Dissident Gardens

by Jonathan Lethem

  After the Schachters hung him out to dry, disavowing to Gilroy’s emissaries any knowledge of Lenny’s scheme, Lenny’d been reduced to making his case in a tribunal of IRA back rooms. You’d never know how every pub on Queens Boulevard was bigger in its dark hidden area, like the human brain or the universe itself, until you’d been collar-yanked into a half dozen or so. Replace all the medallions with legitimate Krugerrands? Impossible now that you bozos have wrecked my access to Schachter Numismatics! (Not that it would have been possible anyway.) Ever heard, dolts, of goose and golden egg? Only maybe he shouldn’t have introduced a fable with the implication of kill. These being less than allegorical-minded human beings. One had bashed him in the left temple with a pint glass, a soreness aggravated by the stovepipe’s brim, even while the purple bruise was veiled in the hat’s shadow.

  “The gold content was the same,” he repeated now to his idiot cousin-in-law. “And furthermore, ‘I cannot tell a lie’ has nothing to do with Abraham Lincoln, that’s Washington and his cherry tree, the father of our country, only I suppose you came over too late for them to reeducate you.” At this moment Lenny became aware with a start that he’d undercounted their group. Despite all possible vigilance, peripheral vision had failed—this damned beard. Talk about your dark matter: It was Rose’s schvartze protégé, from so long ago, now grown mountainous. The black man seemed fearful, despite his size—hunkered against the chaos of the gathering parade, the giant drifting puppets blotting the sky. His costume, if it was a costume, a sky blue dress shirt tucked into belted slacks, over loafers. In his chubby paw drooped a spangled mask on a stick. “The black Fischer,” Lenny said. “Still bestride the earth. Let me guess, you’re dressed as William S. Buckley.”

  “Cicero’s graduated Princeton, Lenny.”

  “So I’m not far off. What are you doing hanging around with these schmucks?”

  “Cicero’s been a very good boy, but we wanted to help him learn to walk on the wild side before he vanishes into grad school.”

  Lenny met the young man’s hard, suspicious gaze. It wasn’t so different from that of the blacks in the subway car, only leavened with all the learning Rose had crammed into that fledgling intelligence. Then leavened, too, with bitterness, at having surely run into countless obstacles neither intelligence nor Rose could help him surmount. A six-foot-two, three-hundred-pound black preppy? A fag who, on Halloween night in Greenwich Village in 1978, needed to be schooled to discover pleasure? The world couldn’t use one of these. Cicero struck Lenny, for all his uncanny characteristics, as nothing more than the typical black man in America: fucked twelve ways from Thursday.

  “By ‘walk on the wild side’ I trust you mean to indicate the coming international workers’ revolution that will wipe away all you see before you,” said Lenny. The joke was rote, almost exhausted. It called to a lost universe only Miriam even recognized, and Miriam only reluctantly. “You still play at the pieces?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Chess.”

  “I’ve let my game lapse.”

  “Good, it’s imperialistic propaganda, with nothing to teach you except to savor stalemate. Now all you need is to shed that outfit in favor of camouflage, sign up with the Sandinistas here. They might look like a joke, but a getup like that could save your life should the proletariat suddenly seize control of the factories.”

  Cicero stared. Good, thought Lenny. Employ the black man’s silence, I’ll employ the Jew’s babble. We’ll each use what we’ve got by birthright. Not much, but it can’t be taken from us.

  “Lay off, Lenny,” said his cousin. She looked like a Ramparts centerfold in her fatigues. “We’ve paid our activist dues, now we’re more in the market for a revel.”

  “So long as you recognize it is a market. In what sense paid dues?”

  “We just came up from a rally for the People’s Firehouse. The victory’s a year old, but we decided to put Koch on notice by hitting the streets with the Halloween parade.”

  He waved her off, Lincoln freeing with a casual gesture slavish notions. “It’s not for me, to mix up organizing with puppetry. In the thirties, you had murals, in the fifties, dulcimers. Now in the seventies, papier-mâché. I like actual Marxism better.” In fact, Lenny held a poor sense of what Miriam’s beloved firehouse squatters had fought for or accomplished, and doubted he wanted to learn. Was there anything more goyish than firemen? Surely there could be no quadrant of the city more anti-Semitic than the Polish enclave of Northside. He’d heard rumors that the Polish-language daily newspaper there still ran pro-Hitler editorials.

  “You should have spent a few nights at the occupation, it was pretty inspiring. A legitimate action, not yakety-yak.”

  Lenny, unable to stop himself, drunk on unchecked presidential authority, leaned in to whisper and to fondle Sandinista tit. “I’ll give you legitimate action.”

  “Off, Lenny.” She shoved him. He staggered back, into a troupe of bearded ballerinas. Tommy remained oblivious to their scuffle—oblivious, or amused, as he always had been at the prospect of Lenny’s rivalrous claims on Miriam. Only Cicero watched, his eyes indicting, his face still too good for his spangled mask. Meanwhile the Irish folksinger left Miriam ungallantly undefended, stood gawping instead at costumed performers, pointing out exemplary freaks to his wide-eyed son in horns, the pacifist water buffalo or whatever he represented. More arrived each minute, a panoply like something from Bosch or Brueghel except featuring vastly more men with breasts. Everywhere, men with breasts, all except Lenny—maybe there was the solution, maybe he should grow some of his own, or stuff a brassiere to self-grope. He was going crazy.

  “I can’t help myself, Mim, the prospect of death has straightened out my priorities.” He felt his dick through his pockets. “I’d like to get something straight between us—you ever heard that one, Mim? Get it? I’d like to get something straight between us.” Maybe if he fell to the sidewalk, clutched himself to her leg, and humped like a dog for fifteen seconds he’d relieve himself of a lifetime’s torment. If he ejaculated in his Lincoln suit could it qualify as a seduction deferred? Certainly it would appear as nothing remarkable in this bacchanal.

  “Prospect of what death?”

  “Have you listened to nothing I’ve told you?”

  “The IRA guys?”

  “I have to go underground. I survived McCarthy in full view, but these jokers have got my number.”

  “I don’t recall McCarthy sparing you any attention.”

  “Moe Fishkin signed up for the army, the easy way out. I went the harder route.” Everything was a pun in his condition. The titanic puppet Lincoln had veered into the airspace above them, as though magnetized by its twin. Lenny felt as large and inhuman, as perilously obvious even in disguise.

  “So with life flashing before your eyes you reaffirm your campaign to rape me in front of my husband?”

  “Don’t use such bourgeois language. We’ll slip away, go climb up a pole at the People’s Firehouse, since it’s presently vacated.”

  “I was going to offer you a little holiday reefer but frankly now I’m terrified.”

  “Please, I could use the narcotic. Especially a cigarette moistened with your lips, as I’ll apparently never be.”

  “Lenny. Don’t act so berserk.”

  “I’ll keep my hands to myself, I swear. Indulge me, Mim, I’m on the brink, I’m berserk with despair. Get me high.”

  Miriam had been preparing the joint without delay anyhow, she’d only been taunting him. Now she curled herself around it, to shield her lighter’s flame, right in front of the kid and the cops and the black preppy and the bearded ballerinas and the guy dressed as a purple flounder, but in a city where old orders were being disassembled by flamboyance and bankruptcy and derangement they stood tonight at the exact lawless center, this zone flooding in every second with a new freakish phenomenon, some Puerto Rican kids in zoot suits and Mohawks now, and a guy in an improbable bulldozer outfit—a bulldozer with eyeliner, bec
ause you shouldn’t forget eyeliner—in a city gone berserk itself, nobody cared one whit about a public joint. The miraculous thing was that if the mooks in Lenny’s pursuit were to penetrate this throng in their outer-borough mufti, their Members Only jackets and time-machine duck’s-ass haircuts, they’d be the freaks. They’d leap out like neon. Mim handed the joint to Cicero first and the Princeton grad took hold of it and gave it a good drag, to his credit. The hippies might loosen him up yet. Cicero scowled concentration, puffer-fished cheeks and eyeballs, then passed it along. Lenny accepted it, and had just time enough to flood his lungs down to his diaphragm, to his furthermost bronchioles, when he understood that his vision of Members Only and duck’s-asses wasn’t premonitory but preconscious: mind’s-eye hadn’t conjured mooks but gleaned them in slantwise vision, through hair’s-width apertures in the blinders of his beard. Lenny fruitlessly attempted to raise his voice and coughed spasmodically instead, the noise drowned in a cacophony of mirth and flattery and a marching band’s blaring rendition of “Macho Man,” and also the adding-machine clatter of blood in his ears. His arms pinned behind him, an elbow’s hinge cinching his windpipe, Lenny was muted, taken to ground, beneath the fluttering shadow of his doppelgänger, which now appeared a mournful soul rising to the heavens. He lost compass of Miriam immediately. Forget the father Sandinista and the kid with horns. The last he saw was Cicero staring with helpless inertia. A bodyguard-size figure but every morsel of will trapped in his skull, behind his eyes. Now the Halloween parade had begun. They dragged the lesser Lincoln in the opposite direction.

  The Last Communist is dreaming. The dream is of a footnote, a new footnote he’ll add to his monograph, 1841 Quarter Eagles in Proof-Only and Circulation: A Dissent. The result he’s sought, by means of five years’ pestering, has come to fruition, the New York Numismatics Society Press consenting to issue a second edition of his book, in order that innumerable misprints be corrected; now, in the course of making repairs, the Last Communist has inserted a golden footnote, one with the power to redeem his whole expedition through planetary time. For it simply isn’t allowable that the Last Communist should perish with this monograph his sole accomplishment, not as it stands in its error-ridden and excessively obedient first printing, yet, with the insertion of the footnote, in which he’s daringly fused Marx and David Akers to his original scholarship into the occult legacy of the gold standard, he’ll die satisfied. Marx once called money “a veil,” yet this is not to suggest, contrary to many readings, that money is only to be looked behind, for the truth it conceals; we must also apply our keen gaze upon the veil, which in a materialist view consists of something in itself. Thus begins the golden footnote, as it unfolds before the dreamer’s eyes. According again to Marx, “the simple commodity form is the germ of the money form”; what then, is the simple commodity? Gold. That substance rooted in earth itself, and yet with its alchemical binding power upon our senses, tantalizingly suggestive of metaphysical properties; in gold we discover how a veil may be also a germ; gold, medium of mud and stone, a turd or fecal form, may exalt, within the realm of phantasmic hoarding, to become booty of empire and wealth of nations. To grasp what crimes attach hereupon, not merely the suppressed saga of the 1841 Quarter Eagle in its circulating rather than proof-only strikes but also Nixon’s abolition of the gold standard, we turn again to Marx, who recalls how, in our disequilibrium between money as a circulating symbol and gold as an aesthetic commodity, we arrive at a crossroads where stands the hoarder, the comical Shylockian miser, whose desire for money “is in its very nature insatiable.” Here the dreamer loses sight of the text, the golden footnote he wishes never to see the end of; something—the pen with which he writes? a Quarter Eagle? a Krugerrand?—sears the palm of his hand, rousing him.

  The Last Communist on the last night of his life, maybe, comes to light again with the 7 train as it screams through its improbable curvature at Queensboro Plaza and onto the elevated track, moon and streetlamps piercing the subway’s car like Saint Sebastian’s arrows. Yet it’s not so much the light that wakes him as the tiny arrow of extinguished joint piercing his palm. He’d apparently clutched it while enmeshed in struggle and now finds it has singed the meat of his fist’s interior. He opens his hand and lets the roach fall to the train’s floor. A film noir clue, prized from a dead man’s fingers. His abductors pay no attention. They have the car to themselves, likely have spooked other occupants from boarding as their odd tableau rolled through stations—two goons and a comatose Emancipator. Stovepipe perched on the seat beside him, miraculously unruined. Soreness of half-crushed esophagus suggests he’d gone half the distance to death already and then returned. He wonders how long his brain was without oxygen.

  Since 1956, maybe.

  Perhaps earlier, from the day he dandled his cousin and his mentality had drained into his lap.

  Chessmen, baseball, Krugerrands, the constellation of nonsense with which he’s decorated his lonely life. All of it surrounding an abiding mystery: his beliefs. These form a little zone of dark, sheltered and abiding within the Last Communist through decades of incomprehension and scorn, as the 7 train shelters ignorant commuters through passages of dark and light.

  The Last is a man abandoned by history. He should have been at the inception, forging a bloody Communism in the teeth of czars. Or lived to participate in its eventual triumph, an H. G. Wells vision impossible to impart to lesser mortals. He should never have been stranded here, in the endless disaster between. Here is only irrelevancy, Miriam’s Yippie boycotts and day-care marches; the folksinger’s death-penalty vigil; hairsplitting Trotsky dreamers and Frantz Fanon Third World fetishists, French eggheads who’d reconfigured Marxism as mumbo jumbo, a new form of Kabbalah. Or civil rights, which gave way to Black Power, and then see your reward: the hatred of a kid like Cicero. Ha! You might as well, just to pick a random example, try protesting apartheid by retailing ersatz Krugerrands to the Irish Republican Army.

  There is no place anymore for the Last and yet if he is honest with himself he knows he is not the Last, he is only carrying a torch for the Last, a torch she hardly needs as she’s been out there blazing all the time, waiting for the world to come to her door. She who vanished into the neighborhood: cops, library, pizza parlor, a Christmas card from the borough president pinned on the fridge for her cover story. Sunnysideism is Late-Twentieth-Century Communism.

  Lenny should have quit when he got in deep with pickles, should have learned to relish shirts saturated in brine. He was closer then than he knew.

  The 7 train idles at the Lowery Street station. Just as the doors begin to close he leaps, not forgetting to grab his stovepipe, and is through, and free.

  Rose opened the door and let him in without a word: Perhaps it is the case that a visit from the man in the stovepipe hat is, by this time, her whole lifetime overdue. Of course, come in, what took you so long? Lincoln, Rose’s Elijah, and why be passed over forever? Just like her, to think that he’d select her door actually to come through. “Four score and seven years ago today,” Lenny said aloud, and his initial jest was overtaken by the sincerity the words and occasion seemed to demand of him, by the wish not to disappoint. But he stopped. If only he knew the whole speech. Rose stared flatly, her eyes acute and implicitly demanding, awaiting whatever. Her stoical gaze not so different from Cicero’s. Yet like the rest of the world Cicero had abandoned Rose, vanished to Princeton and beyond, into Miriam’s Halloween parade. Lenny wondered how long it had been since Rose had even heard from the ungrateful protégé.

  The whole century had vacated Sunnyside Gardens, quit darkening her door. Yet had it learned anything in the process?

  Lenny’s lips couldn’t from within the Lincoln beard say hide me or hold me though he desired both. He couldn’t think of the words of either Gettysburg or Proclamation and couldn’t find his own voice. No assertion seemed equal to the woman before him, from whom his every disappointment had sprung, she alone familiar with the unspeakable Red certaint
y in his soul because she herself had instilled it, even if barely meaning to. Goonish cousin, he’d been at her table, one summer evening in 1948, and heard something he believed, like others believed in God or country. His parents fed him forkfuls of kugel and Rose fattened his brain with revolution.

  Rose in her nightgown stepped back across her kitchen linoleum and stared at the Lincoln silhouette against the moonlit green of the block’s courtyard gardens, and he wearing the costume suddenly wondered if she even knew who it was inside, whether she’d made him from his voice or his thumbs, or was fooled. He’d seen no trick-or-treaters while stumbling in through the Gardens. No jack-o’-lantern at her front step. Lenny closed the door behind him. His tongue might be frozen but he still possessed the righteousness inside his Lincoln pants. Or he possessed it again, despite his being manhandled by the mooks and extradited onto the 7 train. This was like the hangover boner Lenny could rely on, at waking after a night of drinking, a force affirming life-in-the-old-boy-yet against evidence to the contrary. Or perhaps like the notorious erection discovered when they cut down and examined the body of a hanged man. Whichever, he’d use it to continue his statement, to make his protest, his filibuster against death. In fact, it encoded its own statement, was a homing device that knew more than he did, one pointing back through daughter to mother, from Manhattan to the old countries of Queens and Poland. A prewar boner, embodying knowledge of a time when neither Europe nor Communism nor the woman before him had been ruined territories.