American Subversive (31 page)

“Good timing,” I said.

“For once.”

I moved to put my arm around her, but she inched away.

“Come on,” I said, “can't we just enjoy the moment without—”

“Did you come here to apologize?”

“For what?”

“For
what
? Being an asshole, for starters. You disappear for days and then show up drunk in the middle of the night demanding to get laid.”

“I didn't
demand
anything. You're the one who was just barking out orders.”

“Oh, fuck off. That's not what I was talking about and you know it. Where were you? Are you seeing someone else?”

“No.”

“Is this about those names you gave me at Malatesta? Because nothing came of those. In fact, that whole dinner was bizarre.”

“What are you talking about?”

She sat up, facing me. “I'm talking about this, us. What's
happening
with us?”

“I don't know.”

“Because I feel like I'm putting in all the effort here.”

“That's not true,” I said weakly.

“Do you even care anymore? About our relationship? About your job? Roorback's been nothing but shit for a week now. At least you used to care about not caring. Now you've given up on everything—”

I wanted to close my eyes again. It was so much better like that.

“—and it's embarrassing. Do you think my friends don't notice? They don't trust you anymore, Aidan. I mean, what am I supposed to say when they ask where you are? And who you're with?”

“Oh, you've never been at a loss for words.”

“Really? Right, then. Here are five more:
Get the fuck out!
”

“That's only—”

“Now!”

PAIGE
 

I DROVE REFLEXIVELY, UNCONSCIOUSLY, SEEING NOTHING BUT SNAPSHOTS of life before—

Bobby hugging me good-bye, handsome, soothing, self-assured.

Keith that first night I met him, bright eyed and full of wonder.

The way we come to trust people, men. The old schoolyard game, falling backward from a height and knowing we'll be caught. They didn't tell us it would never be so easy again. They didn't tell us everything afterward would be a futile attempt to get back to that perfect moment, the risk and certain reward.

Months of tightly wound precision, the thought before the step, everything analyzed, every word and glance and action. I'd had enough sense to take the money and a knife from the emergency drawer in the kitchen, then I'd packed the laptop, the printer, and what few clothes I had into the car. It was the car we'd driven up in months before, through the broken country, the three of us so bent on fixing it. And now.

I stopped for gas at a Kwik-Mart near Albany. There were no other customers so I pulled around back and, using the car as cover, smashed the laptop and printer on the ground, then put the pieces into a garbage bag and tossed it into a dumpster. Everything except the hard drive: I'd get rid of that later.

A Sunday afternoon in September and the two-lane Thruway was crowded. Still, I kept glancing across the divider. It was ridiculous, I knew. Keith always took the other route, I-91 up through Connecticut and Massachusetts, and anyway, what were the chances I'd spot their car among the thousands of others heading north? It was starting already, the sordid truth of life on the run. Relentless anxiety. Perpetual paranoia. I needed to think more clearly, become more observant. But how soon before that led to paralysis? It's hard to move when you see danger in every direction.

This was how I passed the time, with pointless games of what-if. The rest was too much to contemplate. All that had happened and still might. Movement was important, the simple act of driving. And so was the luxury of a destination. Because I knew where I was going. I'd looked up Weehawken Street before I left, and on the screen, from above, it had looked like a rotting alley, a dilapidated wharf slum that had, for whatever reason, fallen through the cracks of the sprouting metropolis. Did he really live there? And did he live alone? Every question raised a dozen more, each more troubling, more menacing, than the last. But I no longer cared. This was my only real option. If you could even call it that.

So breathe. Roll the window down. The air was cooler now; it carried remedies and resolutions. I turned on the radio—not NPR or the news, but music, an indie station out of Amherst. I didn't know the bands, but I'd never really known the bands. What was the point? They came and went so fast, you could spend a lifetime trying to keep up.

Two more hours to the bridge, then a straight shot down the West Side. I remembered a massive parking complex on a pier near Houston Street, an archaic structure with a ceiling that leaked greenish ooze (I'd borrowed an old coworker's car one weekend, years ago, and this was where she'd stored it). It was a sinister place, but now it might be a godsend if it still existed. I could park in some distant corner, then remove the license plates and scratch off the VIN inside the driver's door (it would be weeks, maybe months, before someone called a tow truck or the cops). Then I'd throw the hard drive into the Hudson, clean myself up, and walk over to Weehawken Street.

What would Aidan Cole say? Would it all end there, on that
desolate block, with a curbside confrontation? Or would he invite me upstairs, then barricade me in? Behind the wheel, I felt for the knife in my pocket. It was a switchblade, but that was better than nothing. It was only a deterrent anyway. I would never use it, could nev

I just . . . theres a man outside thewindow where I'm writing thi

SOM EONES HERE . .

AIDAN
 

THERE HAD BEEN AN UPRISING OF SORTS, A GROUP OF PROMINENT ROORBACK commenters who'd banded together to admonish—or should I say abuse—me for what they perceived as a serious dip in the quality, and quantity, of my recent posts. For a while I'd ignored them, but their comments only grew more vocal, so I changed course and announced one morning that the battle had been joined. I fought back hard, railing against the most earnest and insipid among them, then “executing” the worst offenders by revoking their participatory privileges. It raised everyone's game. Dozens of pithy comments, mine included, now streamed down from every post, endless back-and-forths that often threatened, like some protracted David Foster Wallace footnote, to supersede the original text. Roorback was becoming an online cesspool, slowly draining and dangerously atrophic—except everyone was a little bit brilliant, what with the embedded literary allusions and clever turns of phrase, the meta-references and nuanced understanding of irony. To think all this energy was being wasted in the comments section of a low-culture blog. Or did that make us high-culture? Only one way to find out: throw the question to the wolves and let them chew on it awhile.

Derrick, of course, loved the increased audience participation. It livened up the site, made it truly
interactive
. He'd figure a way to monetize the trend soon enough.

“But they're basically all complaining,” I told him, when he called late one Sunday afternoon to encourage me.

“Good, play that up. The commotion, the noise. Let's be rude and rile feathers.”

“But if I spend all day fucking around with commenters, it'll mean less original content,” I told him, glimpsing an opening.

“Fine, the comments are funnier anyway.”

I took this lying down. Quite literally. I was spread across the length of my thrift-store couch, laptop on lap, muted ball game on TV, monitoring comments and prewriting the next day's posts. I'd promised my father I would drive up to help him celebrate his sixtieth birthday in Litchfield the following evening, and that meant getting the next day's quota written and uploaded before I skipped town after lunch. I wasn't worried; I'd found my blogging groove again. I'd been back from Vermont less than two weeks, but already my memories of Paige were beginning to falter. I'm not saying I was questioning events as they'd occurred, but what had occurred was so utterly bizarre that the whole thing seemed, well,
unlikely,
and never more so than at that moment, as I tried to proofread a paragraph while Derrick chattered away in my ear about Roorback's upcoming redesign—
more ad space, a broader platform, changing demographics
. To think he'd almost fired me the day after my ill-advised visit to Cressida's apartment, when Roorback.com had lain dormant for hours while I slept off a hangover that no pills or further poisons could remedy. Instead, he'd chosen to deliver a stern warning, and I had heeded it, fallen in line, gotten back to work. This was my life after all, like it or not.

We were still on the phone when the buzzer rang.

“Who's that?” Derrick asked.

“I don't know. Chinese, probably.”

“You're ordering dinner? It's only five thirty.”

“Lunch,” I said. “I'll call you back.” I hung up and walked over to the front door. I hadn't ordered any food; I just couldn't deal with Derrick. Who was this then? Cressida? No, she still wasn't speaking to me. Touché? He never visited anyone; people came to him. Most likely, it was some other marginally employed friend dropping by because he was in the neighborhood and knew I'd be home. It was the West Village, after all, and I was a blogger. Perfect prey for the Sunday drinker.

I pressed the
TALK
button, said, “Hello?”

There was no response. Maybe some derelict was trying to get into the foyer for a nap. Things like that still happened on Weehawken Street. Everything did. I sat back down on the couch and reached for my laptop.

The buzzer sounded again. Shrill and insistent. I marched back over to the door.
“What?”
I snapped into the box on the wall.

Nothing.

“Who is this?”

No answer.

I went to the window and opened it. Leaning out as far as I could, I scanned the street below. The sidewalks were deserted. With the exception of two men loitering near the back door of the old Badlands Video store—and as shady as they looked, they were too far away to be the culprits—the entire block was empty. Maybe the buzzer was screwed up.

I fell back onto the couch. I had more blog posts to write, and I needed to call Derrick back, but the Mets bullpen had loaded the bases and my phone was vibrating with texts concerning the evening's usual palimpsest of parties and get-togethers. I was thinking of heading to Brooklyn for a night of barhopping on Smith Street with some blogger friends. It was cheaper on that side of the river, and the girls, all ink and dye, more alluringly unique—

The buzzer,
again
! Louder still, and longer. That's it! I sprang up and out the door, took the steps three at a time, and was downstairs in fifteen seconds. I charged through the security door and the front door, and then I was outside, gazing upon exactly the same scene I'd just observed from the window. No one was around. Even the Badlands duo were gone. What the fuck? I put my hands on my hips and looked up at the sky. It was a cool, clear early-autumn day, and the sun was lingering mercifully over New Jersey, as if the state might need the extra light.

When I looked back down I saw her. She was leaning against the side of the long-abandoned gay bar across the street, a small duffel bag strewn over her shoulder, wearing skinny jeans and a snug V-neck T-shirt, and in that way that frivolous thoughts often precede important ones, I marveled at her chameleon existence, altering to fit every
new environment. And then I realized what this meant, that none of this was over, and the thought paralyzed me. On some subconscious level I'd assumed that
I
was in control: if I didn't write about Paige Roderick, she would slowly fade out of existence. But here she was, casually crossing toward me. As if she lived here, too.

“Are you alone?” she asked, when she reached the sidewalk.

I looked around.

“Upstairs, I mean.”

“Yes.”

“No roommates?”