sound exactly like the life he craved for himself: dignified planet, Che Guevara, McSorley’s, falafel, Eldridge Cleaver, hashish, the Fugs, Ramblin’ Jack, dim sum.

  The chicken was, in fact, a chicken. On Mott Street, in the confusion of the entrance to something called the Chinatown Museum—an indoor court of attractions as decrepit and uninviting as the worst Coney Island parlor, ominous even in daylight—a dirty white hen strutted and pecked in a decorated vitrine that had been wheeled from the shadows to the edge of the sidewalk. “This is Clara,” said Miriam. “She’s going to tell your fortune. Hell of a lot cheaper than Sylvia de Grace.” Miriam purchased a token from Clara’s mute keeper, a Tom Thumb man this time, and shoved it into the slot. A winsome jingle played and Clara the chicken began a spinning dance, then pecked at one of several tabs on the interior of the cage, releasing a few grains of corn to the floor of her captivity, and a card with Chinese symbols and English words into Miriam’s waiting fingers. “Here you go,” said Miriam. “You want me to read it to you?”

  Did she think he couldn’t read, after all? Cicero, so watchful and adept in the secret chambers of his self, so committed to the path of invisibility, could nonetheless be amazed at how unilaterally his disguise as a fat black boy really worked: Really? You think I’m not watching and judging and desiring, not scheming to realize my desires? In certain eyes, Cicero felt granted no more sway in the human scheme than a bulldog leashed to a lamppost or a passing cloud that briefly took an amusing shape. But no. He caught his breath. This wasn’t that. What Miriam proposed was that she play oracle, take Sylvia de Grace’s place in the thwarted plan to hear Cicero’s destiny unveiled today.

  “Yes,” he said. “Read it to me.”

  She slipped it into her pocket. “I will, but not here. I’ve got another idea. You ever had a Dave’s vanilla?”

  The answer, this time, was actually yes. Rose had once taken him to the Canal Street egg cream mecca. Not everything in Manhattan was Miriam’s invention. Yet Cicero strategically lied, shook his head, cocked his eyebrows, waiting for her to explain what he already knew. As with letting Miriam narrate the chicken’s fortune-telling, Cicero chose to let her believe in his susceptibility to her wonders, his gullibility, even where he wasn’t susceptible or gullible. The form Cicero’s devotion still took, with Rose, with Miriam, with his own mother, was an unwillingness to disillusion.

  This would change.

  Miriam and Cicero perched together on stools at the counter of Dave’s fountain, another timeless zone of men in dented fedoras slurping coffee under Depression-era signage, of glasses cleaned and dried with checkered cloths that were neither clean nor dry. They put their backs to the purring chaos of the intersection at Canal and Broadway and at her suggestion each sampled both a chocolate and a vanilla. The white-aproned counterman was only twentyish and had already seen it all in his day, didn’t blink at fizzing up four egg creams for a black kid and a hippie chick, never even quit whistling. Beneath the apron the counterman’s robin’s-egg-blue shirt was rolled midway up his forearms, the sinews and muscles of which thrummed hypnotically as he stirred syrup from the bottoms of their glasses with a long spoon. Miriam held Clara the chicken’s fortune-telling card up and then scowled for the sake of drama. “You ready? Hey, Cicero, you paying attention?”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s a biggie, I’m telling you.”

  “What?” Cicero recognized the sound of himself completely taking the bait, felt seven or eight years old and schoolyard-teased instead of the crafty double-digit sophisticate he’d become.

  “You have been sent among men to foment revolution and blow manifold minds.”

  “It doesn’t say that.” He reached for the card, she lifted it away.

  “Sure it does—in Chinese. Let me finish. Boy, this is one freaky chicken. All roads lead nowhere, choose one with heart. Never look back, something might be gaining on you. She said, Who put all those things in your head—hey, Cicero, you like the Beatles?”

  “What’s it really say?” Miriam’s evasiveness had now sold him on the urgency of the chicken’s censored wisdom.

  “Who’s your favorite Beatle?”

  That was easy: Paul. “Ringo. What’s the card say?”

  Miriam frisbeed the chicken’s fortune through Dave’s wide opening to the street, onto Canal’s sidewalk, underfoot the passersby. “Screw it, it wasn’t that great. You know what Rose told me when I played her Sgt. Pepper’s?”

  “What?”

  “I won’t listen until they stop screaming. That’s an exact quote.”

  “Huh.”

  “You don’t think that’s funny, that she’s placed herself at the head of the anti-screaming brigade? Listen, what’s it like with you and her?”

  Cicero might or might not have understood the question. “It’s okay.”

  “You can tell me anything, kid.”

  “Anything like what?”

  “Give me a for instance. The single worst thing she ever did in your presence. Go ahead—I’d believe the worst lie you can think of.” Miriam drained her vanilla, straw squawki
ng at foam dregs.

  Were Miriam’s conversational swerves even swerves, or were they explosions? She danced in her own minefield, it seemed to Cicero. Anyway, the worst thing Rose Zimmer had done was done out of Cicero’s sight: her possession, and serial repossession, of his father. Worst thing? That Rose existed for Cicero in the first place. Yet this affront was impossible to examine usefully, being the founding astonishment of Cicero’s life, the dawning of his understanding that he was born into a world of liars, rather than being born the world’s first.

  What did Miriam know of the situation? The start of Rose and Douglas’s affair, according to Cicero’s calculations, matched to Miriam’s start of putting Sunnyside behind her in favor of MacDougal Street. Even if Miriam had noticed the disaster, at what point would she have noticed an infant dragged in the disaster’s wake? The Sunnyside Citizens’ Patrol was founded in 1955; Cicero had been in utero when his father met Rose Zimmer.

  “Cat got your tongue? Let me get you started.” That’s when Miriam mentioned her voyage into Rose’s kitchen stove. Her description was accompanied with a bit of convulsive, perhaps involuntary reenactment, fingers seizing Cicero’s shoulders to demonstrate Rose’s force and suddenness. She nearly jostled herself and Cicero from their stools, arousing the curiosity of the soda jerk.

  Cicero, then, in his bafflement at all that had transpired, might or might not have let his eyes again relish those sinewy forearms beneath the rolled sleeves. Something in Miriam’s awareness registered this possibility, even as she recovered her poise, the demon impersonation of Rose eclipsed again in her expression. Perhaps it had occurred to her, too late, that nothing Cicero could supply would be any match for what Miriam had revealed: The game was over before it began. She changed the subject, though without declaring what the new subject was, exactly.