Dissident Gardens

by Jonathan Lethem

  “This park is my home,” Toby said, extinguishing the roach with his fingertips. “I do fifty miles a day.” A rare boast. Sergius knew to take it seriously.

  “Have you won any races?”

  “The competition’s with yourself.”

  Sergius let this sink in. Nothing to kill or die for.

  “You still hanging around with Murphy?” Toby asked. “That whole Lamb’s War bit?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  “I dunno.” Squinting off into some middle distance, Toby appeared to measure how much disenchantment he could want to mete out, then conclude he had little choice. “You figure out who the Lamb is?”

  “Huh?”

  “Quaker shit seems pretty cool, I mean, I was pretty into it myself for a while, but it’s really all about Christ.”

  “There are Quakers who don’t believe in Christ,” said Sergius. Though certain of this fact, he didn’t sound certain to himself.

  “Sure, maybe a few. I looked into it, though. You know most Quakers don’t even do silence, right? It’s called a programmed meeting, they’ve got ministers shoving the Light down your throat, like anywhere else. I’m not too into being programmed, myself. My parents tried that Werner Erhard shit on me, when I first started getting into fights. The point is, George Fox, that dude was all about Christ.”

  Sergius felt the perch shrinking or sinking beneath him. Strawberry Fields might in fact be more bowl-shaped, their granite outcropping lodged at the bottom, looking up. Meantime, Toby volunteered further results of his researches. “Thing is, Christ’s the redeemer, right? He’s put on earth to forgive us for our sins, because we’re, you know, born stained.”

  Maybe you’d shrunken the world around yourself, narrowed it to what you could grasp or survive.

  Shrunk to fit the soul in question.

  “So I figure when some scar-face hippie starts pushing Christ, he’s really saying he thinks I’m evil. I mean, could you look at a little crying baby and think he was born stained? Don’t you think that shit’s fucked up?”

  “I guess I’m more just into the nonviolence thing,” said Sergius. And nothing to get hung about.

  “Yeah, that’s cool. You hungry? I know this place on Amsterdam Avenue where you push your money through a bulletproof window, they give you, like, ten pounds of chicken fried rice for three bucks—it’s crazy.”

  The next morning he tumbled downstairs, unshowered and in a cottonmouth fog, to shove his knapsack into the seat of Stella Kim’s puttering Fiat, there where she waited double-parked, for the ride out to Queens.

  “Late night?”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  She chuckled. “Don’t worry, Rose won’t know the difference.”

  They snaked along a Central Park cut-through with the taxis, then vaulted the Triboro into that impossible homeland of steaming stacks and tombstones. Sergius waiting to recognize anything, not daring to guess what trigger lay in his outer-borough DNA, but before they’d descended from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway Stella pointed out the nursing home. The site bore no relationship to anyone’s homeland, situated in no neighborhood or even residential zone, instead nestled hideously in an elbow of the traffic’s flow, eight-story tower garbed in a few inadequate hedges, park benches shadowed by the barren overpass. The whole scene was the opposite of evocative of anything, a rebuke to his vanity’s presumption that Queens had to do with him personally. Maybe only numbness waited behind his dread of this expedition, making his all-night anesthetic session with Toby redundant. His grandmother in enforced exile, just another chance for Sergius not even to know what he’d missed behind the door labeled Sunnyside.

  The smell inside was cruel, cherry Jell-O and urine under a baseline of floral disinfectant. Floor tiles everywhere curled onto the walls, chest-high, as if the whole building were a barely disguised tub for convenient sluicing.

  “If you’re hungry you can grab a tray,” said Stella Kim. “They don’t mind.”

  “No thanks.”

  She walked him to the room’s half-open door, then stood aside. “Last time she thought I was Miriam. I doubt that’s going to help you to, you know, get the visit you need.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll see what the nurses are saying. If you don’t see me, I’m getting a smoke outside.”

  He applied to Berklee College of Music, the claim of a single-minded devotion to the instrument his way of letting the Quaker expectation down easy. The elders of Fifteenth Street paid his tuition anyway.

  In Boston, two different girlfriends left him because they didn’t believe a boy who’d had parents until he was eight years old couldn’t remember his parents’ faces or voices or touch—at least this was why he felt they’d each left. As if their genial, pale-eyelashed guitarist had revealed some morbid vanity, as if he’d conjured the absence of Tommy and Miriam as a kind of warning, of an emotional stubbornness too unpromising to glimpse in a college boyfriend.

  After Berklee he did private tutoring for a while, in Cambridge and Bunker Hill, paying off his loan debt in cash that he walked up to the teller’s window to deliver. Some grain of him, though, chafed at entering the homes of the wealthy. He was reasonably sure this was a throb of Miriam’s teaching, her message stirring in his bloodstream, like the guilt he felt whenever placing a bunch of grapes in a shopping cart or ordering the wedge of iceberg.

  Skills exportable, at one point he got as far as Amsterdam, then Prague. There, among other Americans, he found himself taking the unwinnable side of ongoing political arguments, entrenched in perverse resistance to an expatriate culture dedicated to trying to outrun the sell-by date of hippieism. As for Europeans, they persistently asked if he was Jewish, and he had no answer. He left Europe.

  Six months away, he’d floated free of his contacts, apart from the tutorial service, which set him up in Newport Beach this time. He drew the line at sleeping with his students’ moms except for once. He made friends with a black guy who worked on a fishing boat, which answered no question about what Sergius was doing in this particular place.

  He wasn’t by this time in touch with Murphy. He hadn’t attended any meeting for worship since he couldn’t remember when.

  Yet when Pendle Acre called and said Murphy was gone—the seeker and penitent having presumably finally climbed up some version of his own asshole—and would Sergius want to seriously consider interviewing for the job, he went. A mentor at Berklee had spoken with him once about how the transmission of the gift of music from one person to another didn’t necessarily involve taking the stage; this had struck him as pathetic at the time, and yet here he was, career teacher at twenty-six. Even Murphy, paragon of modesty, had ascended a few risers, been the performer once or twice before retiring to the risk-aversion of his discipline, to his student-acolytes’ renewable innocence.

  The place was superbly unchanged. Since Sergius suspected he was, too, any alteration would have bothered him deeply.

  They didn’t give him Murphy’s basement suite at West House—those rooms were now occupied by a female math teacher Sergius eventually slept with a couple of times, once on the same couch on which he’d sat and learned of Tommy and Miriam’s murder, also lost a thousand hours of his life to fingerpicking instruction, and one time shat his pants. Yet even before he’d made the math teacher and visited her suite, Sergius felt he’d come home to the inevitable. He wondered if anyone could have warned him that the day he followed Murphy into the West House basement suite a part of him would never exit again. He doubted it.

  The first time he intruded on the fire circle and silenced their talk, Sergius saw himself in their eyes—that redheaded loser actually went here!—and knew they were as right as they needed to be.

  For what it was worth, Sergius now concluded he despised Murphy. Fuck Murphy, for knowing Miriam and Tommy better than he had. Fuck him for once bedding Stella Kim but not managing to hold her interest. Also fuck him for his fingerpicking, which Sergius had been forced by his advanced
training to understand was superior not only to Tommy’s, heard on records, but to Sergius’s own. Fuck him for his Quaker guilt-tripping, so plausibly deniable, and yet which by its monotonous abiding-with-the-Light had sunk so deep in Sergius he could barely help but broadcast the same variety himself. Fuck Murphy for luring Sergius into a Lamb’s War without mentioning the Lamb was Christ, and fuck him, yes, for his unhidable, unfixable harelip, which from the first had been there to teach Sergius to reprove himself for not being able to discount ugliness. Fuck him for being, in the end, all Sergius had, and not enough.

  What was despising Murphy worth? Nothing.

  Murphy had only been helpless to be anything but himself. Could only teach what he taught, and Sergius hadn’t managed to learn it. For what had been Murphy’s first lesson, before all the others, if only Sergius had been paying attention? That pacifism and music had flown to Nicaragua and been destroyed. And what had Murphy had to offer him thereafter? Pacifism and music.

  For the lamb who lies down with the beasts is devoured.

  The bull guided into the arena, refusing to fight, is slaughtered notwithstanding.

  The Time Pilot who never fires a shot remains stuck at level one, until his enemies thicken to blot out the very air he requires to breathe.

  Sergius had that day entered the room to confront the debris of Rose Angrush Zimmer upright in a chair, clad in a bright-patterned, wide-lapelled polyester shirt and black slacks, costume draped like a puppet’s on skeletal limbs. The black of her eyes shone out, only sure live thing in the pale limp flesh of her cheeks. Rose’s hair, still black-streaked, was being brushed into an upswept shock by the same orderly who’d presumably dressed her and helped her to the chair—for she was undoubtedly propped there, made ready for her visitor. And now the orderly announced him. “Look, Miss Rose, your grandson’s come to see you.”

  “Hi, Rose. It’s Sergius!”

  A sound came from her then, a long snorting sigh from deep in her chest, a flicker of dire merriment trapped in there somewhere.

  “I’ll let you two be,” said the orderly. At that he and Rose were alone.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t visited you.”

  “Who?” she demanded.

  “Sergius. Your—Miriam’s son.”

  “Who?”

  The eyes drilled him, her lower lip jutting in a sarcastic smile, no matter that sarcasm might seem beyond her powers. Maybe it was her last power.

  Perhaps it would have been useful to have Stella Kim here, if only to be mistaken for Miriam. By the chain of resemblances Rose might have fixed herself to the moment’s significance. Sergius and Rose, two blood relatives, each other’s last. No, he realized. I’ve got useless Gogan uncles. And Rose has sisters in Florida, cousins in Tel Aviv. My great-aunts, my cousins, if I knew them. Yet Stella Kim had said they rarely contacted Rose now. Seeing her, who could blame them? What was he doing here?

  “I went to school in Pennsylvania, so I couldn’t—after they died—”

  “Who?”

  “Look at my face,” he suggested. “You used to say I looked like Albert. Your husband.” Desperate to be recognized, he’d risk cruelty.

  “Who?”

  The bright eyes and sardonic grimace beamed a transmission from the unsalvageable world. The rest, faded and faked, upright like a dummy, her owlish hooting, all might be the price of his amnesiac crimes. The dead thronged in the room between them, unable to supply their names.

  Then, in a surprise that jolted the essence of vomit into Sergius’s mouth, Rose produced a complete utterance, voice as lucid and commanding as that which had quaked him at four or five years old.

  “Have you any idea how long it’s been since I had a proper bowel movement?”

  “No,” he finally managed.

  She narrowed her eyes and hissed the punch line. “Nothing but rags.” The fullness of Rose’s contempt was levied at this inadequate product of the formerly awesome engines of her intent. “I strain, for hours. Rags like you’d blow from your nose, Cicero.”

  The name meant nothing to him. “I’m Sergius, Rose. Your grandson.”

  “Who?”

  They circled this way, as toward a drain. He said his parents’ names to Rose, mentioned Uncle Lenny, spoke of Sunnyside, in each case eliciting a horrible guffaw. For that was what he’d decided the grunting sighs low in her chest were attempting to be—laughter. The ghost of a cackling relish at having outwitted her visitor. She’d spoken the unfamiliar name to him twice. Cicero? Was the philosopher her imaginary friend? There were no books in the room. The depths in Rose’s gaze were opaque. Or no depths but phantom of depths. Forget not, lest ye be forgotten. His violent need was to salvage a token from her room, souvenir of a tour of the ruins. Maybe she’d have her old Lincoln cameos around, the medallions with which she’d decorated her shrine. Lenny’s penny books had kept Rose’s fetish vivid for Sergius, alive in his uncle’s mockery: “Your bubbie prefers King Abraham, with a crown of thorns. The cent, see, this is the People’s Lincoln.”

  Sergius rifled her bedside. He found only soiled yellow file cards, remnants of some old address system, each entry typed on a cursive typewriter and hand-annotated, Rose’s degeneration illuminated in her longhand’s descent. The annotations fixed identity, cast judgment, or reported fate: “second cousin,” “library trustee,” “never calls,” “divorce,” “hate,” “dead.” At the bottom of this rubbishy drawer, hidden beneath a few flowery drugstore get-well cards, Sergius’s fingers met something soft as flesh. A tattered calfskin folder. It revealed a foxed U.S. Office of Price Administration war ration book (Any attempt to violate the rules is an effort to deny someone his share and will create hardship and discontent. Such action, like treason, helps the enemy …), hand-inked lines reading, “Zimmer, Miriam Theresa” and “Age 5 months.”

  Theresa? His mother had a middle name?

  Why Theresa?

  How could it all be so arbitrary?

  Sergius fled.

  “How’d it go, kid?” He had no idea how long he’d been gone, except Stella Kim ground out her second cigarette, and with her heel now rolled the two butts beneath the park bench where she waited.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Was she able to talk?”

  He thought of bowel movements. “No.”

  “Did she know who you were?”

  “I think she called me Cicero.”

  Stella Kim laughed sharply. Everyone laughed. Likely the dead laughed, too. “I guess that makes sense,” she said.

  “Why does that make sense? Who’s Cicero?”

  She explained.

  2 Ferns of Estero Real

  What, in this high boot-trampled mountain clearing, at nightfall on her life’s horizon, was Miriam Zimmer Gogan’s to defend? Only to be the last to know herself and what had happened. To maintain the boundaries and integrity of the self to her private finish line. To mark some conclusive distance from Fred the Californian, now up to who-knew-what in his tent, here in this forest cul-de-sac, under the mountain’s darkening torrent of odors and shrieks, the dark’s onset. Miriam had felt night pronounce its terrors three times now since their jeep ride up out of León, into the incongruous rain forest of pine and banana riven with sudden pitches of swamp and secret bushwacked cornfields. She hadn’t glimpsed soap or running water since León: How could he even want her? But his stink was worse. Her stink would be swallowed in his. To direct her own scene, then, under the proscenium of leaf canopy and contrails. To recollect her purposes and powers as a leader of men and be untenanted by whatever mayhem Fred the Californian wished to visit upon her. To deny the pig Fascist his delight. To perhaps cadge one more American cigarette.

  In point of fact Miriam had purchased, with wonder as if excavating from a junk shop some holy relic, a rainbow-bull’s-eyed pack of Vantages in León before the benighted escapade into the mountains, before she and Tommy had fallen in with the maybe-CIA botanist. The Guardias had stolen the pack from her at the
first checkpoint, and then she’d bummed one back, when on returning to the jeep after their interrogation she’d seen three young soldiers clustering around the treasure. One futzing open the cellophane, the others leaning to snag one and to share a match. Was Miriam about to happen upon a Dave’s egg cream or a Jade Palace moo shu pork on this mountain? Not too likely. A Vantage would have to do. To have been, therefore and to her very last, that one who’d after interrogation brazenly divert back to bum a cancer stick from men so young that behind their fatigues and ammunition belts they could as well be the Puerto Rican contingent in the lunchroom at High School 560, she flouncing over to demonstrate to Lorna Himmelfarb how she was unafraid and that all men are brothers. New York policemen and firemen appeared this way to her now, ballplayers too, the baby Mets, John Stearns and Lee Mazzilli.

  She’d spent her life approaching and confounding groups of men, plenty in uniform, like the phalanx on the steps of the Capitol or the screws in the D.C. jail; now Guardia and Sandinista alike struck her as boys. The exceptions? The exceptions were the problem. The botanist, yes, but worse the two men into whose hands the botanist had by idiocy or villainy delivered them. El Destruido and Fred the Californian. The guerrilla chief El Destruido a gruesome bandy warrior, his whole form like that of a creature enslaved but also strengthened by a sojourn under the gravitational pull of some planet ten times the size of Earth, Saturn or Jupiter maybe: mud-clotted fatigues dragged to earth, bunched at his ammunition belt, the biceps and calves exposed by his rolled sleeves and pants legs sluggishly large and elastic and hairless, glimpsed lengths of a python in repose. El Destruido’s drooped canvas hat was worn at the horizon of his eyebrows, baggy eyes masked in permanent shadow, and the mustache framing his comically weak chin was also gravity-enslaved and no more persuasive than those Miriam and Tommy had donned as Halloween props.