The Radicals

by Ryan McIlvain

  I waited for the old ire, the sense of rightness in my cause—I suddenly wanted it, needed it—but it wouldn’t come. Nancy Grace filled the screen, with a harry of legends and tickers and crawls all around her. I’d caught a little of this loop out of the corner of my eye before, but now it assaulted me head-on: pictures of Bosch and Bosch’s family, and now Nancy Bosch at a lectern with two adult children at her side, all of them red-faced, swollen, as Nancy struggles to read prepared words about a loving husband and father, a good man, who never deserved this. Cut to another snippet of video as the suited executive squints and raises his hand against the strobing gale of camera flashes—cut to a large black Escalade pulling past a corridor of metal police barriers that holds back the angry protesters with their signs. The chasm widened in my stomach and I began to fall through it, Alice-like, falling into nothingness, blackness. I rushed back to the kitchen counter and grabbed my plate, scurrying back downstairs to eat alone.

  “Son?” Mom called after me. “Eli?”

  At the writing desk all my recollections read back like horrible stalls, feints, repetitions. I’d started practicing my statement to the police, too, writing it out like the fool I was.

  Where was I on the night of August 21? Out for a little drive with friends, Officer, and I think a stop-off at a diner—what night was that again? A Thursday? It must have been the Peter Pan Diner, and I must have ordered from the breakfast menu since I remember the hash browns tasting like wood chips soaked in oil. An overrated place, we all agreed, and yes, cash only—we paid in cash. Then we took the long way back to the city, pulling over to the side of the road when a rainstorm made a mockery of our windshield wipers…Then we drove the rest of the way home without incident.

  What a fool I was! What a rank coward to cling so hopelessly to this thin little filament of a chance! If the police came digging, circling back, prodding my story for inconsistencies, I was supposed to volunteer that we’d actually stopped off in those dark rainy woods to smoke pot, fishbowling the car. This was Sam’s invention, his pièce de résistance—it explained why we’d taken the toll road up (they’d have the footage available) and the out-of-the-way way back. It also gave off a little whiff of criminality, ergo plausibility—ergo problem solved.

  I confess that I’d briefly felt flattered that the group should choose me for this subtler role—the fool!—this character who withholds a minor infraction, then confesses it shaking and racked. And then I felt genuinely racked, genuinely shaky to learn that Sam had been keeping weed in the bowels of his old-school glove compartment all along. (If the cops checked for traces there, he assured us they’d find them.) The fact astonished me: All the time we’d been out on “junkets” in Sam’s Buick, chasing and tailing Bosch around the city, or out trawling around for unguarded cell phones, laptops, iPads—all this time Sam had carried the classic pretext for an arrest in his glove compartment.

  This moving target of a man—when had I lost the bead on him? And had I ever really had it?

  In the late afternoon I heard someone on the creaking stairs descending, hesitating. The wooden planks lulled their song momentarily, but now the song resumed and gathered tempo and purpose. I was at my bedroom door before Mom could get into the entertainment room. She saw me, startled back.

  “Oh,” she said. “I was just coming to talk to you.”

  “I figured.”

  The room glowed bluely with light from another cutaway window against the wall, a lighted band of blue-white sky above a narrower band of dark loam. The house was set at an angle, you remembered, dug into a slope that slowly rose toward the back of the property. In heavy rain I used to watch the black dirt gel and burgeon at my bedroom window, half daring the earth to come through the glass and bury me, sink me struggling in that black grainy sea, a white hand sticking out in sudden desperate protest—Of course I didn’t really mean it!

  “Do you have a minute?” Mom said.

  “Actually,” I said. “Maybe not quite yet.”

  “Let’s pretend you do, okay? As a favor to me? Call it a trial run.”

  “A trial run?”

  “You pretend you’re the kind of son who still comes to his mother when he needs help, I’ll pretend I’m the kind of mother who can still help you. Okay? A trial run.”

  She sat at one end of a plaid couch against the wall and patted the spot next to her with her small white hand. She wore blue argyle socks and the gray corduroys, narrow-waled, that Dad liked to run his fingernail across at speed, making a sharp little zeep sound. A thin black sweater, narrow with white stripes, like a fashionable take on prison garb. She’d cut her brown hair to curl tight around her ears and upper neck, having taken inches off her pageboy too. She opened her mouth to speak but changed her mind, dropping back into a not-quite smile.

  “Why am I here, right? That’s what you want to know?”

  “We assume you’re here because you need to be here,” Mom said, “but yes, a little detail would be nice.”

  I leaned my back against the armrest, slipping my feet under Mom’s warm thighs as I’d done throughout childhood, the two of us reading, say, or watching TV, with Dad off in his study or away on business. Sealed away in our respective minds but close, connected, touching.

  I started into the lie I’d prepared for this conversation too, another alibi—things souring with Jen, the engagement called off, the ultimatum from Hahn to finish my dissertation or else, the job I’d gotten, the job I’d lost, the money I’d borrowed from them and all but squandered…I could see the concern in the long smooth lines of my mother’s face, but I couldn’t tell whether or not she believed me. For some reason I felt that the money was the sticking point—ten thousand dollars wasn’t easily sneezed away. I described what I’d spent to appease the people I’d crashed with for too long, how quickly large sums can disappear in New York. I said I was sorry—and I was.

  “I’ll pay you back,” I said, “I promise. I want to pay you back.”

  “How much of it do you have left?”

  “About four hundred.”

  The money was Hahn’s, but the figure was accurate.

  Unfazed, Mom nodded, but then she said, “Who are these friends you owe money to? You owe them rent, you said?”

  “I don’t owe them anything anymore. I didn’t mean that. They’re not really my friends, either.”

  She looked calculating now—doing the numbers, carrying ones across multiple lanes of numerical traffic. You saw it happen at parties sometimes, family gatherings, a vacant look while she went somewhere behind her eyes and peeled back the weeks and months and years of your time on this earth. Tell her your birthday, she’d tell you the day of the week you were born on—a trick she’d learned in graduate school.

  Mom said, “Is one of these friends you owe money to Alex? Your old girlfriend Alex?”

  I looked at her without cover, without preparation.

  “She called the house this morning while you were in the shower. She asked if you were here.”

  “She did? What did she say?”

  “She just asked if you were here. I said you were but you weren’t available, could I take a message. She didn’t have one. I think she might have been calling from a pay phone. It was a strange call.”

  “You’re sure it was Alex?”

  “I recognized her voice. She seemed shy to be talking to Eli’s mother. Do you owe her money, Eli? Does she need money from you?”

  “Does Alex need money? How should I know?” I said. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I’m just asking you a question,” Mom said. “Are you in trouble?”

  For the rest of the afternoon I waited for Alex to call again, or text—or something. What did she want from me? Why was she calling my parents’ landline? I waited through the evening and late into the night, cycling through the old CDs still arranged in the si
deways wooden cubby on the brown dusty ledge above my bed. The old bulbous CD player still worked, with the cutout picture of Robert Plant, curled at the edges, yellowing with age, hanging on the wall with a red thumbtack through one of Plant’s iconic golden curls. In the picture he is quiet, eyes closed, holding the microphone tenderly with overlapping hands as if he just might kiss the thing instead of sing into it—an older man’s gentleness, his face lined. “Going to California” was on the player now, 3:00 a.m. by the red glowing numbers of the clock display. I sang along to the chorus distractedly, as I had fifteen years ago, more—

  Made up my mind to make a new start

  Going to California with an aching…

  The words stretched on Plant’s ghostly tenor like a canvas, an otherworldly skin. Perhaps it was here that I’d picked up the crooner style Mal chided me for when I tried to sing Mahler.

  I’d never been to California. I’d only gone as far west as Maria Nava’s backyard in Phoenix, Arizona, it occurred to me now, and now I thought I didn’t stand much chance of completing the journey to the coast. Eastward, against the course of empire, I’d gone as far as Europe after college—London, Paris, Brussels, Munich, Berlin, Vienna, Florence, Rome. For a month you run along rail lines and rutted tourist trails like a neuron passing unthinking through the automatic brain, the vast cerebellum of western Europe. The sameness of desire is humbling, occasionally comforting—very occasionally. When I think of that trip now the first thing to resolve out of the gray blur of monuments and mansard blocks and other generic beauties is the talismanic head of Karl Marx, at his gravesite in North London. You wend back through the unpruned greenways of Highgate Cemetery and suddenly there it is, looming up hero-size—Marx’s great gray bust on a high granite base. The forehead sat hugely above prow-like brows, great recessed pits for eyes, the round nose riding high on a prodigious sea-foaming wave of mustache and beard. He looked like Poseidon, Zeus, a menacing Santa Claus. Years later when I sold my car to fund a weeklong trip to Florence with Alex, I made a special arrangement for an eight-hour layover at Heathrow so that Alex could visit the grave too. The afternoon was misting, I remember, and Marx looked changed, less inspired and inspiring, his eyes prosaically visible in the gray even light. He seemed to be looking down on us, weighing us in the balance.

  “Done ticked this box, haven’t we?” Alex said in a sudden chirping cockney.

  I couldn’t tell if she was joking to mask her disappointment or to lighten mine, or maybe both. Done tixed is box, aven’t we?

  The gilt lettering of “WORKERS OF ALL LANDS UNITE!” looked faded and a little chintzy, but Alex posed underneath it and smiled in her pink zippered hoodie that doubled as a raincoat, the water beading and pilling on the soft fabric.

  I tried to keep these memories with me as I journeyed into sleep, fitful sleep, but I couldn’t hold on to Alex or rainy disappointing London for long. In the morning I walked outside into birdsong and bright light, letting myself feel shocked. I walked up the long sloping rise past the Sheehans’ property, past the stand of thin trees where Sean and I had huddled over crumbling pink body parts, the limbs shoveled haphazardly into our gaping id furnaces, the doors of superego standing wide…Eventually I looked around me and saw that I’d wandered far beyond the woods near my house, uncertain of where I was anymore, with no bread crumbs in sight. Then a woman on a horse cantered into view, slowing to a walk as she approached me. What a tall, broad-chested, proud-maned animal she rode! I gave the horse a wide berth as it passed, the woman high in her saddle in white riding pants and a light brown shirt with a darker silhouette of a palm tree on it. She looked distinctly out of place in Plymouth, Massachusetts, but she did match her horse, mocha-colored with white streaks in its mane and lower legs so that it might have been wearing tube socks. I nodded a hello to the woman, who looked off beyond me, battening down her eyes in sudden confusion.

  “Me?” the woman called out, pointing. “Or him?”

  I knew it was Alex before I’d turned around. A hundred yards off, not far from where two trails joined in a sandy confluence, a small figure waved her arms against the brightness of the trail mouth. Familiar in her tank top and shorts, familiar in the voice she lifted up against the tree sounds and wind—I saw Alex’s Honda, too, parked a little ways behind her in a cul-de-sac. A pickup with a horse trailer attached to it curved into view as I picked up my pace, running. A strange sense of calm was coming over me, an inevitability like the movement of an airport conveyor belt. When I got into the car beside Alex I tried to get her attention, putting my hand on her hand as she reached for the ignition.

  “Hey,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

  Alex started the car. “We should go. We’re drawing attention to ourselves.”

  “You weren’t exactly discreet a moment ago.”

  The woman on horseback came to the trailhead, descending her mount with a swift athletic swing of the legs, holding the reins at her cheek like a child with balloon strings. Alex and I must have looked like quarreling lovers in our dumb show, my body at right angles to hers. I needed to know what was wrong.

  “What’s wrong?” Alex said. “What’s wrong? I don’t know, Eli, what could possibly be wrong? I was looking for you!”

  “Why were you looking for me?”

  Alex pulled away at speed. Mailboxes shot past us, cracked driveways, modest white houses through the trees.

  “Where are you going?” I said. “Do you even know where you’re going?”

  “They questioned Sam,” Alex said. “The police questioned him.”

  “What? When?”

  “The other day.”

  “Yesterday?”

  “Fuck, Eli! How should I know? He didn’t give me a detailed timeline on the phone.”

  “He called you? From jail?”

  “He didn’t call me from jail, moron! You think he’d call me from jail?”

  Alex jerked her head back and forth, back and forth again, as if trying to shake off my naïveté, my preening moronic questions. Yet I didn’t know anything. How had he called her? Where was he? How had the police found him? Where had he gone?

  “I don’t know any of that,” Alex said. “I just know we have to find him. He’s obsessed. We have to find him.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Wait wait wait wait wait wait—”

  Through the window the shapes and colors of my childhood spun past—past Ames Way, tree-lined Marshland Street, past Carolina Road, past the O’Briens’ and the Delanos’ and the Sheehans’. The fixed point of the mailbox at the top of my family’s drive rushed toward us—past us.

  “Alex,” I said. “Alex, where are we going? You just passed my house. What are you doing?”

  She was shaking her head again, muttering bitterly through tight-set teeth.

  “What?” I said. “ ‘Fucking’ what?”

  “Fucking amateur! He goes to his parents’ house to hide! Probably the easiest place in the world to find you, Eli, and that’s where you go.”

  A blue minivan shaped like a great sleek nose sped up Standish Drive as we shot down it, a brief sucking boom as we passed.

  “Jesus Christ, Alex, will you slow down?”

  She leaned forward and to the right with the sudden swinging pressure of the car, arcing us left onto Webster at the bottom of the hill, barely slowing at a three-way stop.

  “Oh the discretion!” I sang. “The discretion!”

  At the next stop sign, a four-way intersection, Alex slowed just enough for me to jimmy up the power locks and jump out of the car. A crazed operatic scream chased after me, the noise stretching and yo-yoing back as Alex turned the car around and tracked my progress up the hill, making a running recitative of abuse through the open window: “Goes straight to the first place anyone would fucking think to look, the shit for brains. Get the fuck in the car, Eli! This is seriou
s! Do you doubt it?”

  When I looked up again she was showing me the gun. It was shinier than the other one, all-around shiny, snub-nosed.

  “Wait,” I said, slowing. Alex’s Honda kept pace beside me.

  “Just trust me when I say this is serious,” Alex said. “Okay?”

  “That’s not the same one, is it?”

  “What do you think?”

  “No.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  I broke around the back of the Honda and flew up the little bank of grass that the Teague family never kept mowed—past the fishing boat on its side in the side yard, the lichened blue aboveground pool that Mr. Teague once threw me in to teach me how to swim, my rigid little body like a mute white stone sinking straight to the bottom. The oldest Teague girl broke into our house a year later and stole petty cash, a little jewelry, leaving a sort of calling-card note on our fridge’s message board—the cops compared it to the handwriting on her homework. Half a mile straight ahead, then, through backyards and driveways and copses, clouds of ghosts, bursting through them like a cannonball through its smoke. I came out of these last woods with a crosshatch of thin red lines down my arm, a long pearling streak down my leg. The skin of my face felt tight, the sweat prickling at my hairline. I saw Alex’s car in the driveway, Alex’s form through my fogged-in glasses going soft at the edges as she stepped into my house, my mother holding open the front door.