7

I FIGURED we better haul ass out of Ethan and Terry’s pretty damned fast—like it was one of those famous do-not-pass-Go moments—so I laid it on Cassandra, “Hey, babyshake, you’re looking good again, and the weather’s got real nice, and we got us this fine set of wheels, let’s go see the sea.” She gave me no argument, so we stuffed our shit into the camper and bid sayonara to Ethan and Terry and drove away into the sunset and made it as far as the vacant lot by the Weasel office.

What hung us up was THE REVOLUTION. When you look back on it, that trip seems like loony tunes, but it didn’t at the time. Everybody was heavy into THE REVOLUTION—it was in the air, it was in the water, it was in the goddamn sun coming up in the morning. Like you’d be wandering around the Boston Common, and you’d run into the most hopeless mind-fucked blotto-paper kid you could possibly imagine, and the most subversive thing he’s ever done in his life is dropping out of high school, but if you rap with him five minutes, he’s talking THE REVOLUTION. Of course everybody had their own way of thinking on the subject. Now me, I figured that as time went on, there’d be more and more people on our side and less and less on theirs—because we were RIGHT, and not only that, we were YOUNGER THAN THEY WERE—and eventually we’d just take over the world. I mean, we had dope, so how could we lose? And yeah, I know it’s a joke, but part of me believed it.

Well, SDS had themselves a big convention in Chicago, and Pamela the Great went to it, and when she came back, she told us all about it, I mean every fucking detail. Yeah, she brought us right up to date on THE REVOLUTION —from the perspective of the anarchist team, you dig? Cassandra thought politics was horseshit, but she got a laugh out of it too, like she used to say all the time—“What fools these mortals be!”—so she kept egging Pam to tell us more, more, more. You know, just to see how ridiculous she could get.

You think I ever got it straight? Fuck. All I ever figured out was that before the convention there was one SDS, but after the convention there was two of them—each one saying it was the real one and the other one was a bunch of assholes. One of them was the PL team and the other one wasn’t. The one that wasn’t was calling itself WEATHERMAN.

I say, “OK, now who the fuck is Weatherman?”

Pam starts drawing those famous FINE DISTINCTIONS, but John knows me, so he boils it down to the idiot’s level. “They’re mainly people in the NO and around the NO . . . That’s the National Office, you know, the so-called leadership. They think the armed struggle has already started, like by the Vietnamese and other third-world peoples, and all we’ve got to do is jump on the bandwagon.”

So what’s the SDS convention got to do with why Cass and me can’t take off to go see the sea? Just hang on, I’m getting to that. Well, when Pam came back to Boston, she wrote up a long rap about what went down at the convention—TELLING IT LIKE IT WAS. And that heavy SDS guy Phil Vance was practically running the Weasel by then, and he read it and made his pronouncement—“Yeah, can’t argue with that. Yep, that’s really what happened.” So far so good. But then John and Pam laid out another rap about WHAT IT ALL MEANT, and Phil read that one and said it was COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY BULLSHIT and the Weasel sure as hell wasn’t going to print it. So John says, “Fuck you, man, there’s only two editors on the Weasel, and Ethan’s one of them and I’m the other, and we’re going to print it,” and Phil says, “Fuck YOU, man. This rag’s run on participatory democracy, so we got to go to THE MASSES on this one. Yeah, we got to have us a motherfucking MEETING.”

I was pretty sure some vital thing was still eluding me—in the big picture, you dig? I ask Pam if she’s in Weatherman, and she says no fucking way is she IN Weatherman, their politics sucks shit, but at the convention she was AROUND Weatherman because she was heavy into throwing out those PL motherfuckers and Weatherman was all for that too. I say, “OK, how about Phil Vance? Is he in Weatherman?”

No, no, no, John and Pam are telling me. He’s not IN Weatherman, he was AROUND Weatherman at the Convention the same as Pam was, but now that he’s back in Boston, he’s AROUND that New Left group at Harvard, the same as he always was, but that group is . . . OK, here’s where the DISTINCTIONS start getting way too fine for me. First of all, Phil really isn’t IN that group either, he’s AROUND it. And then that group—you know, the one he really isn’t IN? Well, they think Weatherman’s bullshit, but since we’re back here in Boston where the home team is PL, then they’re sort of like . . . oh maybe . . . just a little bit AROUND Weatherman because they hate PL. You following any of this?

I pondered this IN and AROUND business for a long time. Yeah, I used up many a brain cell on it. And then it finally flashed on me. Suppose you got a big pile of shit by the side of the road. Well, a lot of dogs will be AROUND it, but there’s only a few going to be stupid enough to get IN it.

So anyhow, Cass and me can’t take off to see the sea because they’re going to have their heavy-ass meeting any day now, and we’ve just got to be there. It’s like the Wild West, right?—you got to hang around Dodge City just a little bit longer, old buddy, because WE NEED YOUR GUN. Now me, I didn’t give a rat’s ass, but I wanted to help out John if I could because he was a friend of mine, but of course helping out John meant helping out Pam because he figured whatever she was laying down was the Gospel. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t IN her yet, but he sure as hell was AROUND her. He was just about as AROUND her as a man could get.

• • •

PAM HAD been moving, making one of her quicksilver runs, darting neatly around the sullen lumpish objects of the world, but now, with no warning at all, she snapped to a stop. John, following, bumped into her—was blown away once again by her smallness, hard edges, her unmistakable bones; she reached behind her in an instinctive gesture, her hand on his wrist, both steadying him and distancing him, protecting her space. She’d been stopped by Karen Vance: “What the fuck is this shit?” She was waving a copy of Pam and John’s critique of Weatherman.

John drew back another step to give the women room; he didn’t hear Pam’s answer, but the hard tone of her voice cut through clearly enough. The July night was unbearably hot and muggy—as oppressive as anything he remembered from West Virginia. The inside of the Weasel office was filling up with SDS kids; they made things worse, brought their own body heat with them. “You followed Bernardine out of the hall the same as I did,” Karen said. He had no problem hearing her.

“Sure I followed Bernardine out of the hall.” Pam’s New York accent was sharp enough to score glass. “We were finally, finally, finally going to get those motherfuckers off our ass. Of course I followed Bernardine out of the hall.”

Since Pam had come back from Chicago, the convention had been all she could talk about. Bernardine had split SDS, and Pam, of course, had been all for the split. John could have guessed that Pam would have backed any move to expel the mindless robots of Progressive Labor, but he’d been surprised that she’d followed crazy Bernardine—but, on second thought, maybe not too surprised. Pam might have hated Bernardine’s incoherent Leninism, but (and he would never say this to her) she clearly loved Bernardine as an icon: her showgirl’s figure and her miniskirts, her high sleek boots and her chutzpah. Yeah, Bernardine was damned near mythic—a woman not the least bit afraid of transforming the high dangerous charge of her sex into the usable power of leadership. Yeah, that’s what turned Pam on. He couldn’t imagine Pam following any man out of the convention hall.

“Where were your fucking objections at the time?” Karen was yelling, stabbing the air in front of Pam’s eyes. She was a head taller than Pam; she had to lean down. “We debated this shit. What? Have you got amnesia? I remember what you said. You said Bernardine was right on . . .”

“Well, fuck. She was right on about PL. We were debating PL. That was damn near the most brilliant fucking speech I ever heard in my life. But Weatherman? Have you tried to read that crap?”

The meeting hadn’t even started yet, and already the two women seemed to have opened the debate right there in front of the layout tables, so intent on confronting each other that the whole rest of the world could go fuck itself. They were supposed to be allies—both members of the BRWC—but John couldn’t see the faintest sign of sisterly warmth passing between them. Even the way they looked proclaimed their radically divergent tendencies. Pam was wearing what she always wore; perhaps to match the gravity of the occasion, she’d tied her pigtails with black satin ribbons. Karen Vance (no, not Phil’s wife but the woman he lived with) was in baggy green corduroy pants, frayed at the cuffs and worn at the knees, a furiously wrinkled plaid shirt several sizes too big for her, and—despite the heat—steel-toed construction worker’s boots. Karen had a grey tired angry face that would have fit easily into a photograph of Dust Bowl survivors from the thirties; her hair was chopped off as raggedly as if she’d done the job herself with a pair of garden shears. “Yeah, it’s crap,” she was saying, “but so what? It was just something to get us together. From here on out, it’s the action that counts.”

“Jesus!” Pam exploded, turned to John as though calling on him to bear witness. “Did you hear that shit? Jesus fucking Christ, she actually said it,” and turning back to Karen, “No. No no no. You can’t have coherent practice without coherent theory. And the critique’s got to be total. All partial critiques will fail as they’ve done in the past. The proletariat must become aware of itself as . . .”

Karen had finally registered John’s presence. She shot a dark look his way—annoyed, offended—what’s this man doing here, watching this shit go down? “Pamela, Jesus! Where the fuck do you think you are, Paris?”

“Well, where the fuck you think you are? Moscow? It’s Narodnaya Volya, for Christ’s sake. And you know how fucking successful they were. There’s no excuse for ignorance. Ignorance is a motherfucking luxury we can’t afford.”

The small space was filling up. It felt like a steambath in there. He could have sworn that most of the kids walking in now had never set foot in the office before—but, of course, nobody was going to ask for their credentials. The members of the original Weasel staff weren’t just outnumbered, they were lost in the crowd. The SDS forces were packing the meeting just as John had known they would. Great, he thought, we’re fucked before we even start.

Taking a step toward Karen, dropping her voice, Pam said, “Why are we doing this? It’s bullshit. We can’t go on sucking off other people’s oppression. How many times have I heard you say that?”

He saw Karen react to the peace overture—a softening. “Shit, Pamela, I’m not saying there’s not a lot to criticize. I’m not even saying they’re right. I’m just saying we shouldn’t be dumping on them right now . . . that it’s like counter-revolutionary. What the fuck have we been doing? And they’re dealing with male chauvinism . . . internally.”

“Oy,” Pam said, rolling her eyes toward the ceiling.

Then, to John’s surprise, the two women wrapped their arms around each other and hugged. Karen whispered something into Pam’s ear.

Pam stepped back, disengaging, took John’s hand and led him away. “What did she say to you?” he asked before he could stop himself. But they were a council, weren’t they? Didn’t he have the right to know?

“Fuck,” Pam said, and then, bending close, echoed the gesture of Karen’s whisper. “She said, ‘It’s not personal.’ Shit, man, she ought to know better. What the fuck have we been talking about for months now? It’s always personal.”

• • •

THAT MEETING was something else. I’d never caught one before—like your genuine, world-famous REVOLUTIONARY MEETING—and believe me, it was highly entertaining. And it went on for HOURS. Phil Vance was the referee, and he started off by laying it on us what we were supposed to deal with. Like the Weasel had always been into that good old freewheeling debate, but, dig it, some of the brothers and sisters were having themselves some serious doubts about Pam and Ray’s rap—whether it was CORRECT to publish it what with all the shit going down in THIS MOTHERFUCKING REPRESSIVE IMPERIALIST COUNTRY.

Now if anybody had asked my opinion, I would have pointed out that we’ve got free speech guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States—a document much neglected in recent years—but any fool could plainly see that rapping about the Constitution would get you nowhere that night. Well, you know who had the right idea? Ethan. He didn’t even bother to show up. He said the same thing he always said—“If somebody’s going to shoot me, I just ain’t going to come around.” Terry had been hammering at him, like, “For Christ’s sake, babe, that rag’s ours. We just can’t let those dudes take it away from us,” and he’d say, “You can’t lose if you ain’t playing,” and, “There’s nothing to defend,” and other acid-head shit like that. I think he’d got to the point where putting out a newspaper was just too much old-fashioned WORK for him. Yeah, in his head he was already living up in THE LIBERATED ZONE, heavy into the ganja and watching the weeds grow. But Terry had put a lot of herself into the Weasel, so that gave her yet one more item to add to her list of all the reasons why Ethan was an asshole.

So, anyhow, the meeting. You never saw so many people in the Weasel office—everywhere, sitting on the floor, crammed along the walls, hanging from the rafters. There was a lot of talk about OUR GALLANT ALLIES, THE VIETNAMESE, which pissed me right off, and then we got down to the debate. The first up for our side was John—“Ray” they was calling him—and he laid it on them about SDS in the old days and how everybody doing their own thing was where it was at. And he argued against what he called THE LENINI ST MOD EL. What the fuck’s that? I don’t know. But I guess if you’re operating with THE LENINIST MODEL you get to put the limits on the old free speech, and he didn’t want any limits. He said if somebody disagreed with what he and Pam laid down, then they could write their own motherfucking article, and the two sides could slug it out in print—like THE MASSES could read all about it and decide. And then John passed the ball off to Pam, and she was TOTALLY IN COMPREHENSIBLE, which impressed everybody no end.

The chicks were especially impressed. I should say something about the chicks. The ones that were heavy into woman’s lib were all clumped together and dressed up like they’d been hired on as somebody’s demolition crew, and when any of the dudes was talking, they watched him like a hawk, and the minute he said ONE WORD they didn’t like, they kicked into this chant—FIGHT MALE CHAUVINISM, FIGHT MALE CHAUVINISM. They even did it to poor old Phil. At one point he got so frustrated he said, “Would any of the WOMEN like to chair the meeting?” and they all went, oh, no, man, no problem, you’re doing great, but that didn’t stop them from hitting him with the old chant the next time he slipped. And so what it came down to was that if you had the misfortune to have balls hanging between your legs, it was real hard to lay out much of a rap.

Yeah, we had us a lot of cheerleading that night. It took me right back to high school. We didn’t just have us FIGHT MALE CHAUVINISM, we had HO HO HO CHI MINH, and we had POWER TO THE PEOPLE, and I don’t know what all. And there’s this moment when Pam’s rapping, and she’s bad-mouthing Weatherman and she says, “We’ve got to mean what we say and say what we mean,” and that’s just too much for Cassandra, so she starts up this chant—I MEANT WHAT I SAID AND I SAID WHAT I MEANT, AN ELEPHANT’S FAITHFUL ONE HUNDRED PERCENT. It was pretty goddamn hilarious, although you probably had to be there. So that little handful of us—the old-time long-hair whacked-out weirdo freaks—and we’re all sitting together, and we’re stamping our feet and clapping our hands and chanting away, I MEANT WHAT I SAID AND I SAID WHAT I MEANT. Even Pam thought it was funny. Yeah, it cracked her right up. And the heavy SDS dudes were all exchanging these disgusted looks—like see what we got to put up with? Jesus, these goddamned irresponsible hippie assholes.

Well, after—oh, maybe after the first nineteen or twenty hours, it was starting to get real clear that what was going to decide things was which side had the heaviest chicks. Now, the heavy chick for the other team was Karen Vance, and . . . Well, you remember, she was living with Phil—no, no, no, not really IN marriage but just sort of AROUND it—but the way they were acting there in that meeting, if you didn’t know them, you’d think they hardly knew each other. So that gave me the very strong suspicion that the fix was in. And our heavy chick was Pamela the Great, and she was pretty good. Like she could run that mouth of hers a hundred miles a minute, and she was checked out on THE REVOLUTION from one end to the other, and she could cite you chapter and verse.

• • •

PAMELA KEPT moving as she talked—pacing off the length of the room, deliberately, as though measuring her steps. John knew that she was trying to stay ahead of her nerves, and she seemed to be doing OK so far. “Lenin made Stalin possible,” she was saying, “but the honest mistakes of a genuine proletarian movement are a million times better than all the cleverness of any motherfucking vanguard.”

He was so freaked on her behalf he was sick with it. He had to remind himself that she was the same girl who’d once been able to do thirty-two fouettés, so it shouldn’t be a problem for her to maintain control of her appearance. She was looking directly into people’s eyes, taking a few seconds with each of them, forcing them to connect with her personally. “Weatherman says follow third-world leadership. Weatherman says the revolution’s already started, but you’ve got nothing to contribute. Fuck, no, you’re just a white middle-class asshole. Maybe you’re even a woman, and then you’re really nothing. Yeah, chicks, get on the bandwagon. Support the real revolutionaries. The blacks, the Vietnamese. Yeah, it’s always somebody else. Well, that’s bullshit.”

Now she stepped back, putting distance between herself and the crowd. If that small area in front of Ethan’s desk was her stage, she’d just taken command of it; now she could address the collective, the whole. “We’ve got to start from where we live . . . yeah, with subjectivity . . . the wildest dreams of subjectivity. But we can’t stop there. We’ve got to create situations where the revolutionary moment spills out of its container. And dig it, a Leninist cadre is a container, a motherfucking jail. Fuck Lenin. He was a pig. Fuck the vanguard. We’ve got to do it ourselves. Our brothers and sisters in France came close to doing it, and the next time they are going to do it. And we’re going to do it. That’s why we criticized Weatherman. They’ve got an incoherent critique, a partial critique. They don’t want enough, but we want the whole fucking world. We want the world and we want it now. All power to the councils.”

John could hear murmuring here and there. He could see that Pam had got to some of those crazy SDS kids—especially the women. Ah, some of them looked so goddamned young, and he could feel their puzzlement—and then he flashed on what was going down. She’d got to them for the wrong reason. They were asking themselves the fatal question: “Is she more revolutionary than Weatherman, more revolutionary than I am?” Because, in the current climate, the only possible position to take was the one that looked the most revolutionary. Oh, fuck, John thought, it’s all hopeless.

• • •

KAREN VANCE walked to the front of Ethan’s desk, occupied it— taking center stage. Her appearance—grim and serious and tired— opened her statement. “The Vietnamese are winning,” she said.

The chant came smashing instantly back: Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is going to win! Smiling, she waited until it stopped. “You know why the Vietnamese are winning?” she said. “The pigs may have the technology. The pigs may have the planes and the bombs and the bullets and the napalm. But the Vietnamese have got the politics.”

It was that quick, John thought—she had them all in the pocket of her old worn baggy pants. Her height, her manner, her absolute self-assurance—she made Pam seem, in contrast, small and strident. It shouldn’t come down to the goddamned image, but of course it did—maybe it always did—and yeah, on that particular night, with that particular crowd, eye makeup and hair ribbons were not going to do it. No, Pam couldn’t do a trip like Bernardine’s. It took Bernardine to do Bernardine.

“We’ve heard plenty from our anarchist comrades,” Karen was saying. “You know, it’s funny how if you look at it closely, anarchism can sound like liberalism. Just kind of disguised. Or like hippie bullshit. Yeah, it can sound like a big incoherent slithery blob of nothing. Like, ‘Fuck leaders, man, you can’t organize me. Yeah, I’ll come to the peace demonstration maybe . . . like carry a candle maybe . . . if I’m not too stoned.’”

Oh, she’s good, John thought, horrified. Everybody was laughing. Of course they were. Everybody needed a good laugh.

“Fuck this shit!” A voice. Too loud. A male voice. Who the hell was that? Spinning around, John saw that it was Tom Parker.

Tom was already up and moving. “You fucking assholes.”

Nobody seemed able to react. Stunned, frozen. And now Tom was up there in front of everybody. Yelling. “You know what? You’re fucking assholes, that’s what. Our fucking goddamn allies. Jesus fuck.”

Phil: “Hey, Tom. Hey, Tom, now, just a minute, man . . .”

“Want me to tell you about our goddamn fucking allies? Jesus, fuck.”

“Hey, there’s a speaker’s list,” Phil said, stepped forward. Then, in an explosion of movement too fast too see, Phil was careening backward, arms flailing, losing his footing. What the hell? Had Tom hit him? Shoved him?

Phil went smack into the crowd; he was caught, steadied, held upright—his eyes popping, his mouth hanging open. Already a big Harvard dude was coming to his defense, rushing Tom, and this time, John saw the motion. Tom sidestepped. Made a small, neat, deft flick with the side of his hand. Delivered to the front of the throat. That huge guy was nailed, stopped, shocked to nothingness, soundlessly, his eyes spilling with tears. Jesus. Heavy. John’s heart was beating him silly.

“Stop it!” Karen Vance was yelling. “Stop it, stop it. Let him talk. He’s got a right to talk.”

Talk? Tom was already laying it down. “Our goddamned fucking gallant allies! Jesus. Let’s say there’s some dude been playing ball with the Yanks. And Charlie comes by to have a little chat with him, you dig? Well, you get yourself some bamboo, and you sharpen it up real good, and you roll the point around in shit. And you know where you shove that goddamned thing? If it’s his wife and daughters, it goes up their cunts. If it’s his sons, it goes up their assholes. You want to shove it up far enough to do the job, but you don’t want to shove it up too far because you want them to take their time on the way out, you dig? And he’s got to watch that evil shit going down, you dig? And then they gouge out his eyes and cut off his balls and leave him there to think about it. You getting the picture? That’s Charlie I’m talking about. Our gallant Vietnamese ally.”

What had happened to mellow? To the joker, the trickster, the whacked-out slack-limbed clown? Gone. Not a trace of him left. Transformed, pacing, smashing one fist into the big open palm of his other hand. “Jesus! Listen up, assholes, because I’m giving you the straight scoop now. Don’t matter who’s doing it—evil shit is evil shit. They’re doing evil shit, we’re doing evil shit, and we got to stop this evil shit. People want to go to demonstrations, that’s just great. They want to carry candles, that’s just great. Because we got to stop this evil shit.

“It’s their fucking country over there . . . you got that right. If they want to fuck it up, that’s their right. Yeah, and we’ve got to get our asses out of there. Got to deal with our own motherfucking country, because . . . Jesus, you assholes, listen up. Our liberties are going down the tube. Yeah, we’re flushing them away at a great rate. ‘Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.’ It don’t say, ‘not many laws.’ It don’t say, ‘Congress has got to be careful what laws.’ You want to hear it again? ‘Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.’ And that takes care of that, you dig? We should have got that one over in like five minutes.

“And while we’re on the topic, you assholes want to hear another one? The Congress shall have the power to declare War. You seen any declaration of War? Fuck me. Damned if I’ve seen one either. Jesus, you assholes, what are you doing rapping about Stalin and Lenin and Russia and France and motherfucking Nam? Why don’t you try rapping about America? Open your eyes. Everywhere you look, evil shit going down.”

Tom launched into another word run and then stopped. In mid-sentence. Gulping air. His eyes darted across the surface of the crowd. For the first time, he seemed to be able to see the immobilized faces in front of him. He made a pushing gesture—as though trying to free himself from yards of stinking fabric. “Oh, fuck this shit,” he said, and walked.

• • •

TO THIS day I don’t know what came over me. Well, you know what was getting next to me? It was all this shit about OUR GALLANT ALLIES, THE VIETNAMESE. That’s Charlie they’re talking about. Hell, I had a good healthy respect for Charlie, but he wasn’t MY gallant ally, and I guess I just flat-out lost it. Like the next thing you know, WHAM, there I am up in front of everybody shooting off my big mouth, and then I start hearing this little voice in my head, and it goes, “Hey, Parker, what the fuck do you think you’re doing?” All of a sudden I catch up to myself, and there I am right smack in the middle of this dead silence with everybody staring at me. Yep, here he is, folks, the FUCKED-UP VIETNAM VET FOAMING OUT RIG HT BEFORE YOUR EYES.

So I just walked out of there. Like I’m a couple blocks away, and Cass is running after me. “Tommy! Come on, man. Slow down.” I grind to a halt, and she says, “Shit, that was beautiful.”

Well, I don’t know how beautiful it was. I was pretty sure I hadn’t scored any points for our team, not to mention the fact that I’d probably pissed off a number of my regular customers. And I was thinking, OK, Parker, you’re coming up against it. You really can’t trust yourself, can you?

• • •

“MOST OF us here tonight are revolutionary communists,” Karen said, “and there’s a world revolution going on at this very minute, an armed struggle against American pig imperialism.”

After Tom had given up the stage, she’d done what no one else had been prepared to do—addressed the howling vacuum he’d left behind and addressed it with absolute authority. She’d told them that American servicemen were victims of the war as much as the Vietnamese. She’d told them that Mao had been right—a revolution was not a tea party.

“And that brother was right too . . . about one thing. All that crap about freedom we learned in school . . . well, that’s been exposed for what it is. Liberal pig bullshit. We only have as much freedom as the pigs can afford to let us have. And that’s not much. The repression’s coming down, brothers and sisters. It’s here.”

Karen sliced the air with her stiffened fingers. “Our phones are tapped. People are going to jail. People are dying. The Attorney General of the United States is talking about putting us in concentration camps. And there’s agents everywhere now. There’s agents in here tonight, and don’t you forget it. Some of us here tonight are going to do jail time because of the agents in here tonight, so we can’t afford any more of this jive-ass shit.”

If I was a scared kid, John thought, I’d want to be hearing a voice exactly like that. A voice that knows exactly what it’s talking about— a voice that knows the truth. “We’ve got to have good politics,” she was saying, “and that’s what we’re doing here tonight. We’re here to decide whether or not the Weasel should publish an article. Either by itself or along with some response to it . . . what good liberals would call ‘the other side.’ And those are political questions. Let’s not lose track of that.

“That article is a criticism of Weatherman. Just like our anarchist comrades, I read Weatherman. Just like them, I think there’s a lot of crap in it. But there’s one central point that’s true. The Vietnamese are winning. And the question is, do we want to help them or not? Are we going to be part of the solution or part of the problem? OK, so what are we doing? The bombs keep falling. The Vietnamese keep dying. More American servicemen are getting killed . . . or fucked up like the brother we just heard from. And are we just going to sit back and criticize somebody who’s trying to do something about it? Is that a revolutionary act or only an excuse for our own middle-class wimpiness?

“Of course SDS is going to make some mistakes, but if you want to make an omelet, you’ve got to crack a few eggs. And dig it, here’s the main thing I want to say. The pigs can take care of themselves. There’s lots of people working for the pig capitalist press who can criticize Weatherman. And they will. Am I saying we should agree with everything in Weatherman? Oh, hell no. Now’s the time when we’ve got to get our shit together, and that means debate. Ongoing struggle. But I think it’s bullshit to criticize a revolutionary organization in a public statement. Crap like that just helps the pigs. And I, for one, will have nothing to do with it.”

• • •

ALL THE windows in Pam’s apartment were open, but there wasn’t even a puff of a breeze. Perched on the edge of one of her basket chairs, doing nothing more strenuous than watching her, John had to keep wiping the sweat off his face, but she’d hidden herself away inside a thick blue sweatshirt that said Columbia University Athletics. She sat, huddled, her knees drawn up to her chest, drinking her second cup of hot tea, awkwardly smoking one of John’s cigarettes. He wished she’d switch to dope but didn’t say so. “Motherfuckers,” she said.

They’d been purged. The meeting had voted, by a large margin, not to publish their critique, but it hadn’t stopped there. Ethan and John had been voted out of their positions as editors; they’d been replaced by Phil and Karen Vance. An entirely new editorial board had been elected. Not a single member of the original Weasel collective was on it. What he didn’t say to her—what he had no intention of saying to her—was that he was almost glad. It made everything clear.

She was talking in short telegraphic bursts, but he could supply the missing links: “Fragmenting. A plague. Locusts. The first-born. Fuck . . . We keep saying, ‘Come on, it’s just more male-dominated bullshit,’ but they keep going, ‘The Vietnamese, the Vietnamese.’ Well, shit, you heard her . . . She’s going to drop out of the Collective, I just know it. Maybe Judy and Miriam too. Leaving us crazy man-hating bitches behind. No, that’s not funny, is it . . . ? Why did she . . . ? Weatherman? Spectacular show of opposition. Easily recuperated . . . With every split, you lose the chance to . . . Like the dialectic, you dig? But it’s easier just to say fuck you and walk away.”

She stubbed out her cigarette, leaving most of it unsmoked. “She’s sleeping with Ben Pavalick, did I tell you that?”

“Ben Pavalick?” he said. “Who the fuck’s Ben Pavalick?”

“Weatherman, that’s who.”

“Now wait a minute. Karen Vance is sleeping with some Weatherman dude?”

“Right on. And like Weatherman’s into smashing monogamy, so guess who gets fucked . . . as in fucked over? The women, right? As usual . . . Yeah, fuck theory, she’s going to follow her pussy. Oh, Jesus, what a vile thing to say. If a man said that, I’d motherfucking kill him. But it’s true. Oh, fuck.”

She was crying. All out, full tilt, her face pressed into her knees. He took the teacup from her hand, set it down. He wanted to touch her but didn’t know if he should. Sometimes when he tried to touch her, she shot away like a struck billiard ball. But he couldn’t stand it—had to do something even if it was wrong. He allowed his hand to rest lightly on her shoulder. She seized his fingers and held them. Her skin was cold and wet. “Oy,” she said, “I bet you didn’t know you were getting such a weepy girl.”

He hadn’t known that he’d got a girl at all. Yes, they might be a council—she kept saying that they were—but it hadn’t changed much of anything between them, or hadn’t changed anything enough, and he was beginning to resent the politics that seemed to separate them even as it united them. “Pamela,” he said, “do you want to eat something?” For days, he hadn’t seen her eat anything that a rabbit wouldn’t eat.

She looked up at him, her face streaked with black mascara tears, and he felt the full impact of the scary blast she was aiming at him. He expected her to say, “Fuck off, man,” but, after a weighted pause, she said: “Your analysis is absolutely correct, comrade. I’ve got to come down.” She smiled slightly. “This is motherfucking insane. Make me some oatmeal, OK?”

He found the steel-cut oats easily enough. She’d labeled everything. “Tom broke through the dreadful passivity,” she said, “but we couldn’t respond. We were frozen, man. I was frozen. That was the revolutionary moment . . . if we could have met his subjectivity with our subjectivity.”

“What?” he said stupidly. He was stopped in her kitchen, the jar of oatmeal stuck in his hands, staring at her across the full length of her apartment. She was still huddled up like a child in the basket chair. What the hell was she talking about? Did she honest to God believe that they could have started the revolution right there on the spot if they’d done the right thing?

“It was our passivity that allowed Karen to impose a correct line,” she said. “We’ve been trained for that. Dig it, the ego has to become masochistic in order to survive . . . That’s how power maintains itself.”

“What should we have done?”

He kept waiting for the answer. “Pam?” he said.

Her eyes met his. She was smiling slightly. “Pam?” he said.

“Let’s seize the paper.”

“What?”

“Just one issue. Our issue. It’d be the perfect détournment on those assholes.”

He understood her immediately. He didn’t want to do it.

“Yeah, so they voted you out, but fuck that shit. You’ve still got a key to the office, don’t you?”

• • •

AFTER THAT, I’d pretty well had it with THE REVOLUTION. Like John was the only one that made any sense, and I figured all the rest of those assholes were running for Sheriff. Yeah, and it was long past time for me and Cass to grab us a little R and R out in some picturesque locale far far away on the edge of the deep blue sea. Unfortunately, before we could make our break, there was this perennial problem with the coin, and so, yet once again, I did what I always did when in dire straits—fell by to see my old pal, Bobby Lyons.

Cass won’t even set foot in his place. She’s got a book, she says, she’ll just wait for me, so he buzzes me in, and the whole banana-split scene’s still playing, like I don’t know if anybody ever slept in that damn place—crystal city, right?—and we go in his bedroom and shut the door, and he lays a capsule on the table. It’s just a capsule, right? I mean it’s day-glo orange, could be strychnine for all I know, but he wants to fuck with my head over it, so just the way I’m supposed to, I ask him what it is. He hisses at me like a snake—“Aaaaasssssid.”

“Is it any good?”

“Taste and ye shall know.”

“Not at the moment. Just TELL me.”

“Your brain’s going to look like a GI omelet.”

I ask him the price and the price is low. The price is EXTREMELY low. “You must be making this shit yourself,” I say.

He giggles hysterically for a while. Then he says, “Yeah, fuck, lucked out, got me a real good cook. Ain’t no recipe he don’t know, and he uses all the finest ingredients. Yeah, you could say he’s a motherfucking CHEF.”

I’m doing my arithmetic, thinking that I can mark it up a couple hundred percent to dealers, mark it up even more on the street—like I don’t even know what this motherfucking day-glo shit is yet, but in my head I’m already dealing it. It’s an incredible price. And like he knows exactly what I’m thinking. “That’s just the price to YOU, Tommy.”

I say, “Can you do me a thousand caps up front? You’ll see the bread in a week or two.” It’s a joke, right?

But he says, “No problem, darling. It’s because I love you. But just don’t mention our little transactions to anybody, if you follow me.” I look at that goofy smile of his and all of a sudden I KNOW just how big he’s got.

I walked out of there with a thousand caps of so-called acid. I wasn’t about to play guinea pig with any weird drug I’d got from Bobby Lyons, so I went straight over to Ethan’s, laid a cap on him, and he ate it right up. Well, he tripped out heavy for a day—like the whole goddamn twenty-four hours—and when he got coherent again, he pronounced it SOME RIGHTEOUS SHIT, although he said it was a little on the speedy side. I sold him half my stash— which did my heart good because he thought I was nothing but a jerk-off, not a real man of business, you know, like him. “Fuck,” he says, “where’d you get these goddamned things?”

I just winked at him. “Friendly neighborhood source.” Pissed him right off. And then I unloaded the rest with some street dealers I knew, saved like forty or fifty caps to sell as the spirit moved me, went back and paid off Lyons, and lo and behold, I was heavy into the bread. So Cass and I should have been hitting it on down the road, right? Wrong. So why’s that? Turns out that there’s another major development in THE REVOLUTION. Now we’ve got to seize the goddamned newspaper.

• • •

——— JOHN WOKE and saw a girl. She was an inexplicable silhouette, small head and slender torso set inside a black rectangular frame, lit from behind by harsh flaring yellow light. He knew that he’d been dreaming, knew that he was awake, but time had come untied, was flapping loose, and he didn’t have a clue where he was. The rank, muddy smell of the Ohio River was a dream, surely, created from the mold and dust and cobwebs and old unpainted wood of the loft in the Weasel office. Yes, this had to be real—the stacks of unsold back issues piled up next to him; he was using one of the stacks for a pillow— and the girl looking in at him had to be Cassandra standing on the ladder. “What’s happening?” he said.

“Hey, hero,” she said, “I couldn’t tell you.”

What the fuck was he doing? He had no business being asleep. They were in the middle of an action, for Christ’s sake. When he’d climbed up into the loft, all he’d wanted to do was cool out for a while. “Jesus, was I ever down,” he said. “Dreaming. I can still feel the . . . like the filaments. But it’s all vague now. I was dreaming I was back home.”

“Home? Where’s that?”

Good question. “Shit,” he said. “What time is it?”

“Beats me. I’ve given up on time.” She climbed into the loft with him. “It’s getting light out, so it must be another fucking day. Move over,” and stretched out next to him. “You know, Dupre, that old paranoia? Well, sometimes it turns out . . .”

“What’s Pam doing?”

“Oh, Pam. Right. The center of the universe. Working on her page, I don’t know. What did you think she’d be doing . . . handstands? You fall for the weirdest girls, you know that? You got a smoke?”

“Yeah, sure.” He pounded two out of his pack, lit them both, and handed her one. When he’d climbed up here, his own page had been laid out, and about half the front page. When had that been? After three, nearly four—the hour of the wolf. If it was daylight, they must be damned near ready to go to the printer. “What weird girls?”

“You fell for me, didn’t you?”

THUNG: reverberations, echoes. “Yeah,” he said, “I sure did.” And maybe Cassandra had been in the dream—or maybe Pamela. There’d been a hard-edged dangerous feeling to her like Pamela, but she’d also been the girl who’d been in his dreams forever, the one who was never quite there, not quite in the car when he reached for her, and not quite in his bed, and not quite at the end of the street when he got there, running. “Well, it was mutual,” she said.

Now it was summer again, the stink of his own sweat in a loft in an old crappy building in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and down in the office at the bottom of the ladder was the real in all of its nasty hard-edged immediacy—an action, the revolution, a whole bunch of shit that needed to be done. Pamela was down there. But here he was being drawn back into the seductive past. He teetered a moment, not sure which way to go, but he felt a nebulous emotional blur pulling at him. He couldn’t let it go. Fuck the real.

“Everything feels connected,” he said. “Jesus. I can’t quite remember the dream, but the feeling of it . . . Summer. Like that Rilke poem: ‘Lord, the summer was so full.’ That thick heavy feeling of summer . . . flowers, the mosquitoes, the smell of the river . . . Like something’s right on the edge of happening . . . God, Cass, do you remember the smell of the river? . . . Hey,” and finally catching up to her, “what do you mean it was mutual?”

“Mutual means mutual, asshole. Of course I remember the smell of the river.”

They were lying on their backs side by side. He turned to look at her. Those clear grey eyes—he’d always thought of them as familiar, but they didn’t look familiar now. “God, you’re nuts,” she said.

Time.

“OK,” she said, “let’s go back and wallow in it. That’s always good for a laugh. Make ourselves feel really good, right? Ah, our lost youth . . . how motherfucking sweet it was, right? Listen, there’s something . . .”

“It was sweet.”

“Sure. Sure, it was sweet. You think I’m saying it wasn’t?”

“Jesus, the summer you were fifteen, I dreamed of you night after night . . .”

“Oh, fuck. Oh, yeah. The summer I was fifteen. Heavy-duty summer. Motherfucking ridiculous is what it was . . . Hey, listen to me for a minute, OK? I called this chick . . .”

He waited for her to continue, but she didn’t. She sighed. “Shit. Of course it was sweet.”

She dragged on her cigarette, was seized by a spasm of coughing. For a minute, he didn’t think she was going to stop. “You OK?” he said.

“Oh, yeah, I’m the picture of health . . . Jesus, Dupre, you piss me off sometimes. Like the old days when you and William would . . . In some ways you haven’t changed a bit. You’re so full of shit. You think you’re the only one with feelings. Like it’s all one big fucking Rilke poem, and you’re the hero, and the chicks in your life are just . . . fuck, I don’t know. Bit players. Window dressing. The summer I was fifteen, I was horny as a river rat, and I didn’t even know it. I just walked around constantly in this state of exquisite agony. You could have fucked me any time you wanted, you know.”

The sloping ceiling over his head was too low for him to sit upright, but he pushed himself up onto his elbow and looked down at her. “What?”

“What do you mean, what? I thought you knew. Didn’t you know it? . . . Do we really have to go back and wallow in this shit? . . . It was a weird scene, man. It felt inevitable from the first time I kissed you. You kept falling by and making out with me, and Jesus, man, I’d never even had a goddamned date. What were my parents thinking? They must have been insane. Like certifiable. Yeah, the legendary summer I was fifteen. And we’d go out to the park all the time and lay there on a blanket for hours. And if I was lucky, once in a blue moon, I’d get to come. But most nights I just went home and jerked off.”

“Jesus Christ, Cass, why are you telling me this now?”

“I don’t know. Why shouldn’t I? It’s like . . . Well, OK, the summer I was fifteen is not your private property. I was there too.”

John fell back, lay there, smoking, staring at the cobwebs and dirty beams a few feet above his eyes. He could feel his heart slamming his ribs. “I was scared of sex,” he said.

“Yeah, me too.”

“I didn’t have a clue how to do it.”

“You think I did? We could have figured it out.”

“Don’t tell me these things. Jesus.”

“Why the hell shouldn’t I? It’s so fucking long ago, man. So, OK, asshole, have you made it with her yet?”

He couldn’t answer.

“You give me a royal pain in the ass,” she said. “It’s almost like you enjoy being miserable. She really digs you, man. Look, chicks can read each other a lot better than guys can read them, and she’s . . .”

He was left hanging in the middle of Cassandra’s stopped sentence. Pamela was what? Yes, the real had caught up with him all right. His antennae were fully extended. He needed every clue he could get.

“It’s all there,” Cassandra said, “like obvious. It’s in the way she looks at you, the way she touches you. You and your goddamned fantasies. Well, there she is, man, flesh and blood, hair ribbons and all. She’s perfect for you. Christ, Dupre, she must think you’re the biggest tease in the world. So are you going to make it with her? Or are you just going to spend the rest of your life jerking off to pictures of my little sister?”

“But, Jesus, nobody ever tells you how to do it. How the hell do you do it?”

“Look, put a pillow under her ass so she’s tilted up a bit, and then you just shove it in between her legs, right? It’s not particularly complicated. And she’ll help you. Just make sure she’s good and wet first. And if you lose your hard-on, don’t take it like the end of the world. Just do some more weed and try it again.”

But since Pam had come back from Chicago, she’d been on the dark side of the moon, and he felt again the absolute certainty of Cassandra. “You wouldn’t want to show me, would you?”

“Oh, hell. Sure I could. Of course I could. It’s be easy. But . . . Oh, Jesus. Listen, John, we’re completely out of phase now. I’m sick of men. I’m sick of sex. Sometimes I have more fun blowing my nose.”

“What are you doing with Tom then?”

“He makes me laugh . . . But you know what sex does, don’t you? It messes up perfectly good friendships.”

“Does it?”

“Yeah. Every time. Without fail. And right now I’d rather have a friend than somebody else to screw me. Friends are rare. I can always get laid.”

“Well, I can’t.”

“You are an asshole.”

He was beginning to believe her. Maybe it was possible. “Cassandra,” he said, “where’s the clitoris?”

“Don’t you know? Oh shit.” She laughed until she started to cough. She hugged herself, squeezed her chest and coughed, her body contracting.

“You better do something,” he said. “Could you maybe not smoke for a while? That sounds awful.”

“Yeah, fuck.”

“Maybe you need to take antibiotics or something.”

“Yeah, probably. But then I’d have to see a doctor, wouldn’t I? And I’m so fucking paranoid . . . Well, shit, I could make up some off-the-wall name for myself the way you do. Candy Necropolis. How do you like that one?”

He laughed. “Listen,” she said, “there’s a warrant out for my ass in California.”

“No shit?”

“Yeah, no shit. You better believe no shit. This ain’t just the old paranoia. This one’s for real. I called this chick I know back there, about the only one I can trust. Or maybe can trust. Who the fuck knows? I told her I was working at the Bunny Club in Vegas. It was the most motherfucking ridiculous thing I could think of. Don’t even know if there is a Bunny Club in Vegas, but there’s bound to be one, right?

“I just couldn’t go on not knowing. Yeah, the bust came down on the whole fucking lot of them. They’re all out on bail. Groovy, huh? That’s what you can buy when you’re heavy into the coin . . . out on bail and mucho lawyers. And boy oh boy, are they not happy with me. Sweet Andrew especially. Yeah, he couldn’t take the joke. He’d like to do me some serious damage, that’s what she told me. There’s a warrant out for me too, but he thinks it might be phony . . . that, like, maybe I did do a number with the pigs. And he can’t get behind the fact that I ripped off his cute little ass, and . . . Well, you know, serious damage. Oh, he’d never do it himself. He’s kind of squeamish. But he’d hire it done. He wouldn’t think twice about it.”

“Did you tell Tom any of this?”

“Are you kidding?”

“Why not?”

“Why should I? The less people that know about it, the better.”

“You just told me.”

“Shit, Dupre, talking to you’s like talking to myself.”

“Jesus, I don’t know what to say.”

“Well, there’s nothing to say, right? But I’ve got no reason to be in Boston. Like it’s not a place anybody would guess. You could stick a pin anywhere in a map of the States and that’d make just about as much sense. Anyhow, I keep telling myself that. Fuck, I don’t know. It’s all a freak show, right? Ringling Brothers . . . Come on, let’s get out of here.” But she made no move to do it.

“OK, the clitoris,” she said. She unzipped her jeans, pushed them down. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath. “Go ahead. Feel around for it.”

He was too shocked to do anything but what she’d told him. “Where?”

“Right in there.”

“All I can feel is hair.”

“Up higher. You’ve got to open it up a bit. That’s right. Inside there. Spread it open.”

“That little thing? There?”

“What did you expect, a doorknob? Yeah, that’s it.”

“Amazing.”

“Hey. Be gentle. It’s really sensitive. Just run your finger around and around very lightly. Yeah. That’s exactly right. Very nice. And if you keep doing that, she’ll start to get wet. Then you reach into her and get your fingers wet, and ah . . . Yeah, just keep doing that. Yeah, that’s it, you’re doing just fine. Don’t be in a hurry. Girls don’t get turned on as fast as boys, so don’t try to come into her till she’s sopping wet. And she’ll be right there with you, you know. You can talk to her.”

“Jesus, Cass, you give me hope.”

She arched, lifted her pelvis clear of the floor, worked her jeans back on, and zipped them up. “Well, shit, man,” she said, “isn’t that my main function in life . . . to give you hope?”

• • •

TOM AND Terry had been standing close together at one end of the layout tables. John saw them step quickly back from each other. Tom’s eyes found Cassandra. “Hey, old buddy, what’s happening?”

“I couldn’t tell you.”

“Well, shit, babe, if you can’t tell me, nobody can.”

Ethan was sitting on the floor, his back propped against the wall, his legs splayed out into the room like dead wood. His head had fallen to one side; he was snoring. John stepped over the legs. But where the hell was Pamela?

Terry yawned elaborately—exaggerating it? Her curly black hair was hanging in her face. John looked at the frieze she’d been constructing around Ethan’s article, a Kurt Schwitters insanity like the collages on her kitchen walls—naked women, bombs, dogs and cats, dead Vietnamese, bits of copy from the Boston Globe, fashion models, bursts of napalm, chicken legs and hot dogs. “Will it print?” she said.

“Oh, yeah,” John said, “no problem.”

At the end of the table where Pam had been working there was no one at all. Her absence vibrated far back of words—trippy, ominous. It was like—what? Looking at the favorite chair of someone who’s died? Just remembering that they’d died—and a wispy filament of dream still left, some connection. Dreaming of a dead person? “I think she went for a walk, man,” Terry said. He looked up and saw her dark eyes. OK, witch, he told her silently, stop reading my mind.

He looked at Pam’s completed work. It was something she’d written quickly just to fill up the back page, but it must have been shit she’d been thinking about—although he’d never heard her talk about any of it. The only illustration was a single photograph, a mushroom cloud. His eyes ran down the copy. Additives in bread, nuclear waste, second-generation breeder reactors, DDT in plant life, fragile pelican eggs. The last sentence read: “The denial of the feminine is the destruction of the planet.”

He stepped through the open door of the office and out onto the sidewalk. The advance notice of dawn was visible as the most minimal release of darkness toward blue. A small slender figure was walking toward the office—Pamela. She saw him and waved. What he was feeling was so mixed, so elusive, so goddamned poignant that he didn’t know whether to call it joy or despair. She waved again, and he saw now that the gesture was not a greeting but a demand. He began to walk quickly toward her, then broke into a jog to match hers. She caught his hands. “Phil’s onto us,” she said.

“What? How do you know?”

“I saw him drive by.”

“Shit. What the fuck’s he doing up in the middle of the night?” The office, of course, was lit up like a Christmas tree.

They heard the sound of tires, and there, right on cue, was Phil’s old maroon Volvo turning at the far end of the block. It pulled up on the other side of the street. The headlights went out. John and Pam ran back to the office, plunged through the door. “We’ve got a visitor.” John said.

Terry kicked Ethan’s feet. He made an explosive sound like “ungh,” his mustaches flaring, and jerked upright.

Phil was standing next to his car, staring at them from across the street. Now, more than ever, he looked like a nineteenth-century shopkeeper—puzzled and arcane. He crossed the street. John stepped back out of the doorway.

“What the fuck is this?” Phil said. His eyes were darting around. Nobody said anything. He walked along the layout table, checked out the paste-up. “You anarchist clowns,” he said sadly.

Ethan pushed himself to his feet, stretched. “Anybody know this shithead?” he said.

“I think it goes to Harvard,” Terry said.

“You better get your ass out of here,” John said to Phil in a low conspiratorial tone, trying to pack in a whole extra layer of meaning: Come on, pick up the vibe here, man. This could get heavy.

Phil continued along the layout table until he came to John and Pam’s critique of Weatherman. “Fuck,” he said. He stood, reading it. “Fuck, fuck, fuck. What the fuck you . . . We voted you down, man.”

He stared at the copy a moment longer, then reached out and grabbed the laid-out page. Pam was on him instantly, one of her small hands clamping his wrist. “Phil. Don’t.” Their eyes locked.

“Would you folks like this dude removed?” Tom inquired from the far side of the room.

“Put it down,” Pam said.

“Fuck you,” Phil said. “We debated this. We had a vote.”

Tom stepped closer, said directly to Pam: “How about you, sweet stuff? Would you like this dude removed?”

Pam looked into Tom’s eyes. John couldn’t read her expression. “Yeah,” she said flatly, “remove him.”

Tom took a few leisurely steps around the layout table. “Come on, old buddy,” he said to Phil, “you and me’s going to take a little walk.”

Phil let the page drop. Pam stepped out of the way. “Check out the dawn, you dig?” Tom said, smiling. “Contemplate the deep imponderable mysteries of life.”

“Fuck you,” Phil said. He took off his glasses, folded them up, and slipped them into his pocket.

“Shit, you don’t need to do that,” Tom said. “Mellow, you dig? Love, peace, and brotherhood . . . all that good shit.” In the friendliest possible way, Tom let his hand fall onto Phil’s shoulder.

“Fuck you,” Phil said, batted the hand away and took a swing at Tom’s smile.

With hardly any effort at all, Tom stepped aside just enough to let Phil’s fist smash the empty air. With the assurance of a master carpenter driving a tack, Tom snapped his own fist directly onto the point of Phil’s chin. Phil’s head jerked back; his teeth made a distinct CLICK. His knees began to buckle. Tom caught him around the waist and hustled him toward the door.

John whipped the door open. Tom assisted Phil through it and encouraged him on his way—thrust him into a slack-kneed stumbling run.

Phil almost fell. Caught himself. Panting, crouched forward, hands on knees. He straightened up, turned, came right back at Tom, throwing punches. Tom deftly avoided every one of them. He tapped Phil lightly in the solar plexus. Phil grunted and doubled up. “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Tom said. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

Again Phil flung himself at Tom—punching, clawing, grabbing at Tom’s shirt—and then Tom hit Phil so many times, so fast, that John—sick and fascinated—couldn’t count the blows. Tom hit Phil with his fists, his elbows, and his knees. He seemed able to hit him anywhere, any time he damn well pleased. He slammed him up against the wall, grabbed his face with one hand, and hammered his head into the bricks. “Stop it,” Cassandra yelled. “Jesus, man.” Pam was yelling something too, but John couldn’t make out the words.

Tom threw another round of punches and stepped back. Phil collapsed onto the sidewalk. Tom kicked Phil in the chest. Cassandra grabbed Tom by the arm. He spun around, sent her flying. She fell backward, slid on her bottom, jumped up, ran at him: “Stop it!”

“Hey, man, cool,” Ethan yelled and grabbed at Tom’s arm.

Tom stopped, froze—like he’d just dropped back into the real from another time-space continuum. He saw Cassandra still sitting on the sidewalk where he’d dumped her. He saw John watching him, saw the others watching him. He saw Phil lying by the wall, saw the blood. Now John could identify the look on Tom’s face. He’d seen it before when Tom had walked out of the Weasel office in the middle of his speech, but then John had been so surprised by it that he hadn’t been able to call it by its correct name. Terror.

• • •

“THERE’S PROBABLY some . . .” Some what? John thought. He kept waiting. “I can’t,” Pam said. “Will you call Karen? Jesus fuck, I can’t . . .”

“Sure. Do you know her number?”

“I just can’t do it. Do you understand? I. Just. Can’t. Do. It. Her fucking number?”

It had all happened too fast—time warp, film run through the projector at double speed—and John’s head had been left behind in the blur of crazy black-and-white action, maybe on the street outside the Weasel office, maybe on the taxi ride to Emergency. He hadn’t been inside a hospital in years, and without telling him about it, they must have stopped painting the goddamned places white. This one was a nondescript snot-pale green, and Pam was a jagged whir of motion—walking, turning, stopping, walking. Shaking all over. And there were people in the waiting room. Bleeding people, passed-out people. Old people, young people, a woman with a crying baby. Somewhere in the bowels of the building a bell was ringing—or something like a bell. The doctor had looked improbably young; he’d had huge sideburns and a thick black mustache.

“Shit,” Pam was saying, “he got exactly what he fucking . . . What the fuck was he thinking? Why did he . . . ? Jesus, fuck, man, what’s he think? The revolution’s going to be a fist fight? Oh, fuck!” She caught John’s hands and drew him through the big doors, outside onto the street, outside into the city.

“Little boys in fucking kindergarten.” She was rapping compulsively. She certainly wasn’t enjoying anything she was saying. “Jesus. ‘It’s my fucking candy. I’ll kick your fucking ass, man.’ Jesus, I could live happily . . . the rest of my goddamn life happily, oh, I’d love it. Never have to see another man again. Never see one, never talk to one, never have to deal with another motherfucking man again in my whole goddamned life. Jesus, fuck, keep them in kennels for breeding purposes. Yeah, throw them some food over the fucking walls, hose them down every once in a while. Collect their sperm in motherfucking test tubes. Let them punch each other around, kick the shit out of each other, fuck each other up the ass . . . like goddamned motherfucking chimpanzees. Jesus, they fuck up everything they touch. Men? Goddamn them. ‘OK, boys, we’re going to drop our fucking pricks on those motherfuckers. That’ll show them. Yeah, we’re going to come all over Vietnam.’”

The light was flattening out the city like rice paper—which was a damned good thing because there was some kind of hermetic horror going down and his mouth tasted like zero. He pounded a cigarette out of his pack, offered one to Pam. She grabbed it, and he lit both smokes. The words, hard as blown metal, were still ratcheting out of her. “Yeah, you’ve got to call Karen. I can’t call her, I just can’t. Fuck her. See what she says about this one. Yeah, tell her old Phillip got his revolutionary ass kicked, the dumb shit.

“Oh, fuck Karen. Male-fucking-identified is what she is. Goddamn, the bitch, she’d grow balls if she could. Dealing with male chauvinism? Oh, yeah, you bet. Motherfucking hypocrite. ‘In practice, the woman question vanishes as an issue.’ Yeah, right. I want to see it vanishing from her practice. That goddamned fucking cow.

“Shit, I hope he’s all right. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Motherfucking shmegegge. But he didn’t deserve that . . . Oy, fuck, man, I’ve got blood all over me.” It was true; her white shirt was splashed with it. She’d held Phil’s head in her lap on the ride over.

So he was supposed to call Karen. And then what? There was something else. But he’d gone numb or some damned thing. He couldn’t think, and it was that hour when every bird in the city sings its head off. She even had blood on her hands. Maybe he was supposed to go into the hospital and sign something. And Pam was still hammering him with words. But he had to call Karen. That’s right. That’s where he had to start.

A cab pulled up. Someone was getting out of it. With no warning at all, Pam turned and ran to the cab. “Wait, wait,” she yelled, but the driver didn’t look like he was going anywhere.

She bent down, said something to the driver, turned and ran back to John. She was crying openly now. “I didn’t mean you. I didn’t mean you, I didn’t mean you. I’m so fucking freaked, man. Oy, I’m so fucked up. I’ve got to . . . Jesus. I’m below a hundred. Oy, I can’t stop. I need fucking help, man. I’m fucking ninety-four pounds! But . . . Jesus, listen. I didn’t mean you. Do you understand me? You’ve got to understand me. Like politically, I think of you as a woman, do you understand me? Oh, fuck, John, I’ve got to go home.” She hugged him so hard it hurt. “Be careful. Oh, fuck. I’ll call you.”