The Company You Keep

by Neil Gordon

  I opened my eyes and watched assemble the view of a parking lot, liquid with midday sun, deserted but for a man and a girl walking their long shadows toward a truck stop restaurant, the man sweating, the girl in shorts and a tank top. In their wake the air above the hot tarmac shimmered. Total silence filled the scene but for the thrum of big engines beating under me.

  Where was I? A stale and antiseptic smell impinged on my consciousness, insistently, as if it were a clue. With a physical effort I sought to bring it into focus, to name its familiarity, to identify the emotion I carried. When I at last succeeded, it was in fact not enigmatic but as simple as can be. “I am on a bus. It must now be afternoon. I am on a bus.”

  Then it all came back.

  Izzy. I used to be able to sleep anywhere, and wake so happily, when I was young. Now sleep is a brittle physical state, a different consciousness as difficult to attain when you want it as it is, when it’s unwelcome, impossible to escape. I forced myself to repeat, like a mantra, that I was on a bus, on a bus, on a bus, on a bus. And with each repetition emptiness washed through me—a feeling so bleak, so hopeless, that in a man approaching fifty it can be dignified with the name of despair.

  How many days had passed since I blew a joint with Billy in his Sea of Green? Four? Five? How fragile Jim Grant turned out to be, falling apart in three days, four, the very first time he was challenged. Not for the first, but for perhaps the eighth time in my life, I had seen how fragile that whole collection of papers and lies that compose an identity turn out to be, tumbling apart the instant the right pressure is applied. And yet, how unexpected had been the vectors of forces that lined up to take Jim apart! Any one of them I could have weathered; perhaps any two. First Julia, and her lawyers. Then Sharon’s stupid capture. I had always been ready to run with you, Isabel, I had always known this could happen. And now, on the bus, I admitted to myself that the moment Ben Schulberg showed up and began poking around, I had known it was time.

  I had been Jim Grant for twenty years, since the summer of 1976, bicentennial year, the year of Carter’s election. I had been Jim Grant almost as long as I had been myself; certainly through the most important parts of my adult life: college, law school, fatherhood, and divorce. And given that between 1970 and 1976, I was not Jason Sinai but a series of other, fleeting, ever-changing identities, I had been Jim Grant longer than I had been myself. Sitting, face against the bus window, looking at an overheated parking lot, now deserted, I realized that everything that had meant anything profound to me as an adult was born and built as Jim Grant.

  And now it was gone.

  • • •

  I am Jason Sinai. For the first time in twenty years, I pronounced the name of my birth to myself; for the first time in twenty years I let it slip past a little mental firewall that kept it out of my memory. How strange it was: even after twenty years, Jason was immediately present to my mind, intimately familiar. How easily I had let myself be separated from my entire past—my family, my parents. At first it was youth, wasn’t it?—youth, and the potency of my beliefs. And then came Bank of Michigan, and something stronger than my beliefs interposed itself; something that made it impossible for me ever to go home, the way Jeff, and Billy, and Bernardine had moved back to the real world, slowly, their consciences clean, even proud of much they had done. Something that made me abandon, with plain determination and grim realism, any thought of ever going home again.

  And what would happen, now, to Jason Sinai? Sitting in the bus, the thought came to me like a song of mourning. All of the safety nets had belonged to Jim; Jason had nothing. No law license, no house, no friends, no life. No daughter. No daughter.

  It was coming now, like a swimmer surfacing, gasping for air, and with all the twenty years of mental discipline, I tried to escape the truth that had swum into my awareness, the truth that had been sitting there, just below my sleep, when I awoke. But it was everywhere, the bus engine throbbing loss; the carbon-monoxide bouquet of interstate anonymity; the depthless well of mourning that constituted my being. I had lost my daughter. And at the thought, instantly, I decided to surrender.

  But what was surrender? Surrender meant nothing for me but hard time in maximum-security lockup, a state prison in Michigan; Ionia, or Standish. There is no daughter in state lockup. At best there is the harsh neon-lit visiting room where rapists and murderers sit nearby, some in shackles. Such a room had awaited me all the time I was Jim Grant. Now Jim Grant no longer existed, and I doubted seriously that Jason Sinai, in jail, would be able to claim paternity of his daughter.

  And if I could, what good would it do me, when no court on God’s green earth would order Jim Grant’s divorced wife to bring my child there? What good would it do me when, at fifty-six, I would be released, if I was released, and you would be seventeen? What happens to aged vanguardists of a failed revolution, without income, without insurance? How do they live? I’d have to find work, and what might that be? Could I teach? Teachers, I knew, had to swear they had never been arrested. And who would hire a teacher at nearly sixty? Only the marginal would be available to me: clerking somewhere, driving a cab, working at the counter of a Wendy’s. And of the possibilities of freedom I had always so thoughtlessly enjoyed—an empty beach, a private piece of woods—not one would remain. Even state land would become closed to me, as I grew older and more infirm, wouldn’t it?

  I had, I thought, more in common with Julia than I’d have thought: she had outlived her time in front of the camera, and I my place in American politics.

  And you—where would you find the time in your life to visit this person I would become: you with your youth and health, you with your mother’s money and a world of expanding possibilities?

  I had always known where this would end. And all this thinking, all this thinking, I had done it before. I had done it in bed, nights; I had done it on long drives; I had done it standing by the window of my office in Saugerties, staring down at the empty streets. I knew the answer, and knowing it, I said it, once again, aloud. Al tegid lilah, Little J. Never say night.

  I opened my eyes again, now, and began to think.

  2.

  So where was I? Slowly, as I pieced together the events of the night before, reality reassembled itself: this was a truck stop on I-80 to Chicago; I was on a bus; the bus had stopped for a break. Judging by the time, we must be in Michigan. And judging by that same time, Jim Grant by now existed no longer, and Jason Sinai was the object of a manhunt that involved law enforcement from U.S. marshals to the FBI.

  That I was probably still being sought in Canada, not America, was only some help.

  Slowly, gingerly, I pulled my mind back from its grief, detaching it piece by piece, like the tentacles of a starfish from an undersea rock. When I could, I rose, reached my Sportsac shoulder bag from the small luggage shelf above, and climbed heavily out of the bus.

  A wet heat hung over the tarmac like a shroud, endless Doppler whines radiating from the highway with the sound of complaint. On stiff legs, I forced myself inside the truck stop, promising myself a cup of coffee before anything else. But on the way to the restaurant I passed a bank of newspaper machines, and from the front page of the Detroit Free Press I saw both Jason Sinai and Jim Grant’s faces watching me impassively.

  Ducking my face toward the ground, I changed course toward the bathroom and went into a stall.

  Here I locked the door, sat on the closed toilet with my bag in my lap, pulled my legs up, and buried my face in my knees.

  Like this, I sat for an hour.

  A good hour, to let the bus leave, to let the population of the truck-stop restaurants change.

  An hour. Repeating to myself, over and over.

  Let me do what I have to.

  Then I can go to hell.

  Izzy, have you have ever been in danger? On a boat, while traveling, on a city street late at night? Only if you have had an experience of real, sustained danger, danger so unrelenting that you cannot avoid confronting it, will y
ou understand the change that occurred to me that hour, hiding in a truck-stop bathroom on the I-80 through Michigan.

  I had come, at last, to the place you go to if you can be focused, rather than scattered, by risk. Whether decisions are right or wrong, here, you act on them quickly, before they can become too obscured by doubt. I know that’s hard to understand, but it’s true. Perhaps it’s because when you’re in danger, even a wrong decision carried out with determination is better than vacillation. Fear, you see, is the great friend of vacillation, and vacillation is where mistakes are made—mistakes that, here, can be fatal.

  Those who are experienced in danger, those who are practiced in risk, know that you cannot stop yourself from anticipating catastrophic failure, that it might even be the most likely outcome, and that it’s foolish to try to pretend it’s not there. Nonetheless, in the presence of the possibility of imminent disaster, the only sensible thing to do is to keep acting, one decision after the other after the other. Each decision that leads to the next is a tiny triumph. That’s why there’s not only fear here, though there’s lots of that. Every second of liberty is also a tiny triumph, a tiny dose of intoxication. It’s why people become criminals and why most criminals are gamblers, and it kept me, like I say, focused on what I was doing. Against that focus, however, was all the force of grief. Fear, I could use, but grief had to be repressed: fear could be a conscious tool, but grief had to stay where it was without being seen.

  First I stood up and peed, lengthily, and with relief. Then, sitting again, I withdrew from my bag a laundry kit and carefully took out some Grecian Formula hair dye and a black toupee, a small black mustache in a plastic case, an electric razor, a mirror, and a number of little tubes and combs.

  Now, I don’t particularly want to teach you the tricks of the trade, but I will tell you this: if you want to buy stuff to disguise yourself, no matter whether you’re going to leave it in a closet for months, do it at Halloween—no one will bat an eye. Sitting in the bathroom stall, knees pressed together to hold my impedimenta, I stripped off my shirt and began working carefully with the kit that I kept replenished each Halloween. First, I used the Grecian Formula to turn the red hair on my head black. Then I shaved carefully and by feel with a disposable razor, shaving cream, and witch hazel—that way I didn’t need to leave the privacy of the stall for running water. I put on the mustache and the toupee with adhesive. With a pair of barber’s scissors and the mirror, I trimmed the toupee and mustache. Finally, I put on a pair of horn-rimmed glasses with a very slight prescription—so slight that it did not much impair my vision, but still avoided the telltale glare of flat glass on fake lenses.

  When finally I held the little mirror away from my face, I was shocked to see a handsome Jewish man staring back. It was the Jewish part that shocked me—it had been a very long time since I acknowledged my tenuous relationship with my parents’ religion. As for the handsomeness—I have warned you before that I am not without vanity—it saddened me. I did not like to admit how much better I looked with more hair. Perhaps, I told myself, it was just the color.

  I put my shirt back on and cleaned up, then waited for the bathroom to be—or to sound—empty. When at last I thought it was, I left the stall, then the bathroom, and walked directly out into the parking lot. Repressing my now imperious need for coffee, which was making my head ache, and carrying my bag, I crossed the lot to the service road leading away from the highway. Without looking back, I stepped down its verge toward the low skyline of suburban sprawl, soon finding myself in a residential neighborhood of small clapboard homes.

  The streets here were empty: a blue-collar bedroom community on a weekday—at least, I thought it was a weekday—air conditioners letting a dull hum into the air. For a time I walked, nearly thoughtlessly, watching the trim lawns and modest houses, feeling the lassitude of heat in the suburbs. Finally, at a public park where a couple children played listlessly in front of their mothers, I sat under a tree and waited the couple last hours until nightfall, feeling my caffeine-deprivation headache rise to new heights.

  When it was at last dark, I rose and retraced my steps toward the highway, or where I thought the highway should be. This time, my route must have been different, for after several blocks of lit houses in black streets, I came to a gas station and convenience store, both built of cinder block, sitting under a pool of neon light from a high streetlamp. Cicadas had started sounding, so slowly I had not noticed it, but now I became conscious of their ululating scream, like Arab women in mourning, and with it came a sudden sense of panic. There was a video camera mounted on the lamp, pointed to catch the entrance doors of both shops. I crossed a little patch of oil-stained tarmac behind the grocery store to point my back toward the camera and then, shoulders hunched slightly, walked into the store.

  Coffee, here, came in large and extra large. I took two of the latter. I knew I had to eat, and although it broke some of the firmest principles of my life with you, I finally took a bag of Doritos from a shelf and bought those too. Munching the Doritos and sipping coffee thirstily, I walked back out into a din of crickets and went on through the streets of little houses. A soul-destroying place to live, I thought, and as the coffee quieted my headache, somewhere distant, for the first time since leaving you, I felt a grief bigger than my own, the grief of people forced to live lives of work and consumerism in houses like this.

  When, after a mile or so, I found the entrance ramp to the highway, strong halogen streetlamps cast a thick curtain of luminescence—a shower of light that emitted an electric buzz and held a swarm of insects at its top—through the summer-warm air.

  I did not enter the highway but stood just outside the border of the light. The first car that came was a Taurus, and as it approached I stepped fully into the light, thumb up, wrist toward the car. It swerved slightly, then accelerated down the ramp, a woman at the wheel looking steadfastly ahead. A full fifteen minutes passed without another car passing, then a battered Tercel driven by a single man came up. This time I stepped into the light more fully, showing my face, and held a hand up. The car pulled up while its driver, a boy in his twenties, leaned over to unroll the passenger window.

  “Can you give me a ride, man?” I leaned onto the window and showed my whole face, which held anxiety. “My car died. I left it at the gas station up there.”

  “Where to?” The r was French. His face, not recently shaved, was framed by dirty-blond hair, and he wore a denim shirt over a faded orange T-shirt.

  “I’m going to Chicago.”

  “Chicago? Merde.”

  “Wherever, man. As far as you’re going is fine.”

  The boy looked me up and down, appraisingly. “O-kay. Venez.”

  I climbed in and slammed shut the door, defining thereby a microclimate filled with the warmth of my body and the smell of tobacco. A pack of Canadian Export A’s sat on the well under the handbrake. The kid pulled out and the car sank down the ramp into the zone of bright, yellowish streetlamp, merging into fast traffic while accelerating at the limit of its little engine. Now the interior of the car was lit, and I felt sweat come out on my face.

  “J’ai cru qu’on fait plus de stop aux États-Unis.”

  The kid was speaking to himself, I knew. Still, I asked: “Sorry?”

  “No itchikeeng anymore. In America, I thought.”

  I watched the cigarette pack, feeling a horrible desire rising in me. I looked down at it, then back up. The kid was watching me now.

  “Listen, man. Can you take me into Chicago?”

  The kid laughed. “I go to Joliet. I already come from Quebec. You make me drive all night.”

  “Yes.” It was, I thought to myself, like getting in a stranger’s car in New York and asking to be driven to Boston. Without thinking, I reached ten twenties out of my pocket. “I’ll pay gas and food and this on top.” I glanced at him, then back to the road.

  “What ees your problem?”

  I tried to enunciate clearly. “I’m in troub
le with the police. Marijuana. Do you understand?”

  “Oui. And een Chicago, it ees better?”

  “In Chicago I have friends. They’ll help me get a lawyer.”

  He watched for another instant, then turned back to the road, smiling. “Allon-zy donc.”

  Relief flooding through me, I reached a cigarette out of the box. “And I’ll buy more cigarettes too.”

  “O-kay, man.” It came out, this time, in an imitation American accent, as if the kid were making fun of me. And I lit the cigarette, drawing the deep richness into the back of my throat, sitting back in my chair. Feeling, in the interior of the car, the slightly sweaty warmth of my savior. Thinking, as the nicotine swirled into my bloodstream, numbing my lips, cooling my hands, that it was always like this.

  It was always like this. Total strangers would help, for no reason whatever. Some of us had been very public figures in SDS, sometimes addressing crowds of thousands of people, and when we were underground, we would be recognized wherever we went, in restaurants, in bars. Recognized, and after the moment of recognition, ignored. And later, when the police came—and the police came early and often, with warrants, with subpoenas, and with a whole boatload of COINTELPRO tricks—not one person, not a single, solitary person, ever told them a thing.

  All of us, for years after, when on left and right alike we had been condemned—on the right for adventurism, on the left for destroying the movement—we would all remember the hundreds and hundreds of total strangers who, at enormous risk, helped us. People who lent houses, gave money; doctors who saw us; kids who gave us rides, and cars, and apartments.

  How hated were we? Sure: There were those like Gitlin, who hated us on political grounds, and those who hated us on personal grounds, for our arrogance, for our plain meanness. But apart from these, I have never been convinced we were widely hated at all.

  Except for how much some of us came to hate ourselves.