Chapter 4
FROM THE NOVEL SIDE EFFECTS By Harvey Jacobs
Simon Apple played a game with himself. He dangled his arms until his hands scraped the cement floor, then pranced around grunting like an ape. He tried a handstand, then a summersault, then climbed the bars of the cell door. He knew he was on suicide watch, that his antics were broadcast to some video monitor, but no guard rushed to investigate; they were used to his simian routine.
Simon kept moving until he exhausted himself, the point of all that nonsense, then lay on his cot, closed his eyes and let his mind wander through its own jungle. If today was the time for his life to pass before his eyes, the parade was proving to be a shadowy procession of wisps and fragments. He struggled to piece together memories of his early years from specks of dust, the detritus of overheard telephone calls, nursery conversations, family gossip and his father’s famous sleep talking, those garbled monologues babbled on a dark stage for an invisible audience. Was his father trying to tell him something there in the dark, carefully coding the messages among coughs, snores and snorts?
Simon was born a month premature, four pounds, six ounces, a lusty baby “impatient to get his tail slapped” his father, Robert J. Apple liked to say. His first weeks were spent in an incubator warmed by light bulbs. All he recalled about that claustrophobic pod was blazing yellow light without the balm of darkness. That light stayed with him even after he was plucked from his cocoon.
Simon couldn’t swear to exact details --filtered through time’s distorting prism-- but he seemed to remember being baptized and circumcised on the same day. He was yanked from sleep, wrapped in swaddling and hustled out of the hospital to a chapel in Blessed Queen of Angels Church where he was dunked and certified as a Roman Catholic.
From there, a rented Lincoln Continental carried him to Sons of Israel Synagogue. His father, a semi-lapsed Catholic, insisted on twin ceremonies. Simon’s baptism was a fillip to his father’s family and made Robert J. Apple feel better about himself. His mother, Francine, born Jewish, also had left a trail of wounded relatives when she married outside her tribe. She wanted her son to be circumcised if only for the record.
So Robert J. hired the resident mohel at the synagogue, a famous specialist in removing foreskins, to perform the bris. A naked Simon, still damp from holy water, waited while the mohel dipped a wad of Johnson & Johnson cotton into a silver cup of Manichewitz Concord Grape wine and painted it across Simon’s flailing tongue. The baby licked at the fuzzy pink cloud of anesthesia. Then came the slice, worse than the freezing baptismal bath. Simon went from sprinkled to snipped, from icy chill to hot pain, screaming protest with a passion that frightened everybody in the shul. Simon’s startled eyeballs blinked like traffic lights. He wouldn’t stop howling.
When Simon’s parents got him home he began to run a sweaty fever. Robert J. called Dr. Henry Fikel who still made house calls back in the nineteen-sixties.
Dr. Fikel couldn’t tell if the infant’s problem was caused by baptismal bacteria or trauma from the mohel’s blunt blade. Whatever the cause, the doctor recognized that Simon was burning up because of a serious infection that could cancel him out in a matter of hours.
“Listen, the battle is not lost,” Dr. Fikel said. “I’ve been involved with testing a new drug called Cripthalizine developed by Regis Pharmaceuticals. It’s about to be approved by the FDA. The test results have been tremendously positive. The drug is hugely expensive but lucky for you I’ve got samples. If you agree, I’ll administer a dose now. It should be repeated every eight hours until his fever breaks.”
Cripthalizine
(Trade name: Cribangel)
Another miracle from Regis Pharmaceuticals
“Do it,” Robert J. said. Dr. Fikel produced a small bottle of greenish liquid from his bag along with a medicine dropper, sucked an inch of Cripthalizine into the glass tube, squeezed open Simon’s mouth and squirted the emulsion down his throat. Before Simon could react to its oily taste, a rubber nipple was stuck between his bare gums. He sucked at formula, warm and sweet.
Simon Apple knew he’d been bottle fed from overheard conversations that became family lore. Despite heavy pressure, Francine Apple had opted for symmetrical tits over the arguable joys of in-flight fueling. There were extenuating circumstances; Simon’s first baby teeth were like little razor-sharp tusks. Not even the most devoted of mothers could have endured the assaults of his appetite. Simon’s first nickname was The Little Ripper. (Years later that was mentioned at his trial.)
Cripthalizine worked quickly and well. Within 24-hours his fever was gone, the infection subdued.
There would be certain catastrophic side effects but they took time to manifest.