The Starving Years (34 page)

Bobby clung.

“But first I need to…uh…pee.”

“So pee,” Bobby whispered. He let go long enough to allow Tim to take a furtive leak behind one of the balding tires, then glommed on to him again the moment he zipped back up.
 

Tim tried to pull away, and Bobby squeezed harder. He finally decided resistance was futile, gave Bobby a pat on the back, dug his keys out of his pocket and flipped them toward Randy. “You drive.”

“Me?”

“You know how, don’t you?”

“Well, yeah, but….”

“It’s an automatic.”

“How about I take Bobby, and you—”

Tim climbed into the passenger seat and Bobby scrambled onto his lap and buried his face in Tim’s shoulder. Bobby was far too old to fit on Tim’s lap. It didn’t matter. They made themselves fit. Randy watched as if he might attempt to bribe Bobby into letting him take Tim’s place, but Bobby had clearly bonded, so there was nothing for Randy to do but climb into the driver’s seat and start the truck.

Bobby didn’t cry…but he was shaking. Hard. “It’s okay,” Tim said into his hair, which smelled like The Tombs. “It’ll be okay.” It was a lie. His grandmother was dead and his mother probably was, too. But at least he was out of that hellhole.

Once his ex made that parting remark about wanting a child of his own, Tim had decided he wasn’t a kid-person. Now, though, every time he closed his eyes, he saw children—strapped to the wall with plus-signs scrawled on their foreheads, or scrabbling on the dirty floor for manna. It was like having a nightmare. Only Tim was pretty damn sure he was awake.

“You can’t turn there,” he told Randy distractedly. “One way.”

The truck jerked as Randy tried to blend in to traffic, which was making its own lanes as the other drivers went around him. “Sonofa…if you’re not gonna drive, at least navigate. I usually cab it.”
 

“You need to be more assertive.”

“Fuck you. How’s that for assertive?” The driver behind them laid on their horn. “Fuck you, too!”

Randy hit a pothole, and Bobby’s jaw smacked into Tim’s collarbone. His teeth clattered. “C’mon,” Tim said to Bobby, “don’t you want to see where we’re going? It’s okay.”

“Yeah, right,” Randy muttered.

“Look, there’s…how did we end up heading south? We need to go west. Why are you going toward Times Square?”

“Because everything’s one way and my navigator sucks, that’s why.”

Tim scanned the next intersection as Bobby reluctantly turned around in his lap, all knees and elbows, to take a look. Traffic slowed. “Okay, you need to get over to the right. There. No—Randy—right there.”

“I can’t get—”

“Be assertive.”

“Go. Screw. Yourself.”

“Get into the right lane. If we end up on Broadway we’ll be there forever.”

“There’s a car there.”

“Look at that gap—you could have gone.”

“Nelson,” Bobby said. Quietly, but it startled Tim, who hadn’t expected him to say anything at all.

“Yeah, that’s right, we’re taking you to Nelson. Just as soon as we get—” Another small gap in traffic. “Randy, there. There.”

“Up there,” Bobby said urgently, and Tim initially thought he was pitching in to give Randy still more directions he wasn’t going to follow. But then Bobby elbowed Tim hard, and pointed even harder. “Look.”

Tim followed Bobby’s pointing finger to the Jumbotron, where pedestrians had formed a crowd at the foot of the tall, wedge-shaped building, blocking the road. A man who did look a heck of a lot like clean-cut version of Nelson filled the seven-story screen, while the “live” graphic flashed in one corner and the slick, animated Manhattan Minute logo swooshed and sparkled in the opposite corner. Tim almost remarked on the resemblance and then went back to trying to get Randy out of the jam—almost—but then the words scrolling by on the news ticker caught his eye.

…licant, claims tainted food supply to blame for cannibal childr…

“Oh my God—that
is
Nelson!”

Chapter 31

Marianne paced to the door, which had a small window of reinforced glass set at eye-level, and stood on tiptoe to peer out into the hall. Javier watched. She paced to the coat rack, back to the door, sighed, crossed and uncrossed her arms, and finally said, “Why’d they put us in a storage closet? Shouldn’t we be in the green room? Drinking expensive mineral water? Meeting celebrities and eating snacks?”

“I don’t know why.”

“I thought you knew this producer guy, whatsisface, Isaac.” Marianne turned. She’d stuffed the knit hat in her pocket, but even so, she should have looked ridiculous in the leopard print coat and the sequined slippers. She didn’t, though. She looked shrewd. “Did you
know
him-know him? In the intimate sense?”

Of course he did. Once he’d moved to New York, he’d wasted no time familiarizing himself with the predilections and kinks of every gay anchor, reporter and producer he could hook up with. What better way to network? But since he’d never pressured Marianne for any details about her unborn child’s absent father, he saw no need to confirm or deny her speculations about his own sex life.

And now, with his ruined face, those days of “networking” were far behind him, anyway.

“So how come he sent an intern to greet us at the door—and hide us in this closet?”

“He was probably in a meeting.” Maybe. “That’s all they do, all day long. Talk.”

“Where did they take Nelson?”

“To meet with the other producers, and then, assuming he can convince them he knows what he’s talking about, to makeup.”

“He’s been gone a really long time.”

“You’d be surprised how many hurdles you need to jump to get a story on the air.” A story that accused a major, multinational corporation of tinkering with the food supply, anyway. No doubt a smear piece on a pop star or a liberal politician would have been fast tracked on a right-wing show like Manhattan Minute.

Javier would have preferred any other show to this one…but Isaac had been the only producer to take his call. Javier didn’t bring up the hospital in Israel. Isaac didn’t either. Still, it hung heavily between them. So much so that Javier was surprised when Isaac invited him to come on down to the studio—and bring his scientist with him. People would talk—seeing Isaac and Javier together after everything that had happened. Although it wasn’t as if they didn’t already know about the shell in Gaza. The news media clique was nothing if not well-informed.

“So, about Tim,” Marianne said, and Javier was glad to focus on something other than the man he used to be. “He really is…who you said he is?”

“That’s the only reason I met him. I’d exhausted any other contacts who might want to work on the Canaan Products story, even with that recording, so I decided to check out some bloggers. Tim and I…clicked.”

“If I’d known…geez. I probably said some really dumb things.”

“Nothing bad. You might have made him blush a time or two.”

“I went on and on. And then Randy, goading me on about it.” She looked through the window into the hall again. “I hope they’re okay.”

Javier hoped so too.

Marianne wrapped her arms around herself for a moment, and then said, “If we were in the green room, I bet there’d be someplace to pee.”

“Is the door locked? I’m sure there’s a restroom nearby.”

Marianne tried the door. It opened. “I don’t want to get us in trouble.”

“If you need to go, you need to go.”

Marianne slipped into the hall, while Javier leaned back in his folding chair, crossed his arms, and closed his eyes. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d slept. Even so, running on his last reserves, there was an aliveness to the past few days he’d thought he had experienced so many other times…the tang of another man’s tongue sliding into his mouth for the first time. The moment he stepped off the plane in LaGuardia. The dull thunk of his passport getting stamped in Palestine….

He thought he’d been alive in those moments. But it was a pale imitation of a life, screened by a mask of arrogance and privilege. The way Javier felt at that very moment: taut and exposed, and strikingly authentic. This must be what it was like to live.

“Javier?”

He opened his eyes. Marianne had poked her head into the room. That seemed awfully fast. Had he drifted off? Or was the restroom right across the hall?

“Come quick.” Marianne disappeared from the doorway in a flurry of leopard spots. Immediately, aliveness hummed through Javier’s veins as he leapt up to follow. Marianne was at the end of the hall when he got through the doorway. She gestured impatiently for him to hurry, then disappeared around the corner.

Behind-the-scenes newsroom sounds carried down the hall. Phones rang. Interns chatted. An editor barked orders. But Javier had been tucked away in a quiet corner, and the desks and kiosks they passed were empty. Most of the computers were dark, as if the employees who spent their time at those desks had decided it wasn’t worth braving the riots to come to work. But a few of them had screen-savers running. And the monitor that Marianne stopped and pointed to was actually on—and it was streaming a live broadcast.

Nelson’s face filled the monitor.

“He’s on air?” Javier said—and immediately sensed that something was wrong. It was Javier’s story. He should have been in the green room, or the newsroom, or the studio. Not a coat closet.

The sound was low, but it didn’t matter. It was the video that struck Javier as being subtly off-kilter.

Yes, lighting for video did tend to be harsh, but the lights on Nelson were angled directly in his eyes—and they’d been pushed so close that a sheen of sweat glistened on his forehead. He looked both pasty and damp at the same time. He squinted harder as the anchor asked him a question. His eye twitched. The words
Nelson Oliver, rejected Canaan Products job applicant, claims tainted food supply to blame for cannibal children.
 

“It should be Dr. Oliver,” Marianne said. “Or Nelson Oliver, PhD. Or Food Science Specialist. Why are they calling him ‘rejected job applicant’?”

Why? Because it created such compelling spin. Javier’s stomach sank. Discredit Nelson, paint him as the untrustworthy, ridiculous, Leftist crackpot out to scam some money from “the system,” and Canaan Products would take the role as the martyr who, after all, sends boatloads of plain, nutritious manna to developing third-world nations, and who donates generously to various small and nonthreatening local charities. A still, calm portion of Javier’s brain saw exactly how this “reporting” would take place, while the rest of him decided that maybe he did want to see Isaac face to face, after all. Immediately.

He strode toward the newsroom. People stared. Of course they stared. They always stared; he had an eye patch. They stared, but none of them comprehended…none but the intern, a gangly boy barely out of his teens, who jumped out of his seat, but thought twice of it before he moved to intercept Javier.

Javier scanned the room for Isaac’s hair, an unmanageable tangle of curls that stood out from a crowd. He wasn’t there. Or maybe he’d cut it. Or maybe Javier was remembering him wrong…though that was doubtful. Javier scanned again, missing his full eyesight in the utilitarian way he did when he was feeling too practical to stop and be maudlin. But then, on the second pass, he saw the familiar silhouette of Isaac’s hair in the windowed wall of the gallery.

The control room door was unlocked, and despite the elaborate soundproofing, it banged open with a very satisfying crash. Engineers, technicians and producers flinched away from the door, but they held their stations. They were live, after all. Dozens of monitors lit the room in a retro cathode-ray glow, most showing Nelson, waxy-skinned, with a strand of long hair now slipped from his ponytail, and the rest showing the anchor, or stills from the riot, or stock footage of a manna production plant. “Javier,” Isaac said with forced cheer. “It looks like your wound healed well—”

“What are you doing?” Javier snapped.

“C…camera one,” a director said, and the engineer switched.

Isaac looked as if he might be tempted to deny the smear they were in the midst of perpetrating, live, on-air. But they knew each other well enough that neither assumed the other was stupid. “It’s a great story. This guy is great.”

Javier backed Isaac into a wall and made a lunge for him, and Isaac’s blitheness evaporated as he flinched away. Javier wasn’t aiming to strike him, though. He snatched the headset off Isaac’s head, pulling out a few curly hairs in the process, and put it on himself.

He heard the news anchor’s voice as her face appeared on the switcher monitor, blonde, composed, and properly-lit. “If we were to test the manna, we’d find it laced with hormones?”

Nelson sighed, almost a groan, as if the question were profoundly stupid. “That’s not what I said at all. There is a hydrogen-carbon chain that’s been introduced to the manna that prevents the uptake of leptin in the receptors—”

“Teleprompter,” the director said, “Hydrogen in water.”

“Hydrogen,” the anchor said, “which is also found in water, correct? H2O. That’s the formula for water. So you’re saying there’s water in the manna?”

The switcher was focused on the anchor, who had her “I’m just trying to understand” act down pat. Nelson, on the other monitors, though not visible to the viewing public, was working his mouth as if he’d not only fallen for her affected ignorance—he was choking on it.

“Stock three,” the director said, and a shot of glistening off-white bricks of manna rolling down a conveyor belt through a mist of water appeared on the switcher monitor.

“The hydrogen-carbon chain is not water,” Nelson said. “And leptin is the hormone that controls app—”

“Aren’t we carbon-based?” The switcher monitor went split screen, at the order of the director, to Nelson and the anchor. He was a wreck. She looked completely sincere. “Isn’t that what they scan for in the science fiction movies?” she said. “Carbon-based life forms?”

Javier searched Isaac’s face in dismay. “This thing with the manna is really happening. This is true. Why are you making a farce of it?”

“Oh, come on.” Isaac reached for his headphones, and pulled them off Javier’s ears. He tilted his head to one side and looked into Javier’s uncovered eye with a mixture of empathy and pity. “This is Manhattan Minute. You know it’s the party line around here to cater to big business. If this tainted manna story is accurate, it’ll shake out in the end. But right now we need to compete with the exclusive footage of the riot ABC’s been running every quarter-hour.”