Revolutionaries

by Joshua Furst

  No one was fooled.

  Each time she climbed up out of that dungeon, a darkness came with her. And there were jags after Lenny’s letters stopped coming during which my mother simply disappeared into it.

  His silence—the lingering burn of his scorn—was too much for her.

  She’d be up. She’d be down. Either way, out of her mind. Moving the furniture. Moving it back. Gazing despondently out at the rooftops across the street. Studying the pigeons. Wishing she were one of them. Her body still shuffled around the apartment but there was no one inside. Maybe she was doing bennies. Or ludes. Or both. Who knows. Whatever she could get her hands on. She hated the sunlight. She seized up around other people, including me. Her hands shook.

  For one long, disturbing week she obsessively repainted the walls of the apartment, populated them with flowers and vines and woodland creatures, rainbows, peace marchers, frolicking children, nude hairy people of all races and creeds tumbling around a maypole. She stayed up all night, then all night again, three, four, five nights in a row, painting over her work, reimagining it. The flowers got drippier. The dancers trippier. Her agitation worked its way into her brushstrokes, the violence and rage that the image denied revealing itself in the texture of the paint. Splatters. Thick streaks like exploding roman candles where smiling faces should’ve been. Fingers of paint sliding toward the floor; she didn’t bother to wipe them away. Slashes of red. Inadvertent crime scenes. Hovering above it all, like Christ crucified, Lenny with his wild Jewfro, his tired eyes, his American flag shirt torn and billowing like Old Glory herself.

  She was just thirty years old, my mother. Still so young, I realize now.

  She stopped answering the phone. Stopped reaching out. Weeks went by without a word to Isha or anyone else.

  Or, no—Phil still showed up at our door sometimes. He was like family by then. He had his own keys. He’d walk in with groceries, or sometimes with Chinese, and lurk around like he lived there. Not every day. A couple times a week, maybe. Just often enough to remind my mother that if and when she chose, she could take his hand and he’d do what he could to pull her out of the abyss. Until she did, he’d keep one benign eye on me and provide whatever guidance he could. Was it enough? It felt like it was at the time. He read to me. Shakespeare—I remember we went through all of Julius Caesar. Baudelaire. Walt Whitman. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. The Pushcart War.

  The way I deified him frustrated her. She’d tell me, later, “Look, it’s not like he was in a position to save us. He could barely function.” Which was true, undeniably, but I’d maintain—and still do—that at least his intentions were in the right place. To which she’d argue that he wasn’t as selfless as he seemed. He got what he wanted out of the arrangement.

  Well, I don’t know about that. It seemed to me at the time that she barely noticed he was there.

  She barely even noticed I was there.

  Unless I was in the way.

  I learned to keep my distance. To focus on the TV that, now, was always tuned to the same regimen of shows. Joker’s Wild and The Price Is Right and Days of Our Lives. I’d sit on the floor two feet from the screen and stare at it until my vision distorted. A kind of vertigo. A falling inward toward the all-consuming sound and vision.

  In the afternoon, cartoons came on. Ancient things. Black and white, sometimes. Woody Woodpecker. Heckle and Jeckle. If I changed the channel to watch them, she’d be right there flipping the knob back to where it had been.

  So I’d watch what she wanted to watch. The $10,000 Pyramid. Let’s Make a Deal. Anything as long as the drone didn’t stop.

  Sometimes just knowing she was nearby was too much. This person who had ostensibly dedicated herself to shielding me from and teaching me about the world, now buzzing in her shell, depleted by bitterness, incapable, for days on end, of even taking a shower—how was she supposed to take care of me?

  I’d catch her, sometimes, gazing at me, semiconscious. This look on her face—what was it? Regret. But more than that. Helplessness. A fading recognition that her love for me didn’t do me any good. And this…it was harder to bear than the times when she was just pissed.

  I’d retreat to my room and fantasize about escaping, about joining Lenny in the vast Underground.

  But the unknown out there terrified in its own way. The feds still lurked around. Or I thought they did. Watching. Tracking, maybe. Taking notes.

  Or maybe they’d finally lost interest in us.

  As time went by, they stopped knocking at our door. I saw less and less of them out in the streets. But I still felt them there, like ghosts in my peripheral vision. Blurry threats at the edge of my sight that vanished when I tried to catch them straight on, leaving me with nothing, just an ache in my neck from whipping my head around too fast. A constant tension I couldn’t be quite sure was justified.

  Some afternoons I did nothing but sit on the stoop fondling my AK-47 and watching the light bend. The shadows. I was standing guard is what I was doing. Fulfilling my promise to protect her. For hours, I’d watch the people out there, good folks and bad, living their lives. Old ladies pushing squeaky carts over the cracks in the sidewalk. Punks flicking their Zippos against the wind. Bikers on patrol, roaring their engines. Mothers, sometimes fathers, patiently coaxing their children from one distraction to the next, ready with a finger for the little tyke to hold, or else smacking, cajoling, laying down the law. I’d study these people for what I could learn. How the dude in the dog collar slammed out his door at exactly the same time every afternoon. How the big guy with his even bigger wolfhound appeared one day with his arm in a sling. I’d strain for insight, some glimpse of the larger fabric that might link these brief street scenes together, some means by which to understand my isolation as anything other than an aberration.

  I yearned for things I didn’t know how to name, for the confidence of that solitary man in black. Or for the bright aggressive energy of that girl Rosalita. He was a figment but she—well, she was real. Even if I hadn’t seen her since that one day in the park. Just the thought of her posed a challenge to me; to become, to be, to toughen up.

  Then, long after dark, I’d slink back upstairs to wait for the day to end.

  My mother might be sitting at the desk she’d jimmied out of a discarded door, lost in thought, writing something in her nervous spikey script, another desperate letter to Lenny, another brave fable thrown into the void, rolling back the confession that had so enraged him, claiming we were all right, that I was growing, smarter, brighter, that she was thriving, self-contained in her power, that our greatest concern was for his safe passage. I worry! My mind veers to worst-case scenarios! Send word!

  Whatever she was doing, it’s safe to assume she was too addled to have noticed I’d been gone. I remember, so many times, waiting for her in the gloom, wishing she’d at least ask where I’d been. Then slipping off to my little closet of a room. It didn’t even have a door I could slam. I’d sit there on the mattress and peel the lead paint off the wall.

  There wasn’t enough space to contain how I felt. More than resentment or anger or hurt—more even than terror—what I remember is the shame. The pity and the shame. Pity for her and her hard, lonely life. Shame at my inability to save her from herself. What won’t a son sacrifice for his mother? What worth does his life have when his mother’s in pain?

  I’d exhaust myself thinking of all the ways I’d failed her. Then I’d sleep, and when I woke at three in the morning, I’d find her sometimes in the doorway, gazing remotely down on me.

  “Here,” she’d say, lobbing a couple Twinkies on the bed. “Dinner.”

  Eventually I ventured farther from home. Let my mother take care of herself for a change.

  I’d head out mid-morning, stepping past her sleeping body, tiptoe to the stairwell and lift off down the stairs, take them five, eight at a time, bar
ely touching the ground except to pivot on the landings at each new floor. I’d throw the broken front door open with so much force that it slammed and ricocheted back on itself. Down the stoop and out onto the street.

  I ran. For the sake of running, I ran. For the brief sensation of total autonomy. I took off toward the river, toward the west side, uptown, downtown, wherever. I carried my water gun everywhere I went, slung over my back on a strap made of frayed hemp.

  Any and all directions I chose took me past the landmarks of Lenny’s fading influence. Boutiques and head shops, still hawking bongs, but now doing so with less groovy phantasmal joy. The Free Store, still boarded up, the word HATE spray-painted over the old LOVE above the door. Peace symbols had been replaced by circle-A’s and swastikas. None of it mattered. What mattered was that I keep up my speed, keep moving.

  Run. Run forever. Past the addicts and lost ones nodding off on their feet. Past St. Mark’s Church. The Bowery. Past Ukrainian Row where the air, even at this early hour, smelled like boiled cabbage and organ meat. Past the old Chinese folk in the park south of Houston doing their morning tai chi.

  I couldn’t run forever, though.

  Eventually, like anyone, I sputtered out. Doubled-over, hands on my knees, huffing. Kneading at the cramps in my side. Walking it off. The burn in my knees. The rawness in my lungs. The sweat chilling on my face.

  I’d wander the streets. Wading through time. Searching for fuck-all. Not going anywhere, really. Just picking my ass.

  Sometimes I spooked myself, convinced that every vaguely recognizable face I passed belonged to the surveillance team dedicated to torturing my mother and me. I’d feel their eyes following me, their hands wanting to reach out and graze my clothes. I’d wonder if this would be the day when they nabbed me and took me away to the sensory deprivation chambers where they’d spin me and starve me and hang me upside down, refusing to believe, no matter how I pled, that I knew nothing about nothing about Lenny or where he was.

  Other times, I’d forget to be afraid. I’d slip through some filament in my consciousness into a less constricted state of mind. Then, wow. Freedom. I could get lost in that.

  But also, I might not notice the dangers around me.

  Like the time, while floating around in my head in the trash-strewn lot behind the Lafayette Street subway entrance, I snapped back to discover that some dude had joined me. He looked like an alien—that hairless, triangular face they always have. That freakishly thin neck. He’d pulled his legs up under himself like he was about to meditate but his tiny eyes were staring me down.

  When he saw that I’d noticed him, a smile drifted across his lips like he’d remembered a secret. “Hi,” he said.

  My defenses shot up.

  “How’s it going?” he said.

  “Fine.”

  The secret smile came and went. “Yeah?”

  “Yup. Just fine,” I said.

  “You look…Whatcha doing out here all by yourself?”

  “Nothing.”

  He grooved on this, his head bobbing on its thin neck, as if I’d said something profound. “Far out,” he said.

  He’d affixed a cluster of buttons to his jacket, ruining a perfectly good piece of suede. A smiley face. A United Farm Workers eagle. A peace sign. A platoon of slogans and puns.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Rick.” He gazed at me. “Whatcha running from?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, that can’t be true. You’re running from something.”

  “How would you know?”

  He peered across the street like there was something he needed to keep track of over there. “I saw you. Before. Up on the Bowery. You were moving pretty quick for somebody with nowhere to go.”

  “That’s just how I walk. So, what? You’ve been following me?”

  He reached into his pocket and fished around. “They call me the button man,” he said, pulling a new one out. He studied it lovingly for a second, then flipped it around his fingers. “You want one?”

  And there, under its plastic casing, Lenny’s iconic face grinned out at me, black eye and all, the very same image my mother and Kirsh and I had wheat-pasted all over town, now superimposed on a pillow of blue and green letters: FREE LENNY SNYDER. I should’ve fled. I told myself, Get the fuck out of here. But something stopped me. Call it curiosity.

  That secret smile again as the guy placed the button in my hand. “You know him?”

  Savvy enough not to give myself away, I said, “I know who he is. Everybody does.”

  “It sucks what happened to him, huh?”

  Lobbing it back at him, I said, “You can keep your stupid button. It doesn’t even make sense. Lenny Snyder is free. He escaped.”

  The guy slipped the button back in his pocket and took out another one.

  “You’re a hip kid, huh? You know what’s up.” Studying the new button like he’d never seen it before. Waiting for me to ask for a look. “You ever wonder where he went?” he asked.

  “No. Why would I?” Then, “You a cop?”

  He waited a tick too long to say no so maybe it was true, maybe he was a cop. Or maybe he was just another creep looking to force a bond with a seven-year-old. But the coincidence was too great for me to stick around. I thought of the solitary man in black I’d encountered all those months ago, the strength he’d offered, the sense of possibility. I asked myself, What would Lenny do?

  And hopping to my feet, I screwed on my best fuck you. “You’re never gonna find him, pig,” I said. Then, backpedaling, I flipped the guy a double bird.

  Still, part of me was always on the lookout for Walker. Inspecting every light-skinned black man I came across for height and gait and general vibe. Like this would help. Like salvation was still in any way possible.

  Some days I staked out the park, waiting for him and his posse to take over a corner of the bandstand. He never showed.

  Well, once, just once, I thought I saw him ducking into a bodega. Same watch cap. Same army jacket. Same looseness to his step. I followed him in. Hid behind the aisles and spied on him. Watched him in the fish-eye mirror mounted to the ceiling. Tucked myself into a nook back by the service door while he rooted through the refrigerated case for his six-pack of High Life.

  I tracked him out of the store. It was him, I knew it. He had those cheekbones. Those tiger eyes. I crept after him, from a distance at first, then daring myself to get closer and closer. He stopped at a light and I found myself right up on top of him and he swung around—he’d known I was there all along—and said, “Kid. What gives?” and instead of the basso I remembered Walker having, this guy croaked like a toad with a Dominican drawl.

  I shrank away. I went back to running.

  Sometimes I trolled the park for Rosalita. The swarm of kids from the squats who might’ve led me to her were always there, but it had been months since I’d seen her hanging out with them. I sat for hours on the lip of the bandstand, bouncing my heels against the concrete, thinking the longer I waited the more likely she was to appear.

  Often the only squatter kid I saw was the bigger guy everybody called Lumps. He—oh, he must’ve been twelve or so. There was something wrong with him. Or maybe he was just mean. In retrospect, he was ahead of his time. He wore a uniform: all black. Jeans. T-shirts. Boots. Jacket. His head looked like he’d taken poodle-shears to it. Bald patches where you could see his nicked scalp between clumps of hair maybe half an inch long. A far cry from the mop heads everyone else had. And his hormones were fucked up—that’s what Rosalita told me later. He had the body of an albino walrus.

  If he looked like he might not try to hit me—if he wasn’t carrying a stick, say, or destroying public property—I’d edge up and ask where Rosalita was.

  “Fuck off.” His catchall respons
e.

  “Have you seen her?”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  “You think she’ll come out today?”

  “Maybe you didn’t hear me. Fuck off, motherfucker.”

  If I persisted long enough, if I didn’t run away when he faked a punch at me, I figured he might tell me where she was, just to get rid of me. But he never did. It always ended up with me losing my nerve and fleeing.

  One windy day in September, though, there she was, lingering by herself on the far end of the park, awkwardly watching the other squatter kids play Flinch, kicking at the dirt while they spoofed on each other, and blowing giant bubbles that popped and stuck to her nose. When I called out to her, she pretended not to notice.

  She was there the next day too. Again pretending not to see me. This time I didn’t call out. I just sulked and wondered what I’d done, why she didn’t like me, pining, refusing to venture from my perch on the bandstand and risk the public shame of her disinterest.

  And then again the next day. I ignored her this time and focused instead on fucking with the weeds growing out of the cracks in the bandstand’s cement. And once I’d finally succeeded in forgetting that she was out there on the other side of the park, she showed up right in front of me, striking a pose, fists on hips, pelvis thrust forward, the all of her prickling with disdain.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she asked. “Don’t you have friends?”

  I scoffed, pulling my best Lenny. “Don’t you?” I said.

  And after that, it was understood that if I was there and she was there we’d be together, that I’d tag around behind her for as long as she’d let me and she’d be secretly happy about this.

  Rosalita. She was fearless. In the best of ways, anything was possible with her. We did all the things kids do together. We built forts and played games with rules we made up ourselves, testing the bounds of logic, of our bodies, of the known world. We went exploring—spelunking through the subway tunnels, scrambling like rats through abandoned factories. She taught me how to smoke cigarettes. I taught her how to slide candy bars down her underwear without getting caught by the store clerk. One day, apropos of nothing, while we poked around in the gravel under the bridge, she roughly grabbed me and laid a kiss on my lips. Mmm-mmm. She made smooching sounds. Pressed her mouth to mine. It wasn’t romantic, just surprising. Awkward. Two kids fucking around. Pretending we knew things. “Now French-style,” she said, and she showed me how to stick my tongue out and flick it like sandpaper against her own. Another time—same spot—we dared each other to reveal our privates. Then to touch them.