The Darling by Russell Banks

Lyndon Johnson’s America got replaced by Nixon’s and Kissinger’s, and as I found myself growing older, in my thirties now, gray hairs showing up in the tub drain, it had started to seem that all I had to help me explain the content of my present life was the form of my past life.
    There is a crucial transition from radical activist to revolutionary, and when you’ve made that crossing, you no longer question why you have no profession, no husband, no children, why you have no contact with your parents, and why you have no true friends—only comrades and people who think they’re your true friend but don’t know your real name. Until Zack showed up, even though I was paying the price of being a revolutionary, I hadn’t really made that crossing yet, and consequently my life had come to feel shriveled and gray, boring and pointless. I had the effects, but no cause.
    Zack changed that. Almost immediately, as if we were a couple of pimple-faced kids starting a fan club for a rock star, he and I formed an independent Weather cell together—which was how it was generally done in those days, as there was no central authority or headquarters that kept track of us or passed out membership cards and a handbook. We were expected to work independently and generate and carry out actions against the War Machine ourselves. Within weeks, in the dingy, damp basement of the three-storey wooden tenement building on Phillips Street, while in the apartment upstairs, Carol and I and her daughter, Bettina, still pretended that we were a family, Zack and I were in the basement, two or three nights a week and on weekends, trying to make pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails. Cousin Zack, as the little family half-jokingly called him, and I hinted to Carol that what we were making was cool and secret, which she assumed was a present for Bettina’s upcoming birthday, a dollhouse, maybe.
    The rest of the time I sleepwalked through what passed in those days, the early and mid-1970s, for a normal, if quasi-bohemian, life. Except for the fact, of course, that my parents and no one from my childhood or adolescence or even from most of my adult life so far knew what my name was now or where I was living and working or the name of the young woman I lived with and what we did together on those few occasions when we were alone and in bed. And even the young woman herself did not know the truth, and probably never would, for as soon as Zack and I built and successfully set off our bombs, I intended to disappear from her life. I had in fact already cleaned up my room, packed my clothes and books and a few records, and destroyed everything that might connect me to Carol and incriminate her in any way. She had to be able to say, “I didn’t know anything about it,” and be telling the truth. In thirty seconds, all signs of my ever having lived in that apartment could be erased, and would be.
    Otherwise, my life passed for ordinary. If I got caught trying to set off a bomb in the Federal Building in Boston, which was our primary target, or the Shawmut Bank or the eighteenth Precinct Boston Police Station, two of our secondary targets, or if one night, God forbid, down in the basement Zack or I, a little stoned on grass maybe, touched the wrong wires together and blew ourselves and the building to bits—like Diana, Ted, and Terry, when they blew up the townhouse on West Eleventh Street back in ’70—and if as a result of the accident we killed Carol and Bettina and who knows how many others in their sleep, then the neighbors and my co-workers at the hospital and the guys who ran the deli on the corner of Phillips and Bay Streets and the mailman and the guy who read the electric meter and the Greek who collected our rent once a month (in cash, always in cash), they’d all say, I dunno, she seemed like a nice enough girl, quiet, though, kept pretty much to herself, always paid the rent on time, didn’t smile much, didn’t socialize with anybody, except