The Last Notebook of Leonardo

by B. B. Wurge

  Table of Contents

  Also by the author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  The Author

  Copyright Page

  Also by the author

  Squiggle

  Billy and the Birdfrogs

  For Ben

  Dad with six fingers.

  1

  To tell you my story, I have to begin with my father. His name was Carl. For a long time, he worked for the government in a secret building underground. I think his office was in the sub-basement of a sky-scraper in Manhattan. But he never told me exactly. He also never told me what he worked on. I am pretty sure he worked in a science lab discovering important and amazing things, secret things that the government wanted to keep for its own use.

  One day he came home with a giant acid hole in his shoe. The entire front half of his shoe was gone. He seemed happy about it. Whatever had melted his shoe must have been an exciting discovery.

  When I saw the damage, I was worried about his foot, but he said that he always wore Kevlar underwear, especially socks, because you never know when you might drop something nasty on your foot.

  “Dad,” I said. I was only seven at the time. “Should I wear Kevlar socks too? What if I spill grapefruit juice on my foot?”

  “Don’t worry about that, Jem,” he said. Jem was short for Jeremy. “The compound I spilled today is a lot more interesting than grapefruit juice. In fact it burned right through the bottom of the flask, which is how I spilled it.”

  “What was it?” I said. “What were you trying to make?”

  “Oh, never mind that,” he said. “Tell me about your day at school.” He always changed the subject whenever I got too nosey about his work.

  A year later he came home with an extra finger on his hand. I didn’t even notice at first, because it grew very naturally next to his pinky finger just as if it was meant to be there. I saw him looking at his hand in satisfaction, curling and uncurling his fingers, but I didn’t see anything wrong. At dinner, we sat down to eat our hamburgers together. When he reached for the ketchup bottle, I finally noticed.

  “Dad!” I said sharply, dropping my hamburger onto my plate. “What happened to your hand?!”

  “Noticed, have you?” he said, grinning.

  “You have an extra finger!”

  “That’s true,” he said, grinning even more. He had a handsome face, a narrow straight face with a high forehead and black hair that was beginning to disappear on top. He didn’t often remember to get his hair cut, and it usually hung down around his neck and got mixed up with his collar. He had a fiery gleam in his eyes that probably looked slightly insane to people who didn’t know him. I liked him best when he was grinning, because a dozen wrinkles would appear on his cheeks out of nowhere, bracketed one within the next like parentheses, and his face would look mischievous.

  “It’s not a bad match to the other five,” he said, holding out his hand for me to see.

  “Do you have one on the other hand too?” I asked.

  “Nope,” he said, holding up both hands for comparison. “Just one, today. But Jem, I bet if you had an extra finger, you wouldn’t have dropped your burger like that.”

  “Dad,” I said, making up my mind about it, “it’s totally gross.”

  His eyes opened wide and he looked at me with mingled hurt and astonishment. “What do you mean, gross? It’s fantastic! Don’t you understand?”

  I had to admit, it was pretty remarkable. Not too many people could grow an extra finger like that. My dad was a genius; I was sure of that. All the same, I liked to bait him sometimes. I liked to make fun of him just to see his reaction. I didn’t want him to get really upset, but I wanted to tease him a little. So I said, “Dad, people aren’t supposed to have six fingers on their hands.”

  “Not supposed to. . . . People aren’t. . . ,” he sputtered, sitting back in his chair and staring at me. Then he leaned forward and began to talk very fast and earnestly. “Jem! How can you say that! Where’s your imagination? Do you think Leonardo said, ‘gosh, people aren’t supposed to fly, so I’ll just give the whole thing up’? Do you think he said that? Do you?”

  Leonardo da Vinci was my dad’s primary hero. Everything came back to Leonardo sooner or later. Dad even had a picture of da Vinci framed over his bed. It was a copy of a charcoal drawing that the artist had done himself, looking into a mirror when he was an old man, and the face was lined and hairy and strange. The eyes were the same as my dad’s eyes. Thoughtful, deep, and slightly insane. I used to think it was a picture of my grandfather; and in a sense it was. The spirit of Leonardo had helped to shape my father’s mind.

  “Everyone else,” my father continued, “all those ordinary people with little brains, they said that people weren’t supposed to fly. Only birds were supposed to fly. They thought Lenny was crazy. Why would he want to turn himself into a bird? But no. He wasn’t crazy. He invented the helicopter. Did you know that?’

  “Yes, Dad, actually I did know that,” I said, realizing that I had started him up a bit more forcefully than I had intended. But he didn’t even hear me. He kept right on going. I was doomed to another dinner lecture on Leonardo, so I picked up my hamburger and decided to make the best of the meal. My dad did have a point. It is not easy to pick up a large juicy burger in a large bun, with lettuce and pickles and tomatoes piled inside precariously. An extra finger might have stabilized it better.

  “Everyone else,” my father raged, his eyes beginning to bug out, “said he was crazy. But he didn’t care. He invented the airplane. Did you know that? And the bicycle. He drew a bicycle in his notebook, gears and all. And the windmill. And the light bulb. Did you know that? Did you know that he—”

  I almost dropped my burger again. I had never heard that one before. “The what?” I choked. “It can’t be. Thomas Edison invented the light bulb.”

  “Ah ha!” my father said, realizing that he had got to me. It was a game to us, to see if we could spark a reaction out of each other. “So he thought, old Eddie did. But there it is, in one of Leon’s notebooks. A drawing of a light bulb. I saw it myself.”

  “It’s impossible,” I said. “There wasn’t any electricity back then. That was five hundred years ago.”

  “Well, okay,” he admitted. “Maybe it was a drawing of a bat brain. I think it might have been. But it sure looked a lot like a light bulb. And you can be sure, if he had lived another ten years, he would have invented a nuclear powered spaceship. He was working on it, you know.”

  “Come on, Dad. He was not.”

  “The point is,” my dad said, “there’s no limit to imagination, except the heavy-duty cinder block walls people put around it themselves out of sheer silliness. So don’t tell me a person’s not supposed to have six fingers.” He crammed his burger in his mouth and glared at me as he chewed.

  The next day his extra finger was only half as long as a normal one. I saw him staring at it anxiously. The day after that, it was gone, and he was quiet and moody for the rest of the week. He obviously saw his experiment as a failure. I didn’t ask him about it because I knew he felt bad and I didn’t want to make him feel any worse.

  After the incident with the finger, nothing very strange happened for another few years. At least, nothing strange that
he brought home from work. Probably lots of strange things happened in his secret lab. Then when I was ten years old, Dad came home from work and called out to me while he was taking off his jacket and boots in the front vestibule. It was a snowy day, and he had walked about two blocks from the nearest subway station.

  “Jem!” he said cheerfully, banging the snow off his boots. “Don’t panic! Don’t be afraid! Might be a bit of a shock at first. But you’ll get used to it, I’m sure. Can you hear me?”

  I came running from my bedroom. I didn’t know what he had done to himself. Had he lost a foot for real? Had he grown fingers all over his face? I was worried because I knew that just about any calamity, the kind that would devastate most people, would probably excite him. His voice had so much enthusiasm this time that I expected a major disaster.

  I pulled open the door in the kitchen that led to our vestibule, and then I froze. My dad was not there. Filling the vestibule, looming seven feet tall and five feet wide, stood an orangutan, its orange fur standing out all around it like the corona of the sun, a clump of snow on its head, its beady black eyes glaring down at me out of a wide, hairless, wrinkled, hideous gray face. Its lips sneered back, exposing its yellowed fangs, and it said, “What do you think?”

  Dad’s new look.

  2

  For an instant I gagged in terror, and then I got control of myself. I thought he was playing our game again and trying to get me to scream in fright. Luckily I had just been eating a very sticky candy bar with a toffee center, and my teeth were stuck together. So I only made a muffled sound in my first surprise. Then I unstuck my teeth and said, “Hi Dad. How was work today?”

  “What?” the orangutan said, glaring down at me.

  “I said, how was work? Same old, same old? Anything interesting happen?”

  “What?” the thing said, staggering backward and goggling at me.

  I peered at him closely. “You look different, Dad,” I said. “Did you get a haircut? It’s a definite improvement.”

  “Jem!” he shouted, outraged. “Did I get a what? Look at me! Are you blind?”

  “Come on, Dad,” I said, turning away and walking back into the kitchen of our apartment. “I can practically see the zipper on that thing. What are you trying to pull on me?”

  The orangutan lunged through the doorway, bounded into the kitchen, and when its feet landed on the floor the entire room shook with a boom and a rattle, and a cabinet door popped open, and six breakfast bowls jumped out and smashed all over the counter top. The thought crossed my mind that an orangutan costume wouldn’t make a person that heavy, unless it had cement in the feet. And in that case, my dad would not be able to bound anywhere. He would be straining to shuffle his feet across the floor.

  I turned to face him again, a little less certainly. “That’s, um, that’s a costume, right? I mean you didn’t really. . . . Dad, did you really? . . .”

  The orangutan sneered again, showing me all its ghastly teeth. It began to make a sucking, grunting noise that sounded like a giant hacksaw cutting off a horse’s head. I cowered against the refrigerator at this awful sound, but gradually realized that the thing was laughing.

  “Is that what you thought?” the orangutan said. “A costume? No, Jem, no zipper here.” It spread out its long arms, spanning the entire room and touching the opposite walls with its knuckles. “It’s genuine 100% great ape material.”

  Now that I was beginning to understand the truth, I started to tremble. “You turned yourself into an orangutan?” I said.

  “Very good,” he said, sneering at me again. I realized that the sneer was his version of a smile. “You remember your zoology. Yes, that’s exactly right, Jem. An orangutan. An especially large one. Obviously the vocal apparatus is modified to allow for the production of human speech, requiring a reshaping of the hyoid process and the. . . .”

  “Dad,” I said, “is it, like, permanent, or will it go back?”

  “Go back?” he said. “You mean, disappear? Turn back into a person? Not this time. No sir. I’m certain. It’s absolutely permanent.”

  “But Dad,” I said, and now I began to feel sad. “Can’t you go back to your old self?”

  “My old self?” he said, scratching his head with an enormous knobby finger. “Why would I want to do that?”

  “But,” I said, and stopped. I almost said, “People aren’t supposed to look like orangutans,” but I caught myself in time. I knew better than to try that approach.

  He seemed to take my hesitation as a sign that I still did not quite believe him. Actually, I did. I had no more doubts. Turning himself into an orangutan without first thinking about the consequences was exactly the impulsive sort of thing he would do. “Here, feel it,” he said, holding his hand out toward me. “It’s for real.” I touched his hand, and it was solid and warm and strong. It was a real hand.

  “What about the poor animal?” I said.

  “Huh?” he said. “What poor animal?”

  “Did you get it from a zoo?”

  “Jem, don’t talk drivel. I generated the plan on a computer. I didn’t steal anyone’s body. Obviously, if I had taken an actual body, I wouldn’t have been able to shape the hyoid process to enable the efficient production of—”

  “But,” I said, “what will people say? How will you go to work?”

  He waved his hand as if brushing away a swarm of irrelevant details. “The point is,” he said, and then he paused and grinned again. “Actually, I got some interesting reactions on the subway.”

  “They let you on the subway?”

  “To tell you the truth, I think the subway guard was a little nervous about stopping me. But hey, it’s New York, and there’s a lot of strange people in the city. Everybody knows that. So I don’t think it’s a big deal. Jem, I’m starving. What do you say we go out for dinner and celebrate? I know a great vegetarian restaurant a few blocks away. Ah, I feel like a really big salad tonight.”

  The Landlord was a dried up stick. I didn’t like him.

  3

  We walked down the street in the snow. It was dark out already and the snow looked very beautiful falling through the cones of light underneath the street lamps. Sometimes people stared at us, and some of them laughed as if they thought it was a joke, but a lot of people didn’t even seem to notice. They were too busy shopping or trying to flag down a taxi. I was in my coat and boots, hat and mittens, holding my father’s hand. My father, who didn’t own any clothes big enough for an orangutan, wore his boots unlaced and a big umbrella to keep the snow from his head. His fur was so long and shaggy that he didn’t mind the cold very much. His legs were short in comparison to the rest of his body, and his knees stuck out to the sides, so that at every step his body rocked from side to side.

  “Ah, it’s such a treat, Jem,” he said. “Such a new perspective. I never was so tall before.”

  “Yes Dad,” I said, but not very enthusiastically. I was of two minds about the situation. On the one hand, walking down the street with a giant orangutan had a certain coolness factor. I could imagine my friends from school being seriously jealous, except that none of them lived near us so we were unlikely to meet them. On the other hand, maybe we were a little too sensational. Somebody might call the police on us. One old lady saw us coming, clutched her handbag to her stomach, and scurried down a side street.

  We reached the restaurant and opened the door to come in. The waitress saw us and yelped in surprise.

  “Um, a table for two,” I said.

  “Better make it three,” my dad said. “I might need two chairs.”

  When she realized that an orangutan was talking to her, she yelped even louder. She stammered to me to wait for a moment, and then ran to the back of the restaurant.

  After a while, the manager came out wearing a very nice white suit. He was calm and professional. “I’m sorry, Son,” he said to me. “ We don’t allow pets in the restaurant.”

  “I’m not a pet,” my father said. “I’m his d
ad. We’d like a table for three. And your celery special. I feel like celery today.”

  The man blinked and a stringy muscle in his cheek twitched, but he did not lose his calm. He peered up into my father’s face. “I apologize, sir. We never admit patrons who are not properly dressed.”

  “But I don’t own anything big enough,” my dad said.

  “Then,” the manager said, “I suggest you visit a tailor. Good night.” And he closed the door in our faces.

  “It’s discrimination!” my father said on our way back to the apartment. “It’s outrageous!”

  “Dad,” I said, rolling my eyes in annoyance, “what did you think would happen?”

  That night I walked down the street to the supermarket and bought dinner for the two of us: a microwave dinner for me, and three heads of lettuce, six packages of celery, and four packages of carrots for my father. He grabbed hold of our kitchen cleaver and in three seconds chopped up the vegetables into bite sizes and tossed them down his mouth, smacking his lips and gulping and burping.

  “Sorry,” he said, with a smirk. “That’s the way orangutans do it.”

  “That’s okay,” I said, grinning back at him. “I don’t mind.”

  I felt more comfortable than I had a few hours ago. I was beginning to see my dad’s facial expressions in this big hairy creature. It really was him. Inside, he hadn’t changed at all. If he wanted to look like a giant carpet, I could deal. My friend Joey’s father had a wart on his nose so big it was actually bigger than his nose; and my friend Ken’s father had a very long neck with folds and wrinkles like a turkey. You could see the folds jiggling whenever he talked. My dad, in present form, looked a lot better than that. Besides, geniuses do funny things sometimes. Whatever made him happy. Whatever floated his boat. All this homespun philosophy, I began to notice, didn’t entirely take away my anxiety. I was still worried about our future, because even if I had come more or less to terms with his enlarged and hairy condition, I didn’t know how other people might react. If they all reacted like the people in the restaurant, then we were in for some trouble.