Dissident Gardens

by Jonathan Lethem

  A night of firsts and lasts, then. For it was also the first and last time he’d see Douglas Lookins amid the mythic Guardians, who’d swelled in Cicero’s imagination to some kind of Harlem Mafia, The French Connection remade as blaxploitation. Imagine his surprise at discovering the homey, aspirational clan of patrolmen’s families filling the hall, filtering through the lobby clasping one another in a hubbub of reunion, policemen’s medals tangling in rhinestone brooches to great laughter, drinking sweet wine and flipping open wallets to show off graduation pictures, until needing to be urged to go in and be seated, as if at a wedding, around floral-display banquet rounds. Piped through speakers with no low end, the Delfonics and Donny Hathaway. Lining the room, long tables bearing framed photographs of uniformed association members, their reward for being killed in the line of duty during the previous year to be dwarfed by a florist’s masterpieces even more garish than those covering the rounds. An emeritus association officer, accompanied by his withered-apple wife, hobbled on two canes to the lip of the riser, wanting to personally shake hands with the new crop of college scholarship winners, the dweebish, oversize, Department of Health–tortoiseshell-eyeglass-wearing threesome among whom Cicero Lookins himself stood foremost, the top winner, and already accepted at Princeton, too. The runners-up (one of each sex, and destined one for Howard, the other for SUNY Purchase) flanked him like the silver and bronze winners on a pyramidal stairstep—Cicero considered suggesting they conspire in a fist-clenched Black Power salute, but thought better of it quickly. So this was the garrulous, familial Guardians’ world, the black cop’s utopia of solidarity, that Douglas Lookins’s naming of names had barred them from, exiling them to Queens.

  Or perhaps not. Perhaps if he’d tempered his pride Douglas Lookins would have been readily forgiven. One of their own after all, a decorated top cop who’d appeared in that pic with Mayor Wagner, and, yo, any brother know what it takes to make lieutenant’s stripes in a stone racist system. Perhaps dozens of these men had at some point chosen rank over race and named a few names, played a little ball with Internal Affairs, and only Douglas Lookins had made a federal case of it. No way for Cicero to know what sealed his family’s exile destiny, really. For, look now: The Guardians had welcomed Douglas Lookins back, they’d given his son the top scholarship. So why couldn’t the Lookinses have stayed?

  Well, if they’d stayed, who knew where Cicero might be standing instead of atop this pyramid. It was Rose, waiting for them in Queens, who’d pushed Cicero up onto this riser to receive the Guardians’ check. Not merely in some general sense, egging Cicero to his school record of excellence, but specifically, by demanding he go around his father’s objections and write in for the application form that put him up for the Guardians’ scholarship. Rose filled out the paperwork and Diane signed it, her silence an assent to son that was also a mutiny against husband, as well as another remote collaboration with her husband’s lover. Douglas, if he even saw the papers going out in the mail, said nothing. Maybe Rose had discussed this with him. Except he didn’t see a whole lot of Rose these days.

  Now they sat, while Cicero stood gazing out, facing all three from the riser. Douglas and Diane Lookins grim and rigid up at the front, at a table with the parents of the runners-up and a couple of members of the Guardians’ board. All dressed to the nines, yet their table seemed laminated in gloom, the shade cast by Douglas Lookins’s indignation at being dragged back here by, of all things, his effete boy being given a handout. What a trap they’d set for him! What a trap his whole existence had become: dying wife, Queens political machine proving as depraved with ethnic nepotism as anything he’d met in Harlem, and his know-it-all ex-lover, to whom he’d ceded sponsorship of the child only to have confirmed any suspicion he’d harbored as to the incurably queer underbelly of Communist belief. He’d said Help him find the chess books and been handed back a boy who if you put him in great seats behind home plate and tried to settle in to enjoy a game began asking if you’d read James Baldwin. Diane and Douglas and the rest of their table, as still and glazed as Dutch burghers by contrast to the jubilance and funk all around them.

  In the back of the room, unmissable as one of three white faces scattered around, Rose Zimmer. She wasn’t going to be denied the chance to see the triumph of her workings, and so had called in some civic favor, pulled one of her innumerable strings—for a woman as lonely and reviled as Douglas Lookins might take Rose Zimmer to be, as much frozen like Mrs. Havisham in her 1956 betrayals, Rose sure had a lot of strings to pull, a regularly updated Rolodex of the Obliged. No doubt had beaten out some how-do-you-do on her cursive typewriter and gained access. (White access it was, too. Imagine some negroid Mysterious Lady trying to crash the Irish or Jewish equivalent of this clan’s affair.) So there she sat, making God-knew-what small talk at her table, emanating loud-silent waves of surrogate proprietary esteem in Cicero’s direction. Could Douglas and Diane judge the plane of Cicero’s gaze, to know for certain that he looked over their heads to see Rose applaud? Through his Department of Health spectacles, not likely so. Did they know she was back there? Undoubtedly. How not to?

  Day of firsts and lasts. It was the last day Cicero Lookins, on the verge of making his prodigal, seventeen-year-old, grade-skipper’s departure to the Ivy League, could kid himself that his father’s congratulations for this or any subsequent achievement were anything but a tissue-thin disguise on revulsion. For Cicero, seeing his father bilious with rage, understood that it was not only at being forced to congregate with the Guardians. Cicero understood that in his body and person, he, Cicero, was disgusting to his father. Could never be other than. Cicero’s intelligence, his achievements, the embrace of this scholarship, and his acceptance to a college to which his white classmates wouldn’t have dared even apply—none of this mitigated his father’s disgust. All of this made it worse instead. Cicero’s brilliance, the dawning boldness of his inquiry and his skepticism, all ensured that Douglas Lookins would be forced to confront his son’s deviance not as some facet of a subnormality, one pitiable aspect of the pitiable spectacle of a boy who’d sadly not come out right, but rather as something akin to, and borne upward by, the intellectual brashness Cicero’d begun to demonstrate. The queerness would be part and parcel of an assertion, coming from a fifth column of Douglas Lookins’s own paternity, of shit Douglas Lookins simply did not want asserted.

  Cicero knew he also disgusted his mother. In the months before she fled this vale, in the grip of the late mercies of the wolf, Diane Lookins had begun to falter in her pretenses to herself and to Cicero. She couldn’t veil her own revulsion with her son, attained by proxy. She was disgusted with Cicero for disgusting his father, as, axiomatically, she’d been disappointed in Cicero for disappointing Douglas, disgraced by him for disgracing Douglas, et al.—even as she had once been delighted in her child because he had been, long ago and too briefly, delightful to his father. Douglas Lookins’s word might not be law—in practice his words were a conflagration to be doused—but his emotional weathers were the Ten Commandments.

  If they numbered even ten. Cicero wasn’t sure he could name that many.

  Firsts: Cicero Lookins had gotten his tongue around its first dick just six weeks earlier. This miracle, manifest in a onetime act of perfect, double-blind secrecy, Cicero nevertheless felt certain must be worn on his face, as evident as his blackness, as arresting as his mother’s cheeks’ florid lupus rash. So some part of him accorded with his father, looked out from Douglas Lookins’s eyes upon the stage and was revolted, too, to see what Cicero’d suddenly and irreversibly become: one who not only wanted what he wanted but might risk having it. A much greater portion of him, however, dwelling as it did in the subterranean ethical sense of the appetites, was delighted and righteous and at this very instant sailed free of the Guardians’ ballroom stage, oblivious of time and space (racing well beyond a terrified virginal first two years at Princeton, in which time he’d not get hold of any dick again beside his own), into a futur
e where no aging policeman’s censure could damage it even faintly.

  Wear your love like heaven.

  Meanwhile, Rose Zimmer beamed on him from her place in the back of the ballroom, rising from her chair now to holler with the black folks, streaming undiluted pride, like she’d built the pyramidal stand and the riser with her own hammer and sickle, like she’d picked every flower in the room with her teeth, like she’d signed a proclamation and freed the slaves.

  The creak and scuffle of the last exits from the seminar room left Cicero where he’d not wished to find himself again: at sea with Sergius Gogan. No one to blame but himself for extending the invitation to witness the detonation of the three-hundred-pound African American neutron bomb. Even on a good day, Cicero’s clientele filed out under a funereal canopy of hush—it wasn’t like he awaited applause. A strange thing, the professor’s art, the esoteric transaction at the heart of the whole bureaucracy of curriculums and committees: to decant yourself before them, to dare them to wade into the bog of your thinking, what was called your “pedagogy.” Colleagues arrayed along a department’s corridor like rival churches on a Main Street, no two alike in their ritual methods and occult origins. Yet the students, entering the churches, weren’t like congregants. They browsed like shoppers at a mall.

  This wasn’t close to a good day. Yes, high school’s basic training in keeping ass in seat had stanched the room, after the early desertions. And yes, a number had opened their mouths. Cicero was only half able to listen as they turned out their shallow pockets of woe—the standard-issue divorces and institutionalized retard siblings and menopausal tetchiness they discovered when peeking beneath their Band-Aids. Their banalities only made him feel the banality of his own grievances, in the form he’d aired them. Stranded from historical superstructure. Context, always context. Baginstock College’s young adults shouldn’t have been invited to burnish their gripes, not before reading a thousand pages, or ten thousand—Another Country and A Thousand Plateaus and Human, All Too Human, Jane Bowles and Lauren Berlant and Octavia Butler, stuff still months ahead on Cicero’s Disgust and Proximity syllabus, and further stuff too much for any syllabus. They shouldn’t be called to indulge such self-importances, and he’d been in error to set himself as a permitting example. Cicero’s gripes meant nothing to anyone but himself. Wishing to detonate in their minds, he’d instead done so behind a transparent blast shield, melting himself to slag while leaving them untouched: If he be the neutron bomb, they were buildings. Cicero might as well have torn open his clothes and displayed his belly and dick. Guess what Lookins put us through this time. Can’t believe I set my alarm clock for that.

  “Can I take you to breakfast?”

  The morning’s unnamed context now opened its mouth. Rose had commanded Cicero to teach Sergius. Well, he’d at least dragged him to school. Innumerable sardonic replies suggested themselves, but Cicero, bile momentarily drained, found he lacked the impetus to select one and deliver it. He wanted breakfast, even if it had to be with Sergius. Quarts of coffee had his veins wriggling, but it had gone cold in his stomach.

  “You got time enough before you catch your plane?”

  “Sure.”

  A yellow alert. The Portland Jetport was a three-hour drive, and Sergius would be needing to return his rental. Cicero wanted breakfast, but he also wanted Jiminy Cricket out of town, out of the entire state.

  To his credit, Sergius caught the note of inquiry in Cicero’s silence. “I got on a later flight—later this afternoon, I mean. When I read your note.”

  Cicero’s fault again, for summoning Sergius to class. Or Rose’s fault. “Fair enough,” said Cicero. “Let’s breakfast.”

  “Do you like the Lyrical Ballad? We can walk there.”

  Another arched eyebrow. “Who put you onto the Lyrical Ballad?” The little patisserie was a sort of professors’ secret hive, tucked behind Cumbow’s sole rare-book store. A better shield for repelling both the typical Cumbow townie and the twenty-first-century college student could hardly be devised.

  “I sort of made a friend last night, actually. She mentioned it.”

  “You go working the bar at Poseidon’s Net?”

  Sergius shook his head. “No, I met her somewhere else. C’mon, I’ll show you.”

  They crossed the lot, past Cicero’s car, Sergius seeming unduly proud to have gained his little flaneur’s knowledge of the campus footpaths and of the scattering of back streets and alleys that comprised the collegiate side of Cumbow’s miniature downtown. In this, and having acquired his enigmatic “friend,” Miriam’s son for the first time reminded Cicero in any way of his mother, the maven of MacDougal Street. Cicero felt a stir of panic, as if he’d made some irreversible error unleashing Sergius the night before. This town isn’t big enough for both of us.

  No part of Cicero’s dread, however, could have predicted their destination. Occupy Cumbow, such as it was. Three little tents staked out on the expertly appointed lawn in front of city hall, a card table bearing leaflets and a Dunkin’ Donuts box, a few propped-up signs denouncing Pentagon budgets and bailed-out towers of Mammon. Inasmuch as the encampment had gone from a momentary curiosity to an established nonentity, something to pussyfoot past, Cicero was confident his low opinion stood for the general one.

  On a clear morning like this the little outdoor theater was fronted by a rotating cast of three or four trimmed-white-bearded retirees in fleece jackets, Old Lefties who’d otherwise be home penning letters to the Times that were never printed. The actual residents of the tents, however, were younger and skulkier, a couple of dingy young hitchhiker types in darker and ropier beards, with skateboard-stickered laptops draining city hall’s public Wi-Fi, and a girl—woman?—in striped tights, cutoff shorts, and filthy down vest, seated cross-legged holding an acoustic guitar, one stickered like the laptops. Half bundled under her watchman’s cap, blond, chunky, unappetizing dreadlocks. It was these that made Cicero certain he’d not seen her before.

  “Good morning, Lydia.”

  “Hey, Sergius!”

  “This is my friend Cicero. Cicero, Lydia.”

  Cicero mumbled and stuck out his hand.

  “We were heading to the Ballad,” said Sergius. “Wanna come along?”

  Sergius, in the great tradition of the wan hetero, was serially addicted to the Actualizing Other. Now he wanted his magical Negro to befriend—what name was it Cicero’s students gave the archetype? His Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Though this one was a little worse for wear than Zooey Deschanel, her function was clear enough. Cicero had wished to leverage Sergius into some kind of encounter with the missing body of Diane Lookins, or at least force him to behold her chalk outline and puzzle over the crime of her absence. But Diane Lookins couldn’t compete, couldn’t get into the picture at all. Even raging Rose and blazing Miriam, avowed subjects of Sergius’s inquiry, were faded, voiceless ghosts by contrast to what Sergius suddenly had before him: a real live pistol-hot protester chick.

  Lydia, though so far unspeaking, wasn’t shy. She’d shoved her guitar into the mouth of her tent, then leapt up and inserted her small hand into Cicero’s mitt—it was ordinarily with grinning men in suits, deans and trustees, that Cicero recalled the imperative of a forceful handshake a moment too late, his dead-fish offering an unbreakable lifelong habit—and squeezed hard. This, not something every white person could manage. She met his eye, too, twinkling in a conspiracy of the dreadlocked.

  “Sergius said you’re almost his cousin.”

  “Something like that.” Cicero turned on the pavement and slouched, as if toward Bethlehem, in the direction of the Lyrical Ballad. He felt incapable of anything but putting distance between himself and the tiny spectacle of Occupy Cumbow. Though he couldn’t say why it so outraged him, the encampment was like a splinter in his eye. Of course, Occupy Cumbow slumped along the pavement with him now, Sergius and Lydia falling into step at his side. Well, breakfast, at least, was an unimpeachable good. Cicero envisioned shoving one of
the coffee shop’s mammoth, twelve-toed, icing-drenched bear claw pastries across his teeth.

  Sergius now babbled. “I wandered down here after dinner last night, Cicero, it was cooling off and I wanted to explore downtown. You didn’t tell me Cumbow had an Occupy. They cleared everyone out in Philadelphia, but I guess it’s in the small towns where the people are still making their presence known—anyway, when I walked up, you’ll never believe what I heard.”

  “What?”

  “Lydia was playing one of my father’s songs. I mean, can you believe it? ‘To Pass Beneath the Bower.’ I had no idea anyone remembered that record, let alone somebody half my age playing it at a, um, rally.”

  Half your age indeed. But Cicero kept mum. “There was a rally here last night?” This much he couldn’t resist.

  “I’ve played it at rallies,” said Lydia, not troubling even to put defiance in her voice. The secret of her weightless certainty might be that to her it was a rally anytime she lifted her guitar. Anyway, who was Cicero, that she need defy him? “It’s one of the great anthems, people take a lot of courage from that song.”

  “I wasn’t aware.”

  “There’s a bunch of verses to memorize, but the changes are simple, you can teach others to play it really easy.”

  Cicero was truly uninterested. They’d passed the bookstore’s front, ducking into the alley where the coffee shop’s entrance was hidden. It wasn’t the wrong hour to mutter a hopeful prayer for seclusion; a majority of Cicero’s colleagues ran classes in the morning’s second slot and so would have vacated the Ballad until lunchtime. Sure enough, the three of them assumed the corner table in a room otherwise bare of familiar faces. Nor was the barista one of Cicero’s kids, as had been his ill fortune at least once before. Cicero, at the counter, tapped the glass on the other side of which, nestling in a bed of powdered sugar and slivered almond crumbs, lay the morning’s last bear claw: Things were looking up. Sergius and Lydia got lattes and heaping square portions of coffee cake. Lydia spooned additional sugar into her coffee, the American addiction to sucrose being apparently not covered in Occupy’s otherwise wide-ranging critique.