The Marriage Plot (44 page)

In a Moleskine notebook, Leonard kept a precise record of his daily dosages, along with notes on his physical and mental state throughout the day.

Nov. 30: Morning: 600 mg. Evening: 600 mg.

Cotton-mouth. Cotton-head. Tremor worse, if anything. Strong metal taste to saliva.

Dec. 3: Morning: 400 mg. Evening: 600 mg.

Good period this morning. Like a window opened in my Tower of London head and I could see out for a few minutes. Pretty out there. Although the gallows are possibly under construction.

Tremor possibly less, too.

Dec. 6: Morning: 300 mg. Evening: 600 mg.

Down four pounds. Good mental energy most of day. Tremor about the same. Not as thirsty.

Dec. 8: Morning: 300 mg. Evening: 500 mg.

Made it through the night without having to use the bathroom.

Alert all day. Read 150 pp. of Ballard without coming up for air.

No dry mouth.

Dec. 10: Morning: 200 mg. Evening: 300 mg.

Little bit overexuberant at dinner. M. moved my wineglass out of reach, thinking I was drinking too much. Will increase doses for next two days up to 300 mg to stabilize.

Hypothesis: Possible that kidney function not as good as Dr. P. thinks? Or that there are fluctuations? If lithium not flushed from body, can it be assumed that excess lithium remains in system, doing its evil business? If so, might this be cause of dead brain, GI trouble, torpor, etc.? Daily dose may therefore be higher, effectively, than docs think. Something to think about …

Dec. 14: Morning: 300 mg. Evening: 600 mg.

Back to earth, moodwise. Also, no noticeable return of side effects. Stay on this dose a few days, then lower again.

The notion that he was carrying on significant scientific work entered Leonard’s head so smoothly that he didn’t recognize its arrival. It was just suddenly
there
. He was following in the daring tradition of scientists like J.B.S. Haldane, who’d put himself into a decompression chamber to study the effects of deep-sea diving (and perforated his eardrum), or Stubbins Ffirth, who’d poured vomit from a yellow fever patient onto his own cuts to try to prove that the disease wasn’t infectious. Leonard’s high school hero, Stephen Jay Gould, had been diagnosed with peritoneal mesothelioma just the year before, given eight months to live. Rumors around were that Gould had devised his own experimental treatment and was doing well.

Leonard planned to confess to Dr. Perlmann what he’d been doing as soon as he’d compiled enough data to prove his point. Meanwhile, he had to pretend he was following orders. This involved feigning side effects that had already disappeared. He also had to calculate when his medications would run out naturally, in order to refill them often enough to avoid suspicion. All of this was easy to do now that he could think clearly again.

The problem with being Superman was that everybody else was so slow. Even at a place like Pilgrim Lake, where everyone had high IQs, the pauses in people’s speech were long enough for Leonard to drop off his laundry and return before they finished their sentences. So he finished their sentences for them. To save everyone time. If you paid attention, it was amazingly easy to predict the predicate of a sentence from its subject. Only a few conversational gambits seemed to occur to most people. They didn’t like it when you finished their sentences, however. Or: they liked it at first. At first, they thought it indicated a mutual understanding between the two of you. But if you did it repeatedly, they became annoyed. Which was fine, since it meant you didn’t have to waste time talking to them anymore.

This was harder on the person you lived with. Madeleine had been complaining about how “impatient” Leonard was. His tremor may have been gone but he was always tapping his foot. Finally, just that afternoon, while helping Madeleine study for the GRE, Leonard, unhappy with the pace at which Madeleine was diagramming a logic problem, had grabbed the pen out of her hand. “This isn’t art class,” he said. “You’ll run out of time if you do it so slow. Come
on
.” He drew the diagram in about five seconds, before sitting back and folding his hands over his chest with a satisfied air.

“Give me my pen,” Madeleine said, snatching it back.

“I’m just showing you how to do it.”

“Will you please get out of here?” Madeleine cried. “You’re being so annoying!”

And so it was that Leonard found himself, a few minutes later, vacating the unit in order to let Madeleine study. He decided to walk into Provincetown and lose more weight. Despite the cold, he wore only a sweater, gloves, and his new winter hat, a fur hunting cap with earflaps that tied together. The winter sky was blue as he made his way out of the laboratory grounds and along Shore Road. Pilgrim Lake, not yet frozen, was full of freshwater reeds. The surrounding dunes looked comparatively tall, speckled with clumps of dune grass except for stretches of white sand near the top where the wind kept anything from growing.

Being alone increased the volume of information bombarding him. There was no one around to distract him from it. As Leonard strode along, thoughts stacked up in his head like air traffic over Logan Airport to the northwest. There were one or two jumbo jets full of Big Ideas, a fleet of 707s laden with the cargo of sensual impressions (the color of the sky, the smell of the sea), as well as Learjets carrying rich solitary impulses that wished to travel incognito. All these planes requested permission to land simultaneously. From the control tower in his head Leonard radioed the aircraft, telling some to keep circling while ordering others to divert to another location entirely. The stream of traffic was never-ending; the task of coordinating their arrivals constant from the minute Leonard woke up to the minute he went to sleep. But he was an old pro by now, after two weeks at Sweet Spot International. Tracking developments on his radar screen, Leonard could bring each plane in on schedule while trading a salty remark with the controller in the next seat and eating a sandwich, making everything look easy. All part of the job.

The colder you were, the more calories you burned.

His ebullient mood, the steady pumping of his heart, and the big soft fur hat were enough to keep Leonard warm as he walked along, passing the big houses on the water and the shingled cottages cramming the little lanes. But when he finally arrived in the center of town, he was surprised to see how deserted it was, even on a weekend. Stores and restaurants had started closing up after Labor Day. Now, two weeks before Christmas, only a few were still operating. The Lobster Pot had closed. Napi’s was open. Front Street was open. The Crown & Anchor had closed.

He was gratified, therefore, to find a small midday crowd gathered in the Governor Bradford. Climbing on a stool, he looked up at the television, trying to seem like a person with one thought in his head instead of fifty. When the bartender came over, Leonard said, “Are you Governor Bradford?”

“Not me.”

“I’d like a pint of Guinness, please,” Leonard said, swiveling on his stool and glancing at the other customers. His head was getting hot but he didn’t want to take off his hat.

Of the four females in the bar, three were engaged in self-grooming, running their hands through their hair to indicate their readiness for copulation. The males responded by lowering their voices and sometimes pawing the females. If you ignored human qualities like speech and clothing, the primate behaviors became more apparent.

When his Guinness arrived, Leonard swiveled back around to drink it.

“You need to refine your shamrock technique,” he said, gazing down into the glass.

“Excuse me?”

Leonard pointed at the foamy head. “This doesn’t look like a shamrock. It looks like a figure eight.”

“You a bartender?”

“No.”

“Then it’s not your business, I guess.”

Leonard grinned. He said “Cheers,” and began sucking down the creamy stout. Part of him wanted to stay in the bar the rest of the afternoon. He wanted to watch football and drink beer. He wanted to watch the human females groom themselves and see what other primate behaviors they exhibited. He, too, was a primate, of course, in the present context, a rogue male. Rogue males stirred up all kinds of trouble. It might be fun to see what he could get going. But he was getting a bad vibe from the bartender, and he felt like walking some more, and so when he finished his drink he pulled a ten-dollar bill out of his jeans and left it on the bar. Without waiting for change he vaulted off the stool and plunged out into the bone-chilling air.

The sky had already begun to grow dark. It was only a little after two and already the day was dying. Staring up, Leonard felt his spirits sink with it. His earlier mental liveliness was beginning to fade. It had been a mistake to drink the Guinness. Thrusting his hands into the pockets of his jeans, Leonard rocked back and forth on his heels. And that was all it took. In further confirmation of his brilliant move, no sooner did his energy sag than he felt it being replenished, as though tiny valves in his arteries were spritzing out the elixir of life.

Buoyed by his brain chemistry, he sauntered farther along Commercial Street. Up ahead, a guy in a leather cap and jacket was going down the steps to the Vault. The throbbing music inside escaped into the street until he closed the door after him.

Homosexuality was an interesting topic, from a Darwinian standpoint. A trait predisposing a population toward sterile sexual relations should have resulted in the disappearance of that trait. But the boys in the Vault were evidence otherwise. It must be an autosomal transmission of some kind, the associated genes hitching rides on sisterly X chromosomes.

Leonard proceeded on. He looked at the driftwood sculptures in the shuttered art galleries and the homoerotic postcards in the windows of a stationery store, still open. Right then he noticed a surprising thing. Across the street, a saltwater taffy shop appeared to be open. The neon sign was lit in the window and he could see a figure moving around inside. Something mysterious but insistent, something that called to his own primate nature, prompted him to draw nearer. He entered the shop, activating a bell on the door. The thing of interest that his cells had been telling him about turned out to be a teenage girl working behind the counter. She had red hair, high cheekbones, and a tight yellow sweater.

“Can I help you?”

“Yes. I have a question. Is it still whale-watching season?”

“Um, I don’t know.”

“But they have whale-watching boats out here, don’t they?”

“I think that’s more like in the summer.”

“Aha!” Leonard said, not knowing what to say next. He was acutely aware of how small and perfect the girl’s body was. At the same time, the sugary smell of the shop reminded him of a candy store he used to go into as a kid with no money to buy anything. Now, he pretended to be interested in the taffy on the shelves, crossing his arms behind his back and browsing.

“I like your hat,” the girl said.

Leonard turned and smiled broadly. “You do? Thanks. I just got it.”

“Aren’t you cold without a coat, though?”

“Not in here with you,” Leonard said.

His sensors registered an uptick in wariness on her part, so he quickly added, “How come you’re open in winter?”

This proved to be a good move. It gave the girl a chance to vent. “Because my father wants to ruin my whole weekend,” she said.

“Your dad owns this place?”

“Yes.”

“So you’re like the taffy heiress.”

“I guess,” said the girl.

“You know what you should tell your dad? You should tell him it’s December. Nobody wants saltwater taffy in December.”

“That’s what I
do
tell him. He says people still drive up for the weekend, so we should stay open.”

“How many customers have come in today?”

“Like three. And now you.”

“Do you consider me a customer?”

She shifted her weight to one hip, growing skeptical. “Well, you’re in here.”

“I am definitely in here,” Leonard said. “What’s your name?”

She hesitated. “Heidi.”

“Hi, Heidi.”

Maybe it was her blush, or the tight fit of her sweater, or it was just part of being a Superman within reach of a super girl, but for whatever reason, Leonard felt himself getting hard at five paces. This was a piece of significant clinical data. He wished he had his Moleskine notebook with him to write it down.

“Heidi,” Leonard said. “Hi, Heidi.”

“Hello,” she said.

“Hi, Heidi,” Leonard repeated. “Hi-de-ho. The Hi De Ho Man. Have you ever heard of the Hi De Ho Man, Heidi?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Cab Calloway. Famous jazz musician. The Hi De Ho Man. I’m not sure why they called him that. Hi-ho, Silver. Hawaii Five-O.”

Her brow wrinkled. Leonard saw he was losing her and so said, “I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, Heidi. Tell me one thing, though. Do you make the saltwater taffy right here?”

“In summer we do. Not now.”

“And do you use salt water from the ocean?”

“Huh?”

He approached the counter, close enough to press his boner against the glass front.

“I just always wondered why they call it
saltwater
taffy. Like, do you use salt
and
water, or do you have to use
salt water
?”