by Walter Kirn
It never appeared, not that night. Clark, through some complicated excuse, faded off into the depths of his strange house to parley with Sandy or attend to Snooks while I ended up in town, alone, slaking my hunger with convenience food. On my return Clark showed me to my bedroom, which was unfurnished except for a stiff mattress that I remember as lying on the floor, but which may have sat on a Spartan, low-slung frame. The thin blankets and pillows starved my soul as I lay down with a book Clark had provided, a biography of Learned Hand, into which he’d slipped a piece of paper to mark a passage on “Doveridge,” the estate. It had been a quite handsome home once—in a small town or city in the Midwest it might have been a prestigious mortuary—and Clark’s intention was to restore it to its former glory. For now, though, one suffered here, and I resented it. The room went from much too warm to much too cold, and my sleep was turbulent and shallow, an enervating, semiconscious wrestling match with inner and outer abusers—bad dreams, spine-deforming low spots in the mattress. I woke at intervals and read the book. Learned Hand, what an upright, boring life he’d led.
No one came for me in the morning. No summons to breakfast. I listened hard for indications of bustle or conversation in the house but I didn’t feel free to venture farther into it; the unfinished hallway outside my room was dim and forbidding, nothing but dust and echoes. I crept outside, famished, and walked for a good hour along the curving lane where Shelby had died. For a dog owner here not to fence his yard seemed negligent. Clark had hauled in a dummy police car for his own safety but offered “The Shellborg,” as he liked to call her during her wheelchair days, no such protection.
For most of the day I entertained myself. Clark was occupied in an office he didn’t show me, whose location within the house I couldn’t deduce, with a “labor dispute” at his rocket firm, he said. Sandy had gone absent. I made up my mind to leave but didn’t do it; there was no one around to say goodbye to. Clark reappeared as the afternoon was ending with a proposal that we eat dinner out and a glancing allusion to Salinger (he “lived across the way”) that slightly revived my interest in the visit. I’d promised Mike and Robert down in Boston that if I met the literary legend I’d write about the encounter for The Atlantic. The odds of a meeting kept tilting back and forth.
We drove south for about an hour on narrow roads that I remember as passing empty farm stands or handmade signs for farm stands and later on passing lots of rocks and cliffs. Our destination was a café known chiefly for its hot chocolate but that Clark thought we should try out as a dinner spot. As a nondriver, he seemed to relish the trip; he stared out the window like a dreamy kid. I pressed him on kidnap prevention, on Chinese Lebensraum.
“Oh that,” he said. Then he told me more about Jet Propulsion Physics, his “interstellar travel” engineering firm, which was based, he said, in rural Quebec a couple of hours north of Cornish. The system the firm was working on was based on “the Casimir effect,” some force identified by quantum physicists that is created when two particles are placed infinitely close together without actually touching. China had heard the news of this advance. Its space program, a department of its military, had a record of snatching foreign rocket scientists and installing them in its own labs, so why not be cautious? Thus the cop car. Also, Clark said, I should call George Bush tomorrow. I mustn’t be shy. It was silly to be shy.
The dinner disappointed. I don’t remember what we ate, just a sense of skimpiness and that the menu overpromised. I don’t remember what we spoke about; there were so many questions I must have wanted to ask him that I somehow doubt I even tried. The memory that overshadows all else is a small one, but it felt enormous that night: I paid. The meal was on me, and not by choice. It soured me. Clark’s no-wallet act was a Wasp standard and seemed beneath him as wizard of quirk. He’d eaten greedily, as though he’d waited, and had maneuvered me into getting dessert after I said I wasn’t hungry by ordering dessert himself. I was trying to keep the check down, assuming he’d cover it, and I interpreted his pressure tactic as a command to lighten up and let myself be treated. He’d burned me before. The “stipend.” I should have known. But strangely, I thought his mistreatment of me before meant that he’d want to square things now. That’s how I would have done it. Weren’t we both gentlemen?
The return trip to his crackpot mansion felt tense and endless. The highway ran alongside a wooded river and I repeatedly slowed when taking curves, afraid that I might meet a speeding vehicle that had drifted across the center line. Nothing. We were alone out on the road. Who was this man beside me, anyway? He didn’t like or respect me. I shouldn’t be here. After our first meeting in New York, after the five-hundred-dollar check, I should have acted as a smart woman does when she’s dating someone new and dropped him after one infraction: “See ya.” And what was the meaning, anyway, of his excruciating accommodations, the unheated bedroom and the decrepit mattress—was he trying to see how much I’d take from him or, more likely, how little I’d accept?
We drove into Cornish in the gloom that gathers so thickly in barn-and-farm-stand country, the gloom of wherever pumpkins are sold roadside and people hang Indian corn on their front doors. Clark’s face was turned away, but he seemed conscious of my disenchantment. He brought up Salinger again in an obvious ploy to soften me, saying we’d passed his driveway a mile back or so, but I was finished on that subject. Something had changed between us: me. The summer before I’d published a novel that had been bought by the movies and well reviewed, raising my value in my own eyes. I had two children now. I didn’t need friendships that felt like hazings. I didn’t deserve whippings from on high. We slipped off to bed with rote “Good night”s. I resolved to leave before he got up.
I awoke the next morning to find him in my doorway. We would drive up to Hanover and tour Dartmouth’s art museum before it opened for the day (“My aunt built the place; the guard will let us in”), and then, over breakfast, talk about his novels and how I might improve them. “Please,” he said. “I’ve been waiting. I’ve been patient.”
“What are these books of yours even about?”
“I’ll tell you once we’re there.”
“There” meant Dartmouth, which Clark had some connection to, making Princeton about the only Ivy League college that he’d neither attended nor hung around for some sort of obscure postgraduate work. Money makes you welcome everywhere was the lesson I took from this. The campus was austere compared to Princeton’s, very New England in its thin, dry aura, and set out in front was a building with ranked white columns whose classicism seemed fake and overbearing. The museum, though, was more modern. Its facade was made of rain- and soot-streaked gray concrete, like the entry to a bunker. Inside was a desk with a guard who Clark approached while I stood back, polite, discreet. The guard, as predicted, unlocked the place for us, which wasn’t a guard-like move but sure was Clark-like, in that it pressured someone to betray himself so that Clark could better pass as Clark.
We looked around the permanent collection but not in the reverent, pausing, careful manner of ordinary museumgoers. Clark rammed us along past the paintings he prized most, crisply footnoting what we were seeing and leaving me little time to ponder his comments. I wasn’t in an appreciative mood. My mind had no room in it for culture and history. I was plotting my getaway from the situation, my emotional, sentimental exit, not my physical departure. The monologue in the museum was interesting only as a climactic memory of an unbalanced, insulting relationship that had gone on too long and grown disfiguring. The chirping, pedantic, benumbing little prick. I must hate myself at some level; I’d finally acknowledged the obvious. I didn’t feel this self-loathing, not that I knew of, but the evidence for it was piled high. He’d needed so little evidence to diagnose me, and I’d needed so much. I felt loathing now, all right, though mostly in the form of loathing for him. It was all very clear just then, my situation, yet still confusing. I should go write something immediately and try to work it out on paper. I resolved to do it.
We sat at a tippy table on the sidewalk and ordered tea and coffee, juice, and pastries. I vowed to myself to make him pay, though maybe it would be better to split the check; dignity lay in holding up one’s end of things. Or should I shame him by covering the whole thing? Of course it wouldn’t shame him, though it ought to, but maybe beholding further shamelessness would finally force me to act, not merely stew. Tourists went by in their clashing tourist outfits, grumpy with one another, dulled by leisure. I had to get back to work. I couldn’t wait. Every moment with Clark was a horrendous waste. I needed an epitaph for him, and it was this: he was a waste and a waster, and on purpose. To think too hard about what his purpose might be would only be a further waste.
“Did you know I consider you my best friend?” he said. It startled me, his perfect timing. I’d been about to throw coffee in his face. “I’ll tell you why,” he said. You’re the only person in my life who doesn’t want something from me, who isn’t envious. I can’t be myself with most persons. It’s a curse. With you, though, I’m relaxed and comfortable. I’m grateful for this. What a visit! It’s been splendid.”
“Thank you,” I said. I felt cornered by his effusion. I tore a corner off my pastry and dunked it in my coffee, noticing Clark’s expression as I did so. He looked displeased but determined not to show it. I dunked things. He didn’t. We came from different worlds. Mine no longer embarrassed me, however, which meant that his was losing power. I felt sure that he sensed this and I was curious about what he’d do to try to gain it back.
He confessed. He invited me deep into his sadness, pinning me under its melancholy flow. His family was atrocious. His uncles and aunts who’d stood in for his dead parents had shooed him along from home to home. His sister, a lunatic, was rotting in some hospital. Unclear to me was whether he missed her or whether her incarceration suited him; I seemed to recall that he’d portrayed her once as something of a burden. He described himself as a wandering, lost soul who had been educated but never nurtured, who had settled for paid-for knowledge as a substitute for priceless affection. The membranes surrounding his light blue eyes turned pink. The wings of his nostrils subtly flared and trembled. People passed by our table with no idea that a Rockefeller was agonizing nearby, pouring out his troubles to a mere Kirn. “America,” I remember thinking. “It muddles all of us up together in such strange ways.” The melting pot was at full boil.
“Tell me about these novels you’ve been writing.” I asked this, I told myself, to play for time, not because I was truly curious. I managed to stay inwardly remote but my tone was solicitous. If I lured him back into pleasant conversation, I thought, he’d eventually try to dominate it, angering me afresh. I needed fresh anger. He’d sucked it out of me. I needed fresh pain to send me running.
“What?” he said.
“Your books. Your novels. What are they about?”
“Oh, those,” he said. “They’re homages. They’re reworkings. Amusing things to write, but I can’t claim they’re original.”
“Literature’s never original,” I said. I’d got this idea at Princeton, which had borrowed it from Yale, from Harold Bloom, a professor there. His book was called The Anxiety of Influence. It was one of those books whose title tells it all, and that had allowed me to skim it in good conscience.
“My novels are adaptations of memorable episodes from Star Trek, the TV series,” Clark said.
Star Trek? It helped ground me to speak the words. And I hoped it disguised my flabbergastedness. “The rights,” I said. “Have you obtained the rights? If you want to exploit another trademarked property”—I was channeling my lawyer father’s vocabulary, grateful for the cover it provided—“you first have to secure the rights to do so.”
“Oh, I’m sure that the person who owns them will sell them to me. You know, Walter, everything is available for a price.”
“Right,” I said. “That’s true.” I was still regrouping. I was starting to think the process might take awhile. And maybe I should consider drawing it out. To tease him, and to waste his time for a change. “So each novel, each book, is one . . .?”
“Episode,” he said.
“Interesting.” I meant the opposite. I repeated the word to emphasize this fact, in case he’d thought that I was speaking sincerely, not slyly cutting him. “Interesting.” It was a word very seldom spoken in earnest when responding to book descriptions, book ideas; but did he know this? It was also a word that if spoken three times turned back into a compliment, I feared. I didn’t say it again. I tried to seem far away instead, and drifting further by the millisecond, back to my life, to Montana, beyond his reach. And truly, I was almost there. AlI I had to do first was give him a ride back home.
“Star Trek: The Next Generation,” he explained. “You’re probably thinking of the original series. Are you? I suspect you are. The original series never grabbed me. I found it terribly inferior. I much preferred the sequel.”
ELEVEN
I MET COLONEL RAYERMANN for dinner at the Bonaventura Hotel, a spot that he chose for “sentimental reasons.” He revealed them to me in the lobby, a futuristic affair out of the past, soaring, reflective, curved, and cycloramic—a good place to drink after shrugging off your space suit following a trip around the galaxy. With his pilot-like perfect posture, his white, white skin, and his eyes of milky blue (I’d only seen such eyes on German shepherds), Rayermann looked like he’d done exactly that: conquered some starry quadrant for our people, been debriefed, paraded, and returned to base. On his shirt was a silvery, pointy Star Trek emblem that clashed a little with his grown-man’s jacket. He also wore a small lapel pin in the form of a spacecraft; a Discus 3, he called it. He was a most specific former soldier, and why he hadn’t made general I couldn’t imagine. Maybe it was true, what people said about generals: politicians. The colonel wasn’t one of those. He lived too close to the facts.
“This is where we crafted the constitution for the Explorer post,” he said, referring to the post that he and John belonged to. “December 16, 1971.” Then he sipped the cocktail I’d bought for him and that he’d squarely thanked me for. I was ready to buy him another one just to hear again how adroitly the officer class expresses minor gratitude.
Our interview wandered from the start. I was a few years younger than the colonel, but still of an age to groove on matters galactic the way that he and John had in their teens. Since the colonel had had a Top Secret clearance, presumably—the real kind, not the imaginary Clark kind—I asked him first if UFOs existed. He granted me undiscovered alien life forms (a cosmic certainty to his mind) but said he’d spent too long in the army to think that the government could successfully hide a crashed, recovered saucer or a dead Martian. This joke led him down a mournful path as he bemoaned the curtailment of the bold missions that had inspired him in his youth. With the ending of NASA’s Shuttle program, America had drawn inward, he believed, and lost some of its spirit of adventure.
When we spoke about his best friend’s accused killer, the colonel ventured an observation that I’d come across once or twice before, in Internet chat room discussions of the case: Clark, the man of many faces, had the skills of a professional spy. “It’s almost as though he’d been trained either by the CIA or the KGB,” the colonel said. “A few days after he kidnapped his daughter, he had established a completely different identity for himself. Very few people can do that. It takes a very disciplined mind. And a mind that is incredibly capable of compartmentalization. To effectively retire an identity that you’ve been living under for two months, twenty years, whatever it may be, and immediately slip into being someone else . . .” He shook his head and raised one hand to catch the attention of the cocktail waitress.
“I don’t believe he was trained,” he said, “but wow . . .” I nodded at him, because I knew the feeling: prolonged proximity to Clark and to the testimony at his trial had opened up a paranoid streak in me. A couple of nights before, on my computer, while sliding around among Web sites doin
g research on the psychology of murderous narcissists, I’d happened on the ghastly, way-out story of the CIA’s MKULTRA mind-control project. Revealed to the public in 1975 by a specially appointed panel called, of course, the Rockefeller Commission, this very real and profoundly demented program hatched during the Red Scare 1950s had enlisted countless subjects, some of them witting participants, others not, in a range of Strangelovian experiments involving LSD and other hallucinogens. The goal, it seems, was to counter (or compete with) various “brainwashing” techniques thought to be used by our country’s Communist foes—murky Manchurian Candidate–type stuff. The facts of the program were only half the story, though; MKULTRA the myth, the urban legend, was a black octopus of freelance theorizing that choked off rationality in many who studied it. To the self-styled truth-seekers of the midnight Internet, it explained everything, as such theories will, from the assassination of JFK to the formation of the Federal Reserve Bank. According to one fringe Web site I visited, it even explained Clark Rockefeller. He was a zombie of the Power Elite, pharmacologically molded and controlled for purposes malevolent and unfathomable. I spent three minutes on the crackpot site, then shut off my laptop and tried to go to sleep. Impossible. Despite a melatonin capsule followed by a hot bath infused with Epsom salts, my neurons buzzed and sizzled for two more hours.
When dinner arrived, I asked Rayermann about Star Trek. He estimated that he and John had seen each episode “approximately” 120 times. He described to me in a way I’d never heard before and that I found strangely poignant under the circumstances the idealistic appeal of the show’s ethos, especially for children of the Cold War. “Star Trek,” he said, “was a very positive vision. No matter what your trials and tribulations are today, there will be a brighter future. We have to work at it, we can’t give up, but we will get there. It’s about human beings learning to be more equal, in part because we’ve learned that, wow, there are other intelligent, thinking, space-faring beings in the galaxy.”