American Subversive (40 page)

“It's okay. It's just the ground-floor fishmonger. He's hosing down his loading dock.”

“It would help if there were streetlights,” I said.

“Where's the fun in that?”

When the man retreated inside, we hurried past the back of his shop and stopped in front of a short set of stairs that led down to a basement door.

“Do you have a key?”

“It's not locked.”

A piercing iron screech resounded high above us, scaring the hell out of me. It sounded like the end of the world, or at least the city, the infrastructure finally collapsing as we knew it would all along. But the screeching turned familiar, became a plaintive roar, as a Brooklyn-bound train passed on the bridge overhead. Paige glanced up the alley, then went down the steps and through the door. I followed after her.

We found ourselves in a damp basement hallway. The stench of rotten fish was overwhelming, and Paige put her scarf to her face before starting up the dilapidated staircase. Young men and old women scurried past as we climbed, avoiding us just as we avoided them. It was a building of phantoms. On the fourth floor, Paige turned down the hall and stopped outside the second door on the left. She put a finger to her lips and an ear to the door, for a minute, for two minutes, dead still. “Okay,” she finally whispered. She handed me her duffel bag and pulled a strange-looking key from her pocket. Kneeling down, she pushed it in and out of the lock several times, delicately, patiently, like a marksman lining up a kill. She was listening for a click. For some reason I started holding my breath. Then there it was, the faintest of noises. She turned the knob and the door gave way.

Paige stood for a moment in the doorway, but the apartment was empty. I followed her inside.

The room was like the cheapest motel room you've ever seen—only it was half the size and almost completely bare. A narrow entrance hall with a bathroom on the right opened into a rectangular space just wide enough for two cots and a low, rectangular table between them. The walls and curtains were a murky off-white, and dark water stains dotted the ceiling like an archipelago. What little streetlight made it past the fire escape was choked off by the blinds and the filthy glass, and I had to take several steps toward the shapes in the corner before I recognized them as a minifridge, hot plate, and coffeemaker. Paige flipped a switch and a single bulb illuminated overhead. She motioned
to me and put her index finger to her lips.
Bugs,
she mouthed, then started looking around. It didn't take long; there was almost nowhere to hide a listening device. When she was satisfied, she walked over and locked the front door behind us.

“Home sweet home,” she announced, taking off her glasses, her disguise.

“Keith hasn't been here?” I asked.

“Doesn't look like it. And neither has the handler, or there'd be sleeping bags waiting like last time. N3 was originally planned for Saturday night, remember, so unless he's changed his schedule or really needs a place to crash, he won't be here until tomorrow at the earliest—and that'll still give him three days. He's not good all cooped up. Of course, he might be in Mexico for all I know.” Paige walked back to the front door. “You comfortable?”

I'd just sat down on one of the beds. “Sure, why?”

“Because we can't keep the light on. If they do show up early, it'll scare them away.”

With that, she flipped the switch and plunged us into darkness.

Mine was now a life of waiting: hours of boredom and seconds of terror. Like fighting fires, like fighting wars. I didn't believe in Paige's version of the world, but I believed in
her
. If we could just stop running, simply surviving, long enough to breathe again, I would do everything I could to pull her to safety. For something inside me had sparked and caught fire. And when that happens, you can defend any decision, justify any Action.

Slender streaks of gray light appeared through the blinds. Paige positioned herself by the window awhile, but eventually crept over to the cot closest to the door. Her silhouette seemed stolen from a teenage fantasy.

She dug out some snack packs from her bag and we talked as we ate. She told me about the last time she'd been in that room, how similar it had been—alone with a man in the near-dark—and yet how utterly different. She explained what Keith had done, or tried to do, and how that one act had opened her eyes to both his hypocrisy and her own inability to confront it. She'd been taken by him, by his bright-eyed
passion, his endless persuasiveness, and become content within the confines of revolt. But the story of history's great charlatans always begins and ends with charisma, and if most were driven by money or power, Keith's vice was ego. Being the genius voice on the side of truth. And what things you could do from atop that moral high ground.

I thought I was beginning to understand her, just as my own life grew more obtuse. What was changing in me? There'd been no dramatic shift, no come-to-Jesus moment when I grasped the cursory nature of my existence. Rather, it was something I'd known all along. I had come to accept my life, my toxic cultural footprint, but if everyone was walking in the same direction, what did it matter? The idea of standing up, of revolting against something—
anything
—had never been a cogent or realistic option in the America I knew. And so I'd embraced, had
made a living from,
the ceaseless bloat—the publicists and spin doctors; the talking heads and network programmers; Hollywood and Washington. I went along with the screamers and hypocrites, gurus and preachers, everyone who talked
at
me and
past
me and
for
me while I stared blankly at TV screens and movie screens and computer screens, reality this and reality that, and of course the world had gotten away from me, from
us,
because complacency of one kind breeds complacency of every kind, and soon we're going along with wars and genocides because it's easier not to think about them, simpler not to get involved. We had experts for that kind of thing, and what could I possibly know about the great American illusion that they did not? I knew Paige was right to raise her hand and start asking questions. But how did one frame those questions exactly? How did one act upon one's knowledge?

At some point we slept, or I did. Paige, I'm guessing, stayed up a while more, thinking, plotting. How would Keith react if he found us here? And could she really talk him out of detonating another bomb? It sure didn't sound like it, not the way she'd described him earlier.

Would he have the thing with him?

That was my last coherent thought, and my first again upon waking, the trains on the bridge a perfect snooze alarm. Paige was still asleep. I thought of sneaking out to get us breakfast—I was starving—but she'd be awake the second my feet hit the floor. Then she woke up anyway.

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

“Ha ha.” She rubbed her eyes. “I
am
a terrible radical. Look at us.”

She had a point. If it was possible, the room in the half-light of morning had become even more depressing. You could see it now, how grimy it was, and how small. We showered—separately—using our dirty shirts as towels, then assessed the situation. We agreed I should venture out for supplies; Paige posed a greater risk of being recognized, and anyway, what would happen if Keith rolled in and I was here alone? I didn't want to find out.

We got some laundry together. Paige made a list of essentials: newspapers, food and water, blankets and pillows, plastic cups and plates, a flashlight, soap, towels, toilet paper, cigarettes. I made one, too: beer, wine, coffee, magazines . . . cigarettes.

“And I could pick up some lottery tickets,” I said. “Because you never know.”

She was looking at my list. “You're smoking now, too?”

“Can you think of a better time to start?”

It was still early when I left. I bought the papers and wandered around awhile before finding an open Laundromat on East Broadway. The night before, the streets had been a Benetton ad of races and religions, but now, watching our clothes spin dry, I was aware of being the only non-Asian in the place. Still, no one seemed to notice me. I flipped through the
Times,
the
Post,
the
News,
turning each page with a kind of dread. There were a few articles on the Flushing Four—including a piece in the
Times
about the mosque they'd regularly attended—but nothing, I noticed, connecting them to the bombing. And nothing about Paige either. Or Keith and Lindsay. Or, now, me.

When the clothes had dried, I stuffed them into my backpack and left. I bought some groceries at a bodega on Pike Street, then, remembering what Paige had told me about varying routes, started walking back toward the river. I was on the north side of the Manhattan Bridge now, and my plan was to make a right on one of these slender little streets—Monroe or Cherry—and arrive back at the apartment from the east. I'd made it a block when I came upon the Chinatown version of an Internet café—a clubby storefront dive with a neon @ sign in the window. None of the notices on the door were in English, but I looked inside anyway. A computer was free. I had to go online; it was as if the monitor had a tractor beam. As long as I didn't sign into any sites or check
e-mail, I'd be fine, right? I paid the spiky-haired kid behind the desk five bucks for fifteen minutes and sat down beside a fish tank filled with water so murky I couldn't see inside. I started with the usual suspects: CNN, MSNBC, Drudge, the Huffington Post, the Daily Beast, and a few of the newsier blogs. Nothing. The world had moved on without us. Then I checked Roorback. I had to know what Derrick had done, how he'd handled my disappearance. Perhaps EmpiresFall had written again, in which case Derrick would surely have posted the message. I scrolled through the handful of entries he'd written in my absence. They had his fingerprints all over them—from the obvious jokes to the fatal lack of irony. He didn't trust his audience. Several commenters had inquired as to my whereabouts, but Derrick had ignored them. Everything, in fact, seemed like business as usual, suspiciously so. Fighting the urge to check my e-mail, I logged out and left. I felt dirty, as if I'd been splashing around with the fish that may or may not have existed a foot from my head.

I hurried back to the building, entered through the alley, and knocked on the apartment door as instructed.

“How come there's no peephole?” I asked, when she opened it.

“It's an old building. How come you took so long?”

She looked annoyed, like she'd been pacing, but seemed relieved when I told her there'd been no news of us, online or off (“I hope you didn't check your e—”
“No”
). And so we settled into our Wednesday morning. Crosswords and coffee. Newspapers and nicotine. We were huddling in a shelter awaiting a tempest, yet I can't remember being any more alive than I was then. Everything was unnatural and contradictory: the gravity and absurdity of our plight; the sureness and skepticism; the idle calm, the ever-present fear. And the two of us—reading and soon playing cards, like old friends, like new lovers—completely incapable of verbalizing even our most trivial feelings. Paige peeked through the blinds every few minutes, but there was no sign of Keith or Lindsay. Twice I asked her what would happen if and when they did show up. Twice she told me not to worry about it, that she would handle everything, but that just made me more nervous.

“How do you know he'll use the front entrance?”

“Because he has a
key
to the front entrance. People don't use alleyways unless they have a good reason. Like desperation.”

I stopped asking questions after that. The afternoon passed, the air thickening, squeezing out the lingering light. When night fell in earnest, we opened beers to crack the tension. This time there was no talk of theory, of choices made and reasons why. Likewise, we stopped anticipating the future, how this all might end. Instead, we sat cross-legged on the floor and played gin by flashlight. At some point, we moved the game to her more comfortable mattress. She had changed into a black tank top, one I'd just washed, and it was so tight against her that her arms appeared to have punched through and escaped. It was almost pitch-dark in the room now. Paige was worried the flashlight beam might be seen from the street, so we turned it off and let our eyes adjust to the nothingness. She asked about Cressida, and I became conscious of my own voice, its droll timbre, nervously groping for a foothold. Then I stopped hedging and just told the truth, detailed our slow decline (or was it a rise to the surface, away from depth and emotion?). Paige was lying down, then we both were, side by side on our backs, just small talk now, nervous jokes, intriguing pauses. She told me about her childhood in the Smoky Mountains. I countered with harrowing stepmonster tales, masking their sting in humor, or trying to, until it was Paige's turn again, the two of us closer now, shoulders touching, and legs, barely, the way everything should start, with electric hints, and I must have dozed off because it only seemed a blissful minute or two later—though, again, it was hours—when she shook me awake and, before I could say a word, clasped a strong, soft hand over my mouth.

AIDAN