American Subversive (21 page)

Simon and my mother slowly pieced together this chain of events and, in the process, became fast friends. I can see the scene perfectly, my mother sitting this strange man down in the kitchen to announce that the steel monstrosities littering her lawn—for she couldn't have known what they'd be worth,
were
worth—could stay, and furthermore, that he could work on them whenever he wanted. And that's exactly what happened. Simon found a house down the road somewhere (I've still never been there) and worked out a deal to keep using the barn behind my mother's house as his studio. I wonder how long it took her to figure out who he was. Certainly, Simon wouldn't have let on, for he was a man of few words, and the one he used least of all was
I.

So who was he? A late bloomer, apparently. I'm guessing he was some kind of bohemian when he was younger. He'd traveled extensively, had lived all over the States—both coasts and a few places in the middle. Art came later, in his forties, and proved to be his calling. When my mother met him, he'd already made a name for himself as a disciple of Donald Judd's and Richard Serra's. These were men who dreamed in massive scale, who saw the earth as pliable, a natural canvas to be critiqued through addition, through change: great shapes and adjusted environments. In those early years, I'd drive down from Middlebury for a night and there he'd be in the barn out back, with a blowtorch and helmet, bending some enormous metal plate. The noise would be deafening, and still he could always sense my presence. Usually, he stopped whatever he was doing and grabbed two beers from a cooler he kept nearby.

I came to like him a great deal. The artist in residence was good to my mother, became her confidant, her protector. It was never overtly physical. I'm guessing they had both tired of the traditional approach to relationships (I know my mother had), and this worked better, was less complicated. They came together by living apart.

I watched them closely at the dinner table that night as their guests slowly talked themselves out. At some point my mother gave Simon a
slight nod, and a moment later he weighed in on the debate at hand, at once lending it validity and bringing it to a close. He stood up and clapped his calloused hands together. There'd be more nights for talking. These were issues that would never end, people who would never let them.

Buoyant with belief, tipsy with wine, the couples filed out to their Subarus, steeling themselves for the short, drunken drives home. In the doorway, the three of us waved awkwardly after them, aware, perhaps, of what we must have looked like in that sea of headlights—a kind of family.

We settled into the living room with what was left in our glasses.

“So I was thinking of heading up to Vermont for a day or two,” I said.

“And you want a car?” my mother asked.

“I guess. I mean, I could rent one.”

“Don't be silly. You can take mine. We have Simon's van.”

“You're sure it's okay?”

“Of course, though I wish I'd had a bit more notice. I would have cleaned it.”

“What's going on in Vermont?” Simon asked.

“Just visiting an old friend from school. You know, get out of the city.”

“I see,” he said.

“How
is
the city?” my mother inquired. “After that horrible bombing and everything?”

“It was hardly 9/11,” I answered. “Although they can't figure out who did it, which is slightly unnerving.”

“What does your friend from the
Times
say?” my mother asked.

“You mean Cressida?”

“Yes.”

“We've been dating for more than a year, Mom. You should know her name.”

“If you ever brought her up here, I might learn it.”

“Well, we haven't discussed it much. The bombing, I mean. It's not really her beat.” I took a sip of wine and became aware of Simon watching me. Was I that bad a liar? I tried to change the subject.

“Any new sculpt—”

“How's the blogging business?” he asked, talking over me, so that for a moment I wasn't sure I'd heard him right. Was he joking? Simon didn't even like computers. It was part of some larger philosophy he had about synthetic systems and their place in the natural world.

“I'm not sure
business
is the right word,” I said, feeling suddenly defensive. “Though I guess it's a paycheck.” My face was going flush.

No one spoke for a while. Finally Simon got up and stretched. “Well, it's good to see you,” he said, looking me in the eye. He shook my hand and kissed my mother. “I think it's past my bedtime. Have a safe trip, Aidan. And say hello on your way back down.” With that, he took his keys and walked outside. The screen door banged shut behind him.

“I should get that fixed one of these days,” my mother said.

PAIGE
 

IT WAS MIDNIGHT WHEN WE GOT BACK TO THE HOUSE. THE LIGHTS WERE OFF, but Lindsay had waited up, and she came running out to greet us. We were both exhausted (we'd driven back the same way we'd come down, Keith taciturn behind the wheel as I scribbled pages of notes, everything I'd seen and could remember), but we stayed up with her, recounting the trip and its seeming success. She looked ecstatic.

Lindsay didn't notice the change in Keith amid the excitement, but I did. He was wounded. We lived in a world of high symbolism, and Keith, who stood for so much, had been laid low by desire. A weak moment in the strongest of lives, though in truth, after three months I'd learned little more of his life—its facts and particulars—than what I've so far related. Of Lindsay's, I'd learned even less. Yet, the three of us had grown incredibly close. We could now anticipate each other's thoughts so precisely that hours often passed without someone finding cause to speak. It was an incongruous situation—our intimate present, our mysterious pasts—the result of a need-to-know policy that placed our personal histories more or less off-limits. It was a simple matter of plausible deniability, and I kept telling myself it made sense. But I should have known better. In reality, I was the only one in the dark. Keith and Lindsay had been together for years.

The days that followed—two weeks of them—were filled with
endless detail and repetition. But we were focused. We each had our assignments and carried them out with a determination that bordered on competitive—who could do more with less sleep. It was Lindsay's turn now: she and Keith would make the real run together while I stayed home to guard the house. It was the only way. Despite the precautions I'd taken in New York, my movements had no doubt been recorded on dozens of security cameras and surveillance systems—not just in Barneys, but in shops, on streets, everywhere. Lindsay was a fresh face, and she knew what she was doing. I spent hours filling her in on everything I'd seen and learned, everything, that is, except for what had happened—or hadn't—between Keith and me in that dark room. She had enough to worry about.

We went through the plan again and again, until the chain of events was so familiar we couldn't imagine what might go wrong. This was all Keith, of course—it's what he did best—and as he led us flawlessly through our final preparations, I did
my
best to put the incident on Market Street behind us. We were buoyant, driven, gripped by momentum. Most important, in those crucial days leading up to the bombing, we never once doubted what we were about to do—at least out loud. In truth, I thought about it constantly, obsessively. I was, by now, completely resolute in my rationale: Indigo was exactly the kind of target I'd envisioned going after when I agreed to join Keith. I found the company and its operations despicable, and it wasn't difficult to connect their shadowy activities to the larger national narrative (to which my brother was a footnote). But no matter how strong my motivations, I still blanched at the bomb itself. I just couldn't put the thing out of mind, and the cold, steely fact of it took a daily toll. I stayed away from the garage, and stopped asking Keith how things were progressing—the fuse tests and all that. Fairly well, I guess. We were still alive.

The night before they left for New York, I braced myself and went out there. I had to see, just once, what we'd wrought. I knocked three times on the garage's side door, then twice, then once, and said my name. I heard footsteps, and a moment later Keith opened the door. If he was surprised to see me, he didn't let on. Instead, he moved aside and let me in. I saw it immediately: a silver metal suitcase, powerfully illuminated from above, lying open on a worktable in the center of the
space. Keith turned and gazed at his luminous handiwork the way a new father might stare at his infant child—in awe of his own creation.

Wish you could come with us, he said.

It was the first time I'd ever heard him lie.

A few hours later, the suitcase strapped carefully in place, I watched from the window as Keith and Lindsay pulled slowly out of the driveway. They'd been confident and upbeat to the last. Was it bravery? Was it bravado? Both, I thought, but mostly it was stubborn, unwavering belief. Admirable, dangerous belief. For some time I stood there, looking at the place where their car had last been, wondering what I should be feeling. Then I walked over to the desk and got back to work.

There was plenty to do. For weeks, we'd been accumulating paperwork for the identities we'd be assuming after the Action. Our deceased-baby birth certificates had led to Social Security cards, passports, and driver's licenses. Lindsay even had a library card. Now I needed to put the finishing touches on my backstory.

Keith was Todd Anderson. Lindsay was Laura Bellamy. My new name was Isabel Clarke. A, B, C: it made the memorizing easier.

The real Isabel Clarke had been born in a San Francisco hospital and never made it out. So I just pretended she had. In my version, she'd grown up in a split-level house in the Avenues north of Golden Gate Park. Middle-class upbringing, then a few years of community college before the money ran out. She met a man and moved with him across the bay to Sausalito (a town I'd once visited and could describe if I had to), and when he disappeared one night without warning, she'd stayed there, kind of burrowed in. Isabel took graphic-design classes and started freelancing. She steered clear of relationships, had no kids, no terrible secrets or dynamic past—no reason in particular to show up in a Google search. I imagined her living a quiet, sunny life of coffee shops, yoga classes, and weekend jaunts into the city. Then something happened. She picked up and moved East. To Vermont. It was ennui, I decided: the fading gloss of the California dream. But the reasons hardly mattered. What did was the paperwork, and now I had it. Isabel Clarke officially existed. Again.

All that was the hard part. The physical change would be far less
daunting, even fun. Or so I thought. It made no sense to go blond—my roots would show within days—so I focused on style and length. For years, my hair had cascaded haphazardly down past my shoulders. Now, though, I cut it almost tomboy short in the bathroom mirror (though I kept the sweeping bangs to cover my eyes). As a finishing touch, I dyed it a few cautious shades lighter—dark chocolate to something milkier.

When I'd finished cleaning the sink, I went downstairs and opened a beer. Keith and Lindsay would be walking into that Chinatown apartment soon, where they'd spend a few restless hours going over the details of the Action one last time. If it all went well, the bomb would be planted by early evening and set to go off six hours later, when the upper floors of the building were empty. Soon thereafter, the two of them would come tearing back into the driveway, full of adrenaline and the rush of the world between their ears. A long night lay ahead so I tried to sleep a few hours, but it was no use. Instead I read and played solitaire. At some point, I moved over to the computer and started clicking on anything that might take my mind off things. Absurd celebrity scandals. Inane gossip blogs. The ceaseless chatter of a culture in decline.

At 3:25 a.m., twenty minutes before detonation time, I opened the news sites—CNN, MSNBC, Fox, Drudge, NY1. For half an hour I clicked between them, refreshing the headlines every few seconds. It was silent all around me, yet it seemed I was at the center of a thousand moving pieces. A muted timer ticking in a utility closet. A car streaking home in the New England night. A city sleeping through its last minutes of peace. Everything lay before me like a giant puzzle that only I could put together. For the first time in my life, I knew exactly what was about to happen.

MSNBC broke it.
EXPLOSION ROCKS MIDTOWN BUILDING, FIRES RAGING
, announced a large banner at the top of the page. It seemed, on the screen, like any another wretched headline, tragic but also far away, someone else's horrific problem. I felt only numbness. MSNBC had it for six minutes before the torrent came. Words, audio, and finally shaky helicopter video. By 4:15 a.m., every network had someone live at the scene. For a while I couldn't see much; it was raining in New York, and between that and the darkness and smoke, the
building remained a shadowy background presence. But the story moved every which way. First it was Con Ed. Then it was Al Qaeda. Then no one had any idea who it was. I watched for any mention of casualties. We'd done everything we could think of to eliminate that possibility, but no plan was foolproof. A person sneaking around? An employee working late? A mistake, in other words. A victim. Of murder.