Chapter 18
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.
