Here & There (43 page)

According to Eli, Toby hadn’t been around since that first night. Again, appearances. While it might make sense that Lorelei would spend a few evenings at her godfather’s, it would be more than a little curious for her and Toby to be hanging out, at all, let alone three nights in a row.

It didn’t take much to convert her to the cause, though. A day and a night by my feverish bedside, reading through my mother’s tome and my annotations: paranoia can be highly contagious. The next day, she paid cash for three burner mobile phones and had a courier deliver one to Toby at his office. Through texts and short phone calls in loud public spaces, the two of them plotted our next move.

“You’re leaving Purgatory for Providence,” Eli said with a wry smile.

I smiled back, more to make him feel like his attempt at levity had successfully cheered me up than anything else. It hadn’t. The last thing I wanted was to pull my friends down the rabbit hole with me. It wasn’t quite as magnanimous a sentiment as it seemed. I was more concerned that they would slow me down, get me caught, or worse, turn me in.

“What about work? How can she leave work?” It was a desperate ploy, sure, and probably pretty damn apparent. Still, I was not sharp enough to carve out any sense of subtlety.

It was all for naught. Apparently, Lorelei’s been covering for me at Anomaly quite successfully. Going on and on about my
Chameleon
campaign. How I’ve been working nights, employing guerilla, viral techniques throughout the city. She even brought in my sketches that I kept drawing that first night Toby brought me over. Page after page of twisted ribbons, infinite eights, Möbius strips, and ampersands. Her stroke of marketing genius, however, was hiring a couple graffiti artists to tag my doodle all over SoHo and the Lower East Side. They added their own bit of genius, transforming the curves into the Norse serpent, Jörmungandr, biting its own tail.

It’s now the
Chameleon
brand.

Not only that, the boys down at the store loved it so much they agreed to fund an R&D expedition that I, along with Lorelei, apparently needed to take to Indiana to work with this semiotics guru, Carlos Colón. At least that’s our cover. And a fairly in-depth one. She’s rented a car, made reservations at the Day’s Inn in Bloomington, and even hired some actors to drive out there and check in as us. I still thought her explanation for why we weren’t flying was weak—had to meet with a molecular architect at Carnegie Mellon to help formulate and fabricate
Chameleon’s
tech specs. I think she sold it with her extension of the metaphor, though, emphasizing how the best way to fly under the competition’s radar was to drive. The bosses bought it. Even though, as far as I know, there’s no competition for a fictional ad campaign of my hypothetical product/project.

As attested to by my truculence, I wasn’t so concerned with the bosses’ faith in me or the project. I was more nervous about the Department and Beimini. Lorelei brushed off my worries with a shrug. I had never seen her like this before. No humor, no perfected nonchalance, no performance at all. My situation had somehow snapped her into hyperfocused, survivor mode. I foolishly thought it was somehow about me. How far gone I was, how much she truly cared. While that might be part of it (fingers crossed), my situation had apparently struck a chord from Lorelei’s childhood.

“Her uncle was Abbie Hoffman,” Eli shared, with a tone that suggested I should know who that was. Lorelei was out picking up supplies
at the time. “He was a big deal in the protest movement of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Sort of their media guru. Part of the SNCC, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and cofounder of the Yippies, Youth International Party. He was the avuncular left Yin to my right Yang in Lorelei’s childhood. Always filling her head with bedtime stories about his triumphs and defeats: his
exposé
on the Diggers in his book
Fuck the System
; the arrest in ‘68 as one of the Chicago Eight for conspiracy to incite a riot and how the trumped-up charges were overturned; his interruption of The Who’s performance at Woodstock; his book
Steal This Book
; and, of course, the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI.”

Eli went on to explain how that last one was never officially tied to Abbie, but everyone knew it was him. In 1971, he and a few other left activists broke into the FBI’s office in, aptly named, Media, Pennsylvania. They stole over a thousand classified documents, including several about the COINTELPRO operation (Counter Intelligence Program). As Hoffman uncovered, the FBI had been conducting a series of covert, illegal projects involving surveillance, infiltration, discrediting, and disrupting domestic political organizations. They had files on everyone from Martin Luther King, Jr. to Albert Einstein. Once exposed in the media, Hoover had to shut down the operation, especially since the documents also exposed how the FBI illegally used postmen, switchboard operators, and the likes thereof to spy on American citizens.

While I found Eli’s history lesson engaging, I still didn’t see the connection. I mean, yeah, Lorelei’s uncle was a radical who liked to stir the pot and then shit in it, but why get invested in my mother’s disappearance and some bullshit conspiracy theory about DARPA?

Eli’s shoulders dropped, along with his voice, as he let me know I was never to directly bring this up with Lorelei. I could acknowledge it, if she ever mentioned it, but under no circumstances was I to dredge up what he was about to share with me. I nodded in assent, hoping I would keep the promise.

“The FBI neither forgave, nor forgot, Abbie. They kept a close eye on him. In ’73 they planted cocaine on him and got the local cops to charge him with intent to distribute. Shook him up so much, he underwent cosmetic surgery to alter his appearance and hid out for several years. Unable to get him directly, after that, the FBI took an extreme tack, even for them. They kidnapped Lorelei. She was four. It was never publicized. When her parents went to the police, it was immediately kicked up to the very bureau that had taken her.”

“What, they wanted to trade prisoners?” I naïvely asked.

Eli shook his head. “No. They were too smart for that. They merely wanted to send a message—even when we can’t get to you, we can get to you. Within a week, Lorelei wandered in the back door of her parents’
house. She couldn’t tell us much, just that they fed her a lot of ice cream and told her her parents and uncle were in danger, and they were keeping her safe.

“She didn’t sleep alone for the next two years,” Eli went on. “Abbie got the message and disappeared from public life for almost a decade. Until he got arrested for trespassing at Amherst, protesting the CIA’s recruitment actions there, citing their illegal activities and thereby unlawful presence on campus. Then he published
Steal This Urine Test,
exposing the hypocrisy of the war on drugs.”

“Then what?” I asked.

“By the spring of 1989, he was dead. Overdose. Swallowed a hundred and fifty phenobarbital tablets and washed them down with a bottle of rye.”

“That’s horrible.”

“Yeah, especially since he hated rye. Said it was the swill scotch distilleries use to sterilize factory bathrooms. Never touched the stuff. Certainly never would’ve bought a bottle of it.”

“So you’re saying the FBI murdered him?”

“I’m saying that not a single periodical ever mentions the rye—just that the barbiturates were combined with an unspecified alcohol.” Eli went over to his bar again. “And that my goddaughter has a healthy suspicion of the powers that be.”

Considering the Department’s and Beimini
^®
’s resources, I was dubious that Lorelei’s ruse, even with the actors, would fool either for long. An hour later, as we packed, I shared my concern with her.

“Trust me, Tri-Me. It’ll do the job,” Lorelei said, zipping envelopes of cash into various pockets of a suitcase she borrowed from Eli.

My packing had already been taken care of. It sat in a couple of shopping bags of new clothes she had picked up for me in SoHo after work. “All they’d have to do is go to Pittsburgh or Bloomington and find ‘us’ to realize it’s not us,” I said, going on to point out that the only thing that had been working for me so far was them not knowing where the hell I was.

“It doesn’t matter if they figure out the whole thing is a red herring as long as they lose our actual trail.”

“Huh.” I had to admit, it was a pretty good plan. As long as our pursuers (real or hypothetical) took the bait and followed our doppelgängers. In the meantime, one of her investment banker boyfriends had parked one of his cars, a Range Rover, in the underground lot below Eli’s building. Eli then took Little Li-Li’s suitcase and shopping bags down in the elevator, and with the spare car key (to the banker’s car) that Lorelei already had, loaded up the trunk of the IB’s car, conveniently parked in a surveillance blind spot. Eli’s generous tipping habits had their perks. While we avoided security cameras of our own by hiking down fifty-three
flights, Eli also retrieved my mother’s briefcase from storage and tucked it next to the suitcase and shopping bags. Leaving the spare key on top of the front tire, Eli then got in his own car and drove down to Tribeca to meet a business associate for drinks at his favorite bar, The Brandy Library.

It was hard not to laugh as I followed Lorelei’s ass serpentining between parked cars, both of us hunched over like we were in some bad remake of
Three Days of the Condor
. I wasn’t quite sure whether it was a testament to how much better I was feeling after three days of rest or just how far gone I was. Either way I felt invigorated. And also amused at how the universe works its way around. Years of daydreaming about being this close to Lorelei’s intoxicating rear end, and there I was, sober as a Mormon in Mecca, panting in exhaustion from our five-hundred-and-fifty-foot descent, relieved to finally plotz down into the almond-leather seat of some devoted Lorelei suitor’s Range Rover. Wheels within wheels.

It wasn’t until she reached back, grabbed my hand, and pulled me toward the car that I remembered the dream I had about her last night.

It began with the quiet, soft beat of feet padding against a bare stage, legs leaping impossibly high into the air with foot flutters that end in the slightest pitter-pats. From somewhere far off, maybe the sewers, leaks in a foreboding sound of harried apprehensive violins rushing along to a distressed time signature. I recognize it.
Facades
from Philip Glass’s
Glassworks
.

The hair on the back of my neck rises with portent. I turn. Downstage the orchestra pit is entombed in a mausoleum of water three feet thick. Blurred behind the water wall, I can just make out the conductor. It’s Hilary—hair pulled back into a tight ponytail, dressed in a tux. She looks through the wall of water at me and cues the brass section.

The soprano saxophone whines in with an eerie, melancholic resignation. I turn back to see a figure of incandescent blue bound on from upstage right, curve into center stage, and leap at me. It is only in mid-flight that I recognize the dancer as Lorelei.

As if by their own accord, my arms lift up and catch her beneath her armpits. She bends her knees up and crumples into me. Her momentum spins and draws me downstage, as I swoop her downward then back up, turning upstage and releasing her back up into the air, like an incandescent dove that unfurls and alights on the stage with barely a sound. She floats in rhythm up stage left, then circles back downstage and leaps at me again. Again, possessed, I catch her under the armpits, spin, swoop her down then up, and release her.

Neither of us are in control of our movements. We are possessed. Captive marionettes manipulated by string instruments.

We keep doing this, tracing out infinity signs in the air, each spin pulling me slightly more downstage, until finally I realize we are no longer on a stage at all, but atop a massive rock towering over a fast river that bends around the granite base. Heavy currents strain against the curve, murmuring music, whispering dares in my ear.

Lorelei relentlessly soars at me, again and again. I keep catching her every time without impulse. My focus is on the impending edge, until finally I feel pebbles pop out from under the grind of my pivoting feet. The bits of gravel drift down over the brink like popcorn. I toss Lorelei back, she unfurls, lands, flutters in a circle, orbits back to me, and leaps. Catching her pulls me around, she swoops down below the ledge, then back up as we complete the upward curve of infinity, and I release her, once again feeling the slightest shift of inertia push away from her as our momentum divides in two. This time the pebbles pop away from the brink as I drift down.

It’s not so much that I feel like I’m falling as much as it seems like the cliff top is rapidly shrinking, as the vibrato of the saxophone’s lament decrescendos with distance. Until the cold slaps against my face.

The chilled, salt air of the Hudson River rushed through my cracked window. It was just a dream, I kept telling myself. Some nighttime neural discharge. I tried willing myself not to make the connection to Lorelei’s namesake, the German siren Lore Lay who enticed despairing sailors into the dangerous, rocky waters of the Rhine. I worked hard to keep from wondering if maybe she was a Department plant seducing me into revealing Hilary’s secrets. What else could I do? Wheels had been set in motion. I just needed to stay sharp, resist her beautiful pull, and keep ascetic focus.