“I don’t understand what’s going on at Grand Mer and the Ratliff intake and what your part in it is.”
Bob Comeaux shakes his head fondly, socks the wheel. “Same old Tom! You always did lay it right out, didn’t you?” All smiles, he goes suddenly serious. “Good question, Tom!” he says crisply.
To emphasize the seriousness — this is too important to talk about while sailing along in his Duck — we pull off at an overlook, the loess hills dropping away to a panorama of Grand Mer, the cooling tower with its single pennant of cloud, the river beyond, and upriver the monolith of Fedville.
Bob swings around to face me, so solemnly his smiling crowfeet are ironed out white. Again he socks the steering wheel softly. The windows of the Duck go down, the sunroof slides back without a sound, letting in sunlight and the fragrance of pines warming. But there is still the smell of leather, oiled wood, and pipe tobacco.
“You old rascal.” He’s shaking his head again. “You jumped the gun on us. I told those guys! I told them!”
“Told them what?”
“Take a look.” From his suede jacket he takes a paper and hands it to me. It is stationery folded letter-size.
“So?”
“Take a look at the date!”
I take a look at the date. “So?”
“The date is the day before yesterday. It’s already in your mail. The original, that is.”
“Do you want me to read it?”
“At your leisure. It’s a job offer — a proposition you can’t refuse — employment to begin in”—he consults his wafer-thin Patek-Philippe—“exactly twenty-six hours, contingent only upon your clearing the formality of probation tomorrow. It’s official. We even have the brass down from Bethesda, a couple of wheels from NIH. They want you aboard too.”
“Job offer?”
“Tom,” says Bob, his eyes both solemn and fond, “we want you aboard as senior consultant for NRC’s ACMUI.”
“What’s that?”
He smites my knee. “You’re right. That goddamn bureaucratese. Okay, try this. You’re being offered a position as senior consultant on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Advisory Committee for the Medical Uses of Isotopes.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because you know more about the brain pharmacology of isotopes than anyone else. You broke the ground. You’re our man. Starting tomorrow you’re on the team.”
“What team?” I notice a broken V of ibis lowering on Tunica Island.
“There.” He nods toward Fedville. “Your office is waiting for you. Your salary of $85,000—chickenshit, if you ask me, but it was the best I could do, so I went on the assumption that you’re like me and that the service counts for something — will be supplemented by local QLC funding, which is mostly foundation money — I’m in with those guys — so you’ll be making about $135,000—not up to a big-shot shrink, ha, but we figure it will free you up to do your own research, plus you’ll have all the facilities of the center rent-free, as they say.”
The wings of the ibis, not great flyers, are out of sync and flutter in the sunlight like confetti.
Bob pops in a cassette and soon the Mercedes is filled with Strauss waltzes coming from all directions.
“God, don’t you love that,” murmurs Bob, lilting along with “Artist’s Life.” “Doesn’t that take you back to P&S, where we’d catch the Philharmonic, then hoist a tad of bourbon and branch at the Ein und Zwanzig?”
“Actually I’d be more apt to catch the flicks at Loew’s State 175th Street and hoist a beer at Murray’s Bar and Grill.”
“Same old Tom,” says Bob absently, but adjusting the four speakers, ear cocked for the right balance, listening with a frown. Satisfied, he settles back.
I take a good look at him. He has aged well. In his safari jacket, he’s as handsome as Eric Sevareid, as mellow as Walter Cronkite. We two have come a long way, he as much as says, seen the follies of the world, and here we are. Like Eric and Walter he has grown both grave and amiable.
“Any questions, Tom?” asks Bob, moving his head in time with Strauss.
“What is that heavy-sodium shunt at Ratliff all about?”
Bob nods gravely, eyes going fine and gazing past me at the looming, lopped cone of Grand Mer.
“Good question. Very good question. And if you don’t mind, I’ll answer it in my own way with a couple of Socratic questions of my own, shrinkwise, you might say. Okay?”
“Okay.” The wings of the ibis flash like shook foil and drop into the willows.
Bob leans back, puts forefinger to lips. “I’m assuming, Tom,” he says, and pauses, as the strains of “Artist’s Life” die away, “that we live by the same lights, share certain basic assumptions and goals.”
“Yes?”
“Healing the sick, ministering to the suffering, improving the quality of life for the individual regardless of race, creed, or national origin. Right?”
“Right. But what does that have to do with heavy sodium in the water supply?”
“What does that have to do with heavy sodium in the water supply,” he repeats gravely. “Good question, Tom. One might have asked a similar question fifty years ago: What does it have to do with fluoride in the water supply? And if we’d asked it, we’d have gotten the same sort of flak from the Kluxers and knotheads — as you of all people know. Hence our little cloak-and-dagger secrecy. Frankly, I saw no need of it.”
“So?”
“What would you say, Tom—” Bob, who has been lilting along with Strauss, leans forward and, turning down the music, fixes me with a smiling, keen-eyed look. “What would you say if I gave you a magic wand you could wave over there”—he nods over his shoulder toward Baton Rouge and New Orleans —“and overnight you could reduce crime in the streets by eighty-five percent?”
I wait, knowing there is more.
“Child abuse by eighty-seven percent?”
“You mean you’ve done it by—”
He waves me off. “We’ve done it — the numbers will be out next month — but let me finish. Teenage suicide by ninety-five percent. Ninety-five percent, Tom.”
“Yes?”
“Wife battering by seventy-three percent.”
“Yes?”
“Teenage pregnancy by eighty-five percent.”
“Yes?”
“And here’s some bad news for us shrinks.” He winks at me. “Hospital admissions for depression, chemical dependence, anxiety reduced by seventy-nine percent.”
“Yes?”
“And get this.” He leans close. “AIDS by seventy-six percent.”
“You’ve reduced AIDS by a heavy-sodium additive?”
“Not directly, but the numbers are there.”
“How, if not directly?”
He sinks back, eyes me speculatively, turns up “Wiener Blut.” “I’ll give you the easy answer first.”
“All right.”
“By reducing anal intercourse and drug use, shooting up with needles. That’s how the LAV-HTLV–III virus is mainly transmitted, right?”
“Right. But—”
“Here comes the interesting part. Why we need you. Tom, hear this. We don’t have stats for obvious reasons, but in the sodium treatment areas we’ve mentioned, the incidence of homosexuality has declined dramatically.”
“How could you know such a thing?”
Bob shrugs. “Clinical impressions. How many homosexuals have you treated lately? And a couple of interesting items. The Gay and Lesbian Club at L.S.U. has disbanded. Voluntarily. Tom, every gay bar and bathhouse in Baton Rouge is out of business, and not from police pressure. And a tiny but telling little item: the sale of gay and S.M. video cassettes is down almost to zero. Not from censorship, Tom! From lack of interest.”
“How does that come to pass, Bob?”
He appraises me. “I think you might have an idea, Tom, but I’m asking the questions, remember?”