Dissident Gardens

by Jonathan Lethem

  The children—he had, in a few effortless gestures, reduced them to children, incurring a grave responsibility too casually—could never be capable of meeting his request. Before the mountain he couldn’t ascend Cicero now felt the tug of the abyss behind him, the bottomless vale between his syllabus and the ineffable lectures he wished to deliver. The gulf yawning between his drab duties here and the impulses that had set him on this life path, his rebellion against the ordinary thoughtless procedures of the here and now. That rebellion begun at his inability to control salivation at the sight of Tom Seaver’s ass.

  Why expect the nineteen-year-olds to speak intelligibly of their mothers? Most of them likely still spoke with their mothers on the telephone on a regular basis. Or Skyped. As according to Foucault, one can only be able to name a thing after it has begun to die or disappear. Political institutions, the postcolonial subject, or, for that matter, your childhood. Cicero had blundered, once again mixed up living and dead, the Frankenstein affront. Now came the pitchforks and torches, even if only those of his own mental village.

  “I see,” Cicero said now. He spoke as if someone among the silent students had offered up one of those clarifications that lay solely inside of his head. “Why don’t I begin, in that case. You can join in as you are able. What’s on my mind today is the stories that don’t find themselves getting told, the questions that don’t get around to getting asked. The secret people hiding behind and inside the ones that insist on being known instead. I said I would talk about my mother. My mother is almost entirely impossible to think about. In truth, I doubt anyone during her lifetime thought seriously about her for more than an instant or two. If I am more truthful, what little thinking about her I do even to this day consists largely of raging against the fact that barely anyone ever spent a concerted thought on her, including herself.”

  Another walkout. Melinda Moore, one of Cicero’s most capable, who the semester before had continuously surprised Cicero and herself as she produced good close readings in her sorority voice, exiting now in a scuffle of closing laptop and pushed-in chair to make it apparent she wouldn’t return. Indeed, this assembly threatened to shape into a shoe-leather vote of no confidence. Could Cicero push further, trump disaster? He could try. “What I did apart from decline to give Diane Lookins’s life as a person any kind of real consideration was mostly to wish she’d go away. To wish she’d die. I wanted her to make it more convenient for my father, so he could go off with a white lady from the neighborhood, whom my daddy was fucking.” Cicero knew he was right at or just over his morning’s quota for that particular word.

  From his earliest impressions, the family’s home took for the child the shape of a field hospital, one stationed within the battlefield that was the city. Cicero was fairly certain this had nothing to do with the matter of Diane Lookins’s burden of physical ailments, at least not at first. Nor was it solely because of the parents’ literal professions: mother a trauma nurse (albeit only in some hazily referenced past), father a daily operative on the urban front, a policeman carrying a soldier’s rank.

  Instead it was a worldview, or two worldviews intricately dovetailed out of mutual necessities. The urban soldier must recuperate somewhere, must find a place where he can be nursed—a place to offload injury, insult, grievance of all kinds. The nurse, in order to be a nurse without ever leaving the sanctuary of the apartment, needed a supply of patients, or rather the same patient every night, bearing home diverse unfleshly wounds that neither killed him nor healed. The hospital ethos that was conjured, when a person crossed the threshold into the dark, neatly kept rooms, was the function of an attitude of triage, directed toward the permanent emergency of being alive.

  The child’s sensibility and sympathies, on coming to first awareness from within that threshold, were allied with the outlook of her, the nurse-who-was-also-a-patient, the woman fluttering in the dark rooms, not the lieutenant muttering grimly home from duty. This, because the battlefield outside was only a matter of rumor and conjecture, for interpretation from minimal clues, from Douglas Lookins’s bitter snippets of reportage, flares routinely doused by his wife’s plates of food and snapped-on television, by her soothing and hushing and not-in-front-of-the-boy, by her attention-revamping swoons, every manner of daily thing that made sustained talking impossible.

  Ailment came later, with its inadequate ritual cures, half-drained bottles of quinine water, bitters recommended by a knowledgeable cousin down South, shades drawn in vampirish prohibition of the sun, the diagnosis confirming everything the child and mother already knew. Her affliction was elusive, phantasmic, sneaking across the threshold with a wolf’s name, efflorescing in moods and colors as much as in medical conditions. Even prescription bottles of hydroxychloroquine, when those entered the scene, were drawn out of the realm of medicine into the irrational twilight of the lupus aura. Cure could be a mood, too, the seductive and submitting odor of Diane Lookins adhering to curtains and bedspreads, to the telephone’s heavy receiver, to sandwich bread in a lunch box he’d open midday at school.

  The dangers of the world beyond the apartment’s limits were the subject of the interrupted talk, transmitted in a series of fragments worthy of Sappho or Pound. They suggested a world for which the child felt himself unsuited—at first helplessly so, soon enough defiantly. Still, they had the appeal of opening the cloistered apartment to something beyond its humid atmosphere of pity and apprehension. The allusions to a policeman’s universe of treachery bore the appeal of mental intrigue, in a language of seductive opacity. The Wandering Boys and the Four Horsemen. The Guardians Association. The Payne Brothers. The James Barber Incident. The William Haynes Incident. Reefer. Horse. King H.

  On the Take.

  Vice, Harbor, Housing, Motorcycle, Patrol, Internal Affairs, Transit.

  One Hundred Twenty-Fifth, Convent Avenue, Twenty-Eighth Precinct.

  Or simply Harlem, name to an abhorrent chapter in his family’s life, one recent enough that the child’s earliest memories flowed from it. Another home in another city, where everyone was colored and where he and his mother still occasionally journeyed to call on aunt and cousins. A time before they’d come to settle in the rooms venting to the concrete inner courtyard of Lincoln Manor, on Fortieth Street and Forty-Eighth Avenue, south of the el that overhung Queens Boulevard, south of the greener districts of Sunnyside Gardens (despite living among the white Irish and Italians and just a scattering of Dominicans and Puerto Ricans, the child gained a sense of the wrongside-of-trackness in which they’d landed, an ache in the whole neighborhood to be over there instead).

  On the take named a policeman’s cardinal violation, and the undertow of the wave that had driven Douglas Lookins from Harlem—a wave of recriminations, of barely suppressed scandal. Of unnameable former friends and phone calls with no one speaking on the other end. From the start, on foot patrol, Douglas Lookins had been fixed in these crosshairs: the black policeman’s irreconcilable crisis. Hemmed by prejudice in the wider ranks while taken by the street as a betrayer and informant, house nigger, Uncle Tom. Walking that tightrope, between a sky of distrust and a canyon of scorn, you reached out to those like you, those hunkered down and bearing up, in the same fix: your fellow black shields. You formed an association. There had been many of those over the decades, many now dissolved and only rumor. The black policemen’s support networks, meetings conducted in basements for purposes of pooling expertise and salving disgruntlement, then also gathering, under cover of sociality, to get the wives together, to give out some award for outstanding service, like an Elks Lodge. Always, in any event, to stanch the isolation. The loneliness.

  These associations, past and present, provided some of the strangest and most evocative names to be hurled out like swears from Douglas Lookins’s lips: the Centurions, the nearly mythical Wandering Boys, later the Buffalo Soldiers. Above all, the Guardians Association. The sole black cops’ guild to be not merely tolerated but sanctioned by the NYPD, therefore by far the las
tingest and with the widest reach. So it was that Douglas Lookins, who’d skirted participation as long as he could, could feel forced, being a decorated patrol veteran and one of a paltry contingent of black lieutenants citywide, to accept an honorary post in the Guardians. He attended the ballroom ceremony to accept the honor and then turned his back on them.

  Why? What could be so wrong with the beleaguered Negro policeman seeking solace among his kind?

  This: Three-quarters of black cops, like any cops, were dirty. Numbers according to Douglas Lookins; go check it yourself if you want. So to make allegiance with the Guardians was to avow a brotherhood of omertà with so many hundreds of brothers on the take. Taking utmost seriously the height of promotion he’d reached, Douglas Lookins understood himself answerable to the brass, specifically to the deputy commissioner who’d come calling a week after promotion, coffees not even cold on the desk before he’d started asking for names.

  A white deputy commissioner, and Douglas Lookins’s commanding officer.

  Walk a tightrope between a sky of distrust and a canyon of scorn and one of these days even that tightrope might rise up to form a noose around your neck, if it consisted of your fellow black cops keeping vows of dirty silence under auspices of the Guardians.

  Having achieved your lieutenancy in Harlem, squelching black-on-black crime, walloping the shit out of kids in order that they not have records, breaking up picket lines of Black Muslims boycotting the Amsterdam News Building, escorting Mayor Wagner for New York Post campaign photographs, his tall head beside yours even taller in a sea of black kids half of whose hides you’d tanned and might again, distinguishing yourself painstakingly within the community, where worth and stature might be measured in what tidal floods of bodies crossed the street upon catching sight of your high, buttoned-up sentinel’s form easing down the sidewalk, one week after promotion you named a bunch of names in return for the transfer to Sunnyside, there to spend your pavement hours knocking Irish kids with screwdrivers off vending machines and hearing nigger stage-whispered down every block you strode.

  But fuck it, the beat was behind you, those dues paid. Let them disembowel every vending machine from here to the Whitestone Bridge and each other in the bargain.

  The child took years understanding that his father wasn’t actually the only clean black policeman in the history of the NYPD.

  A few years beyond that for it to occur to him that Douglas Lookins wasn’t certified stainless himself, that some shred of guilty overcompensation might lie behind all the righteousness. But no way to ever do more than wonder whether his father had once had a packet of cash thrust at him and not thrust it right back.

  The child took years gathering some sense of it all in the first place, puzzling the policeman’s lament out of Douglas Lookins’s volunteered and unvolunteered fragments. The inescapable truth was that it was Rose who provided the keys, Rose who aided in the puzzling. This might be the core of Cicero’s slavish fury at Rose: that he’d learned more about his father from an hour with Rose than from seventeen years locked inside Diane Lookins’s domesticity. Their home was an institution devised not to understand Douglas Lookins. Not to receive his testimony, inasmuch as the last thing you wanted in a hospital was for the patient to talk. You wanted them to eat, yes—and you fed them to shut them up. You put on the television, fluffed a cushion, and ceded the whole couch in order that the patient stretch his long form out; you remarked on the remarkable vividness of mountain ranges behind John Wayne on the latest color set; you starched and pressed the sheets, all in favor of their comfort—and to entice the patient to slumber.

  And when that didn’t do the trick, you could begin dying.

  Cicero used lexicon and streetwise attitude and an appetite for paradox all derived from Rose Zimmer in order to understand his father. The project was enabled because it was a mutual one, Rose herself trying to get closer to Cicero’s father by means of Cicero. So the two of them could work together on that. It was from Rose that Cicero understood that his father was a strict Eisenhower–Nixon Republican—well, no shame there, loads of cops were, as was Douglas Lookins’s avowed upstanding hero, Jackie Robinson (who’d even endorsed Goldwater). For that matter, James Brown was a Nixon man; Republicanism was a disease common to the self-made, the self-willed Negro.

  James Brown was Douglas Lookins’s surprising musical hero, acknowledged to his son once, while in a disreputable mood (“Louis Jordan’s natural heir,” he’d claimed). But it was from Rose that Cicero understood even to inquire about his father’s music, since they owned no records and Diane controlled the kitchen radio’s dial. It was from Rose that Cicero learned to imagine Douglas Lookins mourning his regular use of free seats at the Apollo, offered gratis by a Harlem bigwig, or to picture him instead listening with solitary pleasure to the radio in a police cruiser resting in the shadow of the Grand Concourse—it was from her he understood to imagine his father as being capable of taking pleasure, rather than just being out there all day brutalizing and being brutalized. It was when Cicero and Rose began comparing notes that Cicero’s view of his father changed, from one derived from Diane’s image of him as a monolith rumbling home needing to be dealt with and endured, fed, and eased to bed, to that of a monolith cavernous on its interior, swirling inside with appetites. (There was nothing wrong with the food Diane Lookins cooked, but you didn’t consume it with appetite, you bovinely fed.)

  Of course, it was by failing to disguise her own appetite for his father that Rose led Cicero to extrapolate his father’s. For, among other things, Rose. Seeing Rose’s appetite taught Cicero that appetite existed—appetite beyond Cicero’s own, which might otherwise have struck him as a unique property, shamefully defining his isolation from the whole of humankind. His mother’s appetite was cloaked in deference and debility, his father’s in stoical fury. Well, Rose demolished the image of stoicism, among other things! Rose let herself be transparent to the child, exposing every kind of raw loneliness, and defiance against loneliness, that had fallen over her in losing Albert and the CP, and in surrendering her daughter to Greenwich Village. And then, exposing to him how loneliness and defiance produced themselves as hunger—an active process of devouring that thrilled Cicero even as it threatened to devour him.

  Is anything more unforgivable than what a child learns about his parents from their lovers?

  And who the unforgiven? Not the parent but the lover.

  If Cicero had been thrust at Rose Zimmer, thrust by his father, in order to collaborate with this crazy Jew in the study of his father, who was designated to make a study of Diane Lookins? Who’d etch her legend into the world? The fact excluded, in this scheme of Rose and Cicero puzzling Douglas together, was, merely, that of Diane Lookins’s entire existence. She didn’t fit in the puzzle. Diane Lookins had no witness apart from her own child. He who, if he contemplated this duty, that of entering into her abjection, of fully grasping it, could only run screaming. Diane Lookins’s existence was too heavy and too light, both at once, for a child to assume as a mirror of his own possibilities.

  Yes, Cicero studied his mother—once he located the pleasure in study, Cicero studied everything. And yes, Diane Lookins in fact had a language of her own, had, even, appetites. Even after she was sick. Cicero discerned this in eavesdropped phone calls, the sultry pleasure of her gossip, items picked up and savored in slavish delight. The sex lives of others. The deaths of others, which confirmed that she still lived. Cicero discerned this too in her use of newspapers and magazines, the nature of those she brought into the house, the care with which she read certain sordid items of confabulated scandal. She didn’t want to hear what her husband dealt with on a daily basis, but so long as the crimes were committed by film stars, Diane Lookins enjoyed crimes.

  What Cicero didn’t and couldn’t do was give one single indication to Diane that she was visible to him. Not that he studied her, or that he registered what he studied, or that it touched him. Instead he put up a mask of boyish obliv
iousness to his mother’s dimensions—to do otherwise would have been too costly. He studied her in mute glances, while wolfing a sandwich and letting her scrape the crusts, while needing to be ordered to wash his hands and ordered to mutter thank you, while dropping his schoolbooks with only a grunt to say he’d handled his homework already during recess, then left the family home, went to Rose Zimmer’s to study the art of opening his mouth.

  Today, though, Cicero wanted to think just for once not of Rose, always and endlessly Rose, but of Diane Lookins, the woman cut to drift in the vacuum silence of her distress. Today, with Sergius Gogan here at his side petitioning for more of the dynamism and strife of Rose, more of Rose and Miriam, please, than Sergius had been allotted, a larger share if you will, sir, kindly surrogate grandson—Cicero wanted to say, no, motherfucker, no. No more Rose. Diane instead. Cicero wished he were teaching an entire course on Diane Lookins, stuffing the invisible Negress down their throats, except he was too complicit in making her invisible himself, he knew.

  Anyway, Cicero kidded himself. Rose had helped him comprehend Diane Lookins, too. For in demonstrating to Cicero the nature and enormity of his father’s appetite, Rose had caused Cicero to understand that Diane Lookins relied on the policeman’s lover—unknown, unseen, unnamed—to drain off this unruly surplus. By fucking Douglas, Rose acted in concert with Diane Lookins and her hospital necessities, her program of pacification. Someone had to tear Douglas down that way from time to time, to catalyze with Diane’s steaming platefuls of food and color television and shushing, to free him to pass out on the couch. The women handled Douglas Lookins in tandem. And Diane Lookins didn’t need to be told to know her tag-team partner existed.

  There was just one time, so far as Cicero knew, that the three, Diane, Douglas, and Rose, had been in the same room. Even then it was a large public hall, and Cicero had no evidence that they’d come within direct sight of each other, let alone spoken. The Guardians Association Scholarship Award gala, the Renaissance Ballroom in Harlem, June 1973. Less than two years later Cicero’s mother would be dead. This ceremonial banquet was the last time he’d see Diane Lookins out in any public setting, short of the dayroom of Mount Sinai Medical, where she passed, or the open coffin at her funeral.