The Caveman's Valentine (28 page)

HOMELESS! HOMELESS! BURNED-OUT SCARED-OUT FOOL OF A HOMELESS Z-RAY JUNKIE!

He called Lulu at her precinct house. He tried to seem cheerful.

“Hey baby.”

“Daddy where have you been?”

“I found a man who’s got the proof, Lulu. A videotape—is that amazing or what?”

“I went by the cave, Daddy, but you weren’t there.”

“They’re trying to kill me. They beat up Matthew and now two of the No-faces are after me.”

“Daddy . . .”

“Please, Lulu. I know how it sounds, coming from me. But please believe me. Please. Can’t you believe your old man?”

“Daddy, do you need any help?”

“I need you to believe me. I need you to believe it’s not that I’m a coward. It’s just—it’s too much for just one man. Too much. They got all the guns. They got all the rays. All I’ve got is the truth. What good is the truth if nobody believes it?”

“I believe some of the things you’re saying.”

“Like what?”

“I believe you’re trying to say you need help.”

“Right. I need help with the case. Do you believe that Leppenraub killed Scotty Gates?”

“No. I don’t believe that one thing, Daddy. But I love you.”

“Did you get the autopsy report for me?”

“No.”

“That was supposed to be my birthday present!”

“Daddy.”

“If they did any kind of decent autopsy the torture would
have
to show up.”

“That’s true, Daddy. And if they’d found evidence of torture I’d know about it.”

“Not if Stuyvesant didn’t want you to.”

“Daddy I gotta go.”

“Why?”

“ ’Cause I gotta go. I got work—”

“Work for who? Huh, Lulu?—who do you work for? Give your boss a message from me, OK? Tell Stuyvesant he was wise to discontinue the Z-rays—they didn’t do squat. They didn’t fucking seduce me, did they, ’cause I’m still here. Call me chicken but how come I’m still here? I’m still on the case, right? Tell him I’m going to see his boy Leppenraub
fry.
Tell him—”

“Bye Daddy. I love you!”

She hung up.

Then there was a terrible rasping noise. It was the Seraphs of Divinity and Vengeance, rasping their dried-up old wings against the dried-up old walls of his brain.

“Love?”
he said into the phone. “You cannot discuss love if you don’t discuss honor in the same breath. A civilization that dishonors its citizens, that herds them into concentration camps at night and makes them roam the streets like dogs in the day, right?—that kills and maims and calls it Art, that encourages its daughters to spit upon their fathers—oh, such a regime cannot speak of love, can fucking
not speak of love!
LOVE WILL DEFEAT SUCH A REGIME!
GODDAMN YOU ALL TO FUCKING HELL!”

The rest of the day was not eventful.

In fact, it was gone, and he had no idea what had happened to it.

It was night, and the NYU students were fanning out in the shelter, and again he had his portrait done. But Romulus’s hand shook too much to send another message to Stuyvesant. And anyway why bother to write a message to Stuyvesant when Stuyvesant could read his mind. Read this, Stuyvesant:
Love will defeat you. Love will defeat you.
He put his shoes under the legs of the bed. He was wide awake as he dreamed. His nightmares of suffering were so vivid they spilled out of his skull and the whole shelter dreamed them, all at once.

I
n the morning he went to the New York Public Library and studied back issues of
The Wall Street Journal, Scientific American,
and the
New York State Law Journal.
He took copious notes. He deduced that Genentech Inc. and Union Carbide had worked in concert on the development of Z-rays, which were produced by lacing human bone marrow through a superconductor.

Accidents had occurred. Bhopal, for example.

A few years ago Stuyvesant had traveled to Utah to test Z-rays for the first time.

Anomalies during the firing produced the illusion of cold fusion in a lab
on the other side of the state.

High school students
in New Jersey
had skipped the prom and made suicide pacts instead.

Where are we going with this, Romulus?

The pot fell off his head and bounced on the library table.

Damn you. DAMN YOU ALL TO FUCKING HELL!

He was shuffling down Sixth Avenue when he saw a crowd gathered in front of a TV store. There was a bank of TVs, and on each TV the same scene was showing. A criminal was being drawn and quartered.

“Yes,” several of the onlookers said reverently.

Said Romulus, “What’s this garbage?”

“It’s not garbage, it’s a challenge to our notions of the preordained psyche.”

“Just watch.”

“Watch.”

“Just watch.”

“Caustic.”

“His cries give voice to our alienation.”

“They prod the frontiers of our animal essence.”

“But they’re in dispraise, in dispraise of disempowerment, so it’s OK.”

“And a little thrilling.”

Screams came through the plate glass. Romulus went into the store and told the salesman:

“Turn it off!”

“Excuse me?”

“TURN IT OFF! TURN IT OFF! TURN IT OFF!”

“Sir, maybe you better leave.”

“If you don’t turn it off right now, misery will boil up in waves and drown us.”

“Yeah, but you better go.”

“Where can I go?”

“I don’t know that.”

U
p at Bob and Betty’s, where he went to return the silk underwear, there were two other Bob and Betty-type couples. “It’s a Bob and Betty festival!” said Romulus, and they all laughed.

Bob—the original Bob—offered him a drink, and Romulus took it, and proposed a toast.

“To the Eternal and Everlasting Cycles of Failure and Resuscitation,” said Romulus.

Bob said, “Hear! Hear!”

The other Bobs and Bettys murmured their approval, and everyone took a sip.

Romulus toasted again. “To the fact that the Cycle Seems to be Stuck, and the Bobs and Bettys are Always on Top.”

They all chuckled at this, and murmured their approval.

Said Romulus, “Let’s drink to the cycle being Just for Show, that it’s got No Moving Parts, and that Those on Top Stay on Top—Bob knows it, and Betty knows it—and for those poor losers down below, hey, let’s drink to them, too, mucking around on their Hungry Bellies with the Thorns and Dogs Snapping at them. Because they’re always going to be shit slogging, right?
Right?
I’ll drink to that. I mean we can lend them some nice threads and clean them up and invite them up for a cocktail but they never will
get
it, will they? They’ll always be animals!”

He threw open the sliding door, and went out on the balcony. It was cold out, and the lights of the city were crystal clear and twinkling. He went to the balcony’s edge, and looked way, way down at the dark courtyard.

He cried: “They got their noses in the fucking ooze, poor suckers, and they’ll believe
every lie you tell them.
Throw down a
clue
once in a while, watch ’em scurry around like rats trying to figure it out.
Right,
Bobs and Bettys? Piss on ’em, they’ll think it’s manna from fucking heaven!”

He unzipped, pulled out his equipment which shriveled from the cold, and it took a mammoth act of concentration but he got it working. He splashed the iron balusters, and then he found his aim and the stream opened up as it fell, scattered into thousands of golden droplets.

He shouted into the abyss, “Drink it up, folks! It’s
stardust!”

Then a wind kicked up and blew the stream back at him, and he got some of it on his pants. He humiliated himself in front of all the Bobs and Bettys and in full view of Stuyvesant, who watched the performance of the beaten man with glee.

He zipped, and went back in, and one of the Bettys was on the phone. He told her, “Don’t trouble yourself. You don’t need the police up here. You’re safe up here.
Nothing
can touch you.”

The original Bob held the door open for him and he left.

H
e didn’t go back to the shelter. He slept that night on the subway trains. And the next night, and the next. A friend saw him there, and said,
“Romulus,”
and he didn’t know what the guy was talking about. He said to the guy, “Don’t say it if you haven’t got proof.”

H
e called Moira again.

“Is Elon there?”

“Elon? Who’s this? Rom?”

“I want to talk to Elon.”

“Elon doesn’t talk on the phone, Rom. Are you OK?”

“Just . . . Elon.”

“What do you want to say to him?”

“I want to try. I just want to try. What else am I supposed to do?”

“I’ll tell him that, if you want.”

“I want to talk to Elon! What is he—is he your brother’s prisoner? Like they say? Does Leppenraub open his fucking mail? What does he do, does he put him in chains and shove stuff up his asshole? Why won’t you let him talk to me?”

Nothing that he said was what he planned to say, though he’d been planning for days. It was pointless to plan.

Next he planned to call Lulu, but the moment she answered the phone he put his fist on the buttons and played all the notes at once.

N
or did he
plan
to go back to the cave.

But one day he was sitting on a water hookup on Madison and thought if he only had his notebooks, he might find it, find it, find the clue. Find it, he thought, and in another hour he was climbing up the slope to the cave.

The beech tree ashimmer. Tiny green slips of leaves. Cyclops sat on the mattress.

“Hello Romulus.”

“Any messages?”

“Two men came by. Had no faces. Night you left.”

“I heard about that. I mean in the last few days.”

“No.”

There was a squirrel hole in the trunk of the beech. He got down on his knees and reached up into that hole and felt around. Two chickadees were at play just above him. Old friends of his.

Said Cyclops, “How was the trip?”

“It was fine. But now I’m dying. I’ll die soon, Cyclops, we’ll go out together. You’re from the South, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Help me with something that puzzles me. I was in the library, checking an atlas, and I noticed an odd thing. It seems that within a twenty-five-mile radius of Tifton, Georgia, are the following villages: Omega. Eldorado. Enigma. Sunsweet. Glory. Mystic. Do you know why?”

“I never been to Georgia but once.”

“I hear Stuyvesant has a factory built of stain glass somewhere around there, where he manufactures brain chemicals.”

“What you got there, Romulus?”

Out of the squirrel hole he had pulled a plastic bag, and he was shaking off the shit and cobwebs. Then he opened it, and inside were the notebooks for his biography of Cornelius Gould Stuyvesant.

He meant to leave right away, but it was a nice day and he could
think
in the cave, with his back up against a certain ergonomically contoured slope of rock. So he stayed and pored over the notebooks there.

Cyclops got up and went away and he didn’t notice her leaving.

It may have been that day, or it may have been on his return visit the following day, when he looked up and saw Miz Peasley was standing there. Joey’s mother. Come all the way up from Lent, North Carolina, to see him.

M
a’am.”

“They took Joey.”

“Who did?”

“They said you sent them.”

“Who said that?”

“I don’t know. They wore white bandages over their faces. They said you sent them. They said they were soldiers of justice. They said they had a message from you that they had to give Joey. They stayed with me for a day, and when Joey called me, they answered the phone and spoke to him. Then he came. He talked to them a long time, in his cottage. Then he told me he was going away with them. He was scared. He said he had to go away with them. He said if I went to the police he’d be killed. He said good-bye to me. Then he drove away with them.”

She stood there. Gray coat, gray scarf. He put down his notebook. He wished he could think of something to say to her, but his thoughts had no spring to them. He could only think that everything about her was gray, except the strands of lovely blond hair that got loose and blew in front of her face, and these she quickly caught and tucked back under her scarf.

Her son was surely dead, but Romulus supposed that no one would ever bother to let her know that.

He asked her, “When did this happen?”

“Three days ago. I didn’t know what to do. I remembered you said you lived in a cave in Inwood Park in New York. It’s insane for me to come here, I know this. But what else was I supposed to do? I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. So I came. Do you know who they were?”

“Yes.”

“Did you send them?”

“Of course not.”

“Oh. For just a second I had hoped . . .”

“I don’t see grounds for hope, ma’am.”

She asked him, “Who are they?”

“One of them’s named Leppenraub. The other, I’m not sure. They work for a man named Stuyvesant.”

“Why did they take Joey?”

“They’re enforcers. They enforce Stuyvesant’s Law of the Perfectly Real.”

“What can I do?”

“Tell the police.”

“Wouldn’t they kill Joey if they found out—”

“Yes. But they’ll kill him anyway.”

“Have they already killed him?”

“There. That’s something you can hope for. You can hope they’ve already killed him. In fact, let me assure you that they have. And let me take you to see a friend of mine, a policeman.”

She thought about it. “No. Joey told me not to.”

“He was just trying to protect you.”

“You said—that day you came looking for Joey—you said things would get better.”

“I said they might. I was wrong. As a prophet, I suck, ma’am. How can things get better? We’ve got every kind of ray cutting us up. There’s twenty thousand TV rays right now telling your brain every kind of lie in the world. And Y-rays and Z-rays and who knows what else and we can’t see any of them but they’re cutting our divinity to confetti. Right now I think I’d kill my daughter for another dose of Z-rays.”