There was this show me and Pug used to watch one summer back when we were little kids. Golden Years, it was called. You probably don’t remember it. Anyway, there was a guy on that show who used to say “Perfect paranoia is perfect awareness.” It was like his motto.
And I sort of believe that.
Anyway, I went to the park instead of back home. I sat on a bench and read the story, and when I was done, I stuck the paper in a park trashbarrel. I didn’t even like doing that, but hey—if Mr.
Sharpton has got a guy following me around and checking on every little thing I throw away, I’m fucked up the wazoo no matter what.
There was no doubt that Andrew Neff, age sixty-two, a columnist for the Post since 1970, had committed suicide. He took a bunch of pills that probably would have done the trick, then climbed into his bathtub, put a plastic bag over his head, and rounded the evening off by slitting his wrists. There was a man totally dedicated to avoiding counselling.
He left no note, though, and the autopsy showed no signs of dis-252
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ease. His colleagues scoffed at the idea of Alzheimer’s, or even early senility. “He was the sharpest guy I’ve ever known, right up to the day he died,” a guy named Pete Hamill said. “He could have gone on Challenge Jeopardy! and run both boards. I have no idea why Andy did such a thing.” Hamill went on to say that one of Neff’s “charming oddities” was his complete refusal to participate in the computer revolution. No modems for him, no laptop word processor, no handheld spell-checker from Franklin Electronic Publishers. He didn’t even have a CD player in his apartment, Hamill said; Neff claimed, perhaps only half-joking, that compact discs were the Devil’s work. He loved the Chairman of the Board, but only on vinyl.
This guy Hamill and several others said Neff was unfailingly cheerful, right up to the afternoon he filed his last column, went home, drank a glass of wine, and then demo’d himself. One of the Post’s chatter columnists, Liz Smith, said she’d shared a piece of pie with him just before he left on that last day, and Neff had seemed “a trifle distracted, but otherwise fine.”
Distracted, sure. With a headful of fouders, bews, and smims, you’d be distracted, too.
Neff, the piece went on, had been something of an anomaly on the Post, which sticks up for the more conservative view of life—I guess they don’t come right out and recommend electrocuting welfare recipients after three years and still no job, but they do hint that it’s always an option. I guess Neff was the house liberal. He wrote a column called “Eneff Is Eneff,” and in it he talked about changing the way New York treated single teen mothers, suggested that maybe abortion wasn’t always murder, argued that the low-income housing in the outer boroughs was a self-perpetuating hate machine. Near the end of his life, he’d been writing columns about the size of the mil-itary, and asking why we as a country felt we had to keep pouring on the bucks when there was, essentially, no one left to fight except for the terrorists. He said we’d do better to spend that money creating jobs. And Post readers, who would have crucified anyone else saying stuff like that, pretty much loved it when Neff laid it down. Because 253
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he was funny. Because he was charming. Maybe because he was Irish and had kissed the Blarney Stone.
That was about all. I started home. Somewhere along the way I took a detour, though, and ended up walking all over downtown. I zigged and zagged, walking down boulevards and cutting through parking lots, all the time thinking about Andrew Neff climbing into his bathtub and putting a Baggie over his head. A big one, a gallon-size, keeps all your leftovers supermarket-fresh.
He was funny. He was charming. And I had killed him. Neff had opened my letter and it had gotten into his head, somehow. Judging by what I’d read in the paper, the special words and symbols took maybe three days to fuck him up enough to swallow the pills and climb into the tub.
He deserved it.
That’s what Mr. Sharpton said about Skipper, and maybe he was right . . . that time. But did Neff deserve it? Was there shit about him I didn’t know, did he maybe like little girls in the wrong way or push dope or go after people too weak to fight back, like Skipper had gone after me with the shopping cart?
We want to help you use your talent for the betterment of all mankind, Mr.
Sharpton said, and surely that didn’t mean making a guy off himself because he thought the Defense Department was spending too much money on smart-bombs. Paranoid shit like that is strictly for movies starring Steven Seagal and Jean-Claude Van Damme.
Then I had a bad idea—a scary idea.
Maybe TransCorp didn’t want him dead because he wrote that stuff.
Maybe they wanted him dead because people—the wrong people—were starting to think about what he wrote.
“That’s crazy,” I said, right out loud, and a woman looking into the window of Columbia City-Oh So Pretty turned around and gave me the old fish-eye.
I ended up at the public library around two o’clock, with my legs aching and my head throbbing. I kept seeing that guy in the bathtub, with his wrinkled old man’s tits and white chest-hair, his nice 254
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smile gone, replaced by this vague Planet X look. I kept seeing him putting a Baggie over his head, humming a Sinatra tune (“My Way,”
maybe) as he snugged it down tight, then peered through it the way you’d peer through a cloudy window, so he could see to slit the veins in his wrists. I didn’t want to see that stuff, but I couldn’t stop.
My bombsight had turned into a telescope.
They had a computer room in the library, and you could get on the Internet at a very reasonable cost. I had to get a library card, too, but that was okay. A library card is good to have, you can never have too much ID.
It took me only three bucks’ worth of time to find Ann Tevitch and call up the report of her death. The story started, I saw with a sinking sensation, in the bottom righthand corner of page one, The Official Dead Folks’ Nook, and then jumped to the obituary page.
Professor Tevitch had been a pretty lady, blond, thirty-seven. In the photo she was holding her glasses in her hand, as if she wanted people to know she wore them . . . but as if she’d wanted people to see what pretty eyes she had, too. That made me feel sad and guilty.
Her death was startlingly like Skipper’s—coming home from her office at UNM just after dark, maybe hurrying a little because it was her turn to make supper, but what the hell, good driving conditions and great visibility. Her car—vanity license plate DNA FAN, I happened to know—had veered off the road, overturned, and landed in a drywash. She was still alive when someone spotted the headlights and found her, but there had never been any real hope; her injuries were too grave.
There was no alcohol in her system and her marriage was in good shape (no kids, at least, thank God for small favors), so the idea of suicide was farfetched. She had been looking forward to the future, had even talked about getting a computer to celebrate a new research grant. She’d refused to own a PC since 1988 or so; had lost some valuable data in one when it locked up, and had distrusted them ever since. She would use her department’s equipment when she absolutely had to, but that was all.
The coroner’s verdict had been accidental death.
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Professor Ann Tevitch, a clinical biologist, had been in the fore-front of West Coast AIDS research. Another scientist, this one in Cal-ifornia, said that her death might set back the search for a cure five years. “She was a key player,” he said. “Smart, yes, but more—I once heard someone refer to her as ‘a natural-born facilitator,’ and that’s as good a description as any. Ann was the kind of person who holds other people together. Her death is a great loss to the dozens of people who knew and loved her, but it’s an even greater loss to this cause.”
Billy Unger was also easy enough to find. His picture topped page one of the Stovington Weekly Courant instead of getting stuck down there in The Dead Folks’ Nook, but that might have been because there weren’t many famous people in Stovington. Unger had been General William “Roll Em” Unger, winner of the Silver Star and Bronze Star in Korea. During the Kennedy administration he was an Undersecretary of Defense (Acquisition Reform), and one of the really big war-hawks of that time. Kill the Russkies, drink their blood, keep America safe for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, that sort of thing.