Dissident Gardens (35 page)

This wasn’t close to a good day. Yes, high school’s basic training in keeping ass in seat had stanched the room, after the early desertions. And yes, a number had opened their mouths. Cicero was only half able to listen as they turned out their shallow pockets of woe—the standard-issue divorces and institutionalized retard siblings and menopausal tetchiness they discovered when peeking beneath their Band-Aids. Their banalities only made him feel the banality of his own grievances, in the form he’d aired them. Stranded from historical superstructure. Context, always context. Baginstock College’s young adults shouldn’t have been invited to burnish their gripes, not before reading a thousand pages, or ten thousand—
Another Country
and
A Thousand Plateaus
and
Human, All Too Human
, Jane Bowles and Lauren Berlant and Octavia Butler, stuff still months ahead on Cicero’s Disgust and Proximity syllabus, and further stuff too much for any syllabus. They shouldn’t be called to indulge such self-importances, and he’d been in error to set himself as a permitting example. Cicero’s gripes meant nothing to anyone but himself. Wishing to detonate in their minds, he’d instead done so behind a transparent blast shield, melting himself to slag while leaving them untouched: If he be the neutron bomb, they were buildings. Cicero might as well have torn open his clothes and displayed his belly and dick.
Guess what Lookins put us through this time. Can’t believe I set my alarm clock for
that.

“Can I take you to breakfast?”

The morning’s unnamed context now opened its mouth. Rose had commanded Cicero to teach Sergius. Well, he’d at least dragged him to school. Innumerable sardonic replies suggested themselves, but Cicero, bile momentarily drained, found he lacked the impetus to select one and deliver it. He
wanted
breakfast, even if it had to be with Sergius. Quarts of coffee had his veins wriggling, but it had gone cold in his stomach.

“You got time enough before you catch your plane?”

“Sure.”

A yellow alert. The Portland Jetport was a three-hour drive, and Sergius would be needing to return his rental. Cicero wanted breakfast,
but he also wanted Jiminy Cricket out of town, out of the entire state.

To his credit, Sergius caught the note of inquiry in Cicero’s silence. “I got on a later flight—later this afternoon, I mean. When I read your note.”

Cicero’s fault again, for summoning Sergius to class. Or Rose’s fault. “Fair enough,” said Cicero. “Let’s breakfast.”

“Do you like the Lyrical Ballad? We can walk there.”

Another arched eyebrow. “Who put you onto the Lyrical Ballad?” The little patisserie was a sort of professors’ secret hive, tucked behind Cumbow’s sole rare-book store. A better shield for repelling both the typical Cumbow townie and the twenty-first-century college student could hardly be devised.

“I sort of made a friend last night, actually. She mentioned it.”

“You go working the bar at Poseidon’s Net?”

Sergius shook his head. “No, I met her somewhere else. C’mon, I’ll show you.”

They crossed the lot, past Cicero’s car, Sergius seeming unduly proud to have gained his little flaneur’s knowledge of the campus footpaths and of the scattering of back streets and alleys that comprised the collegiate side of Cumbow’s miniature downtown. In this, and having acquired his enigmatic “friend,” Miriam’s son for the first time reminded Cicero in any way of his mother, the maven of MacDougal Street. Cicero felt a stir of panic, as if he’d made some irreversible error unleashing Sergius the night before.
This town isn’t big enough for both of us
.

No part of Cicero’s dread, however, could have predicted their destination. Occupy Cumbow, such as it was. Three little tents staked out on the expertly appointed lawn in front of city hall, a card table bearing leaflets and a Dunkin’ Donuts box, a few propped-up signs denouncing Pentagon budgets and bailed-out towers of Mammon. Inasmuch as the encampment had gone from a momentary curiosity to an established nonentity, something to pussyfoot past, Cicero was confident his low opinion stood for the general one.

On a clear morning like this the little outdoor theater was fronted by a rotating cast of three or four trimmed-white-bearded retirees in fleece jackets, Old Lefties who’d otherwise be home penning letters to
the
Times
that were never printed. The actual residents of the tents, however, were younger and skulkier, a couple of dingy young hitchhiker types in darker and ropier beards, with skateboard-stickered laptops draining city hall’s public Wi-Fi, and a girl—woman?—in striped tights, cutoff shorts, and filthy down vest, seated cross-legged holding an acoustic guitar, one stickered like the laptops. Half bundled under her watchman’s cap, blond, chunky, unappetizing dreadlocks. It was these that made Cicero certain he’d not seen her before.

“Good morning, Lydia.”

“Hey, Sergius!”

“This is my friend Cicero. Cicero, Lydia.”

Cicero mumbled and stuck out his hand.

“We were heading to the Ballad,” said Sergius. “Wanna come along?”

Sergius, in the great tradition of the wan hetero, was serially addicted to the Actualizing Other. Now he wanted his magical Negro to befriend—what name was it Cicero’s students gave the archetype? His
Manic Pixie Dream Girl
. Though this one was a little worse for wear than Zooey Deschanel, her function was clear enough. Cicero had wished to leverage Sergius into some kind of encounter with the missing body of Diane Lookins, or at least force him to behold her chalk outline and puzzle over the crime of her absence. But Diane Lookins couldn’t compete, couldn’t get into the picture at all. Even raging Rose and blazing Miriam, avowed subjects of Sergius’s inquiry, were faded, voiceless ghosts by contrast to what Sergius suddenly had before him: a real live pistol-hot protester chick.

Lydia, though so far unspeaking, wasn’t shy. She’d shoved her guitar into the mouth of her tent, then leapt up and inserted her small hand into Cicero’s mitt—it was ordinarily with grinning men in suits, deans and trustees, that Cicero recalled the imperative of a forceful handshake a moment too late, his dead-fish offering an unbreakable lifelong habit—and squeezed hard. This, not something every white person could manage. She met his eye, too, twinkling in a conspiracy of the dreadlocked.

“Sergius said you’re almost his cousin.”

“Something like that.” Cicero turned on the pavement and slouched,
as if toward Bethlehem, in the direction of the Lyrical Ballad. He felt incapable of anything but putting distance between himself and the tiny spectacle of Occupy Cumbow. Though he couldn’t say why it so outraged him, the encampment was like a splinter in his eye. Of course, Occupy Cumbow slumped along the pavement with him now, Sergius and Lydia falling into step at his side. Well, breakfast, at least, was an unimpeachable good. Cicero envisioned shoving one of the coffee shop’s mammoth, twelve-toed, icing-drenched bear claw pastries across his teeth.

Sergius now babbled. “I wandered down here after dinner last night, Cicero, it was cooling off and I wanted to explore downtown. You didn’t tell me Cumbow had an Occupy. They cleared everyone out in Philadelphia, but I guess it’s in the small towns where the people are still making their presence known—anyway, when I walked up, you’ll never believe what I heard.”

“What?”

“Lydia was playing one of my father’s songs. I mean, can you believe it? ‘To Pass Beneath the Bower.’ I had no idea anyone remembered that record, let alone somebody half my age playing it at a, um, rally.”

Half your age indeed. But Cicero kept mum. “There was a
rally
here last night?” This much he couldn’t resist.

“I’ve played it at rallies,” said Lydia, not troubling even to put defiance in her voice. The secret of her weightless certainty might be that to her it was a rally anytime she lifted her guitar. Anyway, who was Cicero, that she need defy him? “It’s one of the great anthems, people take a lot of courage from that song.”

“I wasn’t aware.”

“There’s a bunch of verses to memorize, but the changes are simple, you can teach others to play it really easy.”

Cicero was truly uninterested. They’d passed the bookstore’s front, ducking into the alley where the coffee shop’s entrance was hidden. It wasn’t the wrong hour to mutter a hopeful prayer for seclusion; a majority of Cicero’s colleagues ran classes in the morning’s second slot and so would have vacated the Ballad until lunchtime. Sure enough, the three of them assumed the corner table in a room otherwise bare of familiar faces. Nor was the barista one of Cicero’s kids, as had been
his ill fortune at least once before. Cicero, at the counter, tapped the glass on the other side of which, nestling in a bed of powdered sugar and slivered almond crumbs, lay the morning’s last bear claw: Things were looking up. Sergius and Lydia got lattes and heaping square portions of coffee cake. Lydia spooned additional sugar into her coffee, the American addiction to sucrose being apparently not covered in Occupy’s otherwise wide-ranging critique.

“The thing is, Lydia and I were talking, and I realized my father’s
Bowery
album really is in this wild sense a precursor to the movement. The Forgotten are like a rough draft for the Ninety-Nine Percent, right?”

“Tell me more,” said Cicero, then gagged himself with bear claw before he could further betray his own interests.

“Well, if you’d been to Zuccotti Park, or with us in Philly, you’d see it instantly. Whatever anyone intended at the start, once the camping began the movement was all about making the, you know,
urban homeless
visible again. Showing what the typical citizen has in common. Except first we had to learn it ourselves, by living on the streets.”

Tom Waits growled on the Lyrical Ballad’s stereo, offering his art-school paraphrase of the lament of a hobo, larynx scarred by reflux—the exact vocal equivalent of blond dreadlocks. Cicero suddenly felt he might drown in recursions of minstrelsy, blackface of a very particular kind: appropriations of the Negro vagabond.
Black bum
, hot cultural ticket at last. If only Tommy had lived to see it. The youngest Gogan Boy had never, so far as Cicero’d heard, ever spent a single night “living on the streets”; Cicero wondered how many nights Sergius had, no matter his claim of acquaintance with Occupy Philadelphia. Lydia, on the other hand—Cicero could
smell
the girl.

She interrupted plowing through her coffee cake to speak up now. “Sergius was obviously meant to walk by at just that moment. I mean, I know about a
billion
songs.”

The ironies sank in through a certain dawning panic. Sergius had arrived at Cumbow seeking familial inspiration. Failing to drag it from Cicero, he’d scraped it off the sidewalk anyhow. This a direct result of Cicero’s non-invitation to Sergius to share in sauvignon blanc and gnocchi at the Five Islands Grill: Cicero’s reward for not dining
with Sergius was to breakfast with Sergius’s new girlfriend, aka the Ghost of Tom Joad. A girl whose frank and unapologetic gaze, whose precipitous familiarity, whose
braggadocio
reminded Cicero of no one so much as, yes, a grade-Z Miriam Gogan. Not that Cicero was inclined to offer Sergius
that
comparison. Let him live in blind pursuit of his mother. Only let him please not persist in this sport in Cumbow, Maine.

“I went to Cicero’s class this morning,” Sergius told Lydia. “My first time sitting in a college classroom in, hell, twenty years.” If Sergius ingenuously emphasized the distance between his age and the girl’s, this didn’t prevent Lydia from shining steadily in his direction. Cicero supposed that if Lady Billion Songs had a hard-on for the corpse of Tommy Gogan, then this handy substitute was youthful by contrast.

“Cool. So what do you teach, Cicero?”

She was the first person her age to address him as other than
Professor Lookins
in a while. “Why don’t you ask Sergius to tell you about it.”
And close your mouth while you chew
.

“Well, I hadn’t read the texts, but it didn’t seem to matter.” Sergius’s tone was jaunty—he and his Occupy girl seemed incapable of other than moonish chirping in each other’s presence. So the fact that he was organizing a rebuke was slow to register with Cicero. “I was expecting some kind of Marxist-influenced literary theory, but this was more of a kind of sob session, honestly.”

“It was political in the highest degree,” said Cicero, fierce now. “You might want to acquaint yourself with what’s known as the ‘affective turn’ in the humanities, Sergius. What you’re disdaining with the word
sob
is as political as it gets, the passage of exiled sentiment from one subject’s body to another’s. The transmission of affect.” This was truth and no good at all. Armoring himself in hostility turned Cicero’s sincerest allegiances to jargon and junk, to ash in his mouth. Besides, he hadn’t attended well enough to his students’ testimony, had walled himself from their sob stories behind the tempered shield of his own.

“Well, I’m surprised to hear you defend it, because I thought you pretty much went down in flames. I figured it was all some kind of perverse demonstration on
my
behalf.” Cicero saw that inside the crimson theater of his red hair, freckles, and sunburn, Sergius’s cheeks
had flushed with hot adamancy. “I felt sorry for your students, and then at the end I felt sorry for
you
, which is the only reason I invited you to breakfast, but I guess that was a mistake.”

“You invited
me
here?” Cicero had to work to keep himself from exploding.

“You’re pretty patronizing, Cicero, but you seem to forget I’m a teacher, too.”

“I had thought you were here as a songwriter. But I notice you didn’t even pack a guitar. A teacher, then, sure, I’ll take it on faith. But today you visited my classroom, which put you in the role of student.”

Lydia said, “I’ve gotta say, it sounded cool as
shit
, to me. I keep meaning to audit some classes in one of these college towns. I should’ve started with yours.”

Sergius accepted diversion with plain relief. “Lydia and I wondered if you knew—have any of your students gotten involved with Occupy? She was saying they aren’t a real presence at the camp.”