Eureka (6 page)

Otis said nothing and did nothing but stare ahead at a framed diploma on the wall.

“How old
are
you, by the way?” Tonganoxie asked.

“Fifty-nine.”

“When will you be sixty?”

“In a couple of weeks or so.”

“Eureka, that’s it. You’re now fifty-nine-year-old Otis Halstead, and soon you’re going to be sixty-year-old Otis Halstead. And you hate that. At Johns Hopkins, I once treated a guy—he was a very famous Pulitzer Prize—winning newspaper editor—who was so upset about turning sixty that he wouldn’t come out from under the covers the morning of his sixtieth birthday. He stayed in his bed and under those covers for forty-seven days. So, if it’s approaching sixty that’s triggered all of this, know for a fact that you’re not the only one. And it’s perfectly normal—almost.”

Otis shook his head once and kept staring at the wall.

Tonganoxie let the silence lie for a good thirty seconds. Then he said, “All right, sir. I’m not bald, and I’m not sixty, but I do have my Jeeps. So I have some understanding, on a personal as well as a professional level, about what’s going on—or
may
be going on. On, then, to something else. I understand you’re big in the insurance business?”

Otis, desperate and delighted to move on, confessed that to be the fact.

“I’ll bet you hate it, right, Otis? I’ll call you Otis, you call me Russ.”

“Okay, Russ. No, I don’t hate it,” said Otis.

“One of the most common causes of depression and suicide among aging men, particularly the successful ones, is that they hate their jobs. They’ve worked their asses off to get to the top, and once they get there, they hate it. But they can’t say anything about it because it doesn’t sound right. How can somebody be unhappy with being successful? It’s tough, it’s what I’ve spent the last several years studying. Again, I’ve had my own problems in this area, too. Being a shrink—don’t tell Gidney I said that— isn’t all peaches and cream every day, either. How many men your age do you know who are truly happy, Otis?”

When Otis failed to answer, Tonganoxie said, “I’ll bet it’s damned few. Isn’t that a terrible thing? I sure as hell think it is.”

Otis still had nothing to say.

Tonganoxie grabbed from his desk what looked like a clipping out of a magazine. “I assume you know who Anthony Hopkins is? The famous and great and extremely successful British actor? Somebody just sent me this the other day. Quote: ‘I can’t take it anymore … I have wasted my life. To hell with this stupid show business, this ridiculous showbiz, this futile wasteful life. I look back and see a desert wasteland. After thirty-five years I look back and cringe with embarrassment and say to myself: How could you have done that? I’ve done one or two good films and some bad films. It was a complete waste of time.’ End quote. Hopkins is sixty years old. Now, that’s really sad.”

Otis, who had particularly admired Hopkins in
The Remains of the Day
, agreed that it was really sad.

“With you, Otis, it could also be about guilt,” Tonganoxie said. “You feel guilty about being in the insurance business, right?”

“Guilty? Why in the hell should I feel guilty?”

“Aren’t insurance companies really bloodsucking vultures who live off the tragedies and fears of the rest of us? Without plane crashes and fires and floods and hurricanes and heart attacks, where would you be? You must feel guilty for getting rich off the fears and tears of others. But you haven’t got the guts to quit, so you’ve gone out and bought a lot of silly little-boy things.”

Otis was furious. He stood up. “I’ve got better things to do with my time that having some long-haired jerk in a Packers sweatshirt mouth off about things he doesn’t know a damned thing about. If I’m a bloodsucker, you’re a brainsucker. Good day and go fuck-er yourself, Russ.”

“Good day and go fuck-er
yourself,”
Tonganoxie said with a huge smile. He did not stand up.

“Maybe it’s only boring,” he said as Otis arrived at the door. “All those numbers and risk analyses—reports to read, financial statements to ponder, meetings to conduct. Boring, boring, boring. You’re bored. That’s all it is. Not hate but boredom. More common among CEOs, even, than motorcycle fetishes.”

Otis opened the door and screamed back at Tonganoxie, “Motor
scooter
, asshole!”

“On second thought, Otis, maybe you’re nothing but a classic No Need Monster—”

Otis slammed the door hard behind him as he left.

OUT IN THE
main hallway, there stood good Bob Gidney, trying to look like he was supposed to be there.

“Well, that didn’t take long,” Bob said to Otis.

“The man’s an idiot,” Otis said, still moving. “Did you know he owned four Jeeps? Nobody owns four Jeeps except the U.S. Army.”

Bob, walking along with Otis, said, “He insulted you, right?”

“You’re damned right he did.”

“He always does that. What did he say?”

“He said successful people are depressed, and insurance people like me are bloodsucking vultures who feed on the tragedies of humankind. He said I should and do feel guilty about it. Or maybe I’m just bored. Or that I hate being almost sixty and bald. He’s an asshole. He’s the one who needs help.”

Bob strode alongside Otis out the front door, down the mansion’s steps toward Otis’s Explorer, parked in a small graveled parking lot.

“That’s Russ’s technique—a form of eyeball-to-eyeball shock treatment, he calls it,” Bob said. “He first pisses off the patient and then waits for him to think about it awhile, to decide he might be right after all, and then to call for another appointment to continue the discussion.”

“He’d better not hold his breath for
my
call,” Otis said, jumping into the Explorer and slamming the door with gusto. Then he rolled down the window and asked Bob, “Do you know a lot about Archimedes? The Greek who first said ‘Eureka’?”

“All I know is that he was supposedly stepping into his bath with the king’s crown. He put the crown down in the water with him and made a discovery about the weight of gold being lighter than silver. Something like that. Also, late in his life, he helped invent geometry, I think. A Roman soldier killed him. Maybe for inventing geometry, who knows. What brought that up?”

Otis didn’t answer. He put the Explorer in gear. “What’s a No Need Monster?”

“It’s a very unprofessional nickname Tonganoxie and his fellow experts have for a particular type of depressed male.”

Otis rolled up the window and gunned the engine. Bob Gidney waved goodbye.

The Explorer didn’t move. Otis put the window back down and said, “Give me a thirty-second definition.”

Bob said, “Ambitious young married man throws himself completely into his job so he can be a huge success, provide for his family. Wife and children are forced to make lives without him because he’s never there. Then, sometime in his late forties or early fifties, the man arrives at the top, turns around to have a family life, and discovers that nobody needs him for anything except as a provider. That turns him into a depressed monster of some kind—there are several different varieties—”

Otis, without gunning the engine, eased the Explorer away at a very slow speed.

BACK AT THE
clinic, Tonganoxie was still thinking about Otis Halstead.

Asshole, He called me an asshole. Maybe so
—
maybe right now I am. Of course, in the world of us shrinks, there is no one definition for asshole
.

Russ Tonganoxie had come to Kansas alone, having left the second of two former wives and three children—two from his first marriage, one from the second—back on the East Coast in Baltimore and a Boston suburb. He had come here to the middle of nowhere mostly for professional reasons, because Ashland had offered him a deal he couldn’t refuse. But on a personal level, there were problems. He had never really lived by himself, and he was already weary of the unsettling silence that greeted him at his Kansas door and at the refrigerator, at the dinner table, in the backyard, in the bathroom—in the bedroom.

All he had were his Jeeps. He kept them in the garage of his 1950s one-story brick rambler in the middle of an acre of flatland
in southwest Eureka. There was the new Wrangler, which he drove to and from the clinic and around town. It was a special Sahara edition—the exterior color was officially called desert sand; the interior was camel. There was also an olive-drab original, made in 1942 in Toledo, Ohio, by Willys-Overland; it had spent World War II at Fort Benning in Georgia. The other two were a flashy red Jeepster convertible, from the late forties, and a little red-white-and-blue right-hand-drive postal Jeep from the 1960s.

Yes
, he thought after Otis left, /
have my wheels, too. But not much more than that right now except for some interesting patients. First there was the number two man at the large insurance company who hates his life, and here, now, comes his boss, who seems to hate
his
even more.

HE ISSUE WAS
whether KCF&C should launch a special insurance for computer-dependent businesses and industries. Otis had assigned a task force under Pete Wetmore to study the risks and feasibility of entering this new line. There was to be a full report by this afternoon.

So at 2:35, within thirty minutes after he returned from Ashland Clinic, Otis began the meeting with Pete in the executive conference room on the top floor high above downtown and all of Eureka. The fourteen-story KCF&C Building had long dominated the Eureka skyline. The building’s ornate beige brick structure was the landmark toward which all eyes, traffic, and commerce moved.

Eureka was the fourth largest city in Kansas—behind Wichita, Kansas City, and Topeka. Its seventy-three thousand people in the middle of the state were a mix of professors and students at Central Kansas State College; farm boys and girls who worked at various so-called light-industry plants that did everything from make fertilizer to assemble small jitney-style buses for airport use; and well-educated white-collar folks who ran and manned KCF&C, the banks, and several sizable accounting
and law firms. Ninety percent of the population was white, and 80 percent of the adults had at least a high school education. The public schools were considered among the best in the state, as were the police, the welfare system, the libraries, the health care facilities, and most everything else. Eureka, in other words, lived up to its name on most counts. And it was always easy to find, sitting in the middle of the flat prairie without even a small hill for twenty-five miles in any direction.

Mush. His and Sally’s word for Pete. That was all Otis, sitting here atop Eureka, could think of as Pete talked. Mush. The man
is
mush, his mind is mush. What in the hell is this company going to do when I retire? How in the hell can this piece of mush take over the company?

Otis looked out the window to the western reaches of Eureka and beyond. Sometimes, recently, on days when he was feeling warm and well about his BB gun and toy fire truck and Cushman Pacemaker, Otis swore he could see the Grand Canyon or maybe Los Angeles, way, way out there somewhere.

Right now he swore those were the Rockies, west of Denver, that he saw on the clear blue horizon. And hey, isn’t that Pagosa Springs, home of the Red Ryder museum, out there?

Pete mushed on and on: “The basis for the premise is that computers sometimes malperform or, in computer language, crash. Computer crashes can cause severe business harm and loss to a particular firm or company. A brokerage firm unable to process its stock transactions could lose millions of dollars. An airline reservation and scheduling system presents similar downside potential. So could other computer-dependent companies, of which there are an increasing number. The question is whether the rewards for us entering the field to provide computer crash insurance would outweigh the risk, and at this point, confirming data is not available. Our company has never in its history
been reluctant to see new horizons, to chart new courses, to enter new and challenging fields.”

Mush, mush, mush.

KCF&C was almost as much a part of Kansas as the sunflower—the flower and the song—and “Home on the Range,” the official state song. The company had been founded as a cooperative in the late 1880s by several new-immigrant German farm families, most of them Mennonites. They needed protection from fire, pestilence, and the extremes of central Kansas weather for their Turkey Red wheat crops as well as their homes, implements, livestock, and other personal possessions. In the 1920s KCF&C became a mutual insurance company, with agents and farm customers all over Kansas, and then, after World War II, it reinvented itself again as a standard stockholder-owned corporation. When Otis joined the company in 1968, it had spread its reach to most of the Midwest, including both Kansas City and Chicago, where it sold auto as well as homeowners’ and other kinds of insurance. Working sometimes around the clock and traveling anywhere and everywhere there was a client or a deal, Otis had expanded it further into a major national company. Was it now time to expand into computer crash insurance?