Chapter 9

He didn’t understand yet why people had to fight over everything. A fire in their eyes wouldn’t extinguish, and Miriam, above any one person, fueled that fire with a wavelength of thought that countered the prevailing tide.

Hope didn’t work as well as outrage, as hope for a better future for the rebels pacified them into thinking strategically. But if pushed to outrage, which Miriam almost did amongst her army, it would have enabled the killing. He reasoned that it was not enough to be poor in order to kill, steal perhaps, but not enough to kill. A group needed to be outraged in order to kill, and he sensed that these commandos of the underworld were tired of living underground and outraged that others had the luxury of living above ground, and this outrage would lead them into battle and not the hope of living peacefully.

Simon had access to this outrage, this emotional blunder of the human mind. He had been given a good taste of it. He knew what it felt like to hate society and instead love a vague utopian vision in which he won the girl, had money in his pocket, and was respected by his peers. Unfortunately this conflict went beyond his simple utopia, because when that bit of outrage is exploited, it inexorably tears down an entire system of government, an established economy built on years of compromise, and also the communities that have accepted both of these as a way of life. Perhaps there is something to be said for the status quo, he considered. The status quo, he reasoned, was far more preferable to what an ounce of outrage could do. Miriam quelled her followers with hope, but she knew very well how to tap the outrage and make it explode, whereas her opponent, the U.S. government in this case, was trained to defend a system, trained to defend themselves, and lacked the outrage, lacked the adrenaline, lacked the madness it took to pump waves of violence into the trigger-happy fingers of people who had nothing to lose but everything to gain. The rebels had successfully fused their personal outrage with their reasoning, unable to separate them, and he wondered whether a police force that had been tempered and conditioned to separate their emotions and their logic by an above-ground civilization could win the fight. He didn’t know.

But this had to end somehow. If it were a mere difference of reasoning, then maybe the two sides could be brought to an understanding based on a common logic. But Miriam had infused emotion into the intellect, emotion into basic cognition, and to separate the two would take a life above ground and not below. It came to a point where he didn’t know which side he was on. The threat of conflict split him down the middle, and perhaps that’s why Miriam smiled to him at her cabinet meeting. She knew he didn’t have the maturity to pick a side, and so she used him, hoping he’d do the right things with his time when they finally let him loose, albeit with Salazar following him.

The ice-cold beer Norris handed him did wonders. He could have kissed the man.

“You really think you’ll get away with it,” said Simon on the couch.

“I don’t know,” said Norris, sitting next to him.

“And you’ll fight? You don’t know, but you’ll still fight in her war?”

“It’s not just her. It’s a fight for our way of life. It’s a fight for everything we believe in.”

“Was it really that hard – to live as a mixed couple?”

“We never felt at home. Miriam showed us a way out of secrecy. She gave us another world, and yes, Simon, I’d fight for that world.”

“You’ll fight because you were wronged. What makes you any different?”

“I’ll fight for that too. But what I really want -”

“You want what you can’t have. Hell, I want what I can’t have, and now I have to go back to my father? You’ll be killed, don’t you understand that? Can’t you just accept life the way it is?”

“No, I can’t.”

“And that’s worth dying for – ‘no, I fucking can’t?’”

Norris didn’t respond. Instead he took out his guitar, beat-up and scratched from his many years of strumming it, and sang a tune. It moved Simon to hear a sad song that created emotion out of simplicity, as the song was simple and tragic, reducing doom into a few simple verses. It was amazing how country folk developed an entire philosophy out of morbid circumstances. The song lacked complication as though it knew its own purpose as a song and nothing else. Norris sang about rising water off a river, and in the song, when the water spills over into a man’s house, the man is as calm as a grandfather in a rocking chair, the flood washing over his feet. And that’s what it felt like – a flood that washed over Simon and slowly sucked him under.

Miriam’s movement could not continue, and yet this same movement kept her alive through the floods of time, as though she thrived on the cosmic adversity – the biting off of more than she could chew – and she kept chewing. In some irrational way it was nothing less than heroic, but at the same time it was pointless. The world changes, and we move on, yet she still tethered him to the primordial and shallow battle between hawk and dove, liberal and conservative, war and peace, the haves versus the have-nots. Incredible how past battles are somehow inherited until there is nothing left but pat answers to every question, firm beliefs and ideologies that any imagination could neither reduce nor overcome. Simon didn’t know why she fought these old battles. If she could just spend a day above ground, a day in the newly renovated Times Square, for instance, standing in front of the endless electronic ticker tape, the many visual accoutrements that attracted a new tourist element, and not the Times Square that had yet to be conquered by some militancy that offered no substantive plan in its place, maybe Miriam would have ended her mission. She never lived above ground, and he didn’t know why she tortured herself, why she thought that another man’s poverty was somehow a permanent fixture never to be erased by the beneficent and healing properties of time. She must have lost something or someone back in the trenches before all of this took hold.

He didn’t feel comfortable at all returning to his father and that asshole Stewart. Little connected them, and he grew nervous at the thought of approaching these two. He saw the light just then, as Norris attempted to resurrect a cowboy trauma unfamiliar but with which he empathized. He slept well on the couch as Norris sang into the early hours of the morning. Old Norris loved playing, and in his sleep he dreamt of ranches with cattle and men in cowboy hats stalking the earth with steel-tipped boots and lassoes twirling about their heads.

He awoke while Norris and his companion slept in the next room. Salazar still waited outside, wide-awake the entire time. He was a machine that didn’t need sleep. He left the apartment with Salazar and caught a train up to Broadway. He had a wad of money in his pocket. Before leaving, he shaved painstakingly. He cleaned his face with alcohol swabs, cleaned his ears, and put on laundered clothes. He still dressed in street clothing, but his showering and shaving morphed him into another person altogether. He even combed his blonde locks, and when he boarded an uptown train, he felt at once at home and on par with the other young starlets on their way to well-paying jobs. He sat on the long, hard turquoise seats, a woman in front of him holding the steel strap above, a leather purse at her side with the New Yorker tucked into it. What a contrast.

He had taken the wrong train from 42ndstreet and ended up by instead. He figured Salazar had never traveled to this part of town, and he was right. Salazar wouldn’t know where to buy a suit, because he never had a need for one. Simon just wanted to sniff the old neighborhood.

He ascended the stairs to the Natural History Museum and the New Planetarium nestled across from brownstone mid-rises. He sucked in the air. What he saw was what he wanted from life – kids with backpacks on a routine field trip, joggers and cyclists on their way into the green of the park. He longed for the feel of them, to associate with them, as when he was a pupil, and Caitlin at Spence, and he longed just for a touch of what experiences the people on the street took for granted now that they had regular lives and jobs apart from their youth. Perhaps he felt at home within the whiteness and longed to feed on the core of affluence and urbanity that every upper West side family preserved. He wanted the home in the country, the duplex in town, a stable job and a stable marriage just like any other affluent, well-pedigreed man. He missed the ridiculous holiday parties, the ludicrously expensive bottles of red wine, the inanity of pleasant conversation about things so shallow that a man could take a shovel and hit rock bottom without straining a muscle – these were the things he wanted. He never minded standing around a warm fire, his father poking at the wood and talking about a transaction gone awry, Caitlin with her glass of red wine, her fingers moving up the stem of the glass in anticipation of making love to him afterwards. He missed his own culture and the luxuries it afforded, a time of safety, security, learning, and etiquette. He had forgotten these things, and in a sense forgotten his own people and the things that he loved, the things that allowed him to matter.

But a life underground matured him. He understood that in life everyone had their own paths to follow and battles to wage, and instead of the fierce longing he had grown accustomed to, he also understood that it was merely an image of perfection, an image of what life ought to be like and never how it really was. Families didn’t get along all the time, not even affluent ones. Of course he had always heard about these counter-intuitive notions, but as he headed back to station he manifested them for the first time. Sometimes the wealthiest of people and the wealthiest of lives face harsh realities as well, and maybe the struggles of those above ground and below were not too different but alike in that they shared dreams they could never realize, goals they could in no way reach, people or situations over which they had no control. Maybe Miriam had prematurely come to terms with this truth, because to Simon it seemed perfectly obvious. She may have wanted to negotiate, because she knew there was no way out. When push came to shove, despite the wounds inflicted by the world’s insensitivity, she did not want to die or lead people to their deaths.

He gradually understood the other side. He understood why she was a radical. They were the have-nots, and oppression, or at least the perception of being an oppressed people, would have led anyone into the hazards of cynicism and ultimately into a fight for the same things others had. But her war lacked practicality, even though it could be justified.

Simon took the shuttle from 42ndstreet to Grand Central, Salazar keeping a watchful distance. He rejoiced in his newfound freedom from the underworld. They then caught a train uptown. He marveled at the passengers on the train, even went so far as to cherish their proximity. His euphoria, however, didn’t last very long. His freedom was fleeting, as he had a job to do. He found the clothing store on and waltzed right in with Salazar at his back, his weapon loaded under his camouflaged jacket.