Desperate, Kate caught a flight from Ben-Gurion Airport to Newark four days after Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was assassinated in Gaza City. All her stateside friends were ensconced in marriage, on the road, in prison, or dead. Or address unknown. Except for Russell’s. His name and hometown she read in an English language newspaper while waiting in Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport in the early nineties. Allegedly, he’d been involved with a marijuana smuggling ring after a huge shipment had been seized at JFK International Airport aboard an airliner destined for Amsterdam. Russ popped painkillers, slugging it down with mescal the last night she saw him that December. She flew from JFK to Rome. The Left was organized in Italy in 1973. And strong.

She carefully tore out the clipping, folding it neatly and putting it in her wallet to read later. It remained unopened all the intervening years until now. Returning to America after three decades living abroad working for a multitude of peace, health and political groups, clandestine or otherwise, she’d appear at his door as she had before. Only this time, it wouldn’t be uninvited; she would phone him after clearing customs.

She worked for a NGO in Gaza City whose purpose was to alert the international community whenever acts of inhumanity against Palestinians were documented. A well-connected, veteran European journalist stationed in Gaza told her that he’d heard unsubstantiated reports Israeli agents had targeted her for death. Kate had uncovered and detailed a murder directly linked to Israeli intelligence, evidence she turned over to the journalist. Her life had overflowed with rumors since leaving the States. But this time they could prove true.

The incessant Sturm und Drang in Gaza conferred too much paranoia on her, and she hadn’t the knack to disregard it anymore. Flight or fight. Twice she left Russ, the last time after only a month. She knew the value of hegira.

Six months ago, the journalist informed Kate that his colleague, Dorr, an investigative reporter and her longtime lover while stationed abroad, had been shot dead by American troops in Iraq. A U.S. Marine fired a .50-caliber shell from a heavy machine gun and blasted Dorr’s face. Leave now, for shit sake. Through contacts, he found her passage out of Gaza, as well as securing an airline reservation. She had no intention to join the martyr’s brigade of expats.

A few years ago, Dorr casually mentioned to Kate between assignments on a hot Tel Aviv beach that he and Russ used to be in the alternative pharmaceutical business, selling high quality pot. Big time. Thanksgiving weekend, ‘73, Dorr left NYC for California. Though he almost had an MA degree in economics, majoring in history, he tended bar in a Village hangout that he also owned. Something about carrying on the tradition of his father refusing to be a commissioned officer in the Korean War, staying a sergeant to be with his platoon, hanging with his boys.

Dorr invited Kate upstairs after closing time. That had been her first time with Dorr, as well as her introduction to sex in a hammock. Dorr stayed clear of her in ‘68 because Russ shared her tiny apartment in Mexico City. Solidarity forever.

She always enjoyed Dorr’s stories, and his idiosyncratic take on life fascinated her. He talked about The Movement, how important for him to maintain activist status. Giving life hope, however utopian, was the great divide for him. Those who had belief in complete transformation of society were optimists. All others: despair-lovers, pessimists. They died earlier than his kind. She moved in the following day, drinking more than usual because the bar was open 24:7.

Dorr took many days off, returning with tales from outlaw circles. Schemes for blowing up police cars, leafleting, calling for total boycotts of all Dow Chemical products, supporting the IRA at rallies where John Lennon would show up. Dorr got Lennon’s autograph on a booklet featuring communiqués of a vanguard underground group. She sold the presentation copy to a UK journalist. Dorr’s cremated remains were flown to Ireland, but without the money his ashes would’ve been scattered into the Tigris River in Baghdad.

After two years in the hammock, Dorr urged her to come with him, roughing it in California. She declined because eating boiled squirrel and canning deer meat late at night after 30.06s killed their sorry asses in headlights on old timber roads had no allure. He favored the back-to-the-land movement, setting up a gold claim in northern California backcountry. The civilization of discontent, voices in the book of Genesis wilderness told him, “And the gold of that land is good.” Behind the façade of God lurked a man who learned by trail and error how to grow awesome sinsemilla.

Looking backward, buffering most accurately described Kate’s life then. She operated at a slower speed by moving in with Russ. But, she always desired to be saved and filed by Dorr’s streaming media in local storage for playback by him. Their rendezvous to be announced at a later date.

Russell was her second-place man, while Dorr won pennants. She couldn’t gauge his reaction toward Dorr this time around, especially dead. Or for that matter what Russell thought about her, and whether he even had any curiosity after so long an absence. Or even gave a damn.

The day Dorr traveled west, she moved in with Russ. How could he ever forget when she stood naked facing him, asking whether he believed that people could exhaust the entire body of all its sexual energy by having as much sex as possible, forcing them to find what was leftover. Maybe a soul wouldn’t remain, only the name of their death. It was delicious, Sufi-like for Kate, something Dorr’s presence quelled.

Following thorough scrutiny by customs, using her laptop she found Russell’s e-mail address and telephone number. Considering which to use, she settled on e-mail, feeling comfortable that “Exile’s Return” popping up in the subject line would be sui generis. Just before boarding a flight to San Francisco, “Life After Yoohoo” pushed up her Inbox. They’d consumed many bottles of high-caffeine Yoohoo on the stoop of Russell’s Upper West Side building that December, slowing down the rate of dopamine re-uptake, making rapid-fire amphetamine-like connections, touching everything.

They speed-talked about The War, and those six faces in the New York Post who broke into the Democratic Headquarters in D.C. the previous year. How much their faces looked like thugs, molesters, torturers, killers. They killed the Usual Suspects we all knew and proudly loved. Who said political folksinger Phil Ochs suffered from depression and hanged himself in his closet? That had been their cover. Life resembled bad Roger Corman films stretched end to end, viewed by Thorazine-doped moviegoers. Instead of popcorn, spectators chomped on Good ‘N Plenty morsels with blue Stelazine pills embedded inside each chewy piece. Common visions, uncommon raps.

Russ bounced a reply back, saying he’d pick her up at the Arcata Airport, on California’s north coast, two hundred eighty miles north of San Francisco. As if she’d downed twenty Yoohoos, time’s metabolism accelerating, Kate soon found herself cleansing off her grit and doggedness in a Jacuzzi. She slept intermittently on the flights and felt the weariness drift away. The pulsating water invigorated and stimulated her whole body. Inner and outer. In Gaza City, she and four others shared a bathtub, getting pissed when the last user hadn’t cleaned off their grime.

Unlike New York, Russ hadn’t spent a full day constructing a loft bed, using old lumber found in the gloomy basement of that anachronistic building. He plunked a thick, foam rubber mattress atop the flexing plywood. They both banged their heads against the ceiling making love. Russ calculated wrong, making the bed too near the sky.

Russ’s California house was recessed from the driveway entrance among willows, alders and cedars. Drying herself off, Kate looked out the gleaming bedroom window at those trees, reminding Russ that he didn’t have to chop them down for a bed. They laughed, and drank a local microbrew from tall glasses. Russ made reference to the first time he saw her on a bus traveling to Mexico City from the University of the Americas, a tanned, earnest young woman reading One-Dimensional Man, oblivious to the peasants, one with a goat in the aisle, two with chickens in cages. They discussed repressive de-sublimation over cheeseburgers and fries in Sanborn’s.

Kate fell asleep after one bottle, so it wasn’t until morning, after she got up to pee, seeing a blue heron in bulrushes and cattails on her way back from the bathroom, that they had sex. Afterwards, she plunged into the Jacuzzi, using the hand-held nozzle spray, pleasant niagaras throbbing on the back of her head. The kneading, soothing water loosened taut skin, releasing torque.

Recent evidence revealed that our earliest ancestors’ biting ability had lost much strength two million years ago. That accounted for greater brain mass, more room for thought. As our ancestors became weak-jawed, they developed larger brains, enabling them to solve complex problems. The dossier on those Israeli agents indicated ugly truths. Years of uncertainty, not knowing whether hot water faucets worked, had calcified her mind. The Middle East had shrunk her options. Jacuzzi water-music evinced imprecise, but no less powerful realities. Would she make the leap as the primogenitors had?

How much could one person do over there? Or anywhere? How much justice could be meted out? Dorr’s death had been widely noted in the press, but got quickly expunged from the public mind. He insisted his work covering the American occupation, trying to uncover the brutality of empire in Iraq, directly connected to The Movement. What had The Movement amounted to after four decades?

Happiness was only the occasional, isolated incident, part of a much more expansive sequence of suffering. Dorr should’ve read more Hardy and less Marx. Wasn’t that why he stopped writing novels? He knew it had become counter-productive. Why not give it up, Dorr? Couldn’t he understand The Movement lacked cohesion, perpetually out maneuvered by the hardcore Right. Had he the power and heft to give it needed punctuated equilibrium like all evolutionary development? Would it ever stop the slaughters, people falling from the sky?

Who did she think she was, Boudicca protecting her tribe? A Roman general with a stronger army eventually defeated her. Kate sank her head beneath the water for over a minute. Not suicide, but relief being with Russ kept her faith that she wouldn’t die drowning. Sometimes not coming up for air meant life, not death.

After breakfast, drinking green tea, Russ felt awful that his ex-partner in the herb trade had been greased. Why had Dorr waited so long to find his métier as a correspondent? Translated: Why had it taken so long for Dorr to croak? Yes, croak. Dorr had so much to give. He couldn’t fathom why Dorr hadn’t taken his life more seriously, his time wasted living in an A-frame, all that retrograde, futile politicking for small-time gold miners. That great vanguard, the hoarding, backward class that read anti-Semitic tabloids on backwoods shitters. What would it be, Russ: That Dorr found his niche, and died because of it, or that he squandered his talents among dolts and reactionaries, not succumbing fast enough?

But, then the payoff, those years the crops got larger, how the money accrued had been fantastic. Dorr, a noble grower, an earth-driven farmer rather than a city dealer, an unscrupulous urban capitalist. The Pure vs. The Corrupt. Wasn’t Saint-Just The Incorruptible until the Thermidorian reaction when they guillotined him for being an arch terrorist?

Russ used the scores to buy this house, some acreage, and support his growing family. Dorr gave his fortune to NGOs, got protestors released from jails, contributed money to lawyers handling violent anarchist cases, laundered money, enabling hand-held missile launcher deals on the overseas, black market. It ain’t cheap, the revolution. His Delaware-chartered gold mining firm’s name: Uphaz’s Children. Uphaz was gold in the Bible, you know. Who the fuck was Dorr, anyway? Kate saw a piece of gristle ( organic chicken? ) whiz through the air in her direction. Or had he merely spat out Dorr’s name?

Kate noticed Russ hadn’t shaved that morning, growth shadowing his face. Dorr had undermined his life. Why sabotage the mother of all deals? Who the hell was he threatening Russ with life imprisonment? How could Dorr, demonstrably committed to The Movement, do that to him? Dorr had kept a fugitive safe from FBI goons whose job was to contain ( use? intimidate? imprison? rape? assassinate? ) the self-styled revolutionary, for chrissake, a guy who torched a university forestry department building in the name of the earth. Russ had a great ride with Dorr until things went balls-up. Who the fuck was Dorr?

Kate snapped to attention. One moment the greatest business associate possible, the next slandering him across the glass breakfast table. Accusation without representation. Must have been the aftereffects of smoking dope and its mother, paranoid vigilance, an adverse symptom of being in motel rooms with dealers coming to the north coast, both parties with concealed guns and doing lines. Who was Russ to ask, “Who the fuck was Dorr

Kate looked around his eight-room house. Yes, he married and three kids grew up right here in this house, and within this permaculture. She asked about that word. He told her it was a contraction of permanent agriculture and permanent culture. He’d come epochs from the days and nights of putting in long, thankless hours in Manhattan bookstores, the crime of low wages. Eco-sensitive Russ.

Now, a man with few illusions and even less insanity, he drank another cup of ginseng tea. He sipped it like a true convert during meditation, one who felt vomit rise up his esophagus when reflecting on bad old Lipton Tea days. The lobotomized zone when he’d add to tea creamy flotsam poured from sticky, miniature pitchers on Formica tabletops. Perched upon slippery seats in straight-back booths listening to “Judy In Disguise (With Glasses )” on a two-for-a-quarter-play jukebox. Russ heard that song on shortwave radio together with Kate in Mexico City. They did everything together. What jukebox? Why all that revisionist history?

Though Russ beat the charge on a legal technicality, relieved the Rockefeller drug laws hadn’t put him away in Attica forever, his suspicion of Dorr had been sparked by his ex-wife who suggested that Dorr snitched him out because Russ was Jewish. Occasionally, he chatted up his Jewish heritage. Making causal, enlightened snatches of humor, Russ acknowledged he hadn’t the material to compete with Jackie Mason.

The healthy ritual of drinking oxygen-bleached green and ginseng tea followed years of slugging down cupfuls of Dioxin used in the bleaching process of commercial tea bags had significance only for Russ. That marked the Great Cultural Paradigm Shift for him. But abominable human behavior continued nevertheless. Dilettantish Russ inquired of his erudite, ex-professor attorney during the drug trial: after this therefore because of this. After green tea, therefore Russ gained wisdom because of it? Perhaps Dorr hadn’t ever tasted oxygen-bleached tea, becoming vile and viler. Amen. He dangled Russ over the New York State Criminal Court system like a sinner in the hands of an angry God.

Dioxin was the active chemical in Agent Orange dropped from B-52s, slaughtering the Vietnamese and the surrounding countryside. At least 500,000 Vietnamese newborns during and since the war have been genetically transfigured into hideous-looking, experimental children. Had Russ over-consumed triple café lattes or overdosed left-clicking pornographic thumbnails, deluding himself that a postmodern dietary change would abolish anti-Semitism in the New World Order?

In mid-December, Russ and Kate listened to “The Partisan Song,” Kate singing the French part. Les Allemands e’taient chez moi, ils me dirent, “Signe toi,” mais je n’ai paspeur; j’ai repris mon arme. Russ waited for translation after a long pause. “The Germans were at my home, they said, “sign yourself,” but I am not afraid; I have retaken my call from WBAI for a snap demonstration in Times Square: B-52swere bombing Hanoi. Be there!

He put in Lucinda Williams CDs, all those down-wing inflections. What better place to celebrate pop music heartbreak than on the north coast.

After a cop pushed his stick hard into Kate’s breasts, Russ telegraphed a wild, right hand punch at a sergeant’s jaw, nicking him. He knew he overreacted. The sergeant tossed him on the hood of a police car, while another cop seated in the car grabbed Russ’s leg and gave it a hard, quick wrench, causing him to cry out. His knee hurt badly. At the station house, the sergeant took Russ aside and asked him questions determining eligibility for immediate release until trial. When the cop asked about Russ’s diction, the big officer looked him in the eyes. Russ saw that the high school educated man envied a middle-class, fluent-speaking, college boy sitting across the table. The working-class cop never achieved such heights. Then, Russ knew he’d be OR, out on his own recognizance.
He had a good lawyer; his trial never came up.

Without Russ’s pain, the doctor attending to him in a hospital afterwards would’ve never handed him a prescription for Darvon. They got off the AA train, crawling from beneath the city and into the darkness of 81st Street at the Museum of Natural History. He drank a pint of mescal. They listened to FM radio. You know I’m gonna miss you now that you’re gone one sweet day. Had he not taken that second Darvon, would those words have assumed legendary dimensions? The French Culture Ministry wouldn’t have given Lou Reed the Legion of Honor Award for nothing, would they? Funny thing: Kate hadn’t told him about not wanting to scuba dive for placer gold with Dorr. And she hadn’t intimated that she’d head to Europe, either.

In 1968, Dorr knew students from the National Polytechnic Institute. He and Russ joined them protesting PRI rule. He and Dorr ran for their lives in Mexico City down a side street off Lazaro Cardenas. He held down Russ so he wouldn’t panic and have them get in a headshot. Three hundred were killed in the Tlatelolco massacre.

Afterwards, Kate made them huevos rancheros with a special recipe of Creole sauce, plus jalapenos and cheese. They ate in a tiny apartment in the Juarez neighborhood of the Zona Rosa. Dorr dissected their close call while Russ barely spoke, not looking at him.

Something about the New York protest. Russ’s Times Square punch hadn’t been enough. It missed its mark. Reed’s “Berlin” beat him up; an imaginary Maginot line had been outflanked, and Russ got thumped hard in the solar plexus. The combined force of slightly psychedelic mescal and downers failed. Dorr, the autarkic California mountain man toppled him. Kate would surely join him in the wilderness. She’d leave Russ once again for the better man. The Movement ended, as he knew it must, one sweet day.

She coughed. A kernel of rice cake went down wrong, lodging in her throat. She sipped water, not choking, though still needed to puke, but held it in. She walked outside on the redwood deck, smelling green-chlorophyll air. Having spent her life dodging nostalgia, now she challenged that erstwhile notion. Soon, she reentered the living room.

“It’s good to be back,” she said. “Really.”

“What will you do? Stay here?” Russ gestured with his open palm and arm outstretched.

“Here?” Detesting ambiguity, preferring either/or, she blushed.

“Yes. Not going back, are you?” He looked at the rug, then at her.

“Rachel Corrie was a close friend,” she said. “Very brave.”

“Meaning?” Why the cross-examination? And cruelty?

“You mean could I lay down my life like she did?” They never talked this way in Gaza. He shifted in his chair, running his forefinger around the rim of half-filled glass of organic carrot juice. He more than intruded; he’d raped Kate with his mind.

“I’m sorry.” The following morning after that night on Times Square, she left him for Europe without any tense words. She hadn’t intended to make things difficult for him now. It made her sick.

“Could I stay with you?” she asked. Dangerous ground she walked.

“Do you think a third time would work?” he said. He looked pensive, serious, angry, even mean. She wanted to go back. Gaza City seemed less ruthless than living with such an inflexible man. What happened to him?

“It’ll be better this time.” Yeah, Dorr’s remains had been scattered on the Liffey.

“Maybe we could do it differently.” Relaxed, smiling, warmer.

“Doing what?” Kate had no idea how to get a regular job, especially in Humboldt.

“What Dorr did.”

“It’s U.S. government policy to kill truth-tellers” Her lips tightened, and she paced back in forth in front of him.

“Fascists killed him, I know.” He stood up because she hovered over him as he sat. He sounded calm but not flippant. Facts were facts.

“I won’t die like he did. I want out.”

He remembered the Sugar Ray Leonard-Roberto Duran bout. The second match. When Duran had enough. “No mas, no mas, no mas,” he shouted, walking away from Leonard, losing the championship fight. Machismo wasn’t on the line here. A catalyst, Russ’s boxing analogy, but what Kate said hadn’t squared with the sweet science. It wasn’t a question of masculine pride, but fear. Fear: of old English origin meaning calamity, danger, frighten. The limbic system, where the basic emotions like fear ruled. The cortex’s folded gray matter hadn’t a clue about her wanting to fear no mas.

“We can start right here in Humboldt,” he said. He finished the carrot juice, and walked to the kitchen, bringing back two halves of a tofu sandwich. He gave her one, and they ate silently and in unison, finishing at the same time.

“What can we do?” she asked, calmer now, sitting on the couch arm.

“Fight against dominance,” he said. “Of course.”

“I’ve done that in one way or another since I left you,” she said.

“Humboldt County isn’t isolated anymore,” he said. “Arcata’s City Council voted for a resolution against the Iraq War.”

“The Pentagon made damn sure peace didn’t happen, assassinating Dorr.” The only sound came from Lucinda Williams, singing.

“Voters defeated a big timber company earlier this month,” he said. “It’ll be a long struggle, that’s for sure.”

“Maybe one sweet day we’ll bring them all down.”

He looked at her, waiting for Kate to crack a smile. None came.

“Am I being dissed?” Russ asked, smirking, then laughing like in the old days on grass, stoned, the press of time nonexistent, feeling good, everyday paranoia gone.

“I’m a serious woman,” she said. “Revolutionaries aren’t allowed to joke around.”

They made love in all positions and on every surface in the living room until morning, when they lay sweaty-naked, giggling. Together in the Jacuzzi, Russ told her a big liquefied natural gas corporation couldn’t move here due to an organized, aroused public. Russ then lathered Kate’s breasts while she stroked his penis, and they did it once again.

One sweet day.