The Body Human (13 page)

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 lie
u
tenant came over to me, wanting to know whatever it was I thought I knew about Jeff Connors’s 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 phot
o
graphs for the assault charges. After that, I looked for Bucky.

He wasn’t at his apartment, or at his mother’s apar
t
ment. The weekend security guard at Kelvin Pharmace
u
ticals said he’d been on duty since four
p.m.
and Dr. R
o
mano 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 e
x
pected 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 t
o
gether 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 t
o
gether? 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 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 him?

“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 em
o
tional 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 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 drag 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 anymore.…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 anymore. 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 a
n
ger…
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 torn down as much as built up. But you don’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 b
e
lieve 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 bonding 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 cat
a
tonia,” 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, u
n
distinguished looks, furious underneath. Your basic co
m
petent 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 Fra
n
cesca’s body lying on the roof, not in his room, before the cover-up team moved him and took the second set of pi
c
tures.
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 a
n
ger…especially the anger that it’s over
.

Had
della
Francesca pushed Lydia Smith first, after that shattering quarrel that came from losing their special, u
n
earthly union, and then killed himself? Or had she found the strength in her disappointment and outrage to drive the knife in, and then she jumped? Ordinarily, the loss of love doesn’t mean hate. Just how unbearable was it to have had a true, perfect, unhuman 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 pe
r
fect 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.