Day  7: Thursday

On the morning of Thanksgiving, Betty and I awoke to news of another supermarket attack, this one the ninth overall and closer than any that had preceded it.

“Is that our Acme?” I said.

On the television, a reporter stood in the supermarket parking lot, saying someone had been injured minutes ago while reaching for a package of donuts.

“That’s our Acme,” I said.

Betty grabbed the remote and turned the TV off. I looked at her, my eye twitching, then hurried into the bathroom for my pills. The trial pack of anti-anxiety medication looked like a ransacked Advent calendar. After pushing out the seventh pill through its foil backing, I tossed the packaging back into its drawer, then grabbed the orange bottle of lorazepam and struggled to uncap it.

“Go downstairs and get the paper,” Betty said, after I’d finally gotten it open and dipped my head down to the tap. “Read the sports page. It’ll take your mind off things.”

I stashed the rest of the pills in my robe pocket and did as she said, or tried to. When I opened the front door, I found a manila envelope on the welcome mat. I picked it up and turned it over, not finding an address or a stamp on either side. Finally, I shook it tentatively. It made a sound like a maraca.

Forgetting about the paper, I took the package upstairs, opening it as I moved into the bedroom.

“What is it?” Betty said.

I dumped the contents onto the bed beside her: a dozen or more packets of sweetener, maybe twenty in all, none of them Mexican. Betty and I both reached for one, noticing that something had been written in black ink along the crimped edge.

“Swastikas,” Betty said. “Why would someone send us swastikas? We’re not even Jewish.”

I hurried down the stairs and into the garage, then returned with the VHS tape from our security deck. The system we’d had installed the previous day used stop-motion photography to capture an image every five seconds. I inserted the tape into our VCR, then rewound it to sunset and fast-forwarded through the events from there. Nothing suspicious appeared until just after sunrise, when a Trans Am parked across the street—and just as quickly drove away.

The tape ended in a burst of static. I rewound it to the Trans Am, paused, and hit a button on my remote to zoom in on the image. The driver appeared behind the window, his face a black blur, a splotch, a spectral presence.

“He must’ve seen the Invisible Eyeball,” I said. “He must’ve circled round and parked down the street, then snuck up to our door on foot. There must be a blind spot. Look!” I had returned the image to a standard perspective. The mailbox was in the center of the shot, the Trans Am behind it. “You can’t see the far corner of our lawn. He must’ve parked in front of Jon and Ken’s house and walked up to our door. There’s a blind spot!” I said, pointing. “Don’t you see, Betty?”

And then it came to me. “Hickey!”

“What?”

“I’m not about to stand around and wait to see what he does next!”

I turned for the door, tossing the remote onto the bed.

“But, David, what are you going to do?”

I was still wearing my pajamas and slippers. Betty ran down the stairs after me.

“It stops now,” I said, grabbing my coat from the closet in the hall and hurrying out to the garage through the kitchen.

Betty stepped into the garage as I was starting the engine of the Volvo.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” she said. And then, as I backed out nodding my head: “I was thinking we’d eat around two!”

  

I drove to Jupiter Park in short time, stopping only at a pay phone to remind myself of Hickey’s address. He was no longer living in a house; his life had taken a bad turn, throwing him into an apartment complex not much unlike the one Betty and I had once known.

I parked in a spot reserved for guests and walked into the interior courtyard, then up the concrete stairs to his unit on the second floor overlooking the pool. I knocked, he opened the door, and then my fist flew out toward him. Hickey dodged the punch, but my second one landed—a glancing blow that he responded to by locking me up in his arms and dropping me hard down onto the floor just inside the doorway.

I wheezed, reaching for my side. “I think you cracked my ribs.”

“I cracked your ribs!?!” He bounced on top of me—“What the fuck?”—then did it again, asking if I was on drugs. “I mean it!” he said. “Tell me this time!”

“Nothing illegal,” I managed, my breath short, my voice strained. “Anxiety medication, prescribed. Can you please—” He rolled off of me. “I might be having a reaction,” I said. “The first week you’re on them…” I pushed myself up into a sitting position. “They can make you more anxious,” I said.

He closed the door—“The fuck!”—and walked into the kitchen.

“Do you have any Advil?” I asked.

“Seagram’s,” he said, coming back with two plastic cups. “It works better than anything I’ve got in the bathroom.”

I sat up to accept my drink and took a seat in a rattan papasan chair that was so big I couldn’t keep my legs on the floor. After my first sip on an empty stomach, I felt like I was sitting in a giant’s cupped hand.

Hickey sat across from me in a massive high-backed wicker chair, the type I’d always associated with Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party.

“Now, how about you tell me what this is all about?” he said.

And so I told him about the packets of Sweetness #9 I’d been receiving, and the take-over offer, and my suspicions that Better Health and Flavorings was trying to intimidate me.

“So you’re the one who sent me that packet of sweetener in the mail?” he said.

“I thought you were their muscle. The bad cop to Willingham’s good.”

“Christ, did you even think to check if I was still working for them?”

I mentioned my research online, but he just snorted and said he’d been let go—“for cause, they say”—more than a year ago.

“I was coming up on my thirty-year anniversary,” he said, “and they wanted to keep me from getting all the benefits that would entail. My package had been grandfathered in, you know, back when we split from Goldstein, Olivetti, and Dark. A much sweeter deal than what they’re offering today. Anyway, then some asshole calls me into his cramped, windowless office and says I’m downloading porn on my company computer, and sure, some of what they find on my hard drive is mine, but what the hell, David? I’m a single man. I gotta buy a separate computer just so I can masturbate? There’s an environmental principle at stake, you know?” He drank some more. “And that shit they tried to pin on me? Blondes with big tits? What am I, fifteen years old? My tastes are more refined. I’ve lived a life. You think I still get off on blondes with big tits?”

He finished his drink and went into the kitchen for another, speaking to me over the counter that separated it from the living room. He’d been treating his house as a cash machine, he said. “I finally had to declare bankruptcy last January, about the time I moved here and started pissing off my neighbors by playing Iron Butterfly at four in the morning. Now I’m so piss poor I can’t afford my monthly prostitute, let alone a proper doctor.” He poured plenty of Seagram’s 7 and added a splash of lemon-lime soda. “My mother tells me I’m an alcoholic, my father would like to bury my other leg in the backyard, and my dog—Christ, I’m like a country song—he died this summer, as fat as a cow. You think your life’s bad?” He sat in his Huey Newton chair, sad and impervious. “Look in my freezer and you’ll find a Swanson’s frozen dinner that they make especially for sad fucks like me on Thanksgiving Day. People have been afraid to shop? I been going three, four times a day, just to feel the rush. Been picking up every box in the store—tampons, dog biscuits, you name it—just trying to find a winner. Here.” He reached down past the cushion of his chair and tossed something to me, a black blur that caused me to spill my drink as I went to catch it. A gun.

“This is a gun, Hickey!” My lap was moist from my spilled drink; I held the thing in two hands, not trusting my finger near the trigger.

“Put me out of my misery,” he said. “Go ahead, I won’t mind.”

“God, no! Hickey!” I thought to put the gun on the table, but it was too cluttered with beer cans and takeout food. “Is this because of Sweetness #9?”

“What?”

“Your guilt. Because you were there at its inception. Some people would say we have blood on our hands.”

He laughed. “Weren’t you listening to me? My life is for shit. Look over there.” I followed his gaze to a large open brown box on the floor. “Inside, you’ll find a month’s worth of ready-made food. My doctor said I should get it on account of the diabetes. But I couldn’t stomach it for more than a few days. Not because of the flavor; the food was fine. But the eating out of a box. Delivered in the mail.” He shook his head. “I’m like a stray dog, eating just to survive.”

He took another sip of his drink, then smiled. “So if you’ve always thought of yourself as a metaphorical killer?” He motioned to the gun in my lap. “Pull the trigger and feel what it’s like to be the real thing. You’d be doing me a favor. Really.”

I put the gun down on the floor. “You’re just sad. It’s the holidays.” I thought to invite him to my place, but didn’t know what Betty would say. I tried a kind of hopeful smile. “You know the holidays.”

I stood then, thinking I shouldn’t leave, but not wanting to stay. “I’ll just see about that Advil,” I said, going into the bathroom after he told me to help myself. I found another gun in there (he had seven in all, I’d learn in the papers), this one on the shelf over the toilet, next to a scented candle. It was a six-shooter, big and silver, like something from a cowboy movie. I reached for it and couldn’t resist doing a pantomime in the mirror. The Quick-Draw Artist. The second time I did this the shot rang out, and though I looked to my gun and then the mirror, believing it must have come from me, I saw neither a wisp of smoke nor a shattered reflection.

I rushed out to find Hickey flung back in his chair like that man in the old Memorex ad. The gun was down in his lap, blown there by the force of the shot, and when I stepped around to the backside of his chair, I saw the hole in the wicker ribbing, and then, more memorably, the raw one, like some molten soup, in the back of his head.

At that very moment, neighbors must’ve been looking away from their television sets or up from their breakfasts. Did you hear that? I ran on instinct, a primitive bodily flight, and was halfway down the stairs before I realized I was still holding the six-shooter. I thought to toss it into the deep end of the pool, but I was afraid of fingerprints, thinking mine must be on file somewhere as a result of my stay at Greystone Park. A door slammed closed behind me, and then I remembered I’d handled the gun that Hickey had used. But there was no time to go back, so I hurried out through the courtyard and then was pulling at the door of my car as I heard a voice cry out behind me, a voice that might as well have been my conscience rising up against me after all these years: “Stop him! He’s getting away!”

  

What can be said of what follows? A comedy of errors. I hit not one but two cars trying to get out of the parking lot, then sped through the first stop sign, narrowly missing a bicyclist.

For several blocks I drove without knowing where I was or where I was going. Then, as I neared a four-way stop, I saw a policeman driving toward me. He sped through his stop sign, siren blasting and lights all a-twirl, and parked at an angle in front of me, blocking off my escape. There had been a report of shots fired, a speeding Volvo fleeing the scene, a man in pajamas and a bathrobe with a gun. As he tumbled out of his car, drawing his weapon, I scrambled to open my bottle of lor­aze­pam. “Hands in the air!” he said, and so I threw my fists into the roof, spilling pills everywhere—on my lap, and around the gun I only now remembered I’d dropped on the passenger seat.

“I can explain!” I said.

The policeman pulled me out roughly and down to the street (I chipped my front tooth), then threw a knee in between my shoulders as he yanked my wrists up behind my back.

I turned my face to one side, my cheek pressed down into the cold pebbly blacktop. A man stood on the lawn of the corner house facing me. He leaned into a rake behind a pile of leaves, not moving when the wind picked up and began to undo all of his hard work. I imagine this was when the officer was reading me my rights. I don’t remember it. At some point I closed my eyes and wished—wished so strongly—that I could just fall asleep.

  

Because of the holiday weekend, I wasn’t formally arraigned until Monday morning. It was then that I was charged with two counts of misdemeanor hit-and-run, driving while under the influence (the lor­az­epam), and something called “depraved indifference.” My attorney made much of my “unreasonable detention,” reminding the court of my legal right to be seen by a judge within seventy-two hours, and the way he argued you would’ve thought I’d been held in a secret prison for twelve years. In truth, I hadn’t minded the delay. It had kept me from having to explain myself to Betty or the kids until after the judge had refused to dismiss my case for what she called “a harmless error” and set a date for my preliminary hearing.

“Basically,” I told my family that evening, after I’d posted bail and we were sitting around the kitchen table eating Chinese, “they say I stood by and did nothing while Hickey took his life. They say I may even have assisted him.”

“And did you?” Priscilla said.

“No. God no. It was all a mistake. He wasn’t even the one sending me those packets of sweetener.”

Betty had picked me up from the jail and driven me home, but she’d said little more on the way than this: “I don’t want to argue. I want to believe you. I just need to hear the truth.” Now, as she fiddled with her chopsticks, she said she could’ve told me it wasn’t Hickey if only I’d left the house with my phone that day.

When I looked at her for an explanation, she sent my eyes on to my mentor, who sat there silently in his chair, as still as a forgotten memory.

“He woke up after you left and asked for coffee,” she said. “He refused the sugar, so I looked for the Sweetness #9 in the cupboards. There wasn’t any. It was all upstairs on our bed.”

I followed her eyes to the ceiling, then looked back down to the table when I understood.

Ernest smirked, shaking his head. “Swastikas,” he said. “Jesus.”

“But why?” I asked.

Betty had had plenty of time to think about it. She reminded me that I’d only started receiving the packets at home after Ernst had moved in with us. “He must’ve awoken in the night and put the package together.” He was sleeping in the study, after all, the same room where we had a desk and kept the office supplies. Before that, she said, he could’ve dropped the envelopes at the office on one of his long walks through the neighborhood.

“He made that walk for years,” she reminded me. “The wires in his brain must have crossed up.”

“But why?”

The phone rang, interrupting us. I rose to get it and heard the voice of a foreign man on the other end.

“You are David Leveraux?” he said.

My attention became more focused. “Yes.” Was he Albanian?

“Great-great-grandson of Jürgen Mockus?”

I was nodding now. “Yes,” I told him, “yes I am,” and then he was speaking to me excitedly, asking if he could arrange to visit when he came to New York City the following month.

“Who was it?” Betty asked when I’d hung up.

“A cousin,” I said, still standing by the phone.

“What? I thought you didn’t have any relatives.”

“Long-lost, apparently.”

“Well, that’s great. Where’s he from?”

I spoke the word as if it were the name of a newly discovered planet. “Lithuania.”

Priscilla looked up from her tea. “We still have family in Lithuania?”

Betty looked at her. “What do you mean ‘still?’”

“He’s a bureaucrat of some kind,” I said. “The Mormons came through Vilnius last month, asking for access to their records. One thing led to another and he found me.”

“But I thought you were French-English,” Betty said.

“As it so happens, I’m half-Lithuanian. “

“How am I only now hearing this?”

I came over to the table and sat down. “My grandfather changed his name from Mockus to improve business. Said ‘Leveraux’s Fine Footwear’ had a better ring to it than ‘Mockus’s Shoes.’ You know the French brand: very reliable. Anyway, my father was always threatening to change the name back, but he never got around to it. For me, with everything my grandfather did, it was never a question.

Betty got up and started walking circles. “This is unbelievable,” she said. “My husband has a slave name.”

Ernst Eberhardt came alive then, lifting his eyes as if the distant past had just come into view. “I knew a Lithuanian once,” he said. “A homosexual like the man from Munich.”

His eyes were clear, his voice strong and steady. It was as if he’d been conserving his energy these last few hours in anticipation of telling me this, a story I’d heard before, though a different version, one that contained all of the parts that he, as a good German, had previously skipped.

“This was in Peenemünde,” he said, “where they had us working on special projects before I got reassigned to the Hitler Detail.”

  

After England had defended itself in the skies and the United States had entered the conflict to truly make it a world war, Pabst, Pfaff & Pfeiffer was shuttered and Ernst was given a simple choice: the Eastern Front or the Baltic coast. He chose the latter, having been told that once there, he could expect to enjoy the company of Heisenberg, Stark, Lenard, and of course Werner von Braun, the man behind Hitler’s V-2 rocket.

When Ernst arrived in 1942, he saw this claim was perhaps overstated. He was one of five thousand souls working there, and while Heisenberg, Stark, and Lenard often strolled the grounds at the side of the great man himself, Ernst was far away from the center of power and authority, assigned to a small unit of flavor chemists who had been given only the vaguest instructions to develop a Wunderwaffe that would deprive the enemy of its will to win.

This chemical weapon should not be developed to destroy the enemy, they were told. If it was annihilation they were after, they would have already showered London and St. Petersburg with anthrax and unleashed all of the colorful gasses of the First World War. “Someone will still have to drive the buses when we get there,” Hitler had reportedly said, and so Ernst had gone to work each day trying to create a wonder weapon that the Führer could deliver on the tip of a silent V-2 rocket.

The request intrigued Ernst more than the implications of it troubled him. He considered it while eating, while dreaming, even while performing his calisthenics in the morning. A militarized flavor—such an intellectual challenge! What would it taste like? How could it be deployed to make a citizenry compliant and weak? He emptied and filled his test tube each day, trying out one fearful idea after another. But who was he kidding? Hitler had asked for a weapon of mass deception, and all he could deliver was a better butterscotch.

After the British bombing raid of ’43, in that listless week or two before the scientists were sent inside a mountain to continue production of the V-2, Ernst was joined in a makeshift lab every day by the only other surviving flavor chemists: a tall and lanky Lithuanian and a sallow-faced young man from Munich who wore spectacles and was always grinning at some private thought.

Even though the war had begun to turn in favor of the Allied Powers, the talk in the cafeteria each afternoon was still dominated by those who spoke of the next wave of rockets that would obliterate London and even New York City. Only the Lithuanian and the man from Munich showed no outward signs of patriotism. They seemed to look forward to nothing so much as the film screened in the recreation hall each Wednesday night. (Give them a good song and dance number and they’d have something to talk about for days.)

Their work habits were no more commendable. They arrived late to the lab each morning, forgot to stopper the brown bottles they removed from the flavor library, and even blew Ernst a kiss before leaving early. It was the kiss that infuriated him the most. These men never washed their hands, and so who could say what chemicals they’d handled that day and what risk it might bring to their mouths? Bad science, that was what it was, and that’s what Ernst couldn’t stand—more than being a bad German, being a bad scientist.

One afternoon, when they didn’t return from a long lunch, Ernst strode out to the tent they’d been given after the bombing raid and pulled at the flap, expecting to find them lounging half-naked inside. When he saw they weren’t there, he continued to the showers at the edge of the woods, wishing von Braun were at his side. “Do you see what I’m left with? Their commitment?”

There was only one man in the bathroom, a porcine fellow from the jet propulsion lab who sat on a bench in his robe reading the latest news about Stalingrad. They shared a glum look and a slow nod hello, and then Ernst started back for the lab, spying them in the distance. They were walking out of the woods, the Lithuanian holding a picnic basket as the man from Munich laughed, carrying a bottle of wine.

Rather than confront them, Ernst briskly returned to the lab. He wanted to get all of the details right for his report, so he went straight to their workbench and made a note of the papers littered everywhere, the half-eaten strudel from breakfast, and then—and this disturbed him more than anything else—a partially filled test tube left leaning at an angle atop a scruffy pink eraser. Ernst snatched it. He picked it up, ready to dump its contents into the sink, but before he could, his nose passed over the test tube’s mouth and he smelled something sweet. Something warm. Something light and somehow pink. He breathed it in a second time, drawing the odor deep down into his lungs, and it was so divine, a sensation so vibrant and alive, that he imagined he might float up out of his boots. He kissed his fingertips. He couldn’t help himself. He kissed his fingertips to compliment the work, and it was then that he tasted it—something sweet, something far sweeter than sugar, something unlike anything nature could possibly hold.

He rushed to the other side of the room and poured the contents of the test tube into his cold cup of coffee. The sweetness overtook the bitter taste. It was inspired, and so he returned to their work station in great haste, bringing with him a scrap of paper and a pencil, and while glancing between their notes and the door, he jotted down the formula and even the name they had already given it: Geschmack Drei.

  

“They were captured by the Soviets after the war,” Ernst told us, “but I don’t think they lived long enough to share their secrets. Even if they had, such sweetness could not have survived in Soviet Russia. And so when I left Hitler’s bunker, I took with me only a flashlight and their formula, which was written on a piece of paper that I kept folded in my shoe.”

This morning Ernst told us he had been reassigned to Berlin in late August of 1944, not February of 1945 as he had told everyone since being profiled by Food & Flavor magazine a few years after the war. I didn’t dare stop him to question the date, as to do so would be akin to rousing a man from a waking dream. I sat there like the others, listening.

“When I arrived,” he said, “Hitler was even more hypnotic than I remembered. He spoke of Frederick the Great and a miracle that’d save us from defeat. I believed his every word and secretly feared I’d failed him. I was a German. I wanted to win. What did I know? It was my side. That simple. And so I did what I could. I sweetened his linseed mush and muesli for breakfast, and I made more lively the vegetable juice he drank throughout the day. When he grew depressed, I increased the dose, believing Geschmack Drei would lift his spirits. But by March of ’45, after more than a half year of use, he was speaking of suicide and admitting defeat. Such pitiful words I could have understood coming from the mouth of the Lithuanian or that man from Munich, but Hitler? I didn’t know how to explain it. By April, when he was sending even his secretaries away, I no longer recognized him.

“I was among the last to leave,” he said. “I was still there the morning Goebbels shot himself after watching his lovely wife feed their six sleeping children capsules of cyanide. I had sweetened their coffee. For months I had done this. Like always, that final morning they marveled at the taste.”

He could remember the details and occupants of the bunker with greater force of clarity than he could recall the events leading up to his moving in with us. He spoke of SS-Obersturmbannführer Peter Hogel, of General Hans Krebs and Officer Burgdorf. He recalled mornings in the bunker’s kitchen with Magda Goebbels and Eva Braun, and conversations about Native Americans with Dr. Ernst-Robert Grawitz. The last of these figures sat down one evening at the dinner table with his wife and two children and pulled the pin of a grenade while they ate. Grawitz’s suicide was not a solitary act. He and all the others Ernst had named took their own lives, just as he and all the others had been amongst the most gushing fans and dedicated users of Geschmack Drei.

“Some took it in large doses over several weeks. Others had little more than a sip of sweetened coffee on the day they chose to die.

“After the war, I shared my concerns with the Americans who processed me. I made connections and spoke of unwanted side-effects. And they—what did they do? They took the formula, saying it might have a military use. What could I say?” he asked, looking directly at me. “I was glad to be done with it. I had a passport in exchange. A ticket to New York City.

“Years passed,” he said. “I forgot, or stopped thinking about it, and then a friend from Goldstein, Olivetti, and Dark has breakfast with me at my house one morning and insists I put something in my coffee.” His face brightened. He chuckled. “I recognized it right away. It had been reformulated—six times, I suppose—but even if it was weaker, it still registered on the tongue like a burst of sunlight.”

He looked to me again, his mind having reached a time in which I existed, and like that it all came to a stop. His eyes grew clouded, his body fell into itself, and he looked away as if he’d been unplugged.

It didn’t matter. His story didn’t have an end any more than time did; it continued in me, just as the past carried over into the present, the one shaping the other as much as the other shaped the one, our lives as malleable as Silly Putty.

Ernest got up from the table first, and then Priscilla and Betty. I stayed there for another ten or twenty minutes, though, staring no less blankly into the future than my mentor. If the others saw his failures revealed through this story, I found my empathy. Because what could he have done to protest the use of Sweetness #9? Spoken out against the very government that had let him into the country in exchange for Geschmack Drei? He would have had his green card revoked, or been deported like that former guard at Treblinka who’d been discovered living in Cleveland. What’s more, and this thought was almost exhilarating and certainly freeing, if The Nine was but a watered-down version of Geschmack Drei, that meant my refusal to do anything all these years could be but a symptom of Sweetness #9 poisoning. Priscilla was right. I was sick, no different from everyone else. For what is apathy if not a watered-down version of suicide?

When I got up from the table and led Ernst into his room, I felt strangely calm, but then I was only thinking of myself; now, years later, as I spend yet another day in this work shed banging away at the keys of my old IBM Selectric, I can see how my mentor’s story must have shaken my family. I had warned them about Sweetness #9, however belatedly, but even that had not prepared them for this. Who was to say what would come next? They must have walked away from the table as if from a terrible car crash. After marveling at their escape from danger, they must have felt as fearless as those who’ve survived a near-death experience. I say this because like those who have escaped death, they soon decided there was no reason to hold back.