Alone in the basement print shop, Lee bent to pick up the bleached skull of a rodent—a rat, a mouse, a shrew—which he held out at arm’s length. Like Hamlet contemplating Yorick’s skull.
When he was eight, Lee thought, Harry started coming down here to work … no, play, in the shop. And to hang out with Linda. While he distributed the pied type, he’d keep glancing at her as she set one of the revolutionary leaflets she used to slip through neighbors’ doors: What is to be done? Hmm, The Little Lenin Library: Since there can be no talk of an independent ideology formulated by the working masses themselves in the process of their movement, the only choice is—either bourgeois or socialist ideology.… The leaflet that got her in trouble with the cops, who figured it was the work of a subversive cell—which in a way it was. A cell of one. She was ready to go to prison. Was fascinated by Dahlgren’s stories of going before HUAC dressed as Ben Franklin. Made him tell her over and over (loved the fur hat) about the hearing with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. About Danbury. Imagined herself a teeny-bopper on the cell block. The division of labor converts the product of labor into a commodity, and thereby makes necessary its conversion into money.… She knew her Marx. Malthus’ theory, which incidentally was not his invention, but whose fame he appropriated through the clerical fanaticism with which he propounded it … I wish she hadn’t taken the copy I’d framed down from over the toilet. She was a good Red. Until Harry distracted her with his stories of gumshoes and dames. Late capitalist fantasies of rough justice, carried out by a surrogate of the state when the state can no longer guarantee justice because the game is rigged by malefactors of great wealth. Behind every great American fortune is a great American crime. She’d quote that when she was six and get a pat on the head. At home. Not at school. At school, they corrected her: Andrew Carnegie was a great philanthropist. A great man. Built all those libraries, I told her, where the working class could educate themselves to challenge the state. Doesn’t matter. Carnegie, Frick had blood on their hands. The Homestead Strike. Amalgamated Iron and Steel Workers. The most hated men in America. Not the only ones. They should get in line. Behind every great American fortune is a great American crime. Did she understand what it meant? Does she understand what it means now? For Harry, a great American crime is a chance to redeem human agency. A counter-utopian diversion. Until the whole system is swept away, there can be no redemption. Only individual grandstanding. Not that that’s what Harry thinks he doing. He doesn’t have that kind of ego. Not that kind … but ego. That’s all Harry is. Infantile ego. Remaking the world in his image. How can I blame him for that? Without scientific analysis, political, economic, dialectic things can seem hopeless. Money, power, flows upward. The proletariat—um, the proletariat vanished long ago. The consumeriate. Adidas, iPads, flat-screen TVs; lottery tickets; a fortunate accident with its attendant corporate lawsuit, the real lottery, getting hit by a Staples truck … No chance for a revolution there. I guess my dream of a more compassionate society is as wacky as Harry’s fantasy of a noir world. I’m as delusional as he is.
Lee placed the rodent skull on a shelf.
Linda and Harry, he thought. I want grandchildren.