Contraband

by George Foy

  Billy Flagman saw her crying and went to fetch Rocketman. This took a long time. Billy had to move carefully because he realized how incredibly dangerous it was to put your faith in material things like floor, or linoleum, or walls.

  Billy had studied physics. He had once been an artist in the East Village. His shtick, as a painter, was to study the texts of Fermi and Heisenberg and Hawking, and reproduce in his canvases the relationships traced, at several removes, in particle accelerators.

  Thus, he knew that what men thought of as the ‘building blocks’ of matter, like molecules, atoms – even quarks, strange particles, muons – was nothing more than vast lonely domains of empty space with a few minuscule bits of matter floating around, all by themselves – like croutons on a soup of great darkness – linked only by forces so vague physicists had to resort to poetry to name them.

  So Billy took it slowly as he moved down the halls of the mental health unit, never relying on floor alone, but climbing from chair to couch to table, or at least keeping a hand on walls, and door jambs, and other fixtures whenever he could reach them.

  He found Rocketman in his room, reading an article in the Grassy Knoll Monthly that explained how John Lennon, JFK, and Dag Hammarskjold, lured by a cousin of Jackie Bouvier who was also Lee Harvey Oswald’s confidant, had all been assassinated by a cabal of Southwestern oil magnates known as the ‘Sour Lake Roustabouts.’

  Carmelita was still crying when Rocketman got there. A dozen other patients, men and women, sat around her. Their eyes reflected the TV’s colors.

  ‘Zero Cola,’ the TV said. ‘No calories, no nutrition, no diet problems. The only soft drink guaranteed to contain absolutely nothing!’

  Carmelita sat stiffly. The tears rolled softly down her face, dripped off her nose and made gray splotches on the envelope she held in her lap.

  She made no move to resist when Rocketman took the letter. Rocketman, for his part, made no show of asking her permission. Like Billy, he was interested in the idea of solidity; unlike Billy, it was not the solidity of matter that interested him, but the weight and mass of pain.

  In Rocketman’s mind the concept of privacy had no weight against the reality of pain. Pain was something that carried substance everywhere, and above all in Bellevue. Here it was hard and concrete as the nurse’s gaze, as the iron doors and screwed-down tables. The drugs the doctors tried out on you changed the shape and color of pain but never blocked its source. What it came down to was, you fought with pain hand-to-hand when you could and you shut it out like a horde of hyenas when it let you. It was the only way to function in this place.

  Carmelita’s letter was dated five days before. It was written in pencil on the back of a receipt for ‘Personal Items Consigned during Long-Term Detention.’ The receipt had the words ‘Secure Corrections Corp.’ printed on top. It was wrinkled and grimy. It was signed Roberto Chavez. ‘Roberto,’ Rocketman explained, ‘look, it’s from your brother, he’s alive!’ But Carmelita said nothing, and her gaze did not waver from the TV screen.

  Dear sister,

  (Rocketman read.)

  I don’t have much time to write this. If you get it you know I’m alive and Mama does too, I got rocketed and they blew off half my tailplane and I ditched. I hurt my leg bad and was picked up by a Coast Guard ship and they’re going to send me to Oakdale.

  ‘Damn,’ Rocketman muttered, scraping a large hand nervously over his chin.

  I’m with eight guys in a BON holding tank. They say it’s at the El Paso computer center, but I haven’t seen shit. One of the guys paid off a screw to send out letters and I hope to the Holy Mother he stays paid off and isn’t a plant I don’t know. So this is one bitch of a risk but if I’m going to Oakdale it don’t matter so much.

  Listen Carmie if you get this tell Skid to get the hell out quick because the BON have this new system that is a hundred percent surefire way to nail any even solid contraband operation and they are doing this system now. These guys here are from Black Tuna and the DeLisis and they got it and if they can get the big ones the small ones are cooked too. The only big guys left is a couple Santa Martans and a Tong system. Also the Hawkley people are still working. The guys say Hawkley knows how to get around this new system. If he does he better tell, otherwise it’s bye bye to the Trade I guess, which is too bad cause like the man said it been berry good to me (joke). Also they could get to Skid through me. Tell him I say so, tell him to get out. Listen take care of our Ma and don’t worry about me and do your go-go skating you’re real good and I love to see you dance love

  Roberto

  ‘Damn,’ Rocketman said again, when he’d finished the letter. ‘Ah, damn.’

  He looked at Carmelita, trying to push his sympathy into her with the pressure of eyes, with stomach tension, with sharp and concentrated thought, but the girl’s position stayed exactly the same and her gaze did not change.

  The TV babbled on. ‘Ear Guard,’ it yelled, ‘Ear Guard. And you thought you’d never heard of ear odor!’

  Rocketman thought about what Roberto had written. He tried to block from his imagination the press of fear and affection that had squeezed those words with hoarded ballpoint onto secret paper.

  Affection for Roberto’s sister; care also for the pilot, who Roberto said was in serious danger.

  But it was up to Rocketman to warn the pilot. No one else was going to do it. And that meant—

  He could not stay any longer in this place where the steel doors kept pain from coming in and agony from getting out so that a balance was achieved and policed by Nurse Linda and the various and ever-changing psychiatric interns with their plastic cups full of Stelazine and lithium carbonate.

  This was it, Rocketman thought. This was what he’d been waiting for.

  It was time to elope from Bellevue.

  Rocketman got a light from the nurse’s station. He sat beside Carmelita, smoking hard, for a few minutes. He held her hand, and plotted. As he plotted his back straightened slowly. His mouth pulled upward, gradually and surely, till he was grinning from ear to ear.

  *

  Billy Flagman and Lobo both wanted to go to the roof with Rocketman.

  Billy was Rocketman’s official assistant, but he had a serious drawback on roof trips. The trips always involved sneaking through a panel Rocketman had removed in one of the linen closets, and crawling on hands and knees through an elevator maintenance space and then up narrow service stairs. Billy found these new vistas of unfamiliar matter terrifying, and hung back, clutching the walls, taking five minutes to cover the simplest expanse of hospital tile, double that to get up the stairs, which could be a definite problem, to say the least, if guards came along.

  Lobo, on the other hand, was an asset. He always carried spare hacksaw blades. He functioned as scout on these expeditions, loping up and down the forbidden passageways; sniffing the wind, dropping on all fours if he sensed something wrong, growling like a distempered dog if it came close.

  This time, one way or another, they all made it. Around eight p.m. Rocketman unlocked the door to the elevator machinery housing with a set of skeleton keys the pilot had brought him. Lobo prowled the limits of the roof, and Billy Flagman hung on to a heat duct and suspiciously watched the snow drift down and the buildings blink lights and the black tide of the East River flow thirty-one stories below.

  Inside the housing the rocket was ready. It was squat, only ten feet tall, and round. Its framework was constructed largely of aluminum pipes from the hands-on therapy workshop. Rocketman had been building it for three years. From top to bottom, it consisted of: a detachable nose-cone, with three USAF surplus parachutes folded neatly inside; an enclosed passenger nodule with padded seating and hydraulic controls; and two tanks of oxyalcohol hooked up through a Krauss turbopump to a Hermes hydraulic steering system, part of which the pilot had smuggled in on his last trip. The controls in the cabin led to the hydraulics solenoids, the tank valves and the parachute release. The letters OSTV were painted on the ro
cket’s side in heat-resistant ceramic paint.

  OSTV stood for ‘Orbital Smuggling Test Vehicle.’ It was the pilot’s idea, of course.

  Space smuggling, the pilot commented the first time Rocketman broached the idea of a Bellevue launch. It would be the ultimate contraband route. There were no borders in space.

  Rocketman and Billy gazed at their creation in admiration and some wonder. Lobo looked at the stars outside and gave a plaintive and experimental howl.

  ‘You really gonna do it, Dumont?’ Billy asked. Dumont was Rocketman’s real name. Only the doctors, and Billy, were allowed to use it. Rocketman was large enough to enforce his taste in monikers.

  Rocketman did not answer. He was staring at the bearings of the thrust chamber and the valves of the fuel tanks above. He knew to within five degrees the heat they could withstand. He was familiar with their pressure limits, but he’d been familiar with the parameters at Thiokol and they’d still lost the ship and all the men and women in her.

  His intestines tied in knots as they always did when he thought of how gases from the LOX squeezed through the seals on field joints connecting sections of the rocket booster. As always, the image of Judy Resnick projected itself on that memory. In his mind he could see her, doing her job right the way down, the capsule plummeting, shaking, nonetheless she had gone ahead and switched on emergency oxygen for the guy in front of her while G-forces stretched her slim body and the loveliness of her face was racked obscenely with the certainty of death.

  He had seen Judy Resnick once on a visit to Canaveral, had lusted after her with the pure, ethereal lust one felt for stars, or people who seemed reserved for stars.

  Rocketman’s fists were balled and tight. His back was hunched, as if he were carrying a great weight.

  But it was not his fault. The fifty-three-degree cut-off was his baby. They had asked him, during that famous caucus at Thiokol, why some tests showed good durometer on those seals at much lower temperatures, and he’d answered as best he could, arguing that you always got exceptions, that science was all about unknown variables, you had to take the safe approach. At first Lund agreed; but Lund was only a scientist, and he was fighting managers, a whole bureaucracy of them, and most of those managers were Air Force, or ex-Air Force, and they were not interested in uncertainty. ‘Take off your scientist hat,’ they told him, ‘put on your manager hat’; and Lund changed his mind, though the temperature on the morning of launch was in the low 30s only.

  So Rocketman was overruled. He bore no responsibility. The disaster, he since had realized, could be laid at the door of those who wanted the launch to fail; it was the fault of the clique at the Pentagon’s top levels who wanted the Air Force to have its own ‘independent spacelift capability,’ in the jargon.

  For the Air Force to have its own rockets, they had to scupper NASA’s.

  The Orion Group, the Orion conspiracy. They had sabotaged the NASA launch. The article he was working on for the Grassy Knoll Monthly would prove this beyond reasonable doubt. It all started with the Key West space-missile compact between the Navy and the Air Force; it ended with a deliberate decision to increase the level of risk in the shuttle program so a system eventually would fail, giving the Air Force Space Command an opening to take over the manned spaceflight brief that once was NASA’s.

  Evidence of that decision would clear him of blame, once and for all, and wipe the dark reproachful eyes of Judy Resnick forever from his mind.

  It was very cold on the roof. The snow, light and dry, blew through cracks in the machinery housing. Rocketman shook his head free of the heavy touch of memory. The ghosts of the Challenger: the New Hampshire schoolteacher, the lovely Jewish engineer; stepped back into the shadows. He straightened his back and clapped his hands to warm them. He thought it was lucky there were no Morton Thiokol ‘O’-rings on his makeshift missile to grow brittle tonight. He bent over to check carefully the Hermes solenoids, but nobody had tampered with them. No one ever came in this old vent housing anyway, because the equipment had been disconnected years ago so the hospital administration could buy new elevator motors from a firm owned by the brother of a man on the City Board of Estimate.

  The three men easily rolled the light rocket, on gurney wheels affixed to its thrust skirt, to the middle of the roof.

  ‘Let me do it, Dumont,’ Billy burst out suddenly, as the Rocketman started doing a final systems check. ‘Let me pilot it.’

  ‘We been through this before, man,’ Rocketman said. ‘It’s not going high enough.’

  Weightlessness was Billy’s great fantasy. He saw himself outside earth’s orbit, floating free inside the tiny capsule, totally independent of floor, walls, and ceiling. He would take one of the hospital’s portable oxygen units with him. For a few brief minutes he would not have to worry about outside matter. To all intents and purposes, there wouldn’t be any.

  ‘At six miles of altitude,’ Rocketman explained patiently, ‘you’d still be well in the gravity field when you ran out of fuel.’

  Billy frowned. He thought his friend was hiding the truth. He thought this was because Rocketman wanted to fly the thing himself.

  ‘But can’t you take a passenger?’ Lobo asked. ‘I been losin’ weight.’

  ‘Not enough thrust, Lobo. You know that.’

  Lobo nodded. He got up in a slow, graceful unfolding movement and padded over to the west side of the roof, to look longingly in the direction of the Central Park Zoo.

  In the daytime, Lobo inhabited the normal, even staid psychic confines of a minor tax advisor in an H&R Block office, which was what he had been before coming to Bellevue.

  At night, Lobo became aware of the greatness of that lie, for the darkness brought home a bigger and incontrovertible truth; that he was an Alaskan timber-wolf trapped in the body of a man.

  He knew of three other timberwolves in New York. They had been captured and caged against their will in a special ‘Endangered Predators’ exhibit in the Central Park Zoo. He wanted very much to go and free them.

  ‘When you leaving?’ Billy asked Rocketman.

  ‘What time’s the nursing shift change tonight?’

  ‘One a.m.,’ Billy said – and all at once realized he was standing on an unsupported floor, without walls or ceiling to hang on to in case even a percentage of the earth’s atoms suddenly called in their massive bluff and imploded. He took three long skids through the accumulating snow to the heat duct and clung to the steel like a koala on a eucalyptus tree. ‘One a.m.,’ he repeated in a whisper.

  ‘So it’s midnight,’ Rocketman said, bending to check the turbopump wires. ‘I guess that’s a good time for an escape. Aah, I just hope I got my thrust curves right. I’m gonna look almighty silly, if I fart myself over the roof into the river, or shoot myself into Gracie Mansion, or just burn a hole in the roof and end up in the interns’ station on the thirtieth floor . . .’

  Chapter Seventeen

  ‘If there’s a war, it’s got to be won, and there’s got to be three cheers for the Emperor. Nobody’s going to talk me out of that.’

  Jaroslav Hasek

  The Good Soldier Schweik

  The pilot got back to the City at nine p.m. the evening of Rocketman’s escape; flurries of hard snow crackling out of the sky like the scat of Antarctic birds.

  The lights of the City winked through the white scrim as he crossed the George Washington Bridge.

  Manhattan. It always reminded him of a ship, the pilot thought; the biggest, most intricate vessel ever built. A ship laid out on a deep keel of metamorphic rock, temporarily linked to the mainland by gossamer gangplanks of light. A vessel of countless smokestacks, wheelhouses, crow’s nests, lockers, saloons, galleys, holds, foc’sles, and cabins stacked precariously on top of one another. A windjammer with mighty strutted sails of glass and neon, steel and stone reaching high as the cumulus. A steamship whose great black engines spun, reciprocated, and thundered in the ancient engine rooms deep below decks, filling vast pipes with gas, s
team, water, and high-voltage electricity to keep the great hull always humming and ready for sea; whose triactic antennas and radar scanners, ever alert, brought in from across the universe the data necessary for twenty-four-hour navigation.

  The population of Manhattan reinforced his fantasy, for they invariably behaved as if their island were set to embark on a voyage as urgent as it was unique. They acted like watchkeeping officers, burdened with the responsibilities of navigation, speaking strange sea-tongues with relevance only to the commerce at hand. They were sworn to stay awake, eyes red through the deepest hours of the night, checking that the ten billion running-lights never went out. Nothing could stop or delay them. From the lowest bag-lady to the mayor himself, everyone stood ready to cast off at a moment’s notice, to leave the Hudson, carrying cargoes they could not name, for a destination they would never divulge.

  The pilot was exhausted yet wired from two days of almost-constant driving. He did not feel like going right back to the apartment. At one level this was because highway driving was like an addiction and always demanded more. At another level, driving was a half-conscious state, and the thoughts that bubbled up and hooked together into long and weird chains as you moved were the equivalent of dreams, linked by the epileptic rhythm of yellow stripes and the glow of cats’ eyes. He needed time to let the rhythm die down, allow the thoughts to settle, so he could figure out which were real, and which were creatures of the Interstate that would die when deprived of mileage.

  Most of all he needed a drink.

  He thought of the Weather Café, and rejected it immediately. Too risky, if BON truly was heating things up. A lot of people were aware that freetraders hung out there.

  He thought of Dan Lynch’s, or the Hostage, but they would be crowded, and he needed quiet.

  The Schweik Club, he thought. It was in Queens, but god was it quiet. He aimed the old sedan uptown, over the Triboro Bridge.