Into the Dangerous World Page 2

  Dado was big, smart, and muscular as hell. He’d studied political science. He could carry two cinder blocks on one arm. He read us Whitman, Stokely Carmichael, Tolstoy. He started writing the King Kennedys manifesto during the Nixon trials and finished it by the end of the Vietnam War, right when Ford became president. For a long time, it was just his scrawl on a piece of paper.

  Then I designed the lettering. I worked for weeks, and he hung it over the hearth. It was there until we tore down the yurt.

  We went in the van to No Nukes protests and concerts in Central Park. Nights around the fire, we danced to Hawk’s guitar, Dado’s congas, Waterfall’s tambourine. Barefoot in the warmed dirt, I lost myself in the music. Dado sang in his burr-edged voice songs of peace. When everyone sold off their stuff for cash, he refused to give up his records and phonograph machine.

  Ma sewed us drawstring pants and peasant shirts; she crocheted beads into necklaces and tied them on us for good luck. I played with the beads till the yarn tattered in my fingers. At the farmer’s market, she sold her colorful afghans, her mojo sacks, her friendship bracelets, her A-line floral-print dresses. Ray sold goat butter and the eggs we collected from the feathered bellies of hens. Carol sold canned tomatoes, peas, squash. Waterfall hand-dipped wicks into rainbow bee waxes and sold the candles in bundles.

  My sister Halo took over the accounting as soon as she learned basic math. None of the adults thought it was strange, a kid managing the cash. She put together all the money that came in from the market and budgeted our spending. My sister was all straight lines; I felt curved and knotted beside her. She added and subtracted. I drew.

  At night, Dado made secret objects to ward off evil. I hugged the backs of trees and watched him weld rebar into oval zeppelins with hanging stone eyes. He lassoed branches together in the shape of a star. He dusted every leaf of an oak with pure-powdered pigments we found, and let nature have her way with them.

  Before the King Kennedys, Dado had tried to sell his sculptures. Rejection was like a torn-open wound in him. No gallery would ever take him. They’d never take him seriously. We talked about art, always, but he wouldn’t talk about why the galleries had ignored his work.

  Sculptures. You would never call them that. Was it because you couldn’t sell them? Because they bled rust, because the gypsy moths made webs in them? Was it because they collected spiders and birds, because nobody saw them but us and the spooks who watched you from the trees?

  He wanted to be known. He hated that he never was.

  “Stay on the ground,” he said. He’d grab my hand with his callused paw and pull me earthward. The musk of his hair overwhelmed me. “See the veins on this leaf, and how they match the veins in this ear?” He held a goat still and directed: “Follow the line of its head on that paper with that charcoal. See if you see it any differently.”

  He said the earth’s heartbeat matched my own, and every day, when I woke up, I felt it.

  Dado listened to WBAI, the renegade public radio station. The news, it would set him off, send him on these tangents. “The man, he’s got to destroy his children to build his industry. Eat your young. Give guns to the kids to do your dirty work, that’s right. It’s all the big plan of the FBI—and don’t think they don’t see us. Oh, they’re coming for us—like they did the Kennedys and King and Malcolm X. They’ve got a file on us. One day, they’re going to bust us wide open.”

  Except he was the only one who could see them.

  After the Vietnam War, Carter brought a few years of sanity until Reagan got elected. Dado said that the new president intended to sell the country to the rich. He started an underground newspaper called Carter Lives!, wrote long articles called “Against Ambition” and “Why Greed Kills,” and handed it out at the market. He welded metal scarecrows and put them on the edges of the property to frighten the spooks watching him. After John Lennon got shot, he slipped into a place where no one could reach him. Not even Ma.

  You thought the world was going to hell, the spooks were going to kill every good man left on earth, including you.

  When Dado accused him of destroying his Lennon albums—which had actually been damaged by rain—Randy left with Carol. Krishna told us later he became a banker and bought a house in Larchmont.

  There were thirteen of us left.

  Then, at age fourteen, what Dado had declared the Age of Reason—the time in a person’s life when they are to choose, or are given, a purpose—Halo broke free. She had been following the girls who wore satin jackets at the market. She made friends with them, the “Norms.” She hid a Barbie doll in her bunk; I knew about it, even Ma did, but she let it go, like maybe she secretly hoped Halo would be a Norm, too, someday. The girls taught my sister about the world beyond the scarecrows. On her birthday, Halo called a family meeting in the mess area. Everyone was there.

  She announced: “From now on, my name is Marilyn, and I want to go to public school.”

  We had never been to public school. The adults taught us—Jan had been a teacher. With all the work of the commune, and all we learned there, there was no room for school. I glanced at the other kids; we waited to hear what our parents would say.

  Dado’s husky-dog eyes started glowing with blue fury. He hadn’t expected this. “No. You learn valuable, real lessons here. We teach you what you need to know.”

  Jan shook her head; beside her, Krishna shook his, like they’d already discussed it. Jan said slowly, “You know, Peter, I don’t think it’s a bad idea. Besides, Halo can choose her own purpose. We all agreed on that.”

  Halo was the oldest, the first.

  She said, “I have the right to know things, aside from chicken shit.”

  Dado opened his mouth and this eerie choke came out. His fearful face got that You’re all against me look. The point of his nose tilted down, his long wiry hair went electric. “Not you, Halo. None of those monkey rules for you.”

  “My name is Marilyn, like Monroe,” Halo said. “And I’m going.”

  “You’re my daughter and you’re not changing your fucking name to Marilyn!” Dado raised his voice. “I won’t have you destroyed by the system.”

  Waterfall’s voice was soothing, like her name. “Hey, Peter? What’s going on, man? Something’s happening to you. You’re getting really paranoid. We’re worried about you.” It was the first time anyone dared say it to him.

  “You said I could decide for myself, Daddy,” Marilyn said. She was crying by then. The rest of us kids huddled together. “You taught me that I could be anything, once I have my purpose. Well, I want to go to school. I want to be someone with a running toilet, a high-school diploma, a college education.”

  “A toilet!” Dado was shaking, that jittery shake of his leg that meant trouble. Then he shouted, “You want a fucking toilet?” He grabbed a ceramic mug and threw it. It smashed against the wall. Ma let out a cry and put her face in her hands. He said in a low voice, “You know the FBI has a file on us; they’re learning our plans through a rat. Are you that rat, Halo?” He turned in a slow, menacing circle. “Are you, Ray? Maybe you, Hawk?”

  No one could look at him after that.

  Soon, Jan and Krishna split for good. Over the next few years, one by one, they all did.

  Things went fallow. Dado stopped working the gardens, stopped keeping us in line. He set about stockpiling planks and nails. Ma took to knitting with a fury. She got in the pickup and drove to the city more often to buy her yards of fabric, making more clothes to sell, as if those clothes could get us out of the King Kennedys.

  Marilyn went to school. I wanted to follow her, to see who she talked to and what she was up to, but I couldn’t leave Dado. Even if he didn’t seem to notice I was there.

  I didn’t take a single bath that whole year. I slept in trees. I smelled of goat grease and wore their skins after we ate them. Dado wouldn’t touch the meat.

  L
ast spring, he built that goddamn geodesic dome with everything he’d stockpiled, and I helped him. I loved the feel of a heavy hammer in my hand, the silver sound of it hitting a nail. Like we were getting somewhere, like maybe we would have a toilet someday. Soon as we got the first floor in, he tore down the yurt, and we took up residence. But he and Ma had stopped talking, and the space between them dried up like old leaves.

  The day after the dome got done, he went and got a job at the chemical plant in Jersey. None of us asked him why. We didn’t know what to say. It was like he had caved in, like any last bit of hope he had was gone. I wanted to kick my sister, shake my mother, tell them, “Do something! Help him!”

  In the fall, I started leaving the King Kennedys, wandering around Staten Island, going into the city, because what the fuck else was I going to do? Everyone was gone.

  Blake and the fires came when Reagan proposed a planetary shield that would explode atomic bombs in space. The Star Wars plan. It struck something deep in Dado—deep and screwed up and far, far away. He built eleven stone fire pits around the dome, a master number with an intense vibration that he believed would protect us. When he came home from work, he shucked down to his shorts, fired every pit, and danced while drumming and shouting wild poetry. Some nights, I danced with him; we danced like we could see a whole layer of the world nobody else saw. Because when your dado loses his mind, you might as well go with him.

  Only he didn’t take me all the way.

  Sitting in the shelter with nothing left, I drew on that pile of paper what I could remember, like it would all disappear if I didn’t.

  5

  EVERY DAY FOR two weeks after the fire, I visited Miss Gray. I talked to her through paper, showed her all the stuff inside me. She gave me tests and advice, asked me if I thought it was my fault, what happened. I should’ve helped him. I could’ve stopped him. Maybe if I danced harder, if Ma had . . . if Marilyn had . . . if we had . . .

  Then, Miss Gray called us all in and said, “We found you a place in the city.”

  “A place of our own?” I asked.

  She smiled. “It’s an SRO—a single-room-occupancy hotel—but it’s got everything you need to get by.”

  We’d go late that afternoon, after Ma signed all the forms. April Fools’ Day.

  We took almost nothing with us. We had almost nothing.

  On the subway, unless you were sitting down, bad breath and bodies stumbled into you. That always made me long for air. I wasn’t used to crowds; I hated being underground. Whenever I went to the city, I went only as far as I could walk, but I could walk miles. Now, I tried to make myself one with the subway car, one bee in a giant hive, like I used to at concerts in the park. But I wasn’t feeling very Zen. I pressed my back into the door so nothing could sneak up behind me. Marilyn hung on to a pole, pretending she didn’t know us. Ma sat with her hands folded in her lap, a shopping bag stuffed between her feet.

  The handwriting caught my eyes. It was everywhere, like shouts from hidden mouths. Messages scribbled in ink on the ceilings, over ads, even on the maps. I tried to read them. Something about them reminded me—the drawings I used to do on walls when we went scavenging in empty factories and abandoned houses. I stared at their swoops and zags and sudden straight lines. I took out some paper and copied them.

  Beside me, scratched into the metal, was the word PRAY.

  “Next stop,” Marilyn said.

  We bundled out, into the musty station. Up on the street, it smelled of pizza and cold concrete. Car horns blared, tires screeched, a police siren flashed, a fire truck thundered by. Brick and stone and mortar met my eyes everywhere I looked. It was worse than Brooklyn, trees puny and thin and very nearly dead. People hurried past me, brushing me with their arms. Twilight began, the shimmery night threat devouring day. Streetlights lit a newspaper stand covered in handwriting under a sign that said TE AMO. We stopped at an Italian deli where Ma bought American cheese and bologna, Wonder Bread, and a bottle of 7-Up, shit food like they served at the shelter. We passed a boarded-up building strapped with caution tape, scrawled with more writing—not much I could read except U82GOOD, PRINCE. I’d always written inside empty buildings with nobody watching. I tried to decipher these words like some coded message.

  Our place was on 85th Street, a narrow building made of gray stone, with wide stairs and a curved metal fence painted black that held in a line of overflowing garbage cans, putrid even in the cold. A guy and a girl sat on the steps, cigs burning in their yellowed fingers. As we started up, they didn’t look at us. They didn’t look at each other either, their eyes stuck in the half distance.

  Four dingy flights up, opposite the stairs, an unshaven man reeking of booze slept on the floor outside a door marked TOILETS. Down a bit, Ma unlocked 418.

  I didn’t know what I was expecting—my own room? A bathroom? This was what Miss Gray meant by “hotel”?

  A bunk bed stood by a small bay window that looked out onto the street. Next to it, a faded blue couch and two orange plastic chairs faced a television set on a milk crate. Opposite, an electric burner sat on a half fridge: our kitchen. A folding card table with four folding chairs stood for the dining room. After weeks on a cot with thirty other families, I drank in the privacy. At least that.

  “This is hell,” Marilyn said.

  “It’s temporary,” Ma said.

  I took the top bunk, claiming my space, and rested my head on the musty pillow. Dust tickled my nose; I sneezed. Ma turned on the TV.

  In commercials, kids boogied down the street with a Coke in their hand; suburban dads drank Bud by the BBQ. They ate burgers. “Have it your way!” On shows, invisible people laughed at jokes. Streams of top-ten tips on how to get out stains floated by. Everyone was clean and smelled of green money. I couldn’t stop watching. I imagined being one of them, then I felt sick. My pits stank, my hair was ragged and oily.

  Marilyn braved the public showers to get washed for school. She put on a nightie, got in the bottom bunk for her beauty rest. Ma took the couch. Neither of them mentioned that I was going to school myself, as if it were too weird, as if they had to see it to believe it, as if it might not happen at all. I crashed out in my clothes. Later, I woke to the gray light of the TV. Something crawled up the wall in front of me—a roach. The kids at the shelter smacked them dead by the dozens, taking pleasure in the instant death.

  I pinched it off and held it in my hand, its legs tickling my palm. In the yurt, spiders and ants would creep in, warmed by the hard-packed dirt floors. We put bugs out like unwanted guests; here, I didn’t know what to do with it.

  Ma lay wide awake, staring at the screen. Little TVs reflected in her eyes, the action outside of her, nothing inside.

  Footsteps paced above, a man snored below. I climbed down from the top bunk.

  “Ma?”

  “Hmmmmm?”

  “Hey, Ma, I have to go to the bathroom, and it’s, you know, the middle of the night,” I said. Out in the hall, the guy still slept beside the bathroom. I could see him from the peephole. Marilyn must’ve stepped right over him.

  “I’ll listen for you,” Ma said.

  Listen for what? My screams as he grabbed my legs and pulled me down?

  Ma cut off to start our life over. Don’t look back was the thing that kept her going forward. I saw what it cost her. She said people in the city didn’t care anymore—they had nothing to lose. That’s how I felt: nothing to lose.

  Did nothing to lose mean you had everything to gain?

  I brought my white Swiss Army knife with the screwdriver and awl, two blue ballpoint pens, and my drawing book out with me; my bandage had come off, and now the only time I felt safe was inside my black watch cap and coat. In the hall, I let the roach loose and didn’t use the bathroom. I went out to the stoop, into the fake city light, starless and bitter cold. Everything hard-edged, gum-stuck, broken-
glass.

  Looking at my blank page, I didn’t even know where to begin.

  I drew Dado burning, flames coming from his head, and I swore I could feel him pouring from my veins. His head had been on fire for years. That’s what crazy was like.

  I sat on the freezing stoop, but it felt like the drawing was burning a hole right through my thighs. I tore it out carefully, balled it, and tossed it on the ground. I drew it again, like I needed to get him right—his face, I kept getting the wrong face. The wrong nose, wrong eyes. Fire Pop, burned by the secret agents inside his own mind.

  I tore pages out, digging for him. There was nothing left of him after the fire, they told us—not even bones. I couldn’t stand to sit in the cold, couldn’t stand the pricks in my own heart, the sense that I was truly dead. I got up and walked a few blocks to a park. Central Park. Skeleton trees jabbed at my insides. I dragged my nails across their bark. Yellow cabs sharked by.

  On top of the stone wall, I sat and drew him. I tore and threw him, like I was spreading his ashes.

  He brought me a roll of paper that night. What if I had stopped him? Made him talk to me a little longer? Thinking of him made me want to tear the stuffing from my heart, just tear it out and not feel it anymore. No, I didn’t feel anything, that was the truth. If I took my knife and nicked at my wrists like those shelter girls, I wouldn’t feel it, not one bit. I could hit a vein and watch the blood come pouring out, use its redness to paint on the cold ground.

  I was walking around completely stripped of my life, hair singed, homeless as a stray, half my ear gone. Half an orphan.

  Tomorrow, I was going to start school. School. Me in school, me and school. Those things just didn’t seem to go together.

  No wonder I couldn’t sleep.

  6

  THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN Staten Island and Manhattan was the difference between circles and squares. Manhattan had blocks. Angles, straight lines. Nothing soft, like leaves or dirt, nothing to sink your fingers into unless you wanted to hit dog shit.