A Goat in the Night
In this newsletter: More imaginary reader mail, checking in on Moderna, and a few words of advice.
Part I: Rapaport Hunts Ghosts
I received another unusual letter. This one came as a .txt file on a USB key hidden inside a quart of chicken lo-mein. I found the USB key after I put the chicken lo-mein into the microwave and turned it on.
I hadn’t ordered any chicken lo-mein. Whoever rang the doorbell late that night was gone by the time I got off the couch where I had been marinating, catatonic. I’m not the kind of guy who would normally eat mysterious chicken lo-mein found hanging from his doorknob, but it was late, I had overcooked the salmon I had served for dinner, and I was feeling a little hungry.
After I turned off the fire alarm and got everyone back to bed, I found the USB key lying in the charred, smoky remains of the chicken lo-mein at the bottom of the sink. The burning noodles had melted the plastic case, but the USB key itself didn’t look damaged. I stuck it into my laptop.
The drive, when it loaded, was called “GHOSTS.” Inside was a text file titled “Goats,” which contained a second letter from the mysterious correspondent whose last letter I shared in the January 2 edition of this newsletter. The letter was just one long block of text, with no line breaks, no paragraph breaks, and not many commas. I have reformatted it for readability, fixed some spelling errors, inserted some semicolons, and am including it below.
(The last time I did this I footnoted the introduction to make clear that this whole thing is a goof, but some of you didn’t read the footnote and thought I was trying to pull one over on you, so let me just say up top: I’m not trying to fool anyone, this is an invention, there is no Rapaport, I did not attempt to eat mysterious chicken lo mein, that’s insane. I did overcook the salmon, though. That part is true.)
JN-K,
I apologize for the abrupt ending to my last note. These memories trouble me, as you can imagine. Or maybe I haven’t gotten deep enough into this story yet for you to understand why writing you the other week felt like diving down into a cave, and if I stayed too long maybe I wouldn’t make it out.
When I broke off, I was walking into the night to hunt for ghosts, following instructions I had found in one of the composition books I had stolen from the saddlebag of a Univega ten speed.
The text in the composition books had been written by Baum, the barber who owned the Univega, and who may or may have been getting betting tips from the dead. The ghost hunting method he described consisted of walking around the city at night with a clear mind, empty pockets, and comfortable shoes, while listening on repeat to “Doctor Jeep,” the 1990 single by the goth rock bank The Sisters of Mercy.
The empty pockets were an essential part of the ritual, Baum wrote. No wallet, no MetroCard, no phone, no keys. Leave your door unlocked. Just bring “Doctor Jeep” on an MP3 player or an old Discman, or whatever you’ve got. A tape recorder.
Baum did not explain why it was “Doctor Jeep,” of all the sounds in the universe, and not, I don’t know, the “Chariots of Fire” theme, or the moans of the whales, or the Kol Nidre melody played on a theremin, that would conjure the ghosts. I had never heard “Doctor Jeep” before, and I didn’t have it on my computer, so I bought it for 99 cents on iTunes, loaded it onto my iPod Shuffle, put on the gray orthopedic-looking New Balance 990s I wore when my black-and-white Chuck Taylors made my feet ache, and walked downstairs.
Baum’s instructions posited that there was some kind of a current, a motive force, that flows through the streets of New York City, and that can carry you along if you know how to let yourself be pushed. I stood there on the pavement, waiting for this unseen hand of the city to shove me in one direction or another. Nothing happened, so I started walking.
I walked up the hill towards the subway, then down Prospect Park West towards Bartel-Pritchard. I walked past the diner where they sold a burger with a fried egg between the patty and the bun, which I liked to have for dinner sometimes, with an egg cream and a pickle, if the day’s walk had been particularly draining. I walked past the cop bar and the meat pie place and the yuppie bar that the landlady told me used to be a video rental; past the movie theater and the park entrance, and then down a block lined with psychoanalysts’ offices and into Park Slope.
I didn’t actually believe that wandering through the Brooklyn night while listening to “Doctor Jeep” on repeat on my iPod Shuffle would lead me to a ghost. I thought that I would walk a while, and nothing out of the ordinary would happen, and I would come home knowing what I already knew: That Baum had conned us. His extraordinary winning streak had been a put-on, and he had disappeared with our money. Still, it was a warm night, and I was happy to walk, and maybe I really would meet a ghost.
“Doctor Jeep” was grating on the fifth listen, but by the eighth listen I liked it, and then by the tenth it was my favorite song in the world and I was grooving down 12th Street, turning left, dodging the crowds smoking outside of the bars on 5th Avenue, living for that eleventh replay.
The sidewalks were crowded for a Tuesday night. It had been a cold April, but now it felt like June and everyone was out for a late walk. It was one of those weeks you get in the spring in Brooklyn, when the neighborhood all of a sudden feels busy again and you see the familiar strangers you haven’t seen since fall. It’s like the first day back at school after the summer break, except no one actually says hello to each other. Through the windows the bars looked busy, and I wondered how I would know if I was seeing a ghost.
I hadn’t considered that before. I had turned left and then right and then left again, and I didn’t feel any current pulling me through the streets, but I also wasn’t making any choices; and what if there was some force directing me along my way, and what if it had brought me here, to this block, and that guy over there in the Adidas windbreaker with a New Yorker under his arm was the ghost of a teamster killed resupplying Washington’s troops during the Battle of Long Island?
Or maybe that woman, the one talking on her phone outside the boarded-up OTB, was a dead Italian anarchist who put her head in an oven in 1919 rather than be deported to Salerno? Or the police officer, driving by slow in his Crown Vic. Or the woman silhouetted in the third floor window. Or the baby off in the distance somewhere, screaming for a bottle. Were any of them ghosts? Were they all?
They were not ghosts. I know that now, because I’ve met ghosts, and when you meet a ghost there’s no question as to whether or not you are meeting a ghost. A ghost is dead and not alive in the same way that a cow is a cow and not a pig; there’s no way to confuse the categories. The man with the New Yorker, the woman with the cell phone, the cop who had already disappeared around the corner in his patrol car; these were all living people out wandering in the Brooklyn night, and so was I, and so I kept walking south.
By the time I got to the edge of the Green-Wood Cemetery, maybe around 25th Street, I had listened to “Doctor Jeep” perhaps thirty times, and it was getting colder, and I was getting thirsty, and I had no money and no MetroCard, and home was a long walk. I plumbed my pocket on the off chance I’d inadvertently left a five in there and could stop in a deli for a pack of M&M’s or a Snapple or something, and I felt a bump: The red die. I hadn’t meant to bring it, but there it was. There was a broken phone booth on the corner. I stepped into it and rolled the die across the steel ledge. Two. I pressed play on the iPod Shuffle, and I kept on walking.
Baum’s instructions about how to find ghosts lacked coherence. That morning, after leaving the barbershop and finding Baum’s Univega, I had taken his two composition books home and opened them on my kitchen table. The writing in the books looked at first like random scratches, and I wondered if he wrote in shorthand, or was perhaps psychotic. One of the books was titled GHOSTS, the other HORSES, and I flipped through them both, drinking coffee from a heavy diner mug I had found on a Park Slope stoop a few weeks earlier, beside a worn Dashiell Hammett omnibus and a sign in black Sharpie that read “TAKE IT!” (I took the mug, which said “Orloff’s” on the side in blue italics, but left the Hammett behind.)
Eventually the scratches began to resolve into words. Baum’s handwriting was a jumble of smudged cursive and print, but it was legible, more or less, with a bit of work, and I skimmed past the notes on races and trainers and track conditions that made up the bulk of HORSES until I came to the back, where Baum had accounted for the buy-ins, the wins, and the losses of his little betting syndicate.
Baum had taken tiny buy-ins from the guys at the barbershop each week all year to bet on the weekend cards at Aqueduct, and had won each time. Each week of buy-ins was recorded on its own page, and in Baum’s lists I saw my name show up one week in March, next to the names of the Bukharian barbers from the shop, and other names, too; names I didn’t recognize.
The last of the lists was an accounting of contributions to Baum’s big swing, the massive round of bets he had taken the week before. There were around thirty names on the list, and when I totaled up how much they had put down, I spat a mouthful of coffee back into the mug: Baum had taken more than $40,000.
I had imagined that syndicate had gone in for around five grand, all told; the Bukharian barbers, when they menaced me with the aluminum bat at their shop that morning, had said it was more like $20,000. What none of us had known, apparently, was that someone identified on the composition book page as “the Captain” had bought in for $19,000, twenty times as much as the next-biggest buy-in. I flipped back: the Captain had been betting Baum’s maximum of $5 each since the very first of the recorded pools in the middle of January. I had no idea who the Captain was; the book didn’t say, and Baum had never mentioned him.
I should have dropped the whole thing as soon as I saw that $19,000 bet. I should have taken the notebooks, walked out of the apartment, rode the subway back to Manhattan, put them back in the Univega saddlebags, and run as far as I could from the Captain and the ghosts and the barbers and Baum. I should have forgotten about it all and gone back down to minding my own business: Rolling my die in the morning, walking somewhere, coming home, going to bed, walking again. Stretching out my bankroll so I could spend the summer lying on the beach out in the Rockaways, eating Nathan’s hot dogs at Coney, riding the ferry out to Governors Island to try to break into old officers’ quarters in Fort Jay. The quiet life I had lived until that morning, and wouldn’t have again; not for a long while.
Instead, I kept reading. There were no more clues to be found amid the notes on turf conditions in HORSES, so I turned to GHOSTS. GHOSTS was a stranger notebook. I can’t quote it to you, because I don’t have either of the notebooks anymore; I burnt them one night on the fire escape years ago, just before I left that Windsor Terrace apartment and came back to my dark, northerly home; to a little house near a mountain where I can walk in silence, and I know for sure that the only dead things I’ll see are the rabbit carcasses that the red-tailed hawks leave for the turkey vultures.
I do remember GHOSTS clearly, though. I read it that day, and over and over again in the weeks that followed, looking for clues as the mystery of Baum and the Captain and the ghosts consumed me, and nearly swept me away.
There were pages of GHOSTS that read like instruction manuals for contacting the dead, and pages that read like a dream journal. There was a subway map folded inside, the kind they still give out for free at the booths, with little pen marks on it that you might miss if you didn’t look hard. They don’t put every street on the subway maps, and the pen marks were in blank spots on the map in between the marked streets, and I had no idea how to make sense of it.
What I did think I could make some sense of was the two-page manifesto on ghost hunting I found near the end of the composition book. The penmanship here was less antic, as though Baum had slowed his mind and his hand to make sure that this part, at least, was understood. He had printed “HOW TO FIND GHOSTS” across the top of the first page in block letters and underlined it twice.
The manifesto began with a meditation on the mysteries of creation. Baum wrote that a person looking at, say, the Mississippi River or the Grand Canyon or Mount Katahdin can generally imagine how it may have been formed by a few infinitely powerful forces: The flow of the glaciers, the shifting of the tectonic plates.
A great city, Baum wrote, is different. A man steps off the flight bridge at JFK and catches a yellow cab into Manhattan, and he rides over the Triborough and sees the skyline for the first time in ages, and he tries to name the forces that came together to form it: The price of beaver pelts, the depth of New York Harbor, the founding of the Otis Elevator Company, the invention of the Bessemer process, the invention of the revolver, redlining, white flight, Black Thursday, Black Monday, the militancy of the United Federation of Teachers under Albert Shanker, the Gary Null Show, the sinking of the General Slocum, the murder of Carlo Tresca, the smell of a Nuts 4 Nuts cart, the 1901 tenement law, the 1938 pushcart ban, the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The visitor realizes they’re wandering into an infinity, and they abandon the project.
On the one hand, the smells and moods and traffic patterns of New York should, like the angles of Katahdin’s peak, progress logically from the interactions of some discrete group of inputs. On the other hand, when considering the infinity of the inputs that formed New York City, and the incomprehensibility of the causal pathways that link them, it’s tempting to cast it all aside and imagine, instead, that the whole agglomeration of flesh and steel came together through a toss of some big red die.
In his two-page ghost hunting manifesto, Baum proposed that it wasn’t randomness that gave the city its form, nor some computational process summing up September 11th and the 1969 World Series and spitting out a packed subway car during a wet snowstorm in February of 2011. Rather, Baum suggests a third force, some phenomenon beyond logic or chaos that takes in the the city in its millions, its miles, its millennia, and gives it shape. Baum writes about this force as a current moving through space and time, binding the city’s present to its past.
From there, the argument fuzzes out. The ghosts, Baum writes, are manifestations of this current, or maybe just swept up in it; he wasn’t sure, and it didn’t matter, the point was that, under certain prescribed conditions, you could follow the current and it would carry you along to the ghosts.
It sounded half-baked to me. Even now that I’ve seen the ghosts, I’m not sure that Baum was close to understanding what they are, or where they come from.
That first night, though, sometime around 2 a.m., I did feel that current.
I was walking along 3rd Avenue under the Gowanus Expressway, maybe around 34th Street, and all of a sudden my feet were moving on their own. Everything was silent. No cars bounced past on the highway overhead, no rats skittered around my feet. I felt myself drift to the right, into Industry City, the old industrial district by the water in Sunset Park. These days Industry City is all craft whiskey distilleries and advertising firms and expensive antique stores, but this eleven years ago, when it was halal abattoirs and warehouses with broken windows and guys hosing out their garbage trucks, spraying you with a mist of atomized trash as you walked the cobblestone streets.
That night, though, there was no one and nothing in Industry City but me. The streets were empty, the buildings black, and everything outside of the yellow spotlights cast by the street lamps was a void. I floated along like a man sucked out by a riptide, knowing not to fight it, just to let myself be carried away. “Doctor Jeep” still played in my ears, now maybe on its eighty-seventh loop, but I didn’t hear it any more; the sound was of an ocean’s heave, of an avalanche of rock, of time through an hourglass. I felt nothing. No fear, no anticipation. I had given myself over to the current, and I knew only that the next thing I saw would be a ghost.
And then I saw it. There, up ahead of me, a dark shape just past the edge of a square of light on the pavement cast from a lit window in one of the warehouses. I floated closer to the shape. It was moving, too; unfolding as it moved towards me and into the unsteady light, its form resolving into not the human form I had expected, but that of a full-grown adult goat.
The goat was black, with eight-inch-long horns on its head and a wispy beard. The current carried me within six inches of the beast, and then stopped. The goat stared at me through yellow eyes, silent and unmoving. Its head came up to my solar plexus. I could hear it breathing hard, as if it had been running. If I reached out to touch it, would my hand pass through it?
I stretched a finger towards the ghost goat’s horn as gingerly as if I were testing hot soup. The horn was solid. I patted the goat’s head. It felt warm.
I spoke to the ghost goat. I don’t recall what I said, but I do recall the logjam of questions on my tongue: Are you the ghost of a dead goat? Are you the ghost of a dead person? Why would a dead person appear in the form of a goat, and does that happen to all people, or just to certain people? And are you always a goat, or only tonight? Or are you only appearing to me as a goat, and if I were someone else you might look like a unicorn, or a stack of paper? And what happens when we die, and what is god, and why are we here, and what is the point?
As I say, I don’t know exactly which of these questions came out, or in what order, but I do remember that the ghost goat stared back at me in silence for a moment and then, with a clattering of hooves, jumped into the air and began to run, but not before three men in aprons burst out of the darkness and tackled it to the ground.
There before me on the cobblestones, three men and a goat wrestled, until the goat lost. The goat’s legs tied, the three men stood up, panting. One of them, the youngest, came forward to apologize. The goat, the man said, had escaped from the slaughterhouse. He wiped his hand on his white apron, which I now saw was stained brown and red with blood old and new. Then, the three men lifted the goat and disappeared with it into the dark.
The walk home took hours. The current was gone now, and it was up to me to move one foot in front of the other, and I didn’t get back to Windsor Terrace until the sun was rising and the city was waking up to just another Wednesday. I was exhausted and thirsty and ready to sleep. I couldn’t begin to think about what had happened until I’d rested and showered and eaten, and that wouldn’t be for hours and hours.
My apartment was on the third floor of a row house on one of the avenues, not far from the park. The door to the building was still unlocked when I got there, which was good, because I had left my keys behind. I climbed up to my apartment. I’d left that door unlocked, too, and when I climbed to the landing I saw that it was open. I walked inside, thinking maybe I had forgotten to close it when I left earlier in the night with “Doctor Jeep” blasting in my ears.
The inside of the apartment was a shambles. I had only lived there a few months, and had spent most of that time out walking, but I had some nice things. All of them were smashed in a pile by the door: An electric typewriter, a lamp I’d inherited from a great aunt, a framed poster of a 1910 Stieglitz photograph of the Singer Building. The apartment was a one bedroom, with a little kitchen that opened onto a little living room. From the entrance I could see the whole place. Every cabinet in the kitchen was open, every plate and bowl and cup smashed on the floor. The TV had a paring knife sticking out of the middle of its screen. The blinds were torn down. Someone had used a kitchen chair to smash holes in the drywall. In my bedroom, the bed was on its side, the clothes drawers emptied out.
I stood there staring. Then I heard a flush, and out from the bathroom stepped the tallest man I have ever seen in my life. His body looked as though it had been stretched on some grand inquisitors’ rack; his proportions all wrong. He stooped to get out of the bathroom, and continued to stoop to keep his head from hitting the ceiling. The giant smiled when he saw me. “Welcome home,” he said.
When you read old crime stories, they talk a lot about blackjacks. Guys like Hammett always assume the reader knows what they mean when they write that someone hit someone else with a blackjack, or a sap, or a life preserver, or cosh, but I never did. Turns out they’re all the same thing, really. A short, heavy stick, with a weight on one end and a springy handle. The instant after the giant welcomed me home, one of them crashed into my temple.
I can’t tell you what it felt like, because by the time my nerve endings informed me that I had been hit, my legs had already gone to sleep and the world was getting dim. The last thing I saw before slipping away into blackness was the giant looking down at me from miles above. Next to him was another man, slapping a blackjack against his hand.
“The Captain is waiting,” the giant said. That’s when I drifted off.
This is as far as I can bring this story tonight.
Yours sincerely,
P.D. Rapaport
This letter came two weeks ago. I’ve heard nothing else from him since.
Part II: Checking in on Moderna
I’ve been writing about Moderna since the summer of 2019, when my Barron’s cover story described messenger RNA as the “next frontier in treating disease.” I wrote at the time:
The mRNA drugs wouldn’t just compete with gene therapies as treatments for diseases caused by missing proteins. They could also challenge long-entrenched parts of the vaccine industry and offer new options for cancer patients. It is a multibillion-dollar opportunity… The only question is whether it works.
Last spring, after it turned out mRNA vaccines did work, I wrote another feature about Moderna, that one arguing that worries about the company’s future were overblown. The stock hit an all-time high a few months later.
This week, I have yet another Moderna feature in Barron’s. Here’s how it starts:
In 2019, four pharmaceutical giants shared virtually all of the $33 billion worth of vaccine revenue earned worldwide.
Moderna, meanwhile, had just 830 employees and no product sales.
The pandemic has upended the vaccine business. Moderna has sold or contracted to sell $36 billion worth of its Covid-19 vaccine since the start of 2021. Now, as the pandemic begins to ease, the vaccine heavyweights, led by Sanofi and Pfizer, are ready to reclaim their turf.
Also, I wrote a feature the other week about how Omicron exposed a staffing crisis in U.S. hospitals that could be with us for a while. That article is here.
Part III: Words of Advice
Other songs that were under consideration in place of “Doctor Jeep” as the soundtrack to P.D. Rapaport’s ghost hunt: “Hoboken,” “My Favorite Place,” “A Message to You, Rudy,” and “Boom Wah Dis.”
Speaking of the serialized absurdity: I had the surname Rapaport in mind for my mysterious letter-writer for various irrelevant reasons, but I typed initials “P.D.” without knowing why, and it was only after I pressed send on the email the other week that I realized I was thinking of P.D. Eastman, the author of what I’d wager most adults think of as the worst of the Dr. Seuss books. Eastman, who actually is not Dr. Seuss, wrote and illustrated the atrocious “Go, Dog, Go!” and the stultifying “Are You My Mother?” and published them with Random House’s Beginner Books imprint, which put a Cat in the Hat logo on their covers. That Cat in the Hat logo always confused me, and though I suppose I knew that “Go, Dog, Go!” was not by Dr. Seuss, it seemed like it sort of was? As it turns out, I wasn’t that far off: P.D. Eastman served under Dr. Seuss in the Army, and Seuss later recruited Eastman to write for Beginner Books, so it’s not entirely unfair to blame Seuss for “Go, Dog, Go!” which, I should say, I have been reading about three times a day for the past two months, which might explain my feelings. Seriously, I would rather read “Hop on Pop” eight times in a row than read “Go, Dog, Go!” even once. Even if you put aside the twisted romance between the pink dog and the yellow dog, which others have explored, the language of “Go, Dog, Go!” has none of the pleasure of “Hop on Pop.” “Hop on Pop” just feels good on the tongue. You can read it fast, you can read it slow, you can read it in the Bullwinkle voice you use for Elephant from the Elephant & Piggie books. “Go, Dog, Go!” comes out in only one register, and it’s a boring register. Also, the dog party? The big dog party? Am I wrong, or is it all boy dogs? Big dogs, little dogs, red dogs, blue dogs, yes, they’re all at the dog party. Girl dogs? Doesn’t look like it! Anyhow, I just want to clarify that while the name P.D. Rapaport may appear to the astute reader to be a reference to P.D. Eastman, it’s inadvertent, and I regret it.
Ever wonder what the worst of the late 90s/early 2000s TRL-era music videos was? I did, and I now have the answer: It’s the video for “One Week,” which was at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 for one week in 1998. I do not advise you to watch it, but if you must, here it is.
Remember the Misfits covers? Simpler times. Here’s another Misfits cover.
That’s all I’ve got.