The Company You Keep (38 page)

Paul didn’t mean to convince me to do what I did for the fifteen years after I heard that speech. I went much beyond anything he ever did, including participating in the illegal and immoral dismantling of his SDS, including engaging in multiple fistfights with multiple policemen, including planting numerous bombs at numerous targets, including being arrested again and again, including meeting with my country’s enemies on foreign shores, including plotting the illegal overthrow of my government. But he never stopped being my dear friend, not even the years I was underground, and when he died in 1984 of cancer, a larger part of my happiness than I cared to admit died too.

His was the first death of a friend between 1970, when the town house blew up, and 1984, and as it turned out, the first of the slow series of deaths of friends—from cancer, from accident, and from suicide—that all of us experience on the other side of fifty.

In retrospect it strikes me as fitting.

Paul ended my innocence about life in 1965, and some twenty years later he ended my innocence, too, about death.

When, therefore, in April 1996, I got an e-mail from Paul Potter, barring the improbable existence of an Internet Service Provider from the Great Beyond, I felt strongly that it must be from someone else. You see, I am a highly trained academic. My mind leaps to these insights.

Like a gazelle.

For a time I contemplated the e-mail on my university-issue Mac in
my Angell Hall office—my extremely good corner office, overlooking campus and guarded by a secretary, as befit the chair of the Honors Program, which I was in 1996—not bad for a person who had been on academic probation from 1970 to 1980, while on the FBI’s most-wanted list.

I looked at this e-mail for a long time.

Then I erased the letter and left the office. In a moment, I came back and set the computer’s hard drive to defragment—naggingly, I’d reflected before I’d left the building that the erase command only trashed the name; the file remained on the hard drive until it was reformatted, or—which also worked—defragmented.

I crossed the campus in noonday sun, a man of fifty whose age showed neither in his hair, which was full, nor in his carriage, which was straight, nor in his clothes, which—during summer semester anyway—were virtually the same jeans and T-shirt I’d have worn on this same campus thirty years before, but in his face, where wrinkles radiated out from the corners of his eyes, and his stomach, which had grown. My son, Brendan, had a birthday on July 1, which was a few days away, a Monday. But why would I get him shoes? I walked across campus, down Liberty into Sam’s Shoes, where I wandered, looking: Stride Rite, Timberland, Sebago, Dexter.

Dexter.

From nowhere, like a soap bubble rising and bursting, I saw big German pickles served out of a tub in a dark bar. It was somewhere I’d been with Jason, somewhere not far. We had driven there. It had been summer. And the town it had been in had been…Dexter.

Now it came back to me in a detailed memory. It was during the building of the I-94 overpass, and we’d gone right into the Army Corps of Engineers field office to requisition dynamite. Nan, who had in this action as in most done all the intelligence out of a secretarial job for a
related company, had gotten it all: letterhead, paperwork, company routine—all the way down to floor plans of the field office’s entrance, allowing us to walk in, wearing jeans and hard hats and carrying rolled-up blueprints, talking casually, and go directly to the right office. Nan had gotten it all, and so solidly, so competently, that we hardly felt afraid handing in the forged requisition form.

Nan, myself, Jason, and Mimi: this was the Ann Arbor “affinity group,” later “cell.” Mimi planned, Nan executed. Nan was a mole, they used to say, but Mimi was a field officer. Nor was it lost on your father and me that we were rank and file. Waiting for the Army Corps office to fill the order, we’d done what troops do everywhere: stood in a bar, drank too much, a bravado to show each other how unscared we were. Mimi watched into the window of the office from a parked car with binoculars, and when she saw that the explosives had been pulled and packed in four little wooden boxes, she’d walked into the bar, ignoring us, and ordered a Stroh’s. If she had ordered Bud, we would have walked out and split up to the two parked cars, your father waiting for Mimi to join him, me waiting for Nan. As was, Little J and I finished our beers, went out and picked up the dynamite, and drove it straight from Dexter across the country to Oregon, knowing that crossing the other way, to Michigan, was dynamite that had been stolen out there. That, too, was a Mimi invention: the risks of transporting explosives, she said, were less than the risks of being traced ex post facto by a chemical signature found at the site of the explosion. That’s why, insofar as the FBI ever traced any of our explosives, they never found the suppliers—at least, not within two thousand miles of the explosion itself.

Okay. Now I knew who had e-mailed me, and what he wanted. That is, I knew Jason Sinai wanted me to meet him on July 1, a Monday, Brendie’s seventeenth birthday, at the bar that served big German pickles out of a tub in Dexter, Michigan.

Not a small thing to ask the chair of the Honors Program, holder of an endowed chair in the humanities at the U of M, ex officio of the Guggenheim Nominating Committee, and MacArthur Fellow. Not a
small thing to ask him to meet a fugitive, wanted on charges of murder and kidnapping, the subject of a nationwide manhunt.

On July 1, a Monday, the first thing I did was wish my seventeen-year-old son—whom I had to wake for the purpose—a happy birthday, and present him with his present: a book of practice SAT tests. Then I went through two of them with him: Brendan Lewis had spent far too much of the previous year stoned to be sure of getting into the U of M, where baby boomers’ kids competing for admission—not to mention the private-school kids from New York—had made even in-state entrance questionable except for the strongest students. This took the better part of the morning, but finally when I finished battling the boy through the two tests, I also gave him a 1976 Stratocaster I’d battled even harder for on eBay. I accompanied it with a short commentary, of course, on what, for him, passed for music. Brenden listened with forbearance—my son’s musical interest tended toward the Beastie Boys, intersecting with mine only once at Jimi Hendrix. While Nan, smiling, watched the boy holding the guitar in awe, I watched Nan, and while I watched, I debated whether to tell her what I was doing. By the time Brendan took off to show his girlfriend the guitar, I had made my decision, against.

Not that she would have been scared. In the days, Nancy McGinn had been a far more prominent member of Weather than I, had planned and executed some of the most daring actions, and now, as an adult, was still ahead of me, as a doctor and—since Brendan had grown up—a frequent traveler for Médecins sans Frontières.

Nan, in fact, probably could have planned what I was about to do better than I. Still, something decided me in favor of secrecy. A lot was at stake in meeting Jason Sinai, more than enough to outweigh the demands of communal interest in favor of the demands of compartmentalization. I was quite sure that Nan would agree.

So without telling my wife what I was doing, I dressed in my bike clothes and, carrying my helmet, left the house.

The bike allowed me to cross from Awixa Road to Highland Drive, through the Arboretum, out by the hospital, and against traffic all the way across town to Main Street, where I wheeled it inside the Avis office. Already Nan would have been unhappy with me: I’d
washed
rather
than
cleaned
—washed away the chance of being followed rather than analyzed it and identified any possible followers. She, who had with Mimi evolved a virtual religion around how to detect a tail, would not have approved one bit.

Against that, however, was my absolute surety that I was under surveillance. I absolutely could not believe that the FBI would not be watching me if they were looking for Jason. They would have to be deeply stupid not to, and I was no longer convinced that they were that stupid. Sometimes, even, I found myself supporting them. Waco, for example. And if they were following me, then a washing, quick and dirty, as I had just done, was appropriate: I didn’t need to identify people I was already assuming were there.

In the Avis garage I carefully packed my bike into the trunk of a Dodge Intrepid, which I had arranged to have rented for me by the departmental secretary on a university account, in case my credit card records were subpoenaed. Then, sheltered by the open trunk, I took a pair of jeans out of my bag, slipped them on over my bike shorts, tucked in my T-shirt, put on a baseball cap, and slammed the trunk shut. Finally I pulled onto Main Street and out to the Huron River Drive toward Dexter, noting with satisfaction the empty road behind me.

Reflecting that I would likely not recognize Jase.

Wondering what Jase had in mind, coming to Michigan, finding me.

Never once, however, questioning what I was doing, now, putting my entire life of the past twenty-five years in jeopardy, risking my family and safety, to see my old comrade when my comrade was wanted by the law.

Did I think Jed was going to show?

On balance, I think not. I was open, though, to the possibility that he would. And in any case, that afternoon of July 1, I found myself attracted by the very starkness of the possibilities.

Life, I was thinking, hardly ever gets as clear as it as now.

Dexter, Michigan. A booth at the back of the Sportsman bar. The bar darkened against the afternoon sun, all mahogany, all smoke, all the murkiness of a place where light was totally unnecessary to the business of men drinking seriously, all just the way it was twenty-five years ago and more. The only nod to the present was the races from Saratoga on high-definition satellite TV. Other than that, the horrors of the present were as if still a quarter century away.

Life, I was thinking, sitting in the furthermost booth in the dark bar, drinking more beer than I had drunk in the past twenty years all together, watching the windows casting through the half-closed Venetian blinds, narrow bars of light against the smoky air—life hardly ever gets as clear as this.

Three choices. If Jed showed, then I stood a chance of coming closer to what I was looking for. If the police came, then the run was over, and I had lost everything. And if no one came?
Don’t waste time trying to answer questions you don’t have the data for.
Mimi’s voice, sounding the old rule, as if reverberating within my skull.

My job, for the instant, was to wait. As so often in these things, waiting was the hardest job.

I, Jason Sinai, in a bar. A handsome, determined man, handsomer than even my disguise alone would have made me, due to the fact that people look their best when they are facing danger. Their skin flushes, their features set, their eyes hold their steadiest gaze. Perhaps they look their worst—pale, drawn—when they’re scared, but surely they’re at their best when they’re being brave.

There are two consolations in facing real danger—which few of us ever do—as opposed to running from imagined danger—which happens all the time.

The first is how good it makes you look.

The second is how free it makes you feel.

I, Jason Sinai, alone in a bar. A bar I had last been in during an operation to procure dynamite, in 1969. We’d used the dynamite in four different bombings, and never was any connection made with the I-94 construction in Dexter, Michigan, never, to this day. Now I was back in that bar after twenty-six years, and for the first time it occurred to me that, these twenty-six years later, I had not only escaped capture for the robbery of the explosive, for the bombing itself, but I had somehow remained free. And for the first time since leaving you, a deep sensation of that freedom passed through me.

Isabel. Should I try to describe that day in the Sportsman’s bar, Dexter, Michigan?

Let me put it this way. Buddhists say enlightenment is preceded by four glimpses of freedom. I had long felt that two such glimpses had come my way, both years ago while I was fugitive.

Once, I felt I had glimpsed freedom as an ideal for which I was fighting—freedom from a whole system of repressive rules, of course, but a freedom deeper than that: the freedom that comes, as the Port Huron Statement put it, from seeking what might be unattainable but what was a liberation, in its very pursuit, from the unimaginable.

Another time I felt I had glimpsed freedom as what I was living as I
crisscrossed the country under phony names: freedom from the expectations that defined me; freedom from the oppressive; above all, freedom from the constant awareness of an unwitting network of police, computers, tax collectors, doctors, schools. To be unknown. To be anonymous. Together, they meant to be autonomous, in a way that few people ever experienced in their lives.

Both experiences had been greatly potent, so much so that it became a question I was always asking myself, in the long, searching, torturous exercises we called “self-criticism sessions,” in the soul-searching kind of conversation we used to have, whether I was more fundamentally motivated by a selfish wish to feel free than a revolutionary principle. For there was, at the heart of the experience, something in being a fugitive I valued more than any other experience of my life. A fundamental freedom, one that I had never been able entirely to define. Was it the chance no longer to be yourself? Was it having no responsibility? I wasn’t sure.