So Much Pretty (32 page)

She was in just a little pain. And the flood of adrenaline had cleared her head of the drugs. She was elated and terrified to be outside. She could not see the highway or parking lot from where she lay, but she could hear police sirens. She crouched and looked for the blank black space the river cut into the landscape,
and finding it, she ran fast, sprinted, was in flight like in a dream, and then there was no more pain at all, just the occasional shock of a stone beneath her foot. And she ran to the river. The water was freezing, she could barely feel the smooth stones and silty bottom on her numb feet. She walked out until she was waist-deep and then put her head down and swam.

Alice and Theo

MAY 1, 2009

O
N MAY DAY
, beneath the bridge on Rabbit Run Road, Theo stood on the river bank below his car with a backpack. He had everything. Hair dye, a snorkel, an insulated bodysuit for swimming, rope, a knife, a fake driver’s license with her picture, her hair Photoshopped black. He had brought a conservative-looking blouse and sweater and skirt. And a black hooded sweatshirt and black spandex pants. He had withdrawn fifteen hundred dollars from his college account, shaved his head, and was wearing colored contacts that made his eyes brown. He had driven all night from the Hudson Valley, and he would take the contacts out and drive all the way back in an hour whether he saw her or not. That was the plan, if he had read her letters right, if he understood
The Wind in the Willows
, if she had not simply lost her mind. That was the plan, and his part was small. Small enough so that he could walk away.

Whether he saw her or not, he knew she’d gotten out. Before leaving campus, he’d read online that she had been taken to the hospital the day before, and he heard it five times on the news driving there. His eyelids drooped, he squinted a little, and suddenly, he saw an eye looking at him from the reeds. Pale clear blue. She was lying in the water, and her body and face were covered with mud and sticks; he realized the thing he had thought was part of a branch was the curve of her bicep. She blinked several times when she knew he’d seen her—looked to the right to show him where to put the bag. But he didn’t leave.

He picked up some rocks and threw them out into the river.

And he whistled a few bars of the Woody Guthrie song “Let’s Go Riding in the Car.”
Let’s go riding in the car, car. I’ll take you riding in the car
.

He looked down. She shook her head almost imperceptibly. He looked more closely at her. There was something wrong, not just exhaustion or cold. He felt his chest tighten like it might burst. She was waiting for him to walk away.

He threw a few more stones, whipped them hard out into the dark green water.

She was staring up at him. Her blue eye so clear, exposed. Now that he had gotten used to where she was, he was afraid she would easily be seen.

She whistled the first six bars of “Peter and the Wolf” so quietly. It was time for him to do the catch. Let go of the bar. Drop the bag. Drive away.

Her heart was pounding in terror every second he stayed, but she continued to stare at him. Looking for the place in his eye to enter, to tell him that she loved him. She received his fear, took in the way he was moving.

Then she just looked at him with pleasure, regarded his beauty. His wide shoulders and long strong arms and legs, the way his jeans fit. His chest, the curve of his jaw, his lips.

This relaxed her. They were frightened, but they were doing this. They were not too frightened to live or to live with what had happened. But they were frightened.

She whistled it again, knowing that it was dangerous now. He looked up and down the riverbank—no one around for miles. But then he hadn’t seen her, either, at first. Anyone could be looking at him, at them. He experienced a moment of complete dislocation from his body, felt that he was not there. Then looked at her again, covered with mud and sticks and brush, and knew she must have been there for hours. He was glad it wasn’t as cold as the week before. He set the bag down in the low honeysuckle hedges.

She blinked several times in acknowledgment. The shape of her eye arced in a smile.

And then he smiled. Stood for a moment as the first rays of sun began to shine out across the river and move, reflected red as blood on its surface. Then he walked up the embankment and back to the car to wait.

Constant

HAEDEN, NY, MAY 5, 2009

T
HERE WAS NO
comfort in the familiarity of the house or the green of the garden or the stillness of the barn. The place rang with Alice’s presence and with fear and collective ill will from the town. Days before, news helicopters had circled the property, hovering above Gene and Claire’s and then Ross’s compound. And last week, while still in the city, Con had seen a photograph in the
Times
of the inside of the barn—the trapeze and paintings—which meant someone had been in there without Gene and Claire knowing and found or taken God knows what.

Since Con and Michelle had arrived two days ago, Claire had not left the bedroom. She hadn’t spoken to any of them, and it was unnerving. He was thankful to have something to do in helping them, because it helped combat his own shock. And though he was filled with pity, he also had to fight his baser feelings of rage at Gene. Con knew it was not rational to be hating his best friend, broken as he was, but he did at that moment. Hated him for the life he’d given Alice, brought her up to live like a colonialist, the new agrarian blind. Thinking the work to be done is in feeding your immediate family and a dozen acquaintances with artisanal food. Eating heirloom tomatoes in hell, like some kind of undead things subsisting near the River Lethe. Gene’s big dream of changing what people grew was already realized in New York—the towering Whole Foods on Houston Street with the chalk sign reading
ARE YOU HUNGRY
? facing a park filled with homeless people. Doctors and lawyers and hipsters and losers with rooftop gardens and the Union Square farmers’ market selling pork chops from rare pig breeds, two for thirty dollars.
And at the front of this movement were those who branched out to colonize the cheap fields of the hinterland. Gene and Claire and him—he bought the property, introduced them to Ross.

What had they hoped would happen? That the whole town would change? The whole town had changed now. He was trying not to be angry, but it was too much. And he could end up taking the kind of fall you read about. Him with his dark skin, him with the birthday money, the doting uncle, the summer visits.

Con had set things up with a lawyer for all of them. Left New York, left work, contacted friends in Montreal, looked into the possibility of placement for all of them with Doctors Without Borders. It was as if all the work he had done his whole life would now bankroll some soft exit or lengthy trials and civil suits. His own contradictory ideologies had come to their natural conclusion. Alice was free somewhere, he was sure of that, and he would not let them be arrested. If there was one thing he could do after all she had done, it was to make sure they were not charged with anything. Not charged with conspiracy.

Michelle was packing Alice’s things, everything that hadn’t been sealed in plastic bags and taken out of the house by the police. But mostly, Michelle was there to sit with Claire.

Con had gone through the house and barn, collecting books to take to the county dump:
The Revolution of Everyday Life, Endgame, Running on Emptiness, Against Civilization, The Temporary Autonomous Zone, The Betrayal of the Self, Future Primitive, Soon All This Will Be Picturesque Ruins
. He picked up Berkman’s
Prison Memoirs
and threw it in the box filled with these kinds of titles, all of them comprising an awful commentary. Con had been planning to throw out the books or burn them, but it didn’t matter anymore. His stomach felt hollow, and he knew that he was in shock, in a kind of controlled panic. In some ways, it didn’t feel all that different from sitting in the boardroom at Pharmethik. Rage. Panic. A thing snowballing.

Con took the box of books and set it on the kitchen table.

“What are you doing, Connie?” Gene asked him softly. “Packing things up nice and neat for the feds?”

“Brother,” Con said, keeping his voice low and steady, looking at his friend’s face. Gene was pale, and his eyes were swollen and bloodshot. “I know we are more upset than we can even feel right now, but we can’t be stupid for the next few weeks—continue to be stupid. I think our choices are very limited at this point. I’ve bailed out Ross, who is completely fucked, and we have now been interviewed enough by the local police to have real cause for concern. I can assure you, this is not the end. They will find things, no matter how circumstantial or academic they seem to us, and they will find reasons to have us all arrested, and very very shortly.”

“Honestly,” Gene told him, “the reasons aren’t circumstantial. We know who we are in this place.” Constant struggled to nod and stay silent, and then Gene pulled a worn paperback out of the box, opening it randomly and reading to himself for a minute before reading it out loud. “‘Behind us far over the walls of the arena the vague notes of the band begin again and float like banners across the hot sky. Meat. Blood. Memory. War. We rise to greet the State, to confront the State. Smell the flowers while you can.’”

Con had nothing to say. Only his friend’s grief prevented him from taking the book out of his hands and tearing it to pieces. Eating the fucking pages. None of this shit mattered one bit anymore! Meat. Blood. Memory. War. No shit. What kind of a moron was Gene Piper?

It was simply a description of their lives. Con’s especially. Looking away, or maybe looking directly at all of them and at everything, every little detail for far
far
too long, until all the pain that he had understood, that he had never revealed, never acted upon, had created what felt like an inevitable moment. A moment he couldn’t prevent now, no matter what—a moment he created with a fucking birthday present. It might have only happened
faster if he’d been living there in the first place. Or maybe it never would have happened at all. As he stood and looked at Gene, his rage subsided, and he felt he might cry but didn’t know if it was from relief. It didn’t matter anymore if he understood anything or not. He was moving again in a way that required precise thinking and acting. He knew what she had done, and he knew how fucking brave it was, and it had set him free and might also send him to jail.

Who, apart from Con and Alice, had been close enough to the state to pass, to be considered a leader, considered one of them? She may have looked exactly like Gene, but in this way, she was Con’s daughter and no one else’s. And he wasn’t about to let her down, let her parents go to jail. Enough of the bullshit. They could reflect on it when they got to Montreal.

Gene tossed the book back into the box and looked up at Con, and when he saw his friend’s eyes, so much like Alice’s, his thoughts stopped racing. A somersault in his stomach, a breathlessness. It came like a wave. He’d thought he was feeling rage, but really, it was the last surge of denial before desolation, and it was breaking, fast, to fall upon them all. The baby he and Michelle had delivered, their little girl, their friend, with her voice and her laugh and her new questions, her drawings and ideas, her sweetness, her incredible sweetness, was gone, and their dream and their house and the life they’d loved was gone, too.

Michelle came out of the bedroom. Her face was drawn and swollen from crying. “She’s talking,” she said. “I’ve written a script for Xanax. I’m going to drive into Elmville and pick it up.”

“Try to be back soon,” Con told her. “I’d like to get us all out of here by three o’clock.”

She kissed him as she pulled keys from her bag, and he felt the heat of her face and tasted salt.

“No. No,” Gene said. “Fuck! If they had let us stay with her in the hospital all night, she would still be here, and we would know if she was okay. We’ll never be able to go anywhere now!
People will think we’re meeting her somewhere.” His voice broke, and Con came forward to put his hands on his shoulders. “I don’t want to go anywhere. What if she comes home? Oh my God oh my God,” he whispered. “My God.” He wept. “Please let her be safe, let her be safe. I don’t care what she’s done.”

Flynn

CLEVELAND, OHIO, OCTOBER 25, 2009

F
ROM WHERE I
sat, I could see the orange light shining on the windows and illuminating the bricks on the building across the street. People were coming and going from the art gallery next door that used to be an old slaughterhouse. Dressed up in formal strangeness, standing out front smoking. There must have been another opening. I watched a woman walk across the street wearing high boots and a poncho made entirely out of small flame-shaped white lightbulbs. My apartment is two blocks from where my old apartment was and twice as big, has a better view of the street.

From the other room, I could hear the scanner, a set of tones, and then cops talking back and forth in numbers and street names.

I shut my laptop and sat watching the pigeons, watching the fading light turning pink and bright as it fell across the buildings, cutting sharp and dark shadows into the brick. I listened to the people from the gallery talking and bringing things onto the loading dock. Someone sang the first verse of an old Velvet Underground song, and then there were kids shouting as they rode by on bikes.

“Hey! Hey! What’s that?”

“It’s art. You wanna come to our show? Actually, wait. You want to do us a favor? I’ll give you five bucks if you ride around and give people these cards.”

“Five bucks? Nigga, please.”

“Were you raised by a drag queen? Because nobody says ‘Nigga, please.’”

“No skinny-ass Chinese guy doesn’t, maybe.”

“FYI, I’m Korean. Are you guys going to do it or what? Five bucks and you can come eat at the opening, too.”

“Well, FYI, you got those mini hot dogs like last time? ’Cause that shit was good.”