by Tim Kring
The doctor’s eyes twinkled. “You can say that again.”
Morganthau seemed about to make some peeved rejoinder, then broke off. He fluttered his hands in the direction of the doctor’s waist. “Dr. Leary, please. If you would kindly adjust your, ah, shirt.”
The doctor looked down and saw that the tails of his shirt had parted around his penis like a waterfall around a rock (although, on closer inspection, he realized the protuberance was actually the bottom of his tie, but he decided against pointing this out). Chuckling slightly, he pulled his shirt closed and fastened the bottom button, then hurried off after Morganthau, who had already descended the stairs and turned toward the right. He walked quickly, as if more comfortable having the doctor’s genitalia behind him, and soon they’d rounded the northeast corner of the Big House and were heading toward the thick stand of pines that crowded the back of the building, and which sheltered—the doctor suddenly remembered why the agent had roused him in the first place—the coach house, i.e., the gamekeeper’s cottage.
“Has something happened?” he called after Morganthau.
“In a manner of speaking,” Morganthau said without turning around. “I have someone I think you should meet. He’s in the cottage.”
The doctor skipped and slipped over the damp grass after Morganthau. He expected him to say something about the man in the cottage, but the agent just walked silently around the corner of the house. When the pine forest came into view, he pulled up slightly. Leary could almost feel his trepidation at the sight of the shadowed wall of trees, their silver trunks all but invisible in the blackness. Almost shared it himself. Then, visibly squaring his shoulders, the agent marched forward. The doctor heard him take a deep breath. Then:
“Mr. Luce and his compadres have, in their inimitable manner, referred to the nineteen hundreds as the American Century.”
Leary did his best to process this random statement, but he was distracted by the back-and-forth flapping of his genitals against his thighs. His left foot was soaked through, the pair of socks starting to flap off his toes like a flaccid … well, like a flaccid.
“There are those of us who think in grander terms,” Morganthau was saying. “It’s 1963, Dr. Leary. We have passed the halfway point of the ‘American Century.’ We are, in fact, less than forty years away from a new millennium, and there are some people who would like to see the year 2000 as the beginning of the American Millennium. But such a dream requires more than foolish experiments with hallucinogenic chemicals. More than a shift in policy or diplomacy. It requires truly visionary thinking and, when necessary, a capacity to make and execute the difficult decisions. To strike preemptively, when the enemy is ill suited to return fire. To set aside certain niceties of the democratic process for the sake of the greater good—the good to generations not yet born, as opposed to those now scurrying over the face of the earth.”
The doctor understood now. Morganthau was justifying himself. He had done something wrong. A part of him wondered if the man in the cottage was alive or dead.
“But instead of being a part of these grand plans I find myself dealing with a man who does not even realize he has neglected to put trousers on, or, for that matter, underpants.”
The doctor chuckled. “For the record, Agent Morganthau, I am aware that I am not wearing any pants. I am aware, for that matter, that I am not wearing any underpants. It’s quite chilly this evening.”
“Dr. Leary—”
“I have to say, Agent Morganthau, the last man I heard speak of a ‘thousand-year reign’ was Adolf Hitler. I find it chilling—terrifying, not to mention morally reprehensible—that a man who believes that one nation might possibly have evolved a way of life that would serve the whole of humanity for a period that amounts to more than half of recorded history should be overseeing a project that might well have such an impact on the future of the species.”
Morganthau snorted. “Are you really comparing me to Adolf Hitler?”
The doctor considered his answer for a long time.
“I suppose I am. I was going to say that of course I wasn’t. That of course Nazi philosophies so far outweighed yours in depravity that there could be no comparison. But, though I choose to believe that the spirit of freedom is still present in this country, I have to admit that any man who believes in the existence of a philosophy that could serve mankind for a millennium, let alone a man who claims to know what that philosophy is, is a man so alienated from what it is to be human that, yes, I do believe he exists on a continuum with the Führer.”
Apparently unprepared for such a reasoned, or at any rate semantically comprehensible, response, Morganthau was silent, and after another few steps, the doctor continued.
“You will probably be surprised to learn that I applied for and was accepted into West Point. You will probably not be surprised to learn that I resigned my commission before graduating. However, I did serve my country during the Second World War as a staff psychologist. I worked with hundreds of soldiers, many of whom had been physically scarred, all of whom were emotionally devastated. I asked myself what they had suffered for, what countless others had died for—and so soon after the Great War. The War to End All Wars, and yet, less than a quarter century later, we had embarked on another, even greater effort at global annihilation. I, too, am motivated by service, Agent Morganthau. By the desire to help my country and my fellow man. It just so happens that we have chosen different ways of doing that.”
They were well in the forest now. The overhead branches blocked out most of the moonlight, and the two men had to keep their eyes on the ground to avoid tripping.
“I liked you better when you were jumping around and raving,” Morganthau said.
“Well, I’m still pantsless. And if it makes you feel better, I’m saying all of this to a green-scaled lizard with a Marcel Duchamp mustache and a Magritte bowler hat.”
For the first time the agent cracked a smile. “Really?”
The doctor laughed. “Actually, no. You have a bit of a silvery glow, but that’s all.”
“That’s funny. You’re glowing a little bit … oh, Jesus.” Morganthau suddenly started running. In his slick-soled shoes, he stumbled over half-submerged roots, but he continued charging forward. Grabbing his penis and testicles to keep them from flopping around, the doctor ran after him.
“What is it, Agent Morganthau?”
“Do you keep any LSD in the cottage?”
“For research purposes only,” Leary panted. “A trip can be … quite different … when you share it with … someone else.”
“I think they found it.”
“They? There’s more than one?”
“Chandler is the one I want you to meet. Naz is the, ah, delivery agent.”
“Now is not the time to be coy, Agent Morganthau. Who is this man, and why did you bring him to me?”
Just then a group of six or seven deer started up almost directly in front of Morganthau and the doctor. Both men jumped backward, and the deer ran the opposite way—i.e., in the direction the two men had been running. Suddenly the deer pulled up short. Dirt flew from their hooves as they wheeled around and charged straight at Morganthau and the doctor. No, not at them. Past them. One streaked by so close that Leary could have reached out and touched it if he’d wanted to. The earth vibrated with the speed of their passage, and the sound of crashing was audible long after they’d disappeared into the shadows.
For a moment the two men just stood there staring after the invisible deer.
“That was … strange,” the doctor said finally.
“Indeed.” Morganthau’s voice was unnaturally hushed. Hushed, and full of fear.
“My specialty is human psychology, not animal,” the doctor said, “but I’m tempted to say that there’s something in the forest that scared them even more than we do.”
“You asked me who I’m bring you to see, Dr. Leary.” The agent turned his glowing face to the doctor’s. “I’m bringing you to see the thing
that scared the deer.”
UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
WASHINGTON, D.C.
May 17, 1963
I, Special Agent Beau-Christian Querrey, having come to the conclusion that I can no longer fulfill my duties to the Counter Intelligence Program of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, do hereby tender my resignation, effective Monday, May 20, 1963.
This is not what I signed on for.
Very sincerely yours,
BC Querrey
Department of Justice Building
Washington, DC
May 17, 1963
Ding-dong.
Gladys Miller’s smoke-laced diphthongs preceded her corpulent form into BC’s office by half a second. A cigarette dangled from the corner of her pink-painted lips.
“Did you see this morning’s Peanuts?” she asked as she made her morning rounds, dropping off papers, retrieving others, and generally poking her nose into places it didn’t belong.
“No.”
She pulled her silver cats’-eye glasses from her chest to examine some photographs in a manila folder on top of a filing cabinet. The pictures documented the arson of a post office in rural Alabama, nothing more grisly than the corpses of ten thousand letters, and Gladys let out a smoke-filled sigh as she let the folder fall closed.
“Lucy finally let Charlie Brown kick the ball.”
“She did?” BC reached for his newspaper.
“Of course not. And you”—Gladys turned from the filing cabinet and pulled BC’s resignation letter from his typewriter with a sharp zzzzzzzip—“have just about as much chance of asking me to send this letter. So, what’ll it be, sir?” She waved the paper in front of him. “Should I drop this in interoffice mail? Or just file it with the others?”
BC didn’t even think of protesting. From her tightly laced steel-gray bun to the sensible shoes five feet below it—not to mention the some two hundred–odd pounds in between—the department secretary was the kind of woman for whom the term “battle-axe” had been invented.
“With the others,” he sighed, and watched as Gladys wadded up the letter and dropped it in the trash basket. She took a long inhale and stared at the man behind the desk. Shoulders broad as a yoke, fingers spindly as wire hangers, a little boy’s haircut crowning the whole package: buzzed on the backs and sides, three-quarters of an inch left up top. Just enough to comb to one side. The part, pulled as tightly across BC’s scalp as the ribbons of Gladys’s girdle, sliced through his dark brown hair like a scar.
She shook her head in confusion or disappointment or possibly even dismay and ashed on the letter she’d just thrown away.
“He wants to see you. And for Pete’s sake stand up straight. You go in there looking like a beat-up old dog, he’ll just kick you that much harder. Heck, I want to kick you myself.”
BC was a foot taller than Gladys—thirteen inches to be exact—but he felt smaller than a headless chicken as he skulked past her out of the room.
“I enjoyed your report on Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” she called after him. “If it’s half as racy as you make it out to be, I’ll have to run right out and buy a copy.”
Until that moment, BC Querrey never imagined Gladys Miller having a sexual thought in her life, let alone a sexual experience. Yet her throaty cackle (she would be dead in three years from cancer of the larynx) filled his mind with an image of her naked bulbous body running through a dewy English meadow. It was not a pretty sight. But it turned out to be infinitely preferable to what the next twelve hours had in store for him.
In 1963, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation still occupied a suite of rooms in the southwest (i.e., back) corner of the Department of Justice Building. Funding for a dedicated FBI facility on the north side of Pennsylvania Avenue had been approved by Congress the previous year, but it would be another eleven years before the Bureau moved out of the “temporary” quarters it had occupied in Justice for the past thirty years. In the meantime, Helen Gandy, the model to which Gladys Miller (and every other Bureau secretary) aspired, guarded the director’s outer vestibule; once past her slight but formidable presence, visitors entered a short hallway made cramped by a double colonnade of fireproof black filing cabinets. This was “the Vault,” the director’s famed—and feared—personal files. Though there were any number of more secure locations the Vault could have been located, the director insisted the cabinets be left here for all to pass through as their made their way to his sanctum sanctorum. Ten black metal boxes, five on each side. Yet the material they contained—compromising information on Hollywood stars, leading journalists and politicians, not to mention every president since Calvin Coolidge, who’d appointed Hoover head of the (not-yet-Federal) Bureau of Investigation all the way back in 1924—was enough to have earned their owner a forty-year sinecure as the nation’s Top Cop.
Or so it was said. Upon Hoover’s death in 1972—though he spent forty-eight years running the Bureau, he died two years before the building that bore his name was completed—Helen Gandy and Clyde Tolson, the associate director and Hoover’s closest confidante, destroyed most of its contents, and, like the Ark of the Covenant, whatever charms and totems it guarded passed into myth. Certainly BC had never seen the cabinets open, nor had anyone he knew. Although a mountain of circumstantial evidence pointed to their reality, still, the young agent had never been able to shake a sneaking suspicion that the files were as devoid of real data as those lists Joe McCarthy waved around on the Senate floor a few years ago, and every time he walked through the narrow corridor he had to put his hands in his pockets to keep from banging on the cabinets to find out if they were hollow.
Beyond the Vault lay the director’s imposing yet somehow provisional-looking private office. Double doors opened onto bare ivory walls and beige carpeting into which the logo of the Bureau had been woven. The far corners were guarded by eagle-capped poles sporting gold-fringed flags of the United States and the Bureau; between the flags were two windows looking out on Constitution Avenue and the back of the National Museum of Natural History, and between the windows sat the director’s modestly sized desk. Over the desk hung a picture of the president of the United States of America. Though John Kennedy had been in office for two and a half years, a large pale outline still framed his rather skimpy-looking portrait, as if to say that the war hero so popular with the younger generation had a long way to go to fill the void left by the general who masterminded the Normandy invasion and defeated Adolf Hitler.
Needless to say, BC had no idea that Melchior was thinking almost exactly the same thing ten miles away in Langley.
Beneath the haloed portrait, a man sat squinting at a stack of pages through a pair of black-rimmed reading glasses. His thinning hair was combed flat against his skull, and his pale, almost neckless face spilled over a nondescript gray suit like foam spewing from the tip of a science-project volcano. Four decades in office had erased any vestige of an inner self from J. Edgar Hoover, until only the public servant remained. He had secrets, of course—secrets always came with power, as evidenced by the gauntlet of filing cabinets—and the director’s were rumored to be as scandalous as anyone’s. But that’s not the same as saying he had an inner life. The Bureau had replaced Hoover’s blood with paper and his imagination with indexes, engulfing his once-lean features in a gelatinous form that seemed held together by the buttons of his suit and the knot of his tie. His eyes blinked out of two folds of skin like myopic camera shutters. His voice was as rapid and impersonal as clacking typewriter keys. He glanced up when BC entered the room, then returned his attention to the stack of pages before him—field reports by the look of them, which he was marking up with the earnest concentration of a second-grade teacher.
“Didn’t your mother teach you not to walk into a room with your hands in your pockets, Agent Querrey?”
BC pulled his hands from his pants. The lead of Hoover’s pencil crossed out lines with a faint s
queak that made the agent think of a termite burrowing through a wall. “Tell me, Agent Querrey,” the director said after a long moment, “have you ever heard of a psychologist by the name of Timothy Leary?”
The name rang a bell, but BC couldn’t place it. “No, sir.”
“Until very recently, Dr. Leary was associated with Harvard University.” Hoover’s voice was slightly vexed, as if he expected Bureau agents to know the faculty of every major American institute of higher learning, or at least those of the Ivy League. Or who knows, maybe it was just the report in front of him. He touched his pencil lead to the tip of his tongue, drew a line through six or seven words, then continued speaking. “Dr. Leary left Harvard at the beginning of the year, and, after a brief sojourn in Mexico, has now established some type of ‘experimental-community’-cum-‘research-center’ outside the town of Millbrook, New York.”
BC could hear the echo of beatnik mumbo jumbo in a term like “experimental community,” but he wasn’t sure how such activities merited the attention of the Bureau. Of course, he rarely understood why many of the groups he investigated merited the Bureau’s attention, so that wasn’t saying much. It wasn’t his job to know, only to do.
“The express purpose of this research center,” the director was saying, “is the investigation of an extremely powerful ‘psychoto-mimetic’ chemical compound called lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD for short. The Bureau has, of course, been aware of LSD for some time. Allen Ginsberg and other malcontents of his ilk have been extolling its virtues for some time. It is manufactured by Sandoz Laboratories, a pharmaceuticals company based in Switzerland. For the past several years, Sandoz has graciously allowed us to track not only its sales in the United States, but also its export to other countries as well. Just over a year ago, however, we noticed a discrepancy between the amount of LSD Sandoz manufactures and the amount they purport to sell. Initially we feared the company was concealing shipments to the Soviet Union or one of its Eastern Bloc satellites, but with a little digging we were able to discover that the missing quantity had in fact been acquired by Dulles’s boys over at Langley—McCone’s boys, I should probably say—although I think we all know where their loyalties lie. Ac-cum-mu-late.”