Dissident Gardens (53 page)

She hadn’t thought about fucking so much in years as now that she was willing to die to prevent it.

Yet not to die any sooner than she had to.

She didn’t think the darkened path back to El Destruido’s camp held any possibilities. There was always the forest itself, but no. In this she agreed with Rose. Always opt for civilization’s brutalities, for the stupidities of the urbane. Not for Rose or Miriam the primal indignity of nature. The forest was death. Fred’s tent was a tiny patch of
civilization and perhaps somehow inasmuch a zone of susceptibility to speech and reason. Fred’s tent was where she’d go and find her fate as soon as she emptied the pressure in her bladder that had been with her for hours. Fred’s tent was where the cigarettes were.
Why did you rob banks
,
Mr. Sutton?

To tell one more joke whether anyone got it or not.

The salvaged Vantage, lit for her by those acne-cheeked Guardias, was Miriam’s last smoke to this point. But Fred the Californian would give forth with one of his unfiltered whatevers. He’d grant her one in the spirit of the condemned’s last request, because even
batshit psychotic freelancers
have a code. He’d grant it under the flag of romance, that being according to
Ms. Magazine
any rapist’s self-exculpating fiction. Miriam had never been raped despite a few brushes, a loft’s freight elevator, older brother Rye, Dirk in Germany, a scattering of other Who What or Wheres, these accounts all discharged now. To die unraped, then. To live a little more before dying. To taste a cigarette. She smelled him smoking in the tent and the vividness of the American’s cigarettes were unlike anything she’d known, little nerve-rewiring tendrils reaching her where she squatted now. In cities the buildings might be made of smoke, Manhattan an ashtray, a bowl of lives smoldering down to crud and every ostensibly clean shirt suffused, deodorant giving way to surges of impatience and nicotine. When they took to the mountain road the CIA botanist had, in his pedantry, as he waded in from the roadside again and again for a sample, insisted Miriam attend to the ferns. In boredom she’d complied, begun learning the names—
Microgramma, pedata, cuspidata
—and then despite herself felt her senses unnaturally heightened. The forest’s silence had reached her then, animal dew dripping through the leaves, the scentless uncivilized sweetness of the oxygen. A cigarette was like an acid trip out here. Fred the Californian might be smoking Camels, anyway something unfiltered, or maybe it was that the filters had been removed from her sinuses and forebrain entirely, that she now tripped on withdrawal and uncensored fear. To arouse in him the prospect of a little romance, then, before wrenching his testicles or jamming her elbow into his black-furred throat or raking her already splintered, mud-rimmed fingernails to draw his blood. She’d
taste
the Californian’s blood if she had to.

To first live a cigarette’s interval and then to die, then to make the man die if she could. To retain the involuntary dowry of her wifely virginity. Tommy at Quaker meetings on passive resistance while she and Stella Kim studied self-defense for women with a martial arts expert who’d gotten boners when they wrenched his arm up and pulled him close for the pretend knee to his real balls. (“Twist, gouge, scream,” the self-defense instructor had repeated. Here, she wouldn’t bother with the screaming.) Stella fucked the guy, who was later, they heard, arrested for armed robbery, something ridiculous and humiliating about a kung fu “master” carrying a sharpened screwdriver. What she’d give for one now.

What was Miriam’s anymore?
To know the kid was safe
. Before they’d gone out of León she’d written to Stella Kim, in knowledge it could be the last chance:
Whatever happens don’t let my mother get her hands on the kid
. Miriam’s message otherwise convivial, touristic, covering two postcards and then sealed in an envelope on which she’d scribbled the commandment again on the envelope’s paper itself, beneath the flap. Let it be found. Let it be seen.
To know she’d lived
. To have reached the high air of the jungle no matter the hands into which they’d fallen. To have gone among the poets and revolutionists when Albert was among the bureaucrats and informants.
To not give anyone the satisfaction
, including foremost this fucker or would-be fucker Fred the Californian now with what a glimmer told her was a pistol in the tent and pretending not to stare through the mosquito netting to watch her squat as the urine flooded from the corroded Brillo between her legs, as she made exact aim at a patch of ferns, tribute to
la Flora de Nicaragua
. To have hand-ushered Tommy to the very limit of his capacities and talents. No one needed to hear
Sandinistan Light
, Tommy only needed have written it, the album like a hologram formed between them, as real as
Bowery
. If he wasn’t dead already he’d be playing the songs to soldiers at another campfire, nodding his head in the face of their impassive flicker-lit incomprehension, as if by persisting he’d eventually get them to sing along,
C’mon, everybody this time!
To be, unlike Rose, married to her last instant to the first and only man who’d had her. Yet at the same time to discover, as did Rose, but to bear the knowledge more capably, that
every cell is infiltrated in the end
.

“Mrs. Zimmer was found walking four miles from her home, after dark.”

“Which direction?”

“East, I think. Why should it matter?”

“Just curious. Go on.”

“When they took her home there was nothing in her kitchen apart from a few tins of sardines. And in the refrigerator some cans of V-8 juice.”

“That’s probably about what you’d get if you checked her fridge anytime in the last couple of decades. I mean, since whenever they invented V-8 juice.”

“Um, yes … I see.”

“Which, I’d never thought of it before, must be some kind of wartime ration thing, no? Eight vegetables in a can?”

“I’m sorry?”

“I should be the one apologizing. You were explaining Rose’s state when you found her.”

The social worker who’d left a message for Cicero Lookins with the Comp Lit secretary had evidently not anticipated being met with he who materialized in her office; never mind his tweed jacket, his navy tie, his penny loafers, never mind his perfect syntax and
undropped g’s. Never mind his tight-picked, clean-edged, one-inch ’fro, this being years before his dreadlocks—his hairy jargon, his surplus value, his untranslatable self—had belched forth. Erudite sass from a two-hundred-pound black man was enough. So it had gone for Cicero, almost since exiting the Renaissance Ballroom stage for Princeton, stupefaction like this bureaucrat’s at the sight of him being serial reward for his excellence in not only reaching the stations he’d reached but for modulating his voice to the local norms. Apparently he’d fooled this particular white lady on the telephone when he’d returned her call. You’d never need wonder how a Clarence Thomas could assemble his shoulder chip in reverse, for it was by Cicero’s attainments that he’d gained special witness to the liberals’ adjustment to a brush with
actual
equality. Let her saturate in her dilemma; he’d grant no rescue.

“Perhaps you know that her sisters are in Florida. They’ve been unresponsive. In one of her lucid moments Mrs. Zimmer suggested we contact the Queensboro library board, but it appears her term with them expired a couple of years ago. Her natural daughter is deceased. There’s a grandson, just a boy, and a distance away. She identified you as her son-in-law—there may be some gap in our records.”

“It’s in a manner of speaking,” Cicero said.

“If there are other family members you’d suggest we call—”

“I may be her best option at the present time.”

“She also mentioned an Archie.”

“I don’t think he’ll be any help to you.” It had taken a few phone calls to Rose from his Princeton apartment before Cicero had sussed out who she was on about.

“Is he—a friend? Visitors, even occasional, are a lifeline in and of themselves, especially during transition to managed care.”

“I believe he’s married and would prefer to be left out of it.” Cicero doubted it would advantage Rose with these people to explain her robust occupancy of the imaginary. No, Archie Bunker won’t be assisting Mrs. Zimmer with crossword puzzles in your dayroom, no more than would Abraham Lincoln, Fiorello La Guardia, or John Reed. Yet let the social worker be startled, if she needed to be, by the risqué implication that Rose had poached a married man. The
bureaucrats should be on notice what a boisterous handful they’d taken aboard here, if and when Rose reoccupied her “lucid moment,” and maybe even if not.

Let Rose have enough in her, he prayed, to eat this fucking joint alive and spit it out.

Conflating resentment-at-underestimation on his own and Rose’s behalf, Cicero Lookins might be more than halfway toward the commitment he’d no notion he’d shown up in this office to make: to serve not only as Rose’s interim power of attorney but as her, yes, surrogate son-in-law, solitary soul advocate, spirit animal. The last of her life’s companions, both Douglas Lookins’s and Archie Bunker’s relief pitcher.
Lifeline
, the social worker’s word for it. He’d zero intention at the moment of nominating himself, believing he’d consented only to sign the forms that would permit the visiting doctors here to recommend her for the surgical unblockage of the blood circulation around her lower intestine, which some diagnostician had suggested might allow return of her cognitive function and with it her emotional thermostat, such that she could regrasp the rudder of her own end-time destiny.

Cicero sort of doubted it, but he didn’t mind them trying.

He just wouldn’t want to be the one who had to inform her that her apartment wasn’t there for her to return to. That any hopes of living outside the Lewis Howard Latimer Care Facility rested with the chance of hospitality from one or the other of her married sisters—those whom Rose relentlessly excoriated for the suffocating conformism of their retreat to Florida. Their offspring might be alive, but their sensibilities had perished! No, having been told Rose was little better than comatose, Cicero signed what he had to sign and got out, not accepting the invitation to go in and have a gander at her. He instead went out of the drab facility, put his tie in his pocket, and walked until he found a pizzeria. Ate in Rose’s honor a Queens slice with extra cheese—her regular sustenance, between cans of V-8—before finding his way to the F train. Then, taking the occasion of the command visit to the five boroughs to pause in Manhattan before hopping Jersey Transit, he conveyed himself to the West Side Highway to suck a little dick. Or, preferably, a big one.

The moon of his life had two faces, one light and one dark. The sunlit face: his increasing grasp of a vocabulary with which to articulate suspicions regarding the unexamined assumptions dictating the everyday life all around him, the enabling of a savage critical excellence. Cicero Lookins laid waste to a seminar as he’d once laid waste to sixth-grade chess opponents, pulverizing the ranks of their pawns, then treating their major pieces like pawns too. In this bright New Jersey light, in seminar rooms and book-lined offices and in full auditoriums where he stood to fillet a speaker with his intricate qualms, respectfully expressed—in the fullness of this light Cicero seized the attention of his mentors. Under their guidance he began placing articles and presenting at conferences. Then, waiting for no one’s permission at all, began his first book, converting his mentors to peers as well.

The dark face? His second life he’d commenced under another mentorship, that of a visiting postdoc named David Ianoletti, a thirty-two-year-old Jewish Italian whose youthful baldness was compensated by a wild swarthy hair suit everywhere beneath his clothes, nearly curling from the neck and sleeves of his shirt, insulating his slippery small body somewhat as Cicero was insulated in his pigmented plushness: undressed, neither was bare. Ianoletti tutored Cicero out of his sophomore virginity, past a foolish trepidation that he wouldn’t be permitted to animate anything but a
theoretical
queerness out here in Jersey, demonstrating how his Eden of scholarship needn’t also be monastic.

The experiences Cicero’d sampled once, twice in a Sunnyside playground restroom, weren’t excluded on this side of the Hudson River. The frontier! Manifest Destiny, get it? What exactly did he think Lewis and Clark had been getting up to, anyway? Or Allen Ginsberg, for that matter? In that spirit, Ianoletti took Cicero in his Toyota Corolla—Cicero, who, in this one way a perfectly average New York kid, wasn’t yet a driver—on a tour of the glory holes and other specially appointed toilet stalls of the New Jersey Turnpike: the J. Fenimore Cooper Rest Area, the Joyce Kilmer Rest Area, the Clara Barton Service Area, and the especially fruitful and apropos Walt Whitman Service Area.

Then, and in the meantime, seeing Cicero’s problem with driving, on a warm May night, as a parting gift at semester’s end, Ianoletti returned Cicero to the city of his youth, in the direction of which Cicero’d turned a chilly shoulder since his parents’ deaths. After a nice but judiciously light dinner at an Italian joint on Hudson Street, his generous lover introduced him to the trucks that hid in the shadows of the ruined West Side Highway, parked empty of freight and left open to discourage damage by would-be bandits, and to what went on inside and around the perimeters of the trucks nearly every night. There, Cicero discovered for himself, discovered not as a theory or principle or rumor but discovered with his eyes, ears, nose, hands, and cock, the unashamed homosexual bacchanal that had become possible in the historical margin between Stonewall and disease.