The Radicals Read online

  “Okay.”

  “I promised them, Eli.”

  “Okay, look. You’re new to this, you’re enthusiastic—that’s good. I’m just not sure a sentimental attachment is always the most effective means to—”

  “What are we doing here, anyway?” Sam said. “We’re just sitting on our asses. What ‘means’ are we employing?”

  “Alex and I were making calls just today—the local media needs its ‘color stories,’ don’t they? The pressure’s building on the bank, Sam, you know it is—”

  Sam waved this away impatiently. “I need you to do something for me,” he said.

  “Or otherwise we wait for the confrontation on the day of foreclosure—we get the media there for that—”

  “Eli,” Sam said. “I need you to do something for me. Will you do something for me?”

  He called it “knocking doors”—the phrase courtesy of the Mormon missionary work he’d tried for a few months before ditching the work and the church altogether. We’d always just called it “canvassing,” but now a religious shadow, a “mission,” a sense of conspiracy hung over the day’s efforts. At one point Alex knocked on a door, and a white woman in a yellow bandanna, late sixties perhaps, opened and squinted at us—whether from the sun or suspicion we couldn’t tell. (I pull this door from a memory trove of dozens, whole hours of them.) The woman, Jan, listened to what we had to say with smiling attention, nodding at appropriate intervals, her expression going sad and chagrined at all the right moments. When she opened her mouth it was a formal, Nordic accent that edged her words. She ran the flat of her palm up and over the bandanna, as if pressing her brain for excuses.

  “I think it’s terrible what’s happening,” she said. “I just don’t know what I can do to help.”

  “Ideally you would come and join us in solidarity with Maria,” Alex said. “If not full-time, at least on Monday when the bank wants to evict Maria and her children so it can sell the house without her permission. Several of your neighbors have already committed to be with us that morning. We think the presence of community members will send an important message.”

  “Oh, well…” Jan said, and smoothed back the yellow bandanna. “I’d like to be there, but I work in the mornings.”

  “The eviction notice is for seven a.m.,” Alex said. “Many of your neighbors are planning to come before work. Will you commit to that as well?”

  “It’s just that I run a half-day childcare group and it begins at seven thirty. Parents sometimes drop the kids off early. I’d like to be there. I’ll try to be there…”

  She was averting her eyes now. It was just the two of us, Alex and I, but I supposed we were intimidating enough. I reminded Jan about the name and number of the local congressman we’d listed in the flyer and also the name and number of the home-loans manager at Bank of America. I said we hoped she’d put in a call to them, at the very least, and express her support for Maria. If enough pressure mounted on these people, who knew what could happen.

  “Of course. Yes, thank you, I’ll do that. I hope everything goes well for her,” Jan said, and with a curt quick smile she shut the door.

  Out on the sidewalk Alex said, “I wish you’d stop letting them off the hook like that.”

  “She was never on the hook.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I thought we weren’t going to argue epistemology,” I said, putting a joshing arm around Alex’s shoulder. We bumped along for a few paces like that, our hips knocking together, my palm clammy—I only now realized how clammy—against the warm bare skin of Alex’s upper arm.

  Alex wrapped her other arm around my waist and said, “You’re petit bourgeois, you know that?”

  “There are worse things.”

  “Are there?”

  She pulled away and doubled back to the little inlet of another chain-link gate leading onto another cement walkway—an entire street of these, an entire neighborhood of slight variations on this theme. How much longer could this go on? How much longer did it need to go on? I checked my cell phone but couldn’t quite make out the numbers in the powerful glare. It was pervasive, this glare, palpable, another element. I squinted into it at Alex—a gray tank top today, the same khaki shorts, her legs long and thin coming out of them, dull brown. Today she wore a faded blue Mets cap that cast a brim of darker blue shadow onto her forehead, her sunglasses hung at the bottom edge of it. I couldn’t see her eyebrows, but I gathered they were raised.

  “We’ve been doing this for an awfully long time,” I said.

  “It was your idea, wasn’t it?” she said.

  “We’re going to die of heatstroke.”

  “Your idea.”

  By the end of the afternoon we’d collected a few more commitments, none of them firm enough to anchor much hope to, and none of them to occupy with us full-time. It was just as well. The clutter in Maria’s backyard had grown by the hour, an almost bacterial expansion, until the half-used ketchup bottles, empty water bottles, rocking beer cans, plastic-bag tumbleweed coated the grass and all the hot-to-touch tarps and towels too, and we decided to create a committee that dealt only with cleanup, and I was its chair.

  Alex took a shower when we got back to Maria’s, then came into the backyard to help me and Adam and a few of the ASU crew collect the latest trash, three large Hefty bags full of it. Adam was becoming a little less unbearable—perhaps. In any case he’d joined me in grumbling about the more or less permanent loitering group around the AC in Maria’s living room, the group that made the bulk of the overloud, over-messy camp in the backyard at night, then transferred its spirit and sprawl in the daytime to the indoor couches. I’d joined them there a time or two, but compared to them I was Alex-like, Herculean in my commitment.

  “Where’s Sam?” Alex asked once we’d come in from the backyard. “Where’s Tiffany?”

  I answered honestly that I didn’t know.

  Nate from ISO, one of the biggest disappointments of the occupation, a couch occupier, sat watching a video on the laptop that perched on the couch’s arm. Dawn, Ali, a few others crowded in beside him, scrolling silently through their phones. Nate didn’t look up as he said, “Sam and Tiffany? They left a while back. That Jamaal guy too. They took his car.”

  “Did they say where they were going?” Alex asked.

  Nate shook his head.

  “What the hell are you watching, anyway?”

  The video showed a younger Larry Bosch in medium close-up, warm lighting, a generic fireplace backdrop—it looked like a 20/20 interview. Fuller featured, less severe than I was used to seeing him in the glare of recent events—the thin bellow-like folds down his neck that you noticed in current photographs were the ghosts of former jowls, apparently. Here Bosch looked comfortable, a well-fed man. His wife, in a collared red blouse, sat a little stiffly beside him, smiling.

  “What is this?” Alex said again.

  “I don’t know,” Nate said. “Call it research.”

  “It sounds like a puff piece to me. The poor rich people.”

  Bosch was running with a question about his first company’s bankruptcy—his sense of helplessness and failure, his responsibility to the investors, to the employees, the sleepless nights, the personal money he’d tried to plug up the leaks with.

  “We had to move into my parents’ house,” Bosch’s wife said. Nancy. “Larry was out of work for almost two years. Our kids were in middle school. We were terrified.” Midwestern features, a wide high forehead, the pale yellowish skin communicated something honestly strained about these memories.

  Bosch rested a chubby hand on his wife’s arm, laughed uncomfortably. “That was a very difficult time for us.”

  “Jesus,” Alex said. “Click out of this, will you?”

  “What?” Nate said. “I was curious.”

  “He recovered quit
e nicely, didn’t he, Mr. Rags to Riches? Just remember that this is the same guy who froze Maria out of her retirement account. He cares so much about his employees that he speculates and defrauds them out of a company—not for the first time, it sounds like.”

  “I hadn’t forgotten, thanks.”

  “No?”

  A stalemating silence developed between them, Nate holding Alex’s eyes as she stood above him.

  Finally Alex said, “Did Sam and Tiffany say when they were coming back? Or Jamaal?”

  Nate leaned over the couch side to check his cell phone, mumbling something.

  “What?” Alex said. “Nate?”

  “No,” he said, straightening again. “That was a no.”

  It was almost dark by the time they did get back, Sam and Tiffany and Jamaal clod-stepping and swaying into the backyard, where we’d set up an after-meal drink and chat with Maria. Her round face was pleasantly flushed by now. She wore black pants and a red Verizon polo shirt with a little golden name tag pinned above the logo. The sun had dropped below the scrim of dark scrubby mountains behind the house, behind the city, and for once it had taken the heat with it—a watery convocation of pinks and oranges spread out in the lower atmosphere, the desert sky going down medium, medium rare. We were enjoying ourselves, sitting in a circle of camping chairs among the greasy cheese-strewn taco boxes that Maria had brought home for us. When we’d protested she’d said, “I can’t eat them all myself, can I?” Her children sat on either side of her, Luís slumped and thin in red soccer shorts, his chin resting on his sternum like a pensioner’s, regarding the phone he thumbed expertly at his lap, Aida more compact, hunched over her phone, an armadillo curl to her small back.

  When Sam saw us with the Bud Lights he raised an invisible can and called out, “Excellent idea!”

  He was the softest on his feet of the three of them, more boneless than usual in a ratty blue polo, each step undulating up his long body like a wave, up his narrow chest and shoulders and his thin putty neck, chin weak, mouth parted—Little Lockjaw no more. Tiffany wore her inebriation better, quieter, true to form, a subtle slackness in her wide olive face, a subtle glossiness in her eyes. Only Jamaal, already relaxed in a bright pink T-shirt—the loose physique, too, the loose dandelion Afro—only Jamaal looked all the way normal.

  “You must be the designated driver,” Maria said, walking a beer over to him. “Here, take my seat. I was just heading inside.”

  We all protested this announcement, but Maria said, “Another early shift tomorrow,” singsonging the words, falsely cheery. “No, I shouldn’t complain. It’s what I wanted. It’s what we need.”

  “You can always complain,” said Adam. “It’s an inalienable right.”

  “How set in stone is your work schedule?” Sam asked Maria. “If you needed to cancel a shift, or maybe come in late…”

  “They like you to give twenty-four hours’ notice. Why?”

  “But if you got sick,” Sam said. “You don’t need to give a day’s notice if you’re sick, right?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Why?”

  “No reason in particular.”

  Maria hesitated, waiting for Sam to continue. When he didn’t, she turned to us and put on an easy enough smile. “Thank you for the work you all did today. Thank you again. God bless you. Good night.”

  Maria’s children followed wordlessly after her into the small stucco ranch house. A soft yellow light stood in the sliding glass door, glowing yellower by the minute against the darkness.

  “You guys were out drinking?” Alex said to Sam and Tiffany and Jamaal as they settled into the vacated camping chairs.

  “Any leftover tacos by chance?” Sam said.

  “No. You were at a bar, is that where you were?”

  “We went to celebrate. Sort of.”

  “Celebrate what, sort of?”

  Jamaal and Tiffany looked to Sam as if by prearrangement. He tipped his long white face back in a long swill of Bud Light. A few lanterns had been brought out and set in the middle of the circle to fend off the darkness, and the sharp thin glow of them cast Sam’s Adam’s apple in stark relief. Of Man’s first disobedience and the fruit of that forbidden tree…What was he stalling for? I honestly didn’t know. My only job had been to keep Alex away from the house for a few hours—beyond that Sam had been vague. He was thinking of trying something, he’d said, but it was too provisional to mention, a shot in the dark.

  Adam, in the un-Edenic dreadlocks, laid his hand on Sam’s forearm when he lowered the can. “What’s up?” he said. “Where did you guys go?”

  “Okay, people,” Sam said. “Open minds.” He turned to Tiffany. “You’ve got all the jargon down. You tell it.”

  “It’s not that jargony,” Tiffany said, “and Jamaal should get a lot of the credit too. It was one of his former law professors who gave us the name of a friend, a legal arbiter at the courthouse downtown. The connection was what got us in the door without an appointment, but it was Sam’s stubbornness—his asshole-ishness?”

  Sam shrugged.

  “ ‘I am not moving from this chair until you pick up that phone and make something happen,’ ” Jamaal said, hunching his shoulders nebbishly, overenunciating in a parody of Sam’s clipped voice.

  “That was what kept us in the guy’s office,” Tiffany said. “I think we might have burned that bridge in the act of crossing it.”

  “At least we crossed,” Jamaal said.

  “The arbiter called Bank of America and explained Maria’s situation, the Soline connection, our occupation of the property, all of it. He was on a first-name basis with the loans manager, with Ned. After about ten minutes they’d hammered out a nonbinding oral contract—which basically means two guys talking on the phone. Maria would need to agree to it to make it real. The gist of it is this: She’s not getting out of it. No clemency, no forgiveness of back payments—the bank refuses absolutely, what sort of precedent would it set, and so on. The bank will, however, offer a partial debt forgiveness in the form of a waiver of any potential deficiency judgment after the sale of the house. In a deficiency judgment, if the house were to sell for less than Maria’s outstanding balance on the mortgage, which is a very, very likely scenario, Maria would still owe that money to the bank, with interest, and typically these rates are highly injurious. It’d make a bad situation much worse, extend it out for years. But what the arbiter has tentatively arranged is for the bank to let Maria walk away from the sale free and clear, no deficiency, no further debts, nothing. A clean start. The arbiter has also offered to walk Maria through the paperwork tomorrow, which is a bit of a miracle on such short notice and bearing in mind that we basically barricaded ourselves in his office, had no power of attorney, and weren’t all that grateful for what he did do. By the end of an hour our relations with this guy were only amicable in the legal sense of that word. Here’s his card, with Ned the loan manager’s information on the back. Ned Chamberlain. My advice would be for somebody to go inside and pull Maria out of the shower or wherever she is and give this to her immediately. The home-loans manager said the papers need to be signed tomorrow if they’re going to be signed at all. Come Monday it’s too late and the eviction notice stands as is. That was made explicit.”

  Tiffany held out the business card to no one in particular. At length I took it and brought it to my lap without really looking at it. The crickets had come up, the night birds.

  “Huh,” I said. “Huh.”

  Alex took the card from my hand and tore it neatly in two, dropping the halves at her feet.

  She said, “Who else knew about this? Did you?”

  “I didn’t,” I said. “I had no idea.”

  “You think this is good news?” Alex said to Sam and Tiffany. Jamaal was beginning to look chastened already. “Where is there a shred of good news in this?”

  “She’s
going to lose her house,” Sam said. “She’s out of options there. We’re all out of options there.”

  “That was made explicit, was it?” Alex said. “By Lord Fucking Chamberlain?”

  Sam stood up from his camping chair, listed a bit, like a sailboat, a sloop in sudden wind. He moved across the circle with unsteady purpose and gathered up the torn business card at Alex’s feet.

  “This is real,” he said. “This is a real option. What do we honestly think is going to happen Monday morning? We chain ourselves to the furniture and the cops just capitulate, the bank says never mind? They’ll just dig in harder! This isn’t some Marxist theory class, it’s reality, and there’s a real family that has to live in it.”

  Sam was looming over Alex’s chair, not meaning to perhaps, but looming higher with each breath, like an oil derrick.

  “You need to sit down,” Alex said.

  “I’m taking this inside to Maria. This is a real option.”

  Sam stepped uncertainly toward the house and Alex caught a hank of his shirt and hauled him back, levering herself out of her seat with the action and pulling Sam down into it in a move so swift and efficient it might have been choreographed. Alex crossed the circle toward Sam’s empty seat, tossing back over her shoulder that I should talk to my protégé, talk some sense into him.

  “Why didn’t you tell us about this?” I said. “Something this important you should have told the group beforehand.”

  “Not to mention Maria,” Adam said.

  “Not to mention Maria. If I’d known this was what you were planning—”

  “You knew about this?” Alex said. “I thought you just said you didn’t know.”

  “I didn’t. Not specifically.”

  “He knew,” Sam said. “Oh, he was in on it. His job was to distract you while we made off to try something practical, something real in the real, material world. We didn’t know exactly what, and we didn’t know if it would work, so we didn’t advertise our plans, least of all to Maria. We didn’t want to get her hopes up.”