Andersen, Kurt (58 page)

“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 this 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.”

“And how’s your mom dealing with it, do you think?”

“Sad because she’s not that sad about it.”

Like mother, like daughter; like grandma, like grandkid.

As our conversation drifts into the backwaters of small talk—the rap song I heard this morning “is really old, like from eighth grade”; Sophie sold her fake dynamite on eBay for $2,245 and donated the money to Anonymous—I wonder why Waverly hasn’t said anything about the most recent pages I’ve sent her. Neediness never ends.

“So,” she says suddenly, “is Stewart hot? He sounds like he’d be hot.”

“For an old guy. To me, he is. His name’s not really Stewart, you know.”

“Duh. Did you feel guilty about cheating on Grandpa? That’s the most shocking thing to me in the whole book. So far.”

“I did. But your grandfather wasn’t faithful, either. There was a woman in New York and another in Helsinki. Maybe more.” I’m pathetic.

“Do you like this Stewart guy more than you liked Grandpa?”

“Your grandfather was a good man.”

“It seems from the book like you married him because he was boring. And not white.”

“He was very nice. And very creative. And a
great
father.” And entirely self-contained. And really boring.

“If you hadn’t done what you did when you were young, the assassination thing? Do you think you would have lived your life differently?”

“Yes.”

“How? Exactly?”

“I’m not sure. I would’ve had more fun. Taken different kids of risks.”

“Fun is overrated.”

“That’s funny. But I’m not sure it’s true.”

“You’re the one who said it to me. When I was ten and made you take me to Disneyland. I wrote it down.”

“Maybe just Disneyland is overrated.”

“I should get going. Love you, Grams.”

“I love you, too, Wavy.”

When Christianity was new, confession of sin took place very differently. You didn’t slip into a private booth and secretly confess your wrongdoings to some discreet divine bureaucrat, privately recite the prescribed words and go home cleansed. Nowhere does the Bible mention any such one-on-one confession. Nor did you confess habitually, not for serious transgressions, sinning and confessing, sinning and confessing, sinning again and sincerely confessing again—
for these and all the sins of my past I am truly sorry
—before being wiped free of sin and absolved yet again. You confessed publicly. You were absolved only
after
performing your penance. And you were permitted to do it once a lifetime.

Doing away with the public confession of sins and mandating private confession at least annually—”Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat,” as Stewart says—enabled Christianity to scale up. So did the Protestants’ subsequent abandonment of confession altogether. Back when public, one-time-only confession was the rule, Christianity was a cult of a few million, 1 or 2 percent of all the people on earth. Today there are two billion of us.

Us?
I’m afraid so. Fifty-two years after refusing confirmation, I’m still a Catholic, the way I’m still a midwesterner thirty-nine years after moving away for good—nonpracticing, diasporic, heretical, but never entirely former. It’s like how I’ll always be a person who was eighteen in 1968.

Although I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell only metaphorically, I do detest and am heartily sorry for what I did, and having firmly resolved to do penance and amend my life, I confess my sins. Mea culpa. Amen.

Something like our modern legal system might have developed without a thousand years of religious practice beforehand, just as something like
Homo sapiens
might have evolved without a million years of intermediate species, without the
Homo erectus
and
Homo heidelbergensis
and etcetera. But that’s not the way it happened. Christian confession and penitence in the first millennium were beta versions of the second millennium’s legal trials and statutory penalties. Hell and purgatory were replaced by capital punishment and prison and probation, and the Bible by constitutions and statute books.