Tolstoy Kicks Ass!

When Z found Rai that evening at the Place, he came bearing two gifts, something extraordinary for him.  Had she been that much of a bitch? Rai wondered.  Was he trying to make her feel better?  She didn’t know exactly what to make of that hypothesis.

 

The first gift seemed particularly out of character, given Z’s hatred of all things Russian (except Lenin and Trotsky, of course).  He handed her a package with a certain amount of fanfare; he had even taken the time to wrap it.  She made quick work of the paper bags and little ribbon, and found a hardback copy of the new translation of Anna Karenina.  She almost broke down in the middle of the lunchroom.

 

“Thank you, Z.  That’s just so cool.”  Without the veneer of Weltschmertz, she looked like a little girl again.  Several of the staff members gathered by the kitchen looked at her as if they didn’t know who she was.  “You’re a good friend.  I know I don’t tell you that enough.”

 

“No biggie.  Just thought you might like it,” he replied gruffly.

 

“Like it?  I always wanted to read it.  Always.  So what else did you bring me?”

 

He unrolled the now recognizable form of a subway advertisement.  It had been an ad for the New School University.  Now it appeared to be an ad for Aristotle.

 

 

 

“Almost everything has been discovered already.”

-Aristotle

 

 

 

As they rode the train up and down the West side, then off toward Park Slope, dozens of people laughed and pointed to the fake ad.  Just about everyone knew Aristotle as the wisest man in history, yet they saw him saying something so horribly wrong.  Students laughed at the sign, black grandmothers explained it to their grandkids, Upper West Side Jews guffawed as they got off in the Village.

 

Rai had loved the idea when Z had first shown it to her, but now, unexpectedly, she was not pleased.  “Fuckers,” she whispered to Z after a group of Gen X computer types slid off the train, talking about discovery and science.

 

“Huh?”  Z was surprised.  He thought they’d provoked exactly the kind of controversy Rai wanted.

 

“They’re just such fucking losers, but they wanna pretend they’re better’n they are.  So instead of actually trying to be smarter or stronger or whatever, they just wanna see great people humiliated.  It makes them feel like they don’t suck so much.  Pure fucking resentment.”

 

“Except–”

 

“Except nothing.  They get to feel smart for knowing who Aristotle was.  They feel good about themselves, so they laugh.”

 

“Maybe–”

 

“All we’re doing is fucking helping Muggles feel good about themselves.”

 

“But they are reading…”

 

“But are they learning anything?  No.  Zippo.  Just becoming more comfortable.  More quiet.  More boring.”

 

“Sometimes its just good to see a name.  Maybe tonight one of them will pick up a copy of the Nicomachean Ethics.  It’s possible, huh?”

 

“Just what we need.  More fucking Aristotelians.”  

 

“God, Rai.  You hate it when nobody notices a quote, but when I find one that gets everybody talking, you get pissed.  Ya wanna give it a chance here?” 

 

“‘A mere consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.’”  By the time she finished her quote, she had almost reminded herself not to be so serious, but she was still unhappy.  Her plan to teach the Muggles to think was not going where she wanted.  She and Z seemed as far from enlightenment, fame, revolution, and meaning as they had been a week before.

 

 

 

 

 

*     *     *     *     *

 

 

 

“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

-Karl Marx

 

 

 

Perhaps it was Rai’s dark mood that inspired her to chose that particular quote, or perhaps it was Z’s clever idea to use it over an ad for the Dance Theater of Harlem.  “Black people doing ballet?  Like they’re from Kiev or some shit.  Now that’s a fucking nightmare,” he had pontificated.  Unfortunately, no one even had the chance to be confused, because after they had slid it into place, a pack of 16 year old gangsters rampaged through the car, breaking everything they could find.

 

“Dead traditions, broken…”  Rai looked for a word and couldn’t find it.  It was becoming increasingly difficult to make a silver lining out of their failures.

 

Z said simply, “Fuckers.”

 

“So whadda we do to make people pay attention?  How they gonna learn what we have to say?”

 

“Hit ‘em over the head with a hammer.  That’s all that’s left.”

 

“C’mon, there’s–”  Rai didn’t even know what she wanted to say.

 

“Maybe thinking is just one of those traditions of dead generations.  Why think when you got Puff Daddy.  Or is it P. Diddy?  Fuck ‘em all.”  The expression on his face held more than his usual anger.  It hinted at despair.

 

Rai knew that another nightmare weighed on top of Z.  Or perhaps it was many nightmares.  From time to time, she told herself that if she had the excuse of his past, she’d let herself go really insane:

 

That morning when he woke in suburbia with neither memories nor clothing, Z had run madly through the strip malls of north Houston.  Though he could never describe how, by nightfall he found himself downtown.  Only cops and homeless old men prowled the surreally deserted streets, but Z knew that he could not trust the police; he did not know how he knew, but he knew.  Terrified of everyone but desperate for any protection, he mustered the courage to approach four black men smoking cigarettes on a corner.  “Can you help me?” he asked, hearing for the first time his own Jamaican accent.

 

“Who are you?” asked the youngest of the four, staring with distrust at the expensive clothes Z had found on the floor that morning.  Z couldn’t respond.  “I said, who the fuck are you?”

 

“I don’t know.”  And he began to cry.

 

The next several days offered no more clarity.  He began to call himself “Z” when the old men informed him that the enigmatic “X” had already been taken, and they taught him where to get a free meal and how to shoplift a candy bar.  Soon, though, he found another desire even stronger than hunger.  Since he was young and handsome — in spite of the scars — he could always find a woman at a soup kitchen who would assuage the demands of his body.  No one needed to teach him about sex.  Somehow, he already knew.

 

From time to time, Z tried to explain what those first days had been like, but his memory and vocabulary failed him.  He could remember only disgust: at his own body, at the food he picked from dumpsters or off styrofoam plates in church basements, at the women who satisfied his desires.  In the midst of that horror, he had told Rai, he needed something beautiful.

 

Redemption, if one could call it that, came in the form of words.  In one of those church basements — now in New Orleans, where he had hitched to escape Houston and the heavy blankness it impressed on his memory — he found two books: a King James Bible and a copy of “Romeo and Juliet.”  As for every other fifteen year old boy in the history of the West, the Bible opened automatically to the Song of Songs, and he found that the words printed there touched not only him, but also the women to whom he recited them.  These stolen words and his roguish charm won him a bed and roof on many wet nights.

 

Others may have doubted Z’s story, but Rai could not.  Life on the street had taught her that sex was a more horrifying continent than she had ever imagined when her fantasies roamed an immaculate bedroom in Vanillaville.  She might have predicted the respectable middle class men who offered a home to both boys and girls in exchange for sex, but respectable middle class women that would invite a scarred black body into their beds?  Unfortunately for her childhood dreams of human innocence, Rai saw it every day — not just with Z, but with dozens of handsome boys at The Place.  When she asked Z about the phenomenon, he was evasive.  For some it was fantasies about black sexuality, he admitted, for others a game of power or a motherly urge or a desire for sex without commitment, but he avoided the details.  “Just leave it at this,” he told Rai with something between a grimace and a naughty smile, “men have no monopoly on perversion.”

 

The combination of sleeping with white women and living on the street gave Z an intimate knowledge of questions of power and injustice.  At least that’s what he told anyone who asked him how he came across Marx.  Of course, he had heard the name, but for the first years available to his memory, Z had just thought of Marxism as old tyrants in badly cut suits.

 

Then one day in San Francisco, a good two years before he met Rai, Z saw a beautiful blond girl selling newspapers in the Haight. As he had hitched his way across the continent, libraries and bookshops and the occasional lover had introduced him to many new books, especially romantic poetry.  He had been memorizing Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, so he gathered his courage, walked up to the girl, looked her straight in the eye, and recited.

 

 

 

Leaning into the afternoon I cast my sad nets

into your oceanic eyes.

There in the highest blaze, my solitude lengthens and flames,

its arms turning like a drowning man’s.

I send out red signals across your absent eyes

that wave like the sea or the beach by the lighthouse.

You keep only darkness, my distant female;

from your regard sometimes the coast of my dread emerges.

Leaning into the afternoons I fling my sad nets

to that sea that is lashed by your oceanic eyes.

The birds of night peck at the first stars

that flash like my soul when I love you.

The night gallops on its shadowy mare

sledding blue tassels over the land.

Beds where eternal thirst flows

and weariness follows, and the infinite ache.

 

 

 

  Her eyes did not become dreamy in the way they were supposed to.  She held the newspapers tightly against her breast (Z read THE DAILY WORKER in red ink) and asked, “Who wrote that?”

 

“Pablo Neruda.”  Z said proudly.

 

“Really?”  She allowed the papers to fall away a bit.  “He’s one of us.”

 

“Huh?”  Z responded, confused.

 

“A communist.  A Marxist.  That’s why the Chilean fascists killed him,” she clarified.

 

It would take quite some time for Z to learn that Neruda’s death had not been quite so dramatic; at the time, the story of Neruda’s martyrdom just contributed to Sabine’s already substantial appeal.  By the time Z finally got her into bed (two days, an endurance record for him), he had learned much of The Communist Manifesto by heart.

 

It was Z’s first real relationship.  Sabine took him to political meetings, introduced him to party and labor leaders, got him to sell newspapers, and made him read for hours on end.  A good Leninist would have called her thought ‘heterodox,’ depending as it did on Trotsky and Che, but what she lacked in knowledge, she made up for in passion.

 

A psychoanalyst might have said that politics filled the wound in Z’s soul where his past should have been, or that it served as a revenge fantasy for the cold looks he received that first morning in wealthy Houston suburbs.  Z simply declared that Marx made sense, or more accurately, that Marx allowed him to make sense of his own life.  He had experienced injustice, and now he had a tool to understand it.

 

Z and Sabine spent four months together before Z got cabin fever and decided he had to leave, but he left with his head full of revolutionary words and his bag full of books by the Frankfurt School.  More difficult, he had the heart of a true convert, and he desperately wanted the masses of America to see the light as he had.  With some of the income he had made from selling newspapers, he took a bus into Oregon, rented a cheap room, and printed out a hundred copies of the first several pages of The Communist Manifesto.  Without much trouble, he found the lumber mill outside of town and walked there with a heavy ream of paper and a sturdy wooden box.

 

At shift change, he set the box upside down in the parking lot, stood on top of it, and began to preach.  “Workers of the world, you have nothing to lose but your chains!” he began, and then worked his way into a fury about the alienation of labor.  The lumbermen leaving their shift just ignored him, walking to their cars with their faces averted, then driving quickly out of the lot.  It was the workers coming onto their shifts who were the problem.  As Z was preaching the difference between use value and exchange value, a burly logger stepped up to him.

 

“You should probably go,” he said.

 

“See!” Z cried.  “Management sends its stooges to undermine the voice of the working man!  But will we retreat?  No!  Will we surrender?  No!  Because–”

 

“Son, I’m the steward of the union here.”  The lumberjack replied menacingly.  “Those men–” he pointed to a group of several even bigger loggers standing by the gate, their arms held akimbo “–those men have asked me to tell you that if you don’t leave voluntarily, you’re going to leave involuntarily.”

 

Z continued, “And shall we collapse in fear before the Kulaks and the lumpenproletariat?  No!  Because we see the future before us, and–”

 

The six men lifted both Z and his soapbox from the ground and carried him toward the road.  He began to struggle against them, but they simply held his arms until he slipped out of their grasp and swung wildly with his fists.  He felt one punch strike home, then only blackness.  

 

A nighttime rain woke him.  He was in a ditch by the road on the far side of town, with all of his pamphlets scattered on top of his body.  He stumbled back to the motel, terribly bruised.  The next day, still limping, humiliated by the experience, he stuck out his thumb to go east.

 

As hard as Rai tried to press him for the details of the next two years, Z remained silent, with a look as close to shame as Rai ever saw on his face.  His consciousness raising plan had gone badly, and from time to time he alluded to bruises outside a Kentucky distillery or a broken rib in front of a Detroit car plant.  Once, he had returned to San Francisco, remembering the blissful months with Sabine, but, with an angry tear in her eye, she told him she’d become a lesbian.

 

The needle that Rai had found in his arm 18 months before in Washington told her a lot about the intervening year.  Even so, Rai had never looked at her friend with pity.  She respected his strength, admired his mind, and was infinitely grateful for his protection.

 

In one of those uncommon moments of emotional insight that allowed Rai to tell herself that she was not always a bitch, she remembered that Z had brought her a gift that morning.  She wasn’t nice to him very often, she admitted.  Maybe that’s what he needed.  Maybe she could be a little kinder to him, even compliment him from time to time.

 

Inviting Z to the MoMA that evening had hardly been a financial sacrifice — it was “pay what you wish,” after all — but Friday night had always been her time to be alone.  She felt like it was a kind offer.  Certainly kind enough that he could have been nicer in turning her down.

Rai was glad that Mike arrived early.  She would not have been able to sustain her pout for much longer.  She rather enjoyed pouting, but it was so out of character that it required a conscious effort.

 

“Hello, ma chère.”

 

“What the fuck, Mike.  How can you be so happy all the time?”

 

“I am not always happy.”  He sat gently next to her on the stands.

 

“Well, you’re fucking smiling every time I see you.  And I don’t like it.  Life sucks.  So how do you smile when life sucks so much?”

 

“But life is funny.”

 

“And horrible.”

 

“Often, the horrible is the most funny.”

 

“Don’t fucking patronize me.”

 

“Patronize?”

 

“Like I’m stupid or some shit.”

 

“I would not say this if I think you are stupid.”  He looked at her with the kind eyes that she had wanted from him.  “I cannot teach you lessons, but only things you already know.  And you know this: life is absurd.  Sometimes good, sometimes horrible, but always absurd.  But one can laugh at the absurd.  So I laugh.”

 

“You really think that?”

 

“Maybe.  Or maybe it is an absurd idea, and it makes me laugh.  Maybe I pretend to believe it because it makes me happy.  Who can know?”

 

“Come on!”  Sometimes, Rai just wished Mike would just say what he meant.  

 

“Let me tell you a story,” he began slowly.  As Rai waited, she remembered why she always came to talk with Mike: regardless of her worries during the day, she forgot them in their conversations.  “I learned to laugh in Siberia.  The most absurd place on Earth. Where if you cannot learn to laugh at the mud and the pain and the cold and the evil of people, then you will die.  Those who came back can laugh at anything.”  Rai wondered how he could say such words without losing the playful sparkle in his eyes.  “Though perhaps many now laugh in a mental asylum.”  

 

“Is that true?”

 

“About laughter in mental asylums?  Of course–”

 

“Shut up.  I mean about you and the Gulag.”

 

“Perhaps.”  He smiled again.  Rai liked Mike.  Even loved him, in the way you can love a distant relative.  And she knew that his words were always kind, and that there was something true about them.  He was guileless, that was it.  A truly good man.  But the stories he told circulated under so many layers of irony that she never knew if their truth was of the factual kind.  Today, she did not want irony.  She wanted to hear that everything would be OK.

 

“You’re such a pain in the ass, Mike.”

 

Mike made a small bow with his head, pretending that she was only joking with him, then turned back to the game.  

 

Rai felt the pedantry in her voice, but she pushed on anyway.  “Mike, you’ve just made an outrageous claim.  You said a prison camp taught you to laugh.  So let’s hear the defense.”  

 

Mike sighed.  “You may not think that this story is funny, Helen, but it made me laugh for many days.  So I will tell you:

 

“It was spring, the season for mud in Yakutsk.  The mud can be two, even three feet deep, and it is very, very sticky.  It exhausts one to walk through it, and it is very slow.  That spring, the guards made us work many, many hours, planting crops.  I do not remember what plant.  Wheat, I think.  Before dawn, we would slog into the mud.  Step, slog, step, stick.  It was bad work, and we did not come home until after dark.  Then we were too tired to move.  We could not run away because the mud would trap us.  It was better than any fence.”

 

“This isn’t funny.  It’s horrible.”

 

“It is both, Helen.  There was an old man who was a prisoner with us.  I believe he was a professor, or perhaps a writer.  But an old man, an intellectual.  A Jew, I think.  Not a man made for the fields.  One day, we all heard him scream, and then he fell into the mud.  He had died of a heart attack.”  Rai winced.  “The doctor came, and pronounced him dead, but now it was three hours after he had fallen.  When the guards told us to take him to the graveyard, we found that he could not move.  He was stuck up to his waist in the mud, and it had begun to harden around him, because it was a hot, dry day.”

 

Mike had begun to smile, as if anticipating the punch line.  Rai could not see how this was going to be funny.

 

“Next the guards called for the tractor, and they tied a rope to him to pull him out.  But the tractor slipped in the mud.  It could get no traction.  The professor would not move.  Even in death, it seems, he had found a way to resist the authorities.”

 

Mike chuckled.  Rai wondered how this kind, good-hearted man could laugh at a dead Jew caught in the mud.

 

“By now, it was 9 at night, and dark was coming, so the guards told us to plant a cross by him and leave him in the field.  A cross, by a Jew in an atheist state.”  Mike shook his head in bemusement.  “We put it there, but as we left the field, we saw vultures circling.  We were sad, because the professor was a friend, and we did not want vultures to eat him.  Then one of the men joked that the vultures were from the Party.  And you know, I think it was true.

 

“When we woke, they sent us to the same field again.  As we came close to that cross, we saw five vultures around the professor.  All flapped their wings and made the sound that vultures make.”  He tried to caw in imitation, but he could not, because he had begun to laugh.  “As we approached, they did not leave.  They just flapped their wings harder and harder.”  He could only get out several words between each laugh.  “And then I came close, and I saw that the mud had imprisoned the legs of the vultures.  They could not fly away.  They could not even get to the professor to eat him!”

 

Mike exploded with laughter.  “What’s so funny?” Rai yelled furiously while he gasped for air.  “The old man died.  A Jew.  In prison.  It’s tragic!”  Then she couldn’t help herself; she began to laugh with him.  Not because she suddenly found the story comical, but because his laughter was so contagious that she could not contain herself.

 

Finally, after several minutes — an error on the field, when the first baseman had looked curiously at them and been whacked by a throw from shortstop, extended the laughter even more — they finally stopped to catch their breath.

 

After another minute, Rai could breathe again.  “Seriously, Mike.  It’s not funny.”  She wiped a tear from her eye.  Her makeup looked like hell, she was sure.  Philosophical failure, sweat, and hysteria could not be good for her appearance.  “You’ve got no respect for the poor guy’s death.  How would he feel right now?”

 

“He’d probably laugh harder than we.  The professor had a great sense of humor.  You know a joke he told us?”

 

“I dunno if I wanna hear.”

 

“A man arrives at a prison camp, yes?  On the train.  And an old prisoner asks him, ‘how long is your sentence?’

 

“The new prisoner says, ‘Five years.  Five long years…’

 

“So the old prisoner asks, ‘What did you do?’

 

“And the new prisoner says, ‘Nothing.  Absolutely nothing.’

 

“  ‘No, that can’t be,’ says the old prisoner.  ‘For “absolutely nothing” they give ten years…’ ”

 

“That’s not fucking funny, Mike,” Rai declared through barely supressed laughter.

 

“I know what you want to say, my dear.  Tragedy is a serious thing.  We must treat it seriously.”

 

“Exactly.”

 

“Sephardi or not, Helen, you are very American.”

 

“Whaddaya mean?”  Rai did not understand why, but the comment sounded vaguely insulting.

 

“Americans believe tragedy is all tears, but when I grew up, tragedy was a part of every day.  Like dinner.  Every day, a dose of tragedy.”  Now Mike spoke sincerely, a tone Rai did not expect, and more smoothly than he had as he had told the story, as if he had said these lines before.  “But there are some dinners where the family is sad, and there are others where you laugh so hard that you can barely eat.  Maybe this is not a good example.  But some tragedies are grim, but others are absurd and funny.  We must laugh at the absurd ones, because otherwise they will kill us.  Misery is always there.  One must laugh whenever he can.”

 

“But at a dead Jew in the mud?”  

 

“Americans go to the movies to laugh, but you are very serious people.  Perhaps you do not need to laugh so much because life is not so hard.  I do not know.”

 

“I appreciate the concern, but don’t lecture me.”

 

“I am not…”

 

“Here’s the thing.  Maybe you don’t always have to go and commit suicide over every tragedy, but you gotta take it seriously.  Otherwise… it just feels mean.  Like, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about being miserable.  Part of my life, like it or not.  It’s like, I dunno, it’s what Pechorin does, right?  Even if he is a rat bastard, there’s something there.  If I can make a good story outta my misery, it’ll be a story and it won’t suck as much.  Maybe I can laugh too, and that’s cool.  But that’s just about me.  So it isn’t cruel.  Boring, maybe, ‘cause there ain’t zippo going on in my life, but not cruel.  Or maybe it is, but I’m allowed to be cruel to me.  It’s different with other people’s suffering.  It’s serious.  You gotta recognize that it matters.”

 

“Of course!”  Mike was almost taken aback.  “But listen to what you say: ‘it is serious’ and ‘it matters.’  I know that in English these ideas are the same, but yet, they are not.  Because many things are serious that do not matter at all.  Look at the face of a doorman at an expensive building.  He must be very, very serious, no?  Yet even he will admit that his job does not matter.  While funny things — they are not ‘serious,’ you say — can matter very much.”

 

“Like what?”

 

“Like Don Quixote.  What book matters more?  Yet you will laugh every page.  Shakespeare often, too.”

 

“Those are stories.”

 

“Yet you told me how important stories are to you, and I also told a story.”  Mike looked at her significantly, hoping he wouldn’t have to explain.

 

Rai sat forward and rested her chin on her hands.  She wondered if Mike’s story were true — he never talked about his past, and suddenly, he was telling her about the Gulag?  He’d probably just read it somewhere.  But it was interesting, even if not literally true.  She had to admit that she felt better than she had half an hour ago, that that’s what she had wanted.  She looked out onto the skyscrapers on Fifth Avenue.

 

After an inning of silence, Mike spoke up.  “Perhaps I am too bold, Helen, but may I ask you a difficult question?”

 

“I guess.”

 

“Why do you not go home?  I would miss you, yes, but I believe that you are not happy.”

 

Rai shrugged at the question and raised the left side of her mouth in an uncertain smile.  “Was Myshkin happy?  Or Nikolai Appolonovich?  I dunno.  Prob’ly not.”  She looked out over the game, unsure why people running around in circles could inspire such loud cheers.  “It’s not like I’m looking for pity or anything, but I got a lot more to complain about than anybody in these books.”  She tapped the pack beside her.  “But am I happy?  Is anybody?”

 

“You could have a different life.  Your parents would accept you home, yes?”

 

“Home?  That’d be pointless.  At least here I can pretend my life means something.  It’s just that life sucks and that’s that.  Like you said, I just gotta learn to laugh at it ‘stead of getting all worked up.”

 

“Each day I understand better why you like these books.  Once I thought they were not for a young woman.”

 

“C’mon.  You told me yourself that all teenagers are just characters that got lost on the way to a Chekhov play.  Look.  It’s like I understand that life’s tragic.  All those yuppie fucks over there–” she pointed to the apartments of the Upper East Side “–can pretend life’s cool and happy, but even for them, it’s not.  Ever look at one of those skinny bitches out walking her dog, or yelling at the kids?  She’s miserable.  And the men’re even worse with their scotch and tittie bars when their wives aren’t looking.  ‘Cause it doesn’t matter how rich you are.  People still die and your kids still hate you and someday you’re gonna die in a car wreck.  It’s just the human fucking condition.”

 

Rai had allowed her carefully cultivated irony down as she spoke, so Mike’s sudden laugh shocked her.  “Of course!  You are right!”  He slapped her on the back.

 

“So if I’m right, don’t laugh at me.”  Rai felt hurt.

 

“I laugh because you are right.  These ‘yuppies,’ as you say, they do not see that life is sad.  But you see through the lie, you see it is absurd.  So you can laugh.  Yes, you are very, very smart, Helen.”

 

“Thanks, Mike…” The hurt feelings were almost instantly forgotten.

 

Rai looked thoughtfully out over the field, allowing herself a vague pride at Mike’s last comment.  She had always found softball boring, but the game they were watching seemed particularly empty; even the players seemed unexcited.  She needed to change the subject.  “You know what I’ve been thinking about?  This Emma Bovary person.  The French babe you told me about.  That’s her name, right?  She sounds a lot like Z.”

 

Mike shook his head in a confusion bred from more from the uneven segue.  “You say many things that I cannot understand.  Your friend is very little like Emma Bovary, I think.  In fact, if he were rich, he is the sort of man with whom she might have fallen in love.  The danger, the fear, yes?”

 

“It’s kind of his spirit that’s the same.  I mean, Z can talk all he wants about ‘social being determining consciousness,’ but…”

 

“He does know his Marx well.”

 

“Yeah, so he claims he’s such a historical materialist, but y’know how he really works?  He sees words in a book, and he wants to make them real.  I mean, I don’t think he even loves women, or sex.  He loves that stupid Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair.”

 

“Neruda.  Of course.”

 

“And does he really empathize with the poor?  Care about justice or whatever?  I don’t think so.  He doesn’t even like people.  He just thinks the phrase ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ is cool.  He reads a book, thinks, whoa, cool, I gotta do that, and then he does it.  So that’s why he’s like Emma.”

 

“They both love words more than life, so then they wish to make literature into reality.”

 

“So what happened to this Emma chick?”

 

“You must read the book, Helen.”  He returned his attention to the field, where the game had become exciting as they had been lost in conversation.  It seemed to be the last inning; the team at bat was on a run, and with each score, they counted down the runs to a tie.  But then: two quick outs, and it appeared the comeback was over.  A small woman came to bat, and the outfield pulled in to protect against a blooper.  On the first pitch, she knocked it way over their heads.  Two runs scored, and her team rushed onto the field in victory.

 

“Score one for the chicks.”

 

“They should not approach so closely.  Finally, I begin to understand this game.”

 

The outfielders on the losing team shouted invective across the field, each blaming the others for their bad position.  Rai laughed at them, and not with her kindest tone.  Finally, the diamond cleared and two more teams arranged themselves for their game.