Words, the power of speech, have evaporated from him completely.
‘Say it, pussy. Say what you are. Say what you’re good for.’
His self — something small, a glove, a pebble, dropped off the side of a mountain. Someone hooks him, jarringly, in the ribs. Someone else deals him a shin-kick. Someone else, a knee to the groin. He’s on the dirt, the faces surprising: Johnny Bronco, with his cool moustache; Eustace, his old buddy from the Red Creek commune; Irving, who was badly beaten for missing that boat to Jonestown a few weeks ago. Jim laughs amiably into the microphone. ‘Don’t hit him too hard; he’s still gotta work,’ then, in tender wonderment, ‘He’s not fighting back? Course he isn’t. Little peace-dove. Bless him.’
Lenny feels himself hauled up by the armpits. Wetness on his cheek; his own blood, clean and sweet as watermelon. ‘What are you, Lenny Lynden?’
Lenny still can’t see Jim for all the people, the UFO lights in his head.
‘Nothing.’
7.
Living without a woman, the promise of a woman’s touch, smiles, glances, is a bit like living without hot showers, or privacy when shitting, or enough sleep, or morning coffee, or sugar, or meat — juicy hunks of hamburger or chicken and not just a few scraps dissolved in gravy — or weed; especially weed. It’s a life without softness or luxury; a life of bare necessity; a life that sometimes has Lenny looking at the sharp tools in his hands and wondering.
When he sees Minnie weaving among tables in the Dining Tent a couple of nights after the confrontation, he drops his gaze as though searching for a lost earring. Keeps his gaze down if he so much as senses the presence of a female over fifteen and under forty; the jelly of a walk, the shadow of a breast, the tangle of an armpit; sweet, hot zones absolutely forbidden to him.
It’s a relief when Yolanda is taken off the sugarcane crew for getting too friendly with Quincy. Still, there are days when Lenny’s blood seems so close to the surface, it’s all he can see. Blood-hot visions. Terra, at the edge of the sugarcane field, telling him, Lenny, you’re sweet. Before he knows it, in full view of the crew, pacing Quincy, he’s breaking a stalk, crunching the sweet-wet; and before he knows it, Quincy’s fist is crunching against his cheek.
‘Fucker! That’s stealing. You’re gonna steal from the rest of us?’
‘Sorry,’ Lenny bleats, heart hammering; the pain dizzy, exhilarating. ‘Sorrysorry.’
When, one afternoon, they stop work to listen to the press conference broadcast, Lenny sits on the pavilion floor picking at his scabs.
In one word, ‘impressive’ — Rev. Burne, his former father-in-law, tells the reporters.
Jones brainwashed my teenaged daughter and married her off to a divorced junkie — his other father-in-law, Mr. Day.
It concerns me as a father, it concerns me as a man of law, and it concerns me as an American. Jonestown needs to be investigated — Mona’s dad, who owns all those factories in New Jersey.
After serving his country, my son became a dedicated peace activist. He wouldn’t be in Jonestown if it didn’t align with his values — Phil’s mom, a nice-sounding lady with a Southern accent.
I was Jim’s son-in-law for seven years. He’s a crook — Su-mi’s ex, Dwight Mueller.
I’m critical of communalism, but the fact stands, Peoples Temple has given my mom and brother a sense of meaning and direction — Ned, miraculously dragged away from his job as a neurosurgeon.
After the press conference, instead of going back to work, they get fried chicken. After chicken, there’s a screening of M*A*S*H. After M*A*S*H, Jim has them entertain him with revenge fantasies: blowing up Dwight inside his fancy car; crushing Mona’s dad with his own factory machinery; cutting off Terra’s tits and shoving them inside her traitor-bitch mouth.
Lenny feels like vomiting up his chicken. But he doesn’t. Days later, the image of Terra’s mutilated body appears to him so calmly, he steals more sugarcane just to feel the fists.
Others steal, too. Others are beaten, and not just for stealing. Rondelle, one day in the fields, starts singing slave songs at the top of her lungs. Paolo Jones — who replaced Quincy after he got his guard privileges stripped for trying to sneak off with Yolanda — tells her to quit it. Rondelle sings louder. Paolo cracks her in the nose with the butt of his rifle. Everyone stares at the rifle, Rondelle’s bleeding nose. Then they lower their heads and keep working.
Every couple of weeks, Lenny is called to the clinic to help with X-rays. A kid with a broken arm from a failed slam-dunk. A senior with a shadow on her lungs, still operable, not like Liesl’s. Clarisse Luce, eight months pregnant, with an impacted wisdom tooth. ‘Poor kid: not even born and she’s meeting the dentist!’ she jokes through her pain, face cheekbone-y, heart-shaped.
Lenny prefers the cool, sterile air of the clinic to working in the dirt and sun. Yet it doesn’t occur to him to ask for a transfer.
Likewise, it doesn’t occur to him to get back into bed when he falls out one night, dreaming of gunshots in the jungle. He wakes to boots stepping over his body.
Another stormy night, returning from a meeting in the pavilion, head crashing with news of bloody wars in Africa, race riots in the US, Klansmen patrolling state lines and murdering with impunity, it doesn’t occur to Lenny to protest when a guy pulls him into the bushes, unzips them both, takes out both their dicks. They pull at each other for a confused minute, then it’s over, and the guy’s pushing him away, coughing, ‘Faggot,’ fleeing.
A life without softness or luxury. A life of bare necessity. Not a life he especially wants, but did he ever want life? Did he ask for it? ‘Every child has the right to feel hostile for being brought into this world,’ Jim tells them one night. ‘Living is agony. Nobody wants it.’
There is no other life. He wants no other. He wants nothing. What are you, Lenny Lynden? Nothing. And when you’re nothing, nothing can be lost — or that’s what he thinks, until Brother Tobias comes running up to him in the field one afternoon.
‘Lenny: your mom just had a seizure,’ Tobias tells him. ‘She’s asking for you.’
The first thought Lenny has, seeing Liesl on her deathbed, is how thin she is. Holocaust thin. His next thought is, people didn’t get deathbeds in the Holocaust. Or drugs to ease their pain.
He sits. Then, because it seems like the thing to do, clasps her cold, blue-mottled hand.
When Liesl wakes, she pulls her hand away, wipes it on the sheets. ‘Lenny,’ she says in a wispy voice. After a while, she asks, ‘Bethy and Neddy?’
‘They send their love.’
He listens as Liesl talks at length about his siblings, Beth especially. Beth’s Edwardian-era wedding dress. Brother Ralph, who works with Liesl in the library, comes in and says, ‘Again with that wedding dress, Liesl?’, tries to get her to drink water. She refuses.
Dr. Katz checks in; says if her body doesn’t want water, don’t force it.
Liesl appears to go into a trance, or to fall asleep, eyes open. A gurgling comes from her throat. Ralph, seeing Lenny’s discomfort, offers to watch her while he gets some air.
‘No … I’ll stay.’
The ladies who share Liesl’s cabin sleep elsewhere that night. Lenny sleeps in the chair by her bed, and, later, on a spare bunk. Over the PA, Jim’s voice is slurred, soporific.
Lenny wakes before sunup; habit. Liesl is awake too, making agitated little noises like a cat that’s lost a mouse. He goes to her. It takes him a while to realize she’s speaking German.
‘Mom?’ he says. ‘It’s me … Lenny.’
Ralph and Tobias come by later with rice. They’re both gay, but not a couple. Lenny wonders if his life would be easier if he was gay; if his mom would like him better. He tells them she was speaking German. Ralph says, ‘She does that sometimes.’
Lenny eats some rice. Liesl won’t eat, but this isn’t surprising.
&
nbsp; Lenny supposes there are things he should ask his mother. He’s relieved when she falls asleep. Phil comes in. ‘Heard the little patient was speaking Deutsch?’
‘Yeah,’ Lenny says; then, in case it wasn’t evident, ‘She’s sleeping now.’
To his surprise, Phil stays.
Phil is good-looking. Lenny always figured as much, but it’s obvious, confined in the cabin with him. Phil pacing. Phil leaning. Phil sitting on a bunk. Phil asking innocuous yet disorienting questions: ‘How’d you like UC Davis?’ and, ‘That’s where you met Evelyn, right?’ and, ‘I had a buddy at Davis. Maybe you knew him? Jake Nash, class of ’66?’
Lenny doesn’t know if Phil is gay, but he suspects he might be.
Waking to find Phil, Liesl’s eyes light up, as much as a half-dead woman’s can. They start speaking German. Sporadically, Phil translates: ‘Uncle Franz’s grand piano,’ or, ‘Cycling with Clara down the street with the linden trees.’ At one point, Liesl lapses into poetry; at another, a wavery-sounding German. ‘Yiddish.’
Later, Liesl looks directly at Lenny. Phil explains, ‘She says she stopped being Jewish when she married your father.’
‘Oh.’ Lenny guesses he knew this.
Liesl speaks again. ‘“My children aren’t Jewish. They’re American,”’ Phil translates.
Lenny nods. It’s true, he’s never considered himself even half-Jewish.
‘“I thought if my children grew up American, they’d be protected.”’ Phil smiles sadly. ‘“The older ones, yes. Lenny, not so much.”’
‘Oh,’ says Lenny. ‘So … does she wish I was raised Jewish?’
Phil asks. Liesl shakes her head firmly.
Suddenly, Lenny remembers that cruel thing Beth told him, all those Thanksgivings ago. He asks, ‘Does she wish I wasn’t born?’
Phil doesn’t need to translate. Liesl nods.
Lenny’s mother dies that night. After receiving her last rites from Jim, pledging her undying allegiance to socialism. Jim stays to comfort Lenny. ‘She was a beautiful revolutionary … Could’ve healed her, if it wasn’t for your traitor-bitch wife draining my psychic energies.’
In that moment, Lenny hates Jim with a celestial clarity. But, next moment, he starts crying, and Jim hugs him, calls him, ‘My son.’
Dr. Katz signs the death certificate: Lynden, Liesl. March 14 1914, Salzburg. Austria. September 30 1978, Jonestown, Guyana.
Voices low, but not so low as to exclude Lenny, Jim and Phil discuss the burial. A jungle burial, far from their water supply. ASAP; decomposition sets in fast in this climate. Can Carpentry whip up a headstone? No religious crap, something for a good socialist?
Lenny is back at work by lunchtime.
At work that day, among the dirt and beetles, Lenny finds the broken head of a trowel, and doesn’t think anything of slipping it in his pocket. Doesn’t think anything, either, of sharpening its edges with a bit of granite he finds by the shower block that evening.
Two nights later, with animal deliberateness, he slits his wrists.
8.
There are mornings, lying in his cot in the Special Care Unit, when Lenny dreams Jim Jones’s voice in his ear, Jim Jones’s hand reaching under the sheets and taking out his cock. Jim working at him desperately, weeping as the cock slips, over and over, like a bar of soap from his grip. Weeping, slipping, until Lenny wakes with a feeling of joyous limpness. Dead; it’s peaceful, being dead.
‘You’re lucky you didn’t get tetanus.’ Sally-Ann Burne, streaked with morning sunlight, confirms he isn’t dead. ‘That thing was like ninety per cent rust.’
‘… Tetanus?’
‘Don’t worry, we gave you a shot.’
Lenny looks down. He’s shirtless. Bandages on his wrists.
‘Try not to mess with those. We don’t want your stitches coming undone.’ Sally-Ann checks the bandages; squeezes his fingertips like she’s trying to juice them. ‘Your circulation’s good … No damage to the tendons, either … Oh, Lenny. You really scared us.’
‘Sorry,’ Lenny mumbles.
‘You scared Father,’ she adds. ‘You know, he cares so much. And you know what he says about individual suicide; it hurts us as a group—’
But Lenny can’t listen to this. Just … can’t. He watches Sally-Ann’s lips move, tries to remember who she is to him, or who she once was. Davis. Thirteen years old. Playing guitar at his first wedding. Always drawing, painting, making faces, kicking him under the table.
‘Do you still draw …?’ he asks once she’s finished talking.
Sally-Ann looks surprised. There’s a hint of Evelyn in her oval face, small gray-blue eyes, but so what? Why should he care?
‘Yeah.’ She smiles faintly. ‘I’ll show you my sketchpad sometime.’
Lenny closes his eyes.
There are drugs. Drugs that keep him soap-slick, cotton-headed. Watching the world through a dusty netting, dust-moths beating their wings. A tall young guy walking in the green beyond the netting with a dark-haired boy on his shoulders, the boy pointing at the trees.
‘Dat you!’
‘What? You sayin’ I’m green and leafy?’
‘No! Dat you! Big-as-sky!’
‘Yeah, that’s me,’ the guy mutters. ‘I’m the son of God. Big as the fucking sky.’
Martin Luther Jones. On his shoulders, Evelyn’s child, Soul. Lenny feels nothing for the child … but, again, why should he?
Another day, Sister Diane comes by and asks about his wrists, his mother, his feelings. He tells her nothing, or things like nothing: ‘I don’t know,’ ‘I don’t remember,’ ‘I’m tired.’
He’s tired. So tired. Like he’s just traveled through several dimensions, tired. Like a hibernating creature, dug up before its time. Like the ability to not be tired was drained from him, along with those two pints of blood.
He sleeps. Sleeps. Wakes. To Sally-Ann lathering his face and wearily singing, ‘Shaving cream! Nice and clean …’ To beautiful Yolanda, sleep-creased and floppy-armed, protesting, ‘But I don’t wanna go to White House …’ as Elly Bud gravely helps her into a robe and slippers. To fiery walls at sunset, Jim calling a White Night.
Around Lenny, the nurses whisper: ‘Do we all have to go?’ ‘Somebody’s gotta stay here.’ He goes back to sleep. Is stirred in the dead of night by Janet Lakshmi. ‘It’s time. Get up.’
In the pavilion, Jim is crooning, ‘It’s all over. They’re coming to kill us. Step over now; step over.’ The queue worms all the way to the radio shed. Guards outside the queue.
‘What’s happening?’ bellows Brother Garnet, an older white guy, put in the Special Care Unit for threatening someone with a machete.
No one answers Garnet at first. He keeps bellowing until Eustace, rocking his little son Kwame in his arms, sighs, ‘Just drink it, and maybe we’ll all get some sleep.’
Laura Kana, a few places ahead, gives Lenny the stink-eye. ‘It’s your wife’s fault. Her lawyer daddy convinced some congressman to come here with a TV crew.’
‘Congressman?’ Lenny can’t quite fathom what a congressman is, but it sounds bad.
‘Congressman Theo Hanson. Big Democrat hero,’ Laura says in a la-di-da tone. ‘He thinks he’s going to save us like those baby seals in Alaska.’
‘Baby seals?’ Lenny definitely can’t fathom what baby seals have to do with anything. Crying babies, though, he can hear them.
‘Mothers, keep those babies quiet,’ Jim orders. ‘Clarisse? No need for that baby to be crying. Death ain’t fearful. If you want a successful reincarnation, you gotta face death bravely.’
Outside the queue, seniors sit drinking from paper cups. One lady empties hers stealthily behind a bench. The lady beside her yowls and a plump young nurse, Junie Crabb, bustles over with a new cup, looms over the first lady until she drains it.
Beyond the pavil
ion, bodies are playfully twitching, rolling. When Lenny finally gets his own cup, he downs the sweet, dark liquid like it’s cough syrup. Jim notices him from the stage. ‘You. Why’re you still here? Get outta my sight.’
Obediently, Lenny skulks out to the fields to die.
He doesn’t die, though. Just sleeps. Wakes to stamping feet, war cries.
The next day, back in the Special Care Unit, Sally-Ann removes his bandages. The cuts are grayish-pink, tingly, but no pain. ‘It’s been a month. You can probably work again.’
‘Fieldwork?’
‘Not fieldwork.’ Sally-Ann looks at him sadly. ‘We’ll find you something else.’
After lunch, he’s given some paint-flecked fatigues, a T-shirt, brought out to the playground by Quincy, who’s a janitor these days. Quincy shows him how to clean the big tires, scrape graffiti: leave us in ☮; Tera is a traytor whore; fuck Congressman Hanson.
He cleans until his wrists hurt. Then he lies on a tire, squints at the cloudy belly of sky, and pretends not to hear Quincy asking, ‘You done? You gonna do the rest? Or … not?’
Later, the playground floods with children. They’re cute. Striped T-shirts. Overalls. Sun suits. Flappy hats. He sees Evelyn’s child among them and, again, feels nothing … until that nothing transforms into a great, gaping something like the sky falling in.
‘Lenny? Are you alright?’ Sister Phyllis, a sweet old Indiana lady who works in the nursery, peers down at him from a backdrop of doom-clouds.
‘Yeah … I’m alright.’
‘Just, it’s getting dark? And it looks like rain any minute?’
‘I’m alright,’ he repeats. ‘Just cloudwatching.’ Then: ‘Do you think it’s falling?’
‘What’s that?’
‘The sky … Do you think it’s falling?’
‘Well … it’s never done it before. Don’t see why it would now,’ Phyllis humors him. ‘Rain, though. Looks like rain, for sure. I’d hate to see you get wet, honey.’
In response, Lenny closes his eyes. Keeps them closed until Phyllis trots away with a herd of small children; until the rain begins plopping, people yelling and rushing for cover.
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