Dissident Gardens

by Jonathan Lethem

  Rose’s only daughter was dead. That no one should have to live through the death of a child was a tempting motif, yet so generic that it plainly left her unsatisfied even as she bewailed it. Soon enough, she let it go. After all, who were you accusing in such a circumstance? God? In whom you didn’t believe? She was insatiable in search of a better enemy than old nonexistent Yahweh; for instance, the Jamaican nurses. They’d imprisoned her here, they’d stolen cash from her bedside table, they coveted her clothes. Between interrogations of these women who merely changed her sheets and gave her sponge baths and sometimes forced her to move her limbs to spare her bedsores, Rose resorted to ancient archetypes of enmity. She rediscovered Trotskyites: Cicero, when he tried to explain to her the slant of his studies, turned out to be one. And Nazis. In fact, her hunger strike might be against Nazis.

  “What I wouldn’t give for a braunschweiger on good black rye,” she told him, in the course of refusing an ice-cream-scoopered mound of tuna on shredded iceberg.

  “You want me to get you one?”

  “Are you kidding? I haven’t eaten German liverwurst since 1932. Not that they don’t make the finest of everything—if I close my eyes I can still taste it.”

  “Maybe if I hunt a little I can find you a U.S.-made liverwurst sandwich.”

  She waved her hand. The conversation was defunct. When he arrived next, it was with a liverwurst sandwich. Not German, he assured her.

  “What did you pay for this?” she said after one bite.

  “Who cares, Rose?”

  “Whatever you paid, you were robbed. Only the German is any good.”

  “But you wouldn’t eat the German.”

  “I’d spit on it.”

  Nonetheless, the liverwurst went in her. So their eating club was alleviated of the burden of the trays. He ferried in lasagna and borscht and pierogis and pastrami, all according to her whims; he imported cheesecake and licorice and Orange Crush, and everything they demolished together while she complained of its inadequacy to the food of her memory and of Cicero’s unthriftiness, his foolish inability to locate a bargain. Given the lousiness of the food, the prices were ludicrous, a crime he’d paid so much!

  Cicero recalled her munificence when as a child she’d insist he eat three, four slices of pizza, plunking a ten-dollar bill on the counter, then sending him home to Diane with what change remained from it jangling guiltily in his pocket. He’d never realized what a coupon-clipper she’d eventually become, eking out her years alone after quitting the pickle factory. Now, in this world of shrunken battlefronts, Cicero’s perceived extravagance was an enemy at her gate. Like all enemies, it demanded to be shamed into submission. Fair enough. Cicero enjoyed feeling extravagant in her eyes, though his forms of luxury had nothing to do with an outlay of $3.99 for a not-terrible pastrami on rye.

  Paranoia, thrift, denunciation—as the backdrop of her recollections paled, these irrational essences took the foreground. She’d spent her life poring over Real’s double-entry books, after all; maybe what was left behind wasn’t the Communist but the managerial accountant. One day he arrived to discover her in a fury, claiming the staff had stolen a pair of slippers, ones he’d presented on his previous visit. She needed them, had begun walking, making scouting forays to the dayroom. His mistake was to have purchased a pretty nice pair.

  Cicero looked. The slippers were beneath her bed. He pointed them out.

  “No, no, no, listen to me, they took them.” Her voice was full of real terror. “The moment my back was turned. They’ll take anything, I don’t dare sleep.”

  “Those are the slippers I bought you.”

  She barely glanced, was derailed for not a second. “They resemble them, yes. They replaced yours with this pair of fakes, thinking I wouldn’t know the difference.”

  “That’s pretty … elaborate.”

  “They switched them in the night. I gather they found these at some ninety-nine-cent store. Where else would they shop?”

  “The slippers look exactly the same to me.”

  She arched an eyebrow, as if having sprung a trap. “They are the same, only made of cheaper materials.”

  “You’ve worn them?”

  “What choice do I have?”

  “Well, then. Despite being surrounded by enemies, you’ve got slippers.”

  She breathed heavily through her nostrils, as intolerant of his shortcomings as when at ten he’d failed her demand to help solve a stubborn quadrant of her New York Times crossword. “Yes, think of that. You got fleeced again.”

  “Fleeced how?”

  “If these schmucks were able to find adequate slippers, perfectly resembling the pair you bought, give me one good reason for buying such an expensive pair in the first place?”

  This golem of rebuke may have been the point from the beginning—who knew? surely not Rose!—but it had needed the electricity of conspiracy to get it up on its feet.

  The golem, though, was Rose, made of parts of her old self. For she was up on her feet these days, in slippers supplied by Cicero, and it was Cicero who’d prodded her to eat, and to think and remember, to gather her forces. Now, in a careful-what-you-wish-for instance, it would be Cicero who had to feel accountable that she’d begun, yes, to competently terrorize the joint. He’d even managed to fatten her up a bit (and himself, too), much to the astonishment of the Jamaican ladies. Heaped pastrami with horseradish mustard, chocolate malteds in Styrofoam cups, trays of eggplant Parmesan—burning this new fuel, Rose regained her snap and bite, took a survey of the dayroom’s occupants and found them wanting. Convicted, without trial, of a mass conspiracy of lumpen stupidity. Incapable of debating with her the connotation of a 60 Minutes segment, let alone analyzing either the miscalculations of the Popular Front or the sinister contrivances of the nursing staff. Relegated to her borough’s last holding area, before dispersal of its people to the copious acreage of waiting cemeteries, she declared herself ashamed on behalf of Queens. What she’d give in here for an Archie—what she’d give even for an Edith Bunker to wrangle with. Dialectic had collapsed for Rose everywhere, from the disappearance of Miriam from the other end of the telephone line to the loss of the old familiar contest of appetites in the arena of her body.

  “I don’t want sexual intercourse anymore,” she said one day. “I don’t miss it.”

  “Good for you.” It was, Cicero sometimes thought, all he wanted. Add this, then, to the myriad gulfs between them, the fascinated unsympathy that bound him to Rose. “What I pine for is a bowel movement.”

  He’d bought her a lined notebook, and she’d begun a tabulation, a record of her failures at toilet, in the faltering block letters that had subsumed her script. “The food goes in,” she told him. “It must come out eventually.”

  “I’m sure it has been, somehow.”

  “No, Cicero. I’m being converted into a block of solid human waste. That’s the only explanation.”

  On this subject alone, Rose recovered her irony. What, short of obsessional disappointment, had ever lit her fuse? Albert had failed and abandoned her; she’d gone to lunch on the ironies for a decade, until Communism came along to displace him. Now it was her shitting.

  “There’s less of you and more of it every day,” Cicero suggested. In Lacanian jargon, a phenomenon such as the cessation of Rose’s sexual longing and the replacement of her familiar self with an excremental double bore the exotic name of aphanisis: the dissolving subject’s failure to identify, in the face of the world’s depredations, with the contours of her own desire. But Cicero spared Rose the translation of her potty talk into Latin. Save it for the other side of the Hudson.

  “I’m conforming to my peer group,” she deadpanned. “I’m getting ready for the dayroom.”

  Early in May, buds on trees and birds actually audibly twittering on the island of landscaped pavement where the Lewis Howard Latimer Care Facility soaked in BQE exhaust fumes, at what Cicero figured to be the summit of Rose’s new capacity to tyrannize her ca
retakers, a nurse pulled him aside, to say, “You must take her from this place.”

  “She couldn’t possibly live with me,” Cicero blurted, terrified by what might be his own shadow, unless it was the shade of Diane Lookins. He’d accustomed himself to the waves of disgruntlement emanating from these dark-skinned women each time he strolled through the automatic doors with another grease-redolent paper sack, to visit the white Jewish lady who handled them more imperiously than any other—that, no easy contest to win. From his early flippancy with the social worker who’d summoned him here, Cicero had been humbled by the degree to which he depended on these women to go on tolerantly wiping Rose’s behind and to phone him when she’d suffered a downturn. His only tactic was to keep his head low while passing through.

  The nurse clucked. “She’s well enough to step outside. It’s no good for their souls never to leave these walls. I meant nothing more. You do as you like.”

  The next week, leading her to the subway on a bright gusty Wednesday afternoon, Cicero almost panicked. How tiny Rose had gotten! Maybe the size she’d ever been, except to his imagination. But now, enfeebled. She’d regained vitality by local deathbed standards, such that he’d kidded himself. Here on the outside she struck him—even dressed to what remained of her nines, and emboldened by his saying Hell yes, let’s take in a Mets game—as likely to be swept off the curb by the least gust of litter-fouled wind. How’d they persuaded him she was capable of a field trip? Why’d Cicero chosen to believe them? Yet he got her aboard a 7 train.

  There, like a child, Rose insisted on standing at the double doors to ogle the approaching platforms, each a stretch of sidewalk severed from the earth and propped aloft on girders. She strained for the least sight of Shea, Sterno can in Band-Aids of orange and blue, as it heaved into view two stops before the Willets Point exit. Seeing her alive to the world, Cicero grasped the sense of the nurse’s injunction. He’d discounted the cost of Rose’s enclosure. He’d himself come to weirdly relish the sensory-deprivation episodes of these visits, his interest passing beyond a kind of cold study, or something penitential, to a bodily savor of what he could only call the scent of death. He supposed he was burying his parents in slow motion. Or maybe it was a Pavlovian effect, given how he rewarded himself for each slog to Queens with an immersion in the realm of the West Side trucks.

  They walked up for the day game amid only a scattering of desultory regulars and hooky-playing teens, to learn, no great shocker with the Mets these days, that the ticket representative had on offer good pairs and singles in all sections. Before Cicero spoke Rose leaned in and said, “Up with God.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Upper level reserved. The cheap seats.” Tickets in her clutch, headed to the turnstiles, she expanded. “I’d say sneak in, if you weren’t too big to hide. If you’re unsatisfied with the view we’ll finagle our way to field level in the later innings.”

  “Sounds like a white-people thing. When the black man sits in the upper deck, he usually stays there.”

  “Then you’ll be the Rosa Parks of the upper deck.”

  “Sounds exciting. But what’s with the God talk?”

  She shrugged. “It’s just an expression. ‘Where’d you sit at the game?’ ‘Oh, you should have seen our seats. We were up with God.’ ”

  “Sounds like Lenny.”

  “Not everything that sounds Lenny stems from Lenny. Lenny didn’t invent Lenny, in point of fact. I heard the ballplayers are going on strike soon.”

  “See, Rose? Labor’s not dead yet.”

  She waved him off, labor being eternal or never having lived in the first place. “The sonovabitch owners are slandering them in the yahoo press. What are you staring at, Cicero? You think I can no longer decipher the sports section of the New York Post, the only paper that comes into that place on a daily basis, God help us.”

  “Just impressed you made the effort.”

  “Don’t patronize me.”

  He wasn’t. The opposite. He was gawping as she revitalized to an almost terrifying degree, like a sponge form nourished with water and whose ultimate size was unpredictable. Next thing she’d have him by the shirt sleeve and they’d be working the rounds of the stadium as if it were the sidewalks and storefronts of Sunnyside.

  “There must be an elevator,” he suggested.

  “Let’s walk. I like the ramps.” It was as though the el platform had inspired Rose to migrate to highest ground, whether to pontificate to her borough or to try and step on its head. In accord with this speculation, they perched in shade near the stadium’s rim, the players seemingly no nearer to them than the LaGuardia jets shearing atrociously low, in a section sparse enough nobody observed how Rose and Cicero sat and yakked through the anthem.

  “They’re never gonna sell us a hot dog up here.”

  “You can go and get some, unless you think they won’t sell hot dogs to a black man. I’m a naïf, I wouldn’t know of such things. Who’s this pitcher?”

  “Pat Zachry, Rose. I thought you were getting regular with the Post sports section.”

  “Pat Zachry failed to make an impression.”

  “Yeah, well, Pat Zachry’s what happens to Tom Seaver in the age of Reagan.”

  He left her there, took a census of the gloomy food outlets in the stadium’s chilly upper caverns, corralled dogs, soft heavy pretzels, soda. Dave Kingman hit a bases-empty home run in the fourth and thin cheering from across the horseshoe of stadium resounded around to their side, rattling like coins in a cup. Zachry let runs bleed through in the odd-numbered innings, shadows of light stanchions groping over the mound now, the game taking on a lulling rhythm of despondency, pierced now and again by a self-amused jeer.

  “It’s not much, but it’s pretty good,” said Rose.

  “Yeah.”

  “Why didn’t we do this a long time ago?”

  “We’re doing it now.”

  “Take me inside after the next out.”

  “You cold?”

  “I need a toilet.”

  He dropped her off and found the men’s, where, how do you do, some seventh-inning-stretch action looked to be unfolding. Cicero sensed it at his back while he stood at the urinal, more stalls occupied than their nearly abandoned section could possibly demand, the sort of thing that went on everywhere once you knew to look. Another ready partner appeared then, slipping into the remaining stall. Maybe Wednesdays were a regular Upper Deck Reserved situation, reliable as the Walt Whitman Service Area, who knew? Well, somebody. Cicero didn’t trouble to zip his fly before slipping in behind him, and his fortyish Irish-dad-looking friend gave up his burden about as quickly as Pat Zachry letting the Giants tack on another run. Cicero was rinsed and waiting, his back propped on the chilly cement wall, before Rose reemerged.

  “Cicero?” she began, once they were back in their seats.

  “Um?” They’d picked up a couple of ice creams. He spoke with a tiny wooden paddle in his teeth.

  “You believe in God?”

  A foolish question: What chance had Rose ever given him to sign on for that stuff? By the time Cicero might have tracked down those particular avenues in his own mind he’d found Rose’s skepticism waiting around every corner, preformatted for his convenience.

  Yet if he had a grudge against her this wasn’t it. Of those consolations that Rose’s disdain had foreclosed from his consideration there wasn’t a single one Cicero would ever wish to have bothered with. Her intervention in his life story, her intrusions on his mind, had represented among other things a significant time-saving measure. From the shoulders of giants, and so forth.

  “Why should I suddenly believe in God?”

  “I just enjoyed the shit of a lifetime, that’s why.”

  “Me, too,” he lied.

  “What are we, the Corsican Brothers?”

  But it was never like that again.

  Six months later he found her in bed, unwilling to dress for his visit, file cards strewn across the bedspread. Her ho
rrendous blockage was back, her world again narrowed to the size of the room, or to the size of the shrinking room within her. The Shea visit had faded like a dream. “Help me, Cicero,” she said, not a plea but indignantly, as though he’d neglected this effort long enough. Rose’s handwritten cards, home for her tattered recall, an address file grown to a Parkinson’s-feeble block-letter index of the players under Rose’s memory proscenium: Real’s Radish sales reps and library board members shuffled together with ancient CP contacts disguised as boyfriends, or vice versa. Sister, reminded one card, Flatbush address lined out, replaced with another in Florida. Then, in a shakier hand, DEAD. Others held random jottings, Rose scripting cues for every occasion. Elie Wiesel HATE formed the complete text of one. If she could somehow read all the notes at once, or project the cards into a hologram of her own head, she’d be restored.

  There was no card for Miriam, who therefore went unmentioned lately. Cicero couldn’t imagine any sympathetic reason to bring her up. Nor her grandson, who’d been vanished to Pennsylvania.

  That Sergius Gogan didn’t come up was a mercy to Cicero particularly, a sore spot he didn’t wish probed.

  “Who you looking for?” he asked now.

  “He’s a policeman I knew.”

  “You know a few of those.”

  “No, no, long ago. He’s dead.”

  “Then why do you care?”

  “I … want him to arrest a nurse.” Always this, the dire bottom line on her plummets: black women thieving what belonged to her. Always this: a onetime revolutionist’s fantasies of uniformed men, bringing cold justice.

  “How can he, if he’s dead?”

  She stared as if he were stupid, the primal exchange between them, an eternal principle pointing back to his first uninvited lesson in the Dewey decimal system.

  “You looking for my father?” he suggested, just to rescue them from this brink.