Tolstoy Kicks Ass!

Mulberry Street entertained Rai for a while, as she watched the crowds of tourists sitting in tables along the street, unaware that the place they were visiting no longer existed.  Little Italy had been absorbed by Chinatown, leaving only this strip of Italian restaurants, the memories of gangster flicks, and the smell of marinara sauce.  By eleven o’clock, though, the tourists had dispersed to their hotels, or to the bars and clubs of Soho, and boredom returned to Rai with a vengeance.  She continued to walk, but her feet hurt.

Z’s apology had better be good to make up for this, she thought sleepily. 

Finally, at perhaps ten minutes ‘til midnight, she made her way back from Soho toward Little Italy.  Rai was terribly hungry and tired, and ready to be furious if Z was as late as usual.  She wished she had thought to steal an eclair from the bakeries on Mulberry.

Lafayette Street below Houston manages to be seedy and terribly expensive at the same time, perhaps because an enterprising real estate agent had managed to convince a lot of retail outlets that danger was sexy.  Behind an empty lot on the other side of the street sat an ancient garage, graffitoed with the black outlines of ski-masked terrorists, bandits, or Zapatistas.  Z had always loved the mural, claiming that it pointed to an increasing proletarian consciousness in the city.  Maybe that’s why Z had asked her to meet him there, she mused.

Waiting for traffic, Rai glanced across the street at the lot; a couple of expensive cars were parked there.  Then, silhouetted against the building, like a mobile graffito, she saw a tall, lithe body dash through the light, onto Prince Street, and around the corner.  Seconds later, as she still tried to convince herself that she had actually seen Z sprint away, a car exploded in flame.  With every other pedestrian on the street, she ran toward the explosion.

Just like outside the MoMA, the car was a Lexus — this time an SUV, but the stylized “L” was obvious on the scarred tailgate.  The crowd began to push at Rai, and she knew that she should leave before the cops arrived, but she had to look around.

Indeed: there on the wall, painted as a cartoon bubble above one of the Zapatistas, she saw the quote:

“War is common; strife is right, and all things happen by strife and necessity.”

-Heraclitus

She looked at the graffito for quite some time, trying to understand why Z would post such a strange quote.  Nothing came to her mind — she wasn’t blank or shocked or any of the things that most people might have expected.  She was just confused: why was Z doing this again?  Hadn’t she convinced him to give it up?  And what did it all mean?  “War is common and strife is right”?  Sure, it sounded a lot like Z, but could it serve any purpose in advancing Z’s precious revolution?

Sirens screamed in the distance, and red and blue strobes added color to the stark graffiti mural.  Rai pushed through the crowd, slid onto Lafayette, and walked quickly uptown.  Suddenly, she was furious with Z.  Why was he doing this again?  Though she saw regular entrances to the subway, she just kept walking and thinking, her mind going in useless, worried circles, each deeper than the last.  She should have talked to Z more while she was sick, made sure that he never went for that sort of idiocy again.  She rehearsed the arguments she should have made, devastating proofs of the pointlessness of terrorism; she thought of all of the bombers in her Russian novels, the foolish revolutionaries of Dostoyevsky and the noble — if rather boring, in her opinion — poems of Mayakovsky.  Why hadn’t she told him that?  She had thought the victory won, she was sick, she was so happy to hear Z’s deep Jamaican voice reading Anna Karenina… none of those excuses mollified her guilt.  Soon, Z would be in jail, and it would be her fault.

From time to time, she forced her thoughts out of this vortex, and she began to wonder what Z could possibly have meant.  Why choose a violent, illogical quote from a Greek guy no-one had ever heard of?  Would Heraclitus convince New Yorkers to join Z’s revolution?  She doubted it.  Either he was crazy, or his intentions stretched beyond the capacity of her imagination.

And then she returned to feelings of guilt.  They lasted through a long night’s walk; she feared to go into the Park, where she might meet Z.  She didn’t want the closed space of a subway, which felt terrifying after the explosions she’d seen in the streets.  Plus, she needed to think; to think, she needed to walk.  So up Broadway to Fifth, up Fifth to the Park, across to Madison, up through the closed façades of the world’s most expensive stores, where Muggles could spend $500 on a t-shirt.  She laughed a bit at what she saw through barred windows — pre-ripped and dirtied jeans for several hundred dollars, Dolce and Gabbana studs that would have made any street punk blanch — but fashion made her think of Z.

Then up to 96th, where she turned around, knowing that Spanish Harlem was no place for a girl to walk alone in the middle of the night.  Down Lexington…  By the time dawn came, she had no idea where she had been.  She only she that she was tired, enraged, that her feet hurt, and that she understood nothing more about what Z was doing and why he was doing it.  From the South Street Seaport, where she watched the sun come up over Brooklyn, she began to walk slowly uptown again, and by the time she reached Times Square, the Place was open.

Rai quickly managed to offend several of her new acquaintances with her pensive, tired silence, but she dismissed them as thin-skinned and brushed off their hurt looks.  How many times could she play chess against Toker, anyway?  Wasn’t he bored to beat her all the time?  Still in her own world, she climbed down into the basement, brushed her teeth, and took a long shower.  Frustrated that her hair had grown long enough to comb, she asked Juan for the clippers and shaved it close to the scalp.  Looking at herself in the mirror, she was rather surprised how pretty she was — tired, short, confused, but really not bad looking.

Somewhat relieved of the pensive burdens of the long night, she walked back into Times Square, then into Sephora.  With some eye liner and a touch of base to hide a zit that had broken out that morning, she felt almost sharp.  That’d teach Z not to be such an ass, she thought.  Show him what he was missing.

More significantly for her interior struggles, a clean body had led to a clean mind, and Rai no longer felt trapped in the tail-chasing spiral of thought that had imprisoned her the night before.  The thick mucus in her throat, that eternal sign of a clogged brain, had decomposed, and though she still didn’t know what Z was trying to say, she finally thought she might be able to figure it out.  Maybe there was another clue by the MoMA, where he’d begun his erudite terrorism, a line she’d missed.  With enough determination in her step to erase the pain in her feet, she headed up 6th Avenue.

Later, when asked what had inspired her response to Z’s graffito, Rai invoked a genetic, Semitic demand for commentary.  “Midrash, you know,” she would say with the condescending tone she had mastered during many arguments with Z.  In fact, her motivations eluded her.  She had simply seen Z’s graffito, not yet hidden by concert posters, and it made her mad.

“He alone is worthy of life and freedom

who each day does battle for them anew.”

-Göthe

She felt in the backpack for a thick black marker they had used to deface an ad on the subway and scribbled the first phrase that came into her head.

“You shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

-Gospel of John

It hurt Rai to quote St. John-the-fucking-anti-semite, but the line just worked.  Even with the Lexus towed away, “battle” had a very clear meaning, and its meaning was wrong.  Freedom was not about violence.  She refused to accept that.  Even more, she refused to let other people read such an idea.  She wanted to teach them about thinking, about philosophy, to offer a moral response to terror.  She wasn’t quite sure why it needed a moral response — perhaps so the Muggles wouldn’t associate literature and violence, perhaps to make them think a little, perhaps just because she couldn’t let Z have the last word — but she knew it did.

She walked away with an unexpected feeling of contentment, even feeling the need to look over her shoulder from time to time to remind herself just how cool she was.  And to see if anyone had stopped to read the words.  They hadn’t.  Even so, she wanted someone with whom she could share her genius, but that thought led to Z, so she pushed it from her mind.  “Fucker,” she thought.  “Here or not, he’s still fucking with my mind.”

Fast steps took her downtown on Fifth, and though she thought of running up the monumental steps between the lions to the Public Library, she concluded that she really needed open stacks.  The branch across the street would serve her much better.  Without even a thought, she found herself in the tight shelves of fiction in the back of the first floor.

Oddly enough, she didn’t come to these stacks to read — at least not while in this mood.  Many wonderful pages of Anna lay unread in her backpack, and she felt no need for new plots or new friends.  No, the point of the experience was… æsthetic, she insisted (always with the “æ”, a letter she loved).  Z called her walks through literature obsessive-compulsive, but that was just because he didn’t know shit about psychology except for a couple of long words.  Starting with “A,” Rai ran her eyes over each spine, searching for the Russian authors she had never read.  Aksakov, Aksyonov, Briusov, Bunin…  And then (this was why Z called it obsessive, but that was just because he didn’t understand the pleasure of fingers on a dust jacket), she caressed the spine of each novel, wondering what the pages might contain.  Her fingertips touched Georgian mountains and Khazak steppes, troubled cavalry officers and young women glowing with depression, duels, winters, the drawing rooms of a thousand aristocrats…

By the time she had reached Zinoviev, Z had disappeared, as had the exhaustion of a sleepless night, even the heat of the street.  The ritual had done its assigned work.

Rai would have preferred to spend the evening alone, stewing on Z’s idiocy and convincing herself that it would all turn out OK, but she was too hungry to go straight to the park, so she found herself at the Place, avoiding conversation with Toker and Petey while trying to remember the contentment she had felt with her fingers on the spines of books.  She was staring at her food so intently that when Z walked into the lunchroom, she almost failed to notice.  Even so, he would never permit anyone to ignore him; as he strutted across the room, he sent her pulse racing and tightened her muscles, leaving her with the same confused anger that had cursed her pacing through the city the night before.  Maybe this is what it’s like to have a lover betray you, she thought, remembering Dmitry Karamazov, Vera, even Karenin himself.  Her hands clenched senselessly, breaking the plastic fork she’d been holding.

“Fuck, what’s wit’ you alla sudden?” asked Toker, but when Z sat next to him with a catlike grin, he lost any chance of an answer.

“Yo, viva la revolución,” Z pronounced, in an accent that sounded nothing like Spanish.  “When you wanna tell me exactly how much I kick ass, well, here I am.”  He leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his head, a gesture that might have looked cool in a Scorcese flick, but which Rai found ridiculous.

“You, you… you cunt-licking…” she looked for a noun strong enough for her anger, but couldn’t find it.  “You have no fucking clue, do you?  None!”

“Gotta break some eggs to make an omelet–”

“Don’t you quote fucking Stalin at me!  Or do!  Maybe that’s what people need to hear, that you’re some baby Stalin who thinks he’s got a dick that makes bitches moan, who thinks he’s some big shit.  Well,” her voice had now become a shout, and those of everyone else in the room had become silent.  “Well, let me tell you, Z, that I feel your prick every night when you’re dreaming about me, and I…”  she paused dramatically, “I am not impressed.”  As he gasped for words, she reached into her bag and pulled out the magic marker she had just used to refute his graffito.  “This,” she said, waving it in his face, “this is what it feels like, OK?”

Z’s usual command of language had failed him.  “But… but… revolution.  Literature.  It’s all there… everything we wanted…”

She stood, calmly tucked her chair under the table, and walked — regally, she thought — to the door.  “Read the writing on the wall, asshole,” she declared, brandishing the marker, before she swept down the stairs.

When Rai arrived at the Place a half an hour before breakfast, she sat down in the common room and pulled Anna from her bag.  But before she could even read a page, she heard a commotion in front of her, then looked down to see a chess board and Toker’s hands arranging the pieces.  “You’ve avoided me enough.  Today, we’re gonna play.”

“Oh, please, Toker.  I barely slept last night.  You’re just gonna whoop my ass.”  She liked Toker, and even felt a bit bad about having ignored his offer of a game for so long, but right now, she wanted to be in Moscow, not New York.

“We both know better’n that.  Half your brain tied behind your back, you’re still smarter’n Einstein.  But if you wanna be a wimp, take white.”  Toker noticed Rai’s eyes on his motley collection of pieces: blacks, browns, reds, even a blue bishop.  “There ain’t any full sets of dark left.  This is multicultural chess.”  He seemed proud of having used such a long word.

Rai shook her head as if to clear the cobwebs and opened with her queen’s knight.  Toker responded with his queen’s pawn, and the game developed quickly.  Rai surprised herself with her play; her mind and her instincts were working much better than she had feared, and though Toker was clearly the better player, she kept in the game for quite a while.  Several other kids gathered around to watch them play.  Rai felt good about her game, even when, after half an hour of play, Toker slid his queen onto the C2 square and mated Rai’s king.

Petey, sitting beside Rai, laughed.  “He’s always gonna win with that square.  Defend C2, then put the queen there.  Ya hadn’t already figured that out?”  

“Don’t blow my game, you fucker.”

“She’d see it soon anyway.”  He turned to Rai.  “Wanna play?”

“After breakfast,” she said, gesturing at the kids filing out of the common room.

Over breakfast, she considered telling Toker and Petey about the graffiti that she and Z were planning around the city, but she decided that, smart as the boys were, such erudition was throwing pearls before swine.  Great chess players, sure, but hardly well-read.  Hard to read great literature on the street, after all.  Though quite true to her character, it does not speak well of Rai that she had failed to notice the tattered copy of The Dharma Bums that poked from Petey’s rear pocket.  

The call for breakfast had saved Rai for a moment, but when they returned to the common room, Rai played three games against Petey and lost all of them.  Badly.  She continued more out of sheer perversity and inertia than from the delusion that she might be able to win a game; he was so much better than she that she didn’t even feel like she was learning.  Finally, she realized that these losses were not doing any good at all for her already delicate self-esteem, and she begged off yet another rematch.

On the way out the front door, Rai heard her name.  “Whoa, I got a message for you,” Tanya said, and dug into her desk.

“Thanks.”  Rai read her name in Z’s handwriting.

“He seemed way high on himself.  Boy’s smart, but I got no clue how you put up with him.”

“Me neither.”  She raised her eyebrows, turned out the door, and opened the envelope.

Midnight.  Prince and Lafayette.  Be there.

Couldn’t he just have come into the common room to tell her? Rai thought.  And why all the secrecy?  And midnight in Soho?  Wasn’t that a trifle melodramatic, even for Z?  And where was she going to sleep afterward?  

As she turned uptown on 6th, she finally realized what was going on.  He was just planning a dramatic apology.  But why did he have to wait so long?  12 hours…

Several days had passed since she had last seen Mike, but Rai instantly dived into the finest details of her personal drama.  Whether her story was happy or tragic, she always felt an intense narrative pleasure when her life merited story-telling.  In the flowing words, misery became story; yet in that pleasure, she failed to notice the shadows of concern that passed over her friend’s face.  “It’s so fucking dramatic, don’t you think?  I almost feel like Anna.”

“I see you have fallen for yet another of my countrywomen.”

“Yeah.  She’s way cool.  But it’s really not that complicated for her, is it?  She wants to know what it’s all about, too, but she doesn’t have to live on the streets and stop terrorism all by herself and obsess about Lermontov and tell her stories to other people so she can think she’s cool.  Meaning just shows up, and she grabs it.”

“It?” Mike asked, with more than a touch of disbelief in his voice.

“Meaning.  Vronsky.  Whatever.”

“But meaning and Vronsky are not the same.  Not even close, I think.”

“The dude is a bit of a loser, huh?  Bummer she couldn’t have fallen for Pechorin.  That would be a kick-ass novel.  Maybe I’ll write it some day.  But even if Vronsky is a dweeb, she meets him and suddenly something’s going on in her life.  It’s going somewhere.  I mean, who the fuck would read a novel where Anna and Karenin are happily married?  Boring shit.”

“Going somewhere is not always going somewhere good–”

“Don’t blow the ending for me, huh?  The thing is that it’s interesting.  That’s the deal.  She’s got a narrative arc in her life, and–”

“Sometimes, I wish that you did not have these theories about your books.”

“What, narrative arc?  Cope with it.  I just like the phrase.  It sounds good.  Lotsa words do: onomatopoeia, Ouougandougou–”

“I’m sorry?”

“Capital of Burkina Faso.  I used to sit at the kitchen table with Dad’s globe, look around the world, imagine where I was gonna go when I grew up, y’know?  Ouougandougou.  I wanted to go there.  I don’t know anything about it, it’s prob’ly just some podunk shithole in the middle of the desert, but what a cool name.”

Unexpectedly, Mike spoke a couple of lines in Russian; though Rai didn’t understand a word, she loved the sound.  She asked him what it meant.

“By chance, on a pocketknife,” he said slowly, as if unsure of the translation, “you will find the dust of faraway lands, and strange, vague colors will wrap your life.”

“That’s awesome.”

“That’s Blok.”

“ ‘Cept for me it wasn’t dust.  It was maps.  No, really, like words.  Ouougandougou.  Pretoria.  Mogadishu.  Windhoek.”

“You speak like you say the name of a lover.”

“Yeah, huh?”  She paused.  “That’s what I wanted, y’know?  Travel the world, find out if there was really anything there under the map.”  A note of real melancholy had entered her voice.

“You speak as if you cannot.  But you have only 17 years, Helen.  Much time to voyage.”

“And loads of money to do it with.  Does it look like I’m saving up for a cruise to fucking Namibia?”

“I would not expect these words from one who survives with no money at all.  You are a clever girl, Helen.  You decide to go, and you will go.”

“I’ll swim.  Get into the Gulf Stream and follow it around.”

“You are much less charming when you are cynical.”

Mike’s words brought Rai up short.  He was right, of course, even if she did not want to admit it.  She could do what she wanted.  “Like Abdul,” she said, half aloud.

“Abdul?”

“This guy.  He’s from Sudan, I guess, but he got here by stowing away on a ship in Cairo or some shit.  I met him at the Place.  Not exactly the experience I want, ‘cause it sounds like he almost starved to death… but there’s a narrative arc, huh?”  She looked at him sideways, with newly coquettish eyes.

“There are better ways to travel.”

“I gotta get Z to go with me, though.  They say Kinshasa’s pretty dangerous, so a bodyguard would help, huh?  Pity apartheid ended, ‘cause I coulda got him to go to Mozambique and join the ANC.  Any other oppressive governments he might want to overthrow?”

“Helen, I had wanted to talk to you about your friend…”

“I guess pretty much all of them, huh?”  Rai continued as if she had not heard him, though she had.  “Mugabe sure sucks, but no way Z’s gonna get on the side of those white farmers.  What about taking up the with Tutsis in Burundi?  Think he’d go for that?”

“I do not…”

“Y’know where I really wanna go, Mike?  Lethsotho.  Now that’s a fucking cool name.  And y’know what?  I did this report on apartheid in social studies class once, right?  And there was this king of Lethsotho named Mshwshwsh.  What would you do to have a name like that?  Fucking whack!”

“Helen.”  He spoke in a tone that finally got her attention.

“Yeah?”

“I believe that you do not think enough of the actions of your friend.  To destroy a car, this is not something small.”

“I talked him out of it.  I told you that.  Z can be a dick, but he listens to reason.”

“You know I do not lecture you, my young friend.  It is not in my character.”

“And it wouldn’t work.”

“Yes.  But I worry about this.  I do not want to see you in jail.”

“No jail for me.  That’s why I put Z back on the straight and narrow.  He’s gonna listen to me.  When I put my foot down–”

“Your foot is heavy.”

“Pure strength of will.  I’ll show you how to do it some day, if you ask real nice.”  She was relieved that a teasing tone had re-entered their conversation.  She hated it when Mike voiced her own worries.  “Hey, so I got a question.  Why the fuck did Anna marry Karenin in the first place, huh?  You’d think she was smarter than that.  Dude’s a complete fuckface.”

“I believe you are not correct.  Yes, the man is formal…”

“Fucking boring.”

“Perhaps.  Bus he is not unkind.  He gives his wife much freedom, he does not beat her.  When you think of most husbands of that age…”

“But there’s no sex appeal.  Zippo.”

“We are speaking of marriage. Helen.  Not sex.”

“But it’s so unfair.  Marrying somebody ‘cause your daddy says so, or ‘cause you gotta pay fifteen million servants to keep the estate.  I mean, these people are just prisoners: to daddy, to money, to tradition…”

“You are normally more original in your attacks.”  He raised his left eyebrow, and she laughed.

“Pretty obvious, huh?  Thing is, everybody and her cousin’s already read this book, so it’s not real easy to say something new.”

Mike stayed in the fields longer than he often did, staring out over the grass when they were not talking, but eventually he needed to return to Queens, and she still had seven hours before the time Z had set for their meeting.  During Rai’s first days on the street, boredom had attacked her like nothing else, for the hours stretched out with nothing to do: no homework, no obligations, not even the fixed hour of a curfew or a bedtime.  For someone as impatient as she, those stretching hours had been pure torture.  At some moment, she had learned the term “horror vacui,” and she used it about time.  She needed something to fill those hours.

Z, of course, had always provided that service.  One could complain about almost every aspect of her friend’s character, but he was never boring.  To argue with him, to listen to him pontificate, to prowl the streets late at night… he gave content to her days.  How long until she was supposed to meet him?  The big clock above Columbus Circle marked 5:15.

With a sigh, Rai ceased her pacing around the fields and strode over to the rocks where climbers always gathered.  She envied their grace on minuscule holds, but she wondered how the girls there survived the testosterone poisoning.  She scrambled to the top, where the sun would last longest, and opened Anna.

Tension overcame even the memory of boredom.  Stress filled the stables where Vronsky prepared Frou-Frou for the steeplechase; sexual tension filled the mansion, as Anna and Vronsky tried to escape the servant boy who would surely gossip if he saw anything interesting.  God, but that repression was exciting, Rai thought, that search for any chance to insinuate a flirt where the boy would not notice, the imagination of a furtive touch so much more thrilling than any real caress…

Had she stepped back to think, Rai might have said that time dashed like Vronsky’s horse, but she had no time for such thoughts.  She only felt Anna’s anxiety, watched the horses race, jump, trip… God, to be at that steeplechase, to hear the shouts, the rustles of satin dresses, to feel the gaze of a too-bold cavalry officer.  Vronsky’s horse sprinted; Anna and Rai rose with the crowd.  He would win!  The horse leapt the last ditch.  Vronsky sat back too far…

Frou-Frou writhed on the ground, its back broken.  Rai ran onto the field… or perhaps she did not.  She could no longer make out the words on the page, for darkness had fallen on Central Park.

Rai needed to scream at Z, but he wasn’t at the campsite.  How could be possibly have done that, taken her brilliant, noble plan to teach philosophy to the Muggles… and turned it into terrorism?  She paced across the little clearing, kicking her Docs into the dust, throwing the tarp onto the ground.  First he had chosen bad quotes.  Then he put them in bad places.  Now he was hijacking her whole plan.  Bombs?  Fires?  And then he’d quoted Göthe.  He’d never even read Göthe!

She coughed.  She walked in circles now, imagining one argument after another — in each one, Z appealed to Marx and Lenin and Che, but by the end, he always yielded to her superior logic and begged for forgiveness.  She just wanted him to show up so she could let him have it.

She practiced a series of angry stares, waiting for him to emerge from the forest.  He did not come.  She coughed again.  Suddenly, she felt very tired… but she could not be asleep when he came.  That would undermine her moral force.  She paced again, even pinched herself.

How could he do this to her? she demanded.  He was sure to get himself thrown in jail, and then she’d be all alone every night.  Would they let her visit him in jail?  Would they let them argue about Marx?  They never showed that in the movies.  She noticed a little wobble in her walk.

And what if… what if they thought she had been in on it?  Yazmín was an alibi, Rai assured herself, but would the jury believe someone like her?  Rai’s mind trembled from arguments against Z to fears of women’s prison.  She shivered.

Maybe she could argue with Z in the morning.  She felt horribly tired.  She laid herself down and wrapped the tarp around her shivering body.  The border between fears and nightmares was not clear, but eventually she fell asleep.

Several hours later, alone and cold, Rai woke herself in a horrible fury of coughs.  Her confused mind placed her at home.  “Mom, I need water!”  she shouted.  No one answered.  She tried to get up, but her body had no muscles.  “Water, please get me some water!”  Slowly, as she managed to crack her eyes open, she realized that she was not in her bedroom.  She tried to move again, but couldn’t.  Her heart raced.  Again, she coughed, and this time she couldn’t stop.

She didn’t need to touch her brow to feel her fever.  It was all there in her head.  She couldn’t move.  She had no water.  Z was far away, maybe in jail.  In the past, he had always been there when she had been sick, but now she was alone.

I can make it to the Place, she told herself.  Nurse Martínez will help me, like he always does.  She willed every ounce of force into her muscles, but nothing happened.  Could she blink her eyes?  She could — she was not caught in that kind of sci-fi nightmare.  Just an jejune nightmare.  Even in her delirium, she congratulated herself on her vocabulary.

Maybe someone would find her and help her.  She could scream, and someone walking through the Park… through the darkest part of the Central Park in the middle of the night, like a druggie or a pimp or a junkie or a Crip or a cop… she caught her shout for help.  She would just die there, alone.  He body folded over with yet worse coughs.

Then, as if out of no where, Z appeared.  He unscrewed the top of a jug of water and handed it to her.  “Drink.”  She did, then coughed again.  She wondered if one of her ribs would break.

When she could speak again, she didn’t even think of the arguments she had composed just hours before.  She dispatched him to steal some Rubetussin.  Cops and guards infested every 24 hour pharmacy he could find, so, finally, he stood outside the Columbus Circle station with his hand out, feeling a terrible mixture of despair and humiliation.  The few pedestrians at that hour of the morning looked away with disdain or walked to another entrance, so it took him until seven in the morning before he had collected the necessary five dollars, bought the medicine, and run back, fearful, to the Ramble.

He found Rai rolling around in the throes of a nightmare, so he quickly woke her and forced her to drink as much of the medicine as she could.  She looked horrible: her complexion had gone sallow, her shoulders sagged, and her voice had lost all of the life that made up her charm.  Though Rai was often sick, Z had never been able to numb himself to her pain.

“C’mon.  We gotta get you to see a nurse.”

“Just lemme sleep.”

“In The Place.  C’mon.  I’ll help you.”  Against her will, he gently lifted her up, then half carried, half supported her on the long walk into midtown.  Movement pulled Rai out of her torpid, fatal inertia, and by the time they reached 59th Street, she was even able to support most of her weight on her own feet, though the alcohol in the cough syrup made her steps weave.  Each five minutes, Z allowed her to sit and rest on a park bench or at a bus stop, but then he forced her to continue, unsure how long he had to get her help.  Fortunately, the medicine had stopped her cough, but her mind seemed lost in some labyrinth.

Finally, some two hours after they had left the Ramble, they arrived at The Place.  The nurse’s office was on the fourth floor, so after Tanya called to make sure the nurse was in, Z lifted Rai onto his back and carried her slowly up the stairs.  On the landing at the second floor, she vomited down his back, but he continued upward until he finally found Nurse Martínez’s door.  Z opened the door, lowered Rai onto the examination table, and collapsed onto the floor.

Nestor Martínez was a big man with fashionable goatee, a handsome face, and the arms of a bodybuilder.  Z gasped out Rai’s symptoms as Nestor took her pulse and blood pressure.

“Thanks,” Nestor said as Z finished his breathless report.  “Get yourself cleaned up, then c’mon back up, ‘mano.  I think she’s gonna be OK.”  He picked up the phone and asked Juan to rearrange the shower schedule so Z could clean the vomit from his back, and Z stumbled off downstairs.

Rai slowly opened her eyes as Z closed the door quietly behind himself.  “Thanks,” she said hoarsely, then began coughing again.

Nestor heard the quiet word and turned to her with a sad smile.  “Howya doin, Rai?”

“Shitty.”

“Yeah.  Looks like it.  You got a great friend, though.”

“Just wish he–”  Another attack of coughing interrupted her, and by the time she had calmed down, she had forgotten what she had wanted to say.  

Nestor handed her a glass of water.  “You’ve got a serious fever, too, and your heartbeat’s like a chihuahua’s.”  He smiled, and Rai managed to raise the corner of her mouth.  “You feeling alright to answer a couple of questions?”

By the time that Nestor had discovered that Rai had been malnourished for the last several months, hadn’t had her period since December (a common consequence of life on the street), and had been sick regularly all summer, he was ready to take her to the hospital.  “You think that’s a good idea?” he asked her in the tone that said that it was, whether she thought so or not.

“Tuberculosis.  I’ve got consumption, don’t I?”

“They’ll have to do a test.  That’s tough to find out.”

Rai coughed again.  “I’m trying to joke around.  That’s a disease for Russian princesses.”

“I wish.  It’s all over the city now.”  He paused, then looked down at his notes.  “Do you shoot anything up?”

“God, no!”  Her words were animated for the first time all morning.  They exhausted her.

“When you have sex, d’you use condoms?”

“I don’t have sex!”  She lay back on the table, wishing she could be calmer in her self-righteousness. 

Nestor shook his head.  “I think we gotta get you to the hospital.  C’mon.  I’ll hail us a cab.”  He called down to the basement so Juan could tell Z to meet them at the curb, then he helped Rai down the steps, stopping on the way to tell a pretty, shaven-headed black woman where he was going.  Z met them at the front door, his face split between concern and his habitual attempt to look dangerous, and they squeezed into a cab and headed toward St. Luke’s.

When Rai woke the next day, she found Z sitting next to her bed.  A passing nurse informed her that malnutrition, dehydration, and a common flu virus had put her into this state, then another came with discharge papers. Clearly, they wanted to clear her out as soon as possible to make room for a paying customer.  When Z began an attack on “bourgeois medicine” filled with curses and marxist epithets, Rai calmed him down and told him she just needed to rest.  She had led him halfway to the exit by the time guards arrived to escort them the rest of the way out.

Over the next several days, Z nursed her back to health in the common room of The Place by reading her Anna Karenina.  Rai loved the sound of his voice reading the convoluted sentences, and she found herself in the Oblonsky mansion, mediating an argument in a ruptured family.  She stood on the platform of the St. Petersburg station in Moscow, her eyes tearing at the man crushed under iron wheels.  The snow blew around her on the train back to St. Petersburg, as Vronsky approached with infinite charm and hungry eyes.  Even when Z became exhausted, she wouldn’t allow him to cease the reading.

By Tuesday evening, Tolstoy and antibiotics had banished whatever bug had attacked Rai’s body, and she felt ready to wander the city without Z’s supportive shoulder.  She even allowed her friend to close Anna for a while, and they talked.  Though her arguments were not as forceful as she wanted, she loved the feel of philosophical fervor on her tongue again.  Even so, when she tried to bring up the car bomb outside the museum, he quieted her with a quick look at staff in the common room.  When she tried again, he told her that Nurse Martínez had prohibited getting worked up, and he read from Anna until she stopped trying to interrupt.

Finally, one warm afternoon as they lounged on the grass of Sheep Meadow, Rai refused to let him change the subject.  Three days had passed since the bomb, and there had been no sign of cops, so both her fears and her anger had calmed.  Unfortunately, her fever seemed to have erased the brilliant arguments that she had constructed; she would have to start from scratch.

She rolled lazily onto her side, showing Z that she was relaxed — a little talk would be no threat to her health.  “It’s time we had a chat,” she murmured.

“Nurse Martínez said…”

“Medical excuses are not going to get you out of this.  Blowing shit up is a bad idea, and I don’t want you to pretend that you don’t know it.”  She felt proud of the calm in her voice.  It would keep Z off guard.

“Let me just tell you what I’m thinking.”

“I know what you’re thinking.  I’ve already gone through this argument a zillion times in my head.  You think people aren’t paying attention.”

“You told me that!” “That’s why you’re thinking it.  You’re also thinking that they are not reading the quotes right.  That they think it’s a game, or some kind of joke.”

“But they don’t see it that way–”

“When they read Göthe over a flaming Lexus.  Exactly.  Terrorism as an interpretive tool.  Like pictures in a kiddie book.  It’s clever, Z.  I’ll give you that.”

“So now they’re reading what they should.  Philosophy is against rich people, against stupid fucking Infiniti sedans with hundred dollar cup holders.  You know that most people say they choose their cars based on their cup holders?  Fuck that sh–”

“Stay on topic, Z.”  Rai felt quite proud of herself.  Not only was her voice calm, but she wasn’t cursing.  This is how she had planned the argument!  “OK, so the moral is that people who think are against the rich.  Göthe’s against the rich.  But is that what people really read?”

“That’s all they can fucking read.  We don’t give them a choice.”

“Temper, Z, temper.”  She was really enjoying this argument.  “Words are always iffy.  You know that.  And symbols are even worse, even if the symbols are one fire.”

“But–”

“So what do they read?  Not that Göthe’s against the rich.  Not really.  Not that fighting for freedom means blowing up luxury.  You know what they read?”

“Enlighten me.”  Z had settled down.  She would have to poke his buttons again.

“They read that thinking is destruction,” Rai intoned.

“It is!  Destroying fucking error, destroying fucking oppression–”

“Muggles aren’t that smart.  They can’t put a direct object on a verb.  For them it’s just destruction.”

“So what?  Let the rich fear my fucking destruction.  Let them shit their pants when they get in their cars, just like I do when I see a cop.  If fear’s what they’re going to read, that’s even better.  Let ‘em live in terror, then they’ll know what it’s like, then they’ll–”

“It doesn’t work, Z.”  She spoke so softly that he could only hear her if he stopped shouting.  “Somebody puts a gun to your head, do you do what he says?  For a second, maybe.  Government says it’ll throw you in jail for smoking pot, but you still smoke.  People don’t do sh… stuff because they’re afraid.”

“I’m just waking ‘em up–”

“The whole point of guerrilla philosophy was to get away from all that.  Make people think, but don’t tell ‘em what to think.  Bombs fu… bombs mess that up.”

“They make ‘em pay attention.”

“And what do they think?  ‘Fear me.’  That’s all.  That’s boring, Z, and we’re not boring.”

“Yeah, but–”

“Then we’re agreed?  Tomorrow we’ll work through some revisions on the graffiti campaign, but no more bombs.”

Z said nothing.  Rai felt as content as she had in weeks.  Unfortunately, her friend’s continued sullen attitude eroded that happiness away grain by grain, so when he finally looked at the advancing clouds in the west and announced that he was going to prowl the Port Authority, Rai was almost relieved.  She could spend the rest of the afternoon reading Anna, have a good night’s sleep, and begin revising the guerrilla philosophy in the morning.

Finally, after the sun had dropped behind Central Park West, Rai closed Anna with a satisfying thunk.  Once her body returned fully to New York, she realized, far too late, that she was hungry and had missed dinner, so instead of heading straight for the Ramble, she walked over toward the West Side, where she remembered a couple of groceries on Amsterdam that left fruit stands on the sidewalk.

Walking along 66th, eating one of the apples she’d nicked, she reluctantly avoided the Barnes and Noble across from Lincoln Center.  Though she would have loved some time in a bookstore, she did not know if the book would set off an alarm, so she just ambled past the darkened brownstones of lawyers and bankers still at work.

With a quick detour to avoid a pack of Crips that had gathered at the edge of the Park, she dropped into the woods, throwing one apple core into the underbrush and pulling another from her pocket.  As she walked into the Ramble, she decided that she was bored with their old spot, so she snatched the tarp from the tree and headed south, looking for someplace that no one would expect her to be.

She finally strung the tarp to several trees in the southern part of the Ramble, on a thin peninsula that extended out into the boat pond, but as she stretched out on the leaves she had carefully arranged as a sort of mattress, she realized how cold this arrangement would be without Z.  The wind tore away all of her warmth without his warm body to protect her.  She tore down the tarp and wrapped it around herself, which might not protect her face from the coming storm, but which would surely keep her warmer.

She had never slept in this part of the Ramble before, so Rai paid close attention to the sounds of the forest even as she ate a banana and then an orange.  Though she could not make out the words, she heard many voices, all of them male, and though none had that tone of insecure authority that the cops had perfected, she prepared herself to run at the least sign of danger.

In spite of the cold wind, she had chosen a low, narrow ridge for her bed; it would not flood if it rained.  As she looked into the dell below her, she thanked God for her decision.  Two men — one middle aged, heavyset, well-dressed, and white, the other young and latino — pushed through the undergrowth into the dell, then looked around into the now-dark woods.  The younger nodded to the older, then, without a word or a hint of romance, he unzipped his pants.  The older man dropped to his knees and threw his mouth at the boy’s crotch.  Rai wanted desperately to run, or at least to turn away, but they were no more than ten feet from her, and any motion would have drawn their attention.  She closed her eyes tightly, but she could not close her ears.

Fortunately, the act ended quickly.  Hearing the clink of a belt buckle, Rai cautiously opened her eyes to see both men fully dressed, as if what had just happened had not.  The older man reached into his pocket, pulled out his wallet, handed several bills to the boy, then faded back into the forest.  The boy counted the money, then swore under his breath: “Maldito maricón.”  For the first time, Rai saw his face; she recognized him from The Place.  She didn’t remember his name, but she knew he hung out with Toker and Petey.  He’d never seemed gay, but then again, probably he wasn’t.  Making ends meet on the street was tough.

For the next several hours, Rai heard grunts and voices in the trees, but fortunately, no others arrived in the dell in front of her.  People had told here that there were places for casual sex and prostitution in the park, but she had never run into them before; in fact, she tried hard to avoid all the sites of the underground skin industry: the transgender hookers on the 14th Street Stroll, the gays on the pier off Chelsea, the girls around Penn Station or under the bridge in Queens.  She resolved never to sleep on this narrow peninsula again.  After two hours of anonymous groans, she was even ready to march out of the place, privacy be damned, but just as she resolved to get up, she heard rain on the trees, several curses from the woods, the sound of running men, and then the place was silent.  She had never been so glad for a storm.

She squiggled her body further into the tarp to hide her face from the rain, then remembered her bag, wiggled an arm out, and pulled the precious books under the tarp.  Finally, she rearranged herself again, wrapped the tarp tighter so that the water that penetrated the many holes wouldn’t drip directly onto her skin, and closed her eyes.

Though it took almost an hour to get comfortable and to become used to the sound of the rain on the tarp, Rai finally fell asleep.  She was very tired.