American Subversive

by David Goodwillie

Here they were, a generation later, the sideshow performers of my youth. The acts were different, the grotesque faces new, but their calls and come-ons were the same. And they still haunted me. I followed Aidan Cole down the midway as memories of Bobby and the Mountain Man came rushing back. My brother often broke my train of thought, but the moment was too critical and I fought hard to stay in the present.

  What was Aidan doing? For one thing, he didn’t seem to be looking for me. Maybe he’d given up and come to enjoy the fair: a good walk, some fresh air before heading back to New York. He sauntered along, absorbing the atmosphere, like a man taking his first steps in a new city. The situation seemed so improbable. He appeared completely unthreatening, and yet he radiated danger, veritably pulsed with it. I came up close behind him as he stopped to watch a little boy shoot baskets. A crowd had formed, offering distraction, providing protection. The safety of large numbers. This was the moment, and I tried to block out the risk. Exposure, capture, the end of everything. I could still turn around, retreat to the house and tell Keith we’d been made. We’d be free and clean in half an hour, no prints, no traces. Just pack up the new bomb and move on—another house, another garage. I knew how Keith worked; he gave himself options. We’d vanish into the heart of the country we were trying to expose, trying to save. But I couldn’t turn around now. I had to know who this man was, this bridge between my lives. Because I thought I’d burned them all.

  I grabbed his arm and he didn’t pull away. He was understandably astonished, yet he made no move toward—or from—me. I’d been ready to run, but as he stood there groping for words, I knew I wouldn’t have to. He was no cop, no agent, no bounty hunter. There was nothing hard about him. His eyes were deep and blue in the sunlight, his wavy, brown hair too wild for Wall Street, too tame for the arts. His clothes—the jeans, the shirt, the hip sneakers—were slightly less than a statement. He was ruggedly handsome, but seemed uneasy in the outdoors; athletic having never played a sport; well-groomed without relying on products. I wondered what worlds he orbited, what scenes he slinked around. Then I wondered if anything truly terrible had ever happened to him. Because it didn’t look like it.

  Fucking say something, I told him.

  I was angry. Everything was flooding back now, a decade of witnessed indifference, the selfish manifest destiny of a generation I’d failed to fit into. And so I’d chosen this other way, this contrarian antilife. Now this, too, was being threatened.

  When he finally opened his mouth, he said my name and I almost broke. I hadn’t heard it from a stranger in so long. When I knew he wouldn’t run—he was as interested in me as I was in him—I led him through the crowds toward the back of the fairgrounds. It would be safer there, past the animals, past the people. I found a place near the sprawling carny camp, where I could escape if I had to.

  But he proved easier than I thought. He talked right away—a convoluted story about some vague, anonymous e-mails he claimed to have received that connected me to the bombing. By name, by photograph. All this work, these months of planning, of methodical calculation and attention to every detail, and some blogger (for that’s what he said he was, a professional blogger) with too much time on his hands finds me in three days. Through my parents, no less! I didn’t believe him. He had that city sheen, acquired over years of small talk around small tables; he was all practice and polish, and it was impossible to see underneath to where his motives might lie. But when I pushed him, he pushed back, said he’d have gone to the cops already if that was his intention. And when I mentioned blackmail, he looked almost disappointed, as if I’d let him down. The timing, though: it didn’t make sense. Whoever sent the e-mails claimed we’d bombed the wrong floor several days before that fact came to light—and then only as a theory—in the Times.

  And still I was fine until he showed me the photograph. It was no random picture, no casual crowd shot. It was a close-up of me, crossing Madison Avenue after walking out of Barneys that day. Who could have taken it? Who knew I was there? These were questions I couldn’t begin to answer. And didn’t want to.

  For there was only one answer. And it was as unacceptable as it was implausible.

  People were pouring out of nearby tents. Sure, there was safety in numbers, unless you no longer trusted anyone. Unless you found yourself all alone.

  Which is when I ran.

  AIDAN

  FOR YEARS I’D LEAVE NEW YORK, AND WITHIN A DAY OR TWO, NO MATTER where I was, I’d start craving all I’d left behind. There was a velocity to the city, a careening inevitability that became addictive. Everyone I knew felt it—the great rush of plans and possibilities—and we lived accordingly. What was it exactly? It was everything vibrating at once: streets and restaurants and parties and clothes and lofts and stores and cabs and subways and, of course, people—the native, the foreign, the old, and the young, everywhere the young, a never-ending spectacle of fresh faces and lithe bodies to befriend and despise, to love and to leave. And at some point it was all supposed to slow down, ease up, as our younger selves gave way to commitment and responsibility. But that had yet to happen. We all kept running around. As the music changed and films came and went. As skirts got longer and then shorter. As places opened and closed and opened again. Some of us turned thirty. Some forty. And if the money never quite came—never enough, anyway—no one truly seemed to care.

  But three nights on the road and I didn’t miss anyone, or anything. Not Cressida or Touché. Not the wired world or the brick-and-mortar city. It was as if I’d finally left its gravitational pull, its far-reaching effects. But what to do now? I pondered the question all the way back to my mother’s house. She was cooking dinner when I pulled in, and she asked me to stay. But I just couldn’t. If I wasn’t longing for New York, I couldn’t hang out in Shady either. My mother’s life was so simple and safe. There she was, listening to NPR as she stirred pots and uncorked wine. And the rest of the cast was bound to show up sooner or later, ready for another one-sided debate about whatever graced the cover of the latest Utne Reader. The radical world had moved past these people, and I had glimpsed its new face, beautiful and troubling as it was. My mother called a cab to take me to the station. I had a few minutes, so I went looking for Simon. He was where he always was, in the barn, blowtorch in hand, frowning at a piece of steel. He raised his face mask when he saw me.

  “How’d everything go?” he asked. “You had good weather.”

  “Pretty good, yeah. It was hot.”

  He put the torch down and came over to shake my hand. “Staying the night?”

  “No, I have to get back.”

  “Sure,” he said, nodding, and I couldn’t tell how he meant it.

  “How’s my mother doing?”

  “Happy. I think she’s happy.”

  “Me, too. I mean, I think she is, too.” I was flustered. Every conversation with Simon went like this. Small talk and easy listening. And it was frustrating because I really respected the guy. I wanted him to take me seriously, and here we were discussing the weather. I didn’t pretend to know about his art or his family or his past, but I knew what he was like. I’d witnessed the quiet charisma, experienced the subtle charm, and I knew how strongly my mother felt about him—about his kindness (if not exactly his warmth) and obvious intellect. And I was sure he felt the same for her.

  Then it struck me again, the idea that I could talk to Simon, that I trusted him. Surely, somewhere in a past as vague and intriguing as his, he’d known people like Paige. Activists and worse. Maybe he could help me understand her mind-set, explain how a seemingly sane person could take her beliefs so far. If, indeed, that’s what she’d done. But, no, I’d just sound ridiculous; the whole affair was so improbable. Besides, Simon was an artist who lived in the woods and worked in a barn. He was almost completely disengaged from modern society. Wasn’t Paige the opposite?

  We said our good-byes then, and he slapped me on the back. “Take care,” he said, and I told him I would. When, partway across the lawn, I
looked back at the barn, he was staring at his steel plates again, hands on his hips, a puzzled look on his face.

  And so the city.

  It didn’t bode well for my relationship that when faced with work, friends, or lover, I chose lover last. Work meant money. And friends didn’t yell at me. I spent my first morning back in New York blogging. Derrick’s texts had turned menacing, all caps and explanation points. He’d filled in for two days, and the novelty had worn off. I knew how he felt. But it was my job, so I went back to it. I scoured the blogosphere, the news sites, and the daily papers, searching for anything I could run with. I posted my weekly wrap-up (though it was now Tuesday), a few celebrity sightings, and a semi-amusing commenter story about a lost weekend in Bushwick. Next, I scanned my in-box, but found nothing earth-shattering, nothing substantive . . . nothing from EmpiresFall. Who was I kidding? That’s what I was looking for. I couldn’t get away from it. From her. At 2:30 p.m., I stopped for lunch. Eight posts, three of them lazy links to other sites. I checked the stats: 53,723 unique visitors since 9 a.m. Numbers like that once buoyed my confidence; now they just sapped it. All those people, running out the clock in their barren little cubicles, looking for cheap laughs, idle gossip, anything they could repeat later over martinis and melting candles. I had a story for them. A tale that would blow those candles right out. And still, I didn’t write a word of it.

  Four more posts. I uploaded them and turned my laptop off. No standing by, no hibernating: off. I couldn’t think through that low hum. I turned the air off, too, and opened my windows to the late-afternoon stink of Weehawken Street. A yawning garbage truck. Car horns on the West Side Highway. The city, moment by moment, a place of tacit agreements, short-term leases, nonbinding contracts, instant gratification. And still nothing ever changed.

  I hadn’t thought it through this far. Past finding her, I mean. If I wasn’t going to turn her in or expose her on Roorback, what exactly was I going to do? Share what I knew with a reporter? With Cressida? Or keep digging myself? But where should I start? The story had run its course. I’d found her, then let her get away, and I didn’t even know why. So I did what I always did in a bind: I texted Touché. He was involved in this, too, whether he liked it or not. When he promptly called back (he thought texting was for teenagers) and invited me over, I put on my sneakers and left right away.

  Dusk set in as I made my way to Washington Square. It had been some time since I’d been to Touché’s apartment, but the splendid routine was the same. Ellis, the ageless doorman, called upstairs, then led me across to the gated elevator (“the first residential model Otis ever made”). He ushered me in, turned the key, and a minute later—a minute filled with seamless urban small talk—he threw the gate open with a flourish and I stepped into the Touché family “pied-à-terre.”

  “Vodka or gin?” came a familiar voice from somewhere up ahead.

  “Vodka!”

  “Ah, yes, of course. Americans don’t drink gin anymore.”

  “You’re American, too,” I called out, following the voice toward the kitchen.

  “Don’t remind me,” he said, as ice fell into glasses. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

  I wandered into the living room and over to a circular oak table that in some earlier time had hosted Santo Touché’s legendary card games. Now, it hosted his son’s decidedly less glamorous computer setup. Normally a free moment and a Wi-Fi connection would have me tapping my way online, but now I stared at the screen with the kind of seething animosity we save for those people and objects that come to control our lives against our will or better judgment.

  Touché shouldered his way through the swinging door, drinks in hand, and laughed when he saw me hovering over the monitor. “Going through withdrawal?”

  “Shakes and hallucinations.”

  I took the drink he proffered and we clinked glasses—Fishers Island tumblers.

  “You and your virtual world,” Touché said. “A man cannot exist in two realms at once, remember.” He sank into the nearest leather armchair. I made my way to the adjacent couch.

  “You love your aphorisms, don’t you? Whose is that? Let me guess: your fellow countryman Márquez.”

  “You think everything must come from somewhere else.”

  “It’s called history.”

  “An American giving history lessons.” Touché took a sip of his drink and crossed his legs. “Márquez, by the way, is Colombian.”

  This is what we did—parried around the important subjects of our lives like fencers. Like friends. We spent years waiting for something exciting to happen, and when we suddenly found ourselves at the center of a major story, it took us three drinks apiece to bring it up. It was as if the very mention of Paige Roderick, or the mind-numbing possibilities she represented, might shatter the facade of small lies and exaggerations we’d constructed around our own lives so as to give them meaning.

  This, at least, is what I was feeling. Touché was feeling something else. He was talking about a theater actress he’d met, a flaxen-haired thespian named Brontë or Briony or some such, whom he’d just seen in the new Alan Bennett play on Minetta Lane, and how afterward they’d strolled down to Da Silvano for a late-night bite and a bottle of Barolo, and wasn’t it perfect when pretty girls lived up to their savory names—

  “I found Paige.”

  My friend sat up in his chair. “I thought as much.”

  “Do you want to know about it?”

  “Have you told anyone else? Have you told Cressida?”

  “No.”

  Touché frowned at his glass. “I suppose I know too much not to know the rest.”

  “Can I trust you?”

  “Aidan.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “Well, you needn’t.”

  “Because I don’t know what to do. That’s why I’ve come to . . . I could use some advice. She was involved, Julian. I talked to her.”

  “You what? She admitted to the bombing? Here, start from the beginning. From when I dropped you off at the ferry.”

  So I did. I told him what had happened, everything I knew or could surmise (except for what she looked like in person, because Touché could so easily be sidetracked), concluding with a careful rendering of the encounter at the fair.

  “Is that it?” Touché asked, when I’d finished, almost half an hour later. “That’s all she said? I wouldn’t call that a confession.”

  “Well, it sure was something. And, anyway, the point is that she exists. I tracked her down. Actually, she tracked me down. Which means she—or they—must have a whole system in place up there. Lookouts, infiltrators . . .”

  “I still think it may be a joke, a . . . how do you say . . .”

  “Prank?”

  “Yes.”

  “But who would try to pull something like this? And why?”

  “Because it doesn’t make sense any other way,” Touché said. “Seriously, what are we talking about here? A beautiful woman, a beautiful American woman—young and smart and with every door open to her—becomes involved in an act of terror, in this time, in this country, and we—you and I—are the only two who know about it? Come on, Aidan. It’s not the way of things.”

  I didn’t answer. What was there to say?

  Touché stood up to refill our glasses (for the third time). I was getting drunk. Why was I there? What was it I wanted Touché to do, exactly, besides believe me? Maybe that was enough for now. No, it wasn’t enough. I needed his counsel because he of all people would understand the reactionary mind—its motives and machinations, its next moves. Touché was a product of political turmoil and the outmoded—or at least un-American—belief that a government could be toppled, a country overthrown. And if my friend could comprehend mass insurrection, he could certainly get his head around a young extremist with a fetish for violence. Or whatever the hell she was.

  He came back with the drinks.

  “So, she was beautiful?”

  “Yeah. I guess.”
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  “Like the photograph?”

  “Tell me something,” I said. “Why didn’t you come to Vermont?”

  “Aidan, I can’t spend my life flying friends up and down the East Coast. I had things I had to—”

  “Oh, bullshit. I wasn’t asking you to take me to some beach party in Bar Harbor. This was real and you knew it. You knew it back on Fishers when—”

  “So what if I did. Huh? You want the truth, Aidan? Here it is: this isn’t my business. And it’s not yours either. Of course I knew you might be onto something. But we’re not talking about an ordinary crime here. We’re talking about treason. Do you know what that is? Do you have any idea at all? It happens to be the only crime specifically mentioned in your precious Constitution, and you could be charged with it right now. I’m sorry, I hate to sound so dire but—”

  “Treason is an act against a government.”

  “A nation. Not a government. There’s a difference.”

  “Well, I’m not the one blowing up buildings, Julian.”

  “Yes, but apparently you know who is, and that’s just the same . . .” His voice trailed off. He took a sip of his drink and pushed his thick, dark hair off his forehead. “Let me tell you something now, and then we won’t speak of it again. It’s the story of my father’s best friend, Eduardo López. They grew up together, same private schools, same wealthy neighborhood. The López family owned textile factories and was very respected in Caracas. Soon, they became politically involved, as my family did—as every family did that had something to lose—and when Eduardo came of age, he was sent to school in America. Dartmouth, I believe. My father, as you know, was at Harvard. This was the fashion of the time. Now, of course, we’re sent to America out of necessity: it’s the one place Chávez can’t touch us. It was Eduardo López who introduced my father to my mother—at a regatta in Newport—and that’s an act not quickly forgotten where I’m from. Eduardo and my father remained the best of friends for a long time. Even after Chávez took over in ’98 and they grew apart politically.”