by Mark Powell
He tried to talk to the black guys on the subway, giant earphones wrapping their heads.
Fuck you looking at, nigga?
Cornrows. Winter coats like spacesuits, like they were packed inside, bundled for some Mars mission. He walked up to them, looked at the mud-spilled eyes, the jaundiced skin, the uncut nails. Watch caps. Dreds tucked under a do-rag.
You need to shimmy the fuck on, cornbread.
He didn’t care. Coat-hanger tattoos of puffed brilliance. Wounds slathered with antiseptic cream and wrapped in panty liners. Acne. Shave bumps. Not just blacks, but Mexicans, Salvadorans, Hondurans, Chinese, Indonesians. These were his people. He wanted to make contact, to know them, to share the struggle if only they would realize he was one of them, inside he was one of them.
He kept going, walking, doing.
The war was on TV, but not so much anymore. People were sick of the war.
Sand and palms. An artillery shell stuffed into a camel’s ass.
I ain’t saying it again, cornbread.
He began to suspect skin mites, but the point was academic: given the right mindset you could cup suffering in the bowl of your joined feet.
Girls took interest, or maybe one girl, a passing interest that manifested itself as a shy wave or—on two, arguably three occasions—holding the elevator door for him. But Reed had no time for this. Shrugged her off because there came a time when a man had to think, goddamnit. He hid behind his stutter, the way his tongue couldn’t seem to stay off the back of his teeth, the way it failed to climb. The aggression he was holding in check. The way he stood there in front of God and his fallen world with his finger in the dike, waiting.
He was called upon by a documentary filmmaker named James Stone who took Reed’s deference for latent homosexuality. Reed wasn’t gay, but he was lonely, and allowed Stone to take him to the occasional meal, another time to an indoor firing range in New Jersey where Stone held forth with his ear protectors up on his head like plastic growths. Let me tell you what fear will do for you. Stone saying this. Fear will wipe you clean. You can depend on its redemptive powers, Reed, on its potential to re-create. It’s why guys like me go to firing ranges, yeah? A handgun is pure potential. The only genuine re-creation any of us will ever get. A gun, a bomb, a weapon, young master Reed, is the simplest and surest way to reshape the world. He slid down the ear protectors in a much too studied manner. He was faintly brown skinned, darker than Reed. He was making a film about a collective of anarchists. He was possibly in love with a Jesuit priest. Possibly, also, it was a nun and Reed was imagining the whole gay thing. You aim with your dominant eye, but do not shut the other. That’s the trick.
Another day they shot pumpkins with an Adaptive Combat Rifle at a range out near the Newark Airport. Stone’s face was just starting to give, the first expression of sag and paunch. He kept one finger near the rim of his nose but never quite in it. He believed he was having a spiritual crisis. These goddamn anarchists had him confused and he was not a man conversant in muddle. I’m seeing things. Fairy-tale ghosts. Sometimes these white clouds follow me like smoke rings. He called early, day after day. Referred to them as Reed’s wake-up calls, a public service available for a limited time because shortly he was off to finish his documentary. These American anarchists working for peace in Baghdad or maybe it was Damascus or also, possibly, Mali.
Half-asleep, body chewed by bedbugs, it was difficult for Reed to keep such details straight.
“It’s endlessly childish and mean but don’t think violence doesn’t happen. These people stand in the way, Reed. Human shields. Half-crazy, half-brave.”
“Let me sleep.”
“It doesn’t actually accomplish. This is what I’ve discovered. Violence, I’m talking about. It doesn’t accomplish. Yet it still beckons.”
“What time is it?”
“You don’t sound tired. You slept well, didn’t you? Clear conscience. Or maybe you mean physically, eight solid hours.”
“I want to sleep to quarter to six, that’s my dream.”
“That’s your fantasy, taking place in said fantasy world where the bad guys don’t go blowing the good guys up.”
“You’re the one who said it beckons.”
Jimmy, then, with his big Ha! “Like you have no idea.”
Stone had a one-bedroom in Nolita, barren but for the pasteboard furnishings it came with, the spare dresser and bed, the mini-fridge, the floor lamp with its shrink-wrapped cord. Reed visited once and found Stone blaring Leonard Cohen. A neighbor knocked against the wall with what sounded like a broomstick.
“All I wanted to be growing up was a folk singer,” Stone said. “John Prine or Joan Baez, I didn’t care. Then my mother went and convinced me what a mistake that was.”
Then James Stone disappeared, off to finish his film in Baghdad, to screen a film in Telluride, to do something somewhere that wasn’t here. Reed half-remembered talk of a fellowship from a think tank in maybe Missouri or maybe Minnesota because, again, at times it was difficult to keep things straight.
One day at work he got into the office personnel file and double-clicked his name and then double-clicked on the PDF of a reference letter from a former teacher and when he read “You wouldn’t think boys like this still exist” he stopped right there because the sentence was pure possibility. It could fall either way but as it stood—as Reed let it stand—it was like that moment in a car, rolling backward but already you’ve shifted from reverse into drive and at any moment that sudden catch will wake you.
His mother called.
The girl held the elevator a third time—possibly a fourth time, given your point of view.
One day, Stone called wanting to talk about self-immolation, a sacrificial act, Reed. They’re doing it right now in Tibet, in China. They did it in Tunisia. This isn’t just an inventory. There’s an ecology here, a web on which you might plot desire and anger and the endless bullshit called life on planet earth.
“Jimmy—”
“Don’t think this isn’t timed to climate change, to glacial melt. All these burning bodies heating up the atmosphere. You need to know this, Reed, but I’m warning you: don’t speak of it. You speak of it and you silence a room. Mothers will hush you, come and put a hand on your arm, comfort you. But rest assured that someone somewhere, some young man, eager but sad, he’s going to set himself on fire. Moscow, let’s say. Red Square. And that’ll be the last you hear of Putin.”
He called another day to talk about Dostoyevsky because did Reed know that when old Fyodor kicked off he left behind an outline for a sequel to The Brothers Karamazov? Did Reed know this? Just a little nugget of info I’m relating here. Reed had read Karamazov, right?
Reed was silent, alone in his room and nodding in that glazed way that indicated he hadn’t but would never admit as much.
“Reed? You there? You’ve read it?”
“I’m f-f-familiar with it.”
“Familiar with it. All right. Then you’ll appreciate that in the sequel Alyosha—you remember Alyosha? Youngest son, would-be monk?”
“Of course.”
“Well, he runs off to Moscow and becomes a Christian anarchist. A terrorist, I’m saying, Reed. A legitimate thrower of bombs. Boom, boom, boom. Strange fact, right?” He laughed. “Just a little nugget is all. Something I thought you might appreciate.”
Reed hung up, Googled “James Stone director,” and read demented shit about torture and death, his connection to the billionaire Peter Keyes. When he searched for Keyes he found him everywhere, news about his wealth, about his murder. Profiles in Wired and the New Yorker. Someone had named a sandwich after him. Grilled tempeh on brioche. The kind of thing you’d eat in a Lucite chair while outside it rained.
And while those meanwhiles curled one inside the other—little seahorses fit fin to fin until one couldn’t be discerned from the next—he decided to up his game, to make his overtures overt. Walk around Zuccotti Park talking shit, NYPD cameras everywhere. Buy a zero
-degree sleeping bag and a SteriPEN water filter as if he was taking up permanent residence in the wild. Haunted army surplus stores and online anarchist message boards. Returned to the range alone to shoot exploding zombie targets because—he guessed—pumpkins were out of season.
James Stone drunk-dialed and cried, absolutely wept into the phone, but you couldn’t say why, not that Reed would want to even if he could. The world is bricked out of sadness, a block-by-block construction, injustice on top of anger, as ugly as it is impervious—is that not reason enough? You aim with your dominant eye, but do not shut the other. That’s the trick.
When the zombies exploded they scattered a burst of pulpy gray matter. Like brains, obviously.
He bought something called a LifeStraw that could filter up to 10,000 gallons.
Read Adbusters on the 6 train.
His father was named CEO and transferred to Atlanta where he could occasionally be seen discoursing on the Eurozone crisis on CNN.
Meanwhile, a guy on the trading desk got hooked on hot chicken from a soul place in Dumbo but wanted his sour cream from some artisanal creamery in goddamn Fort Greene. It’s Thorstein Veblen. It’s conspicuous consumption if he wasn’t confusing things, and he couldn’t wait to blow it the hell up.
Meanwhile, meanwhile . . .
There were ads on Craigslist for assault rifles. Narco-traffickers laundered money through eBay. He read up, little nascent revolutionary in training. Tried to wrap his head around bitcoin. How it can be money but not money. It was baffling, but he knew that was just nineteen years of brainwashing speaking up like one of the yapping terriers tucked beneath another braceleted arm.
The girl holding the elevator had pale legs and a slide of gum between her upper lips and teeth and it was that pink he would think about later, that pink like the inside of a seashell. Whatever was precious tucked within the mother-of-pearl. He smelled her perfume, guessed her underwear to be lavender.
His mother called again: Why don’t you come to Atlanta, honey, why don’t you come stay with us? He said no, but secretly was already there, starting over at the whole starting-over thing.
Please, Reed?
When he said maybe she sent him a credit card which he promised himself he wouldn’t use and didn’t until one day on a whim he bought the elevator girl a $900 camel’s hair coat he never had the balls to give her.
These were moral failings, chinks in his righteousness not even his puckered skin could redress. He drank from the bathroom tap which now and then went brown and he tasted the rust so thick he practically chewed the water. But even this wasn’t enough. In this world how could it be?
There was a street off Houston that sold nothing but birds. Not just exotics, not just macaws and parakeets, but ordinary chickadees. Wrens. Blue jays. Ornate cages. Mineral-enriched seed. Cracked corn. A block over people paid $300 a month for the privilege of swinging a sledgehammer at a tractor tire while a man with a shaved head screamed at them. Faster. Harder. More.
Excess.
Greed.
Ego.
He was almost certain his father belonged to three different racquet clubs in three different cities.
How do you live in the world a good man? was maybe the question.
Or maybe he was past questions. Maybe all he wanted was to be surprised by his life, to be overtaken by himself. Maybe all he wanted was to blow things apart so radically that what was left was unrecognizable because why the hell would he want to recognize the life he currently led? It was ridiculous; he knew it was ridiculous. He had things to offer, he had access. Why wasn’t anyone else noticing this? He cared about the poor, about their suffering. He was on their side, goddamn it.
It was an argument he’d played out countless times with his father, the Great Professor who could do anything and everything except teach his son. Sitting together in some Chelsea brasserie, his father in town for a conference and having lunch on his expense account. The white savior complex, son. Reed’s advocacy, Reed’s interest, just another form of colonialism. They’re human beings, Dad. And his father looking up from his fritto misto. That’s exactly what I’m saying. When you speak on their behalf you are taking away their personhood. You’re acting as if they can’t speak for themselves.
But— But there were no buts, no responses. In the presence of his father Reed could never speak and soon enough that impairment (his mother’s word) spread outward like ripples troubling a pond and he couldn’t speak in the presence of anyone. Tongue-tied said his father. So he began seeing a speech therapist three days a week, and then a psychiatrist who wanted him to talk—was she fucking serious?—about his relationship with his parents, as if such a thing existed, as if such a thing was anything more than the leftover spillage of his well-appointed childhood.
Reed wasn’t made out of his childhood, for God’s sake.
Reed was constructed from the need to act.
Why wasn’t anyone noticing this?
And then someone did. Someone made contact because at some point desperation begins to register. It moves outside the self to occupy actual physical space. Has to be addressed as much by the larger world as the sad sack son of a bitch sitting in his shirtsleeves, drinking instant coffee.
The summer groaning with heat and never-ending unrest and then the summons arriving with the swiftness of fall. Thanksgiving Day a message appeared in his inbox beckoning him to a theme restaurant in Times Square where they waited for him at a second-floor table, the place otherwise empty. A man and woman, early middle-aged, suburban, and safe. The decor was that of an Old West movie: a saloon with WANTED posters and potted cacti, a cardboard cutout of Clint Eastwood. The bar served sarsaparilla and the waitresses wore bonnets and gingham dresses. The waiters were in straw hats, twine strung through their belt loops. Reed paused for a moment at the head of the stairs, warm in a shaft of noon sun.
The man stood to shake hands.
The woman kept her eyes on the stairs.
“You’ve come to our attention,” the man said. “There has been talk.”
The woman wore a blue pantsuit. The man had a head of gelled hair and a mouth of tiny teeth that put Reed in mind of Indian corn, worn nubbins that belonged between the lips of a toddler. He put a manila envelope on the table, slid it past a smear of maple syrup.
“We are,” he said, “in need of a courier.”
“Who are you?”
“We represent a collective of sorts. But me personally, I’m the Voice of Reason.”
Reed never opened the packages. A note would arrive in his box, a time, a place. There were flat DHL envelopes and larger boxes plastered with packing tape so that they appeared more as conceptual art than means of transference. They went to PO boxes or corner bodegas or, on one occasion, an apartment in the same Chelsea building where he had once lived with his parents. What effect these deliveries made he never fully knew. If something had happened—an attack, a bomb—he might have traced his movements, established some causal chain. But nothing ever happened. Yet, every week he felt a gathering rightness that bordered on religious ecstasy, every movement an act of devotion.
In February a package arrived from James Stone. The postmark por avión, stamped over the Arabic, stamped over the image of a dusty man in a djellaba. A copy of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Demons and a book of Francisco Goya prints with a letter folded inside.
I want to thank you for your hospitality, Reed, and, particularly, for your quiet acceptance of my own uncertainty. My life as I know it has changed radically and already I know how ridiculous this all must sound, but if it isn’t clear enough let me state it plainly: I’ve joined the group I’ve been filming. They—we—are committed to getting in the way, Reed, to sticking our puny twigs in the great big spokes, to throw our bodies into the gears of the machine. No matter what happens, Reed, I want you to know that I am trying (very inadequately most of the time) to stand in solidarity with the poor and oppressed. Thank you for understanding my choice of this path. I look
forward to seeing you again with joy and hope and with the assurance that we will surely fuck them up.
I may call on your help in the future. In the meantime, abide in
love,
James Stone
Reed put the letter in the trash, but couldn’t quit thinking about it. Took it back out and put it in his pocket. He looked at the Goya. He tried for weeks to read the Dostoyevsky but it only made his head hurt, like some higher math understood by a grand total of no one. Suicide—that was the only thing he took from it. Suicide as the only act you could truly own. But the Goya, the Goya ignited something inside him. Some pure light that he felt scrape and gather until it shone so bright within him it began to shine out of him.
In March he could wait no longer and asked for another meeting with the Voice of Reason.
“This is uncommon,” he told Reed, same upstairs table, same tourist trap. But no woman to study the stairs. “I trust you have a reason for such imprudence.”
“I want to carry something of consequence.”
“You have been.”
“Come on.”
“You continue to.”
“Come on. I want something that really matters. I know you carry heavier things.”
“You think we don’t love this country, don’t you? The crewcut cops. The amber waves of grain.”
“I want to carry something with weight.”
“Like a brick?”
“Like a gun.”
“What do you know about guns?”
“Like a bomb.”
“What the hell do you know about bombs?” He looked at Reed as if trying to untangle something, his hair, his motives, and Reed wondered at his own delivery. He had practiced before, alone at his mirror in Flatbush, because it was such a ridiculous thing to say. A bomb. So stagey. A b-o-m-b.
“Let me tell you how the world works,” the Voice said, “the adult world, I’m talking about. You want to do serious work you immerse yourself in it, you disappear inside it. Most people don’t have the focus for serious work, and those that do tend to have it only once in their entire lives. You look up and it’s gone. It flutters away.”