I Am Max Lamm (21 page)

Nevertheless, the phone number in red looked written especially for someone.

They might return any moment. What if the senator or the big-boned stepsister had forgotten their wallet or keys? Yet, exhilarated by his near-miss in the closet, by evading the conservative warhorse whose insatiable daughter he was screwing, Lamm felt alive! More alive than he’d felt since . . . the night he drowned in the East River? The morning he awoke from his coma at New York Hospital? Haunted, hungry Lamm! He didn’t want prison, or a lynching from Malik’s vigilante avengers, or to atone for his crime or else suffer guilt, madness, damnation. Didn’t want
not
to live, to rot undiscovered beneath a Hyde Park barbeque, to envisage Malik’s eyes squirting semen stolen from his own vesicles, to see his eternal sweetheart’s ghost in a foreign synagogue. He wanted to go home! To evade the police, the tabloids, the vengeful gangs, to return to Melbourne’s Jewish enclave where he would hug his late grandmother and eat her homemade
kugelhopf
. You are not a lemming! You will not wait in this wardrobe until J Edgar Hoover returns from dinner!

In two minutes Lamm returned the shoebox to its hiding spot, stuffed the blankets onto the shelf, then fled down the stairs. He ran into Hyde Park, another skinny young man on his evening jog. Go hide the gun beneath the barbeque.

Lamm sat on the stone rim of a birdbath embossed with dried chewing gum. He gazed east through the trees. There, over the dim shag of willows’ fringes, glowed the clock above Queensway Tube station. 1.26 a.m. They would have returned home three hours ago. Kelly collapsing on her bed to watch MTV all night and snort crushed tablets of Seroquel, an anti-psychotic that doubles as a sedative; Jacqueline opening her laptop to check the voluminous influx of emails, press releases, party invites, friend requests; the senator relaxing on the marble toilet, reading the
Wall Street Journal
as he bid farewell to the £65 lobster.

Tomorrow is Monday, the first day of your second week of
this
. The beginning of the end. The banks will be open, so ask Kelly for the money. Five thousand pounds for a fake passport. Tell her that you’re a drug mule on the run, she can relate to that. Perhaps her father’s visit has sufficiently perturbed her that she’ll do something so irrational? If she won’t lend you the cash, will she reject you for asking? In families like hers, the financial sixth sense is indestructible.

Of course, Lamm knew the exaggerated reports of Hyde Park after dark. A no-man’s land of foxes, squirrels, rats clawing the undergrowth; of muggers, homeless bums, gay men cruising the late-night beats. According to the mums and dads of wealthy West London, nocturnal Hyde Park is the Brazilian favela meets Caligula’s rape chamber. Yet who in this park has committed a worse crime than yours?
You’re
the terror.

Near the grey shimmering fountain, three cigarettes pinpricked the dim. A trio of closet queens, hooking up away from prying eyes. They’re Hyde Park’s husbands satisfying their mundane secret. The sky unusually clear tonight, its silvery pinhole sequins multiplied a thousandfold. Unimaginably far from your mess, the stars ancient, cold, intractable.

That moment, dazzled by the constellations unusually bright for central London, Lamm recalled –
saw –
his eighth-grade school excursion to the McKay Planetarium at the old Melbourne Museum in Swanston Street. The afternoon that Brian Zwinger, a school parent, professor of astrophysics at Monash University and Mr Lewski’s squash partner, engrossed eighty-four students with comets, asteroids, planetary nebulae, turbulent quasars eating stars, white dwarfs, red giants, pulsars signalling for aeons like perpetual interstellar lighthouses, black holes devouring light and time itself, the big bang and the beginning and end of it all (which might really be the same event).

The eighth graders stuck their hands up, asking the distinguished professor about
ET
,
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
,
Star Trek
or the alleged UFO crash at Roswell in New Mexico. With his percipient thirst for knowledge (frustrated by the dull conversations he endured with gorilla training partners on the tennis court), Lamm was especially fascinated by Professor Zwinger’s description of how the elements came to exist. The ferocious, elegant process: the elements’ evolution in stellar furnaces, expulsion as stardust, incorporation into the lumps of rock that formed planets, where finally they became the air, minerals and water that sustains life.
Everything
on Earth, the professor announced – the pink soft stuff of your brain, the green trees, black soil, purple clouds, cantaloupes, fruitbats, surgeons’ scalpels, stealth bombers, Siberian tigers, undiscovered diamonds, the sky, the air, this page and this hyphen, everything, anything! – was cooked up in an exploding star. Professor Zwinger liked to speak with his hands, a charming incarnation of the stereotypical science boffin in his Georges corduroy jacket, short clipped beard and thick glasses (he was shortsighted from years of staring into the 2.0 m telescope atop Siding Spring Mountain near Coonabarabran).

‘See, kids? We’re
stardust
! We’re made from elements that were manufactured in stars! We’re mostly carbon that’s billions of years old, cooked up from hydrogen compressed inside a supernova that exploded with the energy of a trillion H-bombs!’

Professor Zwinger clicked onto the next slide: a diagrammatic sketch of hydrogen fused in a star’s core.

‘Over
billions
of years, the cosmic dust from exploded supernovas sticks together through gravity. Gradually, the dust clumps into new stars, asteroids and planets, including our home three rocks along from the sun. Any questions?’

Another student – the third in thirty minutes – asked if UFOs would attack New York City like in the movies. But Lamm was engrossed by his own hands. Stardust, eh? Your skin, fingerprints, notches, cracks, scratches. The fivefingered creations of flesh that you use for eating, picking things up, playing tennis, writing with a pen, jacking off. It’s all exploded stardust, besmirched!
You’re made from disaster
,
you make disaster
.

Zwinger requested a volunteer from the audience. The lucky kid would win a Melbourne Planetarium badgepin. Amid the frantic chorus of
me! me! me!
, he selected an uninterested girl adjusting her knee socks in the front row Reluctantly she answered her name: Rachel Samuels.

Not that her introduction was required. To the boys in Rachel’s class, she was the conversation topic, shared obsession, unobtainable quarry. Onstage, she showcased that bewitching nervous smile – two slightly crooked bottom teeth accentuating her face’s symmetrical perfection – and her crowd-pleasing precocious breasts. She followed Professor Zwinger’s instructions, at the right moment touching the gleaming spherical electrode of his mini Van Der Graaf generator. The younger kids roared as static electricity spiked Rachel’s hair up like a spaghettified cauliflower, while the eighth-grade boys were hypnotized by her tight school dress, her nubile nippled marvels that induced many a schoolboy’s first experiments with Vaseline behind the locked bathroom door. Those breasts, her glassy aquamarine eyes, the superior unperturbed look she shot at the leering classmates. The haunting wet dream of Lamm’s adolescence, Rachel Samuels too was stardust.

How defiantly she glared at the stiff salivating boys! More desirable for her resolve
not
to be embarrassed. Then the astonishing moment: from the planetarium’s stage, Rachel Samuels stared at the skinny tennis champ in the second row. Those incredible five seconds returning to Lamm as he wondered – hoped! – whether her ghost would again haunt him tonight.

That school excursion when they first locked glances. Rachel was fourteen years old, yet already accomplished at wordlessly telling a hopeless voyeur what he needed to know. She spelt ‘
you’re a pervert
’ with the tilt of an eyebrow. Who would’ve thought eyebrows grew like hers? So thin, dark, emphatic! Despite the apocalyptic realization that Rachel had identified his infatuation – this was, after all, his most nerve-wracking moment since his bar mitzvah speech a month earlier – Lamm maintained his gaze as she returned to her seat on the planetarium floor.

Rachel turned around and stared at Max Lamm. Her earthquake. A strange soft look –
I know you’re watching me
,
I know why and I like it –
that never wavered, never stopped; not two days later when they kissed during the intermission of
Fiddler on the Roof
, not when she went to London that summer and sent him four gigantic words in pink marker on a postcard of Trafalgar Square:
LONDON SUCKS. LOVE RACHEL.
Her expectant, excoriating glance invaded Lamm’s thirteenth year, invaded his dreams until he awoke in sodden boxer shorts. Every year, every moment since, their afternoon at the old Melbourne Museum had strengthened in his memory; all the exquisite excruciating details. Her stare that promised something astonishing for a thirteen-year-old boy, something revelatory and truthful, until the evening of 21 December, 1988, when she was blown out of a bombed Pan Am airliner into the dark Scottish sky. Rachel too was ageless, indestructible stardust, and she was gone.

Lamm checked his watch: 2.16 a.m. For nearly an hour, he had been dozing in this empty birdbath. Comfortably collapsed against the granite backboard carved with a redbreasted robin blind from cataracts of hard bubblegum upon either eye. Icy dew glazed his forehead, his shoulders ached, his hunger surged.

Lamm hurried to buy food. To the convenience store on Great Cumberland Place, for another microwaved pumpkin pie.

About a hundred metres off the path, a gardener’s shed stood beneath a weeping willow. Lamm stopped, still. An unnervingly familiar sound emanated from that padlocked windowless cube of painted chipboard and corrugated perspex. The hair on his arms, the noradrenalin in his bloodstream surged upwards as Lamm’s sympathetic nervous system – the fight or flight response – sprang into gear.

It was the sound of somebody coughing. Not just
any
cough; Lamm didn’t presume this was a homeless bum with a chest infection. This wheezing, overdone cough sounded uncannily familiar. Intoned not only by phlegm, but a sharp American – Texan? – take on the ‘
arghhhh
’ sound rolled in the larynx. An exaggerated half-spoken cough, expelled the way John Wayne elongated his vowels to pronounce ‘parachute’ as ‘
per-aaah-shoot
’
. Creeping closer, Lamm suspected that he had heard this cough very recently.

You have!

It was a cough due to a chest complaint, Lamm remembered from what he’d overheard that afternoon, which had persisted despite the dry microclimate up at Davos in the Swiss Alps, venue of last week’s World Economic Forum.

In the lavender bushes, the noise got louder.

‘
Arghhhh . . . ahhhh . . . ahhhh
. . .’

Something else in that cough too; not just obstruction of the airways or saturation of the alveoli. A moan, a sigh, a pleasurable pant. Lamm recognized it intimately: catharsis! An asthmatic crescendo of ecstasy!

Gingerly, Lamm crept around the gardener’s shed. Treading on a brittle twig, he froze at its crack. But whoever was moaning, they weren’t listening for interlopers. The muffled groans, interspersed with coughing, got louder as Lamm discovered the source.

In the grey moonlight, two men heaved behind the shed. A tall dark-haired guy, trousers around his ankles, knelt in the damp leaves. Breathing through his nose, his lips were enwrapped around somebody’s dick. Forwards, back, forwards the man’s head rocked.

Lamm knelt too. Carefully he edged forward, through the scrub, until there was no mistaking the identity of the recipient. Lamm watched the Minotaur groan towards his climax. After what seemed like aeons more sucking, gingerly the senator pushed the mystery man away from his groin.

‘Okay, Larry. It’s your turn now.’

Sworn enemy of the Beijing sweatshop imperialists! Steadfast guardian of star-spangled military dominance! Champion of pre-emptive regime change for the Islamofascist kleptocracies! Obstinate foe of Saddam, Kim Jong Il, the Ayatollahs and Ted Kennedy, unofficial oil baron, sitting chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, this year’s after-dinner speaker at the NRA’s Washington banquet. The silver-haired mentor to Oliver North, a riding partner to Reagan in his later years, the Senate representative most likely to eulogize Dr Kissinger when that leatherskinned warhorse goes to the great US embassy in the sky. Senator Richard Davis Wesson, a credible contender for the Republican presidential nomination, knelt in the leaves beneath a tall, uncircumcised, fortysomething man named Larry.

What, Lamm wondered, was Wesson thinking about
now
? Going down on Larry, did the senator imagine beefy shirtless Marines, phallic nuclear silos, erect uncircumcised missiles, cigar-shaped daisy cutters taking out the Iranian nukes and a few villages too, all to help the old hawk blow his load? The senator who, a fortnight earlier, had eloquently argued on
Meet The Press
that gay marriage was an affront to the founding fathers; who was a steadfast opponent of same-sex unions when the issue drove a wedge through the ’04 election; who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell in Washington; who refused to meet the gay Log Cabin Republicans for fear of alienating Focus on the Family; who publicly lambasted David Geffen, Elton John, Jann Wenner and the other powerful gay advocates; who, every chance he got, denounced the sacrilege of two men marrying, was, in front of Lamm, sucking on Larry’s dick with stamina, relish, expertise. Of course, the photograph of Bobby! The chiselled blonde gigolo, the phone number in red ink, hidden inside a shoebox in the wardrobe. Probably one of many.

And surely the senator isn’t the only one. Must be other covert gays at Capitol Hill and the Pentagon, just as there are gay cowboys, gay navy SEALS, gay quarterbacks. But the potential of what he was witnessing, the beneficial volcano that it could unleash, didn’t occur to Lamm until Larry was about to blow.