The Portable Veblen

18 THE CURS

The bed of a tortured soul is always in shambles by morning. Blankets thrown to the floor, sheets twisted like ropes. Paul’s phone buzzed, waking him from a painful dream about returning to high school to graduate and being given a plastic garbage bag to wear as his gown. His eyes had crusted over, and his pillow was drenched with drool.

“Yeah?” he managed, unhinging his jaw.

“Paul? It’s Susan Hinks.”

Paul sat up in his bedroom in Mountain View, disoriented, rubbing his eyes with his fists. He’d spent very little time at his own place in the past few months; it was as if his life before Veblen filled him with shame, as if in those days he’d been a clown with a naked backside, having darts thrown at his ass cheeks by laughing chimps and frat boys.

Now he remembered. He’d called Hinks late last night, said to call him back, no matter what time. So he jumped up to get his blood pumping and asked what she knew about the release of his device.

Nothing. But she’d received a message from senior management at Hutmacher yesterday afternoon announcing some kind of adjustment in the trial. She was to take today off until she received further instructions. That’s all she knew.

“Susan, you’ve coordinated other trials. Has this ever happened before?”

“They’re all different, Dr. Vreeland.”

“But is it — have we done everything — right?”

“I hope so! I really have tried to do a good job.”

“It’s okay, Susan. You did a great job. I wasn’t saying—”

“Just last week I sent the binders to everybody on the IRB, and over to Hutmacher, and I checked all the permissions and release forms for the human study a few days ago, and all our supplies are stocked and I returned the cadavers and we just had a pizza party with the families of the volunteers, and—”

He reassured her further, told her he’d go to the VA right away and find out what was going on.

He got up, made some coffee, took eight hundred milligrams of Advil, ran his hands through his hair, started the shower, opened his mouth, lost his balance, fell against the cold tiles. He remembered how the manager proudly referred to them as “honed Italian marble” when he showed Paul the apartment, along with the other architectural details meant to appeal to what Veblen had told him Thorstein Veblen called the emulation instincts of the striving classes, such as heated towel racks, clubby brass plumbing fixtures, a Jacuzzi bath, and a cedar sauna. How many nights had he spent alone here with frozen pizza and a remote control? Nights trying to make plans with scattershot calls. Weekends so vast they felt like a graveyard of bones.

Yes, he was in hate with the world that morning, livid with loneliness. He’d written Veblen a ten-page letter during the night, full of remorse and regret and declarations of his love. But the gremlin of anger made him tear it up and grind it in the disposal in his sink, because he had no idea what he was dealing with. Was their current state of alienation an ethical dispute, or was the ethical dispute a front for some deeper problem she had with him, some ultimate horror she’d experienced during his family’s visit, some glimpse she’d had of him when he’d least expected it, which revealed him to be a loser and a fraud?

Cheater! Cheater! Cheater!

But he wasn’t. Cloris was trying to make him cheat, but he would not!

Maybe a hired sniper would fell him before the day was through. Or maybe some Hutmacher henchman would drive him off the road so it looked like an accident. They’d think of something. They had their ways.

Then he was shredding El Camino, wishing he could vaporize everything in his path. He honked at a wobbly cyclist, feeling great stress, which was manifesting in a body rash, itching, and the sensation that saliva was oozing between his lower teeth, necessitating the jutting of his lower jaw like a catch tray.

He’d heard it said that every man needed a friend he could turn to if he had a body to dispose of, and for Paul, Hans was the one who’d be there with the bag.

Hans knew the real him, verruca vulgari and all. In high school, after Millie was sent away, he and Hans formed a gluey allegiance; Paul realized that Hans’s penchant for self-inflation rose from his neglect by a world-class set of jerks, his parents, and decided he was worth knowing. Hans was the only person alive who’d ever sided with him about his brother, Justin, without an ounce of guilt. He had a supersized capacity for hatred, as elastic as a colon, as vaulted as a cathedral, as open as a prairie sky, and so was therefore able to hate Justin with an amplitude even greater than Paul’s, spending many hours coming up with twisted accidents that could befall him, making Paul laugh to the point of pain.

It was Hans he called when he first found Millie on the fledgling Internet, back in 1999. In those days, he used a primitive search engine called Alta Vista, and results were spotty. (She’d evidently married a veterinary student and by now they had three children and took up space in Portland.)

No, there was only one person he could call at a time like this, and Hans picked up on the second ring.

“Hey,” Paul said heavily.

“Hey, what’s happening?”

“I need to talk.”

And Paul launched in. Everything, Cloris, the trial, his fight with Veblen.

“Oh, man,” said Hans. “Nip this in the bud or she’ll have you by the balls the rest of your life.”

“But her reaction was sincere, and she’s right.”

“Sincere is the worst. Sincere is how they get your balls. I’d say, ‘Babe, don’t go all pro forma on me, this isn’t about right and wrong, it’s about us against them.’ And remind her there’s no true purity in the world.”

A small detail had been worming its way through his mind since that evening he’d spent with Cloris Hutmacher, something he’d been unwilling, until now, to unsheathe. He said to Hans, “Question. If you were with a woman, and you’re making out, you’re already in her bedroom, and suddenly she tells you she has athlete’s foot and thinks about it while she’s having sex, what would that communicate to you?”

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.”

• • •

THE 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.

• • •

DURING 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.

Paul had never been strangled before, but he knew that if his carotids were pinched much longer, he’d go unconscious, and then if Warren Smith kept at it his brain would die. He did not want his brain to die, despite all his flaws, and he rolled and jerked and did everything he could to stop it. The acorn-sized amygdala in his forebrain was in full panic mode, screaming to his hypothalamus to pump out corticotropin-releasing hormones, which were then triggering his pituitary gland, which was then jetting out a stream of adrenocorticotropic hormones, which were then traveling through his bloodstream to tickle his adrenal glands atop his kidneys, which then spewed cortisol with all their might. The cortisol kick increased his glucose production and therefore the fuel for his brain and his body, so he was able to claw at Smith’s face and neck with renewed urgency, while his heart fibrillated wildly, and his breath became shallow and his skin poured sweat, all agents of an autonomic nervous system beyond his control.

And then Warren Smith let him go, just like that. As if he’d measured just how much Paul deserved and this was enough. Paul found himself discarded on the ground in an artificial alley with sniper fire cracking overhead. He’d survived. He breathed deeply. Eventually he rolled on his side, pushed himself up. He felt dizzy but he managed to stand. He could walk. He moved slowly through the CURS door, pausing unsteadily at the base of the stairs to the control room. Then he took another deep breath and left the building.

Outside he smelled the earth and heard birds singing their songs. He lumbered across the grass and recognized the sound of the squirrel, chippering and signaling, urgent and shrill, over the sound of tires spreading gravel through the parking lot. Squinting in the sunlight, he saw Cloris Hutmacher throwing her Tesla in gear.

The squirrel shrieked and ran zigzag, directly into her path.

As Cloris made her trajectory for the exit, Paul clapped his hands to scare the squirrel from its course.

Squirrels, oddly, have a tendency to weave back and forth in front of cars, then freeze, unable to decide which way to best escape them. They can’t be blamed for their failure to adapt to modern technology after forty million years. The zigzag escape works quite well with predators, and is sophisticated in most respects.

But laws of motion, an understanding of trigonometry, and a knack for assuming the worst all told Paul the squirrel would soon be flattened by the car. Which left him no choice but to run forward and throw himself in the way.

No, she wasn’t going to stop. She wanted to run him down like an old dog. “You want a piece of me?” he barked, ablaze in his head, driven mad by the idiocy of all mankind.

And taking that on, he felt no fear. Only the certainty that he was looking the leviathan square in the eye.

He presented himself, fists up, teeth bared.

Thrrump, bump, thrump, thrump.