35
Wheel Life Pictures is in a building in Santa Monica that’s old for L.A., which is to say a building built around the time I was born. Originally a small factory, it has been renovated, adaptively reused—also like me, although much more stylishly. I’d be surprised if any of the dozen people Alex employs here are more than half my age.
I’ve been standing and staring out the twenty-foot-high gridded glass window toward the Santa Monica airport for five minutes when I feel his hands gripping my shoulders.
“Ms. Hollander,” he says in a soft growl.
I spin around and we kiss. When we were eighteen, he was slightly taller than I was, but now we’re the same height. He’s astonishingly fit. His hair is shortish but thick and luxurious, so white that I wonder if he bleaches it.
He tells me one of the reasons he bought the building is that he can leave his office and be aboard his Gulfstream 650 ten minutes later. “I can actually walk to the plane.”
“Really? It’s only a ten-minute walk?”
“That sounds about right. I said I can, not I do. It’s a two-minute drive.”
An assistant brings me a perfect cappuccino with a decoration on the foam that I guess is a wheel. I pass on the offer of “a few foie gras nibbles” left over from a lunch meeting. Selling foie gras has been prohibited in California for the last two years, but possession remains legal. The assistant closes the door to Alex’s private office.
Rio was “fantastic, of course,” watching England beat Germany in the World Cup final was “too perfect,” seeing white lions in the African bush was “beyond.”
“And this black panther we saw rip apart an impala? In Ethiopia? My God, the sexiest creature ever. Although did you know ‘black panther’ is redundant? All African panthers are black. Funny.”
“You finally made it to Ethiopia. I remember your plan to live in exile in Addis Ababa.”
This is my attempt to bring up 1968 gently, but he ignores it and proceeds to tell me that he’s heading to outer space.
“How very Bond-villain of you,” I say. “Someone I know went last year, on one of the first regular flights.” After my colleague’s wife died unexpectedly, he decided he could afford to drop two hundred thousand dollars of their retirement savings on a one-day adventure into space. “You take off from New Mexico, right?”
Alex frowns. “That’s Virgin Galactic,” he says, as if I’d asked whether the Chrysler out in the parking lot was his, or whether his round indigo eyeglasses were from LensCrafters. “It’s cute. But it’s just a few hours, up and down. Suborbital. They only go up sixty miles, the same as from here to … Laguna Beach. And they sell it like some theme-park ride—’Virgin Galactic Mission Control,’ ‘book with your local accredited space agent.’ Please.”
“So what are you doing?”
He smiles. “Lunar expedition.” In eighteen months, two years at most, he will spend a week flying to the moon and back, orbiting a few times but not, alas, touching down. He’s accompanying a forty-three-year-old South African entrepreneur (electric cars, solar power, spacecraft) named Elon Musk. “We’ll be the first private space explorers.”
Alex explains all this with a straight face, but I will Google this Mr. Musk after I leave here to make sure he isn’t a fictional character, maybe a Viennese coconspirator of Harry Lime’s from The Third Man or a villain from one of the dozens of James Bond novels published since Ian Fleming died.
“Remember watching the pictures from the first Apollo mission that orbited the moon,” he says, “those mind-blowing images of the lunar surface and the earth? Didn’t we watch together, you and I, on the telly in my suite in Adams House?”
“I was never in your suite in Adams House, Alex.”
“No! That’s impossible.”
“We didn’t hang out much after freshman year. And also? We wouldn’t have been on campus, because that first lunar mission, Apollo 8, was at Christmas.”
“Bang on! Nothing can stop Hollander the human search engine!”
“It’s the book. I’ve spent a lot of time researching, getting all the dates straight. Apollo 8 was Christmas—1968.”
“Poor Buzzy, eh?”
My second attempt at a soft segue has worked. “It was awful. So sad. And so unnecessary.”
“How much did he know about this book of yours?”
“He knew about it. I met with him earlier this year.”
“Did you?”
“You know what? Buzzy never served in Vietnam. I found out that was total bullshit, complete fiction.”
“Is that right? How interesting. He knew you knew that? He knew you were going to write that?”
I shake my head. “So: Alex.”
“Yes, counselor?”
“In April sixty-eight, when … at the end, when you had your last phone call with Chuck, you told him you were CIA.”
“I told him I knew people in CIA.”
Thank God: he is no longer trying to gaslight me. “Did he tell you he was an agent, too, an informant for military intelligence, for the army?”
From his expression, the momentary but unmistakable look of surprise, I can tell he’s impressed by what I know. He shakes his head. “I didn’t find that out until afterward. Not from him. And I’ve never known that it was the army. They didn’t tell me which agency. Interesting.”
“At the end, you were trying to get him to work with the CIA, like you. Right? You were trying to bring him in from the cold, to save him.”
Are his eyes moistening?
“I was. I really was, Hollander.”
“I know that, Alex. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you in person.” All of the possible phrases seem thin: I understand, I forgive you, no hard feelings. “Both of us were trying to save Chuck.”
He smiles. “This is like the end of Gaslight, when Ingrid Bergman has Charles Boyer tied up in the chair and toys with him, letting him think maybe she’s going to let him go.”
“I am publishing the book.”
“So how were you trying to ‘save’ Chuck, Hollander?”
“Right after the rest of us decided not to go through with it and he kept going, I phoned the Secret Service from New York and gave them his name. Which is why, for the last forty-six years, I thought I’d gotten him killed.”
Alex smiles. “Interesting. So interesting. All of us were compromised.”
“Except Buzzy.”
“Buzzy. He was a clown.” Alex stretches, clasps his hands behind his head, swivels around to look out his giant window, then turns back. “You know, I’ve decided I can deal with people knowing I stopped an assassination. Having worked with CIA has lost its old stigma. In fact? It may be the opposite now.” He looks at his watch. “I love seeing you. And we absolutely will have dinner soon. But … are we about through with this, Hollander?”
We are not through. “The thing I don’t entirely understand about you and our plot, Alex, is your state of mind. Your precise intentions at various moments. You were a CIA asset between August twelfth, 1967, and February second, 1968, and you were still a CIA asset after March thirty-first, 1968, when we called it quits, and until we graduated in June 1971. But exactly what were you thinking during those two months from February third, after we decided to kill Johnson, until March thirty-first?” I’m being disingenuous, as all litigators sometimes must be.
“I don’t know what you mean,” he says. “I don’t have the calendar committed to memory like you, darling. A touch Rain Man-y, no?”
“From the morning we decided to kill the president until the night we decided not to, were you with us, or half with us, or what? You turned on a dime and voted to cancel the plot as soon as Johnson said he wasn’t running for reelection—”
“Doesn’t that answer your question? As soon as I thought I had an opportunity to persuade the rest of you to call it quits, I went for it. I was the opposite of an agent provocateur! I was the agent apaisant!” I assume he’s been dying to use thi
s phrase for years.
“But Buzzy and I immediately backed out and called it quits, too, Alex. You didn’t need to do any persuading.” I pause. “You didn’t tell the CIA about our plan until after we canceled the operation.”
“I think you’re mistaken on your chronology,” he says, but he seems nervous.
This is the sort of Perry Mason cross-examination check and … mate moment that I had exactly twice in my thirty years of practicing law, once at trial with a mildly retarded accomplice to a homicide in the Bronx and once when I was deposing a very clever and crooked chief financial officer.
“No, I’m really not mistaken,” I tell him.
“It’s ‘he says, she says.’”
“No, I’m afraid it’s he says, secret CIA internal memo says. According to a memo from 1971, WHEEL-14—you—provided information in April 1968 concerning a plot to assassinate President Johnson. April 1968. In other words, two months after we hatched the plot. And after we abandoned it. In other words, all the time when push was really coming to shove, and we were making the plastic explosive and buying the guns and testing the airplane and all the rest of it, you neglected to tell the CIA and snitch on your comrades. You were with us. You were as committed or crazy as we were. You were in.”
He closes his eyes and breathes deeply.
“Don’t pretend you betrayed us, Alex. You didn’t.”
He finally opens his eyes. “I’m bipolar,” he says.
“So I read. So we’ve discussed.”
“Everything I did in 1968? An eight-week-long manic episode, I now know.”
As he describes the symptoms of mania—taking on risky and highly goal-directed new projects, having unrealistic self-confidence, behaving impulsively, making inappropriate plans for foreign travel, jumping from one idea to another, speaking rapidly, grandiosity—it does sound like a perfect description of his behavior in February and March 1968. It also sounds like a perfect description of Chuck’s and Buzzy’s and my behavior. I’ve never understood as well as I do right now why Americans have plunged so heedlessly and gratefully into this diagnostic age. Diagnosis is tidy and scientific. Diagnosis is easy shorthand explanation, the way text messages and tweets replace ambiguous conversation and complicated argument. Diagnosis replaces moral analysis and personal responsibility and censure. Bipolar disorder: two words, six syllables, end of story.
And now Alex is a victim whose certified illness I exploited then and am exploiting again.
“After the last time we spoke,” he says, “I thought about pulling a Buzzy. How would you feel then, Ms. Truth-teller?”
I say nothing but keep looking straight at him.
“I even have a suicide plan,” Alex says. “I meet with you here, today, then do it right afterward by overdosing on insulin, injecting a hundred units, they’ll think you came in here and did a von Bülow on me, the way he did in his wife.”
“He had a motive. I don’t.” And Sunny von Bülow lived on for a quarter century after the insulin overdose.
“But how perfect, assisted suicide that looks like murder—it’s like the end of The Third Man, when Harry Lime gives Holly Martins the okay to shoot and kill him in the sewer.”
He’s grinning. I don’t say anything.
“You are so easy to freak out, Hollander. I’m not going to do myself in. I don’t want to miss all the fun when your book comes out. And I was afraid I’d make a bollocks of it and spend the rest of my life as a pickled cucumber, like poor Sunny von Bülow. But the insulin-overdose idea? My new writer on the Afghanistan picture, the Third Man remake, loves the idea. So much more intimate than a gun.”
Alex’s last words to me are “We don’t validate.”
I have no ticket; his building has a free parking lot; he’s joking.
I drive a few blocks from Wheel Life Pictures and park at the curb, so I can write down everything Alex has just said while it’s fresh. A teenager in an old Camaro slows as he drives past with his windows open, super-loud hip-hop blasting the whole block, and stops next to me at the light. I think I just heard the singer rap “James Bond coupe,” but I assume I’ve misheard until he gets to the chorus, which consists of the line “Aston Martin music” repeated a half dozen times. A Santa Monica police officer appears—a young woman in shorts on a bicycle; oh, Santa Monica, you are cute—and as the teenager checks her out, she stops and turns to him and leans down to make direct eye contact and taps her extended right index finger to her lips. The mimed shhhh actually makes the boy turn down his music fifty decibels before the light changes and he turns left on Pico toward the ocean.
I am inordinately cheered by watching this encounter.
On the drive home, I learn from All Things Considered that the complete disappearance this summer of the Arctic ice cap has a silver lining—big ships will be able to steam straight over the North Pole, circumnavigating the globe in half the usual time. And that a Russian multibillionaire’s childless young widow has had all the egg cells removed from her ovaries, fertilized in vitro, and dispatched around the planet to impregnate thousands of surrogate mothers whom she’s paying a hundred thousand dollars apiece to bear and raise her thousands of children. And that the president of Brazil, who was a Marxist guerrilla as a girl in the late 1960s, has developed a special friendship with Vladimir Putin, the former KGB man. I’ll say it for the last time: we live in a James Bond world.
Back on Wonderland Park Avenue, I call Stewart to tell him about my meeting with Alex and get a this-number-is-not-in-service message on all his burners. Then I text his regular cellphone. No reply. I send a carefully innocuous email to each of his personal accounts, and they all bounce back, undeliverable.
I’m accustomed to his occasional ghostliness—we didn’t communicate at all for almost six months in 2001 and 2002—but he was supposed to return a week ago from Kabul or Islamabad or wherever the hell he went. “Don’t worry like a wife,” he said to me early in our relationship, fifteen years ago, after he’d flown off to East Africa and gone radio-silent for three weeks, “or I’ll start treating you like one, which you won’t like.” But I’m worried.
I call the only other person on earth who knows what I’m up to. She’s at a café in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, “eating an eggplant panino”—panini in Bed-Stuy? New York has changed since I’ve been gone—before returning to a shelter to finish digitizing a homeless family’s documents, including the children’s report cards. She tells me that the oldest kid in the family, an eight-year-old boy, missed three months of second grade last year. “He’s totally a G-and-T kid. It’s really depressing.”
“Oh, God, that is depressing. Child Protective Services can’t do something?”
“What do you mean? The mom’s doing the best she can. She has a part-time job. She was taking a night course at CCNY until they got kicked out of their apartment. She’s incredibly inspirational.”
“But … an eight-year-old drinking gin and tonics?”
“G and T is gifted and talented, Grams, he scored ninety-seven percent on the official test. He’s like a genius. I’m going to give him my iPad. You know what I’ve realized? What people like them really need? Are lawyers who can deal with all the stupid bureaucratic bullshit they face. Did you know Legal Aid has to turn down like nine out of ten poor people who haven’t been arrested or anything but just come to them for normal legal help dealing with their lives? It’s so fucked up.”
“It is.” At the end of my Legal Aid service, I published an article about how the social welfare state had further embittered the poor and uneducated by creating an excessively legalistic system they aren’t equipped to navigate. I compared it to the Bridge of Death scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where one knight is allowed to cross by naming his favorite color but another is asked the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow. I was accused of being a racist, a socialist, and anti-union. “It’s very fucked up.”
“Should I go to law school?”
“Maybe so, honey.
I think you’d be a great lawyer. But you don’t have to make any irrevocable choices now. You’re not even eighteen.”
She tells me that even though she believes in her Virtual Home project, which is about to expand to three other cities, she has “decided to go offline, personally.” Her revelation came, she says, when she called Virtual Home’s Web hosting service about a problem and “got totally freaked out by this IVRed computer I was talking to.”
“IVR?”
“Interactive voice response. I got angry, and the computer knew I was a woman and knew I was angry. It told me to ‘please calm down, ma’am.’ Fuck that. Fuck texting every five seconds and Foursquare and Facebook and the rest of it. It’s DIY fascism, you know? Totalitarianism lite. Big Brother as a group hug. Fuck the fucking Singularity.”
The thing about young people who glimpse malign truths? They’re hyperbolic and annoying, but they’re not necessarily wrong on some of the essentials. Although my parents’ generation may have paid too much attention to our generation’s shocked and breathless truth-telling in the 1960s, nowadays I think a lot of us probably err too much in the other direction, shrugging in our Snuggies and pouring another drink.
“So Mom pulled the trigger,” Waverly says. “Dad’s moving out after Labor Day. It’s really happening.”
“I know. How do you feel?”
“Okay. At first he just kept saying ‘I guess it is what it is,’ but now he cries almost every day. Feeling sorry for him is better than thinking he’s a dick.”
True Believers Page 44
