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Stone allows Sara to leave.

Stone fills a small enameled pot with water. He turns the knob on the stove until the electronic igniter clicks. He waits for the flame. With smooth, familiar movements, he pops the scarred white cabinet open, removes a paper box, and holds it against his belly while choosing a packet of red bush tea. He slaps the door shut.

The tension at the kitchen table is like waiting for a hurricane. We are losing the sun and palm trees are blowing inside out; traffic lights swing wildly on their cables. The storm shutters are up and the house is sealed, but within the hour we will be beset by knocking winds like a thousand screaming inmates.

Stone sits down and stares into his cup. A sightless maroon surface stares back at him.

“I’d talk about the philosophical aspects of these people I was living with,” he says, “but all the FBI cared about was ‘Where are the fugitives? If they’re not planning to blow something up, we’re not interested.’ There was no intelligence gathering. My supervisor wasn’t listening. ‘Where are the fugitives? Where are the fugitives?’

“They were trapped inside their own box. It was Hoover’s dirty little war and the Weathermen were the guerrillas. They knew the land. They had allies. It’s amazing how many well-to-do, educated people helped them out.”

“That’s how pissed off everyone was about Vietnam,” Megan says.

“Then I go back to the office and get shit from the straight agents. So now I’m bitter toward the Bureau. Now it’s really them and us. Except I don’t fit in anywhere. Hoover’s saying hippies are filthy and depraved, but that’s the only place people like me are comfortable. The only folks who’ll shelter us. I would cry. I’d sit in my apartment in Venice and get high and eat nothing but candy for the sugar rush, and cry.

“And they knew it. The Bureau knew I was going wack but they did just the opposite—sent me back in. ‘This guy is good. He’s done it. He got himself accepted. Let’s send him back.’ Which really fucked me up. I shifted up to Santa Barbara, lived in a tepee in a public park. Looked like a radical, hair down to here. Smoked dope, engaged in group sex. I knew Vietnam vets who threw their medals away. We tripped out together, cried for our brothers. I remember lying in a park on the grass and letting my tears go into the ground, like they were mixing with every casualty that ever was. The country was blowing apart. Our government was killing millions of civilians in Vietnam. The war drove everyone out of their minds.

“This is not how I was raised. My family had decorum. My father was a deacon of the church. But I’m still carrying the flag, tattered as it is, so I go up to Berkeley and do my thing. Agitate. Penetrate. Lie to the college kids who smoked my dope and were my friends. Sleep with chicks, big ones, ugly ones, lesbians—‘Put a flag over her face and do it for Old Glory,’ the Bureau used to say. ‘Get information and move on.’ Things were so volatile that before I took the assignment, I went back home to say good-bye to my parents, because I thought I might get killed on the job. I couldn’t tell them what I was doing, but I wanted them to know it was for the right reasons.

“But, yeah. The right reason. Agents I came up with, my own buddies, we would raid a suspected Weather collective in an apartment building in east Los Angeles and hang people outside the windows upside down by their ankles. I did that. True. We’d rob their houses, intimidate their families, spread false rumors about them at work, because our government said that was the way to win hearts and minds, remember?

“Here I am, living on campus, stoned out of my mind, getting down with the folks while trying to hold on to my Bureau identity—really holding on—believing we had right on our side and this scum had to be caught and put in jail because they were criminals, because they were blowing up the Capitol Building and the Queens Courthouse and Gulf Oil. See, darlin’? Anarchy is nothing new. But then the Bureau fucked with Megan, and I told them not to—and I couldn’t hold it