Inside the tent, the scene was just as disturbing. Even with the end-of-December weather, Gus wore his patched denim cutoffs with no shirt. His belly was painted in vibrant colors in a psychedelic pattern with words like Kablam! and Pow! scrawled above each nipple.107 His face was painted gold with thick black outlines around his eyes, nose, and mouth. A white towel was wrapped around his head. The makeshift turban and long gray beard added to the unsettling image. Fronds of rhododendron and holly were stacked around his chair as if it were a throne. He carried a six-pack of beer.
“What the hell is going on?” I asked.
“‘In Wildness is the preservation of the World.’”
“I doubt Thoreau was talking about getting trashed and planning terrorism.”
Gus punched a hole in the bottom of a beer can, popped the top, then tipped his head back and shot the beer in one gulp.
“The new year is upon us.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Not just literally but figuratively. A time to be reborn, a time to start anew.”
“Enough already. I just want you to be honest with me.”
“Like you were honest with Peter about looking for your biological father?”
How does this man know everything?
I decided Gus might be bluffing and tried to stay focused, difficult as that might be.
As Gus observed the tranced-out disciples, I knew where I’d seen this place before—in my imagination back in high school when we read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The book had given me the creeps for weeks, and the thought that I might be re-enacting it now sent a round of goose bumps up both arms. The only things missing from the scene were decapitated heads stuck on poles.108
I tried to access my brain’s hard drive to remember the book. Was I supposed to be Marlow to Gus’s Kurtz? Was I meant to capture or kill him? The only thing possibly worse than a national historic site with land mines was a frightening fictional character coming to life in some pseudo-Congo setting whispering “The horror! The horror!” I had to get out quick.
“Oh, come on,” Gus said. “It’s the end of the world, anyway—don’t take yourself so seriously.”
“Me?” I pointed to the interior design of his fort. “Don’t you think you’re being too realistic with this idolatry thing?”
“Real? What is real?” he asked. “Have you figured that one out yet? Make sure you get back to me when you do.”
As I hurried back down the hill, I realized the teacher I’d invested so much time and effort in was as clueless about reality as I was.
Janine jumped on my bed while I was still asleep.
“Peter let me in. You have to get up.” She took my jeans and sweatshirt from the floor and threw them at me. “It’s all a game. Gus is screwing with us.”
I sat up, leaning on my elbows. A girl was in my room.109
“Wake up,” Janine said. “You were right.”
“About what?”
She sat on the edge of the bed, as far away from me as she could get.110 “Because I was in on it.”
“What?”
“Pretending to have an affair with him, planting those fake land mines in his truck—”
Although I’d had only a few hours of sleep, Janine now had my full attention. “Gus was messing around with my mind, and you were helping him? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Don’t be mad. Gus was trying to teach you about the nature of reality. He told me if I cared about you, I should help him. That you had a great sense of humor and would totally appreciate the cosmic joke.”
Even though I was wearing the lame candy-cane boxers Peter had given me last week, I jumped out of bed and paced around the room. “Let me get this straight. I’ve spent hundreds of hours doing research on land mines, I contacted the FBI, I dug thirty holes around Walden Pond, I GAVE UP MY KIDNEY TO GET YOU OUT OF GUS’S CLUTCHES, and now you tell me you were in cahoots with him all along? Is this your idea of a joke?”
She stood up and faced me head-on. “So I guess we’re even for Brady.”
“Is that what this is about?”
She headed toward the door without a trace of remorse. “Brady, plus thinking I betrayed you on the campaign. I’m sure that played into it too.” She waved goodbye without looking at me. “Nice shorts, by the way.”
I dialed Beth ten times until she finally picked up. I told her everything Janine had just told me.
“I hate it when people play devil’s advocate,” she finally said, “but what if Gus is screwing with you now? What if he’s using Janine to tell you there are no land mines when there really are?”
“Don’t you think my Rube Goldberg mind hasn’t thought of that? Suppose she’s really innocent—”
“Let’s not go that far.”
“Suppose she’s really innocent,” I repeated, “and he’s talked her into thinking she’s doing me a favor by saying there are no land mines.”
“Or she’s still pissed about her dog and was happy to send you off on a wild-goose chase. What does Peter say?”
I couldn’t admit that Peter and I had barely spoken. I knew Beth would go ballistic with the next question, but I asked it anyway. “Suppose he is my biological father. Why is he torturing me? Is this some kind of test?”
“For the last time, he’s not your father! What are the chances?” She interrupted her rant to ask if I was near a TV. “There’s a crawl on CNN saying the Secretary of Defense and the other Pentagon guys had to cancel their appearances in Boston for some emergency meeting back in D.C.”
I raced to the living room to verify Beth’s story. “So, that’s it. We’re done. If there are land mines—and who even knows what to believe anymore?—their targets are no longer in town. So we’re free.”
“Take the train to Providence,” Beth said. “We’re on break, but there’s a huge party tonight. Let’s celebrate.”
I asked her what she was talking about.
“Hel-lo! It’s New Year’s Eve, did you forget?”
I’d been so busy trying to stay one step ahead of Gus that I’d totally forgotten what day it was. Beth invited me to come down again and was disappointed when I told her no.
“Just tell me why,” she said. “As if I don’t know what you’re going to say.”
I tried to explain that even though the land mines might’ve been fakes and even though the Pentagon guys weren’t coming, there was still a slight chance that Janine was lying and Gus had planted the ammunition.
“But the big photo op got canceled! There’s no one to blow up.”
“Except for tourists, and hikers, and Thoreau freaks like me. I can’t go to a party when there’s even a chance Gus might’ve been serious.”
“What does Superman do now that everyone uses cell phones and there aren’t any more phone booths?” Beth asked. “Where do you change into your leotard and cape?”
I told her I’d talk to her next year111 and grabbed Peter’s keys from the counter. I threw my sleeping bag into the car and headed to Walden.
If I hadn’t been worried about the apocalypse, the moment might’ve been perfect. The full moon looked as if it had been run through Photoshop; it was five times its normal size. The night was not too cold, with barely any wind. I stood at the top of my favorite ridge and took a mental picture of the reflection of the moon and trees on the pond, an image to call up when I needed something tranquil and right just the way it was.
I spent the next hour walking through the woods searching for trip wires or freshly dug holes. After a while, I realized Janine had probably been telling me the truth when she said the whole land-mine thing had been a setup. Until I saw a flyer taped to one of the trees advertising a midnight peace vigil on the south end of the pond, I’d totally forgotten112 we were on the cusp of a new year.
I unzipped my sleeping bag and wrapped it around me. These past few months, I’d walked in the footsteps of Thoreau and performed craftwork in the spirit of Gandhi. Had emulating these icons of nonviolence and
simplicity rubbed off on me at all? Maybe it was a waste of time for each generation to reinvent the wheel. Maybe there were people who lived dozens or hundreds of years earlier who had the game of life figured out. Maybe all we had to do was follow their lead with a few tweaks of our own. I played a game of What Would Thoreau Do and realized that, although his life was simple, it was full and varied. I doubted he’d waste time trying to figure out Gus. He had beans to harvest, wood to chop. I had to get on with my life.
I fell asleep tucked between the earth and the stars.
Quote from Walden at the cabin site
I woke up half an hour later to the sound of Gus’s voice. He wore camouflage cutoffs and a sleeveless fleece vest with no shirt underneath. A smudge of leftover gold paint remained on his neck like a neon hickey. He leaned back on the earth beside me.
“I’m hitting the road,” he said. “But I wanted to say goodbye.”
I asked him why he was leaving.
“I’m a nomad—I no mad at you, you no mad at me.”
I had to smile at the lameness of the joke. I asked him where he was going and what would happen to his disciples. He told me he had no planned destination and his students were ready to practice without him. When I sat up to talk, I noticed a large group of people at the opposite end of the pond, probably the peace activists preparing for their midnight vigil.
Gus propped himself up on one elbow and wondered if there was anything I wanted to ask him. Here was a chance to finally make the inconclusive results of the DNA test conclusive. But I first chose to ask about something more pressing. “Were there ever any land mines?”
He shook his head and laughed. “Were you looking in my truck? Those weren’t land mines.”
The wave of relief I felt was physical.
“You must’ve been worried out of your mind,” he said.
“Petrified.”
He laughed again. “No, those were bombs. They look like land mines, but different results, believe me.”
“Did you say bombs?”
“Your pal betagold was chomping at the bit for this assignment. You’d think with a new kidney she’d be eager for a few more years of life, but when she makes up her mind, watch out.”
I begged him to explain.
“She wants to sacrifice herself for a worthy cause.”
“What worthy cause? Is this part of that game Janine was talking about? Are you putting me on? Tell me!”
“Betagold has really embraced the dark side. I gotta say, she’s one of my most committed students.”
My kidney was giving betagold the strength to kill innocent people? What happened to enjoying another few years with her grandchildren? I tried to piece together the disparate scraps of information, but one thing didn’t make sense. “The Pentagon canceled. What’s the point?”
Gus looked confused. “Those guys from the Defense Department? What do they have to do with anything?”
“Weren’t they your targets?”
A huge grin spread across his face. “That’s so obvious! If you want to put the fun back in fundamentalism, you’ve got to do something people aren’t expecting.”113
What had I missed? I asked him again who the target was.
He nodded toward the group on the other side of the pond. “You know who I hate more than those thieves at the Pentagon? Activists who are so disorganized the best they can do is hold up candles and hope for peace. Activism used to mean bringing a government to its knees—standing for hours in the rain, walking to work for months rather than breaking a bus boycott, chaining yourself to a tank. People today think they’re doing something by complaining to their friends about how much things suck. It makes me sick. We stopped a war during my lifetime. Now the government runs rampant over our civil rights, and no one wants to get off the couch except to hold a candle.” He waved his arm across the pond as if he were a magician. “As soon as it turns midnight, betagold and your new kidney are blowing those do-gooders into a thousand picket sign–holding pieces.”
This had to be a joke. What kind of twisted mind blows up people praying for peace? But when I looked over at Gus, he made Conrad’s Kurtz seem like Little Bo Peep. Between the glow of the moon and his wicked eyes, he appeared to be the devil himself.
“The beautiful thing is when they investigate afterward, your DNA is all over the diagrams and detonators,” Gus said. “I saved enough of your blood sample to splatter on the evidence and pin tonight’s terrorism on you. You were trying to get my DNA, but I got yours—different reasons, of course. And after your tête-à-tête with the FBI, it sounds like they’ll be eager to buy my manufactured version of reality.” He put his arm on my shoulder. “Goodbye, son. May the forest be with you.”
I shoved him off me and sprinted down the hill.
Running along a narrow path through the woods at night is tricky, even with a full moon. I fell several times, once on my side, which had me clutching my solitary kidney in pain. I wished the pond were frozen so I could run across the ice to save time. It wasn’t fear of the FBI or Gus’s betrayal that propelled me forward but a passionate sense of purpose I hadn’t felt in a long time. Sure, I’d made sacrifices—I’d given betagold enough life energy to let her implement her terrorist beliefs—but this was something else. Gus’s violent plans were screwing with my world, and that was a whole different thing. Let the old guy wax nostalgic all he wanted, but messing with the future of my universe was not okay. As jumbled and confusing as these past months had been, I now realized I couldn’t give up the struggle to make the world a better place. There was no one else to do it. Not because I was special—we were all equal to the task—but because I wanted to. The world was full of all this breathing, all these pumping hearts, all these ideas, all this life. It was time for people who chose not to positively contribute to get out of the way and let the rest of us give it a go.
I’d always had more questions than answers, and asking why seemed a giant waste of time. As okay as it was to accept reality, it was also perfectly right to try and change it. And that’s what I was doing. I needed to stop waiting to be fixed; all I could do was start where I was. I was human and flawed. For the first time in my life, I felt like I actually belonged. Sitting and waiting around for burned-out adults like Gus to solve the world’s problems seemed a surefire formula for failure. I ran through the darkness like a leopard chasing prey, picking up speed with every step.
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of the two giant koi reflected by the full moon. I hadn’t seen them in several weeks, but as I ran by, their orange-and-white blur gave me hope. If they represented liberation, maybe I was finally free.
As I reached the edge of the clearing, I knocked over a man in a tie-dyed parka. I helped him up and asked him if he’d seen a grandmotherly type in a heavy vest.
“Are the Grannies for Peace here? I love them!”
I tried to place the man’s face but couldn’t. I gave up and ran from person to person in search of betagold. The moon, candles, music, and dancing combined to make the setting seem like a surrealist’s dream. I wondered if I’d really just had a conversation with Gus or if I was still sleeping in my down bag on the other side of the pond. I actually looked across the water to see if my body was still there. I put my hands on my knees and caught my breath. Maybe this was an innocent group of people supporting peace and Gus was screwing with me again. But just as I considered abandoning the whole project, I realized where I’d seen the man with the parka—he was one of the agents from the FBI. Was it typical for federal agents to attend midnight peace rallies? Was he some kind of spy? If the FBI didn’t believe me, why were they here now? I tore through the crowd to find him, and as I did, more and more people looked familiar. One man resembled one of the cops who’d arrested me. My perception of what was real and what wasn’t totally blew apart. Was this all taking place in my mind? Was I having an official nervous breakdown?
Just as I was ready to fall down the well-known rabbit hole, I spot
ted betagold. She wore her black beret and camouflage tracksuit with a backpack strapped to her chest the way some people carry babies. She was walking straight into the center of the protestors.
“Stop!” I yelled. “Somebody grab her!”
It must’ve been close to midnight because the group started counting down. “Ten, nine, eight …”
“Somebody stop that woman!”
“ … seven, six, five …”
There were probably fifty people there, even a few small children. I didn’t think twice about what I had to do. It wasn’t my own life that flashed before my eyes as I raced to betagold; it was Gandhi’s. I remembered an anecdote of a reporter running beside Gandhi’s train to ask for a message to take back to his people. It was Gandhi’s day of silence, so he scrawled a reply and handed the man a note. “My life is my message.” That was what I thought of as I tried to save the others from betagold’s bomb—not of Peter, Beth, Janine, or even joining my mom in the afterlife—just a poignant anecdote about someone else’s time on this earth. But I guess if you have to have someone’s life flash before your eyes, Gandhi’s isn’t a bad choice. In the seconds of slowed-down time, I realized my life, too, was my message. I thought of the Thoreau quote, “If I am not I, who will be?” I finally understood the meaning of my life—to fully embrace being me—but unfortunately that life was now over. The irony made me laugh out loud as I threw myself on top of betagold.
“ … four, three, two, one …”
The explosion was deafening.
When Robert Oppenheimer described his reaction to seeing the first atomic bomb he’d developed light up the sky, he quoted from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita.114 “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” But there wasn’t a mushroom cloud at Walden that night; the sky was ablaze in red and green. I wasn’t dead but very much alive, underneath a giant fireworks display. Several people shouted “Happy New Year!”
Larry and the Meaning of Life Page 10