Beaker's Dozen

  She frowned. “I don’t know. But Jeff has been . . . there were some connections that . . .” She trailed off, frowned again. Her date came up to us, still scowling. “Gene, this is Paul Snyder. Paul, Gene Shaunessy . . . Paul, I’m sorry, I have to go with Gene to wherever they’re taking Jeff. I’m the one he really called. And I said I’d take Darryl to his aunt.”

  “Jenny, for Chrissake . . . we have tickets for the Met!”

  She just looked at him, and I saw that Paul Snyder wasn’t going to be seeing any more of Jenny Kelly’s cleavage.

  “I’ll drive you to the precinct, Jenny,” I said. “Only I have to be the first one interviewed, I have to be as quick as I can because there’s something else urgent tonight . . .” Bucky. Dear God.

  Jenny said quickly, “Your wife? Is she worse?”

  “She’ll never be worse. Or better,” I said before I knew I was going to say anything, and immediately regretted it.

  “Gene . . .” Jenny began, but I didn’t let her finish. She was standing too close to me. I could smell her perfume. A fold of her black velvet skirt blew against my leg.

  I said harshly, “You won’t last at school another six months if you take it all this hard. You’ll burn out. You’ll leave.”

  Her gaze didn’t waver. “Oh, no, I won’t. And don’t talk to me in that tone of voice.”

  “Six months,” I said, and turned away. A cop came out of the building carrying a wailing Darryl. And the lieutenant came over to me, wanting to know whatever it was I thought I knew about Jeff Connors’ connections.

  It was midnight before I got home. After the precinct house there’d been a clinic, with the claw marks on my face disinfected and a tetanus shot and a blood test and photographs for the assault charges. After that, I looked for Bucky.

  He wasn’t at his apartment, or at his mother’s apartment. The weekend security guard at Kelvin Pharmaceuticals said he’d been on duty since four P.M. and Dr. Romano hadn’t signed in to his lab. That was the entire list of places I knew to look. Bucky’s current life was unknown to me. I didn’t even know Tommy’s last name.

  I dragged myself through my apartment, pulling off my jacket. The light on the answering machine blinked.

  My mind—or the Camineur—made some connections. Even before I pressed the MESSAGE button, I think I knew.

  “Gene, this is Tom Fletcher. You don’t know me . . . we’ve never met . . .” A deeper voice than I’d expected but ragged, spiky. “I got your message on Vince Romano’s machine. About the J-24. Vince . . .” The voice caught, went on. “Vince is in the hospital. I’m calling from there. St. Clare’s, it’s on Ninth at Fifty-first. Third floor. Just before he . . . said to tell you . . .”

  I couldn’t make out the words in the rest of the message.

  I sat there in the dark for a few minutes. Then I pulled my jacket back on and caught a cab to St. Clare’s. I didn’t think I could drive.

  The desk attendant waved me through. He thought I was just visiting Margie, even at this hour. It had happened before. But not lately.

  Bucky lay on the bed, a sheet pulled up to his chin but not yet over his face. His eyes were open. Suddenly I didn’t want to know what the sheet was covering—how he’d done it, what route he’d chosen, how long it had taken. All the dreary algebra of death. If train A leaves the station at a steady fifty miles per hour . . . There were no marks on Bucky’s face. He was smiling.

  And then I saw he was still breathing. Bucky, the ever inept, had failed a second time.

  Tommy stood in a corner, as if he couldn’t get it together enough to

  sit down. Tall and handsome, he had dark, well-cut hair and the kind of fresh complexion that comes with youth and exercise. He looked about fifteen years younger than Bucky. When had they taken the J-24 together? Lydia Smith and Giacomo della Francesca had killed themselves within hours of each other. So had Rose Kaplan and Samuel Fetterolf. How much did Tommy know?

  He stood and held out his hand. His voice was husky. “You’re Gene.”

  “I’m Gene.”

  “Tom Fletcher. Vince and I are—”

  “I know,” I said, and stared down at Bucky’s smiling face, and wondered how I was going to tell this boy that he, too, was about to try to kill himself for chemically-induced love.

  I flashed on Bucky and me sitting beside the rain-streaked alley window of the Greek diner. What are you waiting for, Bucky, your prince to come?

  Yes. And, Have you ever thought what it would be like to be really merged—to know him, to be himf

  “Tom,” I said. “There’s something we have to discuss.”

  “Discuss?” His voice had grown even huskier.

  “About Bucky. Vince. You and Vince.”

  “What?”

  I looked down at Bucky’s smiling face.

  “Not here. Come with me to the waiting room.”

  It was deserted at that hour, a forlorn alcove of scratched furniture, discarded magazines, too harsh fluorescent lights. We sat facing each other on red plastic chairs.

  I said abruptly, “Do you know what J-24 is?”

  His eyes grew wary. “Yes.”

  “What is it?” I couldn’t find the right tone. I was grilling him as if he were under arrest and I were still a cop.

  “It’s a drug that Vince’s company was working on. To make people bond to each other, merge together in perfect union.” His voice was bitter.

  “What else did he tell you?”

  “Not much. What should he have told me?”

  You never see enough, not even in the streets, to really prepare you. Each time you see genuine cruelty, it’s like the first time. Damn you, Bucky. Damn you to hell for emotional greed.

  I said, “He didn’t tell you that the clinical subjects who took J-24 . . . the people who bonded . . . he didn’t tell you they were all elderly?”

  “No,” Tom said.

  “The same elderly who have been committing suicide all over in the city? The ones in the papers?”

  “Oh, my God.”

  He got up and walked the length of the waiting room, maybe four good steps. Then back. His handsome face was gray as ash. “They killed themselves after taking J-24? Because of J-24?”

  I nodded. Tom didn’t move. A long minute passed, and then he said softly, “My poor Vince.”

  “Poor Vince? How the hell can you . . . don’t you get it, Tommy boy? You’re next! You took the bonding drug with poor suffering Vince, and your three weeks or whatever of joy are up and you’re dead, kid! The chemicals will do their thing in your brain, super withdrawal, and you’ll kill yourself just like Bucky! Only you’ll probably be better at it and actually succeed!”

  He stared at me. And then he said, “Vince didn’t try to kill himself.” I couldn’t speak.

  “He didn’t attempt suicide. Is that what you thought? No, he’s in a catatonic state. And I never took J-24 with him.”

  “Then who . . .?”

  “God,” Tom said, and the full force of bitterness was back. “He took it with God. At some church, Our Lady of Everlasting Something. Alone in front of the altar, fasting and praying. He told me when he moved out.”

  When he moved out. Because it wasn’t Tommy that Bucky really wanted, it was God. It had always been God, for thirteen solid years. Tell Father Healey I can’t touch God any more. . . . Have you ever thought what it would be like to be really merged, to know him, to be him . . . No. To know Him. To be Him. What are you waiting for, your Prince?

  Yes.

  Tom said, “After he took the damned drug, he lost all interest in me. In everything. He didn’t go to work, just sat in the corner smiling and laughing and crying. He was like . . . high on something, but not really. I don’t know what he was. It wasn’t like anything I ever saw before.” Nor anybody else. Merged with God. They knew each other, they almost were each other. Think, Gene! To have an end to the terrible isolation in which we live our whole tiny lives . . .

  “I got so angry with
him,” Tom said, “and it did no good at all. I just didn’t count any more. So I told him to get out, and he did, and then I spent three days looking for him but I couldn’t find him anywhere, and I was frantic. Finally he called me, this afternoon. He was crying. But again it was like I wasn’t even really there, not me, Tom. He sure the hell wasn’t crying over me.”

  Tom walked to the one small window, which was barred. Back turned to me, he spoke over his shoulder. Carefully, trying to get it word-perfect.

  “Vince said I should call you. He said, ‘Tell Gene—it wears off. And then the grief and loss and anger . . . especially the anger that it’s over. But I can beat it. It’s different for me. They couldn’t.’ Then he hung up. Not a word to me.”

  I said, “I’m sorry.”

  He turned. “Yeah, well, that was Vince, wasn’t it? He always came first with himself.”

  No, I could have said. God came first. And that’s how Bucky beat the J-24 withdrawal. Human bonds, whether forged by living or chemicals, got scraped down as much as built up. But you didn’t have to live in a three-room apartment with God, fight about money with God, listen to God snore and fart and say things so stupid you can’t believe they’re coming out of the mouth of your beloved, watch God be selfish or petty or cruel. God was bigger than all that, at least in Bucky’s mind, was so big that He filled everything. And this time when God retreated from him, when the J-24 wore off and Bucky could feel the bond slipping away, Bucky slipped along after it. Deeper into his own mind, where all love exists anyway.

  “The doctor said he might never come out of the catatonia,” Tom said. He was starting to get angry now, the anger of self-preservation. “Or he might. Either way, I don’t think I’ll be waiting around for him. He’s treated me too badly.”

  Not a long-term kind of guy, Tommy. I said, “But you never took J-24 yourself.”

  “No,” Tom said. “I’m not stupid. I think I’ll go home now. Thanks for coming, Gene. Good to meet you.”

  “You, too,” I said, knowing neither of us meant it.

  “Oh, and Vince said one more thing. He said to tell you it was, too, murder. Does that make sense?”

  “Yes,” I said. But not, I hoped, to him.

  After Tom left, I sat in the waiting room and pulled from my jacket the second package. The NYPD evidence sticker had torn when I’d jammed the padded mailer in my pocket.

  It was the original crime scene report for Lydia Smith and Giacomo della Francesca, the one Johnny Fermato must have known about when he sent me the phony one. This report was signed Bruce Campinella. I didn’t know him, but I could probably pick him out of a line-up from the brief tussle in Mulcahy’s: average height, brown hair, undistinguished looks, furious underneath. Your basic competent honest cop still outraged at what the system had for sale. And for sale at a probably not very high price. Not in New York.

  There were only two photos this time. One I’d already seen: Mrs. Smith’s smashed body on the pavement below the nursing home roof. The other was new. Della Francesca’s body lying on the roof, not in his room, before the cover-up team moved him and took the second set of pictures. The old man lay face up, the knife still in his chest. It was a good photo; the facial expression was very clear. The pain was there, of course, but you could see the fury, too. The incredible rage. And then the grief and loss and anger . . . especially the anger that it’s over.

  Had della Francesca pushed Lydia Smith first, after that shattering quarrel that came from losing their special, unearthly union, and then killed himself? Or had she found the strength in her disappointment and outrage to drive the knife in, and then jumped? Ordinarily, the loss of love doesn’t mean hate. Just how unbearable was it to have had a true, perfect, human end to human isolation—and then lose it? How much rage did that primordial loss release?

  Or maybe Bucky was wrong, and it had been suicide after all. Not the anger uppermost, but the grief. Maybe the rage on della Francesca’s dead face wasn’t at his lost perfect love, but at his own emptiness once it was gone. He’d felt something so wonderful, so sublime, that everything else afterward fell unbearably short, and life itself wasn’t worth the effort. No matter what he did, he’d never ever have its like again.

  I thought of Samuel Fetterolf before he took J-24, writing everyone in his family all the time, trying to stay connected. Of Pete, straining every cell of his damaged brain to protect the memories of the old people who’d been kind to him. Of Jeff Connors, hanging onto Darryl even while he moved into the world of red Mercedes and big deals. Of Jenny Kelly, sacrificing her dates and her sleep and her private life in her frantic effort to connect to the students, who she undoubtedly thought of as “her kids.” Of Bucky.

  The elevator to the fifth floor was out of order. I took the stairs. The shift nurse barely nodded at me. It wasn’t Susan. In Margie’s room the lights had been dimmed and she lay in the gloom like a curved dry husk, covered with a light sheet. I pulled the chair closer to her bed and stared at her.

  And for maybe the first time since her accident, I remembered.

  Roll the window down, Gene.

  It’s fifteen degrees out there, Margie!

  It’s real air. Chilled like good beer. It smells like a goddamn factory in this car.

  Don’t start again. I’m warning you.

  Are you so afraid the job won’t kill you that you want the cigarettes to do it?

  Stop trying to control me.

  Maybe you should do better at controlling yourself.

  The night I’d found Bucky at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows, I’d been in control. It was Bucky who hadn’t. I’d crawled back in bed and put my arms around Marge and vowed never to see Bucky and his messy stupid dramas of faith ever again. Marge hadn’t been asleep. She’d been crying. I’d had enough hysteria for one night; I didn’t want to hear it. I wouldn’t even let her speak. I stalked out of the bedroom and spent the night on the sofa. It was three days before I’d even talk to her so we could work it out and make it good between us again.

  Have a great year! she’d said my first September at Benjamin Franklin. But it hadn’t been a great year. I was trying to learn how to be a teacher, and trying to forget how to be a cop, and I didn’t have much time left over for her. We’d fought about that, and then I’d stayed away from home more and more to get away from the fighting, and by the time I returned she was staying away from home a lot. Over time it got better again, but I don’t know where she was going the night she crossed Lexington with a bag of groceries in front of that ’93 Lincoln. I don’t know who the groceries were for. She never bought porterhouse and champagne for me.

  Maybe we would have worked that out, too. Somehow.

  Weren’t there moments, Gene, Bucky had said, when you felt so close to Margie it was like you crawled inside her skin for a minute? Like you were Margie? No. I was never Margie. We were close, but not that close. What we’d had was good, but not that good. Not a perfect merging of souls.

  Which was the reason I could survive its loss.

  I stood up slowly, favoring my knee. On the way out of the room I took the plastic bottle of Camineur out of my pocket and tossed it in the waste basket. Then I left, without looking back.

  Outside, on Ninth Avenue, a patrol car suddenly switched on its lights and took off. Some kids who should have been at home swaggered past, heading downtown. I looked for a pay phone. By now Jenny Kelly would be done delivering Darryl to his aunt, and Jeff Connors was going to need better than the usual overworked public defender. I knew a guy at Legal Aid, a hotshot, who still owed me a long-overdue favor.

  I found the phone and the connection went through.

  UNTO THE DAUGHTERS

  A story can begin anywhere: with a character, with a situation, with an image. This one began with a voice. The voice of the snake came to me, not by description (“extravagant,” “rueful”), but in the voice, the exact words, of the first seven paragraphs. Obediently, I wrote them down.

  Then I got stuck.
The snake disappeared.

  It was back a few days later, and I finished the story, although this time with more conscious participation. And then Eve does this. . . No, I don’t like that. How about the snake decides to go to . . . Eventually, about halfway through, the ending occurred to me, and then I figured out how to get there, checking periodically that I was still well inside the original voice.

  That’s how most of my stories get written. But I like it better when the voice just talks and I just write it down.

  THIS IS NOT THE WAY YOU HEARD THE STORY.

  This is not the way you heard the story . . .

  In the beginning, the tree was young. White blossoms scenting the air for a quarter mile. Shiny succulent fruit, bending the same boughs that held blossoms. Leaves of that delicate yellow-green that cannot, will not, last. Yet it did. He always did have gaudy taste. No restraint. Just look at the Himalayas. Or blowfish. I mean— really!

  The woman was young, too. Pink curling toes, breasts as barely budded as the apple blossoms. And the man! My dear, those long, firm flanks alone could make you ache inside for hours. He could run five miles and not even be winded. He could make love to the woman five times a day. And did.

  The flowers were young. The animals, tumbling and cavorting on the grass, were young. The fucking beach sand was young, clean evenly-shaped grains that only yesterday had been igneous rock. There was virgin rain.

  Only I was old.

  But it wasn’t that. That was the first thing that came to your mind, wasn’t it? Jealousy of glorious youth, revenge by the dried-up and jaded. Oh, you don’t know, you sitting there so many centuries ahead. It wasn’t that at all. I mean, I loved them both.

  Looking at them, how could one not?

  “Go away,” Eve says. “I’m not going to eat one.”

  She sits cross-legged, braiding flowers into a crown. The flowers are about what you’d expect from Him, garish scarlet petals and a vulvashaped pistil like a bad joke. Braiding them, her fingers are deft and competent. Some lion cubs tumble tiresomely on the grass.