Bernie’s Big Secret

BROWSER AIDES (Key quotes linked to their location in the text)

“Another time he gave me a hilarious description of a clandestine meeting in a Chinatown restaurant with an F.B.I. agent.”

“As Bernie approached, the young man in the combo turned toward him, revealing that he had a knife in one hand and money in the other.”

“…Which he was certain would convince me he was worthy of assassination and that he indeed should leave the country.”

“Then, in lieu of her body, she shared the Big Secret with me.”

LINKS TO THE SUBSECTIONS
which must be read in-sequence.

1

“You mean,” I said, lowering my voice, “you think that guy back there snuck into the kitchen and put poison in your food?”

Bernie glared hard at me, not speaking.

“That’s why you’re not eating?” I asked.

I looked over my shoulder at the man, the only other customer in the restaurant. He actually was somewhat sinister looking: gaunt, middle-aged, in a dark coat. But that was a coincidence. I turned back to my best friend, terror-stricken across the table from me, and stifled a guffaw.

“He was looking for the bathroom,” I continued. “I heard him ask the waitress. He went into the kitchen by mistake. Bernie, that’s ridiculous. It’s just more paranoia.”

But he looked away, not convinced. He was lean and hunched and had thick glasses with black plastic rims and a helmet of thick reddish brown hair that went from the top of the glasses to the bottom of his collar.

“If you’re not going to eat it . . .” I said, stabbing my fork into a potato on his plate, “I will,” and put the potato in my mouth.

He looked at his food. He was hungry, but pride was involved now.

“Are you sure you don’t want it?” I asked.

He nodded not looking at me. I scraped his plate onto mine. We were in David’s, the best Jewish restaurant in San Francisco , and I was treating him to dinner the night before he emigrated to Israel . His emigration was the desperate act of someone convinced he was under constant surveillance by the F.B.I. In his mind, his watchers had followed him, bugged his phone and those of his friends, and eventually, bugged most rooms he entered. But they had never before threatened to kill him. It was logical they should attempt tonight because this might be their last chance.

There was nothing particularly unusual about paranoid delusions in the early Seventies in San Francisco . Many of my friends had been in a psychiatric ward at least once, as had I about five years before, when I scorched my mind on methedrine. Insanity was an inconvenience like the flu. However, Bernie was not one of those friends who had been in a mental hospital. He had the greatest strength of character, the surest sense of himself, of anyone I had ever known. This made his breakdown the more unnerving.

One cause of his strength was in his every spoken “l” “r” and “s.” He had a speech impediment, an exaggerated lisp, which was further distorted to my California ear by a strong New York accent.

In five years of close friendship, the only things he ever said about his childhood were that he was very close to an older brother and they grew up in a working class, Jewish, Bronx neighborhood. What wasn’t mentioned but implied by his strength of character was a childhood spent crashing through torments.

“Look, Bernie,” I said, chewing his going-away present with conspicuous impunity, “I’m still alive. And I bet I will be for weeks. Past that, who can say? Week after next the planet may not be habitable. But this whole melodrama about government assassins is just…like the poison in this food.”

“Theyoo awe thing-th . . . ( There are things … ) I can’t teh-oo ( tell ) you . . . but they would ekthpwain evewything ( explain everything ).”

He was abandoning his wife and infant son, his career and his country, and he wouldn’t tell his best friend why.