Chapter 16
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.
