by Chase Novak
“People are looking for me,” Keswick says in an unstable whisper.
“What people, Dennis?”
“Never mind. Private business.”
Cal thinks for a moment, and suddenly he sees a path that might be beneficial—it might be a perfect solution: The experiments can go forward with an increased chance of success, and Dennis can have his stupid money. (And Dennis, Cal is quite certain, is a child when it comes to finance; Borman and Davis has a net worth nearing a trillion, and this idiot thinks five thousand dollars is a fortune.)
“How’d you like to make five thousand dollars all in one shot, Dennis? Would that be helpful to you?”
“Every little bit helps, Cal.” Dennis feels a stirring within, unpleasant. Complaining and feeling poorly treated are common for him, and they are oddly relaxing in their familiarity. Being offered something, however, destabilizes him. Being drawn into a confidence. Being offered a deal. He worries about being tricked and worries he will agree on a price that he will look back on with regret. “What do you have in mind?”
“Do you have your guidebook with you, Dennis?”
“Aye, laddie, you mean me Bible, then, don’tcha now?” He says this with his cartoonish approximation of an old Irish priest—it was a routine he used to do to amuse his mother when she went into one of her moods. The book of photographs is on his lap and he gives it a thump.
“Okay, good. Here’s who we need. I’m sure they are in there.”
Dennis opens his book and looks at Rogers expectantly.
“We’d like to take a look at those twins. Sired by Alex Twisden, yes? And the dam was Leslie Kramer, who made our life quite difficult by her insane attacks on our Slovenian friend. You have them in there, I assume.”
Dennis places the open book in front of Rogers. There are two pages of their photos: Alice and Adam in their school uniforms taken five years ago; a grainy shot of Alice getting off a school bus, taken two years ago, while she was in foster care in Cold Spring, New York; Adam in a Cub Scout uniform, his hair wet-combed, a frightened, beseeching smile on his face; and three pictures of the house on Sixty-Ninth Street, of the surveillance variety, showing the front, back, and cellar doors.
“Well, that’s your five thousand dollars, Dennis.”
“So you really think these two might have the right balance? Is that the plan? Get in there, have a chance to test them on an ongoing basis so we can replicate the exact mixture of dominant human strain and the recessive tincture of the nonhuman?”
“Dennis. Take it easy. Even a lot of the experienced chemists are struggling to keep up with this. Just do your job, okay? This isn’t an audition. We need you to get those two and bring them in. Do you think you can handle this?”
“Handle it? Why wouldn’t I be able to handle it? I’ve handled everything else, haven’t I?”
“You’ve been terrific, Dennis. No complaints here.”
“You said I have a much higher capture rate than anyone else working here.”
“Did I? I actually don’t remember saying that.”
“Oh, you said it. You definitely said that.”
“Well,” Rogers says. “It doesn’t matter. You’re a valued member of the team, that’s what counts.”
“So, five thousand dollars,” Dennis says.
“That’s right. I’ve got the authorization.”
Dennis sits back in his chair, crosses his legs. In his view, this is going exactly as he wants it to.
“And that’s ten for them both,” he says.
Rogers is silent. In truth, he has been authorized to pay twice this, but he feels it will be safer if this idiot believes he has won some great battle for his measly 10K.
“I don’t know, Dennis…” Rogers says, as if worried, nervous.
“It’s what you said.”
“You keep on telling me I said things I know I did not say.”
“Well, you said. And even if you didn’t—it’s what I want. It’s what I deserve. And I’ll tell you another thing. We’re going to go back, you and me, and see the lab. All I see of this place is the loading dock, shipping and receiving, one hallway, and your office. I’m tired of being treated as less-than.”
“Less-than? Are you in psychotherapy?”
“No way.”
“So, Dennis. You want to see the lab.”
“Yes. I bring those little beasts to you. I want to see what you do with them. I’m not a glorified dogcatcher, you know. I want to understand what you’re doing with all this flesh I’m throwing at you.”
“You want a lot of things, don’t you, Dennis. You want money, you want access. My grandmother used to say this thing: You’ve got a handful of gimme and a mouthful of much obliged.”
“A man does what a man must do, Cal.”
“All right. I’ll tell you what. I’m going to okay a double payment on those twins. Bring them in, unbruised, preferably not flailing around and half crazed—the real emotional ones have been hell to work with. Bring them in, and you’ll have your fucking ten K. How’s that? Make you happy? But as to the other thing—bringing you back so you can get a look at our facilities, see those little fuckers being put through their trials? That’s not going to happen.”
“Why not? Why can’t I see?”
“Dennis, my friend. You don’t want to see. If you had a look, you might not be able to do your job. Trust me on this. You do not want to see.”
“How bad can it be?”
Rogers’s answer is a long, silent stare.
“Are you killing them?”
Silence.
“What do you do with them when the trials are over?”
“Dennis…”
“All right. That’s it. Right now, you need to tell me. What are you guys doing to them?” Dennis asks. A wave of queasiness breaks within him, a weak, dirty tide of misgivings.
“What did you do that you need money so badly all of a sudden?” Rogers counters. “You’re getting ready to leave town too. Aren’t you? What did you do? I need to know if it will affect our company, if we have anything to worry about.”
“If I tell you, will you tell me what you’re doing to those kids?”
Rogers answers with an after-you gesture.
“I accidentally hurt a woman.”
Rogers’s blood quickens. This will have to be dealt with. “What woman?”
“A woman. A prostitute.”
“Hurt her how?”
“Badly.”
“How badly?”
“Very badly.”
“Is she dead?”
“Now that you mention it.”
“Oh…”
“Now take me to see.”
“I can’t do that, Dennis. I’m not authorized.”
“But we made a deal.”
“You made a deal. I didn’t say anything.” He sees that Dennis is about to object and he raises a hand, a cop stopping traffic while a wreck is cleared off the road. “My advice—and I do think you should take it—is to do your job, bring us those twins, take your money, and get as far away from here as possible. There’s a lot at stake here, Dennis. Trillions of dollars. You and I are old friends, of course, but believe me, the people who run this thing—they don’t screw around. If they think you’ve done anything to bring undue attention to our operations, they will…” He rubs his hands together and opens them up, like a birthday-party magician who has just made a dime disappear.
Cynthia knows this much. Wherever those kids have taken off to—with that awful Rodolfo, to be sure—they are going to be in danger. Whatever aspect of their nature prevails, they are kids, and kids court danger. They are magnets for oddballs, marginal types, creeps. Kids need to be watched. Protected. They could end up smoking pot. Shoplifting. And this is the best-case scenario. The very best case. Alice is just restless and angry enough to be lured into having sex—which (and this is another certainty of Cynthia’s) she is in no way ready for. And then it occurs to her: Underage sex is also a best-case s
cenario. In fact, anything short of replicating the vicious, uncontrollable behavior of their biological parents would have to constitute a best-case scenario.
She waits on the ground floor. As soon as the door opens—when and if—she will see them, and she will grab them. They will be punished. There is no way around that. But how do you punish children who ran for their lives because they believed the people who gave birth to them and were pledged by all the laws of nature to nurture and protect them were, instead, planning to eat them? How do you punish children whose father’s body burst like a balloon full of blood when he was plowed into by a bus? How do you say to children, “Okay, you’re grounded,” when their own mother was ground to a spray of blood and bone by the implacable, insatiable whirling turbine of a jet engine?
Okay, no punishment, then. So? What are the magic words to ensure that they will come home and stay home? Is she somehow, Cynthia wonders, not communicating to them how loved they are? What are the magic words that will make them trust her? What are the magic words that will keep them off the streets, out of the park, not on the run, not sprinting into God knows what kind of danger? Will someone please tell her: What are the magic words?
The sun has come up. It is already hot in the city and it is only eight o’clock. She turns on the central air-conditioning; its frigid whisper is no match for the gnawing of the rats. She fishes for the TV’s remote, finds it in its familiar resting spot between the middle cushions of the sofa, and turns on the too-big Toshiba. She doesn’t care what channel comes up; she only wants something to compete with and, if possible, mask the infernal nyyahh-nyyahh of the rodents’ auto-dentistry. She’d gotten the big TV for the kids, thinking, what child doesn’t love a large television? But they are indifferent to it.
Those exterminators! What kind of city is this? As the TV comes on, Cynthia grabs for the phone. By now, she knows by heart the numbers of three separate exterminators. She calls the one that has been the most apologetic. Better to have a bit of blue sky blown up her behind than be overtly insulted.
As she waits for her call to be answered, she sees a familiar face on the TV. It’s that glowing little boy the twins had with them. Dylan! He is standing in front of a beautiful old mansion, flanked by Mayor Morris and his wife. The words Happy Ending, Mayor’s Son Found, Little Dylan Safe and Sound march across the bottom of the screen.
Cynthia aims the remote at the set, turns up the volume.
“We are a family reunited,” Mayor Morris is saying. He looks stern, sleepless. It’s odd to see him without his signature outfit: the blue blazer, white shirt, shiny necktie. Here he is without a jacket, and the top button of his shirt has not been fastened. At first, Cynthia thinks he has taken foppishness to a whole new level and is wearing an ascot. But she realizes a moment later that it is not an ascot but body hair, rising like thick smoke.
At the same time, the exterminator’s voice mail has been activated and she is instructed to leave a message and assured that someone will call her back “just as soon as possible.”
“As soon as possible isn’t going to do it, guys,” Cynthia says. “I am living with a fuck-ton of rats!” She leaves her numbers once again and emphatically breaks the connection, though pressing an Off button makes her long for the days when you could slam a receiver down into its cradle and really let your feelings be known.
“Thanks to the efforts of the entire NYPD,” the mayor is saying, “and in particular the tireless work done by our stalwart Central Park Precinct, the story of this one New York City family has an extraordinarily happy ending.” He looks down at Dylan—who is pulling faces at the phalanx of cameras—and pats his head.
Did I imagine that? Cynthia wonders, because to her exhausted eyes, it looked as if the mayor’s hand was trembling as he performed the paternal pat for the media.
Now one of the newscasters is on-screen, a lovely woman with a strident tone to her voice. She looks to be about twenty-five, but her manner is that of a woman who has been cheated and deceived and has made a personal promise to be ever vigilant from that day forward.
“On the heels of Dylan Morris’s rescue and return to Gracie Mansion, the questions surrounding his disappearance continue to circle Mayor Morris and his closest advisers. There is no doubt that the very real human drama accompanying Dylan’s disappearance—indeed, the disappearance of any child in this great city—is a riveting event that plays on the emotions of anyone who has been a parent or a child; in other words, every single human being not terminally hard of heart. Nevertheless, speculations as to what really happened the night of Dylan Morris’s disappearance continue to surround the event, and the sudden, somewhat puzzling nature of his return will do little to quiet those who say, for instance, that the boy was in a rehab of some sort, or that the entire incident was staged as a way of bolstering Morris’s flat polling numbers as he approaches reelection, or that Dylan was not abducted or held against his will but was a runaway. And those who hold with the runaway theory are quick to ask the question: From what was Dylan fleeing?
“Meanwhile, the fabled Central Park Precinct, which was, by all reports, spearheading the search for little Dylan, has been remarkably quiet about the search and his so-called rescue. All we could get from a precinct spokeswoman was the following statement: ‘The New York Police Department continues in its commitment to make our Central Park safe and fun for all the people of New York, as well as the millions of visitors to our city. To best further that aim, we are closing the park in order to deal with security risks and make the park a place where all New Yorkers can go without worry. I won’t be taking questions at this time. If you see something, say something. And be safe. Thank you.’ ”
With Dylan no longer on the streets with them, there is nothing to prevent or forestall open season on the brood.
Rodolfo knows it’s time to move—not just for him, and not just for the few select friends he has with him on Riverside Drive, but for each and every one of the wild boys and girls. Over the past few years, they have been managing to live safely and even thrive on the outskirts of the city’s life. They have even managed to make money. But now it’s over. This much he knows. And he has a responsibility, not only to his own genes, but to all of them. Even the ones who he knows grouse about him and shoot him the bird when his back is turned, even the ones who have openly challenged his authority—they need him, and their safety is his sacred duty.
He has sent out the word. The place where all the packs have been gathering—the Diana Ross Playground—is no longer safe. It is out of the question. And as for the wild ones living around Tompkins Square Park, the message is the same—get out. City Hall Park, Washington Square Park, Inwood Hill, and Van Cortlandt—begone, begone, begone, begone. Of late there has been a migration to Brooklyn’s Prospect Park—easier hunting, fewer hassles—but Prospect Park is no longer safe, nor is Fort Greene.
“We’s scatter now,” Rodolfo says. He is getting everything valuable out of the apartment, starting with thousands upon thousands of dollars in cash and then going on to enough vials of Zoom to plunge a hospice into an orgiastic frenzy.
Alice is following him as he winds through the apartment. She holds a striped-green-and-yellow laundry sack wide open and he drops the money into it. There is money under cushions, behind books, in the back of the closet, in the inside pockets of old overcoats. After the cash is collected, the fridge is emptied of product—for this part of the operation, Rodolfo has Adam’s assistance; he holds a duffel bag lined with towels, to keep the vials safe in transport.
“What are you going to do with all this?” Adam says, peering into the bag. A strange coppery smell rises from it. A part of him is repelled by it, but he is also intrigued.
Rodolfo shrugs. “We’s never know,” he says. “It’s money. Us’s making a whole new life, far away, brother. We’s got a hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars. Maybe it’s enough, maybe not. Maybe us’s needing a little top-off. What do we do? Zoom. Oldies who want to be young,
they going to be there too.”
“Are we going to meet here?” Alice asks. She is on one side of Rodolfo, Adam is on the other. They walk the apartment’s long central corridor to the front room, where Boy-Boy, Bump, Suzie, Captain Blood, Lola, and Little Man have been making calls, letting everybody know that today’s meeting is important—the most important they have ever had.
“We’s going to Pelham Bay Park,” Rodolfo says. “Separate ways. Cho-cho número seis.” He snaps his fingers, grins. He is trying to make the best of it. Optimism has always been his style, personally and administratively. Positive reinforcement is how he and his kind best learn. Dark looks, worried body language—it all does more harm than good.
“What about Polly?” Alice asks.
She and Rodolfo lock eyes for a long moment until, finally, he shakes his head sadly.
A couple of the crew make the run to Broadway and come back with pizzas and bottles of Mountain Dew. Before setting out for Pelham Bay, they all gather in the front room for a final meal together. It does not look particularly ceremonial—some sit, some stand; they are eating right out of the boxes and drinking straight from the bottles. But the mood is somber, final, and apprehensive. Boy-Boy has his arm around Lola, and Bump gazes at Rodolfo with adoration, as if the wiry sixteen-year-old were a vision. The infants have been propped up on the sofa, and they play languidly with one another, a barely coordinated tangle of arms, legs, and wings.
“Tell us’s what me’s said, okay?” Rodolfo whispers to Alice. He purses his lips, shakes his head, letting her know that he doesn’t trust himself to keep his emotions in check were he to speak to them all.
“Okay,” Alice says. She notices Adam looking questioningly at her, but she turns her eyes away from his.
“Rodolfo wants us to take the number six train uptown. The stop says Pelham Bay Park. Go up the stairs where it says Bruckner Street.”
“Bruckner Boulevard,” Rodolfo says.
“Right. Bruckner Boulevard.” Alice takes a deep breath. A kind of happiness goes through her. It feels as if she has just quickly drunk a cup of warm tea. She feels the rush of it in her throat, her stomach, her arms, hands, legs, feet. She wonders: Is this the thing you hear about? Is this love?