Revolutionaries

by Joshua Furst

  “Stop it,” I said.

  He lobbed another one.

  “It’s not funny.”

  “I’m not trying to be funny.”

  “Just stop it.”

  The next pebble bounced off my forehead.

  “You almost hit my eye.”

  “So it’s still funny,” he said. “If you still have your eye. ’Cause it’s all fun and games till somebody loses one. Remember, kid?”

  He tossed another one, this time explicitly aiming it at my face.

  “Can’t you just stop throwing things at me, please,” I said.

  “Sure,” he said. And then, of course, he did it again.

  “And can we, maybe, go home?”

  I was shaking. Shivering. Even colder than before. I had a dreadful sense that I was going to lose it and the tears were going to start falling down my cheeks and Lenny’d be so pissed that he’d throw larger rocks at me, harder. Or maybe he’d just flake out and ditch me there. My hands found my arms. Covering up. For protection. For warmth. A little bit of both.

  He noticed. I know he did. He—how do I put this? It was like he changed shape. Actually, physically morphed. Shoulders collapsing. Hard edges melting. Realizing all at once that he’d gone too far.

  “Fuck it,” he said.

  He tossed another pebble in my direction, but halfheartedly, like he was saving face. The rest fell through his fingers as he backed away from me and slumped down on the concrete ledge behind him. Shaking his head.

  Sad. A pure, simple sadness.

  He’d be leaving the next day—or the day after. He was looking at a future in which he might never see me again. And this trip, this visit to this abandoned zoo—it was as much for him as it was for me. So we’d have something to cling to when we missed each other.

  I know this now. Even then I’d felt the pressure of its importance.

  Edging toward him, grasping for something like courage, I said, “What about our mission? We still have to free the animals.”

  For a second, he watched to see if I was kidding. Then, slowly, the smirk broke across his face. “All right, kid. Sure. Let’s go free the animals.”

  We did the loop again and again. That zoo’s not that big. We’d been walking in circles for hours by then. And as we made our way around and around, Lenny started hopping. He skipped. He cracked his knuckles and did one of his famous cartwheels. Psyching himself up. Returning to form. He did some karate kicks.

  “Who we gonna free, kid?”

  I didn’t know. We’d placed so many animals in so many cages—often in the same cage on successive go-rounds—that I couldn’t keep them straight or even remember which ones were where.

  “What animals are weakest?” I asked.

  “Well.” He contemplated the contributing factors. “The mice are the smallest, but I don’t know that that makes them weakest. They’re shrewd little fuckers. You ever try to trap a mouse with your bare hands? Damn near impossible. And they’re basically just rats—which you gotta love, right? Rats are tough motherfuckers. One, they’ve got strength in numbers. Two, they’re pests in the best of ways. Vicious. Diseased. They’re creative destruction incarnate. When the plague comes, they’ll show you what ‘all men are equal’ really means. They’ll inherit the world. You ever hear of the super rat? He can leap thirteen feet from a standing position. His bones have mutated—they’re soft, like cartilage—so when he falls out a window or off the top of a building, he bounces like a rubber ball, no broken bones, no punctured organs. Just a bounce, and he’s good to go, racing off to the next dumpster. So rats are out, and by extension mice are too.”

  “There’s the insects,” I said. “They’re even smaller.”

  “Exactamundo. Beetles, stick bugs, mosquitoes, dragonflies, water bugs, grasshoppers, crickets, cockroaches—can’t forget cockroaches! Bees and wasps in all their variety, leaf bugs—you know them? They’re green. Shaped like holly. Plus, the millions of butterflies and moths that populate the Earth. And ants! All those fucking ants! You get the picture? Strength in numbers again. Times a billion.”

  This went on for I don’t know how long. Propping an animal up, knocking it down, going through the whole menagerie, boom, boom, boom, fish, frog, newt, deer, fucking marmoset.

  Finally, as we circled around the plaza again and passed the sculpted hill of slides and ledges, I cracked it. “Penguins!” I said.

  Lenny’s head bobbed—processing, processing. He pulled at the air like he was trying to grab my meaning. “Tell me more,” he said.

  “Penguins. They can’t fly. They can barely walk. I mean, what do they do? They’re just lumpy black-and-white beanbags, really, bopping and sliding around on the ice.”

  “You’re on to something, kid,” he said. “But where do they keep the penguins in this motherfucking hole?”

  “Right there!” I pointed.

  Pounding his forehead with the butt of his hand, he said, “Of course. I’m fucking blind.”

  We were each pretending for the other, yet somehow, together, we’d conjured up something true. I felt it. A rustling in my brain like gusting leaves. Something about the difference between who we are and who we seem to be. About how the bad—or the problematic—the annoying, destructive, hurtful, negligent parts of a man exist simultaneously with the good. How sometimes these barbed parts of a person are the good. They’re inseparable from the good, so entwined that the one can’t exist without the other, two versions of the same vision, a difference in point of view. These weren’t thoughts a six-year-old could manage, and I couldn’t have articulated them like this, but I felt them flickering just beyond my comprehension.

  What I mean is I saw him, that day at the zoo, as someone separate from my own needs.

  “You see that trapdoor?” he said, pointing at a padlocked slab of black plywood hidden on one of the platforms. “They must be jailed up in there.”

  He ran off to rummage in the trash bags piled up in one corner of the plaza, kicking and rolling them over each other so he could see what was beneath them. Then, not finding what he was looking for there, he poked around the plaza, peering through the chicken-wired windows of the buildings to study the dark spaces locked away inside. Scheming. He waved me along behind him and we wandered down a little path that led around the back of one of the buildings. We found a shed back there, a cramped little room barely bigger than its waxy green parks-and-rec door. No windows, but somehow, Lenny had a sense. He brushed me back and knelt down to study the rusty iron lock.

  His overstuffed wallet open in his palm, he coaxed a thin vinyl sheath out of the inner sleeve. A glasses repair kit. Seconds later, he’d jimmied the lock open and slipped into the shed. When he came back out he had a crowbar in his hand.

  “Freedom?” he said, meaning me.

  “Yes!”

  He thrust the crowbar out in front of himself like a sword. “To the penguins! For freedom!” he said, this time meaning the spirit in the air.

  Snickering, giggling, delirious, we raced back to the plaza and hopped the moat and scrambled up to the door of the penguins’ jail. Lenny wedged the crowbar’s spiked end beneath the tab of metal fastened under the padlock. He planted a boot on the lip of the platform and yanked.

  “Hey kid, be a champ. Get in here and give me a hand.”

  Standing behind me, he showed me where to hold my hands on the crowbar, placed his own over them and readjusted the bar.

  “You ready?”

  “What if we get caught?” I said. I was thinking of the pigs and their billy clubs.

  “You’ve been arrested before, kid. It’s part of the fun. There are good laws and bad laws and it’s okay to break the bad ones. Think of how betrayed these penguins’ll feel if we don’t save them. Sometimes, when the cause is great enough, you have to sacrifice yourself. It’s a moral imperative.�
��

  “I don’t know what that means,” I said.

  “It means let’s smash some shit up and free the fucking penguins!”

  One flex of his muscles and the screws holding the metal tab in place pulled free from the wood.

  “You did it, kid!”

  He flipped the door open, and we peered into the stairwell and the black void beyond it.

  “Check it out,” he said, a hand cupping his ear. They’re clapping for us. They’re shouting, ‘Spartacus, Spartacus, Spartacus!’ And look! Here they come!”

  And we watched as the penguins hopped up the lip of the platform and slid down the side, hundreds, maybe thousands of them, waddling to freedom. And though they were invisible, though they didn’t exist, they seemed, right then, as real as anything could possibly be. They huddled together, a great mob of them, brushing past our knees, moving as one toward the zoo’s main exit, which was, of course, also padlocked shut. They bottled up in front of it, bobbing up and down, waiting.

  “All right, kid. Our work here isn’t done yet,” Lenny said. Raising the crowbar over his head with both hands, he strode forward to free them. “Kid? I can’t do this without you.”

  And again guiding me, letting me feel like I was the one doing the job, he slipped the crowbar into the loops of chain bunched around the gate and cranked it like a propeller, twisting the chain around and around until it buckled and froze. And then with one more crank, a great exertion of force that I could feel vibrating through my own arms, he popped it.

  He unraveled the slack from around the iron bars and flipped the gate’s flimsy lock with his pick. Didn’t take but a minute.

  “Set them free,” he said.

  And I did. I swung the gate open on its creaky hinges and the penguins flooded past us. Not just penguins. Leopards and chickens and foxes and peacocks and pandas and snakes. Elephants and tigers and badgers and grizzlies and white-tailed deer and flamingos and platypuses and elk and moose. Squirrels and chipmunks. Voles and moles. Meerkats. Tarantulas and salamanders and geckos and Gila monsters. Otters, mink, rabbits, bobcats, hippos, lemurs and rhinoceroses. Emus and giraffes, hundreds of giraffes. Hummingbirds and woodpeckers and birds of paradise and turkeys and Canadian geese and robins and chickadees and sparrow after sparrow after sparrow after sparrow. Donkeys and wallabies and wildebeests and ferrets and baboons and gorillas. Monkeys of all sorts and sizes—rhesus, howler, capuchin, spider. The horses. The mules. The water buffalo. Koalas and kangaroos. Even domestics: dogs and cats and goats and sheep and steers and animals I didn’t know the names of. Animals the world hasn’t seen before or since. Jackalope, of course, but many, many more. Animals that could be recognized only by their sounds. The kra-kraw. The chit-chit-chitter. The whee-ee-eeze humpf. The chupaboom and the gwooaah. Huffers and hailers and mouth-breathers. Stompers and shufflers and galumphers. And, bringing up the rear, the mice and the rats and the cockroaches, the skeeters, beetles and termites, a great mass of bugs, tumbling over and over itself like one giant vibrating organism. Then the turtles, slow-poking along, skittish. And finally, like trail cars, marking the end, the pigs—not the ones who patrolled the streets, but those other, most intelligent of creatures.

  We watched them all go, watched them swarm down Fifth Avenue and march into the traffic that couldn’t be bothered to notice they were there.

  “Come on, kid,” Lenny said.

  And we chased after them. Joined their ranks. We ran through the city with them, wild and free, the two of us, Lenny—my father—and me. And at some point, I realized I wasn’t cold and I wasn’t hungry and I didn’t give a fuck anymore that my favorite shirt was torn.

  * * *

  —

  “You remember that?” he asked again that night as we flew back to New York from Miami.

  I told him I did. I said, “I remember all of it.”

  For a while he stared at me, studying my face, searching for something there, some sign that the things that had mattered to him would matter to me too. That he’d made a difference. That hope wasn’t lost.

  “Yeah,” he said. Turning away, he pressed his forehead to the window and gazed out at the clouds piled below us like neon-blue pillows lit up in the moonlight. “Good times.”

  I could sense him retreating to one of his dark places. If there was a future, he couldn’t find it. And so he went silent. He shut me out.

  Not another word for the rest of the flight.

  Maybe…

  I guess what I’m saying is I’ve fought my fights.

  You go ahead and change the world if you want. Me, I’m skeptical. I’ve done my time. I’ve opted out.

  A person’s got to live.

  You dig?

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Revolutionaries would not exist in the form it does now without the help of a great many people. I am indebted to each of them and grateful for the kindnesses they have shown me.

  Gary Fisketjon chose to take another chance on me, and he, along with his assistant Genevieve Nierman and the many other folks at Knopf, have shown yet again why they’re the best in the business. I thank them, along with Richard Abate, for ensuring that this book found its way into the world.

  My early readers included Andrew Altschul, Edward Gauvin, Matthew Goodman, Gordon Haber, Mike Heppner, Nicola Keegan, Binnie Kirshenbaum, Adam Langer and Jeremy Mullem. Each of them provided important perspectives that contributed to helping me focus the work. Hanan Elstein, who read the book in manuscript more than once, was particularly insightful. And Joseph Michaels, who masterfully scrutinized every single word, sentence, paragraph, chapter, etc., refused to let me get away with anything less than the best that I could do (I’ll say of him what he once said of me: “Somebody give this man a job!”).

  Ben Clague, Em Pacheco and David Bradley likely destroyed their eyesight deciphering my microscopic handwriting as they transcribed the raw material of this book into a typewritten electronic form that I could then manipulate and edit. Without them this work would have forever remained nothing more than the lunatic scrawl of a madman.

  Throughout the years of drafting and redrafting, Ruth Adams and the good people at Art Omi consistently provided me with a quiet, encouraging space in which I could disappear entirely into the work. On the basis of nothing more than a whisper in his ear from Brenda Lozano, Cesar Cervantes Tezcucano offered me a transformative monthlong stay in Luis Barragán’s magnificent Casa Pedregal in Mexico City. And Todd Lanier Lester allowed me to join, ever so briefly, the brave community of Lanchonete, a coalition of artists and activists roaming like radical nomads around São Paolo. Each of these people and organizations supported me, both materially and spiritually, and reminded me why the work I was doing mattered.

  In less tangible but possibly more crucial ways, DW Gibson—my partner in crime for some fifteen years now—as well as Eva Fortes, Uche Nduka, Rien Kuntari and everyone else who’s passed through Kristiania, joining the argument, struggling and dreaming and fighting off futility, bolstered me when I didn’t know how to bolster myself.

  Alicia Maria Meier found value in my work when I had lost all confidence and helped me rebuild my belief in the possible. I’m humbled by her faith in me and my writing and astonished by the ferocity with which she pushed me to stick to my principles. Long may you run.

  For no discernable reason, Lee Bob Black has continuously taken it upon himself to do things for me and my career that I would never think to do myself. He claims it’s fun, but it seems to me more like hard labor. I don’t deserve it.

  Finally, there is one person who has sustained me beyond all possible measure: my wife, Elizabeth Grefrath, whose wisdom and compassion know no bounds.

  * * *

  —

  Oh, and of course, I am grateful to Abbie Hoffman—provocation, inspiration—for having ever existed. We need your spirit in the world, now
more than ever.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Joshua Furst is the author of Short People and The Sabotage Café, as well as several plays that have been produced in New York, where for a number of years he worked in the downtown theater scene. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is the recipient of a Michener Fellowship, the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Art Omi. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.

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