After eating, Stan and Berto fell asleep on the floor, their heads on their still-rolled sleeping bags, Sledge snoring along with them. My brother was standing in the bedroom doorway watching Irina and the baby, who were also sleeping. He’d grown a beard since I’d seen him and looked fatherly and devoted, and in the back of my throat I felt the sudden, harsh salt of tears.
Angus came up behind me and put his hands on my shoulders. “There’s a roof,” he whispered.
We climbed up a fire escape and found ourselves looking out over the drab rooftops of the student ghetto. It was still early in the morning, and the sun was gentle. Angus lit a joint, then handed it to me.
“Did you get this in Bisbee?” I said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“That’s where Wylie said you went.”
“Well, Bisbee’s less an actual destination than a state of mind.”
“If you say so,” I said. I was trying to identify precisely when I got stoned, a moment that had always eluded me in the past and now seemed, for some reason, within my reach.
“How’s the research coming along?” Angus said.
“Not so good,” I said, not even wanting to think about it.
Angus sat down on the roof, leaning back on his elbows, and grinned at me. His cheeks and the bridge of his nose were pink from the sun. I sat down beside him, wondering where his hat was.
“You should leave the library and take to the streets,” he said. “Put down your pen and join the cause.”
“I mostly use a computer,” I told him. “Not a pen.”
“My point remains the same,” he said, and exhaled smoke.
“I think you’d like some of the art I work with,” I said. “I study a lot of revolutionary people, guerrillas who were trying to change society. Women putting their bodies on the line.”
He raised his eyebrows and looked unconvinced, then rolled onto his side and put his hand on my thigh. “Like how?” he said.
“Picketing museums, doing outrageous performance art in public spaces, that kind of thing. This one woman wrote a poem, rolled the piece of paper up, then scrolled it from within her, you know, body and read it out loud to an audience. And there were these others who dressed up like cheer-leaders and each had a letter on her sweater — a C, a U, an N, a T — and they did cheers to, like, take back the word or whatever. They were very political.”
Angus was smiling, with his eyes closed. “I like you,” he said, “because your secret rebellious side is so badly concealed. That’s why you hang out with me so much.”
“I don’t have a secret rebellious side.”
“In fact it’s not even a secret.”
“It is too,” I said.
“So you admit it.”
“I don’t even know what we’re talking about,” I said.
Angus laughed, and after a second I did too. I lay down next to him, my face to the sun, and put my hand on his leg. The sweet smell of pot rose and buzzed around my ears. Angus covered my hand with his. Then, long before I was ready to leave, he stood up and pulled me to my feet and said it was time to get going.
Back in the apartment the troops were rallying, sort of, sleepily and with some complaints. “Does this have to be done today, man?” Berto kept saying. Wylie sat in the corner with Irina, silent and deeply tanned and expressionless, holding the baby. Even the dog lay on its side, only one eye open, mustering a minimum of enthusiasm.
“This one’s ready to go, so why wait?” Angus said. “The hard work’s been done. The rest of the troops have been informed. It’s a cakewalk.”
“What is a cakewalk?” Irina asked.
“It’s something easy,” Angus said eventually. “Easy as pie.”
“You know, I have tried to make pie,” she said, “and it is not very easy.”
“Irina,” Wylie said. “Never mind.”
“It is the crust part that can be hard.”
“What are you guys going to do?” I asked him.
“It’s the Sandias,” Angus said.
The plan, he explained, was to remove the crest of the Sandias from the life of the city, to take it away, temporarily, so that people would remember that it was there. Most people forgot to even look at the mountains, as they went about their pitiful day-to-day lives. This was what he called them, “pitiful day-to-day lives,” in a tone I hadn’t heard before: sharp with not just excitement but disdain. I wondered if he thought my mother’s life was pitiful, or mine. In fact, I decided, he probably did, but also thought that I could be saved from it or somehow redeemed.
“So, we’ll divide,” Angus was saying. “Kickoff time is midnight. Stan and Berto, you two take the roads. Wylie and Irina and I will take the tram.”
“Who’s going to secure the airspace?” I asked. There was a silence. “Just kidding,” I added, but nobody laughed. “Where do I go?”
“Home,” Wylie said.
“No.”
“Yes.”
We glared at each other, both of us cross-legged on the floor.
“Children,” Angus said quietly, seeming amused. “Lynn, you’ll come with me. We’ll all meet back here at midnight. Class dismissed.” He clapped his freckled hands, and the dog jumped.
Angus wanted me to while away the afternoon in a motel, but I had other plans. Cornering Wylie, I told him there was something I wanted him to do with me.
“Not go home,” I said, before his scowl could harden. “Someplace else. Come on, I’ll let you drive the Caprice.”
“You’ll let me drive my own car?” he said.
“Yes. I’m that generous.”
I directed him through traffic without telling him where we were headed, though he figured it out soon enough.
“Nice butterflies,” he said, looking at our old house. “You’re on a big nostalgia trip, aren’t you?”
I opened the car door. “I want you to meet somebody,” I said. I got out, walked up to the Michaelsons’ front door, and knocked, Wylie following slowly behind me.
Daphne herself opened the door, wearing a navy-blue business suit with white hose and matching blue pumps with little white leather bows. She looked beautiful, glassy and severe, like a Midtown skyscraper. For a second I thought I’d imagined the entire thing: her insanity, her room, her collection of Vogue magazines.
Then she said, “I knew you were coming.” She stepped back from the door and walked away down the hall.
I followed her, and could hear Wylie behind me, although I didn’t look at him. Daphne Michaelson led us into the same room, the magazines neatly lining the walls, and sat down in the same chair, arranging her skirt neatly over her knees. She smelled like Chanel No. 5. There was nowhere else to sit, so Wylie and I just stood there.
“What I’m about to tell you,” she said, “cannot leave this room.”
“Mrs. Michaelson, do you remember us? Wylie and Lynn Fleming, we used to live next door?”
She nodded. “You’re here for the files. Everything is carefully maintained.” She pointed to a box on the floor that held another stack of magazines, an issue of Mademoiselle on top. “Rose red, romantic red, red in the afternoon,” she said, looking back and forth between me and Wylie with a gaze of such intensity that I had to will myself not to nod. She took a manicured finger and wiped the pad of it across her mouth, then held it up. “Ragtime red,” she said.
I realized that she was naming lipstick colors. “Mrs. Michaelson,” I said, “I think—”
“Listen,” she said, “I tried to tell you earlier. It’s a permanent wave.”
Wylie said, “Mrs. Michaelson, are you taking your medication?”
She stood up. In her classic pumps she was as tall as he was. “Light is what makes every color,” she said. “Especially red. I prefer a red with bluish undertones myself.”