The Portable Veblen (7 page)

“Oh. Fine. The long-distance thing isn’t easy,” said Cloris, and to stay on target for the future of his device, he pushed the scene he had witnessed from his mind.

He followed her inside and she brought them drinks on the couch, and shortly, one of her hands was on the cushion near his shoulder, then on his shoulder, finding its way like a garter snake to his ear. She had a thing for the little flange at the front of the ear called the tragus, and she pinched it at least six or seven times.

“You are a gorgeous man,” she said, embarrassing and thrilling him.

After a long session of making out (she tasted of vodka, and her mouth was surprisingly small, her tongue fast and flighty, putting him in mind of kissing a deer, for some reason), she threw herself back on the pillows and said, “I don’t have relationships anymore. But you’re hard to resist.”

“Then don’t,” Paul said, in motion toward her, fueled by instinct.

“I was a very decadent person in my twenties. You have no idea.”

He listened, with a hard tug in his groin.

“I had problems. And then, about five years ago, something shifted.”

“And what was that?”

“It coincided with my work for the company. I suddenly transferred all of that excitation into my professional life.”

“That’s a tragedy,” Paul said, grasping her fingers.

“So now, if I’m spending time with a man, which I’m not, I’m a nun these days, I’m impatient, I think about work, I double-task. I’ll be smiling and thinking about my toes and separating them to aerate them. And I’ll be thinking, there, that’s something I can accomplish until this is over.”

Paul cleared his throat. “Hmm.”

“Is that fair to the man?” she pressed.

“Depends on the man.” He laughed, as he only thought right, though he would never have taken her for a person with tinea pedis
.

“Come here,” she said, pulling on his collar.

“I think you’re struggling,” Paul said, with renewed interest in kissing her.

“I am.”

“Maybe someone should help you with your struggle.”

He reached for her skirt, and under it, just long enough to feel that her inner thighs were cold, but with that she jumped up and laughed in an agitated and sophisticated manner, and said, “Come upstairs!” And he followed like a pup.

Her bedroom was vast, with a huge bed that she rolled over in order to rummage in a bedside drawer and retrieve a bronze pipe, tamping it expertly with pungent weed. She took a few long tokes and passed it to Paul, who was so surprised in a bad way that he
shriveled. The scent of marijuana was his least favorite odor in the world. Even feces on a shoe smelled better than cannabis resin.

“No, really,” he said, when she pushed the smoking bowl toward him.

She indulged several more times, then flung herself back into the playpen of pillows, kicked off her shoes, sent them flying, and patted for Paul to lie next to her.

“He’s coming out next year,” she gasped.

“Who?”

“Morris,” said Cloris, exhaling loudly. “I have to figure out something fun to do with him. I
never
get it right. What did you like to do when you were eight?”

“I don’t know, the usual.”

“What’s the usual!” she said, hammering him with a pillow.

“Hey!”

He grabbed one from the multitude of bolsters and puffs at the head of the bed and socked her back.

“Paul!”

He drew himself up on his knees, and moved toward her, as she began to sniffle.

“How can I know the usual, I don’t live with my son, there is no usual.” She sniffed.

“Cloris? You okay?”

After a while she sat up, cross-legged, to dab her face with the sheet. “I get very emotional about him.”

“Why isn’t he with you?”

“That’s old school, Paul,” said Cloris. “We let Morris make his own decisions.”

“Mmm. Best.”

“Anyway, his father can’t have him in the spring and he’ll be here for a while.”

“That’s nice,” Paul said, worried he’d failed to keep things on track. The moment seemed to have passed. He gazed at her bare feet on the bed, wondering what grew between her toes, bound up by his desire to do the right thing in the presence of an heiress, whatever that might be.

“Were you a Boy Scout?” she asked.

“Definitely not.”

“A camp counselor somewhere? A coach?”

“No, no. Not me.”

“You seem like the kind of person boys would admire and imitate. Like my father.”

He tossed it off as if the compliment meant nothing to him, but he wanted to bury it, entomb it, make a shrine of it to worship at for the rest of his life.

“Come here,” she said, and then something happened—it was kind of like having sex with someone but not quite. It was a scratching, raging, rolling catfight of flesh and bone and disclaimer—
we both know this doesn’t mean anything
—until it was inexplicably over and he was almost heaved off the side of the bed. Then Cloris disappeared for about twenty minutes. Finally he wandered downstairs and bumped into her in the kitchen, dishing up bowls of spaghetti
alle vongole,
which they soon ate at a long table, discussing business as if nothing had happened. Driving back to his depressing condo just off El Camino in Mountain View later that night, he wondered if he’d just torched his whole career.

(And then he would meet Veblen a few weeks later, and would be so immediately bowled over by his feelings for the smart but
spacey, undervalued woman with the handmade clothes and self-cut hair, who typed in the air and loved squirrels, that it would strike him as the closest call in his life.)

When he learned he was off to Washington, D.C., for an interview, his father said, “Terrific, Paul! You can go visit the Wall and see your uncle Richard’s name, can’t you?”

“Dad, I don’t think I’ll have time—”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute. It’s right in the middle of everything, outside, and you don’t have to pay admission or wait in line.”

“Dad, I’m going for an interview. They’re flying me out. If I have time I’ll go, of course. But—”

“Are you saying, Paul, that you’d go all the way to Washington and not visit Richard’s name?”

“I’ve visited it before, with you. I’ve seen it.”

“Oh, I see. You only need to see it once. Paul! Get your priorities straight!”

“Dad, I’ll go to the Wall if I can!” Paul barked back.

“It hurts me to think that we’ve only been there once. You could maybe take some flowers.”

“Do they do that there?”

“I don’t bloody hell care what they do there, you can take him some flowers. You can set them down under his regiment.”

“I’ll try.”

Soon enough he flew to Dulles, riding a cab past the gentle deciduous arms of eastern woodland fringing the highway. Rising into the powder-blue skies like holy temples were the strongholds of Northrop Grummon, BCF, Camber, Deltek, Juniper, Scitor, Vovici, Sybase, and Booz Allen Hamilton, while the gentle green grass and low trees waved around them, sprinkled with rusting
conifers sick with disease. He heard the overture to a rock opera forming in his head, a rousing confluence of
Carmina Burana
and
Tommy,
and had a fleeting fantasy of supporting two careers with his boundless force.

He was taken to a building in Arlington, Virginia, a stone’s throw from the Pentagon, and those on the committee, some with their uniforms and Minotaur heads, jabbing their swollen thumbs through his documents, gave him the once over.

Present were Grandy Moy, Louise Gladtrip, and Stan Silverbutton, all from the National Institutes of Health (NIH); Vance Odenkirk, Willard Liu, and Horton DeWitt, all from the Department of Defense (DOD); John Williams, MD, National Naval Medical Center, Bethesda (NNMC); Lt. Col. Wade Dent, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center (WRNMMC); Brig. Gen. Nancy Bottomly; Reginald Kornfink, committee manager, DOD; Alfred Pesthorn and Cordelia Fleiss, FDA; Col. Bradley Richter, U.S. Army Medical Materiel Agency (USAMMA); and Ms. Cloris Hutmacher.

“Traumatic brain injury in combat has become the number one killer of our troops,” Paul began, gazing down the table. “It was the signature injury of the Iraqi and Afghani campaigns. Warfighter brain injury studies to date include a lot of hopeful breakthroughs on tissue regeneration, but none addresses the need for intervention on the spot, before the cascade of damage begins.”

A few of them actually yawned. He responded passionately:

“Let me get to the point. For the past year and a half I have performed a rigorous study of decompressive craniectomies on lab animals with a tool of my own invention, and I’m ready to translate my results to a Phase III trial—”

“We’ve got a few ‘animals’ for you,” one seasoned bureaucrat broke in, with a bitter snort.

“We’re getting an extended Doberman,” Kornfink said, drumming his pencil on the table.

“What’s that?”

“That’s what I wanted to know, but we’re getting one.”

“How extended is it?”

“I’ve heard of those.”

“I’ll let you know,” said Kornfink. “I’m breeding them. Shelley’s idea for my retirement.”

Suddenly the inert committee appeared to remember why they were there, and returned to Paul, as if nothing had happened.

“Dr. Vreeland, the Department of Defense will consider cooperating with the VA and the licensor to fund this study. How do you propose testing in field conditions?”

Paul said, “The VA in Menlo Park has several vacant buildings which we’ve submitted petitions to use to create field conditions with all relevant noise, light deprivation, smoke, and so on.”

He added, “We’ll also want to invite trained medics to test the procedure in simulated conditions, rather than MDs.” He cleared his throat, and pulled on his collar.

“This is something like a field trach, is that what you’re thinking?” asked Bradley Richter, a sinewy man with dark eyes and a pronounced underbite, reminding Paul of a sea angler with skills adapted to life in the dark deep.

“Yes, sir. Medics easily master tracheotomies in emergency situations. For testing we’d move from cadavers to live volunteers in these aforementioned conditions.”

“By volunteers, are we talking scores less than eight on the Glasgow Scale?”

“We’re looking at a number like that,” Paul said, having been warned by Cloris to keep this vague.

Cloris Hutmacher spoke up. “I’ve already met with Planning at the VA in Menlo Park and they’re ready to lease us Building 301, which is a fifteen-thousand-square-foot structure currently in disuse. Any of the WOO simulator systems would fit there.”

Richter took notes.

Paul cleared his throat. “If we succeed, which I believe we will—”

“People, this is huge,” said Cloris.

“Cloris has an eye for the huge,” pronounced Richter.

Cloris said, “It’s a cusp moment for all of us.”

Paul gazed around the oblong slab, at men and women who’d served the military and had undoubtedly been the trendsetters and thugs of their grade schools.

“This is clearly an opportunity of the highest order,” he heard himself declare. “To serve. My country.” He made methodical eye contact with each person present. “My father’s brother, PFC Richard Vreeland, Company C, Second Battalion Fifth Cavalry, First Cavalry Division, died of blast wounds to his head, chest, both legs, abdomen, and right hand in the ambush at Phu Ninh.” He had never mentioned his uncle’s annihilation to anyone before, and the expediency of doing it now shocked him, yet made him feel like maybe he could be a player after all. The room fell silent. “As soon as this meeting is over, I’m going to visit his name on the Wall. I want this as much for our country as I want it for him.”

A round of backslapping ensued. Cloris told him he was spectacular, and invited him to join some of the committee members for drinks. “Well, I’d like to, but I need to go by the Wall. My uncle,” he added.

“You really meant that?” An admiring glint flashed in her eyes. She was as thin as a whip.

“Of course I did.”

“Come with us now,” Cloris said. “Visit the Wall later.”

“But my flight leaves at nine.”

She whispered, “I won’t tell anyone you didn’t go to the Wall. Come on!”

They went to a noisy bar in Georgetown. Cloris spent her energy speaking closely into the large, open ear of Bradley Richter. Paul perspired heavily and drank too much. He didn’t end up visiting the Wall, but planned to tell his father he had. Or maybe not—maybe he’d tell his father he
couldn’t,
as he’d said all along. Well, it would make his father happy to think he’d tried. Throw the old man a bone. A cab returned him to Dulles within the hour, and he received the offer the next day by noon.

•   •   •

P
AUL RETURNED
from his tour of the VA grounds by nine
A.M.
In the lobby, an elfin woman in a yellow checkered skirt and a white blouse with a pin of a Scottish terrier on the collar stepped out and waved at him like a crossing guard.

“Dr. Vreeland!”

Susan Hinks had soft blond hair and cornflower blue eyes, a fine fuzz of blond on her cheeks, and an expression not of an embryo but of something quite fresh. A voyeur would know how to
describe it. “Welcome. It’s great to meet you, Dr. Vreeland!” Her voice was charmingly nasal, with a mild midwestern twang, and her teeth were notably large and clean. “I’m your clinical coordinator and I’ll be providing support in all responsibilities related to the NIH and the DOD and Hutmacher. I’ll conduct follow-up evaluations, watch compliance with protocol, take care of the case reports. I’ll be your liaison with the Investigational Review Board, the IRB. We’ve been completely overwhelmed with volunteer applications—we’ve still got people calling and going around the usual channels to get in.”

Paul felt a surge of pride. “Seriously? Is this trial especially attractive for some reason?”

“Any trial is attractive,” Susan Hinks said. “They have to wait so long for treatment in the system. If they get into a trial, they get a lot of attention.”

He gave her a skeptical look.

“Are you trying to tell me these veterans are willing to get a hole punched in their skulls just to get a checkup?”