Garcia's Heart (13 page)

So Patrick had the option of continuing to do research in his university–waiting for his turn on the machine to do the necessary functional
MRI
studies, dealing with the infighting in a department where his career was on a death watch, scrambling for grants and hanging on–or, as Marc-André said after the food arrived, he could establish his own company and control everything. Marc-André gave Patrick what he now knew was a standard business-school presentation: a neo-Marxist analysis delivered over lunch in an expensive Thai restaurant. And during this particular Marxist-Thai fusion meal, Marc-André reminded Patrick that he did not own the means of production, that he would be a worker forever crouched in the great field of science. To remain in that state required Patrick to accept a false consciousness. Patrick didn't know Marc-André at this time, so he was very impressed.

It didn't turn out to be that simple. In resigning his position at the university and founding Neuronaut, Patrick discovered that he'd traded the collared tensions of an academic department for the open warfare of a lawsuit, where, in the university's deposition, he was portrayed as little more than a not-yet-tenured thief. The judge saw it differently.

Now, he was rich.

It turned out that Patrick had set his sail at high, high tide. Neuronaut went public with an initial offering whose success stunned even the
MBA
s. He had become a salesman, explaining the technique in terms that anyone with ambition and a chequebook could understand. He spent a disorienting season in countless meetings, luring Jeremy Bancroft away from another biotech start-up to act as Neuronaut's first
CEO
, poaching psychometricians from various psychology departments, and trying to set up the first free-standing functional brain-imaging centre in the United States, all accompanied by the beep, beep, beeping of the Brinks truck backing up to the door. And it wasn't like he'd been doing poorly before; it's just that what he made as a junior faculty member at a prestigious university was less than what now periodically fell out of the crevices of his sofa. He was rich enough that he was uncertain of his worth at any one time. For Patrick, wealth was best understood in terms of degrees of freedom. He was free to pay his team of intellectual property lawyers. He was free to have his own laboratory. He was free to go.

Personally, it had been necessary to retool. Becoming suddenly wealthy in America was a consciousness-raising experience, perhaps inferior only to becoming famous or publicly battling cancer, and Patrick recognized the responsibilities that went along with this newfound status. He stepped away from rental life in Brookline with the speed of an evacuee, and anyone who wanted the furniture remnants of that life was welcome to it. He took his computer and his books and some clothes and, like switching sectors in post-World War
II
Berlin, he migrated over to a new life. He purchased a condo in Kendall Square, appreciating the irony of living in a brand spanking new building constructed
to look like a period terra cotta-clad warehouse converted into condos.

“Is this Chicago style?” guests would ask as they admired the prominent overhang through one of the two smaller double-hung sash Chicago-style windows.

“You have a good eye,” he would reply, handing them a glass of Pinot Noir that ached, ached.

He thought that he liked his apartment. The Chicago style was very popular. Minimalist, modern, American. Ornament subordinated to an overall structural theme. Yes, he was drawn to this terra cotta cliffside, its fraudulent history, its height.

A lifestyle change followed his new address. He wanted simplicity, he told himself as he cycled to work on a bike that cost more than his first year at the provincially subsidized medical school he had attended. He owned a black Saab 9-5–the regimental sedan of the technocrati–that slept in the caverns of a garage under the condo, but he didn't drive it. Simplicity. He had space now, beautiful space. He took off his shoes so as not to hear footsteps like mortar rounds sounding off the cherry-wood floors in the main room. The ceilings were high and the windows big enough, and the only outside disturbance to his peace was the occasional rimshot of birds meeting their terminal reflections.

The apartment was empty for the longest time until Heather convinced him to have it decorated, convinced him to let her “prepare” the rooms. Now his furniture was sculpture, his rugs tapestries, and his kitchen an anteroom to the larger cathedral of asceticism. He would have liked it to stay museum-bare, gallery-bare. When guests nodded admiringly at the furniture, he could still tell them of his misgiving about certain pieces, his curatorial restlessness. They appreciated it.

It could be said that everything had gone well, that having no limitations and becoming wealthy had made him feel renewed and re-energized but he found he couldn't shake a sense of exhaustion. He attributed it to holdover fatigue, a lingering after-effect of the petty, narcissistic atmosphere of academia, and then, over time, he reasoned it was the stress of starting a business and that eventually he'd feel that energy again, that unfettered curiosity amped up by entrepreneurial ambition. But he felt nothing other than nagged by his partners, even Bancroft. He felt lost.

In the last year his insomnia had worsened. He woke up earlier and yet was always tired. Typical stuff. It wasn't difficult to see what was going on. He had the chance to speak to a psychotherapist but really, how can you be talked out of a serotonin problem? A physical thing, a serotonin thing. He decided on the pharmaceuticals because they made the most sense to him. And he had felt a little better recently, more able to face people at the office and able to come to Den Haag. Perhaps the war crimes trial of a friend in the middle of a Den Haag autumn was too stern a test for any medication. It made him feel like a test pilot, brave and doomed, his fate only partly under his control;
let's see what this baby can do. Take before meals.

But this helped–here, walking on a Den Haag sidewalk with the García sisters and Paul, he felt something. Maybe it was the aggravation of their questions. Or just strolling in the warm Dutch November twilight. His face hurt, drooped with pain, but he felt better. Maybe it was the punch, Roberto's gift of a mini-lobotomy. But more probably, it was the Garcías. Getting pissed off, after all, was a very human emotion.

Across Johan de Wittlaan, Patrick heard voices rise and then the thud of a ball being struck. People in a park. A makeshift
playing field, the grass a dull yellow under the streetlights. Nothing unusual about a game of six-a-side soccer, except that the players were speaking Spanish and one of them, now on the ball, was Roberto. Patrick didn't say anything to Celia or Nina, instead slowing his pace, falling behind to watch. One of the men on the sideline was a white-haired man whom Patrick recognized as the union organizer from San Pedro Sula. He had been on the witness stand earlier in the day. People shouted and laughed, they knew each other, they were Hondurans. So this was where they went after the trial, Patrick thought, suddenly alarmed at Roberto's recklessness for playing on a field with some of his father's accusers. His victims. Roberto chipped the ball ahead and another man, in his twenties, judging from his pace, latched onto the lofted pass and nudged it between the two shoes that served as goalposts. Half the players lifted their arms and gave a shout and Celia and Nina looked over. They must have seen Roberto too, but they said nothing, and walked on.

The Garcías told him they were staying at a
pension
a few blocks down the road from the strip of hotels where the Metropole stood. It hadn't occurred to Patrick that Den Haag continued past the Metropole, and the thought of houses and pets and people cooking food and scratching themselves out there was slightly unsettling. Once at the Metropole, they idled on the sidewalk for a while, the events of the day and ten years of silences weighing on them. Patrick didn't want to go back to the hotel room. He didn't want to be alone, a realization that would make anyone lonelier, more panicky. He offered to get some milk from room service for Paul if they wanted to come up. They agreed to come in, still wary, looking up at the towering Metropole as though they had
been asked to scale the facade. Patrick asked Celia if she wanted him to carry Paul, and after she paused, he qualified the offer by saying she must be tired. Celia then passed Paul over, slowly, as if to allow maximum time for the child to react to this stranger. But there was no eruption. Paul settled into Patrick's arms and they carried on through the revolving doors. They walked unaccosted through the lobby, the Dutch respectful of what they assumed must be a sleeping child and so he was spared the frantic clerk waving him down as they crossed to the bank of elevators. The child was light in his arms. His brown eyes studied Patrick, and he tilted his head from side to side to survey the swollen eye and compare it to its unpunched cousin. Patrick could only guess at what the boy saw, the before-and-after effect.

Despite the scrutiny and the headache worsening with exertion, Patrick felt taller, stronger. He considered that carrying Paul, carrying any child, must confer an ennobling effect. He imagined he skulked less with the child in his arms. With a child, he was not a man with a bruised and beaten face but simply a man carrying a child. Anyone would look at them and surmise that Patrick got this bruise defending the boy, rescuing him. Paul could be his son. Yes, Patrick would give his life for him. The small boy touched the swollen ridge of Patrick's cheekbone, not a ridge any more but a hillock inflating into a butte, and Patrick tried not to wince, not to react in any way that would alarm the child. He couldn't help but wonder who Paul's father was. He saw only Celia in the boy.

In the panelled mirrors of the elevator, Patrick was presented with multiple views of his face that he felt striking him like a second punch. No discoloration in the yellow light but the entire right side looked deformed, a stuck-on prosthesis
from a bad movie. He tried to turn away from reflections of himself, but it was impossible.

When they got to the room, everyone spent a few respectful minutes in front of the view of Den Haag from sixteen floors up. The streetlights were on, and a half-galaxy of stars scattered on the flood plain until they were extinguished by the North Sea. From her bag, Celia extracted plastic bags of sandwiches and carrot sticks, passing them out to Nina and Paul, who accepted them wordlessly. Patrick called room service for milk and they sat down. Paul climbed onto the bed with a sandwich clamped in his mouth.

After finishing his meal, Paul began bouncing tentatively on the mattress, negotiating the surface like an astronaut. The García sisters looked lost, and the room seemed smaller to Patrick than it had earlier that morning. Nina, sworn enemy of silences, picked up the remote and snapped the television on. Whatever pleasure he had in inviting them up dissolved into the admission that having them there felt like nothing more than an embarrassing foray into nostalgia, memory burdened with need. But it was human need, he thought, as Paul bounced beside his aunt and Celia stared out into the twilight, and he did need the Garcías now, as much as he had needed them then.

 

SIX

That first day Patrick showed up at Le Dépanneur Mondial, García was waiting for him at the front door. He unlocked it and, after letting Patrick in, gave him a sheet listing all the tasks his young ward would do that day. It was a contract. Patrick was to read it and García waited until it was signed. They went first to the back alley where Patrick whitewashed over the aborted spray-painted message. He swept and then scrubbed the aisles. He replaced light bulbs and washed counters. García showed him how to “face” items on a shelf of canned goods and then told him to do the whole store. This was before nine. Once the Dépanneur Mondial opened, customers began to drift in, and by mid-morning there was a constant crowd. Some people sat at one of the two small tables the Garcías had set up near the newsstand at the front of the store, drinking concentrated coffee from small cups and reading their papers. Many were people who Patrick recognized from other deps, new customers here now, thumbing the fresh produce and chatting to Marta García, who again and again
lifted her eyes to keep track of Patrick, as she would do throughout the day.

At eleven that first morning, Roberto backed through the front door, pulling a dolly piled high with boxes. He was a year older than Patrick but clearly a different species: much taller and already growing a moustache that made him appear even more like his father. He wheeled the dolly around with a professional indifference to the safety of others, purposely weaving toward Patrick to make him jump out of the way. Not a word of acknowledgement, which told Patrick that Roberto must have known why he was there, what he'd done to his father's store, Roberto's store. Patrick's fists clenched as he passed, but nothing happened. The door chimes sounded again and this time it was a young woman, carrying another box of what looked like bananas. The young woman leaned over the counter to kiss her mother. Roberto shouted something in Spanish to his father, who turned to Patrick.