Free Dissident Gardens by Jonathan Lethem

chandelier. The atmosphere was noon-luminous, heat-immense. The bowl of sky enclosing the two heads scarcely cloud-daubed, blue almost friable where it pressured the rim of pines the swimmers had left behind. Third week of September and hotter than the hottest day in August, hotter than Cicero felt Maine ought to be, or need be to invite ocean-swimming. Cicero floated vertically, a three-hundred-pound bowling pin barely able to stay below, his toes straining toward those chilled deeper layers.
    A fact you knew, if you got in the ocean: The world was getting hotter.
    Could get hotter still.
    The second head, named Sergius Gogan, had no way to shield its whiteness from noon’s blaze, whereas Cicero sheltered under his irregular self-generated umbrella, his lumpy, going-gray helicopter blades of dreadlock. Unmerciful of Cicero, taking Sergius out here. He’d read somewhere that pure redheads like Sergius and his late father went on freckling their whole lives, a one-way progress of melanin from birth to grave, so every sunning niggered their countenances. Sergius wasn’t, in Cicero’s view, as eye-catching as his dad. He now resembleda helpless pink balloon adrift atop gibbous squiggles of its own reflection. Cicero could hardly convince himself a body extended below.
    Sergius Gogan, sad fortyish orphan, had come to Cicero in a rental Prius, after flying up from Philadelphia, in a project of research on the topic of Sunnyside Gardens. Research to what ends? Sergius hadn’t said. Fair enough, Cicero knew all those people of whom Sergius spoke. Yet why, pray, should it be Cicero’s duty to navigate Sergius through matters of his own blood and kinship, legacies that were, despite all happenstance,
not Cicero’s own
? Cicero Lookins didn’t want this talk. Being Baginstock College’s miraculous triple token, gay, black, and overweight, Cicero usually relied on his ominous aspect to keep the numbers down in his classes and office hours. If only he could take all his office hours in the ocean! But the prospect of immersion hadn’t shaken Sergius Gogan.
    “Yes,” said Sergius now, snorting and gasping in the salt. “Yes. Tell me what you really think. Of course.”
    “Forget about Sunnyside Gardens,” Cicero said. “There’s no book in that subject or someone’d have written it already. If they had, nobody’d want to read it.”
    “I wasn’t thinking of a book. I plan to write a cycle of songs. About the Gardens, about Rose and Miriam, and Tommy. About his career, too.”
    “Ah. Taking after your father.” Cicero knew Sergius Gogan taught music to children, at the Pennsylvania Quaker boarding school, the same where he’d been sent when his parents went to Nicaragua, and stayed after they died there. Cicero supposed he’d distantly heard that Sergius’s instrument was guitar, like Tommy Gogan’s. That Sergius might also compose folk songs was unfortunate to consider.
    “I’m trying.”
    “Concept albums run in the blood, huh?”
    “I guess.”
    “Well, your father had nothing to do with the Gardens, so far as I knew. Anyway, your father didn’t interest me.” Cicero let the distinction creep in unannounced: that between
familiarity
and
interest
. It was time to become obnoxious.
    “Why not?”
    “Tommy was sincere in his commitments to you and your mother,and to nuclear disarmament and Salvador Allende. He also struck me as a cold fish. I didn’t dig his music, what I heard.”
    “I’d been hoping you’d tell me about Rose and my mother,” Sergius said, now exiling his request in an indefinite past, wilting at Cicero’s obstinacy as had any number of young aspirants before him. “And Cousin Lenny.”
    “Ah.” Listen, Cicero wanted to tell Sergius: Cicero Lookins has his own parents and grandparents and cousins, his own dead to get maudlin over, and not one is Jewish or Irish or anything-
ish
. They’re black. You, receding-red-haired ghost, with accent blandly neutral, not even tinged with