12

AND THEN there was another little thing that was bugging me. Cassandra and Lorraine were getting real tight, and I don’t know why I should give a shit, but I did. Cass seemed to think that Lorraine was some kind of guru, like she had the ultimate scoop on the ways of the world. Cass would go, “Some of her stories, man, whew.”

Yeah, Lorraine was just full of stories, and every one of them was more horrible than the last one, and the more horrible they got, the funnier she made them. “So there I am in the slammer AGAIN.” If you know how to do it, you can deliver a line like that so you crack up everybody in the room. “And fuck your due process. ‘Lorraine,’ they say, ‘you are going to tell us some interesting tales, and until you start telling, you are going to remain here.’ And it was the worst fucking place I’ve ever been, man. The only way I could keep the dykes off me was to tell them I had hep . . . which was true, I DID have hep. And periodically I’d say, ‘Hey, didn’t I hear something once about one phone call?’ And they thought that was real funny. And there I am ten fucking days and I haven’t even been charged. And finally one day I’m in this big exercise room with all the other prisoners, and what do I see but a pay phone hanging on the wall. And the matron has to split for some reason, so she says, ‘Now I don’t want any of you trying to use that phone.’ And there are all these women in there. They all want to make a phone call, but they’re all TOO FUCKING SCARED, some of them even saying to me, ‘Hey, she said not to USE it.’ Like a bunch of fucking sheep, man. And if I hadn’t got that phone call in, I’d be there still.”

Cassandra says, “Yeah, I know about those fucking California cops,” and she tells her story about the time they busted her, sitting in the hole for twenty-four hours buck naked with no smokes and all the other profound joys of that experience.

So Lorraine’s got to top that one. “Shit, so he says to me, ‘Put out, bitch, and put out quick.’ I look out the window of the cruiser and there’s nothing but warehouses . . . nothing, not a soul. I mean, even if there was, who’s going to stick around when the MAN comes cruising down the street? And they know I’ve been hustling, and they know I’m into doogie, and they know I’ve got a record long as Interstate Ninety. Well, to make a long story short, I fucked the one of them and sucked off the other, and that wasn’t so bad. What was bothering me was the mean one, the real son of a bitch . . . the way he kept saying he was going to jam his billy club up my ass if I didn’t get right down to it. Amazing how friendly you can get under some circumstances.”

So Cassandra gets to lay out her rap about how women are fucked over from day one, and Lorraine agrees with her totally, and Lorraine has got ten stories to every one of Cassandra’s because Lorraine’s had every number run on her that it’s possible to run, and she’s had her ass drop-kicked from San Francisco to Boston and back again, and it’s NO NEWS TO HER. “You’re born a woman, you’re just out of luck. You know, I used to wish I’d been born UGLY.”

“Yeah,” Cassandra says, laughing. “I’ve thought of that myself.” And Cassandra and Lorraine are yucking it up and just getting tighter and tighter.

OK, so there was this old-time beatnik bar called the Incision, and it was a regular hangout for junkies—of both the REHABILITATED and the NONREHABILITATED variety—and it was cool as all hell, like it had a lot of blacks going in there, and a lot of hip types going in there, and a lot of deals going down—nothing changing hands, you dig, but all the good words taken care of. And Lorraine would fall by there damned near every night to hustle drinks and bread. She knew all the regulars, and she could sit and drink for free, and before the night was out, she could always hit some man up for a LOAN, so she’d come home with five or ten bucks in her purse, and I guess that five or ten bucks was better than nothing. I used to watch her getting fitted out for her run to the Incision, and fuck, it was awe-inspiring, like watching somebody paint a battleship, it was that deliberate. She’d lay on the makeup with a hand trowel, and check it out in the mirror to make sure it was enough to DO THE JOB, and then she’d check out her ass to make sure the skirt was short enough and tight enough to DO THE JOB, and then she’d give me a little grin like, “Yeah, well, I guess I’m still worth ten bucks.”

The next thing I know, Cassandra’s going with her. I couldn’t believe it. Here’s the same chick who just a few months ago was chasing some poor secretary up the street like a mad dog, the same chick who’s worn nothing but jeans ever since I met her, and here she is shaving her legs and painting her face and climbing into one of Lorraine’s miniskirts and checking her ass in the mirror to make sure it will DO THE JOB, and pretty soon Cass is coming home every night with five or ten bucks in HER purse—and before that, you couldn’t have got her out in public with A PURSE if you’d held a gun to her head. But what the hell, at least she was bringing home a coin or two, and besides, wasn’t she just DOING HER OWN THING? I tried to keep my big mouth shut, but upon occasion, I would let slip words to the effect of how scoring drinks and coin with Lorraine at the Incision was maybe a little bit farther down the old road toward sleazedom than Cass should be traveling, and she’d snap back at me, “Fuck you, man. You deal your drugs and I’ll deal mine. You’re a great one to talk. What about Bobby Lyons? Jesus, that guy’s a half-pint Mafioso. He’s a motherfucking asshole, man.”

By then I knew perfectly well that Lyons was a half-pint Mafioso and a motherfucking asshole—I mean, I knew it a hell of a lot better than Cassandra did—but he was my main source, so I was kind of touchy on the subject. I’m saying, “Well, you see, sweet stuff, there’s this strange savage ritual the natives conduct here in Somerville once a month. It’s called paying the rent.”

It’s not like I didn’t have other sources, but they were not RELIABLE, you know what I mean? And Lyons was always reliable. And the weird thing about him was he never stopped asking me to come in with him—PARTNERS, right? And I got to admit, I thought about it. I mean, Lyons never burnt me. Not once. In fact, it was just the opposite, he went out of his way to help me out, and a lot of times he’d just lay shit on me for no good reason. Except that—well, Christ, maybe it really was that simple, the son of a bitch LIKED ME. And I probably WAS the only dude in town he could trust. And, you know, it would have been easy. Of course he was into some things that filled me with those famous DOUBTS AND RESERVATIONS—but I could have swallowed my pride, right? And it wouldn’t have to be FOREVER, right? And I’d have bread out the ying-yang, and I could even salt away a coin or two for the old rainy day. Yeah, I knew it was a lousy idea, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it either.

• • •

INTERRUPTION FROM another galaxy, a spaceship bong—the voice of a lightly struck marimba. Lying in Pam’s bed, doing what they always did when the day had so beautifully concluded itself far beyond the hard edges of anybody’s agenda—smoke and licorice and vanilla oil—and now what? At one in the morning. The doorbell. “Oh, Jesus,” she said, “who the fuck . . . ?”

Paranoia was shredding him like a grater. “Don’t,” he said, “just let it . . .” but she was already up and moving, pulling on jeans and shirt.

He grabbed up his own clothes and shot straight into the bathroom. Blown-out dumb as a brick, he ran water, soaked a washcloth, smeared soap on it, and scrubbed away the eye makeup that had seemed—well, up until a few seconds ago had seemed not merely innocent but so natural he’d forgotten he was wearing it. Through the closed door, he heard footsteps, a man’s voice, and John’s shaved armpits blazed with sweat. He felt seared, end to end, hairless as a slug, and for one lunatic’s moment, imagined himself simply staying in there, safely locked away in there, until it was all over. Pam was the boy; she could deal with it. But no. Pam was not the boy. She was the same as he was, and they were a council, and he prayed to Whomever to give him some useful center in this tintinnabulating real. Why did he have to be so utterly, so goddamned stoned? Then, scrubbed and dressed—that is, masked—he unlocked the door and stepped through it. A man was sitting at the kitchen table. John had never seen him before in his life.

“Time to intensify the struggle, you dig?” the man was saying to Pam. The man turned; his eyes met John’s, and he smiled—a sad thin warmth. “Ray,” he said, then, shrugging, “Come on, man, it’s me.”

Who? The skinny bald man, hunched forward, bending, apologetic. A little old man, collapsed in on himself. No, he wasn’t like that at all. He wasn’t old at all. Wire-rimmed granny glasses and a Harvard boy’s Harris Tweed jacket. Pert, pursed, lips—sharply cut, almost too pretty. And (oh, my God) the picture finally blew itself together—it was Phil Vance with his beard and mustache shaved off.

“He’s dropped out,” Pam said.

“Yeah,” Phil said. Shrugged. “Fuck.”

“What?” John said.

“Out of Weatherman,” Pam said. “You want to do some smoke?” she said to Phil.

“Oh, Christ, no. My head can’t deal with that shit right now. You got anything to . . . I don’t know. You got anything to drink?”

Pam’s eyes met John’s. Neither of them drank anything stronger than Oolong. “Maybe Deb left something,” she said, and he heard the unspoken message: Come on, man, function. He sat down at the table with Phil.

“Shit, man,” Phil said, “I don’t know. We got back from Flint, and like our cadre. Heavy, man. Criticism, self-criticism. Day after day. We’ve been dropping acid and . . . like day after day. Everybody’s onto everybody. Watching everybody. Like nobody can be alone. Not for ten minutes. You’ve got to report . . . like, ‘Hey, I’m going to crash now. Is that OK? I’m going to the can now. Got to take a dump. Is that OK?’ Jesus, I’m not putting you on. Everything, you dig? You’ve got to report, and Ben . . . you know, Ben Pavalick. He’s kind of emerged as the . . . He lays out this rap like, ‘Nobody can leave now. Dig it, we all know that by now. It’s really clear by now. We’ll have to kill anybody who tries to leave.’ And I just . . . snapped. Something in me . . . Like I just waited like . . . And I said, ‘Hey, I’m going out for smokes. Just up to the corner, OK?’ And I never went back.”

Pam had found—of all wacko things—a bottle of sherry. She poured a splash of it into a teacup. Phil knocked it back. “You want anything to eat?” she said.

Phil was staring down at the table top. “I’m never going back,” he said. “They can fucking kill me, I don’t care. I’m going home. If they want to find me and kill me at home, they can do that.” Voice planed flat. John watched him. Pam was making a cheese sandwich.

“Jesus,” Phil said, “how’d we get here?”

“I’m really fucked,” Phil said. He was trying to tell them how fucked he was. He was back in the Days of Rage now, laying out that rap—getting busted in Chicago, getting the crap kicked out of him in Chicago. A cracked rib—among other things. He’d recovered from the other things, but the goddamn rib still hurt. “Those Chicago pigs were not fucking around, man.” And then they murdered Fred Hampton. The Chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party. Slaughtered him in his bed. Came in, guns blazing, fired hundreds of bullets into that goddamned place. “Shit, you can still see the bullet holes. They didn’t give a shit. The motherfuckers. They just riddled the place, man.”

The Weatherbureau freaked. A crucial event. “Like now was the time to intensify the struggle, you dig?”

All of the Weather collectives met in Flint, Michigan, in an old hall in a black ghetto. A huge cardboard machine gun was hanging from the ceiling. On the wall were the enemies of the people—LBJ, Nixon, Mayor Daley, Sharon Tate . . .

“Fuck, I heard that,” Pam said, “but I didn’t want to believe it. Sharon Tate?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Look, was it . . . ? Sharon Tate and those other . . . the ones the Manson Family killed?”

“Yeah. Sure. Yeah, the Tate Eight.”

“It was in LNS, for fuck’s sake,” John said.

Her eyes zapped him into silence. “The Tate Eight, Jesus,” she said. “I want to hear it. I want to hear it from somebody who was there. OK, Phil, so tell me . . . just how the fuck were those . . . ? How was Sharon Tate supposed to be an enemy of the people?”

“Fuck, I don’t know. That’s where it was at, you dig? That was the line, you dig? She was rich. Decadent. A sleazy actress. White skin privilege . . . I don’t know. They didn’t spell it out. She was like a symbol.”

“Some symbol. She was pregnant.”

“Yeah, I know. Jesus, Pam, I’m just trying to tell you. Listen. Bernardine laid out this rap. She was . . . God, you should have seen her. She was way out there. She said we were going wimpy. Like after the pigs offed Hampton, we should have burned Chicago to the motherfucking ground. She was . . . Sexy? Jesus. These thigh-high black boots. Stomping around, yelling. Turning everybody on . . . men, women, everybody. Like everybody wanted to fuck Bernardine.”

“But killing Sharon Tate? How was that . . . ?”

“Fuck if I know. It was nuts, OK? I know it was nuts. Just listen. I’m trying to tell you, for Christ’s sake. It’s what Bernardine said. ‘Weatherman digs Charlie Manson.’ Like Charlie wasn’t wimpy. Charlie had balls, right? Like Bernardine says, ‘First they killed those pigs, and then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork in a victim’s stomach.’ Yeah, Bernardine really dug that shit. She thought it was wild. And she did this.” He thrust his hand into the air in a stiff salute—three fingers spread. “That’s the fork, you dig? That’s what she did. So after that, we all went around giving each other the fork, you dig?”

SMASH—like something blew up from the strain. Jerking back in his chair, John saw the fragments of the plate Pam had winged into the sink. “Fuck,” she said. “I didn’t want to believe it. I thought that was . . . I thought it was just a bunch of fuck-ass agitprop. But it’s true, isn’t it? Murdering women? Murdering pregnant women? This is a revolutionary act?”

Watching this shit go down, John was a strobe misfire. Freaky echoes. Contact high from Phil’s acid? Fuck, some things you shouldn’t have to live through stoned.

“Jesus,” Pam said. She wasn’t yelling. Most definitely, John thought, she was not yelling. “They’re motherfucking male-identified,” she said. “Like totally. And it’s not politics, it’s religion. It’s motherfucking demonology. Was Karen into that shit?”

Phil shrugged again. “We were all into it.”

“Tell me. This is important. I’ve got to know.”

Their cadre, Phil said. It was still going on. It was going on right at this minute. Criticism self-criticism. “You know what we call it? ‘Weather Fries.’

“Everybody sits around in a circle. Ben passes out the acid. These fucking weird neon-orange capsules. You can’t say no. Nobody can say no. Everybody drops. And when you’re tripping, you get criticized for your counter-revolutionary actions and thoughts. There’s no way out. Only one way to survive. You’ve got to admit your crimes against the people and criticize yourself. You ever read Darkness at Noon? I get it now. Makes perfect sense now . . . how all those dudes could have been kissing Stalin’s ass right up to the minute he had them shot.”

The cadre attacked Phil for being wimpy. He’d been hiding behind white-skin privilege, male privilege, intellectual privilege, every goddamned kind of privilege. They really went after him. The women were the worst. Karen was the worst of the women. “Like we’ve been married for five years. She knows me really well.”

Phil’s head fell forward. He was hiding his face. He was crying. “Sorry. Sorry, man, sorry. Jesus, I’m sorry.”

Pam stepped to the back of his chair—not looking at him, not looking at his face—pressed her hands into the muscles of his shoulders and squeezed. “Fuck that shit,” she said. “Fuck those assholes. Fuck sorry.”

“When you’re criticizing somebody . . . There’s nothing that’s off limits. You’re allowed to say anything, you dig?”

He stopped crying. He simply turned it off—CLICK—pushed himself upright, his eyes scraped down and shiny. “There’s one more thing you’ve got to know,” he said. “We’re going to start offing pigs. That’s the next phase . . . for our cadre, you dig? We renamed ourselves ‘the Fork.’ We’ve got some guns . . . a couple hunting rifles and a pistol. Shit. I don’t know anything about guns. Fuck, I don’t want to know anything about guns.”

Their cadre made up a hit list. They started with the BIG PIGS. Politicians, judges, cops. And then they made a list of PIGLETS. Small-time motherfuckers, counter-revolutionary swine, traitors, so-called revolutionaries who’ve sold out the revolution. “You guys are at the top of the Piglet List. That thing you wrote in Zygote . . . ‘Bring Your Balls to Chicago.’ That puts you right at the top of the list. As soon we move into action, you’re going to get offed.”

The BIG PIGS would just be blown away wherever they were—in their beds, taking a walk, sitting in a restaurant. But there’d been some discussion of what to do with the PIGLETS. It had been decided that Piglets should die, squealing, on their knees. Like it was a political act, you dig? So people would get the message—here’s what happens to counter-revolutionary swine. Yeah, you’d make them drop acid, and then you’d hit them with the revolutionary criticism. However long it took. By any means necessary. And when you finally got them to the point where they were admitting their counter-revolutionary bullshit, where they were squealing and crying and begging for mercy, they’d get a single bullet in the base of the skull. And then the cadre would make a circle around the corpse and eat dinner.

“There was some discussion,” Phil said, “about who was going to do the people on the Piglet List, like who was going to fire the bullet. We were talking about killing people we know, right? So offing the piglet would be a test of revolutionary commitment.” He looked at Pam. “The cadre decided that Karen was going to do you.”

The color was gone from Pam’s face. Not a gradual thing. It was just gone. “She agreed to do it?” she said.

“Shit, Pamela, what do you think? We’ve been tripping for . . . God, I don’t know how long. Days. Of course she agreed to do it. She hated the . . .It made her fucking sick . . . But she knew she had to do it. We were like . . . turning ourselves into tools of the revolution. And if you could kill a friend . . .If you could do that . . . Fuck. You’d be there.”

Pam and Karen had been more than friends—John had figured out that much. “Ideology is,” Pam said. “Is the collec tive . . . the collective . . .” She made a pushing gesture: Get away from me. “The super-ego becomes . . . co lec tive, and the, and the . . .”

Disaster had struck her deep in the body. She contracted, gagging. Gulping air. Sweat beading up on her forehead. She struggled to breathe, head thrown back, brushed off John’s hand, pushed him back, pushed herself back, walked away. Stood, her back to them. Directed out the nothing window, her voice came back. “I can’t deal with this shit.”

John, desperate. “Hey, it was a fucking acid trip. A fucking bad acid trip. An evil jerk-off fantasy. Motherfucking sick porn. They’re not going to off anybody.”

Dry-eyed now, Phil was grinning reflexively, slack-faced and stupid as a clown, and John saw that, yes, it was real death they were talking about. Phil might have run from it, skittering away like a rat, but the threads of it were still all over him. John’s anger was immaculate. “Shit,” he said, “so who was supposed to off me?”

The shopkeeper’s apologetic shrug—sorry, we’re sold out of that. “Me.”

• • •

SO I go see Lyons. By that stage of his career—what with him being a highly successful man of business—he always kept lots of chicks at his place, and he made sure they were always whacked right out of their pretty little gourds, and they were there for exactly the same reason he kept plenty of food and booze and smoke and doogie and crystal laying around—like you were supposed to help yourself. But he always picked one of the chicks to be his GIRLFRIEND, like at his beck and call twenty-four hours a day. He’d been trading up on the girlfriends for a while, always looking for the new and improved model, and eventually he’d settled on one named Susie. When she first turned up at Lyons’ place, she was like a little ray of sunshine, one of those apple-cheeked girls with real sparkly eyes, a real oh-wow kid. She just made you smile. Of course she didn’t stay that way for long.

Now, paying attention to Lyons’ chicks was not high on my list. No, usually what I was paying attention to was BUSINESS. But that night, I didn’t have much choice in the matter. We do what we always do when we want to have some WORDS—go in his bedroom. Susie’s trailing right along with us. Lyons and me are rapping away, and I haven’t quite got around to telling him how wonderful things are at the Shooting Gallery, but I’m getting there. And Susie’s being real annoying. Like if you decide you want a teenager for a girlfriend, that’s exactly what you’re going to get. She’s hanging all over him, getting in his way, interrupting everything he says, and so finally, without any warning at all, he just hauls off and whaps her one. Knocks her flat. And she’s down on all fours on the floor crying and he just goes on rapping away like nothing’s happened. She gets up and he whaps her again. He says, “I didn’t tell you to get up yet, cunt.”

He rolls a joint, giggling and laughing, and she’s whimpering to herself, and my stomach’s tightening up like a vice. A few minutes drag by and she says, “Can I get up now, Bob?”

He says, “No, not yet.”

I can’t see her face because it’s, you know, kind of pressed into the rug, but I can see the back of her neck, and it turns bright sunset red. I have this very strong desire to take Lyons and crack him over my knee like a stick. And he looks at me, and I look at him, and I can see by that merry little twinkle in his eye that he knows EXACTLY what I’m thinking.

OK, so there’s a number of possibilities about what’s going down. Maybe Lyons wanted to teach her a lesson, and he went about it in kind of a crude way. Or maybe he wanted to teach ME a lesson— because I could take him out in less than half a second and I wouldn’t even work up a sweat doing it, and he KNOWS THAT, so maybe he was saying, OK, old buddy, I got the top card now. Yeah, you may think the way I’m treating this poor little girl is shitty and disgusting and worthy of your wrath, but you won’t do dick about it because YOU’RE IN IT WITH ME UP TO YOUR EYEBALLS.

Or maybe it didn’t have a damn thing to do with Susie or with me. Maybe he was just nuts. Like I always knew he was nuts even back at Ton Son Nhut—of course we were all nuts at Ton Son Nhut—and four million hits of crystal sure hadn’t helped any.

Or maybe nuts didn’t have anything to do with it either. Maybe he was just doing it because it was fun—like they say, THE EXERCISE OF POWER FOR ITS OWN SAKE. I know that one. I’ve been there myself a few more times than I like to admit, and I know it feels pretty good. That’s probably the way Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon felt too. But anyhow, I’m thinking about all this shit, and to put things in a nutshell, I am not having a real good time.

So I’ve got to sit there listening to him giggle and squeak like a bat, and she’s got to lay there on the floor—and I swear he made her lay there for damned near an hour—until he goes, “Susie, my sweet, why don’t you make us some tea?”

She gets up and makes us some tea. She can’t look at me, and I can’t look at her either. “OK, Tommy,” he says, “what can I do for you tonight?”

What I needed was a key. And I needed it up front because I was tapped right out. And I needed it pretty damn quick. But I just couldn’t do it. “Nothing, man. I just fell by to check out your ugly ass.”

“Well, shit, a man always needs SOMETHING.”

“Not me, Robert. I’m looking good.”

• • •

OK, SO I might have won that little head game with Lyons, but I was, like they say, running on empty. I checked my other sources, and lo and behold, they were dry as a bone. OK, so talk about swallowing your pride, I fell by to see Ethan. He’s always glad to see me. He misses my company when I ain’t falling by. He thinks I’m his good buddy. He pulls his nose out of his seed catalogues and rolls us a big fat doobie, and we lay back on the pillows on the floor in the living room and start emitting the good words. Terry’s in the background the whole time, you dig, making tea and slicing up the home-made bread for us dudes. And of course she can hear everything I say when I’m asking him if, hey, maybe he’s got a source I could tap into along with him. She don’t even look at me, but I can feel how disgusted she is.

Ethan is loving it to pieces. Me with the friendly neighborhood source I wouldn’t let him in on? Me who always has grass out the ying-yang? Coming TO HIM? Oh, you better believe he’s happy. Maybe he’ll help me out and maybe he won’t, but he’s got to make me squirm first. “Well, you know how it is, man. Boston’s in kind of a dope drought at the moment. It’s all a matter of the ECOLOGY.” And that gives him his chance to lay it on me how we’re all in it together—THE WHOLE EARTH—like it’s like one big interconnected system, man, and air pollution in China ends up on the North Pole bothering Santa Claus, and the state of the grass supply in Boston is directly related to the political situation in Mexico. I go, “Oh, yeah, is that right?” and we do that one for a while until he gets around to admitting that, yeah, maybe one of his sources might have a few extra keys coming in.

Well, after that I was scrambling. Ethan always got dibsies—I mean, after all it was HIS SOURCE, right?—and so I was welcome to the seconds if there was any. And I had to keep checking back with my other half-assed sources—like I always had to be somewhere sometime checking out something, not to mention moving my little bit of grass when I could get my hands on it, and the general public was beginning to get annoyed with me because I was no longer what you could call RELIABLE, and when you start losing the good will of the general public, you’ve lost it all. Shit, there were times when I figured I could do better selling the Encyclopedia Britannica door to door in North Dakota.

• • •

JOHN WOKE in the cool blue mornings to the smell of Pam’s coffee and a strange openness, a chasm in the array of sound where her fingers on the keys of her typewriter should have been. He heard, instead, her bare feet padding from one side of the room to the other. Later in the day, she would tell him about what she’d been thinking, or at least some of it. She talked about religion infecting political movements: “Like Vaneigem says, the old hippie of Nazareth worms his way into everything.” She talked about the Jacobins, the Puritans, Oliver Cromwell, the Spanish Inquisition, the Albigensian Crusade. She talked about ideology becoming a collective superego, the individual members of the group forced to become masochistic in order to survive. And all of that theoretical crap, of course, was going into her total critique—which John had begun to think of as The Critique. Or maybe it wasn’t. She didn’t seem able to write anything down.

And she didn’t seem able to eat. Dozens of carrots, an occasional apple or pear, a handful of nuts or a spoonful of yogurt, once an entire head of lettuce with a splash of French dressing on it, and lots of coffee, lots of water—that’s all he’d seen going down her throat since Phil had been there. It was scary how quickly the weight could drop away from her. When they went to bed now, her bones hurt him. “Hey,” he said, “you’re getting too thin.”

“Listen,” she said, “don’t ever try to make me eat, OK? It just makes things worse. When I get freaked, it’s like . . . I don’t know, something shuts down, and food just . . . It’s my way of working through things, OK? It’s just temporary. Don’t worry, I’ve been here before. I’m keeping track of my weight.”

She could still talk. Oh, yeah, she could do that all right— compulsively. He’d seen her going nuts before—hurt, driven, and distanced—but not as bad as it was now. She didn’t use the word “betrayed,” but he was sure that’s what she was feeling—rapping about Karen and the other Movement women who’d been sucked into Weatherman. “The minute I hit town, they’re all coming on to me. What? I’m supposed to provide everybody’s lesbian experience? Jesus, there’s not enough of me to go around. Why don’t all of you just go off and sleep with each other? They’re going on and on about the joys of sisterhood, and they’re afraid to hold hands. I had my first girlfriend when I was fifteen, for Christ’s sake. What were you guys doing at fifteen, getting ready for the junior prom?”

“Did you say that to them?”

“Oh, no. Are you kidding? It’s everything I wanted to say . . . And Karen’s really persistent. Phil’s over at the Weasel, so we hop into bed. And she turns into the most terrified little girl you ever saw in your life. Well, we get through that one eventually, and then, oh, wow, I’m the greatest thing since sliced bread. The stars and stripes fly out of my ass, man. I’m her first, you dig? She’ll never forget me. She’ll always love me . . . for ever and ever and ever. Yeah, you bet. A bullet in my fucking brain, that’s how much she loves me.”

He said the same thing he always said: “It was a bad trip on bad acid. A sick jerkoff fantasy. They’re not going to kill anybody.” But he didn’t know what to believe.

When he’d first moved into Pam’s clearly articulated space, he’d been able to bracket off his paranoia, but he couldn’t do it any longer—and neither could she. When the doorbell sounded, she no longer ran down to see who it was; she used the intercom. She locked her father’s car. She set up an elaborate arrangement with the women in the Collective to call each other at specific times; if someone wasn’t where she was supposed to be when she was supposed to be there, then the group would go into action to find her. When she and John walked anywhere, they checked out everyone around them. To avoid a car snatch, they kept well back from the edges of sidewalks, sometimes walking single-file. They never went out at night if they could help it. When they were separated, they established fail-safe times. She made him memorize the phone numbers of all the women in the Collective—and her father’s, doctor’s, and therapist’s numbers in New York. Nothing was to be written down.

It wasn’t just Weatherman—their paranoia now extended to everything and everyone. There was, for instance, that long-haired, vacant-eyed young man they kept running into. Why was he always walking around the Square at the same time they were? Twice they’d caught him standing across the street from their apartment doing absolutely nothing. But if he was an agent, whose agent was he?

“It wouldn’t take much effort to bug this place,” John said. “They’d just have to memorize our routine and then wait till we go to the Zygote office.”

“We better not have a routine then.”

“But what if they’ve already done it?”

She shrugged. “Shit, there’s some things you just can’t . . . Well, OK, if they’ve got a bug in here, I hope they dig our sex life.”

Their sex life? Right, he thought. How would that look to an agent? Shaving his face took ten minutes; shaving his entire body took over an hour. Within days, it was growing back, a constant annoyance. For a while, he’d gone around smelling like a gigantic apricot; then Pam had bought him mentholated skin cream—a delicious tingle, a pothead’s groove—so now he smelled like mint leaves. It was addictive—sleek, shiny, smooth skin. He loved the way he looked. Staring into the mirror, feeling what? Turn-on, of course, and a complex bittersweet pleasure. It made him want to lose weight too, join Pamela in her madness—anorexia nervosa atypical—so they could firmly and finally bracket off their paranoia, lie on her white bed, display themselves to each other on her white eyelet lace, and admire each other’s emerging bone structures as they thinned out quietly into sweet Romantic death.

But he could never do that. It was a sick fantasy, and the paranoia wouldn’t stay bracketed off for long, and he could never take anorexia as far as Pam did. Acid had left him with a vivid sense of himself as a body in a world full of bodies, and bodies need to be fed. Part of him was still the Zen monk who throws down his hoe and laughs when the dinner bell rings—and there was a point, too, beyond which Pam would become too thin, would stop turning him on. He’d already seen her there once—the gaunt driven speed freak she’d become after the Chicago convention. He didn’t want to see her there again, but that’s where she was headed. What was driving her now? Paranoia cranked up to an unsustainable pitch? Grief?

He’d been sure that he’d already run every possible disaster through his mind. Back in his wretched little box off Central Square, the radio blatting away, or the TV, stoned to the eyeballs, he’d sweated through every brilliantly imagined detail. The agents who turn up at the office. The groovy Movement dude—or chick—who’s really an agent. The bust on the street, the bust at the airport, the thunderous KGB knock at four in the morning, the too-tight handcuffs in the back of the car, the slow hours of interrogation, the days in solitary, the passage of time. The sit-ups and push-ups and all the poetry he remembered—doing anything he had to in order to survive. The writing—if they gave him anything to write with. Now he had another lovely story to add to his repertoire of bummers. His naked, shivering, hairless body would reveal him to be the most loathsome of subversives—a depraved little sissy faggot—and that’s exactly how his gleefully self-righteous pig captors would treat him.

He’d even become afraid of writing. He was afraid of what he’d already written. Why in God’s name had he ever laid out his and Pam’s utterly mad ideas in print, in Zygote, for everyone in the world to see? The only response that had yet come back from the world had been from women in the Collective: “How the hell did you ever get a man to sign that with you?”

“What did you tell them?”

“I said you weren’t a man, that you were an androgyne just like me . . . and you’d renounced male privilege. I told them that we were playing with reversed sex roles.”

It was true enough, but he felt—to use Pam’s word—“demeaned” by her cool summary. He didn’t tell her that.

• • •

THEY DIDN’T find out about the townhouse explosion all at once. Bits of information kept dribbling out day after day. The first reports suggested that it might have been gas pipes blowing up. “I know that neighborhood,” Pam said. It was in Greenwich Village—trendy, chi-chi, the big bucks. “I’ve walked by that house a million times,” she said. Movie stars lived around there.

The explosion must have been a real motherfucker. It had shaken the entire area, punched out a hole in the house next door, shattered windows across the street. Several people had stumbled away from the blast but couldn’t be found to comment. The townhouse had burned so badly that the whole damned thing had collapsed in on itself. When the fire was out and heavy equipment had been brought in to stabilize what was left, firemen finally managed to go inside where they discovered the first body—a young man in jeans. “It wasn’t gas,” Pam said.

Reports the next day said that the house was owned by a James Wilkerson; he was away on vacation. One of the people who had escaped alive and gone missing was his daughter, Cathlyn. “Shit,” Pam said, “Cathy Wilkerson.” Weatherman.

When the first body was identified, it turned out to be someone named Ted Gold. “You know him too?” John said.

“Of course I know him. Fuck, man, I’m going to know them all.”

The police found SDS leaflets. The press said that the townhouse had been a Weatherman bomb factory, and something must have gone terribly wrong. The police found two more bodies—one was that of a young woman. Her head and hands had been blown off; she had been riddled with roofing nails. The other body was a torso so badly mutilated that the sex couldn’t yet be determined. They found blasting caps, alarm clocks, wires, dynamite.

“Roofing nails,” Pam said. “That’s motherfucking anti-personnel, man. That’s bombs you use against people . . . I kept hoping, like, hey, maybe it’s just another big show. Like let’s see who has the biggest mouth, who can run the heaviest rap, but . . . Part of me just didn’t want to believe it, but it’s true. The whole scene’s fucked, man. If murdering a pregnant woman is a revolutionary act, then that’s exactly where you’re headed . . . like it’s inevitable. Fuck, I just wish I wasn’t so goddamned right all the time. Jacobins, Cromwellites, motherfucking religious fanatics . . . Religion. Once you’re there, anything’s justified.”

In New York, bombs went off in the headquarters of IBM, Socony Mobil, and General Telephone and Electronics. Weatherman didn’t take credit for them, but the press blamed them on Weatherman nonetheless. In the townhouse, the cops had found a fingertip belonging to the headless, handless body of the young woman; the identification came back and was released to the public—Diana Oughton. Pam couldn’t stop crying.

John didn’t know what was happening. Up until the moment she’d got the news—one of the women in the Collective had called her up and told her—Pam had seemed to be just as cold and angry as he was. Now she sat at her desk where The Critique, untouched for weeks, was stacked up in a neat pile. She stared in the direction of the window, tears running down her face. “She was a good person,” she said.

What? he thought. She’s mourning the death of a Leninist asshole who was making bombs to kill people?

“Can you imagine what they had to do to get there?” she said. “To get themselves cranked up to that fever pitch? Can you imagine the violence they had to do to themselves?”

He took her hand. She allowed him to lead her to their bed. Once she lay down, she gave up—drew her knees up to her chest, wrapped her arms around them, and sobbed. “Oh, baby,” he said, stroking her hair. He never would have imagined Pam as inarticulate, but that’s what she was now—her words forced out in small, tear-soaked bursts. “Like that thing Laing . . . the forces of violence called ‘love’ . . . What if you’re doing it to yourself ?”

He wanted to shake her out of her grief the way a terrier shakes a rat. “Jesus, Pam, you were talking about the split in the Movement the first night I met you. Well, this is it, you dig? Not PL. PL’s always been totally irrelevant. It’s motherfucking Weatherman. We should have seen it coming. We never should have tried to do anything with Leninists. They were always the enemy. They’re just as much the enemy as the CIA.”

“You don’t understand.”

How could she say that to him? He’d never in his life worked harder at understanding anyone.

“She was a good person,” she kept saying. “She was sweet. She was kind and gentle.” She hadn’t known Diana very well, but they’d had a long rap once, really intense. “She was . . . I don’t know how to tell you. She was why I was in SDS. She was the best we had.”

“They want to kill us,” he said. “Not metaphor. Like right smack down in the real.”

“Oh, just shut up, man. You’ve got to let me feel what I’m feeling.”

OK, he thought, I’m not going to say another fucking word. He lay down beside her. “The tip of her finger,” she said. “Jesus fuck, man, her head, her hands . . . motherfucking roofing nails.”

Yes, he thought, roofing nails. Of course, roofing nails. But now her telegraphic fragments were no longer about Diana Oughton; they were about Karen Vance. He could sense the connection between Diana and Karen—an elusive vibration—but his head wouldn’t move fast enough to bring it into focus. “It’s what happens to women,” Pam was saying. “Like it’s a . . . Shit, in a warped mirror. What did Karen have to do to herself so she could . . . ? Like male-identified . . . No, it’s more than that. Like how could she . . . ? Oh, fuck, man, Karen did love me. She did. It was real.”

She allowed him to take her in his arms. She felt thin—tiny, bony. Like a child, she pressed her face into his chest. She hadn’t cried since Phil had dropped by to deliver his terrible news, so she must have been storing up these tears. “We’ve got to get clear of men,” she said to the man holding her. But no, he had to remind himself, she doesn’t think of me as a man.

He thought she’d cried herself out, but when she pushed him back and stood up, he saw that she was still crying—soundlessly now, but the tears streaking her cheeks. “I’m going to call Deb,” she said, already across the room, already picking up the phone and dialing.

“What? In New Mexico? The motherfucking phone’s tapped.”

“Fuck that shit,” and into the phone: “Hey, it’s me. Pamela. Is Deb . . . ? Yeah, OK.”

He followed her. Holding the phone to her ear, waiting, she looked into his eyes. He’d learned to read her wordless communications, but he couldn’t read that one. “Deb?” she said into the phone. “It’s me. Did you hear . . . ?” and then she was crying again—full tilt, flat out, doubled over with it.

He was appalled at what he was thinking: I can’t take any more of this shit. Heading for the door, he gave her a stiff wave. “You don’t have to go,” she called after him, covering the mouthpiece of the phone. But, yes, he did have to go.

As angry as he was, he couldn’t leave without a word. “I’ll be back,” he said.

• • •

HE WALKED around Harvard Yard four times, fast, before it made even the slightest dent in the jangle. What a stupid exit line, he thought. “I’ll be back,” implied that he’d considered not coming back. He should go back now. He didn’t want to go back.

Cut loose. Out alone again in the dreadful real with the paranoia grinding him like a million rolling boulders. All the assholes involved in the townhouse explosion had been NO—or at least he thought they’d been—but what about Karen Vance’s whacked-out little underground cell in Dorchester? Maybe they were still dropping acid every day and following their own sick path—revolution as violence as pornography. With their brains irradiated to a putrid day-glo orange, would they see the townhouse explosion as a SIGN ? Yeah, the time is at hand, motherfuckers. Ready or not, here we come. Now we’re going to off some pigs and piglets—and he and Pam would be easier to kill than some goddamned senator.

He didn’t know where the hell his politics were these days, but there was one thing he did know—he must never allow himself to get drafted into anybody’s murdering club. Just like Pamela, he’d thought that the murdering clubs were exclusively male—and just how goddamned naive had that been? OK, so if he knew better by now, where did that leave him? Nowhere. Everywhere. Fucked, God help him. Man, woman—the way those words were used these days, he didn’t want to be either of them. He wanted to be as elusive as one of those weird subatomic particles—the moment you try to pin it down, it’s gone.

After six times around the Yard, he walked back to the Square. The jangle had backed off a bit, but he could still feel it waiting to jump him. He’d been gone too long—Pam didn’t know where he was—but he still couldn’t go back. Having a car had spoiled him, but shit, he still knew how to ride the MTA. Even better than that, he had some money in his jeans from his last Zygote paycheck. He hailed a cab and told the driver Somerville.

Without a clue what he was doing, he stood a moment on the sidewalk, looking up at the crappy old house Cassandra had labeled the Shooting Gallery. The last time he’d been there, it had been death-trip winter—ice-bound, snow-clogged, locked into black stellar cold—but the sky tonight was translucent blue, and the wind felt wet, not icy. The snow had melted, spring was coming; the seasons were rotating through their old comforting cycle just as though the world wasn’t about to end at any minute. He didn’t bother to knock, stepped into a curious quiet like a pause in the general proceedings. A radio in the kitchen was playing bebop—the metalwork of some disassembled tune. He followed the sound and found crazy Lorraine sitting at the kitchen table, smoking. “Hey, Raymond, what’s happening?” She was cooking something—pasta maybe. Her boiling water had steamed the windows. The scene looked almost normal—damned near domestic—but the whole house stunk of cigarettes and dope. “She’s upstairs, man,” she told him, gesturing up with her head.

He found Cassandra alone in the bedroom she shared with Tom. Nothing in there but the bed and a pile of clothes in the corner and an old crooked stand-up lamp that looked like it had been scavenged from the Cambridge dump—nothing else, not a picture on the wall, not even a chair. Cassandra was lying on the bed reading; she looked up when he stepped through the door, and he felt the force of her grey eyes—their accuracy. “Far fucking out,” she said, laid her book aside, stood up, and hugged him. He was still scrabbling, and it took him a moment before he could hug her back. “Hey, Cass.”

“You sorry asshole,” she said, “I didn’t know how much I missed you till I saw you walking through the door.” Wow, that wasn’t her usual hip persona that found things mind-blowing or trippy or a drag but never simply human. Could he do it too—express something that was simply human? “What the fuck’s happening, man?” she said.

“I couldn’t tell you.” Space travel, moon landing—from Pamela’s world into Cassandra’s too fast, his head left lagging behind, ruminating paranoia in the cab or pursuing empty circles in Harvard Yard. He’d forgotten how short Cassandra’s hair was these days. If you put a blazer on her, she’d look like a pretty British schoolboy. “You want to do some smoke?” she said. Of course he wanted to do some smoke.

They sat down on the edge of the bed, and she rolled a joint. Being here had brought his head into painful focus. He didn’t want to be living anywhere else but in Pamela’s little white box, but life there had begun to feel closed in, hermetically sealed, almost like a trap.

“You ever read this?” Cassandra said, tossing her book into his lap—Carlos Castaneda. “Everybody and their dog has been telling me I’ve got to read this damn thing, and I’m going, fuck, I don’t want to read something everybody’s reading. But they were right, man, it’s a real trip.”

“Oh, you bet your sweet ass.”

“‘Learning is never what you expect.’ Shit. If there was nothing in there but that one line, it’d be worth the price of admission. So what the fuck you doing? Still working for Zygote?”

“Oh, yeah.” She passed him the joint. He fired it up.

“Wow,” she said, “that androgyny thing you guys wrote. Motherfucking blew me away, man. Like I had to go scrape my brains off the wall and stuff them back into my skull, and I’m not just bullshitting you. I started reading it, and every word, I’m going, ‘Oh, far out. Wow, that’s true. Why didn’t I think of that years ago?’”

“Hey, thanks. It wasn’t just me, like most of it’s Pam . . . So what’re you doing? Where’s Tom?”

“Oh, he’s out, man. Flat out, far out, running on a tight schedule, fuck if I know where he is.”

“How about those evil dudes in California? You heard any more from them?”

“No action on that front, but I haven’t checked it out, so what the hell do I know? Nothing is what I know. Sleeping dogs lie, I think that’s how it goes.”

He passed her the joint. “Zoë keeps threatening to come up,” she said, “and I keep going, ‘No, no, no, it’s not quite . . . um . . . auspicious. Yeah, the omens and portents haven’t aligned themselves up properly yet.’ Maybe I should go down there again, pay her a little visit, like head her off at the pass, but fuck, man. I love her dearly, but she’s straighter than a Barbie doll. So what’s happening with your love life? How’s Pamela the Great?”

“She’s bummed out about the townhouse explosion. You heard about that?”

“Oh, yeah. Heavy. It’s like that thing from Pogo . . . ‘We have met the enemy, and he is us.’”

“That’s good,” he said, laughing. “It’s too easy, but it’s good.”

The dope felt good too—and he realized that dope hadn’t been feeling good for a while. Too much paranoia, too many weird complexities, and then, WHAM, he caught up to where he was. His obscure inner compass had told him exactly where to go; he’d just walked into that good, solid, well-built sense of coming home, and all it took to get there was Cassandra. Maybe now, eventually, in an hour or two, he could go back and deal with crazy Pamela.

“Hey, Dupre.” Cass had been rapping about something. She’d just interrupted herself in mid-sentence, her voice suddenly shifting into the tone she would have used if she’d said, “Hey, look, a falling star!” She was staring at his chest. “What have you done, you asshole?”

A burst of fiery pin points, scalp to crotch. He knew exactly what she was seeing. Why the fuck hadn’t he been more careful? She reached out, snagged his t-shirt, and pulled it down. He batted her hand away, sprang to his feet.

“Oh, you fucking jerk,” she said, laughing. Jumped up and pursued him. Backed him against the wall. Thrust her hand down the front of his t-shirt. “Blow me away, man. Smooth as a baby’s ass. What the hell are you doing?”

Not a single word was available to him. “Oh,” she said, grinning, “I get it. You guys are really doing it. You’re motherfucking androgynous. Far fucking out. How much more?”

“What do you mean, how . . . ?”

“Your legs? Did you shave your legs?”

He squirmed away from her, slid along the wall, was stopped by the corner. Still laughing, she dropped to the floor and pursued him on all fours. Intoning: “Did. You. Shave. Your. Legs. You asshole.”

She grabbed his left ankle with one hand, with the other reached up under his jeans and felt his skin. “Far out. You honest-to-God motherfucking did it.”

Appalled, John heard a high-pitched sound coming out of himself like a teenager’s hysterical giggle. She was undoing his belt. “For Christ’s sake,” he said.

“Take it off, Dupre. Come on, I want to see it all, man.” She grabbed his jeans in both hands and jerked them down. “Whew. Beautiful.”

“What if Tom . . . ?

“Fuck Tom. Tom’s long gone.”

She sprang to her feet, yanked his shirt over his head. “Come on, come on, come on. No half measures. Let’s see the full catastrophe.”

Lickety-split, she stripped him down to his underwear—even his socks—and stepped back to take in the full view. He was so embarrassed all he could do was stare at his bare feet. He could have sworn that every inch of his body was blushing.

“Wow,” she said, “you are so skinny, and so smooth . . .”

He looked up, met her eyes. She was smiling slightly. “I bet you know where the clitoris is now, don’t you, old buddy?”

Of course he was laughing—what else could he do? He was laughing so hard he couldn’t stand. He backed up until he felt the wall behind him and slid to the floor, laughing.

Then he was stopped and so was she. Flipped out of time, they regarded each other in one of those somber grey pauses that could have been anywhere back along the track all the way to the first night they’d met. “Oh, yeah,” she said, “I bet Pamela just eats you up with a spoon.”

He couldn’t look away from her eyes. “But seriously,” she said, “you got to ditch those Jockeys. They don’t do a thing for you, sweetie. I mean, you shouldn’t wear little pink bows or, you know, anything motherfucking ridiculous. But not Jockeys . . . You wear dresses?”

Anger—a steel defense in him closing up and locking. “No.”

“Well, why not? She might like it. I know you’d like it. I don’t mean Cinderella, for fuck’s sake. But you’ve got to feel what it’s like in a skirt.”

He already knew what it was like in a skirt—although he hadn’t worn one since he’d been a kid. He didn’t want to tell her that. “Androgyny’s like a middle ground,” he said.

“Oh, yeah. I can dig it. But, skirts and . . . hey, stockings, man. How could you possibly resist? You got to try stockings.”

Still looking into her eyes, he finally flashed on it—this was Cassandra and there was nothing he had to defend. “I don’t know if Pam wants to go that far.”

“You might be surprised, man.”

Yeah, he might be. He was continually surprised these days. And a tearing—or no, more like a fracturing. Awareness. Amplified distractions. One of them was right there—Lorraine’s distant skittering of bebop. It had been there all along, reminding him that they weren’t alone. He kicked the door shut, retrieved his clothes. Watching him get dressed, Cassandra picked up the dope and the papers. She used plain old Zig-Zags. He was glad of that. “Let’s really do it,” she said. “Let’s get motherfucking ridiculous.”

The curtain was going up on the next act—whatever the hell it was going to be. He sat on the edge of the bed and inhaled smoke. “Remember the night you took me to the Louis Armstrong concert out at the park?” she said.

“Of course I do. You think I could ever forget that?”

“Well, that was . . . It wasn’t the first time I’d ever had stockings on, but it was the first time I ever understood why anybody would bother with the damned things. I’ll never forget the feeling. It’s hard to describe. There’s this sleek, smooth . . . but a kind of raspiness too, almost scratchy. Not quite scratchy. But your legs kind of . . . zzzz when they slide against each other. Oh, wow, man, I was like right in the center of everything, like I had it all. School was out, and in the fall I was going to be a motherfucking sophomore, and I had a new dress and a boyfriend in university and I had stockings on, man. Yeah, I was looking good, and, wow, did I ever know it.”

“And I’d never seen a girl in my life as beautiful as you that night.”

“Yeah? Well, you always liked me, so your taste can’t be trusted. But it’s like . . . Being a girl’s a bummer most of the time, but there’s moments when it feels just great. That’s how they suck you into their whole sick trip . . . So how is it?”

“How’s what?”

“You like being a girl? Or androgynous . . . or whatever you are?”

“Yeah.”

“You dig the sex.”

“Oh, yeah. Christ, I don’t how to . . . It’s wonderful. It’s like a drug.” And he realized that he’d come to complain about Pamela—at least that had been one of his conscious reasons—but now he had no intention of doing that. His loyalty to Pamela couldn’t have felt any more compelling if they’d been married. “She’s sexually very aggressive . . .”

“Sexually aggressive? Oh, gee. Oh, wow, is that ever a surprise. I’m just blown away by that. I never could have guessed that . . . I bet you’re the first man she’s ever been in bed with in her whole goddamn life.”

Yes, he could still be surprised. Maybe it was true—or at least partially true. If Pam had been in bed with men before him, it probably hadn’t counted for much. He was probably the first androgynous boy she’d ever met who hadn’t been gay.

In the same way he would have watched on old film clip, he watched Cassandra drag, hold the smoke in, let it go. “Oh, I got her number right away,” she said. “Takes a chick to get it. Like all this energy zapping between us. I even thought about it . . . for maybe half a second. Like, hey, wow, I’ve never made it with a chick, it might be kind of interesting. That’s why she rubs dudes wrong. Like Ethan and Tom. They’re too dumb to figure it out, but they can sense it. She walks in the room, and they go, ‘Oooh, something’s not right here.’”

She passed him the joint. What a strangely inhuman thing to do, he thought—inhale the smoke from a burning plant. “Pamela thinks you’re an androgyne just like us,” he said.

“Oh, she does, does she . . . ? Well, of course I am. Whatever that is. Like ‘X people,’ you don’t want to pin it down too much. Then it gets like . . .”

“A box.”

“Right on.”

He understood her perfectly. “And nobody’s going to put you in a box, right? You’re Cassandra, the cat who walks by herself.”

“And you’re still the guy who’ll try anything. Remember telling me, ‘Ordinary experience isn’t enough’?”

“Did I lay that rap on you?”

“Shit, man, you laid it on everybody.”

The dope was running his pulverized brains through a flour sifter. Yes, he knew that he’d met her the spring of his senior year in high school, but it felt like he’d known her forever. “Cassandra,” he said, “I am so glad to see you.” And not far from there—only a few hundred miles—the great Ohio was rolling along right at the edge of everything.

“When I was tripping out on that weird fucking acid,” he said, “you came and helped me out.”

“Groovy. What did I do?”

“I asked you how I could get off . . . like off that crazy roller-coaster . . . and you said, ‘You don’t get off. You just hang on.’”

“Shit,” she said, laughing, “that wasn’t an acid blip. That was me.”

• • •

SO ONE night Terry and me are doing our rendezvous number, and we’d been doing it for so long, it was getting kind of casual. Like we parked in different places and met up on this corner where there’s no street light, and then we zipped real quick into the building, and it was always a relief to get off the street. Not a huge relief, just this little whew—like everything’s cool, like hey, we did it again. And so we’re trotting down the stairs and on back that long hallway, rapping away, not thinking much of anything, and I unlock the door to John’s apartment, and the minute I step inside, I detect the fact that things are somewhat different. Like the place has been THOROUGHLY TRASHED.

I’m standing there going, what the fuck? All the bookshelves pulled down and crap flung every which way like a twister hit. And my first thought is, shit, why would John do that? He must have been really pissed off about something. But if you give me a half a chance, I’ll usually get there, so eventually I catch up to my second thought—hey, it wasn’t John who did it.

Terry agrees with me. Yeah, it’s obvious, she says, somebody’s been through there looking for SOMETHING. And she’s real upset because we’d got kind of fond of John’s place, like it had kind of turned into OUR PLACE. Of course Terry thinks it’s A SIGN.

“Sure, it’s A SIGN,” I say. “It’s A SIGN that somebody’s one jump behind John’s ass.”

No, no, no, that’s not what she means. She knows that down here on the EARTHLY LEVEL it was somebody after John’s ass, but it’s the HIGHER REGIONS she’s talking about. You know, the COSMIC FORCES. And she figures it’s A SIGN FOR US. “Yeah?” I say. “So what do you suppose that SIGN might be?”

She’s not sure, but it’s heavy, she knows that much. Maybe it means that Ethan’s onto us—or if we’re not careful he’s going to be onto us. Or maybe it means that we can’t keep on running things in our usual half-assed way, that we’ve got to make some kind of DECISION.

Well, I don’t know about any of that shit, but one thing I do know is that I’ve got to give John the straight scoop, so after I get done conducting my business with Terry for the night, I give him a call, wake the poor fucker up, and lay it on him that we need to have some words. Like this is HEAVY, man, like this is JUST BETWEEN THE TWO OF US. I didn’t want Pamela the Great around. I figured this one called for a sniff of that old autonomy.

• • •

“IT’S BEEN jimmied,” John said. “See the scratch marks.”

“Hey,” Tom said, “you’re really checked out on this secret agent shit.”

“Constant paranoia’s good for something,” John said, and it was true. He’d rehearsed this scene a hundred million times before so if it actually happened, he’d go on automatic pilot—this is what you do next, and then this, and then this. OK, he told himself, don’t freak. Breathe. What you’re feeling doesn’t matter a sweet goddamn; it’s what you do that counts. Start by checking it out. Try to figure out who they were, what they wanted. “I’ve got to think,” he said out loud.

“Yeah?” Tom said. “So think.”

Something echoey here, something spacey. Was he going blooey? Hell, no. He’d never fainted in his life, and he wasn’t about to start now. “They didn’t do any nasty fuck-you shit,” he said, “like writing PIG on the wall or taking a dump in the middle of the floor. And it wouldn’t be Weatherman anyway because everybody knows I’m living with Pamela. Like everybody in the Movement knows that. They were looking for something. But looking for what?”

Now he was looking—for clues, signs, tiny details, omens, anything. “All my papers are over at Pamela’s,” he said, “so there’s nothing here that could identify me.”

But how about all the pictures of Zoë on the walls? Could anybody figure out who Zoë was, connect him that way? No, that was sheer lunacy. All they’d know about the guy who lived here was that he was one horny son of a bitch.

“Arthur T. Jones,” he said, “that’s who the landlord knows. Yeah, that identity’s blown. Well, shit, Mr. Jones didn’t have much of an identity anyway.”

Wait a minute, John thought, the money. The book was right in front of him—Memoir of a Revolutionist. It had been tossed onto the floor along with all the other books. He opened it, and the bread was still in there. “Shit, man,” he said, “you’d think if they were going to all this trouble, they’d flip through the pages, right? Does that mean they were amateurs, or does it mean they were in a hurry?”

Could he read their minds from the chaos they’d left behind? “Were they looking for Raymond Lee? Or were they looking for me? Raymond Lee really exists, you know.” John had made sure of that, had dropped lots of clues. Raymond Lee was from Akron, Ohio, had been out in the Haight for a while, but then he’d drifted into Boston, worked for the Resistance, worked on the Weasel. He was an anarchist. He’d written those crazy articles with Pam Zalman in Zygote. He lived with Pam Zalman. “Everybody in the Movement knows him. That means the agents know him too.”

“Yeah, right. So who knows who you really are?”

“Ethan and Terry and you and Cassandra and Pamela.”

“That’s all?”

“Yeah, that’s all. That damn well better be all, or . . . Shit, if the agents know who I am, that means they’re just toying with me.”

“Either that or they figure you’re more useful out running loose. Like you’re going to lead them somewhere. Just like the narks at our place.”

“You know,” John said, “that could be right. They honest-to-God believe the Movement’s run from Peiking or Hanoi or Havana, the dumb fucks.”

But what the hell did John know about Tom? Ping down the backbone. “Hey,” he said carefully, “when you said you had some use for this place, just what were you using it for?”

He saw Tom go silent and hard. Oh, shit, John thought, I’m dead. But then Tom shook his head and laughed. “Fuck, man, it was kind of dumb, but . . . Like I’m sorry, man, but I was using this place to store grass.”

John laughed too. He’d been right; all of his instincts had told him that—if he couldn’t trust Tom Parker, he couldn’t trust anybody. “Why didn’t you tell me that before? They were looking for dope. Did they get anything?”

“No. I was in between shipments. Hey, I don’t think they was looking for dope. I think they was looking for you.”

Tom had been standing, too tall for this cheese box; now he sank into a squat and began rolling a joint. “Tell me, old buddy,” he said, “why I shouldn’t be driving you to the airport.”

“You know why,” John said.

“For that chick, huh?”

John sank to the floor too. He took the fat joint Tom was offering him, lit it and dragged. “I can’t leave Pamela right now.” It wasn’t that he hadn’t thought about it. But he couldn’t leave her when she was as fucked up as she was.

“I thought you was going to tell me you was doing it for the revolution,” Tom said.

“Oh, yeah. Right. Sure that’s what I was going to say.”

“Hey, old buddy, check it out.” Tom made a sweeping gesture— the trashed room. “Don’t that look dumb to you? Don’t that look clumsy to you? Was that some sneaky bastards or just a couple assholes doing their job? Don’t that say standard-issue cops to you? But the thing you got to remember . . . cops may be dumb, but they keep on coming. You got a little bit of room to maneuver, buddy, you better take it.”

Why, John asked himself, was he smoking grass? Why was he doing it now? They weren’t cops, he thought, because they’d jimmied the door. That was a good point, but he couldn’t get himself to say it. He passed the joint. Tom took a wickedly long toke, held it, and then, like a magician’s trick, let the smoke filter slowly out of his nose. “I respect you, old buddy, you know that?” Quiet, nearly meditative.

“Yeah?”

“Coming back here, risking your ass. Trying to do your bit. Yeah, we got to do something even if it’s wrong. You like this shit, man? This is Columbian shit. Top of the line.”

The dope was coming on too fast, a swirl of rotating distractions, and times like this, times when one should be able to keep one’s mind simple, focused on what was right in front of one’s goddamned nose and not go spidering away down some obscurely tugged strand— “Shit, man,” Tom was saying in the same quiet dreamy voice, “you want to . . . Fuck me, but Mister Charlie’s one evil dude, and we get over there, we get just as evil as Mister Charlie. Do you understand what I’m telling you? Yeah, like let’s all climb down in the sewer together, right? Yeah, we’re having ourselves such a damn fine time, all down in the sewer together, right?”

John felt the joint being pressed between his fingers. Oh, what the hell, he thought.

“You know,” Tom was saying, “guys will show you the ears they collected. Proud as can be. Show you their pictures. Why the fuck anybody’d want to take pictures of that shit, I’ll never know. Like, ‘Hey, man, dig this one. We shoved a grenade up her ass. Pretty cool, huh?’ Or like . . . Jesus, there was this one picture . . . I’m going like, ‘Jesus, what the fuck happened to him?’

“‘We peeled him, man.’

“‘What the fuck you mean, you peeled him?’

“‘Shit, man, you ever peeled a peach? Just like that.’

“Yeah, man, it’s just . . . And then there’s . . . Shit, like some things are like standard issue. Chucking Mister Charles out of the chopper. Standard issue. Happens every day. Zips falling out of the sky regular as raindrops. And the Bell Telephone Hour. You know that one, don’t you? The field telephone wired up to the old testicles. Happens every day. Even chicks. Wires shoved up their cunt. Lots of laughs, right?”

What could John say to that? “Fuck, that’s heavy,” he said.

“You don’t know the half of it, old buddy. Yeah, so why did they go after that poor son of a bitch, Calley? Because fucking Nixon needs him, that’s why. Yeah, folks, it was just that crazy dude, Calley. Everybody else is sane. Yeah, you bet your sweet ass. Jesus Christ, man, My Lai’s going down over there every fucking day, and everybody knows it.”

He’s right, John thought, and I don’t know the half of it—and don’t want to know.

“But I was field maintenance, right?” Tom was saying. “The air force’s primary mission is to fly and maintain aircraft capable of flying. Yeah, that’s the truth, and it’s a fucking joke, man. I’m just supposed to keep the fuckers up in the air, right? I’m not supposed to be out there playing Doc Holliday at the OK Corral.”

“What did you say?” John said. “What are you talking about?”

“Did I ever tell you about Tet, old buddy? Shit. You know, we should have seen it coming. I mean the night before, there was all these fireworks and shit going down, because it was, you know, the new year, but that night it was motherfucking quiet. Like the mama-sans didn’t show up. Like they knew there was going to be some heavy shit, you know what I mean?”

“Yeah,” John said. “Yeah, I do know what you mean.”

“Incoming, that’s where it starts. I mean where the hell else would it start? There’s supposed to be a truce on, but do you think Mister Charles gives a fuck about any truce? And you know what? It took us forever to get any weapons because they locked them up at night. That’s how swift they are in the You Sure Are Fucked United States Air Force. It was awe-inspiring, I don’t know what else to call it. The choppers drawing all this fire, like these green tracers going up, and Charlie’s out there all right, I mean thousands and thousands and thousands of those motherfuckers out there . . .

“You know, I heard one of those Harvard assholes in the Weasel office, he said it was symbolic. Yeah, that’s what he called Tet. Symbolic. And I just motherfucking lost it. Symbolic my fucking ass. Charlie wanted Ton Son Nhut, and Charlie had a pretty good idea he could take Ton Son Nhut, and Charlie came within an inch and a half of taking Ton Son Nhut, and the main thing stopping him was the SPs. Motherfucking light infantry is what they were, and there were just waves and waves coming at them, and they held. I still can’t believe it. And then the choppers got into it, and a lot of them went down too, a bad sorry day when the army’s got to provide air support for the goddamn air force, but that’s what it was, a bad sorry day, so it was pretty much touch and go there for a while until the Three Quarter Cav showed up, and you could hear them coming in, man, like a herd of elephants, and it was the best sound you ever heard in your life, so don’t tell me it was motherfucking symbolic . . .

“A lot of good men bought it that day. And the dudes in the choppers, and those SPs on the ground . . . I really owe those fuckers. Yeah, nothing’s too good for those dudes. When we say we were brothers, that just ain’t bullshit, and to my dying day I’ll be grateful to those dudes, and whatever any of us did that day, we did it for each other, and it’s a fucking crime the way they’re wasting our fucking lives over there, man, for fucking nothing.”

John had been staring at something, a dark blur like a cloud of gnats, but now he saw that it was just another mental trick, not a real thing in the room with him. Tom had stopped talking. He looked over, found Tom sitting quietly, watching him. “You going to waste your life for fucking nothing, man?” Tom said.

“Shit,” John said.

“You want to go to the airport?”

John couldn’t say a word.

“Hey, old buddy,” Tom said, “I know you been getting your rocks off, and I know how good that feels, believe me, I do. But listen up, it’s me, old Mad Tom talking to you now, and I ain’t going to bullshit you. I just want to ask you something. Just between us two dudes with our hammers hanging down, don’t you think that skiddly chick might be leading you a little bit off course?”