Dissident Gardens (56 page)

But it was never like that again.

Six months later he found her in bed, unwilling to dress for his visit, file cards strewn across the bedspread. Her horrendous blockage was back, her world again narrowed to the size of the room, or to the size of the shrinking room within her. The Shea visit had faded like a dream. “
Help
me, Cicero,” she said, not a plea but indignantly, as though he’d neglected this effort long enough. Rose’s handwritten cards, home for her tattered recall, an address file grown to a Parkinson’s-feeble block-letter index of the players under Rose’s memory proscenium: Real’s Radish sales reps and library board members shuffled together with ancient CP contacts disguised as boyfriends, or vice versa.
Sister
, reminded one card, Flatbush address lined out, replaced with another in Florida. Then, in a shakier hand,
DEAD
. Others held random jottings, Rose scripting cues for every occasion.
Elie Wiesel HATE
formed the complete text of one. If she could somehow read all the notes at once, or project the cards into a hologram of her own head, she’d be restored.

There was no card for Miriam, who therefore went unmentioned lately. Cicero couldn’t imagine any sympathetic reason to bring her up. Nor her grandson, who’d been vanished to Pennsylvania.

That Sergius Gogan didn’t come up was a mercy to Cicero particularly, a sore spot he didn’t wish probed.

“Who you looking for?” he asked now.

“He’s a policeman I knew.”

“You know a few of those.”

“No, no, long ago. He’s dead.”

“Then why do you care?”

“I … want him to arrest a nurse.” Always this, the dire bottom line on her plummets: black women thieving what belonged to her. Always this: a onetime revolutionist’s fantasies of uniformed men, bringing cold justice.

“How can he, if he’s dead?”

She stared as if he were stupid, the primal exchange between them, an eternal principle pointing back to his first uninvited lesson in the Dewey decimal system.

“You looking for my father?” he suggested, just to rescue them from this brink.

She nodded.

“You can’t remember his name?”

“I—”

“Douglas. You want me to write it down?”

“Yes.”

He flipped over a twenty-year-old file card and used the blank face to commit a fresh tag for his father.

DOUGLAS LOOKINS

LOVED YOU

DEAD

The gaps grew. He did once in a while find her voluble, though. Some days she talked as she hadn’t in fifteen years. Cicero dubbed these the Dementialogues, something akin to the deathbed filibuster of Dutch Schultz, or H. G. Wells’s
Mind at the End of Its Tether
. Swiss-cheesed with missing nouns, they nonetheless showed flashes of her old cryptological verve, her lunch-line debater’s logic. She’d begin without warning.
“It isn’t the Jew in me that fell in love with a Negro, Douglas. It’s the Communist.”

Cicero lately was finishing a book, growing proudly fat in his carrel. Or say
taking on some stature
, the signature classroom heft and gruffness that he’d come to accept as a derivation from his father. So let Rose call him Douglas if she wanted. Cicero visited less frequently, his New York ritual overturned in any case, the words “gay cancer,” once just a whisper going around, lately getting into the newspapers. The West Side trucks had grown nervous, then eerie, and then depopulated overnight. To take the Jersey Transit in was sheerly a sacrifice, at best a chance to grade papers or take a nap.

He made it his duty to keep her talking if she wanted to try. “Why’s that?” he asked.

“You can quit being a Jew, it’s done all the time. Be absorbed into the parade of American winners. The Communist part, with no choice to be what it is, only to walk naked or in shame—
that’s
the Negro in me.”

“I like the way you think,” he said. “You might want to keep your voice down, though.” He glanced at the hallway, where she never ventured anymore. “Don’t go walking naked either, okay?”

Yet the fragments shoring her ruins were not all decipherable. When decipherable, not all compelling. She’d begun reminiscing about the Lower East Side, dullish shit regarding icemen and ragpickers, a lover’s career on the Yiddish stage, and he’d thought the fragments weren’t even
hers
. Rather, it appeared she’d been cribbing from Howe’s
World of Our Fathers
.

“You browsing that Trotskyite’s book?” he taunted, but she didn’t seem to recognize the word, or want to. A late flirtation with not only
father
, or
Cicero’s father
, but
the Holy Father
might be overwriting even that baseline sectarian commitment. For she’d been reading Moses Maimonides’s
Guide for the Perplexed
as well, preposterous
as this might seem in her condition. He caught her at it one day.

“I can bring you some other reading matter, if you like.” He unpacked salt bagels and whitefish salad, mostly for himself these days.

“God creates the world by going away from the world,”
she said.

“I know I’m slow, Rose, but I just don’t get it.”

“If He’s here, He takes up all the room. It’s only by leaving that He opens a region of possibility for anything else. For
all this
to occur.”

“So what’s that meaning to you, in particular?” Cicero braced himself for a translation of Maimonides’s terms along the lines of Rose’s peristaltic fixation:
To make room for a feast you must first take a dump
.

“This, Albert, is the reason we never had a revolution in America!” She’d called him
Albert
by now a dozen times,
Archie
too, none of it seeming any longer anything too personal. He was content to be the man in Rose’s life, her Big Other.

“How so?”

“Capitalism wouldn’t get out of the way. We couldn’t breathe, we couldn’t begin to exist. It filled all available space.”

“The God That Refused to Fail?”

“Yes!”

“You did okay, though, Rose. You existed for a while. It’s in the record books.”

In the upper story of a top-to-bottom house party on Pacific Street in Brooklyn, a slyly renovated fixer-upper with exposed brick walls shellacked and the staircases replaced with spirals, a kind of home that despite his status here as “native” New Yorker Cicero’d never been in but pretended, to the many in-from-the-provinces young fags packing the rooms, that he had, full of framed black-and-white Fire Island photographs, the reclaimed diner table and also the upright piano’s bench bearing trays of emptied drinks and strewn with smashed rinds of expensive
fromage
, the whole thing a birthday bash for one of these older queens seemingly half the convivial tribe had bedded and who
showed some early signs of the wasting disease, and now someone shushing the crowd and snapping off the Carly Simon on the stereo so that for an instant the storm raging outside and rattling the stale-grouted windowpanes sending a chorus of silly-spooky
whooooo
’s through the party, quieting the crowd not for cake and candles but to raise the volume on the television and cajole the revelers to attend to the spectacle unfolding there, Diana Ross commanding a drenched million picnickers and ghetto boys from the open stage in Central Park, Diana Ross not bowing to the storm but soldiering on, and this now becoming the party’s main attraction as though scheduled for their delight, Cicero joining, too, and acting as though he knew these songs other than from his father’s well-worn
Supremes’ Greatest Hits
double LP with the skip that wrecked “I Hear a Symphony,” meanwhile, the dancer Rolando, who’d just half an hour before been explaining to Cicero that in ballet one never so much as lifted one’s hand without considering the parallel plane of the corresponding foot, had now slipped the big toe of his own quite beautifully bared foot into one of Cicero’s front belt loops, from behind—it was here, in the house party in the July storm, that Cicero realized not only that he never need visit Rose one single time again if he chose not to but, somehow more significantly, that despite having called her the day before to say he’d be coming and having come from Jersey
he wasn’t going to visit her today
.

He didn’t even know how the fuck you got from here to there on the subway anyhow, and he wasn’t going to ask one of these in-from-the-provinces young fags if they could tell him. He simply wasn’t going out in the storm.

He asked to use the telephone and he called and got an attendant he knew a little. Not one of the island nurses this time but a younger black from the neighborhood. He thought of her as a girl though she was likely Cicero’s age. Hell, possibly a freshman at Sunnyside High when he was a senior and keeping it to herself that she recognized him, and who, it now occurred to him all at once, had been searching, in their previous Latimer Care Facility encounters, for a chance to puncture what she judged as Cicero’s excessive air of propriety moving through her zone. When he asked this attendant to explain to Rose that he couldn’t manage to get there in the storm, she just barked
her black-girl laugh into the receiver. You think she gonna remember you called
yesterday
? The phone wasn’t far enough from the hoots and catcalls in the room where the television showed a Supreme on her bravest day, the diva’s triumph as if devised as a transmission to this whole insular defiant homosexual group mind, the realm no more native to him really than any other into which Cicero’d insinuated himself, with its secret semiotics like
Ethel Merman
and
Sydney
and
The Trading Post
. The girl surely heard it all leaking through the line, and then Cicero understood that he was actually hearing Diana Ross’s voice twinned through the phone, and then the attendant said,
You watchin’ the show? Because we sure is, and I wanna get back to it, brother
, and Cicero wondered if the mysteries and inversions of his identity could ever be stanched so long as he set foot in this goddamn city.

And then he was far away from that place, or from all those places. A great number of things and people had begun to die, some of them in reality, some of them only in Cicero’s mind. In the recourse of his discipline he could tell himself, and sometimes believe it, that the purpose of his work was to bind and salve what was lost. Critical thinking might merely be another name for triage, the salvaging of what could be salvaged from the continuous ruin of human occasions. Cicero was not so far now from his original vision, home as a kind of field hospital, his mother the nurse in attendance. Only now the whole world was the hospital, and he was the nurse.