Randy was the vocal advocate, the one who found a way of working the phrase into most conversations, Demolish monogamy. He and Oz—who had once posed for a photograph in which he and Annabelle fit, kissing, inside the same oversized Shetland sweater—spoke of the constraints romantic love imposed on the mind. The individual, Randy said, cannot devote himself to a movement when he is devoted first to another individual. Monogamy is a trap in our thinking. Fay had stood on the sidelines of the half circle that formed around him, nodding with a knuckle in her mouth, and afterward devised an errand.
Wright accompanied her, both of them in sunglasses and balaclavas as they drove through Newburgh, a city of beautiful, ruined houses where no one wanted to live. The things hanging from the rearview mirror, feathers Annabelle had laced there at a happier time, swung when the gearshift lurched, blocking and revealing his view of Fay’s crying.
Later that week, when she began sleeping with Oz, who was narrow shouldered in wire-rimmed glasses, someone for whom the appropriate quotation was always available to be spoken quietly, a graduate of a school he referred to only by the area in Massachusetts, Randy punched a hole in a wall. The issue seemed to be that she had chosen a single alternative, rather than the diversity of the five other men in the house. “That’s not freeing you ideologically,” he hissed at her, to which she said a stony total of nothing. MASCULINITY IS POISON, someone wrote in tidy ballpoint capitals next to the buckled crater of plaster his fist had left.
Oz, over a cauldron of bulgur and little else, suggested to Randy that he watch the two of them together sometime.
“I’d rather watch you fuck yourself,” Randy said.
“Enlightenment called for you,” Annabelle chimed in. “Long distance.” It became a line they repeated often, all of them but one.
WRIGHT PASSED HIS DAYS IN his mind, with the textbooks Fay had pilfered somehow, all of them bearing the name of the previous owner, Brock Stevenson, a figure he imagined with great jealousy, a boy on a bicycle with braces on his teeth. As often as she could she looked over his work, and the way she squinted one eye when recalling some formula, the way she reached for analogies to better explain, were some of the last moments when she was familiar to him. She taught him the Pythagorean theorem and how to steal, only from corporations, only necessities. In a K-Mart parking lot she kissed him when she felt the bags of rice tucked into his waistband. A value system is living and dynamic, she had said, changed by forces working against it. Any linguist will tell you that the only perfect language is one never spoken, she said.
They behaved as though the smallest of pleasures were anathema, a distraction from the mission at hand, watching each other for any sign of joy and snapping when they found it. Someone’s hot sauce was poured out and left empty, a patterned scarf thrown on the fire, a joint flushed down the toilet. The first week of February, with a line about how they must take advantage of whichever resources were available, Annabelle skinned and roasted a stray cat.
15.
BUFFALO, NEW YORK, 1971
Standing outside the closed noise of a classroom, imagining what might be kept in the row of lockers he faced, Wright was thinking still how easy it had been, the concrete walkway that cut through the snowy lawn, the oaken double doors unlocked.
There would be books inside, of course, but also lunches, sandwiches cut at the diagonal. Trumpets in cases, shoes just for track, cameras, maybe, keys. Imagining this, possessions in the dark, accessible only by secret combination, gave him a longing that was almost sexual.
When the door opened to reveal her, tall and black in pleated slacks that revealed the point of her ankles, pink polyester kissing sensible heels, he apologized. She was placing a sheet of paper in a folder attached to the outside of the door, on it the word ATTENDANCE stenciled in red, and when she saw him she kicked her foot out to keep the door open.
“New here?”
Wright brushed the hair on his head to the right, full of a strange feeling, something that could have been power, the idea that there was nothing about him she could know if he did not tell her. The thought ran around his mind and sharpened to a phrase: nothing about me, nothing about me.
“This the class you’re looking for? Mrs. Henderson, English? Ninth grade?”
He could not lie, he thought, if he did not answer. She smiled without her teeth and opened the door wider, bowing in a dramatic way to let him in. It was almost too warm. The desks, blond wood and slightly tilted, looked like they were listening. He loved how they were a contained system, each married to an attached plastic chair, and the odd wish he had was to sleep under a row of them, crawl in between the margins of sneakered feet. He was shorter than the tallest student by a foot, but not entirely an exception in the study of bodies. Puberty was nearly a sound among them, a song some of them knew and would not sing to the others.
It was something he had never experienced before, the whole room turning to him. It put him in mind of being bathed. She asked him his name, and it was as if the lie were supplied by not his brain but his body, so automatically did it come.
“Brock”—he swallowed—“Stevenson.”
“Your name is Rock,” someone howled, a boy who was sitting up on his haunches on the chair, leaning forward on the desk like a sphinx. He was thin and tall, the bones of his wrists exposed by a sweater too short, and Wright wanted to kiss him, the novelty of another boy, another incomplete body. “Rock, Rock, dumb ol’ Rock.” He said these words again, drumming them out on the skull of the girl in front of him, who had an Afro crowned at the hairline with one pink bow. Mrs. Henderson cleared her throat and snapped her fingers twice, to which half the room snapped back once. She did it again, the hand raised while she faced the chalkboard, and this time all of them snapped back. The sound was as moving and surreal to him as the rest of the space—watercolor self-portraits hanging from clothespins on a string that crossed the windows, the blotted faces backlit by drifts of snow, three shelves of books and a stuffed chair in which to read them, a sign that said BRING ONE HOME THIS WEEKEND!
“Brock Stevenson,” she said as she finished writing. “Is that the correct spelling? Or is it a p-h?”
The beauty of the perfect cursive made him want to admit everything right there. Not my real name, don’t belong here, haven’t been to school in almost two years. Again he did not respond.
“Tell us what you know about yourself, Brock Stevenson.”
The face he must have made was of real torture, he thought, because she laughed, her mouth open so wide he saw a silver filling. She was tilting her head now, a palm curled on her cheek.
“I ask everybody new,” she said. “It’s just a way of attaching your life to ours. You can tell us anything you want, anything that comes to mind. Some people start with where they’re from, or what it is they want to do or be.”
He believed for a second that he might answer with something witty and avoidant, America’s first talking horse, a fly on the wall, but it didn’t come. Instead he cleared his throat and said only, “Here.”
The boy who had called him Rock, still sitting on his feet in his chair, could not come up with the correct rejoinder, and it appeared to make him uneasy. Wright’s final sincerity was an odd weapon, or the total lack of one, a message that any cruelty would fall on him without resistance. Tipping her head the other way, Mrs. Henderson indicated a seat at the front. He could feel her examining what was missing, a backpack, some identifying document, a pen even, some proof this had been the plan at all. From her desk she removed a notebook, wrapped in plastic, a new sharpened pencil from a jar, and she set them on his desk without a word. He did not thank her, and he hated himself, and the scarf around his neck, too, pink and synthetic, woven through with metallic thread, obviously meant for a woman. Inside of his sneakers were plastic bags to keep the snow out, and he believed everyone would hear them, so as he walked he hummed a piece of a song, a choice that did nothing to cauterize his strangeness. “He think it’s the fuckin’ G
rammys or?” said the sphinx. “The winner is Rock.”
It took a minute, after this, another two rounds of snapping, for the class to quiet again. The howling at who he was aside, he spent the next two hours refashioned by happiness, his scalp prickling with what she taught them, the grace and freedom of thoughts that weren’t his.
WHEN SHE SPOKE, MRS. HENDERSON, WHEN she put an idea forward, it was like watching someone decorate a room very carefully, hanging things where their colors made sense, shifting the position of a chair in relation to a window. Her confidence and flexibility created his. He was breathing more. They were discussing a novel he had read and it felt like a miracle, the only indication in recent memory that he was a good person doing the right thing. His hand was up the whole time, the fingers all spread an inch apart, little force fields between them.
“Why do you think,” Mrs. Henderson said, “the writer keeps the protagonist’s name a secret until the end of the book? Why is he only called the boy?”
“Because he believes he does not deserve one,” Wright said. “In keeping it from us, the writer helps us to feel the anxiety he does, of being without a role or purpose. Revealing it only after he has suffered tells us how suffering has its merit, and can make identity feel earned as opposed to given.”
Though his hand had been up, she had not called on him, and he believed this was why his answer reduced her to silence. She had her hand over her mouth as if to keep from expelling a belch, and he apologized, twice. There were construction-paper silhouettes of the city’s buildings running the wall to her right, there was the sound of a water fountain going off in the hallway outside.
“Never apologize for your intelligence,” Mrs. Henderson said, something about the skin around her temples activated, looking at him only after she’d spoken. After another silent moment, a girl in the back made three kissing noises, and then the classroom erupted, the plastic seats squeaking against the metal they were welded to and the sour smell of bodies in the winter deepening somehow. By the time she had the room organized under her again, everybody snapping back after four tries, the bell rang. “Have a good lunch,” she called. “Don’t eat an apple for a doctor, eat it for yourself.”
She didn’t have to ask him to stay after. He knew.
The room, emptied, did an eerie impression of itself, the props strange without the actors. He’d closed the notebook but opened it again.
“I forgot to ask for your pass,” she said, moving a wet cloth over the chalkboard, then leaning against the clean green. Her fingers curled around the slate lip of it, the nails trim and short and unpolished. PASS, he wrote, in capitals in his notebook, and then he circled it. She made eye contact but then looked, he thought, at the scarf, the haircut he’d given himself in a third of a mirror. He wondered if she could smell more than his bad breath—the essential badness of his teeth, the crumbling of which he often dreamt in clinical detail.
“I forgot to get a pass.”
Wright told himself this was not technically untrue, that it had not occurred to him to try and this was a kind of forgetting, but he knew the question was coming he could not avoid, and he steeled himself against this, curled every toe.
“Do you know where the office is? You’ll need one to come back here tomorrow. That’s something I have to sign off on.”
“I thought I might not need a pass if I came prepared.” Even chewing the skin around his thumb as he was, he could barely get through the weak attempt. He considered the seams of the carpet as he said this, the white of the baseboard paint.
Another conversation ran through the spoken one, coded to an extent that lay beyond him, and his attempts to divert it felt sloppy.
“Being prepared is a wonderful thing. I wish that were all we asked of anybody. Where were you before this?”
“I was in another country,” he said. The truth rendered him more of a captive, the fact he hadn’t elaborated a question passing now over her face.
“How old are you, Brock?”
“Enough to know better,” he said, a joke that didn’t land. Her jaw gained some definition, a slight firming as she tried to imagine his angle.
“You’re welcome to take that notebook,” she said, pulling on a hooded parka. “I’m going to bring you to the office now.”
“I can go tomorrow on my own,” he said.
“I insist.”
They walked with her hand light on his lower back, he stopping twice to tie his shoes and tuck the plastic bag back into the rib of his sock, she speaking the names of people she passed in the hall, first and last, like they were punch lines, students and other teachers. “Edna Roberts! Frank Dibbern!” When they passed a shuffling white-haired man wearing a tie embroidered with balloons, she whistled like a catcaller and he blushed.
“I think I forgot something in the room,” he said to her, standing in front of the door on which a word was painted in decaying gold leaf. O F C E. “My pencil.”
I forgot all my clothing, he might as well have been saying, the only photos of a life that’s gone now. She pulled a Ticonderoga from her pocket and pressed it in his hand and fit her fingers around the knob.
“I look forward to seeing you tomorrow,” she said, a lie for his benefit.
“I won’t be late this time.”
She nodded and squeezed his shoulder, and then she was a shadow behind the frosted glass, and then she was a good person he had only imagined.
“I’m supposed to call my mother,” he said to a face behind a high counter. Under its fiberboard he pushed at a wasteland of dried gum with his thumbnail. In his periphery an Aqua Netted bob, helped by red fingernails and clacking bangles, did its nosy thinking.
“Hon, are you new here? Do you look like somebody? He looks like somebody. Doesn’t he, Nance?”
A phone passed over the chipped surface and he dialed without thinking, the first response of which he’d been sure. Wherever they went, his mother grilled him on this until he spoke without stutter: the number of the pay phone closest in the network of them Shelter maintained across the country. In the receiver he heard it being dialed and imagined the stall, the corner of a vacant lot where a gas station had poisoned the ground. He had watched them step into it, his mother or Annabelle or Oz, as though it were an expensive and powerful car, pinching the doors closed with two fingers, looking around at what was possible inside it with great admiration. They had chosen it for the surrounding desolation. Only once had they found someone else in the booth, an older woman wearing clothing from every season. Wright had watched Oz and Fay standing on either side of the grated glass, tapping out a rhythm with the heavy rings each wore on their fingers, looking away with slapstick mischief when the woman looked toward them, then groping and kissing for her benefit.
Randy answered on the first ring, speaking in code Wright could understand, something they all said to each other.
“That you, Ralph?”
“I need you to pick me up,” he said, and muttered the address of the school. Annabelle’s teal van rattled around the corner ten minutes after he’d stepped outside, and Randy spoke only once on the drive back, not even a full sentence. At an intersection he pulled back on the fur-covered gearshift, sucked in a third of a cigarette in one inhale, and said, pointing at Wright but keeping his eyes ahead on the traffic, “All of our lives in danger.” Randy made a gesture with his hand, one that meant, All of it, gone—a fist puffed on to bare the fingers flat, a dandelion blown away.
In the office the secretary had gasped, in the middle of the phone call, and Wright believed she knew: who his mother was, the sort of things she said with her eyes emptied out of feeling. But he had been wrong.
“I’ve got it,” the secretary had said, and giggled, high and bright. “You know you look just like Vincent Kahn? It’s the first man on the moon, Nancy, right here in our office, and he’s calling home sick.”
16.
NEW YORK CITY, 1971
A brittle two months later, Fay and Wright lay
in the bed of an ash-blue truck, covered by potato sacks filled halfway with lentils, making a journey from Philadelphia to New York unseen. “You can’t just reinvent my life completely without telling me how it’s been changed,” he told his mother. Wright’s body in the sleeping bag fit exactly between the steel ridges of the truck. His birthday cake that year had been a Twinkie Oz held out in his palm, smashed from hiding it there.
“You could start with why are we in this truck, covered up like criminals, instead of a regular car with seat belts and an AM/FM dial.” He had been in the country twenty months, never allowed to actually live in it. They hit a bump and his mother’s involuntary moan, the light peal of fear, worked at his anger, softened it temporarily.
“We’re in this truck because my name is attached to an activity that the government considers wrong.”
“Which activity would that be?”
“Along with other members of Shelter, I engineered an explosion in the Philadelphia courthouse. We put in a call beforehand, we always do, to evacuate the building.”
She was speaking from a script, the words arriving without any adjustment for their circumstance, and he wanted to unsettle her somehow, pull her hair, douse her in water. All the answers to his questions he knew already, but he wanted to make her say them.
“And why is your name—”
“Afterward we issued a communiqué explaining our actions, which went out to newspapers, and I signed my name at the bottom.”
He craned his head up toward the unzipped mouth. He saw a slice of a billboard, the word YOU in black against white, and a toothpick of sky, and a crow passing over. In his teeth he felt each car and truck that overtook theirs.
“I love you. Please say something.”
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