Side Effects

by Harvey Jacobs

  “More true than not except that God seems to have blinked,” Simon said. “Why wasn’t Polly allowed to—?”

  “There was no record of any marriage license. We can’t allow anybody a night of fun and games in the Death House just because they might feel the urge to conjugate.”

  “You could have given us one night together,” Simon said.

  “I know,” Brian Beem said. “I was for it. But the warden felt what might be picked up by the security cameras might end up in every porno shop in America.”

  “Not just America. Placebo has fans around the world,” Simon said. “She’s an icon. Tarnished, but an icon.”

  “Who?”

  “I meant Polly Moon.”

  “Getting back to Brother Lucas,” Beem said, “Making that connection was easy, cut and dried. Courtesy of Ms. Moon, we had enough of your body fluids, hair samples, all kinds of markers you’d left on Brother Lucas’s corpse, inside and outside. The jury was very impressed by the fingerprints on that slightly edited “Dearest Love” letter we found stuffed in Luke’s anal cavity. The prosecutor couldn’t say if Brother Lucas put it there to let us know who shot him or just for sentimental reasons.”

  “My valentine to Polly Moon? She showed you that ?”

  “Afraid so.”

  “It’s a shame Polly’s last album turned out to be such a bust. I liked some of the tracks.”

  “Nothing to hum or dance to, nothing to match The Windchime Concerto, ” Brian Beem said. “That’s what I call authentic New Age music.”

  “Thanks,” Simon said. “You know, I never felt bitter toward Polly for working with you, Brian. I guess that’s a measure of how I adore that woman. At the time, I did think it a bit coincidental that she turned up at The Irish Song the way she did, but somehow I just accepted that as part of the normal flow of events. Does that sound dumb or what?”

  “Dumb but understandable,” Beem said. “I believed my first wife when she said she was spending those Monday nights taking a course on Raising Healthy Hydrangeas. And there was the case of Veronica Lake, a major star who ended up as a hooker and boozer in some jerkwater town in New England. Or was that Betty Hutton? Or both? So we thought it was credible enough to ship Polly Moon to Montibello.”

  “And it worked. I bought her whole story. You know what the President said to me? He said, ‘Simon, did you know the anatomy of women is the reason we’re sitting in an oval office instead of a squared-off room? That the architect who built the White House was very much aware of the vaginal implications of interior design? Something called Feng Shui. Rumor has it he was spurred on by the First Lady. And she was right on target. This room generates enormous energy. It’s an aphrodisiac. That helps explain some of the otherwise unforgivable hanky panky that’s scandalized the Executive branch of government. I know you’re blindfolded, but you must sense how history was forever changed by this ovular environment, clitorally speaking.’ ”

  “You were never in the oval office,” Brian Beem said. “You never spoke with the President.”

  “I’d know that voice anywhere. He was the one who convinced me to take my medicine, no pun intended. He was the one who brought Regis Van Clay into that room to spout the statistical disasters caused by my existence. Between the two of them, I was ready to run outside and lay down on the nearest guillotine.”

  “You were marvelously cooperative,” Beem said.

  “But humiliating my family by conjuring your monk-murder fabrication with that fugu fiasco. I didn’t deserve that or expect such treatment, not after the President shook my hand and patted my shoulder. You do know they’re awarding me a posthumous medal in a century or so? My lawyer, Marvin Klipstein, said he’d negotiated that deal. But who can say if they’ll keep their promise?”

  “Not me,” Brian Beem said. “Well, I think you’re up to speed now. I have nothing more to tell you that I can speak about. I hope it gives you some solace knowing that, albeit indirectly, you’ll be memorialized on millions of warning labels in many languages until the end of time. Flagging those side effects has already saved more lives than secondhand smoking bans and seat belts combined. Of course, no thanks to you, the dollar hit new lows against those Yens and Euros but now that we’ve plugged the so-called Apple Gap, pharmaceutical exports are already tipping what I call the imbalance of trade. We’ll make a comeback. We always do. We always will. And that’s not hubris. It’s guaranteed by the sacrifice of soldiers, sailors, airmen, spies and so-called ordinary citizens like Simon Apple.”

  “I suppose you know Brother Lucas came to visit me here. He looks better than he did before I murdered him.”

  “You saw Brother Lucas? Did you also see Jesus and Moses waiting to greet you when the ax falls?”

  “It was no hallucination,” Simon said. “He was here. You have to know Lucas is alive and well. He said he’s on special assignment for the Company. You’re incapable of telling me the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

  “What a nasty accusation,” Brian Beem said. “Simon, it’s been an honor to know you. You’re a jolly good fellow. I think that whenever I’m having a good dinner or fornicating with Mrs. Beem some part of me will feel a portion of my satisfaction is deservedly shared by a freckle-faced kid from Glenda, Minnesota.”

  “I never had freckles,” Simon said.

  “I didn’t mean literal freckles,” Agent Beem said. “I meant figurative freckles. Rest in peace.”

  89

  Simon was told that his farewell dinner would soon be served. Living in a world without clocks, that news, not unexpected, still came as a surprise. His only connection with time, except through memory, came from a Hyman Simbok one-of-a-kind hand-painted watch face which he kept in the breast pocket of his saffron uniform stenciled u.s. government issue across the chest and back.

  That watch face, a fat-cheeked imp with ringlets of curly hair, lecherous lips and a bulbous nose that served as hub for the hour, minute and second hands, had become a kind of talisman for Simon, his not-so-good luck charm, a disembodied souvenir from a world where people actually compartmentalized their days to chronicle the march toward oblivion.

  In his section of the prison, always brightly lit for the eyes of security cameras watching for suicide attempts or the vaguest indication of any attempt at escape, the guards were forbidden to answer questions about calendars or clocks. Simon was so immersed in that timeless world he’d long since stopped asking visitors about the progress of the sun’s daily journey or the phases of the moon. If someone like Marvin Klipstein, Esq., who Simon had enough reason to trust, violated house rules and said something like, “Got to get moving, the kids should be getting out of school soon,” Simon didn’t believe him. The only credible truth in the Death House was that only Death, tiptoeing softly over a goose-down path of minutes, knew the time.

  “You have a visitor, not a relative. If you want to see him you’ll have to see him under glass,” the guard said.

  While Simon shuffled down the long corridor leading to the visitor’s room, downstairs, in the prison kitchen, a pound-and-a-half lobster, formerly of Ogonquit, Maine, wriggled on a chrome counter, straining against rubber bands, holding its pincers shut. A large steel pot of water simmered on the stove, sending up the first bubbles of what the cookbook described as a vigorous boil.

  At first, Simon didn’t recognize his meticulously dressed African American visitor, a man in his prime with silver-speckled hair framing a strong, composed face.

  It always amazed Simon that when he caught reflected glimpses of himself in some liquid mirror in a plastic mug or soup bowl (glass and metal was forbidden), he’d see some ancient stranger looking back at him. It took a while to realize he was seeing himself. Whenever he thought about women he’d known, their faces were unchanged, their bodies young and supple. Then Simon was forced to perform the frightful addition of decades, the alchemy of a frenzied accountant correcting the balance sheet of a corporate cheat before an audit.

  Us
ing the same brutal math, he was forced to realize that his visitor was his high school buddy, Chirp Bennet. From Chirp’s expression, Simon guessed the shock of recognition was mutual—they’d both time-traveled over a considerable distance.

  “All these years,” Simon said into the monitored telephone. “Chirp, you’re looking fit as a fiddle.”

  “You too,” Chirp said. “So what’s new with the fabulous fucker from Glenda High?”

  “Not much,” Simon said. “I’ve been on hold for a while.”

  “So I heard. Tell me, are you guilty as charged?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  While the two men checked each other’s faces for wrinkles, Simon’s lobster felt itself lifted through the air then dropped with a splash into the boiling cauldron. It lost all belief in omnipotence. It’s shell turned from the color of sea bottom mud to a furious sunset red.

  “What are you up to these days?” Simon said.

  “I’m the Art Director for Positive Outlook Magazine. Wife, Zelda. Three kids, Malcom, Angela and Chirp Junior. We live in Fair Lawn, New Jersey just over the Washington Bridge. Life is good.”

  “Excellent,” Simon said. “You know, that we lost touch is one of my biggest regrets.”

  “And mine. But you do accept that I could never forgive you for what you did to my Camaro. I still can’t, so let’s not pretend that the wound is healed. You sacrificed our friendship for a quick screw in the park.”

  “A quick screw in the park? Are you speaking of Tabitha Ulman? I loved that woman, head to tail. How could I know I was suffering from . . .”

  The prison chef added a clove of garlic to a saucepan where a generous chunk of butter melted. Then he tossed a batch of potato slices into a pot of hissing oil. While the french fries cooked, he chopped a parsley garnish and filled a small plastic tub with coleslaw fresh from the refrigerator.

  “There’s no excuse for what you did to my wheels,” Chirp said. “But I didn’t come to talk about the past. I didn’t plan to come at all. Zelda said it was the Christian thing to do. So here I am. How could you have fucked Miss Ulman in my backseat when you swore a blood oath?”

  “Look, they’re going to execute me in a few hours. Can’t we kiss and make up? Isn’t there anything I can say that—”

  “No, damn it. Nothing. Listen, it was nice seeing you looking so composed.”

  “You too,” Simon said. “My best to the little woman.”

  “Zelda is six two. She was once in the Olympics. Track and Field.”

  The cook was a religious man. He sensed his efforts were being judged by angels. When he squirted whipped cream on a wedge of key lime pie, he knew those angels grinned.

  “I only slightly expected to get laid that night,” Simon said.

  “I wish I could just forgive and forget,” Chirp said. “But every time I read about you I think ‘Cragar wheels, 4-barrel Holley carburetor, Crane performance camshaft.’ I guess I’m not the man I’d like to be, but you should have done Miss Ulman on the grass. That’s what grass is for.” Chirp Bennet hung up his phone and stood to leave.

  “Yeah, well, later,” Simon said.

  Before Simon hung up, the voice of the guard who screened all conversations cut in on the line and said, “You know the brother is right. And I’m not saying that because I’m an African American, so please don’t play the race card. Oh, by the way, they said to tell you your dinner is ready, Apple. Get it while it’s hot.”

  90

  Simon had always rejected wearing a lobster bib the few times he’d gone to devour one of those atavistic delicacies. Accepting a bib seemed regressive and demeaning both to himself and to the broiled or boiled creature laying split apart on his plate.

  The bib was a plastic carpet that flew Simon back to his days in a highchair, when his lack of size, strength and coordination forced him to accept trading the ultimate joy of a pillow breast and fountain nipple for a spoonful of mush shoved toward his sucking mouth. Every cell in his infantile brain urged him to spit that food back at the tit-miser who fed him, but his body was too hungry to allow for a political statement. So he swallowed stewed pears, mashed carrots and bananas without relish. After that shameful capitulation, he drank his milk from a glass bottle with a rubber nipple and fell asleep.

  It was no bib for Simon Apple, thank you very much.

  The succulent crustacean waiting to offer up its tender meat and tasty roe had lived the life of a cannibal and a pirate. After surviving by murder, procreating by intimidation, enduring mayhem and assault on the bed of the brutal northern sea, one stupid mistake had landed it inside a lobster trap. The captive was plucked into an unsuspected kingdom of air, tossed onto a mountain of ice, thrown into a tank with banded pincers and, undefended, left to crawl through a slimy clot of other doomed, damned homarus americanus, transported to a slaughter house where thick fingers smelling of garlic circled its squirming middle and wriggling legs, then dropped it into the steaming hell of a lobster pot (better than being turned upside down, sliced down the middle then sacrificed to cremating flames) where it sensed, in its last sentient moment, its color change to a sunset mix of red and orange—a Cinderella gift of beauty granted on the verge of extinction. Ironically, the very death blush would make its transformed cadaver so much more appetizing to some salivating gourmet. To wear a bib, always decorated with a sugary drawing of the victim, a crustacean whose history—beginning, middle to violent end—was worthy of a Russian novel, seemed a superficial act, a sad denial of the primitive connection between the eater and that delicious predator whose ancestors dated back to the Big Bang, the celestial fart that created the universe (“and nothing more,” Einstein was rumored to say in private). A bib is armament, like a carapace. A tool for species distancing.

  Definitely no bib, thanks for asking.

  Just as Simon was about to dig out a chunk of tender white tail meat, he heard a harsh, judgmental voice from just outside his cell. “He’s refusing to use a bib!” The voice was obviously annoyed that the prisoner took the bibless route.

  Simon saw a video camera pointed at him. Alongside the camera, a man stood holding a microphone. It was someone Simon recognized but he couldn’t place the who, how, where, when or why of any past encounter. “He’s going after the tail first. Me, I prefer to save the tail and pincers for last. I start by breaking off the legs and kind of inhaling what’s inside them. It’s like the overture to a concert. Not that there’s a right way or a wrong way. But that’s the Speed Sage way.”

  “What’s this about?” Simon said. “I’m trying to get through my last meal.”

  “That’s what this is about,” Speed Sage said. “We’re shooting a documentary for Fox News. On last meals, especially yours.”

  “For some kind of Grand Guignol reality show?”

  “In a way. The gimmick is to show the audience, A, that compassionate conservatism works, that even the worst offenders are treated with dignity and, B, that the animal rights folks are treading on thin ice when they accuse the system of cruel and unusual punishment if a recipe happens to call for meat or, in your case, shellfish. Our crew followed that lobster from its home waters right to your cell and, believe me, no prince was ever treated better. And C, certain parties want a record of your last hours. They want to make sure you’re neatly folded and put away.”

  “I didn’t think those certain parties wanted to make a fuss over my folding,” Simon said.

  “They decided a certain amount of closure was called for,” Speed Sage said. “Can we get on with it now? Try the potatoes or the slaw. Have a sip of cranberry juice. Look like you’re enjoying yourself. Take the nutcracker and crack that shell.” Speed Sage cuddled his microphone and whispered, “ Mmmmm, ladies and gents, let nobody accuse Simon Apple of anorexia, and by anorexia Speed ain’t referring to Czar Nicholas’s missing daughter as played by Ingrid Bergman. OK, on with the show. We’re live here in the J. Edgar Hoover Correctional Facility watching co
nvicted monk-murderer Simon Apple feast on a dinner fit for Bonnie and Clyde. The main course will be topped off by an entire key lime pie smothered in whipped cream and surrounded by a drizzle of raspberry sauce, as requested by the ruthless perp. And you’re picking up the tab, fellow taxpayers. You and me both.”

  “The football game.” Simon said. “At the Munchkin Academy. You were the sportscaster.”

  “That’s it. And you were the seedling with the antlers. We’re old friends, ladies and gents, we go back a few years. This kid was some kind of running back. And look at him now. I knew he’d make good when I saw him break apart the de fense of one of toughest teams in the diaper league. So how did it come to pass that a boy like you is sitting in there while a bum like Speed Sage is out here still doing the play-by-play?”

  “Side effects,” Simon said.

  “Meaning what?” Speed Sage said.

  “If you want the real story . . .”

  Warden Donal gave the signal to pull the plug; the camera stopped rolling, the microphone quit. Speed Sage was ushered off Death Row, defending the people’s right to freedom of the press.

  Two trusties came and cleared away the remains of Simon’s last meal. When Simon said he wasn’t finished yet and asked about his key lime pie with whipped cream and a raspberry drizzle, they shrugged. When he requested permission to keep the unused bib as a souvenir for his stepmother, that sincere and serious request was interpreted as both snide and frivolous, then summarily denied.

  91

  “How was the dinner?” Robert J. said. “Still smells good in here.”

  “They snatched it out from under me. I never got my pie.”

  “Probably for the best. I hear it’s better not to have a full stomach. They’ll give you rubber underwear just before . . .” Simon watched his father fight off tears. “We never could have a real conversation,” Robert J. said.