The Radicals

by Ryan McIlvain

  Good. Right. A man of action, apparently. A complicated man of action. I stood at the right front corner of the Buick’s spreading hood as Sam again approached the driver’s side of the Jeep. The teenager stayed inside his car, rolling down the window and speaking softly, apologetically from the sound of it. Sam’s voice carried back to me—variations on I understand, I understand but damage has been done. He’d heard the crack of glass himself. At one point he called out to me (“Comrade? Damage report?”) and I went around back to inspect Sam’s car: a rubbery stain on the bumper, black streaks like frozen current, and a good-size jagged hole, vaguely New Jersey–shaped, punched out of the left brake light. I took a few more pictures with my phone. By the time I got back to the front of the car the teenager’s hand was holding what looked to be twenties out the window. Sam slowly shook his head. He stretched his long crane-like arm onto the roof of the Jeep and patted it twice in benediction.

  “Go and sin no more,” he said to me, showing a wry little smile as the Jeep pulled away behind him.

  In the car Sam said, “Probably on his phone—saw him try to hide it when I came up to the car.”

  I stared at him, waiting.

  “Which isn’t actually his car. It’s his older brother’s—so he said. Anyway, he did apologize to me.”

  When we came to the scene of the accident a few minutes later, another red light stopped us. The giant Legoland of the turnpike and Route 9 tilted up to the right of us, the ramps rising and curving away. In the shadow of the freeway was the garden center Sam had tried to turn into, its white wooden trellis hanging rows of round flowering plants, pinks and yellows, like pixie wigs. Closer by, I thought I saw red brake-light glass scattered in the road, glinting.

  Finally I said, “Speaking of confrontational politics…”

  Sam laughed a little, blushing. “Yeah,” he said. “Sorry about all that.”

  I held up a clement hand. “Can I ask you a question, though? I’ve been meaning to ask it for a while. Deeply invasive, deeply personal…”

  “Do your worst,” Sam said.

  “Why are you in a Marxist theory class? Not that you don’t belong there. This isn’t a purge. It’s just that, well, I’m curious. I’d always heard you guys were above theory, or you thought you were.”

  “You mean poets?”

  “All you MFA types.”

  Sam nodded his head in time to the road’s vibrations. We were moving again, crossing the great highway plaza. “You first,” said Sam.

  “Why am I in the class?”

  “You’re ABD. You already know the stuff cold. Why go into campus when you don’t have to?”

  “Boredom,” I said. “You get really bored. Do a doctorate, you’ll see—boredom, isolation. Alienation. The dissertation cuts you off from your ‘species being.’ You remember that one—comrade?”

  Sam smiled, shook his head.

  “Well, it’s an embarrassment of jargon, isn’t it? Especially in Hahn’s class. I sometimes think she should have a translator.”

  “She should,” he said. “You.”

  I laughed.

  “Why not? You TA one of her classes, don’t you?”

  “An undergraduate class. A general ed class.”

  “A general education is what I need. It’s decided. You shall intercede with the Mother,” Sam said, turning onto my street, the caged pin oaks and ivied fences, the painted garages and porches and stoops. When we pulled up to the clapboard row house I rented a room in, Sam held out his hand. “You were soundly beaten today, sir. Until soon?”

  “It’s your turn,” I said. “Why are you in the class?”

  “Ah, yes.” Sam repeated the question to the windshield, smiling. His gaze slid down to the empty air around the old slotted tape deck, the grimy knobs and buttons going soft at the edges like rounds of cheese. “Same reason as you, I guess. Boredom. Or I don’t know. I went to a few Occupy marches when all that was going on. Were you involved with any of that?”

  “When there wasn’t real activism to do, sure. It was a good party.”

  “Can of worms?”

  “Not really. That’s the extent of it for me.”

  “I guess for me, with the class, I was just tired of poetry workshops, and maybe a little curious. It’s been a good vocabulary builder if nothing else.”

  “Here,” I said, “hold on a second.”

  I ran upstairs to my room, four walls, three of them covered with jerry-built bookshelves, pine planks and cinder blocks, books on labor history, civil rights, the Marxist canon, the smattering of poetry and prose that I’d kept from my undergraduate days, Continental philosophy, science fiction, a little fantasy, architecture, art, a clutch of Audubon guides, my swollen backlog of The Nation, a long, low, wall-hugging shrine to literature, books like wainscoting, a cluttered riot of books—better that than IKEA shelves. I plucked a narrow reed from the bulrushes, took the stairs two at a time back down to Sam.

  “What’s this?” he said when I handed the slim volume through the window, his voice mock scandalous.

  “Oh it’s dangerous all right. Few things more dangerous than a lucid Marxist.”

  Sam was holding the book up to the light, turning it sideways, squinting. “Looks a little thin—I don’t know. Not much chance of the kind of Stockholm syndrome Capital gives you. This won’t hold me captive for more than the weekend.”

  “Read it slowly,” I said. “And don’t worry about Capital for a while. Hahn never makes good on her threats of reading quizzes—and socialism has evolved. Callinicos is good, up-to-date, a proper introduction. I’ll be curious to hear what you think.”

  “Okay,” Sam said, “I’ll read it. And tell you what I think.”

  One other thing I remember from that morning—not a particularly proximate start to my story, but somehow it feels like the start: a tennis match, a car accident, a car chase, a loaned book in the aftermath.

  I waved Sam goodbye telling him I was sorry about the fresh damage to his car. He stuck his face out the window, as if he could crane around to see the punctured brake light, and gave a full-faced shrug. “The things of this world, right?”

  That was typical of Sam—always signing off with some cryptic biblicalism, as if we’d all spent our formative years in a seminary. We were worldly-wiser now, of course, wry and unillusioned and yet still beatific enough to believe in causes. Or something like that. I’ve since had plenty of occasion, urgent occasion, to think of what that particular quip might have meant to Sam—something about the transience of all earthly things, wasn’t it, but what did that transience mean to him? Was it a good thing? An enabling thing? The more I think about the phrase in Sam’s mouth the less it sounds like a quip at all. Maybe more like a prophecy, or a threat.

  Anyway, I shouldn’t get ahead of myself, or not more than two or three days at this point—skipping ahead to an elevator ride up to Dr. Hahn’s office, late Monday afternoon, and where the hell had the weekend gone anyway? What to say to the good Frau Doktor? Hahn and I were relaxed enough around each other, and I was certainly seasoned enough in the academic game, that I felt I could dispense with the tepid, transparent excuses for why the batch of twenty essays still lay on my office desk, inevitably, ungraded. Not a family emergency, no—my folks sat quietly in suburban Massachusetts like little Matryoshka dolls, tidy and neat: Take off their shells, they’d keep surprising you, but the calm lacquered exterior was calm indeed. And no mononucleosis either—no one to give it to me. No crippling depression (no chemical depression, anyway), no psychotherapeutic Rolodex to flip through and pluck from. I was a hale, hearty, well-adjusted child of loving, educated parents—one of the lucky ones. I just couldn’t bring myself to give a shit anymore. Was that an admissible excuse? Dear Dr. Hahn, I feel my veins fill with lead at the prospect of reading another paper about checks and balances, or the shameful Three
-Fifths Compromise. My limbs like salami, heavy and dead. It’s the same with my own work. It’s a sort of soul-soddenness, the weight of waste. What did it really matter what thirties-era radicals did to try to disrupt the New Deal? Why history? Why yesterday? Wasn’t Time’s winged chariot assembling now, and now, and now? Randolph’s famously open curriculum, a doctorate in Politics, simply, had given me so much rope to hang myself with that I’d now collapsed under the weight of it, crushed under the coiling coils of it, the pile rising on top of me like toxic soft serve, or a funeral cairn, like the brainy abstract involutions I’d once plunged into headfirst. Theory! Ideas! The dialectic! It was Alex who’d cut to the quick of it all a year ago—had it already been a year?—when she dropped out of her fancier program at Columbia, ABD. I could jerk off to Deleuze and Guattari for two hundred pages…or I could actually do something. We were lying in bed when she said it, in a Florence pensione, no covers, no cover at all. She’d made the lazy masturbatory hand gesture, the wet raspberry sound to punctuate the pause. I looked down at my bare flaccid penis, father to none. Alex and I broke up a month later.

  Did I miss her? Of course I did. But what I also missed was some dimly remembered sense of purpose, the orientation toward doing that Alex had apparently reclaimed. Dear Dr. Hahn, is it too much to ask that my life be more than the sum of its little routines? Dear Doktor, what should I do about the sense of hollowness that overtakes me, spreading inside out until my skin feels like a mold?

  The elevator dinged and in walked a pretty girl.

  A redhead.

  Short. Shortish. Not tall, in any case.

  Small freckles on her face, light brown, massing at her cheekbones and nose bridge like the drips in a Pollock painting.

  She pressed her lips together in a thin smile, acknowledging me. I gave the same look back. Her red-brown hair was long and thick, loosely ponytailed, piled into the hood of a navy blue Randolph sweatshirt, her skin that much whiter by contrast, a little waxen in the pallid chrome elevator light. She hit the Lobby button and swung a leather knapsack around to her front, rummaging around in it—scent of vanilla on the tiny breeze, and what else? She’d installed herself in the right front corner of the spacious elevator, weirdly empty, I realized, though it was late in the day. The twin rows of descending silver buttons were partly covered by her body, and as the doors drew shut she turned her head and asked was I going to street level? Did I need something else? Her thin auburn eyebrows stretched in the most modest solicitude, and I couldn’t contain a wider smile. A slight quirk in her look, brown crescent eyes pulling narrower as if by drawstrings, little lines, the faint parentheses appearing at the corners of her face. I was staring, obviously.

  “Was that eleven?” I said.

  The floor began to move underneath us.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Ah.”

  “You needed eleven?”

  “I needed eleven.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What for?” I said.

  She was half facing me now, one hand on her bag strap, the other burrowing into the sweatshirt’s hand warmer. The eyes were narrow, lightly brown. She had light brown freckles like a pale constellation across her narrow, smooth, slightly waxen face. She could have been ten years my junior, and she was beautiful, the kind of beauty that stands just around the corner from typical, traditional beauty, the kind of beauty that forgets itself on a tired Monday afternoon and is all the more striking for it. These impossibilities free you up to be yourself. I complimented her sweatshirt. Very germane, I said. The sartorial laws typically frowned on the wearing of a Randolph sweatshirt, say, on the Randolph campus, but she was obviously above all that.

  She looked up and down my outfit, slowly. “Sartorial laws, huh?”

  Tan canvas shoes, black jeans, a T-shirt, French style, white with gray horizontal stripes—I eyed my reflection in the dull mirror of the elevator doors. A passable build, ignoring the slight swell of my stomach. My flop of late-period John Lennon hair, a little raggedier than usual today.

  “Well…” I said.

  The floor kept falling beneath us, lifting us back down to earth and the bright Formica expanse of the lobby that looked out on Twelfth Street, the trees outside giving off a greenish glow. When the elevator slowed and dinged again, the doors opened onto this scene, prearranged, and the beautiful girl stepped out into it.

  “Better luck this time,” she said, smiling the same curt smile over her shoulder.

  I saw that the button for eleven was already lit.

  When I got upstairs I knocked a brief apology, a lilting little knuckle tap at Dr. Hahn’s office door. It was ajar. I was told to come in, sit down. I was asked how I was. It was a rhetorical question.

  Hahn sat with her arms crossed in front of her on the table, holding court at the small, Arthurian slab in the near corner of her office, a sort of breakfast nook, really, one of the petit bourgeois touches that belied her fierceness and endeared her to me. Around the table sat the two other graduate students I shared the TA-ship with, Greg Baxter and Tiffany Wong. Our work together amounted to a batch of sixty papers split three ways three times a semester. The study sessions we led didn’t hurt much; office hours were barren, paid reading time, really—but the papers hurt, the papers cost. Greg with his round fleshy face and staunch eyebrows, from the Sociology Department, known to wear bow ties, like today, liked to dock his students for split infinitives, prepositions at the end of sentences, all that Strunk and White bullshit. Tiffany was more sensible. A casual friend from the Politics Department, she studied race theory and Asian American solidarity movements and had picked up the extra course, I assumed, for the same reasons I had: money first, money second, money third. She was watchful and precise, always soft-spoken, the skin of her face smoothed back as if by a permanent gust of wind. She once referred to a movie that had “chinked out” white actors in Asian roles, a trick of makeup and lighting that she described through gentle scoffs. A sharp, unsentimental mind. I suppose I was a little cautious around her.

  And then there was Hahn—grumpy, graceful, small-toothed, bob-cut, lithe, bespectacled Hahn. In her office she wore the white blouse and gray sleek pants, matching coat draping the chairback, that a lesbian friend of mine had once apostrophized: “Oh how I love you, Professor Hahn’s pantsuits!” But she was fierce, a Stalinist, unrepentant, known to challenge her students, as she’d once challenged me, if they recited the well-known crimes of the Maoists. Look, famines do happen, don’t they? She didn’t hesitate to criticize her former employers, either, the bosses at Princeton who’d accused her of goading her students to riot in the protests around the U.S.–Contra collusion. She left Princeton before they could force her out, drifted for several years, organized, wrote. Among the talented misfits and castoffs at Randolph College she found safe harbor. Twenty years later I drew on her work on Ralph Ellison in my senior thesis, the cream of which I submitted to graduate schools. It couldn’t have been my undergraduate GPA that got me into the program Hahn more or less ran now. It might have been pure luck.

  “Did you get a chance to average out your papers?” Hahn said, looking sidewise at me.

  “You mean the grades?” I said.

  “Do you have an aggregate? Greg’s hard to please, Tiffany’s on the cusp I’d expected for a second paper—B, B minus. How did your students do?”

  Idiotically, I reached into my backpack, shuffling around for the papers that weren’t there. I must have left them in my office, I announced. I stepped across the hall to the windowless room with the gray felt walls and the quartet of thick metal desks, each of them shared by two graduate students—the Animal Cubicle Farm, we called it. There was the untouched manila folder, thick with papers, lying brazen on the far desk.

  I tried to keep the folder close to my body as I settled back down next to Hahn, the papers like a losing hand at her table. When the m
anila cover bent and kinked open against me, Hahn eyed the first essay as I pushed the cover shut. Traitorous reflex! With a curdled expression she removed my hand and the first essay from the folder, flipping through the unmarked pages. “You need to make more marginal comments than this,” she said. She flipped to the last page, also bare—no marginal comments, no terminal comments, no grade, nothing. Greg and Tiffany tipped their eyes down in concert, suddenly very interested in the grain of the table wood. Hahn took me in with her lips turned inward, a faint white pressure line where the mouth used to be. Her eyes were flat and dull under the slanting bangs.

  “Can an atheist make confession?” I said.

  Hahn took out another paper, lifted the pages, let them drop. She took out another.

  “I was in bed all weekend,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “You were sick?” she said.

  “I wasn’t feeling well at all.”

  Hahn sighed into the silence of the room. She reached into the stack of ungraded papers, adding two more to the pile in front of her. She dealt them all together, rapped them smartly on the table. “I can do these five,” she said. “Anyone else feeling charitable?”

  “I’ll do five,” offered Tiffany, faithful Tiffany. Blessings on the hand that received the stack across the table, blessings on the eyes that smiled at me, a little mischievously.

  “Greg?” Hahn said.

  “Sure,” he said, though he mirrored Hahn in the turn of his lips, his fat fusilli eyebrows rising—a curse on those eyebrows.

  “Which leaves five for ailing Eli,” Hahn said. “Do you think you can handle that?”

  “Of course,” I said. “Thank you. I am sorry, guys.”

  “We need to have these back to the students by tomorrow’s class,” Hahn said. “Greg, if your papers are that bad, they’re that bad, but take another look and consider curving up. Like I said, B, B minus is more or less where I’d expect the second paper to be. Thanks everybody. See you tomorrow.”