I didn’t feel like going into the fact that I had the book too, that Dad included it on the syllabus for a course he’d last taught at the University of Utah at Rockwell, Seminar on Characteristics of a Political Rebel. The author, Jay Burne Ivys, an Englishman, had spent hundreds of hours interviewing assorted members of the Manson Family, which, in its heyday, included at least one hundred and twelve people, and thus the book was remarkably comprehensive in Parts II and III explaining the origins and codes of Manson’s ideology, the daily activities of the sect, the hierarchy (Part I entailed a fastidious psychoanalysis of Manson’s difficult childhood, which Dad, not being a Freud aficionado, found less effective). Dad addressed the book, juxtaposed with Miguel Nelson’s Zapata (1989), for two, sometimes three classes under the lecture title “Freedom Fighter or Fanatic?” “Fifty-nine people who encountered Charles Manson during his years living in Haight-Ashbury went on the record saying he had the most magnetic eyes and most stirring voice of any human being they’d ever encountered,” Dad boomed into the microphone at the lectern. “Fifty-nine different sources. So what was it? The It-factor. Charisma. He had it. So did Zapata. Guevara. Who else? Lucifer. You’re born with, what? That certain je ne sais quoi, and according to history, you can move, with relatively little effort, a group of ordinary people to take up guns and fight for your cause, whatever cause it is; the nature of the cause actually matters very little. If you say so — if you toss them something to believe in — they’ll murder, give their lives, call you Jesus. Sure, you laugh, but to this day, Charles Manson receives more fan mail than any other inmate in the entire U.S. penitentiary system, some sixty thousand letters per year. His CD, Lie, continues to be a mover on Amazon.com. What does that tell us? Or, let me rephrase that. What does that tell us about us?”
“There’s no other book in here, Gag,” Jade said in a nervous voice. “Look.”
I walked over to the desk. Inside the open drawer were a pile DVDs, All the King’s Men, The Deer Hunter, La Historia Oficial, a few others, but no books.
“I found it in the back,” she said. “Hidden.”
I opened the shabby cover, flipped through a few pages. Maybe it was the stark light in the room, slashing and deboning everything, including Jade (her emaciated shadow fell to the floor, crawled toward the door), but I felt genuine chills skidding down my neck when I saw the name written in faded pencil in the upper corner of the title page. Hannah Schneider.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” I said, but noticed, with surprise, I was trying to convince myself.
Jade’s eyes widened. “You think she wants to kill us?” she whispered.
“Oh, please.”
“Seriously. We’re targets because we’re bourgeois.”
I frowned. “What is it with you and that word?”
“It’s Hannah’s word. Ever noticed when she’s drunk everyone’s a pig?”
“She’s just kidding,” I said. “Even my Dad jokes about that sometimes.” But Jade, her teeth bricked into a tiny wall, grabbed the book from my hands and started furiously spinning through the pages, stopping at the black-and-white photographs in the middle, tilting them so they caught the light. “‘Charles called Susan Atkins Sexy Sadie,’” she read slowly. “Ew. Look how freaky this woman looks. Those eyes. Honestly, they kind of look like Hannah’s—”
“Stop it,” I said, snatching the book from her. “What’s the matter with you?”
“What’s the matter with you?” Her eyes were narrowed, tiny incisions. Sometimes, Jade had a very severe way of looking at you that made you feel as if she were a 1780 sugarcane plantation owner and you, the branded slave on the Antiguan auction block who hadn’t seen your mother and father in a year and probably never would again. “You miss your coupon, is that it? You want to give birth to food stamps?”
At this point, I think we would have broken into an argument, which would have ended with me fleeing the building, probably in tears, her laughing and shouting a variety of names. The terrified look on her face, however, caused me to turn and follow her stare out the windows.
Someone was walking down the sidewalk toward Loomis, a heavy-set figure wearing a bulging, bruise-colored dress.
“It’s Charles Manson,” Jade whimpered. “In drag.”
“No,” I said. “It’s the dictator.”
In horror, we watched Eva Brewster move to the front doors of Loomis, yanking on the handles before turning and walking out onto the lawn by the giant pine tree, shading her eyes as she peered into the classroom windows.
“Oh, fuck me,” said Jade.
We leapt across the room, to the corner by the bookshelf where it was pitch black (under Cary and Grace, as it so happened, Caccia al ladro).
“Blue!” Eva shouted.
The sound of Evita Perón shouting one’s name could make anyone’s heart lurch. Mine thrashed like an octopus thrown to the deck of a ship.
“Blue!”
We watched her come to the window. She wasn’t the most attractive woman in the world: she had a fire-hydrant’s bearing, hair the fluffy texture of home insulation and dyed a hideous yellow-orange, but her eyes, as I’d observed once in the Main Office in Hanover, were shockingly beautiful, sudden sneezes in the dull silence of her face — big, wide-set, in a pale blue that tiptoed toward violet. She frowned now and deliberately pressed her forehead to the glass so it became one of those Ramshell Snails feeding on the side of aquariums. Although I was petrified and held my breath and Jade dug her nails into my right knee, the woman’s puffy, slightly blued face, flanked by large, garish pine-cone earrings, didn’t look particularly angry or devious. Frankly, she appeared more frustrated, as if she’d come to the window with the express hope of glimpsing the rare Barkudia Skink, the limbless lizard notorious among the reptilian elite as something of a Salinger, gallingly incommunicado for eighty-seven years, and now it was choosing to stay hidden under a moist rock in the exhibit, ignoring her no matter how many times she shouted, tapped on the glass, waved shiny objects or took flash pictures.
“Blue!” she called again, a little more emphatically, craning her neck to glance over her shoulder. “Blue!”
She muttered something to herself, and hurried around the corner of the building, ostensibly to search the opposite side. Jade and I couldn’t move, our chins conjoined to our knees, listening for the footsteps that reverberate down the linoleum asylum corridors of one’s most terrifying dreams.
But the minutes dripped by and there was only silence and the occasional coughs, sniffs, and throat clearings of a room. After five minutes, I crawled past Jade (she was frozen solid in fetal position) and moved toward the window where I looked out and saw her again, this time standing on the front steps of Loomis.
It would have been a stirring view, one of the Thomas Hardy variety, if she’d been someone else — someone with decent posture, like Hannah — because her cottony hair was blowing up off her forehead and insistent wind had seized her dress and pushed it far behind her, giving her the wild, secret air of a widow staring at the sea, or a magnificent ghost, pausing for a moment before continuing a sad search along the mottled moors for relics of dead love, a Ruined Maid, a Trampwoman’s Tragedy. But she was Eva Brewster: stout and sobering, bottlenecked, jug-armed and cork-legged. She tugged at the dress, scowled at the dark, took a last look at the windows (for a harrowing second, I thought she saw me) and then turned, heading briskly back down the sidewalk and disappearing.