The garden was in even worse condition than before. The dead flowers, which had been in a row, were now trampled, dug up, and scattered. Footprints were everywhere. Signs of violence had replaced the serenity of neglect.
Malcolm saw the imprints of his own shoes, large and deep. Then he noticed the smaller treads of Annie’s tennis shoes. He stepped into the garden and placed his feet over her treads, enjoying how thoroughly his shoes covered them. By this time, he had stopped wondering what had become of Sean. He was unaware of the location of the others inside the house, of Maria on one side of the bed, of Annie on the other, of Sean in his study staring at the twig of bone. Malcolm forgot his friends a moment, while he stood in the garden that Meg, his twin, had planted and left behind. Meg was gone, had given up, but he was still here. He was thinking that what he needed was a house and a garden of his own. He was imagining himself pruning rosebushes and picking beans. It seemed to him that happiness, with such a simple change, would come at last.
1988
GREAT EXPERIMENT
“If you’re so smart, how come you’re not rich?”
It was the city that wanted to know. Chicago, refulgent in early-evening, late-capitalist light. Kendall was in a penthouse apartment (not his) of an all-cash building on Lake Shore Drive. The view straight ahead was of water, eighteen floors below. But if you pressed your face to the glass, as Kendall was doing, you could see the biscuit-colored beach running down to Navy Pier, where they were just now lighting the Ferris wheel.
The gray Gothic stone of the Tribune Tower, the black steel of the Mies building just next door—these weren’t the colors of the new Chicago. Developers were listening to Danish architects who were listening to nature, and so the latest condominium towers were all going organic. They had light green fa?ades and undulating rooflines, like blades of grass bending in the wind.
There had been a prairie here once. The condos told you so.
Kendall was gazing at the luxury buildings and thinking about the people who lived in them (not him) and wondering what they knew that he didn’t. He shifted his forehead against the glass and heard paper crinkling. A yellow Post-it was stuck to his forehead. Piasecki must have come in while Kendall was napping at his desk and left it there.
The Post-it said: “Think about it.”
Kendall crumpled it up and threw it in the wastebasket. Then he went back to staring out the window at the glittering Gold Coast.
*
For sixteen years now, Chicago had given Kendall the benefit of the doubt. It had welcomed him when he arrived with his “song cycle” of poems composed at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. It had been impressed with his medley of high-IQ jobs the first years out: proofreader for The Baffler; Latin instructor at the Latin School. For someone in his early twenties to have graduated summa cum laude from Amherst, to have been given a Michener grant, and to have published, one year out of Iowa City, an unremittingly bleak villanelle in the TLS, all these things were marks of promise, back then. If Chicago had begun to doubt Kendall’s intelligence when he turned thirty, he hadn’t noticed. He worked as an editor at a small publishing house, Great Experiment, which published five titles per year. The house was owned by Jimmy Boyko, now eighty-two. In Chicago, people remembered Jimmy Boyko more from his days as a State Street pornographer back in the sixties and seventies and less from his much longer life as a free-speech advocate and publisher of libertarian books. It was Jimmy’s penthouse that Kendall worked out of, Jimmy’s high-priced view he was presently taking in. He was still mentally acute, Jimmy was. He was hard of hearing, but if you raised your voice to talk about what was going on in Washington the old man’s blue eyes gleamed with ferocity and undying rebellion.
Kendall pulled himself away from the window and walked back to his desk, where he picked up the book that was lying there. The book was Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Tocqueville, from whom Jimmy had got the name for Great Experiment Books, was one of Jimmy’s passions. One evening six months ago, after his nightly martini, Jimmy had decided that what the country needed was a super-abridged version of Tocqueville’s seminal work, culling all of the predictions the Frenchman had made about America, but especially those that showed the Bush administration in its worst light. So that was what Kendall had been doing for the past week, reading through Democracy in America and picking out particularly salient bits. Like the opening, for instance: “Among the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of condition among the people.”
“How damning is that?” Jimmy had shouted, when Kendall read the passage to him over the phone. “What could be less in supply, in Bush’s America, than equality of condition!”
Jimmy wanted to call the little book The Pocket Democracy. After his initial inspiration had worn off, he’d handed the project to Kendall. At first, Kendall had tried to read the book straight through. But after a while he began skipping around. Both Volumes I and II contained sections that were unspeakably boring: methodologies of American jurisprudence, examinations of the American system of townships. Jimmy was interested only in the prescient moments. Democracy in America was like the stories parents told adult children about their younger selves, descriptions of personality traits that had become only more ingrained over time, or of oddities and predilections that had been outgrown. It was curious to read a Frenchman writing about America when America was small, unthreatening, and admirable, when it was still something underappreciated that the French could claim and champion, like serial music or the novels of John Fante.
In these, as in the forests of the Old World, destruction was perpetually going on. The ruins of vegetation were heaped upon one another; but there was no laboring hand to remove them, and their decay was not rapid enough to make room for the continual work of reproduction. Climbing plants, grasses, and other herbs forced their way through the mass of dying trees; they crept along their bending trunks, found nourishment in their dusty cavities and a passage beneath the lifeless bark. Thus decay gave its assistance to life.