American Subversive

by David Goodwillie

  Could it really be so easy? Could targeted violence truly work? I lay awake in that motel room for a long time, as Lindsay slept peacefully beside me, curled up like a question mark. We’d just traveled for nine hours through five states, and still I kept coming back to the same moment. We were crossing into West Virginia on Route 161 when Keith lowered his window and stuck his head out.

  What are you doing? Lindsay asked.

  Listening for the blasts, he said, catching my eye in the rearview mirror.

  I smiled. That he’d remembered.

  AIDAN

  FROM A WELL-POSITIONED SEAT AT A CHARMING SIDEWALK TABLE, I WATCHED as Cressida came striding across Washington Street, her high heels negotiating the cobblestones with practiced assurance. I’d been waiting more than half an hour—and had already polished off a carafe of red wine—but I didn’t really care. We embraced, awkwardly, and Cressida began a complex untangling of wires and straps—from headphones, a purse, and various bags—that quickly came to involve diners at the tightly spaced neighboring tables. Finally, she fell into her chair, bumping the table just as I was filling her glass. The wine spilled. “Fuck,” she said, grabbing her napkin, then mine, as the red pool started to spread. “Sorry I’m late.” It was her standard entrance, perfected over time by actually being late, to everything, always.

  It was rarely just the two of us anymore, and we weren’t sure where to begin. We were always at parties or large dinners. The things other couples did—movies, walks, brunch—we never quite got around to. We were busy, knew people, had lives, and quiet moments had never been part of them. That is, until now. For life’s natural pauses, the gaps in conversation, had begun to widen. We were great around others, but got moody, fell silent, around each other. Tinkering with cell phones, text messages, later plans, we pretended not to notice what was becoming painfully clear: that we’d run out of things to say to one another. But didn’t that happen to everyone? The vacant stares, the unintentional tuning out . . . these, I told myself, were symptoms of nothing more than time gone by. Besides, Cressida could never be quiet for long.

  “So I have something for you,” she said, when we were finally organized. She pulled an oversize envelope from one of her bags. “Here’s the deal: I’ll give you everything I’ve got, but you have to tell me what this is about.”

  “It’s probably nothing,” I said. “Just some weird e-mails I’ve been getting.”

  “About the bombing?”

  “I guess, yeah.”

  “What exactly did the e-mails say?” she asked.

  “Why? Did you dig something up?” It was possible, which is the reason I’d asked her in the first place. As a staff reporter, Cressida had access to dozens of information-gathering programs and websites, and she knew how to use them.

  “Maybe,” she said coolly.

  This is what we were good at—pushing buttons, testing boundaries, baiting each other. I reached into my pocket and produced a copy of the second message from EmpiresFall (though I’d been careful to erase the sender’s address). Cressida read it out loud: “ ‘Subject: Barneys. The shopping wasn’t so good. The blowout sale was on the wrong floor. P.S. This is your chance.’ ” She frowned. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “I have no idea. And the other e-mails are just as cryptic. Except one of them mentioned the three names I gave you.”

  “Why would they e-mail Roorback?”

  “Exactly. It’s ridiculous, but I wanted to get your thoughts just in case.”

  “Did they claim responsibility? Send photographs? Anything else at all?”

  “No,” I said.

  The waiter came and we ordered more napkins, wine, and finally, food. He didn’t write anything down. When he was gone, Cressida opened the envelope and pulled out three file folders.

  “Okay, then,” she said, lowering her voice. “Let’s start with Easton St. Claire. He’s the easiest because he doesn’t exist. I checked everywhere. He sounds made up and he is made up.” She handed me the folder labeled ST. CLAIRE. In it were three pages of search requests. I tried to look engrossed as I thumbed through them. “Next is Paige Roderick, who does appear to be real, inasmuch as there are humans who exist with that name, but . . . oh, come on.”

  “What?”

  “I know what you’re up to.”

  “No you don’t.”

  “You’re wasting my time with these two phony names so I don’t figure out who you’re really after.”

  “And who would that be?”

  “Kimball LeRoux.”

  Kimball LeRoux? I thought I’d made the name up on the spot, but maybe I’d lifted it from somewhere. It did sound familiar, now that she’d said it out loud.

  “Let me ask you something,” Cressida said. “Is this your way of getting back at me for the column?”

  “No. But if you want to think so, fine. It’s probably what we should be talking about anyway. I just thought we could work together for once, focus on something other than our fucked-up relationship.”

  “Really? Is that what it is?”

  “That’s not what I meant,” I said.

  “It’s exactly what you meant.”

  And so we sat there in silence. When the food came, we ate in silence. Malatesta was the kind of inexpensive trattoria you might find on any corner in Florence or Milan, but for whatever reason was rare in New York. Candlelight set the mood, and a beautiful staff sustained it. At nearby tables, people laughed and carried on in foreign tongues. I wondered what we must look like to them, jaws clenched, poking at pasta. A friend of Cressida’s appeared, and we smiled our way through pleasantries and the vague promise of future drinks. Finally, no doubt getting the hint, she blew us kisses and walked away.

  “Look at us,” Cressida said. “We’re becoming one of those couples.”

  “Apparently.”

  She peered up at me then, shifting her eyes without moving her head. “I’m sorry,” she said softly. “But I just want you to be honest with me.”

  “There’s nothing to lie about.”

  “But if there were, then you would? Is that what you’re saying? That’s just—”

  “No!”

  “—perfect! Look, let’s just get through the rest of this, okay?” She reached into the envelope, pulled out the two remaining folders, and slid them across the table. As casually as I could, I opened the one labeled RODERICK. “As you can see,” Cressida continued, “there are lots of Paige Rodericks, but none of them strike me as terrorists.”

  The familiar list included a few new additions. I read through their brief bios, but they were all too young or too old. The last three pages were a compilation of photos from a high-tech Times image search. Cressida started talking about Kimball LeRoux as I quickly scanned the rows of anonymous Paige Rodericks, plucked at random from the American landscape like—

  There she was!

  Did Cressida see my eyes widen? For a fleeting moment she might have, before I recovered, before I narrowed them again and ground my teeth to conceal my astonishment. It was a small photograph, and I tried to look closer without raising suspicion. Paige Roderick! My Paige Roderick! Same face, same dark hair, but now she was wearing a cocktail dress and had her arm around an Ivy League type in a coat and tie. They looked like a well-heeled young couple dutifully posing at someone else’s wedding. There was a tiny caption, but I couldn’t read it without attracting Cressida’s attention.

  I picked up the third folder and tried to appear interested. Kimball LeRoux, Cressida was explaining, was a middle-aged blogger from the Gulf Coast who’d made a name for himself several years back by exposing various governmental lapses during Hurricane Katrina. He’d broken into the national consciousness for a few news cycles and hung on as long as he could—expanding his blog and writing opinion pieces—before fading back into American oblivion.

  That’s where the name must have come from.

  “—I mean it must be him,” Cressida was saying excitedly, as I flipped t
hrough the file, a man’s life laid bare in a dozen scattered pages.

  “I’m sure whoever sent the e-mail was just pretending to be LeRoux,” I said.

  “But why? Look at some of the antigovernment stuff he’s written. Don’t you think we should follow up?”

  “On what? There’s nothing here. Half the country hates the government. It doesn’t mean they’re blowing up buildings.”

  “I can see why you didn’t become a fucking journalist,” Cressida said. “Do you know what your problem is? Or one of them, at least? A complete lack of curiosity. You spend your life waiting for people to make mistakes, and then you publicize them. And when, God forbid, something interesting comes your way, a story you could actually chase down, you let it pass right by. Look! We have his address, his phone number! Don’t you think it’s worth fifteen minutes?”

  Here it was: all the ardor and zeal that had first attracted me to Cressida. We’d been introduced almost a year ago, at one of Derrick Franklin’s dinner parties. He’d seated us beside each other in the hope that she might fall for my slight charms and write about Roorback. But she hated blogs, she told me, before the appetizers had even arrived, and hours later, when we’d jousted for long enough and she’d decided I’d do (at least for the evening), it was too late: the veneer of objectivity was gone. The sex was fine that first night, but what got me was the morning after. While most girls would have scurried around collecting clothing, mumbling excuses, Cressida lay clear-eyed and comfortable in my barely unpacked room on Weehawken Street (I’d relocated from Brooklyn the week before), the creeping sun revealing in her eyes a measured calm, as if we’d done this a hundred times before. I kissed her neck and she moved in close.

  “What’s your name again?” she whispered. I laughed, thinking she was kidding, and laughed harder when I realized she wasn’t.

  It was a marathon weekend, a whirlwind of comings and goings, sex and sushi, galleries, cocktails, a concert, and late Sunday night, when we finally said good-bye, we were on the phone within the hour, talking quickly, slowly, softly, about how easy everything suddenly felt.

  I don’t think it was love, even in those first beaming months. We were both too experienced for anything so unambiguous. But the physical attraction was real. And we liked each other’s stories. She’d clambered her way up from a local newspaper in the British Midlands to the rollicking Fleet Street tabloids, where she spent her late twenties chasing celebrities through hotel lobbies. She had a disarming way of getting people to talk. David Beckham, Kate Moss, Prince Harry—they’d all spoken into Cressida’s tape recorder and regretted it the next morning. By this time, she’d become a name herself, a sought-after entity on both sides of the Atlantic. She was approached by a half dozen stateside gossip pages and celebrity magazines, but she’d grown tired of chronicling the detritus of fame. She was after something else, and only the rebranded-for-the-masses Times could offer it: a job reporting real news, with a saucy column on the side.

  Now she stared me down above the rim of her wineglass, challenging me as she challenged everyone whose lies or lapses might slow her own progress. She wasn’t telling me anything new. I was aware of my faults and had tailored my life so as not to magnify them. And in New York you almost could. But the world eventually catches up, confronts you, offers up a choice. I could have come clean then, saved myself in her eyes. Because I was chasing the story. I was doing exactly the thing she accused me of never doing—being the very person she was begging me to be—and yet I couldn’t let her know it. Not yet.

  Cressida was stuffing the LEROUX folder into her bag. “If you won’t do anything about him, then I will,” she said, standing up in front of her half-eaten pasta. She paused, as if to say something else, then shook her head, kissed me quickly on the cheek, and strode out as she’d strode in, her heels hitting the sidewalk with rhythmic determination.

  She’d left the other two folders on the table.

  I paid the check, grabbed them both, and hurried the few blocks home. Cressida and I had fought enough to become masters at making up, so it seemed strange that we hadn’t even tried. It had been like a business dinner, two wary competitors discussing a potential merger, tentatively trading information before deciding against the idea and quickly going separate ways. But I couldn’t blame her. She was one thing before the other—I’d always known that—and now she was heading home with a folder of information she thought might lead somewhere. What should I have expected?

  That’s why the text she sent me as I walked up my dark stairwell took me by surprise. You used to make me laugh, it said.

  Three stubborn locks later I was sitting in my living room—my only room—spreading the RODERICK folder out across the coffee table. I peered down at the image I’d spotted earlier. It was Paige, that Paige, I was positive. She was wearing what looked like a vintage dress, bare-shouldered and tight through her torso. I squinted at the tiny caption: Brendan Carlyle and Paige Roderick enjoy the smooth sounds of Ernie Lombardi’s Jazz Quartet at last Saturday’s Fishers Island Club Gala. That was it—no date, no context.

  None of this felt right. Over the course of the day Paige Roderick had evolved in my mind, become someone obscene and extraordinary—a bomb-building revolutionary mocking the poisoned culture that consumed the rest of us. But now here she was, just another girl in a fancy dress, advancing effortlessly down the primrose path of blue-blooded courtship. I peered again at the photograph, at the faded face, the impassive eyes. They looked distant, empty. She wasn’t smiling or posing, but she was hardly defiant. I reminded myself that photographs were only captive instants—the briefest flickers of history—and they lied just as people lied. But they told great truths as well.

  She existed, though, and wasn’t that something? A kind of journalistic progress? But toward what? At NYU, I’d heard well-known reporters talk about an indefinable force that propelled them through investigations, one improbable lead to the next. At the time, I’d scoffed at such self-important nonsense, but there I was, staring again at the photograph as I considered the progression of events, and there was a logical rhythm to it. Questions were supposed to come before answers, frustration before understanding.

  Then I was looking for my cell phone. I had my next move.

  Touché answered on the fourth ring. “You don’t sound good,” I told him.

  “That fucking DJ. We were up until dawn. Lord knows what I told her. Hasn’t she learned never to listen to a Latin man after two in the morning?”

  “The girl last night. She’s real.”

  “Very much so.”

  “And I have a picture of her on Fishers Island.”

  “No, she lives in Brooklyn somewhere. Red Hook, I think.”

  “She does? How do you know?”

  “Because she told me,” Touché said.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Paige Roderick.”

  “That wasn’t her name.”

  “Not the DJ!”

  “Oh. Who then?”

  “You don’t remember? The e-mail I opened in Cressida’s room?” There was silence on the other end. “You thought she looked like Jennifer Connelly.”

  “Ah, yes! I almost forgot. I did forget. The beautiful mad bomber. So she did it? You caught her? And here I thought we’d wasted the evening chasing—”

  “I’m being serious. I just saw her in another photograph. She was with some preppy guy at a ritzy dinner-dance on Fishers Island.”

  “Fishers Island?”

  “That’s what I’m saying! I think it was the golf club your parents belong to.”

  “What was her date’s name?”

  “Brendan Carlyle. Do you know him?”

  “I know his sister,” said Touché. “Brendan was a bit younger. Banker, maybe.”

  “He looks like a banker.”

  “When was it taken, the photo?”

  “There isn’t a date.”

&nb
sp; “And you’re sure it’s her?”

  “Positive.”

  “Well, then, there’s only one thing to do.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Are you free this weekend?”

  PAIGE

  THE HOUSE WAS A SLANT-ROOFED SALTBOX BUILT IN THE 1960S WHEN THE nearby ski resorts were still in vogue, and it bore the effects of hard weather, the cedar sides beginning to rot, the roof speckled with replacement shingles. The ground floor was separated into living and dining areas by a pretty stone fireplace, and an adjacent staircase led up to three small bedrooms tucked into the roof like a crawl space. It was nice enough, though all personal flourishes or effects, anything that might hint at the owner’s tastes or identity, had been stamped out by years of renters up from New York and Boston.

  What the house did have was privacy—thickets of dense foliage that protected us from the road and the vacation houses on either side. It was early summer and the ground was a mud-caked sponge. Nearby streams flowed fast with mountain runoff, and the nights were still cold enough to make me miss the South. The few locals we came across seemed dazed and half-asleep. It was the low season.

  The location was convenient; the garage was a necessity. It stood alone, a dilapidated concrete structure fifty yards from the house. When we pulled open the paneled, two-car door on our first morning in residence, we were greeted with great piles of rusted tools and rotting furniture—lawn mowers and Weedwackers, a stained rug, a cushionless couch. Keith waded bravely in, past decades of castoffs—vintage bicycles, a dollhouse, telemark skis, parts of a Ping-Pong table.