“It must be impossible to keep current with every plum in the corporate cake,” Beem said. “Credit for coming up with the demagnetizing agent goes to Dr. Joshua Vine, a Regis Pharmaceuticals team leader on a top secret project funded by the Air Force as a component of AMDD&D. That’s Advanced Missile Defense, Disinformation and Disorientation.”
“It still doesn’t ring a bell,” Regis said. “What’s the stuff called?”
“ Compassarate Dioxide. It was never meant to be an antidote for genital magnetified electro-intrusion. It was designed as a next-generation stealth weapon, a colorless paint to be applied to the fuselage of military aircraft. With demagnetization properties effective in confusing enemy radar pulsations.”
“And how did this Joshua Vine happen to think this Compassarate Dioxide would work on a stiff prick?”
“Ah, interesting story. He says he was reaching for a tube of K-Y lubricant during a midnight tryst in his lab with . . .”
“Who he was fucking is irrelevant, Beem. Keep your focus.”
“His hand dipped into a Petrie dish holding a few ounces of the newly distilled substance and a drop or two must have gotten into the condom—”
“I pay these people to get laid on company time,” Regis said. “Paid to get laid. And they want to unionize.”
“His performance was neutralized. But he noticed a marked improvement in the quality of his stereo system’s performance. The sound level—”
“His stereo system? Who is this idiot? And how did he dare offer a hush-hush preparation for use on Simon Apple? There’s a picture of that jinx with red slash over his face pasted over every desk at Regis Pharmaceuticals. I assume every includes that Nano . . .whatever—”
“Initiatives,” Beem said. Nanotower Initiatives Division.”
“Oh, shut up,” Regis said. “Every department head has been instructed to deny access to any of our products by . . . What’s the use? Nobody pays attention to anything I say.”
“In defense of Dr. Vine, he may not have known that the transmitting penis was attached to Simon Apple. They don’t reveal names. Civil liberties and all that.”
“And now the FCC and the Department of Defense have petitioned the FDA to recall Stalagamide? ”
“They feel the drug might pose a danger to its users and to the entire nation’s communications network and the power grid.”
“We’re going to be forced to black box another of our fattest cash cows,” Regis said. “ Stalagamide brought in six point two billion dollars last year, and there are no reports of Priapus Magnitus. Not one.”
“Well, now there is one,” Beem said. “Better safe than sorry.”
“I can’t believe you said that to my face!” Regis yelled.
“I’m sorry. It slipped out.”
“It slipped out. Like Apple did. You people had him in your hands. I’m trying to keep my blood pressure from splitting my skull. How could you lose him?”
“In all the confusion, he just walked out the door of Building C at Brookhaven National Laboratory where they’d taken him for further study. We found his minibus under a snowdrift. We had it chained to a tow truck but somehow he managed rip off his bumper and drive the damn thing toward the Long Island Expressway. Its tire tracks were obliterated by blowing snow. Wherever he went, trust me, he couldn’t have gotten far. We’ll have him in a matter of days.”
“I’m suffering from palpitations,” Regis said, sliding a Xanelul tablet under his tongue. “Leave me now, Brian.”
After Brian Beem said his good nights and quit the room, Regis Van Clay reached for his private line and called Belladonna.
“Heavy pain,” Regis said when she answered.
“Pain rules,” Belladonna said. “Pain soothes the brain.”
“Vine said it improved the performance of his stereo system,” Regis said.
“Excuse me?”
“Rhetorical comment,” Regis said. “Forget it.”
“I’m worried about you,” Belladonna said.
“Just make me holler bloody murder,” Regis said. “Tonight, anything goes.”
79
Simon waited out the blizzard in a Flatbush Avenue flophouse in downtown Brooklyn, wondering about his next destination on life’s curvy road. He knew he had to leave New York again and find refuge someplace so obscure that the hounds of authority could never catch his scent. This time he had no specific idea of why he was on the run but something said he’d better keep running.
It was entirely possible that a vindictive Martha Marie Hoffer might file a charge of statutory rape against him. But the greatest probability of prosecution was his delectable escape from detention after the scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory determined his world-class erection was the cause of communications mayhem on the trendy South Fork of Long Island.
While government agents argued with local police over the right to custody, or whether, in fact, any crime had been committed, Simon simply walked out the front door. He found his minibus sandwiched between a dozen police cruisers and three huge rigs with gigantic tires, topped by outstretched metal arms Simon guessed were radar scanners. The little bus’s rusty bumper had been chained to a tow truck. Simon got the bus started, threw it into reverse, slammed his foot onto the gas peddle, left the bumper behind, swerved a sharp left, followed an exit ramp, and drove a staggered route to Brooklyn.
Simon had more to worry about when, next morning, he picked up a coffee-stained copy of the New York Post lying on a diner counter. On page six, a daily chronicle of celebrity motion, obsessed with anything to do with Hampton lifestyles, he found an item about Serene Harbor. There was a picture of a supermodel (who boarded her Arabian stallion at a Serene Harbor farm) standing wide-eyed, hypnotized by a greedy blaze that was swallowing the town’s abandoned watch factory.
The story reported that there was hardly anything left of the industrial fossil. Firemen blamed the burnout on a cigar stub, still hot, found in a box of half-melted watch faces. One firefighter was quoted as saying, “They each had their own expression. One looked exactly like the Virgin Mary.”
There were signs that a squatter had been living inside the factory but no body was found. Simon wondered what happened to Hyman Simbok, a man so frail he wouldn’t leave an ashtray’s worth of proof that he ever existed.
Simon realized that even if Simbok managed to escape and find shelter in one of the empty summer cottages around the town, he would know it was dangerous for him to admit he was alive and possibly still an obstacle to Mayor Crimmins’s building plans; better to cut his losses and head for Miami. If a resurrected Simbok declared himself, accused the mayor of arson or laid claim to the factory’s site, the mayor would have him committed or worse.
Most likely, Crimmins assumed that Simon Apple had earned his money honestly and was probably responsible for accidentally barbecuing an unwanted tenant. Still, if word of Simon’s deal with the mayor was ever leaked by some pinball freak at the Skull & Crossbones with twenty-twenty ears, the charges against him would be a lot worse than screwing a nympho drummer, blanking out a few thousand TV screens, juke boxes and phones, then evading custody by the Feds.
After breakfast, Simon took a subway to the root of the George Washington Bridge, hiked across that span to Fort Lee, New Jersey, waved his thumb at the passing parade of traffic and took the first ride he could get heading anyplace. His benefactor, in a pickup, dropped him at an intersection where a major highway met whatever road he’d been traveling, so, following the map of pure chance, Simon positioned himself facing north and west on Route 17, and waited for another Samaritan.
His next ride came in a sleek red Porche driven by a dapper young Asian man. Simon, wearing a battered jacket, plaid shirt, Levi jeans, slush-caked K-Mart boots and a knitted hat pulled down over his ears, felt rumpled and mangy sitting in such an elegant car with its leather seats and a custom-crafted wooden dashboard. The driver’s outfit—a Burberry raincoat, Aussie outback hat, and rust-dyed alligato
r shoes—was a collage of designer fashions, a cutout from GQ Magazine. Simon had the feeling he sat inside a rolling mansion in the presence of a modern incarnation of Kubla Khan.
That impression was enforced by the way the driver handled his designer wheels—hitting near ninety, cutting in, out and around traffic, gliding through a skid over black ice that spun the Porche like a blowing leaf. The man drove with absolute confidence. Simon rode the rocket, his body speed-glued against the posh passenger seat. He considered making some comment about slowing down after the car sliced across the highway on a diagonal cut between an oil tanker and a huge moving van but kept his mouth shut, remembering the dependable admonition that beggars can’t be choosers.
Not a word had passed between the hitchhiker and his latest savior. That struck Simon as unusual since, in his experience, the mandatory duty of an automotive freeloader was to listen, listen and listen to everything from political opinions to ancient jokes to the most intimate revelations—stories about baby-sitter blowjobs, fucking a field hockey princess, plowing a cheerleader after the pep rally, popping somebody’s wife with Alpine tits in the church basement—listening to the endless monologues of proud or sorry souls who were vibrated to confession by the hum of four, six or eight cylinders (but holding the wheel, in control), eager to spill the beans to an easy priest, a transient stranger headed toward some unknown destination.
After twenty miles of silence, Simon’s silent driver said, in accented English, “I hope you not catching.”
“Catching what?”
“Catching me. You face purple blotches. Swollen like wonton. Earlobes like big moth wings.”
Simon twisted his head so he could see himself in the rearview mirror. It was true, he looked terrible, like a bug on steroids, ready to fly.
“You allergic?”
“I do have a problem in that area,” Simon said. “I reacted badly to this salve. But I don’t feel sick or feverish. I don’t think it’s anything you have to worry about. But I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable, like you picked up a leper, so you can drop me off right here.”
“How far you go?”
“As far as you’ll take me.”
“I go Montibello. Little town. Sullivan County. Catskill Mountains. About a hundred mile.”
“A hundred miles sounds hunky-dory. Are there any jobs up there?”
“Maybe some. Pump gas. Clean horseshit at racetrack. But those jobs snapped up by people who live there for many generations. Place used to be full of Jew hotels and bungalows. Jew families come up from hot summer city to breathe some air. Was called Borscht Belt. No more. Now Jew kids go for vacation to Paris, Rome, hey, even Beijing. No business left, not much anyhow. They keep horse track open nights for trotting horses who move legs snip-snap like scissor blades, pull little wagons around a circle. Used to be big sport, plenty money. Not many customers go there anymore. Place falling apart. It’s there mostly to scrape what’s left in sweaty pockets of Off Track Betting freaks who need something to bet on when sun goes down.
“There must be some work at the track like selling mutual tickets,” Simon said.
“Sure. Good jobs in town go to insiders. Everybody somebody’s cousin. Sad situation. But things could get a lot better for Montibello. Maybe gambling casinos allowed up there if they can find any genuine Native Americans from some Borscht Belt tribe. A smart Red Indian with connected bulldozer attorney—wham, wham, wham—who gets around the politics and end up with casino license. I hope a few Geronimos turn up. I wouldn’t mind seeing it happen. I’m telling you, it wouldn’t be bad for me if land prices balloon because I just happen to own few hundred acres.”
For the next twenty miles Simon wondered why his face had puffed up. The only thing he could think of was a bad reaction to Compassarate Dioxide. He carried a tube of the stuff he’d lifted off a table before he trotted out of the Brookhaven Lab. It was another one of those weird tradeoffs: Simon wasn’t walking around with the Eiffel Tower between his legs, but looking like a year-old eggplant wouldn’t inspire anybody to hire him, not even for pumping gas. What was left from the Crimmins money wouldn’t last forever.
“If you need work, maybe I help you,” the driver said.
“Help me how?”
“I have little business going up there. You ever work in garment center? Rag trade?”
“No.”
“Experience good but not necessary. You could learn.”
“Learn what?”
“Your way around. I like you even with your fat face.” A few miles later the driver said, “I get feel I know you from someplace. Were you famous?”
“I doubt it could be called famous,” Simon said. “But I did get some publicity a long time ago. You might have seen pictures in—”
“Give me your whole name.”
“Simon Apple.” Simon meant to reincarnate Sinbad Green but he didn’t have the energy.
“Ah! Ah! Simon Apple. Yes! The fish boy?”
“How would you know that?” Simon said, flexing. He thought that memory was long dead and buried.
“You don’t recognize Shen Wa? Fish boy pull me out of the water down in Florida.”
“Shen Wa? The illegal? That’s fantastic. But they deported you to China.”
“And Shen Wa bounce back again inside packing crate filled with snappy sneakers. Now he’s a big American success. Fish boy, I owe you plenty. You need a job? You got a job. You work for Shen Wa right now.”
80
Shen Wa drove through downtown Montibello, a battered playground whose centerpiece was the Broadway Diner; its façade thankfully outlined in flickering green neon, the only proof that the world wasn’t all black and white. A block from the diner he turned off Main Street, drove a another quarter-mile, then swung the Porche onto an unmarked dirt road hugging the desolate shore of a frozen lake. Another sharp left aimed the car up a long driveway lined by two rows of ratty-looking pines.
At the end of the driveway, Simon saw a huge building in the style of a Swiss chalet that reminded him of the flame-licked watch factory. Half the building was roofless, with broken walls held up by charred black timbers. The other half was intact, hanging together from force of habit. The only sign of habitation was a potted pink cyclamen in an upstairs window.
“Welcome to Feinberg’s Pine Lake Villa,” Shen Wa said, parking his Porche near what looked like the main entrance. “This was some big hotel way back when. Boy oh boy! Hollywood stars got started here. Famous athletes played ball here. Doctors, dentists, lawyers, businessmen, gangsters came here. Famous place for whoring or getting married. Pretty girls saved up all year to come for a week and find rich husband or just get laid. Great food, all strict Kosher, entertainment every night. I get the information from guy who used to be bellhop here. After people stop coming, the owner held onto property waiting for gambling to happen but never happened. After old man Feinberg die—rest in peace—his kids sold it for peanuts to my syndicate. Dumb move. Soon gambling. ”
“And you’re holding out for Tonto to open a casino?” Simon said.
“Who is Tonto?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“The gambling will come. Why should New York State give away all that tax to strangers? Meanwhile, we use the place for other purposes.”
“What purposes would they be?”
“Come inside. I want you to meet some people.”
“Could I wait a few days? Until my face looks less like crumpled gift wrap? And my earlobes scare me. When I look in my magic mirror it says, ‘Who the fuck are you?’ ”
“Listen, Fish Boy, you look fine compared to who’s in there. Your face is no big deal at former Feinberg now Shen Wa’s Villa. Not even worth second glance. Who do you think works here now, hotsy totsies? Mostly illegals who can’t speak English paying off their transportation from China, Korea, Vietnam, Philippines even Cuba. Plus a few mental cases from here and there. Nice people but wounded. You understand what I’m saying? All in the same boat as
your face, Simon Apple.”
Shen Wa led the way past what must have been the hotel’s reception desk, then through an archway leading to a gigantic room with a chandelier larger than the one at Glenda’s Lombard Cinema. Like the sun, that crystal fixture was surrounded by paintings of the twelve signs of the zodiac. “Pretty fancy, eh” Shen Wa said. Simon nodded. “Now we get serious.”
They went through a pair of swinging doors into an empty restaurant kitchen, walking along a bank of stripped-down refrigerators that dangled loose plugs like snakes with pronged fangs, then turned past a wrought iron wood-burning stove that half-concealed another door with an exit sign taped to its frame.
Shen Wa opened the door and gestured. Simon entered his new workplace, startled by a sea of whirring sewing machines run by an assorted band of operators representing every race, color, creed, and gender Simon ever heard of and a few he couldn’t begin to identify.
Beyond the battalion of sewing machines were rows of men and women with spines shaped like shrimp hunched over heavy equipment, carefully guiding menacing embroidery needles that stitched adornments onto women’s coats, blouses, skirts and slacks or decorating men’s glossy club jackets with the logos of football, basketball and baseball teams.
Behind the embroiderers were the pleaters, steaming fabric into accordion shapes, then, behind them, long tables where cutters followed templates of patterns drawn on brown paper. Off to one side, a cadre of punchers slammed buttonholes into blouses and shirts. On the other, a dozen workers followed white chalk trails, stapling blank sweaters and tank tops with glittering rhinestones.
Teenagers on roller skates pushing supermarket carts flew between the rows of machines, reaching into deep bins, filling their carts with loads of partially finished garments and rushing those pieces to other stations in the sweatshop’s assembly line.
Far in the rear of the barnlike structure, workers pressed finished suits, dresses and slacks, hung them on movable racks that were pushed to where labels were carefully added with names like Ralph Lauren, Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, Yves Saint Laurent, Gianni Versace, Liz Claiborne, the whole spectrum of trendy brands.
Side Effects Page 39