The Radicals

by Ryan McIlvain

  “Hey! Hey!” Sam said, marking time with my shoulder blades against the freezer door.

  “Okay,” said Alex, “that’s enough.” She was just behind Sam now, bending to pick up the photographs of flyers and postcards on the floor.

  “What are you going to do, Sam? Are you going to do to me like you did—”

  His eyes warned me off it. He tightened his grip on my shirt and pressed hard until Alex said again, “That’s enough.” With the stack of papers and magnets in her hand she tapped Sam on the shoulder, gently, a gentle little gesture to embarrass him out of violence.

  Tiffany and Jamaal, like plaintiffs at the bar, had come up to the chest-high island that opened onto the kitchen.

  Alex’s face was close to mine at the fridge, intimately close, unreadable, stoic. The words leaked out of her mouth. “Where were you, Eli? Where’s Greg?”

  “Gone, apparently,” I said. “You know as much as I do.”

  “And you have no idea where?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. Okay,” she said, speaking softly, seemingly unaware of the audience drawing in around us like a buoy line. I answered the next questions with the forethought of only a few seconds. I’d gone to see Jen, yes, but only to say goodbye. On our walk home from the grocery store Greg had convinced me that we needed to move, all of us, that the best way to ensure we didn’t get caught unfairly in the police dragnet was to get as far as possible away from it. I said in retrospect it did seem curious that Greg should empty his checking account to buy a few groceries.

  “Only in retrospect, huh?” said Sam.

  He turned on Tiffany and asked where Greg would go. He was from Connecticut, right? Where in Connecticut?

  Unprepared, startled, Tiffany flinched a little, her face bowed. It was the effect Sam had on all of us lately—you couldn’t not sense it: his new volatility, the dry-leaves crackle he gave to the air as he passed. Certainly Greg had sensed it.

  “Where in Connecticut?” Sam shouted.

  “Greenwich area? I’m not sure.” Tiffany mouselike, resentful, shrinking back.

  “Didn’t you say you guys used to fuck? And you don’t know where he’s from?”

  “He just always said the Greenwich area. I never went with him there.”

  “Fine,” said Sam, “fine, fuck it. Fuck everything.”

  He took the stairs with bounding steps that we heard overhead like furniture crashing. When I went to the bedroom half an hour later I saw that some of the furniture really had been crashed—the black scarred chair overturned and the desk on its narrow side, the single drawer lolling out of it like a dead black tongue. On the floor Sam had spread all the papers and books Greg had left behind, rummaging roughly through them. In the middle of this mess I found my marble-covered notebook gutted and torn, all the pages ripped out, all the notes I’d made to remember Jen and the other good times, the bad times too, memory’s ungovernable overflow, all of it lying like the dirty end of a ticker-tape parade on the bedroom floor. I’d reached down to gather what I could when Sam’s scarecrow form darkened the doorway—I turned on it viciously. Sam shoved me back into the room, shouting at me. What the fuck was I thinking putting all that incriminating evidence to paper? What kind of a fucking sentimentalist was I? I charged at him. He waved me past him like a toreador and ran me headfirst into the wooden bunk-bed frame. For a second my vision exploded black and spotted, my legs gone limp. Sam caught me in his arms. He laid me down on the lower bunk bed like a father, or a lover.

  When I woke up all the way it was morning and everyone’s bags were packed.

  In other versions I’m back at the gravel lot. Sam is there by the open car door tucking the black blocky thing into his waistband when I come up behind him and grab it away. I empty the clip into the gravel, one loud sharp bang after the next after the next after the next—

  Or else I empty it into Sam.

  I was in my bedroom in Plymouth now. My childhood bedroom.

  A new notebook lay open on the blue-painted writing desk where I’d spent my first derivative efforts in high school, where I’d stared long and blankly into the thin wood-paneled wall that let in the ground moisture and the winter cold. It was supposedly summer now. Above the desk a small window gave on to a half pane of loamy soil, a buzz cut of pale green grass. You could see the tops of the spare beachy trees where my neighbor used to hide a Rubbermaid container full of ripped-out pages from his father’s Penthouse stash. For five dollars he showed me where it was and for the space of a summer an equivocal friendship was born. One day Sean was righteous with anger over another boy in the neighborhood, Tim Sheehan, a grade below us, a small runty fighter who would wield just about anything, even his bike, as a weapon. Sean had the red livid marks on his calf to prove it, a bright perforated line where the tire treads had bit. “This fucking kid—he doesn’t know when to stop,” Sean said, thrilling to the word we’d both started adding to our sentences to season them, mature them. The woods behind my house connected through a long sloping rise to the Sheehans’ property. One of the last things we did in that shape-shifting summer, Sean and I, was steal the offending one-speed and throw it down a broken cistern.

  My Confessions. This was how I thought of the notebooks now, not that there was anything particularly Rousseauean in my tone or purpose—no dogma, no redemptive plan informed the scenes and memories I instinctively reached for. Into the notebook went Sean and the weightless falling bike, the leaf-composted bottom of the old cistern receiving it like a dark orange maw. Into the notebook went Bosch too, eventually, but not yet. I was getting down the life as I lived it, living to get it down—the other stuff would keep, the sequenced explosions that had sent me down into this bomb-shelter basement for cover. There was a hoary dampness to the light I now wrote by, a permanent evening suffusing the air. The room had been meant for a finished basement suite, I should mention in fairness to my parents. I believe they envisioned it as a potential rental space, but at fourteen years old I was desperate and pushy, impatient to be out of the upstairs bedroom that shared a wall with my parents’ master. It wasn’t their proximity to me that discomfited—I have no unsubtle love sounds to report, no Freudian primal scenes. No, it was much more about my proximity to them. Fourteen is a strangled peat fire in the stomach, and lower, of course. It didn’t matter that several odd-shaped squares of industrial gray carpeting had yet to be cut and laid for the downstairs room’s perimeter. It didn’t matter that the new drywall partitioning the old flooded basement into a bedroom and an entertainment room remained unsanded, unpapered. What mattered was that I be left alone with the lurid pages I’d filched from Sean’s filched stash. What mattered was the twenty-inch TV-VCR in the entertainment room and the Lentz family copy of Schindler’s List, cued up to the brief early sex scene (such was my pre-Internet blasphemous desperation). Within a few years Henry Miller, Joseph Heller, Updike, Roth, and all the other artful bawds had rather koshered my libidinous fugue state, elevating it into art—the art was the art, rather, and I was brought to this limb-littered table, a starveling, to feast. Was it any wonder that I managed to ignore the damp musty smell that hung like a curtain in the room? Or the slick chill patches of wetness that seeped up into the bare cement corners in the mornings and startled my bare feet? Small sacrifices, really—small then, small now. I just needed the privacy. A few words to my buzzing stricken confused parents and I was back in the room where I’d spent my burning years, as I thought of them now.

  In terms of the notebook chronology, I came first to the scene with Hahn and the craven petition for money on the way out of town. Travel funds, we called them, emergency funds. Sam was there to ensure my compliance. He sat beside me on Hahn’s stiff couch, the brown high curtains drawn in mourning, I assumed, giving the room a cave-like air. Stephen had passed just two days before, Hahn informed us. The apartment looked swept and bare, as if it hadn’t been lived in for week
s—a pile of mail crowding onto the fireplace ledge. I remember feeling touched and a little disoriented by Hahn’s choice of words: “passed.” A greeting-card word, a word for Congregationalist pastors. Where had this lifelong atheist passed on to, and where did this surviving atheist, a fresh widow, imagine he had gone?

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I had no idea.”

  “Our condolences,” Sam said.

  Hahn nodded with her lips tight. Behind her glasses with the dim light playing on them, striping them, her eyes were unreadable. Quiet hands on her lap, overlapping—a ridged vein stood out on her top hand and ran up through the fragile wrist.

  “It was a long time coming,” Hahn said, setting her tone down like a subject at a norming session, transitioning to a new subject. “What can I do for you two?”

  She had no illusions about our presence there.

  A strange formality filled her face, narrow as ever, framed by the dark blond bob grown nearly to her shoulders—and the sort of light I’m tempted to call metaphysical limned her features, the face’s dips and prominences, the faint parenthetical creases at either side of her drawn mouth. It was a dim light, crosshatched with shadows, and it coaxed her out subtly, gently, like a Rembrandt subject.

  In the end Hahn asked very few questions and led us down to an ATM at the corner of her street. She took out three thousand dollars, the maximum her bank allowed, and placed the neat stack of hundreds in Sam’s outstretched palm, demurring his quiet thanks. I couldn’t say anything.

  At the foot of her apartment steps she hugged us goodbye, each in turn, and wished us good luck. I asked Hahn when the services would be and she told me. “Services”—another God-tainted word, smelling of camphor, old men’s robes.

  “You’d better have asked about that just to be polite,” Sam said, lifting his arm out on Fifth Avenue to hail a cab. This wasn’t the least inconspicuous mode of transportation, perhaps, but it was the fastest.

  I didn’t answer Sam’s threat.

  “Eli?”

  “Don’t worry,” I finally said.

  “Now I am worried. You can’t just show up at a public funeral, Eli. I’d think that’s pretty obvious.”

  “Don’t fucking worry.”

  “Are you going to Hahn’s husband’s funeral—yes or no?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t turn liability on us.”

  “Wow.”

  “What?”

  “Wow,” I said.

  In the cab back to Queens we were silent, angled away from each other and looking forlornly out the windows, each to his own side. I was forlorn on my side, anyway, slack and glassy instead of twitchy—detached, floating ghostlike past the blurring rails up FDR Drive, the East River a broad tarnished china plate. It took me a minute to realize we’d turned off onto the Midtown Tunnel and by then it was too late. I touched Sam’s narrow knee. He flinched, looked up, squinting.

  “I think this guy’s taking us the long way,” I whispered, almost mouthing the words.

  “So let him take the long way. We’re good for it.” Sam turned back to the window—the city had pivoted to the left, running off behind us. To the right stretched the skinny docks and low red warehouses, the green park-inlets waving up the Brooklyn coast. “City of Whitman,” Sam said.

  “That’s right,” I said. “That’s right—you’re a poet.”

  There was wonder in my voice. I meant no sarcasm. It’s just that it was easy to forget how we’d first met, where Sam and I had come from. He’d rarely talked about his poetry back then, and when he did it was with an embarrassment and a sort of guilt that his baptism into Marxist politics only sharpened, intensified. He’d been thieving all along from the common stock, he said, gobbling up Pell Grants, subsidized loans, and for what? A few tepid sonnets, a villanelle sequence, everything metered and cozied and rhymed. He was a fucking formalist, he said, with self-loathing. But he was too hard on himself—I can say this now, definitively, with Sam in the ground. He had real talent, grace of line, enough earnestness to choke you sometimes, but sometimes it did fill you up.

  The one poem of Sam’s I still have he read one evening, appropriately enough, at KGB Bar in the East Village—red-light-district decor, Soviet schmaltz on the walls, high stools around a cramped gleaming bar, and a patchy PA system, of course. I didn’t catch the title of the poem the first time I heard it read, but the rest of it I liked enough to ask Sam for a paper copy afterward.

  The Good Life

  I despair about where/if it is, this mushroom land,

  dun carpet in a stand

  of dunny trees

  (nutrition in a sun-blocked world)

  I feel quite stuck in cosmic waiting

  rooms,

  the brooms of systems sweeping me out

  with dust toward dust. I must

  get my shit together, I must come good

  after twenty-eight years of grace, period.

  But who do I ask for directions?

  The gurus are cheats, assholes,

  exes,

  and I’ve never really known my Father.

  I’ve only my two thin hands to break brush with.

  Tell me: should I bother?

  At the House Sam divided up the money five ways. We all exchanged curt hugs before retreating to our separate cars—Sam and I to his old broad Buick, Alex and Tiffany and Jamaal to Alex’s Honda. No one knew where the other was going, exactly, and no one asked, though we all had our ideas.

  “Do you think we’ll see Jamaal or Tiffany again?” I asked Sam in the car.

  “I hope not.”

  “They have their suspicions, you know, just like Greg did.”

  “Let them suspect. They don’t know anything, and they’re scared. Productively scared.”

  Sam dropped me at Grand Central with my single lean garment bag—amazing how little you really need, in the end, how much of a life can be abandoned—and I started away toward the station. With a shy honk Sam called me back to the passenger-side window he had leaned across to crack open. Not then, but on the Amtrak home I recalled the day more than three years earlier when I’d slipped a Marxist primer through the cracked-open window of the same front seat, though on that morning the conspiratorial shtick had been just that—a little shtick, a joke. What a horrible joke that Sam and I should be playing out this scene in nervous earnest now, cutting our eyes left and right, lowering our voices.

  “Where were you on that night?” Sam said, testing me. “What were you doing?”

  “Sam, I’ve got it.”

  “What were you doing?”

  “Diner, fishbowl, long way home—I’ve got it.”

  “What diner?”

  “The Peter Pan.”

  “And when the rain got bad, where did we pull off?”

  “Sam, I’m going,” I said, and I headed for the bank of brass-gleaming doors without turning around.

  During the three days I spent at my parents’ house I surfaced to the main floor only reluctantly. Base appetite had driven me to my basement lair years earlier—only appetite could drive me up again. I made ham and cheese sandwiches in the kitchen, quickly, efficiently, or else PBJs (my taste buds regressing to high school too, apparently), trying to ignore as best I could the professional speculators piping in from the TV in the living room. Nancy Grace had the story now. I tried to block out the segments squeezed cheek by jowl between Pepto-Bismol ads, Viagra commercials, shills for the newest heart medication. Mostly it was Bosch’s name, that primal noise, that broke in on me—Bosch…Bosch…Bosch—like explosions from a distant battlefield.

  Since when had my parents watched so much twenty-four-hour news, anyway? How had they learned to watch Nancy Grace?

  “Oh, you don’t really watch it,” Mom said. “It’s just a noise to keep you
company.”

  “It’s unbearable,” I said. I felt my eye, the insistent something under my eyelid beginning to jump and grab with each Bosch.

  “Is it unbearable? We’re so used to it by now.”

  Apparently the “news” as a kind of aural nightlight began shortly after I’d left for college. I’d never complained about it on visits home before, Mom told me. I’d never seemed to notice. Dad, especially, coming in from the corporate cold of an insurance brokerage in downtown Boston—asshole boss, tetchy clients, bad commute—didn’t care for the added insult of an existentially quiet house. Mom needed the constant burble less. Thirty years into her high-school math teacher’s stride, she’d started singing in an ecumenical choir that met several nights a week to practice Bach masses, old Negro spirituals, the whispery haunting pieces that you couldn’t quite locate in time or space.

  “Why not play some of your music?” I said. “Why not run the fucking dishwasher? It’d be better than that, surely.”

  “I could turn it off if it means that much to you,” Mom said, moving toward the set.

  It was the second week in August and she would soon be back in school. She had the rosy capillary blush about her cheeks that suggested inveterate drinking in some Irish, but in my mom it just meant a recent visit to the beach. She’d lost weight where my father had gained it—at the sucked-in cheeks, at the under-chin with its sharper smoother drop-off. When she showed her white teeth they looked whiter, wider, with a plasticky tensile sharpness in the lips. Her nervousness made her look younger by several years. Yet I sensed that any conversation with her reappeared son made her feel older, too, more fragile, as it did me.

  I heard familiar music coming out of the TV, then Maria Nava’s voice.

  “Wait,” I said, “that’s okay. You can leave it on.”

  It was the Bank of America ad Sam had showed me on YouTube. I hadn’t heard the sincerity, somehow, the genuine relief in Maria’s voice the first time I’d seen the ad. Now Maria spoke through her wide soft face into my mother’s living room, shots of Aida and Luís horsing around on the grass. “I was afraid,” Maria said. “I really was afraid for me and my family when all this was happening. I was looking around for any help I could find. I didn’t think I’d find it with someone at a bank, you know, but then I met Ned.” Cut to Ned, hair parted at the side, anodyne, friendly-looking. He looked harmless. Ned began to talk about the “debt-forgiveness plan” he’d created with Maria. Hey, he had a family too, he said, and he knew how hard these times were for hardworking people like Maria. I realized I was watching a more extended version of this commercial, an ad that was also a penitent genuflection that was also and always an ad. The cozy acoustic guitar came up on the young family gamboling around in the green green grass—fade to white and the final tag line in black: “Caring. It’s what we do.”