The Radicals

by Ryan McIlvain

  “Your concern is touching,” Adam said.

  “They’re trying to take her house away from her,” Sam said. His voice was reedy, painfully earnest after Adam’s.

  “Sam!” Alex said, spinning around, throwing her arms out incredulously. “Adam! Everyone! Since when do we talk to fucking cops? Huh? You think these people are your debating partners? They’re cops! They’re instruments of the state! So let’s save our fucking breath, and a little of our dignity, okay?”

  Alex faced forward again, the cops stiffening. We’d all stiffened, I think, and Maria especially. It felt like whole minutes before the giant officer softened, scoffing a little, shaking his large high hairless head back and forth, back and forth.

  “I take it you’re the Occupy leftovers?” he said. “You poor little hipster shits—you guys are all forty years late to the party.” He tapped his partner on the shoulder and started backing toward the cruiser. “Real nice friends you’ve got there, ma’am. Real classy. If they wear out their welcome, you let us know, all right? We’ll check in again.”

  When the cruiser pulled away from the curb, it cleared its throat of a pent-up siren and a burst of blue light, picking up speed as it turned onto Baseline. Maria turned and I saw that her olive face was flushed, glowing with feeling. I don’t imagine I was the only one to read second thoughts into those round sweating features, rosy at the cheeks and tip of the nose, the large eyes sharp with adrenaline—or was it anger? Some of us had gathered around Maria, semicircling her. She raised her voice for all of us to hear.

  “Please move the tents,” she said. “Thank you. There should be room in the backyard. Please do it now.”

  Alex was herself again, reasoning with Maria in soft, persistent tones. We didn’t know if the ordinance was real, first of all, and even if it was, it didn’t matter—what were their rules of etiquette really worth if they couldn’t protect her, or the town, from the likes of Soline? If they wouldn’t protect her. It was a power play, Alex said, and we couldn’t give in to it. That and the fact that moving the tents to the backyard, slinking out of sight, defeated the purpose, the publicity of the protest—

  “Please do what I ask,” said Maria, speaking to Alex but also past her. An impressive finality was in her voice. She put her head down and started for the front door, our loose semicircle drifting open like a buoy line, reluctantly, to let her pass.

  That night I called Jen from the close cocoon warmth of the tent I shared with Sam. The heat hadn’t broken, exactly, but it had slumped off a bit, lazing away as the long twilight lazed above the distant mountains beyond mountains you could just manage to see from Maria’s backyard. The aerial effect, Sam had called it, a photography term he’d picked up from his sister, apparently—that blue on fading blue, that purple on fainter, ghostlier purple. I hadn’t even known Sam had a sister, and here we were sharing a tent on the edge of the desert. Sam was gone now, giving me my privacy. The last light of the day had gone with him, and the inside of the tent shone eerily from the lantern hung from a hook off the central arcing pole. The light made the roof look particularly striking, green-white, milky, like an inverted firmament with the small buzzing insects on the other side of the canvas for negative stars, little odd-shaped holes to let the darkness in.

  “Eerie?” Jen said. “Eerie how?”

  “Like ectoplasm eerie—I don’t know. This weird green artificial light and the ceiling writhing just a few feet above you. I’ve never really liked camping, have I told you that?”

  “Even with all your Audubon guides?”

  “Trees are different. You can study trees from a porch if you want to, through binoculars.”

  “But surely tent sex is some of the best sex there is.”

  “Oh, well…”

  “Are you alone?”

  “Not enough.”

  “Is that why you’re whispering?”

  Through the green milky canvas I could see the dark outlines of other tents, people in camping chairs, people sitting on blankets. I could hear the steady susurrus of quiet conversation. We were all trying to be polite, well behaved, and maybe we were a little bit cowed too. Unusually for us, there was no weed, minimal drinking—we were conscious of the noise. We didn’t want to upset Maria or give the cops the slightest pretext. A wavering world-beat melody wafted up through the campsite from a portable speaker, and of course there were the obligatory boxy chords from a nearby steel string. Nature sounds too: crickets like high violins, a pair of strange keening night birds for woodwinds. For a moment I thought I heard Alex’s voice, mellow and confident at the same time, holding forth about something or other, but then the voice changed, modulating higher and thinner.

  “You still there?” Jen said. “Sweetie?”

  “I’m here. I wish you were, too.”

  “Does that mean your ex-girlfriend’s ignoring you?”

  “Har, har.”

  “How do you know I’m kidding?”

  “You’d better be. It means I miss the hell out of you—bad Jen—in all senses. And it turns out I’m a little more alone than I thought.”

  “Alone and lonely, eh? Should I ask what you’re wearing?”

  I unbuttoned my jeans, adjusting myself. “A little less than I was a minute ago.”

  “Oh, really.”

  “You remember the thing I was telling you about earlier—the aerial effect?”

  “I’d like to see your effect go aerial.”

  “Ha! You upstaged me!”

  “Why? What were you going to say?”

  “I was going to say I’d like to see your areola effect.”

  “Oh would you, Naughty Professor.”

  “What do you say we add some pictures to this exhibition?”

  “Les sexts?”

  I went first.

  “Oh my,” Jen said. “Ooh la la. Okay. I see your aerial effect and I raise you…just a second,” she whispered.

  The interval stretched and something in it possessed me to say, “We’re like my parents, you know that?”

  I wasn’t sure Jen had heard me, if she was still by the phone, but then she said, bemused-sounding, “Paging Dr. Freud?”

  “I just meant with all the wordplay.”

  “Wordplay as foreplay—swordplay?”

  “I’ll stipulate.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you will.”

  I laughed. “Do you know what I mean, though?”

  “Sure. The son seeks the mother in the lover, in the partner. Was that Freud or was that someone else?”

  “It sounds like pop psychology to me.”

  “And you’re saying Freud isn’t pop psychology?”

  “Oh my God,” I said. “Jesus.”

  “You like that?”

  “Where did you get a cheerleader skirt?”

  “Freshman year of high school. I was briefly a Cougarette. Aimez-vous l’image, mon chéri?”

  “I’m on the precipice…”

  “I thought you’d like that. Boys are a bit predictable, aren’t they?”

  “Permission to land?”

  “Wait, wait for me…”

  I was all the way out of my jeans now, boxer shorts down around my ankles, going at myself lying back on my sleeping bag. Steps scraped in the burnt grass outside the tent door—I sat up like a cardiac victim, paddles at my chest.

  “Eli?” It was a female voice. “Are you alone?”

  “One second,” I said. “Sorry, so sorry,” I said, and I cut the call.

  It was Alex, of course.

  “Can I come in?” she said.

  “Give me a second. Let me just put a shirt on.”

  “What’s this standing on ceremony,” she said, as the zippered front flap of the tent began to fall in.

  “Alex, seriously!”

  When I finally di
d open the flap from my side, Alex was smiling, wearing that old raffish face of hers. “I didn’t interrupt anything, I hope?”

  I made myself as comfortable as I could under the circumstances, leaning back on one elbow like a sultan, the other arm placed strategically. Alex sat lotus style, high and straight, boyish in body and manner, on the blue yoga mat I’d teased Sam for bringing along.

  “Just doing a little reading,” I said at length, matching Alex’s smile.

  She offered to come back in a minute if I needed one—not a surprising offer coming from her, but I blushed all the same. And here I’d been girding myself for the next round of wisecracks!

  I’d forgotten. Alex knew about humor, she could speak that language, but the thing you had to learn about her—the thing you learned to marvel at, if you were like me—was that humor for her was incidental, a little frivolous, take it or leave it. It didn’t grease the wheels of the world for her as it did for me, or for my parents: In the Lentz home (“Lentz, like the pre-Easter period, but in the plural,” my father liked to say. “All the atonement we can get”), in our modest split-level set back from a leafy road, we encountered seriousness only where it was impossible not to encounter it: war, genocide, sickness, death and its grim accoutrements. And even then it was only death joined to specificity—in the abstract, Dad especially was capable of poking fun at mortality, disease. Speaking lightly of renal failure, say, or anthrax scares, he’d stop and announce, “You realize I’ll never die of these now, right? Too ironic. Not even your mother’s vengeful Catholic God would do that to me.”

  “My God? I think you need to brush up on your Pentateuch, pal. That grumpy mass murderer was your invention, was he not?”

  And so on, Mom smiling, Dad smiling.

  It was all of life, then, and most of death, love, metaphysics, all tethered to a punch line. It’s not a bad way to grow up—don’t get me wrong—but imagine Marx on the heels of that, imagine Engels, Trotsky, Luxemburg, all that volubility, all that high-stakes High Church seriousness! Imagine the very idea of a confrontational politics. Imagine Alex Esposito and her sharp black box of hair, the way it waved with each cut, slowly, like time-lapse photography, sometimes straight, sometimes slanting down her forehead like a guillotine—imagine me watching her and marveling at her brazenness, her bravery, her sheer quiddity as she pressed the Socialist Worker on students hurrying to class through Washington Square Park, her loud and unselfconscious sloganeering, the impassioned way she chaired the ISO meetings I’d started attending, I confess, much more regularly, religiously (yes, Sam, I’ll say it) after I developed a crush on Alex in my second year at Randolph. A year later she and I had grown into each other’s lives like twisting vine, imperceptible at first, then it was a fact, immutable. We had implicated ourselves in the other’s affection. I learned everything from Alex, so much. What I called my Trotskyist street voice—that was me imitating Alex imitating Trotsky, I think, though who really knew. I knew I liked the words she chose, and the way she voiced them. Only rarely did they overflow into the kind of anger I’d heard that afternoon with the police officers. It was as if the light gathering sharply on the bald officer’s head had blinded Alex to herself.

  “Is everything all right?” I asked her. “Are you okay?”

  “I think we’re okay, yeah. We’ve got a good core group. We’ve got our firing group together. Now we just need to make good on it.”

  I let out a groaning breath, not entirely intentional.

  “What?”

  “That’s from The Urban Guerrilla’s Handbook, right? Our ‘firing group’? We sound like rank phonies when we talk like that.”

  “Oh, don’t be such an asshole,” Alex said, yawning a little. “I didn’t want to talk strategy anyway. You can be Holden Caulfield tomorrow.”

  She slid onto her elbows on the yoga mat until she’d stretched out opposite me, our heads at either side of what must have looked satyr-like in shadow, from outside the tent, this strange two-headed beast reclining silently in a green light.

  “So what should we talk about?”

  “Tell me a story,” she said. “Tell me about this jailbait of yours. Or this Mini-Me of yours.”

  “You mean Sam? The Mini-Me who’s six inches taller than I am and can kick my ass at tennis?”

  “Eli and his tennis.”

  “Game of kings.”

  “I thought that was chess.”

  “Tennis originated in the French court hundreds of years ago, and who’s more regal than the French?”

  “You always were taken with that veneer of sophistication, weren’t you? That’s all the French are good for these days. That and turgid theoretical prose. Where did you find him? Sam, I mean. Is he serious?”

  “You and your seriousness,” I said.

  I told Alex about Hahn and the Marxism seminar where I’d met Sam, Sam there on a lark, at first, an intellectual tourist, the type of thrill seeker Alex and I had seen flit in and out of ISO circles time and again. Was Sam serious? Who could say? I told Alex about the Occupy marches Sam had taken part in. She rolled her eyes. Well, and more to the point, he’d come along to Arizona, hadn’t he? Alex asked how he’d paid for the trip, which seemed to me a violation of unspoken rules. When I didn’t answer the question, she asked it again, and I told her about the money from my dissertation grant that I’d helped him out with—better spent that way, I figured, than on my fucking dissertation.

  “So for all you know he could still be a tourist,” Alex said.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “But you don’t know.”

  “Of course I don’t know. Who really knows anybody, or for that matter anything—”

  Alex’s hand went up and her eyes, suddenly heavy, sedated-looking, dropped like blinds. No, she said, she didn’t mean epistemologically. She hadn’t come here for a philosophy lecture.

  Outside, one of the night birds kipped and the other, in responsorium, kipped back.

  What came next? Besides the waiting, I mean—there was never any shortage of that. How long was it before Sam came to tell me about his run-in with Luís and Aida, Maria’s children, before he enlisted me in his plan to circumvent the group’s plan, the loose “strategy” Alex referred to? It might have been the third day we were there, or the fourth—where memory fails me I’ll order by faith, which, as I understand it, means believing in your own cooked books.

  Call it the fourth day. Faithful Sam came to me with the sweaty earnestness of a faith healer, a tent preacher. He’d been alone in the darkened hallway off Maria’s kitchen, feeling for the bathroom door when he undershot it and opened onto Luís in his bedroom. The boy snapped around owl-like, the whites of his eyes like saucers. He looked much younger in that moment than his sixteen years. Sam gave me the scene in some detail, a good poet—Luís smooth and surprised, swiveled around, his upper body bent over a large brown packing box of neatly folded clothes. Other boxes stood open like mouths around the room. What was he doing? In his own surprise Sam asked the question out loud, as if the answer weren’t obvious. All the walls were barren of the pictures and posters that had hung there for years: you could see the naked outlines, vulnerable-looking, on the off-white plaster, where the posters had shielded the sun and dust. To the left of the bed the closet door was open and a pile of old toys, a child’s toys, cars and trucks and foam balls, green army men, spilled out.

  “And what did Luís say to you?” I said.

  “Nothing,” Sam said. “I’d asked a stupid question. He was obviously in there packing up his life for some storage facility, and then what? How much does a three-bedroom apartment go for in Phoenix? Or a two-bedroom, a one-bedroom? Does part-time work at a Verizon store stretch even that far, and what if the house goes into deficiency? What’s their day-to-day going to be like?”

  “Deficiency?”

  “It’s when the am
ount you owe on the house is more than the bank manages to sell it for. You lose your house and gain a toxic load of debt in the process. That could definitely happen in this housing market. Tiffany was telling me about it. Did you know Tiffany has a law degree? Did you know she practiced for a while at some fancy New York firm? Anyway, she knows a little about foreclosure law. She and that new guy Jamaal, who was at ASU Law for a while, were comparing notes—a bit of résumé-trading too, hackles up. Mostly his hackles.”

  “So he dropped out?”

  “Huh?”

  “Jamaal. You said he was at ASU Law?”

  “Too much debt for too few prospects, I guess. Apparently he failed to see the benefits of being institutionalized and underpaid and scared all the time. Not like you and me, eh, comrade?”

  “Well—”

  “I wasn’t done with the story,” Sam said. “So I’m in there with Luís, right? I’m in the room when in walks Aida with a grocery bag of packing leftovers, some old trinkets and things. She was going to add them to the donation pile unless Luís wanted anything. Then she noticed me in the room and went quiet and tight, like she’d just been called on in class. I could tell I was intruding on a sort of intimacy. Luís spread the bag’s contents on the floor and started picking through them. It was the kind of stuff you just collect over the years—a snow globe, a little checkers set, that sort of thing. He held up this weathered stuffed giraffe with a long spotted neck and long painted lashes around the eyes, and I could tell it meant something to her, just from the way he held it, like he was asking a question with it. Aida’s eyes darted over to me as if to explain why she didn’t want to talk about it. Luís said she should keep it—they were keeping it—and Aida just said okay and sort of stood there in the room like she didn’t know how to leave. I got down on my knees and helped Luís put his sister’s things back in the grocery bag. I handed it to her and I said—I said this to both of them—”

  “I think I see where this is going,” I said.

  “I said that they should both keep all their things. We were going to find a way to help them keep their house. That’s why we’d come here.”