The Portable Veblen (37 page)

Hans snorted. “I’d wonder what else she had growing, and where. Who we talking about?”

“Someone before Veblen.”

“Let it go,” said Hans. “When you strike out with a woman, don’t they always look better in hindsight?”

“I guess what I’m saying is, there’s no way she was into me if she’d say something like that.”

“Why torture yourself. It’s old news.”

But it was hard to let it go—his professional standing seemed to be forming a warm puddle around his feet.

“It’s like the way people go to the bathroom in front of their pets,” Paul concluded, bitterly.

“You’ve lost me, dude.”

“Like they’re not on the same level of consciousness.”

“But sometimes you can’t help it. They follow you everywhere.”

“It’s like taking a dump in front of your dog.”

“Let it go, man.”

“And I was the dog.”

“Don’t look back!”

“Fuck.” Paul swallowed. He noticed a nick on the new dashboard and a field of greasy crumbs around the parking brake, indicating
that everything in radius of him would end up ruined unless he did something to change.

All at once, despite his nausea and headache, he felt plentiful with purpose.

“Hans, I’m going to have to file a whistle-blower suit against Hutmacher Pharmaceuticals.”

Hans groaned. “Why rock the boat? Uma’s already telling people Cloris is one of her clients. Try a little diplomacy, turn it around!”

“It’s too late for that. I want you to make sure Veblen is taken care of if anything happens to me,” Paul continued, feeling courageous for the first time in his life.

“You’re scaring me, brah! Cool off before you do anything, I’m serious.”

“I have to move fast. I just wanted you to know.”

“I’ve always got your back, you know that.”

“Thanks, man.”

•   •   •

T
HE BOAT
he would rock was no skiff, it was a vessel the size of the world. It was a craft loaded with everything Veblen admired the other Veblen for drumming about, captained by extravagant greed and filled with plundered treasure. A heavy, foundering ship, gorged to the gills.

Crossing the grass at the VA, he crunched acorn husks beneath his shoes, and ducked as a jay dipped aggressively close to his head, and watched a squirrel run up an oak with less hatred for the little mammal, with eyes and ears and lungs and appetite not so different from his own. He had regularly purchased lab
animals for his work, ordering from troubling laboratory lists such as this:

Lactating Female—$25.00

Pregnant—$20.00

Newborn <6 days—$6.95

Exbreeder—$15.00

without giving it a second thought.

When the squirrel reached the crook of a low branch, it turned and flicked its tail with the sass of the metronome perched on his old piano, and Paul lurched with recognition. The full tail, the white crests around the eyes, the brindled paws—could it be the squirrel from Tasso Street? The squirrel was flicking its tail at him, chortling.

Chuukksklsllslslslslls!

“What do you want from me?”

Chuuuckklsldlkls!

“Is it you?”

Chkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkcrekkkkkkkkkkkk!
the squirrel clucked.

The creature seemed to be trying to tell him something, and he gave it one last regard.

“What? Spit it out. Stop beating around the bush!”

As he walked closer to the hospital he noticed a cluster of cars arriving and parking near the back exit, the double doors wide open for discharges. With a quick sweep he spotted a multiple amputee from his trial, bundled in street clothes, being loaded into a van fitted for wheelchairs. In the back of a station wagon, he saw another of his volunteers being fastened in by his wife.

Paul ran straight up to the ward.

Bruce, the male nurse, was in conversation with a woman who had gathered her father’s clothes and toiletries. An orderly pushed the man in his wheelchair into the elevator.

“What’s going on?”

Bruce shrugged. “Beats me. The party’s over.”

Paul sprinted down the corridor to his office—the desk, credenza, and swiveling leather chair had been removed. His computer was gone too. His files, his records—all gone. His model schooner lay on the floor in the corner with a snapped mast, and his picture of Veblen sat beside it.

He called Cloris, left an insinuating message. It was time to bring the whistle to his lips.

With his phone he started to compose. He pulled up the addresses of Grandy Moy; Louise Gladtrip; Stan Silverbutton; Vance Odenkirk; Willard Liu; Horton DeWitt; Reginald Kornfink; Alfred Pesthorn; Cordelia Fleiss; John Williams, MD; Lt. Col. Wade Dent; Brig. Gen. Nancy Bottomly; Col. Bradley Richter; and Cloris Hutmacher. He included everyone on the Institutional Review Board in Washington; several top officials at the FDA; and Susan Hinks, clinical coordinator. Then he opened a new screen and got the address for the editors of the
New York Times
and the tip line at
60 Minutes
and added them as well.

To All Concerned:

I’m writing about the Pneumatic Turbo Skull Punch, US Patent #8,999,863, currently being manufactured by Hutmacher Pharmaceutical Corporation, based in Wilmington, Delaware. I am the patent holder of record, and until today was the primary investigator for a clinical trial being conducted at Greenslopes Veterans’ Hospital in Menlo Park, California. Certain irregularities in the completion of this trial have necessitated the writing of this letter . . .

With the sudden violence of a riptide, the text was sucked backward, and no amount of further input could hold it in place. The words were disappearing.

Certain irregularities in the completion . . .

Certain irreg . . .

Cert . . .

Within seconds it was over. The document was blank. The screen made a noise like an old needle scraping across an LP, and shut down.

Paul snorted with a unique blend of terror and ecstasy.

He ran out to the copier in the hall and removed a piece of paper from the tray. Then he began to write the letter by hand. Simple and direct, details to come. He wrote fast but signed at the bottom slowly and carefully, so that his name was clear for all to see.

Then he made twenty-five copies, leaving one in the copier for insurance.

Spyware, huh? He anticipated his father’s told-you-so’s and Veblen’s told-you-so’s, and yet to have told-you-so’s to fall back on could be looked at as the support he’d need going forward, a way to reunite with Veblen, unless it backfired because she didn’t like to share grievances. To turn to the light and do the right thing, that’s what mattered now. He was going rogue!

Out of the building, across the grounds. The squirrel resumed
its chatter as he neared the oak, and he hesitated, arrested by its insistency. He almost spoke to it. He almost said, “You
were
trying to tell me something.” His mouth was dry and his eyebrows were burning, and the squirrel screeched and snapped its tail. He began to run.

He came to Building 301, found the door propped open. Had they started on this too?

The staging ground for the Confined Urban Rescue Simulator took up more than half the interior of Building 301. The lights were on in the elevated control booth and, jumping the newly fashioned plywood steps, Paul threw open the door and discovered a chubby boy in a striped sweater lording over the controls. It was Cloris’s son, Morris. A scrawny but prosperous-looking guy in an upmarket hoodie sat in a chair beside him.

“Well,” Paul said, rolling the stack of letters into a tube.

“Hey, Dr. Vreeland, I’m Robbie Frazier. Too bad we never got the chance to use this honey. Thought Morris could have some fun with it before we break camp.”

“Morris is not the first person I imagined using this.”

“This is so awesome!” yelled Morris.

Below them, visible through the Plexiglas, lay an eerie scene: a few shadowy two-story buildings with shuttered windows, parked cars and trash cans crowded in a narrow alley between them. It was currently nighttime in the Confined Urban Rescue Simulator, and through a speaker the sound effects of a violent siege could be heard. Inside the control room, a black, yard-long panel deployed all the effects of a battlefield. The CURS was soundproofed from the rest of the warehouse and visible only through the heavy Plexiglas where Paul now stood.

“Is Cloris Hutmacher here at the VA?” Paul said loudly.

Robbie shook his head. “Can’t tell you the lady’s whereabouts. We’ve got today to get this thing broken down, that’s all I know.”

“Can you stop it, please?”

Red sliding switches, now grubbied by Morris’s pudgy little hands, controlled light levels across the CURS. Blue switches produced explosions in a range of decibels and timbres, as well as gunfire from assorted weaponry. There was a black knob for volume control, an orange switch for sirens and helicopter noise, and a whole bank of brown switches for human effects, which Morris demonstrated. Paul shuddered when Morris produced the sound of an American screaming for his life, while another toggle generated aggressive Arabic shouts.

Paul looked through the glass at the urban landscape, now exploding and smoking, obviously fake yet primally terrifying anyway. Despite his parents’ intense antiwar agenda, or probably because of it, Paul had always admired the pageantry of the great battles of the ages. When they’d read Shakespeare’s histories in high school, he’d been completely swept up in Hal’s personal test at the Battle of Agincourt. Until then, the young prince had been considered a major fuck-up. At Agincourt he had his chance at majesty, and earned it.
“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.”

“It’s even better than CoD!” Morris yelled. “Want to try it?”

A figure seemed to dart through the strobes.

“Is somebody in the simulator?” Paul asked.

“It’s closed,” Robbie Frazier said. “That’s why those lights are so disorienting. You just
think
someone’s there.”

Paul ran down the steps and let himself inside.

The door disappeared in the shadows, and all around him were whispers and approaching footsteps, scuffling, shouts, and then the sudden reports of machine guns. An Apache helicopter tattered the air with such force he clapped his hands to his ears. A grenade exploded to his left and set his teeth humming. A barrage of gunfire rained across the sky and he leaped between a parked SUV and the building, dazed after ten seconds of exposure.

How the hell could you do a procedure in a shit storm like this? The phony wind screamed and drove grit into his skin. He quickened like an animal, hackles rising. The wind filled his cheeks like balloons. Grains of sand pitted his eyes and he blinked and spat. He shook at the sounds of bombs and helicopters, overwhelmed by the smells of phosphorus, sulfur, and potassium chlorate drifting past in explosive puffs.

The waste of this was insanity. Fuck Jonathan Finger! Fuck Cloris! He would have gone straight to the DA’s office to spill everything, but at that moment he felt a pair of hands go around his neck. He arched his back and caught a glimpse of Sergeant Major Warren Smith falling on him, his arms like giant prongs, eyes fried with accusation, the crater on his nose turning white.

•   •   •

D
URING THE
sixty-nine seconds he was struggling for his life in the CURS, Paul managed to survey an array of his personal failings.

It was clear, as his carotid arteries were compressed with great force and he dropped the pile of his game-changing letters in order to fight back (and as the copies scattered and were sent aloft in the
wind, funneled upward in the direction of a fan that sucked them into a vent), that something had gone very wrong in his life.

During the moments Paul was being garroted by Warren Smith, he saw the chain of events that linked this brutal moment to all the follies of history. Smith didn’t want to go back into the war machine, and who could blame him? He thought with ardent tenderness of Veblen and the hurt he’d caused her, and then of his mother paying a morning visit to a recently defunded geriatric facility in Humboldt County, sitting on a worn canvas chair listening to an old man talk about his dry, itching skin for which no cream gave relief. He thought of his father out in his forge, waiting for the fire to get hot enough to bend some iron, anesthetizing himself for some past hurt with a moist bowl of garden-fresh sinsemilla. And he thought of Justin at his day-care facility, wondering if his brother remembered giving Paul a piggyback ride through a field of snow, a long time ago when they were boys, and Paul hugged his neck and promised to make him some Creeple Peeple with his mold, but never did, because he couldn’t bear to do anything in the plus column for Justin. Did Justin remember that? During the moments Paul was being strangled, he thought of Cloris Hutmacher spread-eagle on a catamaran in some Caribbean clime, daydreaming about a new tax strategy with the tuneful name of
variable prepaid forward,
which would save her untold millions in the coming years, and would allow her to partake of another fun tax strategy, in which she’d purchase a private gallery, set up a private foundation, and donate her own art to the foundation and gallery, and still control everything.

While Paul was being strangled, he foresaw pallets of Hutmacher
products being removed from Boeing C-17 Globemaster IIIs with the aid of Manitex Liftking forklifts at existing U.S. military bases in Afghanistan, Kosovo, Germany, Italy, and Iraq. Not to mention Japan, Okinawa, Kuwait, Macedonia, South Korea, and Australia. As well as Bulgaria, Bahrain, Brazil, Djibouti, Greece, and Guam. And of course Israel, Spain, the United Arab Emirates, Greenland, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kyrgyzstan, and the Netherlands. And furthermore, Portugal, Turkey, and the UK, and how much it all had to do with the ticklish tragus of Bradley Richter from the DOD, no one would ever know.

And his beautiful, adorable, lovable fiancée was figuring out how to break up with him. And squirrels were planning a day to migrate en masse. And a poorly chosen diamond engagement ring lay cold and despised in a drawer.