Abbey Rowe

Diana is talking about Altamont again. What you need to know about Diana is that she describes herself as the kind of person who lives in the present. The day we met we had just left our S.D.S chapter meeting in Michigan and she was telling Bill Ayers that the two most important things to her were peace and the future. So I remind her about this and she says something like “you’re one to talk” or “you don’t know me” but I’m already checked out and thinking about tomorrow. Diana can tell I’ve stopped listening and so she goes back to work. It’s hot in the basement. The sweat on Diana’s face is like rain and to look at us you might think we were two soldiers caught in a monsoon, the sound of water on our helmets like hands. Thousands of hands, all clapping down on us, like applause.

Diana wipes a towel across her face and I think about when Bill stopped by last night and pushed the wet hair from her neck.

“There’s nothing sexier than a girl who can work with her hands,” he told her. I could tell Diana was upset by this but she’s a Weatherman first and a feminist second and besides she’s been dating Bill for a while now and I guess she’s already given up educating him on female objectification. So she just smiled and let him kiss her. I’ve always been very attracted to Diana. I think Bill knows this but they’ve taken up on monogamy and I guess he figures I won’t bother going against him on that. So now Diana and I are alone while Bill is out somewhere “getting things done” with Ted, and the Kathys are upstairs- that’s Kathy Boudin and Cathy Wilkerson. Cathy Wilkerson’s dad owns the building we’ve been working in and I put down my screwdriver for a second to ask Diana how much she thinks a place like this must’ve cost. Diana laughs in that way she laughs when she’s outraged about something. Like when she talks about the volunteer work she did in Ghana. “If people could just wake up and look around…” Another thing to know about Diana is that this was something she was big on five years ago. Community service. She was good at it too, until she realized that it wasn’t making any difference and split from S.D.S with the rest of us. Diana gestures to the wall behind me. “That’s where Dustin Hoffman lives.” Diana says this without looking up, two wires caught in her hands like sterling silver, pulled taught.

“Where?”

“Next door.”

“Damn.”

That’s how we talk down here. Short, succinct. Like reading from a telegram.

“Terry?” Diana says my name and waits for me to look up. I’ve been dissecting an alarm clock for what feels like the last two hours and I think I’ve finally got the timer rigged but I hold on and say what.

“Terry.” Diana’s been doing this since we started a week ago and before she goes at it again I just say —

“It’s done.” Well, she says. Not really. Not yet. And then she’s back in California: “When Meredith died…”

Diana thinks she knows injustice because of the D.O.R riots. Like the greatest offense the left could have ever make against the government is a few broken windows and a Molotov cocktail. Sometimes I think if Diana had it her way she’d still be overseas, or back in Cuba with Kathy. Diana seems to defend peaceful protest on principle. The issue for her isn’t whether anything gets done, it’s whether anyone gets hurt. What Diana forgets is that peace only helps people who look like her. Not our black brothers and sisters in the Panthers, and not the people of Vietnam. The problem with Diana, and even with Bill and the other Weathermen, and especially with S.D.S, is that fifty years from now nobody’s going to look back on their lives and call them radicals. Not extremists. Hippies, maybe, but they’ll always just be protesters. Kids whose dads were lawyers and kids whose dads lived next door to movie stars. I’m not saying I came from coal miners or anything but at least you won’t find me going around trying to protect a broken system just because it protects me. Diana’s whole thing with Altamont is that we’ve lost sight of what she thinks we should be in sight of. And what she thinks we should be in sight of is three more days of peace and music.  

“The sixties didn’t die with Meredith Hunter. They died with Fred Hampton.” Diana stops talking. “When a country kills its own people it cannot and should not expect them to remain peaceful.”

“But Terry.”

Diana starts looking like she’s about to cry so I tell her what Bill and I have been telling all of them this past year.

“We’re bringing the war home, Diana.”

I can’t tell if her face is wet from crying or sweating but I look at Diana and she’s so beautiful and I realize all of a sudden that her hair is the color of leather but the way it falls off her shoulders is like silk and now I’m thinking about the night we spent on the train together coming home from Chicago. One of those nights that etches itself into your memory before it even ends, when it still seemed to me like there was some kind of goodness that still exists in all of us.

That night there were ten of us, all weathermen, pulsating in and around and through each other, like all those tiny particles that make up our universe. Like atoms. And I remember how I pulled Diana’s face towards mine through all the rest and how I brushed my thumb across the thin skin of her eyelid and how her silence seemed to explode inside of me. I look at her now as she pulls a sleeve up to her face and I can see the faint purple veins painted across her skin. Another thing you need to know about Diana is that her eyelids aren’t really eyelids at all but iris petals, still wet and heavy with dew.

This is what you need to build a bomb:

*       Pipe. Shorter than 8 inches, because longer won’t explode right, and thinner than 2 inches, because thicker is going to cost you more money. And you want metal, not plastic. Cathy went out and bought us a water pipe a few days ago and she didn’t have any trouble finding it. Just over 5 dollars for ten feet.

*       Dynamite. If you’re building something designed to explode, you’re going to need explosives. Dynamite is cheap effective and easy to find and cleaner than chemicals or gas. Less room for things to go wrong.

*       Batteries. For the alarm clock.

*       Fuse. About an inch.

*      Alarm clock. This is important if you need something timed. Since we’re planting these before the dance starts, we have to build up to something more elaborate than just lighting the end and running. There are two other types of delayed action bombs, chemical and physical, but we’re using electric.

*       Shrapnel. Shrapnel can be anything, as long as it’s sharp. Staples, scrap metal, razors. We’re using nails. Since our goal is personal injury, not property destruction, shrapnel is more important than firepower.

Getting the materials was easy. When Cathy and I were carrying the pipe down to the basement I felt like we were soldiers again, like I how I felt earlier in the heat with Diana. And I realized then how much the hollow end of a water pipe looks like the barrel of a gun. The bigger problem so far has been with wiring. None of us knows much about electronics and we’ve been really careful so far but I know Kathy has been talking about maybe bringing someone else in to help. The mechanics of it aren’t too hard to follow: cut the pipes and drill a hole in the top for the fuse, fill with dynamite and nails, attach wires through a dry cell to connect the fuse with the hammer and alarm bells, set the clock.  

I ask Diana if maybe she wants me to turn the radio on down here and she nods. Stretching my legs feels incredible and I figure since I’m up I should bring Diana a tissue, so I do that and then sit down again next to her with Cathy’s transistor radio and a box of Kleenex in my hand.

“Alright?”

She doesn’t say anything else so I start messing with the dial. The reception isn’t great down here but I figure I’m a pro engineer by now so there’s no reason I shouldn’t be getting a signal. I’ve never minded the sound of static. It’s soothing to me. Something I learned recently was that a tiny part of what you’re hearing when you hear static is called cosmic background radiation, which is left over from the big bang. Eleven billion years ago. To me this is really wild and I point it out to Diana.

“They call it ‘relic radiation.’”

“Oh?”

Part of me thinks Diana knows this already. She’s got Bill fooled, and maybe even Cathy and Ted, but not me. I could tell the day I met her, back that winter in Michigan, that she’s smarter than all of us.

Diana sighs. When Diana sighs it rings in the air like a dog whistle. Like something no one can hear, not even her. She takes the radio and starts playing with the antenna. She stares at me then and I notice that her eyes are dry and I wonder if maybe I should put the tissues back. Before I get up Diana reminds me about the way the world ends.

“Not with a bang,” she says. And after that we stop talking for a while.

They have a monument in Fort Dix called The Ultimate Weapon. Two soldiers built it in 1957 after a public relations officer thought a twenty-four-foot tall replica of a charging infantryman would raise morale. The gun alone, an M14 rifle, is seven feet long. What’s fascinating to me about the statue at Fort Dix is that the whole thing was made from scrap metal. Old railroad tracks and things like that. The inscription at the base of the statue reads: “This monument is dedicated to/ the only indispensable instrument of war,/ The American Soldier/ THE ULTIMATE WEAPON.” And looking at a photograph of it for the first time last week, seeing the twisted metal body with its mouth forever gaping, its knees forever bent, its gun forever cocked, I felt something almost like kinship. Like I was a statue too. Like all of us Weathermen were statues. Forever on the brink of destroying a system forever on the brink of destroying me.

I don’t remember Diana leaving but she must have because now I’m down in the basement alone and it’s getting late. Our workshop looks like litter strewn across a beach. A dead battery lies next to a pile of cigarette butts and a gutted alarm clock. Pipes stand like the logs from a dock that’s been washed away and dynamite floats like buoys around a sea of wires. The radio static becomes like waves. Wading towards the staircase, shirt clinging to my body like a wetsuit, I feel on the brink of vomiting.

Cathy’s kitchen has a marble floor and a refrigerator that must be eight feet tall.

“Diana up here?” Kathy tells me no; asks how things are going downstairs. Fine, I tell her. Explain how much we have done, how much we have left to do, how long it’s going to take, how my head feels like it’s about to explode.

“There’s Advil in the drawer there.”

Fishing around for the pills I ask Kathy what she’s been up to all day, trying not to sound passive aggressive. Now that I’m out of the basement I remember how nice this house smells. Clean and earthy and sweet, like the air in the Catskills. Kathy is saying something about blueprints and travel time but now I’m thinking that maybe I’m tired of living in the city. And I know I can’t leave yet, because after tomorrow everything that we’ve been working towards for years is finally going to happen, but maybe when the war ends I can go upstate somewhere and live in the mountains. Like I said, I’m a pro engineer by now. I could take up on a patch of land near the water and build a home for myself. Small and comfortable. I’d have a girl there, too, or maybe a few girls. I think about pitching this idea to Diana.

“Terry?” Kathy wants to know if I’m listening to her. The Advil looks like chicken pox in my hand and I dry swallow it while giving Kathy a thumbs up. Cathy walks in then and lays her head on the granite countertop. She closes her eyes and says:

“Diana’s doing it again.” I figure I know what it is, which is backing out, but I ask anyway, which is what Cathy tells us. She also tells us she feels like she’s dealing with a child. And before I can ask: “Upstairs.”

Somewhere a mile or so down from Fort Dix a noncommissioned officer is eating dinner early. Something light. There’ll be food at the dance, his wife had reminded him that morning, so he won’t want to go and fill up beforehand. The noncommissioned officer figures he can get away with a ham sandwich so he has that. Upstairs, his wife has laid out three different dresses with varying combinations of heels and pearls. The noncommissioned officer hasn’t been asked for an opinion yet but whatever she chooses is probably fine with him. With people like that, all they care about is appearances. The noncommissioned officer takes his shower and puts on his uniform. Black tuxedo jacket with gold bands on the arms and lapels, checkered with ribbons and medals, and a frilled white shirt with a bowtie. The noncommissioned officer doesn’t look at his gold buttons and think about the wives of the men in My Lai. Wives of men who will never go to balls with other wives of husbands. Wives and husbands whose livelihoods are not built upon the wide scale destruction of foreign nations. Buttoning his coat, the noncommissioned officer isn’t thinking about the wives of the men in My Lai, the hundreds of them, whose bodies were ravaged and mutilated before being left to die in the tall grasses and shallow waters of their hometown.

The noncommissioned officer is old now. And his wife is old. His wife was beautiful ten years ago when he left the country but what she’s lost in physical appeal she’s more than made up for in loyalty. And she’s thin. The noncommissioned officer smiles to himself and to look at him you might even feel pity. And you might even want to plead with the noncommissioned officer to make amends. Looking into the eyes of the noncommissioned officer, you might even think those eyes looked a bit like your own, brown and turned down at the crease.

And you might picture how it feels in that fraction of a second before a nail shoots through your pupil and into your skull, and you might wonder if it wouldn’t feel like a fraction of a second at all, but like an eternity. You might even, for a moment, understand Diana.

But that’s before you remember that this is a war. A civil war that the country waged upon itself. So you think about that nail driving through the noncommissioned officer’s heart and you think that maybe the deaths of the officers at the dance in Fort Dix will mean something. That maybe everyone will finally see that things have gone too far. That maybe this will be the catalyst for a revolution. That maybe fifty years from now, you will have become a revolutionary.

I thought that when I went into Cathy’s Dad’s bedroom I would find Diana spread across the bed, a pillow covering her face, her back rising and falling in sobs. I thought I might comfort her. Bring her more tissues. Kiss her on the forehead. Then she would see how I’m there for her when Bill isn’t, and we’d go back downstairs to finish the bombs together. And later, when we’d both be sleepy, and maybe tipsy off a few glasses of Cathy’s dad’s wine, she’d tell me that she’d love to go live with me in the mountains, after all this is over, after we’ve won.  

The problem is that Diana is not destitute and strewn across the bed. The problem is that Diana doesn’t look like she needs my help. The problem is that Diana doesn’t even look like she wants me there at all.

I ask are you okay. Diana’s little iris petal eyelids look like they’ve been replaced by fishing weights. Steely and cold.

“Do I look not ok?” I hate questions like these. Changing tactics:

“You need to come back downstairs.”

And before I can do anything to stop her she’s up and shouting and making me angry.

“What you and Kathy are doing, what you’re planning on doing, it isn’t protest.” I start to talk but Diana holds a hand over my mouth and I can taste the salt of her palm burning in the cracks of my chapped lips. “It’s not anything but murder.”

I want to tear Diana’s hand from my face. I want to slap her and I want to grab her wrists and kiss her. I want to hurt her and make her cry. I hate her. I want to hate her. I want her to love me. But she says you’re using shrapnel. She says there’s other kinds of bombs we could be making that aren’t designed to kill people, that aren’t designed to kill as many people as possible. I want to tear Diana’s hand from my face but I know if I do I won’t be able to stop. And I know that’s what she wants, to make me angry, to make me the bully, so she can complain to Bill and destroy our whole operation. So I just stand there, like a punching bag, like a statue, and let her finish her monologue. “You’re looking for a death count. You kill these people, these innocent people, and you’re no better than they are.” Then she calls me a monster. She says she hates me and all of us and that she can’t do this anymore. Then she stops talking, her words static in the air like relic radiation, like something that will exist in fragments of everything I hear from now until the moment I die.

Diana steps back and takes her hand with her, puts it over her own mouth and then over her face. She screams. She shakes her head. She turns and feels for the doorknob, letting in all the light from the hallway and the smell of Cathy’s house that suddenly feels offensive to me, that has become an odor. And I’m still standing there when I see Diana staggering down the staircase and towards the basement.

The ringing you hear in your ears after a bomb goes off is called tinnitus. Depending on how close you are to the explosion and its intensity you might never stop hearing that ringing. The rest of your life will become indiscernible from that moment, because to your ears the bomb will have always just gone off. Music, laugher, the sound of your girlfriend’s breathing. All of those things will become like the bomb. Shrill and destructive and undying.

The other thing that could happen is that you get your hearing back but that frequency, that pitch in the air breaking through the silence after an explosion, will be dead to you. You won’t ever hear it again. Even if another bomb goes off, the ringing will be a few decibels lower. I wonder if maybe so many bombs could go off that a person could become deaf. Not from the intensity of one explosion, but the from the gradual impact on your body from years of slow and consistent destruction. That’s what the war is doing to me, I think. Numbing me. So that even the feeling of hundreds of nails exploding into my head would be like the feeling of being in my bed at home, knowing pain only as something happening to someone else miles and miles away from me.

In the basement Diana is holding a stick of dynamite in the air like a weapon. Like she’s planning on hitting me with it.

“Diana.” She shakes her head. She says she’s not going to let me do this. She says Bill and Ted and the others agree with her, that she’s not the only one. She says that me and Kathy, that we don’t know what we’re getting ourselves into. And she says that Ted is on his way now and they’re going to stop this.

I want to do something to make Diana understand. So I tell hear again about what the US did to the soldiers in My Lai.

Gang rape. Mutilation. Napalm that burned the skin off of children. I say this slowly, every word emphasized. But she just keeps telling me that peace is the only way to affect change. She just keeps telling me that we would be on their level, that we would be the murderers. I remind Diana that the American government is the murderer. I remind Diana that they killed Fred Hampton. They shot him dead while he was sleeping, just because he threatened their system. Just because he was black and wasn’t afraid of them. But Diana isn’t listening to me. She just keeps saying it’s murder, it’s murder, it’s murder, it’s murder, it’s murder.

And that’s when she reaches for the bomb. I lunge and looking into the dark pupil of her eye I see my face reflected back at me and in those last few moments before the wire short circuits I think maybe she’s right, maybe things could be like they were that night on the train again, that night when the whistle in the air came from the gap between Diana’s two front teeth and not the clatter of thousands of nails pouring down on us like rain and I think: she’s right, and I think: I’m sorry, and I think: I can fix this, and as my body becomes the smoke filling the room, the blinding light separating my fingerprints from my fingers, I think: this is how the revolution dies.