The Nine Lives of Alexander Baddenfield

by John Bemelmans Marciano

  Cutting through Chinatown across the lower fifth of Manhattan is Canal Street, which got its name from having been built over the longest canal of New Amsterdam. Baddenfield Castle looms over the corner of Bouwerie Lane, separated from the sidewalk by the last remaining section of old canal. This moat protected generations of Baddenfields from those who would do them harm. For the same reason, what had been built in 1643 as a windmill and cottage had over the years morphed into a watchtower and castle.

  Alexander grew up in a kind of lockdown, surrounded by the battlements, barbed wire, and spy cameras of his family stronghold. The greatest measure of security, however, came in the form of Winterbottom himself. So obsessed was Winterbottom with the thought that nothing bad should happen to the last of the Baddenfields that he hardly let Alexander do anything at all.

  Some of his precautions were the kind we all learn. Winterbottom instructed Alexander to look left before he crossed the street, then right, then back left again. Like many a parent, he smeared the boy with so much sunblock he could’ve passed for a ghost. But Winterbottom always took things one step further. Even when Alexander was old enough to sit in the front of the car, Winterbottom insisted he remain in the back, strapped into his booster seat. Wary of food allergies, he kept Alexander on the most restricted of diets. “Remember your ancestor Nikolas, who died from eating an onion,” Winterbottom would say (no matter that it was actually a tulip bulb). No nuts, no milk, no cheese, no ice cream, no bread, no pasta, no soy, no shellfish, no eggs, and absolutely, positively no onions.

  Winterbottom was so nervous that what little he allowed Alexander to eat he always tested himself first. How could he know the boy’s meal wasn’t contaminated with E. coli or salmonella or some other fiendish bacteria? Or that it wasn’t poisoned by one of the Baddenfields’ many enemies? (And he wasn’t just being paranoid—on several occasions, Winterbottom was hospitalized for poisoning!)

  Through Winterbottom’s best efforts and the boy having been orphaned at so young an age, Alexander should have become the first decent human being his miserable family had ever produced. Should have, but didn’t. Nastiness was intertwined with the Baddenfield DNA. That, plus Alexander was just too filthy rich. It’s hard to be good when you’re rich, and Alexander was quite possibly the richest person on earth, having inherited not just his father’s money, but the money of all the Baddenfields who had ever lived.

  So how bad was Alexander?

  Alexander always wanted to be a bully. When, on the first day of kindergarten, he realized he was the smallest kid in class and thus unable to beat anybody up, he paid a couple of second-graders to do the job for him.

  Alexander kept a water pistol filled with ketchup to squirt at anyone who annoyed him. The thing was, most everything anyone else did annoyed him. Being nice annoyed him. Being grateful annoyed him. Saying thank you annoyed him. Holding the door open for people annoyed him. Being happy annoyed him. Being sad annoyed him.

  Alexander littered everywhere.

  Alexander would carefully plant slimy black banana peels in doorways, on sidewalks, and anywhere else people walked, in the hope that someone would slip. As he was not allowed to eat bananas, this meant he wasted quite a lot of fruit.

  Alexander used a stroller until he was eight, because why walk when someone will roll you? The only reason he stopped was that people began to think he was in a wheelchair and kept coming up trying to be nice to him. He went through a lot of ketchup that way.

  Alexander wore diapers until the age of nine. It was a lot of effort to wipe his own behind, and a dirty job besides.

  When he was ten, Alexander quit school. “What’s there to learn when you’re already rich?”

  Alexander even poisoned his own meals, sending Winterbottom to the hospital on several occasions.

  The older Alexander got, the less Winterbottom could control him. He would attempt to coax Alexander back to school, pointing out that his father’s same attitude had left him unable to read the WARNING! QUICKSAND! sign. Alexander noted that (a) he could read and (b) his father’s mistake had been leaving Winterbottom Sr. behind, a point Winterbottom Jr. could hardly argue.

  The story of the safari always made Alexander sad. Not because of the grisly deaths of his father and relatives. He was quite glad to be rid of them, seeing as he had inherited everything they owned. No, what grieved him was that in the tale lay the proof that Baddenfields always died young and with their just deserts.

  At his twelfth birthday party, Alexander couldn’t manage to enjoy himself. Partly it may have been the twelve unlit candles that stood on his cake—Winterbottom wouldn’t allow any real fire in the house—and partly that his only guests were his cat, his driver Sam, and Winterbottom. But his real agitation came from the grim facts he confronted on the plaques below his ancestors’ portraits in the Hall of Baddenfields:

  ROLF BADDENFIELD

  who died from smoke inhalation, october 3rd, 1616, aged 24.

  WEEMS BADDENFIELD

  who choked on a cherry pit, february 22nd, 1749, aged 17.

  QUINCY BADDENFIELD

  who froze to death selling ice cubes to soldiers at valley forge, February 19th, 1778, aged 26.

  It wasn’t that Alexander feared dying. The boy’s single good attribute was his bravery. In fact, Alexander daydreamed of the dramatic ways in which he might meet—or better yet, cheat—death. What upset Alexander was that he only had one short life to live and that, by his family’s standards, it was already half over.

  All this made Alexander particularly resentful of his cat.

  “Life is totally unfair,” he told his pet, who was rubbing up against his leg and purring. “You are nothing but a worthless cat, whose best day is taken up by twenty-three and a half hours of naps, while I am richer than rich and want to do things you can’t even imagine. But you get to have nine lives, and I get only one.”

  His cat, whose name was Shaddenfrood, purred louder.

  Alexander brooded over this injustice until, in a flash of spectacular self-interest that only the mind of a Baddenfield was capable of, he hit upon his Great Idea.

  “Winterbottom!” Alexander yelled.

  Winterbottom, who was in the middle of making a flourless, cheeseless, tomatoless pizza, dropped everything and raced down eight flights of stairs to make sure nothing was wrong. “Yes,” he panted, “Alex,” he panted, “ander,” he panted.

  “What took you so long, Winterbottom? I have had a Great Idea.”

  “A great idea?”

  “No,” he corrected him. “A Great Idea.”

  “Ah, I see—a Great Idea. And how can I help with this Great Idea?”

  “Call Dr. Sorrow,” Alexander said, rubbing his hands together.

  “Dr. Sorrow!” Winterbottom gasped, terrified something really was wrong. “Do you have a fever? Is it foot-and-mouth disease? Was it the eggless omelet I made you this morning?”

  “Just call the doctor,” Alexander said, unnecessarily, as Winterbottom had already hit the SORROW icon on his phone.

  Dr. Alfred August Sorrow was the greatest doctor in the world. He had restored sight to the blind, provided tans to albinos, and made the legless walk, and for these and other outstanding accomplishments he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Doctoring a record seven times.

  Dr. Sorrow had first treated Alexander as a baby, when Winterbottom had brought him to the office, convinced that he had contracted some horrible disease or another while on safari. More than once the doctor had cursed himself for having taken the boy on as a patient, as the Baddenfield clan represented everything he detested. But how could he hold a baby responsible for the sins of his family? Of course, the boy had grown into every inch a Baddenfield.

  So it was with a frown that Dr. Sorrow answered Winterbottom’s call. “What is it this time?” he said to Alexander’s hypochondriacal caretaker.

 
“Please don’t hang up on me, Dr. Sorrow! It’s urgent this time! I swear to you it is!”

  “You know the office hours. I know you know them, because I tell them to you every time you call. They are—”

  “I think he is dying, Doctor.” There was muffled fumbling of the phone. “Yes, Alexander is definitely dying.”

  Dr. Sorrow sighed and hung up, not bothering to argue since he knew he’d wind up going to Baddenfield Castle anyway. He would at least do it slowly. And by subway.

  The Canal Street stop of the Z train let Dr. Sorrow off at the corner of the castle. As he rang the bell and waited for the drawbridge to lower over the moat, he looked up at the gloomy brick monstrosity and wondered what it would be like to be so utterly filthy rich.

  Winterbottom, as always, was there waiting for him. “Come in, come in,” he said. The doctor shuddered walking through the creepy hallway with all the portraits, and again when the elevator deposited him on the top floor of the castle, in the tower that was Alexander’s room. The boy was sitting in a chair stroking his cat, like some sort of junior varsity James Bond villain. He hardly looked sick. In fact, he looked as healthy as a boy could. Then again, he always did.

  “What is it?” Dr. Sorrow asked, although it sounded less like a question and more like an accusation.

  “Hello to you too, Doctor,” Alexander said.

  “What is it?” Dr. Sorrow said again. “Do you have a fever?”

  “Oh, I’m not sick in the least,” he said. “What I want is to offer you the opportunity to go down in history as the greatest doctor ever.”

  Dr. Sorrow, pretty much sure he’d go down in history as the greatest doctor ever regardless, asked what Alexander meant by that.

  “What do you mean by that, Alexander?”

  “What I mean is, I have a Great Idea.” He paused for dramatic effect. “I want you to surgically remove the nine lives from a common house cat and implant them into me. This common house cat,” Alexander said, and squeezed Shaddenfrood.

  The cat went Meow!

  “And if the cat doesn’t make it through the operation,” Alexander said, “well, that’s a price I’m willing to pay.”

  Meow! Shaddenfrood again went.

  The proposal shocked Dr. Sorrow. He’d been prepared for something insane, but this was too much! “You . . . you rotten boy, you!” he sputtered. “I am not proud of having been your doctor, but I have been bound by my Hippocratic oath to do my best to save the life of anyone who is my patient. But this! This is not saving a life! This is giving you eight more! This so-called ‘great idea’ of yours.”

  It irked Alexander that the doctor failed to appreciate his Great Idea, but he still wanted to convince him. “Look, Doc, have a little bit of vision. I’m presenting you with the opportunity to make medical history here.”

  “The only opportunity is for malpractice! Such an operation would be immoral, not to mention impossible!” Dr. Sorrow composed himself and sniffed. “Only a not-very-bright boy who quit school at far too young an age would ever come up with such a ludicrous idea.”

  Although Alexander may have been the meanest boy alive, he highly detested it when other people were mean to him. “Oh fine, you crotchety old quack!” he said. “Take yourself and your Noble Prizes and your Hypocritical oaths and get out of my house! You may be the first-best doctor in the world, but I’m going to find the second-, third-, and fourth-best doctors and hire them all! I will hire however many it takes to get what I want.”

  “I can assure you, young Baddenfield, that you will be hard-pressed to find any reputable physician willing to take on this ‘great idea’ of yours, let alone the second-, third-, or fourth-best doctor in the world.” Dr. Sorrow bowed his head and said, “I am only glad that I no longer have to be in your service. Good day, and good-bye.”

  Winterbottom followed Dr. Sorrow all the way down the winding staircase, begging him please, please not to quit, the boy was a Baddenfield, and surely, sooner rather than later, he would get deathly ill and only the great Dr. Sorrow would be able to save him. Before he finished walking across the planks of the drawbridge over the moat, the doctor paused. He quite strongly was attached to that Hippocratic oath of his, and it really didn’t let him fire a patient, no matter how awful.

  “If anything is ever truly wrong with the boy,” Dr. Sorrow said, stepping onto the sidewalk, “call me.”

  A. A. Sorrow, MD, may have been the greatest doctor ever, but he was lousy when it came to judging the morality of his fellow physicians. As it happened, it was easy to find doctors willing to do anything Alexander asked, so long as he was willing to pay them gobs of cash to do it. The problem was that all of them, to a man and to a woman, were baffled as to how to accomplish the surgical feat in question.

  Crisscrossing the world in the family Boeingfield 999, Alexander and Winterbottom went far and farther down the Best Doctors in the World list they had printed out from Wikipedia, until Alexander had gotten sick of hearing the same answer over and over.

  “Doctors! They’re no use at all!” Alexander said, walking out of the Zurich office of the twelfth-best one and ripping up the list. “No more doctors!”

  “It’s all for the best,” said Winterbottom, who had been trying to stop Alexander’s scheme from the start. “Even if you were to find a doctor who believed that cats have nine lives, transplanting them would be too risky a procedure to perform on you. The last of the Baddenfields should not be treated as a guinea pig!”

  “I’m not giving up,” Alexander said. “Now I need nine extra lives just to prove all these quacks are wrong.”

  Returning to America, Alexander had his pilot land in Readington, New Jersey, home of the largest drug companies in the world. Located here was the headquarters of Baddenfield Pharmaceutical, or—as it was affectionately known within the industry—BaddPharm, home of such wonder drugs as the Komadose® sleeping pill.

  “The drug companies are the ones that do the research, Winterbottom,” Alexander said. “They invent the medicine, so they’re the ones that can get me my nine lives.”

  But the word in New Jersey was no better than it had been anywhere else.

  “I’m afraid we only create drugs that treat diseases, Master Baddenfield, sir,” said the Head Chairman of Executive Vice Presidents for BaddPharm. “We don’t do anything that would actually make people healthier. That would be bad for business.”

  Alexander began to shake. His face went from pink to red to purple. Foam formed at the corners of his mouth. He was about to have one of his Alexander Moments, which generally involved a string of third-person pronouncements and mortal threats. Winterbottom opened his mental umbrella and prepared for the storm.

  “Alexander Baddenfield is unfamiliar with things not going his way.

  “Alexander Baddenfield does not like the word ‘no.’

  “Alexander BADdenfield is going to start firing people.

  “And worse.”

  An emergency meeting was called. All of the top research scientists from all of the departments of BaddPharm were summoned to the largest meeting room in the facility. The doors were locked, the windows covered over. On the whiteboard at the front of the room, the agenda was written out in black magic marker:

  • AB wants 9 LIVES

  • AB has CAT with 9 LIVES to GIVE

  • HOW to TRANSPLANT 9L from CAT>AB

  All the assembled MSs and PhDs scratched at their notepads and tapped at their laptops, racking their brains for an answer.

  One by one, the experts were asked to render their expert opinions, and one by one they obfuscated. “Obfuscate” is a big word that few understand; “to obfuscate” means “to use big words for the purpose of not being understood.” Here are some of those words.

  When Alexander could take no more, he held up a hand and said, “Enough! If you all think you can confuse and b
ore me into going away, you’re wrong. Is it too much to ask for you to solve one little problem? Is it going to be the think tank for all of you?” Normally, a think tank is a gathering of top minds; at BaddPharm, it was a literal steel tank that employees were locked into. “And no one gets out until someone gives me something that helps!”

  “How about Dr. Graft?”

  The name cracked the silence of the room like a bite of potato chips in a library. Everyone turned to look at who had said it, a low-level intern in the toe fungus department. “Oh,” the man said sheepishly, and shrank down in his chair.

  “Who?” Alexander said.

  “Dr. Torvic Kranstenenif. ‘Dr. Graft’ was a bit of a—uh—playful nickname. But really, it is best not to speak of him,” the Head Chairman of Executive Vice Presidents said in a nervous fidget. “He was a—well, I don’t know what he was. A mad scientist, I suppose. He caused us a lot of trouble, and cost you a great deal of money.”

  “What did he do?” Alexander asked.

  “He worked in our artificial limbs division. It’s really a wonderful part of the company—giving arms and legs to people who don’t have them. Profitable, very profitable.” He smiled. “Mostly, we make fake limbs out of plastics and metal, but Kranstenenif—well, Kranstenenif had a different idea.”

  “What was it?” Alexander asked.

  The chairman looked around the room for support, but no one would meet his eye. “Animal parts,” he said. “Kranstenenif grafted animal parts onto human beings. I mean—that’s what he wanted to do. We didn’t let him, of course.”

  “Well, why not?” Alexander said. “I’d rather have a pair of ostrich legs than no legs at all. Wouldn’t you, Winterbottom?”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “So what became of this Kranstenenif?”

  “Well, after we fired him, he opened up his own laboratory in the Arctic Circle,” the chairman said. “No one has heard from him since.”