Dissident Gardens (57 page)

By the time Cicero tested negative in Oregon—left to wonder whether he’d escaped infection by happenstance of his preferences or some idiot luck of the body—word had reached him of David Ianoletti’s death. The trucks not only were gone but had been swept ahead of a merciless harvest of the regular denizens, a world vanishing like a mirage. Who knew how many from that Pacific Street house party still lived? Half? Fewer? The heyday of a polymorphous bourgeoisie had been such a brief interval, in the end. Its formerly obnoxious ritual songs now hung in the air, strains of party music drifting across some unnavigable body of water.

Cicero was an expert deathbed visitor. Attending to Rose, he’d learned the marks to hit: mainly, get his damn self through the door, into ward or hospice or darkened bedroom, abide beside a dwindling body. Primarily the task was to show up and not demand anything of the dying. Tell a nurse to circle back later, while never doing the same with a doctor; hike up a gown and steady a body over a toilet seat, wipe up after. T-cell count obsessions were a sport not so different from Rose’s constipation journals, really. Cicero’d made peace with the odor of certain disinfectants commonly applied at the join of an IV needle to the crook of an elbow or back of a wrist, didn’t begrudge the ocher stain these sometimes imparted to his Arrow shirts. Cheated of any chance to visit David Ianoletti, he’d made amends with other lovers. There were not so many of those, putting aside the men at the trucks with no names he could trace—though among his lovers’ lovers, and his friends, the times offered plentiful dying men to call on. After a while Cicero told himself to quit. Just because he was an expert was no reason to make too much a habit of it.

The last time, in for a conference, Cicero went without calling ahead, directing his cab from LaGuardia off the Grand Concourse and to Latimer by easy memory, then checking his rolling suitcase with the nurses at the front station. He’d brought Rose a copy of
The Vale of Attrition
, just off the presses, imagining it would mean something to her to see her nappy-headed protégé published. People of the Book and all that. Now he was one.

Well, it might have meant something to her a year earlier. He placed it in the chicken’s claws that had become her hands, and she stared, Kubrick-ape-at-monolith-style.

“I
wrote
it, Rose.”

All that existed of her was the adamantine skepticism death-beaming through slitted eyes. Her mouth might be fused shut. He’d been away long enough now, and she’d journeyed far enough over her horizon, that it wasn’t by any means certain she knew who he was.

He pulled the book from her hands, turned it over, and let her examine the large paperback’s back cover. Verso Press wasn’t ordinarily in the habit of using an author photo, but Cicero knew the passport-style black-and-white served a purpose of which no one had
dared speak: to make obvious, without needing to awkwardly assert in the jacket copy, that diversity had occurred, in case the author’s name didn’t sound black enough. Cicero’d posed in a Jean-Paul Sartre trench coat and skinny tie in front of a downtown Eugene consignment shop. Through the shop window’s reflections a still-life arrangement of tchotchkes was visible over his shoulder, prominently including a dressmaker’s dummy, bald but with breasts, its gaze directed out of the frame. Cicero’s dreads were under way now, sea snakes still adrift in the current, not yet dragged down by their own weight.

“Look,” he said. “That’s me, there.” Why bother with names? Let her put the picture together with the man before her. It came to him that this exercise meant more to him than he’d admitted. He wanted to impress her.

Rose bore in, obliging him by paying what little she had in the way of attention. “Who?” she said.

“Me. I wrote it. You can keep it.”

She scrutinized the photo, maybe putting something together. Then her fingernail, hideously large, clicked on the profile of the dressmaker’s dummy.
“Who?”

“Me.”

Rose shook her head, closed her eyes, inhaled through widened nostrils, indignant to be misunderstood.

At last she mounted one more effort to pronounce her objection to what had been placed before her.

“Why won’t she look me in the eye?”

Retrieving his luggage, the nurse said, “Funny thing. She goes a year with no visit, then two in one week.”

“She had someone else here?”

The nurse nodded. “Her grandson, I think, a teenager. With a woman, but the woman didn’t go in.”

All his life Cicero had been in training to open his mouth. To inform Rose in the matter of how it had gone with him, being child-prisoner of her stewardship. Or to make the sole confession the prisoner owed, of the crime committed after he’d served the whole sentence and been freed. Helpless audience,
his
prisoner now, she’d also be self-erasing, impossible to injure. Cicero could say anything, knowing it would slide off the greased façade of her present. Next visit, she’d have reverted to old wars. Yet Cicero’d not found his voice, just fed the next Dementialogue with mild queries, until the last chance was gone.

One day, that was what it was. Gone.

Now, with Sergius Gogan and the girl eight or ten hours gone down I-95, Rose’s bemused grandson presumably aboard his airplane while his sexy singer, his Marxist Pixie Dream Girl, tried out her routine in the Occupy Portland encampment, Cicero lay awake on his bed, room lit only by the picture window’s imperfect, flat-assed moon, as it gilded the pines and water, this night cooled enough that the thermostat hadn’t cut in, no central air to drown the heave and rattle of his own undead breathing. Yet by the same token Cicero lay sweaty in his sheets, unable to believe he’d ever be dropping off, remembering too well in the dark that morning’s hell, his bloodless tingling arms like another body trapped beneath him, and dreading the chance that sleeping he’d commune with Rose, the real and restless dead.

Say what you know and I don’t.

Nor had he opened his yap and disburdened himself to the grandson. The stupid fact remained lodged inside his stomach all this time, ulcerated into an unwanted secret.

Told to Sergius, it hardly even rose to the level of a confession. Just a silly story of how the young man’s whole life came to be arranged—look, kid, here’s the radioactive spider that bit you!

Yet Cicero’d withheld, as if in the primal grip of some Lieutenant Lookins
hold-your-tongue-and-let-them-hang-themselves
injunction. “Keep your bullets in your gun.” Well, Cicero’d fired one, once. The opportunity had found him, in the form of a pair of hippies making their way to his door one afternoon in Princeton, June 1979, the summer between Cicero’s graduate education and his first weeks of teaching, that hinge into his present life.

Stella Kim had been dressed in what Cicero supposed she’d thought was modest for the occasion, just a string of chunky furnace-glass beads and a black beret for decoration, over a purple blouse Cicero was reasonably sure he’d seen before, on Miriam. Well, it made sense Stella Kim would see raiding Miriam’s closet as a suitable memorial strategy—the two women had a
Persona
thing going in the first place. As for Harris Murphy, he appropriately enough presented as a poor man’s Tommy Gogan in his denim work shirt, tennis shoes, hair that cleared his ears by way of comb instead of scissors, beard a foolish way to split the difference between exhibiting and hiding his deformity—that was to say, a poor thing indeed.

Harris Murphy and Stella Kim insisted on taking Cicero to coffee, or lunch, before getting to their point. Cicero brought them to a restaurant where he thought they’d be comfortable, where they could get a sandwich with sprouts in it, and when they asked what he wanted he said he wasn’t hungry. The two were nervous at what they were doing, and proud, too, and had the heterosexual stink about them. This whole legal melodrama was enfolded in some humid encounter left unmentioned, but unmistakable to Cicero. Stella Kim was bound to dump Murphy—that, too, was obvious. She ran rings around him.

Of course it was Stella who had any real knowledge of Rose, so it was Stella who did all the talking, and all the insinuating. Murphy just listened, glowing at her, in love. But Cicero also understood that it was Murphy who’d be the kid’s real caretaker if they pulled off this maneuver. Stella Kim could take this business or leave it, put it aside as easily as Miriam’s purple blouse. She showed Cicero her prize, the letter from Nicaragua, with Miriam’s poison-pen injunction reiterated within the robin’s-egg-blue airmail envelope.

“Why is this all going down in Philly?” Cicero asked.

“Nobody’s clear what the jurisdiction is. But Rose called the cops in Pennsylvania, maybe because the Queens cops told her she had to. They were probably just trying to get rid of her.”

Cicero could see it. He’d seen it before. Rose getting up in the face of a baffled public-school principal or beery supermarket manager, or helpless librarian or bus driver even. Rose being wished to be rid of, by policemen most exactly.

“He is her grandson.”

“She didn’t even try to find out what was going on with him for two months. We’re just doing what’s best for Sergius. I mean, c’mon.”

“So you want me to see this judge.”

“Miriam’s gone. Nobody else can say what you can say.”

Well, that was so.

Two weeks later came his chance, to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. He dressed to impress and appeared where he was asked to appear, in the wood-paneled, pipe-stinking office of an old man who looked as unhappy with the scenario as Cicero felt. Yet, when the questioning began, Cicero also felt the nauseating onset of a monolithic hypocrisy, that of an institution that shored its power precisely by leaving every person covered in self-revulsion while abjuring its own sick curiosity. Cicero sat, not meeting the judge’s eyes, siloed in his indignation and his blackness and his natty suit.

He could honor Rose or Miriam in this room, not both. If honor anyone at all. He supposed it might just be as simple as choosing the dead woman.

“In this regrettable—
hurm
—unusual—
hurm hurm
—been suggested you might provide—
hurm
—never ideal—in full confidence—
hurm
—decision rests with me—any light you might shed—
hurm
—”

“Rose never did me no wrong.” In obeisance or revolt, couldn’t say which, Cicero descended to Ebonics.

“Been led to believe—
hurm
—”

“Maybe you could ax me in particalur what you wanna ax.”

“—something concerning a kitchen stove?”

“Oh, yeah. I can corroborate that shit, yeah. Stuck her
haid
right in the
oven
.”

“—
hurm
—”

“You really need more than that? ’Cause I got places to be.”

Lydia stroked Sergius off in the rental in broad daylight, as he aimed the car through the vacuum of towns or traffic between Augusta and Brunswick. Though they’d shared a kiss the evening before, it had been a chaste one, seeming an idealistic extension of his discovery of the encampment and her singing. Indeed, her guitar had been strung on her neck between them, legislating distance like a chaperone’s ruler. They’d only begun making out in earnest after getting out of Cumbow, at the last rest stop before the interstate, having pulled in to pee and score more coffee, plus some maple-sugar candy in a little glassine tray, formed into the shape of endangered waterfowl, terns, plover, and loons, and which they devoured in the parking lot—what a fiend she was for sugar! It was like having a pony, the way she bared her teeth to the gums and nibbled it up from his hand!—and then, the gritty sweet still on their tongues, they’d gotten hot and heavy in the car. But he had a plane to catch, a ticket he’d already rejiggered once. She’d begun fondling his thigh through his jeans as he eased into the one-point-perspective task, set the rental’s cruise control to sixty-five. They had no music, Maine radio was hopeless, a desert. And then she fondled more than his thigh. And then she unzipped him.