Revolutionaries

by Joshua Furst

  The harder he tried, the less I wanted to give. “Sure.”

  He fished a bud out of the tangled mess inside the baggie and held it up for me to study. “Take a look at that mossy shit growing on the leaves there. You see it? If you could get up close enough—here look, you see? Crystals. Pure THC. A hundred times more potent than what you get out here in our glorious land of the free. It’s an organic hybrid cultivated by the CIA, but joke’s on them, huh? It’s in the hands of Nick Dixon now. And through him it’s made its way to you, the one and only super-duper far out Mighty Mouse himself, Freedom Snyder.”

  I glanced at my mother, who grimaced back. Sarcasm or silence? Silence.

  “So what do you say? Should I roll up a doobie?”

  “If you want. I don’t know. Yes, I guess?”

  He didn’t flinch. Outwardly, he didn’t change at all. But I caught the warning he shot me. The rage flashing in his eyes like a light switch flicked on, then off. The violence clamped under his shuck and groove. His true feelings for me. How contingent they were. The need. The loathing. For the rest of his life, whatever we did, however well we got along, part of me watched for this tiger to bare its fangs.

  It lasted just a second and then it was gone. It flew right past my mother and the Queen—or maybe they’d learned to take this aspect of his personality for granted.

  He unsheathed a paper and folded it into a canoe. He sprinkled the sticky clusters of leaf inside, rolled it with his fingertips, then again in the flat of his palm, twirling the ends into conical swirls, not quite sealed. Gauging my impressions at every step, like, hey kid, dig this. You still watching? Tell me you’ve ever seen a more skillfully rolled joint. Holding it out for me to admire. Waving it in my face. “Textbook,” he said. Then he fished a lighter from the pocket of his cords, held the joint to his lips and lit up and took a long pull.

  Threads of smoke tumbled from his mouth then curled back in. He studied the cherry. Smiled at it. Took another pull, deeper, flexing his diaphragm. The weed crackled and popped. And then, satisfied, he held the joint out to me.

  “If you don’t turn on, brother, you can’t tune in,” he said, wheezing, holding in his breath, the smoke trailing out from between his teeth.

  I appealed to my mother but there was no help there. She held herself tight, watching, taking mental notes, still too full of hope to admit sides were being drawn.

  “Do I have to?” I said.

  Lenny took another drag. “You don’t have to do nothing,” he said. “But, man, I heard you were Lenny Snyder’s kid. Where I come from, that’s supposed to mean something. I figured you for more of a cool motherfucker. Or at least not a pussy.”

  The Queen touched Lenny’s knee like she was trying to silently remind him of something. He barely noticed. His everything was aimed at me. I ached for my shattered AK-47. “Why do you keep doing that?” I asked him.

  “Doing what?”

  “Pretending. Faking. Acting like I’m some stupid kid.”

  And my mother, after all those months of longing and lobbying on his behalf, of blind faith, abandonment and derangement, after having finally lost so much that she’d begun to slowly reckon with herself only to be called back by him with tantalizing distortions and the erratic possibility of hope, she did the only thing she could right then. She slid to the couch and placed herself protectively by his side. For the first time since this weird test began, she had something to say. “We talked about this, Freddy. How we were going to—”

  “Faking? Pretending? I don’t know what those words mean,” Lenny said, waving the joint like a pointer. “Reality is a social construction. Dig? Reality’s not real. It’s all perception. You see Lenny Snyder when you look at me? That’s your prerogative. I look in the mirror and I see Nick Dixon. Caroline, she sees Nick Dixon, too. So does Suzy.” As he said each of their names, he put an arm first around the Queen and then my mother, pulling them close, bending them to his will. He leaned toward my mother, flexing his arm around her neck so he could take a hit off the joint he now held near her chin. “So, see? There’s a perception problem here. We’re all on one trip over here and you’re floating around over there, all by yourself. Have fun with that. Or you could take the fucking doobie and join us over here in our reality. And I’m telling you, this place is a lot more fun than wherever the fuck you are.” With insistence, menace, pulsing in his fingertips, he transferred the joint to his free hand so as not to singe my mother’s hair and then disentangled his arm from around her neck.

  What choice does a kid have in a moment like that?

  Trapped in a foreign place where the dark woody walls are squeezing in on him and the silence outside stretches to infinity. Everything familiar miles away. And his mom—the one light, the little warmth he can be sure of finding, there in the room where he’s being bullied by his father—not lifting a finger to intercede. He takes the joint. He holds it to his lips and inhales its musty scent, breathes the smoke deep into his lungs, coughs it back out.

  “That’s the spirit,” Lenny said, snatching the joint back.

  He turned his attention to my mother and the Queen, talking fast, working his patter, coaxing hees and haws out of them, while I sunk and sunk into the beanbag.

  Wherever he got it—I’m sure it wasn’t from Bob Marley—that pot was some strong shit. My vision narrowed. My secondary senses came alive. When I tried to follow the conversation, I found that I couldn’t. Their voices came at me like tones on a musical scale, plains of sound, not human language, and I’d just barely decipher a thread of words—pear tree down the hill, maybe, wild asparagus along the road—when another thread would tumble over it, and then another, the language piling on top of itself like layers of tapestry thrown over my head, each one weighing me down a little more until, in order to breathe, I had to wriggle loose of them entirely.

  The scents in the room came for me next. That crackly wood smell you get in country cabins. The smell of time, of history growing dry and stale. That and the pungent odor of Lenny, who, even here where he wasn’t playing the hippie fool, still hadn’t learned how to bathe himself. And the stink of marijuana floating over everything, carrying the adult voices back to me again, waves crashing down on me, pulling me under.

  The only escape was to slip inside myself. Change lenses. Reset the terms of the experience. Instead of chasing sensation I darted after the strong thoughts rooting in my head. There was danger to this, too. Every thought had weight and import. Each strand of memory, each half-concealed concept, each fillip of logical reasoning, the strings of approbation and encouragement, they all recalled things Mom had told me, or Phil, or Rosalita, or, yes, Lenny too—the sum of my limited experience, undulating, iridescent, out of reach like the tentacles of some blind deep-sea squid. And I knew, I just knew, that if I could grab onto one of these flickering ropes, if I could hold it tight and climb it inch by inch, following the implications and resonances to the developing idea hidden within it, I’d arrive at the body from which it and every other thought sprang, the great tangled mess of meaning that would explain the secret of myself to me. But they moved too fast. They whipped through my head with such velocity that, when they slammed against my skull, they stunned me, left me dazed. Just when I sensed I was starting to understand, I’d realize I’d forgotten the central piece of information I needed to create sense. The solid thing I’d believed I held turned out to be a vast vacancy.

  I fixated more and more on Lenny, stared at him as he cracked himself up. Nick Dixon. Lenny Snyder. Lenny Snyder. Nick Dixon. The same but different. Different but the same. He had a different nose but the same eyes. A different haircut but the same wiry hair. The scary part of him remained intact—the arrogance and self-regard, the omnivorous ego, the compulsive need for everyone, even me, to reassure him that, yes, he was the coolest person in the room. But that other part of him—the playful part, the reckless goofiness
, the part that produced somersaults at the barricades and enabled him to sneer that, no matter how thick the locks on the jail cell, nothing, no system, no person, no bureaucratic machine, would ever separate him from his joy—that part was gone.

  A flame sparked and died in my head. A flick of the Bic. A match in the wind. Delusional me, trying and failing to burn down the country club as though that would win his love, thinking I could look to him for guidance, for the key to growing up—as though he was capable of recognizing anyone as anything more than a groupie or a threat. And which was I? His son. I’d been ready to devote myself to him blindly, completely. But now? He’d flashed his rage. Made me the enemy. My mind constricted around this thought. Paranoia set in. A wave of sensation flushed through my body like ice water. I felt myself tense, relax, tense, relax. The flip of a filter. The lens changing again and again. Then the fear and palsy crept back in.

  I must have been shaking because next thing I knew, my mother had me by the shoulders, holding me out in front of her so she could search for some movement behind my eyes.

  “Freddy,” she said. “Freddy, what’s going on?” Then she pulled me to her breast and smoothed my damp hair.

  And I remember Lenny watching, worried maybe, or ashamed, or just confused. And I remember him saying, “What?”—to the Queen? to my mother? To whichever one of them had thrown him a look. Almost whining. Pleading, How is this my fault?

  This was just the first night. We stayed for four days.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, I woke up blurry and shuffled downstairs to find Lenny and the Queen of Sheba blasting Clapton in the kitchen, him yelping along, the both of them grooving, joyous, completely nude. They were making omelets, ostensibly. More like vegetables sealed in a laminate of egg. Onion and mushrooms, mostly. A country feast, they claimed. A display of the earth’s bounty.

  My mother was there too, wrapped in a caftan. She sat cross-legged on a chair out of their line of fire, cradling a hand-thrown coffee mug in her lap. She radiated beatitude. When she saw me blinking in the doorway, she beckoned me toward her and pulled me tight, coiled her arms around me so I could feel the tranquility vibrating in her core.

  Sitting at the farmhouse table later, I picked at my food, searching for something edible. By the time I finished, I looked at my plate and discovered all I’d accomplished was to meticulously move everything from one side to the other.

  “You’re gonna hurt my feelings, kid,” Lenny said.

  I studied the slime on my plate.

  The Queen, deflecting, talked about gardens.

  Later still, my mother sat me down in the attic, where they’d stored us. “I know this is confusing, Freddy,” she said. “But you know? Why try to make things worse when you could be working toward making them better? Give him a chance. Do it for me. I need this.”

  So I did. For her.

  And I’ll give him this—during the daylight hours, he and the Queen really did try. We were made to feel like guests at their country estate, everything stage-managed to show off the placid, idyllic rhythms of their lives. They took us on drives through the mountains, showed us the ski resort, just recently closed for the season, with its stagnant T-lifts and patchy mud slicks. They took us to lunch at a quaint one-room diner—one of those streamlined aluminum jobs—that took forty-five minutes to get to on back roads and made the same grilled cheese as anyplace else.

  We went for a hike along a marked path up some mountain. Sometimes the Queen would hang back and let Lenny pad along next to us with his weird new gait. He and my mother held hands, awkward as innocents fumbling through a first date. What struck me was how they seemed not to know each other, how tender, how timid, they were. Like each feared the other was about to get crushed. There was no room for me in those moments. I’d fall back to walk with the Queen, watch her watching them. Her tolerance, approval, willingness to share.

  When the sun began to set, they took us to the dump, where we locked ourselves in the car and watched the bears dig through the trash and gorge themselves on rotting vegetables and moldy sliced bread.

  Those days—the first one, anyway. It was like music. Soft and sentimental. Leading me to forget what had happened the night before. Tricking me into thinking I’d fallen out of the world. Out of this world at least, with its grunge and sin and panic. That I’d slipped into an alternate reality, a place without strife that still smelled new, where ugly intentions hadn’t been invented yet, a place that had always been there, hidden away, waiting for me to take the dare and leave my propriety and my possessions behind. All you—all I—had to do was embrace it.

  And I did.

  We all did.

  Or it felt like we had.

  Until night fell and I remembered that everything I’d brought with me—the things Lenny had and hadn’t done, the fears and hurts and unanswered questions, the memories and their lingering effects—it was all still there, ineradicable, inescapable.

  The second night, when the pot came out, I ran away. I hid in the attic with the lights out. Watched the shadows quiver. Willed the time to pass. No one came looking for me. What a gift. The silence, especially. The way every rustling came through more acutely. A chipmunk on the roof—I could pinpoint exactly where it was, when it darted and where to, when it picked at a shingle with its tiny claws. Hoots in the distance and right close by. Howls. Whimpers. The nocturnal world stretching its muscles. And two flights down, sometimes, the adults getting raucous, laughing, shouting for a moment before quieting down.

  Then later, footsteps on the floorboards.

  Something else, too. The sloshing of the water bed in the room below mine. A giggle—my mother’s. More sloshing. She moaned, low like iron, and said something I couldn’t hear. The movement of the water took on a tidal quality, wave after wave rolling up against the frame and tumbling over my mother’s mewling. Then, Lenny’s voice, sharp as a siren careening out of the city. He cackled. “That’s my girl!” He sounded just like himself.

  And floating in the darkness above them, I felt seasick and fled downstairs in search of anywhere, I didn’t really care, just as long as it was away from them.

  What I found was the Queen, set up on the couch with a flimsy copy of The Nation in her lap. She looked up at me with a kind of adoration. “Hey-ya.” She held my gaze. So placid. Centered in that way white women aspire to be but only truly attain when they’re both rich and damaged. Like the wind blew through her. An intense, overwhelming calm. I had no choice but to stay.

  Sunk in the beanbag’s intractable fist, feeling conspicuous and stupid, I waited for her to placate me in some barbed way.

  “He’s happy you’re here,” she said eventually. “We’re both happy you’re here. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you, but he’s overjoyed. You’re just about the most important thing in the world to him.”

  I could still hear the water bed’s slow churn.

  “It’s been hard for him. Isolating. Weeks go by with him not doing anything but lying here on this couch. He doesn’t speak. He won’t eat. I bring him a glass of water, I say, Nick, please, we have to figure out how to go on with our lives. And he doesn’t even see me. It’s like he’s not in there. Like no one’s home. When I touch him on the shoulder he just turns his face to the cushions. But he’s been on a high since your mother wrote to say you were coming. He’s a whole new Nick. I like him better this way.” She raised her mug to her lips and took a long meaningful sip of tea.

  Upstairs, the water bed rattled like a torrential storm had attacked it.

  “Are you having fun?” asked the Queen.

  Fun. Not the word I would’ve used, but I nodded. There was only one answer.

  “I’m glad.” She gazed at me again, pushing for connection. “I’m hoping we can be great friends.”

  I could hear Lenny upstairs, yipping, now,
like a fucking Chihuahua. The Queen floated that calming look of hers over me and said, no lie, “Don’t worry about that. Your mom and dad are just showing how much they love each other.” She smirked. “If we’re going to be friends,” she said, “it would be nice to get to know you.”

  There’s nothing like kindness to send a weed wacker down your spine and clear away the spurs. My resentment melted. Heat rushed through my chest.

  “So tell me,” she said, “if you could snap your fingers and go somewhere instantly, where would you go?”

  “Happy Wok Number Three.” I was thinking of Phil.

  “Oh?” she said. “Why’s that?”

  “They’re authentic. And they don’t use MSG.”

  “What do you like to order at Happy Wok Number Three?”

  “Egg rolls. And sweet and sour. Mom makes me get the chicken, but the pork’s better.”

  “I like moo shu.”

  “You have Chinese here?”

  “Sure. There’s Chinese everywhere. Chinese and McDonald’s.”

  “Mom won’t let me eat McDonald’s.”

  “Chinese is better.”

  “Yeah.” I felt mysteriously close to her now.

  “We could go to the Chinese place tomorrow, if you want. Nick likes Chinese. He’s just like you. Sweet and sour pork.”

  Just like me. I remember cherishing that. Despite everything. It was all I’d ever wanted to hear.

  “Best New Garden. That’s what it’s called.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  My mother and Lenny and the water bed had gone silent upstairs. Except for the Queen and me, the house was silent. I hadn’t even noticed.

  “It’s settled, then. Best New Garden for dinner tomorrow. We’ll have a feast.” She twisted her lip in a quizzical, almost flirtatious way. “But, Freedom, what if you could snap your fingers and go anywhere. Really anywhere. Even places you’ve never been before. Like, me? I’d go to the Galapagos Islands to see the Komodo dragons and the hundred-and-fifty-year-old sea turtles.”