The Enthusiast (26 page)

“Okay,” Pearl said.

He kissed her head and pulled them both closer. The kids were nervous now, stuck on the couch with the broken national memory, but in the months since his injury they'd turned the humoring skills of children everywhere into superpowers.

“When we go out there, I'm with a guy next to me,” Bar
ney said. “I go, ‘We're playing God here. We're playing Trinity.' He goes, ‘Yeah, and Trinity's unbeaten.' He's always kidding. And then we watched it with sunglasses. We said, ‘We're like Shiva, because we have all the arms now.'” He pointed across the room. “There.”

He watched the explosion, the cloud rising and the glare speeding over the sand. The dread on his face, a forecast of lifelong haunting, was everything it would have been.

Deirdre, in the doorway, said, “Barney?”

He looked up at her, New Mexico gone. The bomb had never happened. Decades of history relaxed. “Do you want to help with dinner?” she said.

“Sure.”

Deirdre ran the cooking the way Barney had before, asking him and the kids to measure tofu and barley. She and Pearl steered him away from knives and the stove. They'd stopped weighing the portions.

The next morning Barney had a visit from his lab colleague Ralph Dreher, a stubby guy in his fifties with giant eyebrows. He handed Barney a scientific paper and said, “This is pretty interesting, the alloantigen stuff. I'll come back with Dick in a few days and we'll talk about it.”

The doorbell rang again that afternoon, when Deirdre and Michael were at the store, Pearl was doing homework in the kitchen, and Barney was listening to a samba CD Dad had sent him. I opened the door to find a guy in his thirties holding an airport thriller and a book of crossword puzzles.

“Hi,” he said. “I just brought some things by for Dr. Bay to pass the time with. I thought I might say hi to him if it's a good time. Did I meet you before?”

“Yes,” I said. “Kind of.” He held the books out. I hesitated, then took them. I said, “This might not be a—”

“Who's here?” Barney said, coming up behind me with his cane.

“Hey, Dr. Bay. How are you doing?”

“I'm fine. How are you?”

“I'm good. Thank you. I don't know if you remember me. Last time we saw each other we had quite a discussion. I was lying down on your car. We were waiting for the security folks to come haul me out of there. They were busy with a dog problem right then, so you and I had a little time to talk.”

“I remember the dog,” Barney said. “It was a short-haired dog.”

“I don't think you saw it then. But you could have seen it another time. That could have easily happened.”

“Were you sick?”

“When? Oh, as far as the lying down. No, that was something where we had a difference of opinion. We don't need to talk about that now. I just wanted to say I hope you're feeling better. We're sorry about what happened. We've got people praying over you.” Barney looked up. “I mean—”

“Thank you for coming,” Pearl said from the doorway. “We have to ask you to leave now. My dad is tired.”

 

I
came back in April with Patti. The day we got there Deirdre said we could all go for a walk when the kids got home. “Barney can go half a mile now.”

“We could take a walk on Higuera Street,” Barney said. He still sat on the couch most of the day, but his voice was stronger and his fingers didn't twitch.

“That's in California, sweetie,” Deirdre said. “That's where you went to college. We're in Lawrence now.”

“Yeah.”

The radio was on low, tuned to the day's bad news. Patti said, “Can I turn this off?”

“Yes,” Barney said. “It's more depressing than a big dance number.”

Deirdre said, “Okay, sweetie, but a big dance number wouldn't be depressing.”

“Yes, it would,” Patti said. “They're completely depressing.”

“Sister's right,” Barney said.

“What's her name?” Deirdre said.

“Patti.”

“Good,” Deirdre said.

Barney picked up the TV remote, turned it on, and found an adventure show where people were rock-climbing. He said, “Henry and I did that, in Colorado. He almost dropped me but then he caught me.”

Deirdre, keeping her voice light, said, “Did you guys really do that, Henry?”

I looked at Barney. He shrugged. “Yes,” I said.

Deirdre said, “Jesus, Henry,” and walked out of the room.

Barney said, “What did Henry do?”

I followed her into the hall. She said, “I asked you this at the hospital. You said, ‘Gee, I don't know, Deirdre, Barney doesn't do things like that.'” Her eyes teared up.

I said, “Could we go back in there?”

In the living room I turned the TV off and said, “Barney, Deirdre wants to hear about the sports you did. Is that okay?”

“Yeah.”

I told them about his ice-climbing, desert-running, whitewater rafting and roller-skiing, the mountain-biking and bouldering we did together, my meeting with Freebird, the websites, the Ernie guy—everything I knew. When I finished Barney said, “Wow.”

Deirdre sat next to him on the couch and said, “Did you really do all those things?”

“I think so,” he said.

She put her arms around him. “You could have hurt yourself.”

“No, I
did
hurt myself.”

“Do you remember hurting yourself?”

He thought for a minute. “I think so.”

“That's good,” she said.

 

W
hen I went back in June, Barney was withdrawn, sitting on the couch, scowling at dust in a sunbeam, and rarely talking. “The neurologist says it's a normal phase,” Deirdre said.

I sat with him in silence most of the day. The party I wished to speak to wasn't available, and when he had been available I hadn't said a number of things I should have.

That night I called Gerald, whom I hadn't talked to since Species Showcase, and told him about Barney.

“God, I'm sorry,” he said. “How's he doing?”

“They think better. It's hard to tell right now.”

“Do you stay there or go back and forth?”

“Back and forth,” I said. “I'll be home tomorrow night.”

“Good. I'd like to see you. We're getting ready to move back to New York.”

“How come?”

“I miss my guys there. I think my coffee guy here disapproves of coffee.”

In the morning Barney still wasn't talking, but at noon, when Ralph Dreher came by with Dick Tagaki, another guy from the lab, Barney waved them in and said, “We can spread our stuff out here.”

They covered the coffee table with notes and printouts. “Dick's got a new angle on this motor neuron business,” Dreher said.

“I don't know if it's really an angle,” Tagaki said, handing Barney some papers. He was thirty, with a madras shirt and a brush cut. “This is with neuroepithelials from BG02.”

Barney read the papers, his lips moving over the phrases. When he finished he looked up and said, “This should tell us what to do next. It should tell us what to ask.”

“Sure,” Dreher said.

Barney looked lost and spoke in a whisper: “I don't know how.”

“You will, though,” Tagaki said. Barney shook his head.

It was quiet for a minute, and then Dreher said, “I think that's good for today.” Barney nodded and handed him the papers. When they left I followed them outside and asked how they thought he was doing.

“Better,” Tagaki said. “The recoveries on these take a long time.”

“I know there's no magic wand,” I said.

“No,” Dreher said. “That's what we're working on.”

I went back inside. Barney had fallen asleep, but when I came in he opened his eyes and said, “Henry. Hi.”

“Hi,” I said. “Do you want to take a nap?”

“No, that's okay. How are you doing? Are you okay?”

“I'm fine,” I said.

“That's good,” he said, and closed his eyes again. “I think we should cheer up, though. They have that available. I saw it.”

N
one of this goes,” Gerald said, pointing to the lizard enclosures and basking rocks. “Some people who care deeply about animals are coming by to get those later.”

He and Chloe and I were carrying boxes from their Mill Valley Victorian to a moving van. There were movers, but Gerald had paid them a little extra to let us help.

“Can you and Patti use this table?” Chloe said. “I can't see it in New York.” She was a head shorter than Gerald, beautiful in a moving-day sweatshirt. I said yes to the table and we wedged it into my Echo.

“Do you know what you'll be doing there?” I said.

Gerald shook his head. “Nothing with animals. The people at the Customs Service have gotten very worked up about how some of the animals are coming in. It's a good time for us to relocate.”

“There's always something,” Chloe said.

When the house was empty we sat on the front porch with beers while the movers closed up the truck. One of them, a guy the same age Gerald and I were when we met, brought his clipboard over for Gerald to sign.

“Okay, sir. We'll see you in New York,” the mover said.

“You taking Eighty?” Gerald said.

He nodded. “We should be there in four days.”

“No need to drive recklessly,” Gerald said. “We're visiting in Wisconsin on the way.”

“Okay,” the guy said. “Thanks.”

He turned to go. “I know a place in Nebraska,” I said, “for Indian tacos.”

“Oh, okay,” the mover said. “Let me write it down.”

I told him how to find the place near
Country Ways
. Then I gave him Danish pastries in Utah, a lady selling old shirts in Colorado, and a friendly bar with pool tables in Illinois.

“I would take note of these recommendations,” Gerald said.

“They're not available to the general public.”

The guy put a fresh piece of paper in his clipboard. I gave him hamburgers in Iowa, a lake in Ohio, funnel cake in Pennsylvania, comic books in New Jersey, and a Chinese musician playing the
erhu
by the fountain of an outlet mall in Nevada. I kept going, surprising myself, drawing freely from the list of places I'd thought I never wanted to see again. He filled four pages on both sides. When I finally stopped, he said, “Wow. Okay. Thanks. We'll try and hit some of these.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Actually, it's kind of a great drive.”

F
irst geese,” Deirdre said, spotting them in the rushes just before they took off in a loud
V
over the lake in Lawrence. It was afternoon and the kids were in school. Barney was walking on his own, although he sometimes had to put a hand on someone's shoulder.

“Do you remember the place in Houston?” I said.

“A little,” he said. “The food.” His real voice was almost back. “First rabbit.”

It stared at us for a second and then ran into the high grass. Barney looked at his watch, stopped walking, and said, “I have to go to the lab now. We're having a meeting.”

He was right this time. Deirdre dropped us off on campus, and Ralph Dreher and I helped Barney climb the stairs. “We're doing vascular endothelial for the HSCs,” Dreher said. Barney
nodded. He had to put both feet on each step and rest a minute before going up the next one. “The incubation's with mouse monoclonal nestin and then sheep anti-mouse.”

It took us ten minutes to get to the second floor, where Dick Tagaki and four other people were waiting in a conference room. Barney took the latest edition of Dad's datebook from his backpack, put it on the table, and sat down.

“We brain-injured the rats on Tuesday,” a young woman said. “We'll be injecting them tomorrow.”

Barney read a printout and spoke slowly. “We should look at which ones express O4 and which ones express GFAP. That's something…”

He looked at the young guy sitting across from him. A minute went by in silence, and then Barney looked down, saw the datebook, and opened it to two pages of taped-in Polaroids of people with their names written underneath. “That's something Lucas should look at,” he said. The guy nodded and made a note.

After an hour Barney got a headache, but Dreher told me that two months ago it had been twenty minutes. They were learning to catch the headaches faster, before they led to blackouts or throwing up.

We went downstairs, where Deirdre picked us up and took us to the house for dinner. Barney was back to cooking and Deirdre was weighing the portions again. After dinner, when I was about to go to the airport, Deirdre said, “Can you guys go get those presents?”

The kids ran out of the room and came back with two big packages they'd wrapped themselves, taping pieces of black-and-yellow paper together. “Like Aunt Patti's shirts,” Pearl said.

The presents were two emergency backpacks, like theirs,
with flashlights, meal bars, tick spray, and first aid kits. “These are wonderful,” I said. “Patti will love this.”

I got full waist-up off Deirdre and a ten-second hug from Barney that came close to spraining my shoulder. At the airport I stuffed Patti's backpack into my suitcase and carried mine on, thinking about how people kept giving me backpacks, a conspiracy to get me walking. It was a great gift idea, and I was moved, but the airlines were going through cutbacks, and I ate my emergency meal an hour out of Kansas City.

Y
esterday at breakfast Patti told me that her brother-in-law, Stewart, had decided to quit being a lawyer and become a smokejumper. “He's looking for a fire department that tracks into it,” she said.

“Stewart?” I said. “Has he ever done anything like that?”

“No. It just came to him. He says he wants to make a difference. His parents are flying in. My mom's losing her mind. Stephanie won't stop crying.”

“Stewart,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “Go, Stewart.”

After breakfast I walked her to the corner. It's been a year since I helped Gerald move, and eight months since Patti and I moved ourselves. Our house is on Duquesne, six blocks from downtown Clayton, ten blocks from Riddenhauer's, and across
town from the Tradewinds Apartments, which were torn down for condos six years ago.

There was a stiff breeze at the cross street, a preview of autumn. I kissed Patti, walked home, and went up to the room where I put out
Clayton
.

It's not one of those one-city lifestyle magazines, although that would be fine, putting headlines like
UNREAL ESTATE
and
IF YOU KNEW SUSHI
into type all the time. But
Clayton
is for people who collect Claytons, or live in them. We salute the repurposed department store of the month, and give directions to walks in the margins. Our readers compare notes on how to fend off the big-box and the high-end, an area in which they've had some success.

It's not all small towns, though. Our New York correspondent keeps the reader informed about bakery guys and urban songbirds. The veteran Washington reporter James Rensselaer vents under a pen name in a column called “You and Your Government.” A caveman in Missouri writes about relationships. A Hudson River Valley composer of song cycles contributes a page called “Subliminal Hymnal.” Like every title I've worked at,
Clayton
covers an enthusiasm. In this case the enthusiasm has no name, but it's there.

We're too small for Jillian to distribute yet, but she put us with her printer in St. Louis, and our order is a little bigger every month. So far the office staff is just me and the Silex, a one-pot unit I bought a month ago. I try not to let the last half inch of coffee get crisp, but sometimes there's the press of business.

I spent the morning on reader mail and ad sales, walked to Lofton Street for a sandwich, came home, and called Barney to plan my next visit. The headaches are easing and he's up to
three hours a day at the lab now. Pearl is helping out there this summer.

When I hung up I went outside, picked up the hose, and hung beads of water in the flower bed. The enthusiasm is for what happens every day, always the same and different.

I worked all afternoon and then went back outside for a few minutes. There's a time of day when every house on the street is split by the same diagonal into sun and shade, and I try not to miss that.

I went back in, and then I heard my friends outside. Steve is still in Chicago, but everyone else is around. Scott and his wife, Melanie, came first, and then Jeff, who sank into the living room couch and said, “It's my ankles, hon. I don't know how I go on.”

“You're a martyr, hon,” Scott said. “I swear to God you are.”

This is a thing called Tired Ladies on the Bus. No one remembers how it started. “At the end of the day, you can say you moved things along,” I said.

“That's all you can ask for, hon,” Melanie said.

We walked to the Cuban place on Stovall, which used to be the Thai place, and for a while a Mongolian barbecue. Dina and her husband were holding the table. Jillian and Jack wanted to come but couldn't get a sitter for Emmylou.

It was strange at first, seeing everyone's grownup faces, but I'm used to it now, and it's the old photo collages at Jillian and Jack's house that stop me. I didn't expect to live here again. The enthusiasm is for switchbacks as a means of transportation.

Patti and Megan got there last, and said they were paying because they'd gotten an order. They make a line of ladies' activewear, with passivewear on the way. The clothes are sold in more than four stores nationwide. The T-shirts are blank.

After dinner we all walked together as far as Lofton, where Patti and I split off to go home, stopping on Meader to buy the paper. These days I follow the news. There are days when the days seem numbered. The enthusiasm is for what we can do with what's left. Meet me under the big clock.