The Last Manly Man (17 page)

“Men are trouble, women are trouble, people are trouble. That's life, darlin'.”

“I guess.”

“I have one quick stop to make not far from the hospice. It's on the way. This chick's cranky. She runs a darkroom for a news wire service.”

“Do we have time?”

“It'll take five minutes.”

On West Seventy-ninth, a young, short white woman jumped into the back and glanced at us quickly.

“Jesus, what took you so long,” she said to Blue.

“Had to look after my karma, darlin',” he said, not bothering to introduce us. “Long time.”

“Yeah, how you doing, Blue? Still dating your ex-wife?” the woman asked him.

“Yeah, am I a jerk or what?” he said, handing her a little bag of weed. “How's it goin'?”

“Shit, I've been working seventeen hours a day. It's even worse than usual,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because of all these fucking feminists in town. It's worse than when the pope was here during the high holidays and I spent Yom Kippur at work eating like a pig and swearing like a sailor.”

“They didn't give you Yom Kippur off?”

“Hell, no. You don't know how it is? Ever since
Newsday
laid off all those people, the market is glutted. I wanna keep this job, I kiss ass.”

“It sucks. Fewer people control more of the money. People are worked like dogs,” Blue sympathized.

“Nothing against the pope,” the woman said to me. “Just in case you're Catholic. I'm a Jew, I don't think he's God's anointed whatever on earth, but he was a partisan during World War Two, against the Nazis, and I give him credit.”

“And he has said some nice things, good things, gentle, loving shit lately,” Blue said. “Know what I mean? I don't mind the pope. I'd like to get stoned with the pope. But he doesn't do this. I bet Jesus would do this. He could party. He liked to hang out with sinners and took a bad rap from those … what were they called?”

“Pharisees,” I said.

“I shouldn't do this tonight,” the woman said. “My boss wants me back in at four-thirty
A.M.
I told him I couldn't come in on such short turnaround. I'm only human, you know? And he says I have to do it. And all I wanna do tonight is go home and blow a fifty-dollar dube.”

“I hear ya, darlin',” Blue said.

“I'd almost given up on you, Blue,” she said. “I was gonna go to the river to get some pot.”

“You have to be careful down there. They're busting a lot there now. Cops pose as pot sellers and then bust you.”

“I always go to a cool guy, X, got dreads down to his ankles. If he's not there, I don't buy. Hey, thanks, Blue.”

She was out the car.

When we got to the hospice, Blue dropped me off and said he'd be back later to pick me up.

Jason was sitting in Dewey's room working on a laptop. He was no longer in drag, but he still had traces of makeup around his face.

“What did Dewey say?” I asked. Dewey was again unconscious in the bed.

“Not much. But I have learned some things. I retrieved an encoded E-mail from Central. Dewey had requested a boat and some commandos for a liberation sometime next week. He needed saboteurs and primate specialists and had requested some people he'd worked with before. But Central hadn't heard back about the particulars. Dewey was supposed to get a map at his meeting with the scientists the day he was beaten up, and learn the identity of the evildoer or doers behind the bonobo abduction. When Dewey came to, briefly, I asked him about the map. He said he had it. But the map was not in Dewey's personal effects.”

“Damn.”

“The boat's on its way though. It'll be here for a week. We have it at our disposal.”

“And Hufnagel?”

“Here,” he said, and handed me a computer printout. “There's a photo on the Internet. Let me find the website.”

There were only a few small blips about Hufnagel. One of the stories was from his hometown newspaper, the
Greason
(Idaho)
Globe
, which reported that Hufnagel had disappeared shortly after an investigation was begun into the financial affairs of his lab. Investigators said he had gambling debts and appeared to have siphoned off large amounts of money earmarked for research to help pay his debts. He was divorced and had lost his only child, a son, in a plane crash.

Among the other press mentions of Hufnagel was a short paragraph in an old
Time
magazine from the late 1980s, in an article about advances in fertility drugs, hormonal therapy, and pheromonal research. The things you learn from reading. For example, did you know that for many years, the most popular fertility drug, Pergonal, was made from the urine of postmenopausal nuns? Why postmenopausal Italian nuns? Because the urine of childless, postmenopausal women is rich in the chemicals needed to produce the drug, convents are rich in childless, postmenopausal women, and the maker of the drug, Serono, was originally Italian-owned. But evidently the demand for the drug far outpaced the urine output of Italian nuns (I had a cartoonish image of nuns lined up like laying chickens in coops, being continually force-fed water in order to produce for their evil pharmaceutical masters), and new drugs had been developed to take up the slack.

Hufnagel's work had focused on hormones and pheromones, how nature regulated them, how they could be manipulated. He'd done work with insects, livestock, and primates, including bonobo chimps in captivity at a midwestern zoo.

“Look at this,” Jason said, handing me the laptop.

It was a picture of Harris Hufnagel.

“It's the man in the hat,” I said. “Okay, we know Hufnagel and Bondir were both scientists, and they met with Dewey the day he was beaten up.…”

Dewey stirred, groaned, and without opening his eyes, mumbled repeatedly, “The hat, the hat,” before snoring loudly and falling back into a deep sleep.

“Where's the hat?” Jason asked.

“My sort of boyfriend has it. Actually, it should be on its way back to me. Probably won't get it until Monday.”

Jason sighed and looked over at his friend Dewey. Poor kid, I was almost starting to feel for him.

“You okay?” I asked.

“It's hard to see Dewey like this,” he said. “He's my best friend. What if he has brain damage? What if he doesn't come out of the coma again?”

“I'm sure he'll be okay,” I said. “What do the doctors say?”

“They think he'll have minimal damage, but they won't really know until he fully regains consciousness. People come out of comas sometimes with different personalities, speaking with strange accents, with memory loss.”

“I'm sure he'll be fine. I hope he doesn't come out of it as a meat eater.”

“Tell me again the people you've interviewed and the questions you've asked? Maybe there's something we've overlooked.”

Just like a man, I thought. As Wallace Mandervan said in his book,
Men Made Easy
, “Swallow your feelings and get back to business.”

“You saw the DeWitt interview, and the Morton interview, Nukker … I asked them to describe their vision of the man of the future … what it means to be a man.…”

“But Dewey was beaten before you began the interviews.”

“In pre-interviews I asked similar things. The role of men in relation to women, to children, what makes a man manly. You know, there was also a guy who grows human hair in a test tube. Did I mention him to you?”

“That's a horror movie waiting to happen,” Jason said.

I smiled because I had thought the exact same thing, in those very words.

“What if the hair escapes and spreads?” he went on.

“Like kudzu. Before you know it, the whole eastern seaboard is wearing a toupee. People would have to comb their lawns.”

“Scary. See what I mean about monster science? But I don't see why the test-tube-hair man would need bonobos,” Jason said.

“Nor the fashion designer, the at-home fathers, or the Anthrofuturist who thinks Deep Blue the computer is the Man of the Future.”

“So we have three likely culprits, DeWitt, Nukker, and Morton.…”

“Morton seems awfully nice and normal, relatively speaking. I'm golfing with Morton tomorrow on his estate.”

“Why?”

“My boss is trying to sell him a whole lot of advertising time.”

“Capitalism,” he sneered.

“What's the alternative?” I asked. I was tired, and starting to lose patience a little. “You want us all to go back to living in the woods, foraging for nuts and berries? That was no Disney World of happy people and woodland creatures. If mankind didn't fiddle with nature, we'd all still be living in caves.”

“I'm not against technology, just the misuse of it. If we put as much into developing solar energy as we put into fossil fuels, we wouldn't have to go to war with tin-pot dictators over oil. We have a world full of useless crap Madison Avenue convinces us we have to have, and we're destroying the planet to get it.”

“Let's not argue,” I said. “I'm tired. Is there anything else we need to do tonight?”

“No. I'll beep Blue and have him come get you,” he said.

I was dog-tired when I got home. After I fed Louise Bryant, I dropped onto my bed and wished—for a moment—for a simpler life, like the one in the old Morton ads, where I was a mom and a wife in a crisp pink apron with a big strong man to look after me. I looked up at the photo of my friend Susan Brave and her husband and baby on my wall and wondered why I couldn't do that—find one guy, settle down, have a child, work part-time. Technically, I can't have kids biologically without expensive and difficult in vitro, due to my screwy fallopians, but there's always adoption. But for some reason I have not been able to make those sacrifices. My dad did. He always wanted to work for NASA, but he gave that dream up, became a math teacher and weekend inventor to support my mom and me. He made sacrifices.

Why couldn't I? Seemed like it would make life a whole lot easier and more pleasant, having someone big and strong to look after me, instead of me having to look after so many people.

How was I going to work on my series, play the executive game with Jack, save the bonobos, and get laid? The responsibility was crushing, and an old panic stirred to life within me, a panic I hadn't felt since just after Jack gave me my big break, when I seriously thought about chucking it all, getting into my Soyuz rescue vehicle and jetting outta news. I had even drafted a Plan B and a Plan C, for escape or in case of failure. Plan B: Take my savings and my 401(k) and buy a diner or some road-side attraction, like the world's biggest ball of string or a vegetable simulacra museum. Just live a goofy, loose-flowing life in a shack by the side of an interstate, hosting the curious, selling souvenirs, writing my memoirs, and maybe tending a little garden out back. Only have to do one thing at a time, instead of two or three. Plan C: Take a leave of absence to go off with my absent super Phil and his friend Helen Fitkis to Calcutta to work on the Leprosy Eradication Project. Every month, during my period, when I'm feeling like the Good Jesus and lamenting that my life has no humanitarian purpose, I feel the urge to pack it all in and run off to Calcutta to help the lepers. But as Phil pointed out, first bad postmenstrual day and I'd end up telling the lepers all
my
problems, and, you know, the lepers have enough problems of their own.

Anyway, I have a curse on my head. I could be living the pastoral life a zillion miles away from everyone but a few slow-witted chickens and a cow, and a dead body would probably drop on me out of the sky.

I couldn't quit now. If I did, they'd just close down the unit, fire everyone. They were depending on me. The staff was depending on me, Jack Jackson was depending on me, and maybe the bonobos were depending on me too.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Jack's car, an impressive stretch limousine, picked me up at 9:00
A.M.
that Sunday, and took me to an East Side heliport, where Jack and a helicopter were waiting.

When we were all in, Jack handed me a set of miked headsets.

“So we can talk on the way out,” he shouted over the sound of the chopper blades. “You ever been in a chopper before?”

“No,” I said. “I never got news chopper assignments.”

“It's fun, not as secure a feeling as a plane. Much freer,” he said as the helicopter lifted off the pad.

“Will I be able to get back to the city if I need to leave early?” I asked Jack. “I am waiting for someone to beep me about my series. Might be a good lead.”

Jason was working his animal rights connections to find out what he could about Dewey's bonobo mission, and I'd asked him to beep me if he found out anything. But I couldn't tell Jack all this. I wanted to tell this father-figure everything about the man in the hat and the bonobos and the dead French scientist, Luc Bondir. But again, I'd been sworn to silence, and Jack, for all his good points, had a big mouth.

“Yeah, no problem. The chopper can take you back anytime,” he said, and his leg rubbed lightly against mine before he pulled it away.

It seemed like an accident, but I couldn't help wondering if the gossip was partly right, if Jack was attracted to me, if I was being recruited to be his concubine or something. As Louis Levin had said to me when I was complaining about the gossip, Jack and I were both nuts, both unattached, and both heterosexual, so it wasn't completely off the wall.

Jack was certainly good-looking. He could have bought himself new hair, but he didn't—he stayed bald, “no plugs, no rugs.” It worked for him. It heightened the Daddy Warbucks, Yul Brynner, kinglike thing he had going with that shiny pate. Even if he didn't have 4 billion dollars and a worldwide media empire, which can compensate for a lot of flaws, he would have been an attractive man. But to me, he was Our Fearless Leader, and I couldn't quite get far enough past my awe to lust after him. I didn't get a vibe from him that he was lusting for me either, but then I'm often wrong about these things. Often, I think men are attracted to me who aren't at all, and I miss all the cues from men who are until they practically declare themselves to me in a public place.