The Radicals

by Ryan McIlvain

  “He saw us,” Sam says. “He looked right at us. He recognized us.”

  Alex leans across the gearshift and turns the key in the ignition, the old bathroom fan of the Buick’s motor belatedly catching and sputtering to life. Sam is doubled over in the front seat like he might be sick. A hollow pock sounds behind me as the brown trunk fills the rear window. Sam is out of the car, the air livid with the open door’s ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding—

  “Sam?” Alex says. “What are you doing?”

  In a moment she is up and out of the car too, opening her arms as if to shepherd him back inside, or block his way. She notices something. Her eyes go wide, pleading. She says airlessly, “What the fuck are you doing?”

  Sam has the gun. He tucks the black blocky thing behind his shirt into his waistband. He folds Alex’s arms like umbrella spokes to her side, holding them there and saying, “Relax. Wait here. You too,” he says, suddenly turning at the weight of my hand on his shoulder.

  “Sam,” I say.

  “It’s fine,” he says, “just wait here,” and he starts toward the trail at a wolfish trot.

  For a moment I obey him, I stay put, Alex and I both, stuck to the spot, and then suddenly we’re running, suddenly we’re sprinting down the trail. Up ahead in the latticed dimness Sam has picked up his pace, not turning around. “Sir?” he calls after Bosch. “Hey, sir!” The man in the too-large mackinaw turns his head at Sam’s approach—I see him darkly, distantly, rolling up his shoulders in an instinctual flinch. The voice that comes out of him is defiant. “No press. No press!” Something menaces in Sam’s movements, his footsteps breaking, rattling in the dirt. “What do you want?” the man says, almost quietly now—not a yell, not a plea. The yell of pain comes from Sam as the collie sweeps in from off the trail and latches on to his ankle. You can hear the dog growling, grunting as it rips and pulls. A single pistol shot, a loud pop, makes the dog lie down.

  Now Bosch makes a sound—“God,” it might be, or maybe “Gus,” a dog’s name. Bosch is running away from Sam, with Sam running after him—we are all running now—with Sam shouting after him to stop, wait, stop, wait, and now the old man has pitched forward, jerking forward and to the side as if bitten by the sound, then another, then a third loud pop. The last move is decisive but very slow, or perhaps it just seems that way from this distance, this catechized remove. Sam stands above Bosch as the old man rotates slowly on the ground, Sam tracking him with his gun, following his movements, as if stirring something in the air.

  The report stops me cold—Alex too. After a few seconds she inches up beside me on the trail, staring straight ahead. Her look is small, white, mindless.

  “He shot him,” she says.

  “Who? Who shot him?”

  “Jesus Christ he shot him.”

  I must have looked mindless too. No light on upstairs, I’m sure of it. All of a sudden I was all feeling, the sum of automatic commands, but I couldn’t seem to catch my breath. I was taking in great brimming mouthfuls of air, great gulps of the stuff, and it did no good. A sharp pain was in my chest now, an ocean in my ears. The body on the ground hadn’t moved in several seconds—the man on the ground. Fish-mouthed, streaming, gasping, I turned again to Alex, searching out the face of this blank-faced woman who used to raise an eyebrow at me, quirk her pink playful mouth in the middle of a conference talk that had gone off the rails, gone ridiculous somehow—the look acknowledging this and diffusing it. I think I was looking for that look now, if I could be said to be doing anything in this mute, popped instant. Sam was standing twenty feet away from us, checking his clothes, I realized later, for blood.

  He put the gun back into his waistband and broke into another trot. Alex put out her arm to stop him, the stile of her arm, and this time he let himself be checked.

  “The shells,” she said.

  “What?”

  “The shells.”

  “Shit.”

  While they collected them, I was moved on a watery conveyor toward the bodies, unconscious of my steps, my pained breathing, the sweat running down my face and into my eyes, the body asserting and erasing itself in rhythm, a sort of tidal flow. Here was a dog tipped over on its side—forelegs sprawled, a modest swell of dark cranberry blood slicking the hair down the neck and upper back. The whitish tongue lolled sideways in the parted mouth below flat, dark, crow-like eyes. I was distantly aware of a conversation about footprints. Alex was off the trail trying to wrestle a low leafy oak branch from its trunk while Sam, lanky Sam, muttering, bent and bent at the waist like an oil derrick as he scoured for the last shell, he couldn’t find it, it wasn’t there—

  “Here,” I said. “It’s here.”

  A lucky penny catching the light, a gold doubloon, it hid half under the dog’s back leg, in the wispy sandy hair running off it. The shell was warm in my hand, dully shining. Something burnt hung in the air, something wet underneath it. I was less attentive to Bosch, or really more afraid of him, but now here he was too: on his back, one side of the beige mackinaw fallen open to reveal the swell of gut pressing out against the pale blue button-up blooming with black-red spots, black galaxies of blood. His legs twisted awkwardly away from him, in mid-stride. The thin bellows of his neck stretched out under his chin, his face cast back, eyes open and full of shock—a bronze expression, cast. The mark on his forehead sat too high for a Hindu’s bindi, but this is what came to me even then. What blood there was pooled darkly in the little well just below the vanished hairline, the skin around it bruising already, and under the eyes. His color was changing.

  “For fuck’s sake,” Alex said, pulling me out of my crouch, throwing me backward toward the car. She had the leaf-rake in her hand. “Follow Sam!”

  In the car Sam drove at speed, taking turns that pushed and rattled me like a loose cracked egg from one side to the other of the cavernous backseat. I was leaking something, emitting strange sounds. When I looked up the trees were streaming fitfully by in the window, another chiaroscuro, more dark than light now, a nauseous-making darkening strobe. I closed my eyes and opened them again and the scene hadn’t changed.

  “Sit up,” Alex said from the front seat, turning around. “Put your seat belt on. Be quiet.”

  I obeyed and obeyed. I was waiting for sirens, roadblocks, helicopters lowering down to block our way—I knew with perfect clarity that someone was coming for us, and then no one did. Perhaps no one had heard the shots in that isolated wealthscape, or if they had they’d mistaken them for hunters, teenagers playing with leftover Fourth of July noisemakers…Apparently we’d been lucky. Then, a little above Yonkers, our headlights began to mist over, lighting like amber the first drops of rain, little flecks of it, mote-like, then the long limpid lines. From the elevated highway through upper Manhattan the lights of the city appeared crazed, schizophrenic, trailing down the windows in long prismatic strips and cracks—a smell of rain mixing with the urine (my own, I realized) and everything else the rain kicked up, ammoniac, sweet, sulfuric. In the front seat Sam had the window cracked. I heard him breathing in that watery shearing air.

  “You think this rain is getting up into Westchester?” he finally said.

  When we got back to the neighborhood Sam parked the car a good mile from the House—we didn’t question his judgment on this point, but Alex was saying, almost whispering at first, her voice just rising above the million fingers of water on the car’s broad roof, “Nothing planned, nothing fucking planned…No message in it, no meaning in it, nothing organized, nothing fucking planned…” she said, with the litany rocking her up into a hoarse scream. Sam rolled up the window. Alex rocked forward and back in her seat, rocking the car, rattling visibly. I was on a wavelength with her, on the horrible conveyor again going past the horrible features of the dog in its false sleep, Bosch with the cast-back neck turning ashen already, the birdlike sheen in his eyes.

  “People know
who he was, what he did,” Sam was saying. “They’ll put it together.”

  “Oh they do? They will? So that was your plan all along? That was your plan all along? That was your fucking plan?”

  “He saw us,” Sam whispered. “He recognized us.”

  The bullet hole was high and to the right on the forehead, the little shining well of blood with the dark bruising all around it, starlike, an explosion of nerves.

  “You think people are going to remember what some corporate asshole did two years ago? You think people are going to care? Joe Six-pack wearing a hole in his fucking couch?”

  The bruising around the wound looked synaptic, a new decaying life, like the bruising on a pear.

  “Tell them I did it on my own,” Sam said. “The police. Tell them you had nothing to do with it, it was only me, and it was. I didn’t mean to, but it was. He wouldn’t stop. He saw us—”

  “Shut up.”

  “He recognized us. Tell them you tried to stop me. Go tonight, right now, go right now and tell them—”

  “Shut up! Just shut up!” Alex said. “Just shut up and shut up and shut—up!” Alex said, lifting off on the last word into another scream, soaring on it.

  Sam reached for the driver-side window handle and cranked it down again, gasping in the rainy air.

  In the backseat I reached for my eyelid, my left, suddenly. A sudden something, a larval something had hatched and was beating its stiff wings unceasingly under my eye. I’d begun screaming too, matching Alex decibel for decibel.

  In other versions of that night Alex and I do go to the police. Who knows what we say there—I haven’t worked that out. The catharsis, the resettling of gravity in the seat of the stomach, is simply in turning up, trudging into that harsh-lit room, linoleum floors, maybe a chain-link gate at the intake desk. We are soaked and shaking, but we are there.

  “Did you see this?” Tiffany said the next morning.

  She put the open laptop in front of Alex at the dim-lit breakfast table, gently, with a kind of reverence. The Times had the story, the Posts, the TV news stations with their helicopters hovering over the lot where we’d parked, now marked off with police tape. I didn’t know what Alex was pretending to see for the first time exactly, but I knew enough. My eyelid twitched and gathered, an involuntary puckering. I felt the pores of my forehead yawn open. I hadn’t slept. I hadn’t had solid food in nearly twenty-four hours, and I had no appetite.

  The computer’s pale glow lit Alex’s features from underneath, making cavities above her chin and eyebrows, dark raccoon circles of her eyes—she looked stricken but to me utterly staged. She wore a carnival mask.

  “What is it? What’s up?” Sam said, bringing a cereal bowl over from the counter, hovering at Alex’s shoulder.

  Tiffany watched them reading the screen; I watched Tiffany watch them. She wore an oversize, Sam-like T-shirt that said “Lifeguard” on the front of it, with a large red cross underneath the word. The shirt made her look younger, more naïve, washed up on the far shore of a teenage sleepover. She frowned a little, a perplexed searching frown that took Sam in as a smile grew around the corners of his lips—a sliding scale.

  “Wow,” Sam said. “Is this for real? Is it my birthday today?”

  “What are you talking about?” I sensed it was my turn.

  An early-morning jogger had discovered the body and alerted police—no search party had been organized, no alarm sounded previously. It made you wonder about the state of Bosch’s marriage that no call should go out to the police when he failed to return home from his evening walk. Maybe the dog was mostly Bosch’s, maybe he had another apartment, a pied-à-terre in the city to work and play in. Who knew how the other half really lived—their intrigues, their secrets, the array of their enemies. All the articles we’d seen so far had been variations on the AP story and basically useless. Tiffany’s article too: a few brief facts about the body’s discovery, and lower down a brief paragraph of background on Bosch and Soline, Soline’s “violations” (sickeningly toothless word), the subsequent bankruptcy and trial, Bosch’s ultimate exoneration. The police were investigating all possible leads—a piece of boilerplate—and asked anyone with information to come forward.

  In another version of these memories the mad heartbeat in my eyelid, the fluttering wing pushing out of my eyeball carries me off to a private corner of the House, out into the bright glaring streets, anywhere. I make the call myself. I tell the police what I know. Which means what—a plea bargain? Immunity in exchange for testimony? I call a lawyer. I call my parents with their lawyer friends. I take Jamaal aside, I take Tiffany, the local Juris Doctors. Or else I climb up to the third-story roof of the House and contrive to leap headfirst for the sidewalk.

  Sam turned to the table now, addressing us with a clownish, overextended smile. “Somebody beat us to it! Where should we send the thank-you card?”

  My skin slipped under its hardening layer, like a shudder of water under ice. It was the glee in Sam’s Grand Guignol style—

  “Jesus,” Alex breathed.

  “What?”

  “A lot of good it does Maria Nava and everybody else,” I said. “The eight-cents-on-the-dollar crowd.”

  “Fuck Maria,” Sam said. “I thought we’d established that. As for the others, well, yeah, I guess you’re right. It was always going to be hard to get back the money Bosch stole from them, but I guess you’re right.”

  “Since when do you read The New York Times?” Alex asked Tiffany.

  “I saw it linked.”

  “Linked where?”

  “On Twitter.”

  “Twitter?” Alex said. “I thought we weren’t doing Twitter—any of that corporate-troll bullshit. We’re supposed to be limiting our exposure.”

  “I don’t send tweets, I just follow a few friends and old ISO people.”

  “Deactivate the account,” Alex said, and turning to Sam and me, “You guys too. Or no, don’t deactivate, just stay off it. Keep quiet online. Even this Bosch story—keep the searches to a minimum, don’t establish any patterns. I don’t like to think what Big Brother can swipe from the ether nowadays. And another thing: No more sticky fingers, no more trawling for cell phones, laptops, whatever. We need to cut all that out for the time being, shrink our exposure to zero.”

  Alex’s look, roving slowly across the table, dared us to disagree. Tiffany held her face perfectly still, I noticed, like a bell jar.

  “And the money piece?” I said.

  “We’ll figure something out. You’ll help us figure it out, Eli.”

  “Shrink it down like a tightly puckered asshole,” said Sam, looking at me as he curled shut the fingers of his right hand into a fist, making a sealant schloop sound. I can’t be sure but I think he might have winked at me then.

  He was coming unhinged. I suppose we all were.

  “Is this really so funny to you?” Alex said. “We haven’t exactly been discreet in our opposition to Soline and Bosch. We could be suspects in this.”

  “Suspects in what?”

  We all turned at the sound of Jamaal’s voice, a little groggy coming out of him as he filled up the kitchen doorway. He wore a V-neck undershirt, loose basketball shorts, rubber sandals. Greg was behind him and apparently showered and fully dressed, his wet bangs icicling down toward the bunched bushy brows that seemed to repeat Jamaal’s question.

  “Come check this out,” Sam said excitedly, waving them over to Tiffany’s computer. I couldn’t tell if the flapping-pennants tone came out of Sam genuinely or not. I think now that it did. And why shouldn’t fake enthusiasm at someone else’s murderous work shade into real enthusiasm, as if the work really were someone else’s? Wasn’t that what was happening to me? Each time I flashed on the scene—each time the scene flashed on me, broke in on me—I felt less and less attached to it, less attached to my life, my body, the co
nveyor belt lifting me off the ground until I floated above the trail, silently, above the bodies laid out underneath me like bones in an archaeologist’s dig, the wasted fragments calmly waiting for some magical touch to piece them back together again, wire them upright.

  We lay low in the House, all of us, for another two days. No one had had to tell Tiffany or Greg or Jamaal to stay inside—they just followed our lead, crouching when we crouched. Our faces shone with strain, everyone squinting indoors, communicating through private signals what strategies they’d worked up to cope with the minutes like hours, hours like slow carving knives against the skin.

  For my part, I thought of Jen. I sought her out in the whited-out, shocked spaces of my mind, trying to re-etch her there. Stray moments obliged me by reappearing, brief scenes, pale figments that I managed to hold, tremblingly, like water in my cupped fragile hands. In the foolishness of my passion I’d deleted all photos of Jen from my phone, all videos, text messages—all the sweet banal e-mails going back to the first tentative weeks of our relationship. Passion’s passionate inverse, really. It was the storm I’d carried with me out of the calm, quiet breakup. All keepsakes I’d trashed too—down the garbage chute in Jen’s apartment complex went the small cardboard moving box silted with romantic notes, movie tickets, theater tickets, concert tickets, the playbills that featured Jen’s name just inside the front cover, the creased trail map we’d used to navigate Angels Landing in Zion Park, the single-sheet program from Jen’s senior recital with the baroque embroidering notes in the margins, the doodles I’d made during the Liszt and Gouldian Bach pieces that bored me, the other notes, complete with rapturous underlines, that I’d made during the long John Adams piece and the Mahler lieder that enraptured me (remarkable tone…eerie yet beautiful…beautiful…BEAUTIFUL!…).

  It was more than the idea of Jen I loved, I’m sure of it now, much more than her talent and her beauty. The deleted e-mails I mourned the most were the ones in which she’d massed all the sweet silly punny texts we’d exchanged over months and that her phone could no longer hold. Intending to file them away in her computerized journal, Jen was typing them out one evening at the high wooden dining-room table. I snuck up behind her, hovering my chin near her shoulder and whispering some hammy accusation about what was zees, incriminating notes from her paramour?