“It’s cheerful,” Dane said politely.
“I want you to feel at home. But no funny business.”
“Funny business?”
“No women. And no self-abuse.”
“Oh. Don’t worry…”
“I have good reason to worry. Yes, I do. You see, I had a visitor who thought it was fine to play with himself in the bathroom. I turned him in. And you know what? He was wanted in Vermont for sexually abusing a 90-year-old woman. Can you imagine? That could have been me!” She paused for Dane’s reply.
“Not you! You’re too young!” Dane replied to avoid offense.
“If I had my say, he would have fried in an electric chair until his hair sizzled and his eyeballs popped like blood-soaked corks. That’s all he’s good for in my book. But they extradited him.”
“Unbelievable! Well, that’s our system,” Dane said, hoping to abridge the discussion.
The woman clobbered the floor with her cane. “There’s a brass recital at the church, if you like that sort of thing…And if you’re hungry, Chuck’s Chowder Hut makes chowder the way I like it—piping hot.”
“Thanks. Sounds perfect.”
“Not perfect. But good. I like my soup hot and my cider cold. I have no use for tepid.” She squinted. “You know what else I like hot?”
“No, I have no idea.”
“Guess.”
“I don’t want to presume.”
“Go on. Guess!” the woman growled, her myopic eyes flaring like nuclear events.
“Oh, okay. Umm. Oyster stew?”
“No. Try again.”
“Uh, this is hard. Lobster bisque?”
“No! Try again.”
The woman looked so eager that Dane felt an enormous pressure to get the right answer.
“Umm, hot toddy?”
“No! A hot bath! Haha! I was sure you’d get that.”
“You’re full of surprises.”
She smiled beatifically.
“Well, run along. The night is younger than I am. Ha! Ha!”
When she left, Dane threw himself on his bed to be released from the stiffness of two days of bus travel. Instead, he sank into the Venus Man-Trap mattress and was swallowed alive.
He studied the wallpaper as if were an old textbook and made out the design—alternating elephants and sunflowers—then struggled out of the bed with his sore back to make the recital.
The church sanctuary had the musty funk of rectitude. The red carpet was threadbare in spots and the white walls were more appropriate to a clinic. Red velvet pads on the wooden benches had worn away in circular buttock depressions. Dane hoped the brass would blow away his depression, but the polyphonic fanfares sounded like musical preludes to an execution.
He left during intermission and meandered down the dark commercial streets of Matthias before returning to the boarding house. Dane ascended the arthritic porch stairs and opened the heavy, belligerent door of the lodging house, dark but for the perpetual office light. He padded down the hallway when a voice barked from behind.
“Who are you?”
“I’m your guest. From faraway?”
His hostess squinted and lurched at him with her cane.
“Who are you?”
“Your guest!”
The cane cracked down across his shoulders. Instinctively, he snared the cane in his hands, while the proprietress kicked and screamed, “Intruder! No one violates my peaceful home!” She flailed at Dane before a heavy weight caved in on him, belonging to another guest or handyman.
The police sorted it out. They asked if he needed medical attention.
Dane declined help despite bruised ribs and a swollen face. He wanted as little fuss and documentation as possible. His hostess gave him ice, aspirin and piping hot chowder, served with profuse apologies.
“Ever since we were robbed 22 years ago I have been a different person. I used to be trusting. I was gracious. No more!” Her face quivered and contracted. Her large body quivered. Sobs and tears poured out of it like a wrung sponge. When she stopped, she wiped her face with her sleeve.
“Can I make you something? How about a nice mayonnaise and relish sandwich?”
Dane laughed through his painful ribs. He felt safe because his hostess owed him for the beating. According to his personal sense of justice, Dane believed his physical punishment in Maine was a sign that his New York trouble might be over; the landlady’s assault was a karmic down payment on his crime.
“Can I get change to make a long distance call?” Dane asked. His cell battery had discharged and he wanted to talk to Becky and Iris.
The woman opened a drawer to a trove of nickels, dimes and quarters. With ten dollars in nickels and dimes, he called from a payphone.
“Did anybody call?” he asked Becky.
“No.”
“Anybody come?”
“No.”
For Dane, such a simple question provided a respite but failed to solve the underlying problem. The police had not come yet, but they would. He had transgressed and must be punished.
While Dane contemplated his fate brewing in New York, his shabby room, with its flabby mattress and revolting wall paper, made him feel like an outcast on the verge of a desperate act. The behavior of his hosts added the kind of local color guaranteed to make visitors homesick. During his second afternoon, he returned to his room after lunch and discovered someone else’s feces in his toilet—a result of poor hospitality or worse plumbing. What did his sheets have in store? He slept on his covers and nearly froze to avoid finding out.
Staying in the room was no worse than leaving it. Dane navigated the dark, decrepit halls and stairs. He often encountered there the cane-wielding proprietor, who glowered at him like he was an escaped convict. However, her maternal feelings were aroused when she heard Dane’s “sniffle.” She referred him to Chuck’s Chowder Hut and gave him a zigzag of directions he could not recall or follow. When Dane asked a passerby the location of Chuck’s, the man smiled at Dane as if he were telling a vintage insider’s joke. “Chuck’s been boarded up for years,” the man said. “The proprietor’s been in a hospital for the criminally insane. He was lucky to get that after what he pulled.” One night after a football game, Chuck spiked his famous chowder with a “date rape” drug and assaulted the high school cheerleading squad.
When the anticipation of great chowder was withdrawn, what was left for Dane in Mathias but insanity? The townsfolk appeared to exist there for the reason Dane lingered—a vain hope of security in its oblivion.
On his third night, Dane was awakened by a flashlight in his face. He shouted.
“I thought I heard you yelling in your sleep. I wanted to be sure you were all right,” his hostess said.
“I shouted because you shined a light in my face,” Dane said.
At that moment, Dane made up his mind to leave Mathias.
He took the next bus to Boston and a train home. He missed Becky and Iris and felt guilty for exposing them to the consequences of his mistakes.
He phoned from the subway station down their street. Iris met him on the plaza near some ping pong tables. He wore sunglasses, a raincoat and a tilted baseball cap.
“Daddy?”
“Iris. I missed you. Just walk ahead and let me in. I’ll walk in the service door and come up through the basement.”
“Daddy, why are you acting so weird?”
“Don’t ask obvious questions,” he replied in a quiet growl that made other commuters turn before they walked up the stairs to the street. “Just walk ahead of me.”
Yes, Dane was home.
Case 7-F
MENTALOSCOPY: AN INVASIVE, HIGH-RISK PROCEDURE
17. THE RECKONING
For weeks Dane woke up in the middle of the night expecting a violent knock on the door. He thought he should wait outside his building to be arrested like Shostakovich the composer did when he believed Stalin’s police were coming for him. But no one came for Dane.
One da
y, the Bacchus buzzer burped. It was mid-morning and Dane expected no deliveries or repairs. He peered out the window at the street below, where a black car was double-parked. When the doorbell sounded more insistently, Dane squinted in the peephole. Two men stood in the hall and looked back at him.
Dane trembled. The dreaded moment had come. Just when he was willing to face the music, the musicians showed up. Clearly, he was tracked down and would finally have to account for what he did to Patricia Holmes in the freight elevator.
“Dane Bacchus? We’d like to ask you a few questions. May we come in?”
He opened the door. Two men in raincoats entered and took seats at their dining table. One man was larger, younger and had a crew cut. The other was short, portly and bald. Becky looked at Dane searchingly. What was this about? He could not face—or tell—her. And then as he looked around the table at the impassive visitors and his stricken wife, words of remorse poured out of him.
“I did not kill that woman. I only threatened her when she falsely accused me of threatening her. Actually she started screaming before I threatened her. The dumpster was not my idea. It was just there!” Dane broke down in sobs.
The men looked at Dane nonplussed. No one spoke.
Dane was now both fearful and confused. His breathing was shallow and his hands were shaking.
“Mr. Bacchus,” the man in the crew cut said. ‘Take a deep breath.”
“I’m trying,” Dane said. “I’m allergic to stress.”
“I’m Agent Dempsey,” the taller man said. “This is Agent Hardman. We’re from Washington. We came to ask you a few questions related to your work as a pharmaceutical copywriter.”
“You’re from Washington? New York dumpsters are outside your jurisdiction?”
“Most of the time,” the bald agent replied. “To be honest, we didn’t understand a thing you just said.”
“Oh, that’s uh, well, I’m sorry,” Dane stammered. “I’m writing a story and I have a problem separating fantasy and reality, right, honey?”
He glanced at Becky, who nodded along with consternation in her eyes. Dane gave her a reassuring smile. If these agents were from Washington, they came on federal business, not on a local matter. The pressure was lifted from Dane for the moment. It was exhilarating to answer questions from Washington because he felt sure he had broken no federal law. He was in a giddy mood.
Dane did not know that Patricia, whom he lured with Chinese take-out and flogged with a cheap wig, awoke in the service elevator dumpster covered in magazines and mu shu chicken. She climbed out of the canvas dumpster and realized an hour had passed. When she told her supervisor she had been assaulted in the service elevator by a tall, transvestite delivery man who once worked for GUN as a freelance writer, he waited for the punch line. When it did not come, he stared at her like she was foaming at the mouth. Patricia laughed and said it was a joke. She knew pursuing the complaint would be a false move. People would say she used drugs and drank. She could not risk police involvement, a blood test and probing questions. She let the incident pass as one more reason to be paranoid.
The federal agents sat at the Bacchus kitchen table, opened briefcases and removed papers. “We came to speak to you about your timesheets at…”
Was Dane being investigated for padding timesheets? His joy that these were not NYPD detectives gave way to fresh panic. “I’m being investigated by the IRS!” he thought. In the hierarchy of situations to be feared, a visit from IRS agents signified top level trouble—and he was in it.
“Gentlemen, if you’re from the IRS, I have to tell you upfront that my billing was always accurate,” Dane pleaded. “They tried to corrupt me. They ordered me to bill my time on the toilet but I wouldn’t do it. You want to know why? Because I don’t spend that much time on the toilet. I do my business and I’m out of there!”
The men looked at Dane incredulously. They neither believed nor cared to hear about his toilet estimate. Overall, the inquiry did not seem to be starting well. The agents looked unconvinced and unhappy with Dane’s performance. Dane knew he had to defend himself but not to the point of obstruction. He wanted these G-men to go away—satisfied. If they left mad, they would be back with a vengeance. He scrambled for something else to say that might please them.
“If you want to see my tax returns, you’re welcome to them. They’re clean, too, in style and content. My wife prepared them. She’s very meticulous. Okay, okay! I’ll admit it. I claimed my printer cartridges as an expense—occasionally. But that was only a few hundred dollars. You know, printers are cheap but they really nail you with the ink. And, oh yeah, I itemized oil changes when I used my car for work. I’ll write you a check—with penalties, if you want.”
Dane reached for his pen and checkbook to show his good faith. He hoped they would be appeased, if not pleased, by his coming clean, but the visitors’ faces remained as hard and impassive as before. Agent Dempsey scratched his short hairs and rubbed the corners of his mouth with his hand. He, in particular, seemed disappointed in Dane, as if he initially had high expectations of him but no longer viewed him as a credible witness—of anything.
The agents closed their briefcases almost in unison.
“Mr. Bacchus, we’re not here to hear about your IRS returns; or about your time on the toilet, or about a woman you may or may not have assaulted and thrown in a dumpster,” Agent Dempsey admitted.
Dane swallowed and tapped his foot but tried to conceal all emotion as they perused his face. Alas, it was too late for that act.
“So wh-wh-wh-y are you here?” Dane stammered.
“Mr. Bacchus. You’ve been padding your timesheet for years…”
Dane’s mouth was opening to protest but before a word could escape, Agent Dempsey interrupted him.
“We’re aware it’s standard industry practice. Just one small scam in a range of criminal activities. Sure, we could make an example of you. You might be convicted—or exonerated. Either way you’d spend your last dollar defending yourself.”
Dane’s body was a burning edifice he wished to flee. Advertising was bringing plague after plague upon him. Becky held his hand.
“We’re not interested in ruining your life, Mr. Bacchus,” Agent Hardman said. “We want you to tell us what you know.”
Little Dane, the tiny, old man in Dane’s soul who reminded Dane of his innermost fears and dreams, now came out of hiding, which suggested the worst was over. These agents had dropped Dane in a deep hole, only to toss him a flashlight. They would not destroy him. Yet, if he failed as an informant, with nothing but inconsequential crap to relate, would they think he was holding out and mete out twice as much vengeance?
“What I know about what?” Dane stammered. “I was just a writer.”
The two men glanced at one another knowingly.
“Mr. Bacchus, in the past year many important drugs have been withdrawn from the market or been given “black box” warnings for harmful side effects,” Agent Dempsey explained. “Others have been proven ineffective. And still others have resulted in multi-million dollar lawsuits and settlements.”
“Yes,” Becky interceded. “It’s in the papers everyday.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” Agent Hardman said and turned to Dane. “Mr. Bacchus, we ran every name associated with pharmaceutical advertising through our computers and your name was associated with more bad, dangerous and discredited drugs than anyone else in the country.”
Every misgiving Dane had in the past ten years crashed down on him. Every warning and adverse events section of every package insert of every drug he ever worked on—each patient who contracted cancer, had fevers, suffered from priapism or bleeding—was on his conscience. They were no longer mere mouse type on onion skin paper. These were people with faces, bodies, dreams and a lot of pain. They suffered and died while he made a decent, middle-class income to send his daughter to day camp and give her piano lessons. How venal he was!
“I didn’t know!” Dane expostulated but they all k
new he did.
Agent Dempsey opened his briefcase, removed a document and pushed it toward Dane. “Does this look familiar?”
“It’s my résumé,” he stammered.
“Why don’t you start at the beginning?”
Dane described his descent into advertising. He explained his aspiration to be a great writer, his struggles, disappointments, poverty; years of teaching and classroom abuse by bored and indifferent students. He recounted his desperate decision to try advertising as a career with little prospect of success and his belief that truth was key to the effective promotion of drugs and devices.
“I told colleagues and superiors—drugs are not corn flakes. These are potent substances with the power to heal—or kill. When doctors prescribe them and patients swallow them, trust must be an ingredient.”
Dane stopped. The silence in the room was like a precipice. He dared not go further. He watched for signs on the agents’ faces that he affected their emotions but they remained dour and intractable. Becky looked at Dane with an admiration he had not seen from her in a long time.
“My supervisors ordered me to write what the client wanted, to hell with accuracy or facts, but I wouldn’t do it. I always made sure of my facts and never wrote anything without clinical support.”
The agents grunted. One wiped his forehead; the other removed his glasses and rubbed mucus from his conjunctiva.
“Mr. Bacchus, did you know of any instance when the advertising agencies deliberately lied about a product to mislead the public?” Agent Dempsey asked.
Dane recounted the bogus research he attended: the male transvestite discussing a woman’s hormone replacement therapy; simulators with fake toilet bowls and virtuo-sapiens for Grovil. He detailed the Refluxydyl GERD conspiracy and the purple folder. The agents nodded at this intel. Agent Dempsey told Dane that they were aware of this conspiracy. He extracted a photograph from his briefcase and showed it to Dane. “Do you recognize this man?”
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