Andersen, Kurt (27 page)

“Awesome,” Sophie says.

There are television sets suspended from the restaurant ceiling. The three screens I can see, including one right over our table, are all tuned to FOX News.

“Hey, look,” I say, “they’re talking about you guys.”

One of the FOX morning anchors is wondering why “the mainstream media doesn’t want Americans to know that these ‘occupiers’ in Miami, a lot of them, are connected with groups supportive of terrorist organizations, like Hamas.”

“What the mainstream media doesn’t want Americans to
know,
” Waverly says, “is that there are millions of Americans who don’t think the big banks and the multinational corporations and these governments should get together and rig the system for themselves.”

“Word,” Sophie says. Until now, I’ve only heard characters in movies and TV shows say that.

“They’re sort of peas in a pod,” another of the FOX News people says, “all the G-20 folks
and
these protesters. Right? Young anti-Americans in tie-dyed T-shirts getting ready to scream and yell at middle-aged anti-Americans in suits and ties. And the mainstream media’s in love with both sides. It’s ironic, is what it is.”

It’s ironic, all right.
Everybody
agrees,
my left-wing traveling companions and the right-wingers on TV: the liberal mainstream media are in a conspiracy with the political elites and international capital to befog and oppress the regular people and squash freedom.

Earlier, Sophie had showed me a tattoo on her lower back, a line of dialogue from
The Matrix,
IF
YOU
ARE
NOT
ONE
OF
US,
YOU
ARE
ONE
OF
THEM,
lettered in perfect Helvetica with the first half in red ink, the second half in black. Now she asks me, since I run a law school, if I think she should include photos of her tattoos as part of her application to college.

“Are you applying to art schools?” I ask.

“Good morning, ma’am.”

I swivel. A very tall policeman is standing right by our booth, addressing me. His partner, standing a couple of yards away, has his right hand on the grip of his automatic pistol.

“I’m Deputy Thigpen from the Sumter County Sheriff’s Office? I need to go ahead and take a look in your pocketbook?”

“What?”
I’m startled—doubly so, because for some reason, his name sounds familiar.

“Can y’all go ahead and hand that pocketbook to me, ma’am, please, now?”

Even as I ask, “Why, Officer?” I realize why.

“Ma’am, we have a reliable report indicating probable cause to suspect a possible violation of South Carolina narcotics laws.”

“A
ha,
” I say, and force a smile as I reach into my bag for the zippered black nylon pouch that holds my diabetes gear.

“No, ma’am,
stop
—I need you to remove your hand right now from inside the pocketbook.” His partner takes a step closer to us.

I take out my hand and let it hover just over the open bag, as if he’d screamed
Freeze!
But then I worry that might come across as some kind of disrespectful joke, given that I’m still smiling. But if I stop smiling, I’m afraid I’ll look angry or nervous. I am nervous. We are in the rural South. I look like the city slicker I am. Sophie’s eyebrow and nose are pierced, and
FUCK
IT
is visible on her left collarbone, each of the tattooed letters—F, C, I in green and U, K, T in red—slightly, alternatingly askew from the vertical. Hunter wears blond dreadlocks. The flap of Waverly’s backpack is imprinted with both the anarchist symbol and the peace symbol. One might note, too, that Hunter is wearing a T-shirt that says
BAMN!
, but I doubt the Sumter Counter sheriff’s deputies know that’s shorthand for “by any means necessary.” I could also introduce into evidence Waverly’s nonwhite racial mix, but—stereotype: denied—Deputy Thigpen is black.

I remember now when I first encountered that name. I wasn’t much older than these kids. It’s funny how some low-priority memories remain for so many years in cold storage, perfectly preserved.

“Please put both your hands on your lap, ma’am,” Deputy Thigpen’s white partner says loudly, trying to get in on the action.

Waverly to the rescue. “My grandmother has Type 1
diabetes,
Officers. She was injecting
insulin.
If she doesn’t inject insulin, she dies. Okay?” Dramatically put but true. “By the way? She’s a lawyer and a former federal official. Just FYI.” Wavy, honey, don’t overplay our hand.

Officer Thigpen glances at his partner, who raises his eyebrows in a quick
uh-oh
gesture. Officer Thigpen leans in so close, I can smell that he’s a smoker—“Excuse me”—and grabs my purse, which he places on an empty table and starts pawing through. He unzips the diabetes pouch and looks at the syringe and finger pricker and insulin vials, immediately zips it up and sticks it back in my purse.

“If you’d like,” I say, “I could have my doctor fax you the prescriptions to your … station house.”

“Not necessary, and I sincerely apologize for the misunderstanding, ma’am,” he says as he hands back my bag. “Y’all have a great Sunday.”

I try not to stare as he walks over to our waitress, who is cowering behind the front counter. He gets very close to her and very quietly gives her a very stern talking-to with his index finger jabbing in the direction of her chest.

“That was clutch,” Sophie says. She is delighted to have been in such close proximity to unjust hassling by a policeman.

“Well,” I say, “it certainly woke me up. I need a drink.” The children nod but don’t smile. “I’m kidding about the drink.”

“Are you all right, Grams? You want to test your blood?”

“Maybe not here, at this very instant.”

“You just seemed really … scared,” Waverly says.

“I was surprised.” Other diners are glancing over at us. “And embarrassed, I guess.” And scared, panicked, that the cop, as he rifled through my bag, would pull out the queer page of notes that Stewart gave me on Friday, and pass it along to the Sumter County sheriff, who would pass it along to the special agent in charge at the nearest FBI field office, and so on. Which is ridiculous, but that’s fear and secret-keeping for you.

Back on the bus, I unfold Stewart’s handwritten seven-point progress report once again. It’s on a single page in pencil, which might be an old-school affectation. Or maybe spook stuff—wouldn’t graphite be less traceable than ink or type fonts? Come to think of it, he was wearing gloves when he arrived at the restaurant. No fingerprints, literally.

1) Files (except SS/DHS) back-roomed & super-scrubbed, but my current moderate-high confidence assessment: your infiltrator (assuming existence) was
not
F Entity.

When I was getting to know him, I noticed that Stewart went out of his way to avoid saying “the FBI,” because it was too straightforward and respectful. He’d call it the F Entity, the feebs, the G-Men, oh-dee-envy (ODENVY being a CIA code name for FBI), the First Bunch (short for First Bunch of Idiots), but never simply the FBI. By “SS/DHS,” he means the Secret Service and Department of Homeland Security.

2) High-confidence assessment #2: YOU weren’t the feeb infiltrator. (Discredited theory: you, COINTELPRO junior G-chick from 1968, get special free pass for DoJ in 1997. But no.)

COINTELPRO is the acronym for the FBI’s secret counterintelligence programs, which started infiltrating agents into SDS and other New Left groups in the 1960s. When I was in law school in the ‘70s and the existence of COINTELPRO had just been revealed, my constitutional law professor one day in class posed a hypothetical about entrapment. “Miss Hollander,” he said, “let’s say you work for the FBI, you’re part of COINTELPRO posing as a member of a radical antiwar group …” In my answer, I managed to paraphrase the due process clause of the 5th Amendment and make some quasi-witty reference to the fact that the FBI had only recently started allowing women to become agents. But I was shaking and breathing so heavily afterward that a 3L sitting near me, a bearded and extremely cute Southern boy, gallantly asked if I was okay and needed any help. There weren’t blood glucose meters back then, so to this day I’m not sure if I was hypoglycemic, or just panicky about the secret I was newly keeping.

And “DoJ” stands for Department of Justice, which vetted me in 1997.

3) No OGA material yet, except indirectly, Out-Damned-Spot-wise—i.e. per my earlier, looks like they scrubbed & purged up the wazoo.

When I was with Stewart, he would also never say “CIA,” and he almost cringed whenever I did. I thought it was like an actor who won’t say “Macbeth,” or a Jew who spells “God” “G-d,” or a Skull and Bones member who refuses to hear the club’s name uttered. But he said it was because he “just can’t stand how civilians get such a boner from hearing it or saying it. Like they’re a character in some fucking James Bond movie.” This was before I’d told him about my childhood Bond fixation. He sometimes says “the Agency” or “Langley,” but usually, he calls it OGA, which is short for Other Government Agency—one of those things that starts as a joke but then becomes normal nomenclature. I was new to federal acronyms the first time I heard him use the phrase, and I guessed that it meant Original Gangsters of America, which he found hysterically funny.

4) SS/DHS files have a 4/1/68 phone call, untraced, from a stray—dorm pal? family member? weapon vendor?—re Levy, Charles A. But no record of you & 2 others.

Stewart had said before that he thought the files kept by Homeland Security—DHS—would be the easiest nut to crack.

Without any help at all from me, he now knows there were four of us, and he knows the names. I find this simultaneously chilling and comforting.

5) Macallister, Alexander G. III’s correspondence w/ comandante en jefe in 1965 via Canadian mail drop + 1967 Comecon student junket made him (minor?) OGA subject of interest. Nothing post-1971.

I remember Alex’s letter from Fidel Castro—the
comandante en jefe—
that he kept and had framed, and the cultural exchange program to Budapest and Zagreb—COMECON is short for Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, the Soviet bloc countries—that he went on the summer between high school and college.

6) Don’t recall if you FOIAd INSCOM. But your infiltrator smells army to me. (Moderate confidence).

I have indeed sent Freedom of Information requests to INSCOM, the army’s Intelligence and Security Command.

7) Freeman, Bernard L. “Buzzy”, USCG PO3 1965-67, son of AEC lifer w/ right-wing politics & D.C. connections now: sure
looks
like your fink.

In college we were slightly suspicious of Buzzy at first because he was a Vietnam vet, a U.S. Coast Guard petty officer third class, and also because his father had spent his career working for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. But then we came to trust him for the same reasons—because he wasn’t a coddled suburban wuss like the rest of us, because he’d seen and done terrible things in Vietnam and was single-mindedly seeking redemption. Although I grew suspicious of Buzzy once again in the ‘70s, after he became a conservative, surely it can’t be personal loyalty to the rest of us that’s made him keep our secret all these years.

I’m desperate to email Stewart and discuss all this, add my hunches and caveats here, fill in a gap there. But he’s determined to discover as much as he can on his own, and given the precautions he’s taking—last time we talked, he said he wished we “had a cutout,” which turns out to mean an untraceable way of passing information—I maintain Internet silence with him.

I check my email and see that Greta has sent me a second apology, now even sorrier for suggesting the other night that I had dementia, and for believing Alex. But also wondering, perhaps, when I get home, no rush, if I might want to submit to an autobiographical memory interview conducted by a disinterested medical professional, maybe take a confabulation battery test. “Just to reassure *yourself* that your remote memory is totally shipshape,” her email says.

“Oh … fuck you.”

“What, Grams?” Waverly’s warm head rests against my shoulder, her eyes closed.

“Nothing, honey. Thinking out loud.”

“Where are we?”

“Georgia, almost Florida. Go back to sleep.”

She wriggles and readjusts and cuddles back into me. Her right hand rests on the head of the tiny stuffed dog, made of upcycled cashmere, that pokes out of her backpack, its snout pressed against the top of the encircled A.

Another email from Greta, this one much briefer. Waverly has already filed a report to her mother about the incident at Stuckey’s. “You almost got ARRESTED?!?” Greta and Jungo had been dubious about my abilities as a chaperone. Now they’ll be imagining
Thelma and Louise 2.

I consider various replies to Greta.
Completely bogus dope charge. Stop. In Sumter County lockup. Stop. Please post bail, ten large, ASAP. Stop.
Or maybe
Almost arrested? Really? Sorry, I have no memory of that happening.
Instead, I write, “It was really nothing. The poor cop was just doing his job. Talk soon! Love from I-95, Mom.”

I Google-search “confabulation battery”—it consists of two hundred questions.
Fuck you,
I repeat, this time only in my shipshape mind.

Sunday afternoons make me contemplative even when I’m not staring out the window on a long-distance bus trip. Time’s arrow slows down, and its path is no longer so simple and straight from past to present to future. Sophie, reading the movie tie-in version of
Howl,
asks if a line in the poem is a reference to Absolut vodka ads: “on Madison Avenue … run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality.” He says he doubts it, so I don’t point out that Ginsberg’s poem preceded Absolut vodka by twenty-five years. Since lunch, we’ve passed nothing but the green interstate exit signs for off-ramps into the 1960s and ‘70s—Daytona Beach, Disney World, Cocoa Beach, Cape Canaveral, John F. Kennedy Space Center.