The Radicals

by Ryan McIlvain

“Give me the fucking keys!”

  “Might want to rack the thing first, you fucking amateur.”

  I pulled the top of the gun toward me like you see in the movies—a sudden terrifying clack filled the air.

  “You might also want to load the thing,” said Sam, stepping toward me, his palm outstretched. “There’s no ammo in it.” He said again, “Give me the gun, Eli. This doesn’t involve you anymore.”

  He lowered his head and shook it once, disgustedly. When he lunged for my arm the gun bucked and Sam folded forward like a briefcase. He dropped to the ground bent forward and holding his side, screaming. He was screaming my name. It took me a long time to understand it but the noise, a blue peal in that clearing, was forming itself into words. I could make out my name. “Eli! Fuck, Eli! What did you do?” The ringing came up in my ears then, in my emptied-out bell-struck skull, the ringing canceling out everything, pushing me back, staggering me back toward the getaway car.

  “Where are you going, Eli? Eli!” Sam shouted.

  I was driving by pinpricks, just trying to avoid the trees, aiming only for blankness. I could hear Sam’s screams reach a new desperate pitch behind me, rising up through the ringing like an aria. “Eli, help me! Come back! Eli! Eli! Eli!”

  This is the picture I’m left with. This is the scene I come back to again and again, more helplessly, more joltingly than the one with Bosch. I’ve presented it here by way of reconstruction, a first-time recording—my notebooks leave off just before Alex’s arrival at my parents’ house in Plymouth.

  Anyway, you don’t forget something like that. At the trial Sam’s death at my hands was taken for a kind of confession from us both, a bodily confession, with the signature in Sam’s blood like a long rough stroke from where he’d dragged himself back to the Buick. He called an ambulance but didn’t know where he was, didn’t know who’d shot him. On the 9-1-1 tape they played at the trial his voice is weak already, drained: “I didn’t recognize him. Never seen him before. Please hurry.” The lead prosecutor, a vain man despite his lumpy baldness and rough, pitted cheeks, argued for an interpretation of events that made Sam look amateurish, thoughtless, careless, stupid, blind, and very lucky. The state wanted it both ways—Sam was a bumbling, raw, instinctual Raskolnikov whose obvious left-behind clues required a table of crack lawyers in smart suits to decipher them. When a reporter asked this same prosecutor, post-trial, how the three of us had evaded capture for nearly two weeks, he replied, “Beginner’s luck.”

  Nothing I have to say here will match that for crassness—I regret everything we did. I regret the deaths, of course, but more than that, prior to and larger than that, presupposing it, enabling it, I regret Sam’s projection that incubated and grew, with our help, and became flesh and blood. The zealot’s heaven imposed on earth, in the little patch of dirt where Bosch lies turning and turning still. For what it’s worth—and I do know how little it’s worth—I wish Bosch were still alive. I think Sam wished that too. Whatever access of panic or nihilistic drive overcame him in that moment by the lake in the woods, I have to believe it was momentary, unplanned, and uncharacteristic. I want to believe that. I had seen Sam’s gentleness overlaying his sharpness, the lubricating skin, the kind gestures, the gentlemanly niceties. And weren’t they more than mere gestures, mere niceties?

  On the Long Island Rail Road train into New York that night, with Greg’s Jetta left behind at the station just as I’d promised it would be, I saw a text message from Sam. It must have come in only a few minutes after the 9-1-1 call: “You didn’t mean to, did you? I believe you didn’t. S.” It took me almost an hour to respond—was he all right? was he in the hospital?—and by then he wasn’t responding at all. Alex, too, got a message from Sam that night. She admitted as much at the trial, but no more. “It was of a personal nature,” she said in the affectless tone she adopted during those weeks, her brown eyes flat and withholding, and not once meeting mine. The evidence of the message was buried along with Alex’s cell phone in the East River silt. Sam’s phone had been destroyed with a well-placed bullet to the memory card—an arduous task. All that blood swathed over the Buick’s leather seats, the thick console, the wide glove compartment that he finally unlocked to take out the gun. The rest of the evidence in the car remained intact, preserved carefully, lovingly, a diorama of Sam’s guilt—he was a Christian to the end. His final recidivism was to try to take upon himself all the punishment, all the sin. In the Buick’s trunk: another handgun, an unscrubbed laptop, a scatter of books, and a handwritten note that read “I alone killed Lawrence Bosch on the night of August 21. —Sam Westergard.”

  There were four guns in all, and all of them purchased through an Armslist page sourced to western Pennsylvania. Sam’s name and details had been changed for the purpose, the seller’s too, presumably, but the IP addresses matched. The story about Sam’s sister and the new baby, the hunting tagalongs with his brother-in-law—all bullshit. A lie for my benefit, and apparently for Alex’s too.

  One of the books found in Sam’s trunk was The Urban Guerrilla’s Handbook, perhaps the most incriminating of the documents he’d taken from the House. It was complete with Sam’s careful underlinings, his sparse but telling notes. “Yes,” he had written at one point, a simple yes floating up the margin like a trial balloon, the word tied to a double-underlined sentence about how the imperialist giant is known by his toe, how that single prominence foretells the great gathering bulk behind it. “Start your attack, therefore, at the toe…” Sam had written at the bottom of the page. On another page he’d written: “Phoenix as our Moncada?”—Moncada, the military barracks where Castro’s forces had suffered a defeat that paved the way to future victory. All this was introduced as evidence at the trial—Sam’s pipe dream, apparently. His pipe-bomb dream. I can see that now. I think I might have seen it then—had I chosen to see it. At the time I pushed any hard-stop realities out of my mind—we were only talking, weren’t we, no matter how earnest or daring the talk, how thrilling? Also, I had no idea Sam was building up a small arsenal. The section in the Handbook on munitions was particularly well underlined.

  Four guns. One to Sam, one to Alex, the gun I had taken with me to Greg’s, and the gun in the Buick’s incriminating trunk. The black blocky pistol Sam had shot through his phone with was the same one he’d shot through Bosch with—it bore only his fingerprints. When the paramedics finally arrived they found Sam’s dead body in the driver’s seat, with the glove compartment unlocked and hanging open like a mouth, its secrets spilled.

  I still don’t know what to make of it all. What was this threatening “talk” Sam had planned for Greg, and would he have done more than just talk? Why should that gun have been loaded? Or did Sam know the jig was basically up—playtime was indeed over? He’d pre-prosecuted himself with the left-behind clues, cast the narrative of his guilt (I alone killed Lawrence Bosch…) in the amber of his ancient Buick. At the trial the police photographs of the car looked Hollywood-ized, klieg-lit, flooded with annihilating light—for each line or feature the photographs carved out, another was lost in the glare. Sam’s giveaway T-shirt was deep crimson down to the bottom hem, the jeans stained and wet through the crotch. His face, as I can’t help but see, had the same death wanness I’d seen on Bosch’s face, the vital color drained from it, the skin like parchment. I can see the slaked tilt of Sam’s head and neck against the car’s side beam, and the long, sharp, locked jaw—all lurid. And all of it for nothing. You wonder if Sam’s Christ would have climbed down from his blood-slicked cross if he’d known just how little his sacrifice would matter. The state wanted its heads in the end, live ones, and only Alex and I had ours to offer. Thirty years for Alex, thirty-five for me—parole on the distant edge of that horizon, on “good behavior,” but what does that mean? What does it mean today, or tomorrow, or twenty years from now? Twenty years is an epoch, an endlessly receding mirage, like Sam’s heaven.

  But I
have gotten ahead of myself.

  On the train back to New York, with Sam’s text message catching me up more breathless than I already was, a sudden spasm, a contraction of the lungs like you see with whole cars getting flattened like beer cans—I looked out at the night and saw only my reflection in the glass, dull, haggard, shocked. I fixed on the long regress of my glasses reflected in the window reflected in the glasses…I suddenly wanted to see Jen. I needed to see her. I remembered that Stephen Hahn’s memorial service would be held tomorrow morning—I wanted to see Hahn too, and I wanted to see tomorrow morning. The night slid darkly by beyond the window, darkness foreshortening the world and framing me inside it, a complicated image, diffuse, spirit-like, as if the soul I devoutly doubted had slipped from my body to hover over and observe me, judge me, sending invisible currents of thought and disdain from that world to this, a synaptic tentacling. In high-school physics it was Dr. Zeke who’d lit up a pale crystal ball like a miniature sun. It radiated spikes and zigzags of energy until you laid your palm on it and drew all the molecular action to yourself—narcissism at the level of biology, at the level of the cells. “Chemists want to be biologists,” Zeke often said, loose with his students, seigneurial, smelling powerfully of the Marlboros he smoked in the room’s equipment closet. “Chemists want to be biologists, biologists want to be physicists, physicists want to be gods.”

  Strivers everywhere. “That’s the hierarchy,” Zeke said. “That’s life.” Endless striving. I thought how odd it was to be through with all that, through with life in the middle of life, in my body and out of it, observing. All I wanted now was to see Jen, then Hahn, then I’d lift my hand from the buzzing ball for good—I would turn myself in. This plan in its seeming modesty reassured me as I stepped out again into the open air. New York City surrounded me, the great masses with the neon lights covering them in a fish-tank glow, the Hieronymus masses with their plain handsome wide narrow black white faces passing, a strobe effect of them, shifting, merging.

  The cabdriver on the way over to Brooklyn spoke to me in his deep sonorous accented voice, from Elsewhere. He asked me where I got my news from.

  “My news?” I said.

  “All the mainstream outlets are owned and operated by one company only, did you know that? You have to go online to find the real truth.”

  I’d never heard of the website this earnest chatty man mentioned to me—I’ve forgotten it now—but the worldview he espoused was instantly familiar. I could have been listening to a member of the Group, unsung, unremunerated, a professional truth teller who’d heard and answered the call. Multinational corporations were set up above governments, whole countries, shaping world events to serve their quarterly profits. Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Palestine, Egypt, Sudan, Syria—all of it could be resolved in a month if a handful of billionaires got together in a room and decided on it. But why would they? It went against their vested interests. The military-industrial-technical complex, the haves and have-nots, depressed labor, rarefied tax evasions, elections bought and sold.

  I tipped the man handsomely—I had $300 of Hahn’s money to my name, in cash—but on the sidewalk outside Jen’s apartment I felt coated in something, some new contaminant. The taxi pulled away down the dark empty car-lined street trailing its brake lights, turning and disappearing. A cold blue light filled the window in Jen’s living room, the white pleated curtains riffling softly in the air conditioning. It was cool now, but I remembered how hot Jen’s apartment could get in late summer. I felt the weight of brackish river water in the air, an expectation of fall. When I buzzed the number, it was Mallory’s voice that answered—to my relief, I realized. She came downstairs in black formal pants, high to the navel, and a white blouse that billowed and overflowed the waistband like a pirate’s shirt. Mal pinched and released the excess fabric and said, “Work, Eli. Damned work. I just got home.”

  “I see.”

  She stepped out onto the gray cement stoop that a canvas awning overhung, dividing the shadow from buzzing streetlight. Mal’s face was in the gloom, the finer features obscured, but I could make out easily enough the look of chagrin rising up, the preemptive apology.

  “Is she here?” I said.

  “I think maybe you should come back, Eli. Or could you call?”

  “Is he here with her?”

  She nodded.

  “I’m in trouble, Mal. I need to talk to her.”

  “You’re in trouble?”

  “Please tell her it’s important. I know it’s awkward for her.”

  “Not just for her.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Well,” Mal said, holding open the door behind her, “you might as well come on up. Make a clean belly flop of it.”

  In the open living room Jen sat on the mint green sofa cushion. Her crossed legs were drawn up like an ascetic’s, her arms hugging her knees, her upper body pressed forward under the kneading hands of her boyfriend on the longer couch. Macduff looked harmless and smaller than I remembered him, boyishly intent on his ministrations, a pink bud of tongue sticking out of the side of his mouth. He saw me first—surprise and caesura, interrupted in the middle of this quotidian intimacy, quotidius interruptus. If I’d had the ability to feel pain at this scene, a silent shard sliding into the palm I held up to the man—I still didn’t know his name.

  Now Jen looked up at me, making sense of the change in the room’s atmosphere. She wore blue Randolph gym shorts, mesh and loose, pooling like water at the base of her white thighs. I’d have ached to see this, too, though not with desire. Wasn’t it months into our relationship before she’d felt comfortable enough to lounge in this gym-rat comfort in front of me?

  “Mal?” said Jen, looking over to her friend. She had her palms out too, pleading helplessness.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I am sorry. I made her do it.” I addressed all three of them.

  For a moment Jen’s face was uncertain, wavy—concern overtaking the anger. How wrong had she been about me? Was I dangerous? Her mute eyes slid slowly past me like a satellite dish readjusting. She exchanged silent signals with Macduff. “What are you doing here, Eli?” she asked, not looking at me.

  Nothing could have sounded hollower than the vague euphemisms I’d prepared about “trouble,” “mistakes,” “consequences”—like a high-school guidance counselor to a truant. I chose silence instead.

  Jen looked up at me and repeated her question. Her summer-light hair was parted casually and fell in waves past her shoulders. She was waiting. The room felt suddenly cavernous, running away from me—I caught myself against the doorframe. Mal reached out her hand. Was I okay? I fought something back for a long minute.

  For all this, Macduff kept silent beside Jen. I felt suddenly grateful to him, indebted. How easy it would have been to cut me down, to make some macho taunt, but instead he followed Jen’s lead.

  Finally I said, “Professor Hahn’s husband, her husband, Stephen—he died. The memorial service is tomorrow morning.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Jen said.

  “I have nowhere to stay.”

  Macduff was on his feet now—not abruptly. He rose with an attempt at casualness. He might have glanced at his watch.

  “Derek,” Jen said.

  “It’s fine,” he said. “I’ll call you tomorrow morning, okay?”

  I stepped aside to let them pass together out of the apartment, sending another apology like a weak paper airplane down the stairs. It fluttered, sank. Childishly, sheepishly, I clung to the wall inside the door with my hands behind my back, the loose diamond of my elbows, slouching, avoiding Mallory’s eyes.

  At length she said, “What kind of trouble, Eli? Are you not going to tell me?”

  “If it’s all right with you, I’d rather not say.”

  “Of course,” Mal said. “Of course. Don’t put yourself out for me.” She
went back to her room.

  When Jen came upstairs I was alone on the couch, staring at a rerun of House Hunters International, another comfort measure it had taken Jen longer than this, I thought, to begin in my presence. At first it was all PBS opera broadcasts, art films, classic musicals—it all had to mean intensely, as I think Robert Browning put it. That was our model, whether we knew it or not—the Brownings, the Sonnets from the Portuguese, Mahler and Mozart, high love and high art rising together like a winding staircase. Only later did we let down our guard and take off our finery around each other, confiding guilty pleasures in pop country music (me), Agatha Christie novels (her), reality TV shows (both of us). For a while our favorite after-dinner fare was the show that flashed aquamarine and pale-sand white across the screen just now: young Americans, mostly, grand locales, big dreams and plans and sometimes the budgets to make them happen, mostly not, but we never tired of it—that blue-and-white dream field, that vicarious expanse.

  “You sent Mal away?” Jen said to me.

  “No, no. Not really. I didn’t mean to.”

  Without breaking her stride she passed out of the living room and returned with a load of bedclothes—sheets, a pillow, a red-and-orange Mexican blanket we’d once picnicked on in Central Park, I remembered. I thanked Jen again, apologized again, looking off at the screen now, past it, out of cowardice.

  “Do you remember this one?” she said from behind me. “I’m pretty sure we watched this one. Young couple leaves New York to live simple in Costa Rica. They want to live by the beach.”

  “But they can’t afford it. They’re crestfallen with the prices. I remember.”

  On the screen a curving wedge of hourglass sand ran up to meet the couple in their pastiness—the young husband in a Hawaiian shirt, the young wife in a loose pink blouse flapping behind her like a sail. The next scene shows the couple in a low darkish room with the windows cut directly from the stucco; the room has the stoic, unformed air of a monk’s scriptorium, but with green spiny palm fronds waving from outside. The Hawaiian-shirted husband is slouching, squinting as he takes in the space, the kitchen, living room, and dining room all combined, apparently. Can they make it work? The woman is shorter by a head and a half, her sail-shirt sagging. What does she think of the place? It’s hard to know. The couple is unfailingly polite in front of the plump man with rawhide skin, a bone-deep tan, and a real estate license on the side. If they have hesitations they whisper them, careful of the agent’s feelings, perhaps, but careless of the conventions of reality TV. There was a flash-forward to the next segment as the show went to commercial—another apartment, cleaner edges on the inside, a more traditional floor plan with the kind of built-in bookshelves that Jen and I had always oohed and aahed over. Then a shot of the couple out in front of the apartment, squinting into the gale of downtown traffic.