The Enthusiast (25 page)

“Bob DeBonis. I don't think they've made any progress with him. I hope yours works out, though.”

“Thanks,” I said, and stood up to go. “I met someone who said to say hello to you.”

I gave him the ex–vice president's regards. Patrick rolled his eyes. “Him and the mad bomber,” he said. “Boy, can you pick 'em.”

I
flew overnight to Houston, rented an Accent, and drove to the Starling Center for Rehabilitation, a tan hacienda in a medical complex shaded by carob trees whose dry pods crackled underfoot. I'd worried about finding a locked ward, but the lobby looked like the conversation area of a savings and loan. There were ten patients there, one talking to himself in a speeding whisper and another tearing page after page from a magazine, but most of them quietly watching TV. A few were paired with staff people. The uniform was a peach polo shirt with a picture of a starling poised for flight.

I was almost at the desk when a woman in her sixties rushed up to me, grabbed my arm, and thrust her baffled face close to mine. Terrible breath poured from her mouth as she said, “
Where's my Ted
?”

A polo-shirt woman came over, eased my forearm free, and said, “I don't think he knows that, Grace. I'll tell you what, let's have a seat over here with Frances.” As she led Grace away she gave me a smile that said, “You know how it is.” I wanted to have no idea how it was. I told the guy at the desk I was there to see Barney, and he said to try the patio.

He was out there, whispering to himself in a wheelchair under a pepper tree, in a floppy tennis hat, shorts, and a T-shirt from the dads' club of Pearl and Michael's school. His hands were on his knees, palms up and fingers fluttering. There were older patients on either side of him, snoozing in the sun. When he saw me he smiled, said, “Henry!” rose halfway out of the wheelchair, and fell back in. His fractures were healing but the brain injury had screwed up his balance and he was relearning how to walk. “Is sister here?”

“Patti? No, she had to work. But Dad is coming.”

He beamed at me. “That's wonderful.”

A polo-shirt guy came out and said it was time for lunch. I wheeled Barney into a dining room of round Formica tables, with patients' shaky artwork on the walls. Over tomato soup the patient across from us asked if we were brothers. “I can always tell if people are brothers,” she said, “but I need to see them both.”

“Dad!” Barney said. I looked up and saw my father walking toward us in another perfect suit, this one blue. “That's terrific,” Barney said, “that we're all staying here.”

“I know,” Dad said, squeezing Barney's shoulder. “It worked out great.”

After lunch we took Barney to physical therapy, left him with the trainer, and sat down outside. “I brought him this,” Dad said. “I think it might help.”

He handed me a spiral-bound datebook with a smiling
picture of himself on the cover and a time-management tip from him on every page. I looked from the picture to the real dad in front of me, and was about to ask him why he would give a schedule book to someone whose schedule had been obliterated, when he misread my look and said, “Oh, I brought one for you too. It's in the car.”

 

W
e took Barney to his room, where the furniture was white and the walls powder blue. Every day an attendant pinned up a flyer with Barney's name and age, the date, where he was, what had happened to him, and seasonal clip art of people throwing footballs and raking leaves.

Dad and Barney sat at the desk with the datebook open in front of them. “Okay,” Dad said, “what's something you might have to do this afternoon?”

“Go to a meeting,” Barney said.

“Okay. So you write that in there.”

Barney scrawled
meeting
in the 3:00
P.M.
slot. “We're going to have a country,” he said. “We have some farmers coming, and some horseshoe guys.”

“Blacksmiths?” Dad said.

“Yes,” Barney said. “So we get liberty. And we wear wigs in the room.” Next to
meeting
he started a jagged drawing of a standing man. “We have people coming in boats from their old countries, because God is too strict. God is scaring the kids. That's one of the things, for our meeting.”

“To take up,” Dad said.

“Yeah.”

“So we make that a bullet item.”

Dad pointed to where the bullet items went. Barney nodded but kept drawing the man, who was holding a sledgehammer
now. “It doesn't matter how late we stay up,” he said. “We have to finish. And then we'll all stand in line and sign it. Then we'll take questions, if anyone has questions.”

A polo-shirt woman came to the door. “Barney,” she said, “it's almost three o'clock. Time for that meeting.”

 

T
he meeting was a memory class. Barney's fellow students were a guy who'd gone through a windshield, a woman who'd been without oxygen to her brain for ten minutes after a heart attack, a guy who'd crashed his motorcycle, a guy who'd confused his wife's once-a-day pills with his three-a-days, and a woman who'd almost drowned.

“Who had ‘meeting' in their book for today?” the teacher asked.

Barney and the half-drowned woman held their datebooks up. The motorcycle guy giggled, clapped, and said, “All right, Barney! All right, Celeste!”

Paula looked at Barney's book. “‘Meeting,' good, and that's a nice drawing,” she said. “Who is that?”

Barney stared at the drawing. Dad whispered, “Blacksmith.”

“Sshh,” Barney said to Dad. “He's the village smithy,” he told Paula. “His funding required him to hammer all day. His arms were so big from using the hammer that he didn't even need the hammer anymore. He said, ‘Get that hammer out of here. That hammer's gonna be the death of me.'”

“All
right
, Barney!” the motorcycle guy said.

 

D
ad and I had dinner at his hotel, a fancy one near Herrman Park. We didn't talk about Barney. I told him about the strange
animals at Species Showcase and he told me about helping a brass quintet in Seattle set long-term goals. In the morning we ate toaster waffles and banana chunks with Barney, and then Dad said, “I'd better get going. I have a thing in Minnesota.”

We wheeled Barney to the lobby. “This is all good, what's happening,” Dad said.

“Yeah?” Barney said.

“Definitely. You're making a lot of progress.”

“Sometimes there's nothing for a while,” Barney said, “and we'll attack it another way.”

“Sure,” Dad said. “You need to approach it freshly.”

“You used to give people extensions for that,” Barney said.

“Like for the ailerons.”

“I did when I could,” Dad said. “See, you remember that. Your memory's good.”

“Yeah,” Barney said.

Dad leaned down to hug him and said, “You can have all the extensions you need. You just take your time.”

“Okay. Thank you very much,” Barney said.

Dad stood up, clapped my shoulder, and went out the door. Barney watched him walk to his car and said, “I think he's got a lot weighing on him now.”

 

T
he relatives talked on the phone all the time. What did the specialist say, no, his exact words, where are we on activities of daily living, did the physical therapy lady look happy? The specialist's exact words were “You know those weird thoughts you have just before you fall asleep, a whole situation you think is real, and then you realize it isn't as you're going under? That's where your brother is all the time.”

I could see that when I sat with Barney, his bewilderment
forcing his eyes a little farther back into his face each time I visited. I couldn't take it for long, and a half-hour errand was a luxury vacation—gum and underwear at Target, a hospital cafeteria with salt-flavored gravy on everything—but then I'd hurry back to him, and when the visit was over I couldn't stand to leave. I split the difference by crying in the rent-a-car before driving to the airport, my shoulders shaking limp in a broad cross-section of the American rental fleet as the months went by. I'd come back as soon as I could, and when Barney was at music therapy I'd make business calls from the William P. Starling Courtyard, where people who didn't know where they were would draw close to me and nod at what I was saying to Walter Denise, just to have something to agree with.

 

T
he flyers in Barney's room were illustrated with snowmen now, and he'd lost another five pounds he couldn't spare. As I wheeled him out of memory class he talked to me from the side of his mouth, conspiring: “I'll give you five bucks if you get me out of here.”

I said, “Barney, you're joking.”

“Yeah, you don't have to get me out of here. It's okay.”

“No, I mean you're making jokes now. I think that's good.”

“It makes Michael less nervous,” he said. “It makes Henry less nervous.”

When we got to his room the mail was there, drawings from Pearl and Michael and a sixteen-page article, “Neurotrophic Improvement of Synaptic Transmission,” by Barnard Bay, University of Kansas, and Parmalit Singh, Johns Hopkins, with a handwritten note that said, “Barney, here's our offprint, as promised. I enjoyed our phone call. I can tell you're knitting cells together in the hippocampus a mile a minute. I'm sure we
will be yelling at one another about quantifying data before the snows melt. Fondest regards, Pat.”

Barney flipped through the article, whispering over the charts and tables. When he finished he wheeled himself to the door and said, “I have to go downstairs now. We're presenting this.”

“Wait,” I said. “That's not what we're doing now.”

“I have to go,” he said, trying to wheel past me.

“We're in Houston, Barney,” I said, jumping to block the wheelchair. He had a nice Paralympics feint going. “We're at the rehab place.” I jumped too hard and knocked into the doorjamb.

A polo-shirt guy, one of the bigger ones, came in and said, “How are we doing here?”

“People are waiting!” Barney said, standing out of the wheelchair and grabbing my arm.

“Okay, you know what, that's not appropriate,” the polo-shirt guy said. “Let's get you settled down here.” He tried to ease Barney into the wheelchair, but Barney pushed him away, knocking over a jar of jellybeans from a well-wisher at Stanford. When a second polo-shirt guy came in, Barney gave up and fell into the wheelchair, out of breath.

“How we doing, big guy?” the second one said. “Little better?”

“Yeah,” Barney said.

The first one waved me into the hall and closed the door to the room. “This isn't that unusual of a thing,” he said. “They might need to dial his medication a little. Probably the best thing is if you come in tomorrow.”

“I have to go home tonight,” I said. I had a Fun Fare.

I got in the car and drove toward the airport, but a few blocks before I got there I pulled into the parking lot of a liquor
store. It was dusk, the air full of neon, jet fumes, and rippling heat waves.

I'd promised Patti, Mom, and Deirdre that I'd call them, but I called Information instead and asked for Parmalit Singh in Baltimore. When he answered I introduced myself and thanked him for sending the article. “It meant a lot to him,” I said.

“No, of course,” he said, in a mild accent, South Asia giving way to Eastern Shore. “He should see his work. He should reap the fruits. How is he responding?”

“Really well,” I said. “I think he'll be out of there soon.”

“That's terrific. Please say hello for me, will you?”

“Sure. Okay. I won't keep you.”

“No, that's fine,” he said. “It's good to get the news.”

I pressed the phone harder to my ear. I could hear the sounds of his house in the background, a string quartet on the stereo and a little kid laughing. It was the opposite of where I was: warm light on wooden floors in some University Park or Hill or Commons. I could even hear the sounds outside his window, a rough-engined car downshifting and college kids laughing on their way somewhere.

Actually, I couldn't hear any of that. I'd heard only his voice, and the silence after his polite goodnight. My brain, like my brother's, leapt to fill in the spaces.

 

I
n February Barney went home to Lawrence. He'd been there three weeks when I visited, landing late in the morning and renting a Fit. The sun glared like camera flashes on six inches of snow, and a fresh blizzard was expected that night.

Deirdre let me in and gave me limited neck and shoulder. She looked okay, but her forbearing smile was worn to nothing.

Barney was in the living room, sitting on the couch in his
grays and browns. He'd gained a few pounds back and replaced the wheelchair with a walking stick. Just after I got there the kids came home from school, hugged me, and then sat on the couch with Barney, who pulled them close and said, “What are you working on?”

“Atoms,” Michael said, opening his binder to show Barney his homework.

“That's very good,” Barney said. “Henry, look at this.” He held up Michael's drawing of an “Our Friend the Atom” atom, with particles making hood-ornament ovals around the nucleus.

“I was in the desert for this,” Barney told Michael. “In New Mexico. I couldn't tell you and Pearl what I was doing there. I apologize for that. They said, ‘Go to the hotel in Santa Fe and someone will get in touch with you, but don't tell anyone what you're doing. Tell them you're there for your health. For the desert air.'

“I waited for three days and then a Jeep came for me. The driver said, ‘What are you guys doing out there?' I told him we were from the USO. I said we were writing music for the soldiers. The driver said”—Barney's face lit up—“‘You passed, buddy! You passed the test!'

“But now we're out there and we never stop working. The president keeps calling up to ask how it's going. People say we're killing people but we're not. We're saving them. It's called Little Boy but it's not a real little boy, so don't worry, okay? Pearl?”