Dissident Gardens (59 page)

“Hello, I was told—”

“Sir, will you stand back, please.” The supervisor left Sergius’s proffered hand dangling. He gestured with his own radio at the seat Sergius had initially refused, on the principle that
he had a plane to catch
, though he’d checked himself before producing even such faintly intemperate I-am-a-citizen-with-rights language. They knew he had a plane to catch. His boarding pass remained in his left hand. Now he took the seat, revising expectations downward. He was grateful they’d at least left the door open. The younger man left the room, returning to the pat-down area, while the intermediary, the radio-woman who’d still not ever addressed Sergius directly, took up a disinterested pose in the corner. You were meant to find women in uniform erotically fearsome, but perhaps those properties were reserved for the attendants in the sky, or she-cops of the earth he’d left behind. This officer emanated only a fierce gray neutrality, making her seem a feature of the purgatorial cubicle.

“Would you mind answering a few questions?” asked the supervisor.

“Sure, whatever.” This came out sounding sulkier than Sergius had intended.

“We’re grateful for your patience. You entered the terminal at 1:36, according to a time-stamped security tape. However you didn’t make contact with the airline kiosk for an hour and a half, and it was another twenty-five minutes before you made the attempt to clear security.”

Sergius’s passage had been downgraded to
an attempt
, no matter his innocence beneath the bower. An hour and a half? Once they’d
exited the illicit bathroom, he and Lydia had moved their stuff again, to a bank of vacant seats at a high window, there to moon and spoon until he’d reluctantly and relievedly let her go. Teenagers did this all the time, in airports, on train platforms, and so forth.

“I was early for my flight.”

“Would you tell me in your own words how you spent the duration of your time in the facility before contacting the airline kiosk?”

“Who else’s words would I use?” Idiotic; if, with this quip, he was winning, it was to lose. Undoubtedly a rival account existed, in the form of surveillance video.

“Sir, I’m employed by you the taxpayers to render security for flights departing this facility. We operate on a standard basis with no special predisposition or attitude.” The gray baseball manager had seen a thousand seasons, was master of a putty-like jargon with which he painted all outcomes as indistinct and unspecial. “Once you’re flagged I have to generate paperwork to resolve the matter, and so, you and me, we’re both inconvenienced here at this juncture. I’m seeking your full cooperation now to avoid additional disruption of the screening process.”

“Were you watching us in the bathroom?”
Sergius heard the childish term and was embarrassed.

“Sir, you were automatically flagged by the incongruent time signature. We’re just following protocol.”

“I imagine—what I did might be some kind of misdemeanor.” There was time, still time, to melt at the gate into Boarding Group Six and, as he breached the cloud layers, to mass this interview into the jumble behind him, with Cicero, Lydia, all else.

“I can still get you on your flight, sir,” the supervisor said, mind reader now. Or perhaps this was routine carrot-dangling. “I’ll need to photocopy your ID and boarding pass, and I’ll require for you to answer a few other questions to round out my report.”

“Sure.”

“The person with whom you arrived at the terminal was known to you, I mean previous to your encounter?”

“What? Of course.”

“The distance from the rental lots to the terminal is brief here, sir, but you’d be surprised what folks can get up to.”

Sergius told himself this change in register, the unfunny salty humor, was a positive sign.

“No, known to me.”

“For how long?”

“A—a little while.”

“Did she give you anything to carry in your luggage or on your person?”

“No.” Only a lingering scent, an ache, a vision.

“Not a fellow traveler, then?”

“Sorry?”

“She’s not to be considered a fellow traveler?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?
A fellow traveler?
Is that some kind of code word?”

“Sir, I try to be cautious to use appropriate terminology and if I’ve offended you, I apologize. I meant that despite accompanying you to the facility she had no travel plans today—would that be accurate?”

“But that isn’t what you said.”

“Maybe you could offer a term in place of mine, sir. Put it in your own language so I’ll understand.”

“I don’t think so.”

“She was no traveler of any kind, I gather. I’ll just need to make some indication here. Would you care to give me her name?”

“Fuck you.”

“That’s unnecessary, sir. What was she, sir, if not a traveler?”

I am the backwards traveller, ancient wool unraveller
—this was a lyric Harris Murphy had regularly crooned at his adopted boy, when Murphy most wished to console Sergius or lull him, in his sobbing, to sleep. Sergius had never known the origin of the tune, though in Murphy’s rendition it seemed to call to him from some distant Celtic isle. Sergius wondered now where Murphy was, whether he was still alive. Too late, it was all too late.

“No traveler at all,” said Sergius. “She’s an Occupier. Write that down. And so am I.”

“So you are what, sir?”

Backwards traveler. Time Pilot. By birthright an American Communist, Sergius wished he could say.
You’ve apprehended an American Communist
. Yet he hadn’t the first idea what these two words
really meant even apart, let alone when you ran them together.
And we were sailing songs, wailing on the moon
. That was where the backwards traveler had ended up, in Murphy’s lyric.

“I meant we were Occupying your fucking bathroom.”

“Sir, I wish you to understand the seriousness of this situation and suggest you roll the untoward language back a few degrees so we can all get on the same page here.”

“We did it, right in your pokey little Jetport. You got me, you caught one.”

“One what?”

“You tell me.”
This was not the rejoinder of Sergius’s wild vicarious dreams. In fact it might be a kind of plea. You tell me, please. Tell me, if you can.

“Sir, this is the very facility Mohamed Atta used to begin his journey. I was there that day and I’m not proud to say we waved him through. On that day my personal American innocence died and I’m here to say right now
never again
, not on my watch. Will you please put both your hands on the table there now, thank you.” In the manner of the baseball manager lifting in coldhearted reluctance the bullpen telephone, the supervisor nodded to the woman with the radio. “Go ahead,” he told her. “You better tell ’em to pick up the girl.”

Sergius lay his hands on the table. His plane by now gone. This, all this, as it was meant to be. Sergius, arrived here in this crucial indefinite place, this undisclosed location, severed from the life of the planet yet not aloft. Arrived at last at this nowhere in which he became visible before the law.

A cell of one, beating like a heart.

JONATHAN LETHEM is the
New York Times
bestselling author of nine novels, including
Chronic City, The Fortress of Solitude, Motherless Brooklyn
, and the nonfiction collection
The Ecstasy of Influence
, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, Lethem’s work has appeared in
The New Yorker, Harper’s, Rolling Stone, Esquire
, and
The New York Times
, among other publications.

Visit:
www.jonathanlethem.com

Novels

Gun, with Occasional Music
(1994)

Amnesia Moon
(1995)

As She Climbed Across the Table
(1997)

Girl in Landscape
(1998)

Motherless Brooklyn
(1999)

The Fortress of Solitude
(2003)

You Don’t Love Me Yet
(2007)

Chronic City
(2009)

Novellas

The Shape We’re In
(2003)

Story Collections

The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye
(1996)

Kafka Americana
(with Carter Scholz, 1999)

Men and Cartoons
(2004)

Nonfiction

The Disappointment Artist
(2005)

Believeniks: The Year We Wrote a Book About the Mets

(with Christopher Sorrentino, 2006)

They Live
(2010)

Crazy Friend: On Philip K. Dick
(2011, Italy only)

The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc
. (2011)

Fear of Music
(2012)

As Editor

The Vintage Book of Amnesia
(2000)

The Year’s Best Music Writing
(2002)

The Novels of Philip K. Dick
(Library of America, 3 vols., 2007–2010)

The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick
(with Pamela Jackson, 2011)

Selected Stories of Robert Sheckley
(with Alex Abramovitch, 2012)