Brooklyn is where Oscar Fate meets Antonio Ulises Jones, an elderly Communist who remains alone at the end of a long retreat in the borough’s party ranks. The city is more than a setting for their conversations: its dwindling cells give political history a local scale, measured in vanished comrades, a crowded apartment, and Jones’s continued presence when no one else remains.

Setting and Encounter

Fate meets Jones by chance in one of Brooklyn’s poorest neighborhoods. Jones, perhaps eighty years old, lives in a two-room apartment whose living room holds a table and more than fifteen folding wooden stools. A photograph on the wall shows Jones beside Robert Martillo Smith, a Brooklyn city maintenance worker famous for wrestling alligators in the sewers. The room’s many seats suggest a past or hoped-for gathering, while the account offers no sign that such a crowd still assembles there.

The neighborhood also appears through the walks Jones takes with Fate. Sometimes Jones puts on large sunglasses, takes a cane, and leaves it by the door when they return. His bodily presentation can look frail, but the gestures do not establish that he needs the cane; they remain part of the sparse, concrete portrait through which Fate encounters him.

A Political Community in Decline

Jones recounts Brooklyn’s Communist history as a sequence of shrinking numbers. The party had more than a thousand members during World War II and reached thirteen hundred after the war. At the start of McCarthyism, the number had fallen to about seven hundred; by its end, scarcely two hundred remained. In the 1960s, there were half as many, and by the 1970s no more than thirty, scattered across five cells.

The decline continues in Jones’s account: ten members remained at the end of the 1970s, and four at the beginning of the 1980s. Two of those four died of cancer; another disappeared without telling anyone. Jones speculates that the missing man may have traveled and died en route, or gone to live with his daughter in Florida. By 1987, Jones says, he was the only one left. Brooklyn’s history is thus rendered not as an abstract political chronology but as a chain of losses whose endpoint is one surviving member.

Jones’s Ideas and Conversations with Fate

Across three conversations, Fate tests Jones on Communist leaders and doctrines. Jones condemns Stalin and Lenin, but praises Marx as a wonderful man, with one reservation: his temper, which Jones attributes to poverty. Asked about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of socialist regimes, Jones says that he had predicted the outcome ten years earlier. He then opens the window and sings the first lines of the “Internationale,” asking whether it sounds like an anthem made especially for Black people. The exchange joins a personal political inheritance to the racial histories Jones keeps alive in Brooklyn, including the Scottsboro trials, which younger neighborhood residents no longer remember.

Jones’s commitment is not sustained by an active network. He says he is no longer in contact with Communists in the United States or abroad, apart from occasional correspondence with a retired UCLA professor, Dr. Minski. He had belonged to the Third International before Minski persuaded him to join the Fourth. His answer when Fate asks why he remains is blunt: “Because someone has to keep the cell operative.”

Narrative Significance

The Brooklyn episode reaches the reader as a dream while Fate sleeps during a television report about a disappearance in Santa Teresa. The shift places Jones’s account of a nearly extinguished political cell inside a larger narrative concerned with disappearance and lives that go unremembered. Jones’s vanished comrade is not definitively explained: his possible fate remains speculation, one more absence that the story refuses to resolve.

Fate’s published story about Jones brings him professional recognition, but colleagues treat it as a picturesque portrait of a marginal figure rather than as an account of political history. Fate never sees Jones again. Brooklyn therefore persists in the narrative through a brief, mediated encounter: an apartment, a photograph, a declining membership roll, and the old man who stays behind to keep the cell operative.