Authors: True Believers
I didn’t know that. “This is why you called?”
“Uh-uh. His archival life has suddenly become more, as they say, transparent. Spectacular death tends to do that to privacy scruples. I can now tell you with almost a hundred percent confidence that during the 1960s, except for his sweet two years of service in the U.S. Coast Guard getting high and tending the lighthouse in Mendocino, Bernard L. Freeman had no direct contact whatsoever with any government agency concerning your un-American activities. He wasn’t one of your snitches.”
“Okay. Good.”
“Unlike you.”
Stewart knows I called the Secret Service. “How long have you
known
? About me?”
“Known for sure? Mmm, let’s see, about … four, five seconds now. When you and I first discussed this, you said you’d FOIAd Homeland Security, which I figured had to mean Secret Squirrel. And I told you early on that somebody dropped the dime on Levy to Secret Squirrel headquarters in 1968. Then after I voice-stressed you in April, I had a fairly good idea that somebody was you.”
“But you told me your machine said I was telling the truth. You lied?”
He chuckles. “I didn’t lie. About your lie to me. I was economical with the truth. There wasn’t any stress showing when you said you had no ‘ongoing relationship’ with any agency.
Before
that, though, when I asked if you’d ‘cooperated’ with any agency? Your voice-gram was like a fucking postcard from Yosemite, this nice big El Capitan. I busted you accidentally. You’d be surprised how often the game gets played that way. Part of the fun of it, really.”
“Ah, the ninja jester.”
Not long after we first met, when Stewart told me about a shocking, funny secret deal he’d brokered years before to get
Sesame Street
on TV in the Persian Gulf by arranging for the sale of advanced weapons to Arab governments, I told him I’d never imagined the same person could be a ninja and a jester. He’d said, “Well, they were both medieval and both employees of the regime—and besides, what about the Joker in
Batman
?”
He asks me about Greta and Waverly, and I tell him I’m sorry to hear his father died.
“Hey, I’ll be in L.A. again, next month, on my way out to Seoul. Want to hook up?”
“Sure. But people our age should not say ‘hook up.’ What’re you doing here this time—more super-duper unmanned aerial vehicles?”
He laughs. “I’m not your age. Yeah, an unmanned aircraft system incorporating surf and turf. Big system-integration show. The navy’s got this new electric gun up the coast, fires these giant rounds with no propellant or powder at Mach fucking ten. From Malibu they could push a button and destroy your house twenty seconds later.”
“Nice to know.”
“Don’t be so un-American. The idea’s for the UAV flying out over the desert, eight miles high, picking targets for the electric gun, and
simultaneously
finding buried bombs, IEDs, that this new gadget, this all-terrain robot laser, can go fry. Multitasking—same platform protecting the good guys at the same time it’s dealing with the bad guys.”
I don’t mention to Stewart that our 1968 plan to deal with our bad guy involved a small UAV that we’d turned into an improvised explosive device. I don’t tell him that we mixed up a big batch of acetone peroxide in a dorm room—the same explosive, I recently learned, used by the failed al Qaeda shoe bomber in 2001 and the failed al Qaeda underwear bomber in 2009, and in the successful bombings of the London Underground in 2005 and the Boca Raton yacht in 2013.
Stewart is joshing when he calls me “un-American.”
Anti
-American, maybe, from age sixteen to age nineteen. But
un
-American? Operation Lima Bravo Juliet was a hell-bent, self-dramatizing, wildly optimistic improvised do-it-yourself scheme to improve the sinful world, not entirely unlike the English Puritans’ plan to create utopias in the American wild, not unlike the American patriots’ attacks on the British before the Revolution, not at all unlike the abolitionist John Brown’s attempts to organize a violent slave uprising before the Civil War or the bombings of abortion clinics and murders of abortionists. For those first three months of 1968, we embodied that part of the American character that has troubled and scared me ever since. On the other hand, as it turned out, three out of the four of us never entirely lost our minds or abandoned common sense. When the facts changed and it seemed crazy to carry on, we stood down. Except for Chuck Levy, we were flexible and pragmatic, the way Americans pride themselves on being. For better and for worse, in 1968 I think we were
very
American. Terribly American.
28
Alex and I did wind up staying in New York for two more days, sleeping on Sarah’s floor at NYU. She asked why I seemed so freaked out. I told her it was because I’d slept with Buzzy, and Chuck had found out and disappeared.
None of us heard from Chuck on Monday or Tuesday. On Wednesday, when North Vietnam responded positively to Johnson’s Sunday peace initiative and agreed to begin negotiating, we thought:
That’s good, that might help make Chuck come to his senses, understand we’ve made the right choice.
But Chuck didn’t call.
When I got back to Cambridge, Buzzy told me he hadn’t intended to tell Chuck about us. But as the first round of their argument about aborting the mission got angrier and louder Sunday night, Buzzy said, and Chuck insisted
he
knew that
I
wouldn’t want to back down, “it just kind of came out. In the heat of the moment. I also sort of thought, to tell you the truth, that it’d be a slap in his face in a good way, to bring him back down to terra firma—you know, chicks, guys, instinct, real life.”
After breakfast on Thursday, I was nervous, because that afternoon was Archbishop Cooke’s installation. Johnson did go to New York City, did fly his helicopter into midtown Manhattan. That night on TV at Alex’s, the three of us watched
Air Force One
landing at JFK, the president waving and walking across the Sheep Meadow, antiwar protesters outside St. Patrick’s on Fifth Avenue. As it turned out, Johnson had walked out of and back into his helicopter four different times during the afternoon.
None of us said what each of us was thinking, that we’d have had four separate opportunities to dive-bomb him by remote control in the middle of Central Park. There was nothing on the news about a radio-controlled model airplane, or an explosion, or shots fired, or a would-be assassin taken into custody.
After a commercial, Walter Cronkite came back on and announced that just minutes earlier there
had
been a shot fired,
had
been an assassination—not in New York City but in Memphis, and not President Johnson but Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Oh,
shit,
” Alex said.
The world was flying to pieces. Monsters had been unleashed. I might have cried no matter what, but my crying was for myself as much as for Dr. King, because I felt partly responsible for his death. I had been infected by the assassination pathogen. I had bought into the insanity. When Walter Cronkite said “police have issued an all-points bulletin for a well-dressed young white man seen running from the scene,” I shrieked.
“It’s
not
Chuck,
” Alex said. “He loves King.”
“It was obviously a
rifle,
” Buzzy said.
“I know, I know,” I sobbed.
Black Americans started rioting everywhere, in a hundred different places, and kept rioting all weekend long. The National Guard was called out in two dozen cities. Buzzy kept buying the Washington newspapers, so we read detailed coverage of the thirteen thousand troops deployed in Washington, D.C., marines with machine guns on the steps of the Capitol and army infantrymen guarding the White House. Still nothing about a radio-controlled airplane buzzing the president, or an explosion, or shots fired, or a suspicious young white man taken into custody by the Secret Service.
I was fortunate that I hadn’t gone down to Washington to look for Buzzy. I felt lucky, and I felt bad about feeling lucky.
We didn’t hear from Chuck that weekend. Monday, April 8, was his nineteenth birthday.
The three of us anguished about our rogue member, but I alone secretly anguished about my secret call to the Secret Service. I felt like a poseur in class, pretending to make pertinent comments about Colette and explain the similarities among the trickster figures in Native American and Caribbean myths. I imagined the worst. I had occasional hopeful thoughts, too, ranging from the banal to the extravagant. Wouldn’t he come back to campus for finals in May? Or maybe he wasn’t waiting for his moment to strike but had decided to take off, assume a new identity, go to Addis Ababa by himself. He had his new passport and a lot of cash. If he’d flown overseas on April 1, the day he disappeared, the Secret Service wouldn’t have had time to put his name on any list.
On Tuesday I went to the memorial service for Dr. King at the church in Harvard Yard. Again my crying was partly selfish, because it started when Chuck’s freshman seminar teacher rose to deliver one of the eulogies. With his beard and long hair, twenty-nine-year-old Professor Peretz looked like Chuck would look in ten years—that’s the thought that made me choke up, and then his words made me start weeping. “It is now five minutes before midnight,” he said. “Not earlier. Five minutes before midnight.”
On Sunday, April 14, I phoned my parents. My mother had spent every weekend all winter ringing doorbells in Wisconsin for Gene McCarthy, so she was ecstatic that he’d won the primary by a landslide, and even happier when I neglected to pooh-pooh his victory.
“I’m so pleased you called us on
Easter,
Karen.”
“Good.”
It’s Sunday, Mother. I call every Sunday.
“I’m glad.”
“Are you feeling all right, honey? You sound out of sorts. How’s Chuck?”
“The same.” We talked for another few minutes, and almost as soon as I hung up, the phone rang.
I was going to kill the president, and I cheated on my boyfriend with one of our best friends, and Chuck has gone into hiding with the arsenal we assembled, so yes, Mother, I guess I am feeling a little out of sorts.
“What is it?”
“He called.” It was Alex. “I just got off with him. He’s still in Washington. So that’s good.”
I didn’t stop to ask why that was good. I wondered if Chuck had tried calling me and gotten a busy signal. “How does he sound?”
“Not
quite
as mad as a box of frogs.”
“Did you get his address? Or a phone number?”
“He refused. ‘Operational security,’ he said.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
“When I asked if he’d heard Johnson’s speech to Congress”—the president had convened a joint session to propose “constructive action instead of destructive action in this hour of national need”—”Chuck just laughed. He’s staying in some rooming house in the ghetto down there, and he was thrilled to be in the middle of the riots last week. He was thrilled that some guy he met where he’s staying, some random Negro, told him that Stokely Carmichael was talking to a crowd in the street right near where they were. Chuck went out and heard him say, Stokely Carmichael, ‘It’s time to end this nonviolence bullshit.’ He talked about sneaking out after curfew with the Luger, like he was playing some kind of game. And he kept saying, ‘Alex,
this
is the revolution … This
is
the revolution.’ He asked if I’d heard about Rudi Dutschke.” A few days earlier in West Berlin, our number one favorite New Left leader had been shot in the face by a young neo-Nazi. “He said, ‘It’s sad, but man, the worse the better.’ He’s almost out of money, though, so that’s good, too. And he said to tell you not to worry the Cubs have lost two of their first four games. Which seemed sort of … sane-ish.”
“Does he have the plane and the putty?”
“He didn’t say. I didn’t ask. I assume so.”
“Did he mention me and Buzzy?”
“He said, ‘I guess I had it coming.’”
“What does that mean?”
“He said, ‘We’re all human.’ He said, ‘Along the way, we’ve all been sneaky and disloyal in our own ways.’”
“What does
that
mean?” I thought of my one-minute conversation two weeks earlier with Special Agent Hardison. I’d never told Alex or Buzzy or anyone else about the call.
“Who bloody knows? But I think there’s a real chance it may work out okay. Johnson’s going to Hawaii tonight, so that’s another fairly brilliant piece of luck. I think I’ve made a good start, you know, to bring Chuck in from the cold.”
“What, he’s calling it quits and coming back to Cambridge?”
“It’s delicate, Hollaender. It may not be that simple. He and I are going to talk again tomorrow night.”
Maybe because I’d heard a lot of Scripture at the service for Dr. King, or maybe because it was Easter, I spent the rest of the night thinking about Genesis 22, one of the stories in the Bible that I’d always found horrible and unfathomable. That’s the one where God, (apparently) in order to test Abraham’s unquestioning faith, commands him to murder and burn his young son Isaac in “a holocaust,” but then (apparently) sends an angel at the last instant to stop the sacrifice. Was I Abraham or God? Was Chuck Isaac or Abraham? Was the angel Alex or me? In any case, the story in the Bible ended happily.
29
Forty-six springs ago, after we ended the plot, I decided my tragic flaw was an overactive imagination, my love of stories, that I would never again assume the guise of some fictional character—no more young King Arthur or Alice, no more
Howl
beatnik, no more Bond girl, no more New Left mother-country guerrilla. As things turned out, I’ve had to play a different fictional character for forty-six years, a version of Karen Hollander who did not conspire to assassinate the president.
I admire my eighteen-going-on-nineteen-year-old self for having the acuity and will to see clearly what I’d been doing my whole life—imagining myself as a fictional character—and then decide to quit doing it. It wasn’t until many years later that I came to understand it wasn’t only Alex and Chuck and I who had quasi-fictionalized ourselves; that we’d been afflicted by a pandemic perceptual glitch.