T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

“Oh, yes,” Prok rumbled, “yes, you’ve wired us all right, and we’ve wired you back. Repeatedly.” Prok was up from his desk suddenly, curt and angry, striding through the doorway to confront the man in the brown suit while we looked on sheepishly. “But perhaps you have difficulty with the written word?”

The man stammered out an apology, all but melting into his shoes, but he never stopped wheedling. “As long as I’m here, I wonder if you might just — oh, just the smallest tour of the place. That’s all I ask. And the tiniest glimmer of what you hope to accomplish. From all I hear you’re fantastically dedicated, rigorous, really rigorous”—and here he looked beyond Prok to where we sat riveted at our desks—“and you’ve got a real crackerjack staff too. A minute? Just a minute of your time?”

Prok was impassive, hiding behind his interviewer’s façade, and if you didn’t know him you wouldn’t have guessed at how close to snapping he was. His voice gave him away, throttled in the back of his throat, a kind of articulate croak: “I’ve explained all that a hundred times already, explained it till I’m exasperated beyond the point of civility, and I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave our offices—”

“But I wouldn’t be in the way — I’d just want to get a feel for it, for your work.”

“—and not set foot on these premises again till you’re expressly invited.” Prok waved his hand impatiently, as if dissipating a swarm of gnats. “Don’t you see? Don’t you get it? If you people don’t stop pestering me there won’t be a volume to review.”

The journalist must have detected the same despairing crack in Prok’s voice I did, because he immediately tried to hammer a piton into it and hoist his way up: “‘ Invited, ’ did you say? You mean you’re going to open up, then? Good, good. But why wait? I’m here now. Think how useful I can be, spreading the word — that’s what you want, isn’t it? To spread the gospel? Right?”

The light from the hallway liquefied Prok’s spectacles. He hesitated. He did want to spread the word, but not piecemeal, and not in a way that would cheapen and undermine everything we were hoping to accomplish. “All right,” he said finally, “I appreciate your interest, and this is what I’ve decided on — what we’ve decided on, my colleagues and I — as a matter of policy.” He took a moment to glance over his shoulder at us, and we did our best to support him, though we were as eager as the man in the brown suit to hear what he’d come up with. “We’ll be issuing invitations to all the major newspapers and magazines to come here to the Institute, have a tour of the facilities, record your sex histories and receive full access to the page proofs — once those proofs are completed, that is. And I have to emphasize that: Completed. Finished. Ready to go. Now, do you understand?”

“I’ll be the first?”

“You’ll be one of them.”

There was a pause. The man shifted his weight from one scuffed brown shoe to the other. His face was shrewd, narrow, the face of an extortionist, a second-story man. He’d come to rob us, just as surely as Skittering had. “You don’t mean you’re going to make me traipse all the way out here again — look, here I am. Can’t you just make an exception, just in this one case?”

I almost got up — I was on the verge of it — because why should Prok, with so much on his shoulders, have to deal with this too? I could have ushered the man out the door, could have broken him in two if it came to that, but Prok was in charge here, always in charge, and Prok never wavered.

“Both you and I know that wouldn’t be fair, now don’t we?” he said. From where I was sitting I couldn’t see Prok’s expression, but I could have guessed at it, Prok looming over the little brown man, in absolute control — the steely look, the mask of indifference — and subtle, so subtle. “But I take your point. You are here, aren’t you, and as long as you are we may as well get your sex history and save us all the trouble when you return.” Prok turned to me then, Mrs. Matthews gone back to her typing, Corcoran trying to suppress a grin, Rutledge fidgeting in his chair. “Milk, would you mind doing the honors?”

And so it was. Prok brought the reporters on in two waves, the magazine writers first — in August — and then the newspapermen in September, even as he was putting the finishing touches to the manuscript. We set up a conference table in the office across the hall, from which we’d evicted one of Prok’s colleagues in the Zoology Department (above his protests, but with the blessing — and imprimatur — of President Wells), and Prok packed the reporters in as if they were so many shot-putters and pole-vaulters crowding onto the team bus. First he lectured them on our findings and the boon they represented for mankind, then gave them a tour of the facilities and an opportunity to talk individually with us, his shining and punctilious staff, finally making a plea to each of them to give up his history not simply in the service of the project but for the practical purpose of gaining insight into our methods. Better than fifty percent of the journalists took him up on it, and that kept us busy, all of us, frantically recording sex histories even as the rest of them snooped around town, looking to unveil a little local color. As you might imagine, there was a real run on the bars.

Before they left, Prok gave them each a set of proofs, and then — this was pure genius — had them sign a thirteen-point contract vowing not to publish their stories or release any of our figures prior to the December issue of their respective publications and to submit all articles to us in advance so that we could vet them for errors. Of course, the effect was to stifle any criticism and at the same time harness the press to the service of our own ends — there was an outpouring of highly favorable articles, and all in that crucial period leading up to the book’s release. We endured the sensationalized headlines as a matter of course, because there was really nothing to be done there, but by and large the articles themselves were more than we could have hoped for. Suddenly the whole nation — the whole world — was listening.

The rest is history.

All well and good. We’d achieved celebrity — or at least Prok had — but if before we’d been able to work in relative obscurity, now everything we did was magnified. And if Prok had been able to relax into his work in the past, into his gardening, his gall collecting, the meandering field trips to seek out taxonomic marvels and acquire histories, now he was driven and manipulated by his own success, pulled in a hundred directions at once. There were mobs of visitors all of a sudden, many of them quite prominent, travel and lecture requests, nonstop interviews, and letters — thousands of them — pouring in from all over the world, each more heartbreaking than the next. Prok was a guru now, and gurus had to sit at their desks from sunrise to sunset, tending to the needs of the faithful.

Dear Dr. Kinsy: My husbend wants to do unnatural things with me in bed like kissing me in my private parts but I think such things are unattracktive and sinful and I was hopping you could write to him or make a call and tell him to leave me alone. Yrs. Sinceerly, Mrs. Hildegard Dolenz

Dear Professor: Twelve years ago I met the woman of my dreams, Martha, and married her on the spot. She is a woman like no other and I am satisfied with her as a good mother to our six sons and a good cook and etc., but for the fact that she is no longer interested in marital relations and I don’t know why. Is this natural in a woman of her age (38)? If so, can you tell me what the cure is or if I should look for relief in other quarters, because I have become friendly with a widow of 54 years of age who seems truly more interested in relations than my own wife. Very Truly Yours, Stephen Hawley, Long Beach Island, New Jersey