Dissident Gardens

by Jonathan Lethem

  “Ferdinand, oh yeah, cool. You know, I used to have this book when I was a kid.”

  No, he wanted to say. It is a new book. It is my book. Not part of your constellation of lodestones, the fog of references it was his legacy to navigate. No. This was given to me by Santa Claus, whom you never met. Such sudden anger against her! Had he ever dared before? He touched the smooth clean cover and almost pulled it back from her grasp, but he needed her to read the words aloud to him.

  Soon, before he’d learned to read, Sergius memorized and could subvocally incant the whole sacrament of Ferdinand the Bull Who Refused the Bullfight. Ferdinand, who grew strong and handsome and retained the love of his mother, who endured the bee’s sting. Ferdinand, who disdained the feistiness of his peers and the red of the cape, who never relented in his love of peace. Of flowers. He who entered the realm of violence yet stymied its expectations, pacified its livid heart. He who, when greeted with the world’s belligerent invitations, preferred not to.

  Sergius understood why the Quaker Santa Claus would appear and give him this book: because the world was an arena. Alphabet City. P.S. 19, the Asher Levy School, an arena. Tommy and Miriam—the inconstancy and chaos of their domestic disarrangements and of their haphazard war with history, their hair-trigger availability for marches and vigils, for squattings and occupations—an arena beyond description, one he’d been born inside. The revolving-door population of the commune itself, this bedazzling warren of NYU filmmakers and Okinawan terrorists and sylph-like women in yoga poses, an arena. His grandmother, seething in her dimmed rooms, straightening the Lincoln relics in her kitchen when the boy bumped them, staring at him too coldly, for too long an interval, before clutching him to her sighing bosom, then stage-whispering to Miriam, “The spitting image of Albert? This is what you bring into the world?” An arena unto herself. Uncle Lenny, horrendous mouth stinking of cigars and pickled herring in cream sauce, ogling Stella Kim, berating Sergius’s stamp collection, and scratching his ass—him, too.

  The book about the bull was intended to prepare Sergius, twice over. Once, to understand that when he was sent from Alphabet City to the Quaker boarding school in rural Pennsylvania he was being placed, like Ferdinand, in the safe pasture his own essential nature demanded: Sergius was being permitted to quit the arena.

  Second, the book prepared him to believe that when Tommy and Miriam flew off to Nicaragua, into the wider and more terrifying arena of violent revolution, armed only with Miriam’s training in the art of passive resistance, that judo maneuver of being triumphantly arrested, and with Tommy’s guitar and his musician’s kinship with the people, that they would, like Ferdinand, wield the magic armor of nonviolence and return unharmed.

  Harris Murphy’s flaw, a harelip twisting plainly visible beneath his beard, went unmentioned among the children at Pendle Acre. Even at that Quaker place, the students weren’t incapable of cruelty toward their teachers, but Murphy’s intensity concerning his charges made it impossible. The music teacher’s sincerity was a kind of test, and if most of the students had failed him by the time they’d reached the high-school grades, they’d been forced to do so on his own terms. To mock the harelip would have been to suggest they’d been injured by Murphy’s demands on their character, his undeniable insight, his uncanny ability to know when you were high on pot, yet not to betray that knowledge to the Committee on Ministry and Oversight.

  Murphy was one of the few actual Friends among the young teachers there. Usually it fell to the headmaster and the board of directors, along with a few older faculty, to maintain the advisory standards: that faculty self-governance operate on the Quaker model of consensus decision making, that the students be led in silent worship for half an hour each day before classes. No matter if those leading the meetings were as little adept in abiding with the Light as the tittering, eye-rolling teenagers. Murphy, the exception, would speak, to students who’d listen, of the private value of silent practice to his own spiritual journey. (If God, like harelip, went unremarked, that was only the usual Friendly reticence at an imposition of terms, the sleight of hand that had tempted Buddhist Quakers, Jewish Quakers, even Atheist Quakers to come sit at the benches.) Murphy read George Fox and would insert aphorisms from the great mad founder of the Society of Friends into his teaching, and the first song each of Murphy’s advanced guitar pupils learned, before he obliged them by cracking open the mysteries of “Dear Prudence” or “Stairway to Heaven,” was “Simple Gifts,” in its Quaker revamp:

  Walk in the Light, wherever you may be

  Walk in the Light, wherever you may be

  In my old leather breeches and my shaggy shaggy locks

  I am walking in the glory of the Light, said Fox!

  That the younger teachers at Pendle Acre were a bunch of neatened-up, rustical hippies went without saying. A teaching job and full residency at the liberal-minded boarding school made a deftly strategic pastoral retreat from the wounds-licking counterculture. They were fleeing the same sort of lifestyle damage familiar to the students, especially those who rode the Greyhound bus home to Philadelphia or New York on weekends. Murphy, though his personal details remained shrouded, was one of these too. Specifically, a broken-winged folkie, another victim of Dylan’s mercurial demolition of the acoustic revival. Maybe, though, Murphy’d been too pure even to tolerate Dylan’s earlier style. Maybe he’d found modern songwriting itself a bit ostentatious. Murphy strongly hinted so. He’d been half of a duo, Murphy and Kaplon, who’d never gone into the studio, who’d only been recorded once, a single track on an anthology LP called Live at the Sagehen Café, performing “The Cruel Ship’s Captain.” Murphy’d played on bills with Tommy Gogan! Yet he unsubtly hinted to the son that he preferred the sound of the father’s voice blended with those of his brothers, on one of those Irish harmony albums Tommy disdained.

  Yes, Murphy had known Sergius’s mother. A little. Smile tight when he acknowledged it. Murphy being the self-serious type Miriam would have provoked because she couldn’t help herself. Yes, Murphy’d known them both. It was no accident, then, when to free themselves for the journey to Nicaragua Tommy and Miriam took Fifteenth Street’s tuition grant and installed Sergius at Pendle Acre, the boy came to live at West House, where Harris Murphy was the resident adviser. No matter if the awfully intense harelipped fingerpicking observant Quaker music teacher was broken-winged or not, it was his wing Sergius Gogan had been placed under. And no matter who’d first telephoned whom, nor what consultations had gone on previously among headmaster and any number of others, it was Harris Murphy who took Sergius aside in privacy that day and told the eight-year-old that his parents were missing. Then Murphy who let him know, three weeks later, that Tommy and Miriam’s muddy corpses had been unearthed, excavated along with a third body, believed American but as yet unnamed and unclaimed, from a hillside, and were due to be flown back to New York City—but that Sergius was, for the moment, staying where he was. As he would, it turned out, more or less forever.

  Sergius didn’t think that day to ask about his grandmother. Murphy didn’t mention her. The surviving Gogan brothers, eking their living touring the western Canadian folk circuit by bus, were no possibility whatsoever. Sergius would live at Pendle Acre. The whole school would parent him. Quakerism would parent him. Sergius, that day, didn’t ask questions at all.

  Murphy’s rooms in West House: the low-ceilinged suite with its basement entrance; the vast wall of jazz and blues LPs, all else modest and monkish, the putrid red shag rug not entirely covering the poured slab of cellar floor; Murphy’s kitchenette, the faltering whistle of his teakettle; the crates of Bukowski and Castaneda and Frank Herbert; his two guitars on upright stands, varnish beaten off their wooden faces by his strumming; his stacks of fake books and of old copies of National Lampoon, in the photo-collages of which Sergius would eventually first glimpse photographs of a woman’s bared breasts (as opposed to the actual breasts of Stella Kim, which he’d glimpsed already, one February night when the
commune’s radiators howled and sizzled in excess and Stella bewilderingly forsook T-shirt or bra); Murphy’s large, water-stained print of the Edward Hicks’s The Peaceable Kingdom, the official Quaker masterpiece, in which the lamb lay down with all the other beasts of the kingdom, and to view an actual painted copy of which Murphy would one day lead Sergius and a group of middle schoolers on a field trip to Philadelphia; the framed copy of a Village Gate bill proclaiming the night on which Murphy and Kaplon had opened for Skip James, autographed in a red scrawl by James; all of Murphy’s paltry vanities and secrets laid bare and which Sergius memorized, he understood later, in compensation and revenge for Murphy having taken him that day down into those rooms to say that his parents were missing, then a second time to tell him they were dead.

  Murphy’s rooms, those Sergius remembered.

  Sergius had cultivated a private science of remembering, in order to understand and absolve himself for what he couldn’t. He’d figured it this way: You remembered what was continuous and what was anomalous. The continuous because it stuck around to remind you of itself. The anomalous because it stuck out and so your mind made a Polaroid of the oddness, to gaze at in fear, lust, or bewilderment forever. Stella Kim’s nipples, say, as seamless and purple as the dye-dipped tips of Easter eggs. Those, anomalous forever, he remembered. Santa Claus, that night at Fifteenth Street? Anomalous, unforgettable, enshrined. Dead Cousin Lenny’s sneering at his stamp collection? Easy, anomalous, in its almost feral intensity. Conversely—memorable because continuous—were dead Cousin Lenny’s “penny books,” those rigid, governmental-blue folders into which Sergius obediently thumbed three examples of each year’s Lincoln cent: one unmarked from the Philadelphia mint, one marked S for the San Francisco mint, and one marked D for the Denver mint. The penny books were moored in permanent reality and bridged Sergius’s New York life and his Pendle Acre bedroom, where he kept them on a shelf beside The Story of Ferdinand. So an even simpler principle: You remembered what you kept. You remembered, maybe also, what you wanted. What you couldn’t keep or reasonably wish for was forgotten.

  By these laws, Sergius forgot his parents.

  Tommy and Miriam met no standard for being unforgotten, having been continuous, then lopped off. His parents were an atmosphere that drifted off to space, leaving nothing to breathe.

  His parents were unkept. Unlike Ferdinand or the penny books, Sergius hadn’t imported them to West House. Nor could he credibly wish the dead to resume their lives. No one not in Sergius’s position could ever know how little anyone ever actually remembered of anything. Sergius watched the other children with their parents and thought: You see but you do not remember.

  Strolling cavalier amid the living of the earth, you’d never even know you weren’t bothering to press Record. This was what Sergius told himself, in attitudes of torment or shame or simply in wonder at what vast emotional amnesia befogged the first eight years of his existence on earth. His mental dioramas were constructed from hearsay, remarks by Stella Kim or some other Seventh Street housemate, from photographs, and from his tantalized reworkings of what little strobelike images he did possess: snatches of child’s-brain footage grabbed in the tumult of this or that protest at the Department of Health and Human Services or a rainy vigil at the gates of Sing Sing, or of waking astounded to have dozed all night on his mother’s raincoat in a corner of the People’s Firehouse, where he’d reached up to fondle the weave of a wide flat fire hose spindled above his head. Yet in each strobe-flash or footage-clip nothing of Tommy and Miriam. His parents refused to enter a frame, never spoke a line even from outside the frame. They existed by implication, outlines punched in backdrops.

  Behind, the outer spaces of self.

  If the dead were dead, and in expunged memory unreconstructible, what could the boy reasonably wish to be given in compensation? A mystery.

  In any event, on the day Sergius learned of his parents’ death, Harris Murphy presented him with a guitar. An emblem of his father, Sergius supposed, though like his mother it made a body he could cling to. The guitar was also like Sergius himself, a shape molded around a vacancy and made easily to cry. In fact, the process of tuning, the endless tuning that consisted of most of his first lesson on the guitar, and his second and third as well—Murphy kept the boy at it, the music teacher’s gift for abiding with repetition—sounded like nothing to him so much as the moaning and guttering sounds that forced themselves periodically through his body and for which he was the involuntary audience. Sergius asked Murphy if the guitar was his to keep. It was. It could be kept, could go back to Sergius’s room upstairs, to live there with him at night. And so at night Sergius pretended it was the guitar that was doing the crying. Anyway, the interval of crying was subject to a mercy. Weeping for his lost parents was like his parents themselves, an ambiance, in its vastness unspecific, and an ocean that when you stepped dry from it, you wholly forgot.

  Sergius was then converted. From what, he wasn’t certain. Converted from innocence, perhaps. Yet also from too much unwelcome experience. He was converted from the passive study of chaos, of his family and the commune and the city surrounding it, to Murphy’s two disciplines: the guitar and Quakerism. Did the headmaster even require Sergius go to class those first months? He remembered nothing of class, if he’d been there at all. He sat at meals with Murphy and the other students absorbed in the music teacher’s penitent, monkish worldview, while the scorning high schoolers blazed around them.

  The whole rest of Pendle Acre School was then just junk and noise, needless to consider, at the center of which sat Murphy at his guitar, in the rooms of the half-basement apartment, where were shelved the books from which the reformed hippie read aloud without explanation, nodding his head significantly, breaking the silence with a question or by picking up his guitar again, meanwhile a bag of pretzels open and go ahead, help yourself. Murphy’s whole vibe, of abiding in voluntary sensory deprivation, was not unrelated to everyone’s whispered certainty that he’d gotten stoned a hundred times more than even the stonerest of the Led Zeppelin–jacketed dudes of the upper grades, no laughing matter actually how many brain cells he’d allowed to float off to the four winds. From this, Harris Murphy’s quiet authority derived. Murphy’s recovering from the sixties, from the world outside Pendle Acre’s walls, was akin to the eight-year-old’s getting over New York City and Tommy and Miriam, their lives as unfathomable as their deaths. It made a perfect fit.

  Sergius would make himself, then, not only a guitar prodigy but the most prodigal Friend. The Quakerest kid, in a place where there was a fair degree of competition. Meeting on Sunday was optional—perhaps so the weekenders wouldn’t be encouraged to feel they’d gotten out of something—but dozens showed up to do, well, something in the silence, to feel a part of it, anyway not to scorn. Some kids even rose to give witness, speaking in testimony of the Light. Morning meeting before classes was compulsory, and therefore more rote—plenty of Pendle Acre kids used the time to scribble on homework pages, making up for what they’d neglected the night before. Each opportunity, morning or Sunday, Pendle Acre’s little orphan embarked into the Light with ferocious determination, and there was nobody in Quakerdom who’d ever have told him he was doing it wrong. By the logic of Quakerism, at least as it had presented itself to him, first at Fifteenth Street Sunday school, then in paraphrase by Harris Murphy, you couldn’t do it wrong.

  Or maybe there was one way. Sergius, a month or so after his parents’ deaths, stumbled into a violation of the Advice of Moderation. It happened because Murphy had given him a book—not a Quaker book, or not directly, except in that typical Quaker embrace of darker-skinned peoples and their indigenous traditions—Day of the Dead: Mexican Myths and Folktales. Perhaps compensating for a certain barrenness in Quaker conceptions of the afterlife, Murphy handed the sorry kid this thing full of jolly skeletons and benign ghosts, of zombie ancestors more often misunderstood than ill-intentioned. The animate corpses in the Mexican tales had a consoling
ly lumpen quality, stumbling through a droll dusty universe not much different from that of the peasants or shopkeepers they’d been before being put in the ground. Besides, the book seemed to Sergius to say, Your parents vanished south of the border—they died in the Spanish tongue. So the book might be intended to reveal to him where exactly they’d ended up.

  For some weeks Sergius carried the book with him, the new Ferdinand. He’d seized on the tale of a certain Pedro, whose older brother died falling from a burro. This older brother had at his request been entombed with a sort of chimney or speaking tube that stuck out of the grave, in order to give report from the other side. And so Pedro had faithfully gone and on a daily basis communed through the tube with his dead brother, speaking with him of matters secular and prosaic: of earthworms, the crops, and the prospect for rainfall, and of the ironic fate of the burro from which the brother had tumbled—it had been sold into a war, one which the brother had avoided by dying, and which Pedro was now spared according to a local rule that no family should lose both its sons.

  Three weeks in a row, Sergius brought the Mexican book to Sunday meeting and, after a certain interval of silence and a spontaneous message or two from a teacher or an older kid, stood and cleared his throat and read aloud the story of Pedro at the graveside. See, he intended the message to say, it’s okay. The dead are still around. And I’m okay. You don’t have to feel sorry for me.