Backward-Facing Man

by Don Silver

  As the sun climbed over the row houses, Chuck followed Stardust precisely as he had followed Lorraine on the campus of Boston College. Down Medley to Appleberry, left at the corner, and then left again. He paused under a bridge and watched her skitter up the steps two at a time as the train arrived. The conductor called, “All aboard,” just as Chuck hit the platform. With what remaining strength he had, he pulled himself into the second car as it began to move. Inside, he doubled over. It took him a long time to catch his breath.

  Monday, March 16, 2000

  “I get it,” Stardust said, sitting up. “I’m here because you have no one else.” It was dark. She could sense Chuck in the room with her, smoking.

  “No.” He was near the door.

  “I’m here because you’re scared and you can’t think of anyone besides my mother to call, and now she’s gone.” It was the end of the third day, or perhaps the beginning of the fourth—longer than she’d ever dreamed she could spend with a man who might be her father and still not be sure. He’d talked exhaustively about the past, yet he’d revealed nothing of himself. So she was trying to provoke him.

  “No,” he said, louder.

  “I’m here because—”

  “Stop!” Chuck was thinking about the agents in his dorm room, the little particles of smoke and dust suspended in the stale air. “It’s much more complicated than that.”

  “What could be more complicated than this?” Stardust said, opening her arms to include the two of them, the tiny windowless rooms, the not-quite-converted factory. The weekend had been more like a history lesson than a reunion.

  “After the raid on Higher Purpose, I meant to square things up with your mother. To help her out if I could.” He sounded petulant. He’d betrayed Frederick and Lorraine just as Artie had betrayed him. They hadn’t meant for the boy in Oneonta to be holding the package when it went off, any more than he’d intended for Gutierrez to be in the tank that day. “You do certain things,” he said, “then everything around you turns to shit….” It wasn’t a confession. It wasn’t an apology. “I gave him up. I made a deal for myself. I sold him out. I gave the FBI Frederick’s name. I told them where to find him.” Stardust saw him wince when his cigarette glowed. “The truth is, I wanted them to get caught.”

  So you betrayed somebody, Stardust wanted to say. Big fucking deal. You wouldn’t be the first person in the world. But she didn’t. She held her tongue. A strange, familiar feeling rose up in her chest.

  “All my life, I’ve done what’s best for me,” Chuck said. “Everything you see around you—everything I have—I got off somebody else’s back.”

  To Stardust, betrayal and contrition were ancient and animal drives, like fucking or hunting, neither evil nor righteous. You do the things you do, and you get over them. Plain and simple. She imagined the sun outside rising, commuters on the early-morning trains. From the other room, she smelled bacon, something spicy, coffee maybe, with cinnamon. “Why didn’t you come for me?” she asked.

  For this, Chuck Puckman had no answer—just an ache in the pit of his stomach and a slightly sickening feeling that would crystallize much later in thought—after he’d had hours upon hours to reflect. The weekend had imposed a kind of wakefulness on him that was more painful than anything he’d ever experienced. It was then, only hours before his sentencing hearing, in the dim light and the moist, close air that he began to acknowledge his responsibility for separating a young woman from her father. “I’m sorry,” he said, unable to swallow.

  There was the sound of clothes rustling, and then the door opened. Stardust watched his silhouette appear and disappear against the light in the hallway. From the bathroom, she heard a roiling, choking sound that seemed to come from the bottom of the ocean. A toilet flushed. Stardust let her head fall back against the pillow. It flushed again. She found the lamp switch and put her clothes on. Then she made her way down the hall into the kitchen, where she poured herself coffee.

  A half hour later, when Chuck emerged, his face was clean-shaven, and his hair was slicked back. For a long time, he stood beside the fish tank, tapping cylinders against the glass, watching the fish swim up, one species at a time. He was wearing dress slacks and a clean shirt, and, in the light of the tank, Stardust saw a soul-less man, not unlike the lawyers she rode the elevators with every day. In the kitchen, Rahim wiped down the surfaces with a towel, scouring the toaster oven, the refrigerator door, then the oven top; glancing nervously at the two of them. “Technology is destroying our quality of life,” he said randomly, as Ovella began serving breakfast.

  Stardust put a spoonful of sugar into her coffee. Chuck walked in from the living room, holding up a bright orange cylinder. “Twice a day,” he said to Rahim, jiggling the plankton.

  “Take the gross national product,” Rahim said. “What economists would like us to believe is a numerical representation of the value of all goods and services manufactured and performed in the U.S.” Rahim looked at Chuck for some kind of acknowledgment, but he was just staring into space. Ovella passed around a plate with bread and muffins. Rahim continued. “Most people cite the rise in GNP as evidence that technology and free-market capitalism are improving quality of life. But it’s a fallacy. Sure, people suffer from violence, disease, and social ills, but on the whole, they say, our standard of living is higher than it’s ever been. Well, that may be, but our quality of living sucks, and we can prove it. If you were to measure GNP with all the waste taken out—if you added up the cost of things people buy that get lost or that don’t get used…”

  Rahim was agitated now. His neck extended forward over his breakfast plate, and they could see little beads of sweat above his mustache. “Religious relics, bookmarks, lawn chairs, pressure cookers, electric toothbrushes, back scratchers, gift subscriptions, dictionaries, diet food, not to mention doubles of things people buy, forgetting what they already own—clothes that sit in closets, stuff that gets sold on Softpawn, everything that’s returned to manufacturers, dumped in landfills, or dumped in foreign markets—along with what people buy, but later admit they didn’t enjoy—bad movies, lousy books, shitty meals, impossible self-help regimens, failed medical procedures, outfits that look better in the store windows than they do on our bodies, well, shit! Our gross national product is shrinking! Our mental metabolism is so fucked-up, we don’t even notice this!” He was on his feet now, pacing.

  Stardust had an urge to laugh. It wasn’t just the tension around Chuck’s sentencing, or hearing a bone-thin ghetto guy make a speech about macroeconomics. It was the incongruity of everything.

  Ovella got up and put Coltrane on. Rahim returned to his seat, dejected. The four of them poked at their food. For a long time, nobody said anything. When they finished, Rahim started clearing the dishes.

  “Whatever happens…” Ovella started, but Chuck held up his hand.

  In the bathroom, Stardust applied makeup, covering the bump on her forehead. A cloud of moisture hung in the air, and she smelled shaving cream and hair tonic. Chuck’s towel was balled up on the floor, as if he’d be home soon. In the bedroom, she folded the sweatpants and sweatshirt she’d worn all weekend and then slipped into her skirt.

  “Taxi’s here,” Ovella called from the other room.

  Stardust took a last look around, which is when she noticed the picture. The frizzy-black-haired boy with the beard and the unfocused expression and the loopy grin was Chuck. Frederick, taller by almost a head, was holding a beer and looking directly into the lens, a menacing expression behind his glasses. Lorraine was almost outside the frame, staring away, ever hopeful and distracted. Stardust flipped it over and pried the little prongs back, then slipped the photo in her purse beside the flashlight, toothbrush, and panties.

  In the cab, Chuck emptied a prescription bottle into his hand, leaned his head back, and swallowed. Stardust looked at him carefully. It was the first time she’d seen him in daylight since the walk from the train; his face seemed translucent and his body even smaller t
han before. She imagined him younger—his hair black, his lips full and moist, his nose and eyebrows less prominent, the skin around his eyes and mouth tighter and much smoother.

  Stardust Nadia had been born in June 1969, the summer of love—Shelly, until a few months after Woodstock and the Joni Mitchell song from which she was renamed. Now, thirty years later, wrestling with the issue of paternity, less than an hour before Chuck would be lifted by the talons of justice and locked up, far from where he could provide answers she was unwilling and unable to let it go. This was her shot. The cab turned south on Broad Street. In the distance, they could see William Penn on top of City Hall. “Maybe your mother was right,” he said finally. “Maybe we keep coming back after we die until we get it right.” He wasn’t ready for this either.

  “I wish my generation had something to push up against,” Stardust said softly. The western entrance of City Hall was surrounded by city workers picketing. Sunlight bounced off the scaffolding. A pigeon arched toward them and descended, landing on a trash can. The driver turned off the meter and looked in his rearview mirror. Commuters were streaming out of Suburban Station, umbrellas and newspapers tucked under their arms, an occasional gust of smoke wafting toward them from vents in the sidewalk. Chuck pulled a manila envelope from his shopping bag.

  “In case something happens,” he said, staring straight ahead. “This is the deed to the factory. Let Softpawn run. Rahim knows what to do. It’ll pay the bills. It’ll keep people working.” He asked the driver if he could borrow a pen, then scribbled the name “Eddie Palmieri” on the outside of the envelope. “If you have questions, call Eddie. He knows where most of the skeletons are.” Chuck slid a twenty through the Plexiglas partition and opened the side door. For the second time in four days, Stardust Nadia followed him of her own volition.

  Afterword

  There are detailed descriptions of every car, every pier, every office building, and every military statue blown up in the late sixties and early seventies, yet there’s very little about the Volcano bombings and almost nothing about Frederick Fergus Keane. You get no hits on the search engines, no archived news stories or files from the Freedom of Information Act, no pictures from his high school yearbook. In the written and recorded history of the SLA, including seven audiotapes the group made and delivered to San Francisco radio stations, there’s no mention of an eighth tape or its transcription—the one Lorraine claimed to have received in the mail just after she returned from Honesdale. It’s as if Fergus Keane didn’t exist and the Volcano bombings never happened.

  For a long time, I tried imagining his life. Did he blend into the heartland or drift back to New England? Did he settle down or continue as a provocateur? There are so few data points—born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1943, attended MIT in 1966 and perhaps early 1967, disappeared the morning of November 12, 1968. I spent several months at the main branch of the Philadelphia Public Library researching the sixties. I visited thrift stores, collecting record albums, vintage clothing, and knickknacks from that era. In the dining room of my mother’s cottage, I posted a ten-foot section of blank newsprint, to which I attached photographs and posters, bumper stickers, and copies of newspaper headlines in the approximate order in which they had occurred. I went to New York City. In Columbia’s archives, I found articles, interviews, and books about the SLA. I listened to the recorded voices of Don DeFreeze, aka Cinque M’Tume, of Bill and Emily Harris, Alan and Judy from Honesdale, Patty and the others—long, tedious declarations of class war, demanding the redistribution of wealth and the dissolution of white society—comically overwrought by today’s standards. With the help of Patty’s agent, I got copies of her numerous television appearances, which I watched several times to try to determine my friend’s state of mind when she was released.

  This much I do know: Frederick’s manifesto differs markedly from anything attributed to the SLA. It is not, like so much of the sixties rhetoric, naïve or dated. There’s no passing the microphone around. No amplified outrage. No evidence of groupthink. It’s one man’s voice, and the speaker is cynical, self-aware, with faint traces of what could be described as a working-class New England accent. And although it refers specifically to the SLA, it takes a much broader view of society than any of the other missives from that time. A professor from Berkeley I talked to says it is as cogent and authentic an attempt to square up Marxism and modern times as he’s heard, its title alone worthy of a spirited debate about free speech and the impact of media ownership in the hands of giant corporate conglomerates. And yet if there is such a thing as Frederick’s manifesto, there is no evidence of it either in the public record or in government files I was able to get released under the Freedom of Information Act. There is nothing but the typed letter Lorraine received from Salt Lake City, Utah, postmarked August 1975, and a beat-up cassette tape I found in the box she gave me.

  CAPITOCRACY

  You’d have to be an idiot not to notice how the companies that sponsor radio and television shows influence content. You think the news is objective? You think there’s such a thing as free speech? You think we have freedom of the press? Think again. People in this country have been lulled into a voting and consuming stupor.

  Our economic system needs consumers to consume. In the twenties, William Randolph Hearst transformed journalism into hucksterism. The media’s the army the ruling classes use to exert control over society.

  Democracy’s been trumped by capitalism. Choked out like a weed. Company owners and politicians use the media to bully and brainwash people into buying products and voting for policies that keep the system going.

  Last year, using a made-up revolutionary group called the Symbionese Liberation Army, the government annihilated two movements that were threats to American society—radicalism and black militancy.

  Using techniques they learned during the Korean War, the CIA got a black ex-con to brainwash and coerce a group of middle-class white kids into wreaking havoc. Over a twelve-month period, these idiots murdered a black superintendent of schools, kidnapped media heiress Patty Hearst, and robbed banks, all in the name of the radical left.

  Public opinion is swinging to the right. The government got what it wanted, and old man Hearst got what he deserved!

  For a while, I was obsessed. I hired a lab to do electron dispersion spectroscopy, which confirmed it to be standard issue paper, prepared on a Smith Corona portable electric, exactly the kind manufactured from the mid-sixties to the late seventies. I examined the rhetoric, studied the syntax, broke down the sentences, hoping to find a writing sample from Frederick’s high school days. I even engaged a company that specialized in forensic audio enhancement, hoping to identify background sounds and to pinpoint the accent of the speaker on the tape.

  But the more time I spent thinking about it, the less interested I became in the actual transmission and the more intrigued I was by the content. The concept of capitocracy, Frederick’s term for the fusion of our economic system with our form of government, and his manifesto, seem powerfully prescient. “Who owns the means of bewilderment,” my professor friend says, “owns our country.”

  As to whether or not the government released a small but virulent dose of radicalism to inoculate the country from an all-out revolution seems like conspiracy theory that may never be proved or disproved. Still, it’s hard to ignore what Frederick asserted—that the fall of the Symbionese Liberation Army coincided with the disintegration of the black militancy and youth movements of the sixties.

  In August 1975, a year after Honesdale, Patty Hearst was arrested with Wendy Yoshimura, the Asian girl Lorraine called Joan. The trial was a circus and Patty’s defense abysmal. Despite being kidnapped and tortured, Patty was convicted of bank robbery and sentenced to seven years in federal prison. This is what happens, the local Hearst paper editorialized, when children rise up against their parents, when blacks take up arms against whites, and when liberalism prevails over conservative values.

  Old news stories
drop like meat through a barbecue grill. Chuck Puckman’s sentencing drew no reporters, no sketch artists, and nobody taking pictures of the blonde by his side. Though she didn’t know for sure at the time, Stardust Nadia suspected, and therefore testified, that she was indeed Chuck Puckman’s daughter, who, until that weekend, had never met her father. Owing to the tragic and recent loss of Stardust’s mother, Wilkie Crackford argued Chuck’s sentence should be de minimis.

  The last time I saw Lorraine was a week before her trip. She still had some things she needed to buy, so we met near an outfitter in Suburban Square. Over corn soup and quesadillas, she told me she was eager to test herself against the elements, and I believed her. There was nothing morbid or ominous about it—no hint that she might not return—other than that what we were working on would be the basis of her memoir. If anything, there was a kind of settledness or resolve that she may not have possessed the first few times we met.

  I remember a particular moment with Lorraine. It was a Sunday afternoon—my favorite time of the week—when everybody is momentarily aligned in the absence of ambition. Lorraine had been talking for almost an hour: about Frederick’s frame of mind after the Fenway hack, the disastrous turnout at the Democratic National Convention, how their VW kept breaking down on the way back from Chicago, and how the guy driving it kept hitting on her while Frederick fooled around under the hood. She remembered getting back to Cambridge, Frederick hell-bent on making his mark on the movement. He’d decided on a target in upstate New York. When Frederick insisted on using Chuck to gather the chemicals, Lorraine objected. She said she had a really bad feeling.