American Subversive (34 page)

“We don't have to talk about this,” I said. “It's late.”

But she shook her head stubbornly, almost violently, and I knew that whatever she was about to tell me was being said for the first time. Wasn't it always easier to confide in a stranger? Or was I now a friend? I poured what remained of the wine into our empty glasses, but she didn't notice.

“You have to remember,” she began, feeling her way along, “that Bobby was the son of a soldier. And no matter what else happens in your life, that fact stays with you, especially if you're a man. None of his friends thought he should go. They were all antiwar, and so was my brother, to an extent. He was still at Appalachian State when 9/11 happened, and it changed his thinking, turned it a bit. In all our years together, I'd never heard him defend the government; his relationship to America was more physical, even spiritual, as if he'd reached an understanding with the land itself and didn't much care who laid a larger claim to it. But when I came home that first Thanksgiving after the attacks, there were tinges of patriotism in his dinner-table opinions. And afterwards, he and my father would stay up late, talking in the study, arguing with ghosts. Painful history. Wars fought and to come. This was before Iraq, of course, when Afghanistan was the only looming battleground, and Bobby told us he was thinking about the National Guard. He could get money for school, he said, and when he graduated, still be more or less a normal citizen. If he got called up—and really, what were the chances?—Afghanistan, to his mind, was a worthy fight. My father wasn't so sure. Every war seemed worthy before people started dying, he said. But, in the end, Bobby prevailed. We'd been raised to abhor organized religion, and Al Qaeda and the Taliban represented its horrific
extreme. My brother believed they qualified as enemies in a way that domino-effect communists never quite had.

“And then, as soon as he signed his papers, Iraq came along, and Bobby and half a million others were suddenly trapped like lab rats, awaiting a fate they'd never fathomed. The greatest bait and switch in American history, my father called it, but still, we weren't overly worried. Iraq would be a video game played by generals with joysticks: find Saddam and it was over. Bobby finished his last two years of school and took a job as a park ranger. He spent his Saturdays at the local armory and every few months drove down to Gastonia for more formal weapons training. But that was the extent of it. The wars dragged on. Other National Guard units were fighting, but another year passed without Bobby being contacted. What an awful time, the never knowing, like some endless game of Russian roulette. It's weird to say, but when the call finally came, it was almost a relief. Bobby was living up in Boone with his friend Carter Gattling, and they were basically off the grid—no phone, no TV, no Internet—but my dad drove up there, against every instinct he had, and got him. I flew back home the weekend before he left for Fort Dix, and between the Raleigh airport and Maggie Valley I must have driven past a hundred yellow ribbons and
SUPPORT OUR TROOPS
signs. It was as if every house had a child in uniform, and I guess that should have been comforting—that we weren't alone—but it just made everything worse. This was the end of 2005, and the news seemed so bleak; the war had turned, and the idiots who'd authored it had been reelected. Here it was, exactly what my father had feared, but still he put on a brave face. We all did. The North Carolina National Guard was part of the 505th Engineer Combat Battalion, which served as support—‘round out,' they call it—for the 101st Airborne. Bobby was being deployed to Kirkuk, near Kurdistan. Back then, Kirkuk was one of the war's few success stories, and his company had orders to keep it that way. That meant patrolling borders and training Iraqi soldiers, but also building schools, polling stations, community centers. Most of the hard fighting would be south of him, in Baghdad and Fallujah. There was nothing to worry about, he told us the night before he left, as my parents and I moved food around our plates. He'd be doing the same thing he'd been doing up in Boone: policing the wilderness. Only now he'd have a better uniform.

“And he was right,” Paige continued. “He got through his first tour without a scratch. In his e-mails to me, he actually sounded like he was getting something out of it. The rebuilding process, the starting over. He befriended Iraqi families—traded gifts, accepted blessings—even stayed in touch with them when he finally came home.”

“To Carolina?”

“Yeah. Fifteen months overseas and he slipped back into his old life like it was a sock. Same job, same friends, same apartment. He came to see me in D.C., and I marveled at how comfortable he was moving between his army life and his antiwar friends. The awful truth of the larger picture. The hopeful moments of the smaller ones. He was trying to arrange for an orphaned Iraqi boy to be brought over, a child whose parents had been killed by American bombs. Bobby's unit had taken the kid under its wing as a kind of amulet, a reminder of the good they could do. But the boy disappeared from a refugee camp before the red tape could be cut, and Bobby, he was just so . . .
deflated
. That he couldn't help one troubled kid in a nation full of them. In '08 he got called for his second tour, and there was never a question as to whether he'd go. Other guardsmen were deserting, guys he knew and respected, but Iraq had gotten under my brother's skin in a way I'll never understand. At home, there were more late-night talks, a father and son with a war between them—a war fading quickly from America's consciousness. Part of it was the recession, part pure exhaustion. The surge had mostly worked, and the only thing that remained was to shore up the Iraqi army, then get the hell out. But wars never end as scheduled, especially stalemates. Thousands died in Vietnam while politicians argued over wording, how to position the retreat. The insurgency never quit in Southeast Asia, and it hadn't quit in Iraq either. The most dangerous time for soldiers, my father once said, is when their country forgets they're still fighting.”

It was quiet out on Weehawken Street. What time was it? I had no idea. Reality had fallen away. There was only Paige now, her agonizing truth revealing itself in slow motion. All that remained was the awful end.

And so she steeled herself to carry through. The tears were flowing again, tears as sad and brave as any I could imagine. She described the broken land Bobby returned to: nothing standing, nothing left.
His unit worked for a year, taking it town by town—digging wells and clearing rubble. He wrote when he could and called every few weeks, his despondency coming clear through the crackle and static of the satellite phone. Something terrible was going to happen.

Then it did.

“The army incident report called it a ‘perfect ambush,' ” Paige said. “A roadside bomb exploding in a gutted village north of Mosul. The bodies and debris from the lead truck blocked the narrow street, and the remaining vehicles in Bobby's convoy had no choice but to try to back out. The snipers opened fire immediately, from windows and rooftops, from everywhere. They blew out the tires, then took aim at the men. A dozen heavily armed Americans—my brother among them—fired back through the smoke, and soon the fight moved from the streets to the surrounding buildings, room by room, the insurgents fading through walls, into tunnels, underneath the endless sand.

“A period of time passed with no shooting, and I've always wondered if the Americans let their guard down. In the investigation that followed, the battalion leader said he thought they'd cleared the area, but there was a lot of confusion, obviously. They were commandeering an abandoned house when someone heard a noise upstairs. The soldiers followed the sound, peering around corners, weapons twitching, ready for the first sign of movement, anything, anything at all, and then they turned another corner . . .”

Paige stopped, and when she spoke again, it was without emotion.

“Several weapons discharged in the chaos, but the army never did identify the shooter. The killer. It didn't really matter; his uniform was enough. That he was one of ours. After that, what difference does it make?”

I went over to her then, put my hand on her shoulder,
around
her shoulder, and when we hugged, it was like the hug at the end of time, or the dawn of it, when there's nothing left to say because we know too much, or we know nothing, and maybe that's the same thing. At some point, red-eyed and exhausted, Paige stretched her feet out and lay down. I spread a blanket over her and turned the lights off. Then I climbed the ladder to bed. God only knows what she was thinking about, dreaming about:
what she knew
. I couldn't digest what I'd
heard, beyond the awful facts, and then I could, just one thing: the fact of her, lying there, when she could have been anywhere.

I lay awake in my bed beneath the ceiling. Paige lay across the room in the darkness. When I'd tried to shut the window—the breeze off the river had picked up—she'd stopped me, and now, in the silence, I realized why:
she wanted to hear them coming
. The thought shook me. That someone could live like that. I listened for her breathing, her movements, because there's no way she could have fallen right asleep. Alone and on the run. In a stranger's house, in a city of millions, every person a potential threat, the one who could snatch away her freedom. But didn't she have it coming? New York was only returning the favor for the damage she'd done, physically and psychologically. A building bombed and a city made to face itself again, face the questions that still lingered—about our larger lives, risk and safety and the order of things. For a few days she had shocked us back to reality, she had terrified us to our core.

The grinding night. Another hour passed. I felt rushed and overwhelmed, at odds with everything. What was I doing? What had I done? Men were spilling out of the bars onto Christopher Street, their laughter echoing up the block. Cars charged up the highway toward the all-night dance clubs in Chelsea. Everything I should have asked, coming at me now. Questions about consequences, about power and authority; about how this all would end. What a strange sensation, being in that room with her. It was something I could feel, right there in the pitch-black, a kind of pulsing glow, coming not from the radioactive woman on the couch, but from somewhere else. Inside me.

AIDAN
 

“AIDAN.”

I opened my eyes, barely conscious. Where was I? In my own bed, it seemed, and alone, so who just called my name? And what happened last—

“Aidan, come on, wake up.”

“I am. Awake.”

PAIGE RODERICK!
I sat up and bumped my head on the ceiling as I peered bleary-eyed into the room below. She was sitting at the kitchen counter, writing something on the notepad I used for messages.

“You always get up so late?” she asked, without looking up.

“What time is it?”

“Seven fifteen.”

“Christ.”

“You'd make a terrible radical, sleeping so soundly.”

“Yeah, well . . .” She had changed shirts, though the jeans and sneakers were the same. And her hair was wet: she'd
showered
. How had I slept through that? I climbed down carefully and put coffee on. The apartment smelled like shampoo; it smelled like hope. Paige asked if she could get online. I motioned to my laptop, and soon she was clicking through news headlines.

“Just public sites,” she said. “Don't worry, I won't log in to anything.”

How long had I slept? Two hours? Three? I felt exhausted. I needed to assess things, regroup, so I excused myself to take a shower of my own. Freed from her immediate presence, her engulfing physicality, I stood under a stream of hot water, closed my eyes, and tried to clear my head. . . . And then it hit me, nearly knocked me over:
that she'd actually done it!
She really had set off a bomb, and still I hadn't turned her away, or turned her in. But
why
? There is no absolute answer, even in hindsight. I knew I was acting foolishly, and I understood, at least hypothetically, the potential consequences of my decisions. But neither fact had dissuaded me (after all, I hadn't been involved in—or in any way condoned—what she'd done and could therefore, I believed, still claim some kind of ignorance). I was just going with the drift of things, as I had—as everyone I knew had—for years. At the same time, I began to take hold of my situation. I felt sharper and more present, and if I could pinpoint a moment, not when my mind-set changed, but when the
potential
for that change occurred, perhaps it was then, wet and still waking, as the awe and confusion began to wash away. And if the reasons I attached to my thinking weren't exactly pure—I was acting out of hormonal self-interest as much as any muscular altruism—well, at least I was doing something. Or about to. I had never been in a position to play savior before, and as scared as I was—and I was terrified—the role appealed to me.