Gilligan's Wake: A Novel (30 page)

BOOK: Gilligan's Wake: A Novel
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“Well, Roy,” I said furiously, since under the circumstances I thought that he could hardly insist on being Mistered, “what if I were to mention to anyone who interviews me that—well—that
you
were the one on his knees?”

“That’s sure not true now, is it? Anyway, I fished up some sad sack out of Kay’s talent pool who now knows every detail of our little rendezvous, right down to the pattern of the ugly tie that kept on getting in my eyes, I mean his. And guess what, Prof? The poor bastard’s broke, and we also look kind of alike. You so much as say that I was even in Washington that night—which it turns out I wasn’t, you’ll be happy to know—and I’ll call it either a case of mistaken identity or a deliberate smear.”

“What I’d call
this
is an awfully steep price to pay for one lost erection,” I said angrily

Roy sounded genuinely taken aback. “Christ, this isn’t personal. Even if I’d wound up swallowing a whole milkshake, I’d be doing exactly the same thing. I guess you don’t know me very well.”

“How do you know
me
?” I asked. “I mean, how did you find me—how did you know who I was?”

“I know who everybody is,” Roy said.

 

 

All the same, he plainly didn’t know everything
about
everybody, providing a source of some merriment to us both over the next thirty years. Not the least reason his attempt at blackmail had left me spluttering was that it was so unnecessary, since if Oppenheimer needed smearing all Roy had to do was ask. I had lost all sympathy for my onetime chief some years earlier, when to my incredulity he and a majority of his fellow hand-wringers on the AEC’s Advisory Committee had voted
against
developing a hydrogen bomb. I had even considered resigning my own post in protest, but soon realized I’d do better by both bomb and self by remaining in place, and quietly passed word to Teller—still out in Los Alamos—that he had a friend in court.

Subsequently, at least in Washington, D.C., Oppenheimer had become an increasingly vague presence in the corridors of nuclear power, devoting the bulk of his time to his other post as head of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton—a party to which, I noted with cold rage, I was distinctly
not
invited. Clearly, my ex-boss feared the competition of younger and more limber minds, since once in New Jersey he preferred to keep himself surrounded by a dismal clutch of has-beens and mediocrities—with Einstein, who hadn’t had a new idea since 1905, as the most glaring example of the first category, and Oppenheimer himself leading the pack in the second.

The stunned look on my erstwhile superior’s face as I gave my testimony, and the confusion of his faltering claims to have been barely aware of my existence at Los Alamos, are memories I shall always dote
on. So is the recollection of how soon I found myself in a position to tease Roy about his miscalculation of the need for leverage in my case, for as I exited the hearing room, he hailed me from the window of a nearby taxicab.

Still inflamed to the point of being able to count the metal teeth on my zipper by thoughts of the dwarfishly stunted, almost hydrocephalic receptionist—her evident need for Priap’s succor augmented almost to the point of madness by the milky cast in one eye—who had brought me coffee as I waited in an antechamber for my name to be called from the witness list, I made hasty use of a newspaper to hide my condition as I accepted Roy’s invite to climb in alongside him. Nonetheless, when he saw Oppenheimer’s always pained and now tentpoled face peering up at him from the front page of
The Washington Post
, he smirked knowingly.

“Lincoln Memorial,” he told the driver. “Then just keep going around.” Then he leaned back.

“I’ve had you checked out. Maybe I should be looking at you with new respect,” he told me, instead looking at me with new chumminess.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean 1947. The Filipino talked,” Roy explained. “As soon as you were done with him, he tottered off to find the Secret Service, clutching a copy of
How to Win Friends and Influence People
and babbling that he’d been raped.”

“He was
raped
?” I gasped, horrified. “That same
day
? Was it before or after I had sex with him?”

Roy’s expression grew slightly quizzical, but then he resumed his story. “Of course, the gook thought that what you’d written in the flyleaves must be some sort of threat. But the minute the Secret Service passed the book on to us, we realized it was an even smarter plan than the one we’d been working on. It just took us years to figure out you were responsible.”

“And who is ‘us’?” I asked.

“That,” said Roy, “is the reason you’re getting a ride in my taxi, pal. I think it’s time you started working on purpose for the same people you’ve been working for by accident.”

“And who are
they?”
I asked.

“The same people I work for.”

“Joe McCarthy?” I was puzzled. “That’s only one person. Unless he and his brother Charlie are in it together, of course.”

Roy looked contemptuous. “Joe? That drunken nincompoop? Christ, no. He’s on the skids anyhow, and what did he ever have to do with Oppenheimer? Tom Swift you’re not, Prof, since the hearing you just testified at wasn’t even on Capitol Hill. No, that’s only my cover job—and not for a lot longer, either.”

“What’s your real one, then?” I asked.

“The same thing it’s always been. The same thing it always will be, and don’t let my boyish bad looks fool you—I turned fifty-four this year. I,” said Roy somewhat floridly, “am the lawyer for the American Century. I represent the people this country is
for”

“And who are they?” I asked again, mystified again. At which my friend Roy grew less florid.

“How the hell would I know?” he said. “Most of them don’t even know who each other are. I mean, they’re all white, and they’ve all got money, and a lot of them live in Connecticut. But beyond that, pal,” he shrugged helplessly, “we might as well be talking about the fucking man in the moon.”

 

 

Having reached the Lincoln Memorial, the taxi began to circle it—something now no longer allowed, incidentally. Beyond Memorial Bridge, every time we came around, I could see the hill of Arlington on the far side of the Potomac, with its crowning mansion that had once fathered and now mothered graves. The view seemed oddly incomplete; some sort of small fire at midpoint would be the perfect finishing touch, I thought nonsensically. If my usually powerful mind struck even me as a tad disordered at the moment, that was because Roy had never stopped talking:

“Here’s how it works,” he was saying rapidly. “No one of them knows more than a dozen or so of the others—just enough so they can
go on marrying each other and keep the loot in the family, or families. No one group ever communicates with any other group, since that would increase the risk of exposure.”

“A cell system,” I murmured. “It sounds as if they
did
learn something from the Communist Party, after all.”

Briefly, Roy looked stumped—a rare condition that he deeply hated. “The which? Oh, the ‘godless ratfink Commie bastards,’ “he recited tonelessly. “Actually, I don’t think they’ll ever admit it, because they’re such godless ratfink Commie bastards. But they got the idea from my clients.”

“If the cells don’t ever communicate with each other,” I asked, having more than once felt the identical curiosity about the Comintern, “how do they figure out what they’re all going to do next?”

“They don’t,” Roy said tersely.

“Then how do they even know what they want?”

“They don’t. They never have. These people have the brains of pineapples, Prof, and the only thing they ever invented was croquet. But they don’t need to know what they want. They just get it, because they’re the people the country is for.”

As a scientist, if nothing else, I was growing exasperated. “But how-”

“Do you remember the story of the centipede?” Roy interrupted, having anticipated me. “How it’s walking along one day on its hundred legs—and then another insect, say a butterfly, floats up to it and says, ‘Jesus, but that’s impressive, Mr. Centipede. How do you ever manage to control all those legs?’ Of course, nobody has ever asked the centipede that before. It’s never even noticed that it’s
got
a hundred legs—just figures something’s keeping it moving down there, what the fuck, who cares, and now it’s on to the next leaf, munch munch. But thanks to the butterfly, it starts to
think,
for the first time—and never takes another step until it dies. And ants start chowing down on it while it’s still alive.”

He exhaled noisily. “Well, nobody’s ever asked my clients that question,” he said. “And if I’ve got anything to do with it, which I do, no fucking butterfly ever will.”

The cabdriver’s neck, I now noticed, sported a huge goiter. From my
lap, Oppenheimer’s pained face began to rise again. “But Roy,” I said, rapidly putting the business section atop it and dragging myself back to Topic Β with some difficulty, “if we don’t know who they are, and
they
don’t know who they are—and don’t even know what they
want
—why on earth do we work for them? It doesn’t make any sense.”

“It doesn’t have to. Like I said, they’re the people the country is for. And they’re so stupid that they’d never get
anywhere
without us. Anyhow, the money and the perks are pretty good…Hey,
putzyl
You, with the goiter. Quit with the goddam circling already. Take us to the Smithsonian. You trying to make us sick?”

“I’m feeling a little dizzy myself,” I confessed.

“Think so? Wait’11 you see the nightclub underneath the Smithsonian,” Roy said comfortably. “Prof, your whole family’s life savings since 1776 wouldn’t be enough to bribe the headwaiter. And you won’t believe the main exhibit.”

“Tell me,” I said.

“Amelia Earhart!” He giggled happily. “We’ve had that bitch under lock and key for twenty years. Too many broads were starting to get

funny looks in their eyes when they saw her up there, flying.”

 

 

As usual, Roy was right. The money was staggering, and the perks—particularly for a man of my increasingly philanthropic brand of sexuality—nothing short of extraordinary. However, I won’t have you think I simply spent my days egging on good Priap to do his kingly best for gasping old duffers in oxygen tents, three-hundred-pound women with skins all aglow from eczema, and grateful amputees of both sexes, forcing Laggilin pills for my heart condition down my throat by the fistful. Delighted that my genius at problem-solving had finally been recognized, had a sword clapped in its hand, and ordered to take that hill, I worked harder than I ever had in my life. My first major success was contriving the Suez crisis of 1956.

As Roy laid it out for me, the problem at hand was to find some
means of preserving the anticolonialist reputation that the United States still enjoyed around the world at a time when we had, in fact, become its leading empire. Taking only a moment to collect my thoughts before grabbing a pencil and an envelope on which one of my predecessors appeared to have amused himself by working out a modest brain-teaser—the answer was “Eighty-seven,” I noticed automatically—I quickly devised a beautiful little stratagem, whose first step was for Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to guarantee the World Bank loans required by Nasser’s Egypt to build the Aswan Dam. A few months later, on a pretext, I had Dulles
rescind
the loan guarantees, leading Nasser to retaliate—as I had gambled he would, in my plan’s single question mark—by nationalizing the Suez Canal.

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