by Sam Lipsyte
“Take this to Mom,” he says. The other boy speeds off through trees.
“You’re in deepies now,” says the older sandy son. “Mom said one more little thing and she was calling Hank Krull.”
The boy walks the snowholes of his running brother, a mittened form between the bends of birch.
“Deepies,” Martin says. “Don’t tell Lucy. Don’t tell her a thing.”
Some days we’re up there smoking on the prayer rock off the hill trail, smoking on the big slab facing east. Martin says the local braves used to sit here a few hundred years ago to watch the sun go up, watch the wagons roll by, beseech the Great Spirit to kick Manifest Destiny’s ass.
“But the only way to win,” says Martin, “is to organize people.”
“What people?” I say, wave out to the half-stump woods.
“They’re coming over tonight.”
“Tina, too?” I say.
Tina is my lady of the revolution. She was a daughter of Midwest mansions, come to university to study slides of the paintings that hung in her father’s halls.
Then she took Martin’s elective, “Introduction to Resistance: Semiotic to Semi-automatic,” and he saw in her the makings of a revolutionist. This was just before the graduate-school dean kicked Martin out for “beliefs antithetical to the pursuit of happiness.”
Martin took Tina home to the compound, to Lucy and me. We ate rabbit cassoulet. It was Martin’s specialty. We drank a case of beer, then laid into some good port. For the sake of function I had given up shooting speed.
Tina came upstairs to see my Kronstadt, to kiss it.
“Martin really loves you, you know.” she said.
There are certain reasons why women tell you of another man’s love for you, but I did not know them then.
“Pledge allegiance to me,” I said.
“Martin says we will eat in communal kitchens,” she said. “Thousands at a time. Everyone will work three days a week. No surplus.”
“We’ll get married in a tank,” I said. “We’ll win over the army and they’ll give us a tank. A Bradley Fighting Vehicle.”
“Forget it,” said Tina. “When the state withers away so will monogamy and marriage. Good riddance. Besides, I’ve only been with four men so far. Only one without rubbers.”
“Anyone I know?”
“Martin thinks the house is bugged. Do you think so?”
“Assume surveillance, rest assured,” I said, quoting my mentor.
We are scrap-whacking in the yard, all business, when Lucy drives up. She gives us her don’t-we-have-enough-wood look, cluckety-cluck.
“Don’t even,” says Martin. “It’s been a long day.”
“A long day of what is the question,” says Lucy. She can be sitcom mom when she isn’t technician-white lady, or Rosy-Lucy Luxemburg.
“Oh, Lucy,” says Martin.
“Crazy bitch,” I say.
“Hey,” says Martin. “Watch it.”
“In a good way,” I say.
Martin does some whacking. He always lets me slide, slither out from what I say. Maybe he feels guilty, being my teacher once, and me still a little slow. Maybe it’s our fabric-softener softened shirts. We are from the same kind of towns. We both know the sound of swivel-head spray at midnight on a summer lawn. We both know the weak secrets of us.
“Bronstein came from a farm-owning family, you know,” says Martin.
“About the ice pick incident,” I say. “Was he wearing his glasses?”
“Every day with you. Enough.”
Maybe he’s right. Maybe it’s being in the hills like this, with people down in town doing good and evil, and us just having to wait.
When Martin brought me here to meet Lucy I knew from the first moment that there was something between us. Call it chemical, call it mineral. It’s vegetable when she is out in the garden in her morning robe, picking radishes for dinner. Somehow, though, without even a kiss, I suddenly became their son, the sulky one, the wild one, all the ones they vowed to never bear.
I made peace with my lust as a matter of priority.
Lucy is our rock, our reason.
Martin is the teacher, but it’s Lucy who will set us free.
Still, the meals the man cooks! My God, if he were not the Bronstein of his age, he could have gone to New York City, been master chef to the ruling class.
“The idle’s aproned idol,” Martin said.
Tonight is Greek night, lasagna.
“A popular peasant dish,” says Martin.
Lucy drinks off her wine.
“I couldn’t find this poor woman’s vein today. They give you three tries, then someone else takes over.”
“You’ll feel better at the bonfire meeting,” says Martin.
“Tina’s coming over with some new recruits,” I say.
Lucy lifts up the wine bottle as though to examine the label. It’s the usual vineyard scene, happy serfs up to their hips in grape.
“Christ, how did this happen to me?” she says. “I tell them about all this at work and they think you should be committed.”
“What did I say about that?” says Martin. “At work, you never heard of me.”
Lucy bangs the bottle on the table edge. In the biopic of Lucy it will break, but now it only bounces.
“I’m going to kill someone,” she says.
“That’s silly,” says Martin. “For now, I mean. It’s anarchic, futile. We must build a base of—”
“Fuck your futility,” says Lucy. “I’m going to fire a bullet into somebody’s ear.”
“That’s nice talk for a nurse,” says Martin.
“I’m a blood technician, my dear. I have a job. Did you get this month’s check from mommy yet? You’re thirty fucking years old. And your little moron friend here. Can’t decide whether he wants to do you or me.”
It hurts, but I forgive each sentence before the next hisses out.
“You know,” says Martin slowly, “Bronstein did not rise out of destitution, either. It’s not a requirement. Would you rather my mother give the money to the Policeman’s Benevolence Association?”
“Fuck Bronstein,” says Lucy. “I’d waste him with an ice pick in half a second.”
“You need a nap,” says Martin. “But first, how about a little surprise?”
“I’ll get it,” I say, go to the kitchen for the key lime pie.
The new recruits drive up in a rusted sedan, a classic suburban bougiemobile, the kind my father used to drive me around in to show off all those atrocities of the state, the natural man-made wonders that always have those splintery benches nearby to drink warm root beer on. Put a quarter in the bughead metal scopes and maybe you can see the blood of workers drip-dried on the dam walls.
They pile out, girl after girl, stringy hair, parkas and hats, bundled, fevery sweetnesses who believe what I believe.
Here comes Tina with her deathmarch boots and mansion-colored hair, a deep-tongued angel like a painting from before Mister Marx was born. Sometimes when I see her I worry our cause is real, that we will die in low rooms with buckets and wires and sponges. State men will spaz me with volts, goad me into informancy. I have a low treachery threshold. Then the hummer days will be a faraway dream.
There are some new boys here, too, the kind who read French in the original and trick you into thinking their hearts are pure. These types prey like mantises on the kind and curious. There is one named Floyd I have seen doing deep stares at my Tina. It may be time for a cadre-to-cadre chat.
Lucy feeds the fire with our busy scraps. We lean into the light and say our names.
“Greetings from the campus branch,” says one boy, so gallant with a zit-scorched chin. I raise my beer to him.
“Smash the state!” calls a sweetness, and giggles, as though goosed by the dark.
“Welcome all,” says Martin. “Tonight is a special night for me. It is exactly ten years since I came to the conclusion that human life makes sense only insofar as it is lived in
servitude to the infinite. You may ask what I mean by that. Look around you. See the moon? The outline of the trees against the night? Is that what I mean by infinite? Well, I could cut those trees down tomorrow. I probably will. I could detonate the moon. That’s not what I mean by infinite. Certainly we are not infinite. We are flesh and blood, minds full of the rot of capitalism. Born dead, really. No, comrades, what I mean by infinite is…”
Now comes a tender kind of animal squeal from off behind the woodpile. I know it, that sound, know it too well, and my heart frogs up. I find her there with that boy, Floyd. She is doing what she is doing as though it were some kind of contest where you have to be quick and cannot spill.
“Traitor!” I say.
“You don’t own me,” says Tina, “I belong to history, you dumb fuck.”
“Hello, comrade,” grins pinned Floyd.
My hook is up, hooked in the moon, but I cannot move, cannot take my eyes off the kid’s majestic thing. It’s like the first time I read Nietzsche, and Martin had to talk me down.
Now Martin talks me down once more. My hook, too.
“It’s okay,” he says, “it’s okay. Go back to the house. Go back to the house, man.”
Now I must be shouting. Martin’s hand is on my mouth. Now I must be biting. His knee on my neck.
That night I dream of sirens, the deep, womby wail of them slicing over trees, Lucy screaming, “Barricades! Barricades!”
It’s a two-pronged attack, what they call a pince-nez in tactical circles. Cherrytops roll off the pond road onto the compound, crunching ice. That kulak bitch trails them in her jeep, calling out the window, “Get those communists! Get those junkie creeps!”
“We are not communists!” I call out in my world-historical dream-world voice, which is deep and resonates with the inexorable.
Through the flames of the bonfire I see forms of men come through the birch line. They hop stumps and scrapwood, sweatshirts and facepaint caught in the hack of headlight beams. They have baseball bats and compound bows. Pistols squawk in the graveyard and the far-off woods. Rape shrieks come down from the prayer rock. The flower of our nation lies in puppet mounds around the fire pit.
There is Martin in a bloom of ruin among them.
I awake, peek out the attic window. The bonfire is an ash disk on the lawn.
I listen to Martin and Lucy, their Saturday morning coffee talk, or what slivers of it slat through my floor.
“I’m just worried that he’s really crazy.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just that. That something’s really off.”
“I know.”
“We should call his folks. Or maybe contact the psychiatric community, problematic as that may be.”
“Is this all the cream?”
“Take mine.”
“You know, I love you in that robe.”
“We’re not done talking about this, Martin. I’m going to call his folks. I think he’s snapped. He tried to kill Floyd.”
“He seems a little wiggy. I shouldn’t have given him that hook.”
“He smokes all of our pot.”
“He doesn’t really do much for international socialism.”
“Those things I said, I was angry.”
“I’ve been selfish.”
“Come here.”
Lucy hands me a stack of newspapers on the way out to my father’s car.
“Onward, upward,” she says.
We drive down the pond road.
“Well,” says my father, “I hope your little adventure in social unrest is over.”
“Guess so,” I say.
“When the freaks turn you out, then it’s time to re-evaluate things. Wouldn’t you agree?”
“You have a point.”
We pass the kulak’s house, turn onto the country road, go by White Power Pizza one last time.
“Hungry?” says my father.
“I’ll eat tomorrow,” I say.
Home is so fabricked and glowing. I had almost forgotten the softness of the world. Here’s my little room, the bed, the desk, the lamp, and my little mother in it, folding towels for me.
I am down in the valley now.
I eat many tomorrows away. I miss Martin’s cuisine. Everything here comes in plastic with a scissor line. I watch the men on TV in their good, dark suits, their free-market starch. Lucy would be laughing, Martin cursing, but I can only stare.
My mother and father say they see a leap for the good in me. I am quiet and take my boots off at the door.
I think of Tina often. I think of her in several fixed positions, with slight rotation.
Someday, I shit you not, the order will come down. Someone will surely be sending the orders down then. There will be a knock on the door, an old comrade in the glittering tracksuit of the new regime, chin pimples gone to grave divots. The state, he will explain, the new, glorious state, requires assistance with a certain hero of the people who has lost himself to rogue notions. We need a man, he will tell me, a man who can get in close, a man who is maybe a bit soft in the head but with a terrible hardness to him from all his short-term memory loss.
This order will come down and I will slip my hook in a grip for the road. I will take a slow bus up to the hills. We’ll sit there up on the prayer rock, Martin and me, talk of our victory, recall old struggles, laugh about the sandy sons. It will be a meeting of dearest friends and I will fill his bong for him from my private government stock. We will weep for Lucy, slain at the Battle of the Malls. We will mourn Floyd, him of huge heart and member, executed live via satellite, purged by fiends. We will rue those dark forces of counter-revolution and counter-counter-revolution that maneuver as we speak. We will sigh, admire the layers of light in the sky from the sunset behind us, build a fire for the cold coming night. I will hoist my hook from the grip, kept all these years, a memento of exile, of sacrifice.
“Hey,” Martin will say, “I’ve been looking all over for that fucking thing.”
“Forgive me, Bronsteins!” I will shout, hook my hook in my hero’s eye, drag him by the brow bone to his pyre.
Beautiful Game
Gary gets to pick a park. A nice gesture on the part of the state. Or is it the city? Gary studies the list, picks one far from home. Last thing he needs is a neighbor, a friend, family even, seeing him in some kind of get-up, coveralls, a neoprene vest, poking around with one of those trash-poke sticks.
The kids from the school, say, with their frisbees, their dogs.
It would get around.
It’s hard enough this woman at the desk knows what he’s done. Maybe she’s from a bootstrap family, foreign. Here’s Gary, lucky to be born a citizen, wasting his good fortune. All he can do now is try to set things straight.
He’ll start with the park.
He has some days before he’s supposed to report. He stays home, drinks O’Doul’s, shoots cocaine, watches the tube. It’s non-alcoholic, the O’Doul’s. Gary bought a case of it by mistake. They don’t mark things properly anymore. Still, it’d be wrong to pour it down the sink.
They have a tournament on TV, football, the other kind, countries, flags. He finds a team to follow, a side, Cameroon. So far, a Cinderella story, the color man says. But how does Cinderella end? Does she win? Gary hopes so. Something will happen to him if Cameroon loses. Maybe it’s stupid, reminds him of all the stupid people he always thought himself positioned against, but here he is: a rooter. It is not a good epoch for position-taking. How long is an epoch? Maybe he can wait it out.
He goes out at sundown, after the games, buys some bagels, cigarettes. This morning’s bagels marked down. A man stands near the bagel store. His legs are in leggings. Blanket strips? He’s bleeding from the mouth.
“They took my teeth!” the man says.
“They’re just getting started,” says Gary, gives the man a buck.
At the bank machine, Gary doesn’t check his balance. Better to leave it to the gods. Someday the machine will shun him. Why kn
ow when?
Gary had a band back when that was a good idea, toured the basements of Europe in a bus. The Dutch dug it best. The Dutch got the put-on underneath the hurt, the howl. Gary’s not sure he would get it himself anymore. This was years ago, before the whole thing got big, and small again. Now it’s gone. The tradition is gone. The kids at the school, they hardly even know that really famous group, the one with the singer who killed himself. The singer in Gary’s band killed himself, too.
The drummer quit, went to divinity school.
Now Gary likes to tell people at parties how he works with kids. It explains him, his shoes, his age. The only parties he goes to are those his mother gives. He talks to the children of his mother’s friends, younger people, yoga, the big new job, no stains on their teeth. He doesn’t really work with kids, either. He works near them, odd jobs, errands, the elevator, recess guard. The kids wave, say his name. Kids are precious, priceless.
Gary has a price.
He just lowers it a lot.
The thing is, all Gary did was try to stick up for the cart guy. Sweet guy, cart outside the synagogue, always the freshest stuff: squash, cucumbers, fruit. The older cop was hassling him, the rookie hanging back.
“Officer,” said Gary to the rookie, “what’s this about? A permit?”
“Fuck off.”
Gary was uptown to meet someone, a buyer. A tiny deal, a taste, a favor, bagel money while school was out. The buyer was nowhere.
“I pay your salary, officer,” said Gary.
“I doubt it, pal.”
The older cop banged the cart guy down on a tomato crate. The cart guy was talking in a bootstrap tongue.
“Hey, Turkey, you from Turkey?” said the older cop. Gary eyed the gun on his hip.
Maybe it was a test from God, see if Gary would stick up for the cart guy.
Maybe it was that Gary once played a little football, American. Tactics, crackback, spear.
He put his hand on the shoulder of the older cop.
“Lay off of him,” said Gary.