American Subversive (46 page)

So what happened? I'd been feeling safe enough to start venturing out to the bookstores and coffee shops on nearby High Street, places thick with oblivious students, their strange collective force enshrouding me. One afternoon, on my way home, I spotted my handler walking with another guy, a postgrad type, half a block ahead of me. That's fine, I thought; the kid has a life. Still, I followed them as they turned left on Chittenden, then right onto my street. They walked two blocks south and stopped within sight of my apartment. That's when my handler pointed. It was subtle but unmistakable: he pointed right at my bedroom window. And his friend? He nodded slowly, as if this solved some kind of mystery. What was going on? Only one explanation made sense: I was about to be handed off to someone new.

The next morning, I walked to the Internet café I'd begun frequenting and found an open computer near the back. I was working there because the secondhand laptop I'd been given had died and my handler had yet to bring me a new one. It was a risk, I knew, but I couldn't just sit home doing nothing. Anyway, I'd come to enjoy the machinations of the writing life—coffee, smoking breaks,
time
. . . the idea of measurable progress, if only on-screen. I wrote in Word, saving each day's work onto a removable flash drive and deleting any evidence
on the computer itself. It wasn't a perfect system, as there'd still be traces of what I'd written on the hard drive. But unless someone knew where—and how—to look, he or she wouldn't find anything.

The café was a little way off the main drag, so it was never too crowded. Even better, the computers in the rear offered not just privacy, but an unobstructed view through the front window. And that's where I was gazing as I pondered a critical part of the narrative—my confrontation with Aidan on Weehawken Street—when I suddenly saw him again, my handler's friend. He was standing on the sidewalk directly outside the shop, studying the awning, then peering down at a notepad, as if confirming an address. He looked like a typical student, in Abercrombie and loose jeans, but something wasn't right. He looked
too
typical,
too
forced—like a Mormon dressing hip for Halloween. Did he walk inside? I don't know: I was already out the back door. Two sightings in two days were quite enough for me.

I should say something about the Movement, which is no longer a movement at all (if it ever was one). It has no unified goal. It's not
moving
toward anything, really. Yet, it is real, and effective, and has already saved my life several times. Who are they? They are the end of an ideal. I'm talking about a few hundred people—activists and yuppies, boomers and students, black and white. They are extremely tuned-in and pleasantly tuned-out. They are not whom you'd expect.

What they have in common is each other. If they once charged barricades, they now work covertly, tending to the more daring among us, those willing to act. They feed us and clothe us and move us around. They solve impossible problems. When the bomb exploded that night at N3, something clicked, something deep and instinctive. I knew where we had to go, and that we'd be taken care of when we got there. We were in shock, of course—not the ringing shock of close-quarters detonation (we were far enough away to avoid that), but the deeper, more searing shock of sudden, life-altering loss. Simon was gone. Parts of three floors had been decimated, and Aidan drove through the burning debris as if he'd once driven through war zones for a living. Neither one of us turned to look at what remained. Instead, we pressed on, plan in place, down the West Side Highway, not speaking,
not yet. I checked my makeup in the mirror as Aidan dipped back into the city to drop me off at the Ninth Street PATH Station (the Christopher Street stop was too close to his old apartment). When he pulled up to the curb, he kept looking straight ahead. I opened the door and got out, the city that far south still blissfully ignorant of the carnage uptown.

Journal Square in half an hour, I said.

Journal Square, Aidan repeated.

Hey. I leaned back in through the open door. We'll be okay.

Aidan turned to me then, and I saw in his eyes that he wasn't scared. He'd be there on the other side of the river.

The Movement took care of us. In Bernardsville and then Trenton. A colonial mansion on Philadelphia's Main Line, and an apartment near the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. We traveled at night, like desert Bedouins, like fleeing slaves. Many were old friends of Simon's, men and women who'd once stood by his side while attempting the impossible, and they fought their ingrained reluctance to ask questions with a very human need to understand what had happened to their former comrade. They wanted some kind of closure. Aidan and I accommodated them as best we could. In the press, we were—and still are—the only suspects, but these people knew the real story. For they knew about Keith. They'd been his believers and benefactors. Now, though, they called him a traitor, an egotist, even a nihilist, and he was all of these things. But in the end he was a genius, too, and this was also grudgingly acknowledged. Facts were facts: despite the contents of the N3 bomb, Simon had been the only casualty. He'd been the only person in the vicinity of the explosion, and had he not disrupted the natural course of events, Keith's plan would have worked to perfection. Would have worked . . . and
has
worked. Just look at N3 now, as post-attack sympathy has turned, in the wake of the network's heavy-handed reaction, to a broad-based condemnation of the company—their bias, their tone, their agenda—and the broader industry as a whole. Just like Indigo.

But at what price? Simon is dead. A man as good as any I've known. And what has he left behind? The heartbreak of a woman
outside Woodstock. The aspirations of a Movement outside time. And Aidan.

He's left Aidan.

As far as I knew, this was the first great loss of his life, and I watched him carefully in the long days that followed—days of chaos and constant anxiety. It was overwhelming for him. Julian and then Simon. Deceit and then death. We were all to blame. And we were all innocent. The world held no absolutes—I'd learned that the hard way—and those who believed otherwise were fooling themselves. Yes, a man was dead,
only
one man, and still the loss was horrific. My brother had been one man, too. One death can mean so much.

I think about it all the time, the moment good intentions become something else, something less. Aidan and I were separated after Pittsburgh. It was the only way. We were all over the news, and traveling together had become impossible. We said good-bye at a truck stop—there is symmetry in life—just a few moments alone in a parking lot, one last embrace. We were aiming for stoicism and almost got there. Then it was time to move. Always, it was time to move.

I snuck out of that café in Columbus and never turned around. For weeks, I stayed in lodging houses and roadside motels. I took Greyhound buses and commuter trains, sleeping, when I slept, at an angle, away from the aisle. Paducah. Memphis. Fort Smith. I was riding the American backbone vaguely west, as if pulled, like countless millions before me, toward some mythical promised land. I had coded phone numbers in my pocket, lifelines I'd been given here and there, but after Ohio I felt safer on my own. Still, I knew it was only a matter of time. My face was everywhere, and I was cold and tired and broke.

One shivering morning, in Joplin, Missouri, I walked out of a foul, stinking YWCA and called a number in Chicago.

Another booth in another diner, this one just west of Gary, Indiana. He recognized me with unsettling ease. He was, I'd been told, one of the original Weathermen, and as I slid in across from him, I could tell
right away that he'd known Simon. We ordered coffee. He called me Isabel, and for a few minutes we caught each other up on relatives we didn't have. When he was satisfied I hadn't been followed, he left a tip on the table and we walked out to his car. I half-expected him to tell me it was over, that I should turn myself in—as he once surely had—and hope for the best. Instead, he said I had options. There were other cities, other countries. We drove to his home in the southwestern suburbs of Chicago, and I took a shower and cleaned up. I told him a night of solid rest would be enough. Anything more, considering who he was, would be too dangerous. He said he understood.

We reconvened in his modest living room, over pasta and beer. I was wary, at first, of talking about what had happened, but I shouldn't have been. He had more than a passing knowledge of recent events. He knew about Simon's network, and the details of the Actions they'd carried out. He even knew about Columbus.

The man you saw outside the coffee shop was a Federal agent acting on a tip, my new friend said, but he somehow convinced your young handler that he was one of
us
—a member of the Movement sent by higher-ups to look after you.

You're kidding, I said, momentarily shocked at how right my instincts had been.

I wish I were. But you, more than anyone, should know that we're never safe. Our beliefs, our mistakes . . . they stay with us when all the rest fades away. Look at me. He raised his arms—exhibiting the extent of his small apartment, his compromised life, everything reduced by his past—and shook his head. Simon Krauss was the only person I've met who succeeded so thoroughly at being someone else, he said.

And there it was: Simon. The subject that could no longer be ignored. The awful irony of his death: the work of a laced bomb, like the town house forty years before. Wires crossed. Lines crossed.

I asked my host where Aidan was.

I have no idea, he said.

Is he all right?

And even if I did, I couldn't talk about it.

Please
. I need to know.

The man sighed and changed the subject.

We should get you to the West Coast, he said. We have people in
place out there. And you need time to regroup. You've been through a lot.

He grabbed a napkin and jotted down the name of a town, along with some contact information. I'd never heard of the place. What about San Francisco? I asked.

Too risky.

He was right, I knew. Yet I so badly needed to be around people. The thought of being sequestered somewhere remote was crushing.

I asked then if he might get word to my parents. Let them know I was okay. That I loved them. That I was sorry. He said he would, and I could tell he meant it.

In the morning, he drove me to the Greyhound station in Joliet, and soon I was on the road again. Through Illinois and Iowa, then an ice storm in Lincoln, Nebraska. The duffel bag at my feet said
TEXAS IS GOD'S COUNTRY
, but surely this was, this rolling world outside the window. Still, I couldn't take my mind off Aidan. I should never have gone to Weehawken Street. I should have said no a thousand times. What was he was writing? I wondered. An indictment, surely, a denunciation—of me. For I'd ruined his life. I stared out at a dark, starless night, the journey dragging endlessly on, mocking the memories of our days and nights together, of things I should have said and didn't. Somewhere near North Platte, I finally fell asleep, my forehead hard against the frosted glass.

When I woke, it was light outside, or almost light, and I dug around in my bag until I found my notebook and a pen. It had been weeks since I'd done any writing, and as I wondered if I should pick up where I'd left off—those first hours in his apartment—I realized, again, what an incredible chance Aidan had taken. He was a man brave enough, in this doctrinaire world, to change his thinking, to walk away from everything he knew for everything he didn't. Now, he was out there somewhere, enduring a life he'd never asked for. I wondered then about the chapters to come, mine and his, the unfolding annals of America, grand proclamations giving way to intimate emotion, loss ceding to love.

Because that's what I feel. I know it now.

If only I'd had a chance to make it right, find him as he'd found me, and save him the same way. Cheyenne, Laramie, Rock Springs. I wrote all morning, and in the early afternoon I looked outside and saw mountains. White mountains, then a white city. I no longer knew what day it was. I no longer cared. We came in past strange, soulless suburbs, the houses pale as the snow, and not until we'd pulled up to the station did I realize I was in downtown Salt Lake.

We were changing buses. I gazed up at the departure board. There was one leaving for San Francisco.
The place you ended up when you could run no further
. Had I reached that point? Certainly, I was close. But I needed to finish the story—to think and write without the world coming at me.

So I got on a bus heading north instead: I-84 up through Idaho and Oregon. And that's where I am as I write this now, sitting in a window seat watching this sprawling country race endlessly by, away from itself, its history, its wars. Only I'm the one who's moving—or the bus anyway—and it's better that way, to stop dwelling on the past, to head somewhere hopeful. I just pulled the napkin out of my pocket and looked at the contact names. My new handlers, Jim and Carol. I'll call them from a pay phone when I get closer.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS