Dissident Gardens (51 page)

The place was superbly unchanged. Since Sergius suspected he was, too, any alteration would have bothered him deeply.

They didn’t give him Murphy’s basement suite at West House—those rooms were now occupied by a female math teacher Sergius eventually slept with a couple of times, once on the same couch on which he’d sat and learned of Tommy and Miriam’s murder, also lost a thousand hours of his life to fingerpicking instruction, and one time shat his pants. Yet even before he’d made the math teacher and visited her suite, Sergius felt he’d come home to the inevitable. He wondered if anyone could have warned him that the day he followed Murphy into the West House basement suite a part of him would never exit again. He doubted it.

The first time he intruded on the fire circle and silenced their talk, Sergius saw himself in their eyes—
that redheaded loser actually went here!
—and knew they were as right as they needed to be.

For what it was worth, Sergius now concluded he despised Murphy. Fuck Murphy, for knowing Miriam and Tommy better than he had. Fuck him for once bedding Stella Kim but not managing to hold
her interest. Also fuck him for his fingerpicking, which Sergius had been forced by his advanced training to understand was superior not only to Tommy’s, heard on records, but to Sergius’s own. Fuck him for his Quaker guilt-tripping, so plausibly deniable, and yet which by its monotonous abiding-with-the-Light had sunk so deep in Sergius he could barely help but broadcast the same variety himself. Fuck Murphy for luring Sergius into a Lamb’s War without mentioning the Lamb was Christ, and fuck him, yes, for his unhidable, unfixable harelip, which from the first had been there to teach Sergius to reprove himself for not being able to discount ugliness. Fuck him for being, in the end, all Sergius had, and not enough.

What was despising Murphy worth? Nothing.

Murphy had only been helpless to be anything but himself. Could only teach what he taught, and Sergius hadn’t managed to learn it. For what had been Murphy’s first lesson, before all the others, if only Sergius had been paying attention? That pacifism and music had flown to Nicaragua and been destroyed. And what had Murphy had to offer him thereafter? Pacifism and music.

For the lamb who lies down with the beasts is devoured.

The bull guided into the arena, refusing to fight, is slaughtered notwithstanding.

The Time Pilot who never fires a shot remains stuck at level one, until his enemies thicken to blot out the very air he requires to breathe.

Sergius had that day entered the room to confront the debris of Rose Angrush Zimmer upright in a chair, clad in a bright-patterned, wide-lapelled polyester shirt and black slacks, costume draped like a puppet’s on skeletal limbs. The black of her eyes shone out, only sure live thing in the pale limp flesh of her cheeks. Rose’s hair, still black-streaked, was being brushed into an upswept shock by the same orderly who’d presumably dressed her and helped her to the chair—for she was undoubtedly propped there, made ready for her visitor. And now the orderly announced him. “Look, Miss Rose, your grandson’s come to see you.”

“Hi, Rose. It’s Sergius!”

A sound came from her then, a long snorting sigh from deep in her chest, a flicker of dire merriment trapped in there somewhere.

“I’ll let you two be,” said the orderly. At that he and Rose were alone.

“I’m sorry I haven’t visited you.”

“Who?” she demanded.

“Sergius. Your—Miriam’s son.”

“Who?”

The eyes drilled him, her lower lip jutting in a sarcastic smile, no matter that sarcasm might seem beyond her powers. Maybe it was her last power.

Perhaps it would have been useful to have Stella Kim here, if only to be mistaken for Miriam. By the chain of resemblances Rose might have fixed herself to the moment’s significance. Sergius and Rose, two blood relatives, each other’s last. No, he realized. I’ve got useless Gogan uncles. And Rose has sisters in Florida, cousins in Tel Aviv. My great-aunts, my cousins, if I knew them. Yet Stella Kim had said they rarely contacted Rose now. Seeing her, who could blame them? What was he doing here?

“I went to school in Pennsylvania, so I couldn’t—after they died—”

“Who?”

“Look at my face,” he suggested. “You used to say I looked like Albert. Your husband.” Desperate to be recognized, he’d risk cruelty.

“Who?”

The bright eyes and sardonic grimace beamed a transmission from the unsalvageable world. The rest, faded and faked, upright like a dummy, her owlish hooting, all might be the price of his amnesiac crimes. The dead thronged in the room between them, unable to supply their names.

Then, in a surprise that jolted the essence of vomit into Sergius’s mouth, Rose produced a complete utterance, voice as lucid and commanding as that which had quaked him at four or five years old.

“Have you any idea how long it’s been since I had a proper bowel movement?”

“No,” he finally managed.

She narrowed her eyes and hissed the punch line. “Nothing but
rags.” The fullness of Rose’s contempt was levied at this inadequate product of the formerly awesome engines of her intent. “I strain, for hours. Rags like you’d blow from your
nose
, Cicero.”

The name meant nothing to him. “I’m Sergius, Rose. Your grandson.”

“Who?”

They circled this way, as toward a drain. He said his parents’ names to Rose, mentioned Uncle Lenny, spoke of Sunnyside, in each case eliciting a horrible guffaw. For that was what he’d decided the grunting sighs low in her chest were attempting to be—laughter. The ghost of a cackling relish at having outwitted her visitor. She’d spoken the unfamiliar name to him twice. Cicero? Was the philosopher her imaginary friend? There were no books in the room. The depths in Rose’s gaze were opaque. Or no depths but phantom of depths. Forget not, lest ye be forgotten. His violent need was to salvage a token from her room, souvenir of a tour of the ruins. Maybe she’d have her old Lincoln cameos around, the medallions with which she’d decorated her shrine. Lenny’s penny books had kept Rose’s fetish vivid for Sergius, alive in his uncle’s mockery: “Your bubbie prefers King Abraham, with a crown of thorns. The cent, see, this is the People’s Lincoln.”

Sergius rifled her bedside. He found only soiled yellow file cards, remnants of some old address system, each entry typed on a cursive typewriter and hand-annotated, Rose’s degeneration illuminated in her longhand’s descent. The annotations fixed identity, cast judgment, or reported fate: “second cousin,” “library trustee,” “never calls,” “divorce,” “hate,” “dead.” At the bottom of this rubbishy drawer, hidden beneath a few flowery drugstore get-well cards, Sergius’s fingers met something soft as flesh. A tattered calfskin folder. It revealed a foxed U.S. Office of Price Administration war ration book (
Any attempt to violate the rules is an effort to deny someone his share and will create hardship and discontent. Such action, like treason, helps the enemy
 …), hand-inked lines reading, “Zimmer, Miriam Theresa” and “Age 5 months.”

Theresa? His mother had a middle name?

Why
Theresa
?

How could it all be so arbitrary?

Sergius fled.

“How’d it go, kid?” He had no idea how long he’d been gone, except Stella Kim ground out her second cigarette, and with her heel now rolled the two butts beneath the park bench where she waited.

“I’m not sure.”

“Was she able to talk?”

He thought of bowel movements. “No.”

“Did she know who you were?”

“I think she called me Cicero.”

Stella Kim laughed sharply. Everyone laughed. Likely the dead laughed, too. “I guess that makes sense,” she said.

“Why does that make sense? Who’s Cicero?”

She explained.

What, in this high boot-trampled mountain clearing, at nightfall on her life’s horizon, was Miriam Zimmer Gogan’s to defend? Only to be the last to know herself and what had happened. To maintain the boundaries and integrity of the self to her private finish line. To mark some conclusive distance from Fred the Californian, now up to who-knew-what in his tent, here in this forest cul-de-sac, under the mountain’s darkening torrent of odors and shrieks, the dark’s onset. Miriam had felt night pronounce its terrors three times now since their jeep ride up out of León, into the incongruous rain forest of pine and banana riven with sudden pitches of swamp and secret bushwacked cornfields. She hadn’t glimpsed soap or running water since León: How could he even want her? But his stink was worse. Her stink would be swallowed in his. To direct her own scene, then, under the proscenium of leaf canopy and contrails. To recollect her purposes and powers as
a leader of men
and be untenanted by whatever mayhem Fred the Californian wished to visit upon her. To deny the pig Fascist his delight. To perhaps cadge one more American cigarette.

In point of fact Miriam had purchased, with wonder as if excavating from a junk shop some holy relic, a rainbow-bull’s-eyed pack of Vantages in León before the benighted escapade into the mountains, before she and Tommy had fallen in with the maybe-CIA botanist. The Guardias had stolen the pack from her at the first checkpoint,
and then she’d bummed one back, when on returning to the jeep after their interrogation she’d seen three young soldiers clustering around the treasure. One futzing open the cellophane, the others leaning to snag one and to share a match. Was Miriam about to happen upon a Dave’s egg cream or a Jade Palace moo shu pork on this mountain? Not too likely. A Vantage would have to do. To have been, therefore and to her very last, that one who’d after interrogation brazenly divert back to bum a cancer stick from men so young that behind their fatigues and ammunition belts they could as well be the Puerto Rican contingent in the lunchroom at High School 560, she flouncing over to demonstrate to Lorna Himmelfarb how she was unafraid and that
all men are brothers
. New York policemen and firemen appeared this way to her now, ballplayers too, the baby Mets, John Stearns and Lee Mazzilli.

She’d spent her life approaching and confounding groups of men, plenty in uniform, like the phalanx on the steps of the Capitol or the screws in the D.C. jail; now Guardia and Sandinista alike struck her as boys. The exceptions? The exceptions were the problem. The botanist, yes, but worse the two men into whose hands the botanist had by idiocy or villainy delivered them. El Destruido and Fred the Californian. The guerrilla chief El Destruido a gruesome bandy warrior, his whole form like that of a creature enslaved but also strengthened by a sojourn under the gravitational pull of some planet ten times the size of Earth, Saturn or Jupiter maybe: mud-clotted fatigues dragged to earth, bunched at his ammunition belt, the biceps and calves exposed by his rolled sleeves and pants legs sluggishly large and elastic and hairless, glimpsed lengths of a python in repose. El Destruido’s drooped canvas hat was worn at the horizon of his eyebrows, baggy eyes masked in permanent shadow, and the mustache framing his comically weak chin was also gravity-enslaved and no more persuasive than those Miriam and Tommy had donned as Halloween props.

“Does it mean ‘Destroyer’?” Tommy asked. “Destroyer of what?”

“More precisely, ‘The Destroyed,’ ” said the botanist.

“Tell him I’m going to write a song about him.”

After a brief exchange with the guerrilla in Spanish, the botanist said, “He says he expects many songs to be written about him after his death.”

“I’ll have this one finished sooner than that,” Tommy boasted.

Negotiations on this point had faltered, however. As the forest soldiers came and went from the pit fire, afternoon caving to leaf-glade evening, the American whom El Destruido grinningly introduced as
Fred el Californiano
took the botanist’s place as their interpreter. It was as if he’d been waiting in El Destruido’s camp for them, as if relying on their being magnetized, one American to another. Fred’s outfit, drab cliché anywhere else, was disconcertingly incongruous here in the rain forest: serious biker leathers, battered aviator glasses on a band around his neck, and a serious biker’s belly stretching a Joplin T. His beard looked either ten days old or like remnants hacked at with a jackknife. The way he’d lurked on the periphery before stepping to the fore made Miriam think of the abstract expressionists in the Cedar Tavern, how they’d mull behind whiskeys until lunging in without warning to brawl, or to try to pick off a Bennington girl. Fred evoked as well one of Rose’s mute conspirators, those at a CP meeting who massed contradictions in silence, wallflowers of evil. The botanist himself was now nowhere to be seen. El Destruido, too, vanished briefly from their circle. The boyish soldiers generously shared banana-leaf-wrapped portions of bean gruel and something in tin cups going under the name of coffee. Certainties blurred in the dusk light.

When El Destruido returned, Tommy inquired, by means of Fred the Californian, “You
are
a revolutionary, yes?”

El Destruido nodded happily, needing no translation.

“But not a Sandinista?”