American Subversive

by David Goodwillie

  The night before they left for New York, I braced myself and went out there. I had to see, just once, what we’d wrought. I knocked three times on the garage’s side door, then twice, then once, and said my name. I heard footsteps, and a moment later Keith opened the door. If he was surprised to see me, he didn’t let on. Instead, he moved aside and let me in. I saw it immediately: a silver metal suitcase, powerfully illuminated from above, lying open on a worktable in the center of the space. Keith turned and gazed at his luminous handiwork the way a new father might stare at his infant child—in awe of his own creation.

  Wish you could come with us, he said.

  It was the first time I’d ever heard him lie.

  A few hours later, the suitcase strapped carefully in place, I watched from the window as Keith and Lindsay pulled slowly out of the driveway. They’d been confident and upbeat to the last. Was it bravery? Was it bravado? Both, I thought, but mostly it was stubborn, unwavering belief. Admirable, dangerous belief. For some time I stood there, looking at the place where their car had last been, wondering what I should be feeling. Then I walked over to the desk and got back to work.

  There was plenty to do. For weeks, we’d been accumulating paperwork for the identities we’d be assuming after the Action. Our deceased-baby birth certificates had led to Social Security cards, passports, and driver’s licenses. Lindsay even had a library card. Now I needed to put the finishing touches on my backstory.

  Keith was Todd Anderson. Lindsay was Laura Bellamy. My new name was Isabel Clarke. A, B, C: it made the memorizing easier.

  The real Isabel Clarke had been born in a San Francisco hospital and never made it out. So I just pretended she had. In my version, she’d grown up in a split-level house in the Avenues north of Golden Gate Park. Middle-class upbringing, then a few years of community college before the money ran out. She met a man and moved with him across the bay to Sausalito (a town I’d once visited and could describe if I had to), and when he disappeared one night without warning, she’d stayed there, kind of burrowed in. Isabel took graphic-design classes and started freelancing. She steered clear of relationships, had no kids, no terrible secrets or dynamic past—no reason in particular to show up in a Google search. I imagined her living a quiet, sunny life of coffee shops, yoga classes, and weekend jaunts into the city. Then something happened. She picked up and moved East. To Vermont. It was ennui, I decided: the fading gloss of the California dream. But the reasons hardly mattered. What did was the paperwork, and now I had it. Isabel Clarke officially existed. Again.

  All that was the hard part. The physical change would be far less daunting, even fun. Or so I thought. It made no sense to go blond—my roots would show within days—so I focused on style and length. For years, my hair had cascaded haphazardly down past my shoulders. Now, though, I cut it almost tomboy short in the bathroom mirror (though I kept the sweeping bangs to cover my eyes). As a finishing touch, I dyed it a few cautious shades lighter—dark chocolate to something milkier.

  When I’d finished cleaning the sink, I went downstairs and opened a beer. Keith and Lindsay would be walking into that Chinatown apartment soon, where they’d spend a few restless hours going over the details of the Action one last time. If it all went well, the bomb would be planted by early evening and set to go off six hours later, when the upper floors of the building were empty. Soon thereafter, the two of them would come tearing back into the driveway, full of adrenaline and the rush of the world between their ears. A long night lay ahead so I tried to sleep a few hours, but it was no use. Instead I read and played solitaire. At some point, I moved over to the computer and started clicking on anything that might take my mind off things. Absurd celebrity scandals. Inane gossip blogs. The ceaseless chatter of a culture in decline.

  At 3:25 a.m., twenty minutes before detonation time, I opened the news sites—CNN, MSNBC, Fox, Drudge, NY1. For half an hour I clicked between them, refreshing the headlines every few seconds. It was silent all around me, yet it seemed I was at the center of a thousand moving pieces. A muted timer ticking in a utility closet. A car streaking home in the New England night. A city sleeping through its last minutes of peace. Everything lay before me like a giant puzzle that only I could put together. For the first time in my life, I knew exactly what was about to happen.

  MSNBC broke it. EXPLOSION ROCKS MIDTOWN BUILDING, FIRES RAGING, announced a large banner at the top of the page. It seemed, on the screen, like any another wretched headline, tragic but also far away, someone else’s horrific problem. I felt only numbness. MSNBC had it for six minutes before the torrent came. Words, audio, and finally shaky helicopter video. By 4:15 a.m., every network had someone live at the scene. For a while I couldn’t see much; it was raining in New York, and between that and the darkness and smoke, the building remained a shadowy background presence. But the story moved every which way. First it was Con Ed. Then it was Al Qaeda. Then no one had any idea who it was. I watched for any mention of casualties. We’d done everything we could think of to eliminate that possibility, but no plan was foolproof. A person sneaking around? An employee working late? A mistake, in other words. A victim. Of murder.

  That was the chance we took, the awful risk we lived with.

  As the smoke began clearing with the morning’s first light, the blast site became visible. Firemen were moving around inside; the reflective bands on their jackets flashed when the cameras zoomed in close. I studied the damage, what was gone, and still there. Because something seemed off. I stared past the color-coded alerts and terror advisories taking up so much of the screen, the endless updates and breaking developments. And then I knew. The hole in the building: it was on the fifteenth floor.

  Indigo’s offices were on fourteen.

  I counted the floors of 660 Madison again and again as the camera panned out and almost missed a bleary-eyed reporter confirm what I’d been waiting to hear: no one had died or even been injured. I leaned back and exhaled, and right on cue, a car turned into the driveway. It was them. Keith parked out of sight of the road, and together they came bounding up to the house, beaming like newlyweds. I greeted them at the door.

  Are you guys clean? I asked.

  Spotless, Lindsay answered. I got in and out, no problem.

  Keith hurried to the laptop. Have they mentioned Indigo yet?

  No, I said. They keep talking about Barneys, as if it takes up the whole building.

  They’ll figure it out.

  Well, that’s the thing, I said, looking from Keith to Lindsay and back again. I’m not sure, but I think we might have a problem.

  It’s always the smallest detail. The busted brake light. The earring left under the pillow. Or the simple fact that many buildings don’t have thirteenth floors. Lindsay made the mistake, but any of us could have caught it.

  I put on coffee and the three of us sat down to work through what had gone wrong. A dark stairwell, a small-beamed flashlight, the mask she was wearing. Lindsay had counted the flights in her head, she told us, because there were no floor numbers next to the exit doors (I couldn’t remember if that was true).

  I went to the computer and began searching the building’s online rental records. It didn’t take long.

  It looks like the office we hit is some kind of fashion showroom, I said.

  Was, Keith said.

  Was.

  Well, there’s nothing we can do now, he said, but wait for someone to make the connection. The thing exploded directly above Indigo. They’ll have sustained a lot of damage, too, and plenty of people will be sniffing around. I’m not that worried.

  Then should we open the champagne we bought? Lindsay asked.

  Sure, Keith said.

  By the way, Lindsay added, turning to me. I like your hair. I meant to tell you.

  And so we drank champagne while New York City smoldered. While mothers watched television and held their children close. While the government increased its threat level and a president vowed revenge. At some point on that Sunday morn
ing, the rain reached us. Lindsay went outside and held her arms wide as it soaked her through. Keith joined her. They clinked glasses and he spun her around. Then, without hesitating, he looked through the sliding-glass door and beckoned to me. I couldn’t tell if he was sincere, but I needed to believe he was. We would be three or we would be none, and so I walked outside and raised my glass to theirs.

  I told you, Keith said.

  What?

  That we could do this.

  I always believed you.

  And the bomb, it went off without a hitch. The timer, the wiring, everything worked perfectly. Did you see the hole in the building? It was really . . . beautiful.

  He wiped the rain from his face and drank straight from the bottle, his last word still hanging in the heavy air. It sounded familiar. And then I knew. Keith had gazed into the woods on the Merritt Parkway and said the same thing.

  Nature and violence and a man who found beauty in both.

  This, then, was the point of no return. We were violent criminals now, enemies of the state (even if the state didn’t yet know it). When Keith and Lindsay finally went to bed, I stayed on the deck to watch the day creep in. The woods had come alive after the rains, and I tried to hitch the moment to a happier memory. But the past seemed unreachable. I couldn’t find Bobby, couldn’t see his face. Only then did the full gravity of what we’d done hit me. It hit me so hard I sat down against the side of that soaking house and started shaking.

  AIDAN

  MY MOTHER COOKED BREAKFAST AND WE ATE TOGETHER AT THE KITCHEN table. Bacon and eggs and lots of coffee. I wasn’t much for a.m. chitchat, so she did the honors, catching me up on her summer—volunteer work, travel plans, news of family friends. She seemed content. She’d navigated middle age so gracefully. How old was she? Sixty-one or sixty-two. The perfect time to find happiness, I thought. I was anxious to hit the road, but shrugged off my more petulant self and stayed awhile and listened and afterward was glad I did.

  I left around 10:30 a.m. Simon’s van was in the driveway, and I thought of him, back there in the barn, trying to shape the unshapable. Maybe he’d be a good man to talk to about Paige Roderick. But what could a sculptor tell me about a terrorist? No, Touché had made me gun-shy. This was my story for now. I climbed into my mother’s Subaru and pointed it north.

  The New York Thruway on that heat-choked Sunday morning was eerily empty. The radio offered only church sermons and right-wing talk shows, and when I could no longer tell them apart, I started sifting through my mother’s ancient CDs—Anne Murray, Dan Fogelberg, Loggins & Messina, some bizarre-looking duo named the Captain & Tennille. I settled on Gordon Lightfoot.

  I didn’t have a plan, exactly, but I didn’t care. I was exhilarated; no more planes or trains. The simple act of driving seemed fresh and exotic, even if the route was familiar—that straight shot up the spine of New York State, then winding back roads into Vermont. We used to make the trip half a dozen times every winter when I was kid. We’d set off from the city late on a Friday afternoon, my mother packing the station wagon, then swinging down to Midtown, where my father, waiting impatiently on some predetermined street corner, would hop behind the wheel and proceed to take his latest, greatest shortcut out of Manhattan. From there it was a race against the coming night, a bulky radar detector our only ally, Dylan and Johnny Cash our only friends.

  Now, as then, I stopped for a quick bite in Glens Falls, then took Route 4 east toward the state line. Nothing had changed. The towns—Fort Anne, Whitehall—dated back to the Revolutionary War and had suffered through any number of American booms and busts—railroads, industry, farming, tourism. As a child I’d been whisked past their empty storefronts under cover of night, but now, unsheathed in daylight, they appeared beyond redemption or repair. I shivered as I drove past the maximum-security Comstock Prison—now the Great Meadow Correctional Facility—lording over a nearby hillside like an ominous warning.

  The landscape changed as I crossed into Vermont. Dead fields came to life in flourishes of color. Small towns bustled with people. The Mad River Valley was tucked away in the Green Mountains, two-thirds of the way up the state. It was a near mystical place of steep slopes and steady snows and, better still, was tough to get to, a fact of geography that kept the worst of the weekend ski warriors away (their caravans stopped at Stratton and Killington—the full-service resorts farther south). The Subaru ground its way up the Lincoln Gap and coasted down the other side, past boarded-up inns and alpine lodges, then Mad River Glen, its legendary single chairlift hibernating in the heat. But the valley’s workhorse was Sugarbush, and through the trees I could catch glimpses of its crisscrossing trails hanging high above the valley. It was one of the largest ski areas in the East, and for a time, in the 1960s, the most glamorous. They called it Mascara Mountain back then, in tribute to the wealthy New Yorkers who journeyed up in booze-filled buses for long weekends of excess on- and off-piste. Soon, though, the in-crowds moved on—to the Rockies, the Bugaboos, the Alps—and the Mad River Valley never quite recovered (which explains why my young, cash-strapped parents, and later, their college-aged son, could afford to ski there).

  I’d never seen the valley in summer, the thousand shades of green and the overgrown nearness of it all. I passed an ancient lumber mill, crossed a small bridge, and found myself at the intersection of Routes 17 and 100. To my left was the village of Waitsfield, but I’d save that for later. I needed a place to stay, so I turned right and a mile down the road spotted a cluster of weathered cabins spread among a grove of trees. The Mad Mountain Motel. I turned into the driveway and parked in the near-empty lot.

  I rang the counter bell once, then again, and finally a petite woman well into her seventies appeared through a side door. I asked for something cheap and quiet.

  “All the same price,” she rasped. “Up here for the fair?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The livestock fair. Best in the state.”

  I nodded, not sure what to say, then handed her my credit card. She ran it through an old machine.

  “Cabin six,” she said. “Last one on the left.”

  She gave me a key along with my card, and I shouldered my bag and took off on foot. Cabin six was on the edge of the property, a good thirty yards beyond its closest neighbor. It was a glorified wood hut, the inside all brown—even the bedspread. There were no glass windows, just screens with shutters, but they wrapped around three sides and kept the cabin from being too gloomy. No air conditioner either, so I opened everything up including the back door. I stepped outside, but there wasn’t much to see—just a gravel path that led past a forlorn flower bed and disappeared into the base of a hill.

  Now what? I sat on the corner of the lumpy bed and considered my options. I felt like Paige was close. Like I was close. Yet the valley spread out for miles in every direction. And so I would, too. I showered under a lukewarm trickle and changed into the nicer of my two shirts. I thought about calling Cressida again, but drove into town instead. It was almost 5 p.m.

  Waitsfield had shrunk since my college days, but the supermarket was still there, anchoring the modest strip mall along Route 100. It had been years since I’d been to a real grocery store (I bought my food at delis), and I weaved around kids and shopping carts in a state of bewilderment. This must be where she shops, I kept thinking. I imagined her darting down the aisles in a baseball cap and sunglasses, like a celebrity or a battered wife, then keeping her head down as she paid in cash. When I reached the checkout line, I realized I’d accumulated only potato chips and a couple of bottles of red wine (there was no fridge in the cabin for beer). Two lanes were open, two cashiers: an almost anorexic-looking blond woman about my age, and a ruddy-cheeked young man so full of overachieving spirit (he kept scanning items so fast they didn’t register) he must have been angling for management. I got in his line.

  “Having a party?” he asked, when it was my turn. He smiled and ran the bottles through until they caught. “There’s a liquor store
down the road if you’re looking for the hard stuff. We can’t sell it. State law.”

  “How’d you know I’m not local?”

  “Small town in summer,” he said, as I gave him a twenty.

  “Well, speaking of that . . .” I reached into my pocket and produced a copy of the Barneys photo I’d printed out back in New York. “You don’t know a girl named Paige Roderick, do you? She’s an old friend of mine, and I heard she was living around here.”

  He studied the photograph closely, then gave me my change and looked again.

  “Can’t see her face too well,” he said. “But still, I’d remember someone like that. If you really think she’s in the valley, try a bar down the road called the Purple Moon. It’s where everyone goes.”

  “I will. Thanks.” He handed back the picture and I began walking out, but something didn’t feel right. I turned around, wondering if I’d forgotten a bag, but I had everything, and the kid was already busy with the next customer.

  The only thing to do was go door-to-door. The hardware store, the Internet café, the Ski & Sports Warehouse where the stoner behind the counter stared at the photograph as if he might know something, then looked up and said, “Sorry, dude, haven’t seen her. But she looks pretty hot.” I tried the shopping center across the street. Pharmacy, toy store, real estate office. And then the bookstore. It was the only other place I could imagine her—leafing through the earnest musings of Señor Guevara.