Andersen, Kurt (43 page)

“You’re not sick or anything? I mean, ‘before you go’ in like twenty years, right?”

“Sure hope so.”

Speaking of LeBron James, she tells me, Sophie “copped a disorderly conduct plea” in Florida and just finished serving her one-week sentence in the Miami-Dade Women’s Detention Center, an experience for which she’s receiving independent-study credit from their high school. “She’s like this celebrity now,” Waverly tells me. “It’s sick.” I know “sick” isn’t exactly a pejorative. The night of Sophie’s release from jail, paparazzi photographed her standing next to LeBron James at Mark Zuckerberg’s thirtieth-birthday party at a South Beach nightclub called Snatch.

“So you,” I ask Waverly, “are not freaked out by what I did?”

“You didn’t
do
it.”

“Wait and see what we did. What happened.”

“When I got back from Miami, Dad gave me a book on cults.”

“He thinks you’re in a cult?”

“He thinks Hunter’s brainwashed me. You know, Hunter’s always talked about how insane the Vietnam time was, but I never understood what he meant until now, from reading your book.” She pauses. “I’m not saying
you
were insane.”

“Oh, I pretty much was.”

“Right,” Waverly says. “Temporarily. Right?”

“Yup,” I confirm, and we say goodbye.

My temporary insanity aside, I think it should be noted for the record that the slaughter in Vietnam was staggeringly and unnecessarily huge. More than a million soldiers and another million or maybe two million civilians died.

We know now, however, that a considerable fraction of those civilians were killed by the North Vietnamese and Vietcong. We know now that the Tet offensive really was, as Lyndon Johnson said, “a complete failure” militarily for the Communist side.

And we know now that the prisoner we watched being executed on TV had previously killed one of his executioner’s men and the man’s wife and children. We also know now that the general, the cold-blooded killer who so shocked my conscience that evening, had been considered a humanitarian figure in South Vietnam.

We also now know, by the way, the truer stories behind some of those ghetto riots in the summer of 1967. The taxi driver in Newark was roughed up by the police, but he didn’t die. The kid shot by the Tampa police had robbed a store. The kid in Houston was shot not by the police but by another kid. I am not saying that racism in America in 1967 wasn’t savage and deep-seated, only that some of the spontaneous violent uprisings against it were ignited by plausible fictions.

And as disinclined as I am to feed my son-in-law’s hysteria concerning my granddaughter, in 1968 my friends and I did comprise a little cult. Which is why I’ve been allergic ever since to groups of people with single-minded visionary passion and without any doubt that they possess the one truth—why, ever since, I’ve seen cults everywhere I look, not just literal cults, like Scientology, but the astoundingly successful ones around Warren Buffett and Oprah Winfrey, Linus Torvalds and Steve Jobs, Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama.

Ours was a cult based on our narcissistic love of our beautiful young American selves and hatred of the horrible American pod people callously killing millions. As with the Muslim cult of hate embodied for a while by Osama bin Laden, and as with the worst and nuttiest of the new American haters, ours was a nihilism that fancied itself utopian. On the spectrum of self-righteous madness, we were somewhere between the lunatic Islamists and the lunatic American right-wingers.

I call Greta. She asks if I’m relieved to be finished with the school year. Commencement was two days ago. I’m touched that she keeps track of my academic calendar.

“It feels excellent. I can lock myself in my bunker and finish the book by Labor Day. Which is why I’m calling.”

I tell her I need a primer from her on the neuroscience of hate, which is, along with love, the focus of her work.

“You really want
my help
?” she asks.

The surprise in her voice makes me feel like crying.

Over the winter I asked her about the neuroscience of free will, but I didn’t tell her it was research. She’d told me the evidence mainly indicates that free will is an illusion, an instant revisionist trick our minds do to fool us into thinking we
decide
what to do and
then
do it—whereas it’s more like the reverse of that, our unconscious lizard brain initiating every action on its own, and only then our conscious brain rubber-stamping those actions as “choices.” Or occasionally vetoing them. I find that somewhat comforting, as I contemplate what I did back in 1968, but also disturbing as a user’s manual for human consciousness.

“Yes, sweetie, I do want your help.”

She tells me about the “neural correlates of hate” that she and her fellow researchers have started pinpointing, no longer solely by taking fMRI pictures of blood flow but by injecting photosensitive proteins and then shining blue light on the exposed brain to see how it responds. And, in her newly funded project with neuroscientists in Shanghai, by implanting electrodes directly into the brains of people who are consumed with hate.

“How can you do that?” I ask.

“Technically, you mean?”

“No … ethically.”

“They’re volunteers.”

I don’t raise the question of what “volunteering” might mean in China. “Cutting to the chase, the bottom line is? Give me ‘Neuroscience for Dummies.’”

“I
hate
it when you do that.” We both laugh. “Correlating isn’t the same as causing, of course, but hate seems to burn mainly in the right side of the front of your brain. One’s brain. That’s where hateful feelings are either denatured or amplified.”

“Each of us is wired to either hate more or hate less?”

“Basically, probably, yeah. Certain families and certain cultures
intentionally
build up the—so to speak—hate muscles in the brains of children. Hurting them, insulting them, steeling them, maybe indoctrinating them with false beliefs.”

“Your grandmother indoctrinated me with plenty of false beliefs about the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost—”

“No, no, I mean false beliefs about the people you’re supposed to hate.”

“Ah.”

“By the way? One thing that
really
interests me? A couple of the neural correlates for hate are also significant neural correlates for
love.
Makes sense, right? The happy or angry tunnel vision that won’t switch off.”

Like in Karen Hollaender, ages seventeen and eighteen. “Right.”

“As with most brain states, there’s a useful mode and a pathological mode—schizophrenia bad, creativity good. A guy I know in San Diego is doing interesting work on athletes, how the best ones develop tunnel vision, psychologically as well as literally, in terms of visual perception. Swimmers, especially.”

“Swimmers, huh?” Such as a boy who swam the 400-yard freestyle at the 1966 Illinois state championship in under four minutes? “That’s interesting.”

As we chat about Waverly, Jungo gets on an extension, tells me he’s trying to “really Six Sigma her college admissions process,” and reads aloud from his Excel spreadsheet of “places we’re planning on applying to,” so that I can give him the names of all the professors and deans and trustees I know at each institution. I’m so relieved that Stanford is not on the list. Alex is on Stanford’s board.

“Thanks, Mom,” Jungo says, “I’ll shoot you a follow-up email with action steps,” and when he hangs up, I ask Greta if she’s talked to Alex Macallister again.

“Uh-uh, why?”

No reason in particular except that he’s the only person alive for whom I feel actual hatred.
“Oh, I had a conversation with him after you and I talked in New York, and … I just thought he might have been in touch with you again.”

I rarely feel anger, let alone hate. I sometimes feel frustrated and disgusted and despairing, but it almost never blossoms into true hate, not even for the ideologues on TV and radio and their overexcited cult followings of ignorami. I never hated Jack. Not only did I not hate my acquaintance who slept with Jack at the start of the last decade of our marriage, but it was my lack of anger when I discovered her betrayal that made me realize I didn’t want to be married to Jack much longer. I did hate the psychiatrist who told my son Seth at fourteen that his Asperger’s is “in all likelihood due in some measure” to my “mothering style.” I hated a man who called me a “self-satisfied corporate pawn” and “chilly crypto-conservative” in his review of my first book, and until he went to prison for securities fraud, I hated the asshole at my law firm who said with a smile at a partners’ meeting in 1989 that “as a smarter-than-average gal,” I was “living proof affirmative action can sometimes work.”.Mostly, I hate feeling or seeing hate.

In 1967 and 1968, however, I truly and viscerally hated every American official responsible for the war in Vietnam, in particular Lyndon Johnson. I had merely a simmering repugnance for people like those I would become, the self-satisfied corporate pawns and crypto-conservatives who refused to admit how wrong and untenable the system is, grown-ups who let a nice paycheck and a dry martini and a good book in a comfortable chair prevent them from challenging the racist, warmongering, imperialist status quo.

At age sixty-four—and tomorrow, sixty-
five
—I still disapprove of imperialism when it humiliates and immiserates and brutalizes people. But visiting which cities makes me happiest? Charleston, Cuzco, Cartagena, Cape Town, and Hanoi, the glorious antique urban residue of European colonialism. I am a postcolonial colonialist, just as I am an irreligious lover of religious art—Michelangelo, Mozart, cathedrals, “Amazing Grace.” I still disapprove of unnecessary wars, but does even the leftiest lefty today refuse to use GPS because it’s an app invented and operated by the Pentagon?

After the waiter takes our order and we clink our glasses of red wine, Stewart says, “I’m afraid, my dear, you’ve proved a theory of mine about you.”

My throat tightens. Tonight is supposed to be pure fun. Until now, neither of us has mentioned 1968. I fake-smile. “I thought you and your gizmo decided I was telling the truth.”

“Whoa! The lady protests too much. I’m talking about you and menus—your dinner.”

“What? I like mozzarella, I like spicy pasta, I like crab. And since you love garlic, I figured you’d forgive the pesto breath.”

“You always order the items on the menu that have the most words. Every time.”

I smile authentically and shake my head. I ordered two dishes—bufala mozzarella with pesto, salsa romesco, tapenade, and caperberry relish to start; for my main course, squid-ink chitarra freddi with Dungeness crab, sea urchin, and jalapeño. “You know me better than I know myself.”

“This is the business I have chosen.”

“Speaking of which, what brings you to the Mojave this time?”

“Not much, quick look-see at the new FEMA concentration camp and mind-control facility we’re building out there. Usual bullshit.”

“Ha ha. Do you not want to tell me?”

He lowers his voice but raises the pitch. “I was out at Edwards looking at this
unbelievable
new UAS.”

“Ah, a new UAS.”

“Yeah, the thing can cruise
stratospherically
for almost a
week.
It’s got imaging resolution of half an inch at twelve kilometers. I could make out each of your buttons from fucking forty thousand feet. And get your heat signature.”

“What’s a UAS?” I finally ask.

“Oh, right—unmanned aircraft system. Unmanned aerial vehicles.”

“A drone, a Predator.”

“You are such a civilian, and so 2011. A Predator stays up for a day, day and a half. It flies low, lower than a passenger plane, and it’s noisy as a garbage truck, so the bad guys hear you coming. This thing is
quiet.
”

“What a nice birthday party—learning about a new, improved way for my country to kill people.”

“
Bad
people.”

“I’m sure.”

“And a lot fucking fewer not-so-bad people. With this, we might be able to reduce the NCCCR, no bullshit, from ten down to like one or two.”

I give him a look.

“Noncombatant collateral casualty ratio. The friends and family we unavoidably whack when we take out a bona fide target with a Hellfire.” He smiles. “You know what else? No, I shouldn’t tell you this. You’re going to think I’m a totally cold, callous motherfucker.”

“That horse left the barn fifteen years ago. Go ahead.”

“This thing is hydrogen-powered, the engines on the new drone. Totally
green.
”

Nineteen-sixty-eight hasn’t come up by the time the waiter takes away our plates, commencing the interval of quiet pre-coffee glow.

Then Stewart says, “So: eighteen United States Code
1751.
”

I sigh. He knows.

“A wet job,” he says. “
The
wet job.”

“Yup.”

“I mean,
that
shocked
me.
You fucking
inhaled,
baby. Capital crime.”

I nod.
Whoever kills any individual who is the President of the United States,
according to 18 U.S. Code 1751, the relevant statute, shall be punished by death. “Except,” I say, “it didn’t happen in the end. The capital crime.”

“Conspiracy to commit still gets you life, even if nobody dies.”

I nod again. “I know the U.S. Code.”
If two or more persons conspire to kill … and one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy, each shall be punished by imprisonment for any term of years or for life.

“You know what else?” he says. “The great irony? Well, a great irony among several great ironies. It was
Johnson
who muscled his new director of Central Intelligence in sixty-seven to collect intel on campus un-Americans like you. The smart people at Langley hated it. If not for Johnson, your boy Macallister the Third wouldn’t have become such a friend of the Agency.”

“And the CIA wouldn’t have known a thing about what we were doing. So the president’s illegal domestic spying saved him. And maybe me.”