True Believers

by Kurt Andersen

  I feel pulled along in the rapids of the fresh information flow. I’ve been handed a piece of evidence, an important piece, and I want to show it off right now, to demonstrate that I have the means and methods and willingness to disinter the truth. It used to work for the police when they were interrogating my Legal Aid clients, and it used to work for me sometimes in corporate depositions, rattling a witness to encourage him to settle, or even enough to make him blurt out some new bad fact.

  I stare at the phone in my hand. The longer I wait, the wimpier I will become. I also want to take my mind off my dad. I wish I hadn’t learned what I now know about my father. It makes me want to sob. I think of what Stewart told me when we first met, that the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community were “America’s frontline Fausts,” makers of the country’s necessary deals with the devil, acquiring vast knowledge in exchange for eternal damnation. My brother will be undone when he finds out what Dad did.

  I dial the home number first, but even there an assistant answers and tells me he’ll “see if I can get him.”

  I listen to some nervous Philip Glassian music playing on his end, rising and falling cellos and saxophones. Perfect soundtrack.

  “Have you rung me to curse some more? Or do I take this to mean your knickers are no longer in such a frightful twist?”

  “Hello, Alex. Last time we talked,” I say, all sweet and reasonable, “you just surprised me. By having recollections apparently so different than mine.”

  “You really did throw a bit of a wobbly, but no need to apologize. Memory plays tricks. Especially on people our age.”

  I almost lose it at “apologize.” But I recover, force myself to smile so he can hear it. “You’re many months older than I am, Alex.”

  “Ha! Remember that fight we had freshman year in Cambridge, about where we’d first seen that photo of Malcolm X holding the rifle, peeking out his window?”

  “I haven’t thought of that since then.” But yes, I absolutely remember. Eating a very late dinner at Tommy’s Lunch, the two of us debating with an SDS boy what “by any means necessary” meant, Alex insisting he’d seen the Malcolm picture in Life, whereas in fact I’d found it in one of Violet’s copies of Ebony. This is good: proof, without any leading of the witness, that he suffers from no amnesia about conversations in early 1968 that involved guns and violence and radical politics. I make a note. “But Alex? I have a couple of things I need to tell you.”

  “Of course, darling. What?”

  “When the book comes out, you can deny everything I say. You can accuse me of writing fiction and pretending it’s nonfiction. You can say I’m insane. You can sue me if you want—”

  “Here, steady on, you don’t want a libel action on your hands.”

  “You can sue for libel, invasion of privacy, breach of confidence, whatever, take your pick. And you might even be able to get an injunction to prevent publication in the UK. But going behind my back to tell lies to my daughter, pretending you’re concerned about my mental health, trying to convince her I have dementia? That is really low. And stupid, because she’s not convinced. In any case, it’s not going to stop me.”

  “This is why you rang?”

  “No, why I called is to tell you that among the things I’ve discovered about you”—the tip-of-a-nonexistent-iceberg gambit—”is that you were a CIA informer.”

  I wait for a denial, harrumph, a “What?”, some kind of response. Or the sound of a hang-up. Instead, I hear Alex walking. So I press on.

  “Beginning in August 1967, on your way home from Belgrade. August twelfth, the day you arrived in Paris, after two CIA officers approached you at your hotel. And took you to an apartment, a CIA safe house, and spent all night convincing you to cooperate with them, to feed the CIA and the U.S. government information about your new boyfriend Darko Vidovic and other Yugoslavian Communist Party and government leaders. And you agreed”—here I am going out on a limb, but Stewart said he was fairly certain—”because they threatened to tell your parents and Harvard and everyone you knew that you were homosexual. Then, sometime later, you also started working for Project RESISTANCE, which was part of the CIA’s Special Operations Group. Which was run by a guy named Richard Ober, Harvard class of forty-three.”

  I speak slowly and calmly and come to full stops. I learned this in doing depositions if my facts were good. It ratchets up the deponent’s sense of one’s omniscience. I have no idea if Alex ever met Ober, and I got his name off Google ten minutes ago, after Stewart mentioned Alex’s involvement in Project RESISTANCE, one of the CIA’s secret domestic operations that spied on people like us starting in 1967.

  “And then”—this next is total inference—”you made sure the CIA knew what we were up to. That’s why you disappeared that whole morning in Washington, right? After the march on the Pentagon? To meet with your handlers ‘in Virginia’? And that morning in New York, right after we called off the attack and you disappeared for two hours? You went to brief them. To snitch.”

  I feel a little bit like the self-satisfied Ian Fleming villain who, having captured Bond, shares way too much information about his scheme for world domination. My motivation isn’t hubris or a weakness for clunky exposition. I want Alex to know the secret I know, and to imagine that I know others so that he might reveal more of the truth or, in any event, realize that resistance is futile. Okay; maybe some hubris.

  “You are really being a bit of a berk, Hollander. You do know that I am very friendly with members of your Board of Regents. And the CEO of the company that owns your publisher now, Gottfried? Is a friend of mine. A close personal friend. He’s sailed with me.”

  So he’s not capitulating. He’s implying that he can get me fired from UCLA and have this book canceled. I’m relieved, almost delighted. He’s given up pretending that we didn’t do what we did in 1968, and he’s no longer claiming I’ve lost my mind. He’s moved on from the denial stage to something between anger and bargaining.

  “There are other publishers,” I say, “whose owners don’t give a shit about you. There’s the Internet. I’m not a nobody. People will pay attention. So …” I hesitate and then go there: “Even if you threaten me, even if you were to have me killed, there’s no stopping this. It’s all written,” I lie. “All done and safely stored in a cloud.”

  “It’s ‘the cloud,’ but Hollander, what fools we are, talking to each other this way! It’s stupid. Don’t be melodramatic! As though I’d do anything to you, for crying out loud. Or you to me.”

  “No, of course not,” I say. Has he decided to relent, to let all the chips fall? Will he ask me to soften the edges, treat him nicely? And why do I have an inkling of déjà vu about this conversation? “Alex, the real reason I called is to ask if you wanted to, you know, fill in some of the blanks. Make it more truthful.”

  “Right-o. Good. Because I do think you’re just a little mixed up about things.”

  Shit. “No, Alex, I’m really not.”

  “I’ll say it one last time: you should leave this thing alone, stop trying to be a policewoman, the last hero standing, opening up a very cold case. Besides, there’s no proof.”

  I really feel as if I’ve had this conversation before. “Have you been listening? I’ve got secret government documents.” Not exactly; I’ve got notes of an oral summary of secret government documents pilfered by an anonymous source. “Your 201 file is very interesting.” I haven’t seen it; Stewart used the term. It’s what the CIA calls its files on individuals.

  “You’re hell-bent on destroying the both of us, is that it, and Freeman as well? On sending your suicide package out into the world? This will now be the leads in our obituaries, Hollander. Is that really the legacy you want?”

  “This isn’t going to destroy anybody. It’ll make you even more interesting. And I haven’t thought about my obituary,” I lie, again, “but the only ‘legacy’ I care about is being a truth-teller.”

  “Ah, truth-teller,” he repeats. “It’s a
far, far better thing you do than you’ve ever done?” Then he sighs and chuckles and sighs again. “I say legacy, you say legacy, you say truth-teller, I say truth-teller. Did our generation start that, inverted commas around everything—shorthand sarcasm in place of actual argument?”

  Again he’s softening, so I soften. “Another modern bad habit that people our age can claim credit for.”

  “I’m having a déjà vu,” he says, “some night in Wilmette, late, we were outdoors, and I was pissed at you both, you and Chuck, and we just kept flinging each other’s words back and forth at each other like turds.”

  “Senior year, prom night, the Crawfords’ backyard.”

  “Yes. I felt so abandoned. I was so angry at you for being a couple—for keeping it secret from me. For not telling the truth. We’d always done everything together. I thought there was nobody I could trust more.” After a long pause, he says, “You know, Hollander, what happened to Chuck was his own fault.”

  “Yeah. But it was a game of chicken that we all started playing together. We’ve all got dirty hands.”

  “If they make the movie, Malcolm McDowell can play me now. And I suppose Tommy Lee has to be old Buzzy.” He means Tommy Lee Jones, the football player two years ahead of us at college on whom Alex had had a secret crush. I’d thought of Tommy Lee Jones as Stewart. “So long, Hollander.”

  I don’t know exactly how I expected that conversation to go, but not like it did. While I was talking with Alex, Waverly texted me again—PLEASE call—so now I do.

  “What is it, sweetie? Is everything okay?”

  “Grams, you’re going to hate me. I read your book. I’m so sorry. I feel horrible about it. I won’t tell anybody anything, I swear. I’m not a snitch. Don’t hate me.”

  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 ea
t 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.