“Sure I’m sure,” she said. “If those Germans can do it, and they have at least twenty years on us.”
“They’re genetically modified, bear in mind. Übermenschen.”
“Here, take one of my sticks.”
“It’s the Moses look. I’m Charlton Heston.”
“Let’s go, my people.”
A few minutes later, in good breath still, I said, “I’ll let you take one of my sticks tonight, if you know what I mean.”
“I was hoping you’d say something like that. It’s nice to have you back.”
The first mile of the hike was easy, or easy enough. The next mile we had to lean into more, the switchbacks narrowing, steepening. All around us vast striated hunks of rosy stone shot up from the green-dotted canyon floor well below us—it was officially intimidating now, and, yes, very beautiful. In the last half mile or so the switchbacks fell away altogether and a long, thin, steadily rising ribbon of blushing stone trail traced the spine of the mountain up to its top. Here the pin oak and piñon didn’t range up the sides of the mountain to cast thin shade over the trail—these trees clung, they were smaller and sparer, bonsai-like, clinging impossibly to the steep rocky sides of the mountain, their roots like grappling hooks.
“Jesus Christ,” I said, looking over the side. “Don’t look over the side.”
“I know. I know that.”
There was a slight tremolo in Jen’s voice—I was relieved to hear it, comforted somehow. She had stowed our walking sticks back in their pack-side holsters, the sticks swinging on certain steep boulder-high rises and clacking behind her like giant castanets. In a few minutes we were holding on to cordons of anchored chains, a feature the park had added, Jen informed me, after too many hikers had slipped to their deaths. The steps were of hard uneven red rock, planing away at odd angles, smoothed slick by weather at points, by too many hikers. I stopped to rest for a moment and realized my hands were shaking. When I’d recovered myself a little, I asked Jen how she knew so much about all this anyway. How had a Western yen cropped up among the piano books and conservatory studies of a central New Jersey childhood?
“It was at Randolph,” Jen said. “I went through a Messiaen obsession. Do you know him? From the Canyons to the Stars is a musical ode to this place.”
“It must be terrifying music.”
“It’s beautiful. A lot of ondes martenot. I’ve got some on my phone if you want to listen.” She looked up and behind her. “Maybe at the top? We should probably concentrate on this last part, huh?”
A rock-hewn stairway the height and pitch of a roller-coaster climb, maybe three feet wide all the way, the little trees down to shrubs now, weeds, mosses, the kind of life that clings to life, and that barely. Five minutes without talking, without breathing, really—all the faces tipped down in seriousness, deep concentration. At the last steel pole anchoring the last length of chain I allowed myself to look up. Jen was there with her outstretched hand, her smile beautiful, heat-blushed, almost sexually relieved, and all that thin blue air behind her.
I rendered my verdict over a lunch of peanut butter and honey sandwiches, gas station trail mix. “I never want to do this again—ever—but I’m glad we’ve done it. Half of it anyway. And I like the view better than the soundtrack to the view,” I said, removing the earbud that piped in Messiaen’s high, windy sounds. “Maybe when we get back down to terra firma, huh?”
We were eye level with the high brontosaurus humps that cast everything else in ridiculous relief: the pygmy river below, the pinpricks of large spreading trees, the scrub brush on the river’s banks much smaller and vaguer than model train foliage, a kind of mere greeny smudge.
“I don’t even want to take pictures,” Jen said. “Pictures wouldn’t do this justice. I just want to try to remember.”
She brought the back of my hand, calm now, to her dry, warm lips. “This is good,” she said. “This is a good, good thing.”
“I’m glad we did it.”
“Do you know what I mean, though? When you wouldn’t change anything? On the phone a few nights ago you said you loved me. I think you were a bit buzzed when you said it—”
“I meant it. I mean it.”
“I mean it too,” Jen said, tipping back her hat brim, lifting the shadow off her white freckled face, smiling. Her mouth was warm and sharp with the taste of peanut butter. It was a long kiss, too long under normal circumstances and in public, but in the hard thin light at the top of Angels Landing, in the gusts of wind that made you brace the stone underneath you, though you were a hundred feet from any edge—in all this a certain inhibition dropped away and an honesty born out of exhaustion came up to take its place, an honesty of the body. We kissed for a very long time. You felt this was a person you could crawl inside of and rest in. This was a person in whom you could find shelter, warmth, affection, understanding, counsel, gentle reproof, love, all good things in good supply.
No one was paying much attention to us anyway. The middle-aged Germans had circled up closer to the edge, passing around clear bags of flax, it looked like, and behind us a regular stream of hikers crested the summit with a rush of relief to blind them almost completely to the amorous couple sitting cross-legged and centered at the summit’s rough table, whispering and kissing by turns. Really it was only the little birds that watched us, hopscotching toward our set-aside meals, fearless, darting for crumbs. Yet whispering felt right. It was a fragile thing we’d found, a sudden thing, a kind of secret we’d discovered between the two of us and we were nervous to let it loose in the rough bracing air. Jen said she’d had some recent good news at work to match the good things that were happening in her life with me. When Raymond had learned of her grad school ambitions, he’d taken it upon himself to disabuse her of them. It was a gentle, joshing process, conducted over the course of several weeks of strategic compliments, strategic jokes (I heard that key change you added—really beautiful playing. Imagine how much better you’d play with eighty, ninety thousand dollars in extra student debt…), all of which culminated in a sit-down lunch a few days ago at a Greek café within view of the Guggenheim, just the two of them. Raymond told her it hadn’t been as easy as she might think in New York City to find a gifted sight reader, a gifted musician, who would show up dependably, coax the best out of each of the auditions, and put up with the industry-standard slave wages they paid her. Not to mention the transcribing and arranging she’d volunteered to do in her after-hours.
Here Jen interrupted her story. “Raymond talks as if that kind of thing is drudgery, but it’s just because he’s tired of doing it. I love it. You think the natural medium for composition is the instrument itself, and it is, but it also isn’t. Until a piece moves from the keys to the staves it’s just this fleeting, private, unstable thing.”
“So he’s got you composing for him?”
“Not for him exactly. He works with a network of composers and songwriters, some of whom pride themselves on being ‘intuitive’ musicians. That’s code for theory illiterate. Sometimes he’ll just give me a songwriter’s practice files and it’s my job to try to make something out of them. Then last week he sent me a raw score, something he was co-writing, ‘toying with,’ he said. It’s a reworking of Kiss Me, Kate, and it’s a mess. It’s just placeholders, vague ideas. My job was again to punch up what was there, make it more rigorous, more complete—”
“Are you getting paid for any of this, Jen? Did Raymond really call them ‘slave wages’? If he’s only paying you with compliments, he’s underpaying you.”
“Easy, Engels, easy. I’m getting there.”
“But the upshot is you’re not applying to grad schools again? You’re quitting?”
“Eli, let me finish the story. We’re still at the fancy Greek place, square plates, several forks—you see where this is going, right? Raymond loves the work I’ve done on the score. Everybody who’s go
tten back my work, whether it’s transcribing or ‘organizing,’ quote-unquote, everybody says great things, you know? I’m really good at this, Eli, and Raymond recognizes that. He gave me a substantial raise, and I see what you’re thinking—you’ll just have to trust me that it’s substantial. But he gave me a raise and a week’s vacation—hence this trip, this view—and he also said he’s going to get me a co-writing credit on the score if he can scare up the funding to produce it.”
“Why is any of this exclusive of graduate school? I thought that’s what you wanted.”
“It’s what I thought I wanted. But I didn’t know what I wanted. I was frightened. I’m a classical musician in the twenty-first century, I’m always worried about where the next rent check’s coming from. But this could be a good thing, you know? Eli? I thought you’d be happier for me.”
“I am, sweetie,” I said, “I am. Of course I am. Come here.”
Everyone was dropping out of graduate school. It was a sinking ship, with the true believers stuck in steerage. I limped along for my sixth year at Randolph, picking up courses through Hahn’s generosity, her forbearance, really. I wasn’t much more diligent in my acquittal of duties than I had been before, showing up to meetings with papers half graded, or very, very loosely graded, intending to go back to the batch once I’d survived the norming sessions and do the students the justice they deserved. It didn’t always happen. I tried to imagine in each student a Jennifer Daugherty banking on her grade in Poli Sci 110 like she banked on a scholarship disbursement, or a meal—it didn’t always help. Hahn and I still met occasionally for dinner, usually at the Moroccan café near her apartment, which really was excellent. It was as if a certain region of my palate had been waiting and waiting for the taste of tagine, like the soul’s lost half that Plato describes, and now it had found it and needed to binge. Hahn usually paid, despite my halfhearted objections. “Don’t embarrass yourself,” she said once. “If you had the money you wouldn’t be TAing for me, would you?” She also knew not to ask about my dissertation or the grant money I’d frittered away in its name. I knew not to ask about Stephen, her dying husband. I had seen him a time or two more—he wasn’t squirreled away, Hahn wasn’t embarrassed of him—but the effect of the brief encounters was chilling, if I’m honest, a constraint on the rest of the night. Steve spoke through an electrolarynx now. The thing had attacked his very vocal cords—ravenous, ravenous appetite, devouring him wholly, cutting him off from the world of friends and acquaintances, who could only smile so long in the presence of his world-weary jokes, his self-deprecations, crudified now by the stiff toneless voice entrusted to deliver them, as if his mind had been switched out for a hard drive. I said none of this, of course, not to Hahn, much less to Stephen, not to anyone. Yet they both sensed it coming off me—they must have—like a scent. Steve leveled his weak whey face at me one day and said through the electrolarynx, “The trouble with living death is that the party goes on without you, doesn’t it?” And Hahn, pushing me to the door, said, “Please, honey. I’ll be back in an hour.”
What was happening with Sam and Alex and the rest of the Phoenix crowd? Not much that I observed. I knew Jamaal and his willowy Afro and his bright, loud loose-fitting clothes had come east from Arizona. I saw him around at a few ISO meetings—he stuck out pleasantly from the somber gray-clad masses of Manhattan. I knew he was in Queens now, with Sam and Alex and a few others from the occupation. Sam had invited me out to their rented house in a couple of tepid text exchanges, or in the post-tennis banter that began to feel forced, sparse, windy—and pretty soon months had gone by without us seeing or communicating with each other. We’d never really talked about what we’d done together in Phoenix, only about the heat and the fucked-up politics of the place. They didn’t even celebrate Martin Luther King Day, Sam informed me.
One day in the middle of my seventh year at Randolph—and believe me that that number could sometimes catch me up breathless—but one day I left Hahn’s office after yet another norming session and set a course walking due south. It was late afternoon and I was on my way to meet Jen and her parents for dinner at an old, dark-wood-paneled place I hadn’t heard of, but apparently it was swank and soaked through with history, a holdover from Melville’s Manhattan. There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, the poet of the sea had written, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs—commerce surrounds it with her surf. I’d been rereading Moby-Dick, some of Beckett too, tacking on to Steve’s obsessions, or maybe just avoiding my dissertation. What this meant in practical terms was that I now carried thick books in my shoulder bag that thumped against my side like an unwieldy externalized heartbeat. The books were giant, world-swallowing, absurd, but of course their very absurdity made them necessary, and their necessity made them absurd (this is from Beckett’s Watt, I believe). In any case, I found comfort in this course of reading, a comfort I tried to draw on now as I headed south toward the commerce-racked Wall Street of my destination. Silly to say, I know, but lower Manhattan often put me in a gloomy, End Times mood, as if it weren’t just the edge of the island I slid toward but the edge of the world, a fifteenth-century seaman, superstitious, scared of sea dragons and usurers, evidently. That my fiancée and her quiet hippie parents waited for me at the end of my journey made it a little less treacherous, but only a little.
Away from the noise and harry of the avenues, I was cutting through Washington Square Park when I heard a familiar voice. It was high, insistent, straining against the wind, shouting out rhythmic, rising lines about billion-dollar cables going into the ground to help the rich get richer faster, about the rising compensation for the top one-tenth of one percent—we weren’t the ninety-nine percent anymore, we were the ninety-nine-point-nine percent, the vast democratic many against an oligarchic few, and the oligarchs were winning! And why? The rest of us didn’t care enough, we weren’t mad enough, we weren’t organized enough! Alex waved a rolled-up copy of the Socialist Worker at passing head-bowing students. They leaned forward under their heavy backpacks like Sherpas, or stared at their phones all the more intently. Alex looked like she might just whap the shy passersby with her newspaper, like an owner to a dog that shits the rug. Her hair was jet-black, India-ink-black, much darker than usual—she must have dyed it—and against that sharp-cut contrast her olive skin looked flour-white. It was as if Sam had rubbed off on her too. I should mention it was March, the sun was dead and buried beneath a thick slate sky, the streets constantly dark and wet. Everyone’s skin seemed to luminesce a bit more, glowing dully or brightly pale as the case might be—we were a city of deep-sea invertebrates. It was still a little startling to see Alex’s pallor, though, seeing her unseen as she shook her head after another slip of undergraduates. She looked geisha-like, a little thinner, too, around the jawline and the long pale neck that descended into a gray wool scarf, a long peacoat. The small stud was gone from her nose, I noticed, only a blemish-like dot where the piercing used to be. I was almost on top of her before she saw me.
“You,” she said.
“You,” I said. “You’re still alive!”
“I’m still alive.”
“Where have you been? How are you? I hear you and Sam moved in together?”
“Something like that,” Alex said. “We’re all keeping a low profile for now.”
“What does that mean?”
She didn’t answer me.
I said I hadn’t expected to see her out paper-driving and sloganeering. I was under the impression she had more or less quit the ISO. It was almost a year since I’d seen her at meetings.
“Those meetings are a joke,” Alex said. “They’re just masturbatory grad students and undercover cops. And this stuff”—she gestured wand-like to the square with a rolled-up newspaper, as if she’d be content to make it all disappear—“this is mostly a decoy. We’re not going to find anyone for the Group here.”
“Come again?”
�
�We’re not going to find anybody for the Group we haven’t already found.”
“The Group?” I said. “I thought Jamaal was joking. The Phoenix Group? You guys have a name now?”
“Mostly just the Group,” Alex said, “and Sam wanted a name. I don’t particularly care one way or the other. It’s just—”
She cut herself off, stiffening the shoulders she’d lifted lazily. Her look had changed; her eyes stared past me, wide, walleyed. I turned to see a tall man in a bloated dark parka, dark sunglasses, and a pulled-down beanie sprinting toward us with long swift windmilling strides. Something flashed in his hand, metallic, shearing light—he was right on top of me, swerving at me, and I still hadn’t put together who he was—and now the shiny something punched hard and flat against the open V of my jacket, right against my shirted sternum, shocking me. The blow pushed me back several steps, took the wind out of me less with the force of it than the shock.
“Move!” the man said in Sam’s voice, but deeper, gruffer, and he took back his arm and pushed past me, sprinting on. I felt the hard weighted thing slide down the front of my shirt inside my coat, lodging at my waistband, as a late teen in a blue ski jacket broke out from behind a crowd of other students. He was red-faced, yelling after Sam. “Stop him! Stop him!”
The student rushed past us before I could get a good look at him, but he went with the reckless, splay-footed stride of a non-runner, a non-athlete. This was Sam’s salvation, apparently. Alex was pulling me away. She had the paper-drive samples tucked under one arm, her other hooked through mine and pulling me in tight. We moved briskly but not too briskly.
The Radicals Page 9
