by Ron Charach
—I don’t know what made me think of it now—maybe because of that gorgeous marble-tile bathroom over there, with the ferns and the Jacuzzi; it’s mighty enticing, goddamn, even has its own little hot-light so you don’t get your snivellin’ little round-shouldered bawd too cold when you come out of the shower.
—The ferns, I regret, are artificial silk. False as a woman’s love. But your point?
—Well, when I looked into that bathroom just now, I had that memory of me standing outside that little aluminum stall at Richview Elementary while you jest plopped and stank away— it was truly rich.
—Your point, Gutterstern.
—I remember thinking: I have never before experienced a more awful smell—I mean, it was an omen. Even back then you were totally anal—why, all you ever wanted out of life was to make a million dollars.
—Well morgan, as they say, if you seek a glorious peninsula, look around you... Let me put on a strong pot of coffee. Best thing to cut through an attack of nostalgia.
—Single malt Scotch’ll do. Make it your best...
—The single malt’s for friends—like myself: how about some cognac, VSOP?
—Very Special Old Person, like y’rself.
galloway uneasy. —If, of course, you’re willing to accept a drink from a pariah whose excrement smells like mine. I’m sure with your steady diet of beans and bread yours must smell like roses—no pun intended. But you are in a scrappy mood today aren’t you? Or should that be tonight? I lose track of time down here. He yawns and nods at the dawn simulator on a timer. Feigning boredom, he heads for his fold-down bar. Made of curved wrought iron in the shape of an elephant’s rear, it allows him to survey his stock. —I see I’m going to have to work harder at re-programming—keeping you solidly on side so to speak.
—Is there another side around here to play for? asks henry, toein’ patterns in the thick rose Oriental rug with his cowboy boot. —Oh, by the way, sorry about decoratin’ that bit of rug over there... I want to kill you, not trash our—er, your—mementos.
—That’s my boy, back to your senses; I knew you still had some basic civility. And galloway hands him a snifter with a couple ounces of Courvoisier swimmin’ ’round, the Casablanca machine unplugged from one of the fat wires to the generator. He collapses onto the smaller love seat across from the sofa done in the same floral pattern.
—Fact is I need one of your lectures again to remind me that There Is No Choice—or not much of one—so that I don’t have to feel tortured every time I look at that beautiful young woman I fathered—who suspects more than she ought to. When she looks up at me with those hazel eyes—of mine—I tell you she’d slay me even if she weren’t the only young thing around here...
—First delete the “father” reference; you are not pater, you are progenitor. I once heard this sperm-bank director say that to a bunch of prospective sperm donors when they got wide-eyed about the idea of spreading their seed around the world. Besides, Car—er—Arlene, or whatever you prefer we call her, was raised neither by you nor your good wife...
—But by your good sister rosemary—and now you get to pose as her loving uncle harold...
—Spare me the sentiment, henry. With all my professional activities, I haven’t had time to develop a true father-daughter relationship—not even uncle-niece, for that matter. With “ma” Rose there has been more of a connection—thank goodness. It’s why she’s turned out as well as she has. Though Rose’s ex, Sam Seeton, didn’t stick around very much longer than the child’s first year, as you’ll recall. Then there was good ole Sam Meyers—your Claire’s cousin—who, unbeknownst to him was raising a blood relative. Well, he didn’t stick around more than a few years either... My sister always did have an edge to her when it came to men. And just look at the dudes she has to deal with now… Ha, it’s precious!
—Oh, yes, “ma” rosemary, indeed. Puts on that sweet-but-frank Kate Hepburn shit, but in actuality she couldn’t wear a miniskirt on accoun’ o’ her balls would show. Maggie Thatcher revisited.
galloway suppresses a smile. —With all the snooping we’ve been up to, it wouldn’t have done well for me to have gotten too close to my so-called niece... Though let me tell you, henry, I have plenty of sweet, sweating young things on DVD over there courtesy of Mr. Andrew Blake—and we’re not talking tasteless here—that’d make you forget that little “daughter” of yours. galloway makin’ little quotation mark flicks with his fingers in an immensely faggy way.
henry leans forward to spring again, considers chuckin’ his brandy glass at galloway’s graying head.
—Whoa, henry, Whooaa! Relax! yelps galloway, pudgy fists hidin’ his face then grabbing at his achin’ arms. —Sure you’re still sensitive about availing yourself to some sights of your own flesh and blood—and I admit, I conned you into watching. But you must admit that Arlene does seem to stir more of that yummy fetish stuff in you than your own wife does—isn’t that so? You know you’re middle-aged when firm, youthful beauty stirs up feelings of awe more than lust. She is rather awesome. Look, I got you to profane your biological tie with her for a reason: she’ll be less able to lure you into doing anything stupid—I admit that. You’re not likely to think of her as your daughter anymore, are you? And wouldn’t she wind up being the first mental casualty if our little cover ever did get blown—
henry hands his glass to galloway for refuelin’ and looks down at the floor. —You know that our little Arlene somehow got her hands on a list that has my full name on it, as well as the name of her second step-father Meyers? A list that spells out the sordid details of your various payouts to us local upstarts. And that her last name on said list reads Meyers, not Galloway? Your sister ma Rose’s last name is down as Seeton.
galloway grows thoughtful. —So she knows she’s not my niece—or that maybe she’s not. And that Rose isn’t her biological mother... Well, we’ll just have to fill her in on all the various divorces her dear old “mother” has been through...
—You never cease to amaze me, galloway, how you can tell a lie without breaking mental stride.
—Practice, henry, practice.
—But don’t you think our Carla-fied Arlene is going to be more than a tad interested in knowing who her real father is—in the biological sense...
—Of course she will. But I’ll just give her the old time-tested psychobabble about being her “psychological” parent, and I’ll brief Rose as best as I can about what to tell and what not to tell...which I admit may take some thinking... But tell me, henry, how could she have gotten her lovely little hands on such a list? How did you find out about it? How much of our ruse did you reveal to our comely miss?
—Look you! Show some respect for my daughter...
—Yes, yes...
—And the rightful daughter of my lawfully wedded wife…
—Spare me, henry! No one forced you to hand over your wife’s precious little eggs to my sister—someone who was a hell of a lot more prepared, mind you, to bring children into this world than either you or Claire were: Claire was pretty heavily into the booze and dope by that point, was she not? Desperate Housewives style. It’s just as well the conception took place in a more hospitable, if somewhat more mature uterus.
—Claire went through three miscarriages, jerk-off, before I handed over her reproductive rights to you. I got sick of it, sick and tired of the whole thing. She took each one of them harder than the last. Stopped our sex life dead in its tracks.
—Three miscarriages and precious little support from a workaholic husband... Besides if it wasn’t for my ability to procure a little lead-lined existence for her still-developing brain, Arlene would never have turned out to be the perfect species of young woman she is.
To which henry can do nothing but grab the arm of the sofa and push himself back a bit—his boots now up on the rosewood coffee table.
—How about a little respect for the furniture, mister morgan? You’re not at ma’s. I can’t just dial up a handyman.
He lowers his feet.
—I told Carla nothing—not a thing. Course, she’s wise to the accents—how could she not be? And she’s figured out that, unlike most of the eight, I actually have mental contents—and more than a few extra years on them. I’ve tried to toe the official party line. I think my old buddy in academia Mr. Amos Barton has also played his part convincingly enough. But what a tangled web...
—Less tangled than the web that led to this, I’ll remind you! Terror, terror, counter-terror. Ka-Boom. Homeland Ministry, Homeland mystery: homeland misery... The US launchin’ retaliatory nukes only compounded the damage.
—Sometimes these damn drugs of yours cloud me so much I’m not sure I believe that story.
—But I’ve got the ending on film, remember? At least the complete destruction of the area around here—if you’d care to sit through it again... Sorry there’s no audio track.
—Christ, to see your world ending on film—this can’t be—it’s so sick…
—Sick, yes, but satisfying. Bearing witness… They all laughed at Nixon for wanting his every word and deed recorded for posterity, at how his vanity did him in. Yet the Pentagon and NSA under Reagan then Bush then Bubba Willy then Shrub then the Big O then his GOP-flop successor filmed our undoing every bit as zealously. These bunkers that we locked the pooh-bahs out of have shatter-proof lens portholes in them so that the shockwave and thermal pulse were captured before the lenses got distorted by the meltdown. Yes, in the end the entire US did a double-Bush atop a Reagan.
—You keep blaming that fogey Reagan even though he left office years before the Event? Even though you’ve always voted Republican.
—Well, perhaps it is a tad unfair for the producer of a B-Western to blame a B-movie actor for paving the way... But remember how many years of treaty after treaty it took before the world could get itself back to just having no more nukes than it had before that man came to power. Even that number was ludicrous; remember how nukes would fall out of those rickety B-52’s right over the Southwestern states, how only a catch in the fail-safe prevented them from going off then... Soviet nuke subs coming this close to a meltdown… The Gipper was a nuclear litterbug. And it didn’t get much better under the prezzes that followed him. ’Specially the mogul with the nest on his head we can’t allow ourselves to mention.
—True ’nough. But who are you to talk, jackass—you’ve gone ’n booby-trapped these sorry remains of civilization.
—You’re not accusing me of arming dick-tators, are you? That would really be a departure, for an American to arm dick-tators. The Shah, Saddam, Osama, Gaddafi, Mubarak, Musharraf, the Saudi Royals, the Emirates, we could go on and on…
—Well, you can keep your state secrets—as soon as I can come up with some advantage to telling Car—er, Arlene the truth about what-all’s gone down around here, I aim to do just that.
—Ahhh, “come up with some advantage,” henry, how very gallowayan of you to qualify it that way. That you’re still after advantage makes me suspect you’re less than fully committed to capital-t Truth; it’s the sign of a mature thinker.
galloway presses on: —You’re not holier than moi, mister morgan. And if I can interrupt your paternal zeal for a moment, I’ll remind you that you and Claire were emotionally divorced around the time she put the hit on you to start reproducing your kind. You were playing the field by then, as I recall... And it only took you one weekend to decide to forego the privileges of becoming a dada. Why, you should be thankful that my sister Rose had the good sense to join us here and bring Arlene along with her—that you still get to observe just how superbly she turned out.
—One more fuckin’ comment out of you—
—Easy boy, easy! Whoaaa!! That’s what you heard—not how I meant it! Now you just set right back down again and pour y’self another strong one. Fact is, it really can’t be said whose daughter Arlene is, given she was raised not only by Rose but by a series of nannies who helped Rose and a fairly brisk rotation of father figures, among whom yours truly is just the latest. Besides, even if I concede you biological paternity, I’ll remind you that you used to donate a lot of sperm to the local bank—at what was it, twenty bucks a shot? So you might be the father of all kinds of handsome and beautiful things who were once out there, who have now pre-deceased you.
galloway continues: —Just be glad one of your offspring ended up in the shelter I set up for myself and acquaintances—ungrateful though they’ve turned out to be—a biosphere cum bunker system Hitler would’ve marveled at. Consider yourself lucky I was eminent enough to have commandeered what was originally designed as a strikeproof Valhalla for the last of our godforsaken missiles.
—And looking back on it, I did quite a number on the Pentagon, securing the dome for myself, especially once the confusion of the final hours set in... Imagine them wasting precious minutes trying to decide which branch of al-Qaeda or ISIS delivered that first salvo of nukes out o’ Pakistan. For all we know they came from the Chinese—or Russian mafia types that got their hands on illicit “tactical nukes.” Ha! “tactical nukes!” Turn the world into a carcass, but do it with tact! But not to worry, we answered them all in kind—even while they were en route—bombed the shit out o’ ‘em, back to the Stone Age as President Nest-head used to brag.
—So what if our little strategic missile defense wasn’t worth Jack. But you have to hand it to those fund-o’-mentalists—who would have ever thought of dusting off the old kamikaze phenomenon: more plane crashes than take-offs! More truck-bombs than trucks. Concrete barriers a staple of every courthouse, every mall. Why, all those two-bit domestic terrorist poseurs, with their anthrax, smallpox and plague scares. We developed such a case of The Cooties we plum forgot about all those wayward foreign nukes. Who could keep count of them? What with sixty Hiroshimas plumbing the deep on a single nuclear submarine. Why, Shrub couldn’t even get the word right: nucular. Me, I always called it what it was: unclear war. The Pentagon top brass liked that.
—You pick a carcass like a jackal, you know that?
—Oh my—damn me with faint praise, why don’t you?
—Why the fuck don’t I...
—The secret is all in the lack of commitment—as in the martial arts, henry, my boy—commit too much weight to one leg, and bingo—you get thrown.
—And you? You’ve committed to this little goon-show. And you’re dipping into your own shit. I see you sneaking rails—that constant nasal drip of yours ain’t the common cold...
—Yes, well... around here it’s pretty common... the air quality issue we have would hardly allow me to choose cigarettes as our universal drug, now would it? Unless they were made of candy or chocolate. So we’ll have to all make due with booze and all the prescription drugs our hearts desire and brains can stand. Besides, henry, one shouldn’t confuse a sensible thing like drug abuse with the kind of commitments that really weaken legs—like “falling in love” and the like; now those toxins I steer clear of!
—I’ll say you do.
—Or religion, there’s another. Why, the world’s major religions backed policies that could only be called mentally defective. I’m not just talking about the religions of the swarthier cultures of old. Look at the Catholics—with their planetary-suicide laws against birth control and abortion. Seven billion earthlings and counting… Sewing ideas into po’ folks’ minds that condoms didn’t really work against AIDS. Mind you, I admit that as soon as them Moslems and Hindus and whatever else migrated to North America, they got sane pretty quickly—except for the ones who trained in our flight schools so as to learn how to blow us up and crop dust us with bugs. And a few of them did do quite a number on Europe. But most of them were decent chaps—regular wogs. When there’s money to make, people smarten up, they focus
less on their holy books and fancy costumes and more on their business lives. Until they tilted t’wards global terrorism. Destroying capital. All that’s bad for business...
—You say business lives the same way most people way sex lives or love lives. Business, that’s your religion galloway—
—Guilty as charged, Doctor Botox... You know, it’s only your past good head about finances that lets me tolerate you; your flowery side has always been grating. I’m an old WASP. You’re a middle-aged Jew. Once those two kinds of people are freed of their respective churches, there’s absolutely no difference between them—absolutely none, provided, that is, they hang on to their good business sense. They can sit back in the company boardroom with each other over a cognac, especially after they were allowed into the locker rooms of each other’s country clubs.
—I love your Keep It Simple social analysis.
—Had you remained stuck in your adolescent “poyet” phase—you know, like when you were a young medical student touting socialism, of all things—well at that point you wouldn’t have been worth saving.
—Saving! You call this being saved!
—Oh, my apologies, Jews don’t take to being saved, now do they?
henry sets his glass on the table and considers tearing galloway’s throat out of his head—but starts to feel wobbly in the knees.
—Okay, I’ll cut the Jew-baiting. Still, I observe that the old you would’ve hurled your snifter across the room, precious cargo and all; now you set down the liquid gold before you let fly.
—Cut the “pigs like us” routine, galloway...
—The bottom line, Doctor M., is that you lack the technology to turn things around here—though what on earth you’d turn it to is by no means clear. As an alternative, if you really don’t like the little first-person shooter game we have going, there’s always suicide, Will Gordon style.
Ah yes, the old taunt, galloway’s favorite. Life’s a bitch? Then die!
—Somehow when one has just sat through watching the world blow itself to shit, the notion of doing likewise is...