The Radicals

by Ryan McIlvain

  “This isn’t the one where they make a shoe stand out of the bookshelves, is it? And the guy forbids his wife a piano because it takes up too much space?”

  “You think these two would do that?” said Jen, taking a seat on the edge of the couch, the bedclothes sitting chaperone between us. “I don’t think they’re capable of that. Maybe this is a new one?”

  Her glass half full for these strangers—of course. It was Jen’s default mode. How I’d missed this woman! How I’d miss her again. I decided to tell Jen everything, and plainly, but not yet. I’d tell her on the way to Hahn’s husband’s memorial tomorrow morning. I didn’t want this moment to die too, fragile, flickering in the light of a car commercial.

  As it happened, I dressed in a pair of Derek’s gray khaki pants the next morning—I’d survived the night—khaki pants and a navy blue button-down that he’d left behind at Jen’s apartment, the items pinching and pressing at my chest and middle. It felt like a final insult that our proportions should more or less match, but with the more on my end. I’d tried to trim my edges with tennis, hone myself, make myself a proper vessel for something, but not even the House’s privations could thin me much. Out on the street I told Jen the story all at once—or I tried to, but she kept telling me to go back, wait, was I serious? Waiting for the punch line that never came, slowing to a stuttering walk, almost to a standstill.

  “You’re serious?” she said again. “You’re serious?”

  Against her somber outfit, a black skirt and a black, unseasonably thick sweater, her face looked parchment pale, drained but impervious, refusing to take in the vital facts. I didn’t help with my delivery, I suppose, speaking the words automatically, distantly, as if they had nothing to do with me.

  Finally Jen stopped altogether on the sidewalk, turning me to face her. People I have no memory of pressed by on either side. We were feet from the stairs of the Greenpoint Avenue subway station, a great cavern underneath us.

  “Are you serious?” Jen said to me. “Are you being serious?”

  “I’m just trying to tell you what happened,” I said.

  “And what are you saying happened? Tell me again. Tell me slowly, Eli.”

  I told her again. Then I said, “I’m writing it down for you.”

  You get more used to it over time, but never all the way. No image of your dead brings them back to you, of course, or changes what happened to them, and yet you can’t help searching out the magic icon, the potent imagining. Take the effort to remember Stephen Hahn before he shrunk down so vividly into his wheelchair. It’s just that—an effort. You feel the uselessness of it in the strength of your wishing for it. That’s God, too, I think. That’s any heaven you can pin the name on.

  I do regret that I didn’t get to attend Stephen Hahn’s memorial service, or see Hahn again. Jen took me directly to the Ninety-fourth Precinct building off Lorimer Street, a gentle frog march. She insisted on calling around for a lawyer for me. She held my hand at the intake desk.

  I would have liked to apologize to Hahn that morning, however obliquely. Any outright disclosure would have only added to her grief, but a hug, a grateful word in her ear…I can imagine the gathering: an older, dignified, gray-haired group, with a smattering of students and perhaps a few former patients, all of us in nighttime colors under Hahn’s high ceilings, a photograph of Stephen, pre-sickness, handsome and gently arch, smiling out from a frame on the fireplace mantel. Maybe Hahn can bring just such an image to mind when she thinks of Stephen—I hope so. My image, as I said, is set. How could any framed photograph compete with the live man trembling at the top of a minivan’s ramp, listing to one side in his motorized wheelchair, the face gaunt and plastic, the body at the edge of a great darkness, with only the eyes showing clear? And how, for that matter, could any other picture of Larry Bosch dislodge the last one I keep of him, that bird’s-eye view of his body on the path, the legs twisting away, trying to take him somewhere but never actually moving him?

  And yet I find I can picture Sam as I want him—small mercy to have driven away from his death so blindly. Small mercy to have known him best and least. Perhaps at his core, in his essence, I didn’t know him at all—perhaps he eluded himself in that way—but bodily I knew him. Bodily I can conjure him—his long, pale shape, his square jaw cutting the air, cashiering out against the backdrop of a green tennis court. I can see him at the service line, long and gaunt but somehow doughy, too, in his giveaway T-shirts, his baggy basketball shorts, his pale unmuscled legs descending out of them like gym ropes. Where does all his power come from, his speed and agility? He is beating me easily now. He is rounding into form. The arm rises to the toss, crane-like, regal, the spinning yellow ball in the air like a sun at its zenith.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  John Adams never wrote a piano piece called “The Radicals,” but I’d like to think my made-up John Adams piece isn’t too out of tune with the austere, hauntingly beautiful works he has written—Hallelujah Junction, Shaker Loops, and The Gospel According to the Other Mary, to name just a few of the pieces that coursed around in my apartment or in my head as I wrote. Also, while New York University students did stage a protest a little like the one Eli describes, it didn’t get as violent and it didn’t take place in the post-Occupy moment I placed it in. And these liberties appear just in the first chapter or two—I’ve taken many others, of course, incurring many debts along the way. Books like Mark Rudd’s Underground and Larry Grathwohl’s Bringing Down America helped me riff and extrapolate a little more intelligently, as did many of the writers and pamphleteers the characters in the book read and reference.

  For their conversation, critique, and kindness on and off the page, I’m particularly indebted to Hugo Aguayo, Aimee Bender, Vanessa Carlisle, Gil and John Gould, Paul Heideman, Officer Tom Loughran, Mike Turner, my agent PJ Mark, my editor Alexis Washam, her assistant Jillian Buckley, and of course Sharon McIlvain, first and best reader, without whom nothing of this—nothing at all.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  RYAN McILVAIN’s first novel, Elders, was longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize in 2013. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, Post Road, The Rumpus, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Tin House online, and the Believer online, among other venues. A former Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University, McIlvain now lives with his family in Tampa, Florida, where he is an assistant professor of English at the University of Tampa.

  On an airless midsummer afternoon in Brazil, in the close, crucible heat of that country, Elder McLeod trailed his senior companion onto a street that looked just like the last one, and the last, and the last. Nothing moved. Or nothing animate, anyway—a soda can rocking on its side, dust scrims, the whites on clotheslines ghosting up above orange-brick property walls lined with beer-bottle shards. Even the gutters looked abandoned, shorn of moisture, a blond sedimentary braid running parallel to each cracking slab of sidewalk. McLeod watched Elder Passos peel off to the left of him, and for a moment all he wanted in the world was to keep walking, epically, all the way back to Massachusetts and the life he had left and the life he ached to have back. He could just ditch the last six months of his mission, light out for home—

  “Elder? Elder McLeod? Hello?”

  The voice came from behind him, rapid and insistent—already it grated on McLeod. He stopped. He turned his head half around, a half show of resistance, but enough to see his senior companion sidled up to yet another door, waiting, gripping the doorframe with his hand even, like a stubborn child in the toy aisle.

  “It’s your turn,” Passos said. “Right?” He motioned his head at the door, which looked just like the last one, and the last: older than the tin it was made of, once blue (or green or yellow), but now, faded and dusted, sun-scored, a blue-gray, the color of dirty mop water. Elder McLeod stared at the door and clenched his teeth out of a sort of slow reflex. And on his Slump Day, too, he thought. That
was the worst part. He thought: Five minutes. I’ll knock for just five more minutes. He looked down at his wristwatch: 3:02. Ten minutes at the very most.

  McLeod backed up until he stood beside Passos at the door. He rapped on the thin metal, a thin warping sound, and out of the corner of his eye he watched Passos watching. They had only been working together for a week, and the force of Passos’s earnestness, his sheer newness, could still startle McLeod. Look at him now: yellow-brown, tall and lanky, his face like a tapering ear of corn, and in the center of it, a smile. Big-watted, toothy. At every door Passos smiled like that, a sort of insurance policy, McLeod thought, in the off chance that someone actually came to a door.

  After several unpromising seconds at this one, Passos’s smile remained bright.

  “How long have you been out again?” McLeod asked him.

  “Huh? Oh. Sixteen months almost.”

  “Congratulations,” he said, but he laughed as he said it, a thin, tight laugh. Parabéns. He pushed air through his nose, shook his head, and stepped away from the door, not waiting to make sure no one was coming. If someone was going to come to a door, you heard it early, heard movement in the house or in the yard, someone shushing the dog maybe, someone calling out Who is it? Or someone rushing up to peer through the gap between the brick wall and the outer door, then calling for a parent—a mother, usually. It happened quick. You didn’t need to stand around, a hopeful debutante holding a smile for full minutes. Did Passos really not know that? The Boy Wonder? The climber who had made zone leader at only eleven months out?

  Elder McLeod waited, half turned again, and now he noticed the shadow of a frown on Passos’s face.

  “Nobody’s coming,” McLeod said.

  “I was just making sure,” Passos said.

  * * *

  —

  The elders finished knocking the street, every door a no-show, and started right into the next street. More no-shows. More smiles from Passos. McLeod wanted to throw his head back and laugh. Instead, he slowed his pace, then stopped, looking down at his wristwatch: 3:08. When he looked up again the world was still the same, everlastingly the same: the dust scrims, the whites on clotheslines, the property walls bristling with colored glass, rows of sharp, bared teeth. He could hear the river in the distance now, but only just.

  At a sudden gust of wind a pair of blue jeans kicked up above the property wall to McLeod’s left. He thought of the old dress pants he’d laid out on his bedspread this morning, a threadbare sacrifice waiting to be burned. A tradition. A rite. Which he would duly observe tonight with Sweeney and Kimball. He hadn’t seen them in a week, not since transfers and the news that they would both become senior companions, at last. He expected they would razz him, the eternal junior, and that they’d see through his good-riddance routine. It did gall McLeod that he had to take orders now from someone with less experience on the mission, and with no knowledge of Carinha at all, the city McLeod had served in for the last six months. But Elder Passos played the game; McLeod didn’t. Passos stooped to the game; McLeod wouldn’t.

  Over the sound of the river came a different kind of coursing, much louder and nearer to McLeod. His senior companion stood to his right, upending a squeeze water bottle above his mouth. The bottle exhaled as Passos lowered it, replaced it in his bag. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand, then nodded at McLeod and started for the next door.

  “Really?” McLeod said.

  Passos turned around. “What?”

  “Today’s my Slump Day, man. And nobody’s answering.”

  “Your ‘Slump Day’?” Passos said.

  “You don’t know what Slump Day is? Are you really that—”

  “I know what it is, Elder McLeod. It’s unbecoming of a missionary. That’s what President Mason said at the last zone leaders conference. No more crass names to mark so-called occasions, and no more burning perfectly good clothes either. Didn’t your last zone leader communicate that?”

  “He communicated a lot of things,” McLeod said, laying emphasis on the procedural-speak he already disliked in Passos. He stared at him for a long, hard second. Then he changed his tack. “Elder Passos, we can pick this back up tomorrow, can’t we? I think eighteen months on the mission is worth a little break. Don’t you?”

  Passos put his hands at the top of his thighs, arms akimbo, long, stick-figure limbs. He seemed to be weighing his options, which battles and when.

  “How about we do five more doors?” Passos said. “Then we’ll take a break, okay?”

  McLeod hesitated a moment, then sighed.

  The first door was Passos’s. Nothing. The next was McLeod’s. Also nothing. The third door triggered an explosion of barking, a big dog from the sound of it, each bark like a mortar round. After several bracing seconds of this, McLeod and Passos moved on. When they knocked the fourth door, a flutter of movement came from inside the courtyard. A door handle catching, a door scraping open. A patter of footsteps approaching the outer door. A young face through the gap. Brown eyes, shorn brown hair.

  “Well hello,” Passos said.

  The face disappeared and the steps retreated. McLeod and Passos heard whispered voices from the open front door, a quick high alto, a dragging soprano. Then the tiny steps again.

  “No one’s here, okay?” said the alto voice through the outer door. Ninguém está aqui, tá?

  McLeod snorted at the familiar phrase. It might have been the very first phrase he had learned to separate out from the rapid slur of Portuguese. Ninguém está aqui, tá? And that final contracted tá, that timidness, so typical of the local style, and so tiring. We’re not interested. We’re not available. We’re not even here. Okay?

  “But you are there,” McLeod said to the boy.

  “What?”

  “I said you are there, aren’t you? You’re someone.”

  “Yeah but my mom’s not here.”

  “Yeah? Who were you talking to just a second ago?”

  The boy paused, recoursed again to his line. “Nobody’s here, okay?”

  “I don’t believe you,” Elder McLeod said.

  Passos turned to him, suddenly furrowed, his dark brows combining in a long sharp V shape. Let’s go, he mouthed, leaning away from the door.

  “But listen,” McLeod continued. “We’re representatives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. You may know us as the Mormons? Well, anyway.” McLeod spoke in a clipped, mock-cheery tone. “I’m Elder McLeod and this is my companion, Elder Passos. ‘Elder’ is a title, not a name, by the way—in case you’re curious. Many people are. But we’ve come here today with a very special message for you and your mother—”

  “She’s not here.”

  “Of course, of course. But we have a message for the two of you anyway. It’s a message about liars and what happens to them in the—”

  “Elder!”

  A hand clamped McLeod’s wrist and he was halfway off his feet. He felt the anger in Passos’s grip, tried to shake himself free of it. “Let go of me!”

  In the middle of the street Passos swung him loose and stared, his dark brows creased even sharper. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “The kid was lying.”

  “Of course he was lying, Elder, but you don’t say that. You never say that! Is this really how you act? Are you really this green?”

  McLeod stiffened at the word. “I’m green? You think I am green. Who knocks doors for two hours right after lunch, when the whole damn country is asleep? And I’m green?” He turned around and started back up the street. Passos yelled after him, “Where do you think you’re going?” McLeod didn’t answer, didn’t turn around. He shielded his eyes against the shards of light off the river as it crooked into view.

  * * *

  —

  He waited at a nearby bus stop for ten minutes. Fifteen minutes, twenty. Had all the bu
s drivers in Carinha taken siestas too, all of Minas, the entirety of southeast Brazil? And where was Elder Passos? He had failed to follow after him, failed to turn up at the bus stop at all. He had succeeded, in other words, in surprising McLeod. Maybe there was a touch of earth in him after all. The Missionary Handbook forbade and forbade—no TV, radio, newspapers, etc., no recreational phone calls, etc., etc.—but it proscribed nothing so strongly as being separate from your companion. And yet…McLeod checked his watch, craned his head to see as far down the street as he could. Nothing and no one.

  A touch of earth. Where was that from again? Something by Tennyson, right? Or was it Longfellow? He would have to ask Mom to look it up for him in his next letter home. Why could he never remember anything? Why could he not hold on to knowledge? Already the yield of years of effort in high school, and all the reading and memorizing he’d done on his own—it had dwindled to traces, scraps of language, and most of it floating maddeningly free of its context. Such that someone says now, at some point, and for some reason, that who loves me must have a touch of earth, the low sun makes the color…and something else. He would have to check it with his mother.