SIDE EFFECTS
a novel by
Harvey Jacobs
Celadon Press
New York
~~~
This book’s story and characters are fictitious. Any resemblance to any persons living or dead or to any pharmaceuticals, products or companies is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2009, 2011, by Harvey Jacobs.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including, but not limited to, photocopying, recording, scanning, and e-mailing, nor stored in any information and retrieval system without prior permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations used in critical articles or reviews.
Cover illustration: Gahan Wilson
Composition: Chet Gottfried
Production and distribution: ReAnimus Press
License Notes
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or
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~~~
To Estelle, Adam,
Ross, Charlotte and Mel
~~~
When did it happen that Side Effects replaced fate?
—Simon Apple
Shake well before using!
—Author Unknown
~~~
1
On the day of his execution, Simon Apple did push-ups and knee bends. Being of reasonably sound mind, he recognized that any such activity was futile, even comical. But the exertion was strangely comforting.
As Simon strained against reluctant muscles and tendons, he wondered why the subject of his innocence or guilt bothered others more than it bothered him. He felt it would be better if his persecutors at least had the courage of indifference.
They all knew that, aside from the usual deadly sins, he was crime free, the victim of an understandable conspiracy. Simon, who fully understood that it was necessary for him to die at midnight, was resigned. Except for moments of sudden outrage.
It was ordained that the Supreme Court would reject any half-assed arguments for clemency advanced by Marvin Klipstein, Esq. That final appeal was another charade, more for them than for him. Pro bono, pro forma, a striving after wind. There would be no last minute calls from the president or the governor.
After predictable outcries from the anti-death penalty crowd and sparse coverage of Simon’s demise by the media, the whole incident would fade to quick oblivion. Simon couldn’t blame the journalists for looking in safer directions. How many reporters and commentators and their plump little children and juicy wives had been thug-threatened: “This is a matter of national security. You have the right to remain vertical if you accept your obligation as a patriot to remain silent.”
Simon knew his only epitaph would be a footnote in a book of blank pages hidden on a shelf in the Library of Congress; maybe a line of coding on a CD in the Justice Department archives. Or was that too optimistic an expectation?
He stood and wiped the sweat off his face with his sleeve. Simon noticed he wasn’t even breathing hard; he felt better than he had in years. All those months of pushing, bending and jumping, his regular prison regimen, renewed his energy. The irony pleased him. The prison doctor told Simon his arteries were pristine, his heart a showcase, the heart of a young ape.
While he did aerobics, facing the stark fact that in a few hours he’d be strapped to a gurney and shipped, collect, to eternity, Simon wondered if he had courage enough to die with grace. Or would he plead and slobber in front of the assembled witnesses?
Would he qualify for an afterlife?
What might that be like?
Some believed liberated souls were laundered by cherubs, sanitized by angels, purged of identity then recycled as newborns.
Others made claims for the persistence of genetic memory. Seemingly sane adults had clear visions of past lives in ancient places, of ancestors praying to lightning bolts.
Simon read there were pregnant woman who played classical music near their navels to give their fetus spiritual and financial advantages; there seemed to be some statistical proof favoring Mozart. If Simon was slated for rebirth, he hoped his bulging new mother would choose that prodigy’s concertos for oboe, clarinet, horn, flute and harp to serenade him in the seminal sac.
He wondered if his new incarnation would have any memory of the current Simon Apple popping up in its nightmares.
Suppose his replacement was a dumb, complacent infant slurping and gooing over action figures inspired by Saturday morning television shows?
Could it be that reincarnation was repetitious?
Did he want conditional immortality?
The day before, in a misguided effort to comfort him, the warden gave Simon a best-selling book fashioned from conversations between a dying professor and a former student. The doomed man suffered from a progressive disease that robbed him of everything but slurred speech and loose bowels. Yet his essential message was an affirmation of life and the human spirit so, in essence, the story had a happy ending; the stricken professor transformed not only to a best seller but a television movie-of-the-week.
Simon Apple wondered what his Boswell could write if he had a Boswell:
They chose to execute Mr. Apple by lethal injection. That phrase affected him in a most peculiar way. It brought on tumescence, that is to say it gave him a hard-on, a real boner, as if it were he who prepared to do the injecting. One reason for his strange reaction was that Apple was a relatively young man, hardly forty. Arrows of possibility flew out of him; he was a man of thrust and vigor. Outer directed. It was unnatural for him to feel victimized, the penetratee rather than the penetrator. To official observers peering into the death chamber, his erection was regarded as arrogant as asparagus. With his last breath, Apple made a vain effort to apologize for what he claimed was only a reflex, but the infusion of toxins disallowed oration. He died at the stroke of . . .
Simon snapped out of his daydreams. He heard a moan from one of his neighbors. “Hey, Billy, what’s happening?”
“Same shit.”
Billy, in the cell to Simon Apple’s left, was a minor rap star who’d murdered his manager. The man in the cage to his right, Big Bobo, had bludgeoned his wife’s lover.
“Yo, Bo, what’s happening?”
“Not a lot.”
Simon envied his neighbors their eruptions. They’d earned capital punishment. A thieving manager and a compulsive seducer were respectable targets. Simon Apple wished he could fashion a rod from the satisfaction of justified revenge to shore up his jellied spine when they came for him.
Even thinking about the trumped-up charges against him made him wince: Monk murder in the first degree. Arguably responsible for the death of an entire cult of devoted followers. The worst kind of rap sheet for a man like Simon Apple who thought of himself as a pacifist.
2
Regis Van Clay, CEO of Regis Pharmaceuticals, followed certain rituals. He ate sparingly. He visited a gym three times weekly for a workout supervised by his personal trainer who he called Kong. On the first of each month he went to the studio of a woman named Belladonna who subjected him to sensible, agonizing humiliation.
At Belladonna’s loft, bare of frills, dark and dismal as a b
ank vault, Regis stripped naked, neatly folded his clothes, prepared himself for insult by emptying his mind of all memory of honors and triumphs. Then, feeling a flush of anticipation, he padded on bare feet to the room where his tormentor paced back and forth on a purple carpet.
Belladonna was a large woman, full-breasted, muscular, with a small head crowned by a massive black wig in the shape of a beehive. Her thigh was tattooed with the image of a scorpion. She wore a silver corset, red net stockings held up by spiked garters, shiny purple boots with high dagger heels, and a thick alligator belt that dangled handcuffs, pliers, a miniature stun gun, and the kind of whip jockeys use on horses charging down the stretch.
Belladonna ordered Regis to stand before a full-length mirror framed by a carved snake with emerald eyes. “Look at yourself, spindly old man. Pathetic fossil. Oh, how Satan smacks his crusted lips waiting for your soul. Send him to me. Send him now! There’s a special place in my house for you, Regis Van Clay, an eternal regimen of unspeakable horrors; you are marked for delicious punishment, scalp to genitals, nostrils to pores. How you will beg for succor. How you will sweat salt and dribble snot asking mercy. But you are beyond redemption, barred from salvation. There will be only pain, no respite. Now, crawl on your belly and suck the muck between my toes, you lecherous, greedy bug of a man. Larval slug, murderous scum, you stain on God’s hairy ass.”
After the mandatory toe sucking, which Regis found only moderately demeaning, he was cuffed, thrown over a stool, and spanked until his buttocks burned. Then he was turned onto his back while Belladonna lit a thick votive candle and let hot wax drip onto his privates. Subject to her mood, Regis could expect to be wrapped in packs of dry ice or jolted by blue electric sparks, sometimes both, depending on Belladonna’s generosity.
She was a creative and sincere professional who devised special methods for inflicting torment on her most distinguished client. She used a shoehorn to shove an eggplant into his mouth. His cheeks stretched into a grimace like a Halloween pumpkin. Belladonna squeezed them together with a custom-made clothespin.
The woman was a wonder.
When their session was done, Regis took a brisk shower, dressed, thanked Belladonna, handed her five hundred-dollar bills, scheduled his next visit, then went back to his office refreshed and reinvigorated.
On the fifteenth of each month, Regis entered a terraced building on Park Avenue, rode the elevator to the penthouse floor where Trilby Morning waited for him in her posh pink and gold nest. He pressed her door chime, which played the first bars of “Amazing Grace,” and felt his heart thump when he heard her click open the dead-bolt lock.
Trilby greeted him in silence with a hug and a long, moist kiss. She was always neatly dressed in a simple outfit—a blouse, skirt, silver hoop earrings and Mary Jane slippers—looking adorable in her motorized chrome wheelchair. The chair was a gift from Regis, one of the multitudes of home care products manufactured by Rovabout Industries, a wholly owned subsidiary of Regis Pharmaceuticals. The girl, hardly twenty, was in perfect health, an outstanding athlete and former ice-skating champion, but the conceit of Trilby as a disabled beauty, a broken flower, excited him to instant desire.
Before a word was spoken, he would follow her humming chair into a bedroom welcoming as a swan’s feathered belly. There was a huge bed with a soft embracing mattress, satin sheets, a lush quilt with great downy pillows, an enormous stuffed chair, a bureau in the French Provincial style holding an army of art glass perfume bottles that reminded Regis of young girls spilling out of school, a Persian rug, a glowing chandelier that sprinkled rosy light through crystal icicles, a large bay window shrouded with chiffon drapery, posters by Mucha and Cheri hanging on walls papered with a bucolic scene of grazing sheep and flute-playing shepherds. Baroque music played from speakers hidden somewhere in the ceiling.
Regis would undress Trilby in her wheelchair while she whispered, “No, please, no,” while she clicked switches that spun the chair in a tight circle. Regis pretended to dance with her while he kicked off his shoes, dropped his pants and boxer shorts, then lifted Trilby onto the incredible bed and took her while he gently stroked her hair with one hand and rubbed her chest with the other. Trilby’s protests changed to moans of the deepest pleasure.
As Regis mounted to climax, Trilby whispered in her splendid singsong voice, “You are my beautiful boy, my love and my salvation. To think of what you’ve done for the sick and troubled, to imagine what you will do to work future miracles of healing, to extend the gifts of life and hope, oh darling, my darling, my ageless angel, my own, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me.” Her monologue once was longer but, at 75, Regis’s staying power edited her praise to one simple paragraph.
When he finished with Trilby Morning, Regis took a long, hot shower, dressed, thanked her, handed her a thousand dollars, presented her with some silly token, a teddy bear, a music box, some toy for her amusement, scheduled his next appointment, then went home to his wife and family in Greenwich, Connecticut, calm, content, satisfied and secure.
On this special day near the end of October, Simon Apple’s last day alive, Regis felt a huge power surge; he made two discreet calls on his private line. He saw Belladonna after lunch then went directly to Trilby Morning. Both women received Patek Philippe watches circled with diamonds in appreciation for accommodating him on such short notice.
Regis told them that, by midnight, his worst nightmare would end, that he could enjoy the rest of his years in relative peace. When they saw the watches, Belladonna kneed him in the groin, Trilby blew warm air in his ear. That sometimes you actually get what you pay for justified Regis’s resolve to live forever and a day. He thought about taking his wife on a cruise to some exotic place for Christmas. He had another watch in his coat pocket inscribed with the name of her poodle, Earthling.
3
Being a mix of Catholic (dad) and Jewish (mom) heritage, Simon Apple was regularly visited in the Death House by Rabbi Shmul Bakla and Father Tim Mahoney. On this last and final day, both clerics were uncomfortable in the presence of the condemned man. They did their best to feign tranquility, bracketing Simon on his narrow cot.
The prisoner wondered about their nervous fidgeting since the whole idea of capital punishment was a basic metaphor for mankind’s transient existence, a mainstay of their motivating philosophies. And they had to know or suspect that God was the ultimate serial killer.
Simon saw that the rabbi was particularly agitated. “You know, Simon, there’s already a small crowd demonstrating outside the prison,” Rabbi Bakla said.
“To be expected. Those people show up at every execution,” Simon said.
“Not those people. Nobody is protesting your execution. I’m talking about the animal rights crowd and a few ultra-orthodox Jews. It’s the lobster thing.”
When they came to ask Simon about his last meal he’d chosen broiled Maine lobster, twice-baked potatoes, Brussels sprouts and a mixed green salad with blue cheese dressing. A local reporter did a feature on favorite last meals. “Aside from the animal rights fanatics,” the rabbi said, “after I made such a fuss about the ingredients in the lethal injection being in accordance with kosher laws, you order a shellfish?”
“I’m sorry if I upset anybody,” Simon said. “It’s hard to explain in any rational way, but since I was sentenced to death I keep thinking about some mindless crustacean splashing around in deliciously cold, salty water off the New England coast marked for the same fate as mine. I’m not proud of such infantile musings, Rabbi Bakla, but those thoughts give me a lift. Believe me, I have nothing against that lobster. I recognize how ridiculous it is to focus a desire for revenge against some blameless creature. I want my lobster hot, red, flame-curled, split, cracked, upside-down on my plate. Horrific, but there it is.”
“To strike out at a lobster is pathetic,” Father Mahoney said. “I wouldn’t expect you to go the vegetarian route but couldn’t you indulge those same feelings with, say, a rack of lamb?”
“Or a
steak?” Rabbi Bakla said. “A roast chicken? Simon, you must realize that what you do reflects on the Hebrew community. It will be hard for me to say Kaddish for a man whose last meal was traif.”
“On the other hand, if I was in your shoes I think I’d choose a lobster,” Father Mahoney said. “With lemon and garlic butter. Boiled, not broiled. A side of coleslaw instead of salad and maybe honeyed acorn squash.”
“Between us,” Simon said, “I don’t expect to be very hungry tonight. I never understood the fuss over charnel house banquets. Do I care what they feed me? I might not swallow a bite but I want that lobster dead.”
“Bitter lad. The basic problem, Simon, is that you still insist on your innocence despite reams of proof beyond any reasonable doubt,” Father Mahoney said.
“I don’t feel guilty,” Simon said. “Did you bring me cigarettes?”
“You know you’re not allowed to smoke in here,” Rabbi Bakla said. “Smoking is bad for you, the other inmates and the guards. Secondhand smoke kills. You want us to break the law?”
“Why am I not sorry to depart this world?” Simon said.
“Do I detect self-pity?” Father Mahoney said.
“There’s still the Supreme Court. Always a vestige of hope,” Rabbi Bakla said.
Simon looked into the rabbi’s sincere, clean-shaven face. Beardless, he looked more corporate than Old Testament, a middle management guide to the grave. Father Mahoney was abstracted, possibly thinking about good and evil or lunch.
“I did bring you a nicotine patch,” the priest said, snapping out of his trance. “It was between the patch and the gum. I thought the patch would be neater. Instructions are on the box.”
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