Tolstoy Kicks Ass!

Though twilight filled the lawns of the park, the dark of The Ramble was palpable by the time they crossed the bridge.  Z reached down his hand to pull Rai up a slope, then led her deeper into the woods.  Within a couple of minutes, they found a little stream, which lead up to a clearing in a stand of evergreens.  Within minutes, the world had changed, and they might have been thousands of miles from the city, with only the dull light reflected off low clouds to remind them of New York.  It was raining lightly.

 

“I’m worthless, Z,” Rai said without any of the defenses she had carefully built up.

 

“Don’t be a fucking idiot.”

 

“I’m just telling the truth.  I’m nothing.  I don’t even have a good story to tell.  Tolstoy’s never come back from the dead to write about me.”  She managed to fake a smile before she told him about the writing class.  “Sudan!  Fuck.  He stowed away across the whole motherfucking Atlantic Ocean.  I’m nothing when I look at that.  Just some boring little middle class American who’s got stuck in the middle of Wonderland.”

 

“Huh?”

 

“It’s like Alice in Wonderland,” she went on as Z pulled a backpack down from the crook of a tree, then opened it and removed a tarp.  “Like going down the rabbit hole into a–”

 

“Does that make me the white rabbit?”  Z handed her a corner of the tarp.  His smirk should have been infuriating, especially right then, but it was exactly what she needed.  “’Cause lemme tell you, I’m not a fucking white anything.”

 

“My metaphors suck today.  Another proof I’m no writer.  This isn’t Wonderland.  It’s the only normal part of the city.  That’s the other side of the looking glass.”  She gestured around them, largely south toward the skyscrapers of midtown.  With practiced motions, she tied a piece of twine to the tarp, then to a small tree at the edge of the clearing.  Z had done the same thing, creating a sort of a tent.  A light rain began to patter against the plastic.  “So it’s not Dostoyevsky and it’s not Alice.  So what story are we in, huh?”

 

“It’s not a story, Rai.  Really, it’s not.”  His voice was tender, completely unlike the words he would say to anyone else in the world.  To hide from the rain, he held up the corner of the tent so she could crawl inside.  She scrunched under the middle of the plastic, the only section without gaping holes, then made room for Z.

 

“But it’s gotta be.  This whole fucking thing, I mean, they killed his mother and his sister.  For nothing.  And then there are people who have Mercedes in a world where people are starving.  And I dunno, AIDS and girls who have to sell themselves and… and this fucking rain.  If it’s not a story, what’s the point?  If there’s not some author up there who’s gonna come up with a moral on page 500, or at least a witty narrator who makes you laugh at all the shit in the world, then what’s the fucking point?”  She laid her head against his knees and tried to find a comfortable position, thinking all the while what a pain it was going to be to get the dirt out of her skirt.  She hated when the rain made them hang the tarp.  “Look, I know what you’re gonna say, and that’s fine.  I mean, go justice, down with the fucking bourgeoisie, end oppression and give a lollipop to every kid in Somalia.”  Her voice had gained sarcasm on top of the recently acquired melancholy.  “But so they free Leonard Peltier.  So what?  Does it all make sense suddenly?  No.  That’s why it’s gotta be a story.”

 

She could almost hear his amused smile; not a cruel amusement, simply kind laughter at the foibles he loved.  “Good night, Rai.”  It almost made her feel normal, a reminder that she had survived these same doubts many times before.

 

“Yeah.  A fucking good night.”  She dug a thin canal to divert the stream of water that crept toward her.  She looked once more at his scarred face, another symbol she couldn’t understand, then, as always, she lied down on her side, and Z wrapped his long body around her.  It had taken months to train him that she needed warmth, not sex, but now he didn’t even try anything.  She knew that most people could not believe that such a nocturnal arrangement did not lead to sex, but that’s how it was on the street.  Her world was so oversexed — the men who invited her home, the constant lewd gazes, the tales of prostitution that filled The Place — that she needed an asylum.  Z was good enough to provide it to her — however reluctantly.

 

“My story’s not good enough.”  She wouldn’t let him sleep yet.  “Not good enough to make up for all this.  There’s no villains, huh?  No fucking loonies that wanna kill my father the village chief.  Or some evil stepfather.  A story like that, and my life’s worth something.  Fuck!  I’m on the street, and I’ve never had to give a blowjob to survive.”

 

“You don’t want that.”

 

“Of course I don’t.  But it’s gotta be part of something bigger, Z.  We gotta change the world.”

 

 

 

“It’s time, Z.  We gotta bring back Marx.”  Z was already doing his morning pushups when Rai stretched her head out of the tarp to make her announcement.  He just grunted his agreement.  “We gotta make people think about injustice and shit.  Your revolution — that’s the story I’m looking for.”

 

“No shit,” he panted.  “Fifty.”  He stood.  Exercise always brought out the details of the scars on his face.

 

“And y’know what else I think?  I think it’s time we got in on that… those protests.  The WTO shit.”

 

“Pansies.  Cuntlicking anti-globalization protesters don’t know shit about shit.”  He helped her to fold the tarp and tuck it into the crook of a tree.  “Faggot-ass college kids flying ‘round the world on daddy’s dirty money.  We want no part of that.”

 

“There’s nobody else doing anything.  At least they’re in the streets.”

 

“In the streets.  Whatever.  We’re on the streets.  That’s what matters.”  He threw on his shirt and pointed east.  “When the revolution comes, it’s gonna be done right.  I’m gonna do it right.”

 

“Alone?”

 

“Hardly.  Speak the truth and the people will follow.”

 

“Don’t be pretentious.”  She pulled a thorn from her skirt before it could tear.  “You just don’t wanna be part of something that somebody else started.”

 

“So?  I’m no follower.  Neither are you.”  He had reached one of the little paths that meander through the woods, and it was now easier to walk.  “So we’re gonna be in front.”

 

Rai didn’t respond for a moment.  She was out of breath.  “And where you gonna get your followers?  No better place than a huge protest, right?  You scream louder than they do, you know more.  Then they’ll follow you.”

 

“I don’t want some punk-ass kid as my follower.”

 

Rai skipped over the obvious response.  “Plus, we’d get to travel again.  Hop a boxcar out to Vegas and join that Anti-Racist Action–”

 

“Just gangs pretending they’re about–”

 

“Z!  What the fuck.  You just wanna shit on every idea I have, or you wanna do something?”

 

“I wanna do something.  But we gotta do it right.  Smashing up Starbucks and Nike?  What the fuck’s that gonna do?  Nothing.  We gotta hit them where it hurts.”

 

“And where’s that?  And who’s ‘them’?”

 

“I’m working on it.”  The stepped onto Fifth Avenue and headed downtown.  The sidewalk was already crowded with suits on their way to work, but when Z snarled, they stepped out of the way.  “That’s what it’s about, Rai,” he lectured as they turned onto 77th Street.  “Make the man respect you.  They don’t respect some pansy-ass white boy with a sign about sweatshops.  Or Ariel Sharon or whatever.  They respect fear.”  He strode down the middle of the sidewalk, prouder and prouder with each suit that hugged the wall to stay away from him.

 

“You know what your problem is, Z?  You just don’t like people.”

 

“What’s to like?”  His combination of snarl and smile was indescribable.

 

“But like, how you gonna lead a revolution if you hate everybody?  And why?  That’s the big question, I guess.  I just don’t get it.”

 

“History,” he responded pompously.  “That’s what it’s all about.  Fucking history.”  He dived into the subway station on Lexington, so Rai never got to ask the questions she wanted.

 

 

 

It hadn’t been easy to get the big poster into the billboard in the Columbus Circle station.  Rai had decided that it was time to be blunt, so she hadn’t even modified another ad.  It was just a big red sheet of paper with the quote written in graffiti style.

 

 

 

“Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains!”

– Karl Marx

 

 

 

Standing on the stairs that connected the 1/9 to the A/C, Rai watched at least two thousand commuters rush by.  No one even glanced at the quote.  “What the fuck!” she exclaimed after half an hour.  “This is whack.  Nobody’s got time for culture.  Fucking America.”

 

“Pay some attention to placement next time.  Like they’re going to read anything rushing down the stairs.”

 

“You saying it’s my fault that everyone’s stupid?”

 

“You’re telling me this?”

 

She stomped off up the stairs.  Z knew that her hauteur meant that he was not to follow her.

Even Rai, who knew him better than anyone else, didn’t know what to make of Z.  He made her laugh, he argued philosophy and politics with her, he kept her warm at night, and he had taught her to survive on the street, but she could find no answers to her most basic questions: where was he from?  Why was he on the street?  What was his name?

 

These questions troubled Z as much as Rai.  Evidence proved that his memory functioned exceedingly well — he could quote long passages of Marx and Lenin — but he remembered nothing from before he was fifteen.  Not his parents, not his home, not even how he arrived, naked, in the king sized bed where he woke one morning.  In a terrible confusion, he had dug through piles of clothes on the bedroom floor, throwing on the ones that fit and discarding those several sizes too large, then sprinted down the stairs and out the front door, ignoring the bass voice that commanded him to return.  He emerged into a suburban idyll that he would always associate with hell, sprinting down one cul-de-sac after another, past perfectly mowed lawns, Victorian façades, and early morning commuters who ostentatiously ignored his tears from behind the windshields of Infiniti sedans.

 

For Rai, the linear scars on Z’s face marked that lost past, but for Z, the important symbol was the heap clothes.  Expensive clothes, men’s clothes.  Knowing that detail from Z’s past, Rai was not surprised with the text that he pasted on top of the MTV ad.

 

 

 

“As a wolf to the lamb, so a lover to his lad.”

 

 

 

-Socrates

 

 

 

As they stood in the Christopher Street station to gauge audience response, Rai desperately wished that she would have vetoed the quote.  Or insisted that he put it somewhere else.  Anywhere besides under the gayest street in New York.  Before they had even been able to watch the reactions, the poster had been ripped from the wall, and as they overheard the angry conversations on the subway platform, it appeared that a gay boycott of MTV was in the works.  Standing in front of the tattered poster, Z laughed uproariously.  Though happy to see an authentically Z-ish emotion from her friend, Rai felt bad about posting the cruel quote.  It wasn’t as if gays faced a lot of persecution in fin de siècle New York, she thought, but it couldn’t be fun to come down into your subway station and see yourself accused of carnivorous pedophilia.

 

“I dunno, Z.  I’d be psyched if they quit watching MTV… but I don’t think this is very nice.”

 

“Nice?  C’mon! Gays run this city.  They can handle a bit of ridicule.  They’re as good a target as anyone else.  And we can make fun of whoever we want.”

 

“Except black Rastafarian Marxists–”

 

“I gave up Rasta months ago!”

 

“You know what I mean.” 

 

“But that’s different.  Blacks actually suffer because of capitalism.  Gay men make more money per capita than anybody else.  They can handle a little parody.”

 

“So could Al Sharpton or Puff Daddy, but we haven’t gone after them.”

 

“Well, maybe we will.  What’s your point?  We put up a funny sign, they got pissed.  Looks like success to me.  It’s what you wanted.”

 

“All I’m saying, Z, is that I think you’ve let…” she searched for a word, then gave up, “…your own experience get in the way.  Oppression isn’t just about per capita income.”  

 

“Look, these wolves have it coming to them.  Chelsea Queens, body builders, tight pants white boys with too much money and not enough–”

 

“Z!”  There are many places in the world where one can get away with loud, homophobic slurs.  Christopher Street is not one of them.  Several large men in tight black t-shirts stared angrily down the platform, looking for an excuse to step in.  Just in time, Z noticed them, so he stared apologetically at his shoes.  He was not very good at the posture, but it convinced them not to attack him.

 

On the train they took out of Christopher Street station — and not fast enough, as far as Rai was concerned — she saw the perfect ad for their next quote.  Acela, the new high speed train to Washington and Boston, had posted its name all over the car in enigmatic style.  Each poster featured a different, random set of capital letters, each beginning with A and ending with B.  As she looked at the ads, words gradually appeared from the confusion.  “ACATCHUPONKAFKAB” slowly became “Between points A and B, catch up on Kafka.”  It was an odd campaign, but people were looking at it.

 

“That’s the one,” she whispered.  “Perfect, huh?  And easy to imitate.”

 

“Yeah.”  He was still unhappy that she had not liked his last quote.

 

“Seriously.  Something pithy, huh?  That’s what we want.”  She stepped up onto the seat and yanked the poster out from behind a broken pane of glass.  “Let’s do it.  I got the perfect quote from that little black book of yours.”  She pulled him out of the train when the doors opened — it was Times Square, and she thought that the library would be a great place to work.

 

Z did not want to sit in the Rose Reading Room — “If we’re gonna deface fucking public property, let’s be a little more subtle, OK?” — but he accepted a spot under the trees in Bryant Park.  The afternoon was sticky — one of those August days for which New York is notorious — so they needed the shade.  Z pulled pens and stencils from his bag and set to work.

 

Rai was impressed.  Not just with her friend’s ability to steal art supplies, but with his æsthetic sensibility (in her mind, Rai always spelled the word with an æ).  During the last several months, she’d feared that they had been drifting apart, but now, as she handed him his pens, that distance faded away.  She felt the intimacy of a nurse handing the scalpel to her surgeon, the private passing ammunition to his gunner… At that moment, his intellect impressed her much more than his homophobia had annoyed her.

 

Z prized his intellect.  Rai knew that.  He liked to think of himself as a proletarian intellectual, the sort Marx imagined as the leaders of the revolution, who could see through the clouds of confusion that allowed most people to countenance injustice.  In Rai he had found a mind as supple and unconventional as his own, and teaching herself his theories on philosophy and politics had made him happier than any other time he could remember.  Unfortunately, when she began obsessing over Russian novels, she had moved her outside of his sphere of expertise.  Pushkin did not contribute to his dreams of revolution, so he had never read him — and as he had informed Rai, he would never waste his time that way.   

 

Though Rai understood the strain it had caused in their friendship, she needed her novels.  However she tried, she could not put down a book by Dostoyevsky or Chekhov or Gogol or Turgenev; even the more esoteric Beily and Bulgakov possessed her.  She knew that the sufferings of a Moscow aristocrat were not hers, but somehow their struggles to find meaning in a meaningless world helped her.  

 

That meaning had not included Z, and she knew that he resented it.  That’s why he was so jealous of Mike, why he made fun of every book he stole for her.  Somewhere in the back of her mind, Rai knew she was jumping the gun, that she had no proof that graffiti philosophy would return them to the garden of Eden.  Even so, under the trees of Bryant Park, she suddenly felt as close to Z as when they had first met.

 

Perhaps a week after she had run away, lonely and wondering how much longer she could stay away from home, Rai had been perusing an exhibit in the National Museum of African Art when Z, drawn toward her by what he always called, “the tightest ass this side of Marrakesh,” asked her about the Malian masks she had been examining for the last half hour.  Though Z’s appearance had frightened her, fear of solitude had overcome fear of him, and they began to talk — first about Africa, then politics, then life on the street.  Rai forgot her homesickness, Z forgot years of misery, and eventually the guards had to escort them out the door at closing time.  As they walked across the Mall in a teasing argument, Z realized that he hadn’t once thought about her ass since they’d begun their conversation.

 

That night, in response to Z’s persistent attempts to turn their intellectual chemistry into something physical, Rai made it abundantly clear that their relationship would never include sex.  Furious, he stomped off to the other side of Rock Creek Park, and Rai surprised herself by following him.  Finding him left her even more stunned: he had collapsed on the dirt with a blissful smile on his face and a needle in his arm.

 

Even in sheltered Vanillaville, Rai had known that such a world existed — the cops that came into her middle school classes had pounded the dangers of heroin deep into her head — but the reality of it shocked her.  No, she wasn’t frightened or freaked out: she was shocked by the pleasure she felt at the sight.  It made her blood flow, it struck her as adventurous and exciting, and it gave her something to do.

 

The ambulance Rai called from a pay phone arrived quickly, but the paramedics showed Z little respect when they saw the needle in his arm.  Rai held his hand as they rushed to the hospital, then filled out the paperwork with invented names and dates as nurses tried to clean his blood stream.  By the next morning, it was clear he would live, but without Medicaid or insurance, the hospital wanted him out of the ER as soon as possible, so Rai found herself supporting a huge, weak body as they limped out the front door.

 

“Look, I don’t even know who you are,” she said as she sat him down on a bench in the sun, “But I just put myself on the line for you, so we’re going to make a deal.”  She had also liked the feel of those words on her tongue.  They felt responsible, independent, even adult.  Like the heroine of a fantasy novel.

 

Z couldn’t understand the contradiction between the shy, thin voice and the determination behind it, but he nodded.  “OK, what–”

 

“As long as we’re friends, you’re never going to use that stuff again.”  

 

For a while, Z argued that he couldn’t quit without methadone, that he couldn’t get methadone without a Medicaid card, that he couldn’t get a Medicaid card without a birth certificate, but Rai did not relent.  Finally, frustrated, he asked, “What the fuck am I going to do?  Have you tie me to a tree while I detox?”

 

“Fine.  I’ll bring you food.”

 

Z never understood exactly why he accepted the stupid plan.  Perhaps he saw Rai as his only chance for redemption; perhaps the suicide attempt had left him addled; perhaps he was still enchanted by the quality of her ass.  Regardless, he found a place in the park near Cleveland Circle, allowed Rai to tie his ankle to a tree and burn the knot so he couldn’t untie it, and sat down to prepare for three days in hell.

 

As she had promised, Rai brought food and water to the tree.  She sat close by him, even caressing his hand in the rare moments when he slept, or when his fury left him too exhausted to hurt her.  She had never seen pain like the symptoms of withdrawal, not even in the faces of Christ in the National Gallery of Art, or in the stories of the martyred Macabees.  Finally, on the fourth morning, the sweat had stopped, the cries had quieted, and his face was almost as handsome as when he had first approached her.

 

Rai took out her pocket knife and cut the rope.  That night, they had hopped a train in Union Station and hid in the bathroom each time the conductor passed.  When morning dawned, they had arrived in New York.

 

 

 

As she followed her friend onto the A train, she felt like she had in those first days.  They were together, linked by a common purpose, brothers in arms… she giggled at the string of clichés that passed through her head.  Happiness, however, did not keep her from paying close attention to the other people in the train.

 

 

 

“God is dead!”

 

 

 

-Friedrich Nietzsche

 

 

 

As Z had expected, the quote was a hit.  Acela ads confused most people in the first place, but the simple message on the A train caught everyone’s attention.  As a downtown train slowed to a crawl after the Port Authority, Rai saw one passenger point it out to a complete stranger; they began an intense conversation about the holocaust.  

 

After the quote provoked a fascinating argument between a butch lesbian and the priest who sat beside her, Rai noticed Z grinning like a little kid, then glancing around to see if she shared his enthusiasm.  It was a strange sight.

 

A Hasidic mother covered her two sons’ eyes when she saw the false Acela ad, so of course the kids squirmed around to see it better.  “How can God be dead, Momma?”  asked the older after he could finally read the words.

 

“Elohenu hayah!” the mother insisted.  “Our God lives.  This is what happens to people when they listen to the lies of the Reform synagogue.”

 

This idea made Rai laugh, but then she also began to feel guilty.  Was her project going to cause these kids to lose their faith?  She stepped across the car and sat down next to the boys.  The mother looked concerned that an Arab ruffian would sit next to her sons, so Rai quickly mouthed a prayer in Hebrew (“Baruch hatah Adonai…”) to calm her.  As the mother turned away to look at the route map, Rai whispered to the younger boy, who was about ten, “Elohim hayah qen.  But don’t let that stop you from reading Martin Buber.”  She slid back to the other end of the car.

 

Over the past eighteen months, Rai’s attitude toward religion had changed several times.  When she first came to New York, she’d enthusiastically attended temple every Sabbath at an intellectual Conservative congregation near Columbia.  She’d met quite a few people that she liked — mostly students and professors — but as she got to know them, they started to ask too many questions.  She was perfectly willing to talk about “How much did Reb Maimonides owe to the Arab logicians?” but the moment the conversation became, “So, where are you living?” she needed to step back.  That last question, asked by the mother of a cute but shy boy who always sat in the back of the shul, had erased her final argument against Z’s proposed migration to Florida.

 

Rai spent some time studying Kaballah.  In an angry mood after her break with the synagogue, she concluded that she liked the Emanations on the Left much more than those on the Right — good and blessed spirits were just so boring.  Soon thereafter, the Miami sun having banished that black, cynical mood, she decided that mysticism was just silly — even if Moshe ha-Leon had been Sephardic.

 

She got one great benefit from the experiment with mysticism.  She learned that she loved to taunt the Hasidim and the Lubavichers.  Sometimes, when she was really bored, or when Z had abandoned her for a long-term affair, she would go over to Williamsburg or Crown Heights, find an old man with forelocks, and shout, “You wouldn’t know the Shekhinah if it bit you in the ass!”  or “The Zohar was written in the 14th century, you schmuck!”  From time to time, a couple of young men would try to chase her down, but Rai had always been fast on her feet, and she reveled enough in their anger to justify the risk.

 

After she had left the synagogue in Morningside Heights, it didn’t make much sense to follow the liturgical calendar — there are not enough Jews at a typical soup kitchen to make a minion — but Rai did try to pray on holidays.  Mostly, her Judaism had become a way to say — whether to other homeless people or to the Muggle masses of the world — that “I am not one of you.”

 

In the end, for all her ups and downs, she thought that Judaism was important enough that she didn’t want two little boys to lose it because she’d agreed to quote Nietzsche on the train.

Rai didn’t know why she couldn’t stay mad at Z.  Though she liked his perverse charm, it certainly didn’t compensate for the cold, lonely nights, the constant arguments, his inability to express any kind of affection…  Her past certainly didn’t suggest a forgiving temperament — the Easter ham still stuck in her craw after 18 months — but she preferred that explanation to the alternative.  She didn’t want to accept that she needed Z so much that she’d let him get away with anything.

 

Regardless of her motives, Rai had completely forgotten her anger just two seconds after Z pulled the sheet of construction paper from a shopping bag he’d kept hidden behind his back.  She stopped him before they could even leave the building, then opened it on the front desk.  Tanya’s papers scattered everywhere, but she had become used to that — she just knelt down to gather them up.

 

“Holy shit, Z!  It’s perfect!  How the fuck’d you do that?”

 

“Stole it.”

 

“From the train?”

 

“Exactly.”

 

Tanya had recovered enough to look at the object of Rai’s admiration.  It looked just like the subway ads for the Marble Collegiate Church, with pictures of the sanctuary and a happy, multicultural flock.  Except for one thing: where the text should have been — some sort of welcoming Bible verse, though Rai didn’t remember which — Z had inked in an entirely different quote.  Tanya read it and laughed.

 

 

 

“Whatever the God of Earth and Heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman.”

 

 

-William James

 

 

 

Rai couldn’t contain her enthusiasm.  “You rock!  You fucking rock!  So where’s it gonna go?  Who receives the benefit of our wisdom?” She tried to add a touch of irony to her voice, but it was almost unnoticeable.

 

“I got it on the F train…”

 

“Then we put it back there.  Fuck yeah!”  She rolled the poster up, gave a quick wave to Tanya, and dashed out the door.  Z followed her, only a bit more slowly.

 

Z had wondered how they were going to replace the text.  Later, he would admit to Rai that he had only been able to steal it in the middle of the night, when no one else was around.  Rai had no such qualms: after they jumped the turnstile at Rockefeller Center, she paced up and down the train until she found an ad with a loose pane in front of it.  She pushed the commuter in front of it to the side, unrolled the tube, and artfully slid the poster over the old ad.  Then, pointedly ignoring the angry gaze of the woman she’d offended, Rai stood back to admire her work.

 

“Fucking brilliant, Z.  Whaddaya say?  You wanna hang out and see what people have to say?”

 

For the next three hours they sat in the same car, like two Madison Avenue advertising executives doing reception research.  Though some Manhattanites laughed at the quote, most denizens of that most secular of boroughs had no interest in anything that talked of God.  However, out near Coney Island, Rai and Z heard two matrons planning to call Marble Collegiate Church to tell the preacher that God was indeed a gentleman, and a polite one at that.  They knew it from their own experience, they huffed.  In Queens, a group of older hispanic men looked at the sign, conferred with each other in Spanish, then became angry.  Rai wished she could understand what they were saying, because it seemed very interesting.  In Manhattan, the best response they got was from a group of white punks who got on at Delancy Street.  One took out a permanent marker and scribbled a couple of exclamation marks on the plastic cover.

 

 

 

That night, Rai desperately tried to read Z’s book of quotes under a streetlight, but his crabbed hand really demanded the light of midday — and a magnifying glass.  Sleep didn’t come easily, but the next morning, as Z prowled the subways for other ads he could steal and modify, she say by Mike’s softball fields, paging through the book in search of quotes that would really teach the Muggles about life.

 

By the time that Mike showed up at noon, she thought that she had found a couple of possibilities.  She was thrilled to see him — and even more thrilled to see that he had brought an extra sandwich.  That morning other things had seemed more important than breakfast, and she was hungry.

 

“Life must be going well,” Mike observed as she devoured the chicken salad.  “you glow, my dear.”

 

“It’s right on.  We kick ass.  I mean, we completely kick fucking ass.  You wouldn’t’a believed those old farts when the saw the way me and Z changed the ad for that fucking church.”

 

“I am very excited for you,” Mike replied, still rather overwhelmed.

 

They had been paying little attention to the softball game, but the fans’ tension drew their eyes to the field.  One team had the bases loaded, and a young, well-built man stood at bat.  He wore his baseball cap backward, which struck Rai as even worse fashion on the field than off.  He swung as hard as he could at the pitch, but the ball merely popped gently into the air and then into the glove of the third basewoman.  The teams changed sides.

 

“Don’t be sarcastic.  I’m serious.”  Rai had a remarkable ability to maintain the chain of conversation in the face of interruptions.  “It’s like I finally found some novelist to write my story, y’know?  Make it go someplace.  Maybe Lermontov’s come back to life and I got him to narrate my life, huh?  Now that’d fucking rock.”

 

“I fear you have gained too much enthusiasm for this book.”

 

“It’s an awesome book!  Pechorin knows you gotta tell a good story.  It makes shit interesting.  Maybe it even makes you laugh, huh?  That’s why I like the bastard.  Dude’s a raconteur.”  She felt proud of the last word, and pronounced it with relish.  “No, it’s like even more.  The dude knows how to live a good story.”

 

“I do not think this is true.”

 

“Huh?”

 

“It is one thing to take a life, with its pains and joys, and turn it into a story.  It is something else to take a story and try to turn it into your life.  This is the tragedy of Emma Bovary.”

 

“Who?”

 

Mike often expressed disbelief at the gaps in Rai’s knowledge.  On the one hand, she could quote Cherneshevsky from memory, but then she’d have to ask who Flaubert was.  “You must read more of the French, my dear.  Madame Bovary read too many novels, and she wanted her own life to be as exciting and romantic as the characters she read about.  She wished ‘to live a good story,’ as you say.  It destroyed her, her marriage, her children.  A great indictment of fiction.  Except that the government did not understand the point, and they took Flaubert to court for trying to corrupt female readers.”

 

“ ‘Our public is still so young and naive,’” Rai quoted in a proud tone, “ ‘that it does not understand a fable unless there is a moral at the end.’”

 

“That’s exactly my point,” Mike sighed under his breath.

 

“What point?”

 

“That you know Lermontov by heart, but you have never heard of the greatest French novelist.”

 

“But this Emma Bovary babe just sounds like a female Pechorin.”  Mike’s expression showed that he was not convinced by her hypothesis, but she did not clarify it.  “This way, I get the same idea without a million pages of women fainting and complaining.”

 

“I find it strange that you do not like most female characters…”

 

“The interesting ones are evil, and the good girls just whine and pretend to be deep.  What I hate…  It’s like Sofya Petrovna in St. Petersburg.  She doesn’t know shit, but because she tries and then screws up, men like her.  It’s like her ignorance makes them feel good about their pathetic little knowledge.  That’s why they like her.  Freud’s the same.”

 

“I’m sorry?”

 

“The stupid penis envy thing.  Freud wants to think his dick’s important, so he pretends all women want a dick.  If we want it and don’t have it, there must be some value in it.  Well, I don’t want a dick.  Not on me, not in me.”

 

“Very smart.”  Rai beamed at the compliment.  “But there are other books, yes? Anna Karenina…”

 

Suddenly, Z, with his usual stealth, whacked Rai over the head with a paper tube.

 

“Whoa, dude!  Basta, huh?”

 

“I’m working all day while you shoot the shit with some old Stalinist, and you got the balls to say ‘basta’ to me?”  As always when he was around Mike, Z roughened his accent into something almost incomprehensible.

 

“So you got one?  C’mon.  Show it to me.”

 

Z looked at Mike in a way he thought was subtle, but which was anything but.

 

“He knows all about it,” Rai laughed.  “C’mon, I wanna see it.”

 

Rai recognized the ad campaign far before she read the word.  It was an MTV poster, the sort with text so surreal that no one could understand it.  At first, the quote that Z had pasted on top made no more sense, but then the meaning came to her.

 

“I dunno, Z…” she said with as much tact as she could muster.

In the middle of the night, Rai woke from her uneven, itchy sleep among the leaves.  A huge raindrop had struck her on the face, and now many others followed.  She wished again for the tarp, and tried to huddle deeper under the leaves, but soon they too were soaked.  Though the August air was warm, she began to shiver; finally, knowing that sleep would not return and she was not going to warm up, she stood and began to pace.  Though soon she felt the blood return to her limbs, the movement did nothing to dry her.  She wondered what time it was and how long it would be until The Place opened.

 

She knew she needed to get dry.  Her resistance to illness was always low: she ate poorly, she never had a bed, and whether at The Place or on the street, she was always around people with nasty germs.  At least she didn’t have to worry about the sexually transmitted diseases Z and everybody else were always so freaked out about; she felt good about that.

 

The rain was not Rai’s only problem.  She knew many bridges that she could hang out under, but lots of other people knew them, too.  Psychotics, homeless old men, winos, thieves… and perhaps worst of all, cops.  If getting dry meant that she would get raped or thrown in jail, she would prefer being wet and sick; the nurse at The Place could just give her antibiotics like he always did.

 

Fortunately, she found no one under the arch just east of the softball fields, so Rai curled herself up in a shadowy corner.  Her eyes flashed back and forth from one end of the tunnel to the other, afraid to see a silhouette against the bluer black of the outside.  The arch — more of a short tunnel under the park ring road — smelled of mold and urine, and the air was so damp that her clothes could not dry; even her hair had grown long enough to hold moisture.  She felt herself begin to shiver, so she stood again and paced back and forth, even jumping up and down in the hope of warming herself.  Once the shivers were gone, she sat again.

 

Rai felt misery in the depths of her bones, and what was worse, she knew that it was a boring sort of misery, the kind that would add nothing to the dramatic, epic story she wanted from her life.  Time passed slowly, without marks or meaning.  Finally, feeling cold again, Rai stood to pace once more.  How long had she been here?  How much longer until day, and how much longer until The Place opened?  She so desperately needed a shower.  And to wash her skirt; she didn’t even want to think of the piss and grime she’d been sitting in.

 

Suddenly, she heard a voice at one end of the tunnel.  Then another responding.  Outer Borough accents — Brooklyn, she thought.

 

“– the worst assignments.”

 

“How come they can’t transfer me to the fourth precinct?  That’s all I fuckin’ asked.”

 

Cops.  Rai didn’t wait to hear any more of the conversation.  If they found her, smelling like this, under a bridge at three o’clock in the morning, it didn’t matter how good a lie she told.  They would know she was homeless and they would lock her up.  Or they would send her to a shelter — either Covenant House (nothing more than a Christian, inquisitorial prison, in Rai’s estimation) or a city women’s shelter (where she was sure to be assaulted, raped, and pricked with dirty heroin needles).  Rai sprinted out the end away from the cops.

 

They seemed to hear her steps, because as Rai waited outside, she heard them slide carefully into the tunnel, whispering to each other.  She just wanted to get away, so she ran up onto the ring road, then south toward Midtown.  She could see a glint of light in the east; day was coming.  It wouldn’t be too long until The Place would open.  Maybe she could find someplace out of the rain down there.  She walked out of the park and down Sixth Avenue, rain dripping down her face, her skirt soaked, her blouse plastered immodestly to her chest.  Several hardy joggers ran past her, headed into the park.  Somewhere in the lower fifties, Rai saw a cop, so she began to weave back and forth across the sidewalk, pretending to be a college student going home at the end of a long bender.  The cop gazed down with a mix of compassion and pity, then ignored her and walked on.

 

A skyscraper created a roof for part of what street kids calle “the bat cave”, the strange little park with a Japanese fountain on 46th Street, and half a dozen kids had gathered there.  All were silent, trying to warm themselves as best they could with wet blankets, cigarettes, and alcohol.  Several of them sullenly passed a joint around.  Rai sat against the wall as far from the others as she could and hugged her knees to her chest.  She felt so cold.  She had forgotten the meaning of life.

 

Time simply passed, marked only by the flick of a lighter at yet another cigarette.  Rain poured off the buildings, but where Rai sat stayed relatively dry; even so, her clothes showed no sign of losing their dampness.  Gradually, the streets became lighter, and several people walked by on 46th, carrying umbrellas.  They looked at the wet, filthy kids with disdain.  Rai didn’t even have the energy to flick them off.

 

Finally, after an eternity of shivering, one of the kids announced, “It’s nine.”  Rai saw that he wore an expensive watch; she wondered if it were stolen or fake.  Fake, she imagined.  If it were stolen, he would have sold it last night and found himself a hotel room and a hot shower.  She stood stiffly and shook blood back into her arms and legs, then walked unsteadily through the downpour along 46th Street to The Place.  She signed up for a shower.  Fifth in line.

 

In the common room, she collapsed onto one of the lightly padded couches along the wall.  She was so tired she could not even think, but at least some warmth had returned to her body.  She watched the other kids filter in.  She could tell the ones who had dared the subway, because they were drier and more cheerful.  Those who slept in the park or on the street looked sopping, exhausted, and bedraggled.

 

Finally, staff called Rai’s name, and she stumbled down to the basement to take a shower.  Though kids generally weren’t allowed to do laundry on weekends, Juan allowed Rai to throw her sopping clothes in the washer.  She wrapped a towel around herself and walked into the shower, not even feeling the shame of exposing her body.  She stood in the hot water for as long as Juan allowed her, then dried herself off, found a sweatsuit she could wear for a while, and collapsed in one of the soft chairs scattered around the basement.  She fell instantly, deeply asleep.

 

She woke with a start.  Juan was shaking her shoulder.  “Rai.  Rai.”  She opened her eyes, and he smiled gently at her.  “Your clothes are done, and lunch is ready.  I let you sleep for a while, ‘cause you looked beat.”

 

“Thanks.”  She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and walked past the television into the laundry room.  Television — that’s right.  What a strange dream.  The only part she remembered was that she had been appointed director of a musical comedy based on the Weather Channel, and she had tried to teach a baritone the voice of a thunderstorm.  She wondered if that were a sign of madness.  Or just of idiocy.  Then she closed the door and changed back into her comfortable, habitual clothes.  As she walked back upstairs, she stuck a head into the shower room to thank Juan for letting her sleep; when staff bent the rules to help her, they needed support.

 

Though hardly at the top of her form, Rai was surprised how good she felt.  Just three hours of sleep, and she almost felt content.  When she saw that the cook had made oxtail soup, she even felt good.  She gobbled down two bowls — keeping warm the night before had used a lot of energy.

 

After lunch, she walked down the stairs to the common room.  She wanted to sleep again, but there were too many kids around to lay down on a couch.  Instead, she sat up straight, closed her eyes, and tried not to think of Z.  Or of the cops.  Or anything else.

 

The sound of her name yanked Rai back to the room.  One of the staff members, sitting at the table with three kids, beckoned her to a Scrabble board.  Though Rai firmly believed that she had preserved her anonymity in The Place, in fact quite a few staff members worried about her: she always seemed so lonely, and her only friend seemed to be Z — about whom staff had serious concerns.  Several of them had decided to try to integrate her into the communal life of The Place.

 

“I’m fine, thanks.”  Rai leaned back and closed her eyes again.

 

“C’mon, I need a challenge!” joked a shaven headed white guy with a little goatee.  Rai didn’t remember what his job was — some sort of counseling — but she thought his name was Terry.  “I’ve been winning so many games that I need somebody who can kick my ass.”  He smiled at his previous opponents to emphasize that he was only joking.  Rai liked that fact that staff at The Place were allowed to curse.  It made them seem so much more human; the staff at Covenant House weren’t even allowed to say the word “condom.”  Plus, he had challenged her, so she decided to get up and play.  She sat down next to Terry and collected seven tiles.

 

Though both of the kids and the other staff member who were playing hardly challenged her — they fell into the “cat” and “ha” school of Scrabble, Rai concluded dismissively — Terry was pretty sharp.  Not only did he make good words, he managed to put most of them on bonus spaces.  By the time the board was half-full, Terry and Rai had pulled far away from the others.  

 

As Terry began to play several tiles, the sound of heavy feet on the stairs broke through the silence in the common room.  An emaciated young man, perhaps half-Asian, half-black, burst into the room at a run, then looked up, as if unsure where he was.  “Fucking fuck!  I need my works!  Fucking cunt, get me my fucking works or everybody’s gonna regret it!”   His confusion made his shouts into the sound of a cornered animal, terrified, furious, earshattering.  He spotted Terry at the other end of the room, jumped over the table, fell, and landed at the counselor’s feet.  Grabbing Terry’s bare legs, he now screamed upward.  “You gotta help me.  Oh, please, please.  You don’t even know how I’m fiendin’!”  Tears filled his eyes.  For the first time, Rai noticed the discoloration on his forehead.  Karposi’s sarcoma, she thought.  

 

Terry didn’t try to pull his leg away, even though he could see the signs of AIDS as well as anyone else.  He leaned down and clenched the boy’s hand, then pulled him into a kneeling position.  A sleeve fell away to reveal a long series of track marks.  “It’s bad?”  Terry asked with clear compassion.

 

“Oh, God, you can’t understand.  I’m gonna die.  I’m gonna die.”  Tears poured down his face.

 

“Where are your works, Tay?”

 

“In the basement, man.  My locker.”  He winced, then screamed.  “They won’t let me go down!  What’s up with these fuckers!  I need my works!  Why do you people hate me so much?”  As his voice grew louder, he stood, then threw his arms furiously through the air, spinning his body as if possessed by some wind no one else could feel.  Tears, spittle, and snot spewed over the room, landing on the table, the board, the Scrabble players.  He turned to Terry again, this time demanding instead of imprecating.  “Give me the works!  You know what I got.  You take me down to the basement or…”  He looked at the door.  

 

A very big black man had had entered the common room and was approaching cautiously, with the calmest smile imaginable in those circumstances.  “Tay, let’s step–”

 

“Don’t fuck with me, Dashel!”  He stepped back from Terry.  “You people know what I got in these veins!”  He pulled a paring knife from his pocket.  “Gimme my works or I’m gonna open ‘em up, and there’s blood over all o’ you.  Don’t fuck with me!”

 

“Nobody’s fuckin’ with you, Tay,” Dashel said calmly, continuing forward slowly even as all of the kids in the room sprinted for the door.  Rai stood just outside of blood splattering range; she wanted to see what was about to happen.  “I just went down to the basement and got these out of your locker.”  He held out a hand full of syringes.  “I’m breaking the rules, but we both know you need this.”

 

Tay broke down crying again, almost fell to the floor, then tripped toward Dashel, grabbed the needles, and sprinted out the door as the rest of the kids dived to get out of his way.  Rai heard the sound of feet on the stairs again, then the front door slamming.  Slowly, with a quiet buzz of gossip, a dozen kids filed back into the room.

 

Rai sat gingerly back in her seat.  Terry still sat where he had the entire time.  Now he was scrubbing the table with a baby wipe, and three tears flowed down his left cheek.  “Fucking world,” he said under his breath, then wiped away the tears.  “You OK, Dashel?”

 

“Yeah.  Dope.  I’d likta kill whoever came up with that one.”  Dashel walked slowly over to the table.  A sort of tired despair had replaced his preternatural calm.

 

“You want me to do the report?”

 

“Nah.  You gotta cover the room.  I’ll write it up.  Let’s staff it with Susan later, huh?  He’s gonna kill himself soon if we don’t do something.”

 

“Yeah.  Prob’ly even if we do do something.”  Terry turned back to the board and Dashel walked slowly from the room.

 

Gradually, the players returned to the game.  When she had first come to The Place, Rai had been stunned by the way everyone recovered from a crisis; within fifteen minutes, it was like nothing had ever happened, except for a vague feeling of tension in the air.  Finally she learned that crises were so common that everyone had become numb to the worst the world had to offer. 

 

The board was almost full.  Rai was down to her last four tiles — an H, and L, and two Is.  The scorecard showed her ahead of Terry by only a couple of points; it was his turn.  He stared at the board intently, focusing on an O at the right of the bottom row.  Finally, as everyone else grew impatient, he laid down five tiles.  P H B I A, plus the O.  The final A sat on the triple word score box in the corner.  “Phobia!  Beat that,” he crowed, then tallied his score.  He was now ahead by quite a bit.

 

As Terry had been thinking, Rai had already prepared her play, so she laid it down without even counting if it would top his score.  She used an N on the left side of the board: N I H I L.  Everyone looked at her strangely.

 

“That ain’t a word,” said the boy whose score was lowest.

 

“Yes it is.  Means ‘nothing’ in Latin.”

 

“What, you think we’re playin’ Scrabble in fuckin’ Latin?  If it ain’t a word in English, it ain’t a word in Scrabble.”

 

“Just ‘cause you fucks are too stupid–”

 

“Whoa, whoa,” Terry interjected.  “You guys let me get away with ‘dissed,’ and that’s hardly in the Scrabble dictionary, so let’s let it go.  This has been a tough enough afternoon already.”

 

A girl had been counting up the points.  “Doesn’t matter anyway.  You still lose by two.  Still think you’re so smart?”

 

“Fuck your mother.  If you had one, that is.”  Rai stood, turned her back, and went back to where she’d been sitting.  Before she closed her eyes, she looked back and saw that Terry was trying to calm the girl, who seemed eager to fight.  “Trying to tell me what’s a word and what’s not,” Rai murmured under her breath.  “Like any of those losers are even literate.”

 

When Rai woke, the room was almost empty.  “C’mon,” said a tall black blob that resolved into Z as she rubbed her eyes.  “They’re closing down.  Everybody’s going to fucking therapy or some shit.”

 

“Fuck you.”  She closed her eyes again.

 

“Seriously.  I wanna go get some books.”

 

“Abandon me in the rain, and think I’m gonna fucking steal books for you?”

 

“Whaddaya want?  I’ll get you a Tolstoy, or maybe that Google guy you mike so much.”

 

“Gogol.”

 

“Whatever.  C’mon, lazy ass.”

 

“If a ho’s got johns, what’s a gigolo got?  Jennies?  Go steal something with your fucking jenny.”  She closed her eyes again.

 

“Marx’s wife was named Jenny…”  Z quickly saw that humor was not going to win her over.  He sat down next to her, and she shifted away.  He thought a moment.  “Or,” he drawled, “we could do some guerrilla philosophy.”