The Radicals

by Ryan McIlvain

  I jerked up instinctively to see a plump traffic cop holding his palm out to us. A trio of men in green reflective vests and white hard hats bent over an open manhole behind him. Into the subterranean darkness I could see a hooked stepladder descending alongside a dirty segmented yellow hose, wriggling wormlike with strange pressures. It suddenly horrified me to think that a grown man had to go down there, tucking in his shoulders to get past the hose, breathing in the tangy decayed stench that came up to us a step delayed. We were back on the sidewalk now and I was suddenly nauseous.

  Afterward, in the Korean grocery, I leaned my head into a freezer case. Greg asked if I was okay.

  “Did you make eye contact with that cop?” I said.

  “No, I don’t think so. Why?”

  “That scared the shit out of me. I haven’t caught my breath.”

  Quickly, unobtrusively, we split up to fill hand baskets with the kind of food that could last us a week, two weeks, a month if we needed it to—bunker food. Pastas and soups, beans, canned vegetables and fruit, a goldbrick stack of ramen noodles, rice, bread, peanut butter and jelly, a trio of on-sale boxes of cornflakes, milk, a flat of bottled water that I tucked under my arm and labored toward the front of the store with. Greg intercepted me and reasoned that the water was too bulky to carry home and not exactly indiscreet, either, if that’s what we were going for. I granted the point, but instantly I thought of the electric-looking orange water that stank in the bowl after my recent urinations. (“You’re supposed to pee pale,” Jen had told me—another intimacy.) I went back to scour the shelves until I found a box of Kool-Aid powders to help the tap water go down.

  “Apparently I’m eight years old,” I told Greg outside. “You sport a blinding neo-Nazi haircut for the cause and I can’t even drink plain tap water.”

  Greg snorted a little, surprising me. A car slowed as it passed us in the street, pulling up to the curb, idling, a pair of brown legs getting out and a female voice calling “Yeah, you’re good,” apparently to the driver. It took me half a block to restart my breathing.

  Greg said, “It’ll be nostalgic. Like summers of old.”

  “What?”

  “I used to drink that sugary crap every day.”

  “Oh, the Kool-Aid. Yeah. Thanks for buying that,” I said. “Thanks for covering all this.”

  “Sure,” Greg said, but now he was the one hesitating. At length he asked how much longer I thought we’d be lying low. I said I didn’t know. He asked about the House’s plans now that things with Bosch had obviously changed. A ponderous weight on that last word—“changed.”

  “I really don’t know.”

  “Well, what are Alex and Sam saying about it?”

  “I don’t think they know either. I haven’t actually asked them. Have you?”

  Greg snorted again, but now it meant something else. I realized he and I were in the middle of the longest conversation we’d ever had—mostly I regretted it. The sun, late morning now, came down like a physical presence, a hot hand on the nape of my oily neck, the prickly crown of my head. The moving shadows that moored to the feet and legs of passersby crisscrossed on the sidewalk. Certain nips of quartz or marble, shiny somethings in the gray poured concrete, caught the light and seemed to lift from their places into the lower air, hovering, like fireflies, or the spirits of the dead.

  “Can I ask you something?” Greg said.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “And you’ll answer me honestly?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Did we have anything to do with this?”

  “No.”

  He looked across at me. “You’re sure we had nothing to do with this? None of us? None of them?”

  “No,” I said.

  “No you’re not sure or no we had nothing to do with it?”

  “Fuck you, all right? You asked your question, I answered it. I think I liked you better in bow ties, Gregory, your fucking cardigans—at least we knew where you stood.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You asked your question, I answered it.”

  We kept on toward the House with our grocery bags heaped in front of us, weighting us down. A few blocks shy of the House I started to feel it in my legs—not the groceries, not the first stint of exercise in three days. It was a sort of muscular dread that came over me, a resistance, a force field that the House put off and that my body couldn’t penetrate. Ocean surf in my ears again, and underneath it a reedy whine like you’d hear after a loud bang. Something swooped at the corner of my eye and the eyelid clutched horribly. You felt the drag of surf against your ankles and legs, thighs, stomach, chest, slowing you now, floating you out past the breakers, out into the currents that carried you away from land. I could just hear Greg’s voice coming over the sound of these swells, these vagues that pushed me back—

  “All I’m saying is that if any of us are involved, in any way, or even if we’re not, staying put is not necessarily a good idea. An investigation like this starts at the scene and goes out in concentric circles—family, friends, neighbors, anybody in the area who may have harbored a grudge, anybody, let’s say, who may have gotten arrested on a disorderly at a Soline protest in Phoenix—”

  “You seem to know a lot about this,” I heard myself say, but distantly, drifting back.

  “Yeah,” Greg said, “I do. My stepdad’s a cop. Okay?”

  I was drifting back, wavering, floating away from my life and somehow dreading it at the same time. What I know is that I stopped short of the House’s high cement stoop, set the groceries down on the sidewalk, and made an excuse to Greg. It wasn’t a convincing one, I’m sure. I didn’t need it to be.

  When I was little, my parents embarked on a fitness regimen that consisted largely of charity 5Ks, a little gym work, and their first outings to the local high school’s complex of under-kept tennis courts. To these last I tagged along. The thick grain of the courts came from a mixture of sand and other anonymous grit that the court makers must have added to slow the playing surface down, or perhaps just out of thrift. In any case, it suited our family’s debutante needs, keeping the ball high and hittable. We darted and swooped around the courts on Saturday mornings (I was aping my parents then, a preteen’s carefree prerogative), pretending not to care what happened to our shots, reveling only in the fun of it, the exercise, supposedly, and the fact that we really were debutantes now, twirlers of tennis rackets bought at a proto–big box store called Pilgrim’s Progress. We were playing the gentry’s game not far from the spot where the Mayflower spilled its first WASPs! I recall my mother in bright red cargo shorts—the late eighties must have had another name for them. My father wore gray sweatpants and an Andre Agassi–esque windbreaker, a study in greens: neon, olive, pine. The courts were far from pristine, as I’ve said, and my parents looked much too much of their time to really threaten the timeless Wimbledon-white purity of the game, yet here was Dad unselfconsciously experimenting with topspin and here was Mom, on my side of the court, hopping back to return the shot with a laughing yip! She regathered herself, mimicked a skirt-pinching curtsy as the yellow ball dribbled into the net.

  “I say, Joseph!” Mom called in her best grande dame. “A cracking shot!”

  “Oh you flatter me, Susanne-Anne!” Dad said.

  My mother’s name is Sue, my father’s Joe, and in this memory they’re laughing with the color high in their faces, the wind in their ridiculous outfits. Merciful forgetting has spared me any notion of what I must have worn on those outings, but I do recall the feeling of confidence gathering in my strokes as I hit the ball flat, then obliquely, then with slice (I caught on to the sport faster than either of my parents), and I also recall the uneasy dawning sense that my parents’ rapport had come before me, developed independent of me, and perhaps had survived a little in spite of me. I was quickly very seriou
s about tennis and often glum, throwing rackets and shouting what curses I’d learned in middle school. Not long after this my parents eased off on the family-style tennis dates, enrolling me in private lessons and sometimes jogging the perimeter of the courts together while I sweated and grunted and swung from my shoelaces.

  It wasn’t until the advent of my idea of myself as an intellectual that I learned to take pleasure, fitful pleasure, in sports. My first girlfriend, born in Korea, adopted into a family of looming Irish Catholics, believed she saw things differently from most people, and I believed her. She was certainly an unabashed scofflaw at Plymouth High, if the law there was to take Eagles football and basketball seriously, as it was. I recall Stephanie’s ringing voice in the cafeteria: “Oh my God, will the ball go in or will it not go in? Will the ball cross the net/line/fence or will it not? The suspense is killing me!”

  And this blasphemy was heightened by the fact that Steph, in the year we dated, danced in the JV cheer squad that took the court or the field during halftime and hurled its members high into the air—they looked like solar flares in their orange skirts and tops—and afterward returned to the bench or the sidelines to cheer on the boys. “All that clapping and rah-rah-rah-ing is just contractual,” she often said. A contrarian by nature, she reveled in the eclectic image she knew she presented: short shorts that rode high on her white thighs, dizzyingly high, and the navy blue NPR tote bag that slapped against her side like a bulky constant companion. Years earlier, before I knew her, she’d made the local paper by exhaustively estimating the weight of our town—buildings, houses, cars and trucks in driveways, driveways, streets and roads, graveyards, the putrefying dead, trees, forests, rivers, beaches and marshes, and a hundred-odd-square-mile layer cake of topsoil and subsoil, roots, aquifers, sand, all the way down to Plymouth bedrock.

  With Stephanie, in other words, you had to find a way to justify sport—pure purpose and grace in action, I argued on the shoulders of Aristotle, not so different from the pleasure of seeing a gymnast-dancer tossed in the air. In college I darkened and expanded this view with the help of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, Derrida, Stevens, Larkin and Hardy, Woolf and Plath, and a handful of others who persuaded me, indirectly, that sports were no more or less meaningful than anything else. If all was vanitas, I would latch on to the things that advertised their emptiness, their artifice, the things that took a certain healthy pride in their self-created image—literature mostly, and games. My deepest scorn was reserved for the institutions and virtues that refused this kind of honesty. I mean religion, of course, but also, a little later on, “work” as a faux religion—its various altars to “value,” “productivity,” “efficiency,” etc. I began sprinkling my breakfast cereal with scare quotes, seeing them everywhere, seeing them riding on the backs of every dust mote, every particle of “reality.” After several brief but involving love affairs with Marxist writers (“Food first,” Bertolt Brecht wrote, “then morality”), it seemed I’d become a Marxist myself.

  It’s a common enough rest stop if you’re trying to take the long way around nihilism. You see the alternative there through the trees, flickering and turning like a sunless lake. You start to wind up and up through pine forests, high mountain roads made entirely of words, and wills, a vertiginously high mountain that you build yourself on the way up it. A wrong move, a sudden buffeting wind, and it’s darkness all the way down. One night in the loosening of nerves just before sleep I’d asked Sam what he thought we’d really accomplished in killing Larry Bosch. “Maybe nothing,” he said, and a part of me shuddered with recognition.

  I got these thoughts down in note form in my phone, in the absence of my notebook, with the intention of transferring them later on. I’d need to go back to the House for the notebook at least, a change of clothes, a few other essentials—I was waiting outside Jen’s work, but waiting with the manic, rattling feeling of a man who can see a giant countdown in the noonday sky.

  Nada y nada y pues nada—from the Hemingway story, I noted down. The sky’s whiteness blinded and obliterated. It meant nothing. I couldn’t feel my right leg from the position I’d taken on the stoop. I didn’t care enough to move. When Jen finally came down on her lunch break I lurched after her down the street like a zombie, a Frankenstein—or Frankenstein’s monster. I meant the monster.

  “Good grief,” Jen said, turning. “You’re out of line, Eli.”

  “I really need to talk to you.”

  “This is totally out of hand.”

  “I just really need to talk to you, Jen. Please, okay? I just really really really really really need to talk.”

  Jen started away from me, turning onto Canal Street, weaving through the fissures of onrushing humanity, running me off them expertly. She wore the pale yellow sundress with black polka dots that I’d loved her in, the pink shoes on her feet quick and light like ballet flats. I couldn’t keep up with her, and now I heard that I was crying. I was streaming tears in the middle of Canal Street, crying in loud gasping jags and shouting Jen’s name.

  “Please, Jen! It’s not what it looks like. Please! Oh my God, Jen, please!”

  Abruptly she slowed and stopped, sidestepping into the lee of a McDonald’s entranceway, but now I couldn’t get the words out. She looked embarrassed for me, sour and squinting, confused, angry, repulsed, uncertain, all at once. She brought me into the suctioned-off airlessness of the restaurant’s breezeway, the noise of the city dropping off as the outer door resealed.

  “What? Eli, I can’t…What?”

  I was blubbering.

  “I can’t understand you.”

  I collapsed into her arms—literally. It wasn’t a ploy, a coy gesture. My legs simply gave out in that quiz-show glassed-in booth that looked out on the bristling passersby, the Hieronymus masses of Canal Street. I met their eyes as Jen swung me around, struggling under my weight. The jury of my peers.

  “My life,” I stammered.

  “Here, here…” Jen propped me up against the glass, put her hands on my shoulders to pin me there. “Speak slowly. Slow down.”

  “My life is over.”

  I said it again through halting breaths. I really felt it now. I knew it in my body.

  “Your life isn’t over, Eli.”

  “I think it is.”

  “Look, hey. Look,” she said, dipping to meet my eyes. She swam up in my vision—beautiful Jen through my tears, with the auburn bangs falling into the white round face, the smear of freckles.

  “You can’t follow me anymore,” she said. “You can’t do it, Eli. You understand that, don’t you? Eli?”

  On the other side of the breezeway a tableful of teenagers sat staring at us, cupping their enormous drinks—

  I felt like a worm slit open and pinned to the tray of the world.

  When I got back to the House I saw the brown paper grocery bags slumped haphazardly on the kitchen counter, with one in particular bowed and wavering with a dark low water stain. I discovered the gallon of milk gone warm to the touch inside it. Sam was already screaming at me—he’d followed me from the door—but I went about calmly putting away the milk and other perishables in the fridge. Where the fuck had I been? Sam wanted to know. What the fuck was my problem? Where was Greg?

  I said I didn’t know where Greg was. I said, “Don’t sweat the groceries, huh? Don’t mention it. Your gratitude is so obvious,” I said, but my voice was shaking now.

  Sam took my shirt in fistfuls and threw me back against the fridge door, scattering magnets and papers all over the floor. A printed photo slid to rest upright: Alex and me and a gaggle of others in stages of pale undress, in the packed dark sand of a Long Island beach. We crouched around a giant FUCK THE POLICE that Alex had spent the better part of an hour carving out of the sand with a child’s sand-castle trowel.

  “This is funny to you?” Sam said.

  “Yes,” I said, “yes it
is. Isn’t it to you? Not even a little bit?”

  The strength of his grip surprised me. I felt the hard sharp knuckles of his fists going into my sternum, pushing the breath from my chest, but I laughed all the same. I couldn’t help laughing now. A late Saturday afternoon at the beach with Alex and some of our ISO cohort, with the beige wafer sun low in the sky since we knew our limits, UV-wise, or at least I did—Alex tanned, of course. It must have been her first outing of the season because her legs above the invisible shorts line looked almost milky in their whiteness, the tone below them starkly different, as if my girlfriend of only a few months at that point had been dipped halfway into a giant vat of root beer. It was an afternoon of swimming, reading, and half-assed sand-castle building until Alex hit on her whimsy and we just sat back and watched her work, laughing, shaking our heads, giving occasional pointers. Who had brought their phone? She wanted the angle of the photo just right, politely but insistently prodding a zinc-nosed man to try it again, if he didn’t mind, a little wider, try to get us all in if he could. In this one the FUCK was partially cut off, in that one the POLICE. Would he mind trying one more time?

  From that afternoon to this—could anyone have plotted it? I was almost crying for laughing.