Chapter 19
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.
