His Illegal Self Read Online Free PDF

selected.
    I think there’s a train to the city at two.
    No, I mean until the spring semester.
    You know, she said, and in that second she was vain enough to feel her youth, her beauty, her whole possibility. You know, she said, I have not the least idea.
    What luxury, said the Dean who had previously been her greatest obstacle. How lovely.
    And that afternoon, at Poughkeepsie railway station, Dial, whose real name was Anna Xenos, redeemed what had once been her father’s backpack and lugged it to the bathroom and kicked off her shoes and changed out of what seemed to her to be a rather specious sort of drag. Sitting on the toilet, she repacked so that her interview clothes were on the very bottom. She changed into tights, a camisole, not so much for warmth as protection against the abrasions of a long Nepalese dress patched together from reds and browns and tiny mirrors. She had carried a Harvard book bag to the interview, worn casually as Cliffy girls did that year, over the shoulder and on the back. Now she fitted the bag into the pouch where her father had once carried shotgun cartridges, and, still sitting on the toilet, pulled on a loose-fitting pair of fur-lined boots. Her blister thus soothed, she steadied herself with one hand and undid her hair and fluffed it out not minding, no matter how often she said the opposite, that she did, indeed, look kind of wild.
    She was on the 2 platform just as the train from Albany came in, and when she boarded she found a telephone waiting, directly opposite her. If not for this she might never have called Susan Selkirk. But she was high on life, on possibility, and she was on the phone before she even took a seat…215? Philly? She wasn’t sure. It took six of her quarters. Ridiculous. Like phoning a rock star or a famous author whom your aunt had known, something you only did because you could, because you were not nobody.
    Hello, Susan. It’s Dial.
    Give me your number, said someone, not Susan. We’ll call you back.
    There was a number, too. She gave it, not unhappy to see a few quarters returned.
    She waited for the famous felon as if she were herself some kind of actor in a film, resting her head against the glass, watching the power lines dance like sheet music across the reflection of her extraordinary dress. She was about to talk to America’s most-wanted woman. She was going to MoMA before it closed this afternoon. She was staying with her friend Madeleine on West Fourteenth Street. That’s all she knew about her future. She had no lover, no father or mother, no home but Boston whose “rapcha” and “capcha” occasionally burst the surface of her speech. She watched the power lines rising and falling beside the Hudson and thought, Remember this moment, how beautiful and strange the world is.
    When the phone rang, she saw her hair reflected in the sky.
    Hello.
    Well, said that piercing girlie voice, if it’s not the “bvains.”
    Hi, she said not at all offended by the “bvains.” Rather pleased.
    Far out, cried Susan. Dial had forgotten how she sounded, the shrill pitch.
    What a
coincidence,
Susan said. Listen I’m going on vacation, you dig. I was just wondering where you are?
    Dial could see the conductors walking through the car. The conductor could see her. But she could see Susan Selkirk in the
Boston Globe,
photographed from the ceiling of the Bronxville Chase Manhattan. What might or might not have been a revolver was in her hand. That was what had happened to SDS. Students for a
Democratic
Society?
    No shit, said Susan. I was just talking to my mom about you. I mean, like, now.
    Your mom remembered me?
    She’d rather remember you than me. But listen, I sort of was wanting to say hi to my guy.
    Which guy?
    He was your guy too.
    On the telephone, blasting through Croton-on-Hudson, Dial blushed, pulling her hair by the roots, looking at her staring face in the glass.
    The baby, Susan Selkirk said. For Christ’s sake. I mean my son.
    Right.
    Call back,