Dissident Gardens

by Jonathan Lethem

  “Does it mean ‘Destroyer’?” Tommy asked. “Destroyer of what?”

  “More precisely, ‘The Destroyed,’ ” said the botanist.

  “Tell him I’m going to write a song about him.”

  After a brief exchange with the guerrilla in Spanish, the botanist said, “He says he expects many songs to be written about him after his death.”

  “I’ll have this one finished sooner than that,” Tommy boasted.

  Negotiations on this point had faltered, however. As the forest soldiers came and went from the pit fire, afternoon caving to leaf-glade evening, the American whom El Destruido grinningly introduced as Fred el Californiano took the botanist’s place as their interpreter. It was as if he’d been waiting in El Destruido’s camp for them, as if relying on their being magnetized, one American to another. Fred’s outfit, drab cliché anywhere else, was disconcertingly incongruous here in the rain forest: serious biker leathers, battered aviator glasses on a band around his neck, and a serious biker’s belly stretching a Joplin T. His beard looked either ten days old or like remnants hacked at with a jackknife. The way he’d lurked on the periphery before stepping to the fore made Miriam think of the abstract expressionists in the Cedar Tavern, how they’d mull behind whiskeys until lunging in without warning to brawl, or to try to pick off a Bennington girl. Fred evoked as well one of Rose’s mute conspirators, those at a CP meeting who massed contradictions in silence, wallflowers of evil. The botanist himself was now nowhere to be seen. El Destruido, too, vanished briefly from their circle. The boyish soldiers generously shared banana-leaf-wrapped portions of bean gruel and something in tin cups going under the name of coffee. Certainties blurred in the dusk light.

  When El Destruido returned, Tommy inquired, by means of Fred the Californian, “You are a revolutionary, yes?”

  El Destruido nodded happily, needing no translation.

  “But not a Sandinista?”

  El Destruido’s shrug was given elaboration by Fred the Californian. “He says that despite what the Americans believe, not all revolutionaries are Sandinistas.”

  “Does he know what’s taken place down in León? That the factions are now at last united in one purpose?”

  El Destruido looked to Fred, who spoke to him in Spanish, then explained: “Not all factions.”

  “But he is a fighter in the present revolution, yes?”

  Fred and El Destruido spoke at greater length this time, and laughed awhile, too.

  “What?”

  “He says maybe not so much this present revolution. He says maybe he’s gonna wait for the next one.”

  “The next one?”

  “Sure, there’s always a next one. That’s why they call it revolution, right?”

  Before Miriam herself needed to interfere with Tommy’s next question, El Destruido addressed them directly in Spanish, gesturing at Tommy’s guitar case, making himself fairly apparent.

  “He’d like you to play,” said Fred the Californian. “Before you write about him he’d like to hear some of your other songs.”

  “Sing in English,” interjected Miriam. “Play him some of the Bowery stuff.”

  “Smart lady,” said Fred the Californian.

  While Tommy aired a rendition of “Randolph Jackson Jr.,” Miriam insinuated herself beside Fred. One miscalculation, one small vanity on her part—yet that it might be this which had doomed them seemed unlikely, even in the direst of her self-recriminations. It might only have doomed them to meet their fates apart, like Julius and Ethel. Or not—she might have drawn Fred the Californian’s special focus even before the little effort she took now, hoping to make herself sympathetically legible as a fellow cynic, a seeker of the pleasures of irony. For Fred had to be ironic in some measure, appearing as he did, here in this place? Please? Anything less was terrifying.

  At least it was the case that Fred caught her vibe. He raised his eyebrows as she moved beside him.

  “Odd couple there,” she said, nodding at El Destruido and her husband.

  “Luck of the Irish held out so far.”

  “Tommy heard it was a poets’ revolution, but I don’t think he’d ever seen so many poets with guns.”

  Fred scoured his beard with a filthy thumbnail. “Heard him mention Quakerism.”

  Miriam was startled, not having seen the other American anywhere near at that point. Tommy’d been dropping the full name of the American Friends Service Committee, as he tended to do everywhere, underlining their sacred status as American simpáticos and also fishing for someone to ask, What’s a Friend? One of the younger soldiers had in faltering English taken the bait.

  “Yeah. He’s a pacifist.” She heard herself strand Tommy with a pronoun; her gambit turned seasick as it inched toward outright betrayal. “I mean, we’re not blind to what’s going down in León. The AFSC has their eye on what comes after. The revenge killings start and you’re basically looking at another Chile.”

  “You won’t find much of that around here.”

  “What?”

  “Pacifism.”

  “Ah.”

  “Destroyed’s more into what they call redemption through violence. Hey, no offense, you mind if I listen to the music?”

  Their eyes met, and then Fred’s tracked the length of her body and returned. The only irony Miriam read there of the bitch talks too much species. Miriam began to wonder how far she’d have to rewind her reel—a few minutes? a few days? to León or Costa Rica?—to do anything but tabulate mistakes.

  Fred’s next conference with El Destruido no one seemed eager to translate. “Yo me encargo del cantante, quien me divierte mucho,” said the forest bandit. “Quiere ver combate, pero no sabe lo qué es.”

  “Entonces, ¿vas a dejar a la mujer conmigo?” replied the American.

  “Yo sé qué eso es lo que quieres, mi amigo.”

  And then they’d led Tommy away.

  And Fred the Californian had led her to this clearing where he kept his own camp, a distance apart from El Destruido’s men, and where she became very very afraid, and where the last exchange in Spanish between El Destruido and Fred the Californian became as lucid to her as if spoken in English. And why not? She’d been listening to this language her entire life, only not understood because she’d refused to.

  “I’ll take the singer, he amuses me. He wishes to see fighting, but he doesn’t know what it is.”

  “You’re leaving the woman with me?”

  “I know you want it, my friend.”

  Early March they’d crossed, by rickety bus over nightmare corkscrew passes, from Costa Rica, in the company of a group of American Friends Service Committee organizers who wanted to behold León before it fell. Talk was the city would be in Sandinista hands in a matter of weeks. Tommy was occupying the role of the crusading folksinger-cum-ethnomusicologist, Seeger and Lomax in one humanitarian package, and not unwelcome as such. The revolution, apparently, a party with occasional bombings, at least if you didn’t know what the city had looked like before all the buildings fell down, or mind stepping past a fly-swarmed corpse in uniform here and there. Once in León, especially, they fell in easily with the company of the poetic-revolutionary Sandinistas, Cuban weapons arrayed under tables full of sweating bottles of cold beer and paper plates loaded with nacatamal and quesillo. The dissident factions had at last been all painstakingly melted together, the Borgesians and the Pastorians accommodated by necessity and martyrdom, and the people galvanized behind them, ready to make a real revolution. Somoza’s influence seemed limited anymore, at least in León, to the embattled National Guard and the planes screeching under the cloud layer, looking as though they might not make it over the mountains.

  The night was full of Sandinista folk songs. Tommy immediately learned to sing three or four, memorizing the Spanish phonetically. Muse inert, he might have been leaning to an Englishized cover album of the stuff, until some rough translations forced him to understand that the lyrics largely concerned themselves with how to d
isassemble and reload rifles stolen from the Guardia. It was then that Miriam nudged him in the direction of semblanza—portraiture, so to speak, musical snapshots of people on the verge of claiming their country for themselves. Basically Bowery of the Forgotten all over again, only trova-inflected triumphalism in place of bluesy lamentation. He even reworked some of the Sandinista melodies, minus the allusions to Soviet ordnance. Well before they’d set out for the mountains, in search of further guerrilla personalities, Tommy had nearly an album’s worth, which he nightly burnished ad nauseam in their hotel room. He spoke of forgoing folk purism this time, instead getting his label to hire Cuban players for accents and coloration, the most musical excitement he’d displayed in ten years at least. Thinking, What label?, Miriam bit her tongue.

  Getting out of León and into the mountains, where the fighters trained and reconnoitered, took a little creativity, some asking around: Tommy’s folksong–army profile wouldn’t serve them moving through Guardia checkpoints. They’d met with discouragement and dissuasion mostly everywhere until falling in one evening with a Canadian, one leading, of all things, a botany expedition, cataloguing rare specimens in the Estero Real Natural Reserve. The man was an academic, a fumbler in a sweat-stained linen suit. Impossible to grant his reality except as a figure passing through the backdrop of a Graham Greene novel; Tommy immortalized him in a song the first night. The botanist explained to them he’d exhausted the Honduran side of the range but knew rumors of ferns that grew only on the Nicaraguan. Though most eager to express his solidarity with the people, and to affirm the inevitability of the FSLN’s seizing the reins in Managua, the botanist was in possession of papers from the Somoza government authorizing his foray, papers legitimate enough he’d be willing to tough out a checkpoint even in the company of a man carrying a guitar, just so long as the man didn’t take it out and begin playing.

  In fact, while Miriam was interrogated separately from the men, repeating to seeming incomprehension the mantra of turista and científica, she heard through the murmuring distance of the compound the unmistakable strains of “A Lynching on Pearl River.” Not the most auspicious selection, but Tommy later explained they’d demanded he play the guitar to prove he wasn’t a spy, the botanist’s papers having perhaps not quite the comprehensive sway he’d hoped, and in his panic Tommy’d reverted to his oldest composition.

  As for whether the botanist was CIA, in the end that was the kind of argument you could sustain forever if you had the time, which, it appeared now, you didn’t. When he first vanished from El Destruido’s camp they’d weighed the matter briefly, Miriam exasperated, as so often before, by Tommy’s miraculous virginity in matters conspiratorial. Ingenuous Tommy, the least a spy of perhaps any human Miriam’d ever known, also least qualified to spot one. How much or little the old faggot knew about ferns being evidence of nothing whatsoever, unless you thought James Bond was a real example of how agencies worked. You had to recruit from somewhere. Enterprises odder than fern botany had been propped up by CIA money, their causes advanced even, whole and accurate botany textbooks written, entire botany conferences attended exclusively by CIA fern moles. There might be nobody who even gave a shit about ferns anymore except those who’d entered the field undercover. Not unlike American Party Communism in 1956.

  To win one last argument.

  With her mother specifically.

  Hell, even to lose one.

  The question of whether Fred the Californian was CIA, entirely another matter; at this point she had to pray he was, rather than being what he appeared, or wished to appear, the words for which suggested themselves to her in abundance but failed to string into coherence: freelance, mercenary, rogue, batshit psychotic. It was sort of a relief not to have to try to explain what was going on now to Tommy, though of course that thought twisted on itself, Tommy’s absence being prerequisite to this present education.

  If Tommy was even still alive at this hour.

  Unreasonable to ask to go through life entirely companioned, though Miriam had never figured to die in a place where frogs not only groaned but groaned overhead. Thirty years readying herself to fight this battle under a Kitty Genovese streetlamp. Go figure.

  Having lived her first sixteen years in a dark apartment alone with Rose might be to have been too much companioned in the first place anyhow, Tommy’s relatively low temperature representing a lifetime’s program of recovery from a primal companionship that was more than enough.

  To have been, then, all told, good wife to a good husband, the furthest accomplishment she’d have dreamed of in the Himmelfarb basement or on one thousand revolutionary evenings or out tasting the coffee breath of her Greenwich Village suitors, Porter in his squishy underpants. No more than kisses on the Brooklyn Bridge, on the el, in Washington Square, nothing but kisses and gropings until Tommy made first penetration. Later, on some dozen or a hundred nights she and Tommy might so easily have slipped the bonds of matrimony, into the general polymorphous perversity abundantly available everywhere, including frequently the other rooms of their own house. Smoke a joint, open a marriage. Fall into bed in new formats, in threes or with best friends, including best friends acquired that evening and maybe never to be seen again, say a Sagittarian and Piscean passing through from London on their way to bicycle the length of Mexico and seemingly groovily available with a minimum of consequences (they might be in Chiapas or Costa Rica now, practically shouting distance!). Possibilities touched down like tornadoes in the communes, wreckage that didn’t know it was wreckage and sought to swirl you aboard. None of this had ever actually happened. She and Tommy directed any idyllic impulses to their own bed, behind their own closed doors.

  Women? No, notwithstanding the lesbian undercurrent in any number of Miriam’s consciousness-raising groups, certain wives not only coaching but after hours bestowing on one another their first orgasms—sexual insurrection begun under cover of what might appear to husbands little more than a Tupperware party. Not for her. Plenty of friends had aired their suspicion that Miriam had a hot-and-heavy thing going with Stella Kim. Miriam shrugged this suggestion off, willing enough to leave it mysteriously afloat, though to Tommy alone Miriam had explained how breasts uncannily revolted her. A political embarrassment, but there it was. Probably some kind of maternal trauma—in any event, kissing a woman would have put Miriam in a beyond-impossible proximity to an unnameable dread. Even to frame another woman’s unclad breasts in her mind’s eye was to begin drowning in some psychic version of nausea. When Tommy suckled at hers, not that she didn’t adore the sensations, the reliable wiring, Miriam shut her eyes to keep the ceiling from pressing downward.

  She hadn’t thought about fucking so much in years as now that she was willing to die to prevent it.

  Yet not to die any sooner than she had to.

  She didn’t think the darkened path back to El Destruido’s camp held any possibilities. There was always the forest itself, but no. In this she agreed with Rose. Always opt for civilization’s brutalities, for the stupidities of the urbane. Not for Rose or Miriam the primal indignity of nature. The forest was death. Fred’s tent was a tiny patch of civilization and perhaps somehow inasmuch a zone of susceptibility to speech and reason. Fred’s tent was where she’d go and find her fate as soon as she emptied the pressure in her bladder that had been with her for hours. Fred’s tent was where the cigarettes were. Why did you rob banks, Mr. Sutton?

  To tell one more joke whether anyone got it or not.

  The salvaged Vantage, lit for her by those acne-cheeked Guardias, was Miriam’s last smoke to this point. But Fred the Californian would give forth with one of his unfiltered whatevers. He’d grant her one in the spirit of the condemned’s last request, because even batshit psychotic freelancers have a code. He’d grant it under the flag of romance, that being according to Ms. Magazine any rapist’s self-exculpating fiction. Miriam had never been raped despite a few brushes, a loft’s freight elevator, older brother Rye, Dirk in Germany, a scattering of
other Who What or Wheres, these accounts all discharged now. To die unraped, then. To live a little more before dying. To taste a cigarette. She smelled him smoking in the tent and the vividness of the American’s cigarettes were unlike anything she’d known, little nerve-rewiring tendrils reaching her where she squatted now. In cities the buildings might be made of smoke, Manhattan an ashtray, a bowl of lives smoldering down to crud and every ostensibly clean shirt suffused, deodorant giving way to surges of impatience and nicotine. When they took to the mountain road the CIA botanist had, in his pedantry, as he waded in from the roadside again and again for a sample, insisted Miriam attend to the ferns. In boredom she’d complied, begun learning the names—Microgramma, pedata, cuspidata—and then despite herself felt her senses unnaturally heightened. The forest’s silence had reached her then, animal dew dripping through the leaves, the scentless uncivilized sweetness of the oxygen. A cigarette was like an acid trip out here. Fred the Californian might be smoking Camels, anyway something unfiltered, or maybe it was that the filters had been removed from her sinuses and forebrain entirely, that she now tripped on withdrawal and uncensored fear. To arouse in him the prospect of a little romance, then, before wrenching his testicles or jamming her elbow into his black-furred throat or raking her already splintered, mud-rimmed fingernails to draw his blood. She’d taste the Californian’s blood if she had to.

  To first live a cigarette’s interval and then to die, then to make the man die if she could. To retain the involuntary dowry of her wifely virginity. Tommy at Quaker meetings on passive resistance while she and Stella Kim studied self-defense for women with a martial arts expert who’d gotten boners when they wrenched his arm up and pulled him close for the pretend knee to his real balls. (“Twist, gouge, scream,” the self-defense instructor had repeated. Here, she wouldn’t bother with the screaming.) Stella fucked the guy, who was later, they heard, arrested for armed robbery, something ridiculous and humiliating about a kung fu “master” carrying a sharpened screwdriver. What she’d give for one now.