The Radicals

by Ryan McIlvain

  “Eli?” Alex said.

  I was shaking my head, shaking and shaking it.

  “Is that true, Eli?”

  “It’s true,” Sam said, “but it’s not the issue. The issue is this card you tore up and the opportunity attached to it. A hundred thousand dollars in debt forgiveness is real—whatever we’re playing at here is not.”

  “We spent four hours canvassing in heatstroke heat, Eli, and the whole time your Frankenstein is out trying to undercut it all? The whole time it was just a decoy?”

  “That’s not the issue,” Sam said.

  Alex said, slowly, “You need to stop telling me what the issue is. We’ll decide that as a collective—that’s how this works. You think you’re swooping in to the rescue like some action hero? Debt Forgiveness Man?” She turned to the group. “ ‘Debt forgiveness’? Is that why we came here? Soline detonates an entire town and we come in in our hazmat suits offering forgiveness to the victims? Guess what, Maria, we’re aiding and abetting the bank in taking your house now! We’re apologists for predatory capitalism, we’re ‘reformers’—we would have told you sooner but we didn’t want to get your hopes up!”

  “I live on earth,” Sam said. “Maria and her family live on earth, in the real world, and what you’re talking about is some ethereal kingdom come—”

  “You need to stop fucking telling me what I’m talking about,” Alex said. “I know that a lot better than you do.”

  “You’re waiting for the revolution to come and in the meantime a family’s about to lose their house and gain a toxic load of debt in its place.”

  Sam stood up again, wavered again. ASU Jason was there to block his path, then Nate from ISO, then Dawn and Adam.

  “These aren’t eggs you break to make some grand omelet,” Sam said.

  “That’s true,” Nate said.

  “That’s true,” Adam said, “but sit down.”

  “We’ll decide as a group,” Dawn said.

  At length they all sat down, smoothed their hackles back into place. Another silence came over the group, night-pricked, humming, and in the middle of it you could hear Tiffany’s slow, deliberate intake of breath.

  “There’s one other condition we should have mentioned,” she said.

  In the end we put it to a vote, a grubby circle of dim-lit buzzing parliamentarians. Sam and the ayes narrowly carried it, but with a rider provision from Alex’s noes tacked on: We’d wait till the morning to tell Maria about the offer.

  In the tent Sam and I were silent, avoiding each other’s eye, each pinned to our opposite corner as if we’d fallen into a centrifuge. You could hear Alex outside going from tent to tent pressing her case for appeal. At one point Sam looked up from his Nietzsche and said, “Tent canvassing,” and I managed a little smile. Minutes more passed like this, the crickets out in force now, the kippering night birds, not much else to compete with them since our camp was unusually subdued tonight. Our last.

  Finally I said, “I wish you hadn’t done that.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sam said. “Really. That was shitty of me.”

  “Do you even know what I’m talking about?” My meanness again, my Trotskyist bark.

  “Well, what I’m talking about is what I said to Alex in front of the group, about our arrangement.”

  “Oh it is, is it?”

  “Yes. I am sorry about that. That was childish of me.”

  “I suppose that’s what I meant too,” I said. “Gratefully your other disclosure upstaged it—a little flesh wound in the back, then the grenade.”

  “I’ve murdered The Occupation,” Sam said, flourishing his hands dramatically, “capital The, capital Occupation. Will I ever forgive myself?”

  I shook my head, turning away from him, turning back to my reading.

  “You voted for it too,” Sam said. Then softer, “We’re doing the right thing.”

  I had voted for it too. The other condition Tiffany mentioned was that the occupation disperse immediately—the bank didn’t want a scene at eviction, didn’t want protesters at the house or at the Bank of America offices. Tiffany had let out this news in little hesitating winces, waiting for the blow that never came. No one was much surprised by then. Shut the blinds, turn the lights off—par for the course.

  It would be a sorry way to go out, but Sam and Tiffany and Jamaal were probably right. The risks were too great, and in the end it wasn’t our decision to make. It never had been. If Maria wanted to take her chances with our occupation, leave the deficiency waiver on the table, then by all means let her. But she wouldn’t. Somehow I knew she wouldn’t, and apparently I wasn’t alone in that intuition. The camp was quiet now, and weirdly tidy—towels and tarps had been folded and gathered in in preparation for tomorrow’s teardown.

  Outside, Alex’s voice rose loose and relaxed, lark-like. Then it came to the door of our tent.

  “Are you boys decent?”

  I opened the flap onto her grinning face, the curt bangs and the strong Roman nose and the ebony stud catching the lantern light—she looked like Caesar. She leaned her upper body into the tent holding a half-full dime bag of dry flaky weed—it could have been pencil shavings, or birdseed—and in the other hand she held by its plastic scruff a cluster of Bud Lights.

  “I’ve come to either smoke or drink a peace with your Frankenstein,” she said to me.

  “I thought Frankenstein was the scientist,” Sam said. “Isn’t the monster just Monster?”

  “Don’t get fresh or I might change my mind. Do you want lowercase bud or capital Bud?”

  “I’m not much of a weed guy, actually.”

  “Of course you’re not.”

  “Repressed habits die hard.”

  Alex turned a goofy, kinking, tight-lipped, high-browed smile at me. “No wonder you two get along.” She slipped into the tent and assumed a cross-legged slouch beside me, flopping the slim bag of weed into my lap. “You’re welcome to as much or as little of that as you’d like. It’s not as bad as it looks. But please go smoke it somewhere else. Maybe on a cliff edge, or in traffic.”

  “At least one of those beers is mine, isn’t it?”

  “No, it isn’t, Eli.” Alex blinked at me.

  It couldn’t have been more than half an hour later when I heard the first laughter sounds coming out of the tent. They were laughing together, their twinned silhouettes leaning in close like conspirators. Maybe it was a trick of my hearing, a deception of the greenish light or my green, wasted state—I observed them from a distance, a stoned voyeur orbiting the yard with the skunky weed in a small glass bowl—but I doubted it. I called Jen and got her voice mail, only realizing the time difference (it was almost two a.m. in New York) after I’d left a message about how much I missed her and how I wished, although of course I was happy for her and her job, but I wished she were here with me now, things were going well, but then again not really, not if I was honest, etc., the message dropping down through descending levels of lugubriousness to match the descending clauses. I didn’t trust myself when I was high—it was true I liked control. In general I distrusted states of consciousness I couldn’t re-create out of my own innate tool kit. A very Boy Scout answer from a very Boy Scout boy, Alex would say, had said—something very nearly like that. Didn’t a good book or film or piece of music induce states of consciousness you couldn’t get back to on command? Didn’t love? Didn’t sex? Consciousness, like the reality it pilots, is a contingent thing, and I should learn to embrace that. I should learn to do a lot of things. I should learn, I should learn, I should learn, I should learn…What were they talking about in there? What were they laughing about? How were they laughing just a few hours after they’d shouted each other down like drill sergeants? One more loop around the yard’s perimeter, stepping stealthily, observing all the time the green tent with the two twinned shadowed bodies shifting against
the canvas like the shadows in Plato’s cave, the parallax effect, young Marcel and the spires of Martinville aligning, disaligning…But I was tired of literature, tired of philosophy, tired of ideas and the whole sham show of it. Tired of action, tired of inaction.

  Something buzzed in my pocket, and again. My phone.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, sweetie, is everything okay?”

  “Oh, Jen…”

  “I got your message. Is everything all right?”

  “I woke you.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “I’m sorry I woke you.”

  “That’s okay. What’s up?”

  “Petty politics. It’s nothing, really. I’m sorry I bothered you with it. I do wish you were here, though. I wish I could hold you.”

  “I wish that too.”

  “You know I love you, right? I guess we’ve only really said it in a jokey playful way—‘Oh, I love you, you’re so funny,’ that sort of thing. I mean it, though. Absent irony, absent hedging. You’re perfect for me, Jen—you’re perfect. A lot better than Alex ever was, if you really want to know. Not that I’m comparing you, not that it’s a competition—”

  “You’re not comparing us?”

  “Or if it is, you win by a mile, that’s what I’m saying. What I’m saying is I love you, Jen, and I miss the hell out of you.”

  “I love you too, Eli.”

  “You do?”

  “I do.”

  “You really do? Really truly?”

  “Are you a little tipsy, mon amour?”

  We said good night while I was at the far side of the yard, over by the ASU quarter, and by the time I’d circled back to the green dome tent Alex’s shadow had slipped out. The sleeping bag was warm and fragrant with her body when I settled heavily down on it.

  “You two sounded like you patched things right up, huh?”

  “She already had the votes to overturn it when she came to the tent,” Sam explained to me. “That’s what accounted for her chipper mood.”

  “And what accounted for yours?” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “You’d always be second in her ledger, you know. Not to skip ahead too much, but there it is, comrade—a warning. That one’s married to the revolution.”

  “Huh?” Sam said.

  I see that a certain zeal is at work in my recounting of everything bad, wayward, careless, mean and destructive that marked our last days at Maria’s. It’s a masochist’s zeal, a self-punishing one, perhaps appropriate, but it does leave a lot out. The night after his shouting match with Alex, and the subsequent makeup session, Sam displaced me from the tent altogether—or maybe I volunteered to move? Who can remember from this distance? It was easy enough to see the writing on the tent wall, anyway. I’d talked to Jen on the phone again, self-pityingly floating the idea that she come out to the occupation. It turned out she’d already booked her ticket. By the time she arrived on Saturday evening, the bank’s offer to Maria was dead and buried, and Maria had never even known about it.

  On Monday morning the police came. Adam Carr got himself flex-cuffed and taken in for “resisting an officer”—no real surprises there. ASU Jason ended up joining him in the holding cell, which surprised me a little more, and Alex and Sam did too, which surprised me not at all. I can still see Sam flushing out of the tent behind Alex on that last morning, like some ridiculous desert bird, the loose folds of his oversize T-shirt flapping against his thin upper arms.

  One more moment in Phoenix, or really in its shadow, its aftermath.

  Jen and I had rented a car and were driving up to northern Arizona in gloomy silence. This was according to the plan we’d made, though of course we hadn’t planned on any of the preliminaries: getting kicked off the property so roughly, the rushed awkward goodbyes with Maria and her family, the collection we’d had to take up to bail our comrades out of jail—my comrades, anyway. In the back window of the rental car Jen’s giant pack hulked, complete with the yoga mats like scroll ends and the hiking sticks that had hung down from either side of Jen, like holy tallithim, when she’d first arrived on Maria’s front porch. She said she’d hoped we might get in some Americana on the back end of the trip. I’d said why not.

  Quickly to the Grand Canyon, then—above miles of open, carved-out, calcified sky, like loss embodied, a present absence, and where was the vast spiky mold the land had been imprinted with? Taken up into heaven? I really was sounding more and more like Sam.

  “Well?” Jen said.

  “Well what?”

  “Do you like it? Isn’t it impressive?”

  “Of course it is.”

  Sienna on darker sienna, burnt umber, ocher, a riot of reddish browns, a vast layer cake of them, and the aerial effect stretching back and back through the dipping receding endless wedges of canyon. It was one of those sights that no amount of pre-seeing could quite prepare you for—I had to admit it—and I had to swallow yet again some of the flippancy I’d reserved for the West with its hard-hewn landscapes, its ancient absences. Take a freeway excavation, take a foundation dig. That’s a newborn canyon, isn’t it? Close enough…My father liked to say that forty years wandering in the wilderness had been plenty—he wasn’t a camping man either, and my mother didn’t press him. Mostly our experience of the outdoors was the woods around our house, the little footpaths cut through brambles and thorns and undergrowth that we walked for exercise or relaxation, or a bit of Frostiana in my poet phase. If serious Jen in her thick hiking boots and spider-bottomed canes had showed up for a walk in the woods south of Boston, she would have felt distinctly overdressed, I’m sure, but the pitch and difficulty of the going would have matched the Grand Canyon rim trail, if not exceeded it. I don’t remember breaking a sweat during the hour or two we walked the trail, most of it paved. Large oak and juniper roots sometimes clawed through the pavement and buckled and broke it, but other than that Jen’s hiking sticks weren’t needed, were merely decorative, something rhythmic to do with her arms. No matter—two-thirds of American sporting was buying the sporting gear, wasn’t it?

  “A little barbed,” Jen said to this, “but I’ll take it. At least it’s words. At least you’re talking.”

  “I’m sorry. I am sorry. I think I’m still back in Phoenix a little.”

  “I can tell.”

  It was then, at a scenic turnout from the trail, in front of an easel-like topography display that showed the Colorado River eating away at the ancient plateau over ages and ages, it was then that I told Jen about the loan manager’s compromise we’d left on the table. The evening sunlight was climbing down the rough terraces of stone, the light thickening to orange, moted, honeyed. Jen was silent for a long time, looking out beside me long enough to watch the light change again—it was granular now, arced, the sun slipping down behind the western shelf of a horizon and tipping its last rays brilliantly into the sky like teetering cables. Then the edifice collapsed altogether. I reached for Jen’s hand in the sudden chill; she allowed it to be taken, squeezed my hand in turn, but I sensed a certain reflex in the gesture, a certain loyalty.

  “Of course I regret it now,” I said, “in retrospect. I’m sure everyone does…But there it is. Anyway, I wanted to give you a little context for my mood.”

  Jen asked, “Why didn’t you tell her?”

  “The group decided against it. It was a collective action. You can’t go in there with one set of procedural principles, then switch them on a whim, an individualist whim.”

  “I see.”

  “I feel awful about it.”

  “Would you say you did more harm than good in the final analysis?”

  “In the final analysis?”

  “Don’t do your semantics thing. You know what I mean.”

  “I think it’s a little hard to say at this point.”

  “That’s
an academic’s answer. That’s the kind of hedge you hate.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I think we probably did more harm than good.”

  The sun was down now, the canyon fading before us, an absence ebbing away into the general absence, and there was another chill in the air, the evacuated high air. The mood had broken, though, like a fever, and on the coarse starchy hotel bed that night Jen and I made love, gently, full of need but careful of it, too, careful of ordinary need—it was strange and lovely. Coming down from those heights the blueing light of the TV played over our bodies. We settled into each other’s arms, my shoulder blades cold against the faux-leather pad of a headboard, but only for a moment. In the upper channels we found an old episode of Columbo, one of Jen’s mother’s favorites, one of Jen’s favorites, and we drifted off to sleep to the sound of the bumbling, dissembling, charming detective who always gets his man.

  We kept on in the morning, up and around the big broad rim of the canyon that looked like a green shifting weather system on the rental car’s GPS. Up through piñon forests, the trees bristling from above, roughly uniform, as if a huge sponge of green paint had been dabbed over the land. Up through climbing mountain roads with the sharp rising banks of pinkish earth on either side like geologic cutaways, rocky fins. The land was bunching up, smoothing out again, accordion-like, uncertain. Finally we crossed into Utah, into Sam’s old stomping grounds, and the desert sky lowered like a boom, the power lines running eternally up into the high mesas. A rust-red promontory rose in the distance and soon signs were announcing the little town of Kanab. Gassing up there, driving through the gridded downtown, I half expected to see sober bearded men in formal dress, prophetic distraction, leaning their arms out of pickup trucks or trailing their much younger wives behind them in heavy braids and long calico skirts. In the end I saw only a few people, and mostly they were tired-looking, on the older side, and dressed for the heat. In Zion Park, too—this was our destination, the other stop Jen couldn’t not stop for, and I was game now—but in Zion it was more of the same. Normal people keeping their outlandish ideas to themselves, apparently. The most foreign experience we had was overhearing a troop of bronzed chatty Germans with their packs and sticks—they looked like Jen, like us. We were doing real hiking this afternoon. The sun was broad and flat and strong and in its light you had to squint through sunglasses to make out the signs and wonders: ANGELS LANDING, 3 MI. Up ahead a giant saddle of red-rock mountain broke from the assorted pines and rose and rose. We stood at the foot of all this, the start of a gradual, switchbacking, rock-walled trail—slow and steady, etc. I wasn’t intimidated, but I asked Jen just to be sure.