Today they’d sat on the lawn, and Gabi had cried while she accused Zoya of not thinking to suggest to Cinque that the two of them carry out the errands Teko, Yolanda, and Tania had been sent to complete. Of just plain not thinking. Gabi shook her head, burdened with the inexpressible complexity of her emotions. But they knew each other so well now that Zoya no longer wished to see to a deeper level of Gabi’s character: Gabi was now as much an agglomeration of annoying habits as any stranger, except that she was stupefyingly predictable to boot. When Gabi cried, Zoya always had to fight the impulse to laugh. It was the cruelest thing she’d ever recognized in herself. It was like watching a clown weeping clown tears in clown clothes. Gabi blubbered and snuffled on that retarded Compton lawn and Zoya wanted alternately to laugh out loud and to crush her ex-lover’s skull.
Now she started heading off to her own van, with her own team of Cujo and Fahizah. Gabi reached out and held her by her sleeve.
“Mizmoon,” she said, “happy birthday.” She held up her wristwatch to show that it was past midnight. May 17: Zoya was twenty-four.
“Damn, don’t call me that.”
“That’s your name. You chose it.”
“I choose Zoya.”
“We need to talk.”
You need, thought Zoya, but she looked directly into Gabi’s eyes and raised her chin to indicate that she was listening.
“There’s something wrong here.”
“What do you mean, something wrong?”
“The way we sat. For hours, Trish.”
Zoya cringed. Especially don’t call her Trish. She would choose her names from now on, as often as necessary, swapping whenever one became freighted with outcast meaning.
“So?”
“The police are supposedly coming, and we sit for hours without a word of protest.”
“Protesting what?”
“The just sitting there.”
“Cinque had to work it out.”
“And no one’s allowed to talk while he does it? That’s bullshit, Trish.”
They were whispering in the din of the complaining engines.
“What’s your point? My team’s leaving.”
“Team. You know what this is turning into?”
“What is this turning into?”
“This is turning into like one of those whatchamacallits I read about in Time last year. Cults.”
“Like people in hoods and altars? Drinking blood? You insult me. You insult our hard work, our comrades.” Then, bitterly: “Time.”
“No,” said Gabi, falteringly. “Like the Hare Krishnas. The Moonies.”
Utopian hucksters, dealing in a new variant on the familiar people’s opiate, with daily sales quotas. Their kind would be put against the wall. A look of disgust crossed Zoya’s face: a slight curl of the lip, the subtlest suggestion of a rolled eyeball. She sensed the presence of the expression and exaggerated it in case Gabi had missed it.
“‘Any comrade may leave the guerrilla forces if she or he feels that they no longer feel the courage or faith in the People and the struggle that we wage.’” Zoya quoted from memory.
Gabi walked off.
It was snug in the little apartment on Parker Street where Zoya wrote the Codes of War with Cinque the previous March. It was a rainy spring, and they worked in the kitchen, with the oven door open to warm the room. In the persistent damp, paperback book covers curled back upon themselves and photographs she’d pinned to the walls rolled up tight as scrolls. They had a series of running jokes about the oven, the oven door. Very funny at the time. Delirious. Everything had a heightened sense of meaning in that brief interlude of revolutionary domesticity. Cin was handy. The circular fluorescent buzzed annoyingly; he went to the hardware store and brought back mysteriously useful items in a brown paper bag, replaced the fixture with an incandescent. Soon they sat in the white silence of a GE Soft White bulb, hunting and pecking, holding the world at arm’s length while it waited for their embrace.
TANIA CAN’T STAND BEING with these people, she realizes. While Teko and Yolanda argue about whether they ought to leave now or remain through the second feature just in case, she stretches out in the back next to the blanket. The van smells like warm ketchup. The blanket seems to shiver or tremble from time to time. She pats the blanket on the head. “It’s OK,” she says. “You’ll be OK.”
Despite the engaging subject matter of the film, Teko is in favor of leaving. Yolanda is opposed. The details of the argument are sheer static, a kind of buzzing in the front, and Tania ignores them, patting the blanket with Dan Russell under it at regular intervals, as if she were stirring a pot. At one o’clock the movie ends, and dozens of cars start up and switch on their headlights. Teko and Yolanda argue about whether they should leave right away or wait until the numbers of cars jockeying to join the long line have thinned. Teko wants to get started right away; Yolanda wants to wait awhile. The van sits motionless as they gesticulate and whisper fiercely in the front, occasionally bathed in the headlights of the cars outside that slowly turn, gravel crunching beneath their tires. Moths spin in the dusty shafts of moving light.
At last they join the queue and after a while merge with the traffic on the road.
“We need to get some sleep. We’ve got a big day tomorrow,” says Teko.
“Can we just kind of scoot by the house? I mean, just to see.”
“See what? They’ve gone. Gotta be.”
“Well they didn’t — when they never showed up at the drive-in I was thinking maybe somehow they haven’t heard about the whole thing, our problem today.”
(Another fight brewing, Tania thinks.)
“That’s absurd. And you have any idea what the risk is?”
“This is the guy who fires off three rounds in a shopping mall talking to me about risk.”
“It’s against all the rules of urban guerrilla warfare.”
“This is the guy who shoplifts a pair of socks talking to me about rules.”
“GOD damn it, it was NOT a pair of socks it was a FUCKING bandolier, do you have it FUCKING straight?” The heel of his hand smacking the dashboard on each emphasized word. Yolanda, who has been driving very slowly in the right lane, pulls over to the side of the road and begins to cry, enormous choking sobs.
“Well can you just get a grip. I mean, until we’re somewhere else? Ow, I hurt my hand.”