Chapter 8
HOLIDAY HEARTBREAK
Christmas Amnesty. You can fall out of contact with a friend, fail to return calls, ignore e-mails, avoid eye contact at the Thrifty-Mart, forget birthdays, anniversaries, and reunions, and if you show up at their house during the holidays (with a gift) they are socially bound to forgive you - act like nothing happened. Decorum dictates that the friendship move forward from that point, without guilt or recrimination. If you started a chess game ten years ago in October, you need only remember whose move it is - or why you sold the chessboard and bought an Xbox in the interim. (Look, Christmas Amnesty is a wonderful thing, but it's not a dimensional shift. The laws of time and space continue to apply, even if you have been avoiding your friends. But don't try using the expansion of the universe as an excuse - like you kept meaning to stop by, but their house kept getting farther away. That crap won't wash. Just say, "Sorry I haven't called. Merry Christmas." Then show the present. Christmas Amnesty protocol dictates that your friend say, "That's okay," and let you in without further comment. This is the way it has always been done.)
"Where the fuck have you been?" said Gabe Fenton when he opened the door and saw his old friend Theophilus Crowe standing there, holding a present. Gabe, forty-five, short and wiry, unshaven and slightly balding, was wearing khakis that looked like he'd slept in them for a week.
"Merry Christmas, Gabe," said Theo, holding out the present, a big red bow on it - sort of waving the box back and forth as if to say, Hey, I have a present here, you're not supposed to sandbag me for not calling for three years.
"Yeah, nice," said Gabe. "But you might have called."
"Sorry. I meant to, but you were involved with Val, I didn't want to interrupt."
"She dumped me, you know?" Gabe had been seeing Valerie Riordan, the town's only psychiatrist, for several years now. Not for the last month, however.
"Yeah, I heard about that." Theo had heard that Val wanted someone who was a little more involved with human culture than Gabe.
Gabe was a behavioral field biologist who studied wild rodents or marine mammals, depending on who was providing the funding. He lived at a small federally owned cottage by the lighthouse with his hundred-pound black Labrador retriever, Skinner.
"You heard? And you didn't call?"
It was nearly noon, and Theo's buzz had mostly worn off, but he was still thrown. Guys were not supposed to lament the lack of support from a friend, unless it was backup in a bar fight or help in moving heavy stuff. This was not normal behavior. Maybe Gabe really did need to spend more time around human beings.
"Look, Gabe, I brought you a present," Theo said. "Look at how glad Skinner is to see me."
Skinner was, in fact, glad to see Theo. He was crowding Gabe in the doorway, his beefy tail beating against the open door like a Snausage war drum. He associated Theo with hamburgers and pizza, and had once thought of him as the emergency backup Food Guy (Gabe being the primary Food Guy).
"Well, I suppose you should come in," said Gabe. The biologist stepped away from the door and allowed Theo to enter. Skinner said hi by shoving his nose into Theo's crotch.
"I'm working in here, so things are a little messy."
A little messy? An understatement on a par with calling the Bataan Death March a nature hike - it looked like someone had loaded all of Gabe's belongings into a cannon and fired them into the room through the wall. Dirty laundry and dishes covered every surface except for Gabe's worktable, which, except for the rats, was immaculate.
"Nice rats," Theo said. "What are you doing with them?"
"I'm studying them."
Gabe sat down in front of a series of five-gallon aquariums arranged around a center tank in a star pattern and linked by Habitrail tubes, with gates for routing rats from one chamber to another. Each of the rats had a silver disk about the size of a quarter glued to its back.
Theo watched as Gabe opened a gate and one of the rats rushed to the center tank and immediately tried to mount its occupant. Gabe picked up a small remote control and hit the button. The attacking rat nearly did a backflip trying to retreat.
"Ha! That'll teach 'im," Gabe shouted. "The female in the center cage is in estrus."
The rat backed away tentatively and did some sniffing, then attempted to mount the female again. Gabe hit the button. The male was jolted off of her.
"Ha! Now do you get it?!" Gabe said maniacally. He looked up from the cages to Theo. "There are electrodes on their testes. The silver disks are batteries and remote receivers. Every time he gets sexually aroused, I'm hitting his little nuts with fifty volts."
The rat made another attempt and again Gabe hit the button. The rat spazzed its way to the corner of the cage.
"You stupid shit!" Gabe shouted. "You think they'd learn. I'll hit each of them with the jolt a dozen times today, but when I open the cage tomorrow, they'll all run back in and try to mount her again. You see, you see how we are?"
"We?"
"Us. Males. See how we are. We know there's going to be nothing but pain, but we go back again and again."
Gabe had always been so steady, so calm, so professionally detached, scientifically obsessed, so dependably nerdy - Theo felt as if he were talking to a whole different person, like someone had scrubbed off all the intellect and had exposed the nerves. "Uh, Gabe, I'm not sure that we should equate ourselves with rodents. I mean - »
"Oh, sure. That's what you say now. But you'll call me and tell me I was right. Something will happen and you'll call. She'll stomp your heart and you'll finish the destruction she starts. Am I right? Am I right?"
"Uh, I - " Theo was thinking about the graveyard sex followed by the fight he'd had with Molly last night.
"So I'm going to change the association. Watch this." Gabe stormed over to a bookshelf, threw aside a bunch of professional journals and notebooks until he found what he was looking for. "See. See her." Gabe held up a recent Victoria's Secret catalog. The model on the front was wearing garments spectacularly inadequate in concealing her appeal. She looked as if she just couldn't be happier about it. "Beautiful, right? Amazing, right? Hold that thought." Gabe reached into the pocket of his khakis and pulled out a stainless remote just like the one on the rat table. "Beautiful," he said, and he hit the button.
The biologist's back arched and he suddenly became six inches taller, all the muscles of his body seeming to flex at once. He convulsed twice, then fell to the floor, the crumpled catalog still in his hand.
Skinner lapsed into a barking fit. Don't die, Food Guy, my bowl is on the porch and I can't open the door by myself, he was saying. It was the same every time, he was always glad when the Food Guy wasn't actually dead, but the Food Guy's convulsions made him anxious.
Theo rushed to his friend's aid. Gabe's eyes were rolled back and he twitched a couple of times before he sucked in a deep breath and looked Theo in the eye. "See. You change the association. Won't be long and I'll have that reaction without the electrodes glued to my scrotum."
"Are you okay?"
"Oh yeah. It will take hold, I know it. It hasn't worked with the rats yet, but I'm hoping it will before they all die."
"They're dying of this?"
"Well, it has to hurt or they'll never learn." Gabe held up his remote again and Theo snatched it out of his hand.
"Stop it!"
"I have another set of electrodes and receiver. You want to try it? I've been dying to try it out in the field. We could go to a titty bar."
Theo helped Gabe to his feet, then set him in a chair facing away from the rat table and pulled a chair around for himself.
"Gabe, you are out of control. I'm sorry I didn't call."
"I know you've been busy. It's okay."
Great, now he has the appropriate Christmas Amnesty reaction, Theo thought. "These rats, the electrodes, all of it, it's just wrong. You're just going to end up with either a bunch of paranoid misogynist males, or a pile of corpses."
"You make that sound like a bad thing."
"You got your heart broken. It will heal."
"She said I was dull."
"She should see this." Theo gestured around the room.
"She wasn't interested in my work."
"You guys had a good run. Five years. Maybe it was just time. You told me yourself that the human male was not evolved for monogamy."
"Yeah, but I had a girlfriend when I said that."
"So it's not true?"
"No, it's true, but it didn't bother me when I had a girlfriend. Now I know that I am biologically programmed to spread the seed of my loins far and wide, to as many females as possible, a series of torrid, meaningless matings, only to move on to the next fertile female. My genes are demanding that I pass them on, and I don't know where to start."
"You might want to shower before you start the seed spreading."
"You don't think I know that? That's why I was trying to reprogram my impulses. Tame the animus, as it were."
"Because you don't want to shower?"
"No, because I don't know how to talk to women. I could talk to Val."
"Val was a pro."
"She was not. She never turned a trick in her life."
"Listener, Gabe. She was a pro listener - a psychiatrist."
"Oh, right. Do you think I should start with a prostitute, or 'tutes?"
"For a broken heart? Yeah, I'm sure that will work just as well as the electrodes on your scrotum, but first I need you to do something for me." Theo thought maybe, just maybe, work - nonfreakish work - might bring his friend back from the brink. He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out the hank of yellow hair he'd taken out of the Volvo's wheel well. "I need you to look at this and tell me about it."
Gabe took the hair and looked at it. "Is this crime stuff?"
"Sort of."