A Day In the Half-life

To the reader: A special agent to a federal bureau, left this file at the apartment of an avid fan, who then submitted it to us, with you in mind.

He was ideology and I was methodology.  

This is hardly a confessional. It is not a rail or rant. Neither William Chadwick nor I are weird beardos hunkered down in the woods. Nor are we gun-toting white power right-wingers. This is to prove how our project failed due to the very elements we were compelled to eradicate; the sedentary incompetence that has infected this country.

I arrived at Logan Airport in Boston late, due to fog, one morning last September. My only luggage was carry-on, a briefcase containing a neutron bomb that would wipe out the Greater Boston Area up to the Raytheon plant in Wilmington. I wasn’t nervous about the time, once I made the drop I had to catch a flight to St Martin by 3:30. At 5:30, in rush hour traffic, atonement would be made.

Chadwick and I went to MIT together & graduated in 1949, both with Master’s degrees in physics. He was the beautiful bastard, and I the awkward Wunderkind. He was the idea man, and I the one who made the ideas real. He got the gorgeous women, and I got their frumpy friends. He was ideology and I was methodology.

We were in school during the war. Chadwick’s father, who was inspirational to us both, sympathized with the Fascists in the face of the Communist agenda in America. The Cold War reinforced this sentiment in our minds; there was none of our hearts involved. It was this patriarch who made me aware that the underclasses must be put down and their proliferation halted.

I took a cab from the airport and had driver, a Caribbean, drop me off at Harrison and Stuart, in the middle of Chinatown, in what’s referred to as the Combat Zone. I wanted to soak up the filth, and clear my mind before the big event. I started walking west, toward the Back Bay, where the drop zone was.

At the New England Medical Center, I passed mothers holding bald children whose pallor was green. I grinned, thinking, “Soon your cancer will be burned out.”

The two of us built bombs in California. We always worked for the government, in some capacity, up until the eighties. Because of cutbacks, I then began to do consultations for nuclear medicine. The crowning moment in my career was a speech delivered to the American Oncological Society.

“Individuals are the rebel cells. Affecting all others. They metastasize against society.” With this future credo already entrenched, business was good through the sixties. As the decade closed, the sympathies toward a Free Burn Society improved. The big guns wavered from outward to in.

From Rutherford’s early experiments to Cockcroft’s and Wilson’s, the mission was clear: to accelerate the human race to a singular and pure destiny. But these men of the highest ideals, only thinking in platitudes amongst the clouds, had no awareness of the glutting masses, which labored, but prevented this flight from even beginning.

Chadwick and I were the medium through which these lofty dreams were to be made real, or at least truly begun.

But indeed, today it had begun.

“Though even as a body fights a foreign infection from without, how does one amass an army to fight against those most lethal to the self, the enemy within, soldiers from the order of their own?

“Nothing is more dangerous or crippling than a revolution from inside the home ranks. But occupation need not be taken battle by battle. But, by the displacement of sheer numbers using up too many resources.

“Case in point, the supposed invasion of barbarian hordes. The Eastern and Northern Europeans tribes’ progress into the Mediterranean region was recorded by those whose land was taken up by the uncivilized brutes. These brutes, however, had no written language to record their own migrations. Thus the record is one-sided.

“They chose to have only an oral history, not for lack of advancement, but for higher ideals. The barbarians chose not to develop a written language, because in their own thinking, that would lead to a sedentary populace, which leads to kings and tyranny.

As we are earthbound by the laws of physics, without
these laws we would have no hope of ever lifting off it.

“They chose personal freedom over civil order, a choice that still divides this world today. And the hardest choice for any man.

“Order cannot be seen as unhealthy or unfree. As we are earthbound by the laws of physics, without these laws we would have no hope of ever lifting off it. As a body becomes more complex, more order must be enforced, or the system comes in conflict, and a fugue ensues resulting in cannibalism of the self.”

I walked swiftly over the Harrison Street Bridge, spanning across the expressway. The wind was cutting. Passing the Boston Herald, I thought of how the paper declined into a mere tabloid, yet tried to maintain its status quo, working-class roots. Its lies were thinner than its third page. The liberalist Globe wasn’t much better.

The area was desolate now. Some rummies collected like trash in the wind. In an alcove, one pushed another while the others yelled. He reeled around, drunken, urinating and stumbling. Barely breaking his fall, he leaned on the trunk of a car, urine still cascading onto the middle of the sidewalk. The scent of his sick, fetid water knifed along with the wind.

I made my way onto Appleton Street, and took a left onto Clarendon, and soon was in the now eclectic South End neighborhood.

Three fourteen year olds offered, mostly jokingly, to sell me heroin and then threatened to “kick the shit out of me.” A bug-eyed woman, face speckled with sores, said she’d “suck me for a rock.” The fact that I, a 73 year-old scientist, could be a part of their universe seemed to their bleary perceptions, perfectly normal.

Two men window shopped, oohing at a feathered dress, and then looked on into a shop that body pierced. They held hands, and as I walked by, one reflexively and openly stroked the other’s buttocks.

Two blocks down Columbus, I hooked a right onto Exeter, for a short walk to the Back Bay. The drop zone, the Prudential Building, had been bobbing and weaving across the rooftops.

At the nearby basketball court, a dozen able-bodied young men, leaped and backslapped their way through another workday. Across the park were flocks of sneering mothers each with a brood about her and not a ring on the fourth digits of all their left hands.

At Huntington and West Newton, the Pru loomed and jutted out of the elevated plaza just ahead.

I was making a drop-in call on an MIT alumnus. He wouldn’t be there; I had set up this visitation a week ago, to check his calendar. He would, however, be on his way back into the city, and I would wait as long as I could, but no longer.

The area was under extensive construction, and had changed since I was last there. Prudential Insurance Company had inscribed in foot tall letters, in the wall of the marbled lobby, a very inspirational message. I had desired a few moments of meditation while pondering it. It had been removed during renovation. I tried to recall it in paraphrase saying, “The future belongs to those who save.” Some things are impossible to anticipate for security is a fragile thing. Sometimes no amount of financial success will save you. Disaster is the ultimate equalizer, for it brings everyone down to the same level, from which they must struggle upward.

“In the machine of the body, one malfunctioning of a part leads to a malfunctioning of the whole. It does not rely on the Henry Ford principle of replaceable parts. The operator is just as indispensible as the finite, and infinite, mechanics.

“And so it is with society.

“The leader is not a role model for the people, when the people elect him. In a modern “free society” the leader represents the people, and is an example unidealized. In the body, a tissue sample, one cell, represents the whole of the organism. The secrets of the whole are barely buried within the parts. Any complex organism is like that of a nation; a continual birthing and shedding of its components until all resources are exhausted. The idealized cell is a myth that explodes upon examination.”

Chadwick and I, of course, pulled many college-boy pranks. We sent Dr. Gladstone, a biology professor, over the course of one month, the parts of a butchered swine, starting with its cloven hocks, and concluding with its circumcised cock.

For Shem, the houseboy, we left dismembered chickens, à la voodoo, and heaps of human feces on the phone booth stool, and even used prophylactics on the student lounge pool table.

These pranks, of course, fit our already burgeoning agenda. My present mission was not a fait de complet. But, the making of its beginnings.

So to the financial firm of Belotti and McGinty I headed to pay a visit to Hiram Rosenthal, an analyst. He was actually always horribly anal retentive about numbers, especially significant digits. [The irrationality of  π  always irritated him.] He was at the present hour, of course, making his way back from the Springfield Office.

... while sipping the weak, tepid coffee. She
grimaced back, like a clown behind red lipstick. 

The receptionist was a decadent girl, bespectacled, too many earrings, the edge of a tattoo visible beneath a low-cut, sheer white blouse. Her generous bust heaved in exasperation, when I claimed that I would wait for Mr. Rosenthal. I asked if I may have some coffee, and as I was merely a solicitor (I had made it clear that I was to collect an overdue pledge to the Alumni Association.), I was given directions to the break room.

There it was easy to slip the slim valise behind the soda vending machine. I waited a token twenty minutes, smiling a self-assured grin at the girl, while sipping the weak, tepid coffee. She grimaced back, like a clown behind red lipstick.

She snuffed as I begged her pardon, to take my leave. I hailed a cab, this time a Communist Vietnamese was driving, and rode to the airport. There, I patiently awaited my flight to the Caribbean. The various service personnel about me were quite patronizing, and seemed quite unaware of what was to come, as deep inside me, cascaded waves of intoxication.

My teeth had become loose in the cab ride. In the terminal, I began spitting up blood. My graying hair fell out in clumps, as I ran my hand through it. The darkening liver spots, on the back of my hands, took on the appearance of carcinomas. As I mumbled to the stewardess, two teeth slipped out from rapidly receding gums. It was clear what my life of science and this sacrifice had led to.

I spent the night in Charlotte Amalie, and rose in the early morning, before the lazy news paper sellers had delivered the papers to the hotel. I hired a ride on the truck of a poultry farmer.

One thing I must admit, had been nagging me. The timing device. Chadwick thought it was more appropriate to use the domestic one. I had sourced out an imported one that was failsafe, the one he suggested, was not tested. He was the idealist, his will won out. Brushing chicken down off my suit, I walked up to the beach house that Chadwick owned. He was sitting outside, at a cafe table, with the morning surf roaring in the distance.

He lowered the paper. His skull was spattered with patchy bits of hair, his skin leathered and wrinkled in spots. His eyes were jaundiced, and rolled about in degenerative myopia. His head, wholly too heavy upon the coiled goose-necked spring that connected it to his body, leered out, like a puppet, into the darkness of the mid-morning sun. Cracked lips peeled back to reveal a toothless, bloody maw.

“We failed.” The pictures, on the front page of the papers, were of victory celebrations at sporting events, and glowering plastic celebrities in charity with deformed children. There was no mention of our mission. We looked at one another almost falling into the other’s void-dark eyes. While ours had changed, life went on for everyone else. We didn’t have time to discuss possible scenarios.

We craned our exploding heads upon broken necks, to look down the beach. Several suited men, obviously not tourists, were marching upon us, talking into radios.