Andersen, Kurt (39 page)

By noon in the hallway outside the room where Dow’s research director was supposed to be interviewing chemistry students for jobs, there were hundreds of us sitting knee to knee and standing arm in arm, physically preventing him from leaving and interviewees from entering.

More protesters continued to arrive. “ ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,’” I said softly to Chuck, “ ‘but to be young was very heaven.’”

“What?”

“Wordsworth. The poet? Writing about the French Revolution. He was our age when it happened.”

Chuck kissed my bruised forehead quickly, almost furtively. Bliss was it, indeed. Very heaven.

“Exactly how do we think this show is going to end?” Alex asked quietly as the lunch hour passed.

“I don’t know,” I whispered back, “but that’s what so great about it—it’s
real
instead of everyone politely following a script.”

“Improvisation,” Chuck murmured.

“Like
war,
” Buzzy said in his big twangy voice.

Amazingly, several professors showed up to urge us on.

When the new dean of Harvard College appeared, it all became even more remarkably real. The boys sat up a little straighter, opened their eyes wider, quieted down. I watched the muscles in Chuck’s neck and jaw tighten. The dean seemed to recognize most of them, and they definitely knew him—the year before, he’d been the college admissions director, the very man who had turned each of these boys into a Harvard man. He said it was wrong to restrain the freedom of expression of people with whom we disagreed, that we were running the risk of being kicked out of school because the university could not countenance threats.

Buzzy piped up. “Is that a threat?”

Everybody laughed, the dean included. “Touché,” he said.

Sometime that afternoon the mob somehow decided we would let the man from Dow go—
if
he would sign a pledge that he’d leave and never return. He refused. At sunset the group decided to let him go anyway.

That same week FBI agents appeared on campus, visiting the dorm rooms of boys who’d ceremonially turned in their draft cards at the Justice Department during the protests in Washington. The Johnson administration reaffirmed its determination to bomb and kill in Vietnam.

“Not to be paranoid,” Buzzy said, “but the crackdown has started. The masks of consent are coming off, boys and girls.”

So the four of us began our fall offensive.

Buzzy knew how to make M-80s—big firecrackers he called “small charges”—using purple swimming-pool cleaner and the aluminum powder from cracked-open Etch A Sketches. A friend in California sent him ten yards of green fuse. Twice we set them off just outside Shannon Hall, where ROTC had its headquarters, and once inside the building, right by the ROTC office. Each time we left Xeroxed photographs of napalmed and machine-gunned Vietnamese children with the Magic-Markered legend
YOUR
ENEMIES
.

Chuck managed to acquire a palm-size canister of Mace. We took turns attending the classes of Harvard government professors who advised the Johnson administration on Vietnam—Samuel Huntington and Henry Kissinger are the two I remember—and with a couple of surreptitious squirts of pepper mist, people started coughing and the lecture halls cleared.

Quiet protest was ineffectual. Militance worked, the newspaper taught us daily. The secretary of defense had resigned, we read one morning. “Of course he’s going to go run the World Bank,” I said. “War by other means. Making sure the rich countries and the corporations keep the third-world countries poor and powerless.”

“My parents’ friends in Washington,” Alex offered, “the ones I visited when we were down there? They say Johnson pushed McNamara out because he was going soft on the war.”

“I thought they lived in Virginia,” Buzzy said. “Your parents’ friends.”

“Right, they do. But they work, you know, for the government. In Washington.”

I was scanning the newspaper. “ ‘A twin-engine U.S. transport plane carrying twenty-six Americans and secret documents crashed in the enemy-held lowlands south of Saigon. There were no survivors, but the documents were recovered intact.’”

“Hooray,” Chuck said. I wasn’t sure whether he was being sardonic about the retrieval of the secret documents or expressing solidarity with the Vietcong for bringing down an American plane.

“That’s like the third plane crash over there in two months,” I said.

Chuck looked sad and nodded, which made Buzzy shake his head and say, “Hamlet here can’t quite decide which side are the good guys.”

I smiled, and Chuck flipped Buzzy the bird.

Three Sundays in a row I’d told my mother I would not be home for Thanksgiving, and that she’d “just have to
deal
” with having only one of her three children at the table for “your Norman Rockwell picture.” When the phone woke me sometime after midnight on the Monday before the holiday and it was my dad, my first thought was that she’d forced him to call to make one last try at persuading me.

That wasn’t why he was calling, although I did end up flying home to Chicago that day. He was calling to tell me about Sabrina. She had been in Los Angeles for the Esperanto convention and flying to Cincinnati to spend the holiday with her friend Jamie.

“Honey,” my dad said, “your sister died.”

Their plane had been landing in a snowstorm that night, came in too low, and crashed a mile short of the runway.

After a pause, Dad added, “In an apple orchard in Kentucky.” He spoke the words as if they were meaningful, like a line from a poem. After another pause, he said, “Jamie’s alive.”

“What?”

“He wasn’t killed. There were survivors. Jamie broke his collarbone and an arm, but he’s alive.”

I cried for a while and didn’t go back to sleep. It was weird being hugged by Chuck at seven-thirty
A.M.
in my nightgown in front of the lady at the desk downstairs. It was weird being stared at with such pity by girls I didn’t know as Chuck lugged my little suitcase out to the taxi. It was weird to board a plane fourteen hours after my sister had died in a plane crash.

I hadn’t been in a church since her confirmation, and it was only my fourth funeral. The first had been almost exactly ten years earlier, for my baby sister Helen, when I was too young to hold a candle during the Mass.

It was weird to attend Sabrina’s funeral and burial on the day after Thanksgiving.

Sometime that weekend, between crying jags, my mom started suggesting she had been responsible—because
she
had pushed Sabrina into Esperanto in the first place, and
she
was the one who agreed to let her fly to Los Angeles and Cincinnati despite the dirty-movie stunt, so maybe God was punishing her, my mother, for failing to punish Sabrina.

My father stared at her, speechless, and then took both her hands in his and said, “Your God may be mysterious, Helen, I understand, but He
cannot
be so perverse and cruel as that.” I’d never heard him say anything negative about religion in my mother’s presence. And he wasn’t through. “There are more than enough bad actions in each of our lives for which we
should
accept blame and guilt. But do not concoct reasons to hate yourself. It isn’t your fault Sabrina is gone.”

I felt no blame for Sabrina’s death. But I did feel acute guilt, like a physical pain, about being a bad sister, starting the moment the priest stood by her coffin at St. Joseph’s and said, “May Thy mercy unite her above to the choirs of angels.” A month earlier I’d failed to wish her a happy sixteenth birthday, and I had been consistently bitchy to her for the last five years of her life. She had died, and
now
I loved her.

It was weird seeing the smoldering wreckage of TWA 128 on TV and reading in the
Sun-Times
about the crash, finding Sabrina H. Hollaender among the seven-point names of the
VICTIMS
and James O. Harwood on the list of ten
SURVIVORS
.

I read in the paper that their flight had been two hours late arriving in Cincinnati because the plane was a last-minute replacement—the one they’d originally boarded at LAX had a mechanical problem. I read that the crash was the second at the Cincinnati airport in two weeks, the fourth in two years, the third since 1961 of a plane making the very same approach to the very same runway during the month of November.

Why did Sabrina die and her boyfriend live? If the American Airlines mechanics in L.A. had managed to get the cabin door to shut tight on the original plane, would that flight have avoided the tree in Kentucky? Was the run of crashes at the Greater Cincinnati Airport a coincidence, random statistical noise, like flipping a coin and getting tails seven times in a row, or did it mean some technician or air traffic controller or aviation bureaucrat was to blame?

My mother eventually found consolation in retreating to her faith in God’s plan, in all of its beautiful riddling black-box mumbo-jumbo. But to me, the deaths of both of my little sisters made “God’s plan” seem like a sick joke. After Sabrina died, I started thinking hard—obsessing, really, for the rest of my life—about the unholy power of chance, good luck and bad luck, in governing human affairs. Luck became my subject, the animating mystery of my life.

23

Your Honor, I intend this to be an explanation of why my client was led to do what he did, not an excuse for it.
When I was a Legal Aid defender, that was my customary preface before I asked a judge to cut my convicted client some slack—the “mitigation report” tally of extenuating factors that might, if you were lucky, get your unlucky robber or drug dealer or killer a lighter sentence. I don’t like whiners or people who reflexively blame “society” for the bad things individuals choose to do. But. But. But.

Between 1964 and 1967, the war and the antiwar countercultural fantasia grew symbiotically, centrifugally, exponentially, like a cascading nuclear reaction. I was eighteen at the very moment when American teenagers were being conscripted to kill and die in a deranged war
and
being encouraged to believe they could see and feel more clearly and vitally than anyone else on earth the differences between smart and stupid, authentic and fake, free and oppressed, right and wrong.

I was a fissile creature by the end of 1967 and the beginning of 1968. In the space of a year, having redefined myself as a radical, I’d started using mind-altering drugs, lost my virginity, come down with the incurable illness that occasionally addled and would someday kill me, experienced true love, lost my closest (black) adult friend to casual (white) malfeasance, left home, been beaten by a deputy U.S. marshal on the steps of the Pentagon, gotten punished by my college for opposing the manufacture of napalm, and lost my sister in an airplane crash.

My impatient belief in my own higher sanity became so sure and fierce that it eventually moved into the suburbs of insanity. Sarah, who is the sanest person I know, always says about expensive heels that snap off the second time you wear them or people who use “literally” wrong or her husband spitting into the kitchen sink, “That makes me
so crazy.
” The Vietnam War literally made me crazy. But it didn’t and doesn’t make me not guilty.

Something is buzzing somewhere. I remember and run to the kitchen, yank open the drawer, rifle though the screwdrivers and pens, and grab the second disposable cellphone, the burner.

“Hi, fella,” I say, since it can only be Stewart.

“Did you know your boyfriend’s old man invented the Internet?”

“Professor Levy? I knew he was some kind of computer engineer.”

“In 1968 his company got one of the early contracts from the Pentagon to help build ARPANET, which became the Internet.”

“Okay. So?”

“Spent half the rest of his life working on MILNET, the Penatgon’s private Internet.”

“And?”

“I don’t know. It’s a new fact. It’s at least ironic, given what his son did. I thought you were a connoisseur of irony.”

“That’s why you called?”

“I called to tell you I’m still working it and may have a new way into the lockbox.
And
that I’m going to be out there next month, in the Mojave, and if you’re not otherwise engaged, it’d be my privilege and pleasure to buy you dinner the evening of the nineteenth at Osteria Mozza, let you drink most of a bottle of Selvarossa Riserva, drive you home along Mulholland, and then, with your kind permission, fuck you silly.”

“Okay. Except that’s a Monday and I kayak late Monday afternoons, and I’m not drinking half bottles of wine until the book’s finished, and Mulholland Drive’s totally out of the way.”

“I’m just—”

“Also, that’s my birthday.”

“Don’t you think I
know
that, you unromantic harpy?”

24

I stayed an extra week in Wilmette after Sabrina’s funeral. When I got back to school, Chuck seemed a little different, more anxious, weird. I chalked it up the obvious—being eighteen, the academic squeeze of the end of our first semester, the world continuing to shatter—but then Chuck told me that he and Buzzy had dropped acid together while I was gone.

“It was really intense,” Chuck said. “It got heavy.”

I had to pry out the details of the heaviest heaviness. It wasn’t Buzzy’s rap about wishing he didn’t have a foreskin, or Chuck’s sudden terror that he’d been somehow responsible for Sabrina’s plane crashing, or the two of them staring out their dorm room window at an unleashed collie on Harvard Street and making it dance, or the nearly endless pause between the sixth and seventh chimes of the church bell in the morning. About halfway through their trip, Chuck “suddenly grokked” that Buzzy was probing and testing him. The boys had rebonded over their tag-team psychic-puppeteering of the dog, but the trip had shaken him.

I mentioned it to Buzzy when I saw him the next day. He told a different version. During a conversation about the Pentagon protest, he’d asked why the cops had let Chuck out so quickly, and Chuck moved very close to him, put his face right up to his, and whispered, “You aren’t who you pretend you are, are you?” For the next hour or so, Chuck would rephrase and ask the question again—”Who are you
actually
?” and “If there’s a God, lying isn’t possible, you know?”