Revolution Number 9

by Peter Abrahams

  “Maturity?” said Blake.

  “I’m talking about political maturity,” Malik replied. “Political power, as you know, grows out of the barrel of a gun. That doesn’t mean you have to shoot anyone with it. It’s enough to show that you’ve got it and will use it. No one has to get hurt, or anything like that. We just want to make a symbolic statement.”

  “Who’s we?”

  Malik looked at Rebecca again. She put her hand on Blake’s, gave it a squeeze. “Just listen to him.”

  “Why?”

  “I want you to,” Rebecca said, and rubbed the back of his hand.

  Blake listened. Malik talked. Rebecca murmured sounds of assent. Water ran in the sink; the toilet was flushed a few more times; the temperature and humidity kept rising.

  “I won’t do it,” Blake said at the end.

  Rebecca took her hand away. Malik smiled. “Revolution,” he said, “number-nine style.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Blake said.

  “Like the Beatles song,” Malik explained. “The one that makes a lot of noise and ends up going nowhere.” He got off the toilet, shut off the tap, left the room. Rebecca followed him. Blake walked back to Cullen House by himself, got into the fairy-tale bed. He spent the rest of the night alone, and moved back in with Stuart Levine the next morning. Rebecca didn’t speak to him again until May.

  · · ·

  There was nothing to keep Charlie on campus any longer. He knew the next step. But his feet refused to take it. Instead, when he left the library, he turned not toward town and the bus station, but back across the central quad, past the chapel with its stone campanile, stopping before a white house with black shutters. The sign over the double doors read “Ecostudies Center.” The sign hadn’t always been there. Neither had the house always been white with black shutters. Once it had been cream with brown shutters and had had a simple single door with a different sign over it. Charlie noticed other changes. There were more windows in the front now, and additions had been built along both sides. He might have been seeing it for the first time, an ordinary building, without resonance, like the bare bedroom in Cullen House. Then the chapel bell began to ring.

  Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong. Very loud and very near. Charlie, standing in the heat of the summer sun, went cold. Five o’clock. Of course. I’m off at five. That’s all it was. Just five o’clock. Charlie realized that right away, but it didn’t stop him from vomiting on the well-trimmed lawn. There was no warning, no nausea; just a sudden heaving from deep inside. If you want to make a symbolic statement, he thought, twenty-two years too late, make it on paper. Hardly aware of his movements, he wheeled around and was on his way, away from that ordinary house, the chapel, the central quad, the campus. He tried to keep himself to a walking pace and almost did.

  · · ·

  Blake dropped out of the Tom Paine Club, but Stuart Levine did not. With Cassell’s German-English Dictionary and Berlitz’s German for Travelers at his elbow, Stu built the bomb during the week before Christmas break. He did it in his room, using speaker wire from his stereo, his Big Ben bedside alarm clock, two D-type batteries, and the contents of a brown bag from the hardware store, the sort of brown bag that would hold a couple of peanut butter sandwiches and an apple.

  He opened the back of the clock to show Blake. “You set the alarm for the time you want,” he said. “When it rings this little doohickey moves like so, touching the red wire and closing the circuit. Then the current travels up to the charge and—kaboom. Physics one-oh-one.”

  “Where’s the charge?”

  “That’s not my department, said Willy the Worker.”

  Stu’s fingers toyed with his long, stringy hair. He’d been dropping acid two or three times a week and living on Ritz crackers and cream soda. He had pimples and indigestion, needed mouthwash and a shower, but his eyes were wide open and speedy things were going on inside him.

  Blake examined the device on Stu’s desk. It didn’t look like much—a joke, really, just as dangerous now as it would be if ever connected to explosives. Stu wrapped it in Santa Claus paper and put it under a pile of laundry in the back of his bedroom closet.

  A few days later everyone left on Christmas break. Blake took a bus back to Mom and Ollie; Rebecca went with her father to St. Kitts; Andrew Malik went to a meeting in Chicago. Stu went home to Long Island. He stayed there barely twenty-four hours before his parents, disturbed by his appearance and behavior, drove him to a private sanitarium in Connecticut. The chief psychiatrist admitted him at once. Stuart Levine never returned to Morgan College.

  The next month, Stu’s father wrote Blake a letter asking him to box Stuart’s things and send them COD. He enclosed fifty dollars. Blake packed Stuart’s books, his stereo, his records, his Erector set, his framed Escher prints. He cushioned anything fragile with the button-downs Stu had arrived with and the tie-dyes he’d acquired, and crammed the laundry from the floor of Stu’s closet on top. That’s when he found that the Santa Claus package was gone. But what could he do? “Dear Mr. Levine: When you see Bombo could you ask him what happened to the Christmas present?” Maybe he should have; he sent back the fifty dollars instead.

  Blake saw Rebecca twice that winter, the first time at Flicks, the only movie house in town, where Don’t Look Back was paired with Look Back in Anger. She was sitting a few rows behind him. He turned more than once to look at her, but she seemed not to see him and was gone long before the end of the first feature. That night Blake decided to transfer to another school. He applied to several the next day.

  Blake saw Rebecca again one morning on his way to class. He was crossing the central quad when she came running in his direction. He’d never seen her run before: he was surprised at her speed, and the power and compactness of her stride. In moments she had reached him; she flew by without seeing him. There was no pretense this time: she really hadn’t seen him. He turned and watched her run into the parking lot at the foot of the quad. A car door opened and a man got out, holding a bunch of red roses. Rebecca threw her arms around him. The man was facing Blake, saw Blake watching, smiled with pride. Blake recognized him from the poster: Rebecca’s father.

  On the morning of May 1, the day most of the world learned of the invasion of Cambodia, Blake was sitting at Stuart’s old desk, to which he had moved because of its better view, trying to write a paper on the role of apparitions in Cymbeline but mostly listening to news reports on the radio. Incursion was the word they were using. The word sickened him as much as the act itself; what a giveaway it was, revealing the shame behind all the democratic pieties.

  The door opened and Rebecca came in, red eyed. She stood there silently, listening with him. Blake remained in his chair, looking out the window. After a while she crossed the room, leaned over the back of his chair, rested her chin on the top of his head, like faces on a totem pole.

  “Help me,” she said.

  “Help you?” He turned.

  Rebecca started to cry. “I never want to be without you again.” It was the first and only time he saw her cry. The sight was unbearable. He took her in his arms.

  They were in Blake’s bed, his steel-framed college-issue bed, a few minutes later. They made love, fell asleep, awoke, made love. Blake forgot about apparitions and Cymbeline, forgot about transferring to another school. He couldn’t forget about Cambodia: from the other room voices on the radio kept repeating the news. Blake and Rebecca lay in each other’s arms and heard. But Blake wasn’t really listening. He was feeling that strange, almost masochistic sensation of turmoil and peace that comes when young lovers make up. The bloody news provided background accompaniment.

  She said: “Will you help me?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s a problem.”

  Blake sat up, looked at her, failed to read on her face an expression of the feelings she was feeling. “What kind of problem?”

  Rebecca bit her lip, lip so full, teeth so white. “The bomb,” she s
aid.

  “What bomb?”

  But there was only one bomb. Rebecca had taken it from the closet. Malik had supplied dynamite. They had planted it near the ROTC building last night, after the first reports came in from Cambodia. Malik had set it to go off at 4:00 A.M., when no one would be around, but it hadn’t gone off at 4:00 A.M., hadn’t gone off at all.

  “So what do you want me to do?” Blake asked, although he already knew.

  “We can’t just leave it there. It could be found, or it might …”

  “And Malik?”

  Her face twisted with contempt. “He’s afraid.”

  Blake got out of bed, reached for his clothes. “Don’t,” Rebecca said.

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t be angry.”

  “Why should I be angry?” Blake tugged on his jeans. “You should have just come right out with it. Then you might not have had to fuck me first.”

  Rebecca jerked in the bed, as though he’d struck her.

  “Don’t worry,” Blake said. “I’ll do it. But not for you.”

  Rebecca got out of bed, her breasts white and swaying. Her lips quivered, as though she were about to cry again, but she did not. All at once she looked small, even physically weak.

  “You’re wrong about me,” she said. “This has made everything clear.”

  Blake paused. “Like what?”

  “Like you and me.” She touched his arm. He held her.

  Blake got the bomb that night. Malik had placed it under an overturned flowerpot in the bushes by the entrance to the ROTC building. Blake picked it up, unhooked the wires at the back of the Big Ben alarm clock, carried back the pieces, and had the pleasure of handing them to Malik. He wasn’t afraid. He knew Stu Levine.

  · · ·

  Buzz Svenson opened the door of the Ecostudies Center and stepped outside. Charlie was about a hundred yards away, walking across the quad. Svenson moved out onto the grass, glanced down at the pool of vomit, already soaking into the earth, and followed.

  14

  Four days after the invasion of Cambodia. A rainy afternoon.

  Blake lay in the fairy-tale bed on the third floor of Cullen House, propped up against the pillows. An Introduction to Developmental Economics lay open at his side, but he wasn’t reading it. He was listening to Ben Webster on Rebecca’s new headphones, the first headphones he’d ever worn. Blake, who had just discovered Ben Webster, was trying to picture the old man’s fingering. Rebecca slept beside him.

  The door opened with a bang Blake didn’t hear. Malik hurried in and started talking fast, although nothing he said penetrated the sound of Ben Webster. Then Rebecca sat up and began talking too. Blake took off the headphones.

  Malik brought news. More bad news, not from faraway Cambodia this time, but from much closer: Kent State. The government, invading Cambodia, had expanded the war all the way into the American homeland.

  “We can’t just lie down and take this,” Malik said, his voice high and rising. “We’ve got to do something.”

  “Shut down the campus?” Rebecca said.

  Malik’s lips turned down, as though he’d tasted a sudden mouthful of bitterness. “That’s already happening in other places,” he said. “But here at Smug U? Forget it.”

  “Then what?” Rebecca asked.

  “You know what,” Malik replied. His eyes shifted toward Blake. Then Rebecca was looking at him too. From the headphones on the blanket came the sound of Ben Webster, now tiny and affectless.

  “Please,” Rebecca said to him.

  Blake turned to her—her wild hair, her lips half-open, her eyes clouded with emotion. His mind was clouded with emotion too; inchoate thoughts about why they wanted his help so badly went uncompleted. “All right,” he said. Simple as that.

  “You will?” said Malik.

  Maybe they saw him as a test case; maybe the conversion of this one real person to violence persuaded them that a real revolution was possible. “I will,” Blake said.

  Rebecca put her arms around him, her breasts popping up above the covers. Malik smiled, took off his army surplus knapsack, and laid it on the bed. Still smiling, he went out, closing the door after him.

  Not long after, Blake, wearing the knapsack—like any student’s knapsack that might have held books and pencils and a snack—walked across the rainy campus to his old room, now unoccupied most of the time. He sat down at Stu’s old desk and searched through the bottom drawer. Crumpled at the back he found the four xeroxed pages.

  Blake smoothed them out. “Red Army Faction Manual,” Stu had written at the top. He had squeezed the translation into the margins. Stu had also doodled a series of masked and mustached faces along the bottom, like a gallery of Zorros. Blake read the translation three times, then undid the brass buckles of the knapsack, took out all the parts and the single stick of dynamite, and rebuilt Stu’s bomb. He followed the directions precisely, discovering along the way the point where Stu had failed to adhere to his own translation. Blake followed every step; and then added one more. When everything was done, he cut off two inches of electrical tape, trimmed it, and wound the tape all around the red wire, covering it completely. The alarm bell would still ring at whatever time was set, causing Stu’s little doohickey to touch the red wire. But now no electricity would flow. No juice, no boom. Blake closed the back of the Big Ben bedside alarm clock, screwed it shut, taped the stick of dynamite to it, and returned the whole to the khaki knapsack.

  He was happy. Ben Webster started playing in his head. The music mixed inseparably with the recalled sensation of Rebecca’s body. Blake slung the knapsack over his shoulder and walked back to Cullen House. Night had fallen. The rain had stopped, leaving the air soft and smelling of flowers. It’s enough to show that you’ve got it and will use it.

  · · ·

  The bus was crowded and hot, almost as uncomfortable as the limo of the American future. Next to Charlie sat a young woman dressed in black. She was pale, had dark circles under her eyes, wore her hair in a fifties-style crewcut; made him think of Joan of Arc on her way to the stake. After a while, the young woman took out a book: The Art of Odilon Redon. She opened it and began reading, highlighting some passages with a yellow marker. Charlie had never heard of Odilon Redon. He glanced at the glossy plates of his paintings, looked more closely. The pictures, obviously full of buried meanings he knew nothing about, were hard to turn away from, yet they called up nameless fears. What was this one? A pink horse hovering over a blue-skinned sleeping woman, possibly pregnant. The young woman highlighted: “The objective correlatives, that is, the pictorial components that the eye perceives, are like the tip of the iceberg in Redon’s symbolic structure.” She reread the passage several times before adding a yellow question mark and closing the book. Her eyes closed too.

  If you want to make a symbolic statement, make it on paper. The thought had not come twenty-two years too late after all. Had he not built a symbolic bomb, a paper tiger: a symbol to be interpreted not by the world, but by the other bombers? All at once, time collapsed and Charlie felt an affinity with Blake, his younger self, felt sympathy for Blake, felt the unexpected presence of Blake inside him; felt whole. The feeling filled him with unease.

  The fact is that Charlie Ochs is a fantasy. He doesn’t exist. Night fell. Headlight beams shone through the rear windows of the bus. It rolled east on the turnpike.

  · · ·

  Blake walked into Rebecca’s room, the knapsack over his shoulder. Rebecca and Malik had their backs to him; Malik was on the phone, Rebecca watching, her face intent, as though it was she who heard the other end of the conversation.

  “Tonight,” Malik said. “Don’t worry—I’ll be there.” He handed the phone to Rebecca.

  “Hi,” she said. She listened. “No one will know,” she said. “Ever.” She listened again, said, “I love you too—bye, Daddy,” and hung up. She and Malik turned as one, saw Blake. They looked surprised.

  “Back so soon?” Malik said. />
  “It’s done,” Blake told him, aware, probably because it was all playacting now, of how melodramatic he sounded.

  “Beautiful,” Malik said.

  And he, Malik, carefully set the alarm for 4:30 A.M. “No one’s around then,” he said. “It’ll be safe.”

  “Safe as houses,” said Blake. They stared at him and didn’t laugh. On the walls, Marx, Engels, General Giap, and the others looked on.

  “The question is,” Malik said, “who’s going to, like, put it there?”

  “Me,” said Blake at once, not wanting anyone else to handle it and perhaps peek inside. He felt Rebecca’s admiring gaze; knew without having to look the radiance on her face; marveled at its range, from this supernova all the way across the spectrum to Torquemada. “I’ll do it.”

  Blake left Cullen House by the back door just after one. The night was still soft, still smelled of flowers. There had been a moon before, but now it had set and the campus was dark. Blake made his way quickly to the central quad, past the chapel, to the cream-colored building with the brown shutters, black in the night, where the sign on the door read “ROTC.” Like neighborhood kids, college students know every inch of their physical territory.

  Blake glanced around, saw no one. A few lights shone in some of the residences along the quad, but the chapel and the ROTC building were dark. Blake heard music—something from The White Album, but the name of the song escaped him at the moment—and glanced around once more, again seeing no one. Perhaps he might have looked more carefully, but for what? After all, he wasn’t a criminal and he wasn’t about to perform a criminal act.

  He moved closer to the building, a three-story house of the kind that might shelter a comfortable family. Wooden steps led up to what had once been a porch but was now walled in. The flowerpot still lay upside down in the bushes, but Blake rejected that idea immediately. He didn’t want anyone to come upon his little package before he could retrieve it.

  Blake knelt in the grass, felt the dew on his knees. He examined the steps. Their sides were faced with cheap plywood. There was a hole in the ground beneath the lowest board on one side, as though some animal had been going in and out. Blake stuck his hand in, grasped the bottom of the board, pulled. One end, the end nearer the house, came loose. Holding it out, Blake pushed the knapsack through and crawled into the space under the stairs.