Free Dissident Gardens by Jonathan Lethem Page B

was bitten to pieces before I understood it was for speaking. I had to get away to learn to open my mouth, yet if she was in front of me now I’d probably fail to speak truth to power. For don’t kid yourself, Rose was
all
about power. The power of resentment, of guilt, of unwritten injunctions against everything, against life itself. Rose was into death, Sergius! That’s what she dug about Lincoln, though she’d never admit it. He emancipated our black asses and died! Rose championed freedom only with a side order of death. In Rose’s heart she was a tundra wolf, a Darwin creature, surviving on treachery and scraps. Every room contained enemies, every home was half spies, or more than half. If you mentioned a name she’d never heard, she’d rattle out like a Gatling gun:
‘Who?’
Meaning, if they were valuable to know, why weren’t they
already
part of her operation? If they weren’t, why trust them? Why even mention them? She wanted to free the world, but she enslaved any motherfucker she got in her clutches. Now go back to Philly and write yourself a song cycle about
that
.”

    The trouble with his rant was that time, like a grape blistered by the sun, seemed to Cicero to peel away its organizing skin during the interval of his delivery. The
now
, so oppressively reliable, dissolved. Cicero had become too much the master of this art in the classroom, of unspooling his anger to filibuster any other voice, letting extemporaneous phrases give birth to one another in a kind of generative storm, while his mind voyaged elsewhere.
    In this case, what was left of the grape when the skin peeled away was a heartbeat of somatic memory, a moment that had never stopped reenacting itself in some part of Cicero’s body: a titanically willful woman of forty-something years clutching the hand of a round-faced, baffled African American child, perhaps just six or seven years old that first of the seeming hundred times she dragged him along on her rounds. Rose Zimmer, his father’s lover. She powered with him along the sidewalks of Sunnyside—Greenpoint Avenue, Queens Boulevard, Skillman Avenue—as she made her way spying, gossiping, interrogating, whispering asides, projecting the grid of invisible importances in her brain over the network of streets, onto the apparently innocuousarray of semipopulated park benches and barbershops, onto human beings with shopping carts moving so slowly along the pavement that they may as well have been frozen. The boy coming to consciousness from within this disordered moral map, which had overwritten any other. His being granted access to Rose’s confidences, her ready faith that he could be the repository for them: first inkling of his own complexity. The fact that she reveled in the dismay and indignation generated by his presence at her side, the outlandish enlistment of the black boy as the righteous Commie-Jew divorcée’s right hand: first inkling of his own brazenness. The two of them set Sunnyside aflame, and then visited her favorite soda fountain—whose shopmen and regulars loathed Rose as violently as anywhere else—and soothed themselves with chocolate malteds. Then, having loaded up on comic books and Pall Malls, she delivered him home.
    This was how deeply Rose had gotten into Cicero: Within the imposed and immutable corridors of his mind lay an oasis, a micro-cosmic realm where his present self could converse with her, make fresh access to the single most penetrating intelligence he’d ever known—not that he could persuade her to lay aside the warpages and loathings decorating that intelligence like thorns. These—warpages and loathings—were how he knew it was her. Cicero had no interest in hoodoo. Yet he could reanimate the dead, or one of them, anyhow. It tended to happen at the soda fountain, while seated on twin stools, with malteds before them.
    Cicero glanced at the comic books on the counter, one already soaked at one corner where it had rested in a pool of