Dissident Gardens

by Jonathan Lethem

  “I forgot, there’s something else that Chinese chicken wanted me to tell you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Wear your love like heaven.” Her eyes flickered to the man behind the counter, even as the sullenly handsome youth had become bored with them again, resumed running his grubby cloth along the silver swan’s neck of a syrup faucet.

  That’s how simply, over what could be regarded as merely a piss-thin milk shake, time could be halted, a life hinged in the middle. Cicero’s, specifically. Miriam had seen him for who he was. Unlike the older boys who jeered “homo” at Cicero and a dozen other younger boys in the Sunnyside Intermediate locker rooms, those whom Cicero had no need to fool because they didn’t understand what the word meant nor bother to distinguish among those at whom they hurled it. Unlike, too, the haunted, despondent, hungry men, four or five of whom in the past year, passing on a sidewalk, had auditioned Cicero with speculating glances. From those, men he wouldn’t care to know, Cicero had no reason to hide. Only glance defiantly back and gather a scrap of knowledge marked for the file on what he’d prefer not to become. Miriam was different. He’d hidden from her, as he hid from his parents, and from Rose, as he’d hidden from those few solicitous teachers who’d noticed his intelligence. Miriam had seen him anyway.

  Then, just as wildly, she steered him in yet another direction. Later Cicero would figure she’d meant to spare his embarrassment at being spotted as what was still called, however sympathetically, an invert—despite that the soda jerk at Dave’s did have glorious arms, well worth a lascivious glance between two who’d noticed. The effect, though, was to deepen rather than alleviate his bewilderment. Had the former moment even actually occurred, or was he inventing it? Or, weirdly, did Miriam somehow relate the two thunderbolts? The second of these came when she patted her stomach, stretching Groucho’s face with her knuckles as she made circles beneath the T-shirt.

  “You know why I craved two egg creams on top of all that dim sum, don’t you?”

  For an instant Cicero thought she taunted his weight. Fat faggot. Then, just as quickly, he landed on the obvious truth. As though she’d flashed on Cicero’s thinking of himself in his mother’s womb at the start of Rose and Douglas’s affair. As though Miriam read his mind and wanted to draw a line through all of it, I’m pregnant you’re homosexual we’re linked in thrilling disobedience to Rose who might put your head in an oven too if she knew the truth. Though Miriam was married to the folksinger and there should be no reason for her pregnancy to seem illegitimate or sinister, Cicero was sure he’d been handed a dangerous secret.

  Miriam’s talent for worldly implication, the same suggestiveness that had caused college men to swoon over a high-school girl: always that she knew more than what she knew, and that what she knew was that everything was secretly and sexily connected. Her smile said to Cicero, It’s all true. How could these secrets all be blurted out on the same day, at the corner of Canal and Broadway? Cicero, the sole resister to the outbreak of superstition in his Sunnyside Intermediate cohort, unmoved by the suggestion that if the Miracle Mets could win the World Series and human heroes walk on the moon in the same year there really must be something to this Dawning of the Age of Aquarius after all, substance to the rumor that nineteen-69 really was a sex position if you could get some older teen to confirm it! Cicero might have to abandon his resistance to signs and wonders after all.

  For, if you don’t grant the power of signs, why an oven? An oven! Attempt your suicide and filicide with an electrical socket, a bottle of pills, a guillotine, anything else. How many times had Cicero heard Rose mutter or whisper Treblinka or Auschwitz as the two of them wandered from some encounter (often before Cicero felt they were safely out of hearing) with one or another survivor, one who’d exchanged some words with Rose in clotted, exasperated Yiddish. Ancient souls, even if some were only thirty or forty years old, who had been no more than a kid in the camp, maybe Cicero’s age. The survivors walked on tilted sidewalks, barely able to negotiate a bodega aisle or park bench, their refugee life no more than a long postlude to defining trauma. Rose’s multivalent tone of grievance somehow also encompassing not only rage against the Germans but admiration for their devilish expertise, and aggravation that she’d now be obliged to boycott their literature and chocolate (the Germans gave us Goethe, Cicero!), not only unrivaled depths of sympathy for the suffering of their victims but a dash of contempt for their simplicity, too, their incompetence at not getting out, as well as a trickle of envy for their specially justified postures of misery—Rose, who knew too much, was too complicit with the twentieth century to be merely its victim. Though she was that, too. The century had, in the words of Cicero’s schoolyard contemporaries, ripped her off. The camp survivors, bearing on their shoulders as they slumped along Sunnyside’s pavement among other things the stigma of Stalin’s pact, needled Rose at her injured core.

  Yet Cicero, seated on a stool at Dave’s on a cool November day in nineteen-sexual-position, Cicero at the corner of Canal and Broadway at the dawning of Aquarius yet with not a single one of his planets dignified, Cicero with his head nearly exploding with the reverberations of what Rose Zimmer’s daughter has instilled in him in one afternoon—if Miriam was pregnant with the folksinger’s baby, soon to be named Sergius, then Cicero’s head was fertilized too, pregnant with implications of what leaving Rose and Sunnyside behind could be like for him—Cicero there on that stool was still Cicero silenced. A chubby and excuse me BLACK hole of implications unbirthed, reverberations stilled within him. Born a machine for debunking bullshit, he was also a machine for producing silence. Today, the leeriness that Rose, for all her efforts, had only reinforced in Cicero had been somewhat turned inside out—inverted! yes!—by Miriam’s drunken, feral embrace of the world. And by her seeing into him. If Cicero wasn’t invisible, he’d have to consider his next option. Yet today, at last, Cicero did or said nothing that would have quieted the chorus recommending he examine career possibilities as a linebacker or tackle. The habit was too strong.

  Forty-three years later, Cicero’s dreadlocks were for fucking with minds, his remote-control mental emanations made into fuzzy tentacles. Think of them as chiaroscuro contrails, making permanently visible his head’s explosion from all the crap it had absorbed up to a certain point. More literally, the dreadlocks announced the following: Cicero had spent more time than you can bear to imagine not cleaning something, not obeying rules every mother teaches every child, to drag! a! comb! through! that! mess! Look ye upon my works and despair. Think of the time it took, how many years Cicero had tolerated being a transparent work in progress. For he’d amassed his head in plain view, just walking down the street weeping hair. Yes, weeping: Cicero felt himself to be some kind of ambulatory grievance. He could have reversed course a hundred times, lopped them off to widespread relief any day he chose. But rather had stuck it out. Already so physically problematic, Cicero had opted to sprout antlers, too. Those obtrusive malformations were meant for getting up in your grille, for taking up airspace. If you’d already suspected you did not want to sit in a movie theater near this black man, here’s your justification. The dreadlocks were his brain voice made visible, a silent bellow. Yet with awesome deniability—for they were also merely a hairstyle. How could you be so paranoid as to take offense at a hairstyle?

  Whatever it had cost Cicero to stay hidden for so long was matched by the expenditure of effort to throw his silence off. Cicero recognized he was an angry person. He’d become, in any event, a person it was impossible to embarrass. Instead he embarrassed others. That put him nearer to Rose than to Miriam. Miriam was a consoler and inspirer. She embraced social ritual even in its capricious fictions—all roads lead nowhere, choose one with heart! Cicero, like Rose in the end, preferred his listeners stunned and bleeding, all masks on the floor, or on fire.

  For Cicero, censure of a blatant racist or homophobe was not only useless but fatally boring. The power residing in such accusations was best wie
lded at random, against the most avowedly sympathetic and correct colleague or student. Cicero routinely dropped a casual “But of course, you realize you’re a racist” into friendly interactions. The less evidence on hand, the more destabilizing the result. This was exactly the sort of desire Sergius Gogan had aroused in him in the ocean. Cicero wanted to make himself the issue, on principle. Do not wish for your nice Jewish family romance without me. It does not exist without me. Blame Rose for that if you want someone to blame. She is the one who put the chocolate in the peanut butter.

  Dignified planets? Cicero hadn’t walked one yet.

  Part II The Who, What, or Where Game

  1 The Sunnyside Pros

  “Is he expecting you?”

  “Darling, he should always be expecting me. He should be so lucky as to have me appear. Tell Mr. Shea I have what he doesn’t know he needs, but needs.” Lenny Angrush transferred the thin cardboard box containing the tape reel, pinning it to his briefcase, in order to withdraw his handkerchief and mop his brow. The lawyer’s offices were plush and modernistic, for Brooklyn at least, but the reception area wasn’t air-conditioned. Possibly some sort of stratagem, to soften up petitioners at the great man’s threshold. That being Bill Shea, the glamorous Brooklyn lawyer appointed to bring baseball to the Flushing Meadows swampland.

  Lenny’d gotten his foot in the door months ago. Shea sought a grassroots constituency, something he could point a skeptical sports press at. He’d let Lenny organize a few community meetings, corral names on a petition, even thrown him a few bucks for an award in Shea’s name, honoring Queens College’s Most Promising Future Big Leaguer, which Lenny had landed on his pet pitcher, Carl Heuman. If in subsequent weeks this door hadn’t widened, neither had it narrowed, Shea canny enough not to alienate a man of the people. A door needn’t widen, so long as a foot remained wedged.

  Nobody but Lenny knew how big Lenny’s foot was.

  Now he flaunted his sacred materials before Shea’s secretary, expectantly. The tape reel’s box would have fit easily within the briefcase, which held only a small ledger and a Lucite case bearing twin Silver Eagle dollars from the West Point Mint, but Lenny brandished it on the outside. Let the underling be curious. Let her ask.

  “I’ll tell him you’re here.”

  “Tell him I’ve got better than an infielder, better even than a pitcher this time.”

  “Have a seat.”

  Lenny had a seat in the waiting area. Edged the reel’s box into view. Doris? Flora? An attractive dish, with whom on several visits to this office he’d gotten nowhere remotely. He admired her as she rose and stepped quickly in her flats down the blind corridor, devised to keep the sanctum mysterious. Lenny regularly swore renewed efforts to get women into bed more often and in the ordinary way, to seduce a teller or secretary or waitress such as Flora, not require revolutionary zeal to meet his own, not measure bed partners against the ideal of Miriam Zimmer. There was for instance another Doris or Flora who worked at Carmody’s Rare Coin; he might be mixing up the names. He should exercise his manly function, keep his nether portions operative. For too long he’d marshaled himself for causes: party, proletarians, Mim. Cousin Rose, recognizing in Lenny a counterpart, counseled him to live as other people do—“Dwell in the world, already!” were her words—yet Lenny knew he ran like a racehorse, in blinders, yoked to purposes, locked in his course.

  Coming in dead last, he’d still have run his race.

  Today, like a racehorse, Lenny was poached in sweat. The dew of his hairy wrist soaked its trace onto the white cardboard of the tape reel’s box. Containing his treasure, the new ball club’s theme song, the Irish folksinger’s dowry payment. Lenin Angrush had it figured this way: Having leveraged his heart’s desire for nothing more than a literal song, the song must be worth something extraordinary. Like Jack’s magic beans, the folk anthem’s worth would be proved by its apparent worthlessness—the meek shall inherit, the proletariat shall dictate, the mighty reserve clause shall fall! In Flushing Meadows a stadium of the workers shall rise!

  To each according to his need; Lenny’s need was boundless, incommensurate. Therefore the magic beans of the folksinger’s baseball song would sprout to produce a glorious mad beanstalk, the consecration of the Continental League’s Flushing Meadows ball club, and the shoring of its fate to that of the factory workers of Queens, the indigenous genius and dignity of the borough’s laborers and tradesmen. Just for instance, Lenny’s first baseman, hiding as a second-generation barrel-humper at Rose’s pickle factory. His pitcher, Heuman, lurking in college, studying Gorky and Tolstoy in the original Russian, and who’d eventually need the team to pay for contact lenses in order to better resemble an athlete. Lenny’s catcher, the ice-wagon man’s son. Men of pavement and cobblestone born. Urban Socialistic baseball would rise to demolish the monopoly teams. The Yankees had Mantle, his jingoistic home runs. The Pros had Carl Heuman’s dialectical curveball.

  Lenny saw headlines in his dreams, the World Series or All-Star Game, Heuman Whiffs Mantle Three Times! A strikeout’s worth of strikeouts!

  Fuck Mantle, and fuck the Yankees.

  Screw Mim for not loving him, for never having him even once.

  Screw being crucially milder than fuck, containing as it did some element of tenderness.

  Lenny Angrush and Lawyer Shea would show them all. Shea and his partner, Branch Rickey, heroic integrator of baseball, even if Robinson had turned out to be a Republican, one of those Negro dupes who liked Ike. With Rickey on their side, and Senator Kefauver’s spotlight on the owners’ monopoly tactics, they’d forge a league and a team and a stadium in the homeland, in the bogs of Flushing. All of this, riding on what Lenny Angrush could deliver: a little five-ten pitcher from Queens College with a curveball Mantle couldn’t possibly handle. The pitcher, and a team name incarnating the spirit of the working classes. Those—pitcher and moniker—and the song on the reel of tape.

  And if Lenny Angrush didn’t particularly care for the song himself, who was he to judge?

  The Irish folksinger’s tune would prove crucial. Miriam, falling in love with the singer, had betrayed Lenny. Yet what were Branch Rickey’s words? Luck is the residue of design. The team’s theme song was the residue of Lenny’s desire. As Marx would have it, the surplus value.

  When Dora or Dolly or Flossy (he could think of a thousand names for her, why settle on one?) reemerged, Lenny leapt to his feet and seized her bare arm in his hand, spilling briefcase, but not reel, to the floor. “Where’s Shea? Is he ready?”

  “Let go, you’re hurting my arm.”

  With satisfaction he detected Canarsie in her speech; duress had brought it out, a grain bleeding up through the veneer of elocution lessons. “This can’t wait.”

  “It had better wait. Half an hour at least. He’s with a client.”

  Watching his thumbprint blush to visibility on the flesh of Shea’s secretary’s arm, Lenny figured to mingle purposes. Fuck Yankees, screw Mim. Carpe diem, grab a little residue for himself for a change. Lenny modulated his tone of imperious harangue. When he chose, he could drop an octave, insinuate, ingratiate, beguile. He did now: “Forget Shea, then. I want you to be the one to listen.”

  “Listen?”

  Had she no eyes? “You must have a reel-to-reel around here, for taking depositions, listening to detectives’ wiretaps—”

  She scowled. “What detectives? You’re thinking of some other kind of lawyer, Mr. Angrush. Bill Shea’s on the board of the Brooklyn Democratic Club. He was at lunch yesterday with Robert Moses—”

  “One of our more distinguished racketeers, since the whole burg’s his racket. Listen, conjure up the tape player, trust me. I’ll bring you on the inside, before even Shea gets to hear it.”

  “Mr. Angrush, what is your ordinary work, when you’re not coming up here and bothering us?”

  “Bothering you is my ordinary work. I am what is conveniently dismissed as a provocateur. I say this with no shame.”

&nbs
p; Donna’s or Floris’s eyes widened, perhaps involuntarily. Then narrowed. Seething with suspicions. Good. Let his rhetoric be like the pink imprint of his thumb on the susceptibility of her gray matter. Doreen or Floreen knew Shea took Lenny’s calls. He could afford to strike her as improbable—he was improbable! Of such bewilderments as he saw in the secretary’s eyes now were Lenin Angrush’s sporadic seductions made. In fact, she moved as though hypnotized, to a supply closet incompletely disguised behind wood paneling. There, with a little grunt, she retrieved from a shelf at eye level a reel-to-reel player, affording an instant’s view of her stocking tops at mid-thigh, flesh bulging snowily above. Bless the new knee-high hemlines. Let only cynics say there was no progress in human affairs.

  She set it on her desk, then stood with arms crossed while Lenny took command, unwinding the player’s power cord and locating a socket, threading his precious spool past the heads, testing it with a whrrrr, then pausing again. He raised his hand. “Preeee-senting the new television and radio theme for the Continental League’s linchpin New York franchise, the baseball organization of, by, and for the workingman, the Sunnyside Proletarians—”

  “That’s got to be the worst name yet,” deadpanned the secretary.

  “They’ll be known as the Pros, of course. What do you mean, worst yet?”

  “You can’t be thinking we don’t have nominations coming over the transom hourly, can you? By telegram and telephone, by smoke signals. There’s the contingent that wants to call them the Gi-Odgers or Dodgants. I suppose yours isn’t actually worse than that. I’ve heard Empire Staters, I’ve heard Long Islanders—”

  Lenny brushed her off. “Amateur hour. You’re speaking of crazies, out howling in the bushes—I’ve been in to see Shea a dozen times, your daybook will testify. We’ve had lunches. Shea told me himself, they’ll have to field a team from scratch when the moment comes. I’ve got the players. What do they know of Queens, after all? I’m the bloodhound, I’m their nose on the ground. Flushing Proletarians could be fine, if Shea insists on tying it to the site. Sunnyside is sounding better to me for rhythmical purposes. Listen.”