Age of Unreason

by Warren Kinsella

  “Fucking depressing” was a pretty good way of describing my return to my hometown, too. My United flight landed just past midnight, and the sky was pissing down with rain.

  My dad and the Upchucks and Mike met me at the arrivals gate. Mike, I assumed, had been brought along to wrestle me into my dad’s station wagon in case I tried to bolt or something. As I walked up, none of them smiled, but my dad and the Upchucks hugged me. I didn’t ask where X was.

  I’d been gone for more than three months. The Hot Nasties had gotten the bad news from Stiff Records just after Christmas, and I had basically freaked. I immediately fucked off to the only place I had been happy as a kid: Sanibel Island, the location of the one and only family holiday where my mother hadn’t shrieked at my father all the time. We’d had two great weeks there when I was ten. So, when Stiff dumped us, that’s where I went. To wash dishes. To forget. To cultivate an impressive drug habit.

  The Casco Bay Recovery Center was so named so it didn’t have to call itself what it really was: Portland, Maine’s first real rehab clinic for junkies and drunks.

  To everyone’s surprise, I didn’t object when my dad told me where they were taking me straight from the airport. I was too tired to fight it. Hearing about the bombing, and about Eddie and Nagamo dying, had left me depleted. I felt older than dirt, at the ripe old age of twenty-one.

  We drove in silence, with Sister Betty sitting beside me in the back seat, holding my hand. Mike was on the other side of her. Patti sat up front with my dad.

  I only spoke once. “Has anyone heard anything else about Eddie and Nagamo?”

  Dad looked at me in the rear-view mirror. “No, Kurt,” he said. “They haven’t been positively identified yet, even though the FBI told their families that they’re considered among the dead.”

  “Right,” I said, turning to watch Portland slip by in the dark outside the window.

  Sister Betty tightened her grip on my hand.

  I hadn’t called home and told any of them that I was doing smack, of course. But they all knew my history. They knew what I was like. X, it turned out, also knew someone who knew someone active in the Fort Myers punk scene. They told him that Kurt Blank hadn’t been seen at any punk shows in the area — because, they said, Kurt Blank “was a junkie, washing dishes at some family restaurant over on Sanibel.” Speed had been bad enough — but heroin was the hardest hard drug. The next stop was the morgue. So, to rehab I would go.

  We drove slowly, because it was dark and the rain was really coming down. When we got to the center, the Upchucks and Mike stayed in the car (apparently, they’d been told not to make a big deal of saying goodbye). Before I got out, Sister Betty kissed me on the forehead, Mike patted my arm, and Patti gave me a worried look. I retrieved my backpack from the trunk as my dad waited. It contained a pair of jeans, a few T-shirts and underwear, and some toiletries. That’s it.

  Dad and I went inside the lobby, where a fit-looking woman named Paula was waiting for us. She had short, almost military-style hair and a brusque, all-business manner. Behind her, a big guy in a lab coat was sitting on the reception desk holding a clipboard. It was nearly two in the morning.

  “Dr. Blank,” Paula said, shaking my dad’s hand, and then fake-smiling at me. “And this must be Kurt …”

  “It is,” Dad said, putting a hand on my shoulder.

  Paula extended a hand and I reluctantly shook it. She kept holding my hand, even though I knew it must have felt cold and clammy — a junkie’s claw. “Kurt, welcome to the Casco Bay Recovery Center. I understand you just turned twenty-one, is that right?”

  I nodded.

  The guy in the lab coat stepped forward and handed Paula the clipboard. “Since you’re twenty-one, we require your signature on this consent form,” she said, extending it to me. “The length of individual rehabilitation programs will vary, Kurt, depending on the type of treatment, but most of our plans are six to twelve weeks in duration. Often, the therapists may feel that an extended stay would be beneficial to the recovery process, but this isn’t a hard and fast rule. But we need your consent to get started.”

  I looked at the blur of words on the page and then glanced over at my dad. For the first time, I noticed that he was visibly bent, like a twig. And his face looked so sad. He looked many years older than he was. He didn’t say anything.

  “Do you have a pen?” I asked.

  After I signed, I disappeared. For the next ten weeks, I would cease to exist. I would vanish.

  But not completely.

  CHAPTER 7

  Thomas M. Jones hid in plain sight.

  Being white, male, and unremarkable looking, he knew the best place to hide was where he’d blend in: Maine and New Hampshire. Maine was about ninety-five percent white (in the rural areas, it was closer to one hundred percent). New Hampshire was slightly more diverse — at about ninety-one percent.

  But first, he needed to get rid of the stolen Mercury Marquis. There was a remote possibility someone had seen him getting into it a block away from where he’d left the Ford truck, but he doubted it. And he’d made sure to keep to the speed limit. Besides, he’d been seen at the truck rental in Vermont and at the Holiday Inn. Maybe someone could describe him, maybe not. He wasn’t worried about that. But, just in case, he’d ditch the Marquis. He wouldn’t be found unless he wanted to be.

  Jones had left few traces as he moved through life. No Social Security, no driver’s license — other than a very convincing fake one — no credit cards, no passport. He’d never voted. He had been to a medical clinic a couple times — once for a broken arm, once for a dog bite — but he’d given a fake name both times and paid in cash. He was like that: a chameleon, able to blend in to every background.

  He was also young, only in his early twenties. That’s what someone at the truck rental place would tell the FBI. “Boyish” is how they would describe him. “Looked barely out of his teens.”

  Thomas M. Jones had been home-schooled by his parents, who — amusingly — were progressive hippie-dippy types. The family of three had lived off the grid, like hermits, in rural Vermont — no electricity, no modern appliances, no TV. They grew their own vegetables, hunted for their own meat, pumped their own water, and kept to themselves. His parents had rejected American society because they believed it had rejected the likes of them. It was a warmongering, corporatist state, they told their son, and they deeply despised it. They hated the manifest destiny bullying, they hated the crowded cities, they hated the pollution and the noise, and they hated America’s reactionary capitalist politics. So, they’d withdrawn from it all. Thomas had come along in 1960, when his parents were squatting in an abandoned one-room hunter’s cabin deep in the woods near North Pond, in central Maine.

  But Thomas M. Jones didn’t exist, at least not in the way that other Americans did. His parents didn’t register his birth with Kennebec County, and they didn’t ever take him to the doctor. They objected to drugs and vaccinations, and they always carried with them a well-thumbed copy of the Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy. It was all they needed, they believed.

  Their son was a quiet boy, intelligent and a prodigious reader. When he was young, his parents brought him used books they’d barter for in town, and he’d read them slowly, savoring them like they were a last meal. Then he’d reread them.

  When he got a bit older and could hitch a ride or walk on his own, Thomas would go into town with the only piece of ID he possessed — a library card, made out in his real name — and he’d meander through the stacks at the Brown Memorial Library in Clinton, as happy as could be. Hours later, he’d walk out with a JCPenney bag filled with books.

  With one or two exceptions, nobody ever talked to him. No one ever asked him questions, either. He likely wouldn’t have said much, even if they had. Thomas M. Jones knew how to blend in, how to remain unseen. His parents had taught him to never trust “outsiders,” as they called them. They also made him promise never to tell anyone where they lived. It was
an easy promise to keep; he had no interest in the outside world. With books, he didn’t really need the outside world.

  There were exceptions, of course. For a while, there was a girl his age. She worked part-time at the library in Clinton, and they’d talk. She had no interest in books — even though she worked in a library and was continually restocking the shelves — but she was impressed with how much he knew. “You’re smarter than any kid I know,” she’d told him.

  She’d listen to him talk about Kipling, and especially Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden,” with its thrilling stanzas calling on whites to “send forth the best ye breed,” and its disdain for “lesser breeds,” and describing how slaves were “new-caught, sullen peoples, half-devil and half child.” He also adored Kipling’s The Jungle Book, he told her, with its tales of a boy who lived in the woods and how the indigenous people were worse than animals.

  But it was Friedrich Nietzsche who he came to love the most. It was his father who introduced him to the German philosopher at the age of twelve. “If a person wants to obtain a genuine education,” Thomas explained to the girl at the library, “they should drop out of school and read a hundred books.” His father had handed him a list, handwritten, and he showed it to the girl at the library, wanting to impress her. Then he tendered his library card and started filling up the JCPenney bag again. On the list, he told her, were one hundred of the best books ever written. With this list as his guide, Thomas started to devour Shakespeare, Plato, Shaw, Dostoevsky, Schopenhauer, and — most of all — Nietzsche. For a boy, reading the German philosopher all on his own, without anyone giving him some context about what was printed on the pages, Nietzsche’s musings were electrifying.

  He nodded his head to Nietzsche’s ravings about Jews, who he called “these impudent people [with] their vulgar souls.” Jones also loved Nietzsche’s proclamation of what he called the “affirmative Aryan religion.” That was his religion, too, he reckoned, although he didn’t tell the girl at the library that.

  It all had a dramatic and intoxicating effect on Thomas. While his parents slept in the next room in their shack in the woods, he’d stay up to five and six in the morning, watching the sun come up and reading Nietzsche, excited about “the Superman” and what Nietzsche called “the will to power.”

  Every man seeks to dominate, he decided. That, he told himself, was the nature of all higher life. If a man was strong, he concluded, he could not be evil. “Learn to think beyond good and evil,” his father said to him once, and he did. Whether a man had used brutality or love to acquire power, it didn’t matter to Thomas. Power was an end in itself. After Nietzsche, he started to read up on other powerful men, like Alexander the Great, which led to Napoleon, which led, inevitably, to Adolf Hitler.

  Thomas M. Jones removed his ball cap and scratched his head. He hadn’t thought about that girl for a long time. Where had she gone? he wondered. Is she alive? Didn’t she feel the way he did, after he revealed his feelings to her?

  She’d disappeared one day and never came back to the library. When he summoned the courage to ask the head librarian, she frowned and said the girl had gotten into some trouble and wouldn’t be back. That made him sad for a long time.

  Thomas M. Jones looked at the cheap Timex on his wrist. He’d kept to the speed limit the whole way, so as not to attract any attention. He went south along the turnpike first, toward the state line dividing Maine and New Hampshire. As he’d neared the toll booth, maybe a dozen police cars screamed past, heading in the opposite direction. They were heading toward Portland, of course.

  A minute later, some fire trucks roared past, their lights flashing. Waiting behind a big truck, with another big truck behind him, Jones watched the flashing lights disappear in his rear-view mirror.

  Once through the toll booth, he had gotten off the turnpike at Kittery to use the bathroom at one of the factory outlet places. He bought a Coke at a fried clams place, gassed up, then pointed the Marquis north, back toward Portland and Freeport and Canada.

  He was enjoying himself.

  He drove north, occasionally pulling over to accommodate the police cruisers and fire trucks screaming toward Portland. In the distance, he could make out the column of smoke rising into the blue April sky. He thought it looked like a fist atop a giant blackened arm.

  He went north past Portland, past the exits for Brunswick and Lewiston and Augusta and Waterville. Just past Waterville, he went north and west, heading toward a town called Skowhegan. There he gassed up again, then headed along Highway 2 toward the White Mountains. It was a beautiful day, with the sky a blue that went on forever.

  He didn’t listen to the news. Instead, he played some Wagner on the cassette tape deck. A bit of a cliché, he knew, but he hummed along to the composer’s final opera, Parsifal, as he headed toward Newry and Berlin. Parsifal had been Hitler’s favorite, too. He’d read that somewhere.

  Errol, his destination, was a little town in Coos County, New Hampshire, with a population of maybe a hundred people. It was north of the mountains, along Route 16 and at the intersection of Route 26.

  As he entered the White Mountain National Forest, Thomas M. Jones knew exactly what was going to happen next. He’d eat at Bill’s Seafood in Errol, and he’d take his time. He’d sit away from the doors to the place, in a booth with his back to the kitchen, but with a view of the parking lot. He’d pay cash for his meal, as always. Everyone else would be watching the coverage of the bombing on the single TV above the cash, and no one would even notice Thomas M. Jones.

  By then it’d be getting dark, and he’d drive to the remote spot he’d scoped out south of Errol many months before. He’d park the Marquis on a small incline alongside the Androscoggin River, at the end of a forgotten dirt road, and wipe down the interior of the car. Just like he’d done with the rental truck, just like he’d done with the hotel room. Just to be safe.

  He’d then stand outside the old Marquis and push on the emergency brake with his right foot, and he’d ease the car forward. And then he’d stand there until the Marquis had been completely swallowed up by the black waters of the Androscoggin.

  He’d wait a bit, to see if anyone was around. And, when they weren’t, Thomas M. Jones would head into the woods to the well-stocked camp he’d set up.

  He’d been getting ready for this day for a long time, and he knew what he had to do.

  If he wasn’t too tired, he figured he might even lie on his bunk, open up The Patriot Diaries, and reread the part about the bombing. He practically knew it by heart.

  Life imitates art, he’d say to himself, and he’d laugh.

  CHAPTER 8

  X couldn’t get near Bob Cox in his private room at the Mercy Hospital, of course. Nobody in the media could. Cox was on the fourth floor at the Mercy, away from all the other patients, and under round-the-clock guard by two FBI agents, two Portland Police Department uniform officers, and a couple undercover guys from the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office. He practically had his own team of nurses and doctors and even his own shrink, a therapist from the Maine Behavioral Center. The YWCA security guard was the only survivor who had got a look at Thomas M. Jones, the man believed to be the bomber.

  Sheila Cox was folding sweaters in the men’s department at Sears when the handsome young man with long hair and an earring approached her. “Can I help you?” she asked.

  In his tight black jeans, Converse, and rock band T-shirt, X didn’t look like he was in the market for a Sears sweater. He had a black leather jacket under one arm and some sheets of paper in his hand. He fixed his asymmetrical gaze on her. “I apologize, but I’m not here to buy anything.”

  Sheila Cox smiled a little and returned to folding sweaters. “No apology necessary,” she said, “but most people come in here because they want to buy something.”

  “Mrs. Cox, I’m a USM student. I write for a magazine called Creem. And I don’t want to upset you …”

  She tensed but didn’t walk away. “You�
�re a reporter?” she asked, her disbelief apparent. “Like for a newspaper?”

  “Not exactly,” he said. “I write columns, opinion stuff, for a rock magazine.”

  “Are you from here?” she asked. “From Portland?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Born here, went to school here.”

  “What high school?” she asked.

  “PAHS.”

  “Ah,” Sheila Cox said, smiling a bit. “One of the smart kids. So, what’s your name, smart kid?”

  He told her, then added, “But my friends call me X.”

  “X? Is that your pen name?”

  “Something like that.”

  “So, X,” she said, “I’ve been told by the FBI not to talk to anyone about … well, about what happened to my husband.” Her eyes were flashing.

  “Two of my friends were killed by the bomb.”

  She stopped folding sweaters. “I’m very sorry,” she said. “Were they … also young?”

  “Yes,” he said, looking down. “Around my age — twenty-one.”

  “I am so sorry,” she said.

  There was a long silence. X was not the sort of pushy news reporter she’d probably been warned about. He wasn’t even taking notes.

  “I really need to get back to work, X,” she said. “And I don’t know how I can help someone who writes for a rock magazine.”

  “Of course,” he said, and then held up the sheets of paper. “But I’d like to show you something, if you don’t mind, and then ask you just one question.”

  “I don’t really have time to read anything right now,” she said, looking around. “You can ask your one question, I guess. But I won’t promise I’ll answer it.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “Did your husband tell you what the man he saw in front of the YWCA was wearing?”

  She hesitated before answering. “Bob said he just looked, well, totally normal. Jean jacket, jeans, shirt … clean-cut,” she said. She nodded, then added, “Oh, and he said the man was wearing a trucker’s cap.”