Dissident Gardens

by Jonathan Lethem

  Who opened the door for him he couldn’t say. What he recalled the next day was taking the basement stairs to search for the housemate he crossed his fingers remained living there, a curly-haired NYU film student named Adam Shatkin. Shatkin did remain, and was home, and welcomed Sergius gladly into his room. He produced stuff the boy remembered, books and records the student had shared with him when they’d been each other’s housemates, including a Star Trek calendar Sergius remembered Shatkin thumbtacking to the plaster at the start of January, its pages now flipped to August, to remind Sergius how little time had passed. Up in the kitchen, Shatkin cubed tofu for a stir-fry, which they shared with the flute girl; nobody else was home. Nobody, that was, apart from Stella Kim and Murphy, whose sounds too much leaked through the floors, to the parlor level where the three sat at the commune’s long, scarred-oak dinner table: sounds of Murphy’s guitar playing and their two voices murmuring and some other stuff, sounds which soon came to be dominated by Murphy’s tone of injured pleading, which Sergius hadn’t exactly heard before but couldn’t mistake. Sergius and Shatkin returned to Shatkin’s rooms to watch Channel 11’s nightly reruns of The Twilight Zone and Star Trek on Shatkin’s small color TV and Sergius passed out there, never ended up in his own room at all.

  The next day, on the subway and into the Penn Station cavern to find the train to Philadelphia, he and Murphy moved under Murphy’s severe cloud, a silence not Friendly in any degree, and when Murphy brought his guitar out on the train the temper of his playing was ungenerous, unteacherly, self-pitying. Sergius didn’t take it personally. He pitied Murphy, too, for what Murphy didn’t know and what Sergius could easily have warned him: not to take personally Stella Kim’s quicksilver nature, which Murphy, or likely any lover, could only know as fickleness. For what it was worth—not that Sergius could imagine he’d offer this notion to Murphy—Sergius pitied Stella Kim, too. Unlike Sergius, she’d lost someone she couldn’t forget! It was here, Sergius would later understand, on the occasion of this skin-flaying plunge into the boiling past, that his project of forgetting had commenced. The visit itself he’d recall, but it drew a barrier in memory, one he’d never violate. Tommy and Miriam’s world, the commune, bereft of them: so be it forever. Stella Kim and Murphy were equally fools, and deserved whatever misery they’d discovered together, for the crime of attempting in her third-floor room what oughtn’t have been attempted: to conjure Miriam and Tommy in absentia by joining their own bodies. Sergius had no interest whatsoever in some scraped-up, reheated-miso-soup, harelipped simulacrum.

  Back at Pendle Acre for the start of the semester, self-retrieved from a front of the Lamb’s War for which he’d been proven unsuitable, Murphy returned to his responsible, ascetic self. The dorms repopulated, classes resumed, orange rotting leaves were raked into snaking barricades along the lawns. What might after all have been just a fever dream of New York City, Murphy mentioned only once.

  “I owe you an apology, Sergius.”

  “For what?”

  “That visit. It didn’t work out as I’d intended.”

  Sergius shrugged, tuned his strings.

  “I meant to take you to visit your grandmother, if you wanted. We should have discussed it on the train going in, but, well, I blew it. Is that something you’d want, Sergius? To see your grandmother?”

  Was Murphy kidding? Sergius, facing the judge, had been an inch from asking to live with Rose. Yet, that inch left uncrossed, Murphy’s offer was grievous and absurd. Sergius suffered a gut-rustle of betrayal: Were Murphy and Stella Kim now regretting that they’d engineered this surrogacy? Had all those machinations, of which Sergius knew he’d been kept in ignorance, been contingent on Murphy’s fantasy that Stella Kim would be his girlfriend? The two must be idiots, or else intent on his utter demolition. If an eight-year-old knew it, what adult wouldn’t grasp that, having betrayed her, it was now inconceivable to visit Rose?

  Maybe Murphy just didn’t know Rose.

  Though Stella Kim would visit a time or two, bringing with her the Alice book, a pair of Miriam’s earrings, Tommy’s LPs, some other crap, Sergius never stepped inside the commune again. And Sergius saw Rose just once again, and only after she’d been taken from the Sunnyside Gardens apartment.

  In retrospect, the obtuse question launched Sergius’s long, slow departure from faith in Harris Murphy. A tendril of doubt, one seeded, surely, by the Murphy-skepticism he’d picked up out at the fire circle, amid those nicotine, clove, and pot fumes swirling to the galaxies. More than the wretched expedition, the question was unforgivable. Their visit was convulsive, a lightning strike Sergius and Murphy suffered together. The question, deliberate as a reading from Fox or Nayler, was something else altogether. Yet Sergius couldn’t immediately let himself feel how badly Murphy’d failed him.

  He couldn’t afford to.

  Sitting there, both hands on his guitar but no longer tuning, exercising recently discovered muscles in his temples and eyebrows and high in his cheeks, those that throttled tears, and wishing also to discover some Quaker super-talent for silently dissolving the query Murphy’d hung in the air, Sergius released a hot stinging quart (or so it felt) of liquid shit into his corduroy pants, and through their weave, into the plaid-upholstered cushions of Murphy’s ratty, crumb-infested couch.

  What option, for the Quakerest kid at the arcade? First, master Frogger. Guide the frogs across the highway, navigate the floating logs, usher them to safety in the bays, a perfectly nonviolent practice involving stewardship of a small quadrant of the Peaceable Kingdom. Presumably the frogs, having earned grace in a world of snares, could go now to nestle at the feet of the lion. Frogger made a perfect little Lamb’s War of a video game, and while his Pendle Acre friends blasted away tides of starships on Defender or Xevious, roasting alien hordes in pixel fire, Sergius turned himself into a Frogger savant.

  The older kids, on their way out to the alley for a cigarette or a covert beer, would come to marvel at the wunderkind’s score, on a game they’d been too impatient or slaughter-minded to invest enough quarters to master. Watch that little frog go, man—he never misses! They’d buy Sergius some M&M’s he’d devour while threading another frog to salvation one-handed. All Murphy’s fingerpicking lessons found a fugitive home in Sergius’s joystick dance.

  Sergius might be more serious about saving hexagonal frogs than any human walking the earth.

  He might be the George Fox of Frogger.

  Q*bert was another option, presenting a universe devoid of guns, bombs, or Pac-Man cannibalism: The little surrogate creature, dew-drop or booger or whatever he was formed of, merely leapt and dodged, like the frogs, attempting to stay alive in his peculiar world, a floating pyramidal stairstep adrift in outer space. Q*bert reminded Sergius of the Little Prince, actually, noble orphan on his tiny planet, tending a lonely rose. Q*bert, never able to leap off-screen unless it was to his death, carried a certain secret poignancy. But Frogger and Q*bert were, at last, too easy and too cartoonish, both games for little children unwilling to confront the universe’s starkness even in arcade form. The frogs and Q*berts were Ferdinands who’d never been pricked, nor even led into the arena. For the Quakerest kid, neither made much of a statement.

  The search for a video game with a gun button, but one he chose to renounce, led Sergius to Time Pilot.

  The game was simple: Your tiny plane roved the screen’s center, curling in the air, rotating three hundred and sixty degrees, as swarms of tiny planes of identical make—but enemy markings—entered from all sides. They shot at you, and you shot at them. You began as a World War I biplane, the Sopwith Camel or some other Allied hero, your airspace steadily filling with sitting-duck Red Barons. Time Pilot, as designed, was a massacre.

  When you advanced a level, you moved through time. Next, and faster, were the World War II fighters. Level three, modern air force jets. Beyond that and you moved into a sci-fi future, the more typical arcade motifs. Yet the action, though sped up, remained the same.
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br />   Time Pilot as played by the Quakerest kid was even simpler. It might approach a Buddhist exercise of some sort. Sergius ignored the flat red button for firing his guns, stayed centered with his whole being on the joystick—on flying. His biplane was Silent. Flown thus, attentively, swirling and diving, evading collisions and the intermittent red fire of his enemies, Sergius found he never had to die. The drowsy action of those prop planes, even when they massed, as they did, in uncountable squadrons, was a cinch for him to endlessly evade. Score at zero—Time Pilot’s designers had included no reward for merely staying alive, as opposed to points for kills—he remained stuck in Time. (Sergius later considered how World War I made a sensible limit in what he’d converted to a pacifist video game; conscientious objection had, after all, met its horizon in the Nazis.) His enemies or their fire never grew faster, only kept languorously drifting on-screen, until soon Sergius’s joystick action drew vast clouds of the unkilled along behind, turning as he turned, yet always more slowly and haplessly.

  If his Frogger achievements had caught notice, now Sergius drew crowds. His stands attracted townie kids, as well as the Pendle Acre cohort, upon whom he relied to keep those outraged by his strategy from making anti-pacifistic protest of their own. For one thing, a video game sounded wrong with nothing exploding, with nothing changing but for the growth of the pursuing flocks. Worse, the affront of the untouched red button. More than one hand reached out in frustration to tap it for him, wrecking the scenario, before Toby Rosengard, Sergius’s protector generally on the long walks to East Exeter—and a well-muscled kid behind his Doors T-shirts and bangs, with a little honest-to-God knife scar on his chin from the Columbus Avenue playground altercation that had fated his exile to Pendle Acre—began camping out nearby, presence enough to put out fires before they sparked.

  “Shit, he’s got the whole German air force on his tail. All you’d have to do now is turn and fire and you’d practically set a record!”

  “Yeah, but then he’d move up a level. This way he plays all night on a single quarter.”

  “He’s cheating, you mean.”

  “Go find your own game and leave him alone.”

  “What if I want to play this one?”

  “Okay, he’ll be done in an hour, not that he’ll lose, but we’ve got a curfew.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “Find another game or go beat off in the alley. He’s done when he’s done.”

  All the while the red button grew dust. Time’s pilot roved immaculate in silence, like Ferdinand the Bull navigating an arena of the sky and trailing a comet’s tail of matadors.

  Now Sergius resumed his life as a protester. He’d been too young for the 1979 No Nukes march; he and Murphy had helped the upper grades make signs, then chauffeured them in three vanloads to the special bus to D.C., returning afterward to Pendle Acre to practice guitar and listen to live reports on the radio. One year later, at the reinstatement of the draft, when it was time to march, again Murphy was still too leery on Sergius’s behalf. Sergius pressed the case that he’d been born to demonstrations, citing the People’s Firehouse and a few other things. Still, no dice. Yet maybe these petitions had had a cumulative impact, or maybe, two years later, Sergius had grown just another crucial inch. More likely, in the end, it was Toby Rosengard’s offer to be Sergius’s chaperone that seemed to put Murphy at ease enough to let Sergius go and march.

  Older kids would be along, too, seniors who thanks to some faltering year in their scholastic background were as mature as college freshmen, but it was Toby who’d stepped forward with an appeal in Sergius’s cause. Toby, exclusively attired in black concert T’s and with his chin scar and resolute scanty mustache, cut no particular upstanding figure as he slouched toward adulthood; Toby, surely to Murphy’s discerning eye one of the, yes, stonerest of the stoners—but Toby had something also, to go with that inspiring sturdiness of his frame that caused Pendle Acre’s smattering of jocks always to beckon to him to stub his cigarette and play power forward when they had something full-court going. Toby, a New York weekender by train since the age of eleven, was a born leader, a thing to drive a resident adviser up the wall when it was applied mostly to leading susceptible peers to skipping classes or once actually arranging a keg’s delivery to East House. In as much, Toby’s extending a wing to Sergius might have struck Murphy as a positive turn for Toby, too. So, when that June morning came and more Pendle Acre kids than ever before got driven to the depot, word being the Central Park antinuclear rally could be the biggest ever, something unmissable, this time Sergius boarded the bus.

  Sergius and Toby had been commanded by Murphy to play it safe, and you could, in the vast human sandwich between mud-trampled grass and sky with its distant crust of skyscrapers. The Great Lawn was celebratory, in delighted agreement with itself, but Toby felt otherwise, was intrepid in search of a dissident frontier. He split Sergius from the contingent of Pendle Acre kids. Together they milled to the park’s edge, to feel out the zone where righteousness met the greater world’s enmity or indifference. At Columbus Circle they squeezed into a front line where a horde chanting to bullhorn orchestration—“Whaddoo we want?” “PEACE!” “When do we wannit?” “NOW!”—had wedged to a police barricade, one backed by an edifice of mammoth, flat-eyed horses.

  “C’mon,” said Toby, and they pressed underneath.

  Toby was like Miriam—wild for opposition. This was how Sergius knew his parents anymore, in resemblances, uninvited glances. He found himself swarmed with sense memory now, as if in a reincarnator’s past-life terror, the waking dream of time’s collapse. He’d pressed too near the horses once before, with Miriam, downtown, at the famous occupation of the Department of Health and Human Services, mothers marching for day care, making allegory by dragging kids into the fray. He knew this creature, its widening, abysmal nostrils, sweat-rivers on bulging breast, jackbooted cop dwarfed in saddle by the disaster of the animal itself, something irresponsibly loosed into the streets, suggesting that in their foolish crusades Tommy and Miriam had overlooked how state power, with its electric chairs and H-bombs, reserved for itself the advantage of nihilism. How could Sergius find words to explain it to them? He’d lost that chance. New York was unconcealed as a holding area for past calamity leaching everywhere into the present, the island flooded with jubilant untold millions witnessing for peace shrunken to the width of one suffering boy and one dreadful, likely also suffering, horse.

  For his being a ward of the place and having no predilection to venture much from the grounds; for being, more widely, under the stewardship of Fifteenth Street Meeting’s Scholarship Committee; for tending never to miss a meeting for worship; for being promoted now to a kind of lieutenant in Murphy’s classes, tutoring a legion of younger kids on guitar—for these reasons, at fifteen Sergius was subject to a fond joke around Pendle Acre, that when he finished at some Friends’ college, maybe Earlham or Haverford or Swarthmore, he’d return here, to be Murphy’s replacement. Not that Murphy was evidently on the verge of retirement, though in his Fox-quoting hair shirt he was ever less sociable with the other teachers; perhaps the joke reflected a nervous wish Murphy would take his intensity elsewhere.

  The Quakerest kid wasn’t sure what he thought of the joke.

  Yet other arenas seemed barely more than theoretical to him.

  When one evening he was called to the West House pay phone, to learn from Stella Kim that he might not have exactly forever if he wanted to pay a visit to the nursing home to see Rose—in fact, it could easily be a matter of months—Sergius took the train to New York again. This time, he determined to treat it as an ordinary destination, as opposed to a staging ground for spasmodic episodes pertaining to the irrecoverable past. He’d slay the dragon of his grandmother, discover what dominion she might or might not hold over him, what she did or didn’t hold against him.

  In the same cause, he didn’t take Stella Kim up on her offer to crash at her new apartment on Jane Street, much as a te
enage boy might still nurture images of his mom’s best friend’s casual way with a Japanese robe. He brushed off Murphy’s expectation, too, that he ought to rely on the Quaker grapevine, the elders at Fifteenth Street who’d always offered hospitality. Sergius dialed up Toby Rosengard.

  Toby met Sergius at Penn Station and ushered him to his, Toby’s, childhood home, a cavernous crumbling brownstone on West Eighty-Second, front corridor lined with Toby’s various bikes, for track racing, mountain biking, distance. This was what Toby had shirked college to do: get serious about his biking. With just three souls the house was absurdly empty, a Gothic mansion—Sergius couldn’t quit thinking how many dozens of housemates Miriam would’ve crammed into it. The upper story belonged to Toby and was off-limits to his parents, a couple of shrinks who kept the basement for their offices and mooned around the parlor level in apparent ignorance of the black-light posters and marijuana grow lights above their heads, and to whom Sergius was introduced with a minimum of language on his and Toby’s way back out, into Central Park to sit on a rock and get high.

  The greens were not filled with a million waging peace, perfectly okay with Sergius for the time being. He and Toby had a whole boulder to themselves, soaked butts and Schaefer bottle caps in its craters the sole evidence they hadn’t actually staked out a high perch on the moon. Yet below, a vigil. Sergius, though he couldn’t remember his father’s face, knew a vigil anywhere. Like one of Tommy’s, this involved guitars. Imagine no possessions. The singers, barely older than Sergius, their Lennonism secondhand. Sergius wasn’t the only Time Pilot. The sixties formed a seaweed gauze through which they all paddled, browsing for opening enough to surface and breathe free.