by Joshua Furst
I tried to recall the names of those countries Lenny’s friends were always running off to. “Liberia,” I said. “Algeria. Uganda.” This charmed her. We talked about these countries and what they were like. Why somebody would want to visit them. What they meant, symbolically, to the movement and the world.
All this time, half my brain lingered on what she’d said about me being like Lenny. Since the day he’d disappeared almost two years earlier, my sense of him had tilted and swayed, fragmenting and re-congealing into shapes that I clung to whether they were true or not. Essential illusions that reminded me of who he might be if he were with me, who I might become if I aspired to his shape. I’d emulated the person I’d conjured in my mind—not the real man but the one I’d needed, the myth onto which I’d projected my loneliness. He’d grown to totemic dimensions in my mind, become a creature of awe and wonder. That halo of unruly hair framing his face. The wicked bemusement—the cosmic joke of him—how, no matter what was happening around him, good or bad or peaceful or violent, whatever, his eyes darted everywhere, searching for the irony and the dramatic moment in which he could throw another tack under the wheels of empire. I’d loved him for this. I’d thought this must be what it meant to be an adult. Reckless. Relentless. Fearlessly embracing the chaos. To be like Lenny meant not giving a fuck. And I was too sensitive. I cared too much. But what if there was more to it than that? What if Lenny cared so much he couldn’t give a fuck? Well, then, maybe I really was like Lenny. Or on my way to becoming like him.
But see, this is where things got complicated for me. Because Lenny’d abandoned me. He’d abandoned Mom. He’d put me in danger for the sake of a joke or to prove some fleeting point to the world. Just the night before he’d ridiculed me into submission and gotten me so stoned I was drooling, then he’d laughed so hard he had to hold his dick to keep himself from pissing his pants. I mean, one of the things Lenny didn’t give a fuck about seemed pretty obviously to be me. I was the dog whose water dish he filled with beer. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be like Lenny if it meant I had to be like that. Unless I did. And when the Queen put it so sweetly and matter-of-factly, then yes, yes, yes, I did want to be like Lenny. I wanted him to look at me and see himself and explode with pride and tell me, “I see you and you’re a miraculous creature, and of all the things I’ve done with my life, making you ranks up there with the best.”
I didn’t tell the Queen any of this. Or, I did, but years later, when none of it mattered. That night it just bounced around half-formed in my head while I fell more and more in love with her. How could I not? She was patient and calm. She pretended to treat me like an adult. She listened.
What I did instead was ask, “Where were you? On Thursday, when we got here? Where were you?” A meeting, they’d said. But what meeting could have been more important than us? I couldn’t accept it. I refused to believe it. “You knew we were coming,” I told the Queen. “But nobody was here.”
She waited a long time to answer my question. “You’re right,” she said finally. “We should’ve been here.” She scrunched her eyes, letting this sink in. “I’m sorry. Nick’s sorry, too. He’s too embarrassed to say so, but he is. I promise you.”
“But where were you?” I said.
Her lips clenched, just for a second, and she hid her face behind her mug, studied the drips of glaze lacquered inexpertly onto its surface, hoping, probably, that I’d lose interest, get bored, let her win. “We were at a meeting. Like I said.” She glanced at the ornate grandfather clock standing against one wall of the room. “Some things can’t be avoided. Life’s bigger than you and me.”
She might as well have slapped me.
Eventually, Mom came down wrapped in a towel and patted my hair and sent me off to bed. It was eerie, and, I guess, beautiful, how everyone seemed to be living and letting live.
* * *
—
The next day we wandered around Vermont some more. We took another hike, this time down a craggy canyon, so steep in places that we sometimes just slid from one gnarly trunk to another. At the bottom was a river, or a creek anyway, and for a while we sat around, dangling our feet in the icy water, eating gorp and admiring the patchwork of sunlight in the trees.
Then, later, we toured an alpaca farm and the Queen bought us hats that we’d lose before ever getting the chance to wear them. All day long I had the sense I was being watched. A pressure on my back like the baking sun. A quiet when I turned to look, quick glances, trying to catch peripheral visions that weren’t there. I felt like I was being managed, like something was supposed to happen that day and it involved me but I had to be protected from it. A couple times, as we hiked back from the river, Lenny sidled up to me like he had some special, confidential thing to say, but instead of revealing whatever it was he’d come out with a joke. A priest, a rabbi and an alligator walk into a bar. That sort of thing. When I didn’t laugh, he said, “Maybe back at the house we can throw the ball around. Whaddaya say? You can show me what you’ve got.” A foreign concept, that. He must have known it, too.
We pissed the day away and then returned to the old stone house. We didn’t get Chinese food or play catch. The three of them got stoned and I retreated into myself again. This time, when the sloshing started in the master bedroom, they all played together.
It’s easier the second time around. You block it out. What I did was, I poked around in the darkness, soaking up the place. I left the lights off. Hovered in the shadows like a pickpocket. Getting to know the different rooms. Their smells. The musty smoked air of the living room. The cinnamon and soap of the tiny bathroom under the stairs. The textures and sounds. The wide planks under my feet, gouged and scraped from the old days of iron and coal. I tried to imagine living in this house. Really living in it. Like, forever. The long quiet. The lack of stimuli. In place of the hectic terrors of the city, I saw a big, blank, wide, never-ending boredom. My mother, the Queen, Lenny, they’d be my only distractions. It would solve many problems but create even more. ’Cause, where could I escape to? Nowhere, that’s where. By some trick of the world, hiding out here in the country would make everything, even me, more conspicuous. Lenny must have felt the same way. Like he’d been condemned to being seen, even if the guy people saw was Nick Dixon. Like he’d lost control of the difference between his public and private selves. He was a city cat. And he’d shrunk out here. Maybe that was why he seemed so much more like a man than a god now, still terrifying and awesome, but also sadly visible, intelligible. He was turning into someone I didn’t have to simply submit to, someone I could grapple with and, maybe one day, argue with.
I studied the photos he’d so proudly made me tour. All those important people. All their fading luster. Time trapped in gray scale, no longer teeming and boiling. Just mounted there, inert. Mementos of power struggles that no longer exerted any urgent pull on the present.
On the wall over the shoe rack in the mudroom tucked behind the kitchen, I discovered one Lenny’d skipped over. A Technicolor shot. Recent. Lenny—or with that beard, Nick Dixon—posed like a rock star and lit up in a blur of densely crowded lights. Pelvis thrust forward. Sunglasses covering up half his face. His arms were draped over the shoulders of two other guys in that sloppy carefree pose of men who’ve been partying late into the night. One of them might’ve been the sunflower dude who used to come over and eat all our peanut butter.
But where were they? And why? Well, I knew Lenny. I knew his habits, his needs. I didn’t need evidence to see that they were in New York, not some distant town like the ones where I’d imagined him hiding out. Of course. And the disturbing thing—the outrageous thing—was, I wasn’t surprised by this. It made perfect sense. Just like it made sense that he’d kept this visit a secret from my mother and me. He’d been too busy having too much fun to bother with us.
The truth pained me, sure. But not right away. It shot a capsule of resentment under my skin, a slow
release that would take years to kick in. At that moment, all I really felt was alone.
* * *
—
The next morning, our last, we drove into the podunk ski town up there and ducked in and out of the various shops. Browsing. Looking at skis and jackets and more winter hats, at countless versions of the same landscape painting—birch trees and snowdrifts and misty moons. At muumuus and sandals and fondue pots. Blown-glass vases and hand-thrown pottery glazed with the same drippy patterns as the mugs back at the house. And maybe it was because I’d gotten used to the new him, but not once through any of this did I have the sense that Lenny was hiding. Except for the shlumpy posture and the flattened accent, he was the same old guy he’d always been. Bouncing on his heels, cracking up at his own jokes, making himself as conspicuous as ever.
The place wasn’t built up like ski towns are now. There were only, like, six shops, all clustered into a single block. We ran out of things to do pretty quickly and ended up hanging around in a tiny café. Two tables, a counter, a crusty young dude pushing vegan scones on us.
I got the feeling again that everyone was keeping a secret from me. Every few minutes, Lenny hopped up to lean over the counter and talk to the dude, whispering, scheming, sitting back down just to hop up again.
“I’m bored,” I said. “There’s nothing to do here.”
“You can look at the people.” This was the Queen. “Imagine their lives. What do they love? Where did they come from? Why did they land in this particular place at this specific moment in time?”
My mother flashed me a smile—like try, don’t ruin it—so I did, but there was hardly anyone out there and when somebody did wander past, they looked just like everyone else in this flaxen-haired, thick-blooded, boring old place.
“They’re all the same,” I said, but by now the Queen was up at the counter too, conspiring with Lenny and the dude.
Mom patted my hand, grimaced. She was as lost as me about why we were dawdling here, but she was more willing to let it ride. “There’s a nest up there, see?” She pointed at the stoplight at the corner, where a tangle of fluff and twigs was wedged into the metal arms. “Interesting, huh?” We studied it for a while, waiting for a glimpse of whatever birds had made it, but there was no sign of life anywhere near it.
Lenny’s whispers at the counter had escalated into commands. Something about the “schedule,” about “Joel and Alice.” He didn’t whine, not like the old Lenny. He was a general now. “Where the fuck are they, Carl?” he said. “They’ve got the material. Did you call them to confirm the time? Carl? Did you do that?”
The Queen, Lenny’s deputy, got in on it too. “We’ve got VIPs here for this one,” she said.
My mother perked up. VIPs. She liked that.
“Carl,” said the Queen. “Carl. People are going to be showing up soon. There’s not even a bullhorn. They’re gonna catch us with our thumbs up our asses.”
When Joel and Alice finally arrived, they were pulling a red wagon behind them, loaded with what must’ve been “the material.” They bumped slowly toward us, struggling over the uneven sidewalk. I remember their sturdy boots—hiking boots—and the wool socks pulled up over the cuffs of their jeans. I remember thinking, they’re so straight. It’s bizarre. What happened to the freaks?
Lenny, the Queen and Carl stopped bickering and took themselves outside. My mother and I stayed put, hunkered down, skeptical, feeling left out.
We could hear them through the window. Negotiations. Complaints. Lenny poked through the shit in the wagon. He picked up a cardboard tube and tested its weight. He dug through a box and pulled out a T-shirt, held it up to his shoulders, modeling it. SAVE THE RIVER, it said. White letters on blue cotton. Some ripples below the words, signifying, I guess, water. He made a face. “Pretty good, huh?” he said. And Joel and Alice grinned and they all went back to plotting.
More people arrived, two or three at a time. A small crowd slowly gathering. Good normal people. They could’ve been anyone.
They kept glancing at us, pretending they weren’t. And each look they gave us, my mother threw back at them. She still, despite everything, lived for the fight, and I could see the old excitement churning inside her. Defensive and eager. Impatient. She was growing less and less confused by the second.
“You stay here,” she said and she stalked out, leaving me to watch through the window as she tried to capture Lenny’s attention and coax him away from his new herd of followers, to confront him, remind him that she’d always been his most intimate and motivated confidante. She hung like a shadow apart from the crowd, both there and not there, a spectacle of silence. I was just glad she wasn’t making a scene.
Lenny was now passing out the shirts. He lobbed one at my mother—“Hey-o!” Wink, wink. “Eyes on the prize.” That’s the closest she got to him. The Queen, his deputy, guided her across the street so they could talk. She was hot, my mother, provoking and indignant, talking with her hands, leading with her shoulders. And the Queen indulged her. Warm, imperturbable, she absorbed my mother’s agitation. Just like she’d done with me. Like maybe she did with Lenny. That woman had powers. She was calmness incarnate. By the time my mother came back inside, she was mollified, if not quite appeased.
“Come on, let’s go,” she said.
“Where?”
“Out there. To save the fucking river.”
By then, thirty people or so had shown up. They wore their T-shirts stretched over plaid shirts and sweaters. Some were taping handmade signs to the cardboard tubes. Others had their signs hoisted on shoulders and were fanned out along the curb, little clusters of folk, awkwardly catching up like they only knew one another so well, reading the puns and the wordplay on the signs, the movement clichés they were so proud to have discovered for themselves. It was like the good old days had come seeping out of the mud, but instead of revolution, it was nostalgia in the air. And Lenny shuffled around embracing them, dancing his fingers in front of their babies’ eyes, dipping his head to listen to their concerns. He didn’t flash fire like back in the day, didn’t sneer, didn’t joke. He was steady Nick Dixon.
That’s how it felt anyway, as we watched him and the Queen conspire up front, sending Carl on errands, assigning Joel and Alice tasks, leading the chants, coaxing the march forward. They worked together in a way their flock must have admired—such trust, such understanding, such a beautiful shared vision. Meanwhile, my mother and I, when we joined the parade, lingered in the middle, anonymous, and let ourselves be pushed forward along the route by the winds shifting around us. We were just two more bodies, no more special than the rest.
The march took us through town along quiet streets, past Victorian houses and trees that had lived so long and grown so large that they’d begun to shove the sidewalk around. We passed the strip of stores again. We passed a church, a park. It was a short walk. And we ended up on the lawn of the town hall, a single-story gable-roofed building with a spire that you could imagine the whole village erecting together sometime in a previous century. It was shuttered, vacant, like so much else in that place. Seems we were the only people out on this fine day, or maybe the whole town was here marching with us. A symbolic action, wholly useless. But it brought people together. Lenny gave a speech—I don’t remember about what, saving the river, presumably, how inspiring it was to have such support; you have the power to remake your world if you exercise your rights as citizens of a free society. A chant: “The people united will never be divided.” A boilerplate pep talk. Organizing 101. What I remember is his demeanor up there. Earnest. Humble. Insecure. There was no dig this, no dig that, nothing was groovy. It was like all this was new to him and he’d only found the courage to stand up there because the cause was just so fucking important. Like none of the things he’d done in his life had happened.
The Queen took the bullhorn. She was the same onstage as she was in private—e
ntrancing, so secure in her right to claim her place that when she gazed at you like you might be her equal you felt as if you’d been given a benediction. “Look around,” she said. “See how many of us there are? Word’s getting out. We’re growing. We’ll win this fight. If we keep—look around again! Look at yourselves!” She made eye contact with a few people in the crowd, modeling what it meant to look, to see. Then, raising her arms above her head, she yelled, “How can we lose? The Army Corps of Engineers has nothing on us!”
Applause. Cheers. She silenced them with a wave.
“You want to know how widely the word is spreading? You all know who Lenny Snyder is. Well, he obviously can’t be with us today, but his wife, Suzy, and their son, Freedom, they’re right here. They came all the way from New York to show their support.” She shielded her eyes with the flat of her hand and searched the crowd for my mother. “Suzy?”
My mother floated her open palm above her head, and everybody turned and gawked at us—well, at my mother, mostly. They wanted something, some vision of the past, some thrilling surge of danger.
“Come on up here, Suzy,” the Queen said. “Inspire us.”
Lenny puttered next to her, half-watching his feet, nodded like a sage. He leered at us. “Yeah, hey, bring the kid up here too.”
We hesitated. This person they expected my mother to be—had she ever existed? Did she exist now? I remember being afraid for her, afraid she wouldn’t be able to meet their expectations. When she grabbed my wrist and marched us up to the front of the crowd, I could feel the violence of her emotions seeping through her fingertips into my body. We stood there next to Lenny and the Queen—Nick and the Queen, let’s say; he was too remote to be Lenny anymore—and we scowled out at all these good people. My mother had that look she sometimes got, like she was still at the barricades, behind a great wall, armed and waiting to knife anyone who came too close.