The Portable Veblen (18 page)

“Then
maybe, maybe
it’s time to tell everyone about your special little connection with Caddie Fladeboe.”

“No, it’s not time for that, Paul, no.”

“I think it is!”

Justin said, “I won’t say it again, Paul. I won’t.”

“Let me speak to Dad.”

Bill came back on the line.

“What happened?”

“I told him if he said it again I’d thrash him.”

“Jesus. Was that necessary?”

“It was,” Paul said. “Now that I’m done putting out your fires, I have to go perform surgery on cadavers, if you really want to know.”

“You do that,” said Bill. “I’m sorry we lean on you sometimes.”

“If he makes any trouble at the wedding I’ll take him outside and beat—”

“Enough!”

“He’s a thirty-eight-year-old man.”

“This is your family. Get your priorities straight.”

“You too, Dad, you too.”

“You’ve managed to piss me off, son.”

“Like usual. Like since the day I was born. This isn’t about Justin, Dad. Don’t you get it? It’s about you and me and some grudge you have against me and everything I do.”

“Jesus Christ. How can you say that?”

“You make it easy,” Paul said, shaking.

“This won’t stand. We’re coming down and we’re going to hash this out. This is a new phase of your life and I don’t want these attitudes getting in the way. You’re going to screw things up with Veblen if you don’t have things squared away with your family first.”

“It’s about time you noticed,” Paul said, secretly touched.

And then the rest of the day—Paul met the first group of participating medics, Pvt. Donald Chen, Sgt. Nadir Sadiq, and SP5 Alex Vasquez. They had their notebooks and were up to date on the trial, eager to start. The medics scrubbed down and suited up and Paul led them to the small operating room. An orderly wheeled in a cadaver, and they peeled open the bag to reveal the body of a woman who could not have been very old when she died.

“This lady’s seen better days,” said Vasquez, allowing the bright light to expose unbleeding gashes on her torso, and the lack of one arm.

“Sure has,” said Chen.

Sadiq picked up the notes and read off the various studies the woman’s body had been used for to date, while Paul brought out his device and set about to demonstrate. To build their confidence,
he told them that craniotomy, even performed on a living, breathing person, was a surprisingly safe procedure with no mortality or morbidity reported in reviews of thousands of patients. Then he showed them how his device was equipped with a light and a razor for removing hair from the area, and had an extendable nipple for applying a swath of iodine. He held the prototype to the woman’s skull, had them look closely at his hand while he lifted the safety latch, and then deployed the trigger, allowing the device to punch out a three-inch-diameter circle from the woman’s skull like a ballistic cookie cutter. The action was remarkably quiet, due to the pneumatic tool-muffler built into the small CO
₂
cylinder. The blade was extremely sharp and the device lifted out the skull fragment in one precise motion, exactly as Paul intended.

“This thing’s gonna work,” Sadiq said.

“Don’t act so surprised,” Paul said. “Let’s do it again.”

Next Sadiq tried, holding the cadaver’s head for leverage. He pressed the device to the shaved skull and activated. The cut was clean, and with a quick flip of the switch on the handle, the blade contracted around the fresh plug of bone and lifted it out. “The average skull is 6.5 millimeters thick. The blade is 6.3 millimeters, so it stops just short of the dura,” Paul said.

“Like shooting a gun,” Sadiq said, impressed.

Paul said, “That blade’s coming at 42.7 meters a second.”

“This thing’s your baby?” asked Vasquez.

“It is.”

It was Chen’s turn. He swabbed the skull on the other side, held it in position, and deployed. But this time something went wrong, the cut was incomplete. A 2-centimeter tag of skin and bone held the plug in place. Chen asked, “What should I do?”

Paul said, “Don’t worry. There’s a removable blade on the side, for trims.”

“Should I release the tool?”

“Release the tool.”

Chen released the tool from its faulty grip and the skull flap fell open and hung over the cadaver’s ear. Paul showed them where the removable blade was located and slipped it out, then grasped the skull flap with his gloved hand, but as he did, the short uncut section of skull broke off and the skin began to tear down the side of the cadaver’s head like a strip of paint.

“Now what?” Chen fretted.

“Give it a little cut, fast.”

When Chen applied pressure to the peeling skin, it peeled further, and Paul saw the flaw in his design, and that removable scissors would be better than a blade for their built-in leverage, and he told Chen to let go, and as Chen tried to let go, more skin peeled with the weight of the skull flap, all the way down the neck to the shoulder.

“My bad,” said Chen. “I didn’t make full contact. I want to try it again.”

Paul clipped the hanging flap of skin, and Chen tried again, this time successfully.

“Packs a punch, doesn’t it?” Paul said, and took some notes.

“My dad could use this in his business,” said Vasquez. “It would save a lot of time.”

“Huh?” Paul looked up and saw Vasquez holding the device to the wall.

“He’s an electrician. You need to make openings for wires and switches all the time, and we use saws—”

“Don’t,” Paul said, seeing Vasquez’s fingers touch the trigger, but too late.

The device sprang with a bang.

“Oh shit!” said Vasquez, coughing. “Man, that’s powerful!”

Paul grabbed his valuable prototype, covered in plaster dust. A circle had been punched in the drywall, not all the way through but almost, and Vasquez gave it a small poke, which caused the circle to detach and disappear down the inside of the wall, revealing a nest of wires.

“Oh crap!” Paul started to cough with surprise.

“Sorry, Doctor. It was an accident, seriously,” said Vasquez. “Look at that! I’m telling you, every electrician in the world would want one of these.”

“They’d probably like having a tank too, but they’re not going to get one.”

Vasquez laughed.

It was a three-hour session with the medics, who made a few intriguing suggestions (a glow-in-the-dark rubber grip on the handle, for instance). They completed thirteen procedures, counting the one in which skin ripped all the way to the clavicle.

Ouch. Definitely refine that before starting on the volunteers. He knew what had to be added: sensors that would create the circuit for the trigger only when contact was equally dispersed on the full circumference of the blade.

      8

E
IGHT
K
NOTS

T
o some, the in-law family is a burden and a curse. But to others, it’s a close-knit group with a new opening just for you, and that’s definitely how Veblen looked at the Vreelands, who were in her eyes the kindest, most admirable family she could hope to become part of. She formed this estimation in faith that it would be so, because that was what she wanted, a family at ease, a family free from the heat of a central beast, traveling through vents to cook you in every room.

Back in December, before they were engaged, she met Paul’s parents and brother in San Francisco. The family had made the trip for a business deal, which involved the dropping off of a brown unmarked package during a brisk stroll through Aquatic Park. She learned that Bill and Marion and Justin called themselves “the tripod,” and any tasks they shared their “tripodial duties,” and Veblen felt the bud of love open for them right off.

Paul, it seemed, would have preferred having his toenails pulled off, though he refused to explain why his spirits sagged so notably
before the innocuous get-together, nor his reproachfully sluglike posture and defensive outbursts during it, nor the round of maniacal cackling he gave way to coming home in the car.

Justin Vreeland stood slightly shorter than Paul, weighed around 250 pounds, and had some kind of disorder that rendered him challenged in more ways than Paul could adequately describe. Paul couldn’t even tell her what his brother’s condition was called. He’d said:
I don’t care what it’s called, it’s just my nightmare.

Over the course of that evening, Veblen learned Bill had once been an oarsman in the Grand Canyon, a river guide with a love for the cliffs of Tapeats Sandstone, Bright Angel Shale, Redwall Limestone, and Vishnu Schist. A place you could still find tender spots on the earth, untouched. He had been subjected to a strict upbringing in the sprawling, postwar tracts of Orange County—his Marine Corps dad had served in the First Marine Regiment at Guadalcanal, and took no shine to fanciful daydreams, and Bill had not been his father’s favorite (
Imagine,
Veblen thought,
having to deal with that, on top of everything
); his brother Richard had been the favorite, an athlete and marine himself, so Bill went his own way and saved his earnings and married his college sweetheart and bought a place on ten acres in Humboldt County, where they could have a small farm and build an adobe oven for bread, throw pots in a kiln, operate a forge, and cultivate their own vegetables as well as a fruitful marijuana patch. Paul’s childhood, not something he liked to talk about.

Marion grew up outside St. Paul, Minnesota. Her father was a loyal 3M salesman with a two-inch wedge in his left shoe to boost his shorter leg. He favored plaid jackets of polyester, and carried a small silver flask of whisky in the breast pocket, along with a comb
full of Brylcreem. Marion’s mother had been a beautician, and spent most of her off-hours huddled in the kitchen with her two sisters, who lived nearby, smoking and gossiping about unhappy marriages and wayward kids in the neighborhood. Marion took off to discover her true self in the West and became a nurse, her natural calling. Now in semiretirement, she still substituted and did case management for the county, and was, of the three, the one Paul seemed closest to. Veblen had been quick to decide they were all good and kind, and the fact that they’d kept Justin at home and cared for him all his life was great proof of it.

It was the Ides of March. They were here to celebrate Paul’s thirty-fifth birthday.

“Brace yourself,” murmured Paul, as they pulled into the Wagon Wheel Motel parking lot on El Camino.

“Hellooo!” Marion ran waving across the lot.

“Couldn’t they have stayed at your place?” Veblen suddenly wondered.

Justin pounded on Paul’s hood. His shirt was rolled all the way up to his mouth, where he was chewing on it, revealing his white and doughy abdomen.

“No,” Paul said, with surgical precision.

In the cool air Marion hugged Paul, while Justin pressed Veblen against the moist quadrant of his shirt.

“Let go,” Paul barked, pulling Justin roughly.

Marion said, “You look wonderful, Veblen!” She was a solid woman in her sixties, with a blondish-gray pageboy haircut and steady blue eyes that gave the impression she had never seen a catastrophe that could unglue her.

Veblen liked their eccentric car, thick with dust and activism.
Love Your Enemies: It really messes with their minds
.
Don’t Just Hug Trees: Kiss them too
.
Ran out of Sick Days So I’m Calling in Dead
. She had yet to visit the family homestead, but one night, loosened up with the help of a bottle of wine, Paul embroidered for her the hellish landscape of his youth, replete with prowling DEA agents and infrared photo sweeps from the altitude of gnattish copters, the sweet smell of jasmine and bark and paranoia in equal measure. To Veblen, it sounded wonderfully complicated and alive.

Paul’s father charged out of the room, hair wet and spiky, a child again at the sight of them. He was a robust man in a red bird-of-paradise Hawaiian shirt, with a close-clipped gray beard and silver caps on his canines, and he doted on his family as if they were his favorite characters in a story he’d written himself.

“Hey, son,” he said, kickboxing at Paul with his Tevas, while his arm swung out like a gate to pull him in, then, with the other arm, Veblen, as she worked to understand the niche a father could take in a family. “Hey, you. Let’s see the new machine.” He circled Paul’s car as if NASA had engineered it. “Never set foot in one of these in my life. How’s it run?”

“Oh my god, Dad, it purrs. Wait and see. You can’t even tell it’s on.”

“What’s the hp?”

“451 at 6800 rpm.”

“Wow. What you got for music?”

“Twelve speakers, Dad. Twelve! Get in, sit in front.”

“Let your mother.”

“No, you. And, Mom, you sit in the middle in back.”

“I should sit on the hump,” said Veblen.

“There is no hump in this car,” Paul declared. “I’ve made a reservation at Aubergine.”

“Hope it’s good food, not just fancy,” Bill said, with a grunt.

“Maybe you’ll find out it’s delicious,” Paul said.

Bill fell in front, Marion wiggled to the middle between Veblen and Justin.

“By the way, I got a fleet discount from the hospital,” Paul said, with a momentary quiver in his voice. Was he shy about its luxury, vulnerable to criticism? Something to ask about later.

Paul had previously been the owner of a trusty forest green Subaru, dusted with scrapes and scars of what she assumed were youthful adventures. Veblen thought the status car diminished him somehow, as if constipation and gout and general decay of the flesh requiring extra comforts were just around the corner.

“Old Betsy’s still kicking. She’s got three hundred thousand miles on her,” Bill pronounced.

“You and Mom need a new car.” Paul looked over the seat to Veblen. “They have an old Dodge truck with holes in the floorboards, a death trap. When I did my time in the ER, I don’t want to tell you how many people I saw all chewed up because they were in lousy old junkers.”

“Honey, we only drive her locally,” Marion said. “We always take the Toyota on trips.”