American Subversive

by David Goodwillie

  This was how I passed the time, with pointless games of what-if. The rest was too much to contemplate. All that had happened and still might. Movement was important, the simple act of driving. And so was the luxury of a destination. Because I knew where I was going. I’d looked up Weehawken Street before I left, and on the screen, from above, it had looked like a rotting alley, a dilapidated wharf slum that had, for whatever reason, fallen through the cracks of the sprouting metropolis. Did he really live there? And did he live alone? Every question raised a dozen more, each more troubling, more menacing, than the last. But I no longer cared. This was my only real option. If you could even call it that.

  So breathe. Roll the window down. The air was cooler now; it carried remedies and resolutions. I turned on the radio—not NPR or the news, but music, an indie station out of Amherst. I didn’t know the bands, but I’d never really known the bands. What was the point? They came and went so fast, you could spend a lifetime trying to keep up.

  Two more hours to the bridge, then a straight shot down the West Side. I remembered a massive parking complex on a pier near Houston Street, an archaic structure with a ceiling that leaked greenish ooze (I’d borrowed an old coworker’s car one weekend, years ago, and this was where she’d stored it). It was a sinister place, but now it might be a godsend if it still existed. I could park in some distant corner, then remove the license plates and scratch off the VIN inside the driver’s door (it would be weeks, maybe months, before someone called a tow truck or the cops). Then I’d throw the hard drive into the Hudson, clean myself up, and walk over to Weehawken Street.

  What would Aidan Cole say? Would it all end there, on that desolate block, with a curbside confrontation? Or would he invite me upstairs, then barricade me in? Behind the wheel, I felt for the knife in my pocket. It was a switchblade, but that was better than nothing. It was only a deterrent anyway. I would never use it, could nev

  I just . . . theres a man outside thewindow where I’m writing thi

  SOM EONES HERE . .

  AIDAN

  THERE HAD BEEN AN UPRISING OF SORTS, A GROUP OF PROMINENT ROORBACK commenters who’d banded together to admonish—or should I say abuse—me for what they perceived as a serious dip in the quality, and quantity, of my recent posts. For a while I’d ignored them, but their comments only grew more vocal, so I changed course and announced one morning that the battle had been joined. I fought back hard, railing against the most earnest and insipid among them, then “executing” the worst offenders by revoking their participatory privileges. It raised everyone’s game. Dozens of pithy comments, mine included, now streamed down from every post, endless back-and-forths that often threatened, like some protracted David Foster Wallace footnote, to supersede the original text. Roorback was becoming an online cesspool, slowly draining and dangerously atrophic—except everyone was a little bit brilliant, what with the embedded literary allusions and clever turns of phrase, the meta-references and nuanced understanding of irony. To think all this energy was being wasted in the comments section of a low-culture blog. Or did that make us high-culture? Only one way to find out: throw the question to the wolves and let them chew on it awhile.

  Derrick, of course, loved the increased audience participation. It livened up the site, made it truly interactive. He’d figure a way to monetize the trend soon enough.

  “But they’re basically all complaining,” I told him, when he called late one Sunday afternoon to encourage me.

  “Good, play that up. The commotion, the noise. Let’s be rude and rile feathers.”

  “But if I spend all day fucking around with commenters, it’ll mean less original content,” I told him, glimpsing an opening.

  “Fine, the comments are funnier anyway.”

  I took this lying down. Quite literally. I was spread across the length of my thrift-store couch, laptop on lap, muted ball game on TV, monitoring comments and prewriting the next day’s posts. I’d promised my father I would drive up to help him celebrate his sixtieth birthday in Litchfield the following evening, and that meant getting the next day’s quota written and uploaded before I skipped town after lunch. I wasn’t worried; I’d found my blogging groove again. I’d been back from Vermont less than two weeks, but already my memories of Paige were beginning to falter. I’m not saying I was questioning events as they’d occurred, but what had occurred was so utterly bizarre that the whole thing seemed, well, unlikely, and never more so than at that moment, as I tried to proofread a paragraph while Derrick chattered away in my ear about Roorback’s upcoming redesign—more ad space, a broader platform, changing demographics. To think he’d almost fired me the day after my ill-advised visit to Cressida’s apartment, when Roorback.com had lain dormant for hours while I slept off a hangover that no pills or further poisons could remedy. Instead, he’d chosen to deliver a stern warning, and I had heeded it, fallen in line, gotten back to work. This was my life after all, like it or not.

  We were still on the phone when the buzzer rang.

  “Who’s that?” Derrick asked.

  “I don’t know. Chinese, probably.”

  “You’re ordering dinner? It’s only five thirty.”

  “Lunch,” I said. “I’ll call you back.” I hung up and walked over to the front door. I hadn’t ordered any food; I just couldn’t deal with Derrick. Who was this then? Cressida? No, she still wasn’t speaking to me. Touché? He never visited anyone; people came to him. Most likely, it was some other marginally employed friend dropping by because he was in the neighborhood and knew I’d be home. It was the West Village, after all, and I was a blogger. Perfect prey for the Sunday drinker.

  I pressed the TALK button, said, “Hello?”

  There was no response. Maybe some derelict was trying to get into the foyer for a nap. Things like that still happened on Weehawken Street. Everything did. I sat back down on the couch and reached for my laptop.

  The buzzer sounded again. Shrill and insistent. I marched back over to the door. “What?” I snapped into the box on the wall.

  Nothing.

  “Who is this?”

  No answer.

  I went to the window and opened it. Leaning out as far as I could, I scanned the street below. The sidewalks were deserted. With the exception of two men loitering near the back door of the old Badlands Video store—and as shady as they looked, they were too far away to be the culprits—the entire block was empty. Maybe the buzzer was screwed up.

  I fell back onto the couch. I had more blog posts to write, and I needed to call Derrick back, but the Mets bullpen had loaded the bases and my phone was vibrating with texts concerning the evening’s usual palimpsest of parties and get-togethers. I was thinking of heading to Brooklyn for a night of barhopping on Smith Street with some blogger friends. It was cheaper on that side of the river, and the girls, all ink and dye, more alluringly unique—

  The buzzer, again! Louder still, and longer. That’s it! I sprang up and out the door, took the steps three at a time, and was downstairs in fifteen seconds. I charged through the security door and the front door, and then I was outside, gazing upon exactly the same scene I’d just observed from the window. No one was around. Even the Badlands duo were gone. What the fuck? I put my hands on my hips and looked up at the sky. It was a cool, clear early-autumn day, and the sun was lingering mercifully over New Jersey, as if the state might need the extra light.

  When I looked back down I saw her. She was leaning against the side of the long-abandoned gay bar across the street, a small duffel bag strewn over her shoulder, wearing skinny jeans and a snug V-neck T-shirt, and in that way that frivolous thoughts often precede important ones, I marveled at her chameleon existence, altering to fit every new environment. And then I realized what this meant, that none of this was over, and the thought paralyzed me. On some subconscious level I’d assumed that I was in control: if I didn’t write about Paige Roderick, she would slowly fade out of existence. But here she was, casually crossing toward me. As if she lived here, t
oo.

  “Are you alone?” she asked, when she reached the sidewalk.

  I looked around.

  “Upstairs, I mean.”

  “Yes.”

  “No roommates?”

  “It’s a studio.”

  “What floor?”

  “The top.”

  “There any other way out?”

  “The roof, but the emergency exit door’s been locked for years.”

  She considered this for a moment, distastefully.

  “Also, hello,” I said, coming around. “How are you? Nice to see you again.”

  She ignored me. “If I come up, how do I know you won’t call the cops?”

  “I might if you keep asking me that question.”

  Paige smiled, but so slightly that if I hadn’t been staring at her, I would have missed it. I was still astonished, and not at all certain this wasn’t some kind of setup. But that didn’t make sense. Nothing did.

  “I’ll follow you inside,” she said, looking down the empty block.

  I could have said no, of course, could have turned around, run upstairs, and called the police. But looking back on it, I don’t think that even crossed my mind. Instead, I was thinking we had to get off the street, get somewhere safe, and if that meant my apartment, then fine. What were my motivations? I could tell you they were pure or impure, but they were neither. I was only reacting. I was scared.

  So in she came, trailing behind me up the stairwell, her vintage Converse high-tops so quiet that twice I turned around to make sure she was still there. At my front door she paused, steeling herself to cross the threshold, relinquish a degree of control. “It’s okay,” I said, trying to sound reassuring. She stepped inside and the door closed behind her.

  We stood there awkwardly. Ten minutes earlier I’d been monitoring a commenter debate over which Jonas brother was more likely to end up in rehab, and now . . .

  “Here, sit,” I said, gesturing at the couch.

  “I’m fine.” She was still near the door. I had no idea what to do. I almost wanted to put on music, open some wine, make small talk—the reflex of so many bachelor years in New York, to make the girl comfortable, set her at ease: keep her there. I was disconcerted, and not, initially, by the many questions and complexities surrounding her sudden appearance, but, again, by the simple fact of her beauty. It was entrancing. Her deep brown eyes flitted about the apartment, taking in each poorly painted wall, glancing into dusty corners, then up at my sleeping loft. Watching her, I thought I saw a trace of desperation, and all at once I realized the trouble she must be in. To be coming here. To me.

  “Do you want some water or something?”

  She didn’t respond. She was still scanning the room, and I turned away to let her judge me in privacy. It didn’t take long, and I can only imagine the conclusions she reached—the ball game still on, the laptop surrounded by tortilla chips and cheap magazines, old newspapers stacked on an old chair, and the absurdly small bookshelf lacking in anything substan—

  “I’m not sure how to do this,” she said. “How to talk to you.”

  “About what?” I asked dumbly.

  “I need you to do something. But first I need to know why. I just . . . it doesn’t make sense. You ardently pursue me, and then, when you’ve actually tracked me down, you don’t go public or tell the cops. Do you know the trouble you could be in? What if the Feds came crashing through your door and found us here together? What if I’d been tailed or something?”

  “Were you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “How do you know?”

  Paige walked over to the counter that separated my small kitchen from the rest of the space (such as it was). She pulled out a bar stool and balanced against it.

  “Twenty-five years,” she said. “Minimum. That’s the punishment for harboring a suspected terrorist.”

  “Are you trying to scare me?”

  “Yes.”

  “But I don’t even know what you did.”

  “That’s not what you said back at the fair.”

  “I was bluffing.”

  I came over and took a seat on the only other stool. It was almost like we were flirting, neither of us sure how to get past preliminaries to the substance of the situation. The horrible enormity of it. It must sound strange, I know, but Paige’s involvement in the bombing never seemed less likely than at that moment, when she was closest.

  “Tell me why you came here,” I said.

  “Do you smoke?”

  “Not really. I don’t have any, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Okay then, a beer?”

  “Sure.”

  I walked around the counter and opened the fridge. Several Miller Lites lay strewn across the bottom shelf. I grabbed two, twisted off their caps, and slid one across the cheap Formica. I almost said Cheers, then thought better of it.

  “So tell me,” I tried again. I was still in the kitchen, the counter between us.

  She took a long sip, like a sip in a commercial, and when she put the bottle down, she pushed her long bangs to the side of her face. “A lack of better options, I guess.”

  “That’s the name of a friend of mine’s band. But with a the. The Lack of Better Options.”

  “Cute,” she said.

  “Do you live here, in New York, in more . . . um . . . normal circumstances?”

  “No. I did, once.”

  “What part of town?”

  “Seriously? That’s what you want to know?”

  “I’m just making conversation. You’re not exactly chatty.”

  She exhaled audibly, then swiveled on the stool and faced me head-on. “Okay. Listen carefully. I’m going to tell you what I know about the bombing, and I want you to break the story on Roorback.”

  “What?”

  “I want you to expose me. Expose the entire operation.”

  “But that would be suicide.”

  “Perhaps, but if you don’t . . . well, if you don’t, it’ll get much worse.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s another bomb,” she said, in the same even tone that an ex-girlfriend had once used to tell me she was pregnant. “And this one . . . I need to stop it, stop them.”

  “Your compatriots?”

  “They were, yes.”

  “And you, what, grew a conscience? Lost your nerve? Found the Lord?”

  Paige smiled introspectively. “You make it all sound like a whim, a little phase. Tell me, Aidan—it is Aidan, right?—when was the last time you believed in something?”

  “I believed you were real, and then I chased you across New England.”

  She sighed. I waited. “I’m sorry, you’re right. I didn’t mean to sound accusatory. It’s just that . . .” She cleared her throat. “We were talking about the bomb. The next one. It’s supposed to go off this coming Saturday night. If I tell you what I know, will you post it?”

  “Why the sudden reversal?”

  “Because this one’s designed to kill.”

  We took things slowly. Information. Revelation. She was backing off a precipice and hadn’t yet found solid ground. A place to rest. I turned off the TV and tried to tidy up on the fly, cursing myself for having no candles or aromatic anythings. It was such a guy’s place, but she didn’t seem to notice. When I finally sat down on the couch, she moved there, too, taking a seat at the far end so as to keep the space between us—the worlds between us—intact.

  “Is it always so noisy?” she asked, looking out through the open window. The sky was darker now and empty over the river.

  “I guess. With the highway and all. I can close the window.”

  “No, it’s fine. I’m just not used to it anymore.”

  “Talk about not used to things. You should have seen me in Vermont, this cabin I had back in the woods.”

  “I did,” she said.

  She grinned, but it was cursory. She was already someplace else. I waited, and when she started to speak, I d
idn’t interrupt. Her story began in North Carolina, with a ragtag group of environmental activists, then migrated north. She spoke in short bursts—Keith and Lindsay; targets and Actions—and it sounded, from her lips, like a logical progression of events. Until you placed them in a larger context. Until you actually realized what she was talking about, trying to accomplish: awaken a country by violently exposing its sinister soul. It was beyond the realm of rational human behavior. Yet she seemed, as she recounted her exploits, far saner than most people I knew. As for the bombing itself? However despicable the method, it was hard to argue with the results. America was now keenly attuned to Indigo’s sins. The way Paige and her cohorts had played the press was brilliant, and for an unsettling moment, I glimpsed common ground between us—that deep and abiding distrust of the media. But, Jesus, the ways we’d gone about addressing it!

  Paige began to relax. She settled into the cushions, accepted some chips and salsa. And she kept talking, unburdening herself: Internet protocols, dynamite runs, fake identities. She explained the growing rift between her and the others, the human toll of so much pressure. Then she told me about the shrapnel-sprinkled bomb. And what it was meant for. She stiffened, bracing as if for judgment. But she already knew what I thought. My open mouth, my visible shock, said it all.

  She’d arrived back at the reason she’d come: the Roorback exposé. It was the only way she could stop the next Action without turning herself in.

  “I want you to write the truth about everything,” she said, “except for this—my being here. Tell them you got the information out of me up in Vermont and have spent the intervening time trying to confirm the details. And one more thing: don’t post the story for at least twenty-four hours. I need a head start.”