Hardscrabble Road (3 page)

“Have they made it impossible for you to even think of dissenting?” “I was thinking of ordinary people. People who haven’t
been trained to deconstruct…to deconstruct…”

“What?”

“Reactionary hegemonic discourse,” Delmore said.

Jig sighed. “You’d depress me less if I thought you knew what it meant,” he said, “but that’s impossible, because nobody really
knows what it means anymore. How any of you expect to have any effect at all on the general public is beyond me. You go into
a bar in South Philly and start talking about reactionary hegemonic discourse, and you’ll be lucky to get out to the street
alive, assuming they pay any attention to you at all.”

“But that’s just it,” Delmore said, sliding to the edge of his chair. “They’ve been brainwashed. They’ve been dumbed down
by advertising and infotainment. They’re addicted to media schlock. If we can pull them out of that, if we can break the spell
and show them—”

“What? That NASCAR is for stupid people and they’ve really wanted to be listening to the London Philharmonic instead of Garth
Brooks all along?”

“The high art tradition is a culture trap,” Delmore said. “It exists to make ordinary people feel bad about themselves. The
first step progressives have to take if they’re going to advance the cause of social justice is to validate the cultural instincts
of working people.”

“Right. Give the Nobel in literature to J. K. Rowling.”

“Magic is a culture trap, too,” Delmore said. “It—”

But Jig had turned away. He had had to turn away. He was about to burst out laughing. He looked out the window onto the small,
cramped quad that looked as uninviting as the brutal weather that enveloped it. He was sixty-two years old. His best days
of scientific work were behind him. Science was a young man’s medium. Mathematicians were washed up by the time they were
forty. Physicists rarely lasted past fifty. He was at that part of his life when he was supposed to do something else, and
he was being stymied by a man who ran to fat and stale ideas like a racehorse running to a finish line. The only difference
was that the racehorse would at least be beautiful, and Drew Harrigan was not.

“The thing is,” Jig said, not turning around, “we’ve got a window of opportunity. He’s going to be in rehab how much longer?
A month, forty days, something like that. So for another month or forty days, there are no more hour-long screeds on radio
about how I’m selling out the American government and the American people, how I’m Benedict Arnold—except he never says Benedict
Arnold, did you notice that? He either doesn’t know the reference or he doesn’t think his listeners will. How I’m a traitor
and a Communist.”

“You are a Communist,” Delmore said. “All decent people are Communists at heart.”

“He means a member of the Communist Party, which I most certainly am not. I don’t join parties. I haven’t even joined the
Greens. The question is how to shut him up. It would be a very good thing for me if he’d go to jail.”

“I don’t believe he will go to jail,” Delmore said. “He’s too useful to the special interests that run this country. That
run this world. He keeps the masses content and focused in the wrong direction.”

“At the moment, he’s keeping the masses focused on me,” Jig said. “Or maybe not at the moment. Up until the moment before
this one. And when he comes out of rehab, you know what he’s going to do. He’s going to blame all this on a plot by Communists
and liberals and left-wing nuts. Which he seems to think are all the same thing.”

“He’s going to push it all off onto that handyman of his, Sherman Markey.”

“He’s trying very hard.”

“You know he will. They’ll put Markey in jail for being a dealer and let Harrigan off with probation or something. He’ll never
go to jail.”

“Didn’t I hear that Markey was suing him?”

“Through the Justice Project, yeah. They do good work, but they’re a little too middle-of-the-road. I think progressive organizations
hurt themselves when they temper their message to appeal to what they think is the mainstream, because I don’t think the mainstream
is really the mainstream. People aren’t going to take you seriously if you don’t stick to your principles.”

The quad looked dead and empty. Jig was tired of looking at it. He turned back and saw that Delmore was now more off his chair
than on it. Sometimes he didn’t understand why people like Delmore went on living. He understood Joe Six-pack. Joe Six-pack
liked what he liked and was satisfied with it. Delmore was half one thing and half another, intelligent but not quite intelligent
enough, erudite but not quite erudite enough, cultivated but not quite cultivated enough. No wonder he went in for “progressive”
politics. It was the only place on campus where he wouldn’t expose himself as a mistake on the part of the committee on admissions.

This was not someplace he wanted to go.

He picked up a few of the things on his desk: a graphing calculator; a snow globe with a miniature plastic replica of the
Cathedral of Notre Dame inside it; a copy of his book, Selling Suicide. It wasn’t that Drew Harrigan was calling him a traitor
that was the problem. It was the other things he was saying, the things about contacts with Al Qaeda, about aiding and abetting
Islamicist cells on campus and in the city, about money laundered and money sent. It was a laundry list of things that could
easily become criminal charges under the right circumstances. They were well on their way to the right circumstances. Jig
Tyler wasn’t Delmore Krantz. He could see the writing on the wall and the look in the eye of the dean, who remembered McCarthy
but had his own skin to save first.

It was cold out there and it was going to get colder. If the news these
days proved anything, it was that it was easy as hell for an innocent man to die in the electric chair.

“Lethal injection,” Jig said, realizing only afterwards that he’d spoken out loud.

Delmore looked confused. “What?”

“Lethal injection. They use lethal injection these days to execute people, not the electric chair, not most places.”

“You expect them to try to execute you?”

“No,” Jig said, sighing. “I was just thinking about innocent people being punished for crimes they hadn’t committed. That
it happened all the time. That we know that because of the work done on the death penalty at this very university, in case
you hadn’t heard.”

“The Death Penalty Project does very important work in the fight against global capitalism and domestic repression.”

Jig sighed again. “Sherman Markey is being defended by the Justice Project, though, isn’t he? They’re bringing in Kate Daniel?”

“Kate Daniel is a heroine in the struggle against reactionary—”

“Don’t say it.”

Delmore looked away.

“Listen, tomorrow morning, let’s get Ms. Daniel on the line and have a talk, why don’t we? That might help, strategically.
Don’t you think?”

Delmore nodded. He was staring at the floor. He was staring at the bottom of the bookcases. He was staring anywhere in the
room but at Jig himself, which was how all their conversations ended these days. Jig couldn’t help himself. He really couldn’t.
There were people who hated blacks and people who hated Jews and people who hated broccoli, but Jig Tyler hated stupidity.
He hated it with the same passion with which Martin Luther had hated the Catholic Church and Mary Tudor had hated all Protestants.
He hated it with a fine white fire that was so pure and so intense, it made the problems between the Israelis and the Palestinians
look like a high school football rivalry. He hated it to the point where he sometimes thought that that hatred was all that
was really left of him, the Jig Tyler who had shown up on the campus of the Taft School in 1956, thin and raw and intense,
able to read the math textbook in forty minutes and understand it all, able to read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in two
days and understand it all, a searchlight on a campus full of dimmer bulbs, a legend in a week. He was still a legend. He
just no longer knew what he was legendary for.

“We’ll call Kate Daniel in the morning,” he said, suddenly wanting nothing more than to get Delmore Krantz out of that room
and out of his sight. “We’ll see what she can do.”

Delmore still wasn’t looking at him, but he knew a dismissal when he heard it. He mumbled something and made his way out,
a thin flush of red creeping up his fat neck like vomit coming up a gullet at the end of a long night of drinking. Delmore
was beginning to resent him, Jig knew that.

No matter how worshipful they were in the beginning, they all resented him in the end.

K
ate Daniel was as
cold as she’d ever been, cold enough so that she thought she could shatter her teeth by tapping them with a straw. The heater
in the car wasn’t working right, or something. She didn’t want to think it was so cold that the heater in the car wasn’t up
to the occasion. She kept getting bulletins on the oldies’ station she’d been listening to since she crossed the Pennsylvania
border. She’d have listened to NPR if she could have, but she couldn’t find it no matter how many times she punched the scan
button, and she was afraid it would put her to sleep. She was not, really, the right sort of person to be a liberal. She was
not, really, convinced that it was possible for the temperature to get down to minus eleven degrees. The old joke about global
warming kept running through her head. She fervently wished she had never quit smoking.

Up at the far end of the street, a man in a long overcoat was waiting, leaning forward slightly to see if her car was the
one he was looking for. That would be Mr. Whoever, from the Philadelphia Coalition for the Homeless, Kate thought. He’d look
the car over and either approve of it (in which case she would hate him) or take it as a sign that she was one of those people
who took every possible opportunity to burnish her credentials for revolutionary sainthood. The truth of it was that she truly
hated buying cars. She wasn’t good at it. She never walked off the lot without feeling she’d been cheated. She spent the next
six weeks unable to think about anything but the car negotiations and how she had failed them. It wasn’t worth it. The ’84
Grand Prix was a good car. This one only had 250,000 miles on it.

The man in the overcoat was nodding vigorously. Kate was close enough now to notice that he was very young. He waved her to
the left and she saw that there was a small driveway going to the back of the buildings. In the dark, she couldn’t tell if
it was as strewn with debris as the rest of the street. This was the kind of neighborhood where Coalitions for the Homeless
hung out. It was supposed to be half-full of vacant lots and half-full of drug garbage. She hated the word “coalition.” She
hated it more than she hated the word “committee.” She was already sick of this year’s presidential race, and she didn’t care
who won.

She pulled through the driveway, wedged narrowly between two buildings that both looked as if they should have been demolished
in 1966. She found a neat little parking lot in back, complete with overhead security lights and parking spaces marked by
clean white painted stripes. She pulled in next to the only other car and opened her driver’s side door. It really was minus
eleven degrees out there. There was a wind, too, and it got up under her long wool skirt.

“Ms. Daniel?” the man in the overcoat said.

Kate’s own overcoat was on the backseat. She never wore a coat when she drove. It got in the way of…something. Now she reached
back and pulled her coat up to her, a good camel’s hair one she’d splurged for at Brooks Brothers after the first time she’d
seen herself on CNN, looking like she shopped at the Goodwill Dumpsters, never mind the Goodwill store. She got out onto the
asphalt and pulled the coat around her shoulders. She leaned into the car and got her pocketbook and briefcase. She locked
the car door and shut it.

“Hi,” she said. “I’ve got a suitcase, in the trunk. Am I sleeping here?”

The man in the overcoat sucked in air. “Ah,” he said. “Well. We’ve got you booked at the Hyatt. I mean, if it’s not your kind
of thing, we could always—”

“It’s exactly my kind of thing. I love room service. I won’t bother to get the suitcase out of the car until I get over there.
There’s nothing I need in it now. Are you the one who’s going to be my aide?”

“What? Oh, yes. I’m, uh, I’m Edmund George, yes.”

“Do they call you Ed?”

He looked uncomfortable. “Most people don’t call me anything,” he said. “My professors at Penn call me Mr. George.”

“Do you want me to call you Mr. George?”

“No.”

This was interesting, Kate thought. She got her pocketbook strap over her shoulder. She shouldn’t call it a pocketbook. It
was at least as big as her suitcase. She looked around the parking lot. It backed on a vacant lot. The buildings around them
were squat and dirty and mostly dark.

“Well,” she said, “maybe we should go inside and you can lay out the situation for me. I’m sorry I got here so late. I kept
trying to leave New York and getting held up by odd things happening in traffic. I should have taken Amtrak.”

If Mr. George was thinking that any sane person would have taken Amtrak, he didn’t say it. He just gestured in the direction
of the back door to the building and started leading the way there. They’d gone to all this trouble about security lights
and painted parking spaces, but what they should have done was hire a security guard. At least her car would be safe. It wasn’t
the kind of thing your ordinary cocaine addict was interested in breaking into.

Inside, the halls were clean but narrow, and the ceilings were blessedly high. The place seemed to be deserted. Mr. George
led her down a small flight of stairs—they’d bought a new carpet fairly recently, Kate noticed; she wondered if that was because
they’d had a sudden influx of money or because the old stuff had gotten so awful they’d had no choice—and then around a corner
to a tiny office that looked as if it had been entirely papered in manila legal folders. There was a desk and a chair. There
was a phone, a black one, in a “princess” style that was at least two decades out-of-date. There was a single poster on the
wall, advertising Leontyne Price in Aida at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.