Dissident Gardens (48 page)

In the headmaster’s car, on the road to Philadelphia, Sergius ate from a bag of doughnut holes and listened to an eight-track tape of
Fiddler on the Roof
. It just went on and on.

Before going into the hearing room Sergius was reunited with Stella Kim in an adjacent office. The headmaster stood to one side as Sergius and his mother’s best friend clutched each other for a long while. Sergius found himself drenched in phantasms of babysitting nights, Stella Kim’s scent deep-mingling miso paste, pot, and patchouli. The smell could only carry him back a certain distance; though Stella Kim appeared here in a turquoise pantsuit Sergius didn’t think was native to her at all, he couldn’t now think of how she’d more typically be dressed. He damped a few confused tears against the turquoise knit. Stella Kim seemed to know to hold him just long enough and then they three went in soberly to sit with the judge. The courtroom was more like a large, dull office than that of Sergius’s imaginings, and the judge, equally inadequate, wore no robes and clapped no gavel. He wore a suit, his head was bald, his eyebrows gray and disordered, and he sat not above them, on some podium or tower, but shuffling through a folder of papers at a conference table.

Stella and the headmaster pulled out chairs and seated themselves, indicating Sergius should sit between them. He sat. At the table, too, waited another stranger, who didn’t stand and wasn’t introduced and, like Stella and the headmaster, barely spoke—the judge didn’t wish
them to. The judge made it clear at the outset that the adults present were to remain mute on the sidelines in a meeting between himself and
the child in question
, then went ahead to say any number of things plainly meant for their ears. “I’ve been consternated,
hurm
, by a terrific number of irregularities in this proceeding, not least the simple matter of delays in bringing relevant materials and testimonies to the court’s attention, on one side. Yet again, this entire, ah, circumstance is characterized by a puzzling delay at the outset, on the part of the complainant.” The words were, to Sergius, a baffling fudge. Yet their tone suggested he was indeed in the long-feared presence of monolithic authority, that against which an elemental orientation had pitted him for life. He was certain, that’s to say, that the judge, unrobed and unimpressive though he might be, was likely to now sentence Stella Kim, the headmaster, and himself to the electric chair. They would thereafter be remanded to death row, inspiring a vigil outside the prison’s walls, in which they would be referred to as the Philadelphia Three. “As well, there’s the whole peculiar matter of jurisdiction, yet,
hurm
, seeing as how the 1973 doctrine for the best interest of the child applies here as fully as in New York, and since the complaint was recorded by the Philadelphia police, and in full consultation with the corresponding offices in New York,
hurm
, it’s been deemed that present offices are sufficient to render judgment—” All this, preface to a meeting with
the child in question
that would effectively boil down to a single question.

“Will you confirm for me that you’re Sergius Valentine Gogan?”

“Sergius?” Stella prompted, drawing a glare from the judge.

“Uh, yes.” Sergius hadn’t heard his middle name in a while.
Stranger in a Strange Land
, he remembered.

“Do you understand that your parents are,
hurm
, no longer alive?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll be arriving at a decision, Mr. Gogan, and I’m not asking for you to make it for me, but your opinion has bearing in the matter, as according to the aforementioned 1973 doctrine. Do you understand?”

“Yes.” No.

“Boy, would you like to live with your grandmother Rose Zimmer in New York City, or do you prefer to continue to remain under stewardship of the Pendle Acre School?”

By the end of that summer Sergius’s orbit had expanded from West House, and from Murphy’s table at the dining hall. The narrowed population of vegetable-garden hippies disguised as language intensives drew him into their precincts—the hovel-like, tie-dye-curtained lounge at East House, the rows of sun-blazed, silk-stinky corn rows, the fire circle out behind the storage sheds. Seemingly a little kid could be elevated to peer status in extreme circumstances like these, the preponderance of empty dorms bonding those who remained as survivors, as on a desert island. Despite three decent meals and Pendle Acre’s reasonably plush facilities, the prevailing vibe was that of foxhole-ish endurance, of placement at front lines against an unknown enemy. Cigarettes and hormones might be the common denominators, or the vanishing point where opposites merged. There at the fire circle in particular, feeding brush-cleared tinder and scrap lumber into the crackling flames, then standing hypnotized on the cushion of pine needles and crushed butts, teenagerdom nightly cherished its world’s-end unity. The school’s rolls weirdly amalgamized privileged kids, those who’d been earmarked for private boarding school from the day they entered Country Day kindergartens, and “troubled” inner-city white kids whose parents had taken advice, from meeting elders like those at Fifteenth Street, to remand their children to the Quakerish safe haven. Weirder still, these constituents amalgamized easily, the chips on their shoulders more or less indistinguishable out there in the woods.

The teenagers had another destination, a two-mile walk to the “town” of East Exeter, which consisted of a pizza joint with a jukebox, a pair of gas stations for purchase of cigarettes, and a small videogame arcade, a foray that was off-limits to Sergius. Fine, he felt no urge to leave Pendle Acre. The fire circle was far enough, and surprisingly far. By firelight the sheds formed a wall of shadow to complete a boundary marked by the dense impassible woods. So the fire circle modeled a tiny realm in which childhood had been left behind while the adult universe was nonetheless securely resisted, a million miles away. One night a stoner kid turned his palm to reveal to Sergius a
half-smoked, sparking joint. “Hey, Serge, you’re not Murphy’s informant, are you?”

“No.”

“Leave him alone,” said someone else.

“Hey, man, I just had to check.”

In case he needed to be shown how unready he’d feel for any Alphabet City or Sunnyside ghosts, the music teacher staged an abrupt and horrendous demonstration. One day near the end of that summer Murphy stuffed a few of Sergius’s clean T-shirts and socks into a knapsack and the two of them got on a train. Sergius fell asleep, with a result that it felt scarcely more than fifteen or twenty minutes had passed before he found himself in drowsy stupefaction expunged into Penn Station. Pulling Sergius’s hand, Murphy threaded the commuter chaos to find the subway turnstiles, and beyond, the downtown platform. Then, before Sergius could give form to his objections, they ascended the stoop at Seventh Street.

Stepping inside, out of the August evening’s brightness, Sergius first navigated blind, plummeting through the hard-won, tissue-thin illusion of his present life into a sensory past he wanted no part of. Stella Kim had gathered him up again, bearing all her scents—all of Miriam’s scents. Somewhere a musical instrument tooted scales—a flute, if it wasn’t his imagination. Sergius squirmed loose, to find something more solid, the foot of the stair, the banister he’d learned once to giddily slide down: an intoxicant memory of the interrupted life now unwillingly restored. Yet this too was like mercury under his fingertips, as if the cracked-varnish curves and loose-jointed creak of the newel post to which he clung formed another impoverished effigy of his mother.

Adjusted to the dimness, tears now murked his sight. Yet he saw well enough to notice Murphy kissing Stella Kim, scraping his beard against her face. They all endured this together for a long instant and then Stella Kim walked Sergius around the home that wasn’t his anymore. A new housemate occupied the second-floor room that had
been Miriam and Tommy’s, a willowy blonde, seated in the room’s center, practicing the flute. His parents’ large bed was gone, replaced by her futon, slumped into the form of a couch beneath the windows. On the third floor, Stella’s room, unchanged, and what had been Sergius’s. This was redecorated; no sign of the abandoned stamp collection or those books he’d failed to salvage, their titles now unrecoverable. Others had come and gone from the room, which now served as the commune’s spare flop. Sergius would sleep there tonight. It wasn’t clear to him where Murphy would sleep—the knapsack had been plopped in the downstairs hall. Sergius tried not to understand. The commune was nothing but pitfalls and trapdoors, zones to avoid, like his parents’ LPs, still merged with the commune’s general collection, which he’d glimpsed intact where it lined the parlor wall. What was changed and unchanged here: equally disastrous.

He asked if he could go outside. In blazing red evening the street games had been under way for hours and wouldn’t stop for the dark. The high darkening rooftops scalded him with their total indifference to his presence. Sergius staggered along until he stood on the pavement at the lip of a vacant lot, there to be met by a kid he’d known before, not unfriendly if not a friend, but after the kid said “Your momma died, your pops, too” and Sergius nodded, language abandoned them utterly. They couldn’t even scare up names with which to identify themselves, let alone the terms with which to affix their relation, once the kid pronounced that which had severed the universe and left them standing on opposite ends of it. Someone called the kid back to the game as if Sergius were invisible, which likely he was, or wished to be. A shirtless man sat playing bongos in the backseat of a parked convertible. The gum on the pavement was scorched into blisters, still raw despite the sun’s vacating the skyline. Without having spoken Sergius returned inside.

Who opened the door for him he couldn’t say. What he recalled the next day was taking the basement stairs to search for the housemate he crossed his fingers remained living there, a curly-haired NYU film student named Adam Shatkin. Shatkin did remain, and was home, and welcomed Sergius gladly into his room. He produced stuff the boy remembered, books and records the student had shared with him when they’d been each other’s housemates, including a
Star Trek
calendar
Sergius remembered Shatkin thumbtacking to the plaster at the start of January, its pages now flipped to August, to remind Sergius how little time had passed. Up in the kitchen, Shatkin cubed tofu for a stir-fry, which they shared with the flute girl; nobody else was home. Nobody, that was, apart from Stella Kim and Murphy, whose sounds too much leaked through the floors, to the parlor level where the three sat at the commune’s long, scarred-oak dinner table: sounds of Murphy’s guitar playing and their two voices murmuring and some other stuff, sounds which soon came to be dominated by Murphy’s tone of injured pleading, which Sergius hadn’t exactly heard before but couldn’t mistake. Sergius and Shatkin returned to Shatkin’s rooms to watch Channel 11’s nightly reruns of
The Twilight Zone
and
Star Trek
on Shatkin’s small color TV and Sergius passed out there, never ended up in his own room at all.