The Company You Keep (24 page)

By the Saturday after your daddy’s flight, I was nowhere closer to knowing how to pursue this story than I had been when your daddy had taken off. I woke at six, as I did every morning, not by intent but by insomnia. And as I did every morning, I came straight to the office to turn on my computer and search Nexis for regional newspaper coverage on Jason Sinai’s flight.

I could have done the search back at the hotel on my laptop, but that meant taking the three half-filled coffee containers, the ashtray, and the pile of newspapers off my laptop, which was in the passenger seat of my car.

That’s why I was in the office when I found Rebeccah Osborne’s
Michigan Daily
editorial.

Reading it, suddenly something crystallized for me.

And this is what it was. I already knew that if there were some way for Jason Sinai to exculpate himself of guilt in the Bank of Michigan robbery, then he would be able to reclaim his daughter.

Now I realized that if there was some evidence that he could find and produce to so exculpate himself—to prove himself innocent—wouldn’t it be logical to think that the original investigating officer from the FBI might have some idea what that evidence might be?

I launched Netscape, did a MapQuest search, then went to Travelocity.

I could drive to LaGuardia, fly to Detroit, and drive to Traverse City in about nine hours.

Or I could leave right that moment, drive through Niagara Falls and Canada, to Port Huron, and to Traverse City in about twelve.

The last thing I did before shutting down my computer, pulling out the packed suitcase I kept under my desk, and leaving for Canada was look up the address of the Traverse City Resident Agency whose daughter had written the
Michigan Daily
editorial, and write down the name and number of its Senior Agent.

John Osborne. From my car on the way to the airport, I called the Traverse City FBI office, found that Osborne was not in, and talked the duty officer into calling Osborne at home and having him call me back on my cell. It took perhaps five minutes until my cell rang, which surprised
me. Osborne, a man with a soft voice who let a couple ponderous seconds pass before replying to any one of my questions, told me he was going down to Ann Arbor for the weekend but could meet me there for a quick coffee the next day, Saturday afternoon.

“You’re there on Jason Sinai business, Mr. Osborne?” I was writing the name of a café down while driving with my knee and talking on my cell phone.

Pause. “No, sir. I’m going to see my daughter.”

The
Michigan Daily
editorial writer. I hung up now and settled in for the long drive. Feeling, for the first time since this story started, that I had actually done something right, although, for the life of me, I couldn’t say what that was.

Well, Benny, I’m very sorry to make you stay up past your bedtime. I mean, with only a human life at stake.

Izzy, try to ignore his nonsense, will you? Think of him as a means, not an end. We need him right now, but we can leave him on the sidewalk and drive right away when we’re done, okay?

As for me, what I remember most distinctly from those days is waking that afternoon on the bus to Denver, with big images of dreams still subjacent to my consciousness, realer than the real and filled with menace.

The enigma of awakening. That little interstice where all the preverbal mystery of existence can be experienced again. There was a swirl of pink, filling my still closed eyes, the thin color of sun through the blood in my eyelids, the heat of the sun against my skin. For as long as I could, I held myself there, in that country of swimming pink light, in the limpness of my body, in the unawareness of where I could be. And when I could hold memory at bay no longer, I opened my eyes.

I opened my eyes and watched assemble the view of a parking lot, liquid with midday sun, deserted but for a man and a girl walking their long shadows toward a truck stop restaurant, the man sweating, the girl in shorts and a tank top. In their wake the air above the hot tarmac shimmered. Total silence filled the scene but for the thrum of big engines beating under me.

Where was I? A stale and antiseptic smell impinged on my consciousness, insistently, as if it were a clue. With a physical effort I
sought to bring it into focus, to name its familiarity, to identify the emotion I carried. When I at last succeeded, it was in fact not enigmatic but as simple as can be. “I am on a bus. It must now be afternoon. I am on a bus.”

Then it all came back.

Izzy. I used to be able to sleep anywhere, and wake so happily, when I was young. Now sleep is a brittle physical state, a different consciousness as difficult to attain when you want it as it is, when it’s unwelcome, impossible to escape. I forced myself to repeat, like a mantra, that I was on a bus, on a bus, on a bus, on a bus. And with each repetition emptiness washed through me—a feeling so bleak, so hopeless, that in a man approaching fifty it can be dignified with the name of despair.

How many days had passed since I blew a joint with Billy in his Sea of Green? Four? Five? How fragile Jim Grant turned out to be, falling apart in three days, four, the very first time he was challenged. Not for the first, but for perhaps the eighth time in my life, I had seen how fragile that whole collection of papers and lies that compose an identity turn out to be, tumbling apart the instant the right pressure is applied. And yet, how unexpected had been the vectors of forces that lined up to take Jim apart! Any one of them I could have weathered; perhaps any two. First Julia, and her lawyers. Then Sharon’s stupid capture. I had always been ready to run with you, Isabel, I had always known this could happen. And now, on the bus, I admitted to myself that the moment Ben Schulberg showed up and began poking around, I had known it was time.

I had been Jim Grant for twenty years, since the summer of 1976, bicentennial year, the year of Carter’s election. I had been Jim Grant almost as long as I had been myself; certainly through the most important parts of my adult life: college, law school, fatherhood, and divorce. And given that between 1970 and 1976, I was not Jason Sinai but a series of other, fleeting, ever-changing identities, I had been Jim Grant longer than I had been myself. Sitting, face against the bus window, looking at an overheated parking lot, now deserted, I realized that everything that had meant anything profound to me as an adult was born and built as Jim Grant.

And now it was gone.

•   •   •

I am Jason Sinai.
For the first time in twenty years, I pronounced the name of my birth to myself; for the first time in twenty years I let it slip past a little mental firewall that kept it out of my memory. How strange it was: even after twenty years, Jason was immediately present to my mind, intimately familiar. How easily I had let myself be separated from my entire past—my family, my parents. At first it was youth, wasn’t it?—youth, and the potency of my beliefs. And then came Bank of Michigan, and something stronger than my beliefs interposed itself; something that made it impossible for me ever to go home, the way Jeff, and Billy, and Bernardine had moved back to the real world, slowly, their consciences clean, even proud of much they had done. Something that made me abandon, with plain determination and grim realism, any thought of ever going home again.

And what would happen, now, to Jason Sinai? Sitting in the bus, the thought came to me like a song of mourning. All of the safety nets had belonged to Jim; Jason had nothing. No law license, no house, no friends, no life. No daughter. No daughter.

It was coming now, like a swimmer surfacing, gasping for air, and with all the twenty years of mental discipline, I tried to escape the truth that had swum into my awareness, the truth that had been sitting there, just below my sleep, when I awoke. But it was everywhere, the bus engine throbbing loss; the carbon-monoxide bouquet of interstate anonymity; the depthless well of mourning that constituted my being. I had lost my daughter. And at the thought, instantly, I decided to surrender.

But what was surrender? Surrender meant nothing for me but hard time in maximum-security lockup, a state prison in Michigan; Ionia, or Standish. There is no daughter in state lockup. At best there is the harsh neon-lit visiting room where rapists and murderers sit nearby, some in shackles. Such a room had awaited me all the time I was Jim Grant. Now Jim Grant no longer existed, and I doubted seriously that Jason Sinai, in jail, would be able to claim paternity of his daughter.

And if I could, what good would it do me, when no court on God’s green earth would order Jim Grant’s divorced wife to bring my child
there? What good would it do me when, at fifty-six, I would be released, if I was released, and you would be seventeen? What happens to aged vanguardists of a failed revolution, without income, without insurance? How do they live? I’d have to find work, and what might that be? Could I teach? Teachers, I knew, had to swear they had never been arrested. And who would hire a teacher at nearly sixty? Only the marginal would be available to me: clerking somewhere, driving a cab, working at the counter of a Wendy’s. And of the possibilities of freedom I had always so thoughtlessly enjoyed—an empty beach, a private piece of woods—not one would remain. Even state land would become closed to me, as I grew older and more infirm, wouldn’t it?

I had, I thought, more in common with Julia than I’d have thought: she had outlived her time in front of the camera, and I my place in American politics.

And you—where would you find the time in your life to visit this person I would become: you with your youth and health, you with your mother’s money and a world of expanding possibilities?

I had always known where this would end. And all this thinking, all this thinking, I had done it before. I had done it in bed, nights; I had done it on long drives; I had done it standing by the window of my office in Saugerties, staring down at the empty streets. I knew the answer, and knowing it, I said it, once again, aloud.
Al tegid lilah
, Little J. Never say night.

I opened my eyes again, now, and began to think.

2.

So where was I? Slowly, as I pieced together the events of the night before, reality reassembled itself: this was a truck stop on I-80 to Chicago; I was on a bus; the bus had stopped for a break. Judging by the time, we must be in Michigan. And judging by that same time, Jim Grant by now existed no longer, and Jason Sinai was the object of a manhunt that involved law enforcement from U.S. marshals to the FBI.

That I was probably still being sought in Canada, not America, was only some help.

Slowly, gingerly, I pulled my mind back from its grief, detaching it piece by piece, like the tentacles of a starfish from an undersea rock. When I could, I rose, reached my Sportsac shoulder bag from the small luggage shelf above, and climbed heavily out of the bus.

A wet heat hung over the tarmac like a shroud, endless Doppler whines radiating from the highway with the sound of complaint. On stiff legs, I forced myself inside the truck stop, promising myself a cup of coffee before anything else. But on the way to the restaurant I passed a bank of newspaper machines, and from the front page of the
Detroit Free Press
I saw both Jason Sinai and Jim Grant’s faces watching me impassively.

Ducking my face toward the ground, I changed course toward the bathroom and went into a stall.

Here I locked the door, sat on the closed toilet with my bag in my lap, pulled my legs up, and buried my face in my knees.

Like this, I sat for an hour.

A good hour, to let the bus leave, to let the population of the truck-stop restaurants change.

An hour. Repeating to myself, over and over.

Let me do what I have to.

Then I can go to hell.

Izzy, have you have ever been in danger? On a boat, while traveling, on a city street late at night? Only if you have had an experience of real, sustained danger, danger so unrelenting that you cannot avoid confronting it, will you understand the change that occurred to me that hour, hiding in a truck-stop bathroom on the I-80 through Michigan.

I had come, at last, to the place you go to if you can be focused, rather than scattered, by risk. Whether decisions are right or wrong, here, you act on them quickly, before they can become too obscured by doubt. I know that’s hard to understand, but it’s true. Perhaps it’s because when you’re in danger, even a wrong decision carried out with determination is better than vacillation. Fear, you see, is the great friend of vacillation, and vacillation is where mistakes are made—mistakes that, here, can be fatal.

Those who are experienced in danger, those who are practiced in risk, know that you cannot stop yourself from anticipating catastrophic failure, that it might even be the most likely outcome, and that it’s foolish to try to pretend it’s not there. Nonetheless, in the presence of the possibility of imminent disaster, the only sensible thing to do is to keep acting, one decision after the other after the other. Each decision that leads to the next is a tiny triumph. That’s why there’s not only fear here, though there’s lots of that. Every second of liberty is also a tiny triumph, a tiny dose of intoxication. It’s why people become criminals and why most criminals are gamblers, and it kept me, like I say, focused on what I was doing. Against that focus, however, was all the force of grief. Fear, I could use, but grief had to be repressed: fear could be a conscious tool, but grief had to stay where it was without being seen.

First I stood up and peed, lengthily, and with relief. Then, sitting again, I withdrew from my bag a laundry kit and carefully took out some Grecian Formula hair dye and a black toupee, a small black mustache in a plastic case, an electric razor, a mirror, and a number of little tubes and combs.