“I’m sort of serious.”
“I’m sure you can imagine for yourself, the blizzard. The blizzard of clippings. If you were even to hint.”
“Just a feeling I have. I’m making a mental picture of something growing on my brain. It looks like a walnut.”
“Your brain? The size is right.”
“Please.”
“You know she’s equal to the job. Maybe she still calls it the Big C, but she can handle the research. Remember Grandma?”
“Oh, God.”
“Mom could only whisper the word, leukemia. But she found out everything.”
She had too. Doled out what her daughter and nephew had dubbed the “Platelet Report” every morning. Returned home from the ReSale Oasis with shopping bags full of books about the disease. Living with it. Dying from it. Cures derived from apricot pits. Meditation therapy. Recipe books for chemo patients. A book about a young man with leukemia who fell in love with his young nurse.
“And then she just went, Grandma. Went downhill real fast.”
“But Mom didn’t,” whispers Susan. “It was more words to whisper. Multiple myeloma. You want her whispering at you?”
“No,” he whispers back.
Americans talk about getting sick the way she imagines Europeans talk about sex or food: with real gusto and a connoisseur’s recognition of the quality, value, rarity, significance, and magnitude of a given malady. I am sick, I must die. Lord have mercy on us. And a cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo.
Sick or healthy, they hit the hay. Susan wants some shuteye. But she finds herself crawling out of bed early, to sit at the table in the sunlit kitchen, the schematic of a felony flickering in her brain.
She shakes a cigarette out of the pack before her, places it in her mouth, and lights it. The smoke curls in the sunlight, winds toward the ceiling in ghostly bluish plaits, though of enough substance to cast a shadow.
The thing will happen. They will storm onto private property and forcibly take money. It will be planned to the last detail and timed to the last second, an operation of military precision. And soon. Turns out she does like her part, imagines herself dressing for it. Imagines herself picking something good and American off the diner menu, something above suspicion. Crucial role. Timekeeper. Observer. How many cops? Lights and sirens or silent approach? Guns drawn or holstered? Will the media appear? The intelligence she gathers will be used to refine their technique for the next action.
Politically the value of the action is questionable, since they don’t intend to exploit the propaganda opportunity presented by the assault. What they do intend is to melt into the earth, carrying undisclosed amounts of cash, traveler’s checks, and money orders. She means, in other words it might be interpreted, not altogether incorrectly, as just another bank holdup.
She appreciates the idea of the second safe house. And the idea of a women’s collective is near and dear to her. What bothers her, though, is her skulking impression that as a justification for armed robbery it is pure needy childishness, driven by a kind of bored nihilism. But she’s not about to examine things too closely. Oh, how she’s been waiting for this. They came to her — to her! And then like an idiot, she handed them off to Guy Mock. She should have learned her lesson about him during those early days in Oakland.
They came to her, and there was room for nothing but compassion, what with all the SLA dead, and the empathy aroused by the idea of their being survivors on the run, an overflowing of good and generous and openhanded spirits, and Berkeley felt righter and better than it had in years, with expressions of condolence and solidarity from the Movement, with memorial graffiti on the walls that made them all cry; and they fed them cookies and soup, and brought them changes of clothes, and saved the newspapers for them to read, and delivered their revolutionary communiques, and then she gave them away to Guy fucking Mock.
Stupid idiot! Once the prick saw that he’d cornered the SLA market, he cut her off. All summer she felt sick at heart, frustrated, unfulfilled, empty. They disappeared into their adventure, distant and mysterious, while she spent her days fetching extra dressing and replacing unsatisfactory flatware and sending perfectly good food back to the kitchen because it wasn’t cooked silly. She and Jeff argued over whether her support and concern for the SLA were counterrevolutionary, since (in Jeff’s opinion) it stemmed from her “personal feeling” (he made it sound obscene) for Angela, which (according to him) had the “unmistakable aroma” of “the personality cult.” Susan fumed. Jeff was still annoyed, Susan knew, by the notoriety she achieved addressing the crowd at Ho Chi Minh Park; he had work that day. Now he was giving her shit, telling her how “concerned” he was about her “preoccupation,” which he “felt morally obliged to say” he thought was “not politically based.” She told him to just stick to painting apartments.
But then, midsummer, the calls began. Teko and Yolanda, calling separately, calling together, from public phones. We need you, Susan. Don’t forget us, Susan. She was thrilled. Jeff would conk out after a day painting down in Castro Valley or Hayward, a copy of Grundrisse open across his chest, and she’d be dragging the extension into the bathroom to have the kind of intense, whispered conversation she’d been missing since Angela had gone. They planned for the future, schemed and plotted. She sent money, packets of cash wrapped in dark paper and sealed in manila envelopes addressed to general delivery. She set aside more money to rent the W Street place. They worked the arrangements out, speaking frequently, fervidly; it was intimate and seductive, communication beyond words, she felt. She tried to project soulful desire into every phrase she uttered into the mouthpiece. She missed them. She wanted them.
But it was as a revolutionary that she signed on, even as she formed this emotional bond, and as a revolutionary recruit she expected a more formal sense of belonging, she expected a clear channel to the truth through the many, many shades of gray that she was certain they’d consider, she expected a studious solidarity, the cell hunched over its synoptic texts. It’s beginning to dawn on her that what she has is a small and argumentative group cohering around its mutual discontent, assigning it a name (“fascism”), and using it as a pretext for every kind of dim-witted excess.
Jeff comes into the kitchen, dressed for another day of life-affirming manual labor. She stubs out the cigarette in an ashtray that says GREAT ELECTRIC UNDERGROUND and seizes the soft lapels of her old robe in her hands, draws them together over her breasts. No, this isn’t the time for analysis. She’s always had her doubts. She had them when she found out that Angela was involved with them. She thought it was stupid and fruitless to assassinate Marcus Foster. Viscerally alarming that they invaded the home of Alice Galton and carried her off into the night. Ostentatiously self-seeking when they robbed the Hibernia Bank and shot two depositors. Boneheadedly dense to have risked shoplifting — what was it, socks? — when they were supposed to be laying low in L.A. But she’s caught up in something now, committed, successfully outpacing her boredom, for once. She will be drawn in and implicated, move beyond the everyday, into a kind of history, a legend amid the outlaw annals, larger than ideology.
LYDIA GALTON SAT AT her desk, waiting for Thomas Polhaus to arrive, alternately composing anagrams on a sheet of paper and gazing out the window at the ladies and gentlemen of the press who clustered below, seeking shelter from a cold drizzle beneath the wind-whipped canopy pitched on the lawn. There were more reporters than usual this morning, the reason being the occasion of her daughter’s twenty-first birthday, she supposed.