Dissident Gardens

by Jonathan Lethem

  The first afternoon after he’d offered the story into the silence they smothered him in congratulations. Reading from a book might not be the standard mode of inspired messaging, sure, but for an eight-year-old to give testimony at meeting at all, and more, one in his distinct situation: wow! Murphy took him aside, shook his hand, as Sergius probably could have expected, but also teachers he barely knew, and the headmaster, and a couple of the older girls. It made Sergius a bit of a star, a sacred example of what a place like Pendle Acre was all about.

  So the Sunday following, he read it again.

  This time afterward not so many remarked, and not with such enthusiasm. Murphy just patted him on the back and suggested they work on some chord fingerings. But why demand congratulation? Sergius was proving himself no longer a sport or novelty but a routine dweller in the Light. Pedro’s tale seemed fully as profound the second time aloud as it had each of the dozens of times Sergius read it silently to himself. In fact, the meaning kept expanding. Death is no big deal! Let it sink in for all as it had for him.

  When Sergius narrated it the third Sunday in a row, the headmaster gathered him up for a little stroll and some Friendly counsel about Moderation in All Things.

  Later that afternoon Sergius visited Murphy’s rooms to return the Mexican book.

  “It’s yours to keep, Sergius.”

  “I don’t want it anymore.”

  “You sure?”

  Sergius threw the book against Murphy’s couch. It suddenly disgusted him. Not one kid had mocked him for speaking in meeting, as he knew they mocked one another each time one of them conformed to that mild expectation. Not one single kid had pointed out to Sergius how he was unable to speak to his parents through a tube in the earth as Pedro spoke with his brother. No one had censured him, not even the headmaster, and that was how Sergius could be certain he was pitied everywhere he walked. He was the Mexican book’s dupe, maybe Murphy’s as well.

  “I want the ones who killed them to be dead, too.”

  “I understand,” stalled Murphy.

  “I want to kill them.”

  Sergius spoke from behind a hot mask of tears, but just a mask: He only had to accept he wore it because he tasted snot. He felt that if he had a gun he’d fire it at Murphy, not least for instilling him with Quaker shame at his own violence. That the book had bounded harmlessly into the cushions, that the men who’d murdered Tommy and Miriam were cloaked in inconceivable remoteness, that his killer’s soul was housed in the feeble container of an eight-year-old, none of these tempered his fury. They concentrated it.

  Murphy, seeing what was before him, likely felt he had a test to pass.

  “The Lamb’s War,” said Murphy.

  “What’s that?”

  “Here, sit down, let me read you something.” Murphy, as ever lightning-quick with the palliatives, had a plate of graham crackers and a glass of milk set up before Sergius knew it—could he have had them waiting? Murphy knew his place in the book he pulled from the shelf, too, as if he’d been preparing this reading for Sergius, figuring he’d need it. And the half basement’s shades were already drawn, so none of Murphy’s other pet students would be crouching down and rapping at his low windows.

  “ ‘God hath lost the creature out of his call and service, and the creature now uses the creation against the creator. Now, against this evil seed doth the lamb make war, to take vengeance of his enemies.’ That’s you, Sergius. The Lamb’s War—that’s what you’re fighting.”

  “Is it … George Fox?” Sergius hadn’t heard Murphy use the word evil before. Or vengeance.

  “Nope. This is another early Friend, a guy I haven’t mentioned before, James Nayler. Nayler started as a soldier, a feisty guy, and when he met Fox and started running around England speaking of the Light, they imprisoned him and put a hot poker through his tongue. But listen: ‘As the lamb wars not against men’s persons, so his weapons are not carnal, nor hurtful to any of the creation; for the lamb comes not to destroy men’s lives … his armor is the Light, his shield faith and patience … thus he goes out in judgment and righteousness, to make war with his enemies, not with whips and prisons, tortures and torments on the bodies of creatures, but with the word of truth, to pass judgment upon the head of the serpent, and covers his own with his love …’ ”

  As Murphy droned on and Sergius listened, as Sergius’s mask evaporated, caking and crackling on his cheeks and on his sleeve where he’d sluiced it across his upper lip—and Murphy’d known not to demolish Sergius’s pride with the offer of a tissue—as Sergius salved his aching gut with a mud of molar-crushed grahams and milk, he came slowly to understand that Murphy was reading as much to himself as to his ward. It was obvious in Murphy’s readiness with the passages, the way he now could be seen skipping from one page to the next, stringing Nayler’s words to make his case, skipping over who-knew-what and Sergius didn’t care to find out. It didn’t matter, for what Sergius saw and understood was that the teacher hadn’t readied the book for his student so much as uncovered his own Lamb’s War to Sergius’s view. Murphy hadn’t fought his and won, either—he fought it still, fought it every day, that was the message. Murphy’s voice was hypnotic if you shut your eyes, and if you didn’t, and Sergius didn’t, you were hypnotized by the way his elegant tenor formed itself out from below that twisted scar no thickness of beard could conceal. The harelip was evidence enough of the teacher’s Lamb’s War, it was his serpent-scar, or perhaps a kind of serpent itself, embedded in his flesh. Here was where you encountered the Light: It struck anywhere, anytime. At that instant he and Murphy there in the basement comprised a meeting of two.

  Then Murphy put Nayler’s book on the shelf, didn’t fool around with any offers to loan it out, and Sergius knew that it would be a long time before he spoke again in meeting and that whenever he finally did it wouldn’t be a passage read aloud from a book but a true message, like Nayler’s, a dire stark communiqué from some remote front of the Lamb’s War.

  Then Murphy said, “Let’s play some guitar.”

  At the start of June Pendle Acre thinned out, summer session consisting of just a scattering of kids. Mostly these were the high-school hippies who’d started the vegetable farm and didn’t want to see it die, so signed up for a French or German intensive with not much intention of acquiring a language, nor of even attending the summer classes. More than half the resident teachers hightailed it too, leaving a skeleton crew—though not Murphy. It was three months from the date of his parents’ deaths, and a certain question had become unavoidable to the kid who’d been unaware even of any effort to avoid it.

  “Am I going back to New York City?”

  “Not unless you want to.” Murphy talked over chords, reminiscent of something—a Bob Dylan song?—if Sergius could pin it down. “To visit, I mean.”

  “No, I mean, am I staying in school here next year?”

  “You sure are.”

  “How—”

  “New York Yearly Meeting and Fifteenth Street have got you on a full scholarship, not that Pendle Acre would ever think twice about letting you stay if they hadn’t, Sergius. You don’t have to worry about a thing.”

  It wasn’t much like Murphy to interrupt. Nor to bear upon Sergius with little interrogatory feints, as he did now, the chords continuing all the while. “So do you want to visit New York City?”

  “I don’t know—maybe.”

  “If you did, who’d you want to visit?”

  Sergius shrugged, sensing no right reply. On the tiny menu of names available, he couldn’t think which he ought to mention first.

  “You remember Stella Kim?”

  “Sure.” That had been one of the names.

  “Well, listen, there’s something I wanted to tell you. Stella wants to see you, and next week we’re going to send you up to Philadelphia to see her.”

  “Why not in New York City?”

  “Maybe later, but there’s something we need you to do in Philadelphia, and Stella’s goin
g to be there and help you with it. We need you to talk to a judge, just for a few minutes, and that’ll help make it simpler for you to stay here with us, okay? You only have to do it once.”

  Murphy’s we and us worked like a clamp on Sergius’s hundred questions. Sergius managed to voice one. “Are you coming?”

  “I’d like to, Sergius, I really would. The headmaster’s going to take you up there, and I’ll be waiting here for you when you’re done.”

  “Okay.”

  “All you have to do is say you want to come back here.”

  “Okay.”

  “I want you to believe me on this one thing, Sergius, and that’s that I’m not going anywhere, all right?”

  “Okay.” It would take Sergius years to sort it out, that what was so reassuring about Harris Murphy was also what was sort of horrible: You too-completely believed him when he said he presented no risk of budging from the postage-stamp universe of Pendle Acre.

  In the headmaster’s car, on the road to Philadelphia, Sergius ate from a bag of doughnut holes and listened to an eight-track tape of Fiddler on the Roof. It just went on and on.

  Before going into the hearing room Sergius was reunited with Stella Kim in an adjacent office. The headmaster stood to one side as Sergius and his mother’s best friend clutched each other for a long while. Sergius found himself drenched in phantasms of babysitting nights, Stella Kim’s scent deep-mingling miso paste, pot, and patchouli. The smell could only carry him back a certain distance; though Stella Kim appeared here in a turquoise pantsuit Sergius didn’t think was native to her at all, he couldn’t now think of how she’d more typically be dressed. He damped a few confused tears against the turquoise knit. Stella Kim seemed to know to hold him just long enough and then they three went in soberly to sit with the judge. The courtroom was more like a large, dull office than that of Sergius’s imaginings, and the judge, equally inadequate, wore no robes and clapped no gavel. He wore a suit, his head was bald, his eyebrows gray and disordered, and he sat not above them, on some podium or tower, but shuffling through a folder of papers at a conference table.

  Stella and the headmaster pulled out chairs and seated themselves, indicating Sergius should sit between them. He sat. At the table, too, waited another stranger, who didn’t stand and wasn’t introduced and, like Stella and the headmaster, barely spoke—the judge didn’t wish them to. The judge made it clear at the outset that the adults present were to remain mute on the sidelines in a meeting between himself and the child in question, then went ahead to say any number of things plainly meant for their ears. “I’ve been consternated, hurm, by a terrific number of irregularities in this proceeding, not least the simple matter of delays in bringing relevant materials and testimonies to the court’s attention, on one side. Yet again, this entire, ah, circumstance is characterized by a puzzling delay at the outset, on the part of the complainant.” The words were, to Sergius, a baffling fudge. Yet their tone suggested he was indeed in the long-feared presence of monolithic authority, that against which an elemental orientation had pitted him for life. He was certain, that’s to say, that the judge, unrobed and unimpressive though he might be, was likely to now sentence Stella Kim, the headmaster, and himself to the electric chair. They would thereafter be remanded to death row, inspiring a vigil outside the prison’s walls, in which they would be referred to as the Philadelphia Three. “As well, there’s the whole peculiar matter of jurisdiction, yet, hurm, seeing as how the 1973 doctrine for the best interest of the child applies here as fully as in New York, and since the complaint was recorded by the Philadelphia police, and in full consultation with the corresponding offices in New York, hurm, it’s been deemed that present offices are sufficient to render judgment—” All this, preface to a meeting with the child in question that would effectively boil down to a single question.

  “Will you confirm for me that you’re Sergius Valentine Gogan?”

  “Sergius?” Stella prompted, drawing a glare from the judge.

  “Uh, yes.” Sergius hadn’t heard his middle name in a while. Stranger in a Strange Land, he remembered.

  “Do you understand that your parents are, hurm, no longer alive?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll be arriving at a decision, Mr. Gogan, and I’m not asking for you to make it for me, but your opinion has bearing in the matter, as according to the aforementioned 1973 doctrine. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.” No.

  “Boy, would you like to live with your grandmother Rose Zimmer in New York City, or do you prefer to continue to remain under stewardship of the Pendle Acre School?”

  By the end of that summer Sergius’s orbit had expanded from West House, and from Murphy’s table at the dining hall. The narrowed population of vegetable-garden hippies disguised as language intensives drew him into their precincts—the hovel-like, tie-dye-curtained lounge at East House, the rows of sun-blazed, silk-stinky corn rows, the fire circle out behind the storage sheds. Seemingly a little kid could be elevated to peer status in extreme circumstances like these, the preponderance of empty dorms bonding those who remained as survivors, as on a desert island. Despite three decent meals and Pendle Acre’s reasonably plush facilities, the prevailing vibe was that of foxhole-ish endurance, of placement at front lines against an unknown enemy. Cigarettes and hormones might be the common denominators, or the vanishing point where opposites merged. There at the fire circle in particular, feeding brush-cleared tinder and scrap lumber into the crackling flames, then standing hypnotized on the cushion of pine needles and crushed butts, teenagerdom nightly cherished its world’s-end unity. The school’s rolls weirdly amalgamized privileged kids, those who’d been earmarked for private boarding school from the day they entered Country Day kindergartens, and “troubled” inner-city white kids whose parents had taken advice, from meeting elders like those at Fifteenth Street, to remand their children to the Quakerish safe haven. Weirder still, these constituents amalgamized easily, the chips on their shoulders more or less indistinguishable out there in the woods.

  The teenagers had another destination, a two-mile walk to the “town” of East Exeter, which consisted of a pizza joint with a jukebox, a pair of gas stations for purchase of cigarettes, and a small videogame arcade, a foray that was off-limits to Sergius. Fine, he felt no urge to leave Pendle Acre. The fire circle was far enough, and surprisingly far. By firelight the sheds formed a wall of shadow to complete a boundary marked by the dense impassible woods. So the fire circle modeled a tiny realm in which childhood had been left behind while the adult universe was nonetheless securely resisted, a million miles away. One night a stoner kid turned his palm to reveal to Sergius a half-smoked, sparking joint. “Hey, Serge, you’re not Murphy’s informant, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Leave him alone,” said someone else.

  “Hey, man, I just had to check.”

  In case he needed to be shown how unready he’d feel for any Alphabet City or Sunnyside ghosts, the music teacher staged an abrupt and horrendous demonstration. One day near the end of that summer Murphy stuffed a few of Sergius’s clean T-shirts and socks into a knapsack and the two of them got on a train. Sergius fell asleep, with a result that it felt scarcely more than fifteen or twenty minutes had passed before he found himself in drowsy stupefaction expunged into Penn Station. Pulling Sergius’s hand, Murphy threaded the commuter chaos to find the subway turnstiles, and beyond, the downtown platform. Then, before Sergius could give form to his objections, they ascended the stoop at Seventh Street.

  Stepping inside, out of the August evening’s brightness, Sergius first navigated blind, plummeting through the hard-won, tissue-thin illusion of his present life into a sensory past he wanted no part of. Stella Kim had gathered him up again, bearing all her scents—all of Miriam’s scents. Somewhere a musical instrument tooted scales—a flute, if it wasn’t his imagination. Sergius squirmed loose, to find something more solid, the foot of the stair, the banister he’d learned once to g
iddily slide down: an intoxicant memory of the interrupted life now unwillingly restored. Yet this too was like mercury under his fingertips, as if the cracked-varnish curves and loose-jointed creak of the newel post to which he clung formed another impoverished effigy of his mother.

  Adjusted to the dimness, tears now murked his sight. Yet he saw well enough to notice Murphy kissing Stella Kim, scraping his beard against her face. They all endured this together for a long instant and then Stella Kim walked Sergius around the home that wasn’t his anymore. A new housemate occupied the second-floor room that had been Miriam and Tommy’s, a willowy blonde, seated in the room’s center, practicing the flute. His parents’ large bed was gone, replaced by her futon, slumped into the form of a couch beneath the windows. On the third floor, Stella’s room, unchanged, and what had been Sergius’s. This was redecorated; no sign of the abandoned stamp collection or those books he’d failed to salvage, their titles now unrecoverable. Others had come and gone from the room, which now served as the commune’s spare flop. Sergius would sleep there tonight. It wasn’t clear to him where Murphy would sleep—the knapsack had been plopped in the downstairs hall. Sergius tried not to understand. The commune was nothing but pitfalls and trapdoors, zones to avoid, like his parents’ LPs, still merged with the commune’s general collection, which he’d glimpsed intact where it lined the parlor wall. What was changed and unchanged here: equally disastrous.

  He asked if he could go outside. In blazing red evening the street games had been under way for hours and wouldn’t stop for the dark. The high darkening rooftops scalded him with their total indifference to his presence. Sergius staggered along until he stood on the pavement at the lip of a vacant lot, there to be met by a kid he’d known before, not unfriendly if not a friend, but after the kid said “Your momma died, your pops, too” and Sergius nodded, language abandoned them utterly. They couldn’t even scare up names with which to identify themselves, let alone the terms with which to affix their relation, once the kid pronounced that which had severed the universe and left them standing on opposite ends of it. Someone called the kid back to the game as if Sergius were invisible, which likely he was, or wished to be. A shirtless man sat playing bongos in the backseat of a parked convertible. The gum on the pavement was scorched into blisters, still raw despite the sun’s vacating the skyline. Without having spoken Sergius returned inside.