The Last Manly Man

by Sparkle Hayter

  “Would you girls like to come in and have a cup of tea?” she asked in a sweet, almost frail voice. Gone was the shrill, knifelike voice of hate I had known so well. “I have cookies, too, from the Italian bakery.”

  “Some other time, Mrs. Ramirez. Thanks a lot.”

  “Are you going to look for her?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Ramirez.”

  “I’ll come with you. Maybe I’ll remember the building,” she said.

  Despite my protests, she insisted, and she was the only realistic lead we had. There we were, the four of us, a clumsy redhead, a little old lady and her Chihuahua, and an animal rights freak in drag, a semi-armed posse walking down Avenue C, looking this way and that for thugs and ne’er-do-wells. Go ahead, make our day. It was weird, too, because Mrs. R. had a rep. People walking toward us would catch sight of her and cross the street quickly to avoid her.

  As we walked, she told us some of the secrets she knew, or thought she knew, about the neighborhood, this place used to be a crack house, that one harbored a known wife beater, now in jail, there was a nest of anarchists in that building, and so forth. Despite her penchant for busting other people, and particularly public urinaters, I noticed she didn’t bother to scoop up after Señor.

  Unfortunately, Mrs. Ramirez couldn’t remember the building where my doppelgänger lived. Of all the things for her to blank out on. We walked Eighth Street between Avenues C and D three times with no success, stopping strangers to ask, “Do you know someone who looks like me, lives around here?”

  “It might be that building,” Mrs. Ramirez said, and then quickly changed her mind. “No, it’s not that one.”

  Mrs. Ramirez was getting tired and confused. Very quietly she said, “I want to go home.” Jason offered, in falsetto, to walk her home while I stayed to try my luck with strangers. I gave him my keys, and we agreed to meet back at my apartment. I felt exposed, alone, as Mrs. Ramirez walked away with Jason.

  But finally I hit pay dirt.

  “Oh yeah, I know who you’re talking about,” one man on Eighth Street said to me. “I don’t know what building she lives in. But I’ve seen her. Go to the deli. If you want to learn the secrets of a Manhattan street, ask the guys who deliver for the nearest twenty-four-hour deli.”

  “A woman who looks like you?” the deli delivery guy said, in halting English. “You mean Miss Tee, Miss Trix?”

  “Possibly,” I said. “Do you know where she lives?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Will you take me there?” I asked.

  The delivery guy looked at the man behind the counter, who shrugged.

  “Okay, no problem,” the delivery guy said.

  We walked around the corner and east on Eighth Street toward Avenue D, and I asked the delivery guy where he was from (“Gaza”), why he came to America (“Opportunity”), and what he hoped to accomplish here (“Become a businessman—I want to have ten Americans working for me someday”). His family was still back in Gaza, but he hoped one day to bring them all over. What a lot of responsibility on his shoulders, I thought, and in a country strange to him.

  When he pointed out the apartment building where Miss Trix allegedly lived, I tipped him twenty bucks.

  “Thank you, miss,” he said, bowing his head slightly.

  “No, thank you,” I said. “Hey, you know the apartment number?”

  “Three C.”

  It was a dilapidated little brick building with a windshaft, almost an alley, separating it from the burned-out shell of a squatter building next door. In the seventies and eighties, this was where junkies came to get heroin. They’d huddle in this alley, waiting for a bucket to come down from a window, put their money in the bucket, and wait for the drugs to come back down. Even during the day, I hadn’t liked coming to this part of the neighborhood. It was so sad, all the wasted people walking around like ghosts, being victimized by human animals who lay in wait on every stoop. It had been cleaned up but gentrification hadn’t hit yet, not the way it had in the rest of the East Village.

  With more than a little trepidation, I buzzed 3C and waited. There was no answer. I buzzed again. When there was still no answer, I buzzed the super. An old woman in a stained housedress and orthopedic hose came to the door and did a double take.

  “No, I’m not Miss Trix or whatever her name is. I’m looking for her. Are you the super?”

  “Super’s wife. He’s out somewhere,” she said. She had a piece of dried, cheesy macaroni stuck to her floral slippers. “You’re taller than Miss Trix.”

  “Well, that’s the least of our differences. Can you help me out? I’ve been trying to buzz her, but there is no answer.”

  “She’s up there. I saw her go in. She might be passed out.”

  “Can you take me up there so I can knock on her door?” I smiled my sweetest smile.

  “No, I can’t do that.”

  “I’ll give you twenty bucks.”

  “Let me see it.”

  “See. Twenty bucks.”

  After holding it up to the light to make sure it looked real, she said, “Hmm. Okay,” and motioned for me to follow her in and up a dilapidated stairwell that smelled of urine and bad meat. On the wall, a gang member had written some sort of garish red message in hieroglyphics.

  On the second floor, a grungy-looking man was passed out in front of an apartment door, and the super’s wife kicked him lightly.

  “Nick, wake up and go in to your woman,” she said. He didn’t budge, so she kicked him a little harder, to make sure he was alive, and banged on his door.

  “Cara, Nick’s passed out in the hall again,” she said, before proceeding up the stairs. Behind us, a door opened and someone dragged Nick’s body in feet first.

  “We want a better class of people in here,” the super’s wife said, idly scratching her ass through her flowered shift.

  “Who is this Miss Trix?”

  “Not a better class of person. Just got out of jail. You don’t know her?”

  “No.”

  “Ten years ago, busted for selling bad heroin, using deafmute orphans from Guatemala or somewhere as her mules and lookouts. If they didn’t work, they starved, or she beat them. I guess she’s paid her debt to society and all, but someone should kick some niceness into her,” the super’s wife said.

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “This is it,” she said, and banged on the door. “Miss Trix? Miss Trix? Open up please.”

  More banging was required before the door opened a crack. Only the super’s wife was visible to her.

  “You have a visitor,” the super’s wife said.

  The door swung open.

  “You!” Miss Trix said, and tried to close the door, but I threw my full weight against it and pushed it back open.

  “Hey, I don’t want trouble,” the super’s wife said.

  “Me either,” I said. “Let’s just keep this door open, shall we?”

  I walked in, while the super’s wife waited outside.

  “What do you want?” Miss Trix asked.

  Though Miss Trix was astonishingly good-looking, she didn’t look anything like me, aside from the hair and the pale complexion. Not only that, but I’d seen her before on the street, noticing her only because natural carrot-redheads aren’t that common in my neighborhood. It had never occurred to me that she was my doppelgänger. I didn’t see it at all. She looked nothing like Rita Hayworth.

  “I don’t want to make trouble,” I said. “But if I have to, I will. And I can …”

  “You’ve already made trouble!” she said. “Someone grabbed me off the street late last night, thought I was you.…”

  “Who grabbed you?”

  “Do I know? All I know is, they called me by your name, and they threw a bag over my head and tried to push me into a car. I just barely got away.”

  “How did you get away if you had a sack over your head?”

  “I learned how to fight back in the last place I lived,” she said.

  “
What did the people who grabbed you say?”

  “They asked me for Adam. I said I didn’t know an Adam. And that’s not the first time. I went to your building today to give you a piece of my mind about it.”

  “I have to go,” said the super’s wife behind us. “You okay, Miss Trix?”

  “Yes,” she said sharply.

  “I’ll leave the door open,” said the super’s wife, shuffling off in her floral slippers.

  “What else did they say?”

  “That’s it. That’s when I escaped. And last week, some woman accused me of sleeping with her boyfriend.…”

  “Who?”

  “Some blond in the village.”

  “I have no idea who any of these people are,” I said. “I’m here for a package addressed to me that my super gave you.”

  “Nobody gave me anything,” she said.

  “My neighbors saw it,” I said. “It may be connected to a murder case. Unless you want to go back to prison …”

  “What’s in it for me?”

  “Aside from not going back to prison? What do you want? Money?” I riffled through my wallet and handed her all the cash I had, eighty-seven dollars.

  “I want two hundred.”

  “Can I write you a check?”

  “I don’t take checks,” she snarled. “What size shoe do you wear?”

  “Nine.”

  “I’ll take your shoes.”

  “My shoes?”

  “Give me your shoes and the eighty-seven dollars, and I’ll give you the box.”

  After I gave her my pale pink pumps, she went into a back room and came back with a box.

  “I want your clothes,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’ll give you the box if you give me your clothes,” she said.

  “What will I wear?”

  “You can have my clothes.” Her clothes were garish green and orange, and very dirty.

  “Shit,” I said. What was it with people making me strip lately? With the door wide open, we stripped down to our underwear and switched clothes. Though I was taller than she, we were roughly the same size.

  “Stay out of my life,” she said as I left.

  “Likewise I’m sure.”

  These clothes smelled. I needed a shower, I thought, as I rounded the corner on to Avenue C and headed north toward Tenth Street.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  While I changed out of the ugly doppelgänger clothes, which were itchy and probably full of mites or something, Jason sat in my living room and examined the hat.

  “I feel something inside it,” he said.

  “Wait for me,” I said, throwing on a blue and green sundress and going out to the living room.

  Jason handed me the hat. The lining was silk. When I ran my hand inside it, I felt something, too, a piece of card or something, inside the lining. You had to be looking for it to feel it there. Using a letter opener, I ripped away the stitching, and a folded paper square fell out.

  Jason picked it up and unfolded it. It was actually two sheets of paper, a hand-drawn map and a chemical formula of some kind, with the words “Last Manly Man Project” at the top. There were drawings of three separate molecules, and below that was one large molecule, with a lot of mathematical-looking text beneath.

  The map was tricky. It was a very detailed drawing of an underground lab complex, showing the ventilation and water hookups, with obvious arrows pointing to the place where the bonobos were held. The only locator was a larger arrow that pointed south, with the word “Montauk.”

  “It’s somewhere north of Montauk, Long Island,” I said. “That doesn’t narrow it down much.”

  “Does this mean anything to you?” Jason said, handing me the chemical formula.

  I tried to make sense out of the chemical jargon, words like androstenone, copulin, “effect reversals through molecular recombination,” “transducing cilia,” “nucleotide-gated channels,” and so forth. Greek to me. A brainiac was required. Now, to find the right egghead, someone who could be trusted to decipher the formula without stealing it or blabbing about it to the media. Probably, some of this stuff was available on the Internet, or the library could pull some stuff from its many and sundry databases, but that might leave a trail that Investigative Reports or the bad guys might somehow be able to follow. We would need a safe computer and a photocopier.

  Sally had both. She wasn’t home, but I had the spare keys to her apartment, so we could use one of her computers. For now, all we could do was look up some of the words in the chemical formula and try to figure out what they were. Thank Sally’s gods and goddesses, she hadn’t changed her password again. After I logged Jason on-line, I put in a few calls to the smartest mad scientists I knew and waited for them to call me back.

  “I found something. ‘Androstenone is a male pheromone. Pheromones are molecules, often odorless, detected by the veromonasal gland in the nose,’” Jason read off the screen. “‘The veromonasal gland is known as the second nose, the subconscious nose. It picks up messages the “thinking nose,” which smells smells, misses. It was long thought dormant in humans, but recent studies show it may be more active than previously thought.’ Hmmm. You know how the menstrual cycles of women who live or work closely together start to align?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Happened in every office I’ve worked in.”

  “That alignment is believed to be initiated by an airborne pheromone. Chemicals extracted from male and female underarm sweat and later applied under a woman’s nose could beneficially alter the timing of her menstrual periods.”

  “Does it say more about androstenone? Or this other one, Osmone two?” I asked.

  “Maybe the next article will,” Jason said.

  An hour later, we had read about copulin, Osmone I, and sundry other airborne chemicals. Androstenone, we learned, is a male-delivered pheromone that repels women when they are infertile and attracts them when fertile. Copulin was female-delivered, and incited testosterone development in men. Osmone I was a steroid with tranquilizing effects, being experimented with in aromatherapy. There was nothing on Osmone 2.

  “The androstenone molecule in this diagram,” Jason said, pointing to the computer screen, “is different from the one in this diagram. See? There’s an extra line here.…”

  “The copulin molecule is different too,” I said.

  “Like it has been altered somehow. Well, we know Adam one is an airborne chemical, possibly odorless, that can work on the veromonasal gland to alter behavior,” Jason said. “Other than that, it’s Greek to me. Maybe it’s a love potion.”

  “Or an estrogen bomb,” I said.

  “A what?” Jason asked.

  “Something Alana DeWitt mentioned.”

  The pink phone covered in little blue starfish rang. I answered it. It was Dr. Budd Nukker, the Extropian biochemist who wanted to live forever. He said he could see me for fifteen minutes before dinner at 7:00. It was now 6:00 P.M.

  “‘There’s been some interesting new research involving gene splicing and molecular recombination,’” Jason read. “‘There are already colognes containing pheromones on the market.’”

  “I’ve heard of colognes with pheromones in them. They advertise them on the Howard Stern show.”

  “According to this, independent studies of those colognes showed them to be ineffective. The pheromonal concentration is too low. If they work at all, it’s the power of suggestion, the placebo effect. If they actually worked and someone tried to market them, the FDA would move in to regulate them as mood-altering substances.”

  “So, as long as they don’t work, it’s okay to sell them.”

  “According to this, yes,” he said.

  It was pretty scary, the idea that some odorless or near odorless particle could be released in the air and somehow alter or influence behavior. How invasive is that? You can close your eyes to things you can’t see, but it is hard to close your nose to things you don’t want to inhale, given the prim
al urge to breathe every few seconds. Already, there was an environmental group targeting perfume the way it had targeted cigarette smoke. But how to counter something you can’t smell, something that operates on you subconsciously?

  “Can’t market it legally. So it’s for the illegal drug market?” Jason said.

  “Or someone with a political agenda.”

  “Blue Baker is coming by with some info. He travels all over the city and Long Island, so this map might make sense to him. He’s going to drop me off, but you should stay with him. He’ll take you to see Dr. Nukker.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I have another meeting with the liberation specialist.”

  “Once we find out where this place is, what’s our next move?”

  “Case the place, then plan the liberation,” Jason said. “In a nutshell.”

  Jason’s beeper went off.

  “It’s Blue. He’s almost here. We should wait downstairs.”

  We waited for Blue in the foyer of my apartment building. A black and silver car drove up, and the driver turned its interior light on and off quickly.

  “That’s Blue,” Jason said.

  We ran out to the car. Jason hopped in the back and I hopped in the front with Blue.

  “Hello, ladies,” Blue said, and laughed. “Dewey’s talking again. I just left him. Nurse made some notes.”

  “Thanks,” Jason said. “Drop me off at the Bog, okay?”

  The Bog was an ecofriendly bar and music joint near the Chelsea Piers.

  “Then Robin needs to go see a man,” Jason went on. “And we have a map we want you to look at.”

  “Sure. Keep an eye out, make sure we’re not being followed,” Blue said, checking his rearview mirror. He had some kind of acid jazz playing low on the CD system.

  “What has Dewey said so far?” Jason asked.

  “He had one coherent burst. Apparently, he went to meet with these two scientists …”

  “Hufnagel and Bondir,” I said.

  “Right. That was the day he got beaten up. He told them he was going to meet you next at some restaurant, to find out what you knew.…”

  “How did he know where … wait,” I said. “I remember now. Someone called my office to find out where my dinner meeting was. I assumed it was Benny Winter.…”