15

“NORTH VIETNAM in the last two weeks has stripped away all pretense of respecting the sovereignty or neutrality of Cambodia,” the image on the TV screen was saying. “Thousands of their soldiers are invading the country from the sanctuaries; they are encircling the Capital of Phnom Penh. Cambodia has sent out a call to the United States . . .”

The small, talking, black-and-white image was called “Richard Nixon,” and it was meant to represent the President of the United States. It looked haggard and tired. It was gesturing at a map. “If this effort succeeds,” the image said, “Cambodia would become a vast enemy staging area and springboard for attacks on South Vietnam . . .”

The last time John had watched an American president lying had been in the hot greasy summer of ’65. As miserable as that time had been, it now looked enviably simple. “Jesus, I hated LBJ,” John said, “but at least he was a human being.”

“Was he?” Pam said.

“. . . jeopardizing not only the lives of our own men but the people of South Vietnam as well,” the image said.

Pam was too agitated to sit still any longer. She sprang to her feet to watch. “The Spectacle,” she said. “Fuck.”

“In cooperation with the armed forces of South Vietnam,” the image said, “attacks are being launched this week to clean out major enemy sanctuaries on the Cambodian–Vietnam border.”

“The Spectacle is not the images,” she said. “The Spectacle is relations mediated by images.”

Debord, that crazy Frenchman, had never made more sense, and, for once, John found that a thought of his own had fallen naturally into the weird flipped-around style of the SI: The illusion of meaning is the meaning of the illusion. He wouldn’t write it that way though— not for Zygote’s hippie readership. For those dudes, he had to be simple and clear. He’d say that the image that they were watching was designed to create the illusion that the people of the United States had a meaningful relationship with their government.

“We live in an age of anarchy both abroad and at home,” the image said. “We see mindless attacks on all the great institutions which have been created by free civilizations in the last five hundred years.”

“Hey, that’s a good one,” John said. “Do you like that one?”

Pam made a shushing gesture—and she was right to want to focus so singlemindedly on that small, monstrous, flickering image. The words emanating from the image were lies, but they couldn’t afford to miss a single one of them, because hidden in those lies might be omens. If they interpreted those omens correctly, they might be able to predict what their lives were going to be like, now and in the future—what was possible and what was not.

“Here in the United States, great universities are being systematically destroyed,” the image said. Yep, John thought, the repression was going to be coming down heavy.

“I would rather be a one-term president than be a two-term president at the cost of seeing America become a second-rate power and see this nation accept the first defeat in its proud 190-year history,” the image said.

“Oh, fuck,” Pam said, “and you know what we’ve been talking about in the Collective? Karate and daycare centers.”

“It is customary in a speech from the White House to ask support for the President of the United States,” the image said. “Tonight, what I ask for is more important. I ask for support of our brave men fighting tonight halfway around the world . . .”

John turned off the TV.

“Hey, man,” she said, “did you ever see Triumph of the Will? They’re not that good yet . . . but they’re going to be.”

John felt too squashed to talk. No way he could rise to the occasion, make some smart-ass lefty joke, say something clever and bleakly funny about the Nuremberg Rallies. After the years of protest—peaceful demonstrations and not so peaceful ones, draft card burnings and building occupations, all that work, all that organizing—after three-quarters of a million people had marched on Washington, they’d arrived at this? He almost turned the TV back on—just to fill the room again with more images, with the illusion that they were mysteriously connected to everyone else in the whole damned country. “Shit,” he said finally, “we’re going to be in Southeast Asia for the next twenty years. Maybe forever. But what’s it going to cost them?”

“The State still controls the means of violence. Come on, baby, let’s get out of here. It feels like a goddamn terrarium in here.”

They walked around Harvard Yard. Of course that’s where she would lead him. “Sanctuary?” she said, embracing the university with an outflung arm. “Oy gavalt, half of me feels like crawling into a hole and never coming out, and the other half of me wants to burn six more cop cars. I used to think I could . . .”

She didn’t finish her thought and didn’t need to. She’d told him often enough how she felt about universities. She’d never put it into words, but he’d known that she was keeping her options open—that if she ever needed to crawl into a hole and vanish, she would always be able to find it somewhere in the green groves of academe. But maybe now even that option was being closed off. She walked away.

She stopped, turned back to look for him, waited until he caught up. “John?” she said. “Whoever the hell it was that broke into your apartment . . . What do you think they wanted?”

He should have an answer to that. Right after it had happened, they’d talked it to death, and he’d certainly thought about it plenty. “I don’t think they were looking for anything. Not for dope, not for incriminating documents, not for information, not for anything. I think it was a kind of fuck-you. Like, ‘We know who you are. We can get you any time we want.’”

“Why would they do that?”

“I don’t know. What are you thinking?”

She didn’t answer immediately. Springtime in the Yard—the trees coming into full leaf, old John Harvard on his pedestal looking over it all from a benign distance like a minor tutelary deity. Yeah, it really was another world in there. In the Yard, you could almost feel some hope.

“Cambodia,” she said. “Jesus. Not just sneaking in and denying it, but official, right out there in plain sight, and . . . OK, so what are they going to do now? They won’t be able to tolerate dissent much longer. Not any. And like . . . If they can pick us up any time they want, when are they going to do it? We’ve got to get the fuck out of here. You do know that, don’t you?”

They’d stopped in front of Widener. “One of the great academic libraries,” she’d always called it.

“I’m going to New Mexico,” she said. “Where are you going?”

He couldn’t breathe for a moment.

“Oh, baby,” she said, “I didn’t mean it that way. Do you want to come to New Mexico with me?”

It had never crossed his mind. “Shit, Pam. Give me some warning, why don’t you? Fuck, I don’t know. It’s a long way from Canada.”

• • •

JOHN DIDN’T want to think about Pam going to New Mexico, and he didn’t have to yet because history blew them away once again. US forces poured into Cambodia. Protests broke out on campuses all over the United States; Pam and John could have predicted them. At Kent State University in Ohio, National Guardsmen shot and killed four students. Pam and John could have predicted that violence too—although the location took them by surprise. They would have guessed that nothing much was going to happen at Harvard; the politicos there had sunk into a morass of ideological squabbles, and the riot in the Square seemed to have left the students stunned, exhausted, and apprehensive. But they might have predicted Yale; a lot of heavy shit was going down in New Haven; a huge meeting there had called for a national student strike. Or they might have predicted Berkeley, or Pam’s alma mater, Columbia—certainly one of the big schools with a strong radical tradition. Nobody had ever heard of Kent State. It was a little university right smack in the middle of America.

“It’s true,” Pam said. “They really will kill their own children.”

Students everywhere went out on strike. There were massive demonstrations from coast to coast. John and Pam couldn’t stand to be boxed inside her apartment; driving her father’s car again, Pam kept them in motion—from Brandeis to MIT to Wellesley to BU and back to Harvard—checking things out, trying to connect. They told each other that they were going to write something for Zygote—God knows what. Twenty thousand students gathered on the Boston Common and demanded that the flag at the Statehouse be flown at half mast—and it was flown at half mast. Was that worth writing about?

“I didn’t think I had any tears left in me,” Pam said, crying when she saw pictures of the kids who’d been murdered at Kent State. “They were so young. They were just babies.”

• • •

A HUNDRED thousand people marched in Washington. It seemed impossible to keep track of all the actions and demonstrations— although the students at Brandeis set up a National Strike Information Center and tried to do exactly that. Many schools closed down—the BU administration simply stopped classes and told everybody to go home—but others limped along, trying to function in the whirlwind that had swept up thousands, maybe even a million kids. “Action everywhere,” Pam said, “but no coherence. SDS could have provided the coherence.”

John wasn’t so sure of that. He’d never had much faith in SDS, but maybe she was right. “Not as a motherfucking Leninist vanguard,” he said.

“No, but it could have been the beginning of the councils. Fuck PL. Fuck Bernardine. Fuck Weatherman.”

Throughout the spring, things had been blowing up at an average of roughly one a day; that was their best estimate based on sources they could trust, or maybe could trust—the Boston Globe, the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Guardian, I. F. Stone’s Weekly, and the packets from the two versions of Liberation News Service. Government offices and ROTC buildings were blown up, and so was the Chase Manhattan Bank and the Bank of America. In California, somebody bombed a Safeway. This was not shit coming out of Weatherman—it appeared to be the work of independent groups or individuals—but Weatherman took credit for bombing an army base in San Francisco. Except for the three Weatherpeople dead in the townhouse explosion, the bombs had killed nobody yet, but they knew that it was only a matter of time.

Adam kept asking them for commentary, but they had run out of commentary. Neither of them could think of any conclusion to John’s “anybody could be lying” article—because, as Pam said, anybody could be lying. They knew that Adam wanted them to end with an uplifting positive alternative, and nothing at the moment seemed particularly uplifting or positive, so they transformed themselves into reporters, simply collecting information about who was doing what—when, where, and, insofar as they could figure it out, why. “Zygote’s readership deserves to hear the truth,” Pam told Adam, and of course he couldn’t do anything but agree with that.

“Do we have anything to say?” John asked her. “Will we ever have anything to say?”

“If I think of anything, I’ll tell you.”

She let John write up their news reports. She wasn’t writing anything now. She said she’d had it with The Critique—couldn’t even bear to look at it. “That phase of my life’s over, man. It was pure chutzpah . . . vanguardism. What did I think? I was going to be the next Rosa?”

She might not be writing, but she was finding plenty to do. She was on a run again, driving through the mad Boston traffic with the élan of an old-time cabbie, checking out the real—rapping with people, taking pictures, taking notes. John banged out copy in the Zygote office while she paced up and down and fed him words and phrases. She helped him with the layout. She was going to Collective meetings again, going to karate classes. She’d changed her appearance to match the mood she was in—skinned her hair back into a single ponytail, put on no more makeup than mascara and eyeliner, wore her boys’ shirts and jeans. She looked streamlined and efficient and young. She’d stopped gaining weight, but she wasn’t losing it either—holding steady day after day at 108—until the morning when she stepped on the scale and it said 107. “Fuck! Oy, misery. Jesus, man, I just can’t eat any more than I’m eating. I’m eating all the fucking time.”

John stuffed her knapsack with several flavors of yogurt, baggies of nuts and raisins, slices of Terry’s whole-grain bread, plastic containers of brown rice. It didn’t help. By the end of the week she was down to 104.

She stepped off the scale and exploded into tears. “What am I doing? What am I doing?” She was vibrating like a twanged wire. She paced up and down naked. “Jesus, man, you know what all this shit adds up to, don’t you? Everything? Bupkes, that’s what. It’s just motherfucking action-faction shit. ‘Oh no, man, we don’t know what we’re doing, but we’re sure as hell going to keep on doing it.’ Jesus, John, look at me. You’ve got to be my mirror. I’m too thin, right?”

“Yeah, you’re getting there. You sure as hell don’t want to lose any more.”

“God, I’m sick. Part of me says, ‘Shit, Pamela, you’re OK. You look OK.’ I don’t look OK, do I?”

He knew by now that what was required on his part was infinite patience. “No, you don’t look OK. You’re still too thin. But not much . . . I mean, you don’t look terrible . . .”

“I wanted a few extra pounds so I could . . . I’ve got to be able to go nuts and feel safe. And we’re . . . Oh, what the fuck are we doing, John? We might as well be watching a nuclear explosion, man, for all the effect we’re having on it.

“I just don’t know about . . . Like the Collective. They seem so . . . I never told you the shit I get from them. I was loyal to the Collective, like some things I wouldn’t discuss outside the Collective, but . . . OK, here’s what I’m getting. ‘You’re not part boy, Pamela, you’re all woman.’ What? Like I don’t know what biological sex I am? And what they’re . . . ‘Oh, it’s tragic about the kids at Kent State. Oh, it’s tragic about Cambodia. But as women, our focus has got to be on smashing the nuclear family and building a strong autonomous women’s movement.’ And living with you? At first they thought it was kind of cute, the role reversal, but now they’re saying, ‘One of these days you’re going to have to face it, Pamela. It doesn’t matter how much male privilege he gives up, he’s still a man.’ I need that shit? I mean, like really.”

When she was on a particular kind of crying jag—he could identify it by its hard metallic edge—she couldn’t stand to be touched, and for once he was glad of that. If he touched her, he might give himself away, and he was trying to show nothing, no reaction at all. He told himself that he’d chosen it—yeah, right here in this goddamned apartment that very first night. She’d revealed herself to him clearly enough, and he’d chosen to jump over the edge anyway, and now he was going to splatter on the rocks. Shit, there was no way he could fight the Collective.

But she must have really heard what she’d just said—or maybe he wasn’t looking as blank as he’d thought he was. “Oh, baby.” She wiped her face with her bare hands, flung the droplets away. He saw her stop herself from crying. “Hey, man, listen. How could I possibly be a separatist? The only two people who never gave up on me are you and my father.”

“Thank you.” What an absurd thing to say.

“Thank you too.”

Then, as though she’d just caught up with her vulnerable, naked, exposed self, she grabbed up panties, t-shirt, and jeans, began pulling them on. “Make me something to eat, please. Some oatmeal or something. Oh, Jesus. They are watching us, aren’t they? It’s not just paranoia, is it?”

Was she intentionally changing the subject? Where was she going now? “Yeah, it’s true,” he said. “They really are watching us.”

That empty-eyed long-haired dude they’d identified as an agent had vanished for a while, but lately he’d turned up again. They’d been seeing him in the Square, on side streets far from the Square, and—just like last time—standing across the street from Pam’s apartment doing nothing whatsoever. And now there was another one—a hippie chickie who seemed a little too old, a little too hard-bitten, wearing just a few too many beads. They were seeing a lot of her too.

“What are they waiting for?” Pam said. “I keep having this absolutely absurd fantasy. The door gets kicked in, and here come these two huge motherfuckers in full riot gear, and they go, ‘OK, we know who you are. You’re the mad bad little girl who burned the Pigmobile. Come along with us. We’re going to take you to a quiet out-of-the-way place and beat the living shit out of you . . .’ Do you want to go to Santa Fe?”

No, she hadn’t changed the subject at all. “Pam, you might as well be asking me to go to Mars. Boston’s a short flight to Toronto, but New Mexico . . . Shit, they could bust me there as easy as here, and . . . God, I’ve never in my life even thought about New Mexico. Listen. Do you want to go to Toronto?”

He could see a reaction in her—a tightening, a focusing down. To what? She might still have crying jags, but she was a different person now.

“I’d be at York,” he said. “It’s all raw and new, but it is a university. I’d have a TA-ship, so there’d be some money . . . Your father could send your checks to Toronto as easy as he sends them to Boston.”

She was looking straight at him. Her speckled eyes were radiating light, but he couldn’t read them. “Yeah,” she said, “and I could finish my PhD . . . if I wanted to finish my PhD.”

She looked away; it was in the gesture—something in the way her head turned—that and a barely noticeable movement in her shoulders, a hint of a shrug. “I don’t know,” she said.

Oh, fuck, he thought, she’s going to leave me.

• • •

WELL, SPRINGTIME was upon us once again, and guess what that meant? Ethan had to get back up to the Liberated Zone and deal with his own little slice of the ecology, and this year it was real heavy because he was figuring on moving him and Terry up there for good. Yeah, he kept telling me, THE SIGNS were coming down. Like it had started with the Weasel being taken over by assholes, and then we invaded Cambodia and those kids got killed at Kent State and most of the damn schools in the country were going up like firecrackers— shit, even the high schools—and the hard rain was going to fall now, old buddy, like we were just one step away from the two-headed chickens and the fiery green meteorites. Yeah, it was time, friends and neighbors, for us to get our pale white asses out of town. Why didn’t I come up with him and Terry and have a look? I’d really dig it up there, and maybe Cassandra would too. Shit, there was still plenty of cheap land.

“Right,” I told him, “me and Cass had us such a groovy trip the last time we were up there, what with that smooth easy-going day-glo acid and all, we’re just dying to get back to New Hampshire.” I did not bother to tell him that me and Cass was an act that was no longer playing. I didn’t figure it was any of his business.

So Terry goes off with Ethan, and she stays up there doing Earth Mother for as long as she can stand it, and then, like always, she finds some excuse to come tooling back down to Boston. She said her little trips to the Liberated Zone were real enlightening, like they slammed her up against that famous HARSH REALITY. “It’s clear as a bell, man. I don’t WANT to live all alone with that crazy old billy goat in a geodesic dome on the top of a hill in the deepest darkest woods of New Hampshire.”

By then, it wasn’t just Ethan saying, GET OUT OF TOWN— everybody and their dog was saying it—and so Terry was beginning to inquire about the nature of life in that fine progressive state of North Dakota.

“Dig it, sweet stuff,” I say, “if you think New Hampshire’s nowhere, you ought to see North Dakota.”

“But at least it’s OPEN, isn’t it? New Hampshire feels like, I don’t know . . . like a Grimm fairy tale. Like all these woods packed in and around your ears, and you can’t see out. And the vibe I keep getting from those woods is just something I can’t groove on. But at least out where you come from . . . like isn’t there some sense of space and light?”

“Oh, yeah, if it’s space and light you want, you’re there. Yeah, we got that covered. Nothing else, you dig? But space and light we got.”

Yeah, North Dakota wasn’t such a bad place. Like I knew it really well, and I could go there and VANISH if that’s what I was inclined to do, and I’m not just talking National Geographic, I’m talking PEOPLE. But I couldn’t see Terry vanishing. No, it’d be more like she’d be wearing a big fat flame-red sign around her neck saying WEIRDO FREAK FROM SOMEWHERE ELSE. And the other thing was, I just couldn’t see me and Terry growing old together. Not that we didn’t like each other, but she always felt to me . . . Like the main thing we had in common was in bed, but when we were out of bed, we had about as much in common as a codfish and a gopher.

But Terry didn’t see it that way. “The day you fucked me in the bathroom . . . You didn’t think it was AN ACCIDENT, did you? Well, nothing’s ever AN ACCIDENT, man. We can’t see the pattern in things because OUR VISION HAS BEEN CLOUDED.” And she figured that we’d got together from SOME PURPOSE.

We’re having this conversation on the living room floor in Terry and Ethan’s apartment. Like we didn’t have a whole hell of a lot of choice in the matter, but being there didn’t make me exactly what you’d call COMFORTABLE. “Look, sweetness,” I say, “you’re not really thinking of leaving old Ethan and taking off with me, are you?”

“Why not?”

Well, shit. That one took some getting used to. Yeah, I was having a little problem wrapping my head around that. But I got to thinking, well, maybe. Like me and Cassandra was long over, and maybe Terry and Ethan were getting to the end of the road too. Yeah, maybe it was one of those moments when the music stops playing and you all change partners. And Terry was an amazing chick, no doubt about it. They don’t come any prettier, and she was real smart, and she was heavy into PRACTICAL—like the old coin was never far from her mind—and maybe that would balance me out because when it comes down to PRACTICAL, there are times when I’m not everything a girl might wish for. And, you know what? Maybe fucking her in the bathroom really WASN’T an accident, and maybe it all DID mean something. But Hubbard, North Dakota? “Hey, I’ve never been to California,” I say, “but they tell me it’s a stone groove.”

• • •

PAMELA QUIT the Collective. He couldn’t believe it. Did she do it for him? Maybe she wasn’t going to leave him after all.

“You want to know what I said?” she asked him. “I said, ‘For a long time now I’ve constituted an overt tendency inside the Collective, but the dialectic is getting us nowhere, and to be absolutely frank, I’m goddamned tired of being a minority of one. It’s not that you’re not doing useful work. Like one of the tasks of women’s liberation is to advance the cause of women in the internal power struggle between women and men inside the Spectacle, but I’m just not interested in that. You’ve never liked where I’m coming from, and the contradictions between us are real, not merely apparent, and if you want my formal resignation, this is it . . .’ Oh, they tried to talk me out of it. There were even some tears. But I could see that they were relieved. We parted in the spirit of sisterhood.

“I’m relieved too . . . although I feel like somebody’s died. I don’t know if I believe any of the shit I said, but it felt good to say it. Oh, fuck. There’s always going to be a place for me in the women’s movement somewhere, but that just wasn’t it.”

By the middle of the summer, neither John nor Pam was writing anything. Still part of the Zygote “family,” they helped with the layout. Then Pam decided she didn’t want to do even that; with a check from her father once a month, she didn’t need the money, so John went into the office by himself. He liked doing mindless mechanical work, and he liked getting paid; he’d never felt right about being supported by Pam’s father. “We’ve dropped out of the Movement, haven’t we?” he said.

“Yeah, it looks that way, doesn’t it? I keep thinking I could work with Bread and Roses.” A moderate women’s-lib group. But she couldn’t bring herself to go to any of their meetings. Several of her best friends had dropped out of the Collective too, over ideological differences she didn’t have the energy, she said, to explain to him. “They’re organizing around women’s health issues,” she said. “It’s good work. I could do that.” But she didn’t do that either. She didn’t do much of anything but run through the Cecchetti syllabus for an hour a day. Her weight was up to 110, and she looked wonderful.

Color was draining out of the real everywhere but in bed. “Have you been enough of a femme?” she asked him. “Have you got to do all the things you ever wanted?” He knew perfectly well that her question meant that they were running out of time. They’d already made love—around noon—and now she was making an exploratory probe to see if they were going to make love again. He’d felt, lately, an edge of desperation to their sex life. He wondered if she could feel it too.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t think of anything.”

“Oh, I bet you can. Come on, there’s lots of things we could do. Do you want to wear makeup again? Want me to set your hair in ringlets? That’d be kind of fun . . . although it’d take fucking forever. You’d look like one of those pretty Cavalier boys in the paintings . . . You want to do any of those old predictable cornball fantasies, like wear an apron and be the maid? . . . You want to learn to walk in high heels?”

“I thought you hated heels.”

“I do. On me.”

Their eyes met. He couldn’t look away, but he couldn’t say anything either. She clapped her hands like a little kid. “Oh, I love it. You’re actually blushing.”

She reached under the sheet to check him out. “Do I have your number, or what?”

• • •

PAM KEPT gaining weight. John still didn’t have a clue where the reborn Pamela was going. Sometimes he thought she might be going straight. “I hate all this nonsense about the counter-culture,” she said. “It’s just hippy-dippy bullshit. Like the drug thing, ‘better living through chemistry.’ Enlightenment? Give me a fucking break. What? We’re supposed to drop Soma and be happy happy happy?”

She said she didn’t want to smoke dope anymore. He was blown away; she’d been one of the biggest potheads he’d ever met. “I’ve had it with grass,” she said. “I’m paranoid enough as it is.”

That was true of him too; his paranoia had gone completely out of control, and, yes, dope only made it worse, so he quit right along with her. But even straight, he couldn’t shut down his mind. Now it wasn’t agents or Weatherman; it was the fear that she would leave him, and then he’d be right back in the dark center of the eclipse. No matter how obsessively he searched for a way out, he couldn’t find one. Shit, he should have seen it coming. For all of her talk about androgyny, her main sexual focus was on women—she’d never led him to believe anything else—and she’d dropped lots of hints, starting with, “We’re a good match . . . for right now.” But, oh God, he did not want to turn back into that miserable, sick, self-pitying adolescent who wrote things into his diary like “alone always, no real contact ever, nothing done and nothing ever will.” He vowed to himself that however bad he felt, he’d never allow her to see him like that.

Early in July, Pam finally made it to what she’d weighed when she’d come back from New York—112. “It’s weird,” she said, “for the first time in my life, I’m getting off on eating. And like I know everything you’re cooking’s good for me, but does it have to be so bland?”

He fed her vegetarian chili and corn bread, curries and chapattis, braised peppers and eggplant sprinkled with olive oil and feta cheese, squash soup flavored with toasted cumin, spinach cooked with onions and freshly grated ginger. She went up to 114. “Do I look all right?” she said. “You know I can’t see myself. Come on, tell me the truth. Am I fat? Do I look all right?”

“Are you kidding? You look fabulous. How do you feel?”

“I feel great. Like I could actually pick up something heavy. Yeah, I feel strong.”

At 116 she had to buy new jeans. “Are you sure I look all right? Jesus, my ass feels the size of Boulder Dam.”

“Do you still feel all right?”

“Fuck what I feel like . . . Yeah, I feel fine. What the fuck do I look like?”

She’d crossed a line. None of her extra weight seemed to have gone onto her waist; it had all gone onto her hips and breasts. Nobody could possibly have called her fat, or even plump—but nobody, no matter what she was wearing, could have, for even half a second, taken her for a boy. “Most women,” he said, and meant it, “would kill for your figure.” How could she look like that when she was planning to leave him?

• • •

PAM CALLED Deb in Santa Fe. “She makes it sound like paradise.” There was no paranoia out there, Deb told her. People were sad— about the war, about Cambodia and Kent State—but they weren’t paranoid. The sky was too big, the light too brilliant, for paranoia, and there was that Western tradition of “mind your own business, live and let live.” They were four young women living together in a nice big old house in Santa Fe, and nobody seemed to think it was the least bit strange that none of them had boyfriends. There was plenty of room in the house for another woman. “She kept saying I had to change my entire consciousness, and New Mexico was just the place to do it . . . you know, Georgia O’Keeffe, the whole bit.”

“What on earth would you do in New Mexico?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I’d teach in some dumb little ballet studio, teach the kiddies. The place I was taking classes in New York actually offered me a job, did I tell you that? Fucking blew me away. I didn’t think I had any technique left after all these years . . . Yeah, sure, I could teach,” and then, laughing, “I’d put the little boys on pointe just to strengthen their feet.”

She wanted, she said, the same things she’d always wanted—to see an end to the war, to live in a peaceful non-repressive society. “I want to be able to walk out the door and not have to worry about getting busted, shot, snatched, or raped. I want to be able to wear a skirt in hot weather without feeling up-for-grabs or that I’m selling out the cause. I want to be able to see a good production of Swan Lake and enjoy it . . . without feeling guilty that I’m wasting my time on frivolous, counter-revolutionary bullshit.”

All John really wanted was to stay with her forever, but he didn’t want her to know that. He told her that he wanted to play his Martin again instead of that piece of shit of Ethan’s. He wanted to play in his band in Toronto again—good old Hot Dirt. He wanted to read Northrop Frye and think about archetypes. He wanted to write poetry. “Are we talking about some post-revolutionary utopia or about something possible?” he asked her. “Like some places are better than others. Do you want to come to Toronto with me?”

“No, I don’t think so. I think if I was going to leave the country, I’d go to France.”

That was so firm, so sudden, so unequivocal, so goddamned unilateral that he was devasted. He wasn’t sure he could say a word.

“Do you want to come to Santa Fe with me?” she asked him again.

“And do what?”

“We could stay with Deb in the commune and see what happens.”

“What? Me and five radical lesbian feminists?”

“Is that what I am?”

They were lying in bed together. That was where they seemed to be spending most of their time these days. He wanted to get up and walk out, but he didn’t.

“OK,” she said, “let’s go through it term by term. Radical? I suppose so. An anarcho-syndicalist or maybe a council communist. But not a Marxist-Leninist. I’ll never again pretend that a Marxist-Leninist is on the same side I’m on. I don’t even want to talk to another motherfucking Marxist-Leninist. Lesbian? Well, OK, I’ve got some problems with men, and I might as well admit it. By and large, I don’t like men very much. But some men I like a lot. I liked the boys in my ballet classes, and I liked my gay friends at Columbia, and I like my father, and I like you, sweetheart. But the chances that . . . well, after you, I might never find another man I want to go to bed with, and I like sex, so lesbian? I guess so, if you don’t define it too narrowly. And feminist? Well, of course. So long as it doesn’t mean separatist, so long as it doesn’t turn into a superego riding my ass, trying to make me do things I don’t want to do.”

“That’s very eloquent,” he said. There was someone emerging in the new Pamela who knew her own mind and delivered her pronouncements with a dry no-nonsense crispness. He appreciated her clarity, but he was afraid of her now. “But what about me in New Mexico?”

Her eyes met his and held. She didn’t say anything.

“You’re going to leave me, aren’t you?” he said.

She was beginning to answer him, but she’d waited too long. “Jesus,” he said, his voice riding over hers, “I saved your fucking ass, and now you’re going to leave me.”

He saw a blaze of anger in her eyes. Whatever she’d been about to say died in her throat.

“John,” and he could hear her holding herself back, “listen, OK? Don’t lay that crap on me. I mean just don’t. Yeah, you saved my ass, but I saved your ass too, bubbie. It was mutual . . . like mutual aid, you dig? We don’t need the Church or the State . . . hospitals, doctors, experts, authorities. Like Goodman says, we can heal each other. And we did.”

He knew that if he said a single word, all of his fear, anger, and resentment would come pouring out, so he kept his mouth shut. “OK, my basic. My rock-solid basic. Right now I need . . . I’m not talking about independence. That’s just a load of crap. Nobody’s independent. It’s like . . . Like I’m still fragile. And I can’t let anybody define me. Right now. Because I have to define myself first. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes.”

“We came together as anarchist revolutionaries. If we’re going to go our separate ways, then let’s do it the same way.” She was still using that crisp voice, but he could see how sad her eyes were. “We’re both of us totally different people than we were before we met each other,” she said. “Isn’t that enough?”

• • •

I KEPT checking it out with Terry, and she seemed pretty goddamned determined, so it looked like I’d just acquired myself another girlfriend, and wherever we were going to go, I sure as hell needed a little scratch to get there, but lately I was having trouble catching even Abe Lincoln’s face on a circular bit of metal. I’m thinking, fuck the scruples, and I go back to see Lyons. Susie’s still with him, and that bums me right out. She’s wearing the shortest skirt you ever saw and no panties at all and she’s TOTALLY SILENT. We’re in Bob’s bedroom, and he’s squeaking away. “Well, well, well, Tommy boy, is there any little thing I can do to assist you on this fine night?” And he reaches up between Susie’s legs and starts playing with her pussy—kind of absent-minded, the way you’d pat a dog. “Ask and it shall be given, right?” he says. She bends over a little and spreads her legs wide open and stands there without moving a muscle and stares down at the carpet. It’s SICK, you know what I mean?

“OK, Robert,” I say, “here’s what’s happening. This penny-ante bullshit is beginning to grow old on me, and I was wondering if it was possible for me to enter the game at a somewhat higher level.”

He gets a good laugh out of that one, and he smacks Susie on the ass and makes this little jerk with his head and she’s gone.

“Well, Tommy,” he says, “you’re right on time.” And he rolls us some smoke and starts laying it on me about his business—the WHOLE OPERATION. He’s rapping away like a million miles a minute, and he can’t sit still. He keeps jumping up, and sitting down, and walking around in circles, and banging on the table with his fists, and giggling away the whole time. He keeps peering over at me with these weird poppy eyes and laying it out so fast I’m having trouble following him.

You got to STAY DI VERSIFIED, he says. Got himself a motherfucking FIN ANCIAL ADVISOR. Got him one heavy IN CORPORATED ENTITY. Buying him the old stocks and bonds, chips of the brightest blue. Buying him the old real estate. “You got to be SWIFT, you know what I mean, Thomas? But shit, man, if you got the motherfucking beans, you can HIRE SWIFT.” That one strikes him so funny he’s just howling.

I’m not believing too much of this shit. By then Lyons was spending so much of his time running in fantasyland with Frodo and the boys that he probably didn’t have a clue what was REALLY REAL, but I figured some of it had to be real. “Now getting around to YOU, Tommy,” he says, “the main problemo is in THE MANUFACTURING END OF THINGS.” Did I recall the fine gourmet chef? Well, he’d set that dude up in a brand-new shiny kitchen over in Brookline and laid on him everything necessary. And the chef started out by cooking up the acid, and that went real good, but you know what turned out to be the real money-maker? Crystal meth. Shit, who would have thought it? Crystal don’t take a gourmet chef, any old short-order cook can do it, and it’s motherfucking CHEAP. But you gots to move the QUANTITY, you dig?

And so what he wanted me to do was be the middle man between him and the Brookline Operation because, like always, I was the only dude in town he could trust. And I was thinking, CRYSTAL METH? I’d sure come a long way from Robin Hood.

So I’m the driver. I get to do a lot of walking too. They tell me it’s good for your health. And John wasn’t the only one who got to play secret agent. I park the camper like eight or ten blocks away, a different place every time, and then I have myself a nice stroll through this neighborhood where it’s easy to see if you’ve picked up any new friends. If I’m still alone at that point, I allow myself to arrive at a garage. I’ve got the key to it. Inside the garage there’s a vehicle. Sometimes it’s an older-model car, usually just a blue Chevy. Looks like nothing, right? Other times it’s a panel truck with the name of some plumbing company on the side. Whatever it is, I go for a little drive in it, checking the rearview to make sure that nobody’s decided to accompany me on my journeys.

Then I slide over to Brookline, and the minute I appear in the back alley, somebody’s looking out for me because the garage door pops up. I put her in the garage, and the garage door goes down, and I wait. Some people take out whatever I’m transporting, and they give me something to take back, and then I do the whole thing in reverse. The only one in the Brookline Operation who ever talks to me is the gourmet chef. His name’s Peter, and he looks like a worried college kid. I don’t bother to tell him my name. Shit, I ain’t even got a name.

I never inquire as to what I’m transporting. Every few days I check in with Lyons. He tells me when the next run’s going to be, and he lays the heavy coin on me. And why am I doing this shit? Is it really so I can take off somewhere with Terry?

Then there’s this other odd little thing that goes down one day. Part of the arrangement was that I should always fall by Lyons’ place in the middle of the afternoon because that’s the only time the freak show ever quiets down. So there I am, and I hit the button on the door outside, and Lyons’ voice comes out of the speaker, “Yeah?” And I say, like always, “What’s happening, man?” so he can hear my voice and buzz me in. I slip into the front hallway, and what do I see before me but two guys in suits stepping out of the door to the stairs. And my first thought is, gee, I wonder why they didn’t take the elevator.

They’re wearing grey suits and striped ties, and one of them’s carrying this little briefcase job, like an attaché case. They walk right by me and they don’t even slow down. They both check me out, and then they both look away. They don’t say a word. They’re like BLANK. They keep right on walking out the front door and they’re gone. And I’m thinking, hey, that’s kind of weird.

Very nice suits. Nice ties too. And the thing about cops—well, unless they’re heavy-duty under cover—is they always got short hair. They just can’t help themselves, they get it buzzed right off, and those dudes didn’t have short hair. No, it was fairly long. So shit, they couldn’t have been cops. Or could they? What about their eyes?

There’s different ways to look BLANK, you know what I mean? When a junkie looks at you BLANK, it’s like, “ME? I don’t know nothing.” When a cop looks at you BLANK, it’s like, “I got a million files in my brain, and one of them’s YOURS, buddy, and it’s got everything in it you’ve ever done in your life including what you thought about the last time you jerked off, so don’t give me any shit.” Cops can do something about their hair, but they can’t do a damned thing about their EYES. Jesus, I’m thinking, what the hell were they doing HERE?

I’ve never thought much about Lyons’ building before, but I’m thinking about it now. It’s an old building but kept up real nice so they can charge the big bucks for it. And it’s not like one of these mansions somebody’s chopped up to make apartments—like it’s always been apartments, but built back in the old days when nobody worried about parking, so Lyons rents a separate garage, right around back, where he keeps his custom-painted midnight-blue Lincoln.

I stick my head out the door and read what’s on the door buzzers. There’s an apartment in the basement that says SUPERINTENDENT, and if he’s your standard-issue super, he’s down there at that very moment dead drunk. The building’s got four floors, and every floor’s got two apartments except for the top, and up there Lyons has the whole floor, what he calls “the penthouse.” Feeling like an asshole, I zip down the stairs to the door that says SUPERINTENDENT, and yep, I can hear the TV going on the other side. Then I zip back up the stairs and check every fucking apartment. All I hear out of them is DEAD SILENCE—it’s like two in the afternoon—except for one on the second floor where I hear a mom and a kid. By this time, I’ve got it figured. I trot on up to Lyons’ place, and he says, “Hey, Tommy. What took you?”

I waltz him into his bedroom and shut the door. “There’s two fucking cops just been in here,” I say. “Shit, if they weren’t cops, they sure as hell looked like cops to me. And I’ll give you ten to one they been having a nice little chat with the super about you.”

What I expect him to say is, “No shit? When was that? Jesus, man, you sure they was cops?” and like that. But that isn’t what he says. He gives me a little grin. “Well, Tommy boy, I hate to tell you this, but there’s some things you just shouldn’t NOTICE, if you follow me.”

I’m looking into those nutty eyes of his, and I’m thinking, hey, nothing adds up right. He’s too fucking blown out on crystal to be running the kind of operation he says he’s running, and if he was running that kind of operation, he wouldn’t be living here in this nice apartment in this nice neighborhood with all these weirdoes falling by every night and fourteen different illegal substances laid out in plain sight. No, he’d be locked up in a fortress somewhere out in the country surrounded by fences and dogs and bodyguards with motherfucking nukes. So what were those dudes doing here? Buying? Selling? Making some kind of deal, that’s for sure. But then it flashed on me that I couldn’t tell anymore what was REAL. Yeah, I was getting to be as damned near as fucked up as Lyons.

• • •

THE PLAIN manila envelope arrived the first week in August. It was addressed to Pamela Zalman and Raymond Lee. Inside the envelope was a booklet on how to make bombs. It had everything a prospective bomber would ever want to know—from making Molotov cocktails out of wine bottles, through using clock timers and dynamite, to fabricating your own explosives from ingredients you could buy easily without attracting attention to yourself. “Shit,” John said. “Wonderful stuff. Who’s this from? Weatherman?”

The address had been written on a typewriter. So had the return address—some place in Dorchester. There was no name above the return address, and no one had taken credit for writing the booklet. “Who knows I’m living with you?” John said.

“Everybody in the Movement.”

They kept running into people who’d received the booklet in the mail. Women’s libbers, old SDS types, kids in the Zygote office, even some of the women in the Collective. Pam called friends in New York, and they’d received the booklet too—sent from an address in Brooklyn. “Jesus, they must have sent out hundreds of the damned things.”

It took them a day to make sense of it—talking about it, speculating, trying out crazy ideas, forgetting the whole damned thing, coming back to it again. They drove to the return address in Dorchester and found a vacant lot. “Very funny,” John said.

They thought about what was not in the booklet. How to fuck up university computer centers. How to disable power lines or phone lines. How to construct barricades. How to check for agents. There was not a word of politics. All it had in it was how to make bombs.

It was a very well produced booklet. “FBI?” John said.

“Yeah, maybe. Or maybe another agency. A really secret one. But you’re motherfucking right it’s from the government.”

“What do they want?”

Why would the agents have trashed John’s apartment not really looking for anything? To keep up the pressure, the paranoia. To make him fuck up. The agents had wanted the Harvard Square riot. Some of those NAC guys had been agents-provocateurs. They wanted more chaos—more trashings, burnings, and lootings. They wanted bombs. They wanted people killed. The more the better. “They want the Reichstag fire,” Pam said.

The image called “Richard Nixon” had sent the signal on TV, and he’d been continuing to send it—the American people were fed up with anarchy and disorder. The boys in Washington were going to pass the most repressive legislation in the history of the United States. They were going after the Left big time. What they were about to do would make the Alien Sedition Acts and the Palmer Raids look like child’s play. It was all going to come down in September when the schools reopened, and most ordinary Americans wouldn’t give a shit any more than they had about Kent State. Of course the agents knew who John and Pam were; they’d been watching them. They were watching them right now. They’d get picked up on the first sweep.

But there was one more step to go. “We should have believed Chomsky,” Pam said. He’d laid it out clear as a bell—the only revolution possible in the United States at that particular time was a fascist revolution.

“The dreadful has already happened,” Pam said. “The revolution’s over . . . a revolution not from the bottom but from the top. We’re already living in a fascist state.”

They were walking by the Charles River in the deepening summer twilight. She took John’s hand. “We’ve been fucking nuts,” she said. “We’re both gone by the end of the week.”

But they weren’t gone by the end of the week. They couldn’t seem to be able to get out of bed. “If we never get together again,” she said. “No, shut up. Just listen. I know you, and I know what you’re thinking. You’re going to think that you’re never going to be able to love anybody but me. I’m not being . . . Like I’m not just being stuck on myself.” She rolled her eyes at the silly high-school phrase. “We’re running out of time, so I’ve got to tell you the truth. If you think I’m the only girl in the world for you, that’s just . . . It’s just bullshit, man. So don’t drown in Romantic misery, OK? You’ve got a weakness for that.”

She was obviously trying to think of everything. “The rent’s paid till the fifteenth of September . . . although I want you out of here long before that, like as soon as you can get it together, you dig? I want you to call me from Toronto, you dig? Joan and Sarah are moving in on the fifteenth. That’s when their lease is up. I’m leaving all my stuff for them, so you don’t have to . . . Don’t stick around to get your money’s worth, for fuck’s sake. Just make sure it’s really clean . . . Oh, I know you’ll do that. You’re a good girl . . . I cut keys for them, so you don’t have to . . . Just walk out and lock the door.”

He was shocked to find out that she was leaving The Critique for him. “Do whatever you want with it. It was always ours even when I wouldn’t let you read it. We’ll always be a council no matter what happens. Read it or don’t read it, I don’t care. Maybe there’s some articles you can pull out of it.”

She couldn’t stop making lists—most of them advice to him, things she’d already said. “Don’t try to cross the border with any papers. Not with The Critique, you dig? Oy, they’d have your ass. Mail all that shit to somebody up there. But I don’t have to tell you, right? You know all that.”

• • •

THE LIGHT fell away from the windows until the room went dark— making a small space outside of time, a place to live for a while. He tried to turn off the voice in his mind that kept wailing, “Oh, please, please, please, please stay . . . just a little bit longer.” Pam reached over and lit the light on the bed table. Her eyes were clear and alive. “I love you,” she said.

He was so blown away he couldn’t even make the standard reply. “See,” she said, “I can say it all on my own. You don’t always have to say it first.”

“I love you too,” he said. That was usually her line.

The look in her eyes now was unmistakable. Yes, it was going to be one of those days when they did it twice. He waited for her to make the first move. She was always the sexual aggressor. But she just kept looking at him, her eyes shining with the yellow light from the lamp shade. “There’s one girl you haven’t been yet,” she said.

He actually thought about it. He didn’t have a clue what she meant. “Who?” he said.

“Me.”

Again, he thought about it. How on earth was he supposed to be her? But of course he knew how.

They were both still naked, so he simply pulled the sheet down and exposed her. It was the sort of bold dramatic gesture she liked to make. She slid down from her sitting position, let her head fall back onto the pillow—just as he would have done. She was smiling, he thought, just as he would have been—with the same warm, dreamy, inviting expression. He was remembering all of the times before when she’d come onto him fast and a little bit rough and that had been exactly what he’d wanted her to do. He kissed her the way she’d always kissed him—imitating her aggressiveness. She opened her mouth for him just the way he’d always opened his mouth for her.

There was nothing to do now but continue to follow the line of force that was already flowing, but he’d never been on top before. He stopped, hovering over her, feeling the first brush of panic that would ruin him, but then she did the easiest thing in the world—took his cock into her hands, opened her legs, and guided him into her. She was beautifully wet.

She let her arms fall back to either side, inviting him to pin her down—just as he’d done for her. He caught her wrists and pressed her hands into the bed. He began moving his hips in the subtle, teasing way she’d often used when she was just getting started—but then he felt a hot contradictory urgency. To hell with everything. He’d never felt more male in his life, and now, suddenly, he wanted to drive her all the way to China. She gasped with every stroke.

But it was too much—was forced, exaggerated, was a kind of revenge. He didn’t like the feeling of it. He slowed down. He released her wrists, and she wrapped her arms around him. He drew his hips back, giving her room to move—just as she’d always given him room to move when they were getting near to the end—and she moved with him. They made a simple perfect rhythm. “Who’s the boy and who’s the girl now?” she said.

He smiled, but she must have really wanted an answer. “Who’s the boy and who’s the girl now?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said.

“You’re goddamn right it doesn’t matter.”

They rode the rhythm out to the end of the song, and he didn’t have to ask her because he’d felt it—once again they’d achieved that exquisite mind-blowing epiphany; they’d come together. He let his body collapse onto hers. She whispered, “I’m sorry, baby. I get claustrophobic.”

He rolled to one side. She followed him across the one foot of space he’d created, and he took her into his arms. He thought for a moment that she was going to say something, but she didn’t. He didn’t know how he knew it, but he did—now she could leave him.