"American Subversive" — David Goodwillie

This is the first book I've reread in as long as I can remember.

It's just excellent, even better the second time around.

On the surface it's a beautifully realized thriller centering on a shadowy activist movement that aims to focus attention on what it believes ails America via sensational violent "actions."

At the same time it's a sensitive and penetrating character study of Paige Roderick and Aidan Cole, seemingly successful thirty-somethings who've played the game according to the rules but then find themselves derailed and off the grid, involved in something far beyond their initial intent and tossed about by forces that proceed to grind their intentions into dust as they scramble to stay out of the reach of the law.

Look inside the book here.

Selected (by me) excerpts follow.

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There is no romance in going underground, in becoming anonymous, stateless, tended to by strangers who come and go in shadows. I have no TV, no phone, no computer or Internet. They're serious about communication, or the necessary lack of it, because you never know who could be listening in. The best I can do is a small radio and day-old newspapers, which my handlers bring on their twice-weekly visits. Tuesdays and Fridays at dusk. They flash their high beams at the bottom of the driveway and again closer to the house. Otherwise I split. That's the plan.                                                       

I don't know the history of the place, but I imagine it's been used like this for a while — as a hideout, a safe house, a place to regroup and then move on. Everything here is transitory, cheap, easily left behind. Even the few decorations — the model ship above the fireplace, the sun-faded posters advertising Pan Am 747s and British Rail routes to Scotland — speak to travel, to escape. But there's nowhere to go, not right now, and so I sit here at this timeworn desk, keyed up on coffee and cigarettes, searching for a voice, a way into the story. I want to remember what my life was life before. Sounds stupid, I realize. I lived it, so how hard can it be to put into words?

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Vans of Girl Scouts and Little Leaguers: kids in uniforms, pleading and tugging, hungry for food, starving for attention. That had once been me, but a long time ago. I was their opposite now. A person trying to fade away, climb into a car and disappear completely. I was sitting at a table near the window, newspaper spread before me, pretending to read. No eye contact, no conversations. In my excitement I'd arrived too early (despite biking the route twice the week before, nine miles of hills through a Smoky Mountain dawn), and after dumping the bike out back, had no choice but to buy a cup of coffee and settle in. It was the longest hour of my life. I got up and walked to the bathroom, fighting the urge to glance in the mirror, take one last look. Would I have recognized myself? The faded jeans, the loose peasant top, the old running shoes. My hair tied in a simple ponytail, no makeup. But I didn't look. What was the point? I went back out and sat down. Know your surroundings? It wasn't difficult. Everything was so familiar. The hard part was realizing I might never see any of it again.

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Naïveté. Carter used the word that night in the woods, and it still hovers over me these many months later. How a girl like me could fall so quickly, so deeply, into a world like that. Let me say, first, that the transformation occurred in stages, one leading rationally to the next. At least it seemed rational at the time. And perhaps that's an answer right there. At the time. Because I was drowning, even before Bobby was killed. My many personal failings, at work and in love, in New York and then D.C., had led to a loss of... not hope, per se, but anticipation. At twenty-eight, my life had simply stopped getting better, had reached a plateau in a windowless K Street office, in a crumbling basement apartment off Dupont Circle. The air around me no longer circulated, and I'd retreated inside myself. Was I depressed? I suppose, though I'd never have admitted it at the time (and even now I struggle with the idea of that clinical diagnosis, any clinical diagnosis). My problem was one familiar to political idealists and aid workers everywhere. I was beginning, through, countless cycles of hope and disappointment, to understand the bitter truth of governmental stagnation. Policy was achieved solely through great power, progress by something more like accident. And when you've fallen for all the youthful clichés about making a difference, when you've tailored your life around them, hitting that impenetrable wall of reality is devastating. For things were only getting worse. The global economy was in shambles, the developing world falling out of reach. I was falling out of reach. I was losing myself.

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It was the last thing he said for an hour. The skies opened up before we made it to the highway, and he gave his attention completely over to the task at hand. I turned around every few minutes to check on our cargo, resting innocuously on the cushioned seats. It could have been anything under those blankets. But it wasn't anything. It was high explosives, a fact I thought might lend our journey a certain intimacy — a shared acknowledgement of our feat, our felony. But Keith stared straight ahead, his green eyes fixed on the wet road, the close distance, the near future — no mirrors, no looking back. They were the eyes of a true believer, I realized then, and for a moment they scared me more than anything else in the car.

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I don't mean to say that my friend lacked beliefs; it was just tough to know what they were. Certainly, Touché identified with his Venezuelan roots, if not in revolutionary terms, then with a subtle anti-Americanism that lingered around the edges of his person. That his father was risking his life for a political cause, that he would take it that far, no doubt had an impact on his son. But what of his mother? She almost never came up. Du Pont, to Touché, was just another name in a world of big names. What were the odds that two families likes the Touchés and the Du Ponts would come together? I used to wonder, back when we first met and I didn't know the odds were actually quite good. The rich do get richer, I realize that now. Between Dalton and Middlebury I'd known plenty of well-heeled offspring, but no one like Touché. He was too wealthy to understand money, to realize it was the permanent focal point of everyone else's existence. Debt, like public transportation, wasn't part of his world.

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My role was evolving, the concrete replacing the conceptual. No longer roaming the Internet link by random link, I now searched for specific targets. Studies, trends, and forecasts. Articles, interviews, and essays. The trick, the crucial necessity, was to navigate cyberspace without leaving a trail. It was something I'd never had to worry about in my real-life research jobs, and once again, Keith showed me the way. He had a background in technology. He had a background in life. The wired world was a dangerous place, he told me, its endless pages filled with deceptively-benign sounding cookies, bugs, and logs. The cookies — ID tags embedded in user hard drives — could be disabled; the real problems were the Web bugs and log files. The bugs monitored page visits; the logs recorded server activity. The only way to bypass these was to blend in by avoiding search engines and local ISPs. But that was only the beginning. We downloaded nothing and saved nothing (I took handwritten notes). We stayed away from e-mail, from blogs, from YouTube; from well-known tracking sites and anywhere else that might arouse suspicion — govenment or university sites; extremist sites; anything originating from the Middle East. Instead, I roamed the outskirts of information, picking up scraps, shards here and there.

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For years I'd leave New York, and within a day or two, no matter where I was, I'd start craving all I'd left behind. There was a velocity to the city, a careening inevitability that became addictive. Everyone I knew felt it — the great rush of plans and possibilities — and we lived accordingly. What was it exactly? It was everything vibrating at once: streets and restaurants and parties and clothes and lofts and stores and cabs and subways and, of course, people — the native, the foreign, the old, and the young, everywhere the young, a never-ending spectacle of fresh faces and lithe bodies to befriend and despise, to love and to leave. And at some point it was all supposed to slow down, ease up, as our younger selves gave way to committment and responsibility. But that had yet to happen. We all kept running around. As the music changed and the films came and went. As skirts got longer and then shorter. As places opened and closed and then opened again. Some of us turned thirty. Some forty. And if the money never quite came — never enough, anyway — no one truly seemed to care.

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We had outs for every situation, dialogues we'd conceived over dozens of dinners and committed to memory by morning. It was a never-ending night of improv, this living underground, and all you could do was try to keep up the illusion, no matter how unbelievable it might be. Because your life — my life — depended on it. Depended on overcoming moments just like this, a car backing up, its white reverse lights portending any number of dangers, any number of fates. Then the window coming down, and a man leaning over to say something that could end it all.

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It was starting already, the sordid truth of life on the run. Relentless anxiety. Perpetual paranoia. I needed to think more clearly, become more observant. But how soon before that led to paralysis? It's hard to move when you see danger in every direction.

This was how I passed the time, with pointless games of what-if. The rest was too much to contemplate. All that had happened and still might. Movement was important, the simple act of driving. And so was the luxury of a destination. Because I knew where I was going. I'd looked up Weehawken Street before I'd left, and on the screen, from above, it looked like a rotting alley, a dilapidated wharf slum that had, for whatever reason, fallen through the cracks of a sprouting metropolis. Did he really live there? And did he leave alone? Every question raised a dozen more, each more troubling, more menacing, than the last. But I no longer cared. This was my only real option. If you could even call it that.

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But no, Touché was only saving himself. He'd traveled with me as far as distraction and mild adventure would allow, then run back home to hide. All these years I'd reveled in his soothing self-assurance and celebrated the vague mysteries of his life, as if not knowing him, never questioning him, would make us closer. Which is how I'd ended up with a best friend I barely knew. Why had this never bothered me before? Perhaps because it was hardly unique. My world was full of such friendships; it was the basis of the modern urban bargain — that we could flutter in and out of each other's lives like moths, as long, of course, as we kept to the light, the inconsequential, the marginalia. As long, in other words, as we never truly came to know anyone.

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Highly recommended.