by Susan Choi
There was silence on the line, or at least there was silence from Frazer. She could hear the traffic on Broadway, like a cyclone of honking. “I’m scared,” she admitted.
“Keep your cool.”
“I don’t know how to help them.”
“Of course you do. If anybody knows what to do, it’s you. Just get them busy. We don’t have unlimited time.”
“I know that.”
“For the moment they’ve pulled the good vanishing act, but they need to make the most of the moment. They need to pound out that book.”
“It doesn’t seem like they care. It doesn’t seem like they care if they live.”
“Bullshit. I don’t believe that. They’re the warriors, Jen. They have balls. Bigger balls than I’ve got. Remind them who they are.”
“How can I do that, when I’m not even sure who they are?”
“What? They’re the most important people in the country, that’s who they are! They’ve scared the pants off the government, they’ve made the average American think, Is this some wacky dream? Is our society really so flawed that we’ve spawned these hard cases who won’t take the shit? And the answer is yes. The richest girl in the world has said This is a lie, I’d rather shoot up the place. Jenny, we can’t stay on the phone for much longer, I’m on the corner of Broadway and 116th and somebody might hear me.”
“Then come up here! Talk to them like you’re talking to me. They need it, they need something—”
“I’ll be there two weeks from today. I know, my schedule’s crazy. This week is out, this weekend is completely impossible, next week is out, but next weekend I’m coming. Don’t worry. By then they’ll have written a pile.”
SHE WASN’T SURE if it was true that they didn’t care whether they lived or died; but it seemed to her that all their energy, what little there was of it, went toward drinking wine and avoiding daylight. The night after her encounter with Juan she’d been awakened again, by a sound of voices; the voices were low, but she’d left her bedroom door open to help with a breeze. Again, they were down in the kitchen. “You’re the one who always talks about karma.” The oddly familiar small voice of Pauline.
“That’s not karma.” Also a woman: Yvonne.
“If Juan hadn’t stolen that thing in the store . . . if he’d just acted straight like he says—”
“Straight people don’t buy bandoliers. Juan was thinking. And it would have been fine if that pig—I hate those rent-a-cop assholes—”
“But we didn’t need it, everybody had two. We didn’t need a bandolier.”
“Since when do you know what we need? Since when are you the least authorized to have a fucking opinion?”
Now both girls fell silent, and she didn’t even hear the creaks of the old wooden chairs. She lay perfectly still so as not to make noise with the bedsprings. It was the first time she’d heard Yvonne speak. Yvonne’s voice was bossy, attention-desiring. It reminded Jenny of Yvonne’s body when Jenny had seen it, barely clad in its tight underwear. Though her tone was low, almost a stage whisper, her voice seemed too large for the furtiveness of the discussion. Whatever they were talking about, it was clear that they wouldn’t have spoken that way with Juan present. And Jenny also felt sure it pertained to the deaths of their comrades—even more so when Yvonne added, ending the silence, “I know you think it’s Juan’s fault. But what about you? You were supposed to give us cover, and you were too slow.”
“I don’t think it’s Juan’s fault. I’m just—” Pauline started crying. “I’m sad,” she wailed, her voice, even while wailing, so soft Jenny barely could hear it.
“Shhh. Oh, Polly. Shh. He’ll wake up.” Now Yvonne’s bossiness was more like the reproach of a mother. Jenny heard a creak as someone rose, then liquid being poured—another jug of wine.
“Careful,” Yvonne said. “You’ll spill it.” After a few silent moments—”I’m sad, too,” Yvonne said. “I’m so sad I feel dead.”
“I wish I was dead.”
“Shut up.” And then, more carefully, “You can say that to me. But don’t ever say that to Juan. You know why.”
‘“The brave don’t fear death. The weak desire it,”’ Pauline said, clearly quoting.
Coming into the house now with the first load of groceries, Jenny was surprised to find them in the front room, although with all the windows shut, the drapes drawn, and a thick haze of smoke in the air. If they had been talking before she opened the door, they were silent now. They looked up at her like one person, but without expectation or interest. Pauline was curled on her side on the couch with a newspaper crossword on the cushion in front of her and a pencil dangling loosely from her hand. Juan and Yvonne were lying on the floor. The small radio that had come up in the car with them from Carol and Frazer’s was on, barely tuned to a station; she thought she could hear snatches of big band beneath a constant wash of static, but while the radio was loud in the cramped room no one moved to turn the dial, or turn it off. Outside the day had been hot for hours, and she could smell them, their unwashed bodies pungent and sour, their stink intermingling with the smell of their wine. “I brought you the paper, and the news magazines,” she said. Last week had been the week of black smoke and orange flame on the covers of Newsweek and Time, and the headline, “Surrounded!” Between the covers, the radiant family photos of all twelve of the comrades from their previous, normal American lives. That had been before the nine bodies were positively numbered as nine, and each ID’d by its teeth, and Juan and Yvonne and Pauline were confirmed to be missing. This week marked a lull, and other stories had reclaimed the front covers. “It’s good news,” she said, holding the pile out toward them. “You’ve disappeared without a trace. The FBI is intensifying its manhunt in L.A. and points south, all the way into Mexico. You’ve been spotted on the West Coast from Canada to Tijuana, but nowhere in the East.”
Juan had managed to sit upright while she was talking, and now he took the week’s news from her hands. She saw an ugly fresh scab on his arm. “Thank you,” he said. For a long moment he didn’t seem to know what to do next. Then, “Intelligence,” he murmured, and passed Time to Yvonne, and the newspapers to Pauline, keeping Newsweek for himself. Pauline gazed down at the front pages. Yvonne fingered Time idly.
“I was thinking,” she said. “It might help if you wrote down your feelings about your lost comrades. Your remembrances of them. It might help you—I know you’re in pain.”
They were suddenly staring at her as if she had suggested their comrades be resurrected and then murdered again. “That’s none of your business,” Yvonne said.
“We’re fine,” Juan said harshly. “We’ll get to that book when we get to it.”
That they would think she was only trying to prod them into writing their book, as if she were Frazer, made her discard her caution. “I didn’t mean the book. I meant that maybe, before you can do that, you have to write about them. Write a eulogy for them.”
“We’ll eulogize them with the blood of the pigs they were killed by!” This was Juan, suddenly full of fire.
“An eye for an eye. That’s enlightened.”
“That’s the revolution, Sister,” he sneered.
She lingered another moment in the doorway, gazing back at their six hostile eyes fixed on her; then she turned away into the kitchen and went out the back door. She sat down on the bumper of the Bug, the rest of the groceries still in the backseat, and lit herself a cigarette. She was remembering what Frazer had said—not about their being the most important people in America. Nor about how they were warriors. It was what he’d confessed to her after they’d argued and glared and subsided that night in his Rhinebeck motel room—that the three fugitives had seemed so young to him, the first time he had met them. He’d meant that he, Frazer, was illegitimately old—too old, he’d worried, to keep their confidence. But they were young. Not young like the kid who had carried her groceries, but still young. Frazer would have laughed at her if she’d said this to him. Juan
and Yvonne were only a few years younger than she was, twenty-two or twenty-three. Pauline had just turned twenty. Not such big differences, but they felt big to her. At twenty-three she’d been beginning her life underground, and she couldn’t say she hadn’t also been undisciplined, and terrified, and aflame with self-pity. She’d done and said stupid things out of anger, and an almost suicidal urge to be caught. And herself at twenty? That was the first year she’d been with William, before which she had known almost nothing. Both these ages of hers, looked at now, seemed like children to her. She was amazed that each one was herself, and not so long ago.
WHEN FRAZER HAD found her in Rhinecliff she’d been in the middle of a letter to William. The letter of his she’d been answering, almost four weeks old now, had said this: “I’ve been thinking a lot about zealots. How they taint the whole lake of ideas they drink from, and taint everyone who might share that lake with them. I assume you know the ‘comrades’ I mean; you keep up with the news.” The first time she’d read this she’d actually been annoyed, that their need for a code seemed to have unleashed in William a tendency toward pompous phrases she’d never suspected. Now she didn’t just feel guilty for having thought such an unkind thing of him. She was in a house with those very same “zealots,” and she had to conceal it from him. She refolded his letter, and listened; it was early morning, and they didn’t seem to have stirred out of bed. She took out her own letter-in-progress and skimmed it critically. Every day since leaving Wildmoor she’d tried to finish it, but she was stymied by the number of things that she had to leave out. Finally she started fresh and wrote an account of her quest for the yellow croquet ball, as if she were still at Wildmoor. She’d do better next time. How could she know right away how to translate this new situation? She had to be honest with William while at the same time dropping no clue the prison censors could possibly grasp, and although this meant, basically, lying to William, she still wanted to think that it didn’t.
The truth was that her whole correspondence with William, which she constantly thought of and poured so much energy into, in some way made her miserable. The first time she’d written to him she had signed the short note, in code as obvious as it was foolproof, from his “sister.” He’d responded chastely as her “brother.” And this had seemed wonderful, that in the midst of their crisis, in one small respect, they had both understood what to do. Yet the template was limited. Though William’s letters were more daring than hers were, they still seemed impaired. She knew the letters could only ever be indications, puffs, of smoke from far sides of a canyon, but more and more they seemed to her the essence of her connection to William, and that connection seemed less and less strong. Dana only resealed William’s letters in new envelopes, but tearing the envelopes open Jenny felt a cool draft. And so how must he feel, reading her declarations, already blunted and constrained by their code, and then in Dana’s slanting, regular hand? So different from Jenny’s own, her pointy insistent block letters, her underlinings and loud exclamations. All of that was ironed out in Dana’s transcriptions, and perhaps a little of Jenny’s love was lost also, like steam. She still had his wonderfully formed, upright writing, like notes on a staff, but now it kept to a strange measured tone: “I love you very much. I’m finding good work to do. I’ve been thinking a lot about zealots.” They’d never written letters to each other before his arrest because they’d never had to, and perhaps it wasn’t a skill they possessed and meant nothing in terms of their love. But still, she believed in the romance of letters, and her stomach hurt when she read his. His letters arguably lacked nothing, but she couldn’t stop searching them for an intangible something, the orthographic equivalent of his hands on her skin.
As always, she felt him more fully once she’d put his letter away again in her battered brown accordion file with the limp ribbon for tying it shut. The file was the one thing she’d taken from Dick and Helen’s apartment; it had been in the trash, and had Tax Yr ’64 scrawled hugely across it. It was so full by now she kept thinking the ribbon would break, but she managed to tie it shut, squeezing the file with her knees. Now she could lose herself the way she longed to lose herself in the letters. She thought of their bedroom in Berkeley, the windows open to the breeze, the slight light from the street sifting in. She thought of their mushy old bed, the mattress from Salvation Army that had made a soft dent right away in its center for them, as if they were musical instruments set in its case. Then she thought of his body. The reddish-blond translucence of his hair. The undulations of the blue vein, so prominent though deep within his skin, on the underside of his penis. Her eyes flew open, as if she’d been caught, though the real reason she’d stopped herself was that it disturbed her how quickly these details had faded. For a long time she’d been remembering him by reference to her previous attempts to remember. She didn’t know when she’d last remembered, just by reference to him.
SINCE THEIR FIRST morning in the house a box of writing equipment—a typewriter, a reporter’s cassette-tape recorder in a Naugahyde carrying case, bales of loose scrap paper that seemed to have been scooped up off somebody’s floor, spiral notebooks, notepads, and several rubber-banded bundles of ball-point pens and pencils, all violently deformed at their ends from long, powerful chewing, which meant that they and everything else had been harvested from Frazer’s home office—had been sitting untouched just inside the back door. When she went downstairs a few minutes later to see if the box contained any envelopes better than the ones that she already had, it was missing, and the front room door closed. Putting her ear near the door she heard the tentative pops of the typewriter keys. Pop . . . pop pop pop. Then, silence. A coffeepot had been unearthed and a warm inch of coffee still sat in the bottom. She filled a cup and let herself out the back door. The day was buzzing and humid, high June; she walked around front, past the side window over the kitchen sink, past the front-facing window over the kitchen table, and stopped there, out of sight of the rest of the house. Without going farther she could tell that they’d opened the windows. She heard Juan’s voice, carried out on the breeze. “No. Every word should go in like a knife.”
“I was thinking about it all night,” Pauline said.
“It still sounds like a fucking Hallmark. ‘Evan, you were the man of my dreams.’”
“Oh, just let her,” Yvonne said, annoyed.
By that evening they’d moved from the typewriter to the tape recorder. The typewriter had been silent for stretches of hours; had then pecked like a hen thoughtfully; had sometimes erupted in great fluid bursts, like a rain of small rocks on the roof. At some point it had crashed on the floor; Jenny heard the bright ding of the carriage returning. Compared to those sporadic spasms the tape recording was a constant vague dirge. Someone droned on at length, stopped short, droned again in the same shaky rhythm. Someone else paced and mumbled intently. The tape recorder made a loud clack as it was turned on and off, like a branch being broken. She crept around the kitchen making toast and heating soup from a can, but when she knocked to see if they wanted to eat, all their efforts derailed. “Ah, shit!” Juan cried as she peered through the door. Now they had to start over again. They couldn’t have background noise—that was why the windows were all shut again, and, less obviously, why the room’s only lamp had been snuffed by a blanket. “Listen,” Juan said. There was nothing to hear but the night-insects sawing and creaking. But had there been noises like this back in Berkeley, Juan wanted to know? Just exactly like this? And listen now—Pauline and Yvonne tilted their heads, as if to sharpen their ears. A night flight was passing over, so far above that if it were daytime they would just see the jet as a tiny white flake in the sky. Its slight noise like a faraway ocean—but what if there was some Harvard-trained FBI pig who could hear that and say, “That was Pan American flight 405 heading from Chicago to London at thirty-nine thousand feet on June 9—let’s search all points underneath its flight path?”
It wasn’t until the next morning that she had any idea of what Juan
had been talking about. The noise of the car’s doors awoke her. Going to her window hugging herself against the early chill she saw the three of them crawling over the car like a scavenging pack of street urchins. She pulled on her jeans and went downstairs and out the back door, feeling the cold dew on the soles of her feet. For a moment she just took them in, seeing them outdoors and beneath sunlight for the first time. They were bloodshot and fevered and pale. Their hair was lank, and their clothes looked too big. Carol had bought the car used, with cash, and never registered it, but there had still been an old insurance card and owner’s manual in the glove box. These had now been thrown onto the grass. The map she had bought on her trip into town had been hurled forth as well, and little balls of tin foil and dirty pennies and cigarette butts were raining onto the ground. From opposite sides of the car Pauline and Yvonne began yanking out the mats and digging into the seat cracks, all the while casting burning glances at each other as if to say, See? I thought of it! Juan slowed down, then stopped; he leaned heavily back on the car and for the first time looked at her.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
Pauline and Yvonne didn’t glance at her. “Finished eulogy,” Juan said, and from the gravel in his voice she could tell they’d stayed up the whole night. “Gotta go.” Juan heaved himself off the car with one arm. She saw he was holding the car keys. She’d left them clipped to the sun visor.
She took a careful step forward. “Go where?”
“Go deliver. A radio station. Pigs’ll know we avenge our comrades.” Juan raked a hand through his thicket of hair. “Come on,” he said to Pauline and Yvonne. For the first time Jenny noticed a small package perched suspensefully on the roof of the Bug. From its size it could have been a sandwich, but there was something so disturbed about the way it had been wrapped, in many sheets of note paper secured with scores of different-colored rubber bands, that any person who saw it would find it suspicious. “Radio station?” she said.