Revolution Number 9 (13 page)

“At MIT?”

Charlie couldn’t imagine his Stu, Bombo, at MIT. “After,” he said. He waited for Junior to ask him when after or who he was or what he was doing here. Instead, the boy stared down at the whirling centrifuges, sighed, and said: “He’s going public.”

“Stu?”

The son nodded. “Nasdaq,” he said. “It’s all set. We’re going to be rich. Richer.” He didn’t look happy about it.

“You don’t look happy about it.”

“I don’t?” the boy said, as though it were a revelation. He gazed up at Charlie. His expression changed.
Here come the
questions
, Charlie thought, and got ready to trot out the imperfect cover story he’d prepared.

He never had to use it. The next moment there was a tremendous boom, and the plastic sink covers from every desk shot into the air, one or two striking the ceiling, followed by gaudily toned geysers of detritus from the plumbing system.

Junior looked around wildly. He began to shake. It wasn’t a figure of speech. “Did I do that?” he said. He was his father’s—Bombo’s—son; especially if it’s true that history is farce the second time around.

· · ·

Charlie stood outside Cullen House. It was a rambling structure of brick and stone, sporting columns, a frieze, and other architectural flourishes he didn’t know the names of. An industrial-size vacuum cleaner sat on the threshold. The door was open. Charlie went in.

The smell hit him right away, not strong but complex and unique: buffered floor wax and must, ammonia and rot, frying grease and stale beer: the smell of Cullen House when the sun warmed its old wooden bones. The smell hadn’t changed at all. Charlie walked past a sign that read “Backhand Clinic—3:30” and started up the broad stairs.

· · ·

Rebecca Klein lived at the east end of the hall on the top floor of Cullen House. Strictly speaking, no men were allowed in the women’s rooms after eight on weekdays or eleven on weekends, and it was the job of the senior adviser, who lived in a big and strategically placed room at the top of the first floor, to enforce the rules. But by the time Blake met Rebecca there were couples living openly in Cullen House, and the door to the SA’s room was always closed, nothing ever emerging but the smell of marijuana.

Blake and Rebecca were one of those couples. Blake ate in the dining room, used the bathroom in the hall, slept in the fairy-tale bed, lay talking for hours in that bed, made love in it. That room, unnumbered, at the east end of the hall on the top floor of Cullen House, with its posters and its bed, was his
world during the spring of his freshman year and most of his second, and last, year. There he entered an intimacy he had never known, changing from a boy who kept things to himself to a man who told his secrets, at least to Rebecca. He told her about his mother, about Ollie, and finally about his father in the jungle west of some place with a blacked-out name.

And Rebecca, lying beside him in the bed, with a joint in her hand and Joni Mitchell playing quietly on the stereo, said: “You must be outraged.”

“Outraged?”

“About your father.”

“Because of Ollie, you mean?”

“No,” said Rebecca. “Because he got killed.”

“Outraged at who?” Blake asked.

“At the government, of course,” she replied, sending some outrage his way. “At Nixon, at Kissinger, at the whole fucking establishment that runs this country. Who do you think killed him?”

From the walls around the fairy-tale bed, Marx, Engels, Che, Rosa, La Pasionaria, Mao, Malcolm, Ho, General Giap, and Rebecca’s father all looked on. Everything began to make sense. The political world, a world he had never thought much about, was turning inside out. And as it did, it revealed its ugliness, and he awoke to the idea that there was an enemy to blame for his father’s death and all the other deaths, an enemy right here at home, up on top—and to be toppled.

Rebecca was watching him closely. “I want you to meet Andy Malik,” she said.

“Who’s he?”

“A friend of mine.”

“What kind of friend?”

“A very smart one.” Rebecca rolled on top of him, rubbing her body against his. Blake lost himself there in her soft bed.

· · ·

Charlie knocked on the unnumbered door at the east end of the hall on the top floor of Cullen House. No one answered. He turned the knob and went inside.

The room was vacant. It had a simple, steel-framed bed with
a bare mattress on top, a simple wooden dresser, a simple wooden desk. The walls were bare. It was devoid of resonance, atmosphere, magic: nothing, just an empty student bedroom in the summer vacation. But more than all those absences, what impressed Charlie was its size. The room was tiny, insignificant, claustrophobic. He closed the door and went away.

The library was still open, the young librarian still at her desk. This time she gave Charlie a big smile. “Success?” she asked.

It took him a moment to realize what she was talking about, a moment for her smile to begin to fade. “Yes, thanks,” he said.
You’ve got to be quicker
, he told himself,
quicker and smarter
.

A minute later, Charlie had a business directory in his hands. A few seconds after that he was looking at what he wanted:

The librarian still had her eyes on him as he walked toward the door. He looked at her, wondering again if she had recognized his face, trying to read her mind. He got ready to run.

She smiled. “I’m off at five,” she said. “If you want to go for coffee or something.”

“W
hat I’m saying,” said Andrew Malik, “is that power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Not,” he added after a pause, “my own. Lord Acton.”

The members of the Tom Paine Club, all of whom fit comfortably in Malik’s one-bedroom apartment, laughed. Malik, sitting in the only chair, stroked his black Zapata mustache and allowed his eyes to twinkle. He scanned the faces of the members of the Tom Paine Club, gathered on the floor around him, and the twinkling stopped, the way ripples in water flatten when the breeze dies down. “On the other hand,” he went on, “life without power is a form of death.”

Malik paused again. During that pause, Stu Levine, who came to the meetings with Blake and Rebecca in hope that involvement in the club might lead to getting laid, spoke up: “Is that one Lord Acton’s too?”

Andrew Malik had a look for moments like that—head tilted back, forehead creased, half squinting—a look he now turned on Stu. “That one,” he said, “is mine.”

“A form of death,” said Stu, nodding and reddening at the same time, the way he did in retreat. “Wow.”

It was December of Blake’s sophomore year. Outside Malik’s apartment—only graduate students were allowed to live off campus—snow fell heavily from the night sky. Blake gazed out the window, not really listening as Malik went on about untruth, injustice, the American way. He didn’t need Malik anymore. In the past few months he had torn up his draft card and mailed the pieces to the Selective Service, marched on Washington once, occupied the campus ROTC office twice, and tried to close down the nearby air force base three times.
He’d seen Rebecca dragged off by her hair and arrested, and been whacked across the shoulders with a nightstick for trying to stop it. He’d seen murderous hatred in the eyes of cops and bystanders, seen those poisonous emotions that Nixon and Kissinger and the others tried to hide from the cameras, but still seeped from the screen with every broadcast. Blake didn’t need Malik anymore. He was radicalized; a true believer.

The meeting ended around midnight. The members of the Tom Paine Club went out into the night and walked back to their residences, silent in the snow. Blake and Rebecca were the last to leave. As they went out, Malik said, “Don’t go just yet.”

They turned to him. He stood before his bookcase, a sagging floor-to-ceiling structure of bricks and boards. He was tall and thin, with a narrow, fleshless face and a stooped carriage; without the mustache, it would have been easy to imagine him in robe and cowl. He regarded them from across the room, nodded as though he’d come to a decision, then gestured for them to follow. He led them down the short corridor to the bathroom, where he closed the door and turned on the tap in the sink.

“What’s going on?” Blake said.

Rebecca was more in tune. “You think you’re being bugged?” She seemed excited by the idea.

“Would the government that has no compunction about dropping napalm on innocents balk at planting microphones in my humble abode?” Malik asked.

“But is there any evidence?” Blake said.

“Evidence?”

“Evidence that they’re doing it.”

Malik gave him the look he’d given Stu. “Evidence, Number Nine?” he said. At times, at this sort of time, he called Blake by his baseball number. “How about strange noises on my phone line? Clicks, echoes, voices. Is that the kind of evidence you mean?” He waited for a reply. Blake said nothing. Even as late as a month or two ago, he might have mentioned hearing similar sounds from time to time on many telephones; now he was finding it easier to believe in conspiracies.

Malik closed the cover on the toilet, sat down. Rebecca and
Blake shared the edge of the bathtub. “I’m not satisfied with the club,” Malik said.

Rebecca leaned toward him. “What do you mean?”

“It’s fine for what it is—a tool for raising consciousness. But useless when it comes to action.”

“Why?” Rebecca asked.

“Because it’s an officially sanctioned club of the college, with a known membership and a public profile. What we need is a club within the club.”

The temperature and humidity were rising, as though the little bathroom had a microclimate of its own. “What for?” Blake asked.

“Action,” Malik replied. “Didn’t I say that already?” Twisting around, he raised the lid of the toilet’s water cabinet and removed an envelope that was taped to the inside. He handed it to Rebecca. She opened it, removed some papers, and held them so Blake could see too.

There were four xeroxed pages in the envelope, covered with densely packed handwriting in German, a language Blake didn’t read. But there were diagrams too, and he understood what they were about and why Malik kept the papers where he did.

Malik reached behind him, flushed the toilet. When he spoke, his voice was low; Blake could hardly hear him over the noise of the flushing and the water running in the sink. “I understand your friend Levine is a technical wiz,” he said.

“You do?” Blake answered.

Malik ignored him. He lowered his voice a little more. “Do you think the two of you could build something like that?”

“I doubt it,” Blake answered. “And I wouldn’t even if I could.”

Malik nodded and smoothed his mustache. He was in his last year of a master’s program in political science, perhaps five years older than Blake, although it seemed like much more than that to Blake, and probably to Malik too. “That’s up to you,” Malik said. “You’re the best judge of the maturity of your commitment.” He glanced at Rebecca.

“Maturity?” said Blake.

“I’m talking about political maturity,” Malik replied. “Political power, as you know, grows out of the barrel of a gun. That
doesn’t mean you have to shoot anyone with it. It’s enough to show that you’ve got it and will use it. No one has to get hurt, or anything like that. We just want to make a symbolic statement.”

“Who’s we?”

Malik looked at Rebecca again. She put her hand on Blake’s, gave it a squeeze. “Just listen to him.”

“Why?”

“I want you to,” Rebecca said, and rubbed the back of his hand.

Blake listened. Malik talked. Rebecca murmured sounds of assent. Water ran in the sink; the toilet was flushed a few more times; the temperature and humidity kept rising.

“I won’t do it,” Blake said at the end.

Rebecca took her hand away. Malik smiled. “Revolution,” he said, “number-nine style.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Blake said.

“Like the Beatles song,” Malik explained. “The one that makes a lot of noise and ends up going nowhere.” He got off the toilet, shut off the tap, left the room. Rebecca followed him. Blake walked back to Cullen House by himself, got into the fairy-tale bed. He spent the rest of the night alone, and moved back in with Stuart Levine the next morning. Rebecca didn’t speak to him again until May.

· · ·

There was nothing to keep Charlie on campus any longer. He knew the next step. But his feet refused to take it. Instead, when he left the library, he turned not toward town and the bus station, but back across the central quad, past the chapel with its stone campanile, stopping before a white house with black shutters. The sign over the double doors read “Ecostudies Center.” The sign hadn’t always been there. Neither had the house always been white with black shutters. Once it had been cream with brown shutters and had had a simple single door with a different sign over it. Charlie noticed other changes. There were more windows in the front now, and additions had been built along both sides. He might have been seeing it for the first time, an ordinary building, without resonance,
like the bare bedroom in Cullen House. Then the chapel bell began to ring.

Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong
. Very loud and very near. Charlie, standing in the heat of the summer sun, went cold. Five o’clock. Of course.
I’m off at five
. That’s all it was. Just five o’clock. Charlie realized that right away, but it didn’t stop him from vomiting on the well-trimmed lawn. There was no warning, no nausea; just a sudden heaving from deep inside.
If you want to make a symbolic statement
, he thought, twenty-two years too late,
make it on paper
. Hardly aware of his movements, he wheeled around and was on his way, away from that ordinary house, the chapel, the central quad, the campus. He tried to keep himself to a walking pace and almost did.

· · ·

Blake dropped out of the Tom Paine Club, but Stuart Levine did not. With Cassell’s
German-English Dictionary
and Berlitz’s
German for Travelers
at his elbow, Stu built the bomb during the week before Christmas break. He did it in his room, using speaker wire from his stereo, his Big Ben bedside alarm clock, two D-type batteries, and the contents of a brown bag from the hardware store, the sort of brown bag that would hold a couple of peanut butter sandwiches and an apple.