Gilligan's Wake: A Novel (33 page)

What was she? Why, a thalidomide baby, of course.

Ironically enough, it was an unforeseen consequence of that very condition that cheated me of Sarah—or rather, cheated her of me. The curriculum I had been given by the Arlington County school board, which I was at no liberty to amend, devoted a week to studying the impact on America of twentieth-century immigration. To a son of the old Yankee stock—and I’m sure I speak for us all—this couldn’t help but seem akin to telling the story of a champion greyhound via a minute examination of the fleas along for the ride. Yet there it was in the curriculum, and here was I in the school.

Having volunteered to give a presentation—in my brief and thus far much too remote experience of her, this was a first—Sarah read a paper about one of the earliest of her relatives to have migrated here from China, a chauffeur who had experienced a week of pure terror when a giddy heiress he was driving from hither to yon, and presumably back to hither afterward, mistook him for a second cousin who had been deported on a trumped-up (or so Sarah claimed) charge some months earlier. As her somewhat squeaky warble brought the tedious tale to an end, I made a mental note to reproach her for having depended on an unreliable family anecdote instead of hitting the books; in fact, I realized an instant later, this might be my excuse to tell her to speak to me after class, in a stern voice masking Priap’s kingly glow. Did I have any Laggilin with me? I did. But then Sarah spoke this fateful sentence:

“You see—back then, white people thought that we all looked alike.”

Dead silence fell. While I might have been some years out of high school myself, I hadn’t forgotten my youth’s classroom highjinks so far as to misread the thought in every suddenly bulging eye, the taboo but irresistible
joke now alternately struggling for expression and suppression on twenty-odd clamped pairs of lips; in short, the twenty-odd mute variants on
Oh, well, Sarah—at least that’s not true now
that had begun to writhe on all but one or two of the faces before me as the silence crashed and boomed like waves.

After five or ten seconds, the unspoken retort finally grew so loud that Sarah herself heard it, and fled the room with a sharp if squeaky cry—followed, in a sudden lithe detachment of hip-huggers from chair and alabaster arms from desk, by Sue. Who didn’t return until the following day, glaring at her nonplussed fellow students with a hatred more properly reserved for someone like the apostate Robert Oppenheimer. As for Sarah, despite my several requests to the principal’s office to remind her parents of their obligations, she never returned at all—and so never knew the unique joy that might have been hers, more than making up for the small prick of one of adolescence’s inevitable petty embarrassments as she babbled and flippered her stunned gratitude.

“Why,” Sue was to ask me a month later, green eyes blazing,
“why
didn’t you
say
anything? My God, you just let her
sit
there—until the
dumbest
person in the
room,
which believe me in
that
room was saying
plenty,
would have known what everyone else was thinking. That poor girl!”

“My dear,” I said, “I may teach history, but I try to build confidence. I don’t interrupt my students when they’ve got the floor, and I wasn’t sure if Sarah had finished her presentation. And now, dear Sue,” I said, pushing her head down my chest, “I think it’s time you started yours again.”

Dear Sue. For a man such as myself, to whom being pursued is the natural order of things and wooing the partner’s job, the odd intensity of her abrupt request for citizenship in Priap’s kingdom made agreeing look like a chore less fatiguing than holding her off. At least by my good king’s yardstick, so to speak, it was really all fairly innocuous, and she was a marvelous little baby tigress in bed. For the first and only time in my adult life, I found I didn’t even need to take a Laggilin for my heart condition after a royal audience.

It might have gone on, pleasantly enough, for months more than it did if the predictable unwitting boyfriend, another student in my history class named Gil Somebody-or-Other, hadn’t stumbled across us in mid-preliminary in some woods behind her house one day, thus learning of
his
Sue’s (well, that’s what he thought) cunning bid for extra credit. At our hasty final meeting, she reported that he had taken the whole business preposterously hard—a fairly pointless prelude to the more pressing information she had sought me out to impart, which was that “we” now had a little problem. No tyro in such matters, I made little Problem exclusively hers again by writing a medium-sized check to a local doctor, of whose services I had previously availed myself more than a few times. No doubt he was surprised to see a girl with the use of all four limbs and no visible disfigurements presenting herself for a change.

I might have brushed off Gil’s resentment of me as even more of a trifle if one of the other teachers hadn’t already mentioned, apropos of something else entirely, that the boy’s father wasn’t only a former Marine but an ex-Agency hand, and a hard man at parent-teacher conferences. Soon, though, my careful inquiries ferreted out the information that Somebody-or-Other Senior, far from being in any condition to bluster into my classroom and beat me up for causing his son’s breakdown, was or had been in intensive care with a terminal case of lung cancer, no doubt a contributing factor to Gil’s addled state. If not the primary one, and perhaps the father should have beaten
himself
up instead; ha, ha. The boy obviously got over it, though

No I did not you pigfuck bastard shitass fucker

since many years later, idly browsing through a newspaper, I saw my former student’s face staring blurredly up, with a chain smoker’s incomplete smile, from the author’s photo next to a negative review of some inane 1960s television show’s reunion movie—a show, incidentally, whose premise struck me as oddly familiar, although I could no longer place precisely why. In any case, that’s how I learned that the wan high-schooler I’d cuckolded by letting Priap go a-cherry-picking where he was too unnerved to tread had gone on to become a pop-music and television critic, which I must say sounds to me like a remarkably silly
profession, as most do compared to my own. But no doubt it’s a lucrative one.

As for dear Sue, I have no idea what became of her, not to mention a most peculiar sensation of having company in my ignorance. But all in all, it had been an interesting detour on the royal road—to the point of inducing me to apply my old genius for problem-solving in a new arena by writing a brief treatise on love shortly before my return to Roosevelt Island, which took place far earlier than I had expected. As the treatise has been pressed inside my wallet ever since the day that, taking mere seconds to collect my thoughts, I tossed it off on a few blank sheets of two-ply toilet paper with a fmger continually dipped and redipped in a freshly stirred mixture of cold tap water and my own dung, I’m not even sure it’s all that legible. But let me fish it out now anyway.

On Love

By Professor X

Premise:
Let us first postulate the existence of an ideal Object of Affection (or OAf for short). As he is a perfect OAf all those drawn to him can reasonably be defined as Undeserving Ones (U1). Since this would logically include the entire Population of the Planet (PP), the number of U1, or simply U, to whom this OAf can grant his sexual favors is theoretically unlimited (U1/y). As he is a virile OAf let us also assume that he would be happy to steep himself in PP every day.

Problem:
In practice, what we shall call the Interference of Life (INT—L) has prevented the OAf from achieving his goal (G) of granting his favors to Ui/y. He is surrounded by PP on all sides, yet as a result of other people’s INT-L, if not his own, this particular G has so far eluded him.
Solution:
Admittedly shifting our paradigm somewhat, let us further postulate that this particular OAf is also a Brilliant Scientist (BS). Therefore, it should be child’s play for him to conceive a Means of Execution (ME) that keeps INT-L to an absolute minimum if not causing it to disappear entirely

Conclusion:
O Aj + BS + ME - INT-L = Ul /y—G

Cautionary Note:
For brevity’s sake, the step that has been omitted from the Solution is that of determining the nature of ME.

■

What obliged me to break my contract with the Arlington County school board and return to Roosevelt Island in early 1974 was an urgent inquiry from Hank Kissinger about the status of the Ford animatronic, which might be needed sooner than we’d thought. In spite of knowing that frantic and yet numbingly repetitive weeks of pressing a “Walk” button, pressing a “Chew Gum” button, and hearing a disheartening crash lay ahead of me, I was glad to leave up-top behind.

Nonetheless, the rest of that decade spelled lean times under Roosevelt Island. Roy often stayed away at his lozenge-shaped bunker below Studio 54 for weeks or even months at a time. None of us truly felt that we were back in business at the old stand until our carefully nurtured project to place Ronald Reagan in the White House climaxed on January 20, 1981, with gala festivities whose lavish excess we deliberately made as insulting as we could in a first test of the Gillies’ once again supine tolerance for crass displays of social hierarchy.

Ingeniously, Roy had whetted their appetite by allowing Jimmy Carter to do pretty much as he pleased, the sole restriction being that whatever he came up with had to stay charmless and uninteresting. Since even Carter admitted that this was approximately equivalent to forbidding him to play center for the Los Angeles Lakers—a team we sponsored, by the way, as I was curious to see how long the racial upheaval we all feared could be staved off simply by letting the inner city’s deprived population share something meaningless but exciting with Jack Nicholson—all had gone swimmingly, so to speak, for us sub-aquatics. Just by having Carter advocate them with an air of nettled defensiveness and unpredictable nervous widenings of his eyes, we managed to discredit any number of more or less benign and reasonable notions that might well have tossed a spanner in the works.

Now we were back in the saddle, but in a changed world. Roy had planned all along to resume publication of
Two-Fisted U.S. Adventures
as soon as the new President was sworn in, and even we were dazed when we realized that it was now redundant. Compared to what Gillies across the economic and social spectrum were now prepared to believe—on their own hook and with no help from us—about what their country was up to in the world, our old comic-book versions of events looked like muckraking exposes. While the confession doesn’t particularly flatter our shop’s acumen, I might as well admit it: Reagan was better at the job we’d designed for him than even the designers had thought possible.

My own private celebration of his inaugural had been a romp with a young African-American cocaine addict afflicted with cystic fibrosis, an act of charity on Priap’s part that left its beneficiary in such an advanced state of gratitude that afterward I had to take
two
Laggilins for my heart condition as I listened to his rasping final breaths. Almost as if—so I often thought, with a wry chuckle—our Air Force had been acting the pimp to Priap all along, more and more of the Asian children our planes had once sent screaming down Cambodian and Vietnamese roads with their flesh ablaze from napalm were also reaching what I called the age of gratitude, providing my philanthropic impulses with a whole new realm to succor. In one more of those ironic twists that used to send Hank Kissinger strolling down corridors, hands stuffed in pockets and whistling “Que Sera, Sera,” large numbers of them had ended up as refugees right here in the United States, congregating in the Washington area in the amusing manner of youngsters squabbling over who gets to sit nearest the fireplace. For a while, I found myself breathlessly emerging onto one or the other bank of the Potomac from our lair’s underwater exit, tousled hair drenched and my good king leading the way like Patton, almost every night.

As usual, though, the work came first. Finding yet another arena for my problem-solving genius, I spent a good part of the 1980s involved in urban planning—Roy having called my attention to the fact that the white exodus to the suburbs, while proceeding at a gratifying rate as a
result of their natural instinct to pull up the ladder behind them, could use a jab from us. Taking only a moment to gather my thoughts, I strangled my receptionist’s dog, sliced open its vitals, and used the cur’s still warm blood to sketch out a plan on the office wall.

By finding some pretext to throw open the doors of the nation’s psychiatric hospitals, I reasoned, we could effect the release of thousands of deeply disturbed mental patients onto the streets of all major U.S. cities. Their unpresentable appearance and unnerving behavior would instantly make urban environments even more unpleasant for well-off and therefore easily frightened white Americans. In addition, the mental patients’ presence would considerably exacerbate the already existing “homeless” problem, tying up (in yet another silver lining) the time and resources of do-gooders whose endeavors would win them even more irritation from the general public, since those they were trying to help were so repellent and demented.

“Genius,” Roy said, watching the blood dry on the wall.

“Roy,” I said, only to find mind and tongue struggling to dredge up the unfamiliar word,
“why?
Why are we doing this? Isn’t it just eroding the tax base, and making all these places unlivable?”

“Tax base
?” he said incredulously. “You’re kidding, right?”

“No. Well, I hadn’t planned to be, anyway.”

“I know he’s a Gillie, but I think Ed Koch was the first big-city mayor to figure out something very simple. And that something very simple is this: when you’ve got enough rich people, you don’t
need
a middle class,” Roy explained.