Tolstoy Kicks Ass!

Rai arrived at The Place late in the morning; she’d spent hours sitting on one park bench after another, watching cops to see if they recognized her.  They didn’t seem to, so she decided it would be safe to walk by Officer Safran, the beat cop who patrolled 46th at the bat cave.  Generally he was cool and quite un-cop-ish, and today was no different.  He waved to her as she passed, and she returned a sheepish smile.

 

The shower room was empty.  All of the kids who needed to clean up must have finished already, so Juan sat in front of the television, watching a baseball game.  “Excuse me,” Rai asked nervously.  “Can I talk to you a second?”

 

“Yeah, ‘course.”  Juan flicked off the TV with the remote controller.  “Whassup?”

 

“Um… how’s the clothes situation?”

 

“In your size?  Not much.  You lookin’ for a new outfit?  You wouldn’t be Rai without that black skirt.”

 

“Exactly.”

 

Juan looked confused, but invited her into the back room, then began searching through piles of donated clothes.  “Whatchu want?”

 

“Anything inconspicuous.  I dunno.  Jeans, a t-shirt.”

 

Juan nodded slowly.  “I’m not even gonna ask who you’s runnin’ from.”  He found a small pair of jeans and a green polo shirt.  “Try these.”  He walked out, then closed the door to give her some privacy.  Once she found that they fit, she tucked a donated baseball cap into her bag and threw the old clothes away.  After her shower, Juan feigned that he didn’t recognize her, which she took as a good sign.

 

As she sat in the common room reading, trying not to feel awkward in her new clothes, she noticed a strange sort of quiet among the kids.  Without the loud shouts that generally punctuated chess games or the busy chatter of gossip, rap, and insult, the room felt surreal, almost haunted.  The atmosphere felt so strange that Rai could not even read Anna.  Finally, she turned to the girl sitting next to her, a thin waif she had seen many times at meals but never spoken to, and asked what was going on.

 

“You didn’t hear?”

 

“No.  Somebody’s dog die?”  Even before she had spoken, Rai felt her foot in her mouth.

 

The other girl winced.  “No.  Exxxstasis.”

 

“The fat girl?”

 

“Boy.”

 

“Oh…”

 

“On the stroll last night.”  Though offended by Rai’s blunt questions, the girl seemed to find consolation in telling the story.  Exxxstasis, she explained patiently, was not a girl like Rai had through.  She had been born a boy, grown up in the Bronx, and then, at fourteen, couldn’t handle the pressure any more.  She told her father she didn’t feel like a boy.  She wanted to wear dresses and makeup.

 

In the South Bronx, this was not an option.  After her father tried to beat the feminity out of her with a baseball bat, she ran away and found herself at 14th Street.  With the help of back-alley estrogen, the advice of the girls on the stroll, lots of makeup, and the money her pimp allowed her from the four tricks she turned a night, she slowly transformed herself from José to Exxxstasis.  Though she had not been a pretty girl, she had learned to pass so well that she hoped he might be able to find a job outside the skin trade.

 

“So she was just trying to get enough money for an apartment, y’know?  Said she was gonna turn tricks just this month, then start to look for a real job.  And she woulda got one too.  Smart girl.  Fucking smart.  And funny.  But last night she goes with some john at three in the morning and she doesn’t come back.  Coupla hours later the pimp goes to the spot and she’s in three pieces.  Body, head, dick.  Clean slices.”  The girl nodded slowly, sadly, like someone who had seen everything before.

 

“Shit.”

 

“Same as always.  You know the story.”

 

“What story?”

 

“John comes, thinks he’s got a nice piece of ass, takes ‘er back to the room, fucks ‘er, then suddenly pretends he don’t know she got a dick.  ‘Course that’s what he wanted in the first place.  Ya don’t go to the 14th Street Stroll if’n ya don’t wanna chick with a dick.  But he pretends its some kinda surprise.  Rage, guilt, all that shit, and he kills her.  That’s the story he’ll tell at the trial.  If’n they ever catch ‘im.  Jury’ll go ‘ick’ ‘n’ let ‘im off with a slap on the wrist.  Fuck.”

 

“Yeah.”  Rai didn’t know what more to say.  Further words of consolation seemed pointless, for she hadn’t known Exxxtasis and didn’t know the girl she was talking to.  At the same time, she felt the oppressed sadness of the room; it wormed through her new clothes and onto her skin.  Though she had never wanted it, the culture of the Place had suddenly caught up with her.  She had shared a defining moment.  Next, would she become one of them?

 

 

 

Though Exxxstasis’ death and the heavy atmosphere in The Place had taken her mind off Z and the cops, impatience forced Rai out of the street after lunch.  As she wandered the streets, her mind landed on the strange feel of wearing jeans.  Her skin felt confined, she worried that people could see the shape of her legs, and the denim rubbed against her thighs uncomfortably.  Except for when she donned a pair of sweats to clean her skirt, she couldn’t remember having worn pants since she’d left home.  

 

People looked at her differently.  She had become used to the stares and even whistles her carefully developed look had inspired.  Now men passed her without a glance and teenagers did not scoff at her fashion sense.  As much as she had hated those gazes, she almost missed them.  With her jeans and baseball cap, she had become just a girl, and not the sight she had been.  Maybe not even a girl, she thought with a shock.  With short hair, sharp features, and no breasts to speak of, her skirt had always marked her gender clearly.  The terrible thought sent her to Sephora, where several layers of makeup left no doubt.  She failed to notice that the cosmetics had also obscured her beauty, an exchange she might not have been willing to make for anonymity.

 

However strange her new look seemed to her, she did not regret throwing her more dramatic outfit into the trash.  During the rest of the day, she walked by dozens of cops.  None of them looked twice at her; eventually, her heart did not even race at the sight of dark blue.  Once, hiding from a brief rainstorm, she sat for ten minutes with a cop in a public atrium at 61st and Broadway.  From time to time, the cop glanced up from his coffee at her, but no recognition registered on his face.  

 

That afternoon, Rai only waited by the softball fields for an hour.  She wanted to see Mike, but she feared another hungry night more, so she rushed to The Place in time for dinner.  Toker and Z, still shocked at the way she’d dissed Z the night before, offered to let her stay in the abandoned warehouse where they squatted, but she had been burned by new male friends before.  They accepted her unconvincing excuse.  Everyone had something they were running from, after all, and both of them admitted that sex was not the least of the motives for their kindness.  Even if she looked like shit in that new outfit.

 

Rain began in the middle of the night in the little island of trees near the duck pond where Rai set up camp, and it lasted well into the morning.  For some time after light slithered through the leaves, Rai huddled in the tarp, hoping that the rain would end and she could walk to The Place without getting soaked, but the storm showed no sign of abating.  She got up, sloshed around in the mud, folded the tarp and stuffed it into a plastic bag sliding it into her pack.  Moving every night was becoming inconvenient.  She needed to find a place to leave the stuff so it could dry.

 

Readjusting the things in her pack to make sure that the tarp didn’t crush her books, she felt a folded piece of paper she didn’t recognize.  Torn newsprint, she realized, folded into… was it supposed to be a car?  What a bad job of oragami.  She was about to toss it away, not even curious how it had made its way into her bag, when she noticed ink running in the rain.  Not the ink of the news, but red bleeding through the paper.

 

Quickly, tearing the wet paper, she unfolded the crude oragami.  Blotchy red letters filled the page, almost illegible:

 

 

 

“Every movement of infinity is carried out through passion.”

-Kierkegaard

 

 

 

Z’s writing.  She remembered the quote, which he had pointed out to her as he was struggling through one of his few forays into non-Marxist philosophy.

 

The quote didn’t fit with the other graffiti he had posted.  No hints of revolution, no desperate self-justification.  What did it mean?

 

“Infinity” had a bit of a religious air about it, reminiscent of the Göthe and St. John quotes.  “Passion” could be a euphemism for his campaign of terrorism, which certainly required suspension of his intellectual facilities.  But if that was what he was trying to say, it was just another tired defense of what he’d already done.  Z’s arguments were often repetitive, but this was just boring.  If he’d gone to the effort to sneak it into her bag, it had to be something important.

 

He’d put it in her bag.  The thought ran through her mind again.  He knew where she was.  He’d found her in the middle of the night in a place where she’d never gone before.  Though she wanted to find innocuous, even benevolent explanations, it scared her.  If he could find her like that, what could he do to her?  Passion and infinity: those were sexual words, handed over in the middle of the night.  A threat?  A confession of long hidden lust?

 

She looked around herself, relieved to see only dripping trees, but also frightened.  Where was he?  Where would he find her next?

 

“Fuck,” she said aloud, trying to damp down the fear that had risen in her gut.

 

As her thoughts ground down into confusion, Rai realized that she stood in the pouring rain, getting colder and colder regardless of the intensity of her thoughts.  She turned away and walked quickly into Midtown.  

 

By the time she reached The Place, Rai was shivering bitterly.  It was well past nine, putting her name low on the list for showers.  She slogged upstairs, water dripping from her clothes, and collapsed on a couch.

 

 

 

As Rai shivered in the common room of The Place, Yazmín had attempted to catch her attention several times.  Finally, when Rai looked up, she saw her new friend standing not more than two feet away, looking down her nose with disbelief.  “It’s like you go into some other world sometimes, girl!” she said in a tone halfway between a joke and authentic anger.

 

“Oh.  Yeah.  I’m trying to work some shit out.”

 

“Work shit out on the pot, not when I’m waitin’ to talk to you.”  She laughed, and Rai joined her, though with less energy.  “You didn’t even hear ‘em call your name for the shower, did you?”

 

Rai had to admit that she hadn’t heard a word.  She was glad that someone was awake enough to listen.

 

“I’ll wait for you here.  Go warm up!”

 

The warm shower did wonders for Rai, as did new, dry clothes.  As she had brushed her teeth, unwilling to don her wet jeans and t-shirt, another girl had let her in on a secret.  “Donate the old shit,” she whispered.  “Then get new.  They clean the old shirt and you can just take it again next week.”

 

Though uncertain of the ethics involved, Rai knew she needed dry clothes, so she threw the wet rags in the donations bin, walked to the back, and found a new outfit: too-tight cords and a sweatshirt.  

 

Back in the common room, Yazmín hid a snort with her hand.  “God, girl, you been on the street two years and you never learned how to dress?”  One of the most important differences between street kids and homeless adults, Rai knew, was that you couldn’t distinguish a street kid from a cool kid.  Street kids just knew how to do it cheaper: theft, knock-offs, the iron downstairs.  “That skirt you had, that was bad.  But now you look like a bag lady!”  She took Rai’s hand and led her back downstairs, then, with a wink at Juan, passed into the back room.  Rai was amazed at how passively she accepted Yazmín’s authority.

 

“So.  Yeah.”  She gave Rai a look, then began to rummage through the clothes as Rai wondered why she was taking fashion advice from… well, from someone like Yazmín.  She pulled out lots of black: underwear, tights, short jeans, jean jacket.  “Undress.”  Rai did, unsure, again, why she didn’t tell Yazmín to fuck off.  But even Yazmín’s admiring whistle when Rai pulled off her pants didn’t inspire the expected rebellion.  It just made her blush, then hurry to pull on the tights.

 

Within half an hour, Rai looked like a different person, somewhere between a street punk and a french existentialist poseur.  Undeniably hot, but also unapproachable.  She rather liked it: the outfit made her walk with a straight back and a mean look in her eye.  No way she would have let Yazmín strip this off her, she thought.

 

After a game of spades in the common room — Rai hated spades, thought it was a gangsta game (not to mention that she always lost), but she did it to make Yazmín happy — everyone filed upstairs for lunch.  The Place was crowed that day, as always when kids wanted to escape the rain.

 

Though Rai was not pleased with the hamburgers and fries Kwame had decided to cook for lunch, she still ate three servings.  After a quiet day of informal mourning for Exxxstasis, The Place had returned to its usual level of volume and repressed violence.  Looking around, Rai began wonder who would be the next kid murdered; who would OD’d on dope or crank; who would freeze that winter.  Since she’d come to The Place, four kids had died.  

 

“You thinkin’ about Exxx, huh?” Yazmín asked, with a completely different tone from that she had used all morning.

 

“Wondering who’s the next to go.  Hoping it’s not me.  Or you.”

 

“You’s too smart to bite it like that.”

 

“I don’t even know most of these kids.  I mean, I wanna feel sad for Exxxstasis, but how’m I gonna do that if she’s just a face to me?  I didn’t even know she was a boy.”

 

“You wanna know the rest so you can cry, right?”  Again, a real understanding that Rai had never heard before.

 

“Not for that.  I don’t think so.  But… I dunno.  Without Z, it’s kinda like I wanna know other people.  Or know about ‘em, at least.”

 

“It’s a start.”  Rai felt the tone of superiority that she preferred to use than hear, but Yazmín talked on quickly.  “So check it out.  You know Toker, right?  Guitar genius, pretty decent chess player.  Parents threw him out when he was twelve.  Never figured out why.  Smokes a lotta pot.  I think he’s kinda cute, but…”

 

“But what?”

 

“No street boys for me.  Not anymore.”  She pointed to the girl next to Toker, an emaciated blonde in a black leather jacket.  “Slick.  Whatta name for a girl, huh?  From Jersey.  Rich family, they say.  Mom was a dope fiend, got Slick hooked on it when she was ten.  She started hookin’ to buy the dope, then on the street.  She’s workin’ at Wendy’s now, but the money don’t pay for rent, so I think she’s shacked up with some guy.”

 

Rai had expected a sort of voyeuristic pleasure from Yazmín’s description of the kids in the lunchroom, but she had not expected these feelings for people she had dismissed and disdained for the last eighteen months.  It almost felt like compassion, or pity.  Yazmín pointed out a Lebanese girl who came home one afternoon to find her parents deported.  The suburban boys who ran to the city on a lark and could never get back.  She detailed more forms of abuse than Rai had ever imagined, from teenagers locked in closets for days to a pornographic film cult where children were raped on video.  Then drugs and prostitution and jail.

 

By the time Yazmín had reached her fifteenth story, they had left the lunchroom and walked onto the street, where the sun had burned last night’s rain into a sticky haze.  As they walked through the bat cave and Yazmín pointed out two or three of the Crips who always hung out there, Rai demanded she stop.  “I can’t handle any more of this.”  She felt close to crying.  All of the barriers she had created to keep tragedy and other people out seemed to be crumbling.  Even the new hardass outfit was no shield.  “Please, don’t tell me any more.  I guess there’s a reason I never wanted to know these people.”

 

“Yeah.  After a while they’re all stories though.  I dunno.  I don’t really feel it anymore.  I just kinda listen to what everybody tells me, and I nod, and then…  I go home, I guess.”  They walked quietly up Sixth.  “Well, not really home.  You know what I mean.”

 

After fifteen minutes of sad silence, as they walked past break dancers on the corner of 53rd, Rai wanted to speak again, except she didn’t know how to frame the question.  “Look, Yazmín.  It’s like… I wanted to know why these kids are on the street, and you told me.  But there’s two kinds of ‘why.’  I think.  Like the empirical why and the metaphysical why–”  She noticed that Yazmín didn’t understand.  “Um… it’s like you told me what put them in this shit, like ‘why’ it happened, but not, like, what it’s for.  That kinda why.”

 

“Por qué y para qué.” Yazmín said.

 

“Huh?”

 

“There’s two words in Spanish for ‘why.’  Kinda like ‘from what’ and ‘for what.’  Something like that.”

 

“Yeah.”  Rai nodded.  “That’s what I wanna know.  For what.  For what are these kids in the street?  There’s gotta be some reason.”

 

“’Cause their parents beat the shit outta them.  Pretty simple.”

 

“That’s from what.  I wanna know the purpose of their lives.  Or what they’re gonna do for the world–”

 

“What good’s gonna come outta this?  Why God lets kids suffer like this?”  Rai couldn’t understand Yazmín’s voice, which sounded almost sarcastic, almost, “you don’t really know shit, do you?”

 

“Yeah.  Exactly.”  She slid her own sarcasm into the words, hiding their importance behind irony.

 

“’Cause God’s a fuck.  Either cruel or really, really bad at His job.”

Unfortunately, her pride in the drama of the scene she had produced did not keep Rai warm or dry that night.  The drizzle did not prevent her from sleeping (when she reached the park, she realized exactly how tired she was), but drips off the trees constantly woke her, or threw her into tosses and turns that dislodged the tarp and muddied her clothes and body.

 

Even so, when she woke in the morning, she felt good about herself.  She had done something… again, she paused to think for a word, but her cynicism could accept none of the adjectives she proposed.  “Moral,” “noble,” “virtuous,” and “brave,” were all good words, but even if she had stood up to terrorism and her best friend’s hysteria, those concepts couldn’t possible apply to her.

 

Muddy, but almost content, she folded the tarp, hung it over a tree branch, and began the long walk into midtown.  Long before she crossed the bridge over the lake, she saw the two old drunks that accosted her from time to time.  She almost looked forward to the offer of a “moustache ride,” a wonderful excuse to kick the asshole in the balls and push him over the rail, but she didn’t get the chance to realize her righteous anger.  The men were too drunk even to look at a pretty girl.

 

In the back of her mind, Rai knew that life without Z would require all of her hard-won street survival skills.  Not so much where to get food, how to avoid the cops, or how to stay warm at night, as the skills that kept her sane.  Happiness and pride were hard-to-earn commodities, and she needed to steal them where she could.  This, at least, was her reasoning as she directed her steps toward 53rd Street.  It wasn’t narcissism that motivated her to look at her quote, but survival.

 

Underneath the Christian quote she had found it so difficult to write, a new graffito surprised her.  She was not pleased.

 

 

 

“And Pilate said to the Jews, ‘Here is your king.’  They cried out, ‘Crucify him!  We have no King but the Emperor.’”

St. John 19:14-15

Angry as Z might have been, why would he post that horrible, Jew-baiting quote?  He knew the story of Rai and the Easter Service better than anyone.  He knew how much she hated the lines the reverend had quoted that fateful Sunday.  

 

Suddenly, Rai realized that where their graffiti philosophy campaign had been directed at the world, an effort to teach the Muggles something, this line had nothing to do with the Muggles; it would not mean anything to any of them.  This line came from one of their private debates, and Z directed it only at her.  

 

One day during their migration to Florida last winter, when talk of Che and Fidel filled the air, Rai had gotten tired of Z’s knee-jerk attack on Cuban exiles.  “Gusanos,” he called them, mimicking communist propaganda.  “Worms.  Grubs.  No value at all except to fertilize the soil,” he’d declared.

 

“Just a reality check here, Z.  OK, as far as I can figure, there have been three successful communist revolutions in history, right?  Russia, China, Cuba.  Lot of other countries went red, but they were pretty much derivative.  Sound right?”

 

“Chile.”

 

“Election, not revolution.  And hardly a success.”

 

“Fucking Henry Kissinger.  OK.”

 

“So of these three, two of them fell flat on their ass.  Killed exactly the poor people they were supposed to save.  Ten years after the October Revolution, you’re got the Gulag, Ukrainian peasant collectivization, all that shit.  What, just four years after Mao takes Beijing, zillions are starving because of the Great Leap Forward.  Not exactly a great record.”

 

“You’re just looking–”

 

“I’m not done yet.  Then we’ve got Cuba.  OK, great health care.  Go education.  A tip ‘o the hat for land reform.  But you wanna be a punk in Cuba?  Or a Rasta?  Wanna wear dreadlocks?  I don’t think so.”

 

“Those are just the same bourgeois arguments–”

 

“And you’re not even listening.  I’m not sayin’ ‘no revolution.’  I mean, I’m not quite so ‘damn the torpedoes’ as you, but give me credit for a sense of liberté, egalité, et fraternité, OK?”

 

“The French Revolution was just an explosion of bourgeois consciousness–”

 

“Quit mouthing Engels to me.  What I mean is that I’m with you.  Go justice.  Up with the poor.  Proclaim release of the captives and let the oppressed go free–”

 

“You’d be a lot more convincing if you didn’t quote fucking scripture.”

 

“Exactly my point!  You’re so caught up in the whole ‘opiate of the masses’ thing that you’ve missed the best revolutionary plan ever.  Judaism.”

 

“Come on.  Don’t gimme that shit.”

 

“Look, let’s start from the beginning, huh?  Moses leads the slaves out of Egypt.  Paradigmatic liberation narrative.  Happy anarchy for the next couple hundred years — judges come in to clean up the occasional mess, but lotsa equality, no oppression–”

 

“After they massacred the locals.”

 

“Minor point.”  She barged on.  “Huge resistance to the kings, once they showed up.  Even if the rulers were Jews, the prophets and the people weren’t gonna take any oppression.  Then resistance to the Persians and the Babylonians — good anti-colonial struggles there, Franz Fanon couldn’t do any better — then we kick out the fucking Greeks, and we’re the only people with the ovaries to stand up to the Romans–”

 

“Right.”  Z was sarcastic.

 

“Check it out: Pharisaic revolt against Herod, a Roman puppet.  That’s about 40 BC.  Then a huge revolution in 70 that the emperors can only put down with genocide.  Then Bar-Kokhba in about 125, a really cool Jewish revolt in North Africa a coupla years later — not even in Israel! — and then another revolution in 250.  OK, so we lost every time, but we kept trying.  Pretty major shit.  We just kept goin’ and goin’.  We’re the fuckin’ revolutionary Energizer Bunny for three millennia, and you hop on a bandwagon that falls apart after 75 years.  A wagon that’s run over lotsa poor people.  Get a grip, Z.”

 

“Yeah, like Jews are the vanguard of the revolution today.  Ya got piddly liberals on the Upper West Side and fascists in Jerusalem.  Looks like a plan to me.”

 

“Marx.  Trotsky.  Walter Benjamin.  Rosa Luxemborg.  Emma Goldman.  The American Civil Rights Movement.  Even your man Lukacs.  Need I say more?”

 

“Rosa Luxemborg wasn’t a Jew.”

 

“OK, but the rest–”

 

“Atheists with Jewish parents.”

 

“Still Jews.  Marxism’s just a failed Jewish heresy.  Go back to the source, I say.”

 

“OK, I’ll concede to the year 250.  Maybe the end of the Roman Empire.  Fine.  A thousand years of pretty cool lefty history.  But check it out: from then on, Jews are merchants and traders and bankers and scholars.  I mean, yeah, thanks a lot for keeping the lines of communication open between Europe, Arabia, and China, but really.  Look, who was the backbone of the Spanish civil service?  The tax collectors, the accountants, the bookkeepers?  The Jews.”

 

“That’s a lie.”

 

“Read Benzion Netanyahu.  His son’s a Fascist motherfucker, but he’s got some cool stuff to say about the Inquisition” (What, Rai wondered, had inspired Z to read obscure tomes on Jewish history?  Her?).  “No, you’re gonna have a tough time convincing me that the Jews have been much for revolution since the Roman Empire fell.  Since then, all you’ve done is support whoever’s in power until they turn on you.  Then you run away.”

 

This was one of the few arguments in eighteen months that Z had won.  During the time that politics still mattered to her, she still thought the Hebrew Bible was a pretty decent blueprint for a just world, even if contemporary Jews had given up the most important ideas.  But as she read the quote from the gospel, she remembered his last line: “Since then, all you’ve done is support whoever’s in power until they turn on you.  Then you run away.”

 

He was accusing her of betrayal.  Betrayal of him, betrayal of their cause, betrayal of the future.  Judas all over again.  He’d found the One and Only True Path to Revolution, while she, the namby-pamby Jew, was just supporting the powerful.  Rai was not pleased.

 

Looking around to make sure no-one was watching, she pulled out her marker and scribbled a quote to remind Z exactly who was on the wrong path.  If he thought terrorism was the way to revolution, she could appeal to a higher authority.  After all, what did the explosions do except convince the yuppies that they were basically good people — after all, somebody else was even worse.  She clearly remembered a quote Z had hammered into her brain:

 

 

 

“Only theft can now save property, only perjury, religion, only bastardy, the family, only disorder, order.”

-Karl Marx

She underlined “save,” “order,” and “disorder” twice, then saw a telltale flash of dark blue in the corner of her eye.  She walked quickly down the crowded sidewalk, trying to lose herself in the crowd, but when she turned to look behind her, she saw two cops pushing through the pedestrians — fortunately, morning rush hour had clogged the streets.  Her heart began to beat: not with the excitement she had felt when she and Z ran together from the cops, but with something closer to fear.  She tried hard to keep her head low, and gave a quick thanks for her short stature as she slid past the long line waiting to enter the MoMA.  

 

After the museum, the crowds thinned to almost nothing; the cops would certainly see her, so she ran at a full sprint toward Fifth Avenue, not even glancing at the Church of St. Thomas, where she often spat on the steps.  Fortunately, tourists and shoppers jammed Fifth Avenue, so she could pause long enough to glance back between their bodies to see the cops hurrying down the street.  Rai turned uptown, slithering between fat midwestern bodies and thin Japanese ones.  Her heart pounded; her breath was shallow; she wished she were not wearing a yellow blouse.

 

Again, she took the chance to glance around her.  The cops — both tall, fit white men — looked confused.  One talked into his radio, the other scanned the crowd.  Rai made herself as small as possible, flowed uptown with the window shoppers, then, when she felt she was far enough away, followed some Israeli tourists into Tiffany’s.  Though she felt deeply out of place among the jewels, most of the other shoppers looked equally inappropriate, so she walked through the display cases, watching the huge windows carefully to see if the cops would pass.

 

Over the past year and a half, she had become so used to running from cops that it took Rai several calm moments to note the strangeness of the chase.  What had she been doing?  Nothing more than scribbling on a construction site, a wall already littered with posters and paint.  Even with the cops’ zero-tolerance policies, their response seemed excessive.  Cops didn’t sweat unless they had to, and those two had run hard to find her.

 

Something was going on.  She just didn’t know what.

 

Tiffany’s made her think of Z again — spend enough time with these diamonds and emeralds and any sane person would see the need for revolution.  She often wondered how the rich managed to survive in the city, where a middling street gang from the Bronx could take down a brownstone in Lennox Hill without blinking an eye.  Instead, they went after each other.

 

These were not the thoughts she wanted, so she scanned the windows again, then slipped out the side door, walked down Madison, and headed back to The Place on 46th.  She desperately needed a shower.  Her sweat smelled of fear and mud, and she wanted it gone.

 

 

 

Zapatistas filled Rai’s dreams.  Or more exactly, cartoons of Zapatistas, ski masked figures in black and write, running and dancing against a dirty background, a poorly animated movie.  But then, they began to speak, and Rai’s oneiric camera zoomed out to see people watching the figures, now emerging from the wall.  They spoke in quotes: Shakespeare, Marx, many that she didn’t recognize.  The people seemed deeply affected, listening carefully, nodding, then walking off into the city with a determined step.

 

When Rai woke, she knew exactly what the dream meant.  Each moment that she left Z’s quotes unanswered, they touched more and more people — people who would go into the world to wreak terror, fight revolutions, kill innocents — all because she had failed to refute her ex-best friend.  She quickly unwrapped herself from the tarp, shook it dry, tucked it into her bag, and walked off eastward, bashing through the undergrowth until it led her to the ring road.  The first joggers of the morning plodded past.

 

She hopped the turnstile at 77th without even a glance from the woman in the booth, who seemed too immersed in her copy of Cosmo to notice, then rode the 6 as it made its way slowly downtown.  She allowed herself to doze, but woke at Spring Street and climbed out onto Lafayette, then walked north to where Z had blown up the second Lexus.

 

The scene of the crime was remarkably clean: no glass, no damaged car, not even a yellow police line.  Only a few black splotches on the wall indicated that anything had happened — except, of course, for Z’s two line graffito.

 

 

 

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

-Heraclitus

 

 

 

What was Z trying to do with an obscure quote like that?  A moral defense for using violence?  Trying to fit himself into a long tradition of philosophers who defended war as the essence of humanity?  Setting up the equivalence of capitalist exploitation and revolutionary violence?  They weren’t the same!  She had taught him better than that.  If they were going to be better than the fucking rich, they had to be better in all ways.  Ethically, too.

 

Seeing the graffito and the scarred pavement, she understood better what Z was trying to do.  If she had read that line in a library or a classroom, she would have thought “strife” was something abstract, like principles in formal conflict with each other.  But here, with the soot of explosion on the wall, strife and necessity and war took on concrete meaning.  In suburban America, Muggles could dismiss the idea that “war is common,” but here on the street, where beggars tugged imploringly at fur coats and expensive shoes crunched the glass of the exploded Lexus, war stood right next door.  Like it or not, Z had forced people to read exactly what he meant.

 

She pulled out the black marker she had compared to Z’s penis and scribbled a brief response.

 

 

 

“Resist not evil.”

-Leo Tolstoy

As she’d told Mike several weeks before, she found Tolstoy’s pacifism unconvincing — especially since it derived from the pedantic, self-righteous Sermon on the Mount — but if Z was going to advocate violence like that, well, she was going to have to be a counter-balance.  Maybe pietism wasn’t the proper response to consumer capitalism either, but it had to be better than random acts of terror.  Anna Karenina had reminded her that Tolstoy, for all his occasional condescension, did have something worthwhile to say about how people should relate to each other.

 

Just as she had begun to wonder if this internal discourse had become a bit too moralistic, even for her, Rai remembered the police who had chased her through midtown the day before.  Much wiser, she thought, not to stand in front of the graffiti, particularly with a marker in her hand.  She stepped away from the wall and turned left onto Prince, thinking she’d catch the N-R to Times Square and breakfast.

 

Since the morning commute meant that she was hardly alone on the street, she noticed the cops before they noticed her.  They were on the opposite sidewalk, walking from Broadway, half obscured by the scaffolding of a construction site.  She knew that the narrow strip of cobbles and asphalt would not protect her from them, so she whipped around and blended in with a group of elderly women.

 

Trying to be subtle, she looked over her shoulder.  The pair, a black man and a white woman, had crossed the street and were conferring.  They must have seen her.  Rai broke from the women that had camouflaged her and walked faster.  An eye over her shoulder showed that the cops had picked up their pace, too.  She crossed Lafayette against traffic, dodging a couple of slow, honking cabs, then ran along Prince, past a little diner, then a gallery filled with awful glass art.  Here the sidewalk was crowded and narrow.  She could barely run.  And though the crowd wouldn’t part for her, they slipped out of the cops’ way.  They were getting closer.

 

With an eye on her pursuers, she failed to spot the couple that emerged from the apartment building on the corner.  The woman cursed, and Rai saw that she’d spilled coffee on her blouse.  With a quick “sorry,” she ran across the street, then up Mulberry, much less crowded in spite of even more construction on the sidewalk.  She ran along the street, close to the parked cars, with the creepy and inexplicable feeling she always had on this street: of decay.  Old St. Patrick’s on the right, the Puck on the left, an Ethiopian restaurant — but not the time to remember her 16th birthday, because the cops were getting closer.

 

She turned.  Here in the open street, the cops were running too, and fast.  She stepped up her pace, longing for the legs that had won all the races at elementary school field days.  Houston Street in front, full of cars not yet slowed by full rush hour.  No way she could pass.  Left or right?  Where should she go?

 

For the first time, she felt scared.  This was no ordinary chase, where the cops gave up and headed for Dunkin Donuts if you didn’t just fall at their feet.  These cops cared.  Why?  They recognized her.  Why?  What was it?  What had she done that was so important?

 

Now at Houston.  She looked behind her again.  The cops were 30 feet away.  They were going to catch her.  Without a thought, she sprinted straight into the traffic, barely missed by a black Lincoln, slipping behind a taxi, standing stock still on the white stripe, then another dash.  The median.  Again, ten foot dashes across each lane, a rude gesture for each offended honk, a close call with an Explorer.  Then the other side.  

 

Without even a glimpse behind her, she sprinted uptown, sure that Pharoah’s army was stranded on the other side.