“You’re an intellectual and a revisionist.”
“You take that back!”
“Lower your voices! The neighbors.”
“The neighbors? The neighbors are with us.”
“Not anymore.”
Saul stood at the edge of the kitchen, watching. The kitchen was yellow and not as big as last year. In fact, it shrank every day, yet somehow grew more significant, warmer and womblike, tight, and, currently, suffocating. He didn’t like it when people raised their voices in his food place where Mom and Dad sliced the challah.
“You’re a baiter,” his aunt Judith screamed.
His father (whose File No. FD-505, Scheer, Esau began Subject’s name is included in the Agitator Index.) rose from the table with a raised finger: “Look what he did—millions and now we are supposed to become ‘unavailable?’ Is that the word we’re using?”
“The Co-op’s not safe,” his mother (FD-506, Scheer, Sheila…) whispered, glancing at him. Her eyes often seemed tethered to Saul, knew where he was even when she wasn’t directly looking at him, and they said Leave the room! with one tilted brow. Grownup talk.
He went to the porch and gazed at the Co-op’s dim courtyard, found one of mom’s stubbed cigarettes and lit it, the cool mentholated tar swirling in his lungs. The ember just enough to see the masthead of the newspaper his parents once sold door to door. The orange glow circling the W in Worker
“Hey, that you, Saul?”
“Yeah.”
“What are you doing, smoking your mama’s cigs?”
“She says I can.”
“Ten years old is too young. Put it out.”
He stubbed the cigarette.
His science teacher Mr. Rosen receded into the Co-op’s playground, zigzagging between the monkey bars and swings and then vanishing into the building where he taught in the basement. He taught them recently about ants. In the film, which Mr. Rosen projected onto a retractable blackboard screen, they were bigger than Saul’s head:
The largest ant is a soldier and like all the ants she is blind. She ‘sees’ with her antennae, feeling for trouble
And then a mass, tangled, writhing, on a tree root mound.
These army ants may look like a ball of a million individuals, but make no mistake the colony acts as one
A super-organism with a sensory system of two million antennae.
A skeleton made from the living tissue of workers.
A defense system of soldier ants ready to act at any sign of danger.
A digestive system processing piles of food deep inside.
Even a coordinated system for dealing with all the waste.
These are insects that by working together transcend individual size.
The colony can search the entire jungle and flush out its wildlife.
Each day it sends out a silent probe into the forest in quest of food.
He’d seen footage of the colony taking down hermit crabs even the occasional wounded bird, overrunning, them, enveloping, tearing, carrying bits back.
And then:
A mantis. A ten-meter front across the forest floor. To find prey the ants must first touch it. As long as an animal remains still, it is safe. But the slightest twitch will give it away. Within seconds the prey is pinned down. Within minutes it is torn apart.
Once Saul found a praying mantis clinging to the porch railing with that curious tilt to its head, the bulging green eyes almost cute in their childlike voraciousness. Its head ticked quickly but with no subtlety or fluidity of movement, like a gear with crude notches that would move and stop, move and stop. He remembers scooping up that mantis and letting it tick over his palm, then putting it in a jar and watching it tap around like a blind man with his cane, watching it with his mother’s cigarette dangling from his mouth, then thinking what if, and then watching the tendrils of smoke curl around the mantis and it clawing for the roof of the jar, then slowly, tipping over on its side as its legs cycled sideways to no purpose until they stopped.
His father was a mantis.
Saul slid the porch door open. There were kids his age who’d never left the Co-op without their parents. He’d twice already.
“But…but,” his father said, but was clearly outnumbered.
The shouting became a wall of sound Saul had to crawl under.
“I told you to ‘lower your voices!’” he heard in a whisper that was really a shout. “The Bierdermans…”
It was relatively easy for him to slip past them. He had no intention of fleeing, just wanted air. The Co-op had no gates, but there was a sense he was passing through one as soon as he stepped outside onto the city streets, and hustled to get past any stray squiggling members, still outside after dark. There was a time his mother told him when they used to walk proudly up and down these streets handing out flyers.
But now they would scuttle back and forth in case any police, off duty and liquored up, decided to take out whatever residue of pent up rage they hadn’t already on the Negroes. A straggler Jake Weinstein—or Jay his mother called him—was drunk himself, squirming with delirium tremens as he stumbled from the train station to tip his hat at Saul.
“Shouldn’t you—You shouldn’t—
Saul looked up, terrified as Jay’s mouth sprouted feelers.
He ran down the station’s steps to the mezzanine, and stood, gasping in the shadows with his back pressed against the cool subway tiles. He got on the D.
The stench of urine, sweat and too many bagged breakfasts wolfed down and spilled before work.
The train emerging from the tunnel onto the bridge. The city’s spires soared above him. A hive of lit office buildings. Black clouds threaded the moon, weaving between the sparkling scrapers. The subway car was empty except for a woman in a hairnet and apron speckled with flour whose breath and open flask oozed liquor. Being gentle of spirit, she offered Saul a slug. He clutched the shiny flask which given her shabby attire was a prized possession, and tipped it towards his mouth. One, his father always said. Only one. So, he was prepared for the burning, the fire in his tummy. But they were joyful flames.
The train hissed when it stopped, waiting for the green signal ahead. Outside the tunnel, the train was big and scary, clicking along like a centipede with its armored joints above the East River. The floor of this car thrumming, humming, hot and alive in the soles of Saul’s shoes.
His torso gently ticked side to side with a mild rhythm now. His one pair of cobbled shoes barely touched the subway tiles. His legs finally long enough. In the past he would say goddamn and his father would laugh What god? as the train when it stopped short or lurched forward would hurl Saul across the bench-like seats into strangers’ laps.
He waited for the right moment to stand in the middle of the subway car, arms akimbo, gazing through the plasticine at the inky skyline. The lights, the glow of millions in an anthill. He felt the ambition, the greed, but also the hope, the aspirations of all those drones. But the queen had turned against them and now they must flee. Then he saw them fade, shrink like phases of the moon as the train entered the tunnel on the other side of the bridge until they disappeared.
Lumpens his father called them when he was angry. Proles, his aunt corrected. They are working.
His parents were sleeping when he returned. His mother with one eye open, only glowered and shook her head.
“Now,” she said. “You do this now?”
“To say goodbye,” he said.
“You know better.”
He passed out in her arms.
****
When he awoke, he was in a car and the city was far behind him. They were on one of the new highways, the car gliding away from an urban skyscape awash in sallow green. His mother was driving while his father, exhausted, slumped beside her with the brim of a black bowler lowered over his eyes. His hairy arms crossed. Saul saw a green eye stalk, supple, gorgeous like the grass outside, bend, curve from under the hat, wrap around the seat, then peer outside at the wide wondrous countryside, then at Saul himself, the bulbous eye pod level with his son’s, staring gently, protectively at him.
It was as he was drifting off in the back seat, the gentle rocking of the car, of wind at its flank, rocking it like a crib, a womb of oceanic sound that he suddenly heard a boom and his father hiss “Goddamn it, Cohn!”
As they turned on a bend in the road, Saul saw through the back window, five well-manicured giant fingers reaching for the car behind them. The giant lawyer in a grey silk suit, skinny, pug nosed, dark devilish rings under the eyes. The suit made a great sibilant swishy sound as his arms moved and his tie sounded like an oil piston’s chug as it jerked. That jutting pugnacity to his jaw was instantly recognizable from the photos his father had shown Saul in the newspaper. Cohn grabbed the car directly in front of them, glared in its front window, then disappointed, bit it in half and screamed at them with a mouth full of gears and shredded metal, “See what you did!”
Prepared for this assault, Saul’s father drew a small silver kazoo from his pocket and blew on it noiselessly. Black shapes soon emerged from behind the trees and road signs, a swirl of feelers and thoraxes rushing up Cohn’s pants’ legs and him now scratching at his groin, kicking wildly in the air until he toppled and screamed “Infested! Infested!”
When Saul opened his eyes, his father was sitting in the driver’s seat while his mother napped. Or at least Saul thought she did, but soon heard her shout:
“Watch out, Rand! Rand!”
There was a high-pitched screech of echolocation and a thud on the roof of the car as a leathery talon smashed through the window on his mother’s side. The talon stabbed slantwise, zigzagging left and right, up and down, as the car roared, the nails finally latching onto his mother’s left forearm, which she tugged and slammed against the windshield so it cracked. Esau flipped a switchblade to Shiela who stabbed at it. A howl “‘eds! ‘eds!” and the talon retreated but not before digging into Sheila’s palm, her stiff twiggy fingers cracking, splayed petal-like in different directions as she screamed.
Her wailing filled the car, ebbed and flowed like the tide of an ancient sea as they drove into the darkness. Saul saw black shapes out the window, punctuated by glints of curves, cambers of asphalt, and suddenly grain silos silver, illuminated by spotlights, the curved sides flashing like a bluefish in the Atlantic, like stellar exclamation points, moonstruck. Then woodlands. The trees now a wall of vegetation, leaves bobbing unformed, towering over them with a hidden malevolence.
The road visible only with headlights, which his father kept on low. By the time they’d “arrived” and his father turned off the lights, darkness enveloped them. The foliage so thick, the trees so high Saul couldn’t even see the stars.
“Hold my hand,” his mother said. “The good one.” His father turned on the flashlight and with his arm around her waist and Saul holding her good hand, steered them toward the crude pine wooden door of a cabin.
There were two rooms and his father told him to stay in one as he took his mother to the other and closed the door. Saul sat in the dark. There was rustling and then a terrible screech.
In the middle of the night he had to use the bathroom so he went outside and saw a pale sliver of moon and stars twinkling through the treetops. An owl sat on a branch, its wide eyes narrowing, ticking cautiously back and forth as Saul moved to a tree to urinate. Its head tilted down to watch. There was a clicking gear-like sound. Even in photos he had never seen such a perfect one. It was an owl’s owl.
In the morning his mother’s right hand was bandaged. Thank something—luck?—she was a lefty and was on the car’s right side, where Rand’s talon ripped. She made coffee with a moka pot as his father got dressed in overalls. Saul had never seen his father in overalls before and didn’t know where this costume came from, only that it was wrapped in a box labeled Mo’s with a ribbon and tissue paper like a gift. His father helped make breakfast, some rye and pickled grubs they had in the car, toasted the bready directly on the propane stove’s register, then went outside and buried his hands in the dirt and scraped soil under his nails. He showed his wife who nodded before patting Saul’s head and whispering “Take care of her,” then got in the car and left.
The cabin’s front, which wasn’t exactly cleared, had a few tree stumps for Saul and his mother to sit on and savor a bit of sunlight. The soil there was loose, almost sandy, and had little white flecks, pebbles perhaps in it. They seemed edible, crispy like croutons when he picked one up, but when he tried to bite it, his mother cried “Saul—no!” and he dropped it. Normally, this would not have been much of a deterrent, but given her condition and the dangerous circumstances he thought it best to obey her.
For the next few days his father left in the morning and came back grungier than Saul had ever seen him. It wasn’t dirt under his fingernails but filings of some metal, glinting like knives. His father would spend several minutes coughing so silvery dust spewed everywhere and before he went in the cabin Sheila would pound his thorax to get it all out. It reminded Saul of the glitter he saw on presents or for school projects. Like dad was breathing fairy dust. At night if the moon was full and managed to shine through the cabin’s sole window, his father’s fingers, as he tried to block the glare with a newspaper, glittered like claws.
Yet it wasn’t all bad. Esau often brought food, big loaves of three-day old bread and larvae, or large white pickled aphids they enjoyed, sometimes still squirming and juicy on the plate. The leaves in their part of the woods were unfortunately inedible.
After his father left, Saul and his mother would sit on the tree stumps smoking cigarettes. His mom didn’t even insist on the one cig limit anymore, allowing him three or four until she took the pack away. She’d grimace at her bandage, trying to wriggle her fingers underneath, but any motion was more like a spasm and she’d whisper between gritted teeth unavailable, unavailable.
There was no school for him to go to in those days. No Mr. Rosen for bio. His mother gave him a copy of the Manifesto and told him to memorize it as they might need to burn it soon. And after he’d read for an hour, she’d say go forage but not to stray too far. Their part of the woods was dense with foliage, but eventually he hit trails, narrow, rocky ones at first, which gradually broadened and smoothed. The trees towered over him and he knew from a sign at one fork they were “Eastern Hemlock” or “Tsuga Canadensis” according to the laminated card tacked to the Tranquility Trail’s bulletin board: “The eastern hemlock is a native conifer that provides wildlife with protection from the elements due to its dense branches. Many birds and small mammals also eat the seeds inside their cones. Older trees may also provide cavities that could be used for nests by birds and other small mammals.”
And there was an inked drawing of a sprig of Tsuga Canadensis floating disembodied on the white laminated page with pinnate leaves like feelers, nerve endings. He was very fond of these trees and longed to touch them but there were signs not to, that there were seeds in the ground and it could damage their habitat. “Please Stay on the Trail. Nature’s at Work” with further info in fine print underneath detailing the “hazardous,” “non-native” and “invasive” species the National Park Service was seeking to remove and to not meddle in the “native seeding” process.
Occasionally, he’d see a felled tree strategically placed away from the trail. A clean flat circular cut along its trunk, the tree rings orange and damp from the rain on the outside, then yellow and dry inside. He couldn’t tell if these were hemlock or “invasive species” because their leaves were stripped—their branches as bare and strangely even as hooks on a coat rack.
His mother said forage but he found nothing he recognized as edible on the trail. He was a city boy who knew nothing about foraging or trees. Eventually, he grew bored with this activity and instead followed a stream on the Tranquility Trail to its source—a small rapid and waterfall he would be careful only to visit when no one was around. He’d collect cigarette butts and the occasional match tourists had left behind and smoke them. He’d sit on a big rock overlooking the falls with his legs dangling, watching the spray leap like popcorn balls or acrobats in white leotards with their knees raised.
One day, when he returned to the cabin, an army ant was sitting on the cabin’s only chair. He wore an eye patch and bandolier and had a chevron tattooed to his thorax. Saul’s father brought some tea and the soldier said “thank you, comrade.’
“We’ll make you a bed.”
There was a rustling sound as his parents went outside to gather some leaves. For what seemed like a long time the army ant stared silently at Saul so the boy grew uncomfortable, fidgety as children do. Finally, the ant said, “I would tell you my name but it would be your death sentence. Just know that the sacrifice you and your parents are making is vital to our movement.”
His parents returned with hemlock needles—green for the bed’s base and brown for its top–and tree gum, and glued a bed together. The ant practically fell into it—asleep.
The army ant stayed with them a week. The Captain, as his parents called him, always slept on his left side to avoid pressing on his gouged eye-socket, although Saul would see his crunchy cartilaginous body drifting late at night to the right—it’s more native state Saul gathered—and then just as the Captain’s head was about to hit the sharp hemlock needles, quickly self-correct and turn back. He must have been a right sleeper prior to the gouging and had disciplined himself somehow away from it. It was an admirable quality in an insect.
Each morning the Captain sat outside on his tree stump and whispered into what appeared to be a child’s walkie-talkie or communicator Saul had seen on a sci-fi show. Mark 35, he’d say. 8 degrees longitude, 30 lat. X-ray, Debs. Copy? Saul never heard the response on the other end.
“Don’t stare,” his mother said. “Forage.”
For a week Saul would wander the woods and come home to his mother staring out the window waiting for a revolution that never came. Then one day Saul woke up and the Captain was gone. All that was left was his hat, a grungy grey peaked cap with a red star stitched into it like a baseball logo that Saul’s mother had dipped in the river and wrung dry, the day before, but in the rush depart he’d forgotten. Sometimes, when she wasn’t around, Saul would pick it up and try it on.
In time, he started school again. A new one. Mom polished his feelers and straightened his bowtie.
“You’re Mario now, remember. They’ll hate an Italian less than a Jew. The teacher knows your real name.”
The teacher, a swarthy fellow traveler named “Mr. Johnson” who could protect Saul, was the only reason his parents sent him to Hamilton Elementary. The other kids were alright, the usual quotient of knuckleheads but about a year behind him in math and science so he was bored during those parts. English, however, was useful, both inside and outside of class, as it wasn’t always spoken in the Co-op, not the vernacular at least, so he was eager to lean from his classmates.
Saul was drawn to the studious ones, and there’d be a few at every school he’d attend in the next five years. One whom Mr. Johnson called Eli—though Eli would correct him and annunciate “Elijah, Sir,”—had a real knack for English, could find symbols in The Red Badge of Courage Crane hadn’t even known were there. Saul had gone to Elijah’s home once without telling his parents and sat at the dinner table with his head bowed in prayer, feeling ridiculous before Esau and Sheila found out.
Another, Barnabas, was troubled but creative, lived with his dad, a drunk who didn’t pay his son any mind, a mechanic and collector of broken clocks which Barnabas liked to draw, the gears and innards of which he’d make in his line drawings spring from their casings and mutate, turn into leaves, flowers and vines—a literal bouquet of machinery.
After school, the trio would wander the woods together, telling stories, or rather Elijah and Barnabas would, while Saul “Mario” did his best to listen and keep quiet about his past.
“Hey Mario,” Barnie said. “Didja ever hear a duck fart?”
“No.”
“I’m telling you, it’s something else.” But Barnabas didn’t elaborate, trailing off as he picked up a large stone and hurled it at an Eastern Hemlock as hard as he could.
There was a strange thud, a pfft, then a crack as the tree suddenly toppled. The boys were too shocked to run. How could a rock, a large one admittedly but not that large, knock over a tree?
Saul stared at the roots. They were a color he’d never seen, slick black, scraped and jagged at their right tips. The tree had fallen left, so the roots seemed shiny, metallic underneath. They were almost he swore like copper, like the lucky penny with a patina he’d kept back in the Co-op before his father told him not to believe in luck .
A siren sounded and down the trail he saw a park ranger’s truck.
“Beat it!” Barnabas said.
They scattered as the ranger approached.
As home, his father sat on the only chair with a cold compress on his head, his arms so sore from working he could barely lift the spoon to his aphid stew. Sheila’s hand had healed enough that there wasn’t a bandage anymore but only three fingers worked and the pointer and thumb were like dead twigs, snapped, senseless and grey, dangling from her palm as she stirred the pot. Really, they should’ve been amputated, but with what implements and what anesthesia?
There was, admittedly, an axe in the back corner of the cabin, but it wasn’t sharp enough to do it quick. It seemed almost antique, hand-made, rusty and crudely fashioned. Beside it were leg irons, old and rusty shackles the axe had split in two. And on a few pine logs he’d seen notches, the marks of a child’s height being measured in the wood.
Watching her stir the soup with the thumb and pointer swaying uselessly yet dangerously close to the kettle’s sides was a heartache. Occasionally, they would dip into the boiling stew, breaking the film of the rendered aphid oil without her even knowing it.
“Where have you been,” his father glared but was too weak to really reprimand him.
“The woods.”
“Never after dark,” his mother said.
He lay in bed that night and listened to the mechanical susurration of crickets, not their melody, but their beat, timing it in his head and noticing how each chirp was precisely on the second.
The next day he went back alone to the same spot or what he thought was the same spot on the trail, but the tree was gone and the place where it stood was covered with leaves and foliage that seemed to match the growth of the other foliage. Could this be the wrong place? No, nearby, he found his favorite knothole, the one with its faint purple rim that looked like Grandpa Sims’ drooling rictus when he’d too much Maneschevitz. He stuck his hand inside and wondered for the first time—Is this what the inside of a tree is supposed to feel like? It felt wet and scratchy. He found one or two insect husks, but he couldn’t identify them.
Then when he walked far enough, he thought he saw another hemlock with another knothole almost identical to Grandpa Sim’s down to the scarred notch on its lower left side, only the tree’s bark was a slightly different color, roan, ruddy almost.
The other boys were scared to go back in the woods so soon, and they were all busy. The teacher who now looked at Saul with grave concern had assigned them two passages from The Tempest to analyze. “Not the whole play. The whole play is too difficult, but compare and contrast these.”
Caliban’s This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother,
Which thou takest from me.…and Prospero’s Our revels now are ended….
He felt small hearing these words. He couldn’t help it, subsumed by Shakespeare’s, and part of him wanted to resist. Mentally, he ate an Oreo and thought We are the stuff with cream in it, One little knife-ful, rounded and cheap.
He went back to the park sign and saw a card for the tufted titmouse, a squat dusty blue and grey bird with a whitish chest and short beak. The tufted titmouse is a small bird that is a year-round resident here in our area. It feeds on a variety of insects as well as fruits and seeds. It is often seen in low bushes or dense branches in trees. Its call sounds like “Peter. Peter. Peter.”
He listened and damn if it wasn’t as if fate had struck but he heard Peter, Peter, Peter at that instant. Peter, Peter, Peter repetitively at perfectly spaced intervals.
And here you sty me in this hard rock while you do keep from me the rest of the island. The goal they’d taught him in school, his real school, not this joke of one, was the rest, but here they were in self-imposed exile, self-stymied. He thought of Cohn with his gaping maw and half a Chevy dangling out of it. Yes, but all Dad had to do was name names, and those dangers would recede, and Saul could go back to the city, back to studying ants instead of being one. We are the stuff that dreams are made of. Exactly. Not the dream itself, but the raw squiggly things inside them.
When he got home, his father’s face was ashen.
“Where have you been!” his mother screamed and shook him with her good hand.
“That tree,” his father said. “You had to knock over that goddamn tree, and then go back. You were the only one to go back. Your ‘friends’ told their parents and they told the authorities where we live.”
“I never—”
“They know.”
His parents went outside and started to dig furiously, his mother using her scarred hand to break bits of earth, pounding so hard the two dead fingers snapped off.
There were bits of white little pebbles in the soil, some of which seemed edible, like bread crumbs. His job was to lug buckets of the broken bits they dug to the hole’s side but not too much to the side. Deep underground, as they grew wearier and wearier, they at last heard a crack like an egg and felt the delight of instead of the hard, brutal unyielding earth something hollow underneath. It was a tunnel, an old one by the looks of it. There were rusty chains in it, pickaxes and shackles, more of the white crumbs, shells of some morsels of food, and a road, amazingly a well paved asphalt road. His father tossed their measly possessions in the car and drove it into the hole and the three of them carefully covered it up with dirt and leaves. They sat there for a long time in the car waiting. His father turned on the radio, low, and Saul heard the Captain’s whisper: “Night fall.”
Then there was the sound of trampling overhead and the clicking of many legs, and through the crevices of their makeshift cover Saul swore he saw the scaly underbelly of a centipede.
“We know you’re in there,” someone shouted but it wasn’t at them. There was gunfire and “left!” “blockade” “roads.” After a while, the noise died down and his father started to drive for several hours, perhaps days as Saul drifted in and out of sleep. There was no sunshine nor moon underground, no real sense of time.
Eventually, they arrived at another safe house in the woods, a different woods, with a different kind of tree, loblolly pines he would discover not long before they fled.
**********
This pattern repeated itself in the next few years with slight albeit important seeming at the time variations. They’d stay in a place a few weeks or months but sooner or later they’d be discovered and on the run again.
Once his mother came home from the supermarket and said “Rhonda,” and that was all Esau needed to hear to start packing.
She’d seen an ex-friend, an informant now wheeling her cart in the dairy aisle.
His parents’ relationship frayed. They began to fight, and Saul grew bitter, hardened away from the soft innocence of youth. He grew careless, intransigent, nearly dying once in the woods when some drunken toffs at a wedding party spied him laughing at their buffoonery and fired confetti cannons at him, a barrage of red white and blue paper shrapnel nearly drowning him. He realized at that moment that he was also jealous of them.
Despite the great cause, the secret purpose, the heaven on earth that had never been but was apparently imminent, he wanted simple things—money, a motorcycle, a girl. Sometimes, even a gun. He wanted to be the hero of his own story instead of just a worker ant on the run.
And just as things had become most unbearable when his father flung another This was your and your sister’s idea. I’m just trying to keep us safe! in Sheila’s face, just when a different captain said “soon, soon” for the sixth time before disappearing, they became available again. His father brought home a newspaper one day and Cohn was in chains. Some New York attorneys in pith helmets, park rangers and Canadian Mounties used tranquilizer guns and duct taped Cohn’s mouth to lower him onto the U.S.S. Decency and ship him back to Skull Island. On the ship, Cohn broke out of his pen, lifted his leg to urinate and screamed Reds, Reds, Reds! at the barren sun.
They left the woods but in many respects the woods never left them, the underground tunnels now subterranean in their hearts, their nightmares. Saul dreamt of trees, scaly with alligator skin, towering over him whispering unavailable, the clicking of centipede feet over his head or Rand reaching, raking between the hemlock branches with her unmanicured claws.
For a while his parents stayed together, but real damage had been done. They worked in industry, tried to organize people but couldn’t really connect, never felt like proles, never built that long-dreamed of solidarity, and instead wound up turning some workers off and into snitches for the bosses. They stayed together because who else could really understand what they’d been through.
There became a point when his father was expelled from the party and they sat him in a room at the center of a circle of chairs while a group of “friends” including Saul’s science teacher Mr. Rosen read off a list of grievances and detailed notes on all of his activities, from the petty to the mundane.
The next morning his parents donned sunglasses, raincoats and fedoras and quietly slipped into the New York offices of the FBI, which were really in the back room beneath a secret trapdoor at the Army Recruitment center in Times Square along with a fund raising wing of the John Birch Society. Sheila was silent the whole time as his father Named Names, including her sister’s.
The rift this caused was irreparable and they soon divorced without their shared sense of cause, but in other ways their lives improved. They left the Co-op, but Saul continued with his studies, testing into one of the city’s specialized schools, became a liberal psychotherapist with a thriving practice of disaffected bougie liberals feeling guilty about their roles in late stage capitalism. He eventually becoming a swift hand with the Prozac and Xanax scripts when the bloom was off the Freudian rose.
His mother became a history professor, an engaged feminist, and his father a successful typesetter of Want Ads and Personals at the Voice. He said it had a stable future and would pay for college because no matter what people always need jobs.
*****
Photography Credit: Jason Rice
Lewis Braham is a graduate of Brooklyn College’s MFA program in creative writing. His work has appeared in the Ekphrastic Review, Tuck Magazine, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Reuters and Bloomberg.
