American Subversive (18 page)

We were restless now. Time sped up, the days got shorter. We were finally moving toward something definable, a worthy adversary, an ideal target. When Lindsay showed up one night with the long-awaited fan, we forgot to turn it on for several days.

The heat was still everywhere, but we no longer noticed.

AIDAN
 

IT'S DECEMBER 25, ACCORDING TO THE CLOCK RADIO ON MY WRITING DESK. I'M kidding; it's not that bad. I'm aware of the date. I follow politics. I know how the Jets are doing. And I stay on top of the ongoing search for us. Newsreaders and sports announcers: in the absence of others, these voices have become my friends.

Not that I've been completely alone. My handlers, Jim and Carol, continue, despite the snow, to stop by twice a week like clockwork—Jim on Tuesday nights; Carol, Fridays. (After discussing it, they've agreed to let me use their names, which only confirms what I already knew: that Jim and Carol aren't their real names at all.) They come armed with supplies, but it's their conversation I crave—Movement news, mostly, but other stuff, too, the latest movies, town meetings, anything they'll tell me. That's how monotonous my life has been.

Until yesterday, that is.

I was in the woods behind the house when I heard a noise. More precisely, I was attempting to cut down a Christmas tree. Why? Because I'd always had one, even in that stunted studio on Weehawken Street. It was my only nod to tradition in an otherwise transitional existence, and I went so far as to throw an annual tree-decorating party, the apparent sincerity of which never failed to amuse my friends. I know what you're thinking: I'm compensating for a broken family. And, sure, you're
probably right (my parents, in those early West Side days, took Christmas seriously in every way but biblically, and I was always the spoiled benefactor). We all carry with us the remains of our younger selves, some of us sadly, but most gratefully, for the world seemed whole then, the universe entire, and the less we understood, the more it made sense. So there I was, yesterday morning, in a coppice of pines, trying, and failing, to chop one down. The ax (which I'd discovered in the basement) was quite dull, but I figured it would get the job done. Of course, I'd failed to realize the trunks would be frozen. And I'd forgotten I had no work gloves or snow boots (to say nothing, on the chance it got that far, of a tree stand or ornaments).

Maybe I just needed to get out of the house.

I'd been at it almost an hour with only blisters and loose bark to show for my efforts when I heard the muffled—but distinct—sound of a car door slamming. It caught me off guard, for I hadn't heard anyone drive up. Anyway, there
shouldn't
have been anyone driving up, since Carol, who was due to stop by later, never appeared before sundown. Dropping the ax in the snow, I bounded through the trees to the edge of the clearing behind the house and glimpsed the backside of a man navigating the icy path that led around to the front door. When he disappeared from view, I moved closer, until I was only about twenty yards from his car—an early-model Jeep Cherokee. In-state plates, no bumper stickers, no extra lights or special gadgets . . . nothing official-looking. Who the hell was this? The front door to the house was locked, so unless his plan was to break in, he'd be back soon enough. I repositioned myself behind a tree, and a minute later there he was, retracing his footsteps through the snow. I could see him now, a distinguished-looking man with bushy eyebrows and wisps of white hair curling out from under an ear-flapped cap. He looked like a local town elder. He looked like trouble. Carefully negotiating the icy path, he opened the driver-side door and began rooting around inside the Cherokee. Christ, I thought. He's got a crowbar in there; he's going to smash a window or jimmy a door. But he emerged with something else: a single sheet of paper. Again, he walked around the side of the house; again, he came back a minute later. This time, he started his engine, turned the Jeep around, and followed his own tire tracks back down the hill.

I waited awhile, because that's what I'd been taught to do, and when no one else appeared, I followed his footprints to the front door. The paper was folded in half and hanging from the mail slot. I picked it up like a jury summons, which is to say, unenthusiastically. Because it couldn't be good.

The words were scrawled in black marker:

Neighbor(s) - Please join us tonight for Christmas carols and cocktails, 6–9 p.m. We look forward to meeting you—Carl and Nancy Henderson (2 houses down on the left, look for the colored lights on the lamp post).

I turned around and slumped down on the snowy stoop. Before me lay rolling hills like clouds, soft and white and endless. Was this endless, this high-wire life, expecting the worst of man and instead receiving his best? It was the simplest of acts—inviting a neighbor over on Christmas Eve—yet it floored me. I could never go, but how badly I suddenly wanted to. Just mingling in a warm room, drink in hand, making small talk with strangers. But wait. How had Carl Henderson known I was here? This house, as I said, sits at the end of a long, private drive that winds up through woods and grazing fields. There are three other houses on the road, though I haven't thought much about them since the day I was dropped off. Neighbors are always a consideration, of course—people are nosy—but the houses are far enough apart that they've never struck me as a problem. What business, after all, would anyone have driving farther
up
a private road? Well, now I knew. Carl, or perhaps his wife, must have noticed Jim and Carol coming and going and thought they were living here. And the more the merrier at Christmastime. What was wrong with that? Nothing. Everything.

I was cold and wet and increasingly despondent. I went inside and changed, then sat down and tried to write. But it was useless. As the little things so often do, Carl's note had set off a larger internal crisis. Loneliness, Paige told me once, was just another way of feeling sorry for yourself, and I'd taken her words to heart, allaying that lurking demon by staying busy, by
writing
. But now I stared at my notebooks and wondered what exactly I was doing. Was Paige, wherever she was, still writing her story?
And did our words even matter beyond their morbid salaciousness? Paige has always had clear reasons—comprehensible motivations—for her actions, but mine are less definable and, perhaps, defensible. Which brings me to the question I've been grappling with for months (and one you'll start asking soon enough).
Why?
Why did I do what I did? Ruin my life (or did I salvage it?). It happened fast, as you'll see, but that's no excuse. I knew what was going on. I made decisions—or didn't—freely. But it has taken these words, this attempted explanation—or rationalization—to truly understand what my life was, and what it is now, and how that most improbable line from one to the other was drawn. Call it memoir therapy. Call it an honest accounting. There's a first time for everything.

It's Christmas Day. So here's a present to myself. Another chapter finished, another window opened to the world. Keep writing. The fresh air does you good, kid.

PAIGE
 

THE GOAL WAS NEW YORK BY NOON, SO WE LEFT AT FIRST LIGHT. I SUGGESTED the Thruway, but Keith thought coming south through New England would be faster, so that's what we did—I-91 through Springfield and Hartford and on down to the bucolic Merritt Parkway.

Keith kept looking off into the surrounding woods.

I've always loved this road, he said. It's really beautiful.

He was right: the winding, canopied parkway was beautiful, the
day
was beautiful, all expectation. This was it, our big reconnaissance trip, the beginning of whatever was to come. I would be
the front,
the person who'd appear in public. Part preparation, part improvisation, it was a role I'd played well in North Carolina. But this was New York, and though I'd once called the city home, it was a different place now—taller, prettier, more angular. It was aging well, the recession having left it physically—if not financially—unscarred. We made good time and came in down the West Side, the sun high over the Hudson, past sailboat marinas and massive cruise ships, their white sterns sticking out beyond the piers, as if mooning all points west. Yes, New York still had attitude, but it was a different kind of us-against-the-world—more Donald Trump, less Lou Reed.

We turned east onto Twenty-third Street and sliced across town. New high-rises consuming Chelsea. Baby strollers three deep on Village
sidewalks. SoHo like the world's largest duty-free shop, all perfume and fine leather. And then the Lower East Side. I'd lived on Stanton and Suffolk for a few years after 9/11, when the neighborhood was still scruffy and marginal, when figures lurked in doorways and women walked in groups at night. But it was turning, even then. Gentrification reaches out like a welcoming hand, block by dirty block, until the grip gets too tight and you can't get away. Boutique jewelry stores, then boutique hotels. I left before the turnover was complete, before the last of the Bowery flophouses and Italian butchers closed for good, before Delancey Street became less a border than a boulevard.

Now people were everywhere, lounging half-naked outside coffee shops and frozen-yogurt stores. Some ersatz version of America had invaded these narrow tenement streets. American Eagle. American Apparel. American boys and girls drinking American beers in their snap-button cowboy shirts and Daisy Duke shorts. Grow the legend large enough and the country becomes it. Keith was watching the road. I wanted to ask if he'd ever lived in New York, but he was busy glancing in mirrors, and anyway his experience in the city would have been so different from mine. I'd moved here straight from UNC, a fresh-faced girl chasing rumors of a counterculture. But what I found was conformity, endemic apathy. The counterculture, such as it was at the dawn of the twenty-first century, seemed like the only segment of society that
wasn't
changing. Sure, kids still came to New York from everywhere else, seeking thrills and some loose kind of meaning. But how quickly they discovered themselves—settled into satisfaction, cozied up to success. And it's hard to rage against that.

The streets were playgrounds. They were malls. We turned right on Allen and right again onto East Broadway where it crosses under the Manhattan Bridge, and only then did a different city emerge. We'd come into a narrow pocket on the edge of Chinatown, an immigrant neighborhood that sloped toward the river like it might never find its footing. Life down here was lived in the open. Drying clothes billowed from fire escapes. Asian men huddled over games passed down through centuries. Women watched or shuffled past, weighed down not by what they carried but something heavier—the hard slog of it all. It felt very far away.

But that was the point. Keith turned left on Catherine Street and
proceeded slowly past project-lined blocks I'd never known existed. Henry Street. Madison. Monroe. We were hard against the East River now, could glimpse the crumbling docks and fish stalls of a long-forgotten world. Keith made another left, at Water Street, then turned back up the hill onto Market. This was the oldest part of the island, the streets thin as arteries, and when we found a parking spot, it was all Keith could do to wedge us in. He waited a minute before turning the engine off, but we hadn't been tailed.

We're going over there, he said, nodding at a graffiti-covered apartment building halfway up the block. Fourth floor, the window by the fire escape. I've got keys, we'll pretend we're a couple.

No one's going to ask, I said.

But if someone does.

We walked past the building's two street-level businesses—a filthy fish market and a boarded-up fabric store—and climbed the front steps. Keith knew which keys went with which locks, and once we were inside, we hurried up the dark stairwell, turning our faces from the peepholes we passed. The air smelled like rotting fish and something else—boiled vegetables, tangled roots, foreign soil. Poverty. Keith stopped outside the apartment and listened a moment before opening the door and turning on the light. A narrow hallway opened into a small room with bare walls and a grimy window partially hidden by blinds. A low table separated two cots, and a sleeping bag sat waiting for us at the foot of each bed. There was a bathroom near the front door, but no kitchen—just a coffeemaker, hot plate, and minifridge stacked in a corner. Outside, a train rumbled across the bridge on its way to Brooklyn.