The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  Doc Rebbish had been an inspired teacher, as of course was Mengele.

  Stuartgene will win a Nobel for the results of this work.

  This nameless eviscerated young man from Boise, for a brief moment before his demise, fantasized that he’d found the man of his dreams, at last, his perfect love, a doctor.

  THE SON RISES EVEN MORE

  I’ve just performed my latest interviewing of two young men from northern Minnesota who according to their applications are without parents or next of kin. It’s all been ridiculously easy. Even in Germany nothing was this easy. My arrangements so far are really impeccable. It was an excellent idea to advertise for young men unable to pass their army physicals and who would thus be glad for the chance to serve their country after having been rejected by Uncle Sam.

  I’ve been interviewing all the boys. I call myself their “proprietor,” “an archaic legal term” Amos claims Philip also came up with. (It sounds to me like Amos is telling Philip too much, and I’ve told him to think about this.) The Kursie Foundation had advertised for one hundred young men, offering to pay them a modest sum “to free yourself for the adventure of a lifetime, no questions asked.” They all had to sign papers pledging their “exclusive services” to “Partekla Kursie Institute” for the “protective entirety.” They came from all over the place geographically, these youngsters, and were requested to report to various locations to have blood samples taken and toss back cups of “elixir” like shots of whiskey in a saloon.

  I travel around the Midwest witnessing these blood tests and libations. “Not long, not long at all!” I say heartily to keep spirits up when the impatient ones ask when their big adventure is going to begin. I’ve always been amazed how gullible people are.

  * * *

  I think I’ve finally found friends on the other side who don’t appear to want to destroy me. It’s almost as if they are saying: Let’s see how far we can go with this. I count at least five hundred full-fledged infecteds in America, in various places and pockets, though they’re still too scattered to what your Dr. Itsenfelder calls “meld.”

  The war effort, the war effort, what does that mean?

  ISRAEL AND GRACE

  Dr. Sister Grace Hooker finally calls Isidore Schmuck and arranges to meet Dr. Israel Jerusalem. Each has declined to approach the other’s turf. Israel distrusts anything Catholic: a religion that has as its symbol a man nailed to a cross says it all. Grace, not all that experienced with Jews, puts her foot down on Schmuck, which she can’t even bring herself to say. So these two peculiar people agree to meet in the small park across from the White House. Until she knows better, Grace tells herself to keep her mouth in check. For his part, Israel attempts to accept that a woman in such strangulating attire can be a decent scientist.

  Small bits of information continue to trickle in from the battlefields about peculiar new maladies. From knowing something of each other’s work, each of these protagonists has fortunately and instinctively recognized in the other an excellence that could challenge them to greater heights.

  Israel knows of Grace. She wrote to him after his Titlement article appeared, requesting fluid samples from Evvilleena Stadtdotter and Mercy Hooker. He’s read her many articles in the many journals. She is some hard worker. She puts him to shame. He knows he’s stuck, somewhere, somehow. He is not acclimatizing. That is what Shmuel said. He is still and unendingly having trouble in the New World.

  At home—he lives in the fancy Waldbaum Towers out Massachusetts Avenue also built by his brother-in-law—he stares into space night after night and on weekends. He isn’t clinically depressed. He’s just … unacclimatized. Often he just sits in the lobby and watches the many people come and go.

  What is my life in aid of? What am I doing? Why am I not doing what I should be doing? I thought I was doing what I should be doing!

  Oh, it is a curse to be so steeped in Dr. Freud. Israel has read everything. A little knowledge is messy. Like the battlefields over there, like the hospitals over here, Israel is a mess.

  I now see how discontented civilization must be for anyone who reads Sigmund Freud. I am very angry with you, Sigmund, for teaching me this. Before you, I thought I could function.

  Waldbaum Towers is filled with Jewish families with growing bank accounts. Everyone in this New World prospers. The Depression was gestern. Heute bist fabulous. War is good for business. Sons are leaving, fathers too. Who will run the business? May I request an exemption for my son so that he can take charge? No, you may not. So wives and grandparents take over the business, and they do better than ever. Here in Waldbaum Towers women leave every morning in business suits, often in town cars driven by female chauffeurs.

  Do you remember Mr. Y’Idstein, whom young Daniel encountered at Rabbi Chesterfield’s house? He lives here. In a penthouse. He can look out over all of Washington. His closets are brimming with European masterpieces. Mr. John Foster Dulles, who goes to Germany so often to speak to Hitler, comes here often, to speak to Mr. Y’Idstein. Mr. Dulles runs the big New York law firm Sullivan and Cromwell. Many Jewish lawyers whom Mr. Dulles visits also live in this building. The last time he was here he joked to the Negro doorman, who doesn’t get the joke, that there were as many Y’Idsteins in Waldbaum Towers as in his firm in New York City. “But not as partners, of course.” For those interested, this firm’s wretched wartime activities and the wretched involvement of its chief partner, John Foster Dulles, are chronicled in A Law Unto Itself: The Untold Story of the Law Firm Sullivan & Cromwell, by Nancy Lisagor and Frank Lipsius, which states unequivocally, “Many clients of Sullivan and Cromwell are responsible for many bottlenecks in the war effort.”

  The owner of The Washingon Monument, Alvah Template, also continues to visit Mr. Y’Idstein often. In the lobby one day, Mr. Y’Idstein tells Template to continue not writing about Jewish problems in his paper. “It is not good for the Jews, continues to be my advice.” The Negro doorman, whose name is Bill C. Panama, hears him say this. “Mr. Y’Idstein sure must be one powerful man to speak to Mr. Alvah Template so,” Bill C. Panama says to Claudia Webb, who is here to drop a package off for Mrs. Gertrude Jewsbury, who is in Europe and is rumored to be having difficulty returning. Bill C. Panama recognizes Claudia Webb because she visits with several of the gentlemen in the Waldbaum Towers tower.

  “Good afternoon, Dr. Jerusalem,” says Bill C. Panama, trying to conceal his surprise. “It’s good to see you out of your apartment on a weekend.”

  Yes, Israel is happy when Grace calls him.

  “Great minds think alike,” Grace says when she finds him on a bench in the park.

  “So wast thinkest du?” Why am I talking to her like this?

  She forges ahead anyway. “I have studied the fluid you took from over the eye of Evvilleena Stadtdotter. It is not a new poison.”

  “I believe I have seen it before. In the Andes Mountains. Young people ate each other and died.”

  They both look across the street. Somewhere inside that house, Mr. Roosevelt is taking care of America, with his fine wife. I hope he knows what he’s doing, each of them thinks privately. Grace crosses herself out of habit.

  “You too are frightened of this?” he asks.

  “I have studied a sample of blood from a nun, Sister Fidelma Mae Chinchillie. It was sent to me by Dr. Flo Hung Nu.”

  “These are unfortunate names.”

  Grace nods. They both smile.

  She plunges in. “I have done further tests. I consider her blood to be a false trail and not worth pursuing.”

  Who is this woman calling false? Israel is surprised at how much her finding stings him.

  “Why are you frowning?” she demands. “You really did not complete your work. You found something interesting and you abandoned it. The work I did was work you should have done. I’m tired of cleaning up men’s slops.” She almost chooses harsher words.

  He stares at her. When confronted, he gets tongue-tied. When confronted, he walks away. He st
ands up to leave.

  “Where are you going! You uncovered something important and I am trying to discuss it with you and you walk away! A new possibly transmissible poison discovered as men all over the world are killing each other and spreading their blood is something of great significance. I have already had reports of the increasing appearance on the battlefields of regurgia, which is another name for hepatitis. Is this how men become famous? By walking away? Come back immediately!” She heaves her bulk up and waddles after him, with her good right arm pulling him back to the bench.

  “What is of such great significance if you are calling it false and myself an idler?”

  She smiles kindly and shakes her head. Men have to be coddled at every step. “But surely you must know that in research the mistakes, the false starts, are as important as the successes, and that … You … fool!” She is suddenly angry that he’s so naïve.

  But then she notices his beard, all brown, has no gray in it. He’s still a child, and her voice softens. “You are brilliant to have done what you did so young. And it shows great instinct to take the samples along the way. Great discoveries come from great hunches.”

  Words will not come to Israel. Inside him are many notions he wants to express. He is so thirsty and yet he cannot drink. Here is a fellow scientist who would understand. He has never had anyone to talk to before. She takes him seriously. At Isidore Schmuck, they laugh at him.

  “Talk to me!” She sits there in Lafayette Square, a huge rock in a black frock, shouting even though he sits beside her.

  His eyes fill with tears. Tears are often a leavening agent. He takes her hands, which she is holding out to him, and they go to sit on another bench, this time with their backs to Mr. Roosevelt and his fine wife.

  “Glause,” he says.

  “What is glause?”

  “I have seen it before, the poison. And it was called glause, but I have what Freud would call a repression. The Iwacky knew how to treat it! There are no more Iwacky. I cannot locate my records.” He takes back his hands and presses his palms fervently against his forehead, as if to squeeze pus from a recalcitrant pimple. “Explain, please, my failure, as you called it.”

  She goes over in great detail her findings. She stops suddenly and asks him, “Do you remember mismitosis?”

  His brow wrinkles. The word is not unfamiliar. Again, his eyes gleam with tears as he realizes that mismitosis is somewhere back inside him with glause.

  She thrusts her right shoulder forward for emphasis as she goes on. “I obtained your prehectral slides. I studied them in many ways. You could make a case for defouled mismitosis. But then I think it is my own self-serving nature to consider it. I have longed for any information on what caused my own deformity.”

  They sit silently, looking into space. Then Israel asks, “Are you family to Mercy Hooker?”

  “Yes, she was a distant cousin,” Grace sighs. So much tawdriness in all this and so much poison. So much that belongs in the tabloids and so little that comes from the laboratory. When can she say “Fuck it all” out loud?

  “They are preparing new laws,” he says.

  “They’re always passing new laws. What kind of new laws? What are you talking about?”

  “Senator—one of my patients. He tells me. There is to be a new division of NITS with much power and authority to regulate what treatments we may prescribe and what the manufacturers of pharmaceuticals can sell and indeed our basic scientific research itself. The Department of Food and Drug Supervision. FADS.”

  “FADS?”

  “And FADS will become part of a new enlarged Center of Disease. COD.”

  “Don’t be such a defeatist! What do you care anyway!”

  “We shall be forbidden much that we are now permitted.”

  “The great ones always break the rules!” She wanted to add, “You asshole, haven’t you learned this yet!”

  She finds herself disgusted with him again. Now it’s her turn to leave, without so much as a goodbye.

  “When can I see you again?” he finds himself calling after her.

  She turns and addresses her manifesto more to the park and the White House and the world than to Israel Jerusalem, who calls himself a doctor.

  “You fucking asshole, I have no use for stupid laws requiring scientific certainty when no such fucking thing exists! Laws are to keep the fart-faced idiots in check, to keep dumb dildo dickhead doctors from murdering puking patients who got sick doing something naughty-naughty they shouldn’t have. Fervently I believe that I, Dr. Sister Grace Hooker, with all my discoveries and prizes, am exempt from these lewd lily-livered laws and that every discovery I have ever made, including my love of another woman, has been made because I broke the fucking goddamed shit-eating failure-guaranteed rules.”

  “You loved another woman?” And such foul language she uses!

  “I did, yes. That’s how I caught my mismitosis. Everything good and fine has its price. That’s a law of life that never seems to change. You should know that by now, you who have called yourself a scientist.”

  Again she walks away. In her hurlings, she lobbed the word scientist at him. As a dare? As a threat? As a noble calling he has shamed?

  “No, no!” He runs after her. The words pour out of his mouth, out of his brain, out of the knowledge and instinct that he is overwhelmed to discover are still preciously his.

  “Sometimes diseases, viruses, bacteria, plena, run their course. Like an illness running through a flock of sheep or a group of children, they come, infect, cool down, and disappear. But sometimes they come back next year, next season, next heat wave or cold spell. Sometimes they come back slightly mutated, last year’s flu slightly reformed, renamed, and out to find new converts to its way of damage, even death, especially death. Sometimes they seem to disappear for years or decades or centuries. Sometimes medicines, what I hear called ‘wonder drugs,’ appear to eradicate a disease, we think forever, when they only suffocate it until it teaches itself how to reappear and cause a plague.”

  “I know all that! You speak elegantly when you are angry. What are you trying to say?”

  “Glause and … aliyahhah—yes! That is what mismitosis was called in Palestine when I was a student there! I will bet money on it—that they are the same. I believe … I believe…” He finds these next words almost impossible to utter. “I believe that I myself am now a carrier of glause. Perhaps with your mismitosis you are as well! You have inspired me to attempt to find out. You must send me some of your blood. I shall contact you when I have results. You should attempt the very same and contact me as well. Then perhaps we both can believe more in each other.”

  He bolts off across the park.

  “Be careful!” she cries out after him.

  She sits down on the nearest bench. She’s so tired, and she recognizes the feeling. She is becoming God’s prisoner again. A voice inside her head torments her. It’s not a strange voice. It’s velvet and reassuring and comforting. “To give in to passion is wrong,” the bishop says, “and contrary to what makes us human beings. We do not need to have sex. We can be pure. We can be chaste.” He says these words conspiratorially, yet with a voice exploding as he pumps her harder and harder, with increasing enthusiasm, and for her, pain. He’s mounted her with his purple robes raised over his knobby white legs, and now he’s raping her, grunting into the empty cathedral, “We must care about the lives of human beings inside the womb!” She is twelve years old and the bishop is known everywhere as “the hard-liner.”

  Grace has fallen on the ground of Lafayette Park. She’s having her annual fit, and there’s nothing she can do about it. She wishes the damn thing didn’t always happen away from her rooms. She’s glad Israel’s gone, and she hopes a stranger will be kind and get her home before she starts thrashing and drooling.

  Please, Israel, please discover something that will save us both.

  As she drifts off across from the home of the president of the United States, of all The American Pe
ople, she asks herself once again, Can a cure of cures exist? Why not? I wonder if it already exists and we don’t know about it. Scientists since the beginning of time have dreamed of it. There need never be another war. There need never be another illness. Pain will be eradicated. Dangers will be gone. Men will stop murdering each other. Why is it always the men? Why are men always murdering each other?

  And my good Dame Lady Hermia, is Fred playing his part a little better now?

  THE SKINNY ACCORDING TO FETTNER

  PART ONE

  Ann Fettner was a medical writer who just appeared one day after the plague had started. She had an impeccable list of credits covering viruses all over the world, mostly in the Third World, which is why Fred had never heard of her although she’d heard of him. A straight woman in all ways, she shoots from the hip and takes no crap, his kind of dame. She appeared at Orvid Guptl’s office at the Prick. God knows how she found it: it moved often and was very dumpy. “You guys are going to be eating crap in ever-greater quantities. It’s going to be one helluva story. I want to write it as fully as I can. No one else will let me.” Orvid paid her zilch (his staff is always quitting for nonpayment). Fettner appeared not to care. “I’ve got a few ex-husbands keeping me going, more or less.” She was about fifty but she smoked like a chimney and her lungs would cave in after four or five years of the plague. Middlemarch will get her lungs a major clean-out at NITS but it won’t work. But by then her lungs aren’t the only things to have caved. “This is the single most depressing story and the single most helpless story I have ever encountered,” she will write for her final story in the Prick, just before it folds as well. Again, we proceed too fast. Fred asked her to contribute some background info for where we’re going. As you’ll see, she provided some of the best coverage anywhere.