NEWBURGH, NEW YORK, 1970
The other people with children had peeled off, vanished like the soft part of a body during some season of trauma, revealing only the mangy thing beneath. He and Ocean were the only ones who remained, and Wright kept as far from him as possible, pretending sleep in situations where it was inconceivable. Their positions on their mothers, their feelings about the movement that kept them in places like this, two-by-fours nailed over the windows, cockroaches so fearless and reliable you could name them, could not have been more different. Ocean had the look of someone waiting to be let in, a person underdressed and anxious at the door. He begged to attend the meetings.
All day Wright read, whatever he could, mildewed brochures on woodworking he found in the basements of the empty houses where they slept, paperback mysteries he stole from the drugstores where the adults bought saltines and batteries, Trollope and Austen he took from the shelves of libraries. He was ten. The more he populated his thinking with other text, he believed, the less he was vulnerable to the ideas of Shelter. He would hear one of those phrases they repeated so often, Destroy to rebuild, and mentally counter it with something he’d read, the more innocuous and benign the better, Joinery first requires common sense and reliable tools, picturing the phrase word by word in his mind until the angry spoken thing was gone.
In the privacy of his sleeping bag he fashioned a kind of helmet to keep out sound. Around his thickest socks he wrapped duct tape, pilfered from the collective supply closet, warping and massaging them until they resembled cups. They fit around his earlobes, connected by bands of tape, doubled for strength, which crossed his crown and circled his forehead. Over this went a knit cap, powder blue and bearing the monogram of a parochial school in Ohio. The absurdity of it, the bulkiness, made him look as removed as he felt. He owned few things and guarded them with all his energy, a pamphlet on the state parks of California he had long since memorized, a three-inch bureau that belonged to a dollhouse he’d never seen.
It was a certain type of meeting—louder than the rest and identifiable by peaks and lulls in which the members of Shelter slingshotted insults and reeled from those dealt them—that he had fashioned the contraption to avoid. They had named these sessions, called them Group Criticism. He had seen one first in Syracuse, from a landing on the stairs, his head pushed through the space left by a missing baluster. In the room below they had pushed everything to the borders, forming a crater of gapped wood flooring rimmed by books and folding chairs and piles of papers. Fay had stepped forward from the circle their bodies made, dressed as she had begun to in a thin suede jacket that obscured the beauty of her shoulders.
“Society cunt,” they said, “little queenie, are you gagging from that silver spoon.”
“Would you have gotten here without your daddy’s money in your pocket.”
“Without Randy’s cock in your mouth.”
“Think because you’re a grade-A fuck you’ll be exempt.”
“Think this is a rough game your parents will hear about.”
“Think because you’re a mother you deserve some other treatment.”
Watching it, the greatest wonder to him was how she took it, nodding sometimes, her biggest movement to bite off a crescent of pinky nail, her face like someone in the audience of a film, turned to something bigger than her, ready to feel what she had paid to. Finally she was absorbed back into the circle, and into the middle high-stepped Randy, his T-shirt worn to a kind of perforation, his sunglasses shadowing his face though there was not a lamp on in the squat.
“Here he is.”
“Such a hero for shooting off his finger.”
“What’d you shoot before that, how many kids.”
“Were you a good soldier. Rape some women for the hell of it.”
“Already burned their houses anyway.”
“Even if you didn’t you watched.”
“Does being here make up for your time as a cog in the imperialist mechanism.”
“Such a revolutionary. Such a freethinker.”
“Never mind at the end of the day you want some woman to worship you. How’s it feel to be fucking a woman smarter than you.”
“How long until she says no more.”
“Two months.”
“A month.”
“How do you even get it up.”
Randy received it with his head tucked and his hands in the back pockets of his jeans, noiseless, but the way the wings of his hair moved betrayed him, how they twitched irregularly with the violent intake of his nostrils.
It was a way of systematically deconstructing the ego, his mother said, when she came to Wright later, a shape around his body sometime after midnight that woke him. Freeing it of its comfortable lies, so that the individual could recede and the revolutionary could step forward. He had not asked, had not even acknowledged the presence of her on the mattress except to scoot to its edge, and he hated the rehearsed way she had begun to speak, the built-in gravity of a perfected phrase. There were strings of days when he slept alone and others when her breath in his hair was like weather, and he didn’t know why, though he suspected it had something to do with Randy, how their relationship had changed.
A fight had raged for a week in the boarded-up house, which was heated only by the detritus burned in a cracked granite fireplace. Wright watched the splintered legs of end tables disappear into ash, cheap sneakers curl like dead leaves. The argument had begun with his mother and Randy and spread outward, sides drawn along gender lines and then dissolving in shame once that was apparent.
Randy was the vocal advocate, the one who found a way of working the phrase into most conversations, Demolish monogamy. He and Oz—who had once posed for a photograph in which he and Annabelle fit, kissing, inside the same oversized Shetland sweater—spoke of the constraints romantic love imposed on the mind. The individual, Randy said, cannot devote himself to a movement when he is devoted first to another individual. Monogamy is a trap in our thinking. Fay had stood on the sidelines of the half circle that formed around him, nodding with a knuckle in her mouth, and afterward devised an errand.
Wright accompanied her, both of them in sunglasses and balaclavas as they drove through Newburgh, a city of beautiful, ruined houses where no one wanted to live. The things hanging from the rearview mirror, feathers Annabelle had laced there at a happier time, swung when the gearshift lurched, blocking and revealing his view of Fay’s crying.
Later that week, when she began sleeping with Oz, who was narrow shouldered in wire-rimmed glasses, someone for whom the appropriate quotation was always available to be spoken quietly, a graduate of a school he referred to only by the area in Massachusetts, Randy punched a hole in a wall. The issue seemed to be that she had chosen a single alternative, rather than the diversity of the five other men in the house. “That’s not freeing you ideologically,” he hissed at her, to which she said a stony total of nothing. MASCULINITY IS POISON, someone wrote in tidy ballpoint capitals next to the buckled crater of plaster his fist had left.
Oz, over a cauldron of bulgur and little else, suggested to Randy that he watch the two of them together sometime.
“I’d rather watch you fuck yourself,” Randy said.
“Enlightenment called for you,” Annabelle chimed in. “Long distance.” It became a line they repeated often, all of them but one.
WRIGHT PASSED HIS DAYS IN his mind, with the textbooks Fay had pilfered somehow, all of them bearing the name of the previous owner, Brock Stevenson, a figure he imagined with great jealousy, a boy on a bicycle with braces on his teeth. As often as she could she looked over his work, and the way she squinted one eye when recalling some formula, the way she reached for analogies to better explain, were some of the last moments when she was familiar to him. She taught him the Pythagorean theorem and how to steal, only from corporations, only necessities. In a K-Mart parking lot she kissed him when she felt the bags of rice tucked into his waistband. A value system is living and dynamic, she had said, changed by forces working against it. Any linguist will tell you that the only perfect language is one never spoken, she said.
They behaved as though the smallest of pleasures were anathema, a distraction from the mission at hand, watching each other for any sign of joy and snapping when they found it. Someone’s hot sauce was poured out and left empty, a patterned scarf thrown on the fire, a joint flushed down the toilet. The first week of February, with a line about how they must take advantage of whichever resources were available, Annabelle skinned and roasted a stray cat.