Consequence

by Steve Masover

  Christopher pushed through a knotted crowd where the Muni lines surface from their downtown tunnel, and turned out of the human riptide. The pedestrian crush thinned just a few steps into the Duboce Triangle, the neighborhood from which his collective had taken its name. Three-story Edwardians extended granite steps from worn front stoops; scruffier stucco buildings slumped and peeled as if mourning their once-splendid flats, now carved into cramped apartments. An N train screeched up the gentle grade, too heavy for its rails.

  The way those pearls swung from her earlobes.

  What was he supposed to do? It seemed wrong to obsess over Suvali when he should be worrying about Chagall. But did that even make sense? He’d punted hard choices on trusting the saboteur by declaring the manifesto a personal writing project. For now. So did he owe it to Chagall to avoid the café, and Suvali because she could place him there? Or would precaution at that pitch be neurotic? How could he weigh promises about Chagall’s security against the uncertainty that anything even happened at the Daily Grind? Suvali could have been making idle conversation. He could have misread her signals through a fog of wishful thinking. It wouldn’t have been the first time.

  Christopher unlocked the security gate that screened the Triangle’s entrance from the street, then stepped across the narrow stoop to let himself in. A tangle of voices tumbled down the stairwell as he shut the door behind him. Strange. He’d expected to find Marty suffering one hell of a headache, and the collective walking on eggshells. Upstairs, Marty and Nora’s door was open, a lamp burning beside their empty bed. Christopher ducked into his own room, easing the bag off his shoulder. Zac’s giddy laugh echoed down the hallway, followed by a riposte he didn’t try to make out. Sharp red pepper and an earthy richness of fermented black beans wafted in from the kitchen. Christopher caught a swirl of Marty’s baritone and sprays of Jonah’s sorties in the jumble. Then a long-missing voice.

  Christopher listened.

  There—again. He couldn’t catch the words. But the voice was Brendan’s. Damned if it wasn’t, mellifluous and rough, and completely unexpected. He slipped into the hall.

  Their long-absent comrade sat with his back to the doorway, rail thin, hair clipped to a thin wash of rust over his sunburned skull. Conversation faded as the others noticed Christopher standing there. Allison eased back in her customary chair at the head of the dining table, suppressing a smile. Brendan turned.

  “Look at you,” he said, breaking into a grin. “Like a bigmouth bass that just got a taste of hook.”

  “Look at you,” Christopher countered, winding up to ask how the weather had been in Dachau that morning. But he couldn’t get the words out. Brendan stood and they embraced. Like late-stage AIDS, Christopher thought, appalled by the knobby fleshlessness beneath his friend’s loose clothes.

  “Jayzus and Mary, fellas.” Marty doffed his ice pack. “Break it up before somebody starts weepin’ again.”

  “Martin, be still.” Zac’s voice quavered. He stood in the kitchen doorway, a checkered apron tied over a plain white kurta he favored for meditation, his long hair gathered in a bun. A few leaves of cilantro clung to the chef’s knife held loosely at his side.

  Zac’s emotion echoed Christopher’s own shock. They all knew that Brendan had set out to do right by the indígenas in Chiapas. Now he was … wrecked. Was that the prize for graduating from political theatrics to real resistance?

  “Somebody better set that table,” Nora called from the kitchen.

  Responding to her calm authority, a tone her friends had come to know and love long before Nora sharpened it up in law school, Gregor jumped to answer her summons. Christopher hadn’t noticed him sitting quietly in a corner, drawn upstairs by the commotion, he figured. Gregor had visited the Triangle with his moms countless times over the years, for meetings and banner painting and holiday dinners. He was already at home amid the collective’s chaos by the time he moved into the first-floor flat at the start of his freshman year. Without the dreads he had cultivated since elementary school, and still carrying traces of a chubby boyhood, Gregor somehow reminded Christopher of a lost puppy. Disoriented but hopeful. Pushed by a look from Allison, Jonah followed Gregor into the kitchen.

  Nora brought out a six-pack of Chinese lager and set it on the table. “Go easy,” she urged as Marty reached for a bottle. “Save it for dinner?”

  He retreated with a sigh. “They don’t even let you mix drink with downers anymore.”

  Christopher edged behind Marty and took the corner chair beside him. Brendan returned to his seat at Allison’s left. From the opposite side of the table, Christopher watched for signs of Brendan’s perennial hope that he and Allison might rekindle their long-dormant relationship. She had rebuffed Christopher only once, gently but certainly. He had pretended it was the tequila talking at that party they’d thrown on Carleton Street some dozen years before. Then he had buried his feelings, unwilling to risk their friendship in pursuit of hopeless romance. “I’m amazed to see you sitting up,” Christopher said to Marty.

  “Ah, it’s just a little bump,” his injured housecomrade replied, touching his bandages gingerly.

  “The hell,” Zac said, on his way back to the stove. “Resurrection is contagious at the Triangle tonight!”

  —

  Amid the chaos of Marty’s bike accident no one had cooked the night before, so Nora and Zac had the run of the Seaside Organics delivery. They emptied the weekly co-op box in Brendan’s honor, making fried rice with black trumpet mushrooms, spicy new potatoes with black beans and scallions, hot and sour bok choy topped with garlicky breadcrumbs, and fresh noodles stir-fried with squash, red cabbage, and water chestnuts.

  Zac set the last steaming platter on the table, untied his apron, and sat opposite Christopher. Nora clinked a fork against her plate and nodded to Marty at the foot of the table. The mob fell more or less silent, as Marty raised his bottle high. “Brendan,” he began, “welcome back to the land of the living.”

  “Hear, hear,” Zac said, tilting his lager in Brendan’s direction.

  Marty mimed solemnity for a few long seconds. “However,” he said. “However. If you pull a stunt like that again—if you ever again talk yourself into carrying contraband across a national border, north or south, for good reason or on a fool’s errand? I’ll have no choice but to hunt you down, skin you with a dull knife, and tan your hide myself.”

  “I’m in,” Allison said. They all drank.

  “I’ll help too, if Marty scrapes the meat off first.”

  “What meat? Look at him!”

  “Let’s just hope he’s not actually rehabilitated.”

  Brendan’s voice emerged out of the cacophony. “You greedy cochinos,” he said, an impious glitter in his eye. Platters and chatter stilled. Christopher put his appetite on hold, and sat back to watch the performance. “The food on this table would feed twice as many people three times as many meals where I just came from, and never once—not one single time—did I eat even the humblest supper in the great state of Oaxaca without first saying grace.”

  Ahead of the inevitable groans, Gregor’s arm shot straight up, an intrusion of classroom etiquette so startling that Brendan yielded the floor without argument. Gregor bowed his head over a chipped yellow plate and mismatched silverware.

  Nora rolled her eyes. “I trust your mothers raised you better than to pray in mixed company,” she whispered across the table.

  “We thank our lucky stars that Nora and Zac don’t cook like Stalinists,” Gregor began, whereupon Brendan cut him off with a fervent and categorical “Amen.”

  The decibel level dropped as they turned to the business of eating. Christopher kept an eye on the far end of the table. Was he trying to charm her already? Was she letting him?

  Between mouthfuls, the prodigal fielded questions. “There was nothing to do. Nothing but read and gamble. Most guys stayed loaded on knockoff pharmaceuticals. The big excitement happened when they herded us into the courtyard for a sear
ch. This whistle blew, like an underpowered freight train, and in seconds you’d have guys frantically swallowing every pill in the prison. I don’t think the guards ever once found drugs they didn’t plant themselves.”

  “Did they house you with the other politicals?” Nora asked.

  “They lock up hard-core Zapatistas in a prison outside Tuxtla Gutiérrez,” Brendan said. “Maybe five hundred kilometers east. In Tlaxitlán the politicals were local Oaxacans, most of them simpático with the movement in Chiapas. Anyway, they had their own tank and the guards didn’t like mixing. As for me, I wasn’t broadcasting what drew me south.”

  “Why not?” Allison asked.

  Nora drew back in her chair. “Wouldn’t housing in the political tank have been safer?”

  Brendan cast a questioning glance in Christopher’s direction. The women were grilling him about plain and simple prudence. “Just the opposite in my situation,” he said. “The safest thing was for nobody to be sure who I was or what I was doing down there. For all kinds of rumors to fester.”

  “Were there other Americans?” Allison asked, setting down her fork. “Other American politicals?”

  Christopher watched uneasily. Brendan had dropped plenty of hints in letters shared with everyone in the Triangle. He’d walked a thin line in Tlaxitlán.

  “There were a few gringos,” Brendan said, “but not the type that go south for solidarity work. I steered clear. Hung with the Spanish-speakers and hid behind the language barrier. Like I said, attracting attention would have … complicated things.”

  Allison frowned and went back to her dinner.

  Everybody just ate for a while.

  “There was this one cabrón,” Brendan said. “This guy who called himself Tex.”

  Zac let out a high-pitched laugh. “Oh, please,” he objected.

  “No, I swear. Who knows what was on his passport, but Tex was the name this guy went by. Sixty-something, skinny and mean, a rightwing, badly lapsed evangelical. Busted for running drugs, like most of the guys. Had a crazy line on anything, like this theory that coded messages in The International Jew proved the Israelis are running the whole South American continent as a training ground for Mossad. Sixteen, eighteen hours a day, the guy never shut up. Brawls, whores, vengeance, betrayal. Sneaking kids over the border with heroin-filled balloons in their bellies. Weapons transport to the Contras in Nicaragua. A real poster boy for twentieth-century imperialism.”

  “So what happened to him?” Gregor asked.

  “Tex pissed off a guard. Got his jaw busted, then they threw him in the hole.”

  The room went quiet for a moment. Christopher couldn’t begin to imagine the world Brendan had endured. Day after day, every moment taut with the threat of feral violence.

  “Come to think of it,” Zac said, “a guy named Tex used to hang out at Emily’s when I was bar-backing there. Rangy guy, with wrinkles like he’d been hung up between a couple cactuses and left out to evaporate. And an overbite from hell. The dykes around the pool table used to call him ‘Faxman’—‘Hey, Faxman, stripey-nine to the corner.’” Zac mimed a sheet of paper sliding out from under his upper lip.

  They all laughed. “Different Tex, for sure,” Brendan said. “Tlaxitlán Tex had crooked little teeth, eaten away by shitty plug tobacco.”

  Jonah wrinkled his nose. “That’s disgusting,” he said. “What happened after they put him in the hole?”

  “We never saw him again. It all came down around a major shakeout, some bureaucratic thing rippling out of Mexico City. A few guys speculated they were going to let him out off the books so they transferred him north, closer to the border.”

  “Pass the noodles to Brendan,” Allison said.

  Nora reached for the bowl. “And the veggies,” she said. “The rice too.”

  “Nora, Zac, this dinner’s phenomenal,” Brendan said. “If y’all are kind enough to let me stay on for a bit I’ll be a gringo gordo in no time.”

  Allison placed a hand over his. “You’re always welcome, Brendan.”

  Christopher’s breath caught. His autonomic response was eclipsed by a chorus of agreement, but not before Zac noticed, his elfin features brightening with alert sympathy. Then the moment passed. Christopher corked his untenable sensitivities, and Zac looked away.

  FIVE

  Surrounded by bookshelves, the oak table in the Triangle’s library lay buried under drifts of newspaper and stacks of flyers that had accreted in the week since Christopher’s chat with Chagall. On March twentieth, the anniversary of the war, he was working through an outline for his manifesto, and missing the march from Dolores Park to the Civic Center. Zac had said he didn’t mind a housecomrade bailing on his speech at the kickoff, but the small disloyalty gnawed at Christopher. He typed a citation from Scientific American into his growing bibliography. Balancing the convenience of research at home against Chagall’s paranoia, he made no handwritten notes. Encrypted bytes and the table’s scatter were the only traces of his labor.

  Christopher wasn’t the only one skipping the march. In the week since his return, Brendan had never once gotten up before noon. From the guest room he’d been broadcasting prison-inflected nightmares, a hallucinatory soundscape of muffled shouts and moans reverberating along the second-floor hallway in the wee hours of morning. Tangled in his covers, Christopher would hear Brendan pacing around the dining room at two or three or four a.m., his cramped trajectories perturbed by forays to the back porch for long, brooding smokes. Brendan sometimes paused at the foot of the stairs—thinking—thinking what?—that he should try his luck with Allison?

  In any event, Brendan wasn’t going to surprise him that morning in the library. Christopher would hear him coming. And even if the entire collective were looking over his shoulder there would be no need to hide. With the GeneSynth actions less than six weeks away, it wouldn’t surprise anyone to find Christopher buried in focused reading about biotech agriculture. He was drafting his own manifesto, after all. Not Chagall’s. For now, anyway.

  He was finding plenty to cull from the household clippings file on genetically modified organisms. Just that week reports had emerged of Mexican farms tainted by the spread of GMO corn. Nora had clipped and initialed a wire-service article that told an even broader tale:

  Over two-thirds of traditionally cultivated seeds for major US food crops are contaminated with engineered DNA, according to a study sponsored by the Union of Concerned Scientists. The results point to the failure of methods currently used to segregate genetically modified seeds from unmodified varieties.

  Christopher cited the article in his outline as fodder for “human impact on environment.” When a door opened downstairs he lifted his fingers from the keyboard. Another door closed. The pipes rattled as Brendan started the shower. Then the phone rang, and he reached over his laptop to answer it.

  “Chris? It’s your father.”

  “Hey, Dad, long time.” He neatened the clippings file, cradling the phone against his shoulder. “What’s up?”

  “It’s been a while, I suppose. How are you? I’ve missed a few issues of the Reporter; any big stories lately?”

  “Nothing major.” Christopher registered a labored undertone in his father’s interest, and wondered how many years Professor Kalman meant by “a few issues.” “How’s the lab?” he asked. “Any Nobel Prizes on the horizon?”

  His father chuckled, ignoring the barb. “Not likely.”

  “And Marshall?”

  His father’s voice dropped to a near whisper. “The truth is, I need your advice. Your brother is withdrawing again. He rarely comes upstairs when I’m home. When we do have a few words, all he talks about are stock trades.”

  “Sounds like business as usual.”

  “Worse, I assure you. But he agreed we could invite you to dinner. You can see for yourself. Marshall suggested a week from Monday, would that work?”

  Christopher searched his mental calendar. “Yeah, I think so. What time?”

 
“Oh, I didn’t ask. Hang on a second.”

  Professor Kalman put down the phone, and Christopher heard the creak of the door to his study over the otherwise-silent line. He could easily go another six months without crossing the bay to visit family. The shower stopped downstairs. He initiated an encryption program on his laptop, preparing to wind down.

  “Chris?”

  “Yeah, Dad, I’m here.”

  “Marshall says come between six and seven.”

  “Consider it done.”

  “Shall I pick you up from the BART station?”

  “No need, I’ll enjoy the walk.”

  Christopher hung up the phone. If history was any guide, an evening in his brother’s company would irritate him no end, but he had time to resign himself. In the short term Brendan would want breakfast. He was due for lunch himself. Then they might as well head over to Civic Center, where the antiwar march would end with a rally on the plaza.

  —

  “So I’ve been thinking,” Brendan said. “Since we talked about GeneSynth the other day.” They were walking slowly downtown, after stopping at a crêpe shop in the Lower Haight.

  “You sound skeptical.”

  “A little. I still don’t see how stopping traffic on the Bay Bridge is direct action. The bad guys are meeting at the convention center.”

  “This is the biggest applied biotech meeting in the world,” Christopher said. “Thousands of scientists and marketing guys are going to show up, and hundreds of them work in the East Bay. Chiron, Novartis, a load of little startups.”

  “Okay, that’d be direct, if you stop them from getting to the meeting. ’Course they’ll mostly take BART.”

  “Not all of them. The sales guys ferrying over last-minute brochures and swag aren’t going to lug it over on public transit.” Christopher took note of his own atypical boosterism. Brendan’s doubt, he figured, was crowding him over to the sunny side. “And there’ll be the public protest outside Moscone Center. A broad coalition is planning actions that are going to fill the streets.”