The Last Notebook of Leonardo (2 page)

I peered at him closely. “You look different, Dad,” I said. “Did you get a haircut? It's a definite improvement.”

“
Jem
!” he shouted, outraged. “Did I get a
what
? Look at me! Are you
blind
?”

“Come on, Dad,” I said, turning away and walking back into the kitchen of our apartment. “I can practically see the zipper on that thing. What are you trying to pull on me?”

The orangutan lunged through the doorway, bounded into the kitchen, and when its feet landed on the floor the entire room shook with a boom and a rattle, and a cabinet door popped open, and six breakfast bowls jumped out and smashed all over the counter top. The thought crossed my mind that an orangutan costume wouldn't make a person that heavy, unless it had cement in the feet. And in that case, my dad would not be able to bound anywhere. He would be straining to shuffle his feet across the floor.

I turned to face him again, a little less certainly. “That's, um, that's a costume, right? I mean you didn't really. . . . Dad, did you really? . . .”

The orangutan sneered again, showing me all its ghastly teeth. It began to make a sucking, grunting noise that sounded like a giant hacksaw cutting off a horse's head. I cowered against the refrigerator at this awful sound, but gradually realized that the thing was laughing.

“Is that what you thought?” the orangutan said. “A costume? No, Jem, no zipper here.” It spread out its long arms, spanning the entire room and touching
the opposite walls with its knuckles. “It's genuine 100% great ape material.”

Now that I was beginning to understand the truth, I started to tremble. “You turned yourself into an orangutan?” I said.

“Very good,” he said, sneering at me again. I realized that the sneer was his version of a smile. “You remember your zoology. Yes, that's exactly right, Jem. An orangutan. An especially large one. Obviously the vocal apparatus is modified to allow for the production of human speech, requiring a reshaping of the hyoid process and the. . . .”

“Dad,” I said, “is it, like, permanent, or will it go back?”

“Go back?” he said. “You mean, disappear? Turn back into a person? Not this time. No sir. I'm certain. It's absolutely permanent.”

“But Dad,” I said, and now I began to feel sad. “Can't you go back to your old self?”

“My old self?” he said, scratching his head with an enormous knobby finger. “Why would I want to do that?”

“But,” I said, and stopped. I almost said, “People aren't supposed to look like orangutans,” but I caught myself in time. I knew better than to try that approach.

He seemed to take my hesitation as a sign that
I still did not quite believe him. Actually, I did. I had no more doubts. Turning himself into an orangutan without first thinking about the consequences was exactly the impulsive sort of thing he would do. “Here, feel it,” he said, holding his hand out toward me. “It's for real.” I touched his hand, and it was solid and warm and strong. It was a real hand.

“What about the poor animal?” I said.

“Huh?” he said. “What poor animal?”

“Did you get it from a zoo?”

“Jem, don't talk drivel. I generated the plan on a computer. I didn't steal anyone's body. Obviously, if I had taken an actual body, I wouldn't have been able to shape the hyoid process to enable the efficient production of—”

“But,” I said, “what will people say? How will you go to work?”

He waved his hand as if brushing away a swarm of irrelevant details. “The point is,” he said, and then he paused and grinned again. “Actually, I got some interesting reactions on the subway.”

“They let you on the subway?”

“To tell you the truth, I think the subway guard was a little nervous about stopping me. But hey, it's New York, and there's a lot of strange people in the city. Everybody knows that. So I don't think it's a big deal. Jem, I'm starving. What do you say we go
out for dinner and celebrate? I know a great vegetarian restaurant a few blocks away. Ah, I feel like a really big salad tonight.”

The Landlord was a dried up stick. I didn't like him.

We walked down the street in the snow. It was dark out already and the snow looked very beautiful falling through the cones of light underneath the street lamps. Sometimes people stared at us, and some of them laughed as if they thought it was a joke, but a lot of people didn't even seem to notice. They were too busy shopping or trying to flag down a taxi. I was in my coat and boots, hat and mittens, holding my father's hand. My father, who didn't own any clothes big enough for an orangutan, wore his boots unlaced and a big umbrella to keep the snow from his head. His fur was so long and shaggy that he didn't mind the cold very much. His legs were short in comparison to the rest of his body, and his knees stuck out to the sides, so that at every step his body rocked from side to side.

“Ah, it's such a treat, Jem,” he said. “Such a new perspective. I never was so tall before.”

“Yes Dad,” I said, but not very enthusiastically. I was of two minds about the situation. On the one hand, walking down the street with a giant orangutan had a certain coolness factor. I could imagine my friends from school being seriously jealous, except that none of them lived near us so we were unlikely to meet them. On the other hand, maybe we were a little too sensational. Somebody might call the police on us. One old lady saw us coming, clutched her handbag to her stomach, and scurried down a side street.

We reached the restaurant and opened the door to come in. The waitress saw us and yelped in surprise.

“Um, a table for two,” I said.

“Better make it three,” my dad said. “I might need two chairs.”

When she realized that an orangutan was talking to her, she yelped even louder. She stammered to me to wait for a moment, and then ran to the back of the restaurant.

After a while, the manager came out wearing a very nice white suit. He was calm and professional. “I'm sorry, Son,” he said to me. “ We don't allow pets in the restaurant.”

“I'm not a pet,” my father said. “I'm his dad. We'd like a table for three. And your celery special. I feel like celery today.”

The man blinked and a stringy muscle in his cheek twitched, but he did not lose his calm. He peered up into my father's face. “I apologize, sir. We never admit patrons who are not properly dressed.”

“But I don't own anything big enough,” my dad said.

“Then,” the manager said, “I suggest you visit a tailor. Good night.” And he closed the door in our faces.

“It's discrimination!” my father said on our way back to the apartment. “It's outrageous!”

“Dad,” I said, rolling my eyes in annoyance, “what did you
think
would happen?”

That night I walked down the street to the supermarket and bought dinner for the two of us: a microwave dinner for me, and three heads of lettuce, six packages of celery, and four packages of carrots for my father. He grabbed hold of our kitchen cleaver and in three seconds chopped up the vegetables into bite sizes and tossed them down his mouth, smacking his lips and gulping and burping.

“Sorry,” he said, with a smirk. “That's the way orangutans do it.”

“That's okay,” I said, grinning back at him. “I don't mind.”

I felt more comfortable than I had a few hours ago. I was beginning to see my dad's facial expressions
in this big hairy creature. It really was him. Inside, he hadn't changed at all. If he wanted to look like a giant carpet, I could deal. My friend Joey's father had a wart on his nose so big it was actually bigger than his nose; and my friend Ken's father had a very long neck with folds and wrinkles like a turkey. You could see the folds jiggling whenever he talked. My dad, in present form, looked a lot better than that. Besides, geniuses do funny things sometimes. Whatever made him happy. Whatever floated his boat. All this homespun philosophy, I began to notice, didn't entirely take away my anxiety. I was still worried about our future, because even if I had come more or less to terms with his enlarged and hairy condition, I didn't know how other people might react. If they all reacted like the people in the restaurant, then we were in for some trouble.

The next day was a vacation day for me and I stayed home from school. My father went to work as usual at six o'c lock. Most days he didn't come home until evening, but this day he stomped in the front door in the late morning, his long shaggy arms wrapped around two large cardboard boxes full of papers. He dumped the boxes on the kitchen table and turned to me.

“Well,” he said, in a grim voice, “I quit my job.”

“You
what
?”

“Yes, I quit. I had enough. I told him so. I said it right out. I didn't pussyfoot my words. Well, to be honest, I got fired at the same time that I quit. I mean, I shouted ‘I quit!' just as my boss was shouting, ‘You're fired!' and you'd have to check the video to see who said what first. I think I was first. But he was mighty quick on the draw, so I don't know. Photo finish, as they say. In any case, it all comes down to the same thing.” He pulled out a chair and sat, his enormous hairy bottom sagging off of the sides of the chair. He put his elbows on the table and his head in his hands, and looked at me gloomily.

“How come you quit?” I said, sitting down on the other side of the table and looking at him between the boxes of papers.

“Well, okay, it was like this. I had no trouble getting into the center. I have a card key, and the card reader doesn't care what you look like so long as you have your card. I had just sat down and started on my work, when Clapton comes in and says, ‘Hi Car l,' and he doesn't think anything of it. And Snupplee he comes in and says, ‘Hi Carl,' and goes right to work at
his
desk. Everything is just fine. Then after a while, Old Gordon Spork calls me into his office. And he says, ‘Carl, have a seat,' and I knew that was a bad sign. Especially since I broke the chair sitting in it. ‘Carl,' he says, ‘this kind of thing has gone on
too long. It's got to stop. We really loved your acid bomb, but—' ”

“You built an acid bomb?” I said.

“Sure,” my dad said. “Not on purpose. It was kind of an accidental side effect, and not my main line of research.”

I was fascinated. I had never heard him talk so much about his work before. I didn't even know any of the people he had just mentioned. “Isn't it all supposed to be secret?” I said eagerly.

“Sure,” he said. “But I don't work for them anymore, so I don't care. We built an acid bomb. And the government loved it. They like anything that can melt people. They gave us a list of priorities a few years ago, and melting was up there with mangling, smashing, and boiling. Ugh. I tell you. But do they care for a really useful thing like this?” He pointed to his hairy chest. “Do they? Do you think they care?”

“Dad,” I said, “not to be negative, and I'm not criticizing, but what's actually useful about it?”

My dad did a double take and looked at me. “That's odd, that's what old Spork said. I told him, ‘Come on, it's right up you're alley. It's a disguise. It's camouflage. Supposing a spy needs to go somewhere incognito.' ”

“Um,” I said, “are you sure that being an orangutan would make the spy blend in better?”

“Ha!” my father said. He was getting agitated now, and he jumped to his feet and began pacing the room with a Boom Boom every time his foot hit the ground. I could hear the dishes rattling in the cabinets but none of them flew out and broke this time. “Ha! Spork said that, too! That smarmy old fool he says, ‘Well Carl, you sure blend in great. I bet nobody noticed a nine foot gorilla on the subway this morning, reading the New York Times.' But, I mean, come on. First of all, I'm not a gorilla. And second, supposing a government spy needed to mingle with a society of subversive orangutans and get information from them? It could happen, right? And it'd be great for the witness protection program, too. But he didn't see any of it. He just couldn't see the utility of it. Some people have no imagination.”

“It's okay dad,” I said. I was getting a little alarmed at his agitation. I didn't want him to accidentally break our kitchen table now that he was so much stronger than he used to be. “Calm down. It's the government's loss, if they're too silly to understand.”

“That's exactly right, Jem!” he shouted, getting even more agitated. “You're right! That's what I thought, too. I said, ‘Spork,' I said, ‘this is the crowning achievement of twenty years of work! Everything I've done here has led up to this! And if you don't appreciate it, then I QUIT!' And that's when
he yelled, ‘You're FIRED!' at the same time. But it might have had to do with my foot accidentally going through the wall into the next guy's office.”