by Mendy Sobol
“Oh, don’t worry, Tesla. We’ll get to that, I promise.”
“You have to show me. You have to!”
“Okay, okay, I will. But enough about your brilliant, famous roommate. Tell me about you and Meg. Tell me everything.”
With thousands of words and dozens of photos from my backpack, I told Toby the story of my life in Vietnam. I wasn’t surprised Toby knew a lot about Meg. Vietnamese propaganda had fueled her legend, drawing international attention that lead to her discovery by the global media, making her famous for her work, infamous for rejecting the Nobel Peace Prize. Toby thumbed through my pictures slowly, setting aside a Polaroid of Meg standing in front of the clinic at sunset, shoulders straight, face freckled, smiling at the little Vietnamese girl holding her hand, the girl looking up at Meg, imitating her posture and smile.
“May I keep this one?”
I nodded.
And so we sat there, in an upstairs bedroom at the renegade radio station in the middle of Hilversum’s ghost campus in the city where I grew up, me in a broken-down leather armchair, Toby lounging on his mattress, swapping stories like two former roommates at a college reunion, WFMH’s bizarre programming, nonstop aural performance art, drifting up from the studio, soundtrack for a warm Jersey night. We rambled on about everything. Wellston. Bruin. The Beef ‘n’ Bun. Fireball. Thoroughbred. The ROTC fire. Life in Vietnam. Life in the underground. Toby’s strike against the Pentagon. His strike with Melora against IPI, RITA, and the draft.
“Tell me more about 1971,” I said, “and tell me about Godzilla, Tet, and Virtual Fire. Tell me how you did it.”
“I’ll do better than that. I’ll show you.” Toby stood and walked to a door on the other side of the room. “Follow me, and I’ll take you on a trip to Neverland.”
He opened the door and flipped on a light switch. Inside the walk-in closet, one bare bulb revealed a wooden desk, a folding chair, and three bizarre contraptions. I’d never seen such machines, but I knew what they were.
With paper and pencil, words, diagrams, mathematical formulas, and his three fabulous computers, Toby took me through every step, amazing me with his genius, amazing me more with Melora’s genius, and amazing myself because I could understand, could follow their sophisticated programming after so many years away from computers. For all the personal things we talked about that night, it was then that I felt closest to Toby, and Toby to me, just two old computer geeks talking about what they loved best.
We’d spent the whole night laughing and joking, and from his first bear hug at the top of the stairs, Toby seemed like his old self, the carefree trickster with the casual southern drawl and twinkling eyes. Now his mood changed, his eyes darkened, his words became choppy and strained.
“RITA was fuckin’ evil,” he said. “But how could I hack RITA without riskin’ a lot of lives?” Toby hung his head, staring down at his big hands. “I fucked up so bad in ‘71. The nightmares…. After what I caused in Vietnam, I wanted to disappear forever.” Then he looked up at me, looked deep into my eyes. “I wanted to die. But there was my country, doin’ the same thing all over again in Indonesia. Even worse, with RITA. And who else could step up and do what I could? Anyone who might have a clue was already workin’ for IPI, already part of the war machine. Hey, maybe I’m an egomaniac. Or maybe I’m nuts. But I had to do somethin’!”
I listened, not saying anything, not sure whether I was agreeing.
“Then I found Melora,” Toby said. “She knew RITA was the smartest, most powerful, most ruthless weapon ever created. She knew, because more than anyone, she created it. But she also knew RITA was nothin’ without the draft. Because of her time in the Navy, and because she’s so damn smart, she understood that every airstrike had to be followed up by AEF troopers on the ground. That every poor grunt bastard who got killed or injured had to be replaced. And she figured out what I couldn’t, that there were lots of ways to go after RITA, but only one where no one would get hurt.”
Toby took out his wallet, removed a small rectangle of yellowed, dog-eared paper, and handed it to me.
“Jesus,” I said. “Your draft card.”
“I kept it all these years. A reminder. When they started makin’ teenagers register, I knew there’d be another draft some day, another fucked-up war. So we spiked the draft, burned all those fuckin’ virtual draft cards. And because of Melora, we did it without makin’ an even bigger mess.”
“And you succeeded, Toby. You ended the war!”
Toby shook his head. “No, Tesla, we didn’t end the war. That wasn’t our plan. Melora and I were just hopin’ we could slow things down, point a finger at IPI, make people think, give the antiwar movement a chance. We knew Harriman would order all those kids whose draft records got wiped to re-register, but we had no idea some sorority girl from Oregon would go on TV and refuse. Or that when the FBI arrested her, students on every high school and college campus in America would make her a hero and follow her example. Suddenly thousands of kids are missin’ registration deadlines, and there’s no way they can lock all ‘em all up! Kids from Montana to Mississippi, white collar, blue collar, black, white, Asian and Latino, picketin’ draft boards with their parents, chantin’, ‘Hell no, we won’t go!’ I wish you’d been here to see it for yourself—millions of people standin’ up, sayin’ no to war. I think it scared the crap out of Congress. They finally got the balls to confront Harriman and cut off IPI’s funding. Harriman saw the handwritin’ on the wall, saw a way out and took it. When he called for a peace conference, Hasan could have saved his own ass by agreein’. But psychopaths don’t negotiate. I wish some photographer had captured the look on that bastard’s face when his Pentagon-paid security guards disappeared and Red Path guerillas waltzed into his office and arrested him!”
“But Toby, what you and Melora did—what those gamers did—it’s a miracle!”
“Yeah, pullin’ off Virtual Fire was a miracle. But the real miracle was everything that happened afterward. It would have been the happiest time of my life—if Melora, her friend David Cooperman, Grendel, and the rest of those kids hadn’t been locked in solitary cells. Coop wasn’t my fault, but Jesus, why did I talk myself into believin’ those gamers could go underground? They caught ‘em up in Burlington the next day, takin’ on some locals in one last game while they were waitin’ for sundown so they could sneak across the border into Canada. They never had a chance. And I swear, I was the one who was supposed to get busted, not them, not Melora. That was our plan, and I thought she agreed to it. When she jumped the gun with Godzilla….”
Toby’s voice trailed off into awkward silence, the kind of silence that told me I should change the subject. But there was something I wanted to know. Something a whole lot less digital, a whole lot more analog. And I had to ask.
“Tell me about you and Melora,” I said.
In the four years we spent together in the ‘60s, I never saw Toby blush. Now his face, neck, arms, turned a deep red-pink, the color of a desert sunset, making the black horse tattooed on his shoulder stand out, bringing it to life.
“Never mind,” I said, laughing, pounding Toby’s big shoulder. “I think you just told me everything I need to know!”
But Toby didn’t laugh, didn’t smile. And my smile faded quickly.
“That’s why I sent the message, Tesla. That’s why I brought you here.”
Toby wasn’t a college roommate talking about a girl he met at a sorority mixer. He was an outlaw, and Melora was in prison. And I wasn’t in some dormitory. I was in a house full of accomplices, about to become one myself.
Toby’s plan was simple. Use Meg’s international credibility, her fame, her notoriety. Arrange an exchange.
“I’m the one they want, Tesla. Shit, they’ve been after me for decades. Melora was the real genius behind the draft sting. Her programs make mine look like the shit we did at Wellston. But they don’t know it, don’t want to know. They’ll never believe some girl they used to work with outsmarted al
l of ‘em. Much better for them if they got whipped by Toby Jessup, history’s most notorious hacker. Yeah, they’ll make the trade. ‘Cuz they can’t admit Melora’s that important. ‘Cuz they want me so bad.”
Meg was the key. If she negotiated a deal, Toby in exchange for Melora, Coop, and the gamers, no government would risk the universal condemnation that would surely follow double-crossing The Mother of Vietnam. Meg could assure their freedom and guarantee amnesty for Toby’s accessories at WFMH.
Toby’s plan was brilliant. And I hated everything about it.
“Toby,” I said, “that plan sucks. First, you’re tried and convicted before you turn yourself in. Sure, they’ll put on a show trial. Stick you in front of the TV cameras wearing shackles. Then put you away in a supermax prison solitary cell for the rest of your life. Or worse, if they call it espionage and give you the death penalty! Second, what if they don’t let Melora and the others go? What if they sweep in here and put all your friends behind bars? Sure Meg’s a saint, but it’s not like Uncle Sam ever worshiped her.”
“You should’a been a lawyer like your mother, Tesla—always an argument for everything! But listen to me. The fact is, I am guilty. And I’m already in prison. There’s at least a chance Melora doesn’t have to be. And there’s another good reason for tryin’ it. The dream.”
Toby and I looked in each other’s eyes, neither of us saying a word, the only sounds faint Klezmer music coming from the studio and the in-and-out rustle of our breathing. In that moment I knew what I’d always suspected—through all the years and all the miles, Toby and I still shared our dreams as we had in college.
“The dream’s real, isn’t it, Tesla?”
“Yes.”
“You wrote a program that changed everything, created this reality, saved my life.”
“Yes.”
“I’m not supposed to be here. I died in 1970, just like in the dream. But because I’m alive, Vietnam and Afghanistan got fuckin’ nuked!”
“Yes,” I said again, knowing it was true, knowing I’d admitted the truth to myself long ago, knowing I couldn’t deny it to Toby.
“Well then, we have to fix it.”
“I can’t!” I said. “You’ve gotta understand. I haven’t touched a computer since college, never developed the knowledge, the skills to do what I did in that other life. I’ve thought about it, Toby. God, I’ve thought about it. But the dreams only gave me the vaguest idea how it all worked. And most of the stuff, I don’t understand. No, I’ve thought about it, and if I wanted to, I couldn’t do it. No one can.”
“Melora can,” Toby whispered as the first rays of sunrise shown through his bedroom window.
Chapter Thirty-Seven: Paul
I needed time to think, time to decide. But Toby needed an answer before I left. There would be no safe way to communicate once I returned to Vietnam. Toby, and everyone at WFMH, had to know whether they could count on me, count on Meg. Either way they had decisions to make, and couldn’t make them without an answer. But first, there were some questions I needed answered.
“Toby, what can you tell me about Hilversum? About Applewood?”
“I haven’t seen much, just the view from this window. Kelly can fill you in. Most of what I know about local history I learned from her. Besides, she’s been outside the door listenin’ to us all night.”
“I have not!”
I jumped up, startled by Kelly’s voice coming from behind the door. Toby smiled. The scarred maple door slid open, hinges creaking.
“I took two bathroom breaks and a shower. I’m a stadium concert pro, but you boys almost burst my bladder.”
Kelly stood cross-legged, arms out, hands curved as if in meditation. She still wore jeans, now topped by a station tee shirt silk-screened with a harmonica-playing dog. Her blonde hair hung straight, soaked and slick, drops of water sliding down her peach cheeks.
“I made it a cold shower after all that steamy talk about Meg and Melora.”
Toby blushed again, deeper red this time.
“I can tell you two chatterboxes were never frat boys. Babbling all night about wives and girlfriends, and the ‘wild thing’ never came up once! But y’all sure went on and on.”
“Yeah, Kelly, I guess we’re not shy, retirin’ types like you,” Toby shot back, lips set straight, but eyes twinkling.
Kelly struck a pose, head tilted toward her raised shoulder, index finger demurely touching the corner of her lips, hips thrust to the side. “In finishing school they always taught me the ladies should go and make themselves useful while the menfolk retire to the parlor for cigars and brandy.”
“Is that where they taught you eavesdroppin’?” Toby said.
“Well, they didn’t define ‘useful’. I think that part was left up to us.”
The quick smile fought to find itself on Toby’s altered lips. “How about makin’ yourself useful by telling Tesla what happened to Hilversum and his hometown.”
“Let me get this straight,” she said, eyes narrowing, index finger moving slowly across her lips, finding the exact center. “Tesla travels like fifty thousand miles....”
“Nine thousand,” I interrupted.
“Whatever,” Kelly said, waving her hand in my direction, bringing it back to her lips. “All so you could meet with the guy who’s number one with a bullet on the F.B.I.’s Most Wanted list, collaborate on a plot to free the fair Melora using the good offices of Saint Margaret of Vietnam, risk arrest and a life-long committed relationship with a hairy cellmate named ‘Bubba’, and what you really want to talk about is your hometown and how some radio freaks came to be camped out in the middle of a forty-acre ghost campus?”
“I dream about it,” I said, as if that explained everything.
Kelly arched one perfect eyebrow, looking serious, thoughtful. “That makes all the difference in the world. Why didn’t you say so right at the beginning?”
Kelly thought it began with the Newark riots in ’67. “That was long before I was born,” she said, “but my grandparents grew up in Newark and talked about it all the time. The riots were bad—fires, looting, twenty-six dead, hundreds injured—but what came afterward sucked, too. White people, including my grandparents, ran from Newark and Applewood. Middle-class black people, too. Blockbusting real estate companies went into white neighborhoods talking racism and riots, scared homeowners into selling cheap, then jacked up the prices and resold to blacks. Then banks redlined the neighborhoods and wouldn’t loan money to black businesses or homeowners.”
“The Newark riots went down the summer after my freshman year at Wellston,” I said, “and Applewood had its own small riot the same week. But blockbusting, redlining, white flight—that didn’t start in ’67. It goes way back. And there were other things, too. Things happening when I was a kid.”
I told Kelly and Toby about how New Jersey built a medical center in Newark’s mostly poor, mostly black, Central Ward, tearing down acres of tenements and displacing a whole community. “And before that,” I said, “the East-West Expressway. They built it when I was in high school. It cut Applewood, Orange, and East Orange in half, demolished the core of all three cities, and continued through the heart of Newark. It let whites in the new suburbs—Livingston, Morristown, Short Hills—breeze to Newark Airport doing fifty-five, avoiding the old cities. That highway destroyed whole neighborhoods, driving out whites and blacks, but I didn’t understand what was going on when I was a kid. The history classes I took in college didn’t explain it, either. I didn’t see it as racial segregation until I met Meg. Most of what I know about segregation outside the south, I learned from her.”
“Same for me,” Toby said. “When I was growin’ up in Virginia, Jim Crow was right in your face. A federal court ordered Stonewall’s all-white public pool integrated, so the city filled it with concrete. My boardin’ school let in one black kid, but told the rest of us we didn’t have to room with him. No one did, and he dropped out in two weeks. When I moved up north for college, I
figured I was leavin’ segregation behind. At first, I thought the only people Yankees discriminated against were white southerners. Remember how it was, Tesla?”
“Yeah,” I said. “A psychology professor from Connecticut asked me how I could stand living with a racist from Virginia.”
“I remember that asshole,” Toby said, “but I’ll bet he never asked himself why the Wellston faculty and student body were well-nigh lily-white. I wasn’t askin’ either until I met Meg. Her favorite English professor, a black woman, resigned ‘cuz Wellston had been a white school for two hundred years. It was still a white school when I graduated.”
“And I grew up thinking everywhere in America except the south was like Applewood, and that Applewood was perfect,” I said. “Sure, white parents and black parents weren’t socializing, and neither were Irish and Italian parents, or Jewish and Protestant parents, or Protestant and Catholic parents. But our schools never needed court orders to integrate them. They’d always been that way. All of us kids hung out together—in school and after school, in little league, at the playground, at each other’s houses, at school dances—and all of us were from blue-collar and white-collar families.”
“Not in my New Jersey,” Kelly said. “When I was a kid, only a few miles from here, the only black guy living in my town played second base for the Mets.”
“We knew Applewood was changing,” I said, “even in the ‘60s. You could thumb through my high school yearbooks and see more black kids and fewer white ones every year. White flight became more like white panic. Not everyone moved because their new neighbors were black, and lots of black families were leaving, too. They were making more money and wanted new homes, schools, and shopping malls. By the time Meg and I left for Vietnam, all my old friends and their families, white and black, were gone.”
“That caused big problems,” Kelly said. “Applewood’s public employees—teachers, police, civil servants—they don’t live here anymore, and every night their paychecks go home with them. That killed Applewood’s stores, and the ones that didn’t go broke followed the money to suburban shopping malls where there was more space, more parking, lower taxes, and safer streets. That took away more jobs and more money. Property values crashed and property taxes soared. Ken, the station manager, he’s been at ‘FMH forever, and he says that in the’80s skin color didn’t matter. Black or white, everyone wanted out.”
