Dissident Gardens

by Jonathan Lethem

  He could honor Rose or Miriam in this room, not both. If honor anyone at all. He supposed it might just be as simple as choosing the dead woman.

  “In this regrettable—hurm—unusual—hurm hurm—been suggested you might provide—hurm—never ideal—in full confidence—hurm—decision rests with me—any light you might shed—hurm—”

  “Rose never did me no wrong.” In obeisance or revolt, couldn’t say which, Cicero descended to Ebonics.

  “Been led to believe—hurm—”

  “Maybe you could ax me in particalur what you wanna ax.”

  “—something concerning a kitchen stove?”

  “Oh, yeah. I can corroborate that shit, yeah. Stuck her haid right in the oven.”

  “—hurm—”

  “You really need more than that? ’Cause I got places to be.”

  4 Occupation

  Lydia stroked Sergius off in the rental in broad daylight, as he aimed the car through the vacuum of towns or traffic between Augusta and Brunswick. Though they’d shared a kiss the evening before, it had been a chaste one, seeming an idealistic extension of his discovery of the encampment and her singing. Indeed, her guitar had been strung on her neck between them, legislating distance like a chaperone’s ruler. They’d only begun making out in earnest after getting out of Cumbow, at the last rest stop before the interstate, having pulled in to pee and score more coffee, plus some maple-sugar candy in a little glassine tray, formed into the shape of endangered waterfowl, terns, plover, and loons, and which they devoured in the parking lot—what a fiend she was for sugar! It was like having a pony, the way she bared her teeth to the gums and nibbled it up from his hand!—and then, the gritty sweet still on their tongues, they’d gotten hot and heavy in the car. But he had a plane to catch, a ticket he’d already rejiggered once. She’d begun fondling his thigh through his jeans as he eased into the one-point-perspective task, set the rental’s cruise control to sixty-five. They had no music, Maine radio was hopeless, a desert. And then she fondled more than his thigh. And then she unzipped him.

  “Whoa.”

  She laughed. “You gonna be okay, champ?”

  “I think so.” The four lanes plunged through a tunnel of lonely forest, signs warning only of moose crossing and bridges that flooded in storms. Sergius locked into the right lane, half a mile behind a distant tractor-trailer. He needed a while to steady the thud of his heartbeat and untense the muscles in his thighs before he could stay completely hard, and then, sweet pony’s tongue in his ear, her body pressed against his shoulder and blocking any view through the rearview but no car had appeared there in fifteen minutes anyhow, it all happened at once, and he barely serpentined from his lane, and no one would have noticed if he did. No moose were harmed. She daubed him with brown recycled-paper napkins and he ran the defogger to unsteam the interior glass, all the breath that had come pouring from him at the last instant.

  “Wow.”

  “Wow you.”

  “That’s the kind of thing that could get you killed.”

  “A lot of things go on that only ever make the news if somebody croaks.”

  They left the car littered with rental agreements and cheapo maps, coffee containers and Wendy’s burger sleeves, and the balled napkins she’d used to clean him off her forearm were lost in the pile. He’d failed to stop for gas and so the putty-faced stooges at the rental place charged him to refill the tank at eight dollars a gallon, yet the usual rip-offs now seemed only like the price of entry into a dream, absurd signposts of his distance from this corrupted world of detritus. It was astounding, really, that Sergius could lay down a plastic card and quiet these people asking him questions in voices buzzing like mosquitoes. Not mosquitoes, people weren’t mosquitoes, a horrible comparison. Yet having met Lydia, and in the wake of his foolish journey to see Cicero (what an angry man, what a failed human, in his antiseptic seaside mansion! a mausoleum for his radical sensibility, and then to go abuse his students for it!), Sergius felt he’d floated into a new life, one both urgent—in some way unprecedented to his experience, or with no precedent more recent than that of overnighting in his mother’s arms in the People’s Firehouse—and completely opaque to him. Everything meant something, if only he knew what it was. He had no thoughts of Tommy and Miriam, yet for once they were still presences abiding within him. Could this be the Light? The texture of this new life was nonporous. Like molasses. The mosquitoes buzzed, lodged in their places in the depths of the molasses, and only Sergius, and Lydia at his side, had the privilege of moving through it.

  “Hey, where are you going, anyway?” he said. His voice sounded giddy. He was giddy. “For a minute I was imagining you were getting on this plane!” She’d ridden the courtesy van with him the brief distance from the rental lot to the Portland Jetport’s sole terminal, which presented another oasis of calm. No curbside check-in, no layers of taxicabs, no cosmopolitan hustle here. One jet had crossed the sky as they circled the off-ramp, but now the sky was still, cloudless too. Possibly Maine was secretly part of Canada. Yet the day had burned off its coastal fog, warmed back to Indian summer; he supposed they’d journeyed three hours south, too, from one zone to another. Hard to believe he’d been in the sea yesterday. A return from a spell of northern confusion to his ordinary life, that’s what this was, only he’d dragged this girl out with him. Her guitar case and bedroll were heaped against his lonely duffel, islanded on the stretch of curb where, as the van pulled away, no one remained to observe who or what was being left unattended. Sergius hadn’t touched Lydia’s guitar, not once, not wishing her to know he was a thousand percent more proficient and yet by comparison exquisitely voiceless, inferior in every way.

  “You want me to?” she asked. She took his hand in both of hers, then abruptly—and for just an instant—slid his thumb entirely into her mouth.

  “Uh, sure. I—”

  “Well, I don’t have a ticket and anyway planes are a drag, I never take ’em. Maybe I’ll come down and visit you in Philadelphia if you want.”

  “I’d like that. Though it’s not exactly Philadelphia. And we don’t have any Occupations that I know of.” What did he feel he had to apologize for? His wet thumb cooled in the open air. They’d not spared one word for anticipation of this parting moment, more inevitable than most, writ in the stone of an electronic ticket. “Heck,” he said, “maybe we could start one up!” Among numerous falsehoods of the previous evening, Sergius had spent less time at the Philadelphia encampment than he’d caused Lydia to suppose. But then wasn’t any participation enough to qualify, by definition? He imagined showing her East Exeter, the gas stations and the arcade, no semblance of a public commons. He could teach her Time Pilot, his old trick to make a quarter last an hour and a half. Assuming the game was still there, he didn’t doubt he could recover the knack. It wouldn’t be. He was reeling, he felt, but it was a kind of happiness, though it discovered no happy conclusion. Maybe it was enough to reel.

  “Sergius, that stuff you were saying to your uncle, about the encampments and homeless folks and all that?”

  “My uncle? Oh, sure.”

  “Come on, grab your stuff.” She hoisted her guitar and bedroll now, and led him through the glass portal, which slid noiselessly, into the bland atrium of the terminal. “This might seem weird after all I’ve been saying, but the encampments aren’t important.”

  “No?” Inside, he struggled not to be distracted by the beckoning of the far-off ticketing representatives, those dim sentinels of his coming voyage. Approaching an airplane, your mind prepared by beginning to levitate off the surface of the planet in advance. Airports, even this rinky-dink one, made Sergius feel spaced out, shrunken, strange. Yet he could stow his small duffel in an overhead compartment, needed endure no redundant human contact. He’d only have to play the kiosk, a little video game of its own, until it belched out a boarding pass. But not yet, not yet, for to have it in hand was to part from her. One fact about the Time Pilot was that he never met another, al
ways traveled alone.

  “I mean, a little presence like in Cumbow is nice, but at the big ones, one thing everybody learned is, if you’re spending all your time feeding the homeless, you’re not organizing anymore. ’Cause there’s a lot of homeless, and some of them are flat-out mentally ill.”

  Sergius wanted to object. Aren’t you a homeless person? He said, “Sure, I see what you’re saying.”

  “My boyfriend and I were in Madrid in May last year, we got to be part of the protests there, the Indignados.”

  “Oh.”

  “You probably never heard of them.”

  “No.” His claim on inclusion was idiotic. Now Occupy chose to reveal itself to him as another select vocabulary, an occult dialect, not unlike that of Cicero’s classroom. And she had a boyfriend.

  “I’m touring the last camps before they get shut down, it’s a historical thing. You’ve got to take the wider perspective. We’re viral! Where’s the bathrooms in here?”

  “Boyfriend?”

  “He’s in New York, I’m supposed to meet him. We’re planning the next action, what comes after the camps. C’mon, there they are.” She drew him by his sleeve toward the restrooms. Strung with guitar case, sleeping bag, and duffel, the two slogged like some amoeba through the echoing, ammoniac zone.

  “So you’re in a cell.”

  “C’mere.” Before Sergius could protest, she directed him through the passage to the women’s room. The word for the smell was briny, different than a men’s, some oceanic or menstrual undertone. They heaped their goods outside the stall she’d chosen—the farthest, sized to accommodate a wheelchair and with bulging chrome handrails on all sides—then latched the door and she clambered over him. “My turn, Sergius.” Of course. A woman always wanted you inside her. Sergius was effortlessly hard again. He was met with a bit of a soup, once the tattered cutoffs were at her ankles and he peeled the stripy tights that were her only undergarment. This evidence of Lydia’s arousal, the sopping hair and frictionless inner thighs, was enough to carry Sergius along as they rocked together, hands clutching the handicapped rail. The mouth that had savaged the maple-sugar loons and plover drew at his lips and tongue; when she came, she reared, neck arteries bulging athletically, and again displayed teeth high to her gums.

  She ended in laughter. “There’s no cell, you big dummy.”

  “Sorry?”

  “It’s wherever you are, right now.”

  “What is?”

  “Occupy. Like a way of being, Sergius. Just living differently.”

  No longer early for his flight, Sergius at the escalator found himself gathering with other travelers, men clutching laptop cases, a scattering of couples and families embarking for who-knew-where on a Thursday afternoon through the Logan hub, enough that a line had formed for passage through security. Yet Sergius moved in a field, a splendid bubble extending from his episode in the restroom, that kept all these other human presences in the range of the unobtrusive and inoffensive, the merely pitiable. The Inner Light, that of God in every man, was a dim thing indeed, yet in the afterglow of two orgasms Sergius found the generosity required to grant it. All through the carpeted mezzanine placid travelers un-shoed and dis-walleted, the announcements and CNN feed barely reaching them here, the Jetport’s restaurants and shops beyond view; this liminal zone remained unpolluted by commerce, nothing to trouble the murmur of ritual compliance. One of the new backscatter machines stood sheathed in a ribbon of fluorescent tape, an unwrapped Christmas present, while the line fed through the traditional metal detector. To pass beneath the bower: Sergius’s old private joke in this setting, if you could call the uninvited entrance of your dead father’s voice into your mental theater a private joke. Only now he could hear the song’s chorus in Lydia’s voice, in place of his father’s. Somewhere behind him now, in the humid daylight, she hitched or walked into downtown Portland. Being a young hottie, probably the first car had stopped for her, so she was gone from the Jetport already. Sergius joined the other seekers at the belt, prepared his garments, hoisted up his duffel.

  “Will you step this way, sir?”

  “Huh?” He’d emptied his pockets, set off no alarms. He’d passed.

  “Please collect the contents of your tray and if you will step over to the side here, thank you, sir.”

  The blue-uniformed Transportation Security Administration officer took hold of Sergius’s duffel. Other travelers kept their heads down while Sergius followed his worthless possessions, moving sideways out of the natural flow, a salmon flopping ashore. In one hand he grasped both his Nikes, with wallet and keys and coins loaded inside them, in the other his boarding pass, special license to exist in this place. He wanted to show it to someone again, but nobody had asked. The TSA officer wore a thick walrus mustache on his beefy red cheeks, resembling one of those tough-guy ’70s baseball closers, Goose Gossage or Al Hrabosky. Their jobs had been taken more recently by a slimmer, darker breed of man; perhaps in some other era this officer would have been an athlete, and so the hint of thwarted destiny fueled his bitterness. But no, that thinking wasn’t right, for it was a native resentment that gave athletes like baseball closers their winning edge. They came to the job already bearing their grudges and so, probably, had this man.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Please stand right there, sir.”

  Sergius shuffled in his socks on the patterned expanse, to a place beside the carrel where Officer Hrabosky now unzipped and began rifling through the contents of the duffel. The results were unspectacular but the investigation wasn’t concluded.

  “We’d like to give you a pat-down search, sir, and you have the opportunity to request a private room if you’d prefer.” Bland deference denoted the certainty that every passenger, once jostled from complacency, would reveal as some type of freak on the verge of explosion.

  “It’s okay.”

  After the third caress of his armpits and ankles and lower back had confirmed his lack of ordnance or taped-on bomb, Sergius began to understand that Officer Hrabosky was dawdling, and not in a lascivious way. Another TSA officer had arrived now, a female, and, positioning herself some distance away but in unmistakable relation to the problem of Sergius, she murmured inaudibly into her hand radio. Sergius reminded himself that despite the radios and badges and the fake-cop blue of their button shirts, these weren’t policemen but slaves of an idiot system, brainwashed workers. He’d be Friendly, meditate on the Light in them, escape in a plane.

  “Can you explain to me what the problem is?”

  “I’m sorry but you’ll have to wait, sir.”

  “Wait for what?”

  “A supervisor will explain. You can put on your shoes if you’d like.”

  Sergius got his private room now, though he hadn’t requested it. A windowless, undecorated, low-ceilinged cubicle large enough for a table and two seats, it wasn’t far—you walked right by these places, until forced to notice them. His duffel was whisked off to some other station, apparently for bomb-detecting chemical wipes. Or not; Sergius was given contradictory replies to his queries. The supervisor appeared, a senior citizen who resembled the late-innings closer in mustache and every other regard, only shrunken, denatured of color and vitality, and wearing a zipped windbreaker over the uniform, its puffed form concealing potbelly or shoulder holster, perhaps both. Maybe this was the closer’s manager, then, trudging to the mound for consultation. Maybe the supervisor was the other man’s father—Maine was a small state. But that was absurd. Sergius shouldn’t accord any special wisdom or authority to the man. He was merely old, which made it specially pathetic that his career had culminated here.

  “Hello, I was told—”

  “Sir, will you stand back, please.” The supervisor left Sergius’s proffered hand dangling. He gestured with his own radio at the seat Sergius had initially refused, on the principle that he had a plane to catch, though he’d checked himself before producing even such faintly intemperate I-am-a-citizen-with-rights
language. They knew he had a plane to catch. His boarding pass remained in his left hand. Now he took the seat, revising expectations downward. He was grateful they’d at least left the door open. The younger man left the room, returning to the pat-down area, while the intermediary, the radio-woman who’d still not ever addressed Sergius directly, took up a disinterested pose in the corner. You were meant to find women in uniform erotically fearsome, but perhaps those properties were reserved for the attendants in the sky, or she-cops of the earth he’d left behind. This officer emanated only a fierce gray neutrality, making her seem a feature of the purgatorial cubicle.

  “Would you mind answering a few questions?” asked the supervisor.

  “Sure, whatever.” This came out sounding sulkier than Sergius had intended.

  “We’re grateful for your patience. You entered the terminal at 1:36, according to a time-stamped security tape. However you didn’t make contact with the airline kiosk for an hour and a half, and it was another twenty-five minutes before you made the attempt to clear security.”

  Sergius’s passage had been downgraded to an attempt, no matter his innocence beneath the bower. An hour and a half? Once they’d exited the illicit bathroom, he and Lydia had moved their stuff again, to a bank of vacant seats at a high window, there to moon and spoon until he’d reluctantly and relievedly let her go. Teenagers did this all the time, in airports, on train platforms, and so forth.

  “I was early for my flight.”

  “Would you tell me in your own words how you spent the duration of your time in the facility before contacting the airline kiosk?”

  “Who else’s words would I use?” Idiotic; if, with this quip, he was winning, it was to lose. Undoubtedly a rival account existed, in the form of surveillance video.

  “Sir, I’m employed by you the taxpayers to render security for flights departing this facility. We operate on a standard basis with no special predisposition or attitude.” The gray baseball manager had seen a thousand seasons, was master of a putty-like jargon with which he painted all outcomes as indistinct and unspecial. “Once you’re flagged I have to generate paperwork to resolve the matter, and so, you and me, we’re both inconvenienced here at this juncture. I’m seeking your full cooperation now to avoid additional disruption of the screening process.”