American Subversive

by David Goodwillie

  The bomb, which detonated at 3:45 a.m. in the studios of fashion designer Claudio Valencia, left a large hole in the side of the building and scattered debris over a two-block radius. No injuries or fatalities were reported.

  The New York City Police Department, which has been criticized for what many see as a stalled investigation, released a statement Friday calling Mr. Valencia a “victim of circumstance.” When asked late yesterday about Indigo Holdings, department spokesman Len Jacobs would not comment specifically, saying only that “the NYPD is actively investigating all leads.”

  Based in Washington, D.C., Indigo Holdings invests in corporations operating in the energy, aerospace, and defense industries. Many have contracts with the U.S. government in Iraq or Afghanistan. Since the Indigo Group is privately held, it is not required by law to report earnings and other financial information, and it is not clear how many people work in the company’s New York offices.

  “Certainly, Indigo fits the profile of a company that could be targeted in some kind of anti-West attack,” said Riley Cooper, a terrorism expert at the Rand Corporation. “They operate in the shadowy Golden Triangle where government, defense and corporate interests collide. Or, in their case, coincide.”

  Contacted by phone in Washington, an Indigo spokesman refused to comment on any aspect of this article.

  There are 32 companies listed in the lobby directory of 660 Madison Avenue, and Indigo Holdings is not among them. According to a building employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity, there is no sign outside their suite on the fourteenth floor. “It’s just like this known thing,” the employee said. “If there’s a package for Indigo . . . you call a number and they send someone down. They don’t like people coming upstairs.”

  One theory being discussed by officials involves a feature common to New York buildings, including 660 Madison Avenue: a missing thirteenth floor. “It is possible that someone climbing a stairwell at night could have miscounted the flights, thus believing the fifteenth floor was in actuality the fourteenth floor,” said the FBI source.

  The shopping wasn’t so good. The blowout sale was on the wrong floor. Oh my God. Reflexively, I took my phone out to call Derrick. Or Cressida. But then I took a deep breath and put it back in my pocket. I didn’t want them involved. Not yet.

  My plan was to switch trains in Yonkers and take the Adirondack line up to Rhinecliff. My mother hadn’t called back, which was mildly worrying, but cell phones weren’t her forte, and anyway, there’d be cabs at the station. I had second thoughts only once, waiting on the platform, the city so close I could feel it in the air. Home. It wasn’t too late to turn around, only a matter of changing tracks. The pointlessness of the pursuit no longer bothered me. The opposite did: the mounting evidence. Whatever had scared Touché away. But I stayed where I was, and when the train came I climbed aboard and immediately began feeling better. More sure of myself. Maybe it was the simple decision to do something.

  I couldn’t sleep and then I could, and when I opened my eyes again, the conductor was tapping my shoulder. The sun was lower. We were pulling into a station.

  “Don’t forget your bag,” the man was saying.

  “This is Rhinecliff?”

  “It is.”

  I hopped down and walked with a handful of others through the quaint stone station house. It was a wistful place, that room—what waiting room isn’t?—and our heels on the hard floor echoed back through decades of teary departures and solitary arrivals. Outside, three cabs were parked off to the side, their owners huddled nearby. One of them broke reluctantly off as I approached, and motioned toward his backseat.

  “Where to?”

  “A town called Shady,” I said. “Just past Woodstock.”

  “I know where it is.”

  He didn’t speak again, and that was fine; I was on a down cycle with cabs. We followed River Road along the Hudson, which was wide and tranquil this far north, as if catching its breath before the final run to the city and the sea. It was a grand landscape, everything manicured beyond perfection: the vast lawns behind split-rail fences, green even in the fading light; the mansions and horse fields on not-so-distant hillsides; and the old carriage barns by the road, paint peeling on purpose, rustic in that wealthy way. We took 199 across the river, skirted Kingston, and eventually picked up 28 at the base of the Catskills. The weekend estates of Dutchess County gave way to roadside enterprise—diners, gun shops, gas stations. We turned at the sign for Woodstock and wound into the hills, the night. I tried my mother again, and this time she picked up.

  “Aidan, where have you been?” she asked. I could hear noise in the background.

  “Did you get my message?”

  “No, did you leave one? You know me and those machines. They’re endlessly beeping.”

  “Then check them.”

  “I haven’t had time. I’ve got people over, a little party.”

  “Well, that’s why I’m calling. Do you have room for one more?”

  Shady was a small hamlet outside Woodstock, a patch of land between road signs. Its famous neighbor had seen ups and downs, renewals and revivals, attempts at tourism and campaigns against it, but Shady just plugged along in a timeless limbo that worked fine for my mother and her friends. If Woodstock, with its head shops and hemp boutiques, was a kind of hippie Disneyland (and it was: forty years after the concert—which actually took place an hour away in Bethel—they were still pouring in), the surrounding valley was a haven for the more sensible left, people who’d chosen a certain kind of life and stuck stubbornly to it while the rest of the country grew muscular and unrecognizable.

  My mother’s 1860s farmhouse near the base of Overlook Mountain was encircled by what had once been grazing fields. Now, though, the fields—clearings, really—were planted not with hay but strange monolithic sculptures of varying shapes and proportion, the work of my mother’s close friend Simon Krauss (yes, that Simon Krauss). Driving past them felt like entering some new dimension, and on cue the cabbie slowed down and stared at the looming objects in the twilight.

  “What the fuck?” he said.

  I paid the burgeoning art critic and watched him drive off. The top of my mother’s driveway looked like a used-Subaru dealership, the cars all dented and splattered with mud. I could see their owners through the dining-room window, eight people at a lively table, everyone happily talking and gesturing—a film with no sound, just before the plot takes off. My mother and Simon were seated at opposite ends of the table, monitoring the proceedings like lifeguards on a public beach. I opened the screen door and walked in, choosing to do so just as my mother disappeared into the kitchen. My sudden presence caused a chain reaction. A woman I’d never seen before gasped, and immediately six strangers turned around to face the intruder. Simon saved the moment.

  “Aidan,” he said, his voice low and reassuring. The congregation looked at him, then back at me.

  “Hey,” I said, waving to the room.

  “This is Susan’s son,” Simon continued, rising to come shake my hand.

  My mother walked back in, holding a bottle of wine. When she saw me, she made that face that mothers the world over make when a wayward child has returned home—joy mixed with a reflexive kind of worry. Mostly, though, it was joy. With the exception of two days at Christmas, I hadn’t seen her in more than a year. I just never felt comfortable with her upstate friends. They were relics of an era long past, preserved like rare animal bones and just as brittle. Even then, as Simon made introductions—my mother had hugged me and set off to find an extra chair—it seemed as if I were meeting the same person six different times, a person who’d retreated from some larger life to gain a voice in a smaller one, traded in the big ideas for a sense of diminished achievement. They combated globalization by drinking free-trade coffee, rescued the environment one energy-saving lightbulb at a time. Call it what you want—paring down, going local, dropping out—but I could never shake the feeling that such peace of mind came at the pri
ce of significance.

  I’d interrupted a debate concerning the development of the nearby Awosting Reserve, and as I settled in beside my mother, the talk began anew. It was a well-worn issue, marked by a decade of lawsuits and protests and bumper-sticker campaigns, and soon everyone was talking over one another, their separate voices rising in unison like some great classical crescendo. For they were all on the same side! I focused on the only two at the table who remained silent.

  My mother, ever the host, kept coming and going, clearing and replenishing. She’d never been able to sit still, and the constant movement had served her well. Her lean, handsome features glowed in the candlelight, and although she’d aged in the last few years—lines and veins were cropping up and out—she’d retained the energy of her city days. And the elegance, too. She wore blouses and fitted slacks, even a wrap dress now and then, but it was a subtle glamour, subdued, perhaps, so as not to upstage the various earth tones of her oft-sandaled guests.

  Beauty is beauty, in town or country, and Simon must have thought the same, for he watched my mother with wry bemusement as the racket around them grew with every refilled glass. His silence emanated a kind of authority, and after a while it seemed the guests were performing for his benefit. And awaiting his verdict. But I admired his reserve, as I admired him. Sure, he was famous—at least in art circles—but he was also a good friend to my mother, a partner of sorts, sometimes in love, increasingly in life. They’d been together, in their way, for years now.

  She likes to say their friendship started with a bang. Really, it was a screen door slamming shut. She had just moved to Shady—this was a decade ago—and boxes and artwork from the New York apartment sat stacked against the walls. As I recall, she was unpacking plates in the kitchen when she heard the noise, and rather than grab a knife or run out the back door, my mother, out of some misguided understanding of country life, waltzed into the front hall to see which friendly neighbor had brought over an apple pie or communist pamphlet. But the only thing the hulking man in the foyer had with him was a duffel bag. For Simon Krauss thought he’d just come home.

  Where he’d been and how long he’d been gone, I have no idea, but it must have been months, because Simon’s former landlord had put the house up for sale and my mother had bought it soon thereafter. Most of Simon’s shit had been moved to a storage unit, with the exception of a few industrial-size creations scattered across the property.

  Simon and my mother slowly pieced together this chain of events and, in the process, became fast friends. I can see the scene perfectly, my mother sitting this strange man down in the kitchen to announce that the steel monstrosities littering her lawn—for she couldn’t have known what they’d be worth, were worth—could stay, and furthermore, that he could work on them whenever he wanted. And that’s exactly what happened. Simon found a house down the road somewhere (I’ve still never been there) and worked out a deal to keep using the barn behind my mother’s house as his studio. I wonder how long it took her to figure out who he was. Certainly, Simon wouldn’t have let on, for he was a man of few words, and the one he used least of all was I.

  So who was he? A late bloomer, apparently. I’m guessing he was some kind of bohemian when he was younger. He’d traveled extensively, had lived all over the States—both coasts and a few places in the middle. Art came later, in his forties, and proved to be his calling. When my mother met him, he’d already made a name for himself as a disciple of Donald Judd’s and Richard Serra’s. These were men who dreamed in massive scale, who saw the earth as pliable, a natural canvas to be critiqued through addition, through change: great shapes and adjusted environments. In those early years, I’d drive down from Middlebury for a night and there he’d be in the barn out back, with a blowtorch and helmet, bending some enormous metal plate. The noise would be deafening, and still he could always sense my presence. Usually, he stopped whatever he was doing and grabbed two beers from a cooler he kept nearby.

  I came to like him a great deal. The artist in residence was good to my mother, became her confidant, her protector. It was never overtly physical. I’m guessing they had both tired of the traditional approach to relationships (I know my mother had), and this worked better, was less complicated. They came together by living apart.

  I watched them closely at the dinner table that night as their guests slowly talked themselves out. At some point my mother gave Simon a slight nod, and a moment later he weighed in on the debate at hand, at once lending it validity and bringing it to a close. He stood up and clapped his calloused hands together. There’d be more nights for talking. These were issues that would never end, people who would never let them.

  Buoyant with belief, tipsy with wine, the couples filed out to their Subarus, steeling themselves for the short, drunken drives home. In the doorway, the three of us waved awkwardly after them, aware, perhaps, of what we must have looked like in that sea of headlights—a kind of family.

  We settled into the living room with what was left in our glasses.

  “So I was thinking of heading up to Vermont for a day or two,” I said.

  “And you want a car?” my mother asked.

  “I guess. I mean, I could rent one.”

  “Don’t be silly. You can take mine. We have Simon’s van.”

  “You’re sure it’s okay?”

  “Of course, though I wish I’d had a bit more notice. I would have cleaned it.”

  “What’s going on in Vermont?” Simon asked.

  “Just visiting an old friend from school. You know, get out of the city.”

  “I see,” he said.

  “How is the city?” my mother inquired. “After that horrible bombing and everything?”

  “It was hardly 9/11,” I answered. “Although they can’t figure out who did it, which is slightly unnerving.”

  “What does your friend from the Times say?” my mother asked.

  “You mean Cressida?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ve been dating for more than a year, Mom. You should know her name.”

  “If you ever brought her up here, I might learn it.”

  “Well, we haven’t discussed it much. The bombing, I mean. It’s not really her beat.” I took a sip of wine and became aware of Simon watching me. Was I that bad a liar? I tried to change the subject.

  “Any new sculpt—”

  “How’s the blogging business?” he asked, talking over me, so that for a moment I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right. Was he joking? Simon didn’t even like computers. It was part of some larger philosophy he had about synthetic systems and their place in the natural world.

  “I’m not sure business is the right word,” I said, feeling suddenly defensive. “Though I guess it’s a paycheck.” My face was going flush.

  No one spoke for a while. Finally Simon got up and stretched. “Well, it’s good to see you,” he said, looking me in the eye. He shook my hand and kissed my mother. “I think it’s past my bedtime. Have a safe trip, Aidan. And say hello on your way back down.” With that, he took his keys and walked outside. The screen door banged shut behind him.

  “I should get that fixed one of these days,” my mother said.

  PAIGE

  IT WAS MIDNIGHT WHEN WE GOT BACK TO THE HOUSE. THE LIGHTS WERE OFF, but Lindsay had waited up, and she came running out to greet us. We were both exhausted (we’d driven back the same way we’d come down, Keith taciturn behind the wheel as I scribbled pages of notes, everything I’d seen and could remember), but we stayed up with her, recounting the trip and its seeming success. She looked ecstatic.

  Lindsay didn’t notice the change in Keith amid the excitement, but I did. He was wounded. We lived in a world of high symbolism, and Keith, who stood for so much, had been laid low by desire. A weak moment in the strongest of lives, though in truth, after three months I’d learned little more of his life—its facts and particulars—than what I’ve so far related. Of Lindsay’s, I’d learned even less. Yet, the three of us had grown
incredibly close. We could now anticipate each other’s thoughts so precisely that hours often passed without someone finding cause to speak. It was an incongruous situation—our intimate present, our mysterious pasts—the result of a need-to-know policy that placed our personal histories more or less off-limits. It was a simple matter of plausible deniability, and I kept telling myself it made sense. But I should have known better. In reality, I was the only one in the dark. Keith and Lindsay had been together for years.

  The days that followed—two weeks of them—were filled with endless detail and repetition. But we were focused. We each had our assignments and carried them out with a determination that bordered on competitive—who could do more with less sleep. It was Lindsay’s turn now: she and Keith would make the real run together while I stayed home to guard the house. It was the only way. Despite the precautions I’d taken in New York, my movements had no doubt been recorded on dozens of security cameras and surveillance systems—not just in Barneys, but in shops, on streets, everywhere. Lindsay was a fresh face, and she knew what she was doing. I spent hours filling her in on everything I’d seen and learned, everything, that is, except for what had happened—or hadn’t—between Keith and me in that dark room. She had enough to worry about.

  We went through the plan again and again, until the chain of events was so familiar we couldn’t imagine what might go wrong. This was all Keith, of course—it’s what he did best—and as he led us flawlessly through our final preparations, I did my best to put the incident on Market Street behind us. We were buoyant, driven, gripped by momentum. Most important, in those crucial days leading up to the bombing, we never once doubted what we were about to do—at least out loud. In truth, I thought about it constantly, obsessively. I was, by now, completely resolute in my rationale: Indigo was exactly the kind of target I’d envisioned going after when I agreed to join Keith. I found the company and its operations despicable, and it wasn’t difficult to connect their shadowy activities to the larger national narrative (to which my brother was a footnote). But no matter how strong my motivations, I still blanched at the bomb itself. I just couldn’t put the thing out of mind, and the cold, steely fact of it took a daily toll. I stayed away from the garage, and stopped asking Keith how things were progressing—the fuse tests and all that. Fairly well, I guess. We were still alive.