by W. T. Tyler
“Give me an example.”
“Lincoln was deaf,” Foster said, “hence the majesty, the remoteness.”
Ed Donlon turned abruptly from the window to look at him.
“Theodore Roosevelt was the child of cholera morbus,” Foster continued, “a neurasthenic weakling who transformed his hyperactive will into ours. Empire.”
“You mean that explains it,” Wilson said.
“Oh, yes. Convincingly. Woodrow Wilson was poisoned by his mastoid, a septic cadaver.…”
Wilson, lips pursed, said nothing, brooding out across the rain-pocked pools of the quadrangle, not daring to look at Ed Donlon.
“A grisly cartilaginous King Tut, dead in the mummy’s case at fifty.”
“You have a way with words,” Wilson said. Another nut, he thought dismally.
“One must,” Foster answered, “since the scholarship is so purely conjectural. What is needed is a more solid empirical base, and this is what we’re attempting at the Center. Much of the theorizing is rubbish. I’m giving you the extreme cases, simplex munditiis.”
“So what’s the point?” Wilson asked, frowning. “How is it useful?” In the watery distance he saw a queue of raggedy unshaven men standing near the door of the thalamus building.
“You can quantify political behavior,” Foster said. “Take Brezhnev, for example. What’s his illness? We’re not sure. Or Molotov. There we might have had some answers, although we’re too late for it now. Was his fall purely political? Doubtful. He may have had the Hallermann-Streiff syndrome, a rather rare disease which is hereditary and could account for the small, piglike eyes. Or take Alexander Haig. A heart bypass creates a terrible kind of metabolic stress. We know he’s taut, even seething. What’s its nature? Philosophical? Not likely. Physiological? Probably. That’s reason for concern. I’m sure Moscow thinks so.” Foster smiled, pleased.
“Interesting,” Wilson said. Donlon still hadn’t uttered a word. He despised psychiatry, Wilson remembered, as if it cast a sickly clinical shadow over his robust infidelities.
“Indeed it is, but what it lacks is a more detailed empirical base,” Foster resumed, encouraged. “Where we possess an adequate data base, the results can be quite conclusive. The classic case is Napoleon’s.”
“In what way?” Wilson wondered, turning.
“His defeat at Waterloo. That can’t be explained in military terms. British valor doesn’t explain it. Neither does French irresolution, not at all. No, the cause was physiological. The Napoleon who conquered Europe wasn’t routed by Wellington. He wasn’t even on the field of battle that day. The British surgeon’s autopsy tells us everything—the fatty deposits over the hips, an inch deep over the sternum, two inches over the abdomen, the body as hairless as a child’s. His dynamism was gone. A thymocentric male eunuch, a hermaphrodite, you see. The evidence is absolutely clear.” Foster paused. “His pituitary had failed.”
“So he got laid at Waterloo,” Donlon said, finding his voice. “Buggered by the bloody Duke of Wellington, is that it?”
Coloring, Foster said, “Not precisely.”
“But that’s what you meant, isn’t it?”
“I suppose one could put that kind of interpretation to it,” Foster said prudishly, “although it hadn’t occurred to me.”
“But that’s what you meant.” Donlon was incensed. “What are you, a Freudian?”
“A historian,” Wilson broke in. “What’s your field, Doctor?”
“Diplomatic history,” Foster replied, his face flushed. “Recent history, the cold war, that kind of thing.” The eyes had retreated behind the gray, oyster-thick glasses.
“Don’t mind Ed,” Wilson continued easily. “He likes to stir things up. What are you working on now?”
“Not much of anything these days, unfortunately—not since I took over the director’s duties. I told Angus McVey I would be willing to help out during the interregnum, but it’s been three months now, three ghastly months.…” The frightened eyes roamed toward Ed Donlon, who stood with his back to them, staring resolutely out the window.
“It won’t be long,” Wilson said consolingly. “McVey’s speeding up the search. You’ll be back in your old office pretty soon.”
“I certainly hope so.” Foster’s voice had diminished to a whisper. “Would you like some coffee? We could walk over to the canteen if you like.”
“Sounds fine,” Wilson said.
Foster appeared relieved. “Let me get the keys. We’ll drop by a few offices on the way.”
He disappeared through the door, and Ed Donlon turned and joined Wilson.
“That’s absolute academic bullshit,” he said. “All of it.”
“Don’t make it so tough on him,” Wilson said. “Stop browbeating him. You’ve got him nervous enough as it is. I want to hear what he has to say.” He lit a cigarette and walked to the window, looking again at the ragtag queue gathered along the iron rail leading to the basement entrance of the thalamus building. “What do you suppose that’s all about?”
“Why shouldn’t I be nervous?” Donlon complained, moving after him. “I chair the admin committee, I sign the goddamned checks every month.” He studied the men still assembled in the light rain. Some of them held scraps of newspaper to their heads. “I don’t know. I don’t know what it is.”
“It looks like a Salvation Army soup line.”
A cheerful falsetto sang out from the doorway. “We can go now, guys,” Dr. Foster called. Turning blankly to look at the plump face, those false words still echoing in his ears, Wilson was conscious of the dual or even multiple identities confronting him in the acting director, whom he doubted endocrinology could come to grips with at all.
“I had Kissinger’s seminar at Harvard, but I really don’t know the man personally,” Foster explained as they descended the long dark stairs from his top-floor office in the history building. The large, dim room had showed the neglect of Foster’s transfer from his scholarly duties. The desks and tables were dusty; books were piled everywhere, along with Senate hearing transcripts, scholarly journals, and month-old newspapers. On Foster’s worktable, Wilson had seen four volumes by Kissinger, two by Brzezinski. Foster explained that he was working on a scholarly study entitled “The National Security Adviser as Foreigner.”
“In one of his seminal books,” Foster continued, “Kissinger tells us that history is the memory of states. That’s not an American concept at all, but European. That’s precisely their problem. Neither is American and both are total strangers to the American experience, European émigrés who know nothing about American pluralism. They’re terribly ill at ease in our small-town political tradition, which neither understands. For Kissinger, freedom is the voluntary acceptance of authority, not its absence. He can’t reconcile himself to the American belief that our society transcends our political structures. His version of the state is European, derived from Metternich and Kant, not from Locke. The state is supreme, can make no concessions, you see. That’s why he couldn’t reconcile himself to the Vietnam protesters, why he felt justified in his duplicity and deceit.…”
“What do you think of his recent books?” Wilson asked.
“Completely predictable,” Foster continued, more at ease now in this flush of scholasticism. He led them out the rear door. “It reminds me of the Egyptian pyramids, those enormous tombs built to perpetuate a pharaoh’s grandeur, a mountain of stones—in Kissinger’s case, words. A public tomb. A sarcophagus to his reputation. But he isn’t buried there—oh, no.” He gave up a smile. “The public myth is. This way.”
They circled a hedge, cut across a triangle of wet turf, and crossed through the rain toward the thalamus building. Wilson saw a few gulls from the Potomac floating over the rear wall. “Kissinger’s greatest gift is his intuitive sense, which is quite keen, actually. In every other way, he’s little more than a fashionable platitude. He best defines himself in relation to his audience, like a morbidly sensitive woman. That’s where his thymo
centric personality emerges, you see, and that’s what it is—the persona of a morbidly sensitive woman. He seduced the Washington press corps like Salome, didn’t he? Of course he did. Kissinger the seductress.…”
Ed Donlon glanced at Wilson, who tried to ignore him. Wilson had the impression that Foster might have been talking about himself.
“It shows best at his press briefings, which I used to attend,” Foster continued as he waddled along beside them. “The State Department is just a few blocks away, you know. There, Kissinger’s feminine wiles were always on display—that combination of coyness and flirtation, offering those seductive little peeks at the secrets of state, the verbal lip-play before factual intimacy, the caressing little tongue games before physical capitulation, namely”—Foster couldn’t suppress a giggle; he drew a breath to continue—“namely, the disclosure on background quote unquote of Salome’s SALT I and Vietnam secrets.…” The final giggle came like a hiccup.
Donlon had stopped abruptly. “What is this shit?”
“Sorry?” Foster stopped too.
“What sort of smut are you peddling, anyway?”
“Henry’s ‘Dance of the Seven Veils,’” Foster said, coloring again. “Salome.”
“So what’s it mean?”
“Mean?” Foster faltered.
“You’re a closet Freudian, Professor. No wonder you came up with all this psychoporno drivel.”
They walked on, Foster mortified. “All I was trying to do,” he protested weakly, “was to extrapolate from Kissinger’s presentation self the man within. That’s the practice in psychohistory. You recall Kissinger’s disastrous press conference with the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, don’t you? That’s conclusive proof. As a very attractive woman, she evoked from Kissinger a crudely masculine persona, you remember? The tough guy, the lone gunman riding into a Western town. What happened, you see, was that Fallaci had preempted Kissinger’s traditional role as seductress. He was forced to switch parts, and he’d never been on a horse in his life. It frightened him to death and he said some very stupid things. It was a disaster, the wrong horse, and he betrayed himself. Kissinger as the Lone Ranger? Totally wrong. As Lady Godiva, possibly, but not the other. Totally wrong, totally unconvincing, and everyone laughed at him.…”
“‘Prius dementat,’” Donlon said, eyes to the heavens. “‘Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first makes mad.’”
Haven Wilson changed the subject. “Where do you keep your archives, your old classified material?”
“In Maryland,” Foster replied, wiping his glasses and then his forehead. “A security vault out there. We have a sensitive area here in the basement of that building across the way.”
They reached the rear of the thalamus building, where Wilson saw by a plaque on a corner column that it was officially known as Erasmus Center. The group of men had vanished from the nearby basement entrance. Wilson said that he’d noticed a queue along the railing and asked what it was about.
“Queue?” Foster turned across the porch to glance over the stone coping. “They’re still here.” Wilson followed and found a dozen tattered men in the shelter of the areaway. Most were bearded, their hair long and dirty; the fingers that gripped the newspaper and plastic-bag rain covers were grimy with dirt, the fingernails broken, the knuckles cracked and cob-webbed with scaling skin.
“Who are they?” Wilson asked as they entered the building. Foster led them down the stairs and toward the basement canteen. The smells of his university chemistry and biology laboratories were in Wilson’s nostrils, the air deadened by odors as oppressive as a windless salt sea at low tide.
“That’s the Friday morning registration for the coming week’s experiments,” Foster said. “We attract quite a crowd here these days, especially with the downturn in the economy. Two years ago we just attracted the derelicts off the streets—the winter people, as we call them. Now we get a much better mix. We could always rely on a few students from GW or Georgetown, trying to earn a little pocket money. They can earn up to five dollars an hour, depending upon the difficulty of the experiment.”
“What kind of experiments?”
“All kinds. Psychological tests, routine opinion sampling, some biochemical experiments, a few pharmacological tests, very rigidly controlled—but that gets very technical, a bit out of my line. The past year we’ve been working on a few studies for the National Institute of Health, like our vasopressin work.”
“Vasopressin?”
“A peptide released by the posterior lobe of the pituitary,” Foster said. “It seems to trigger a hormone into the bloodstream that significantly improves memory. Our volunteers have shown memory improvement of anywhere from forty-five to sixty percent.”
“So you test people here.”
“Oh, yes, our volunteers. They’re paid, of course. Test performances are compared before and after the vasopressin’s administered. Our people have scored significantly higher than the NIH volunteers, although that’s not surprising. Probably the Washington winter people would have much more to remember than college undergraduates.” He smiled again.
“Oh, sure,” Donlon said irritably. “Drunks and winos.”
“No, we have very strict medical requirements. Derelicts, yes, provided they’ve a clean bill of health. Excuse me, I want to look in here.” Foster carefully opened a door, peeked into the darkened interior, and then disappeared, pulling the door closed behind him.
“The gentleman is a fruit,” Donlon said, “a fruit and a nut both. That makes him a gay cupcake and that’s not what we need. No wonder everything’s so screwed up.”
“He’s nervous, that’s all. Give him time. How long since McVey’s seen all this?”
“Maybe ten months. He got discouraged.”
“No wonder. Where have you been all these months?”
Foster reappeared, his moon face damp with the warmth of the closed room behind, in which a dozen shadowy figures were seated. “Sorry, but the testing hasn’t begun yet. I thought we might observe.”
“Memory testing?” Wilson asked.
“No, audience reaction. This way.” They continued down the corridor and past the open door of a biology laboratory. A tall cadaverous man in a white laboratory smock leaned against a worktable, stirring a cup of tea as he gazed out the barred window at the ragged figures from the queue as they huddled in the areaway. Foster stuck his head in the room. “Chosen next week’s candidates, Dr. Dobler?”
He shook his head, still gazing out the window. “Have you ever seen such creatures of Tartuffian extravagance?” he murmured, blinking his eyes slowly, like a basking reptile.
“Not recently. We’re on our way to the canteen. Care to join us?”
“No, thanks. I’ve got a group waiting next door. Have you seen O’Toole?”
“No, not today.”
“He was here, but he wandered off. If you see him, tell him to report to the groundkeeper. He’s in no condition for any testing today.”
“I’ll do that.” They followed Foster’s pear-shaped figure down the corridor. “O’Toole’s an interesting case,” he explained over his shoulder, “a perfect testing volunteer in many ways, a tabula rasa. We often try out our new testing techniques on him before we send out a call for a group of volunteers. In the meantime he does odd jobs about the Center, a kind of handyman. No one knew much about him, but the vasopressin peptide seems to have recovered quite a bit of lost history. It turns out he was a Catholic brother in some seminary in upstate New York, seminary or monastery, I’m not sure. In the carpentry shop. His name is William O’Toole. They call him Billy.” Foster stopped as he turned the corner, waiting for them. “If you’ve ever passed a few of Washington’s winter people, sleeping on a Metro duct or a bench in Lafayette Park, you’ve probably wondered where they came from. In O’Toole’s case, vasopressin told us, but much too much.”
“Too much?”
“That can happen too. In the eccentric cases, like O’Toole’s, the vasop
ressin seems to combine with some other neuropeptide, so far unidentified, to form a quite powerful neurotransmitter, activating massive numbers of brain cells previously dormant, something like Sodium Pentothal. It’s prodigious in its effects, virtually uncontrollable, as in Billy’s case—so much so that it seems to create a secondary character disorder or neurosis.”
“You’re pretty up to date on all this medical jargon,” Donlon said acidly. “What ever happened to the historian’s simple behaviorism?”
“Oh, we have that too,” Foster quickly replied, “but not so much here. The last citadels of behaviorism are here in Washington, of course—the White House, the State Department, Defense, Congress, the whole ball of wax.”
The false note echoed in Haven Wilson’s head like a gong. Foster continued: “There’s no doubt about it. They’re all primitive behaviorists, from Reagan on down. So was Carter, so was Nixon. The higher you go in bureaucratic hierarchy, the more primitive it becomes. Have you ever seen a presidential option memo? I came across one the other day in a Freedom of Information case. Professor Skinner himself might have written it. General LeMay expressed the syndrome best. ‘Nuke the Chinks.’ Here we are.”
Foster held open an enameled swinging door and they entered a brightly lit canteen crowded with Formica-covered tables. A stainless-steel counter and steam table stood at the far end. In the far corner, a solitary figure sat at a table with his back to the wall, hunched over a coffee cup, mumbling to a black woman in a pink nylon dress who was clearing the nearby table.
“What use could vasopressin have?” asked Wilson as they crossed to the coffee urn.
“A number of uses. We know athletes use anabolic steroids to build muscle mass. Thinkers might call upon vasopressin to expand efficient brain mass—figuratively speaking, of course.” They drew coffee from the urn. “So it might have any number of practical uses. It would improve court performance, political leadership, competence in Congress, wisdom in the White House.”
Foster led them to a table in the center of the canteen, but left his coffee cup there and crossed to the hunched solitary figure. Wilson heard him tell the man to report to the groundkeeper. The man nodded without comment. He was a slight man with brownish-gray hair and a face weathered and cracked by the outdoors, as puckered as a winter crab apple. The blue eyes had the steady fixed resolve of an addict of some kind, distant yet near, veiled yet piercing. His collarless white shirt was wrinkled under a faded serge coat, held together at the throat by a safety pin. Attached to the lapels of the jacket was a chain of paper clips, something like inverted campaign ribbons, traveling down to the first buttonhole.
