Andersen, Kurt (36 page)

Two weeks ago in Miami, she explains, in my hotel room, the night Hunter got hurt and Sophie got busted, she was using my computer, and came across the manuscript, and just peeked at it, and was about to stop reading when she came to the first passage about herself, and then kept reading, and couldn’t stop, and finally copied the whole thing onto her flash drive and finished reading it on the bus ride home.

“Oh, Christ. You didn’t tell Hunter about it, did you? Or your parents? Or anybody else? Or print it out or email it?”

“
No.
I swear to God, Grams,
no.
I hammered the flash drive and threw the pieces in different sewers and wiped the data on Hunter’s hard drive completely, better than the Pentagon recommends.”

“What?”

“Oh, the Defense Department has this sanitization matrix they use on computers, but they say to overwrite your deleted data seven times, and I did it like
twenty-five
times. Don’t worry. It’s gone. I’m so sorry, Grams.”

“I’m really glad you told me, Waverly.”

I find myself relieved, glad, even, that someone apart from Stewart and my lawyer now
knows
—someone I love.

“It’s cool that when you were, like, twelve years old,” she says, “you guys
invented
LARPing, huh?”

“LARPing?”

“Live-action role-playing games. But Grams?” She’s whispering. “What did you
do
? The big bad thing.”

Right: she’s only read up to 1967. I take a breath, intending to cut to the chase, then I stop. I could blurt out the salient facts in a few sentences, like the counts in an indictment. But why I’m writing a
book
is to lay out something approaching the whole truth, with the thousand relevant dots in place, ready to be connected—some of the lines drawn by me, the overdetermining author and apologist, some by you, my jury of dispassionate strangers—and turned into a picture with the queer complications and shadings that make it a life. I don’t want to summarize my story in a tweet, not even to Waverly. Especially not to Waverly.

“How about this—how about I send you each chapter as I finish it? All the way to the end.”

“Really?
Really?
Thanks, Grams, that would be amazing.”

“And after you read each one, use your sanitization matrix to make it self-destruct in five seconds and then disavow all knowledge of my actions.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Stupid joke. Until I finish, you are my one and only reader.”

“That makes me feel like crying, Grams.”

“
That
makes
me
feel like crying.” Her mother once told me that women produce lots more of a certain hormone than men, and have tinier tear ducts, so we cry four times as often.

Waverly says the second surgery on Hunter’s hand went well, but the Miami prosecutors will agree to drop Sophie’s hoax-weapon-of-mass-destruction charge only if she pleads guilty to possession of a counterfeit driver’s license. “Which is still a
felony,
” Waverly says, “and she might have to go back down there and spend a month in jail this summer. They’re being total fascists about it.”

“That doesn’t sound too fascist to me.”

After I hang up, I pour myself a seltzer and, still in pajamas, walk out to my patio carrying the laptop and legal pad. I sniff the Chinese snowballs and look down past my unbelievably red bougainvillea over the big bowl of Los Angeles—millions of people within my purview but not a single human being visible, the kind of perfectly still, clear, warm L.A. day that seems perfectly sweet or foreboding, depending on my mood.

I sit on the less bird-poopy chaise, the cat curls up at my hip, and I begin transferring notes of my Alex conversation onto a computer file. Even more strongly than before, I have the sense that I’ve heard these transcribed words some other time. I think of the line from
The Matrix
that won me over to the movie—when the rebel Trinity explains to Neo, “A déjà vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix.”

I start Googling some of the phrases in my notes.
Fools we are talking this way … as though I’d do anything to you … you’re a little mixed up about things … you should leave this whole thing alone … no proof.

The omniscient cloud reveals all. My cat stands up, alarmed, when I say “Oh my
God.
”

Whole chunks of his conversation were from the Ferris-wheel scene in
The Third Man,
Orson Welles wheedling and warning Joseph Cotton. Graham Greene is the uncredited writer of a quarter of what Alex said to me on the phone a half hour ago.

“It’s a far better thing that I do,” the Harry Lime character mockingly says to his old pal, the writer Holly Martins, quoting Dickens. And then, “Don’t try to be a policeman, old man.” And on and on: “You know you ought to leave this thing alone … Don’t be melodramatic … There’s no proof against me, beside you … Oh, Holly, what fools we are, talking to each other this way. As though I would do anything to you—or you to me … You’re just a little mixed up about things … Nobody left in Vienna I can really trust—and we have always done everything together.” Even the farewell—Harry Lime’s “So long, Holly” became Alex Macallister’s “So long, Hollander.”

When Google can’t find the other line I’m sure I’ve heard before, I spring up, sending Clarence Darrow scurrying inside ahead of me as I run to the room where I keep the fiction, crouch down to pull an old book from the F shelf, flip pages, read, flip pages, read, flip another page, and find it. James Bond, on the golf course at the Royal St. Marks, having been accused by the cheating villain of cheating, says to Auric Goldfinger: “Here, steady on. You don’t want a libel action on your hands.”

Alex Macallister is a walking, talking real-time remix of fictional midcentury villains. Is he aware he does it? Does he do it all the time, with everyone, and from other movies and books? Is his entire life a nonstop work of performance art that only he fully appreciates? Or is it an unconscious tic, some kind of OCD cultural kleptomania? Either way, I think, it’s stunning, and he’s a fucking nut.

22

Yes, I’d chosen to attend a 331-year-old New England university, a place that fetishized its traditions and the idea of tradition, but in the fall of 1967 Radcliffe and Harvard Colleges struck me nonetheless as ludicrously old-fashioned.

I was ready to launch my modern, independent young adulthood. But I wasn’t allowed to eat with Chuck and Alex and the other freshman boys in their dining hall, and the boys had to wear jackets and ties at every meal. When Chuck visited me at my dorm, he had to sign in with the desk attendant in the lobby, who rang a bell alerting me, whereupon I was supposed to step out into my hallway and yell “Man on” before he shambled up, and then I had to leave the door to my room open as long as he was there. Boys were invited to the dorm lounge en masse a couple of times the first semester for little parties called jolly-ups.

The first petition any Radcliffe student stuck in front of me was a protest against the threatened end of the Saturday-night girls-only milk-and-cookies parties. I declined to sign. (If that wasn’t enough to earn her everlasting hatred, I subsequently overheard that same girl refer to fellatio as
fell-LOT-ee-o.
When Alex and I passed her in the Yard one day and I told him about the mispronunciation, he walked back and said, “Excuse me? It’s
fellatio,
” then returned to me and whispered,
“The bitch is dead.”
)

The college newspaper still called black people Negroes. We were supposed to consider it a great milestone that ours was the first Radcliffe class allowed to use Harvard’s libraries.

All the vestigial quaintness served to fire up my conviction that Alex and Chuck and I were part of a vanguard of a new and improved modern species. As I look back on my freshman year from here in the future, it
all
seems quaint—not just the twee final days of nice-young-ladies-and-gentlemen New England, but our absolutely wide-eyed embrace of the liberated age unfolding and exploding.

I called my parents collect every Sunday after
The Smothers Brothers.
But the only conversation I specifically remember from September until just before Thanksgiving was the one in which my mother, extremely upset, told me about Sabrina’s single great act of adolescent misbehavior. They’d come home early two nights earlier and caught her showing a pornographic double feature in the basement to two dozen fellow New Trier sophomores whom she’d charged $2.50 apiece. Sabrina had learned about renting movies and projection equipment when they’d organized the Esperanto Club screening, and apparently, getting prints of
Gentlemen Prefer Nature Girls
and
A Taste of Her Flesh
was no more difficult than booking William Shatner’s
Incubus.
She was trying to earn enough money to fly to L.A. for the national Esperanto convention with her boyfriend, Jamie, whose family had moved to Ohio over the summer. I loved every aspect of the story except the lack of punishment. Because of her Esperanto excuse, and because my mother felt responsible for having shown Sabrina the movie-exhibitor ropes, they were going to let her go to L.A. and then spend Thanksgiving with Jamie and his family in Cincinnati on the way home.

“Is that what they do in Junior Achievement these days?” Chuck’s roommate said when I told them the story. Buzzy Freeman was nice to me from the get-go—like him, I was a lapsed Catholic; also, I was interested in Vietnam, I cursed, and I injected myself with drugs. He was premed. I liked him because he was so graceful and mature concerning Chuck and me, unembarrassed and embarrassing about popping out to the library whenever Chuck and I wanted to use their room to make out or have sex. Buzzy liked Chuck because they were both outdoorsy and athletic and
male
—the hunting and fishing, the leather jackets, the firecrackers, the Morse code, the radio-controlled airplanes. And Alex was fond of Buzzy because he was attractive, “a civilized
cowboy
or something,” and recently had, like Alex, read Winston Churchill’s
Memoirs of the Second World War.
Buzzy Freeman was almost twenty-one. He had short blond hair but a full beard, and he’d tacked a dirty, tattered red, yellow, and blue National Liberation Front flag to the wall over his bed. He was the coolest person my age I’d ever met. “Buzzy isn’t circumcised,” Chuck told me our first week in college.

He’d grown up in Las Vegas, where his father worked on the government’s nuclear bomb tests. “You could feel it like an earthquake when they’d blow one at night,” he told us the first time we all smoked grass together. “From our backyard, you could see the flash on the horizon. It was like a thunderstorm with lightning but all compressed and shot in slow motion.” Mr. Freeman had become an alcoholic after the government rejected his plan to explode an atomic bomb on the moon to collect lunar samples, and he committed suicide the day President Kennedy signed the nuclear test ban treaty in 1963. Buzzy joined the Coast Guard in order to pay for college, and said he “was in country September sixty-five to November sixty-six, on a cutter out of Danang.” Beyond the basic details of his tour—”Coastal Surveillance Force, Squadron One, cruising the seventeenth parallel”—he didn’t much discuss his experiences in Vietnam. “Boarded junks, fired on sampans. Interdicted NVN supply lines to the VC. It was heavy. So I owe the people.” I knew “VC” meant “Vietcong,” and I found out later that “NVN” stood for “North Vietnamese Navy.” And by “the people,” we understood that he meant the beleaguered Vietnamese struggling for liberation from the vicious American Moloch and its puppet regime in Saigon. Buzzy was our tragic antihero who had been to hell and back and done terrible things but seen the light, an apostate filled with remorse and seeking to make restitution for his imperialist crimes.

All of this we’d learned by our third week in Cambridge. Buzzy had gone to a crappy high school and was excited about being among fellow intellectuals at last. Late one September night in the Hayes-Bickford cafeteria, when the four of us were discussing Malcolm X, Buzzy ran back to his room and returned to lay a tattered, underlined copy of Frantz Fanon’s
The Wretched of the Earth
on the table. Another night, all of us taking turns playing pinball at Tommy’s Lunch, Buzzy said we
had
to read Antonio Gramsci’s prison notebooks—that “Gramsci on the ‘masks of consent’ in liberal bourgeois society is
mind
-blowing.” That’s the way we talked in the fall and winter of 1967. It didn’t sound stilted or ridiculous to us.

One Saturday afternoon in October, we lounged together in the sun on the grass by the river, eating potato chips. We teased one another—Chuck for his striped bell-bottoms, Alex for describing a passing rowboat as “that yellow punt,” Buzzy for liking the Beach Boys and me for calling the band we’d just seen perform in a Boston parking garage the Cream instead of Cream. We created an impromptu quiz show in which we had to recite passages from the left-wing philosopher Herbert Marcuse—mine was “people recognize themselves in their commodities, they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home.”

“Or in their
television
sets,” Buzzy added with a smile, looking at Alex. Alex was probably the only kid in Harvard Yard who had a TV in his dorm room.

Hearing the thirty thousand fans across the Charles chanting and singing and cheering louder and louder as Harvard’s football team beat Columbia, Alex said it reminded him of the Nuremberg rallies in
Triumph of the Will,
which he’d just watched in his freshman seminar.

“I think one reason Marcuse is so persuasive,” Chuck said, “is because he saw Nazism firsthand.”

“Did you know,” Buzzy asked, “that he worked for U.S. intelligence, not just during the war in Europe, total Oscar Sierra Sierra man, but also afterward, in the fifties, in Washington?”

“Wow,” I said, “Herbert
Marcuse
was in the
OSS
? Which became the CIA, right? Did you guys know that?”