Heir Apparent

by James, Terry

  “Have a seat,” he said, motioning vaguely towards an armchair with a stack of magazines on it. I remained standing as he shuffled over to a chair at a round dining table and laboriously turned himself around to sit down.

  “What happened to your leg?” I asked.

  “Before or after they cut it off?”

  I thought I detected a smirk, but it was hard to tell what was really going on behind the beard.

  “Don’t go swimming in a pool full of Mexicans if you’ve got diabetes,” he said.

  He picked up some unidentifiable little plastic object (it looked like a cylindrical bead) from a spread of them on the table and, after studying it for a moment, dropped it into one of several plastic boxes arrayed before him.

  “How’d you find me?” he said.

  “I had your address.”

  “I never gave you this address.”

  “Yes you did.”

  I was prepared to argue the point with the irrefutable evidence of an unimpaired memory, but he wisely chose not to press it.

  “Just throw that stuff on the floor,” he said.

  I stepped over to a nearby shelf. Lined up on it, inside plastic tubs, were what looked like individual pebbles of gravel, segregated by size and shape and color tone: round grayish ones in one tub, oblong violet-toned ones in another, squarish white ones in yet another. On another shelf hundreds of prescription drug bottles (his own) were filled with tiny screws and nails and nuts and washers. Whereas with all his previous collections there had never been any clear order to the piles of junk, or rather whatever system there was had been known only to himself, now there seemed to be a disturbingly precise place for everything.

  He picked up another one of the plastic things and, keeping his eyes fixed on it as he spoke, said: “So what’s wrong with her?”

  “Who?”

  He raised his eyes and looked at me. “Your mother,” he said. “Why else would you come all the way down here?”

  “I came to see you.”

  His forehead creased, but he refrained from comment.

  “You still a detective?” he asked after dropping the plastic thing into one of the boxes.

  “I haven’t been working.”

  “Join the club,” he said then launched into a harangue against the Chinese that five minutes later had evolved into a disquisition on the dubious merits of desalination. He paused for breath.

  “I’m not your son, am I?” I said.

  Until that moment I don’t think he had truly registered that another human being was in his midst. He looked startled, as if he had no idea who I was or why I was there. It only lasted a few seconds, then the dull medicated film slid back over his eyes. His gaze returned to his plastic widgets.

  “What’s going on?” he said without looking up.

  “Just answer me,” I said. “Yes or no. Am I your son?”

  He raised his head.

  “Why would you ask such a crazy question?” A nervous quaver tore at his voice. “What the hell did she say to you? If that woman was screwing around on me all those years …” He looked away, the vein on his temple throbbing. I stared at him. He refused to look at me.

  “I know I was adopted,” I said.

  He shook his head in feigned indignation. At last he looked at me again.

  “Who told you that?” he said. “Is that what she told you?”

  “Just for once could you cut the bullshit. I know everything. I know about Ruth Brenner and the foster home. I know that my birth name was William Morris, that my parents were Walter and Imogen Morris, that I was born on March 24th, 1972, not April 16th. I’ve just seen the picture of both of you holding me, the picture you sent to Ruth Brenner thanking her for taking care of me. So you can drop the act. Just tell me the truth.”

  “Oh shit,” he said and pressed his right palm to his forehead, rubbing it back and forth as he looked down, slowly shaking his head. In time his palm drew back, his fingers slid in to massage the point between his eyebrows. Then, still without looking at me, he braced his hands against the table and muscled himself up to standing. He limped four or five steps over to the bare wall to my right. There he stood, facing the wall, arms limp at his sides, for well over a minute. I have never seen a more pathetic sight. It was as if the shell of lies and self-delusions that he had been living in all his adult life had suddenly shattered and fallen away, leaving this shriveled-up old mollusk naked to the world, at a complete loss for how to go on.

  At last he turned.

  “When did it start?” he said.

  “When did what start?”

  “The paranoia. The weird coincidences. The déjà vu. The ecstatic visions. The heightened perceptions. The trip, Eddie. When did the trip begin?”

  “Dad,” I said, chopping the air with a rigid hand, determined to get through to him. “This isn’t one of your damn conspiracies. Have you heard nothing I’ve said?”

  His eyes were darting back and forth, making calculations, shuffling around the warped pieces of his paranoid jigsaw puzzle of reality. At last they settled on me.

  “You may need to sit down to hear this,” he said.

  I remained standing.

  He shuffled back to the table, closing his robe as he went, as if he felt that the gravity of what he was about to say required a corresponding measure of outward decorum. When he reached the table he planted his hands on it to lower himself, but apparently changing his mind he remained standing. His head slung low between his hunched shoulders, gazing intently at me from under his tilted brow, he said:

  “Walter Morris was a CIA operative on MKULTRA from 1968 to 1973. He was a West Coast field agent with a special interrogations techniques unit. Their job was to pump unwitting subjects full of every drug they had at their disposal, and then watch us like lab rats, see if they could break down our identities, plant new ones in their place. Walter Morris was one of the people who tortured us on the rig. Ruth Brenner was the contact person between the agency and the field unit. We were out there for thirty-two days. They tried everything they had on us: LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, morphine, marijuana, sodium pentothal. There wasn’t any prior consent. It was a total violation of the Nuremberg Code. You ever heard of the Church Committee? The Rockefeller Commission? Frank Olson? Theodore Kaczynski? He participated in MKULTRA experiments at Harvard from 1959 to 1962. He was only sixteen at the time. Sirhan Sirhan was under CIA-induced hypnosis when he shot Robert Kennedy. Jonestown. Jim Jones was CIA. That whole thing was one big CIA lab. The Kool-Aid. They murdered Senator Ryan. It’s all there on the internet. All the files are there. You can read it yourself. It’s not a conspiracy theory. This shit really happened. Dulles was the one behind it. They wanted to create a Manchurian Candidate. That was their whole goal, to counter Soviet and Chinese advances in brainwashing techniques. Everyone thinks it ended in 1973. It never ended, Eddie. It’s still going on, to this day.”

  The truly paranoid man is so intimate with every contour of the terrain of his demented inner landscape that without so much as batting an eye he can plant any seed of new information blown his way and watch it flourish at the speed of thought. At that moment, looking directly into his exhilarated eyes, I realized that in my headlong rush to hear the truth I had conveniently forgotten how utterly unhinged he was. Somehow I had deluded myself into believing that when confronted with the truth, face to face, he would have no choice but to confess. I had underestimated the depth of his infirmity.

  “Walter Morris was not in the CIA,” I said, determined to have my say before I left, if only for my own peace of mind. “He was a mediocre detective novelist.” I took the copy of Guttersnipe that I had stolen from Ruth Brenner out of my coat pocket and held it up for him to see. “He also happened to be my biological father,” I said. “He returned to Ruth Brenner twenty-six years after he and his wife, my real mother, gave me up to her, and he found out my adopted name. He named his detective after me. He spent twelve years of his life following me around, wr
iting novels based on my cases. He was a coward. He never had the balls to face me. Now he’s dead. Shot himself in the head with a snubnose .38. As for Ruth Brenner, she’s an old frumpy woman who ran a foster home. You can carry on in your denial and your paranoid delusion, but those are the facts.”

  He heard me out, flinching here and there at the sharper edges, otherwise gazing at me with profound sadness, as if he were a helpless bystander at the final dissolution of his only son. He was quiet for a while after I had finished. Then, his eyes lowering to somewhere around my mid-section, he said:

  “What’s that?”

  I looked down. Without realizing it I had taken the Silly Putty out of my pocket and was turning it around and around between my restless fingers.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Let me see it.”

  “It’s nothing.” I put it back in my pocket.

  He wouldn’t relent. He came around the table, like a child fixated on some toy he can’t live without. The sight of him limping towards me, his eyes riveted to my pocket, was so pathetic that I didn’t have the heart not to let him see it. I took it out of my pocket and handed it to him. Until then I had always been careful when handling it not to touch the impression or deform its shape. I didn’t care anymore. If he had regressed to such an infantile state that he wanted to play with Silly Putty, why should I stop him?

  “Where did you get this?” he asked, staring fixedly at the impression, squinting like a jeweler through a loupe.

  I didn’t answer.

  He shuffled quickly over to a bookshelf against the left-hand wall, on one shelf of which sat a pile of papers. Picking up a pencil, he started scribbling something, looking back and forth between the Silly Putty and the paper.

  “This is it!” he exclaimed. “This is the directive. Do you know how long I’ve been looking for this? This is going to blow the lid off the whole thing.”

  Suddenly he turned pale. “Sonofabitch,” he muttered. “They’re onto me.” He turned to me with fear in his eyes. “You’ve got to tell me everything? How did you get involved in this?”

  “What the hell are you talking about,” I said brusquely, thinking maybe I could scold him back to reality.

  “The Agency,” he said in a low voice. “The name of the rig was the St. Jerome. I need you on this, Eddie. It’s not just about me anymore.”

  It was hopeless.

  “The name of the company that owned the decommissioned oil rig was Poseidon Maritime,” he went on, “a division of Fletcher Enterprises, headed by Gordon Fletcher.”

  It was my turn to go pale.

  “He’s CIA, Eddie,” he said. “He’s the head of the cell. The St. Jerome was his rig. House of Proteus. They’re all CIA. It’s still going on. They had Walter Morris murdered. Why do you think the police haven’t arrested anybody?”

  I was going insane. Either that or all of the acid he had dropped in the sixties had somehow warped my own brain cells, and I was having a bad trip. How else could I explain it? Where had he gotten Fletcher’s name from? The House of Proteus? Had I mentioned those names to Mom?

  “Gordon Fletcher is not in the CIA,” I said with rapidly deflating conviction. “He hired me to follow his wife.”

  “He hired you?”

  I was in no mood to repeat myself.

  “Drop that job, Eddie,” he said. “Drop it like a lead Zeppelin and get the hell away from him. He’s a dangerous man. What did he hire you for?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “It’s the book, isn’t it?” he said.

  I stared at him. “What book?”

  “The MKULTRA book. He wants to kill the book. There’s only three of us left. Me, Michael, and Jack. Morris made contact with us after all these years. He said he was going to write a book exposing the whole thing. He had never been able to forget what he had done to us. It was all in his head, he said, and he needed to get it out. He was right here, Eddie, as close as you and me are. He told me everything, who was behind it. Three days later he was dead. He was murdered.”

  “He wasn’t murdered,” I said. I don’t know why I persisted in arguing with him, in dignifying his insanity with a refutation. “It was suicide.”

  He shook his head. “It’s still going on. They never shut it down.”

  He was staring bug-eyed at the Silly Putty again.

  “This proves everything,” he jabbered on. “Ruth Brenner was the link between the Agency and the unit on the Jerome. You’ve got to get out of here, Eddie. You’re not safe. Get as far away as you can. Leave the state. Leave the country if possible. You have no idea how far their tentacles reach. They haven’t gotten deep into you yet. I can see that just by looking at you. But it’s only a matter of time.”

  I walked over to him, put my right hand on his shoulder, and with my left I picked up the piece of Silly Putty and squashed it in my fist, right before his eyes.

  His howl of anguish followed me out the door, down the stairs, and across the lawn to the car. I could still hear it, hours later, miles from Appian Way.

  32

  AT A LONELY place called Dan’s Liquors on the northern outskirts of San Calisto, I bought a bottle of Old Grand-Dad. A paranoid shiver ran through me at the sight of myself in the security monitor. I drove on, every now and then catching a glimpse of the moon-dappled water beyond the fields and trees and houses otherwise obscuring my view of the ocean.

  I turned off the highway at the sign to San Calisto Beach and drove half a mile down the narrow road to a locked gate. I pulled over and cut the engine and grabbed the bottle and got out.

  The gibbous moon was bright enough to light my way the remaining hundred yards to the parking lot. I opened the bottle and took a long drink as I walked, following the well-worn path around the restrooms and up onto the beach. The pale tail of the shore curved away to a point far off to the south, beyond which the beam from a lighthouse was wheeling monotonously over the ink-black water. I trudged through the sand, down to the crest of the berm. There I sank down and began to drink in earnest.

  I didn’t know what to believe anymore. Images of Imogen kept flashing across my mind, tugging upwards at my innards. I tipped the bottle back, listening to the ocean as I drank, the slow, steady crescendo as the incoming wave, having reached the end of its journey across the globe, gathered force and rolled over the outgoing one, rising to a thunderous roar as it struck solid earth, the high hiss as the water slid backwards across the sand to be sucked beneath the next wave, slowing molecule by molecule as it skulked out to sea until nothing remained of it but a ripple on the surface of the ocean, sculpted into a momentary mirror, angled precisely to reflect the light of the moon, which light was not of the moon at all but of the sun, having journeyed ninety-five million miles across the vacuum of space to collide with the dead gray dust of the moon, itself once a part of the earth, flung off by some cataclysmic collision and hurled into space only to be coaxed back into perfect equilibrium, leaving a gaping pit in the planet that in time would become the ocean whose rim I was presently sitting on, getting drunk, water wave and light wave meeting in a fleeting kiss whose only record was the pulse against the rods and cones of my retinas, subsequently translated into pure idea, pure illusion, the fiction that out there not far from me was something called water, atop which was sparkling something called moonlight, when in truth it was nothing more than matter and energy in a seemingly infinite number of permutations limited only by the dimensions of the universe, molded by the cells of my brain into metaphors of sorrow and confusion and loneliness, to be archived in my memory for future reference: that moonlit night when I sat on the beach and got drunk and railed against the cruelty of fate, a fate on a collision course with me since the birth or rebirth or endless rebirths of the universe, triangulating across space and time or some other unfathomable dimension to bowl me over and grind me into dust, myself nothing more than the flotsam of the collision of two bodies, themselves the flotsam of an endless chain of collisions, wave upo
n wave of lives rising out of and sinking into the earth, to produce me, a blink in cosmic time, a grain of sand on an endless beach, my own mother’s lover, or just an unsuspecting lab rat in whose brain the novels of Walter Morris were nothing more than a hallucination, a guilt trip, a fever dream, the magma of my subconscious bubbling over in a bath of LSD.

  The bottle empty, I hurled it out into the ocean. I watched as inch by inch the lip of the onrushing waves crept closer to the soles of my shoes. Suddenly a sheet of cold water slid under my ankles, startling me back to reality. I stood up. The beach tilted abruptly southward. I stepped northward to keep from falling, but the beach was faster than me. It sprang up like a catapult and smacked my whole length. I bounced and came to rest face down with a mouth and an ear full of sand.

  The rumble of the ocean was deeper down here, the hiss sharper. I raised my head. Suddenly the lower half of me was engulfed in freezing water. I hollered and tried to stand up, but the weight of my wet pants dragged me back down. I managed to get up on my hands and knees just in time for another wave to slam into me. It tumbled me sideways, sucked me backwards, turned me over. Freezing salty water shot up my nose, down my throat. I hacked and heaved. The wet sand was dissolving beneath me, carving a cavity under my body as the water retreated. I was too preoccupied with trying to breathe to worry about moving. Another wave overtook me, propelling me forward, sucking me back. I clawed at the dissolving sand in a mounting panic to get clear of the waves. I must have made progress, because the next wave died at my knees. I dragged myself up the face of the berm, over the crest and at last onto the dry, warm sand. I kept crawling until the sound of the waves seemed far away. Then I collapsed and lay there panting and coughing for a long time.