Memoirs Of An Invisible Man (5 page)

I smiled my most engaging smile. (I no longer have an engaging smile— or any other smile — at my disposal. It is as if I could only talk to other human beings over the telephone.)

She laughed. “Does he really have a brother who works at Morgan?” she asked.

“Yes. Also a prig.”

Standing on the platform with the spring breeze pushing her hair and clothing around, Anne looked splendid. We agreed on a truce. I would be civil to everyone I encountered. Anne would try to acquire in the shortest possible time whatever information she felt she needed from the Students for a Fair World and from MicroMagnetics, Inc., and we would not linger unnecessarily in their vicinity.

As we spoke, we could see Carillon at the end of the platform, where a road ended in a small circle. There was a dirty grey van parked there and behind it two other vehicles. One, I remember, was an elegant old Mercedes; the other, I think, was an American sedan, badly rusted. Carillon was talking to someone in the van through an open window. Abruptly, doors opened on both sides of the van and four or five people climbed out. Revolutionaries travel in bands, never alone. Several other people got out of the cars. I think probably two or three of them were girls, or women. I was not paying much attention to them — not nearly as much as I ought to have. I remember thinking that most of them looked like undergraduates and that all of them were dressed as something else — workers or peasants from other, more exotic cultures. They conferred in the parking lot for several minutes, and at one point I remember they all looked over at us. Then all of them except Chairman Carillon climbed into the sedans. He stood by the van and watched them drive away and then turned and waved to us to come over. The whole thing made me a little uneasy somehow. My instincts were good. I should have paid attention to them.

The van had only two seats, and I graciously assured Anne and Carillon that I was delighted to ride in back on the floor, but it was clear that no one had considered any other arrangement anyway. The body of the van was filled with a jumble of cardboard boxes and what appeared to be building supplies and tools. I clambered awkwardly through the mess and found several loose cushions, which I tried to arrange into a seat for myself. When I sat down on it, I found that I could see nothing out the windows except patches of sky, and as soon as we started off, I felt myself being heaved from side to side with each turn. There seemed, moreover, to be an odd chemical smell in the van.

In the front I could hear Anne and Carillon having an impenetrable discussion about the interrelations of various left-wing political groups, all of which seemed to be identified by initials, like government agencies. I could not have been less interested. I passed the time trying to figure out what the equipment next to me on the floor was for. I could see several coils of electrical wire and at least two large dry cells. Then with an unpleasant shock I realized that the smell all around me was of gunpowder. I was evidently about to take part in a bombing. This would put me in solid with the investment community. It would certainly be the breakthrough Anne was looking for. Put her right onto the front page,
INVESTMENT
FIRM
LINKED
TO
LEFT-WING
TERRORIST
GROUP
. My hands were trembling as I pulled open the top of one of the boxes and peered inside. More boxes.

Carillon heard me and craned his head around to see what I was up to.

“Everything all right back there?” he asked.

Anne turned her head too and looked back at me.

“Quite a lot of equipment you’ve got back here,” I ventured, as conversationally as possible. “Some sort of hobby, I guess.”

“You might call it that. More an avocation. It would be better if you didn’t touch anything.”

I was quite genuinely frightened. These people seem harmless enough when they mill around in public places haranguing each other about imposing a better world on the rest of us, but properly equipped they can be a genuine menace to themselves and others. I had a vision of Micro-Magnetics being blown to smithereens. This was quickly followed by what seemed a far more plausible vision of our van being blown to smithereens before it could get us to MicroMagnetics. I hoped my voice was not quavering.

“Looks like you’re getting a head start on Independence Day this year.”

There was a little pause. Then he replied, “You might put it that way. As a matter of fact, we
are
going to have a little explosion today.”

Anne, whose head was still half turned in my direction, seemed excited but not at all dismayed by this news. She had her pen and her little journalist’s notebook poised for the details.

“That’s great,” I said. “That’s the way to do it. Show them you mean business. Poof. No more MicroMagnetics. That’ll make those jokers think twice about what line of work they get into next. Opens up my day too. No point in my checking out MicroMagnetics now. In fact you might just drop me off—”

“We’ll just be blowing up a guinea pig today.”

“That’s the idea. These MicroMagnetics clowns are just guinea pigs. If the thing works here, you can blow up anyone who gets out of line.”

“A guinea pig,” he insisted coldly. “The little animal in the cage back there with you. We’re blowing it up in a small simulation of a nuclear explosion, to make vivid the unacceptable horror of nuclear war.”

I couldn’t see a cage anywhere, but I felt a great sense of relief upon discovering that no major destruction was being undertaken and that, moreover, there was probably nothing more dangerous than fireworks bouncing along with us in the van. I felt, in fact, a bit foolish about having been so easily frightened. However, Anne, who, as far as I could tell, had just been contemplating the bombing of the entire physical plant of MicroMagnetics with something approaching enthusiasm, had the opposite reaction. She was suddenly aghast.

“You’re murdering an animal?”

“Exactly!” said the terrorist, with restrained but unmistakable triumph in his voice. “That’s exactly the way everyone reacts. It’s one of the contradictions of bourgeois sensibility that people are more upset about one small laboratory animal dying painlessly before their eyes than by all humanity being steadily poisoned with radioactivity. It’s by exacerbating that contradiction that we can force people to a higher dialectical level of political consciousness.”

“You mean by killing an animal?” Anne asked again, more calmly this time. I could not tell if she was getting the thing into a proper revolutionary perspective or if she was just doing what she thought of as her job.

“That’s right. Do you sec? Right now all of us are already being made the guinea pigs of a capitalist nuclear industry that values profits above human beings. If by destroying this one animal we can make even one more person understand that, its suffering will have been worthwhile.”

Carillon seemed to enjoy speaking this way; he was becoming quite cheerful and animated, and his voice was beginning to resonate as if he were addressing a crowd. In my experience, when one of these people uses the word “dialectic,” you are in for it. I was sure that if anyone offered another objection to detonating the animal, he would be off again and there would be no stopping the dialectical process, so I hastened to agree with him.

“That’s a very telling point, you know.” I tried to sound sincere and deliberative. “Yes, I think that’s right on the money.” The phrase was ill chosen, and he looked back at me suspiciously. I wished he would keep his eyes on the road. There was a pause in the conversation, and Anne, after a sharp glance in my direction, turned back and uneasily resumed her interview of Carillon, keeping her voice as low as she could in the hope that I would be unable to participate.

I located the cage on the other side of the van. It was not much larger than the animal inside. I opened the hinged door and dumped the guinea pig out onto the floor of the van. It lay where it landed, a fat, passive creature. I crawled back to my cushions, feeling suddenly a bit queasy from the motion of the van. I found that I was now concentrating entirely on the way I was being wrenched back and forth. The turns seemed to be increasing in violence and frequency, and I decided we must be on a back road. I was definitely quite carsick. I wished I were not down on the floor and that I had drunk less the night before. I wished I could see something more out a window than a patch of cloudy sky or the occasional tree branch sweeping sickeningly by. I closed my eyes. Worse. Reopen them. Drive taking too long.

When the van at last came to a halt, I hurriedly pushed open the rear doors and stumbled to my feet with as much dignity as I could manage. No sign of the guinea pig, but I left the doors open to give him as much of a chance as possible. Where do guinea pigs occur in a state of nature? Not in central New Jersey. I did not think much of its chances of survival in the wild, but at least its destiny was in its own hands now.

Anne and Carillon were standing by the front of the van, still in conversation. When I came around to them, Anne looked up at me and said, “I’m not quite finished, Nick.”

“Take all the time you want, Anne. There’s no hurry. I’ll be over in front of the building, getting some air. Bob,” I continued, holding out my hand to Carillon, “thanks for the ride. It was great chatting with you and in case we don’t run into each other again, I want to wish you every success today and in all your future endeavors.”

He nodded curtly, ignoring my outstretched hand, and turned back to Anne. On the other side of the parking lot I could see some of his confederates watching us silently — waiting, I supposed, until Carillon was done with us.

I turned and followed a footpath out of the parking lot through a break in a hedge which screened the parking lot from the building. I found myself on the edge of a large lawn with enormous shade trees, which must have been there for generations. To one side, a drive lined with oaks ran from the edge of the parking lot out to the road a hundred yards away. Beyond the lawn in every direction were fields bordered by trees. It was a beautiful place. The incongruous thing was that in the middle of it all was a brand-new, long, white, rectangular wood frame building of the type that you would expect to find surrounded by asphalt in what is for some reason called an “industrial park.” A paved walk led from the parking lot along the front of this structure to the main entrance in its center, where there were two steps up to a threshold flanked by two massive white wooden columns which supported a sort of vestigial porch roof extending no more than a couple of feet out from the rest of the façade. The effect had no doubt been described by the builder as “colonial.” Above this oddly foreshortened structure the name MicroMagnetics was spelled out in twelve-inch-high red letters affixed to the building. And above that was a sort of circular shield six feet in diameter on which were painted two huge red letter Ms joined by the pattern of arcs used to represent magnetic fields. It looked like a gigantic M&M candy. This odd new structure must have replaced a much older farmhouse. If you could have somehow got back the farmhouse, it would have been a very beautiful place indeed.

I stepped off the path onto the grass and walked towards an ancient and massive copper beech, sucking in deep breaths of heavy, humid air in the hope that it would make me feel better. A single large raindrop fell out of the dark sky onto my head. Soon it would really begin to rain. I wondered if that might not be an improvement. Perhaps I should stay out in the rain for a while. Why had I come here?

Dully, I tried to survey the situation. MicroMagnetics was an even smaller enterprise than I had imagined. The entire building could not be even ten thousand square feet. Off to one side there was another, much smaller, concrete structure, into which ran enough power lines to supply a small city. They must be doing something here that required a lot of electricity. Could be anything. Who cares? I took several more deep breaths and tried to decide whether or not I felt any better. I decided to tell myself that I did, although two little points of pain were beginning to define themselves in my eyes. Soon those points would extend back and join in the middle of my head to form a piercing headache.

Although it was still early, a few people had already arrived and were straggling unenthusiastically into the building. They all looked like academics to me. There certainly weren’t going to be any other securities analysts. I wondered if there would even be any press coverage. Of course, if the
Times
ran something by Anne, the event would have to be counted a smashing public relations success. But I wondered again why Micro-Magnetics wanted a public relations success in the first place. Their press release was useless. What were they after?

Fame and vast wealth, I supposed. The usual.

The revolutionaries were hauling their cartons out onto the lawn and setting up their own little scientific demonstration right in front of the entrance. They did not seem at all concerned that someone might object to their presence, which seemed odd. But evidently they were right: no one seemed in the least interested in them. Academic setting. You always have young people milling around on lawns doing whatever they like. Perhaps someone would have some aspirin inside. Coffee. Some of Carillon’s people were crouched in front of the door of the little concrete hut. Not a good place for them.

Carillon and Anne appeared through the hedge and joined the group on the lawn. I watched as Anne wished them all well, then turned and walked out to join me.

“Thanks for waiting.” She seemed to be in a benign mood again.

“My pleasure. I wanted the air anyway.”

“You all right? You look a bit green.”

“I’ll be fine,” I said. “Dialectical materialism always affects me this way. It’s the relentless pitch and yaw of the historical process. How’s the revolution coming? Do I have time to get my money out of the bank?”

“The guinea pig is gone. Did you let it out?”

“Why would I try to stem the irresistible tide of revolution?”

“Well, you were the chief suspect. You and the girl with the long blond hair, who apparently has a history of bourgeois sentimentality.” Anne was definitely in a better mood. “Anyway, it’s gone.”