Dissident Gardens (50 page)

“C’mon,” said Toby, and they pressed underneath.

Toby was like Miriam—wild for opposition. This was how Sergius knew his parents anymore, in resemblances, uninvited glances. He found himself swarmed with sense memory now, as if in a reincarnator’s past-life terror, the waking dream of time’s collapse. He’d pressed too near the horses once before, with Miriam, downtown, at the famous occupation of the Department of Health and Human Services, mothers marching for day care, making allegory by dragging kids into the fray. He knew this creature, its widening, abysmal nostrils, sweat-rivers on bulging breast, jackbooted cop dwarfed in saddle by the disaster of the animal itself, something irresponsibly loosed into the streets, suggesting that in their foolish crusades Tommy and Miriam had overlooked how state power, with its electric chairs and H-bombs, reserved for itself the advantage of nihilism. How could Sergius find words to explain it to them? He’d lost that chance. New York was unconcealed as a holding area for past calamity leaching everywhere into the present, the island flooded with jubilant untold millions witnessing for peace shrunken to the width of one suffering boy and one dreadful, likely also suffering, horse.

For his being a ward of the place and having no predilection to venture much from the grounds; for being, more widely, under the stewardship of Fifteenth Street Meeting’s Scholarship Committee; for tending never to miss a meeting for worship; for being promoted now to a kind of lieutenant in Murphy’s classes, tutoring a legion of younger kids on guitar—for these reasons, at fifteen Sergius was subject to a fond joke around Pendle Acre, that when he finished at some Friends’ college, maybe Earlham or Haverford or Swarthmore, he’d return here, to be Murphy’s replacement. Not that Murphy was evidently on the verge of retirement, though in his Fox-quoting hair shirt he was ever less sociable with the other teachers; perhaps the joke reflected a nervous wish Murphy would take his intensity elsewhere.

The Quakerest kid wasn’t sure what he thought of the joke.

Yet other arenas seemed barely more than theoretical to him.

When one evening he was called to the West House pay phone, to learn from Stella Kim that he might not have exactly forever if he wanted to pay a visit to the nursing home to see Rose—in fact, it could easily be a matter of months—Sergius took the train to New York again. This time, he determined to treat it as an ordinary destination, as opposed to a staging ground for spasmodic episodes pertaining to the irrecoverable past. He’d slay the dragon of his grandmother, discover what dominion she might or might not hold
over
him, what she did or didn’t hold
against
him.

In the same cause, he didn’t take Stella Kim up on her offer to crash at her new apartment on Jane Street, much as a teenage boy might still nurture images of his mom’s best friend’s casual way with a Japanese robe. He brushed off Murphy’s expectation, too, that he ought to rely on the Quaker grapevine, the elders at Fifteenth Street who’d always offered hospitality. Sergius dialed up Toby Rosengard.

Toby met Sergius at Penn Station and ushered him to his, Toby’s, childhood home, a cavernous crumbling brownstone on West Eighty-Second, front corridor lined with Toby’s various bikes, for track racing, mountain biking, distance. This was what Toby had shirked college to do: get serious about his biking. With just three souls the house was absurdly empty, a Gothic mansion—Sergius couldn’t quit thinking how many dozens of housemates Miriam would’ve crammed into it. The upper story belonged to Toby and was off-limits to his parents, a couple of shrinks who kept the basement for their offices and mooned around the parlor level in apparent ignorance of the black-light posters and marijuana grow lights above their heads, and to whom Sergius was introduced with a minimum of language on his and Toby’s way back out, into Central Park to sit on a rock and get high.

The greens were not filled with a million waging peace, perfectly okay with Sergius for the time being. He and Toby had a whole boulder to themselves, soaked butts and Schaefer bottle caps in its craters the sole evidence they hadn’t actually staked out a high perch on the moon. Yet below, a vigil. Sergius, though he couldn’t remember his father’s face, knew a vigil anywhere. Like one of Tommy’s, this involved guitars.
Imagine no possessions
. The singers, barely older
than Sergius, their Lennonism secondhand. Sergius wasn’t the only Time Pilot. The sixties formed a seaweed gauze through which they all paddled, browsing for opening enough to surface and breathe free.

“This park is my home,” Toby said, extinguishing the roach with his fingertips. “I do fifty miles a day.” A rare boast. Sergius knew to take it seriously.

“Have you won any races?”

“The competition’s with yourself.”

Sergius let this sink in.
Nothing to kill or die for
.

“You still hanging around with Murphy?” Toby asked. “That whole Lamb’s War bit?”

“Sure, why not?”

“I dunno.” Squinting off into some middle distance, Toby appeared to measure how much disenchantment he could want to mete out, then conclude he had little choice. “You figure out who the Lamb is?”

“Huh?”

“Quaker shit seems pretty cool, I mean, I was pretty into it myself for a while, but it’s really all about
Christ
.”

“There are Quakers who don’t believe in Christ,” said Sergius. Though certain of this fact, he didn’t sound certain to himself.

“Sure, maybe a few. I looked into it, though. You know most Quakers don’t even do silence, right? It’s called a programmed meeting, they’ve got ministers shoving the Light down your throat, like anywhere else. I’m not too into being
programmed
, myself. My parents tried that Werner Erhard shit on me, when I first started getting into fights. The point is, George Fox,
that
dude was
all
about Christ.”

Sergius felt the perch shrinking or sinking beneath him. Strawberry Fields might in fact be more bowl-shaped, their granite outcropping lodged at the bottom, looking up. Meantime, Toby volunteered further results of his researches. “Thing is, Christ’s the redeemer, right? He’s put on earth to forgive us for our sins, because we’re, you know,
born stained
.”

Maybe you’d shrunken the world around yourself, narrowed it to what you could grasp or survive.

Shrunk to fit the soul in question.

“So I figure when some scar-face hippie starts pushing Christ, he’s
really saying he thinks
I’m
evil. I mean, could you look at a little crying baby and think he was born stained? Don’t you think that shit’s fucked up?”

“I guess I’m more just into the nonviolence thing,” said Sergius.
And nothing to get hung about
.

“Yeah, that’s cool. You hungry? I know this place on Amsterdam Avenue where you push your money through a bulletproof window, they give you, like,
ten pounds
of chicken fried rice for three bucks—it’s crazy.”

The next morning he tumbled downstairs, unshowered and in a cottonmouth fog, to shove his knapsack into the seat of Stella Kim’s puttering Fiat, there where she waited double-parked, for the ride out to Queens.

“Late night?”

“Uh, yeah.”

She chuckled. “Don’t worry, Rose won’t know the difference.”

They snaked along a Central Park cut-through with the taxis, then vaulted the Triboro into that impossible homeland of steaming stacks and tombstones. Sergius waiting to recognize anything, not daring to guess what trigger lay in his outer-borough DNA, but before they’d descended from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway Stella pointed out the nursing home. The site bore no relationship to anyone’s homeland, situated in no neighborhood or even residential zone, instead nestled hideously in an elbow of the traffic’s flow, eight-story tower garbed in a few inadequate hedges, park benches shadowed by the barren overpass. The whole scene was the opposite of evocative of anything, a rebuke to his vanity’s presumption that Queens had to do with him personally. Maybe only numbness waited behind his dread of this expedition, making his all-night anesthetic session with Toby redundant. His grandmother in enforced exile, just another chance for Sergius not even to know what he’d missed behind the door labeled Sunnyside.

The smell inside was cruel, cherry Jell-O and urine under a baseline of floral disinfectant. Floor tiles everywhere curled onto the walls,
chest-high, as if the whole building were a barely disguised tub for convenient sluicing.

“If you’re hungry you can grab a tray,” said Stella Kim. “They don’t mind.”

“No thanks.”

She walked him to the room’s half-open door, then stood aside. “Last time she thought I was Miriam. I doubt that’s going to help you to, you know, get the visit you need.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll see what the nurses are saying. If you don’t see me, I’m getting a smoke outside.”

He applied to Berklee College of Music, the claim of a single-minded devotion to the instrument his way of letting the Quaker expectation down easy. The elders of Fifteenth Street paid his tuition anyway.

In Boston, two different girlfriends left him because they didn’t believe a boy who’d had parents until he was eight years old couldn’t remember his parents’ faces or voices or touch—at least this was why he felt they’d each left. As if their genial, pale-eyelashed guitarist had revealed some morbid vanity, as if he’d conjured the absence of Tommy and Miriam as a kind of warning, of an emotional stubbornness too unpromising to glimpse in a college boyfriend.

After Berklee he did private tutoring for a while, in Cambridge and Bunker Hill, paying off his loan debt in cash that he walked up to the teller’s window to deliver. Some grain of him, though, chafed at entering the homes of the wealthy. He was reasonably sure this was a throb of Miriam’s teaching, her message stirring in his bloodstream, like the guilt he felt whenever placing a bunch of grapes in a shopping cart or ordering the wedge of iceberg.

Skills exportable, at one point he got as far as Amsterdam, then Prague. There, among other Americans, he found himself taking the unwinnable side of ongoing political arguments, entrenched in perverse resistance to an expatriate culture dedicated to trying to outrun the sell-by date of hippieism. As for Europeans, they persistently asked if he was Jewish, and he had no answer. He left Europe.

Six months away, he’d floated free of his contacts, apart from the tutorial service, which set him up in Newport Beach this time. He drew the line at sleeping with his students’ moms except for once. He made friends with a black guy who worked on a fishing boat, which answered no question about what Sergius was doing in this particular place.

He wasn’t by this time in touch with Murphy. He hadn’t attended any meeting for worship since he couldn’t remember when.

Yet when Pendle Acre called and said Murphy was gone—the seeker and penitent having presumably finally climbed up some version of his own asshole—and would Sergius want to seriously consider interviewing for the job, he went. A mentor at Berklee had spoken with him once about how the transmission of the gift of music from one person to another didn’t necessarily involve taking the stage; this had struck him as pathetic at the time, and yet here he was, career teacher at twenty-six. Even Murphy, paragon of modesty, had ascended a few risers, been the performer once or twice before retiring to the risk-aversion of his discipline, to his student-acolytes’ renewable innocence.