American Subversive
Page 34
I think about it all the time, the moment good intentions become something else, something less. Aidan and I were separated after Pittsburgh. It was the only way. We were all over the news, and traveling together had become impossible. We said good-bye at a truck stop—there is symmetry in life—just a few moments alone in a parking lot, one last embrace. We were aiming for stoicism and almost got there. Then it was time to move. Always, it was time to move.
I snuck out of that café in Columbus and never turned around. For weeks, I stayed in lodging houses and roadside motels. I took Greyhound buses and commuter trains, sleeping, when I slept, at an angle, away from the aisle. Paducah. Memphis. Fort Smith. I was riding the American backbone vaguely west, as if pulled, like countless millions before me, toward some mythical promised land. I had coded phone numbers in my pocket, lifelines I’d been given here and there, but after Ohio I felt safer on my own. Still, I knew it was only a matter of time. My face was everywhere, and I was cold and tired and broke.
One shivering morning, in Joplin, Missouri, I walked out of a foul, stinking YWCA and called a number in Chicago.
Another booth in another diner, this one just west of Gary, Indiana. He recognized me with unsettling ease. He was, I’d been told, one of the original Weathermen, and as I slid in across from him, I could tell right away that he’d known Simon. We ordered coffee. He called me Isabel, and for a few minutes we caught each other up on relatives we didn’t have. When he was satisfied I hadn’t been followed, he left a tip on the table and we walked out to his car. I half-expected him to tell me it was over, that I should turn myself in—as he once surely had—and hope for the best. Instead, he said I had options. There were other cities, other countries. We drove to his home in the southwestern suburbs of Chicago, and I took a shower and cleaned up. I told him a night of solid rest would be enough. Anything more, considering who he was, would be too dangerous. He said he understood.
We reconvened in his modest living room, over pasta and beer. I was wary, at first, of talking about what had happened, but I shouldn’t have been. He had more than a passing knowledge of recent events. He knew about Simon’s network, and the details of the Actions they’d carried out. He even knew about Columbus.
The man you saw outside the coffee shop was a Federal agent acting on a tip, my new friend said, but he somehow convinced your young handler that he was one of us—a member of the Movement sent by higher-ups to look after you.
You’re kidding, I said, momentarily shocked at how right my instincts had been.
I wish I were. But you, more than anyone, should know that we’re never safe. Our beliefs, our mistakes . . . they stay with us when all the rest fades away. Look at me. He raised his arms—exhibiting the extent of his small apartment, his compromised life, everything reduced by his past—and shook his head. Simon Krauss was the only person I’ve met who succeeded so thoroughly at being someone else, he said.
And there it was: Simon. The subject that could no longer be ignored. The awful irony of his death: the work of a laced bomb, like the town house forty years before. Wires crossed. Lines crossed.
I asked my host where Aidan was.
I have no idea, he said.
Is he all right?
And even if I did, I couldn’t talk about it.
Please. I need to know.
The man sighed and changed the subject.
We should get you to the West Coast, he said. We have people in place out there. And you need time to regroup. You’ve been through a lot.
He grabbed a napkin and jotted down the name of a town, along with some contact information. I’d never heard of the place. What about San Francisco? I asked.
Too risky.
He was right, I knew. Yet I so badly needed to be around people. The thought of being sequestered somewhere remote was crushing.
I asked then if he might get word to my parents. Let them know I was okay. That I loved them. That I was sorry. He said he would, and I could tell he meant it.
In the morning, he drove me to the Greyhound station in Joliet, and soon I was on the road again. Through Illinois and Iowa, then an ice storm in Lincoln, Nebraska. The duffel bag at my feet said TEXAS IS GOD’S COUNTRY, but surely this was, this rolling world outside the window. Still, I couldn’t take my mind off Aidan. I should never have gone to Weehawken Street. I should have said no a thousand times. What was he was writing? I wondered. An indictment, surely, a denunciation—of me. For I’d ruined his life. I stared out at a dark, starless night, the journey dragging endlessly on, mocking the memories of our days and nights together, of things I should have said and didn’t. Somewhere near North Platte, I finally fell asleep, my forehead hard against the frosted glass.
When I woke, it was light outside, or almost light, and I dug around in my bag until I found my notebook and a pen. It had been weeks since I’d done any writing, and as I wondered if I should pick up where I’d left off—those first hours in his apartment—I realized, again, what an incredible chance Aidan had taken. He was a man brave enough, in this doctrinaire world, to change his thinking, to walk away from everything he knew for everything he didn’t. Now, he was out there somewhere, enduring a life he’d never asked for. I wondered then about the chapters to come, mine and his, the unfolding annals of America, grand proclamations giving way to intimate emotion, loss ceding to love.
Because that’s what I feel. I know it now.
If only I’d had a chance to make it right, find him as he’d found me, and save him the same way. Cheyenne, Laramie, Rock Springs. I wrote all morning, and in the early afternoon I looked outside and saw mountains. White mountains, then a white city. I no longer knew what day it was. I no longer cared. We came in past strange, soulless suburbs, the houses pale as the snow, and not until we’d pulled up to the station did I realize I was in downtown Salt Lake.
We were changing buses. I gazed up at the departure board. There was one leaving for San Francisco. The place you ended up when you could run no further. Had I reached that point? Certainly, I was close. But I needed to finish the story—to think and write without the world coming at me.
So I got on a bus heading north instead: I-84 up through Idaho and Oregon. And that’s where I am as I write this now, sitting in a window seat watching this sprawling country race endlessly by, away from itself, its history, its wars. Only I’m the one who’s moving—or the bus anyway—and it’s better that way, to stop dwelling on the past, to head somewhere hopeful. I just pulled the napkin out of my pocket and looked at the contact names. My new handlers, Jim and Carol. I’ll call them from a pay phone when I get closer.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
MANY THANKS TO NAN GRAHAM, SUSAN MOLDOW, KATIE MONAGHAN, PAUL O’Halloran, Whitney Frick, and Scribner’s boy-wonder, Paul Whitlatch, who made this book both possible and infinitely better.
To my talented agent provocateur, Kate Garrick, who answers all my calls, against her better judgment.
To my parents, whose bemused support is much appreciated.
And to my friends/family, thanks for all the wit and wisdom: Roberta Lee Webb, Jami Attenberg, Michael Balser, Joan Bingham, Jodi Bullock, Richard Colantuono, Amanda Cordano, Laura Dave, Brian DeFiore, Jason Dobson, Emily Edson, Leonard Ellis, Marion Ettlinger, Holley Fain, Catherine Foulkrod, David Gates, Ana Mena-Gonçalves, Janie Goodwillie, Steve Goodwillie, Ken Hamm, Amy Hempel, Jason Herrick, Erin Hosier, Bradfield Hughes, Brandon Kennedy, Patrick Knisley, Ginger Knowlton, Brooke Laundon, Catherine Lewis, David Lynn, Kirsten Manges, John Manley, Alex Marvar, Josh Morgan, Lisa Myers, Patrick Nicholson, Sarah Norris, Jack O’Neill, Kevin Raidy, Anna Duke Reach, Leslie Robarge, Stephen Rodrick, Sue Shapiro, Scott Sherman, Zack Sultan, Eliza Swann, Gay Talese, Sofia Talvik, Benjamin Taylor, Larry Templeton, Keleigh Thomas, Moe Tkacik, Danielle Trussoni, the Van Kempens of Dordogne, France, and my friends at Café Loup.
/>