The Laws of our Fathers

1969-70

Seth

When I was twenty-three and in the midst of crazy times, I arranged for my own kidnapping. I was not actually abducted. It was a ruse of kinds, but in the aftermath my life was sadly changed. One man was dead and I had taken another name. In the years since, I have always felt I had been stolen from myself.

It was 1970, still the height of 'the sixties,' that period when America was in the midst of war and tumult. The combat raged not only in Vietnam but here, at home, where young people like me who opposed US involvement were openly regarded as enemies of the government and our way of life. This role pleased me in many ways, but it gave my existence a persistent renegade air.

By April of 1970,1 had received my draft notice and was being forced to choose between conscription – and the likelihood of a tour of duty in the jungles of Vietnam – or exile in Canada.

Each course seemed unbearable. My opposition to the war was unyielding. On the other hand, I was an only child, weighed down by my parents' many claims on me. Even 1,900 miles away from them and my home in Kindle County, I felt them close – a hot breath from behind – a phenomenon that left me alternately infuriated or resigned. They were camp survivors who had met in Auschwitz after their families – her husband, his wife and child – had perished. My father was almost seventy now, still robust, still full of his subtle commanding powers, but bound for decline. Even more troubling was my mother, a fretful person who seemed to sustain herself by clutching me close. When I was a child, a sensation of my mother's pain was always turning near my heart, and I had grown up feeling an unwavering duty not to add further to her suffering. My departure with my girlfriend for California the prior fall had prostrated her with grief. Actual exile, as my father never tired of reminding me, would revive for her – for both of them – unbearable horrors.

Faced with the pressure of sorting this out, I allowed the other relations in my life to collapse. I fell out badly with my best friend since childhood, Hobie Turtle, who was a first-year law student in the Bay Area. But my greatest agony, as is usually the case, came from love. The spring before, in 1969, I had fallen helplessly for a young woman – strong, dark, and beautiful – named Sonia Klonsky, whom I had met on an overnight bus trip from Kindle County to D C, heading for one of the first of the Student Mobilization Committee's marches on Washington. At the time, we were both college seniors on the verge of graduation, she from the U. in the city and I from stuffy, renowned Easton College. With her striking dark looks, set amid a stormy abundance of jet hair, her long-waisted, full-busted proportions, and, most important, her air of frank seriousness about herself, Sonny was dazzling to me.

I had never been in love. In fact, I had never been a notable success with women. My bleak outlook and sardonic manner made me somewhat fashionable, I guess, but under the strain of sustained female attention, I tended to come off as simply weird.

My relationships all petered out after a few weeks. So my passion for Sonny was a great shock – the heat of it, the puppyish desire to be near, the amazing news that human loneliness, which I took as an elemental condition, could vanish like the reagents in a test tube. My mind and heart spun crazily on the magic of details: We were both left-handed. We both knew the words to every cut on Happy Jack. When we were alone, she called me 'Baby.' The news that I held a spot in the life of someone so fiercely intelligent, so beautiful, so surely destined to make her mark upon the world, clapped home three times a day with the breathtaking impact of divine revelation.

This devotion, the stuff of legends, would have been perfect, had it been better received. Sonny enjoyed my company, my idiosyncratic humor, my headlong commitment to what she thought was right, my unruly, experimental side. But she forbade all talk of love. In September 1969 she prepared to leave for the Bay Area, where she had been accepted at Miller Damon Senior University in an accelerated, interdisciplinary Ph.D. program known as Modern Critical Thought and Philosophy. I moped around until she finally suggested I come with her to California, a step I'd already secretly contemplated, given Hobie's destination for the same locale.

'Because you need a ride?' I was always trying to trap her.

'Seth.'

'No, seriously, man. What'll we be, roommates?'

'We'll be "living together." Dangerous words then for a man and a woman, full of a subversive appeal I could never reject. So we had driven west in my yellow VW Bug, in a two-car caravan with Hobie and his young girlfriend, Lucy McMartin. Big and good-looking, smooth-talking and funny, Hobie was a hit with many women, and Lucy had dropped out of her sophomore year at Easton to follow him. Lucy was cute in a Betty Boop way, a little freckle-faced white girl, narrowly made, always clothed in stylish items culled from second-hand stores – leather vests and a short-billed cap like the ones the Beatles wore in Help! Hobie found Lucy pliant, sweet-natured, and bright, if chronically naive, but she was generally overwhelmed by Hobie and his lunatic manner. Behind her back, we called her 'Groovy,' since that was her automatic reply to any inquiry from 'How do you do?' to discussion of the Tet Offensive.

Entering the town of Damon, California, was much like crossing a national border. Beyond the campus environs dwelled men who looked as if they had gotten their haircuts in pencil sharpeners and women in girdles, but here along Damon's main drag, Campus Boulevard, the culture of the young flourished in a tumbling bazaar atmosphere. The town's transient elements – students and street freaks, hippies, home runaways, and communards – now far outnumbered the indigenous residents, the faculty families, and various grumpy Latinos who had watched as Campus Boul sprawled, surrounding the bookstores and student hangouts and mercados with head shops, candle stores, and the new 'boutiques' vending tie-dyed dresses and garments of macrame. The traffic, thick at all hours with touring gawkers, staggered by, while street performers – mimes and bongo drummers and gentle pipers – did their things, and the Damonites, in leisure suits and floral granny gowns, strolled the avenue among the soiled barefoot hippies, each one inevitably accompanied by a mongrel dog leashed on a piece of string. On the building sides, the trisected peace sign was spray-painted, while harsher words praised the NFL in Vietnam, and Huey Newton, then in jail for supposedly killing a police officer. Appearing often amidst the graffiti in Day-Glo shades was a round-lettered injunction which simply urged, 'Be Free.' Arriving with Sonny, I found all of this, the commotion, the array, the slogans inspiring; I could feel the life of my generation – historical, dynamic, epochal – like a rush flowing through my arms. This was the bold new world, its shape as yet uncertain, but sure to be better than the one our parents had given us.

On the first weekend in town, Hobie led us to Dionysus '69, the theater-of-assault piece, in which cast members mingled naked with the audience. The next night it was Fillmore West, a teeming environment of maximum amplification, sweat, and drug deals, where amoeba-like colored visuals swarmed on enormous projector screens, and various rock maniacs cruised about with a hipper-than-thou air. Hobie, particularly, loved the Bay Area scene: so many wiggy new things to dig, so many new drugs to take. First citizen of the counterculture, he wore shirts mottled with balls of color the size of grapefruits, bell-bottoms bigger than his shoes, and tinted aviator shades. He'd also grown a large globe Afro, somewhat reluctantly, since he'd been at constant odds with the Black Power types at Easton, who called him a Tom for rooming with a white guy.

Hobie and I had grown up together in University Park, the only neighborhood in the Tri-Cities anybody might have called cosmopolitan and probably one of the few in America which, during the years of our childhood, could pass as integrated. Blacks had arrived in U. Park during the Civil War, brought by the Underground Railroad, and were quickly isolated through the device of four public parks laid out around the small area where they resided. But beginning in the 1930s it gradually became acceptable for Negroes of sufficient stature – doctors, dentists, lawyers, certain entrepreneurs – to settle on the white sides of the park. This depressed land values somewhat, and my father, always in relentless pursuit of a bargain, could not resist. Thus, I moved in down the street from Hobie Turtle. As youngsters, we had little contact; Hobie went to Catholic elementary school and, always large, was known as something of a bully. It was only in junior high that we suddenly found each other. He was someone else who openly admitted having weird thoughts about science, girls, his parents.

In high school, we went through phases together. For a while, we were beatniks, appearing each day in berets and shades and black turtlenecks and calling each other 'Daddy-o.' We spent weekend nights in the paneled basement of Hobie's home, eating pizza, listening to Mort Sahl and Tom Lehrer records, and debating the philosophical issues of male adolescence, such as whether vaginas, like snowfiakes, were each unique. In college, we'd become mildly notorious on the Easton campus as performers. During rush week, we did our own minstrel show, a Negro and a Jew, pining together in Jolson-faces before a picture of the honey-haired homecoming queen – Muffy or Buffy or Betty -crooning Bing's old tune: 'I'm dreaming of a' -

Hobie: 'White'

Seth: 'Christian.'

We thought we were hysterical. Both Lucy and Sonny had met the inevitable measure, proving tolerant of our strange riffs. The apartment Sonny and I found in Damon was only a block from them.

So we arrived, and in less than a year I had been handed over to doom. I look back at that young man with his hand-tooled-leather headband, his Sergeant Pepper mustache, the froth of mid-shoulder blondish hair, which my father in his correct Viennese accent never tired of comparing to Jesus's, and feel weak with shame. In spite of my degree from a fancy, famous Midwestern university, I was largely aimless. For a year or two in college I'd had thoughts that Hobie and I would become a comedy act, but I was simply not funny enough; these days I was talking about writing underground movies and had broken all records for repeat watchings of Jules et Jim and the films of Jean-Luc Godard. For the most part, I saw the draft as having rudely barricaded my way, but at moments, especially when I was stoned, I would recognize how large and undifferentiated my universe seemed, how lost I was inside myself. I was liable to fall under the influence of any strong suggestion, acting at moments with no more forethought than a person trying on hats. I knew only a few things for certain: That I was in love. That I wanted the world to be better than it was. Yet my passions seemed powerful enough to light the planet. And now that the earth is somewhat dimmer, I look back with a solitary heart, limp not merely with regret, but also with longing.

*

Sonny had her fellowship and I supported myself with hand-to-mouth measures typical of the era, food stamps, and a variety of odd jobs. I sold The Good Times out on Campus Boul and was eventually recruited to distribute a rival publication called After Dark, basically a skin mag, whose cover each week featured a blurry color separation of an unclothed full-busted beauty whose smoky look smoldered above the fold in the vending machines where I placed the papers. My principal occupation, however, turned out to be baby-sitting for a six-year-old named Nile Eddgar. His parents lived in the same apartment building as Sonny and I, a brown-shingled Victorian with a round bulb extension at one end that rose three floors to a roof pointed like a wimple. The inner construction was shabby – the usual marked walls and devastated carpeting of a typical student slum – but our apartment had an ample kitchen and many nifty Victorian touches, including a raised pattern in the plaster.

I'd found my job with Nile purely by accident. The day we moved in, I knocked on the door to the single upstairs flat, looking for a hammer, and was greeted by Nile's father, Loyell Eddgar, whose movie-star looks undoubtedly contributed to his charisma. He was a slighter, shorter version of Bruce Jenner, an Olympic athlete of the day, with the same long, lank hair smoothly groomed, and a similar Barbie doll handsomeness. I was struck by his eyes, a remarkable limpid blue, which gave him the pale haunted gaze of a mystic. Eddgar, however, had none of a jock's relaxed way – he was rigid as someone taking an electrical shock. As I explained what I needed, he stood his ground in the threshold and clearly would have slammed the door on me had it not been for a mild Southern voice behind him. A pleasant-looking woman in jeans and a chambray shirt approached, her stiff, bronze hair ponytailed, her measured smile reflecting self-control and excellent breeding.

'Will you sit?' June Eddgar asked, as soon as we'd made our introductions. As it turned out, this was a job offer, rather than an effort to improve on Eddgar's congeniality. June explained that both she and her husband, a theology professor at Damon, worked full-time. Their former baby-sitter, our neighbor downstairs, Michael Frain, had quit unexpectedly only the day before in order to supervise a lab in the Applied Research Center. She was, frankly, desperate, and hoped I could step in with Nile, after school and on some evenings.

The notion of me as a baby-sitter seemed slightly preposterous. I had no younger siblings and naturally thought of it as girls' work. On the other hand, I was without any means of support at that point, which meant, even halfway across the country, I felt myself vulnerable to my father and his perpetual craziness about money. He was an economist, one of the first of the money-supply experts, whose lifework – his very consciousness – was given over to money, which, as a result, was the frequent terrain of our many conflicts.

Only after I accepted June's offer did I find out what I had gotten myself into. 'Oh, lad. You're a flippin employee of the chairman of One Hundred Flowers,' I was informed that night by Sonny's departmental adviser, Graeme Florry. We were at the first of what I quickly came to regard as dreadful events, the departmental party, where the grad students chattered brightly and sized each other up. Graeme, a tall ruddy Englishman with a blond pageboy, wore a skinny Jacob's beard fringing his jaw and narrow yellow-tinted granny glasses suggestive of some psychedelic orientation. I had no idea what he meant by One Hundred Flowers or why he seemed so agitated.

'Ask the FBI, mate, Damon security, the town police. Know One Hundred Flowers well, I reckon. Refer to themselves as a "revolutionary council," I believe. The Black Panthers. White Panthers. Weathermen. PLP. The Brown Berets. Everybody, love. The Red Mountain Tribe. Honkies for Huey. Each little root and seed group, all the various head cases who begin nodding vigorously when anyone starts talking about taking up weapons. A treacherous fellow, that one. Believe me. Ordered an execution last year. Did you know that? Word from some poor devil who was involved. God, I hope you're not with the FBI.'

I assured him I wasn't. Graeme took another belt of his whiskey to still his concerns.

' Someone from the Panthers they took for an informant. Coppers found him in a ditch down by the Bay. Injected the poor chap with heroin, forcibly, tucked a wee bit of powder in his pocket so the police would think it was a junkie overdose. Not give a bloody damn. Which they didn't.'

Graeme briefly sketched Eddgar's history. He was the scion of Southern planters – his grandfather had been raised with slaves – a background of gentility and greed which Eddgar freely acknowledged and regularly denounced. He was an ordained minister and, until he had tenure, had been a promising professor in the School of Divinity, with a scholarly interest in comparing the teachings of the Gospels to Marxist doctrine. But after freedom riding and lunch-counter sit-ins in the mid-sixties, he had begun adhering more to Chairman Mao's Little Red Book than the Scriptures. Through his radical organization, Eddgar was suspected of inspiring riots the prior spring, when separate groups of black and white students occupying university buildings had been ej ected by a phalanx of city cops, culminating in the wounding of a university guard who had been shot from across the main quad.

In those first days, Sonny heard the same things about the Eddgars – that they had taken part in planning the prison breakout at Soledad, that a faction in the faculty senate wanted to expel Eddgar from the university – and she repeatedly urged me to quit. Sonny herself was a red diaper baby, daughter of a labor organizer named Zora Klonsky, who briefly, during World War II, had served as president of a Kindle County pipefitters' local. I viewed Zora more prosaically, as the only real-live Commie I'd ever met, and – in utter privacy – a serious nut. But whatever her sanity, Zora was a unionist. She'd broken factory windows but never staged a prison breakout, never fired a gun. The Eddgars were too much for Sonny.

'They're into very heavy stuff' Sonny warned. I was unconcerned. For one thing, I had learned that first day, as June was vetting me, that both the Eddgars were Easton graduates, fugitive Southerners who'd endured four years of Midwestern winters. I sentimentally assumed that made for a bond that would keep me safe. Beyond that, I was intrigued. Given the dismal results produced by the political process the year before – the police riot outside the Democratic convention; Richard Nixon's election and his subsequent refusal to bring the war to a close – many people on the left argued that it was time to move beyond civil protests to militant action. In Manhattan, bombs had decimated the Armed Forces induction station on Whitehall Street and the criminal courts building. SDS, the most prominent left-wing organization on many campuses, had splintered over the issue of violence, and in the fall of '69, the surviving Weatherman faction staged the Days of Rage in Chicago, in which dozens of rads ransacked the streets, smashing auto windows with case-hardened chains and going hand to hand with police. In Southern California, Juanita Rice, the daughter of a prominent industrialist and Republican fund-raiser, was grabbed at gunpoint out of her high school by some cadre called the Liberation Army, who held her for ransom. I regarded these actions as counterproductive and extreme, but I couldn't stifle a spark of excitement at the notion of reshaping the world from scratch. Amid my sense of wandering, dangling, the Eddgars seemed to represent reality, life, the thing I still felt was waiting to start.

Over the years I've wondered of course why it didn't work out between Sonny and me. The times? Did I frighten her with all my crazy passions? Did I cling? Insight, like some sweet inspiration, remains temptingly beyond reach. But somehow living together was hard. The carrying through. The day to day. Neither of us really had the remotest idea how to be with someone else. Sonny's mother, Zora, hadn't lived with a man while Sonny was alive, and from an early age I'd known that my parents' high-strung, suffocated relationship was something I did not want to duplicate. As a result, virtually everything between us was definitional: who did the wash, who made the social plans, how clean to keep the apartment. We fought about it all.

And some of what emerged couldn't be dismissed as mere adjustment. I regarded the girl I'd been dating as the most 'together' person I knew, thoroughly and enviably adult. Sonny was poised and rigorously logical in all circumstances, while maintaining a warm, frank manner. She was quick to laugh at jokes, if poorer at making them, easy with strangers, kind to street people and their dogs. My principal contribution to her, so far as I figured, was to add a combustible element to a life that was a little too confined by deliberation.

Yet living with her, I found Sonny full of mysterious, molten emotions that seemed to defy both her understanding and mine. She was inclined to manic spells, isolated periods of zombie-like staring, as well as adolescent attachments: writers, classmates, clothes that were one week's passion and then were never spoken of again. And she was touchy. Criticisms from professors about papers, or even their disagreement with a remark she offered in class, could make her funky and combative with me. Listening to her at those loathsome departmental parties, I was struck eventually by the way she presented herself as largely sui generis – never any mention of a hometown, or of a childhood in which her father, Jack Klonsky, secretary of the bargehandlers' local, had died in a dockside accident before she was two and in which she thereafter had been traded back and forth to the household of her Aunt Henrietta while Zora traveled and organized. Like a sculpture, Sonny presented no apparent access to her interior space. Desperate for any handhold, I would sometimes study her class notes when she was not around, or inspect the marginalia in the books she read, the passages she highlighted. What was I to make of that exclamation point? What insight made her write ‘I see'?

On no subject was she more confusing than school. At times, she was preoccupied by her department and its hothouse politics, the arch proclamations of her young adviser, Graeme Florry, and the complicated realms of thought she was required to master for her classes. Then periods would set in when she declared it all a waste of time. Philosophy was only about words, she'd say, or she'd repeat an observation of Nietzsche's disparaging the philosophic enterprise. In the catchword of the day, philosophy was no longer 'relevant.' For Aristotle, philosophy and science were one and the same. Now, she said, there were a thousand other fields of study, from psychology to physics, that we depended on to tell us more about the truth.

'It's real things, doing things I admire,' she told me, 'not ideas about them. That's what I'm trying to say. I can't live like this, talking about imaginary categories or making more of them than they really are.'

Often enough, as a means of encouraging her, I asked her to digest her reading for me, like a mother bird chewing and feeding this heavy stuff to me in lightweight bits. In order to speed the degree process, Modern Critical Thought required all students to complete a dissertation proposal by the end of the first term, which meant the work began at once at a furious pace. Sonny's emerging thesis concerned a philosopher named Brentano, who taught that consciousness was, at root, images shorn of all abstractions. Sonny was going to treat him as the unsuspected bridge between the depth psychologists, like Freud, and existentialists such as Sartre. In this connection, she was rereading the nineteenth-century German philosophers. One of her passing fixations was a term – from Nietzsche, I think – traumhaft, a sense that all beliefs – religion, love, the golden rule – were but a dream with no provable justification in morality or science. Our lives, Nietzsche claimed, our customs, were really no more than rote learning. We were, he said, actually afloat within sensation and otherwise unanchored, free but terrified, like the moonbound astronauts had been when they left their capsules and stood in space.

'Get it?' she asked. It was a Sunday afternoon, and we were, as was often the case on Sundays, in bed. It was our time of refuge before the forced march of the week began again. Sonny did not dress all day. We ate brunch and sometimes even dinner on the Goodwill mattress on the floor. In alternating periods, we went through the paper and screwed. When she dozed, I took up the sections she'd been reading. In the afternoons, Sonny moved on to her assigned texts.

'Heavy,' I answered. 'Very heavy. But bullshit.'

'Why is it bullshit, baby?'

'Cause that's not how it is. Not for me. I mean all this raging volcanic shit, I feel? Everything's connected to everything else. The draft. My parents. The war. You. I'm not floating. Not hardly. Are you?'

There was a round window, like a porthole, in our bedroom. Its existence had seemed a typically pointless Victorian frill until a night, a week ago, when the full moon had appeared there and filled the room with light so ghostly but intense I'd found it difficult to sleep. Lost in reflection, Sonny looked in that direction now.

'That's what I feel,' she said. 'A lot.' 'Traumhaft?' 'Traumhaft. There are times when I wonder. Do you know Descartes? Sometimes I wonder about everybody else. Like Descartes did. How do I know they're not in my imagination? How do I know for sure there's anything besides me? And even so, I wonder if I can really reach what's outside of me. There seems such a terrible abyss. Even between what I feel and what I can say about it. I can't -'

'What?'

'Get out? Does that make sense?' She scrutinized me with her searing, dark-eyed look. 'Am I too weird?' 'Not compared to me.' 'No. Really.'

'For-real,' I answered. 'Listen, I'm here. I promise, man.' I took her hand. 'This is here,' I said and fell upon her.

Sex was often the answer. It remains the most intensely physical relationship I've known. Words were the instruments of critical scrutiny to Sonny and talk, therefore, was as dangerous as a game of mumblypeg. In bed, she was somehow freer to give what remained often inaccessible. She was a willing participant in most of the experiments I concocted from a lifetime of unsatisfied fantasies: feathers and vegetable scrubbers; a large red dildo that briefly entered our lives. Our favorite was a tantric exercise we called The Touching Game. Naked and stoned, we faced each other in the dark, our eyes closed, legs folded yoga-like. The rules allowed us to touch with fingertips only – our bodies could not meet. No brushing knees, no kisses. And the genitals were out of bounds; they could not be caressed until some aching point when it became irresistible. Instead, we drifted our hands across each other for endless periods. I shivered when she stroked the skin behind my knee, my toe tops. We would fall, for long pieces of time, into the quivering zone above each other's lips, out of our minds with drugs and sensation, our mouths a breath apart as we trembled on the vapor of each other, of our beings.

In the Eddgars' apartment, the hot-blooded personalities of the revolution came and went: the Progressive Laborites in their workingman's twills; the leader of the Campus Employees Collective, Martin Kellett, with his sloppy redheaded ringlets; and, of course, the famous Black Panthers from Oakland, turned out in shades and berets and their three-buttoned coats of shining treated leather. The most prominent of the Panthers was Eldridge Cleaver. More often, he was represented by Cleveland Marsh, equally famous in Damon, where he had been a college football star. Currently the Panther Party's Minister of Justice, Cleveland was a hulking guy with a terrifying, insolent look. He was a classmate of Hobie's in the entering law-school class, and Hobie, a notorious sucker for celebrities, was forever rushing into the hall whenever Cleveland appeared, the better to fortify their minimal 'Hey, man' relationship.

The members of One Hundred Flowers appeared at the Eddgars' for meetings or occasionally arrived individually at odd hours to whisper with Eddgar on the back porch about some intrigue too sensitive for the telephone. Eddgar was obsessed with security. He assumed, probably correctly, that his organization and he were the constant targets of intelligence gathering and infiltration. That was why he'd removed Nile from a local baby-sitting co-op years before and barred me from his home the day we met. Once daily, the Eddgars swept the apartment for bugs. June used a device called a Private Sentry which looked like a voltmeter with a lightbulb attached, and Eddgar backstopped her, plugging a microphone into an AM-FM radio and his TV set. He chattered constantly – usually sayings from The Little Red Book – playing the channel knob across the U HF band or the full radio spectrum, awaiting any telltale feedback.

According to the rumors about him always circulating on campus, Eddgar was careful never to issue any revolutionary directives on his own. Even the most treacherous orders – to kill the snitch in Oakland or to aid the Soledad breakout – supposedly had been delivered to One Hundred Flowers through the mouth of June.

Coming and going with Nile or visiting with June to discuss his care, I now and then caught glimpses of the One Hundred Flowers meetings. The revolutionaries engaged in fierce doctrinal disputes, addressing each other as 'Comrade' and invoking the names of Gramsci, Fanon, Sorel, Rosa Luxemburg, and Bakunin, arguing about Lin Piao and China's role in Biafra. Meanwhile, June would slip off with different members to ride around the blocks in someone's car, where communications could take place securely. Before these ride-arounds, June and the passenger would search one another for recording devices, passing their hands across each other's bodies so casually that conversations were not interrupted.

The only time Eddgar's security concerns yielded was with regard to Nile's baby-sitting arrangements. June-called Nile a 'troubled sleeper' and insisted he be put down each evening in his own bed. I could tell the Eddgars had quarreled about this, but June apparently felt I was trustworthy and I stayed in their apartment, alone with Nile, on the nights the Eddgars were out with their 'cells,' or affinity groups. Eddgar kept a deliberate distance from me, to be sure, I guess, that I didn't learn too much.

In truth, Eddgar didn't have casual dealings with many people in Damon. He gave his lectures and spoke at public rallies; he carried on passionately at the faculty senate, delivering speeches which appeared to have been borrowed in tone and, worse, in length from Fidel Castro. Otherwise, he was remote. It was something of a privilege if he made any gesture of recognition when I saw him around the theology department. I was going there regularly in the mornings for meetings of the Damon chapter of the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War, which was coordinating local planning for various nationwide demonstrations that took place that fall.

Early in November, I was there mimeographing observations on draft resistance when the machine broke. I sputtered and wrestled with a reluctant gasket, until someone edged in behind me and extended a hand. When I looked back, I found Eddgar. On good behavior at the department, he wore a plaid shirt and contrasting knit tie, and looked almost raffish. Under one arm, he carried papers for the class he was about to meet. He accepted my gratitude without comment, but took an instant to look over the mimeo, still slopped across the machine's canister in a reeking puddle of toner. He could not have made out much reading backwards, but he seemed to get enough and turned away with a wee, telling smile, which, to my credit, irritated me.

'It's not funny, man,' I said. 'Okay, you don't agree, but it's not funny.'

I could tell I had struck a note Eddgar never expected. He lifted a pale hand in a remote gesture of compromise.

'I don't dismiss good intentions, Seth.' He smiled tautly as he quoted Mao: ' "Whoever sides with the revolutionary people is a revolutionary."'

'But you don't think that's enough, right? Good intentions?'

He reared back and observed me at length. 'Seth,' he said finally, 'you sound like you're trying to involve me in an argument you're havin with yourself I sensed instantly he was right. This kind of susceptibility, as I was to learn, never passed Eddgar's notice, and he took a step closer now. ‘I understand you, Seth,' he said quietly, ‘I believe I do. I've seen you here, toing and froing with these Mobilization folk. I see what you're doin. And I confess I've thought of myself. I think of all those high-hope little mimeos and prayer sheets we used to turn out in church basements in Mississippi. I'd say that you bring to mind all the passions of a young Christian activist, if you were a Christian.'

I think Eddgar was making one of his rare efforts at being humorous. Perhaps he knew that I thought of myself as quite a card and was trying to meet me on my own terms. But the remark had an unsettling undertone. I was never much at ease, to start with, when someone else mentioned I was Jewish. It called up my parents' lifelong warnings that my gentile acquaintances would never let me forget this difference. Inwardly, I looked forward to a new world where the need for such self-consciousness would be erased. Besides, Eddgar knew little about me, and it seemed to reveal the abiding attitudes of a small-town Southern boy that he kept this detail in mind. He frowned deeply at himself and remarked that what he'd said had not come out right at all. We hung there, both afraid of the implications were we to part. The vacuum made me bolder.

'What happened?' I said then. ‘I mean to the young Christian activist. Why did he change?' At the age of twenty-two, the news of how lives turned out the way they did gripped me like a thriller.

'What happened?' Eddgar asked himself. He walked as he thought and I followed him into an open courtyard. Although it was fall in the land I came from, Miller Damon was lush with blooming vines and flowering cactuses and ivies with shiny leaves that climbed the sandstone-colored bricks of the low buildings with their terra-cotta roofs. The sheer abundance of the place was still strange to me. Tall eucalyptus trees with hairy, peeling trunks formed a jungle line at the edge of campus, their aromatic leaves mentholating any breeze. At the back of the campus toward the Bay, the brass-colored hills burned to acres of straw, broken now and then by solitary live oaks, each lonely tree looking as if it had been placed there to accommodate a hanging.

'Teaching happened,' Eddgar answered at last. 'Scholarship. Mostly, however, I would be inclined to say Mississippi. That was the intervening force.' He seemed mildly amazed, recollecting the person he now so clearly renounced.

'Did you lose your faith?' I asked this casually, as someone who's never believed much, but I saw from his astonished expression I couldn't have pried more deeply if I'd asked what went on in bed between June and him. We walked on for some time along the single diamonds of Carrara marble that had been laid out beneath a columned esplanade.

'Every semester,' he said at last, 'there's a student who by the second or third class becomes confident that he or she has got me. "How can you claim?" this student will say, "how can you claim that Christianity, which hallows the life of the spirit, has any common ground with Marxism, which recognizes only a material world?" But that isn't what Marxism teaches. Do you think Che isn't spiritual? That Mao or Marx didn't believe in -indeed revere – the life of the spirit? The Marxist believes that the spirit can only find expression in this material world, and in Mississippi, slowly, I came to understand that point of view.

'Slowly, I say. On the night that the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964 – on that night, I felt ecstatic. I felt that years, decades of goodhearted efforts had been vindicated, that the world was finally changed. And, you know, two years later, I went back to Mississippi and there was not a thing different for those folks. Lord knows, I didn't have to go to Mississippi to see that. I could have walked down the road from my father's house and seen the people who have been cutting black tobacco in his fields for generations. But I had to go to Mississippi to see it, if you understand me, and I saw. The same little shacks. The same laundry on the line. The barefoot kids, bathin in big tin tubs. No runnin water, save what came up from the ground. Same ten hours in the field, twelve bits an hour. Still wasn't a school for them within ten miles. Oh, there was some talk of change when I asked. But I had to wonder.

'And I wrestled with myself. I struggled. Viewing that squalor, I would look at those babies, those precious babies, and wonder, "How do I say to you, after all this work, after this great triumph, how can I say to you that it will be no better in your lifetime? How do I, where do I, derive the right to tell you to wait?"

'You see, I couldn't really comfort myself with hopes for future generations, because that meant accepting her misery, the misery of the child I saw now. And I couldn't agree to the sop of the religious, heaven,' he said with mild contempt, 'the poor received in glory, because after all, after all, it was not just the Kingdom of Heaven that Jesus said the meek would have – he said they would inherit this earth. Was he merely taunting them? So that was the question, you see: How do I temporize with this generation? With any one child? What mandate of law, of God – where in anyone's teachings, Christ's or Marx's or Adam Smith's, where does it explain how a government derives the moral authority to tell the poor to languish in squalor, to wait and wait for the earth that is theirs while it is consumed by the rich? What happened to me, Seth, was that my faith, or my conscience, or my moral sensibility, told me there is no logic to this life but revolution.' His dramatic eyes were wide and pale as a wolf's. I was never of anything but two minds about Eddgar. I always recognized how theatrical he was. But as he finished his tale of ardor and personal pain, as he headed off alone beneath the arches of the esplanade, I was barely breathing.

Near 3:30 each day, chubby little Nile Eddgar limped home from first grade and became my responsibility. June had chopped Nile's straight brown hair into a bowl-shaped do a la the Little Rascals, but it would have been a stretch to call him 'cute.' He was an unsmiling, slow-moving soul, a turbulence of shirttails, smudged cheeks, and dirty fingernails. After devouring a snack his mother had left, Nile languished, child of the revolution, in front of my television. His parents prohibited TV and had gone so far as to get rid of their set, but somehow I found myself powerless to keep Nile from the dials. He would sit entranced, stroking one of the few toys he was allowed, Babu, a handsome bear with a pelt of shiny synthetic fur. I seldom interested Nile in the list of kid-time activities June had suggested – the park, the library, projects from school. He seemed to have no friends, partly because Eddgar, wary of government snoopers, didn't allow visits with families he hadn't approved. Instead, Nile moped around, telling me often how much better he liked Michael Frain, the physics graduate student who lived next door to Sonny and me and who had been Nile's sitter for the last two years. Frequently Nile would sneak away and hide in Michael's apartment, waiting for him to come home, at which point Nile would follow Michael around, resisting my efforts to recapture him.

I found Nile's relationship with Michael humiliating. I knew I was a pretty lousy baby-sitter. I was quick to regard myself as wounded by my childhood, yet I had little memory for a kid's preoccupations, while Michael, who was mute, virtually flash-frozen, with adults, could fall with Nile into the rhythms of children's play. I'd find them in a treehouse in the back yard, or in the park, making funny noises and ugly faces at each other as they twisted around a jungle gym, engaged in games where the rules changed moment by moment. 'Let's say I'm the guy who wants the treasure, no, you're the bad guy, okay then we're both the good guys, and these other guys… No, wait.'

Michael had come from a small town in Idaho, and he had about him the arid, silent mystery of those high, empty plains. Michael spoke slowly and only after considerable reflection in a voice with a heehaw monotone that climbed uphill at the end of every sentence. He had a bit of a stammer, too, so that you had to wonder if perhaps he'd been taunted into silence at home or in school. His looks, I was told, were a little like mine – tall and thin with a prominent nose – but he had a fragility I never saw in myself. His head appeared delicate as a china bowl, his skin drawn tightly across his skull, with the wiggly purplish trace of a prominent vein near his temple. Grown long in blondish dreadlocks, his hair was already receding.

I initially viewed Michael as a hapless turkey, with his slipstick hanging from a plastic holster on his belt. But he eventually sifted his way into our life. I found him uncommonly generous. Michael filled in with Nile when he could, and also helped me keep up a preposterous fiction I'd created for my mother that Sonny and I were living in different apartments. The idea of me cohabiting with a woman was much too much for my mother. In her Old World view, marriage would have been morally required, an impossible thought both because Sonny was not Jewish and because it would represent one more rending of the strong fabric that bound me to her. Instead, I'd had a second phone installed in our apartment which I alone answered when my parents called. With Michael's permission, I gave my mother his address and thumbed through his mail each day for her letters.

Nonetheless, what drew Sonny and me to Michael most strongly was probably our stomachs. He could cook, a skill we each decidedly lacked. With the wok, Michael was a master. He could tell the temperature of hot oil within a few degrees, by dropping a scallion on the surface and watching it wither. Since it was often my job to give Nile dinner, and Nile always craved Michael's company, the four of us often ate together. I shopped. Michael was the chef. Sonny did the dishes. We pooled our student food stamps for costs and also fished scraps out of the Eddgars' refrigerator. On the weekends, we were frequently joined by Hobie and Lucy. She was a terrific cook herself and would add exotic touches – cilantro and peppers she'd found in the mercados along Mission Street, or watercress which she'd discovered growing wild beside the golf course in Golden Gate Park.

Michael also began to join us for something we called 'Doobie Hour.' In college, Hobie and I had always ended the day together, passing a joint with dormmates, and we'd more or less kept the custom alive in Damon. In our living room, amid the tattered, used furnishings, we'd all watch an 11:30 p.m. rebroadcast of Walter Cronkite that followed the local news. We smoked or drank wine, making smug remarks in reply to Nixon or Agnew or Melvin Laird when they appeared on the TV screen. Michael would pass on the j, but always seemed to enjoy Hobie's and my late-hour riffs.

Usually during those first months in California, when the news was over, I became the entertainment, reciting weird little sci-fi fantasies that ventilated my grim obsessions and which I liked to pretend could be turned into movies. There was one about a fakir who somehow lost his ability to walk across hot coals; another about a heartless mercenary from Vietnam who became the ruler of a South Seas nation and met a chilling end when the natives saw through his magic. One night Michael told us how the universe was expanding but might someday reach its limit, contracting like a rubber band. According to Einsteinian theory, this would cause time to run in reverse. I spent a number of nights thereafter spinning out tales about this inverted universe in which effect preceded cause, where people at birth sprang out of their graves like tulips and grew ever younger, where you knew the lessons of life before you'd had the experience, and where you perished while your parents were at the height of passion. Michael was especially amused by my freewheeling improvisations on the principles of physics.

He spent most of his time at the Miller Damon Applied Research Center – the ARC – which was located in the elephant-toed hills south of the campus. Within its walls, elite scientists conducted experiments in high-energy physics, including many projects sponsored by the Defense Department in hopes of aiding in the war. According to various reports, these included efforts to miniaturize nuclear devices, to perfect laser-guidance systems for mortar shells and bombs and – the innovation that was bruited about most often on campus – the battlefield use of microwaves.

This would allow the army to stop trying to rout the NLF from their networks of tunnels, dangerous, often lethal duty, loathed by our servicemen. Instead, grunts could just point a portable device and cook the gooks alive. These ghoulish rumors were never denied, and as a result the facility was the target of repeated demonstrations. Marchers stormed up the road and were regularly rebuffed by phalanxes of university security police in helmets and shields.

'Hey, man,' said Hobie one night during Doobie Hour, 'this stuff about roasting slopes in the tunnels – is that for real?'

'That's classified,' Michael said immediately, a response which deadened the room. He finally tipped a shoulder. 'I'm doing a little work in there. Just a little. In one of the labs. Everything is need-to-know. But there's a lot of unusual microwave research. You hear stuff.'

'Evil,' Hobie muttered. 'What about you, dude?' Hobie asked. 'Is your shit classified?'

'That's classified,' answered Michael, in what passed from him as outrageous humor.

As guardian of the counterculture, Hobie was always suspicious of straights and he was sure now he was on to Michael. 'You think Eddgar knows he's got a fascist scientist around his boy?' Hobie asked as soon as Michael left. 'Did you hear him? "That's classified." What could he be doing that's classified? You think he's studying the peace process? I'll bet Eddgar isn't hip to it.' Hobie hooted. He ridiculed political involvements and Eddgar therefore presented an especially tempting target. Hobie's father, Gurney Turtle, was on the executive board of the Kindle County NAACP, and throughout high school and the early years of college, I was arm-in-arm with him and Hobie's mother, Loretta, at marches and demonstrations for open housing, for passage of the Civil Rights Act, during those sweet, inspired days when we believed the right laws would bring down every barrier. Hobie made fun of us all. His concern was the inner realm. He read The Tibetan Book of the Dead and Nightwood and the novels of

Hermann Hesse. He listened to Charles Mingus records, and took incredible quantities and varieties of dope. Hobie's credo was that thought was culture and culture was the vice that contained us all. Anything conventional, any activity people had tried before, whether it was sit-ins or even revolution, was hopeless, a dreary repetition of the limitations of the past. 'Michael's a good head,' I answered.

Lucy, who disliked no one, spoke up for him too. He was an Aquarius, she said. It was a compliment, though I didn't know why. She'd found a job at a kiosk on Fisherman's Wharf, drawing astrological charts, an activity she viewed with Delphic seriousness and which Hobie, to her face, treated as laughable.

'He's just quiet,' said Sonny.

'Quiet?' asked Hobie. 'Sometimes when I'm with him, man, I feel like I'm in a Bergman movie.'

Much as I wanted to defend Michael, there was no denying the cryptic element. He was a ham operator and had three or four radios, big clunky boxes, in his apartment. This activity was what had first led him to speculate about wave motion and energy, the unseen realm of the furthest spectrum of light. When he was ten, Michael's mother had died. He never spoke about that, but I often imagined him as a boy in his small Idaho town, lonely, half-orphaned, sitting up at night, spinning the dials and listening to the jits and jots of Morse code, the static-scratched voices in other languages. Typically, he was only a listener; he sent no messages of his own. He said he had tried it once or twice, but he was never quick enough with the snappy lingo of the airwaves. On occasion when I was searching for Nile, I'd knock on Michael' s door and, getting no response, let myself in, only to find Michael sitting there with his headset, mystically absorbed by these unseen lives and the flickers of sound they emitted from almost as far off as heaven.

On our side of the Bay, Friday, November 14, 1969 was warm and clear. The National Student Mobilization Committee had scheduled local demonstrations across the country, hoping to spark interest in the massive marches set to take place the next day in San Francisco and Washington, DC. My own interest in stopping the war was growing increasingly personal and desperate. Throughout the fall, I'd endured a series of dismal phone calls from home in which my mother in her heavy accent read the latest bad news from my draft board. First my application for conscientious-objector status was denied; then I was ordered to report for a pre-induction physical. In response, I talked about leaving the country, and my mother, two thousand miles away, wept. Grabbing the phone, my father would order me to cease discussing such insane plans. The two of us always ended up screaming.

It's probably useless trying to explain the passions of one era to another. I can say now, as a sign of mature detachment and openness to reason, that my views about Vietnam might even have been wrong. But I do not mean it. They were formed then with the hardness of diamonds and not even the surface can really be scratched. I carried few images of Vietnam with me. 1 did not see its overgrown humid beauty, its mountain verdure, or the casual depravity of drugged-out troops fragging lieutenants or having debased encounters with former peasant girls, now sexual zombies in the meaty trading places of the cities. For me it was the vaguer, close-up view of the nightly news: sweating grunts streaked by camouflage paint, tensely stalking among the oversized leaves of the tropical Asian forests; huts in flames and black-garbed peasant mothers running with their bald-headed babies as strafing raised dust along the earth. The wrong of Vietnam was not on the ground but in the air – in principle, far more than in particulars. I envisioned a black heart, a jungle enshrouded in permanent night, where conscience and reason did not even make the skittering light of tracers in the air. I did not deceive myself: the rage of that era was not simply about whose prediction of the future of Southeast Asia was accurate, or the issue of an indigenous people's right to control their nation, or even the debate about whether Ho Chi Minh was more noble than the U S-sponsored thugs. In my own mind, in my own bones, the war protest represented an entire generation in combat against the rigid views of our parents, especially about the roles of men -about the need for males to be warriors, patriots, conformists, unblinking followers of aging generals and other elders. The furious issue was what would happen to all of us, parents and children, if the laws of our fathers were forgotten.

On November 14, about five thousand people surged up the dry road from campus, boiling dust on our way to the Applied Research Center. We larked in the warm air, flaunting banners and chanting slogans. 'One. Two. Three. Four. We don't want this fucking war.' 'Withdraw, Nixon, like your father should have.' 'Drop acid, not bombs.' Although she was burdened by her classes, Sonny was with me. Women's liberation notwithstanding, the war had a special gender inequality, since only men were being drafted. The watchword of the day was 'Girls say yes to boys who say no.' I always felt the moment I'd won Sonny the prior spring was when I'd confided that I was serious about going to Canada, a step she'd pledged to support.

A lawsuit had forced the university to permit us onto the grounds of the ARC, and its iron gates, tipped in spears of gold, were thrown open. A cast of thousands, we marched on the winding asphalt road past the precise lawns and hedges, up to a wide concrete plaza that fronted the Research Center. The building, ordinarily unseen except from a distance, loomed there like Oz. It was a futurist design with large fluted pillars of sand-colored stucco and vast windows protected from the sun by a cantilevered overhang. Between the building and the crowd, the Damon Security Corps positioned themselves in three even rows. In the middle ground, a single square fountain issued a segmented spray that piddled on brainlessly, wavering in an occasional light wind. The cops wore white reflective patrol belts angled across their chests, the better to recognize each other in a melee, and riot helmets whose Plexiglas visors were raised like the lids on welders' masks.

Long batons were holstered at their sides, and a large plastic shield rested at the feet of each officer, like an obedient dog.

The turnout was far larger than any of us on the Mobilization Committee had foreseen. The weather, a welcome relief from a recent chilly spell, made it a good day to cut classes. I rarely admitted to myself the extent to which demonstrating had become sport for people my age. A generation that had lived secondhand through the television set seemed to find a special thrill in the live spectacle. But the political climate was also provocative. In the aftermath of the Moratorium Day in October, in which campuses and many businesses around the country had shut down, Richard Nixon had delivered a defiant speech announcing that a 'silent majority' of Americans supported his refusal to withdraw from Vietnam. The ugliness of the war Nixon wanted to maintain had been underscored by reports this week of a young lieutenant, William Laws Calley, detained at Fort Benning on suspicion of having slaughtered five hundred Vietnamese villagers.

As music played, the crowd assembled on the ARC's vast lawn. Sonny and I lay toward the rear on a large beach towel. Behind us, people threw Frisbees for their dogs, while the usual contingent from the National Organization for Marijuana Legalization lofted smoke upwind where the telltale aroma breathed down on the security forces, who were powerless to abandon their posts.

Near 3:30, the speeches began. The Moratorium demonstrations were intended to show the breadth of opposition to the war, and representatives of all the participating organizations briefly spoke: church groups, faculty committees, union representatives, businessmen against the war, women's liberationists, browns and blacks, students of all stripes, from rads to McCloskey Republicans. In this pantheon, One Hundred Flowers had been included, notwithstanding objections that their agenda was not peace. As a makeshift stage, the speakers had mounted a sign for the ARC, a large concrete block perhaps six feet high, and near the end of the afternoon Loyell Eddgar appeared there. The various entities that comprised One Hundred Flowers had identified themselves with red arm sashes decorated with Chinese characters. As Eddgar was announced, a number of them forced themselves through the crowd toward the front. About sixty members of the Progressive Labor Party went by close to where Sonny and I were sitting. They were all in their khakis, and rushed forward, heads bowed, hands on the shoulders of the person ahead, the tails of their arm sashes turned at the same precise angle. They chanted: Mao is red Red's Supreme Mao will smash the war machine.

I had never heard Eddgar speak before and my impression at first was that I was experiencing some trick of perspective, seeing from a distance someone I'd known only at close range. Here was this lean figure dressed simply in a button-down shirt and chinos that might have been left over from his college years. His thick, dark hair was lustrous with sweat, and the tendons and muscles in his neck and jaw stood out as he spoke. But gradually I realized he was in fact someone else. Standing on the concrete block, projecting his voice through a bullhorn which amplified both his breathing and the click of the machine going on and off, Eddgar was transformed by revolutionary passion. In the spirit of the Cultural Revolution, he called for the destruction of all elites.

'We must make this university a place that improves the world rather than destroys it. We do not need to study how to cook our enemies. We must study how to feed the poor, and help them feed themselves. We must stop educating the children of the ruling class, to the exclusion of the black, the brown, the red and yellow people who come into our classrooms more often to clean the desks than to sit behind them as students.'

Led by One Hundred Flowers members who were still pushing to the front, the crowd began greeting Eddgar's well-timed pauses with choruses of 'Right on!'

'We must take the power to make the decisions about our lives from people who care only about theirs," Eddgar cried. 'We must, as Mao taught, "Make trouble, fail; make trouble again, fail again… till their doom." '

Suddenly, somewhere near the front, a woman cried out – a shocking, terrified sound. Something was happening. We all knew it. 'This isn't good,' Sonny said and pulled me to my feet. Around us, everyone was rising.

Eddgar, who had been silent for a moment, screamed another quotation into the bullhorn: ' "It is good we are attacked by the enemy, since it proves we have drawn a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves." '

I saw the first rock in the air then, traveling a long arc toward the enormous panes of the front windows of the building. The closed environment, the riot-clothed coppers, the university's sullen, entrenched battlefield atmosphere agitated me enough that an abandoned, heart-sprung piece of me probably soared in flight with that stone. But the thinking part was already in agony. The window seemed to drop out at once. A waterfall of glass crashed down on the cops, who reacted immediately. They claimed afterwards there'd been some further attack, but I know I saw batons swinging then. There was intense confusion, high-pitched screaming, fierce buffeting as people fled.

From the rear, where Sonny and I were, the deterioration near the stage had a remote quality for a moment. We could see the crowd peeling back in rows twenty or thirty deep as the line of cops fell upon them. Then suddenly, the ripples of panicked movement were nearby, then around us – molten faces and piercing voices and hair flying about. The earth jumped with the pounding of the mob. Some people held their ground momentarily to throw rocks and cans, but Sonny and I ran. As I reached the road back to the gates, a young woman stumbled to the asphalt right next to me and I helped her up. There was an open gash across her forehead, amid a throbbing welt. Blood ran on her face and was already crusted in her hair. She wiped at it tentatively and cried aloud when she saw her hand, then she ran along, clearly afraid of being struck again. You could feel from the surging, wild movement of the crowd that the cops were still coming, still swinging.

For a moment, as we all rushed toward the gates, the panic seemed to have receded. I had lost Sonny somewhere and I stood on the tarred drive, yelling her name, answered with the cries of a dozen people like me attempting to find someone from whom they'd been separated. Then, without warning, another hysterical chorus rose up. With the second volley, I recognized the screaming sound of the canisters in the air. The little smoky trails, innocuous-appearing at a distance, dissolved as they rose from the ground, but the students knew enough to take flight with a new, maddened intensity. At the bottom of the hill, I could see people climbing the iron fence, and the spikes rocking at other points as the crowd massed against it. Overhead, the birds who had tasted the tear gas shrieked, flying crazy circles, mad with pain.

Near the gate, it was a horrible scene. I saw a woman with her head trapped against a concrete post, entirely unable to move for an instant until she suddenly disappeared. Beyond the gates, people rushed on, screaming and crying, shouting threats against the police. Once I was on the gravel road, I turned back again, searching the grieved, dirt-streaked faces for Sonny. As they flowed past, I noticed a few who somehow had the foresight to soak washcloths, which were now stuffed into their mouths to abate the effects of the gas. There were even three or four people, each dressed in the PLP khakis, who wore rubber gas masks. As she came by, one woman pried off the green-monster face of her mask and, improbably, kissed me. It was Lucy.

'We're with Cleveland. We were. I don't know where he and Hobie are.' She looked in all directions.

'Cleveland Marsh?' Hobie's law-school classmate. I wouldn't have expected a Panther leader at a peace march – or Hobie, for that matter. Lucy kissed me again and ran on, swept into the current of the moving crowd.

I waited another ten minutes or so, hoping to see Sonny. The wind changed direction then and I ended up catching a mouthful of gas. In full flight, I took off toward the campus. I went to the spot where I'd parked the Bug, but Sonny wasn't there. After some time, I moved on, figuring she could drive home. It turned out she was far ahead and had left the car for me.

Unaware of that, I walked on, reassuring myself that Sonny was okay and hoping to see her on the way. Beyond the bright lights of Campus Boul, the night had closed softly on the streets of stucco apartment buildings, in their soft, reflective shades, and the little tile-roofed homes. Away from the commotion, the panic, I could feel my heart. My shoulder ached for reasons I could not recollect. It was turning cool quickly and you could feel the fog coming, thickening the air, even though it was not yet visible. I was sick to my stomach from the gas, and my eyes now smarted considerably. I knew enough not to rub them, and so I walked along in the cool night streaming tears that I wiped gingerly on my sleeve.

When I reached our building, I heard some kind of shuffling -fast steps, a voice, something furtive. My impression was that it was more than one person. I drew back with an arm raised and yelled out, 'Who is that?'

Eddgar stepped out then from beneath the exterior wooden stairwell which served as a fire escape. He remained in the shadow, beyond the path of light from the fixture over the entry. He was breathing heavily. A rill of sweat glistened on his temple. And he had lost his shirt along the way. He wore only a colored ‘I, and he looked more slender than I might have guessed. He had run from somewhere. Somewhere he was not supposed to be, I thought. I figured he had run to get ahead of the police. So that he could say he was at home. He must have come through the alleys, afraid that the coppers were keeping surveillance on the cars of One Hundred Flowers members, or that he could not move fast enough in the heavy traffic.

'Seth,' he said. He seemed unusually full of himself, his face lifted up somewhat daringly toward the light. 'It's all right,' he said over his shoulder. Then he faced me and in silent instruction nodded toward the stairs. I walked up slowly to the landing outside our apartment, but I knew I'd never make myself go inside. I turned back to watch.

Below me, Eddgar knocked on the shingles as some kind of signal and two people came around the building side – Martin Kellett, the campus union leader, in his heavy motorcycle boots, and a pale, thin person I thought was a woman. She had fly-about dishwater hair and wore an open flannel shirt. She and Kellett carried a rolled stretcher, like something from Scout camp, a canvas sheet suspended between two poles. Eddgar stepped aside then, and they crouched beneath the wooden stairwell. Kellett spoke consolingly to someone. 'All right, Rory. Just cool there, comrade. Here we go.' A man cried out then, and Kellett and the woman emerged bent from the black space beneath the stairwell. A man lay on the stretcher. Even in the minimal light, I could see that his foot was turned at an inhuman angle. 'We're boogying,' Kellett said to Eddgar. 'Truck'11 be in back.'

Eddgar moved off with them. The gate slammed and the latch clinked thickly home. I heard the hoarse rumble of the truck come near, and the explosion of gravel as it tore off again. Then, in the borrowed light, Eddgar reappeared. He caught sight of me on the stairs and trudged up slowly.

'He broke his leg,' he said.

I knew better than to ask how. Something had happened. Something bad. Something Damon Security would want to know about. But what bothered me most was the way Eddgar cupped my shoulder and headed on, without troubling himself to look back. He knew he had nothing to fear from me.