Dissident Gardens

by Jonathan Lethem

  She nodded.

  “You can’t remember his name?”

  “I—”

  “Douglas. You want me to write it down?”

  “Yes.”

  He flipped over a twenty-year-old file card and used the blank face to commit a fresh tag for his father.

  DOUGLAS LOOKINS

  LOVED YOU

  DEAD

  The gaps grew. He did once in a while find her voluble, though. Some days she talked as she hadn’t in fifteen years. Cicero dubbed these the Dementialogues, something akin to the deathbed filibuster of Dutch Schultz, or H. G. Wells’s Mind at the End of Its Tether. Swiss-cheesed with missing nouns, they nonetheless showed flashes of her old cryptological verve, her lunch-line debater’s logic. She’d begin without warning. “It isn’t the Jew in me that fell in love with a Negro, Douglas. It’s the Communist.”

  Cicero lately was finishing a book, growing proudly fat in his carrel. Or say taking on some stature, the signature classroom heft and gruffness that he’d come to accept as a derivation from his father. So let Rose call him Douglas if she wanted. Cicero visited less frequently, his New York ritual overturned in any case, the words “gay cancer,” once just a whisper going around, lately getting into the newspapers. The West Side trucks had grown nervous, then eerie, and then depopulated overnight. To take the Jersey Transit in was sheerly a sacrifice, at best a chance to grade papers or take a nap.

  He made it his duty to keep her talking if she wanted to try. “Why’s that?” he asked.

  “You can quit being a Jew, it’s done all the time. Be absorbed into the parade of American winners. The Communist part, with no choice to be what it is, only to walk naked or in shame—that’s the Negro in me.”

  “I like the way you think,” he said. “You might want to keep your voice down, though.” He glanced at the hallway, where she never ventured anymore. “Don’t go walking naked either, okay?”

  Yet the fragments shoring her ruins were not all decipherable. When decipherable, not all compelling. She’d begun reminiscing about the Lower East Side, dullish shit regarding icemen and ragpickers, a lover’s career on the Yiddish stage, and he’d thought the fragments weren’t even hers. Rather, it appeared she’d been cribbing from Howe’s World of Our Fathers.

  “You browsing that Trotskyite’s book?” he taunted, but she didn’t seem to recognize the word, or want to. A late flirtation with not only father, or Cicero’s father, but the Holy Father might be overwriting even that baseline sectarian commitment. For she’d been reading Moses Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed as well, preposterous as this might seem in her condition. He caught her at it one day.

  “I can bring you some other reading matter, if you like.” He unpacked salt bagels and whitefish salad, mostly for himself these days.

  “God creates the world by going away from the world,” she said.

  “I know I’m slow, Rose, but I just don’t get it.”

  “If He’s here, He takes up all the room. It’s only by leaving that He opens a region of possibility for anything else. For all this to occur.”

  “So what’s that meaning to you, in particular?” Cicero braced himself for a translation of Maimonides’s terms along the lines of Rose’s peristaltic fixation: To make room for a feast you must first take a dump.

  “This, Albert, is the reason we never had a revolution in America!” She’d called him Albert by now a dozen times, Archie too, none of it seeming any longer anything too personal. He was content to be the man in Rose’s life, her Big Other.

  “How so?”

  “Capitalism wouldn’t get out of the way. We couldn’t breathe, we couldn’t begin to exist. It filled all available space.”

  “The God That Refused to Fail?”

  “Yes!”

  “You did okay, though, Rose. You existed for a while. It’s in the record books.”

  In the upper story of a top-to-bottom house party on Pacific Street in Brooklyn, a slyly renovated fixer-upper with exposed brick walls shellacked and the staircases replaced with spirals, a kind of home that despite his status here as “native” New Yorker Cicero’d never been in but pretended, to the many in-from-the-provinces young fags packing the rooms, that he had, full of framed black-and-white Fire Island photographs, the reclaimed diner table and also the upright piano’s bench bearing trays of emptied drinks and strewn with smashed rinds of expensive fromage, the whole thing a birthday bash for one of these older queens seemingly half the convivial tribe had bedded and who showed some early signs of the wasting disease, and now someone shushing the crowd and snapping off the Carly Simon on the stereo so that for an instant the storm raging outside and rattling the stale-grouted windowpanes sending a chorus of silly-spooky whooooo’s through the party, quieting the crowd not for cake and candles but to raise the volume on the television and cajole the revelers to attend to the spectacle unfolding there, Diana Ross commanding a drenched million picnickers and ghetto boys from the open stage in Central Park, Diana Ross not bowing to the storm but soldiering on, and this now becoming the party’s main attraction as though scheduled for their delight, Cicero joining, too, and acting as though he knew these songs other than from his father’s well-worn Supremes’ Greatest Hits double LP with the skip that wrecked “I Hear a Symphony,” meanwhile, the dancer Rolando, who’d just half an hour before been explaining to Cicero that in ballet one never so much as lifted one’s hand without considering the parallel plane of the corresponding foot, had now slipped the big toe of his own quite beautifully bared foot into one of Cicero’s front belt loops, from behind—it was here, in the house party in the July storm, that Cicero realized not only that he never need visit Rose one single time again if he chose not to but, somehow more significantly, that despite having called her the day before to say he’d be coming and having come from Jersey he wasn’t going to visit her today.

  He didn’t even know how the fuck you got from here to there on the subway anyhow, and he wasn’t going to ask one of these in-from-the-provinces young fags if they could tell him. He simply wasn’t going out in the storm.

  He asked to use the telephone and he called and got an attendant he knew a little. Not one of the island nurses this time but a younger black from the neighborhood. He thought of her as a girl though she was likely Cicero’s age. Hell, possibly a freshman at Sunnyside High when he was a senior and keeping it to herself that she recognized him, and who, it now occurred to him all at once, had been searching, in their previous Latimer Care Facility encounters, for a chance to puncture what she judged as Cicero’s excessive air of propriety moving through her zone. When he asked this attendant to explain to Rose that he couldn’t manage to get there in the storm, she just barked her black-girl laugh into the receiver. You think she gonna remember you called yesterday? The phone wasn’t far enough from the hoots and catcalls in the room where the television showed a Supreme on her bravest day, the diva’s triumph as if devised as a transmission to this whole insular defiant homosexual group mind, the realm no more native to him really than any other into which Cicero’d insinuated himself, with its secret semiotics like Ethel Merman and Sydney and The Trading Post. The girl surely heard it all leaking through the line, and then Cicero understood that he was actually hearing Diana Ross’s voice twinned through the phone, and then the attendant said, You watchin’ the show? Because we sure is, and I wanna get back to it, brother, and Cicero wondered if the mysteries and inversions of his identity could ever be stanched so long as he set foot in this goddamn city.

  And then he was far away from that place, or from all those places. A great number of things and people had begun to die, some of them in reality, some of them only in Cicero’s mind. In the recourse of his discipline he could tell himself, and sometimes believe it, that the purpose of his work was to bind and salve what was lost. Critical thinking might merely be another name for triage, the salvaging of what could be salvaged from the continuous ruin of human occasions. Cicero was not so far now fr
om his original vision, home as a kind of field hospital, his mother the nurse in attendance. Only now the whole world was the hospital, and he was the nurse.

  By the time Cicero tested negative in Oregon—left to wonder whether he’d escaped infection by happenstance of his preferences or some idiot luck of the body—word had reached him of David Ianoletti’s death. The trucks not only were gone but had been swept ahead of a merciless harvest of the regular denizens, a world vanishing like a mirage. Who knew how many from that Pacific Street house party still lived? Half? Fewer? The heyday of a polymorphous bourgeoisie had been such a brief interval, in the end. Its formerly obnoxious ritual songs now hung in the air, strains of party music drifting across some unnavigable body of water.

  Cicero was an expert deathbed visitor. Attending to Rose, he’d learned the marks to hit: mainly, get his damn self through the door, into ward or hospice or darkened bedroom, abide beside a dwindling body. Primarily the task was to show up and not demand anything of the dying. Tell a nurse to circle back later, while never doing the same with a doctor; hike up a gown and steady a body over a toilet seat, wipe up after. T-cell count obsessions were a sport not so different from Rose’s constipation journals, really. Cicero’d made peace with the odor of certain disinfectants commonly applied at the join of an IV needle to the crook of an elbow or back of a wrist, didn’t begrudge the ocher stain these sometimes imparted to his Arrow shirts. Cheated of any chance to visit David Ianoletti, he’d made amends with other lovers. There were not so many of those, putting aside the men at the trucks with no names he could trace—though among his lovers’ lovers, and his friends, the times offered plentiful dying men to call on. After a while Cicero told himself to quit. Just because he was an expert was no reason to make too much a habit of it.

  The last time, in for a conference, Cicero went without calling ahead, directing his cab from LaGuardia off the Grand Concourse and to Latimer by easy memory, then checking his rolling suitcase with the nurses at the front station. He’d brought Rose a copy of The Vale of Attrition, just off the presses, imagining it would mean something to her to see her nappy-headed protégé published. People of the Book and all that. Now he was one.

  Well, it might have meant something to her a year earlier. He placed it in the chicken’s claws that had become her hands, and she stared, Kubrick-ape-at-monolith-style.

  “I wrote it, Rose.”

  All that existed of her was the adamantine skepticism death-beaming through slitted eyes. Her mouth might be fused shut. He’d been away long enough now, and she’d journeyed far enough over her horizon, that it wasn’t by any means certain she knew who he was.

  He pulled the book from her hands, turned it over, and let her examine the large paperback’s back cover. Verso Press wasn’t ordinarily in the habit of using an author photo, but Cicero knew the passport-style black-and-white served a purpose of which no one had dared speak: to make obvious, without needing to awkwardly assert in the jacket copy, that diversity had occurred, in case the author’s name didn’t sound black enough. Cicero’d posed in a Jean-Paul Sartre trench coat and skinny tie in front of a downtown Eugene consignment shop. Through the shop window’s reflections a still-life arrangement of tchotchkes was visible over his shoulder, prominently including a dressmaker’s dummy, bald but with breasts, its gaze directed out of the frame. Cicero’s dreads were under way now, sea snakes still adrift in the current, not yet dragged down by their own weight.

  “Look,” he said. “That’s me, there.” Why bother with names? Let her put the picture together with the man before her. It came to him that this exercise meant more to him than he’d admitted. He wanted to impress her.

  Rose bore in, obliging him by paying what little she had in the way of attention. “Who?” she said.

  “Me. I wrote it. You can keep it.”

  She scrutinized the photo, maybe putting something together. Then her fingernail, hideously large, clicked on the profile of the dressmaker’s dummy. “Who?”

  “Me.”

  Rose shook her head, closed her eyes, inhaled through widened nostrils, indignant to be misunderstood.

  At last she mounted one more effort to pronounce her objection to what had been placed before her.

  “Why won’t she look me in the eye?”

  Retrieving his luggage, the nurse said, “Funny thing. She goes a year with no visit, then two in one week.”

  “She had someone else here?”

  The nurse nodded. “Her grandson, I think, a teenager. With a woman, but the woman didn’t go in.”

  All his life Cicero had been in training to open his mouth. To inform Rose in the matter of how it had gone with him, being child-prisoner of her stewardship. Or to make the sole confession the prisoner owed, of the crime committed after he’d served the whole sentence and been freed. Helpless audience, his prisoner now, she’d also be self-erasing, impossible to injure. Cicero could say anything, knowing it would slide off the greased façade of her present. Next visit, she’d have reverted to old wars. Yet Cicero’d not found his voice, just fed the next Dementialogue with mild queries, until the last chance was gone.

  One day, that was what it was. Gone.

  Now, with Sergius Gogan and the girl eight or ten hours gone down I-95, Rose’s bemused grandson presumably aboard his airplane while his sexy singer, his Marxist Pixie Dream Girl, tried out her routine in the Occupy Portland encampment, Cicero lay awake on his bed, room lit only by the picture window’s imperfect, flat-assed moon, as it gilded the pines and water, this night cooled enough that the thermostat hadn’t cut in, no central air to drown the heave and rattle of his own undead breathing. Yet by the same token Cicero lay sweaty in his sheets, unable to believe he’d ever be dropping off, remembering too well in the dark that morning’s hell, his bloodless tingling arms like another body trapped beneath him, and dreading the chance that sleeping he’d commune with Rose, the real and restless dead.

  Say what you know and I don’t.

  Nor had he opened his yap and disburdened himself to the grandson. The stupid fact remained lodged inside his stomach all this time, ulcerated into an unwanted secret.

  Told to Sergius, it hardly even rose to the level of a confession. Just a silly story of how the young man’s whole life came to be arranged—look, kid, here’s the radioactive spider that bit you!

  Yet Cicero’d withheld, as if in the primal grip of some Lieutenant Lookins hold-your-tongue-and-let-them-hang-themselves injunction. “Keep your bullets in your gun.” Well, Cicero’d fired one, once. The opportunity had found him, in the form of a pair of hippies making their way to his door one afternoon in Princeton, June 1979, the summer between Cicero’s graduate education and his first weeks of teaching, that hinge into his present life.

  Stella Kim had been dressed in what Cicero supposed she’d thought was modest for the occasion, just a string of chunky furnace-glass beads and a black beret for decoration, over a purple blouse Cicero was reasonably sure he’d seen before, on Miriam. Well, it made sense Stella Kim would see raiding Miriam’s closet as a suitable memorial strategy—the two women had a Persona thing going in the first place. As for Harris Murphy, he appropriately enough presented as a poor man’s Tommy Gogan in his denim work shirt, tennis shoes, hair that cleared his ears by way of comb instead of scissors, beard a foolish way to split the difference between exhibiting and hiding his deformity—that was to say, a poor thing indeed.

  Harris Murphy and Stella Kim insisted on taking Cicero to coffee, or lunch, before getting to their point. Cicero brought them to a restaurant where he thought they’d be comfortable, where they could get a sandwich with sprouts in it, and when they asked what he wanted he said he wasn’t hungry. The two were nervous at what they were doing, and proud, too, and had the heterosexual stink about them. This whole legal melodrama was enfolded in some humid encounter left unmentioned, but unmistakable to Cicero. Stella Kim was bound to dump Murphy—that, too, was obvious. She ran rings around him.

 
; Of course it was Stella who had any real knowledge of Rose, so it was Stella who did all the talking, and all the insinuating. Murphy just listened, glowing at her, in love. But Cicero also understood that it was Murphy who’d be the kid’s real caretaker if they pulled off this maneuver. Stella Kim could take this business or leave it, put it aside as easily as Miriam’s purple blouse. She showed Cicero her prize, the letter from Nicaragua, with Miriam’s poison-pen injunction reiterated within the robin’s-egg-blue airmail envelope.

  “Why is this all going down in Philly?” Cicero asked.

  “Nobody’s clear what the jurisdiction is. But Rose called the cops in Pennsylvania, maybe because the Queens cops told her she had to. They were probably just trying to get rid of her.”

  Cicero could see it. He’d seen it before. Rose getting up in the face of a baffled public-school principal or beery supermarket manager, or helpless librarian or bus driver even. Rose being wished to be rid of, by policemen most exactly.

  “He is her grandson.”

  “She didn’t even try to find out what was going on with him for two months. We’re just doing what’s best for Sergius. I mean, c’mon.”

  “So you want me to see this judge.”

  “Miriam’s gone. Nobody else can say what you can say.”

  Well, that was so.

  Two weeks later came his chance, to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. He dressed to impress and appeared where he was asked to appear, in the wood-paneled, pipe-stinking office of an old man who looked as unhappy with the scenario as Cicero felt. Yet, when the questioning began, Cicero also felt the nauseating onset of a monolithic hypocrisy, that of an institution that shored its power precisely by leaving every person covered in self-revulsion while abjuring its own sick curiosity. Cicero sat, not meeting the judge’s eyes, siloed in his indignation and his blackness and his natty suit.