Dissident Gardens

by Jonathan Lethem

  What was Miriam’s anymore? To know the kid was safe. Before they’d gone out of León she’d written to Stella Kim, in knowledge it could be the last chance: Whatever happens don’t let my mother get her hands on the kid. Miriam’s message otherwise convivial, touristic, covering two postcards and then sealed in an envelope on which she’d scribbled the commandment again on the envelope’s paper itself, beneath the flap. Let it be found. Let it be seen. To know she’d lived. To have reached the high air of the jungle no matter the hands into which they’d fallen. To have gone among the poets and revolutionists when Albert was among the bureaucrats and informants. To not give anyone the satisfaction, including foremost this fucker or would-be fucker Fred the Californian now with what a glimmer told her was a pistol in the tent and pretending not to stare through the mosquito netting to watch her squat as the urine flooded from the corroded Brillo between her legs, as she made exact aim at a patch of ferns, tribute to la Flora de Nicaragua. To have hand-ushered Tommy to the very limit of his capacities and talents. No one needed to hear Sandinistan Light, Tommy only needed have written it, the album like a hologram formed between them, as real as Bowery. If he wasn’t dead already he’d be playing the songs to soldiers at another campfire, nodding his head in the face of their impassive flicker-lit incomprehension, as if by persisting he’d eventually get them to sing along, C’mon, everybody this time! To be, unlike Rose, married to her last instant to the first and only man who’d had her. Yet at the same time to discover, as did Rose, but to bear the knowledge more capably, that every cell is infiltrated in the end.

  3 Up with God

  “Mrs. Zimmer was found walking four miles from her home, after dark.”

  “Which direction?”

  “East, I think. Why should it matter?”

  “Just curious. Go on.”

  “When they took her home there was nothing in her kitchen apart from a few tins of sardines. And in the refrigerator some cans of V-8 juice.”

  “That’s probably about what you’d get if you checked her fridge anytime in the last couple of decades. I mean, since whenever they invented V-8 juice.”

  “Um, yes … I see.”

  “Which, I’d never thought of it before, must be some kind of wartime ration thing, no? Eight vegetables in a can?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I should be the one apologizing. You were explaining Rose’s state when you found her.”

  The social worker who’d left a message for Cicero Lookins with the Comp Lit secretary had evidently not anticipated being met with he who materialized in her office; never mind his tweed jacket, his navy tie, his penny loafers, never mind his perfect syntax and undropped g’s. Never mind his tight-picked, clean-edged, one-inch ’fro, this being years before his dreadlocks—his hairy jargon, his surplus value, his untranslatable self—had belched forth. Erudite sass from a two-hundred-pound black man was enough. So it had gone for Cicero, almost since exiting the Renaissance Ballroom stage for Princeton, stupefaction like this bureaucrat’s at the sight of him being serial reward for his excellence in not only reaching the stations he’d reached but for modulating his voice to the local norms. Apparently he’d fooled this particular white lady on the telephone when he’d returned her call. You’d never need wonder how a Clarence Thomas could assemble his shoulder chip in reverse, for it was by Cicero’s attainments that he’d gained special witness to the liberals’ adjustment to a brush with actual equality. Let her saturate in her dilemma; he’d grant no rescue.

  “Perhaps you know that her sisters are in Florida. They’ve been unresponsive. In one of her lucid moments Mrs. Zimmer suggested we contact the Queensboro library board, but it appears her term with them expired a couple of years ago. Her natural daughter is deceased. There’s a grandson, just a boy, and a distance away. She identified you as her son-in-law—there may be some gap in our records.”

  “It’s in a manner of speaking,” Cicero said.

  “If there are other family members you’d suggest we call—”

  “I may be her best option at the present time.”

  “She also mentioned an Archie.”

  “I don’t think he’ll be any help to you.” It had taken a few phone calls to Rose from his Princeton apartment before Cicero had sussed out who she was on about.

  “Is he—a friend? Visitors, even occasional, are a lifeline in and of themselves, especially during transition to managed care.”

  “I believe he’s married and would prefer to be left out of it.” Cicero doubted it would advantage Rose with these people to explain her robust occupancy of the imaginary. No, Archie Bunker won’t be assisting Mrs. Zimmer with crossword puzzles in your dayroom, no more than would Abraham Lincoln, Fiorello La Guardia, or John Reed. Yet let the social worker be startled, if she needed to be, by the risqué implication that Rose had poached a married man. The bureaucrats should be on notice what a boisterous handful they’d taken aboard here, if and when Rose reoccupied her “lucid moment,” and maybe even if not.

  Let Rose have enough in her, he prayed, to eat this fucking joint alive and spit it out.

  Conflating resentment-at-underestimation on his own and Rose’s behalf, Cicero Lookins might be more than halfway toward the commitment he’d no notion he’d shown up in this office to make: to serve not only as Rose’s interim power of attorney but as her, yes, surrogate son-in-law, solitary soul advocate, spirit animal. The last of her life’s companions, both Douglas Lookins’s and Archie Bunker’s relief pitcher. Lifeline, the social worker’s word for it. He’d zero intention at the moment of nominating himself, believing he’d consented only to sign the forms that would permit the visiting doctors here to recommend her for the surgical unblockage of the blood circulation around her lower intestine, which some diagnostician had suggested might allow return of her cognitive function and with it her emotional thermostat, such that she could regrasp the rudder of her own end-time destiny.

  Cicero sort of doubted it, but he didn’t mind them trying.

  He just wouldn’t want to be the one who had to inform her that her apartment wasn’t there for her to return to. That any hopes of living outside the Lewis Howard Latimer Care Facility rested with the chance of hospitality from one or the other of her married sisters—those whom Rose relentlessly excoriated for the suffocating conformism of their retreat to Florida. Their offspring might be alive, but their sensibilities had perished! No, having been told Rose was little better than comatose, Cicero signed what he had to sign and got out, not accepting the invitation to go in and have a gander at her. He instead went out of the drab facility, put his tie in his pocket, and walked until he found a pizzeria. Ate in Rose’s honor a Queens slice with extra cheese—her regular sustenance, between cans of V-8—before finding his way to the F train. Then, taking the occasion of the command visit to the five boroughs to pause in Manhattan before hopping Jersey Transit, he conveyed himself to the West Side Highway to suck a little dick. Or, preferably, a big one.

  The moon of his life had two faces, one light and one dark. The sunlit face: his increasing grasp of a vocabulary with which to articulate suspicions regarding the unexamined assumptions dictating the everyday life all around him, the enabling of a savage critical excellence. Cicero Lookins laid waste to a seminar as he’d once laid waste to sixth-grade chess opponents, pulverizing the ranks of their pawns, then treating their major pieces like pawns too. In this bright New Jersey light, in seminar rooms and book-lined offices and in full auditoriums where he stood to fillet a speaker with his intricate qualms, respectfully expressed—in the fullness of this light Cicero seized the attention of his mentors. Under their guidance he began placing articles and presenting at conferences. Then, waiting for no one’s permission at all, began his first book, converting his mentors to peers as well.

  The dark face? His second life he’d commenced under another mentorship, that of a visiting postdoc named David Ianoletti, a thirty-two-year-old Jewish Italian whose youthful baldness wa
s compensated by a wild swarthy hair suit everywhere beneath his clothes, nearly curling from the neck and sleeves of his shirt, insulating his slippery small body somewhat as Cicero was insulated in his pigmented plushness: undressed, neither was bare. Ianoletti tutored Cicero out of his sophomore virginity, past a foolish trepidation that he wouldn’t be permitted to animate anything but a theoretical queerness out here in Jersey, demonstrating how his Eden of scholarship needn’t also be monastic.

  The experiences Cicero’d sampled once, twice in a Sunnyside playground restroom, weren’t excluded on this side of the Hudson River. The frontier! Manifest Destiny, get it? What exactly did he think Lewis and Clark had been getting up to, anyway? Or Allen Ginsberg, for that matter? In that spirit, Ianoletti took Cicero in his Toyota Corolla—Cicero, who, in this one way a perfectly average New York kid, wasn’t yet a driver—on a tour of the glory holes and other specially appointed toilet stalls of the New Jersey Turnpike: the J. Fenimore Cooper Rest Area, the Joyce Kilmer Rest Area, the Clara Barton Service Area, and the especially fruitful and apropos Walt Whitman Service Area.

  Then, and in the meantime, seeing Cicero’s problem with driving, on a warm May night, as a parting gift at semester’s end, Ianoletti returned Cicero to the city of his youth, in the direction of which Cicero’d turned a chilly shoulder since his parents’ deaths. After a nice but judiciously light dinner at an Italian joint on Hudson Street, his generous lover introduced him to the trucks that hid in the shadows of the ruined West Side Highway, parked empty of freight and left open to discourage damage by would-be bandits, and to what went on inside and around the perimeters of the trucks nearly every night. There, Cicero discovered for himself, discovered not as a theory or principle or rumor but discovered with his eyes, ears, nose, hands, and cock, the unashamed homosexual bacchanal that had become possible in the historical margin between Stonewall and disease.

  Though from this point he would now be open, at Princeton and while teaching at Rutgers, and while in the company of visiting scholars or at conferences by himself, to encountering further iterations of David Ianoletti—and sometimes did—and though he soon learned to drive, Cicero became for a couple of years a regular denizen of the trucks.

  He wasn’t in any way ashamed of the dark face. It was merely that it remained dark, even to Cicero while he visited it. An obverse nature defined it: Wear your love like heaven, yes, but what constituted your love might be more than was visible or imaginable from earth. Yet that it was one moon with two faces he explored—that was the point. If Cicero’s sunlight pursuit was to think with critical acuity, to read literature and philosophy as the record of a species attempting to know itself, what did that represent but an effort to give names to the bewilderments represented by his dark-side glimpses of true human freedom? What was theory, his insatiable sorting through successive frameworks of Nietzsche, Barthes, Lacan, all the others, if not an attempt to hurl the net of language over the splendid other life, that of bodies grappling toward and through their incommensurable desires?

  All this had waited for Cicero to be ready, as he could never have been until he’d escaped Sunnyside, public school, the gravitational field of Diane and Douglas Lookins’s home. It was only after, place secured in the sun, that Cicero could afford to slip back to the nether surface, to detail the variegations, the craters and outcroppings, the pebbles strewn there to be known only in the dark. That’s to say, whether he wanted to think it or not, he had Rose to thank! For Princeton, yes, and Nietzsche, but also for David Ianoletti. For the trucks at the West Side piers. He had Rose to thank, and Miriam, only Miriam wasn’t around for Cicero to do any return favors.

  So now this, what repayment might entail. The social worker called. Rose was sensible again, enough anyway that she badly needed a visitor. A familiar face as a peg on which to hang her remaining self. The social worker made Cicero understand that by turning up in person, by signing those forms, he’d placed himself in the sights of the Foucauldian social services machine. Rose Angrush Zimmer, or this ghost that had replaced her, needed that lifeline in the human world. Fair enough. Cicero would be her lifeline. He’d jaunt to Queens, where he’d thought he’d never need set foot again, on some kind of regular basis, why not? He took the train into the city periodically anyhow. And so his visits to Rose, in the garden of her decline, became enclosed in the dark face of his moon, that part of Cicero’s life unknown at Princeton. The convergence was natural, for among his peers and mentors, the various gray Casaubons of his dissertation committee, one would have been as incongruous an explanation as the other.

  “You see, there are these trucks, they’re left open to no purpose, the men come from all over and no one organizes what happens there … for example the other night I was lifted off my feet by a group of strangers, yes, just raised aloft for the strange sensation of entrusting myself to their hands, while another man sucked my penis—”

  “Well, there’s this old woman in Queens … you’d call her Jewish but don’t let her hear you say it. She was my father’s lover for nearly a decade—”

  In Cicero’s fantasy interrogation, his dark-side orals exam, the interlocutor continued:

  “What’s your devotion to this old Jewish or not-Jewish woman—a matter of a certain unaccountable love?”

  “No more that than a certain unaccountable hatred.”

  “You feel obligated, then?”

  “My father didn’t have a lot to teach me, apart from I was obligated to no man.”

  “Obligation’s the wrong word, then. Sheer guilt?”

  “Maybe.”

  His first task was to visit the basement of Rose’s house and sort what remained of her stuff. He bagged the portion of clothing that might still be useful—nightgowns, undergarments, flat shoes, the least ornate of the polyester pantsuits that had in her last years overtaken any other manner of dress. He gathered all papers, the contents of her card file of addresses, a scattering of keepsakes, photographs, and ephemera, a World War Two ration book—the whole compilation more scant than he’d have imagined. He found one school photograph of himself, sixth or seventh grade, teeth cinched in a false smile, shanghaied in a tie his mother had knotted. Not one item gave evidence of his father. No love letters of any kind. Rose’s books had been reduced by some unseen helping hand—“a neighbor,” explained the uninterested manager who’d already rented the apartment—the preponderance donated, with her classical LPs, to a local thrift shop. Nothing remained of her political books, her Engels and Lenin and Earl Browder, nor of her Lincoln shrine, only five or six volumes someone had decided might be essential: a moldering Jewish prayer book, three novels by Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Howe’s World of Our Fathers—the Singer and Howe, he assumed, each unrequested gifts from her sisters, only why saved when the rest was gone? Had they been by the bedside? Had she been reading them? Or did this express some Jew’s editorial hand? He found, too, Moses Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed; it would be too much to credit this last as the selector’s joke on Rose’s present dementia. Cicero packed the books and other paltry leavings, along with the clothes, into the back of a taxicab, to decorate her new life. The furniture, the massive television, and the cabinet stereo, all useless, and in any case forbidden in the nursing home, he abandoned. When she asked, he knew to lie and say he’d taken the television and stereo himself, rather than offering them as he had to the Polish family that occupied her old rooms, to spare himself her excoriation.

  For his first visits they formed an eating club of the most abject variety. At the encouragement of the nurses he always walked into her room carrying two lunch trays. She won’t come to the dining hall, they told him. It confuses her. Maybe, he thought but didn’t say, confusion wasn’t the primary issue. We bring trays to her room, but we can’t sit and put the fork to her mouth. The trays come out full. Maybe she’ll eat with you. Maybe so; he was willing to try. He’d take the trays in, to where she’d been helped to a seat beside her bed, where she waited fully dresse
d, hair brushed, eyes glistening with anticipation and shame at his visit. He’d unwrap the day’s fare, egg salad on white bread, pasta spirals in Parmesan cream. Take the paper cover off the apple juice, tell her the rice pudding wasn’t bad. She’d sample a bite or two, squinting at him, every resource of skepticism and censure still agitating in her smile. The gaze with which she’d cut down American brownshirts, or landlord-corrupted police captains attempting to execute eviction notices, she now levied against Cicero’s slight oversell of the rice pudding.

  Rose had regained her senses. She recognized Cicero when he came. Rose Angrush Zimmer now mounted a comeback, from the bed of her infirmity—yet you can only come back so far as where you left off. She recovered spite, she recovered disenchantment, she recovered paranoia. Except the milieu and personae that had once organized her reactions were mostly scattered to the winds now. She reassembled her deranged silent treatment of the whole of the twentieth century, but it quit before she could fire it. Ronald Reagan was president, history had toppled into absurdity. She’d kissed the century farewell too long ago. Sunnyside? Malnutrition and derangement having destroyed her block-watcher’s authority, she patrolled memories instead, tried to incite against former neighbors and comrades—against her betrayers on the library board, against a misguided Zionist grocer who died in 1973, against a Real’s Radish & Pickle shop steward who’d Redbaited her in 1957.