“It’s a very fine line, Chris.”
“I agree, it is. But for all the bombs they planted after those three of their own died, not a single person was hurt. And then, for me at least, it’s sobering to think how few degrees of separation there are between the longtime activists in my circle now, and Mark Rudd, or Bernardine Dohrn. How close that history is. How their influence echoes.”
“Really? You know these people?”
“I don’t know anybody who went underground,” he said hastily. “And nobody who was in the film. But everybody was in college or at a demonstration with everybody else. And there’s a core of old timers still turning out for protests.”
“Will I be deported if I’m seen with you?”
Christopher couldn’t tell if she was teasing. “My crowd has nothing to do with dynamite or prison breaks,” he said. “But the issues those guys were talking about aren’t ancient history. Every place you turn there are people aggrieved enough to blow up a bus or a train station.”
“Or four airplanes and the tallest office towers in New York.” She glanced over, a deep sadness in her eyes. “It’s remarkable that these Weather people acted on account of somebody else’s struggles. The war in Vietnam as you said, and Black nationalism at home.”
“True,” he said. Her disclaimer about following the politics was too modest. “But it was Weather’s war too. Fifty-five thousand US soldiers killed in Vietnam by the time we evacuated Saigon.” They stepped around a foursome saying goodbyes outside an Eritrean restaurant. “So … can I buy you a drink?” Christopher asked. He had something bracing in mind. A scotch, maybe a cognac. The fog had come in and his hands felt like icicles.
“Depends what you mean by a drink. Maybe some tea?”
Ouch. Her family was Sikh, she’d already told him. No booze. “There’s a café the next street over,” he said. “Kind of a combination café and art gallery.”
“I hope you don’t mind?”
“Of course not.”
—
Suvali found a table by the windows along Lincoln Avenue, across from the eucalyptus trees edging Golden Gate Park. Christopher waited for their order, watching the lazy spin of a mobile hung above the Paint & Palette’s cash register. When their drinks came up he crossed to the table. “Did you want milk?” he asked, slipping into a wooden chair.
“No,” Suvali said, smiling that enigmatic smile again. “Not with mint tea.”
She was beyond beautiful. Christopher looked away, taking in the art on nearby walls. A leering figure with the president’s face caught his eye. The painting depicted a man standing in a fiery landscape strewn with bones, dressed in a monk’s robe and shouldering a pennant decorated with a blood-red cross. St. George, he realized as his gaze returned to Suvali. She was staring into her tea. “What are you thinking?” he asked.
“About the movie.”
Christopher waited for her to say more.
“Something that dark-haired woman talked about—the one sitting at the picnic table. That doing nothing when the world is in a period of violence is itself a form of violence.”
“Yes, I remember that. Naomi Jaffe. A pivotal abstraction.”
“I’m not sure I agree with it.” Suvali looked up, as if challenging him.
“There’s a whiff of original sin in her idea,” Christopher said carefully. “That a person is stained from the get-go.”
“I wasn’t thinking in religious terms. Or perhaps I was, but using karma as a frame.” Suvali blew gently across her mug. “I’d say that exchanging one violence for another only digs a person in more deeply. The way to end the cycle is to step away from it.”
“But Jaffe didn’t say ‘doing anything other than violence’—she said ‘doing nothing.’ She was talking about collective responsibility.”
“She was defending the group’s decisions, Chris. The bombings they did commit, which were terribly dangerous even if they did take measures to keep from hurting anyone.”
Christopher nodded. “The thing is, their group grew out of total impotence. The government kept escalating in Vietnam no matter how many people came to peaceful protests. Nixon didn’t care. It’s not a whole lot different from all those millions on the streets last February, then in March the US invades Iraq.”
“But look what it came to. In the seventies, I mean. What that man who was critical of the Weather people said—”
“Todd Gitlin?”
“The one with the round glasses. He said that this kind of thinking, that you know what’s best for people, is what allowed all the Hitlers and Stalins in history to justify their programs of mass murder.”
“He’s right.”
“So how do you reconcile those ideas?”
Christopher swirled milky coffee in his glass. “Gitlin is still angry that Weather hijacked SDS—Students for a Democratic Society—which … well, never mind all that. But what he didn’t acknowledge in the film is that the logic that drove Stalin and Hitler and Mao to lunatic ends was the same logic that brought Moses to the Red Sea and Washington to the Delaware River. And Gandhi to Delhi, for that matter.”
“I’m not sure I see what you mean.”
“I mean that leaders lead. And things contain their opposites. Mao’s horrific rule lifted tens of millions of Chinese peasants out of poverty and illiteracy. Washington’s ‘free’ government institutionalized slavery.” Christopher was starting to wish he had suggested a lighter movie. “There are inevitable failures and contradictions when theory confronts practice. Still, you have to find the border between standing up for what’s right, versus acts that are dictatorial or violent. Or worse.”
She sipped from her mug. “Do you think the Weather Underground found that border?”
“If it weren’t for the comrades who died making their first explosives they would have become murderers. But it didn’t happen that way. They started to step off the precipice, then scrabbled their way back to solid ground. I think you’ve got to give them credit for that.”
Suvali didn’t answer right away. A fire truck hurtled by, lights blazing. She watched it pass. “Perhaps this is too direct a question,” she said, then raised her eyes to his. “Do people you know do this kind of thing?”
“Planting bombs?” Christopher sat back and lifted his hands, showing empty palms. “Not a chance. I’m firmly grounded in the impotent, sign-waving camp.” He wondered whether that would still be true if he let Chagall use his manifesto. And where did Brendan fit in, attempting to ferry material aid to the Zapatistas?
“Then why do anything?” Suvali asked. “Why pour your time and talent into something you think is hopeless?”
“Because I’m dense?”
“Seriously.”
“Seriously?” She was pushing him to show himself. “Because it’s the only morally coherent place I can find,” he said, leaning forward. “It’s what Laura Whitehorn said at the end of the movie: people never stop struggling to change things that make life unlivable. Everybody looks for a way to make a difference. For some that means trying to give their kids a good life. For others it’s something … more general. Waving signs may seem pointless, but it holds open a space. Someday people are going to jump into that space, when the moment comes around again.”
Christopher lifted his latte, and sipped. She probably thought he was an imbecile.
“You’re a good man,” Suvali murmured.
He set the drink down, embarrassed. “You don’t know me well enough to say that.”
“What I mean is, I think it’s awfully difficult to stake so much on a hope that slim. It’s much easier to make one’s world smaller, to draw a little circle and say, ‘This is what I can affect.’ If you don’t, it’s so easy to overreach. That’s what happened to the people in the film.”
“Maybe,” Christopher said. He watched her hands. Doctor’s hands, long fingers, nails short and scrubbed. Hands that would probably do more concrete good in the world than his. Good that would be far eas
ier to see.
“My uncle says that no matter where a person is in the cycles of history, the tangents leading toward tragedy are easier to follow than the paths that lead to balance.”
“This is the uncle you told me about? The professor?”
Suvali nodded.
“Where does he teach?”
“At a university in the Punjab. Do you know about the separatists there? The Golden Temple, Indira Gandhi?”
“Not very much,” he said. “I know she was assassinated after an awful massacre. I was in high school, I think.”
“It happened in 1984. My uncle was badly injured in the fighting then.”
“I’m feeling extremely ignorant right now.”
“It doesn’t matter. I don’t know your Weather Underground, you don’t know Shiromani Akali Dal. It’s a big world.”
“Humbling.”
A silence fell.
“What field is your uncle in?”
“Mathematics.” Suvali smiled. “I’d be hard-pressed to say anything more exact than that. If doctors had to calculate anything more complex than long division, I’d be in Brighton dishing out fish and chips at the Palace Pier.”
Christopher laughed. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Was Brighton a place you wanted to escape?”
“I suppose I did.” Suvali looked at Christopher, then lowered her eyes again. “Perhaps London was far enough, really. But then I kept going. Westward ho.”
“And once you finish your program?”
“That’s hard to say. Licensure is a bit complicated.”
Christopher watched as a resolution settled over her, a determination she breathed into her posture, the slightest tightening of her expression. How did she see the trajectory of her life?
“What does your father think of you working in newspapers?” she asked. “Doesn’t he want you to be a professor?”
“Oh, sure, he thinks I’m wasting my genetic inheritance.” Christopher smiled, he hoped not too bitterly. “At this point he’d settle for law school.”
“Would you go that route?”
“Not likely. Though it’s hard to say how much longer I can stick with this electronic paste-up gig.”
She nodded. “Did you tell me already whether you have siblings?”
“A brother, Marshall. Struck it rich in the dot-com years, and now he shifts money around the stock market. Another loser in Dad’s book. Money doesn’t count for much in my family.”
“A loser in your book too, if I’m catching your drift.”
Christopher shrugged. He’d aired enough dirty laundry for a first date. “It’s an old story,” he said. “Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau.”
“Vali and Sugriva.”
“I am so out of my depth.”
The crowd in the café had begun to thin. Christopher looked up into a cloud of vellum wings, strung on nylon lines suspended from the ceiling. “Like a kelp forest from below,” he observed. “I wonder if that’s what the artist had in mind.”
Suvali followed his gaze. “It reminds me of the aquarium in Monterey.”
“I haven’t been there for years,” he said. “Do they still have that cylindrical tank, the one full of sardines? Or anchovies, maybe? Flashing around and around, like silver bracelets.”
“They do. It’s hypnotic, isn’t it?”
He watched her stare into the slowly spinning artwork. “I don’t want to keep you too late.”
“Thank you, Chris. I do have to be at the hospital tomorrow.”
—
He flagged down a taxi on the corner. It was a short distance to where she lived, but buses were infrequent at that hour. As the yellow Impala pulled over he leaned in a few uncertain degrees. She pulled away, just enough to rebuff his hope.
“It means more in my world,” she said, placing a hand on his arm. “But I would like to see you again. I … I like talking with you. Will you call me?”
He nodded dumbly. The driver was waiting; Christopher opened the taxi’s door.
“I mean it, Chris. Maybe next week?”
“I’ll call,” he said, and tried to smile as if her refusal hadn’t mattered.
TWENTY
Christopher slipped out of his room and tiptoed toward the stairs, doing his best to preserve the Triangle’s early afternoon silence. His messenger bag pulled him into a starboard list. When someone stepped into the hall he started, failing for an instant to recognize Brendan behind Ray-Bans and a leather jacket. “Christ,” he exclaimed. “You look like undercover FBI in those shades.”
Brendan put on a noirish air, reached for his wallet, and let it fall open to reveal a limp accordion of tattered plastic pockets. “Not too convincing, is it?”
Christopher laughed. “Not too.”
“It’s spooky that the Triangle’s so empty now.”
“Fewer and fewer.” Christopher hiked up his bag. “When are you going to give up couch surfing and come back in for real?”
“Too soon to make a plan, Chris. You heading out?”
“Um, yeah. Meeting a friend.”
“Oh?” Brendan asked. “The woman from the café?”
Christopher felt himself color. He hadn’t phoned since Suvali sped off in her cab the week before, and neither had she. “No,” he said. “Someone else.”
Brendan followed him down the stairs. On the sidewalk they hesitated, each as if on cue.
“So,” Christopher said. He made a birdlike gesture toward Church Street. “I’m heading this way.”
Brendan thumbed over his shoulder in the opposite direction, and gave an exaggerated wink.
Another call to the Zapatista contacts, Christopher guessed. Or maybe just buying cigarettes. Asking would have invited more questions. “See you tonight,” he said, and turned toward the Muni stop.
—
Coming up into UN Plaza Christopher hurried around to the main library’s entrance, barely watching for anybody who might have followed him off the train. Still, he pretended deep preoccupation as he approached the security station. It was all he could do to keep a straight face. To imagine the library guards would be interested in his business, let alone that any of the patrons cared. Who would be watching him? The mohawked skateboy waiting in line at the checkout counter? That horse-faced guy wearing a straw Stetson?
The uniformed guards by the Tattle-Tape sensors ignored him, as expected. He stepped aside for a toothless grandmother shambling by with a pair of fully loaded shopping bags.
Christopher hadn’t run on so little shut-eye since college. The only way to deliver Chagall’s manifesto, he had realized, was to write and rewrite ’til his fingers bled. A stretch of late nights and several quick round-trips with Chagall in e-mail had leapfrogged the project to its last act. Today’s IRC would be all about the fine points, including delivery.
Christopher crossed the lobby and climbed a flight of marble steps, then ascended a staircase that wound up the atrium. From the third floor he took an elevator to five, where the periodical room was jammed, two or three neatly groomed older men at every table. Christopher hadn’t accounted for weekday news fiends. None seemed a threat, particularly. But Christopher needed a seat without an over-the-shoulder view.
He took the stairs back down a level, and found the Patent and Trademark Center vacant.
The usual rites ensued. By the time he got to the chat prompt Chagall was signed on.
CHAGALL: Sorry I missed our rendezvous a few days back.
CHRIS: Shit happens, no apology needed.
CHAGALL: My partners and I think your changes are excellent.
CHRIS: Glad to hear it. You still think generic on strategy works? Without reference to target?
CHAGALL: Yes, powerful as is. Especially latest analogy to cancer. Waiting idly for lumps & fatigue vs. active treatment. Could have been morbid but you made it work.
CHRIS: Thanks. Critique of reductionist science?
CHAGALL: Digestible now. Comparison of scientific complexity to relations
hips in one-child family vs. multiple is easy way into hard topic. We also like comparison of average weather patterns to what’s it like outside today, that science is less certain than it seems. Prior draft was sound, but couldn’t have reached a broad audience.
Somebody’s car alarm began to wail on Hyde Street. He typed out his reply, ducking Chagall’s uncharacteristic praise.
CHRIS: Your comments were helpful. What about call to Civil Society?
CHAGALL: What we liked this time was tight bond between democratic engagement and ‘withering away of the vanguard.’
CHRIS: Nicely put. Too clever a phrase to include though, right? Only parties slated for the dustbin of history would get it. The critical leap is from agreement with moral argument to actual, effective behavior.
CHAGALL: Yes. As in description of nodding while the pastor preaches, then acting badly after church.
CHRIS: So what are next steps?
CHAGALL: What you’ve done is more than satisfactory. Now we dissolve our ties. Essential to destroy all contact info, encryption keys, notes, drafts, etc. To protect all of us.
Chagall’s garrulousness suddenly made sense. This was his shadow-comrade’s last chance to assure the proper steps would be taken.
CHRIS: I didn’t think we were quite finished.
CHAGALL: We can take it from here. Assume you are using win/linux dual boot, as discussed? All relevant data, software, logs on linux partition?
CHRIS: Correct.
CHAGALL: Necessary to completely and repeatedly wipe that partition. Multiple methods—Gutmann, DoD spec, pseudorandom writes. Are these techniques known to you?
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