White Rabbit Chapter 29

29.

Two years ago…

           

A red Ford pickup with a loose tailpipe rattles into the parking lot of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Leaves blow in every direction falling from giant indifferent oaks and nameless others. Dreary rain falls. A security guard is replaying his life in his head inside his beat-up Toyota Corolla with a New York Giants bumper sticker. A not-so handsome man in his thirties named Bill. He is supposed to be patrolling the grounds with a little blue stick he plugs into certain spots on walls to prove he was there. It beeps. The parking garage, fire pump rooms, rooftops, offices, et cetera, et cetera. Instead, he is in his car listening to country music. The rain began about the time that Claude Van Wert’s wipers stopped working. “Goddamn them!” he complained passing the security guard’s gold Corolla. Claude was saying “fuck my luck” before fuck my luck morphed into the acronym FML for people to overuse in chatrooms and texts despite having life pretty fucking good. Claude didn’t have life very good. He was fired from his job as an airplane pilot for Transcontinental Air last month for being a good pilot. He was such a good pilot and racked up so many unused sick days and earned so many performance-based raises that he became a financial liability for the company who began charging customers bag fees and who were crippled by a civil lawsuit for throwing a fat woman with diabetes off a plane for being “dangerous cargo.” Claude had been divorced twice and spent all of his money on hookers and strippers who couldn’t pick him out of a police lineup if their life depended on it. His first wife was a beautiful Indian-American woman, named Namitha, who he met on a layover in Dubai. Namitha told him after four brutal years of dreadful marriage that she was a lesbian. She couldn’t have dreamed of being a lesbian before their marriage. Claude’s second wife, Ella, was a French salesgirl. He took more time off work to be with her and at last he felt that he found his soul mate. They bought a farm in the beautiful French countryside shortly before she died of smallpox. Even though no one dies of smallpox anymore, she did. Numerous relationships had proved to be futile in his search for something more. He was convinced that every woman in the world was a slut and if they weren't they were probably dead.     

            Bill the security guard took a drink of coffee from his thermos. He looked around for people who might report seeing him. No one. He was parked just out of camera view and the only other security officer working was a younger kid in the office looking up hip-hop videos on You Tube paying no attention to the monitors. Bill unclipped his radio and sat it on the torn passenger seat and pulled a lever and leaned back. He tipped his cap over his eyes like cowboys do in the movies when they are planning to sleep but never do. He watched a fat squirrel run along a fence then leap into one of the old oak trees where he lost it as it ran around one of the ancient limbs. It had no fear of falling from such heights but seemed terribly jittery in the grass. He heard ball bearings and tires squeal and watched Claude jerk his wheel and park crooked in a spot in the near empty lot. It was Sunday. Claude Van Wert was white, in his fifties, and neatly dressed in khakis, a blue sweater, with gray wild hair. He was no one to be concerned about, probably someone who works in one of the labs, or a courier, Bill reasoned.

            Claude walked to the second building from the parking lot and went inside. He thought of taking the elevator to the 5^th floor, even pushed the button, but changed his mind, opting for the stairs. He flung open the door and ran up them faster than he had ever run up steps before without even knowing it. Faster than when he was a kid or in college at Alabama in the seventies. He shaved seconds off his time by skipping two steps with every lunge. A strange thing for a man of fifty three that only a man of fifty three wouldn’t notice. Fourth office on the left after the water fountain. Eighty nine steps, he recalled. Another peculiarity. His nose exploded with new smells of floor wax and a menthol cigarette. He looked out the window and saw someone smoking five floors down in a courtyard between buildings. Oswald was closer to JFK. His nose also told him that the smoker was menstruating. He came to an old door with a large glass window. Dr. Maxwell M. Borger & Dr. Paul R. Lavender. Genetic Research and Development. Dr. Lavender was dead but no one had bothered to scrape his name off the glass.   

            Claude was partially correct in his angry suicide note he sent to the FBI shortly before he blew up Flight 1202 from D.C. to Denver. His werewolfism was largely to blame on the federal government. Dr. Maxwell Borger only began the research because he secured a federal grant to do so. Had he not been given federal dollars, none of this would have happened. The research was to make Americans more superior than they already are (according to most Americans). It was partially inspired by the Animorphs books that Dr. Borger’s son, Josh, became obsessed with while he was in a juvenile detention center in Albany for drug possession. Dr. Borger sat across the table and lectured his son about doing the right thing when his son suddenly informed him that he discovered a love for books and proudly showed him Animorphs: The Attack. On the cover a boy was slowly morphing into a tiger — regular boy; strange looking boy with small tail; leaping boy with stripes, fangs and longer tail; leaping tiger with boy eyes and hair; complete tiger walking casually. “Is it possible, dad?”

            “Son,” he said smiling like God, “anything is possible.”

            It was possible. He convinced himself on the drive home.

            A year and a half later the plump balding doctor sat in his office waiting for Claude Van Wert to arrive for his last injection of magic wolf sperm. Project Morphism, it was called, started ambitiously but very discretely. No other doctor besides Dr. Borger was involved because of security concerns but many top officials at the Pentagon and the CIA knew all about it. It was one of a thousand kooky projects with aspirations of making someone rich and the military more powerful. The hope of Dr. Borger was to turn regular everyday people into specific animals by mixing the DNA sequences of the human host with the desired animal through a series of injections. Ideally, Dr. Borger hoped, the person would be able to morph into the animal whenever they wanted through self-cognitive manipulation. He taught them first by ensuring they could whistle and roll their tongue and blow raspberries. Eventually, a brain chip could be implanted with an applicable remote control that would give a General the power to turn an army of regular men into an army of super-tigers, or super-apes, or super-rats. Add a missile pack, laser eyes, or a remote control machine gun strapped to their back and then you would have a perfect weapon. It began with an advertisement in the back of a discrete magazine that gets circulated only in the seediest of places — strip clubs, sex shops, casinos, that sort. Of course it didn’t say volunteer to become an animal for modest pay or for the betterment of society. It was an advertisement for a sexual health and vitality treatment cleverly worded to dupe a desperate reader into believing it was sincere. Have a cock like a pineapple! A vagina like a Venus fly trap! The best part was the respondent had to pay for the treatment. Two thousand bucks. In short, Dr. Borger’s advertisement promised to make every man a rock-hard stud and every woman a pleasurable pincushion.

            Desperate, Claude Van Wert bought in like a kamikaze pilot. He filled out the form and mailed it in and paid a grand down and drove from Allentown, Pennsylvania to Ithaca for his treatments cursing every tollbooth to and from. He was told that he was being injected with wolf blood and relatively easily Dr. Borger convinced him that it would work and that it was completely safe. He became excited at the prospect of being a sex machine. “Will I howl at full moons, Doc?” Claude joked.

            “You just might.” Dr. Borger replied.         

            The first four injections had a tremendous affect upon Claude. He was able to run faster and do incredible things that he wasn’t able to do in years. Sexually, it worked wonders. He was like an animal and couldn’t keep his paws off himself. He even seduced a few wayward women here and there. Unexpected side effects, Dr. Borger noted. Or as he wrote in his notebook, “Unexpected increased sexual virility, too!” Each month that Claude came for an injection he interviewed him and found out how things changed in his life or with his behavior. Claude was becoming more aggressive and hostile. Today, the boom, when at last Dr. Borger would tell Claude that he was a werewolf, if he didn’t already know, and that he was not getting sexual vitality treatments and that the wolf blood was actually wolf sperm. Contrary wise, it was the day Claude was going to tell Dr. Borger that he lost his job at Transcontinental Air and could not pay for the rest of his treatment.  

            Knock, knockety, knock, knockety, knock, knock, knock.  

            “Come in, Claude.”

            Claude wasn’t Dr. Borger’s only patient. Dr. Borger injected other subjects with the sperm of tigers, eagles, bears, rats, lions, gorillas, chimpanzees, panthers, cheetahs, elephants and sharks, but none of them turned out as well as Claude. They all signed a twenty two page waiver but none of them really read it. Whoever does? Claude was no different. After four injections his werewolfism had taken hold and he had black claws, scraggly facial hair, and a heightened sense of smell. The man injected with shark DNA had only a desire to eat fish for every meal and to swim all the time. He licked his lips and drooled on himself while watching people swim at the YMCA. He went to the supermarket and ate raw fish on the way to the checkout, fresh off the ice. The only physical change he experienced was a rubberizing and graying of his skin, his eyes blackening and rolling back when he ate, and growing another row of teeth. He went to a military prison when he lost control and jumped in an aquatic park aquarium in Atlantic City violently attacking a mermaid in front of tourists. There had already been an incident with a dolphin at Sea World. CIA agents swooped in and arrested him and he was never heard from again but his legend remained in the annals of The National Examiner.

            Claude didn’t take the news of being injected with wolf sperm well. It somehow made him feel homosexual. And being that he was suddenly an Alpha male he wasn’t about to take feeling like a homosexual lying down. Dr. Borger attempted to subdue him with a tranquilizer but Claude proved too strong to be subdued by a simple shot. He jumped on the desk, his werewolfism in full bloom, clothes ripping off, hair everywhere, snarling, frothing at the mouth, fangs, claws like switchblade knives and he let loose. In a matter of minutes he ripped Dr. Borger to pieces. And then, still standing on the desk looking like Lon Cheney Jr., like a maniac he howled a howl that woke Bill the sleeping security guard in the parking lot and made the fat squirrel bury himself deep inside a hollow oak. Bill convinced himself he was dreaming and closed his eyes again missing a bloody Claude scampering from the building to his truck.  

               The local police responded hours later when Bill found bloody footprints through the hallway. A pair of shredded shoes lay nearby along with remnants of a blue sweater and khaki pants. Oops. No one had to worry about removing Dr. Paul R. Lavender’s name anymore. It lied in shards of bloody glass on the floor near an eyeball. Four city policemen looked at Dr. Borger’s mutilated body. They looked at a journal that somehow had very little blood splattered on it which lay out on the desk where most of Dr. Borger’s body remained.

Last entry in nearly illegible handwriting: Informed subject of wolf sperm injections…subject appears agitated, angry. Alpha male behavior!!!! Facial hair, pupils dilating, hairy ears, beautiful fangs! Requires injection of…

“What the hell are we dealing with here, cap’n?” A handsome lieutenant asked a captain on his left. The captain subsequently turned to his left and asked the same question to the police chief who was the only non-uniformed policeman in the room. There was a line of curious policemen outside: Sheriff’s deputies, highway patrolman, detectives, et cetera, et cetera.

            “Don’t know, Jack. Don’t hope to find out,” the chief responded back down the line. Twenty minutes later the FBI arrived, four tight-lipped agents. Twelve minutes later six CIA agents were on the scene, equally nonverbal to anyone but each other. The local police left without trying to contest jurisdiction. They didn’t want it. The only one invited to stay was the coroner who was scratching his head with the look of someone trying to put together a 10,000 piece puzzle and Bill, the security guard. Werewolf piss dripped off the New York Giants bumper sticker on a gold Toyota Corolla.