Q: A Novel (9 page)

None of these mitigating narratives apply when a child is involved. Sometimes someone will say something about God and his secret will, but it never rings true. At the funeral of a high school student who has died of an injury suffered during a football game, Chuck Pezzano does not even try to console the family. He throws away the Greek script and admits that nothing he can say will make any difference. He sees death all the time, he says, but nothing can prepare anyone for this. In my opinion, it is his finest hour.

One afternoon at Cypress Hills, my last, they have a service for an infant. No one says much. A few words of prayer are muttered; a teddy bear is deposited in the grave; the tombstone is revealed, noting consecutive years of birth and death. No one cries, which is sadder than when they do. Following the service no one speaks much, but what is to be said?

That evening, while
Q is out, I research Batten disease. It is named after a British pediatrician who described the syndrome in 1903 and is part of a family of diseases called neuronal ceroid lipofuscinoses. This group includes an infantile form, known as Santavuori-Haltia disease, and an adult form called Parry’s disease. Each of the varieties of the illness is caused by a buildup of lipoproteins, which are a combination of lipids and proteins. The lipoproteins build up in the cells of the brain, the eye, and other tissues and cause neurons to die.

With Batten’s, symptoms first appear between the ages of five and eight. The typical early signs are loss of vision, seizures, and clumsiness. Its progression is methodical and insidious. Children with Batten disease become blind and bedridden and lose the ability to communicate. Though it is inevitably fatal, the disease progresses slowly, and affected children live into their teens or, in rare cases, their early twenties. By all accounts, this is a mixed blessing.

In my mind’s eye, I see QE II’s life. It is easy to envision; I do not need my older self to explain it to me. I can imagine the terror of being trapped in one’s own body, of being betrayed by one’s own hands and eyes. And I know the horror would be all the worse for a brilliant young boy with a vivid imagination and lofty goals. A boy such as this would sense the fullness of what had been seized from him—playing basketball in the schoolyard past dusk, learning to drive, his first kiss. And it would be all the more difficult to have a doting mother, Q, by his side. The child would understand that his mother felt everything he did, that his pain was her pain, and the sense of loss and foregone opportunity he felt over his own life would be even more profound for her because she would go on and think to herself each moment of each day what he would be doing if he were there. His life would be ruined, but the pain would end. How much sadder for the mother, whose ruined life would go on?

For her life would be ruined—that much is plain. As clearly as I see the life ahead of QE II, I can see what lies ahead for Q. To protect an organic garden in downtown Manhattan, Q is working around the clock, with complete commitment and devotion to her cause. As I-60 said, she is relentless. It does not take much extrapolation to envision this energy and sense of purpose being applied to a beloved, helpless child. Days spent at the child’s bedside trying to keep him comfortable, sleepless nights, and endless waiting. This strikes me as more daunting than any other aspect of the experience as I imagine it. Waiting for futile doctor’s appointments, waiting for a surcease to suffering, waiting for life to resume.

The boy’s illness would surely doom my relationship with Q. In rare moments of optimism, my confidence in Q’s tremendous strength and determination makes me think she could somehow carry us through. But when I am sitting quietly at the funeral home or walking aimlessly through the streets of New York or sitting on the couch with Q watching TV, I acknowledge that these scenarios are fanciful, the product of my inability to imagine leaving Q. I have no idea how I could ever do this. But the truth is, if what I-60 has told me were to come to pass, Q and I would never recover.

Chapter Nine

D
uring the weeks following our dinner at La Grenouille and our trip to the Mets game, I hear nothing further from I-60. I receive no notes, no phone calls, no solicitations for fancy meals. I walk over to the
W
during my wanderings one day only to find that my older self has checked out and left no forwarding information. I worry about him. But as I emerge from my fog, my attention focuses increasingly on Q. I have no instinct to distance myself from her. To the contrary, I am drawn to her more than ever. In these days of mid-autumn, Q is fully immersed in the endgame of the desperate battle to save her sacred garden. Since this is her cause, it is mine too, and when my mourning ends, I do what I can to help Q and her colleagues organize opposition to the construction of the skyscraper.

The tactics of the campaign are developed during a series of Saturday afternoon meetings at the TriBeCa residence of Ethel Lipschutz, former curator of the scone collection at the Museum of Muffins and Breads in Chelsea. Ethel’s loft apartment is surprisingly spacious, but rather inconveniently located above Conway’s department store on Chambers Street. Chambers Street is easy enough to get to, but the apartment itself can only be accessed through the children’s shoe department in the back of the shop.

“What do you do when the store is closed?” I ask at the first meeting I attend.

“I don’t go in or out,” Ethel replies.

“Isn’t that inconvenient?”

“Not really. I don’t miss evenings or Sundays one bit. Besides,” she says, winking, “it’s rent-controlled.”

Everyone within earshot nods their heads vigorously.

“Seriously rent-controlled!” cries one woman.

“Do I hear adverse possession?” exclaims another.

After a moment, I get the picture.

“And there are, shall we say, perquisites,” Ethel adds, as her eyes shift toward a massive pile of children’s shoes in the corner of the room. The mound is supported by an almost-as-impressive stack of
Boys’ Life
and
Girls’ Life
and
National Geographic Kids
.

“How many children do you have?” I ask.

“None,” she says, her mischievous smile suggesting that this fact makes her cache all the more impressive and valuable.

The strategy arrived
upon by the group is grassroots with a postmodern twist. It includes a heavy dose of the staples of left-wing, ground-up organizing: telephone calls to City Council members, leafleting, postering, distribution of homemade buttons and dehydrated sponges. It also includes, however, a technological
component. To wit: a blog (with seventy-eight nonredundant readers), Twitter posts (with the same seventy-eight nonredundant subscribers), a Facebook community (seventy-eight members), email blasts (seventy-seven; one of the regulars does not have email), and three online discussion forums. Everything is emblazoned with the acronym ENDING, which stands for End Neighborhood Destruction of Indigenous Neighborhood Gardens. During one of the Saturday afternoon sessions, I question whether an acronym should include its own name or use the same word twice, but I am quickly hushed by Ina Levenson, prolocutor of the nonprofit organization that oversees the garden’s operation.

Levenson and her colleagues regard my formal education on the history of campaigns as irrelevant. They have strong feelings about the most effective way to wage political warfare and are also vaguely mistrustful of me. The primary cause of this suspicion is a summer course on American social history I taught as an adjunct professor at the Borough of Manhattan Community College seven years ago while I was still a graduate student at NYU. On the basis of the $1,850 I received from the government for offering this series of lectures, they have concluded that I am somehow part of the “entrenched power elite.” Ordinarily they wouldn’t know anything about me, but, improbably, Jill Nordberg, the group’s homeopathic insecticidist, took the class, received a C, and remains convinced the mediocre grade was a response to her political views, which are somewhere to the left of Trotsky. I recall the incident, as well as the salient highlights of her letter to the chairperson of the BMCC history department, in which she refused to acknowledge me by name. Nordberg wrote, “The professor in question’s lectures, examinations, and syllabus, which embrace discredited right-leaning figures such as Michael Harrington and Nathan Glazer, are uninclusive, anti-progressive, and patriarchal.”

Even the lefty chairperson found the letter extreme and unpersuasive, but I am nevertheless diminished among Q’s peers. When I suggest at a later meeting that all the money spent on handbills and posters would be better used to develop and air a single television commercial, I am unceremoniously dismissed from the group. This excommunication is not verbalized, of course. But it cannot be coincidence that on each of the following three Saturdays, Q asks me, in the voice I cannot resist, to run a series of obviously contrived errands, including two runs for herbs, which somehow can only be purchased in Bay Ridge. I thus am not present for the decision to employ a giant inflatable rat or the coup de grâce of the campaign, a march—in full vegetable costume—from the garden to the steps of City Hall.

I am, rather,
relegated to behind-the-scenes research and support. My first charge is to investigate public enemy number one in the campaign, the Deliver Company, a limited-liability corporation based in the Cayman Islands.

Through my research, I learn a great deal about the Caymans, a tax haven in the western Caribbean Sea. The islands are discovered by Christopher Columbus on his ill-fated fourth and final voyage to the New World. He names them Las Tortugas, after the abundance of sea turtles he encounters there. Indeed, turtling remains the linchpin of the Cayman economy until the 1970s when the natives discover they can make more money as an international financial center, particularly in light of the
declining popularity of turtle soup, which was never all that popular to begin with.

One of the ways the Caymans carve a niche for themselves in the cutthroat financial-haven game is by eliminating taxation. Caymanians and, more relevantly, Cayman Island companies, pay no direct tax whatsoever. The country makes its money by charging a flat licensing fee on financial companies and a 20 percent duty on all imported goods, with the notable exception of baby formula. The Caymans also protect the corporate identity of any company housed in the islands.

This is smashingly popular with businesses, particularly illicit businesses, which loathe paying taxes. It is so popular that the number of businesses registered in the Caymans exceeds the human population. This is a shame because the Caymans are a nice place to live. Temperatures hover year-round between seventy-five and ninety degrees, the sea is generally placid, and the price of baby formula is quite reasonable.

Unfortunately, because of its strict privacy rules, I cannot find out a single thing about the Deliver Company—not its CEO, not its board of directors, not even its address. The whole thing is a mystery, and, as every good campaigner knows, the hardest enemy to fight is the one you cannot see. I am given special dispensation to attend a Saturday meeting at Conway’s during which I report my results. Q’s colleagues are suspicious about my failure to collect information but reassured by my conclusion that this setback is attributable to a widespread conspiracy.

My second charge
is to explore inflatable rats. With this task I am somewhat more successful. I find a store in Illinois offering free shipping and a surprisingly robust selection. The rats range in size from six to thirty feet, with most folks settling on something in the twelve-foot range. Oversized fangs are extra. The store also has skunk balloons.

The rats are surprisingly expensive. Q and her associates could never afford one on their own meager earnings, but Q calls upon the services of her father, and he is only too happy to help. He has been a major benefactor of the garden, as he has been of his daughter, all along. He is sanguine about the potential of the rat. Indeed, the rodents have an excellent track record. They were created in the early 1990s for the benefit of striking unions and had an undeniable impact. Many employers capitulated to the awesome presence of the rat and its unsightly pink underbelly. Over time, the rat balloon came to represent inadequate health care, poor maternity leave policies, and all other questionable corporate practices.

The rats are not invincible. One employer responded by inflating an even larger cougar to menace the rat positioned outside its store. Some companies have litigated against the rat. Two have been arrested, though they were discharged after questioning. All in all, though, the rodents have a fine track record. I negotiate a favorable price and this temporarily restores my standing with Ethel Lipschutz and the team. Only my former student remains dubious. The rest of the group is sanguine about the rat’s potential and their campaign generally. As the march approaches they are giddy with optimism.

The day of the rally
begins auspiciously. The weather is cool and crisp, the pollution temporarily washed from the sky. It is the sort of morning that promotes a sense of possibility. Q’s colleagues are in high dudgeon. At ten o’clock, they gather in front of the garden to begin their assault on City Hall. Their ranks are bolstered by simpatico victims of the oppressive patriarchy, including two members of the Ethical Cultural Society rapid-response nonmilitant militia; Cassandra DeBower, Lenora Fulani’s third cousin once removed; Don Bruford, associate corresponding secretary of New Yorkers Against Violence; Phillip L’Enfante, emeritus professor and former holder of the Tom and Agnes Carvel Endowed Chair in Postcolonial Studies at the New School; Tina Dennis, the
Village Voice
’s alternative lifestyle sex columnist and restaurant critic; Art Vance, former deputy finance chairman of Abzug for Mayor; and three unaffiliated transvestites.

At precisely 10:15, Ethel Lipschutz, commandant of the march, blows a shrill pea whistle and the troops fall into formation behind her, arranged in age order from oldest to youngest. Ninety-three-year-old Phil L’Enfante is thus second in line, followed by Art Vance, eighty-eight, and progressing downward, finally reaching Lipschutz’s nine-year-old grandniece, wearing a pink ribbon in her hair and a pair of Howdy Doody Wacky Wobbler sandals. Thirty-five people in all set out from the garden to begin the onslaught, led fearlessly into battle by a giant inflatable rat and a shoe-hoarding squatter dressed as a zucchini.

The retinue emerges
from the garden, turns right on Rector, then left onto Church. Few people are on the streets since it is a Sunday, but the cortege nevertheless generates some reaction. At the intersection of Liberty Street, a teenager points, bops his head, and yells “Go squash! Go squash!” Ina Levenson, who is dressed as the gourd, gives the boy a thumbs-up. It is obvious she does not detect the sarcasm. To the contrary, she is emboldened and walks on with her head, barely visible over the stem of the squash, held slightly higher. Other members of the company respond similarly to excited cries of “Asparagus Rocks,” “Celery Rules!” and “Yo Yo Yo, Tomato!” Onward, they march.

Near John Street,
progress is stalled when Professor L’Enfante announces that he needs the bathroom. The only good option is a Wendy’s and this sparks a heated debate on whether L’Enfante can ethically use the facility. Q, a vegetarian, is positioned to the right on the eating-habits spectrum of the group, which includes six vegans, three raw vegans, and a seitanist.

“Wendy’s is a purveyor of consumerism and responsible for the inhumane slaughter of millions of innocent animals,” says Cassandra DeBower. One of the transvestites, Janus Edlefield, a fruitarian herself, nods her head in agreement.

“He needs to use the toilet,” I say. “It doesn’t promote consumerism for him to use the toilet.”

“Don’t listen to him,” says Jill Nordberg, my former student. “He is a capitalist tool himself. He’s not supposed to be here at all. He didn’t even have the decency to dress up.”

This is true. I did not dress up. Q said she thought it would be best not to. I am wearing my usual uniform, an oxford shirt and khakis, and have been following the action from a distance, either a few steps behind or across the street. I moved in only to investigate the commotion surrounding L’Enfante’s request. I am clearly an outsider, present only to support Q, but surprisingly, Ina Levenson is on my side. “It’s not like he’s going to buy anything,” she says. “How can it do any harm for him to use the bathroom?”

“They don’t use organic toilet paper!” shrieks Ethel. “They are guilty of the murder of virgin trees!”

It goes on like this for almost fifteen minutes, at which point the debate is no longer relevant. Professor L’Enfante has soiled himself and decides to go home. I help him get a cab. Getting into a taxi can be challenging for someone dressed as a turnip, but he does it, and graciously asks me to wish the group luck getting to City Hall.

“I was looking forward to seeing Lindsay again,” he says. “I would have given him a piece of my mind.”

After entering the
south end of City Hall Park, the members of the group begin craning their necks to see whether the parade has attracted the desired response. Halfway through the plaza, Ethel Lipschutz turns and triumphantly proclaims, “The press is here!” Word filters back through the ranks. “The press is here. The press is here,” says one marcher to another. Chests expand further and the phalanx of vegetables advances with a noticeable lilt in its step. At the steps of City Hall, Lipschutz calls the troops to a halt. As one, the group chants:

Ho Ho

Hey Hey

Urban Gardening Is Here to Stay

Hey Hey

Ho Ho

Garden Displacement Has Got to Go

After five minutes of robust protesting, Ethel Lipschutz stands aside. Ina Levenson triumphantly ascends the steps and begins the press conference.