Gilligan's Wake: A Novel (34 page)

“But the rich were the first to leave,” I said.

“And they’re going to be the first to come back. You ever see
Metropolis,
pal? By the year 2000, New York City’s going to make it look like a documentary—and a pretty damned namby-pamby one, too.”

“But what about the middle class?”

Hands braced on his knees, Roy bent toward the dead dog on the carpet. “Here, Rex!” he called. “Din-din!” Straightening up again, he shrugged.

“Guess he’s not hungry, Prof.”

My single greatest contribution to the 1980s, of course, was the Strategic Defense Initiative, more popularly known as Star Wars. Despite a slyly devised don’t-tax-but-spend-anyway policy that was to send the national debt skyrocketing into the trillions, the Reagan Administration simply hadn’t had enough imagination to create the firewall we needed against funding social programs of any sort well into the third millennium. “It’s the same problem as always,” Roy sighed. “This country’s just so fucking
rich
. We can spend ourselves blind on military Tupperware, we can gut the economy like a trout—and even so, it’s never enough. By the late Nineties, there’s probably going to be a goddamned budget surplus again, and just watch all the whimperers line up for gruel. So figure out what we can do about it now—and what we’re going to do about it
then,
too. You’ve got three minutes.”

Remembering my earlier success with the moon program, and recognizing that what had made Americans finally lose interest in that effort had been the lack of an enemy, I needed only a few moments to collect my thoughts before collecting a .357 Magnum from my desk. Striding out into the corridor, I blew away my receptionist, whose constant moping about her dog had begun to irritate me in any case, and crouched on the floor to quickly sketch out the preliminary plan for SDI with her blood, in which my colleagues kept skidding on their way to their own current projects. Hank Kissinger took a real tumble, but picked himself up with a grin and a friendly wave of his red palm: “Used to it,” he called cheerfully. “No problem. Carry on.”

Needless to say, I knew perfectly well that any moderately bright tenth-grader would be able to guess immediately that Star Wars was impractical. But I also knew it would take twenty years or more and untold billions of dollars to
prove
it was impractical, meanwhile keeping occupied all sorts of able scientists who might otherwise have gotten busy fixing the hole in the ozone layer, to keep their minds from wandering, or saving the remnants of a tropical rain forest so dank and lush that when you were in it you could hardly see a single tree anyhow.

In other words, the unfeasibility of SDI was precisely what made it work—and, if this scientist may be allowed a personal note, it was also something of a sentimental journey, some forty years after the Manhattan Project, to be thinking about nuclear war again. Yet throughout my work on Star Wars, the reminiscent undercurrent generated by already having both Los Alamos and Apollo 11 on my resume also troubled me. I worried that, like many men no longer all that young, I might be simply trying to repeat past glories.

In a brief chat as one of the charwomen scrubbed down the corridor outside my office, Hank Kissinger confessed to a similar concern. Emulating his own earlier triumph with the Vietnam War, he had recently contrived not one but two anti-Communist crusades in Central America. To ensure that no protest movement against either or both would be able to make itself intelligible to the public, he had decided—ah, the Henry touch—to have us fund the rebels in one country while supporting the government in the other. But he too found his whole enterprise’s memory-lane aspect problematic.

“Oh, don’t get me wrong,” Hank said, quickly stuffing his hands in his pockets as usual. “I’m as nostalgic as the next man—maybe a little more so, since right now that seems to be you. Every time I see another hospital explode in Matagalpa or another ten-year-old kid step on a land mine in some Salvadorean village with a per-capita income of eighty-seven dollars a year, it’s like old home week to me. And if we ever decide to legalize cocaine Stateside—say, what the hell, huh? Maybe we should talk to Roy—we’ll have well-trained Green Berets who can take over the business in a fmgersnap. Paratroopers with MBAs—believe me, that’s the future of this country. But still, I dunno—I mean, it’s
good”
he suddenly sighed. “But it’s just not
as
good.”

Although neither Hank nor I knew it that day, our future opportunities to talk to Roy about anything under the sun were dwindling fast. He died of AIDS in 1986—aged, of course, eighty-six, having come into the world, or at any rate into a spittoon in a Union Station broom closet, at dawn on the first day of the American Century, although the obituaries dutifully used the false and much later birthdate his vanity had invented.
As for AIDS itself, I can personally testify that it wasn’t hatched under Roosevelt Island, despite the ravings of some of the more paranoid gay Gillies later on. But the endless struggle to prevent any meaningful amount of money from being spent on finding a cure occupied a good deal of my and my colleagues’ time from the moment the disease was identified right up through my retirement. For all the public’s natural hostility to homosexuals, stifling the average American’s natural sympathy for any category of young men dying painful deaths in droves, no matter how perplexing their lifestyle or alien their sexual orientation, was one of the greatest challenges our shop ever faced. I’m pleased to say we all came through with flying colors.

In my final conversation with Roy, which took place at his deathbed in a New York City hospital, he implored me to hold fast. “Not a dime more, do you hear me?” he gasped on the pillow, his enfevered eyes glittering out of the new hollows of a face now positively nougated with lesions—distractingly so, given Priap’s charitable propensities.

“Not a fucking dime,” he repeated more harshly. Hoisting himself up on one elbow with difficulty, he grabbed my hand with an enfeebled lobster claw, pulling my face close. It was the first time he’d touched me, or I him, in thirty-two years.

“You know how it is, pal,” he muttered-”you understand, Prof. When I think of everything we had to go through when we weren’t even
queer,
not like those other nellies at Kay Josephs’—and then I look at all these arrogant bastards, with their bars that have the fucking signs right out in the fucking open, and their goddam public hand-holding and their fucking parades and their Stonewall and their Harvey Milks and their goddam ACT UP and their goddam Jim Fouratts and their
god damn gay pride
—all acting like it’s
normal,
for Christ’s sake, and some of them wanting to adopt
kids
and get
old
together! But we’ll show them how normal they are. We’ll teach them what love’s got to do with it.
What kind of schmuck wants to get old?
Oh, don’t you see they
deserve
it? They deserve everything they get,” he whispered, and his head fell back onto the pillow.

He was still holding my hand when he died.

Afterward, I returned to Roosevelt Island, swimming down to the underwater exit in a state of some trepidation as to how I would proceed without Roy to guide me. Soon enough, however, I discovered that I needn’t have worried, for it turned out I simply knew what ought to come next, without understanding how I knew it. One day, I asked my new receptionist to fetch me Hank Kissinger, and was informed that he’d retired a year previously. Gradually, it sank in that I was now in charge, and had been for some time; that must be why that fellow had summoned me to his deathbed.

Our labors continued apace, although few things fit my old friend Hank’s catchphrase-”Good, but not
as
good"—like the ascent of Reagan’s Vice President to the top job. Still, it would be uncharitable of me to say so. You see, in a roundabout fashion, I have George Bush, the elder I suppose I should say, to thank for helping me unriddle a desire I hadn’t known had ruled me since the day at Los Alamos when I rolled my newly de-goggled eyes and swallowed a Laggilin for my heart condition as Robert Oppenheimer dolefully intoned, “I am become death.”

Even granting that he too might be nearing the age of retirement, Priap could now be stirred to acts of generosity only by subjects so maimed and mutilated that it was often difficult to bestow my good king’s favors on them in time for me to receive their silent thanks as they expired. Haunted by the thought that soon Priap would be unable to find anyone at all to be grateful to him, I tried to lose myself in work, to no avail. For the first time in my life, I had trouble sleeping at night.

Indeed, insomnia alone could explain how I came to be watching the 1992 Republican Convention on television. As a rule, we sub-aquatics troubled ourselves very little with the sideshows of Gillie politics; after all, the Gillies themselves could barely be bothered to lift a finger by then, and they were the ones who called it a democracy. Yet there I was, staring rather blearily at George Bush—who, to my momentary bewilderment, had abruptly grown almost a half century younger. No longer the nincompoop Chief Executive whose petulant voice over my
speakerphone, near the window past which I had arranged for plastic fish to float belly-up at regular intervals, drove me almost daily to despair, he had just stepped out of the sea onto a corrugated metal deck, looking shaken and more exhausted at twenty than I, or possibly anyone, had ever seen him since.

Later on, I was often to marvel at the way that year’s Gillie election seemed to come down to a contest between two bits of black-and-white film—the footage of Bush the youthful carrier pilot’s rescue by one of our submarines after his plane was shot down in the Pacific late in World War Two, and the later but almost as archaic-looking clip that showed an even younger Bill Clinton shaking hands with Jack Kennedy in the Rose Garden. It was as if the Gillies had suddenly grasped that the twentieth century itself—that era that stayed unimaginable even as it happened, in which I counted my own glory days—was slipping irrefragably into history, and they wanted to gather up and clutch at the faded tickets and confetti still strewn on the dock now that the great ship was growing tiny as it sailed. For all the pro forma talk about the future in the candidates’ speeches, it seemed to me that the real choice on offer, as our gallivanting epoch’s waning grew real, was between those two dim rival echoes of two things alike only in that both were ghostly, somehow summoning, and gone.

Later still, I also marveled at the coincidence at both these relatively small events in the grand scheme of things having been caught by cameras—not that great a surprise in the case of the Rose Garden ceremony, but something to rock the laws of probability back hard on their heels as one watched a then anonymous pilot scramble aboard a sub’s deck amid venerable light-and dark-gray waves. Having grown familiar with Franklin Roosevelt’s puckish streak since the day I first learned of his paternity of our shop, I even wondered if
we
had had something to do with sticking that providential newsreel crew aboard the U.S.S.
Finback
on that cruise. But as we never kept records of anything, I had no way of determining if this had been so.

In any case, as I watched a twenty-year-old George Bush walk up to me out of a forty-seven-year-old sea, I suddenly understood the nature of my own final mission. An instant later, it already seemed extraordinary
that Newton’s apple should have taken so long to drop on my head, waiting until the latter began to nod beneath the spreading
Agaricus bisporus
of my now lengthily shadowed life. Yet only age’s clouded thinking explained why it had taken me so long to see it—I, with my genius for problem-solving; I, Dr. Gordy N. Notcutter, to mention an alias I had used often with Gillie medicos over the years when negotiating Priap’s more extreme missions of mercy. But now the old can-do spirit reasserted itself.

Shutting off the television, and taking several years to assemble my thoughts, I jotted down a plan on the nearest available writing surface. This turned out to be the back of a scallop-bordered old black-and- white Kodak I had never seen before, depicting an object whose nature and purpose baffled me. Finally, I concluded that it must be some monstrous sort of bicycle or icicle, and let it go at that.