Chapter 26
In spite of persistent sadness, the next two days almost convinced Rai that she would make it without Z. Yazmín was off work, so they spent the weekend together, exploring parts of the city that Rai had never seen before. Yazmín had taken her deep into the Bronx, where decay and despair mixed with the ecstatic life of Boricuas on the street (Yazmín had to insist several times before Rai would call Puerto Ricans “Boricuas.”). Then they went to Jackson Heights, because Rai had wanted to find an Algerian neighborhood; they had found Yemeni coffee houses and Iranian restaurants, Morrocan textile shops and a blank shop window with an Egyptian flag, but no signs of Algerians.
Rai had been less disappointed than she had feared with her inability to find her imagined countrymen (and women, she insisted parenthetically). As they had poked their heads into a tailor shops making south Indian saris, Yazmín drinking a fruit juice whose name they couldn’t pronounce but that they had bought in a Colombian grocery, and she trying not to wince at the taste of Arabic coffee, Rai had begun to wonder if she might be happy. Somehow, the meaning of life just didn’t feel quite as important right then.
She had not been able to exorcise Z from her mind, and from time to time (especially on Saturday night, when Yazmín had to leave her to get back for curfew), she obsessed over the meaning of his inscrutable recent quotes. Why hadn’t he accepted her apology? Even so, these thoughts had not occupied the front of her mind, and she had felt a vague contentment that seemed completely inappropriate to the material conditions of her life.
More pleasantly, cops had absented themselves for the weekend. Unfortunately, they’d been replaced by gangstas in the bat cave. Yazmín had explained that the Crips and the Latin Kings were back at war over control of dealing along 46th, which made Rai think of the rumbles in high school performances of West Side Story, but Yazmín disabused her of this illusion. In fact, she had explained, these wars were fought with single gunshots, late at night, or by intimidating the junkies when they came to buy the dope. Rai didn’t really care about the reason; she had just been glad that she could go the The Place without being constantly on guard.
Z chose Monday to punish Rai for her lack of attention — or at least it felt that way to her. She has already been worried the night before — what sort of a person was she to forget her best friend? Even ex-best friend — she didn’t know how to name him any more. She hadn’t even worried about their debate on the walls of the city, hadn’t passed along 46th or 53rd Streets. Perhaps he was ill, perhaps he was mad. Or perhaps he was evil. But she would never save him by traipsing around Jackson Heights with Yazmín.
Rai did not have to flagellate herself for long, because the walls soon stole the job from her. At Lafayette and Spring, there was not just one quote, but a long series of them, as if Z had been so furious with her lack of response that he had to pile argument on top of argument. The thick strokes of paint stood beside the previous column of quotes, bold enough that Rai could read them from a distance.
“Great art loves chains.”
-Stravinsky
“The weight of misfortune is heavy, but happiness is heavier still.”
-Hölderlin
“I am utterly perplexing, and I create only confusion.”
-Socrates
The last line seemed most to the point.
Once her confusion had cleared slightly, Rai felt fortunate that the lines on the graffiti were so bold, so that she did not have to leave the camouflage of the crowd. She had a moment to stare at the wall and ponder it.
What was Z getting at? None of the lines hearkened back to his thoughts about freedom. In fact, that Stravinsky quote seemed to contradict everything he believed. And when had he ever read that? And who the fuck was Hölderlin? Clearly the man (or the woman, Rai corrected herself) had never known real misfortune. Rai would have traded all of New York for a couple more of the hours of happiness she had felt this weekend.
She looked at the last line… Ironically, the quote about confusion was the only one that made sense. Clearly he was trying to perplex her, but why? To undermine her arguments, to force her to give up, to drive her mad?
With a start, Rai realized that she had been standing too still, staring too intently. Soon she would attract attention. She stepped into the flow of pedestrians and sped downtown, her mind still spinning.
“Great art loves chains.” Did Z know that the cops would soon catch him, that he would be in jail? But he had never claimed to be an artist, so those chains would offer him nothing. His art was politics, so maybe he meant that “Great politics loves chains.” It didn’t have the ring of the original, but it was more Z. Maybe it was a reference to Lenin’s time in jail in St. Petersburg, or Mandela’s years in a prison camp. Prison would purify his thoughts, teach him to inspire his fellow inmates. The argument had the same point as all the others: violence was justified by his future time in prison, which would…
Rai stopped her argument in its tracks as she waited for the light at Canal Street. Her thoughts weren’t making any sense at all. Not only was she inventing a stupid argument for Z, but he had never shown such insight into himself, or how to correct his own flaws. It had to be something else.
Maybe he wanted to say that terror was art? Sometimes his manifesto had hinted at something like that. It was almost Russian and 19th Century, something that Nikolai Stavrogin might have said in one of his saner moments. The thought pleased her, not just because she had remembered the name of such an obscure character, but because it made her think that she might have taught Z something, that maybe he had been listening when she went on about Dostoyevsky. But if terror was art, what sort of chains did it love? What was a chain on a bomb? What made him stop?
Her words. The idea came to her suddenly: only her words had stopped him from blowing more cars up. Her quotes were the chains he loved: was he accusing her of complicity?
Suddenly, the line from Socrates took on a new meaning. It wasn’t that he perplexed her, but that their argument confused the reading public. Might people think that her beautiful, eloquent quotes were written to justify the bombs? That some evangelical Marxist terrorist was roaming the city? Maybe that’s why the cops were after her! They thought she was the terrorist mastermind. This was the worst possible result, that people would reject her philosophy as she wanted them to reject his.
And with that, the middle line came to make a perverse sort of sense. She still didn’t know who this Hölderlin was, or where Z had read him (or her), but the quote was right on. She had been thrilled with each refutation, proud of her power and her erudition. Those moments made up most of her brief time of happiness over the last several weeks. Now, indeed, that happiness was a heavier burden than misfortune.
Her ruminations had brought her all the way down Broadway to South Ferry, and as her mind returned to her body, she realized that her feet hurt. Maybe she could sit for a while on the boat.
Then, with a rush of excitement, she saw that the Herbert H. Lehman was pulling into the dock. She hadn’t even thought to look there on the bench, under that first Descartes quote that Z had carved into the wood. Maybe he had left more quotes there, something less perplexing and confusing. She rushed up into the waiting room, brushing aside the stench of the old men who had slept the night there.
The sliding doors were already open, so she rushed through them, ran onto the ferry, then dashed upstairs to the deck where she and Z had started this adventure. Instantly, she was furious: people sat in the seats that she so desperately needed to see. Tall bearded men and their girlfriends, carrying shopping bags from the Armani Exchange. “God free me from the fucking Argentines!” Rai thought so loudly that it almost came out her mouth. She pushed past them to find an empty seat.
Rai couldn’t stop herself from fidgeting, even though she knew that she looked like a five year old who needed to pee. The occupants of her seats sat there calmly, slowly smoking Marlboros. Rai was sure that was illegal on the ferry — it certainly pissed her off.
What would he have written there, she wondered. What sort of quote would fill up the blank spaces in the puzzle? Here was a place where he could sit and write comfortably, without the fear of cops catching him, so he could have written something long and complex, maybe my Marcuse or that Lukács guy he liked so much. She fidgeted again.
As the ferry pulled away from the dock and turned toward New Jersey, the tourists rose automatically to photograph the skyline. Rai slid eagerly down the bench, knowing exactly where to look.
There was nothing there. Someone had just added a new coat of orange paint.
The rest of the ferry ride was interminable. She had brought no book with her, so restless thoughts were her only company. She had struggled so hard to make sense of those last quotes on Spring Street, but how much was lost under that fresh coat of paint?
She knew that only the walls of 46th and 53rd Streets would offer any answers, but she felt a strange resistance to going there. She wanted to figure it out for herself before she got there; to do otherwise would be to read the last page of the Agatha Christie novel before she’d made it through the rest of the book. Perversely, she decided that she would walk to Times Square, and that if she hadn’t figured it out by then. she would deserve to look at the last clues.
She sat for a while in the Winter Garden, then crossed the bridge into the World Trade Center, but she didn’t even look up at the towering walls. If no one was writing on them, they held no interest for her. Then she paced up Church Street, crossed onto 6th, went through the Village into Washington Square Park, watched the chess players for a while, then headed further uptown. As Broadway turned into the West Side, then entered Times Square, her mind was still blank.
She almost forced herself to ignore the words on 46th Street, but curiosity overcame her. In the same broad brushstrokes she had seen downtown, she read three new quotes:
“If the judges were just, perhaps the criminals would not be guilty.”
-Dostoyevsky
“It is more important to want the good than to know the truth.”
-Petrarch
“If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution.”
-Emma Goldman
Petrarch? Who the fuck was Petrarch, she fumed. What had Z been reading since he’d been on his own? At least he’d had the grace to include a little bit of Russian wisdom.
Containing her ire, Rai forced herself to think through the puzzle. All these quotes made sense in the moral universe that Z had created for himself: vaguely self-righteous, justifying his own actions, seeing himself as put upon… Except that line from Emma Goldman. Z had never danced in his life. He hated it. Called it “bourgeois and unproductive,” even if Rai thought he was just frightened that people might see him in an unguarded moment. Why would he want to dance at the revolution?
It had to be a metaphor, but for what? What did Z love to do, something fun and frivolous? Sex, of course, but that was too obvious. He certainly loved to argue, so maybe he was saying that he would still argue after the revolution. Did that mean that the dictatorship of the proletariat would guarantee the freedom of speech?
Her hypothesis was so trite that Rai forced herself to reconsider the other quotes. It wasn’t just the Dostoyevsky quote that flattered her; she also liked “It is more important to want the good than to know the truth,” because it meant that she’d won the debate about the definition of truth. He’d retreated into “wanting the good,” which struck Rai as a pretty feeble defense for terrorism. Even so, none of the quotes fit into the rest of the argument. They weren’t about liberty, they didn’t accuse her of complicity or of confusing the public. Nothing helped to explain why “Great art loves chains.”
She paced back and forth across the sidewalk, failing to notice how Officer Safran stared at her with more than idle curiosity. None of the quotes seemed directed to her at all. What was Z trying to say?
It was dinnertime, and she hadn’t eaten all day, but Rai couldn’t go into the Place without first understanding. What was his point? And how could she rescue him from himself now?
Without another thought, she sprinted past Officer Safran, then ran up 6th against the rush hour crowd. She was winded by the time that she turned toward the MOMA, but the clearing crowd gave her the energy to push on. She saw a lone man standing where the quotes were, intently reading. Her heart brightened for a second: someone was reading what they had to say. Perhaps she and Z had accomplished something, made people think. If a solitary man would stop to read the quotes in the middle of a busy day, how many others had learned something from them? She would ask him if he was confused, if he blamed her…
With surprisingly little effort, she threw her head back and pulled her shoulders up. The man dropped to his knees. Was he reading a new graffito? she wondered. Z had returned to this wall for a new argument. The last clues would be there. Rai looked more closely as she rushed forward.
The man pulled out a paintbrush and a little tin of paint. Confused, she walked closer, seeing him begin to sketch letters on the wall. Closer, she saw his dark coat.
And, as he turned to dip his brush in the can, on his chest, she saw the unmistakable shine of a badge. An NYPD badge. Yet he was painting words under hers…
As the meaning of all the quotes crashed down around her, Rai sprinted headlong toward Fifth. The cops had written the quotes?
New York collapsed into a junkyard of senseless signs. Nothing meant what it seemed.
