by Carson, Tom
Just as I got done outlining the qualities most needed in a perfect Gillie stooge, Roy charged, back into my office. Seeing the screen, he stopped in his tracks. As agitated as he was, he burst out laughing.
“You’re a sick bastard, you know that, Prof?” he said. “But it could work. Fuck everything! Desperate times call for desperate measures.”
“Roy, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.
“Come look.”
Dropping the grease pencil and scrambling to my feet, I stepped back and saw the same thing he had. I was startled, but any half-bright Gillie could probably guess what it was. Showing through my outline, the screen flickered with random images, in bright and somehow soothing colors.
Unwittingly, I had drawn the face of Ronald Reagan.
Beside me, Roy shook his head admiringly. “I wish FDR could have seen this,” he said. “It would give him the laugh of his life.”
“FDR?” I said. “Why FDR?”
His eyes widened. “You don’t know?”
“Don’t know what?”
Wonderingly, he walked to my desk, and picked up Harry Truman’s copy of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Along with a plaque that read “The Buck Stops Here,” its upper and lower rims incised with toothmarks, I kept the book in my office, as any man who has gone on to accomplish much might preserve a favorite memento of where it all began—say, a long-dried husk of coconut shell carved with
the message NATIVE KNOWS POSIT HE CAN PILOT 11 ALIVE NEED SMALL BOAT KENNEDY, or some such thing.
“We always thought that’s why you faked his handwriting,” Roy said as he flipped the book open, to the front flyleaf first and then the back one. Putting it down, he shook his head: “Well, I’ll be damned.”
“He was in the know?” I asked.
“In the know? He was the know.” Roy swept his hand around my office walls, and by implication our whole sub-aquatic lair. “Jesus Christ,” he said, staring at me, “who do you think built this joint? It tickled the ass off him that the island was named for his cousin. Back in Teddy’s day, we were working out of a broom closet in Union Station, and I should know: I was born in it. Anyway, my predecessor found me there in a brass spittoon, on January 1,1900.”
“But what about the Four Freedoms speech, and all the rest of that"—it had just sunk in-”hogwash?”
“Oh, come on—forget the crap he told the Gillies,” Roy said. “The day he gave me my job, all he told me was two words.”
“What were they?” I asked, and Roy smiled.
“ ‘Think big,’ “he said, tilting his head back and clenching an imaginary cigarette holder in his teeth.
As the grooming of Ronald Reagan for the presidency got underway in earnest, our long-range future was assured. But we still had Watergate to get through, and that was no easy chore. As the months went by and the disaster spread like a living Rorschach blot across the calendar, Hank Kissinger grew increasingly rattled. These days, he wasn’t even sure if Nixon’s original decision to hire him had been all that unwitting, as his shaken voice reported over my speakerphone one day. In the Oval Office, he’d had a terrifying encounter with our drunken, baleful Gillie president, who had glared redly at him, eyes glowing like an animal’s at bay, and midway through a lunatically erudite tour d’horizon of the foreign-policy situation frightened poor Hank out of his wits by suddenly snarling Tell me about the fish, Henry. Tell me about the fucking fish. In the fucking Potomac, under Roosevelt Island. I know that you could get me down there. I know you bastards could have saved me if you’d wanted to
“The hell with it,” Roy said one afternoon late in the summer of 1973, as the Ervin Committee hearings silently flickered through Ronald Reagan’s as yet unerased outline on my office television set. “Let’s shut down for a while. Oh, we can keep a skeleton staff down here for the can’t-wait stuff—holding Boeing’s hand, keeping Chrysler in business, all that jazz. But I’m putting Two-Fisted U.S. Adventures on hold, and the rest of us might as well go on sabbatical until this whole ruckus fades. We’re just lucky that you can always count on the Gillies to forget whatever horrible shit they’ve just found out about how this country really works one or two elections later. And call it-”
“Optimism,” I said, having heard this lecture before. “But where will you go?” I asked. “What’11 you do, Roy?”
“Frankly, Prof, I don’t give a damn,” he said. “But the prediction computer in Quonset Two has spat out something about a place called Studio 54 that’s due to open any day now. It sounds like it might be worth my while to check out. And as for you, Prof,” he winked, well aware of Priap’s charitable endeavors, “there’s a lot more cripples and burn victims up top than we could ever teach to swim their way down here.”
The main portal to our sub-aquatic lair opened onto a grove of beech trees on the island above us, from which we could row to either the District or Virginia banks of the Potomac after dark. For my own sorties, however, I had come to prefer the emergency exit located at the river’s bottom, from which, trailing air bubbles, one rose through murk and sludge whose slither on my own ripe skin I found peculiarly invigorating. As one simply bobbed up like a black dot in the current, without any indication of where one had come from, this could also be done in daylight without compromising the secret of Roosevelt Island. I chose to begin my sabbatical by this route.
I broke the surface, gasping and spouting water—and looking, I imagine, rather drolly reminiscent of one of those mythical creatures who decorate the unknown in maps made by medieval mariners. To my north, on the Washington side of the Potomac, loomed a spectacularly ugly building, its ameoba contours adorned with serrated balconies that resembled stacked dentures. As this was the Watergate itself, and the associations thereby conjured up struck me as on the painful side, I decided with a shudder to strike for Virginia, and turned to swim toward Arlington.
Just past the riverbank, intermittent automobile traffic slid by. Along the skyline in the background loomed Rosslyn’s bulky apartment complexes, whose construction had actually been one of our own minor projects; Roy had wanted to find out if Gillies could get along without any prettiness in their lives whatsoever, and decided that the experiment might as well be a local one. In between the breezy traffic and the ugly buildings, a half-dozen uniformed men—looking gaunt, grim, and impossibly larger than life—were erecting a fluttering Stars and Stripes.
After a moment, I realized that I had reached shore directly in front of the Marine Corps Memorial, with its statue based on Joe Rosenthal’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of the flag raising on Iwo Jima.
Tousled hair dripping, I scrambled up the riverbank and set off. Two miles away was the secret cache where we sub-aquatics stored our spare clothes, credit cards and money, along with the keys to a dozen Ford Pintos parked in our secret garage nearby, all of which were rigged to explode the instant we were compromised. Soon enough, I had left the barracks of Fort Myer behind, and was moving through a series of quiet streets and red-brick residential warrens now sprinkled, as Arlington had been since at least 1941, with government families temporarily remanded back to the United States from the fathers’ various outposts in our vast superpower diaspora: Foreign Service familes, Pentagon families, CIA families, and so on.
Eventually, I spotted the advertising billboard I was looking for. Our secret cache was directly beneath it. On my previous forays into Arlington, I had never particularly noticed the building that stood across the street; but I did now, and smiled. All in all, I found myself reflecting, this ad must be a fairly surreal thing for the relatives of grievously ill, perhaps dead or dying patients to see every time they came out of a hospital. It showed a clock with twelve hands, all human and clutching coffee cups.
“There’s Always Time for Some More Maxwell House!” it said.
Within a day, I had rented an apartment and offered the Arlington County school board my services as a teacher. They accepted with as
much abject gratitude as if I’d volunteered to throw Good King Priap’s services into the bargain, for the expertly forged credentials and testimonials I had brought with me from Roosevelt Island, tugging them in a waterproof bag whose strap I held in my teeth, were as glowing as plausibility allowed.
What with one thing and another, though, I found myself teaching not science but modern American history—the same subject that my all but forgotten acquaintance back in Rochester, Minnesota, had talked about teaching before I steered him to intelligence work, although I’m frankly bewildered as to why that long-ago chat in a railroad-station coffee shop should suddenly pop into my mind in this context. Needless to say, it often felt distinctly peculiar to be guiding slack-faced, witless teenagers through a tale in so many of whose chapters I myself had played such a singular though sotto voce role. Yet for a man of my capacities, obviously, it would have been child’s play to instruct adolescents in any topic under the sun; as I learned when one of them looked at me with green eyes.
By Priap’s exacting standards, of course, Sue was no fit object of erotic interest. She had light brown hair that flowed in two waves from a central part on her high forehead, an amused and full-lipped mouth, a lanky midriff often left bare by the nubbly halter tops in favor with many girls her age that long-gone year of white-wine skies and Nixon’s fall, and a rump that bobbed like an apple above her long legs inside the bell-bottomed hip-huggers in which I remember her most vividly. A hue of faintly roseate alabaster, her skin always had the faint, fresh, faintly moist smell of a just uncovered tuber; and her eyes’ twin pools of dilute green light were bright, eager, tender, mocking, and observant all at once.
In short, I found her utterly grotesque, and indeed it was one of her classmates whom I’d initially marked down as the ideal recipient of Priap’s generosity. This was one Sarah Wong, who belonged to a special subset of her generation whose arrival at sexual maturity I had awaited with half-mad impatience. At long last, though, the time had come, and I saw that Sarah and her kind were finally of an age to go half mad themselves—with gratitude, once Priap welcomed them into his kingdom.
What was she? Why, a thalidomide baby, of course.
Ironically enough, it was an unforeseen consequence of that very condition that cheated me of Sarah—or rather, cheated her of me. The curriculum I had been given by the Arlington County school board, which I was at no liberty to amend, devoted a week to studying the impact on America of twentieth-century immigration. To a son of the old Yankee stock—and I’m sure I speak for us all—this couldn’t help but seem akin to telling the story of a champion greyhound via a minute examination of the fleas along for the ride. Yet there it was in the curriculum, and here was I in the school.
Having volunteered to give a presentation—in my brief and thus far much too remote experience of her, this was a first—Sarah read a paper about one of the earliest of her relatives to have migrated here from China, a chauffeur who had experienced a week of pure terror when a giddy heiress he was driving from hither to yon, and presumably back to hither afterward, mistook him for a second cousin who had been deported on a trumped-up (or so Sarah claimed) charge some months earlier. As her somewhat squeaky warble brought the tedious tale to an end, I made a mental note to reproach her for having depended on an unreliable family anecdote instead of hitting the books; in fact, I realized an instant later, this might be my excuse to tell her to speak to me after class, in a stern voice masking Priap’s kingly glow. Did I have any Laggilin with me? I did. But then Sarah spoke this fateful sentence:
“You see—back then, white people thought that we all looked alike.”
Dead silence fell. While I might have been some years out of high school myself, I hadn’t forgotten my youth’s classroom highjinks so far as to misread the thought in every suddenly bulging eye, the taboo but irresistible joke now alternately struggling for expression and suppression on twenty-odd clamped pairs of lips; in short, the twenty-odd mute variants on Oh, well, Sarah—at least that’s not true now that had begun to writhe on all but one or two of the faces before me as the silence crashed and boomed like waves.
After five or ten seconds, the unspoken retort finally grew so loud that Sarah herself heard it, and fled the room with a sharp if squeaky cry—followed, in a sudden lithe detachment of hip-huggers from chair and alabaster arms from desk, by Sue. Who didn’t return until the following day, glaring at her nonplussed fellow students with a hatred more properly reserved for someone like the apostate Robert Oppenheimer. As for Sarah, despite my several requests to the principal’s office to remind her parents of their obligations, she never returned at all—and so never knew the unique joy that might have been hers, more than making up for the small prick of one of adolescence’s inevitable petty embarrassments as she babbled and flippered her stunned gratitude.
“Why,” Sue was to ask me a month later, green eyes blazing, “why didn’t you say anything? My God, you just let her sit there—until the dumbest person in the room, which believe me in that room was saying plenty, would have known what everyone else was thinking. That poor girl!”
“My dear,” I said, “I may teach history, but I try to build confidence. I don’t interrupt my students when they’ve got the floor, and I wasn’t sure if Sarah had finished her presentation. And now, dear Sue,” I said, pushing her head down my chest, “I think it’s time you started yours again.”
Dear Sue. For a man such as myself, to whom being pursued is the natural order of things and wooing the partner’s job, the odd intensity of her abrupt request for citizenship in Priap’s kingdom made agreeing look like a chore less fatiguing than holding her off. At least by my good king’s yardstick, so to speak, it was really all fairly innocuous, and she was a marvelous little baby tigress in bed. For the first and only time in my adult life, I found I didn’t even need to take a Laggilin for my heart condition after a royal audience.
It might have gone on, pleasantly enough, for months more than it did if the predictable unwitting boyfriend, another student in my history class named Gil Somebody-or-Other, hadn’t stumbled across us in mid-preliminary in some woods behind her house one day, thus learning of his Sue’s (well, that’s what he thought) cunning bid for extra credit. At our hasty final meeting, she reported that he had taken the whole business preposterously hard—a fairly pointless prelude to the more pressing information she had sought me out to impart, which was that “we” now had a little problem. No tyro in such matters, I made little Problem exclusively hers again by writing a medium-sized check to a local doctor, of whose services I had previously availed myself more than a few times. No doubt he was surprised to see a girl with the use of all four limbs and no visible disfigurements presenting herself for a change.
I might have brushed off Gil’s resentment of me as even more of a trifle if one of the other teachers hadn’t already mentioned, apropos of something else entirely, that the boy’s father wasn’t only a former Marine but an ex-Agency hand, and a hard man at parent-teacher conferences. Soon, though, my careful inquiries ferreted out the information that Somebody-or-Other Senior, far from being in any condition to bluster into my classroom and beat me up for causing his son’s breakdown, was or had been in intensive care with a terminal case of lung cancer, no doubt a contributing factor to Gil’s addled state. If not the primary one, and perhaps the father should have beaten himself up instead; ha, ha. The boy obviously got over it, though
No I did not you pigfuck bastard shitass fucker
since many years later, idly browsing through a newspaper, I saw my former student’s face staring blurredly up, with a chain smoker’s incomplete smile, from the author’s photo next to a negative review of some inane 1960s television show’s reunion movie—a show, incidentally, whose premise struck me as oddly familiar, although I could no longer place precisely why. In any case, that’s how I learned that the wan high-schooler I’d cuckolded by letting Priap go a-cherry-picking where he was too unnerved to tread had gone on to becom
e a pop-music and television critic, which I must say sounds to me like a remarkably silly profession, as most do compared to my own. But no doubt it’s a lucrative one.
As for dear Sue, I have no idea what became of her, not to mention a most peculiar sensation of having company in my ignorance. But all in all, it had been an interesting detour on the royal road—to the point of inducing me to apply my old genius for problem-solving in a new arena by writing a brief treatise on love shortly before my return to Roosevelt Island, which took place far earlier than I had expected. As the treatise has been pressed inside my wallet ever since the day that, taking mere seconds to collect my thoughts, I tossed it off on a few blank sheets of two-ply toilet paper with a fmger continually dipped and redipped in a freshly stirred mixture of cold tap water and my own dung, I’m not even sure it’s all that legible. But let me fish it out now anyway.
On Love
By Professor X
Premise: Let us first postulate the existence of an ideal Object of Affection (or OAf for short). As he is a perfect OAf all those drawn to him can reasonably be defined as Undeserving Ones (U1). Since this would logically include the entire Population of the Planet (PP), the number of U1, or simply U, to whom this OAf can grant his sexual favors is theoretically unlimited (U1/y). As he is a virile OAf let us also assume that he would be happy to steep himself in PP every day.
Problem: In practice, what we shall call the Interference of Life (INT—L) has prevented the OAf from achieving his goal (G) of granting his favors to Ui/y. He is surrounded by PP on all sides, yet as a result of other people’s INT-L, if not his own, this particular G has so far eluded him. Solution: Admittedly shifting our paradigm somewhat, let us further postulate that this particular OAf is also a Brilliant Scientist (BS). Therefore, it should be child’s play for him to conceive a Means of Execution (ME) that keeps INT-L to an absolute minimum if not causing it to disappear entirely