Immediately the gunfire eased off. A final flare colored the circumstances in shades of violet.
“Terrorism,” Ebenezer Keezer declared, “is the subtraction of the parts. Back to zero.”
Then I began digging.
I scooped out a shallow hole at the edge of the sea and slipped in and carefully packed wet sand against my legs and hips and chest. I apologized to my father. I jabbered away about the flashes and pigeons and sizzling sounds, and my father said, “Sure, sure,” and he was there beside me, with me, watching me dig. I told him the truth. “There’s nothing to die for,” I said, and my father thought about it for a time, then nodded and said, “No, nothing.” His eyes were bright blue. He smiled and tucked me in.
“Am I crazy?” I asked.
“That’s a hard one.”
“Am I?”
There was a pause, a moment of incompletion, but he finished it by saying, “I love you, cowboy,” then he bent down and kissed my lips.
Pass or fail, so I missed graduation. I spent nine days cooped up in a hospital on the outskirts of Havana. The diagnosis had to do with acute anxiety, a stress reaction, and I was too canny to argue. I lay low. There were nurses, I remember, and they were sticking me with sedatives. But I was fine. I recited Martian Travel in my head. I carried on dialogues with Castro and Nixon, offering sage advice and psychological support. I urged caution above all else. If there is nothing, I told them, then there is nothing to kill for, not flags or country, not honor, not principle, for in the absence of something there is only nothing.
I had a firm grip on myself. On occasion I felt a sudden lurching in my stomach, as if a trapdoor had opened, and at night I dreamed barbiturate dreams—gunfire and flares. But I played it cagey. I didn’t cry or carry on; I gave up speech; I smiled at the nurses and watched the needles without fear or protest. If you’re sane, there’s no problem.
I thought about escape.
I contemplated suicide.
No sweat, though, because I was on top of things.
I was released in mid-January 1969. A week later we were back in Key West.
Things were the same now, but different.
“Believe me,” Sarah said, “I’m not making judgments.”
“Of course not.”
“You understand?”
“Yes,” I said, “pass or fail.”
It was early morning, and we were having coffee at the kitchen table. The house had a stale, musty smell.
“No rough stuff,” she said. “Strictly behind the lines. A courier maybe.”
“Fine.”
“Different thresholds, different boiling points. It’s not a criticism.”
“Sure, I know.”
“William—” Her eyes skittered from object to object. She finished her coffee, stood up, and smiled. “So then, a passenger pigeon? Lots of exotic travel. Maybe Rio. Glamour and beaches, all those tight brown bodies. You can scout it out. Make reservations for after the war.”
“Fine.”
“Rio,” she said, “it’s a date.”
I nodded and said, “Fine.”
Which is how we left it.
Bad luck, I never made Rio. But for the next two years, while Sarah and the others pressed the issue, I found some peace of mind in my capacity as a network delivery boy. I was out of it. On March 6, 1969, when the Committee pulled its first major operation—a night raid on a Selective Service office in downtown Miami—I was buckled in at thirty-two thousand feet over the Rockies, heading for a pickup in Seattle. By all accounts they acquitted themselves well. Four days later, when I checked into my hotel in San Francisco, there was a message from Sarah: “I’m famous. Newsweek, page 12. I’m wanted.”
10 
Quantum Jumps
“IF I WANTED TO,” Melinda says, “I could bust out of here.”
“How?”
“Simple Simon.”
“Go on, then, tell me. It’s a dare.”
She laughs. “Don’t be so condescending. I mean, God, if I told you, then it wouldn’t work.”
“True.”
“I’m not a dunce,” she says.
Another laugh, then I hear a clatter behind the bedroom door. Midmorning cleanup—dishes being stacked, the transfer of waste products. It’s all part of our new domestic order.
Stooping down, humming Billy Boy, I open up the service hatch at the foot of the door.
“Ready in there?”
“Just hold your horses,” Melinda says, “it’s not like we’re going anywhere.”
I smile at this. A fair statement: No one’s going anywhere. It’s a lockup. For two weeks now, nearly three, we’ve been living under conditions of siege at these bedroom barricades—an investment, so to speak, in the future—and the service hatch, though small, has functioned quite nicely as a means of communication and supply, a lifeline of sorts. I’m proud of it. It’s a brilliant piece of engineering: a rectangular hole in the door, nine by twelve inches, wide enough to permit the essential exchanges, narrow enough to deflect foolish thoughts of flight. As an extra safeguard, the hatch is fitted with its own miniature door and lock—a door within a door.
Melinda’s face appears at the opening. She slides out a tray piled with dirty breakfast dishes. The chamber pot comes next.
“Yunky to the max,” she says.
“Yunky?”
“It means stink.” She gets to her hands and knees and stares out at me. “Anyway, I could do it, you know. If I wanted to, I could escape easy.”
“Oh, sure, absolutely.”
“You don’t think so?”
Her face is framed by the opening. Behind her, near the bed, I can see Bobbi’s bare foot tapping out the meter to a poem in progress.
Melinda’s eyes shine.
“Okay, here’s a question, smartie,” she says. “What if I got sick or something? You’d have to let me out. If I caught some disease like—you know—like that time I had my stupid tonsils out. Then what?”
Bobbi’s foot stops tapping. This intrigues her, I can tell.
“Well,” I say.
“So then what? What if I said, ‘Daddy, I’m dying’?”
I smile at Bobbi’s curled toes.
“I guess you’d be fibbing, princess.”
“Well, sure,” she says, “but how would you know? I could cry and scream and stuff, just like this—” She makes a twisted face and shouts, “Agony! Polio!”
Bobbi’s toes stiffen.
“Agghh!” Melinda yells. “Can’t breathe! God, I’m choking!”
“Knock it off.”
“Help!”
Her face goes red. She jerks sideways and rolls out of my field of vision. Ridiculous, but I feel some discomfort. “Agghh!” she cries. And then it’s instinct—I reach through the hatch and grope for contact.
“God,” Melinda says, “talk about gullible.” She reappears at the hatch. “You get the idea now? I could do it, couldn’t I?”
“Maybe so.”
“Not maybe. I scared you.”
She wiggles her nose and says, “Agghh!” and then laughs. What are the limits? I wonder. What can be done? Such love. That cool, unblemished skin of hers, it makes me question my own paternity.
“So you see how it works,” Melinda says. “Get sick, that’s one plan, but I’ve got about six zillion better ones. I mean, boy, if I had to, I could—” She pauses, rubbing her eyes. There’s a tentative quality in her voice when she says, “Daddy, what if I did get sick? I mean, really sick? It’s not impossible.”