My Oltan O’Boye. It was just the way he said it. “My Mike Hoolihan is going to come and straighten this out.” I went into the toilet and bawled. Then I went and straightened out the murder in the Ninety-Nine.
The second thing is this. My father messed with me when I was a child. Out in Moon Park. Yeah he used to fuck me, okay? It started when I was seven and it stopped when I was ten. I made up my mind that after I hit double figures it just wasn’t going to happen. To this end I grew the fingernails of my right hand. I sharpened them also, and hardened them with vinegar. This growing, this sharpening, this hardening: This was the reality of my resolve. On the morning after my birthday he came at me in my bedroom. And I almost ripped his fucking face off. I did. I had the fucking thing in my hand like a Halloween mask. I had it by the temple, just above the eye, and I sensed that with one more rip I could find out who my father really was. Then my mother woke up. We were never a model unit, the Hoolihans. By noon that same day we ceased to exist.
I’m what they call “state-raised.” I was fostered some, but basically I’m state-raised. And as a child I always tried to love the state the way you’d love a parent, and I gave it a hundred percent. I’ve never wanted a kid. What I’ve wanted is a father. So how do we all stand, now that Colonel Tom doesn’t have a daughter?
At 7:45 I called downtown. Johnny Mac: Mr. Whip on the midnights, which would now be falling apart. I asked him to have Silvera or whoever run a make on Arnold Debs.
I dug out my list: Stressors and Precipitants. Yeah, tell me about it. I crossed out 2 (Money?). And I crossed out 6 (Deep Secret? Trauma? Childhood?). This doesn’t leave me with much.
Today I’m doing 3 (Job?). And tonight I’m doing Mr. Seven.
THE EIGHTY-BILLION-YEAR HEARTBEAT
Jennifer Rockwell, to say it all in one go, worked in the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Institute of Physical Problems. The Institute lies well north of campus, in the foothills of Mount Lee, where the old observatory looms. What you do is: You take the MIE around CSU, skirting Lawnwood. And spend twenty minutes stuck in the Sutton Bay tailback. The Sutton Bay tailback: Another excellent reason for blowing your brains out.
Then you park the car and walk toward a low array of wood-clad buildings, expecting to be met by a forest ranger or a Boy Scout or a chipmunk. Here comes Chip. Here comes Dale. Here comes Woody Woodpecker, wearing a reversed baseball cap. The Department of Terrestrial Magnetism has the following words scrolled into the wall of its entrance corridor: ET GRITIS SICVT DEI SCIENTES BONVM ET MALVM. I got
a translation from a kid who was passing: And you will be like gods, knowing good and evil. That’s Genesis, isn’t it? And isn’t it what the Serpent says? Whenever I’ve been out to CSU—for a criminology lecture, an o.d., a student suicide around exam time—I’ve always had the same feeling. I think: It’s a drag, not being young, but at least I don’t have to take a test tomorrow morning. Another thing I notice, at the Institute of Physical Problems, is that someone has changed all the rules of attraction. Sexual allure is a physical problem that the students are no longer addressing. In my day, at the Academy, the women were all tits and ass and the men were all dick and bicep. Now the student body has no body. Now it’s strictly sloppy-joe.
I am identified and greeted in the corridor by Jennifer’s department head. His name is Bax Denziger and he’s big in his discipline. He’s big all right: Not a joint-splitter like my Tobe, but your regular bearish, bearded, flame-eyed, slobber-mouthed type with (you can bet) an inch-thick pelt all over his back. Yeah, one of those guys who’s basically all bush. The little gap around the nose is the only clearing in the rain forest. He takes me into his office, where I feel I am surrounded by enormous quantities of information, all of it available, summonable, fingertip. He gives me coffee. I imagine asking permission to smoke, and imagine the way he’d say no: Totally relaxed about it. I repeat that I’m conducting an informal inquiry into Jennifer’s death, prompted by Colonel and Mrs. Rockwell. Off the record—but is it okay if I use a tape recorder? Yes. He waves a hand in the air.