The Radicals

by Ryan McIlvain

  When I got upstairs I did nothing to hide my heavy breathing, the red stripes and scourges on my arms and legs from the neighborhood’s brambly woods. Mom blinked at me. I was bent over my knees.

  Alex said, “Speak of the devil…”

  We told my mother we were going out for an early lunch to hash some things through—vague like that, and I think she sensed we were lying.

  She said, “Is this the type of lunch place that charges money for their food?”

  I put a hand on Alex’s shoulder as we dropped down the stairs, to make a better show of it. When we turned the corner away from the front door Alex muscle-bucked my hand away.

  “Where’d you get the gun, Alex?”

  Back in the car she volunteered a little more information about Sam—less affronted now, driving slower. He’d hung back in the city looking for Greg while the rest of us returned to the leafy suburbs we’d spawned from, apparently. Not that Sam had shown much acumen, either, asking around about Greg at ISO meetings, around the Randolph campus, sleeping at the House or in his car—but that was Alex’s point: Sam was losing it, a danger to Greg, a danger to all of us now. He’d kept it together enough to tell the cops the story we’d agreed on—he was out again, not enough to be held on—but now he was probably out redoubling his search for Greg. An obsessive, a liability.

  “So he called you from a pay phone?” I said.

  Alex nodded.

  “Do you know if he mentioned the fishbowl thing to the cops?”

  “I don’t.”

  “What were the questions they asked him? How did they find him?”

  “I don’t know,” Alex said. “I don’t know any of that. It was two minutes on the phone and most of the time he was asking me the questions, trying to find out where Tiffany or Jamaal had gone, if I knew anything about Greg, anything about you and where you might have gone.”

  “Me? What have I got to do with anything?”

  “We just need to find him,” Alex said, “or find Greg. Find Greg and maybe we’ll find Sam. He won’t be far behind.”

  “And you have no idea where he is?”

  “You mean Greg?”

  “I mean Sam! Your boyfriend Sam!”

  “Is that what he is?” Alex said softly, a little amused. Then she said, “Why don’t you tell me where he’s gone to—he’s your best friend, isn’t he? No? You don’t know?”

  She appeared to take brief satisfaction from this little touché, if that’s what it was, but now her face dropped back into olive-sallow slackness, her hair wet and luminously dark from the shower she’d taken in the downstairs bathroom, the first she’d had in three days. I’d showed her how to work the wonky taps in the shower, the bathroom unfinished like my bedroom, unadorned, the shower stall a mere plastic husk of a stall, a placeholder, the white bowl of the sink sticking out of the wall with its gray throat exposed—provisionality abandoned to permanence.

  Past Alex’s window a row of light-topped silver stanchions ticked by like the measure lines of a sonata, a sudden pastorale. Green within green again, a scrim of trees running behind the unlit car dealership at the edge of town. Up ahead I saw the interstate and signs for Middleborough, Taunton, Norton, each name an echo, a ghost limb. There were years when those place-names would have brought nothing to mind so much as the locker rooms attached to the high schools in them, the dark linoleum hallways after school hours, the spread of fenced-in tennis courts we played on, the meager crowds, mostly parents. Now the names put off a fresh-cut grass smell, reeking mulch, the hiss of sprinklers, the sensorium of suburban wealth that got weaker as you moved out of Boston’s powerful orbit, stronger again as you came into New York’s.

  On the interstate the sky lowered like a shade, darker grays within gray, suddenly, the furrowed white brow of a thunderhead pushing out here and there from the newly installed mass. We were headed toward Greenwich and the millionaire ZIP codes of neighboring Westchester County. Somewhere nearby Bosch’s ghost would be hovering in the air, like a seagull on the wind, a plane in a holding pattern over JFK or Newark. I was up there with it now, seeing the bodies from a bird’s-eye view when I saw them, the eye of memory slowly turning in the air, hovering, half presiding over the bodies, a man’s and a dog’s, in their final loneliness.

  I realized that the car—coming back to earth—was bending away on an off-ramp.

  “We’re getting off?” I said to Alex. “Why are we getting off?”

  I saw her subtly check her phone. I noted the blue illuminated bars showing gas levels on the console stacked four or five high above the glowing red E. A group of faded, sad-looking picnic tables slid by on our left, a widening apron of grass. Then the low-slung rest stop came out from behind trees, a group of small brown shacks with a lodge aesthetic that the gas stations and fast-food chains roughly matched: a restrained set of golden arches, a Dunkin’ Donuts sign in muted earth tones…The main building’s low roof ran up shallowly, its peaked overhang like an amphitheater shell to an audience of cars. The sun was still behind clouds, but enough light seeped through to reflect the slate sky in the prodigious span of windshields coming into view on our right, recalling a super-image spread across a bank of tight-packed TV screens, the sky in the million micro-domes of a bug’s eye.

  “This is the lunch stop we promised your mother,” Alex finally said, parking. “To hash things through, right? I’d love to know what you told her.”

  Inside the main building a line of vending machines and a grimy blue pay phone filled the space between the men’s and women’s bathrooms. I came out before Alex, scoping the layout—a convenience store in the right-hand trench, a fluorescent food court–style expanse at the left, white square tables and chairs all welded together and bolted to the floor as if road-warped travelers might try to pry them up for souvenirs. Just then Alex came in through the front entrance again, the glass doors sucking shut behind her.

  “I thought you were in the bathroom,” I said.

  She nodded at the small leather carryall looped over her shoulder. “Forgot this in the car,” she said, and disappeared into the ladies’ room.

  For a good twenty minutes we sat across from each other eating Quiznos at a table in the corner, a casualness sinking into our skin, like exhaustion, and at the same time, with our guard down, an old-times intimacy coming up, an old-times routine.

  “Guy in the corner,” I said. “Other corner. Don’t stare! It’s like riding a bike, Alex. How are you so rusty at this?”

  “In the Patriots jersey?”

  “The very same.”

  “Half empty or half full?”

  “Whichever you prefer.”

  “Whose jersey is he wearing? Is that Brady’s?”

  I craned my head to try to make out the numbers spread across the man’s spreading gut under the table. I couldn’t quite see them, but then I wouldn’t have known Brady’s jersey number anyway—my taste in sports ran admittedly to the genteel.

  “Not mine,” Alex said. “I’m a woman of the people. I know all about the Boston Football Patriots.”

  “Of course.”

  “Actually, I do know a little about Brady from the tabloids. Let’s assume for the sake of this exercise in”—she hesitated, neck bent, squinting—“in glass half fullness, let’s assume the gentleman in the corner, our friend Rick, let’s assume, is wearing a Tom Brady jersey. Now, understand that Rick isn’t one of those big-boned stocky guys of—what, English stock? Irish?—who seeks some vicarious existence in his favorite righty quarterback. Brady’s right-handed, right?”

  “No idea.”

  “Pretty sure he is. Rick is too. But here’s the thing: Rick doesn’t get off on thinking he is the quarterback Tom Brady, fucking the same supermodels and paying out the same giant alimonies when he gets tired of them—or maybe it’s child support? I can’t remember. But Rick’s no
t interested in that. He just likes the way the guy passes the ball, the way he runs out of the pocket, the way he squeezes a water bottle a good foot above his head on the sidelines, very casual-like, you know? Rick loves that. He loves Tom Brady, but he doesn’t actually want to be Tom Brady. Tom Brady doesn’t get to just relax and eat a Big Mac at a middle-of-nowhere rest stop. Tom Brady can’t eat Big Macs at all. Tom Brady probably has to suffer through an endless stream of minimally plated nouvelle cuisine dinners, often working to make conversation with people he doesn’t know or particularly like. See, Rick doesn’t want that. He likes being alone with his thoughts—he can handle that. Do you see him checking his phone every two seconds? You don’t. He likes to relax and enjoy a Big Mac, which he enjoys a lot better, frankly, than whatever bastardized European fare they serve at those overpriced bistro pubs, whatever the fuck a bistro pub is. If there’s a meaningful distinction between a bistro pub and any other mid-price restaurant with a liquor license, our friend Rick doesn’t see it. He doesn’t get taken in by marketing, he’s not one of Pavlov’s slobbering dogs. The man likes his Big Macs, so what? He likes a shamefully rich football player playboy who’s probably delinquent in his child support payments, so what?”

  With a grimace-smile I raised my index finger like a referee’s yellow flag.

  “Too much projection at the end there?” Alex said. “Okay, I’ll withdraw it.”

  “Why should he feel the need to defend football and Big Macs?”

  “A little splash on the entry, granted, but pretty good otherwise, no?”

  “Eight out of ten.”

  “Who’s rusty now?” Alex said, slapping the table. “Okay, your turn. Who who who who who?” she said, roving her gaze across the room.

  In Florence Alex and I had played this game daily, obsessively, at every meal, every snack stop. The first half of our trip was filled with glass-half-full speculations about soft-eyed gelato-shop owners, amateur artists with their easels at the banks of the glittering Arno, French tourists in their stylish dress, uncomfortable-looking shoes. Then came the midweek announcement that Alex and Columbia were finished, the academic life she’d lived, goodbye to all that—and with it, curling silently, sourly in the air, the suggestion that she and I were probably finished too. From then on the trip had all the lilt of a funeral march and all our speculations about the people we saw went glass half empty, decidedly. The pruned woman kneeling down with her eyes closed at the cordon line before Ghiberti’s golden door? A religious zealot first, an art lover second or third or tenth, or not at all. The glum-looking man at an alfresco café table, staring at the tourists over his thin empty glass? Stood up on a date, or maybe just out of work, swallowing his savings one grappa at a time. The classical guitarist with the long dark braid that hung down her chest like a ferret? Unemployed too, basically. A hobbyist. What else did twenty years of careful study in just about any art make you? I recalled for Alex a line of Saul Bellow’s: The best humanists would be called in to pick out the wallpaper for humanity’s crypt. The guitarist was good, too, very good, subtle and soulful in her playing, and lonely. She set up nightly on the steps of a little stone church a few streets from the Ponte Vecchio. In the distance you could hear the more popular buskers with their acoustic-electric American Top 40 on the famous lit-up bridge. We’d passed these talentless young men before, seen their open guitar cases glittering like treasure chests. How simple it was, sometimes, to hate the world. You just opened your eyes.

  On the other side of the table Alex had come back to herself—playtime over, apparently. Clouds moved in over her face, her eyes unblinking through narrowed lids. At her neck a tendon stood out like a long fin, running down through the clavicle and making a line against which the gentle bait in her throat dropped and rose again.

  “You see that pay phone up front?” Alex said, nodding. “That’s our ticket.”

  “Ticket to what?”

  “Don’t say anything incriminating on the call, just find out where he is. Do you have his number?”

  “Sam’s?”

  “Greg’s. He’s the priority. We need to warn him, but we obviously can’t do that over the phone.”

  “Warn him against what? What’s Sam going to do?”

  “How would I know that?” Alex said. “All I have are worst-case scenarios.”

  She took her phone out of the carryall, a pen, an old grocery receipt, and copied down the number for me to call. She’d tried herself several times but Greg hadn’t picked up, and frankly she didn’t blame him. She was linked in Greg’s mind with Sam, and Sam hadn’t exactly been subtle in his suspicions of Greg, his late hostilities to him. I was different. I’d earned Greg’s trust enough to elicit advice from him, borrow money from him—I’d been the last to see him.

  “I tell him it’s important that we talk to him, but we have to do it in person,” I said.

  “No ‘we,’ ” said Alex. “Don’t even mention me.”

  I took a handful of quarters to the pay phone by the entrance. The doors behind me rang open and sucked shut, sounds of sneakers on the floor mat, the thwack of flip-flops, the traffic noise from the interstate rushing over the cement partitions and coursing in on the breeze. For long seconds I heard no dial tone, no meaningful clicks—I was on the point of fingering down the receiver when a staid single beep signaled Greg’s voice mail. I said the words. I tried to keep my voice low and calm, but a tremor of genuine worry must have ghosted through the message. I don’t like to consider where that fear came from—that Alex’s concern, a concern about what all this might mean for us, is what accounted for the frightened vibrato feathering the edges of my words. Yet it’s also obvious, isn’t it? Self-interest presided over all this, that bugaboo of Marxism and all utopianism, that black beating heart of all genuine interaction under capitalism. Of course I mean it! It involves me! Maybe Greg heard something of this in my message to him—I can’t be sure—but a few minutes later when I tried him again I heard his voice on the phone, his live voice, tinny and far away, trembling, breathless, cowed.

  It had to be in person, I told him. “Not over the phone. In person. Trust me, okay?”

  He gave me the address. I wrote it down. I lied and said I was calling from New York. Two hours, I said, maybe a little under. It was that simple.

  I returned to the table, smiling, an idiot vanity on my lips, idiot vanity on my face, the way it pulled up my brows like a marionette’s, the puppyish, golden retriever’s pride in my eyes…That was me. That was the face I wore to the cliff’s edge.

  “You got it?” Alex said.

  I pushed the paper across to her. “You should have timed me,” I said.

  “Maple Court, huh? In Stamford? That sounds about right—the obligatory tree fetish. I’ll bet he’s at his parents’.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “Quite a group we put together, isn’t it?”

  “What did you expect? We’re a bunch of grad school dropouts.”

  “It’s okay,” Alex said, standing, looking quickly past me. “It’ll be okay.” She crossed to my side of the table and hugged me tight around the neck, leaning into my ear, saying, “Please don’t be mad at me, Eli. This’ll all be okay. Okay? You know I love you,” and she pushed her lips hard into my cheek.

  I wheeled around, tracking her sudden steps to the door. Sam was just inside the entranceway, tall and pale, his thin frame loose in the soiled white giveaway T-shirt that hung from his shoulders as if off a coat hanger, the concave chest, the sharp jaw that bent to receive Alex’s hasty kiss. He pulled her to him, holding her in an embrace, the subtle exchange of the receipt, and now Sam’s eyes were on me. He carried a sagging blue JanSport backpack over his right shoulder as he stepped into the harsher light of the food court, an overhead light that filled him out, lit up the pits and hollows of his face. He was nakedly what he was.

  “Don’t be mad at Alex,
” Sam said as he lowered himself down across from me. I retain the image of a green wispy roadrunner on the front of his T-shirt, an impressionist figure sliding past—I was staring straight ahead, making a fixed frame for Sam to drop into.

  “Eli?”

  “You needed the address?” I said. “Is that why I’m here?”

  “For what it’s worth, Alex didn’t want to do it this way, but it had to be done. It was my idea.”

  I looked up at Sam. “All you’ve got weighing down that backpack is your dirty laundry, I assume?”

  A faint smile crossed Sam’s lips, minnow-like—there, then gone.

  “And what’s to stop me from walking out of here right now?”

  “And hitching a ride back to your leafy Boston suburb?”

  “Or anywhere.”

  “Common sense,” Sam said, rising slowly back out of the frame. The runner in stylized outline, his limbs like wisps of green smoke, rose too—low cacti in the foreground, a few deft lines to hint at canyons in the background. “Cedar City 10k—Fun in the Sun Run,” the shirt said. It moved out of view and trailed after it a belated fug of body sweat and overmatched Old Spice. Sam whispered in my ear, soft and low, dovish, like Alex from a moment ago.

  He loped to the front entrance and turned and waited for me there, feigning interest in a Coke machine that he almost matched for height. He wore the tight dark jeans I’d rarely not seen him in, the ones with the white threadbare outlines in the fabric like salty leavings from his front-pocket wallet, the rectangular cell phone he still used in a pinch, I gathered, and here we were in a pinch. He wore the same flat loafers, too, that he used to slip on after tennis, furred and moccasin-like with wear—or if not the exact pair, a close descendant. He was not one to change styles quickly, Sam Westergard. A man of deep habit. A man of action with the habit of repeating his actions again and again, clinging to his talismanic routines. I later learned that Sam had made a near nightly ritual of his trips up to Bosch’s neighborhood, sometimes late-night trips, sometimes trips that must have shaded into very early morning, the pale light in a few of the tollbooth photos covering Sam’s tan Buick in a purple shroud, covering over the car’s dents and rust spots, taking years off it, but never quite obscuring the license plate or the jagged New Jersey–shaped hole shaping the glow of the left brake light. The sexual politics of the House’s upstairs bedroom being what they were, I never really wondered why Sam should move from mattress to mattress, rarely waking in the same one consecutively, as if the darkness of night hid nothing so much as a silent game of musical beds. Upward of forty trips, I learned at the trial. An obsessed man, Alex had called him—and I’m convinced that that much of her performance was genuine. I could see the burning points of Sam’s personality emanating off him by the Coke machine, unfurling like plumes, like a peacock’s spread of manifold shimmering secrets. For the bird it’s an automatic gesture, an upwelling out of deep, primordial springs. I wonder how much different it was for my friend Sam.