Andersen, Kurt (18 page)

“So, my dear,” I say, “for this memoir of mine. I could use your help.”

“What, my calendar for 1998 and 1999? Like a catalog of our dates or something?”

“Uh-uh. I want to find out what government files exist on me. And like the man says, I don’t have the clearance.”

“
Ahhhh.
A
ha.
I’m a back channel.”

“Because I don’t expect my FOIA-ing to turn up what I’m looking for. Not in this lifetime.”

“Who? Which agencies?”

I take a deep breath and exhale. “FBI—”

“From the background check last year?”

“No. I pulled out before they did anything.”

“And then shot on their face,” he says.

“Ha ha. Anyhow, FBI, CIA—”

“
Oh,
before I forget, I’ve got to tell you this story. In Pyongyang, we just found out they have a special clinic, a sperm bank for the North Korean muckety-mucks, the elite DPRK dudes, to bank their jizz or donate it to infertile peasants or whatever. And they’ve got all these young women, ‘nurses,’ whose
job
it is to
jerk off
the guys into the little cups. Two of them Japanese girls, we’re told. Probably abductees. Is that not unbelievably fucking wonderful? Sorry: who’d you write to?”

“FBI, CIA, the army, and Homeland Security.”

He grins. “Whoa Nelly! Quadfecta! What are your dates of interest?”

“And the National Archives, just to be thorough; 1967, 1968.”

“Really?”
he says, calculating. “From when you were eighteen, nineteen?”

I nod.

“God, I bet you were a super-hot eighteen-year-old. Miniskirts, man! When miniskirts were new and wild and crazy! And I was twelve, just getting addicted to beating off. I don’t need time
travel,
only
communication
across time, so I could tell the twelve-year-old me to take the bus from Buffalo to Chicago to check you out.”

“I know this is a huge ask, and it may be impossible, probably is. And I really don’t want to get you in trouble.”

“In trouble? I live for trouble, Ilsa. Seriously, what the fuck. Early retirement isn’t my worst nightmare. If I were an operator, I’d already be aged out. It’s KMA time, baby.”

“Kill My Associates? Kill the Motherfucking Assholes?”

“Kiss My Ass. It means I’m fifty-eight years old and can do whatever I want. So I’m in.”

“Thank you. As far as the details go, I don’t know what you need me to tell you about what I—”

“
Nothing.
I don’t want to be pre-briefed. Cleaner intel that way. If I want more later, I’ll ask. On the FOIAs, have they denied you?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Good, that’s good, that’s better. Homeland Security? Really?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Wow. You fucking un-American.” I’ve delighted him. As I figured I might. He sings in a silly falsetto: “ ‘What a bad little girl I am, I need you to solve it, bad, bad, bad, bad!’”

“Dinah Washington?”

“Ask your granddaughter.” He gulps some Scotch. “Rihanna. I’ll see what I can do. But tell me: was this the plan, seventeen years ago, why you seduced me?”

“Seduced
you
!”

“In order to turn me into a long-term asset you could cash in when the time was right? Because if so, I am incredibly fucking impressed.”

“Sorry. There was no plan. If anything, the opposite. I actually worried, back then, that because of what you do, you, you know, might have found out things about me that would’ve made it awkward for us. There was no plan. There was just me about to turn fifty, and this slightly insane, very un-boring-Washington, very thick-dicked, very attractive single man.”

“You’re making me hard. Keep going.”

“And a dead marriage.” I signal for the check.

“Now I really get it, your mixing and matching of fiction and nonfiction. I was double-oh-seven come to life—
and
for forty fucking years, you’ve been this based-on-a-true-story outlaw. A fugitive in your own mind.”

I sort of smile and sort of nod. He continues.

“Like I say, I’ll do what I can do and find what I can find. In any case. But for right now, your place or my place or none of the above?”

“Mine, but let me use your phone first, okay?” I pick up his BlackBerry and press the browser icon. “I may want to leave later tomorrow and want to check what the last flights home are.”

“The phone won’t work for you. Ten-twenty, United, Dulles to LAX, gets you there at one in the morning.”

His phone
doesn’t
work. He takes it from my hand and touches the icon, which blooms normally into a browser window. “It’s secure,” he says. “Configured to respond to the speed and direction and pressure of my touch only. Cool, huh?” He pockets it and stands.
“Vamanos?”

Buzzy Freeman lives in extreme northwest Washington, D.C., almost in Maryland. The neighborhood reminds me of where I grew up on the North Shore. Big and biggish houses and perfect yards, lots of old trees, hushed suburban gravitas. People talk about the un-American elitism of life in the District, inside the Beltway, but this is elitism of an absolutely all-American kind. George H. W. Bush lived around here when he was CIA director, as did Richard Nixon in the 1950s. And Lyndon Johnson when he was vice president.

I haven’t had a real conversation with Buzzy since college.

“Wonder Woman! You found us—and my gosh, don’t you look
wonderful,
” he says at the door. He means, I think, that I’m tan and size-sixish and my hair isn’t stiff. Also, maybe he’s detecting a bit of post-sex glow twelve hours after the fact. “Life in Tinseltown obviously agrees with you.”

Tinseltown.
Yeesh. “Thanks, Buzzy—and thanks so much for agreeing to see me on a Sunday.”

He’s wearing a white dress shirt, crimson V-neck sweater, blue jeans, and Gucci loafers. I wonder if the red, white, and blue is conscious theming. Because I’ve seen him on television every few years, my mental picture is more or less current. He’s not obese, but he’s got a big gut; and he’s got his hair, but it’s thin and wispy. It’s hard to believe that I once found him supremely charismatic.

“You’ve grown the beard back.” I remember the day he shaved it in 1968.

“Covers the double chin.”

Some residual wit, at least. He leads me to “the den,” where there’s a fire in the fireplace. “Harleen’s so sorry she won’t get to see you. Still at church, a confab with our pastor, planning this big community dinner we do every Easter. She’s a deaconess.” When we were in college, Buzzy and I bonded over being former Catholics. I guess he’s moved on to Protestantism.

It’s hard to believe that, forty-six years ago, I watched him, for instance, standing outside an army induction center in Boston, chanting “No more war” with breathtaking conviction.

I decline a glass of chardonnay, and while he’s gone getting coffee, I listen to the Bach fugue playing on the radio and squint at the photographs on his wall: young Buzzy with Ronald Reagan, middle-aged Buzzy with Ariel Sharon, old Buzzy with Dick and Lynn Cheney and Jon Voight. He made a lot of money in the ‘80s doing political junk mail, and now he’s got one of those vague, expansive Washington portfolios—chairman of a think tank, vice chair of foundations with “freedom” in the name, conference attendee, cable news commentator—that pass for a distinguished career in public service. I see his honorable-discharge certificate from the U.S. Coast Guard and his college diploma. Lame.

He shuffles back in, carrying a tray with two double espressos and a Spode pitcher of steamed milk. I refrain from making a crack about latte-drinking, white-wine-swilling, NPR-listening conservatives.

We say we’ve enjoyed seeing each other on TV. I tell him I was amused to read that he’d helped organize a screening at the Pentagon of
The Battle of Algiers
during the first summer of the Iraq war, since we’d seen it together when it came out in 1968. He tells me he hasn’t spoken to Alex Macallister since their public shouting match about gay rights during a panel at our twenty-fifth reunion. I tell him about my kids, he tells me about his first set of children, as well as the younger kid by Harleen—”pre-med, but unlike his lazy old man, he’ll
make
it to med school.” He congratulates me on the success of
Objection, Your Honor
but says he doesn’t read fiction anymore, “not even Tom Clancy.” However, he loved
The 7th Founder
—John Jay is one of the conservatives’ favorites; they think the liberal historian-media elite has demoted him to the junior varsity—and when his right-wing friends accused me of recasting their hero as a “secular civil rights liberal,” he asked them, “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot are you folks talking about?” Buzzy served his two years in the Coast Guard before college, and when I met him freshman year, he told me he was “Sierra Alfa Tango seven-niner-zero,” by which he meant he’d gotten a 790 on his math SAT.

“I appreciate that, Buzzy, thanks. Some people on the left hate me for portraying Jay as a good guy, you know.”

“That’s Democrat intellectual honesty for you.”

“The reviewer in
The Nation
mentioned that we were college friends, you and I. Guilt by association.”

“Give yourself to the Dark Side, Karen. Got a new book going?”

I shrug and nod, but he really just wants to tell me about the book he’s finishing up,
Cities upon a Hill: Defending American Values in the Holy Land.
It’s a polemic about how we need to cut Israel maximum slack in their fight against the Palestinians, to “stop worrying about nice neat Miranda distinctions between combatants and noncombatants in kinetic operations when you’re struggling to
survive.
” I’ve never heard anyone use the phrase “kinetic operations” in conversation. It means combat.

“But I assume you’re against killing innocent civilians?”

He sighs. “Oh, Karen … who’s ‘innocent’? You’re the lawyer. People talk about ‘guilt’ and ‘innocence,’ but in our legal system, it’s ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty,’ right? ‘Innocent’ isn’t a verdict. Anyhow,” he says, pivoting directly from murky moral ambiguity to a celebration of black-and-white moral simplicity, “in
Cities
I’m arguing that Americans need to consider Israel a
spin-off
of America, our national soul mate,
su
Judeo-Christian
casa es mi
Judeo-Christian
casa.
And since I’m not Jewish, I can appear to make the case more … dispassionately.”

“In the book, do you talk about the Paul Plan?”

Buzzy’s eyes narrow and he stiffens, leaning forward, the way he used to do in dorm rooms and coffeehouses and greasy spoons, as we chain-smoked and talked and talked about a culture of total resistance, closing our minds in the name of opening them, hardening our young hearts. His ferocity then set a high standard for us all.

“What Ron and Rand Paul have proposed,” Buzzy says, “is soft genocide. It’s just a prettied-up version of what Himmler and Göring proposed before they went for the Holocaust—this time, it’s ship the six million Jews to Nevada instead of Madagascar.”

As you no doubt know, the two Pauls, Republican congressman father and senator son, introduced identical bills that would offer all Israelis virtually automatic U.S. citizenship until 2020. It would also authorize the creation of a new commonwealth on about 1 percent of the American land owned by the federal government, “at least seven million contiguous acres in Nevada, Idaho, Oregon or other states as appropriate”—in other words, a quasi-nation on the U.S. mainland, self-governed like Puerto Rico, a jurisdiction as large as Israel and richer in natural resources, and safely seven thousand miles west of the Middle East and its several hundred million Muslims. Any Israelis who accepted the citizenship offer could live anywhere they wished in America, but they (and any other American) could also choose to live in what’s already being called New Israel, somewhere in the vast boondocks between Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, and eastern Oregon. The U.S. government would create an endowment to build out the commonwealth and resettle as many as six million Israelis in this country.

“It’d cost a lot less than we’ve spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan,” the senior Paul said recently, “and this time instead of
war
we might get Middle East
peace,
peace forever. Plus millions of super-smart, hardworking new Americans, exactly the type of immigrants we
want.
” What they decline to articulate so bluntly is the endgame. After the E-Z-citizenship offer expired, any Israelis remaining in Israel would be on their own, citizens of a country no longer the problematic special ally of the U.S. We wipe our hands of the endless Middle East tragedy once and for all.

The plan has next to no support among members of the political Establishment. What worries Buzzy and his friends is that ordinary Americans seem to like the idea—according to the latest polls, almost 40 percent say it sounds reasonable, and that pool of support is rather astoundingly broad, coming from left-wingers and right-wingers and middle-of-the-roaders almost equally. Only 32 percent say they’re opposed. And with Rand Paul planning to run for president in 2016, the idea will remain in the public discourse. “Perot didn’t get
elected
in ’92,” Buzzy says, “and Ron Paul didn’t get elected last time, but their ideas and their
takes
had a
gigantic
impact. Things are wild now, Karen. Revolution is in the air. People are ready to throw all kinds of babies out with the bathwater. The people pushing this are the most dangerous men in America right now. As dangerous as anybody in Tehran or Yemen or Waziristan.”

“You believe that?”

“
Absolutely!
Absolutely.” Now he’s on a roll. “There are a whole lot of lazy, cowardly, ahistorical moral idiots in this country who always want the easy way out. Remember, I
know
those people, I’m
from
out there.” Because Buzzy grew up in Nevada and served in the military, he’s always cast himself as a more authentic American than the Ivy Leaguers and cosmopolites he’s lived and worked among his whole adult life. And depending on the particular point he’s trying to make, he can use his rustic roots and firsthand knowledge of regular folk to revile either the elite-hating People or the People-hating elite. It’s a neat trick.