Gilligan's Wake: A Novel (32 page)

Although only an editorial cartoonist, Herblock was no dummy for a Gillie. In fact, I sometimes think he might have exposed the whole works if he hadn’ t been too nice a man to believe all this was really happening. However, Roy’s rant was demanding my full attention:

“The son of a bitch has turned
freelancer
;” he sputtered, meaning Nixon, “and
that,
or something very like it"—meaning the paper-”is going to come out inside a year. We can slow it down, but we can’t stop it.”

“Well, the Ford animatronic is coming along,” I pointed out. “We can always send him up top ahead of schedule. It’ll be a rush job, and he’ll probably be pretty clumsy, but we can do it if we have to.”

“That’s a stopgap, and you know it,” Roy fumed. “I want to make sure that nothing like this
ever
fucking happens again. I want a long-range plan. You’ve got five minutes.” Seizing the newspaper, he stalked out.

I picked up a grease pencil and sat down in front of the nearest available writing surface, which happened to be the screen of the television set I always had on, with the sound off, in my office. Having taken a few moments to collect my thoughts, I began to jot random words and phrases on my screen—writing, as is my wont, in all directions, without particularly noticing where my nib has touched down from one idea to the next.

Imbecilic,
I wrote in a long vertical, looping down one side of the screen.

Inspirational,
I scrawled in another vertical, looping up opposite the first.

Docile,
I inserted horizontally in between the two verticals, down near the bottom of the screen.

An uncanny ability to spout perfect nonsense with utter conviction
. I scribbled, all in a bunch at the top.

Rugged,
I wrote in a tiny circle, near the left-hand vertical.

(-looking),
I qualified the previous thought, in another circle across from the first.

Patriotic,
I wrote at the dead center of the screen, my grease pencil sliding unexpectedly in a vaguely Picasso-like hook.

Just as I got done outlining the qualities most needed in a perfect Gillie stooge, Roy charged, back into my office. Seeing the screen, he stopped in his tracks. As agitated as he was, he burst out laughing.

“You’re a sick bastard, you know that, Prof?” he said. “But it could work. Fuck everything! Desperate times call for desperate measures.”

“Roy, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.

“Come look.”

Dropping the grease pencil and scrambling to my feet, I stepped back and saw the same thing he had. I was startled, but any half-bright Gillie could probably guess what it was. Showing through my outline, the screen flickered with random images, in bright and somehow soothing colors.

Unwittingly, I had drawn the face of Ronald Reagan.

Beside me, Roy shook his head admiringly. “I wish FDR could have seen this,” he said. “It would give him the laugh of his life.”

“FDR?” I said. “Why FDR?”

His eyes widened. “You don’t know?”

“Don’t know what?”

Wonderingly, he walked to my desk, and picked up Harry Truman’s copy of Dale Carnegie’s
How to Win Friends and Influence People.
Along with a plaque that read “The Buck Stops Here,” its upper and lower rims incised with toothmarks, I kept the book in my office, as any man who has gone on to accomplish much might preserve a favorite memento of where it all began—say, a long-dried husk of coconut shell carved with

the message
NATIVE KNOWS POSIT HE CAN PILOT 11 ALIVE NEED SMALL BOAT KENNEDY
, or some such thing.

“We always thought that’s why you faked his handwriting,” Roy said as he flipped the book open, to the front flyleaf first and then the back one. Putting it down, he shook his head: “Well, I’ll be damned.”

“He was in the know?” I asked.

“In
the know? He
was
the know.” Roy swept his hand around my office walls, and by implication our whole sub-aquatic lair. “Jesus Christ,” he said, staring at me, “who do you think
built
this joint? It tickled the
ass
off him that the island was named for his cousin. Back in Teddy’s day, we were working out of a broom closet in Union Station, and I should know: I was born in it. Anyway, my predecessor found me there in a brass spittoon, on January 1,1900.”

“But what about the Four Freedoms speech, and all the rest of that"—it had just sunk in-”hogwash?”

“Oh, come on—forget the crap he told the Gillies,” Roy said. “The day he gave me my job, all he told
me
was two words.”

“What were they?” I asked, and Roy smiled.

“ ‘Think big,’ “he said, tilting his head back and clenching an imaginary cigarette holder in his teeth.

As the grooming of Ronald Reagan for the presidency got underway in earnest, our long-range future was assured. But we still had Watergate to get through, and that was no easy chore. As the months went by and the disaster spread like a living Rorschach blot across the calendar, Hank Kissinger grew increasingly rattled. These days, he wasn’t even sure if Nixon’s original decision to hire him had been all that unwitting, as his shaken voice reported over my speakerphone one day. In the Oval Office, he’d had a terrifying encounter with our drunken, baleful Gillie president, who had glared redly at him, eyes glowing like an animal’s at bay, and midway through a lunatically erudite
tour d’horizon
of the foreign-policy situation frightened poor Hank out of his wits by suddenly snarling
Tell me about the fish, Henry. Tell me about the fucking fish. In
the fucking Potomac, under Roosevelt Island. I know that you could get me down there. I know you bastards could have saved me if you’d wanted to

“The hell with it,” Roy said one afternoon late in the summer of 1973, as the Ervin Committee hearings silently flickered through Ronald Reagan’s as yet unerased outline on my office television set. “Let’s shut down for a while. Oh, we can keep a skeleton staff down here for the can’t-wait stuff—holding Boeing’s hand, keeping Chrysler in business, all that jazz. But I’m putting
Two-Fisted U.S. Adventures
on hold, and the rest of us might as well go on sabbatical until this whole ruckus fades. We’re just lucky that you can always count on the Gillies to forget whatever horrible shit they’ve just found out about how this country really works one or two elections later. And call it-”

“Optimism,” I said, having heard this lecture before. “But where will you go?” I asked. “What’11 you do, Roy?”

“Frankly, Prof, I don’t give a damn,” he said. “But the prediction computer in Quonset Two has spat out something about a place called Studio 54 that’s due to open any day now. It sounds like it might be worth my while to check out. And as for
you,
Prof,” he winked, well aware of Priap’s charitable endeavors, “there’s a lot more cripples and burn victims up top than we could ever teach to swim their way down here.”

The main portal to our sub-aquatic lair opened onto a grove of beech trees on the island above us, from which we could row to either the District or Virginia banks of the Potomac after dark. For my own sorties, however, I had come to prefer the emergency exit located at the river’s bottom, from which, trailing air bubbles, one rose through murk and sludge whose slither on my own ripe skin I found peculiarly invigorating. As one simply bobbed up like a black dot in the current, without any indication of where one had come from, this could also be done in daylight without compromising the secret of Roosevelt Island. I chose to begin my sabbatical by this route.

I broke the surface, gasping and spouting water—and looking, I imagine, rather drolly reminiscent of one of those mythical creatures who decorate the unknown in maps made by medieval mariners. To my
north, on the Washington side of the Potomac, loomed a spectacularly ugly building, its ameoba contours adorned with serrated balconies that resembled stacked dentures. As this was the Watergate itself, and the associations thereby conjured up struck me as on the painful side, I decided with a shudder to strike for Virginia, and turned to swim toward Arlington.

Just past the riverbank, intermittent automobile traffic slid by. Along the skyline in the background loomed Rosslyn’s bulky apartment complexes, whose construction had actually been one of our own minor projects; Roy had wanted to find out if Gillies could get along without any prettiness in their lives whatsoever, and decided that the experiment might as well be a local one. In between the breezy traffic and the ugly buildings, a half-dozen uniformed men—looking gaunt, grim, and impossibly larger than life—were erecting a fluttering Stars and Stripes.

After a moment, I realized that I had reached shore directly in front of the Marine Corps Memorial, with its statue based on Joe Rosenthal’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of the flag raising on Iwo Jima.

Tousled hair dripping, I scrambled up the riverbank and set off. Two miles away was the secret cache where we sub-aquatics stored our spare clothes, credit cards and money, along with the keys to a dozen Ford Pintos parked in our secret garage nearby, all of which were rigged to explode the instant we were compromised. Soon enough, I had left the barracks of Fort Myer behind, and was moving through a series of quiet streets and red-brick residential warrens now sprinkled, as Arlington had been since at least 1941, with government families temporarily remanded back to the United States from the fathers’ various outposts in our vast superpower diaspora: Foreign Service familes, Pentagon families, CIA families, and so on.

Eventually, I spotted the advertising billboard I was looking for. Our secret cache was directly beneath it. On my previous forays into Arlington, I had never particularly noticed the building that stood across the street; but I did now, and smiled. All in all, I found myself reflecting, this ad must be a fairly surreal thing for the relatives of grievously ill, perhaps dead or dying patients to see every time they came out of a hospital.
It showed a clock with twelve hands, all human and clutching coffee cups.

“There’s Always Time for Some More Maxwell House!” it said.

Within a day, I had rented an apartment and offered the Arlington County school board my services as a teacher. They accepted with as much abject gratitude as if I’d volunteered to throw Good King Priap’s services into the bargain, for the expertly forged credentials and testimonials I had brought with me from Roosevelt Island, tugging them in a waterproof bag whose strap I held in my teeth, were as glowing as plausibility allowed.

What with one thing and another, though, I found myself teaching not science but modern American history—the same subject that my all but forgotten acquaintance back in Rochester, Minnesota, had talked about teaching before I steered him to intelligence work, although I’m frankly bewildered as to why that long-ago chat in a railroad-station coffee shop should suddenly pop into my mind in this context. Needless to say, it often felt distinctly peculiar to be guiding slack-faced, witless teenagers through a tale in so many of whose chapters I myself had played such a singular though
sotto voce
role. Yet for a man of my capacities, obviously, it would have been child’s play to instruct adolescents in any topic under the sun; as I learned when one of them looked at me with green eyes.

By Priap’s exacting standards, of course, Sue was no fit object of erotic interest. She had light brown hair that flowed in two waves from a central part on her high forehead, an amused and full-lipped mouth, a lanky midriff often left bare by the nubbly halter tops in favor with many girls her age that long-gone year of white-wine skies and Nixon’s fall, and a rump that bobbed like an apple above her long legs inside the bell-bottomed hip-huggers in which I remember her most vividly. A hue of faintly roseate alabaster, her skin always had the faint, fresh, faintly moist smell of a just uncovered tuber; and her eyes’ twin pools of dilute green light were bright, eager, tender, mocking, and observant all at once.

In short, I found her utterly grotesque, and indeed it was one of her classmates whom I’d initially marked down as the ideal recipient of Priap’s generosity. This was one Sarah Wong, who belonged to a special subset of her generation whose arrival at sexual maturity I had awaited with half-mad impatience. At long last, though, the time had come, and I saw that Sarah and her kind were finally of an age to go half mad themselves—with gratitude, once Priap welcomed them into his kingdom.