American Subversive

by David Goodwillie

  It’s already happening in Europe, he said.

  Now, as the sun beat down on us, I sat dead still and listened to words so unsettling, so massive in meaning, that it was all I could do to process them. Keith led me inside and spread out several sheets on the dining room table. They were photocopied blueprints of Indian Point. I stared at them wide-eyed, but instead of demanding to know—as any normal person would have—how he’d got his hands on them, I helped him smooth the corners down. They were incredibly detailed, and showed not only the plant’s reactors and buildings, but its perimeter—the walls, the fences, the gates—and surrounding area. Keith had already pencil-marked various locations with the letters POE (place of exploit), and now he pointed at one and circled it.

  The reactors are protected by the Feds and the NRC, he said, which means heavy walls and well-trained guards, but the rest is left to rent-a-cops hired by the company that runs the plant. Look here, by the cliffs above the river. It’s just barbed-wire fencing. I’m sure there are sensors, too, but it’s like aviation radar—you just have to stay low.

  But, Keith, I said.

  Hold on. Just hear me out. The point is to save lives, not take them.

  By blowing up a nuclear facility?

  Not exactly. I mean, yes, but not the reactors. What I’m talking about is a small, controlled explosion right . . . here, Keith said, pointing to a blank area surrounded by unmarked warehouse-type buildings. See, it’s a good two hundred yards from the reactor walls. Nothing would actually get damaged.

  Then why do it?

  Come on, he said. Think it through. He looked at me expectantly, a teacher waiting for an answer.

  Well, obviously they’d immediately shut down the plant, I ventured. And if the government didn’t keep it closed indefinitely, then the community would.

  Exactly, Keith replied. Which is something, considering Indian Point’s location and safety record, that should have happened years ago.

  But I don’t understand. We’d be killing the very cause we’re promoting. Look at Three Mile Island: the smallest of reactor meltdowns and it crippled the American nuclear industry for decades. Have they even commissioned a new reactor since then?

  Nuclear energy fell out of favor long before 1979, Keith said. But, yes, I get your point. And that’s why we’d release a communiqué clearly stating the reason behind our action: safety. Just think about it. Every plant in the country would immediately reevaluate and drastically ramp up security procedures. The Feds would set new mandates and regulations. We’d avert a major catastrophe by creating a very minor one. Not even.

  And you honestly think we can detonate a bomb inside the grounds?

  Yes, I do. Because nuclear power plants still operate under the old model of keeping radiation in, not keeping people out. We’ll breach the outer fencing with a remote-controlled device, so we won’t have to enter the facility ourselves.

  You’re talking about some kind of toy?

  Sure, Keith said, a grin spreading across his face. Why not? A miniature dump truck or something. We just tape a payload onto the back and off she goes. . . .

  And so, a half hour later, off I went. This was a tougher assignment—most websites of interest were government-run—but the information was out there, and slowly I found it. I needed to know what happened in the buildings closest to the potential blast site, so I found the layouts of six other nuclear plants and compared them to Indian Point.

  It didn’t take long for a problem to emerge, in the form of spent uranium. Keith had assumed the used-up nuclear fuel was trucked away. But that wasn’t the case. There was still no federal depository for radioactive by-product, so most plants, including Indian Point, kept their waste on-site. But where? Since spent uranium was every bit as radioactive as the live stuff, it was stored in underwater tanks protected by impervious steel structures and positioned far from the reactors. These by-product buildings were labeled on some of the other layouts (in one Alabama plant, the building was actually shaded a lovely nuclear yellow), but the location of Indian Point’s spent fuel wasn’t clear. Three buildings were large enough to contain waste operations, and unfortunately two of them bordered Keith’s courtyard-like ground zero. Radioactive material wasn’t flammable like gasoline—it wouldn’t ignite or explode—but it didn’t matter. To my mind, even the possibility of instability, of a leak or spill caused by our Action, made everything else moot. If we couldn’t eliminate the nuclear-fuel equation—and I spent several days trying—then we couldn’t move forward.

  Presented with the evidence, Keith finally, grudgingly, agreed.

  I can’t say I was disappointed. The idea had disturbed me from the get-go. Part of it was the unfeasibility of the Action itself. But what really got me was Keith’s and Lindsay’s blasé approach. Lindsay had come home the day Keith brought it up and, after hearing him out, quickly endorsed the plan. Her big blue eyes lit up and that was it. No one acknowledged that we were flirting with the ultimate taboo, the climactic chapter in everyone’s private book of fear. Were we truly willing to go that far? I’d found Keith’s arguments theoretically sound, but still . . . something goes wrong with a bomb and a town house explodes; something goes wrong with uranium and mankind pays a price.

  The mood in the house changed during our nuclear flirtation. Maybe the word itself was too much. It was a psychic wound, a word meant for nightmares, for death, and just as it hung over America, so it hung over us. The air turned stale. Our tempers grew taut. Keith had said our Actions should speak for themselves, but now he was talking about communiqués, explanations—brochures to highlight the destruction. But, afterward, we were suddenly the ones who couldn’t communicate. Keith squirreled himself away in the garage for three days. I think he even slept in there. Then, one searing afternoon, he slipped up behind me as I sat at the computer.

  Find anything interesting? he asked.

  I must have jumped half a foot.

  Stop fucking scaring me like that, I said.

  Soon, though, I did find something interesting: an article—on Slate—about the construction of a pan-Asian oil pipeline. It mentioned a company called Indigo Holdings as the money behind the project. The name sounded familiar but I couldn’t immediately place it. Had I come across Indigo during my time in D.C.? Or was it the name alone that caught my eye? I started nosing around, and almost immediately things fell into place. The company, I discovered, was a giant consortium—part private equity firm, part global consultancy—that operated at the crowded (and confusing) intersection where government, military, and industry met. Three masters to manipulate, to play off one another, with a single unambiguous goal: the generation of obscene amounts of money. Indigo relied heavily on access to power, and its board was littered with former presidents and prime ministers, Allahs and sheikhs, CEOs and generals—a veritable private-sector (and privately held) administration. They went to great lengths to avoid the press, but nothing so lucrative could operate completely in the shadows. The more I read about their international projects, the easier it became to imagine them as a target. For oil was their objective, the engine behind every investment, every shady inside deal. Here was the military-industrial complex at its obscene best. The nightmare endgame of the capitalist state. Corrupt as man could get.

  Indigo was the grand stage we’d been looking for, and Keith knew it, too. He’d heard of them in the same vague and unsettling light, and as I delved deeper, he started sitting with me, taking notes like a stenographer. If we hit them hard, he said, the media spotlight would linger long after the violent fact. And best of all, though they were headquartered in D.C., they had a smaller presence in New York. The location wasn’t ideal—it was in a Madison Avenue office tower above the famed department store Barneys—but we’d figure something out.

  We were restless now. Time sped up, the days got shorter. We were finally moving toward something definable, a worthy adversary, an ideal target. When Lindsay showed up one night with the long-awaited fan, we forgot
to turn it on for several days.

  The heat was still everywhere, but we no longer noticed.

  AIDAN

  IT’S DECEMBER 25, ACCORDING TO THE CLOCK RADIO ON MY WRITING DESK. I’M kidding; it’s not that bad. I’m aware of the date. I follow politics. I know how the Jets are doing. And I stay on top of the ongoing search for us. Newsreaders and sports announcers: in the absence of others, these voices have become my friends.

  Not that I’ve been completely alone. My handlers, Jim and Carol, continue, despite the snow, to stop by twice a week like clockwork—Jim on Tuesday nights; Carol, Fridays. (After discussing it, they’ve agreed to let me use their names, which only confirms what I already knew: that Jim and Carol aren’t their real names at all.) They come armed with supplies, but it’s their conversation I crave—Movement news, mostly, but other stuff, too, the latest movies, town meetings, anything they’ll tell me. That’s how monotonous my life has been.

  Until yesterday, that is.

  I was in the woods behind the house when I heard a noise. More precisely, I was attempting to cut down a Christmas tree. Why? Because I’d always had one, even in that stunted studio on Weehawken Street. It was my only nod to tradition in an otherwise transitional existence, and I went so far as to throw an annual tree-decorating party, the apparent sincerity of which never failed to amuse my friends. I know what you’re thinking: I’m compensating for a broken family. And, sure, you’re probably right (my parents, in those early West Side days, took Christmas seriously in every way but biblically, and I was always the spoiled benefactor). We all carry with us the remains of our younger selves, some of us sadly, but most gratefully, for the world seemed whole then, the universe entire, and the less we understood, the more it made sense. So there I was, yesterday morning, in a coppice of pines, trying, and failing, to chop one down. The ax (which I’d discovered in the basement) was quite dull, but I figured it would get the job done. Of course, I’d failed to realize the trunks would be frozen. And I’d forgotten I had no work gloves or snow boots (to say nothing, on the chance it got that far, of a tree stand or ornaments).

  Maybe I just needed to get out of the house.

  I’d been at it almost an hour with only blisters and loose bark to show for my efforts when I heard the muffled—but distinct—sound of a car door slamming. It caught me off guard, for I hadn’t heard anyone drive up. Anyway, there shouldn’t have been anyone driving up, since Carol, who was due to stop by later, never appeared before sundown. Dropping the ax in the snow, I bounded through the trees to the edge of the clearing behind the house and glimpsed the backside of a man navigating the icy path that led around to the front door. When he disappeared from view, I moved closer, until I was only about twenty yards from his car—an early-model Jeep Cherokee. In-state plates, no bumper stickers, no extra lights or special gadgets . . . nothing official-looking. Who the hell was this? The front door to the house was locked, so unless his plan was to break in, he’d be back soon enough. I repositioned myself behind a tree, and a minute later there he was, retracing his footsteps through the snow. I could see him now, a distinguished-looking man with bushy eyebrows and wisps of white hair curling out from under an ear-flapped cap. He looked like a local town elder. He looked like trouble. Carefully negotiating the icy path, he opened the driver-side door and began rooting around inside the Cherokee. Christ, I thought. He’s got a crowbar in there; he’s going to smash a window or jimmy a door. But he emerged with something else: a single sheet of paper. Again, he walked around the side of the house; again, he came back a minute later. This time, he started his engine, turned the Jeep around, and followed his own tire tracks back down the hill.

  I waited awhile, because that’s what I’d been taught to do, and when no one else appeared, I followed his footprints to the front door. The paper was folded in half and hanging from the mail slot. I picked it up like a jury summons, which is to say, unenthusiastically. Because it couldn’t be good.

  The words were scrawled in black marker:

  Neighbor(s) - Please join us tonight for Christmas carols and cocktails, 6–9 p.m. We look forward to meeting you—Carl and Nancy Henderson (2 houses down on the left, look for the colored lights on the lamp post).

  I turned around and slumped down on the snowy stoop. Before me lay rolling hills like clouds, soft and white and endless. Was this endless, this high-wire life, expecting the worst of man and instead receiving his best? It was the simplest of acts—inviting a neighbor over on Christmas Eve—yet it floored me. I could never go, but how badly I suddenly wanted to. Just mingling in a warm room, drink in hand, making small talk with strangers. But wait. How had Carl Henderson known I was here? This house, as I said, sits at the end of a long, private drive that winds up through woods and grazing fields. There are three other houses on the road, though I haven’t thought much about them since the day I was dropped off. Neighbors are always a consideration, of course—people are nosy—but the houses are far enough apart that they’ve never struck me as a problem. What business, after all, would anyone have driving farther up a private road? Well, now I knew. Carl, or perhaps his wife, must have noticed Jim and Carol coming and going and thought they were living here. And the more the merrier at Christmastime. What was wrong with that? Nothing. Everything.

  I was cold and wet and increasingly despondent. I went inside and changed, then sat down and tried to write. But it was useless. As the little things so often do, Carl’s note had set off a larger internal crisis. Loneliness, Paige told me once, was just another way of feeling sorry for yourself, and I’d taken her words to heart, allaying that lurking demon by staying busy, by writing. But now I stared at my notebooks and wondered what exactly I was doing. Was Paige, wherever she was, still writing her story? And did our words even matter beyond their morbid salaciousness? Paige has always had clear reasons—comprehensible motivations—for her actions, but mine are less definable and, perhaps, defensible. Which brings me to the question I’ve been grappling with for months (and one you’ll start asking soon enough). Why? Why did I do what I did? Ruin my life (or did I salvage it?). It happened fast, as you’ll see, but that’s no excuse. I knew what was going on. I made decisions—or didn’t—freely. But it has taken these words, this attempted explanation—or rationalization—to truly understand what my life was, and what it is now, and how that most improbable line from one to the other was drawn. Call it memoir therapy. Call it an honest accounting. There’s a first time for everything.

  It’s Christmas Day. So here’s a present to myself. Another chapter finished, another window opened to the world. Keep writing. The fresh air does you good, kid.

  PAIGE

  THE GOAL WAS NEW YORK BY NOON, SO WE LEFT AT FIRST LIGHT. I SUGGESTED the Thruway, but Keith thought coming south through New England would be faster, so that’s what we did—I-91 through Springfield and Hartford and on down to the bucolic Merritt Parkway.

  Keith kept looking off into the surrounding woods.

  I’ve always loved this road, he said. It’s really beautiful.

  He was right: the winding, canopied parkway was beautiful, the day was beautiful, all expectation. This was it, our big reconnaissance trip, the beginning of whatever was to come. I would be the front, the person who’d appear in public. Part preparation, part improvisation, it was a role I’d played well in North Carolina. But this was New York, and though I’d once called the city home, it was a different place now—taller, prettier, more angular. It was aging well, the recession having left it physically—if not financially—unscarred. We made good time and came in down the West Side, the sun high over the Hudson, past sailboat marinas and massive cruise ships, their white sterns sticking out beyond the piers, as if mooning all points west. Yes, New York still had attitude, but it was a different kind of us-against-the-world—more Donald Trump, less Lou Reed.

  We turned east onto Twenty-third Street and sliced across town. New high-rises consuming Chelsea. Baby strollers three deep on Village sidewalks. So
Ho like the world’s largest duty-free shop, all perfume and fine leather. And then the Lower East Side. I’d lived on Stanton and Suffolk for a few years after 9/11, when the neighborhood was still scruffy and marginal, when figures lurked in doorways and women walked in groups at night. But it was turning, even then. Gentrification reaches out like a welcoming hand, block by dirty block, until the grip gets too tight and you can’t get away. Boutique jewelry stores, then boutique hotels. I left before the turnover was complete, before the last of the Bowery flophouses and Italian butchers closed for good, before Delancey Street became less a border than a boulevard.

  Now people were everywhere, lounging half-naked outside coffee shops and frozen-yogurt stores. Some ersatz version of America had invaded these narrow tenement streets. American Eagle. American Apparel. American boys and girls drinking American beers in their snap-button cowboy shirts and Daisy Duke shorts. Grow the legend large enough and the country becomes it. Keith was watching the road. I wanted to ask if he’d ever lived in New York, but he was busy glancing in mirrors, and anyway his experience in the city would have been so different from mine. I’d moved here straight from UNC, a fresh-faced girl chasing rumors of a counterculture. But what I found was conformity, endemic apathy. The counterculture, such as it was at the dawn of the twenty-first century, seemed like the only segment of society that wasn’t changing. Sure, kids still came to New York from everywhere else, seeking thrills and some loose kind of meaning. But how quickly they discovered themselves—settled into satisfaction, cozied up to success. And it’s hard to rage against that.

  The streets were playgrounds. They were malls. We turned right on Allen and right again onto East Broadway where it crosses under the Manhattan Bridge, and only then did a different city emerge. We’d come into a narrow pocket on the edge of Chinatown, an immigrant neighborhood that sloped toward the river like it might never find its footing. Life down here was lived in the open. Drying clothes billowed from fire escapes. Asian men huddled over games passed down through centuries. Women watched or shuffled past, weighed down not by what they carried but something heavier—the hard slog of it all. It felt very far away.