Wonderland (40 page)

Multiplied by millions
.…

He came away from Cady burning with excitement, almost convinced. He felt so healthy now, so strong! He even ate regularly. He was careful to eat hot food, to sleep as long as he could. He had become very important suddenly. If only he could have taken Cady’s advice and at the same time do what he really wanted to do, fulfill an ordinary internship and go into community health work, a general medical practice … he had been so moved by his work in the welfare wards that he could not imagine himself in any other setting.…
Dr. Vogel, Director of …

Helene, respecting his privacy, did not try to argue with him.

Trick teased him a little about his liking for the bustle of hospital
wards:
You want to raise up the halt and the crippled, you want to raise the dead—a small ambition!
But he did not put much pressure on Jesse. He liked most to talk about himself, and on this drive Jesse was relieved that Trick was not bothering him. He spoke lightly, good-natured and very attentive to Helene. “And from then on I will fly from one capital city of the world to another,” he was saying, “treating only wealthy madmen and dining with kings and dictators. I will invent a new psychotheological movement and announce myself its Messiah and appear on the cover of
Time
Magazine. And I will write poems, beautiful poems, poems of love and tenderness, and I will turn up in the intimate journals of the most outlandish people. But I will never be too busy to visit you and Jesse, my dear, any time you want me; I’ll be a candidate for any position in your life—a godfather to your first-born, a resident psychiatrist, anything! You have only to command me to your side.”

The car seemed to bounce with Trick’s good wishes. It was one of his good days, a surprisingly good day. He had evidently made up his mind about going to Massachusetts. For a while he had talked vaguely of quitting medicine and retiring, at the age of thirty-one, to some farm, an uncle’s farm in northern Minnesota, or of volunteering for a United Nations medical program, or of working somewhere with his hands. He had even sighed and hinted of marriage. “Should I marry? Should I take that risk?” But Jesse supposed this to be a joke, since he had never seen Trick with any woman. And Trick never spoke of any woman in particular. If he alluded to women, it was usually in the plural, a fuzzy cynical mob of Ann Arbor females who clamored for him because he was going to be a doctor, and everyone knew that women were mad for doctors and for their money, for their skilled, practiced hands. “Unfortunately, the only woman suitable for someone like you and me, Jesse, is a woman like Helene, because she’s from a family of doctors and knows what to expect. She knows everything and yet she’s brave enough to marry a doctor. But you got to her first.”

He said now, leaning across Jesse to speak to Helene, “Will you command me? To come to your side, I mean. In the years ahead. Will I be Uncle Trick to your children? You won’t forget me, will you?”

“Of course not,” Helene said.

“Because, you know, though I joke around a lot, you two are the people I like best—I admire most—along with your father, Helene, and a few
other people, a very few other people—Everyone else has let me down somehow. They’ve disappointed me. The years have gone by and you two are about all that’s left to me—but I don’t want to embarrass you—”

“You’re not embarrassing us,” Helene said uneasily.

Jesse was silent, disliking Trick’s exaggeration. Why the hell did he always exaggerate?

“Jesse disapproves,” Trick said slyly. “I can always sense when Jesse disapproves. He isn’t sure he will invite me to be his child’s godfather, or even trust me around his children. I can read his mind.”

“Can you really read my mind, Trick?” Jesse said lightly.

“From the very first. Your mind is a complicated one but it repays study.” Trick’s voice sounded with delight. His good humor, his enthusiasm, made Jesse want to put his hand over Trick’s mouth and shut him up before he said too much. His shamelessness brought out shame in others.

“I’m not thinking about the future or about anything,” Jesse said. “I was just watching the countryside.” He rubbed his fingers back and forth over Helene’s hand nervously. It was a private gesture, and yet he had the idea that Trick was aware of it.

“Jesse, you’re not being entirely truthful. It is impossible to think about nothing.”

He was taking them to the pathology farm, about which Jesse had heard wild tales; Trick had spent a few weeks out there doing experiments on dogs for a professor named Ross, who was famous at the Medical Center for the federal grants he had brought them. The grants were confidential in their details—Jesse had heard extravagant rumors of million-dollar projects, research teams sworn to secrecy—all of it, he guessed, a jealous rerunning of the drama that had surrounded the nuclear chemists and physicists in the early forties. And how their secret work had become public, how it had flowered into a cataclysmic reality! No wonder other people were jealous. And now there was talk of biochemical research, counter-radiation work, the explorations of antidotes for germ-cloud formations. Medical students who announced themselves “politically honest” began to defend the money they would be making in a few years. It was a fact, they stated, that the “other side” would be doing this work whether they did it or not, so there was no moral problem involved—it was historical necessity that carried them on. Jesse kept quiet about this. It did not involve
him personally. He did not believe he had to declare himself in any relationship to it. For as far back as he wanted to remember—that is, as far back as he had been Jesse Vogel—he had made his way through the tremulous packed streets of this life by fastening his gaze firmly before him, minding his own business, and if the pavement were to shrink suddenly to the width of a tightrope, he would have kept on in this steady, firm, unimaginative way; knowing that salvation is won only by hoarding the emotions.

“Gatti is in charge out at the farm, but he rarely drops in. He says he’s allergic to the smell of manure. But really he’s got a bleeding ulcer and is not a well man, I’m afraid,” Trick was saying. He knew everything, everyone; no stray rumor or oddity escaped him. He seemed to forget nothing and sometimes entertained Jesse and Helene by repeating conversations he had had with other people. “Do you know Gatti, Helene? He looks like an Eskimo. There’s something cold and savage about his face. A big mustache, a broad, flat face, a sloped forehead. You’ve probably met him. I can’t imagine anyone more antithetical to your father, who is so aristocratic—I mean in his bearing, his brains; Gatti is crude and clumsy, he has a team of kids working for him out here who are like a circus act. I’ll introduce you. If Gatti had more sense he would outlaw visits like mine, but there is speculation that he might want to bring the whole farm down into shambles in order to get back at Ross.… Or don’t you know about that? Jesse knows about that, the feud between Ross and Gatti.”

“No, I don’t know about it. But never mind,” Jesse said.

“It really goes back before your time in Ann Arbor. No need to dig it up. There’s enough shit flying loose at the moment without loosening up more material,” Trick said, and launched into a string of names and projects on the farm while Jesse tried to listen. He rubbed his thumb against the back of Helene’s hand, across the fine small knucklebones. “Helene,” Trick said, “you were wise to stick with chemistry. And you were wise to quit after getting your Master’s degree. Once you fool around in biology, once you stick your fingers in blood, something is absorbed into your own system and contaminates you. Ask your husband-to-be. He nearly puked when he saw his first cadaver, but the second one was easier, and after that they’re all alike. Isn’t that so? Jesse aspires to a condition of personal bloodlessness—he told me that in an unguarded moment—but that necessitates the expulsion of
a lot of fluid. In chemistry it isn’t very clean either; in fact, it stinks a lot, but at least the stink is not anything personal. Out here … well, out here on the farm … there are some hilarious moments, if you don’t have a weak stomach.”

Helene stirred uneasily.

“That’s the farm ahead. We’ve been passing their pastureland. See all the No Trespassing signs? A few farm kids from the area climbed over the fence one day and were exploring. They must have been surprised as hell to see our livestock exhibiting itself; they were sort of paralyzed and didn’t even run away when the caretaker drove out in a jeep to yell at them.… See the gate ahead? When some really high-level work was being done out here everyone had to have an ID card with fingerprints and all. Then something happened, the project fell through, someone abandoned us for Berkeley, and things have loosened up a bit. How do you like the smell? Do you smell anything unusual yet?”

Jesse smelled something acrid, an odor of faint rot.

“I don’t think so,” Helene said uncertainly.

“Maybe I’m hypersensitive,” Trick said. They stopped at the gate and Trick rang a bell. After a short wait a middle-aged man came hurrying out; he looked like an ordinary farmer in overalls, with a placid, bald head and a suntanned face. “This is the caretaker. It’s a weird setup, he and his wife and six or seven kids living in there and the rest of us out doing experiments—Hello, Franklin. How are you today? How is everything out here?” The man flushed slightly at Trick’s gay attention and swung open the gate so Trick could drive through.

The driveway was made of cinders. Behind the farmhouse was what must have been the farm’s original barn, a large, humped building with a fresh coating of red paint and, in rows on either side of this barn, low, slant-roofed sheds made of metal and painted red also, with corrugated metal roofs. Jesse could see cattle moving about in the space between the buildings. A few cars were parked nearby, and a large, battered yellow truck marked
U-M Pathology Laboratory
. Two small boys, the farmer’s children, were playing in the driveway and glanced up as Trick parked.

“Can you smell anything yet?” Trick said.

They got out of the car. A fly immediately blundered against Jesse’s face and Jesse brushed it away. There was the sound of dogs barking,
yipping. Someone was laughing. Trick led the way to the nearest shed, and Helene took Jesse’s arm. The strangeness of this place, the acrid smell, and the laughter made them both feel formal. “Anybody home?” Trick shouted. The screen door of the shed opened and a young man poked his head out. Then a girl brushed past him, wearing shorts and a sweatshirt, and she cried out happily to Trick: “Dr. Monk, you fat thing! Why are
you
honoring us with a visit?” Then, catching sight of Jesse and Helene, she hesitated—self-conscious suddenly, she brushed something out of her hair and it fell to the ground. Behind her, in the doorway, two students were laughing about something. Jesse did not know them well. The girl’s name was Peggy, but Jesse could not remember her last name. She was short and very perky, with a coy, monkeyish face. The thing she had brushed from her hair lay by her feet; it looked like a pink strip of something, maybe rubber. She reddened and shook Trick’s hand. They appeared to be old friends. In turn, he introduced her to Jesse and Helene. Hearing that Helene was Benjamin Cady’s daughter, she nodded gravely; to Jesse she said, “Oh, yes! Jesse Vogel! I think we know each other, don’t we? I’ve heard good things about you.” The students behind her stepped out into the sunlight, stretching their arms. One of them put on a pair of sunglasses. They were all wearing old clothes and sweatshirts with smears of blood or grease on them.

“Hey, it’s about lunchtime! What are you cooking in there?” Trick said, rubbing his hands.

“Oh—don’t look! Don’t look in there,” Peggy said quickly. “It’s sort of messy—these guys have been fooling around all day—You know what they’re like, Trick.”

She brushed at her hair again, as if she thought something might still be caught in it. Jesse saw that the thing at her feet was a small piece of intestine.

“What’s your project, still cats? The same with me,” Trick said, making a face. “Who’s out here now? Whose cars are these?”

“The green one is Edna Bruner’s. Her kids are fooling around with monkeys next door,” the boy with the sunglasses said. “Jesus, you should hear those things scream! It’s worse than when you were out here. The next prefab is vacant but Ray Easton is supposed to come in for the summer session. I hope to be working for him, if I can swing it. Then, down there, the big prefab, they’re fooling around with sheep.
You can see the sheep in the runway over there. Aren’t they the damnedest looking things?”

In a pen behind the shed were a number of sheep of all sizes, even lambs. Most stood still. A few moved painfully around in the puddles of mud and manure. Flies buzzed everywhere. Jesse and Helene went over to look. The sheep had had their wool shaved off in large, ungainly patches, and numbers had been painted on their hides with bright red and yellow paint. A strange smell was loosed by their movement, not of the soil but of metal.

Jesse brushed flies away from himself and Helene. “Then the sheep still have lambs, even out here?”

“Oh, sure. That’s part of it,” the boy said.

“It certainly is part of it,” Peggy laughed. Her face had gone scarlet, not from embarrassment but from excitement; she kept smiling at Jesse as if they were indeed old friends. Jesse thought her peculiar. “They’re always herding the poor old ewes in with those damned rams. There are three rams out here. The females get the worst of it naturally, as in so-called human circles, and the rams just stuff themselves at the trough. Look at that poor ewe there! Do you see the one I mean? Barry Wilkinson had a bunch of first-year students, I swear they were freshmen, out here one day fooling around, I don’t think he paid them more than fifty cents an hour, and they were trying to inject stuff into the sheep. That one started bleeding like hell and the kids ran over to us for help. What do I know about applying a tourniquet to a goddamn sheep?”

“But Peggy saved the thing’s life. She was very noble!”

“I could hardly breathe, the thing stank so. Oh, those blue eyes! The sheep have such crazy blue eyes! I dream about those awful dumb blue eyes, like the eyes of crazy or dying people,” Peggy said with a fake shudder. She was standing beside Jesse and she hugged herself as if cold, grinning up at him. “See that big barn? That’s where they do the work. It’s specially equipped for radiation work. Is it ever creepy in there—you see those crazy blue eyes staring at you from all over—A lot of sheep die in there and they’ve got a nerve to complain about
us
—because Wilkinson is trying all these new teaching methods, you know, bringing undergraduates out and letting them experiment. He says it’s an elite community out here and that it should be democratized. The hell with the budget. They don’t work with the radiation
stuff itself, the kids, I think they just prep the sheep. But they can’t do that right. They’re so clumsy with a razor, I don’t know how they manage to shave themselves in the morning.”