Chapter 5
Half a dozen boats travel the Harbor between Manhattan and Staten Island, so Rai and Z had to wait almost an hour before the Herbert H. Lehman docked in Whitehall. They were strangely, anxiously quiet, watching a bus load of German tourist instead of each other, then finally hurrying onto the ferry as the gates closed.
When they got to the upper deck, they found a crowd of hip young tourists on the bench that Z had marked with Rai’s little knife, so they sat several paces down. The men were tall and wore their hair long; the women wore tight black pants and carried Prada bags. Argentines, Rai thought. Why did Argentines always sit at that spot on the upper deck? Different ones every time. It was very strange, Rai thought. Though she wanted to see Z’s work, she also wanted to see the Argentines respond, so she forced herself to be calm. Z assumed his lazy housecat posture in the late afternoon sun.
As the boat pulled away from the ferry, the Argentines — as well as the rest of the tourists — stood and stepped to the rail to watch the skyline. Hundreds of cameras snapped. Rai stared quietly at the young people chattering away in Spanish that sounded like Italian.
After the ferry passed the Statue of Liberty, the tourists sat down by pairs and groups. A woman in Armani pants and a tiny leather backpack tapped her bearded boyfriend on the shoulder and pointed to the bench. He looked down quickly, smiled, then turned away, but she spoke to him again. They began a serious conversation, full of meaningful looks and thoughtful pauses.
Rai turned to Z and whispered. “Look, look! It’s working! That’s a philosophical conversation if I’ve ever seen one. Look how serious she is!”
“Seriously bourgeois.”
“C’mon, Z, they’re thinking. I mean yeah, whatever, they’re rich. But they’re thinking!”
In spite of his desire to contradict Rai, Z began to share her excitement. “Look, turn around. She’s tapping her head. That’s good. I wish we could understand them. Whaddaya think, they’re thinking through the mind-body problem?” The Argentine woman’s hands were consciously smoothing her blouse.
“Yeah, and if we make the rich think, maybe they’ll criticize–”
Z interrupted. “You won your point, Rai. Awesome plan. Consciousness raising cubed. They’re definitely on the mind body problem. Look how he’s pointing to his head, now to hers. And there’s this sense of sadness, y’know? Excited sadness, like when you’ve decided that some really important idea is, like, wrong, but you’re enjoying the process that got you there…”
Finally, the couple sat back and stared over the water with melancholy eyes.
Rai and Z looked at each other. Z held up his palm. Rai slapped him a high five, then winced. Sometimes she was stronger than she thought. Everyone on deck turned to look.
As the ferry approached Staten Island, the young Argentines stood and crossed to the other side of the boat, probably to see the Verazano Narrows Bridge. Rai and Z eagerly slid down the orange bench to look at their work. There, on the third slat of the seat, they read,
“Cogito, ergo sum.
I think, therefore I am.”
-Rene Descartes
Comments?
Z had known it was a conventional quote, perhaps the only line that even idiots knew about philosophy. At the same time, he’d decided to start the ad campaign for thought with something accessible, and he’d needed something short, because a transit cop could have arrived at any second.
Rai was happy that no janitor had painted over Z’s carving, but she was even more thrilled with what she found under it. Someone had taken a black permanent marker and written, in block letters,
“W disappears! Rene Descartes blamed!”
-The Daily News
Rai laughed proudly. Someone had read her work. It was already earning marginal commentaries. Like the Torah scroll, she thought.
Off to the left, someone had scribbled with a ballpoint pen. Rai pointed Z toward the light marks:
“Pero, es que Descartes nunca pensó en el doble sentido de la palabra ‘yo,’ la quiebra del suj–”
The words appeared to break off in mid-phrase. “What’s it mean?” Rai asked.
“Dunno. Mentions Descartes, though, so it must be about us, huh?”
“God, secondary commentary in another language. I bet even Rabbi Hillel didn’t get this when he was seventeen!”
Z, assiduously ignoring an allusion he didn’t understand, ran his fingers over the deeply carved letters that had started modern philosophy and killed the Church and the Middle Ages. “It worked,” he said under his breath. “I gotta hand it to you. It really worked.”
Rai was not so quiet. “Fuck yeah, it worked! Graffiti philosophy. This is our first gift to the world, Z. The first step to your revolution, maybe. We’ve stolen the words from the philosophers and we’re giving them to the people. Like Robin Hood, except–”
“Robin Hood?”
“–except giving to the poor in knowledge. Now maybe they’ll inherit the Earth–”
“That’s the meek. And it’s in the New Testament. Not your book, Rai.”
“Doesn’t matter. This is going to change everything. Write it down, Z, ‘cause this day is gonna end up in the history books–”
“And they accuse me of delusions of grandeur,” Z said under his breath.
Rai didn’t hear. Or didn’t pay attention. “That quote was fine, but not quite on, huh? I mean, hardly political. So what’s next? Nietzsche? Turgenev? I see something fin de siècle…” For the first time, a note of doubt crept into her voice. “Whaddaya think, Z?”
“I think I don’t understand you.” He felt the need to bring her down to earth. “Remember when you read those stupid Harry Potter books?”
“They’re not stupid. They’re cute.”
“She’s no Tolkein, OK? So you’re reading these books and they call non-magical people Muddles or something…”
“Muggles.”
“So you said everyone else in the world besides you and me were Muggles.”
“Your point?”
“You despise people! You think they’re stupid and worthless. And now you’re Robin Hood, robbing the history of philosophy for their benefit. C’mon, Rai…”
“Maybe I’ve been touched by noblesse oblige. The black woman’s burden.” She smiled.
“You hate that shit, Rai. And just a little comment, but you’re not black, if I remember right.”
“ ‘A mere consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.’” Rai quoted.
“Fuck you and fuck your fickleness, Rai.” Incongruously, he said the curses tenderly.
“We did good, huh?”
“Yeah.”
Rai knew that any good movie would use the moment as a chance for an embrace, or at least a few quiet moments looking over the water before a fade out, so she instantly stood up and began to pace. “OK, so what’s next? I figure uptown. For balance, y’know…”
“Sit down and rest for a second.”
Her steps became almost maniacal. “Nah, we don’t want high modernist. What about something seriously classical? Sophocles, Euripides. I mean, I’d like to do a quote from the Bible, but then they’re going to think that we’re a bunch of Mormons or something. We have to establish context first.”
“Rai, sit down!” The boat had docked and new passengers were boarding for the ride back to Manhattan. As they walked along the deck, they had to dodge Rai.
“Let’s check out the Elektra, huh? That’s got some political stuff in it, a touch of feminism…”
Z reached out to grab Rai’s arm and pull her to the seat. She stood again and began to pace even harder, her voice even more intense.
“Or we could put it in Astoria. I mean, don’t you like the idea of teaching Greek immigrants about classical Greek culture? There’s that park on Newtown Street off the N.” Finally, Rai sat down, then stared at the afternoon sun. After several minutes of rest, she spoke. “OK, I’ve got a plan.”
“Please. Illuminate me.”
“I really like the public transit thing. That’s the motif.” Her voice had become calm and sane again.
“We can’t carve subway cars and busses like we carved this bench.”
“No, but here’s the great thing. We know how long it takes to pull down old ads on the subway, right? They still have the posters up for the EcoFair on the 4 train, and that happened last October.”
“OK. So?”
“So that’s our space. We work our graffiti into the ad, so the cops or MTA people or whoever don’t notice it. Like, I dunno, we slide paper under the glass in front of ‘em.”
“Getting the paper to match those Chivas ads isn’t going to be easy. Where do we get the supplies?”
“From the art room at The Place. Or we steal it from an art store someplace. You’re the expert on that. It’s just crayons and magic markers.”
“But if we camouflage it so well that the MTA inspectors don’t notice it–”
“Commuters in this city see everything except each other. They’ll be thrilled to study great philosophy if it means that won’t have to look at other people on a crowded D out of Park Slope. Inspectors just glance at it, I bet. Make sure it hasn’t been torn down.”
“I like it. Very sharp.” Rai beamed at Z’s compliment. “We need a theme, though. This is like an ad campaign for revolutionary thought, right?”
“Well…”
“Look, this is the way I see it. We’re trying to get people from point A — ignorance — to point Z.”
“Z?”
“Enlightenment.” He smiled that infuriating smile that made her want to kill him. Or hug him. It was as if he denigrated and affirmed his arrogance at the same time. “No, seriously. I see this as a kind of dialectic, y’know? We start with the Greeks, go through Hobbes and Locke and shit, and end up with Marx. It shows the progress of philosophy, and its culmination–”
“In Marx?”
“The Frankfurt School, let’s say.”
“Z, I don’t care if they have nothing else to look at. New Yorkers are not going to read Adorno in the train.”
“They will if we find the good parts.”
“I’m all for quoting Marx. You know that. It’s just… There’s a logistical problem. To do a dialectic, you need history, right? A flow of time–”
“But–”
“Let me finish, please.” Enthusiasm filled her voice. “So, say we put Plato in the N train and Adam Smith in the 4 and Marx in the A. That’s perfect for somebody who’s going from Astoria to JFK, but what if they’re going the other way? History’s backward, right? And what chance will anyone have of reading all three? Zip, really. This isn’t a college class where you can assign a reading list.” Rai heard the pretense in her voice, but it was so fun she didn’t care.
“We’ll number the quotes. That simulates time–”
“Too much effort. You have to let Muggles be lazy, because they are.”
“But we hafta have history. Otherwise there’s no progress, no context, no nothing. We have to have a narrative so that people can make sense of what we’re teaching them, or it doesn’t have the right meaning.”
Rai thought a second. “OK, yeah. Point made. But whatever. Look, Z, it’s all basically academic. We don’t even know what we want to put down. Let’s come up with some quotes first. Then we’ll worry about whether we can put ‘em in order.”
Z sighed, but they had arrived back in Whitehall, and Rai rushed off the ferry and along the shore toward Castle Clinton, so he had no chance to continue the argument. Walking much slower, Z found her five minutes later, finishing A Hero of our Time on one of the park benches that looked out over the Statue of Liberty.
