Gilligan's Wake: A Novel (31 page)

Under a carefully nurtured illusion of being able to count on our tolerance if not consent, our
soi-disant
allies France and Great Britain, both of whom took a proprietary interest in the waterway that one nation had built and the other bought in happier times all around, mounted an invasion to re-open it, in covert collusion with the Israelis. Then came my great coup.

At the UN, I had Dulles denounce the Franco-British intervention as a flagrant act of old-fashioned imperialism—unlike, needless to say (and believe me, it wasn’t), the newfangled kind on which we held the patent. Caught with their landing-craft ramps down, so to speak, and knowing full well that without our backing both their economies would be wrecked inside a week, London and Paris were obliged to give up the whole operation as a botch. As they sheepishly withdrew their baffled troops, we Americans basked in utterly undeserved adulation for the principled manner in which we had forced our very own “allies” to call off their bullying of a smaller nation. Partly to further muddy the waters, and partly because I enjoyed tickling Roy’s funnybone, I had our own tame press demonize Nasser as a hysterical despot while permitting not a breath of criticism of the Israelis—who were as culpable as France and Britain, but had also been in on the whole scheme with us from the start.

It worked beautifully.

Although our own country’s citizens were too docile and uninformed for us to worry overmuch about any rumblings from that corner, we did occasionally feel the need for some domestic prophylaxis. One of my best forays in that vein was the plan—scrawled, after I’d taken a few moments to collect my thoughts, with the end of a burnt match on the cuff of my shirt as I was watching
Gunsmoke
one day—to have President Eisenhower say goodbye to public life by denouncing what we decided to call “the military-industrial complex.” That term occasioned no end of chortling in our vast sub-aquatic lair, located in the middle of the Potomac beneath the supposedly undeveloped woodlands of Theodore Roosevelt Island. Compared to what we knew to be the reality, for Ike to start babbling about a military-industrial complex was a bit like referring to the
Titanic
as the S.S.
Minnow,
, or some other equally innocuous name.

In any case, the guile of it was my expectation—fully borne out by events—that by then everyone would be so sick of Eisenhower, whom we had carefully built up as a genial fool, and would find the sheer incongruity of a warning from this source so perplexing, that anyone who brought up the military-industrial complex from then on would simply sound as senile as he did. I’m told that Ike himself, in actuality about as doddering and kindly as a threshing machine, roared with laughter at my stratagem before agreeing to play the patsy, a decision he commemorated by sighing, “Thank Christ, thank Christ—no more golf. Jesus
God,
but I’m sick of that stupid game.”

And lucky him, for at times our own work seemed endless. Coming over the speakerphone one day in 1961 in my lavish underwater office, past whose windows fish killed by the Potomac’s increasing pollution had begun steadily drifting belly-up, Roy’s voice sounded peevish even for him. “There’s so much goddam money swimming around the country right now, sooner or later even the Gillies"—our organization’s odd nickname for the imbecilic citizens not in the know, albeit one whose origin escapes me—-”are going to start wondering how come there are still poor people and diseases, and all that other crap. Well, if there weren’t, I’d have to start fucking rich ones—and you’d be stuck screwing healthy ones, Prof. Any ideas on how to distract them?”

Telling him to turn on a tape recorder, and taking a few moments to collect my thoughts, I removed one of my shoes and used my desk to bang out a plan in Morse code for a program dedicated to landing a man on the moon within the decade. Of course, there was nothing there, and even the slowest Gillie could have seen that; in this case, the naked eye was no liar. But the program would be fabulously expensive, and allow those of my fellow scientists who might otherwise have been tempted to try curing cancer or designing fuel-efficient cars to have a marvelous time instead building intricate $2 billion trinkets which they could then fire out past the slowly rotting ozone layer, placing these fascinating but perfectly useless objects well beyond the reach of suspicious minds.

Much as I’d like to, however, I can’t claim credit for perhaps the single most celebrated idea ever hatched in our shop. Although modesty, among other things, forbade him from ever confessing his authorship, the war in Vietnam was the brainchild of my colleague Dr. Henry Kissinger, who had gone to work for Roy’s clients well over a decade before that ultimate Gillie Richard Nixon innocently offered him a job “up top,” as we called it in our underwater lair. Bored with watching dead fish float up past
his
window, as he didn’t share my erotic fascination with them—or, at any rate, remained unwilling to admit it!—Hank took on the White House gig as a lark. Having hatched his plan to bump off nearly 60,000 Gillies and uncounted Vietnamese for the defense industry’s sake back before the ink was even dry on the 1954 Geneva accords, it must have tickled him no end to reap all the glory of announcing “Peace is at hand” (well, on paper, anyway) some sixteen years of lucrative if otherwise pointless butchery later, even as his Gillie master fumed at his ostensible subordinate for hogging the kudos.

A sentimental fellow in his way, Hank used to phone down from up top to hear his old colleagues’ amused reactions to his pranks: “Vot do you dink? Isn’t my Cherman accent just a riot? Peter Sellers must be pissing his
pants,”
he used to crow over my speakerphone, switching to his natural Topanga Canyon tones midway through. When he was sure no TV cameras rolled or radio microphones recorded him, he sounded a bit like a member of the singing group the Mamas and the Papas.
Indeed, what I myself miss most about our sub-aquatic alma mater—for like dear Henry, one of the few human beings for whom I’ve ever felt genuine affection, I am now retired—are the laughs.

Although hardly on a par with Kissinger’s, my own most whimsical project afforded Roy a good deal of amusement. In the mid-1960s, in order to conclusively prove the breed’s stupidity—and, frankly, because I needed a vacation, not having been up top myself since 1954 except on brief sorties to visit good King Priap’s subjects—I marooned six archetypal Gillies, chosen for us by a tame academic and canned-soup heir named Joseph Campbell, on what they were told was a desert island not found on any map. In fact, their floating environment was man-made, per my instructions down to the last palm and the white boat with a hole in it, and anchored just out of sight of California’s coastline. If any of the fools had ever thought to climb up into the mountains on a clear day, they could have spotted Catalina.

Undetected, I moved among them in the guise of a fellow castaway, my old impersonation of the well-meaning but hapless egghead never more useful or successful. At night, in the secret complex I’d had built underneath the “island,” I lived like a pasha, and Priap took his pick—although, at times, a shovel might have come in equally handy—from the flattered harem of the deformed, diseased, and freakish I’d had shipped here, at phenomenal expense, from all over the United States. Meanwhile, up top, as I still called it out of habit, none of my six specimens—male or female, sailor or landlubber, young or old, rich or poor—ever guessed that their thoughtful but somehow none too competent companion was not only the very man who had created their predicament, but the invariable saboteur of their pathetic schemes to escape.

I kept the game up some three years, until a call for help from Hank Kissinger—the semi-Gillie Lyndon Johnson’s private qualms about Vietnam made extra work for us all down below until the day that broken man quit the White House—forced me to end the project and return to our sub-aquatic lair in the Potomac, whose last surviving fish turned out to have bit the ooze during my sabbatical. Still, by then I felt my point had been made, and my reaching Washington in one piece was the proof. In all our time together, just as I’d expected, not one of my artificial castaways
off Catalina had even come close to unriddling the only true solution to their predicament, which my scientific integrity required me to include in the experiment’s design. A mainstay of the concept from the moment that, having taken a few seconds to collect my thoughts, I’d roughed out the whole thing on a wall of my underwater office with a lump of coal left over from our annual Christmas party, the one way out I left in for the Gillies expressed my full contempt for them—a contempt that thirty-six months of familiarity had only bred like flies.

You see, as I had rigged the scheme, the only way they could have gotten off the island was to kill me.

Half a decade after my return to our underwater headquarters beneath Roosevelt Island, the clumsy conspiracies of Richard Nixon proved to be the near undoing of us. As a result, I went to live up top again for a while.

Nixon, you should know, was unusually smart for a Gillie. This caused him little else but torment, as his intelligence had led him to glean more than a few inklings of our existence over the years. His unctuous craving to prove his merit by serving our goals as best he could alternated with a mare’s nest of resentments at never having been asked to join our golden combine himself, despite his undoubted industry and almost pathological eagerness to measure up by casting Gillie principle to the four winds.

As all this made him an imperfect stooge, placing him in the White House was something of a calculated risk on our part. At a secret meeting in Gettysburg, even our old standby Ike advised against it, shortly before his motor went on the fritz, the simpleton grin that we’d all taken such malicious pleasure in designing turned spasmodic, and we finally decided that we had repaired and rewired the whole apparatus one time too many. However, by the late 1960s our operations had grown so complex that we felt the need for a figurehead up top who had, so to speak, an ear for our special music—one good enough to let him limp along on the piano, apparently alone on the stage, as our unseen orchestra thrummed and sawed away in its masked pit. In that way, Nixon was a sort of distorted mirror image of his near-immediate predecessor, with
the accidental Johnson playing the role of the equal sign in that particular let X=Y.

Far from being a Gillie of any sort, John Kennedy had been the rare member of Roy’s clientele with enough perceptiveness to understand how the thing worked, and the wit to find it amusing. When he had a message smuggled to our underwater lair announcing he’d grown bored with a steady diet of amphetamines and starlets, and puckishly proposing that he be allowed to take the twenty-five-hundred-mile-long Caddy—our private nickname for the United States—out on a chicken run, we hesitated. But this was back in happier times, and we concluded that we could count on his sense of irony, which was marvelously tuned, to counteract his love of danger.

After his death, when the Gillies began to reverence him as their great idealist, we had some panicked moments down below. Of all things, picking out
earnestness
as Jack Kennedy’s prime virtue struck us as so farfetched that we feared they’d finally tumbled to the game, and were pulling our legs in turn. However, it turned out that they meant it, and after some mutually rolled eyes and bemused shrugs in our underwater corridors, we all contentedly went back to our jobs.

Incidentally, his murder was pure Gillie work, and nothing to do with us. But we certainly profited from the chance to divert all sorts of minds sharp enough to have detected our labors into wasting their careers instead on fruitless speculation and nonsensical conspiracy theories. Eventually, having decided that the Gillies’ obsession with November 22,1963, was adversely affecting their productivity, we gleefully put paid to the whole chapter by manipulating the biggest clod we could find in Hollywood—no easy search, given the competition—into making a movie about the assassination so ridiculous that no one in America ever took the topic seriously again. As I used to rather daringly tell my class during the interlude when I briefly turned high-school teacher up top in Arlington, knowing that my fuddy-duddy manner would prevent them from guessing that they were getting it straight from the horse’s (no, Secretariat’s!) mouth, the true story of history isn’t what occurs, which is often perfectly haphazard, but how and by whom its events are turned to advantage.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, since I had yet to surface. Striding into my office one day in June 1972, a raging Roy threw down a copy of
The Washington Post
dated April 1973. Its headline screamed the news that Nixon had just fired the two animatronic devices we had code-named “Haldeman” and “Ehrlichman,” and an inside page featured a rogues’ gallery of conspirators, some robotic and some Gillie, all involved in something called Watergate. For some reason, one sandy-haired, gray-eyed face, far down in the postage-stamp-sized row of minor players, briefly caught my eye. In an instant, however, I had realized that the reason his hair looked sandy and his eyes seemed gray was that the photograph was black and white, and turned to the predictably indignant Herblock cartoon.