The Enthusiast Read online

  We went into the dining alcove for quesadillas and a big bowl of work Dad had brought home. Barney passed it to me. When he’d left for college I was the family champ at reading him, but now I couldn’t tell if the look he gave me over the bowl meant “It’s your fault this is what Dad’s doing” or just “Here’s the salad. Try not to drop it.”

  Deirdre was an anthropology major specializing in folk myths and a mover in university causes—divestment, T.A. salaries, soy ink. She’d grown up in Kansas, and this was her first trip to California. “That was kind of scary, all that housing and stuff coming here from the airport,” she said. “You can’t believe there are enough people to fill it up.”

  “It’s a crazy scale,” Barney said. “You have to get away from here to realize it.”

  “All the people we went past were like, ‘Look at my body, look at my car,’” Deirdre said.

  “I always thought that was nice, when I came out here,” Dad said. “It was like you have to have a car and a body anyway, so they might as well be colorful.”

  “Oh,” Deirdre said. “That’s kind of neat, when you see it that way. The ornamentation. Barney said you work at a salad place?”

  “Just for now,” Dad said.

  “That sounds good, though. Making salads for people, and then you see the results of it right away.”

  “It’s just temporary,” Dad said. He was getting the transit look, and Mom jumped in, asking Barney and Deirdre how they’d met.

  “A guy was lying down on my car,” Barney said.

  “They were protesting the stem cell work,” Deirdre said. “A group called Fundament House.”

  “I was just standing there, but Deirdre came over and started talking to him.”

  “I just said, ‘Okay, you’re doing civil disobedience for what you believe in. Let’s value that, but let’s look at what’s at stake here.’”

  “She actually debated with him. I never—”

  “No, you got into it too,” Deirdre said. “When he said, ‘Life is sacred,’ you said, ‘Exactly.’”

  “I said one word.”

  “Yeah, but it was the right word.”

  Barney, loved, gave a little smile and shrug. Deirdre leaned her head on his shoulder and he kissed her hair. I’d always thought he would marry a fellow scientist, but she made sense. His work and her causes were going to fix the world. It didn’t matter if their ideas went over ninety-nine out of a hundred heads, as long as their own heads stayed huddled together the way they were right now.

  I wanted to have that with someone too, someone who’d come through the door like Deirdre and say, “Thanks, little California family, I’ll take him from here.” I hadn’t met anyone since Jillian, but I hadn’t looked much, either. At my recent jobs I’d spent most of my evenings at home. When your only tool is your ass, every problem looks like a couch.

  I got up early the next day and took some work out to the patio. Barney was there with a stack of printouts and a scientific calculator.

  “How’s it going?” I said.

  “Good,” he said. “Hard.”

  “I really like Deirdre,” I said.

  He nodded. “I was spending all my time down at the cell level,” he said, tapping his printout. “There wasn’t that much I was interested in up here before I got involved with her. Now I kind of commute between the two. I’m down to like sixty hours a week in the lab.”

  “That’s still a lot.”

  “That’s the other thing about her. She understands why I’m there so much. This could end up helping with all kinds of problems. You could grow heart tissue. You could have people who can only move their eyes now getting up and walking around.”

  “That’s great.”

  “If it works. First you have to run through all the methods that don’t work. There are a lot of those.” He rubbed his eyes.

  “Tell me where you work now?”

  “Ice Climbing.”

  “What is that?”

  I had a copy in my work bag. I handed it to him and he flipped through it, past the jargon, the ONE BADASS CRAMPON ads, and the beauty shots of climbers hanging off escarpments with the obligatory winter sunlight bouncing off the lens.

  “People need a lot of stimulus now,” he said. “Going to the park and throwing the football around doesn’t cut it anymore.”

  “Not for some people, no.”

  “Do you go out and do this with them?”

  “They gave me a lesson.”

  “How was that?”

  “Okay. It was good.” Especially getting back to safety. “I probably won’t stay there that long.”

  He nodded. “I think I’m going to be in Kansas a while. I like the people I’m working with. We might be getting somewhere on spinal cord injuries. And Deirdre and I are going to start trying for a baby.”

  He closed the magazine and looked at the climber on the cover, a spinal cord injury waiting to happen, before handing it back to me. He hadn’t brought up Dad and the sneeze guards, but waiting for it had put what felt like a weather front in my chest, and it was still there.

  I put the Ice Climbing away and Barney went back to his calculator. He didn’t stare at the backyard landscape anymore, so I did it for him.

  5

  I had my own America going, a huge room lined with doors. Behind each door was an enthusiasm, a noisy roomful of slang, spending, sanctioning bodies, factional intrigues, and Freddy Pasco–like stars who walked like gods in that room and like toner salesmen everywhere else. Most people went through only a few of those doors in their lives, but I crashed one wild party after another and came back for more.

  There was always a reason to change jobs. The paychecks bounced or were so small they cleared, or the magazines merged, my career keeping pace with the golden age of cutbacks. If I didn’t get along with someone I was always the one to leave. Why should an enthusiast go and a civilian stay? All those hang gliders, storm chasers, and battle reenactors had found a way to stop time that I hadn’t, but I had a vocation watching them do it.

  Dad got lucky on the escalator. Exploring the mall on his break from the salad bar, he spotted a Franklin Covey store that sold motivational books and time-management systems to the determined. He walked in, got talking with the manager, and a few visits later he was hired to work the floor.

  The customers could tell he’d once fought his way to the middle, and he clicked right away. Soon he was giving store-sponsored seminars where people came to a hotel meeting room and took down what he said in action-item binders he’d sold them. He would mention that he’d once managed forty scientists, say “Talk about herding cats,” and move another eight hundred dollars in product right there in the room. Barney softened up a little toward me on our phone calls, though it might not have been because of Dad’s new job. Deirdre was pregnant.

  The day Dad gave his first seminar I was working at Country Ways in Destination, Nebraska, editing a farmer’s article about hip lock during calving. Around the passage Think of this in lieu of how you would feel if someone were to put a couple of forceps on you and yank you straight out of the vulva. You would squeal with justification!, I decided I needed coffee.

  I took a chance, going over to the wood stove that heated the Editorial Department’s half of the barn and shaking the enamel percolator. It didn’t slosh, and there were witnesses, so I had to make a new pot. Country ways meant sustainable farming, energy independence, and colon health, but above all self-reliance.

  I put on my coat, scarf, gloves, and galoshes, got a cup and a pail and walked out into the snow. When I’d arrived in the fall the air had been filled with the strong contradictory smells of cider, pigsties, alfalfa, baking, organic fertilizer, and thrip-fighting garlic. Now there was only the cold, which sprung my eyes and mouth open like I was hearing bad news over and over.

  I went into the main house and stumbled to the pantry with my glasses fogged up. Someone had roasted coffee beans, saving me twenty minutes of fire-building and
cranking. I filled the cup with them, pumped well-water into the pail, and went back outside. Crossing a tractor path, my boot broke through ice into mud and I almost lost the coffee beans.

  Rudy, from Circulation, was smoking a cigarette in front of the barn. “Coffee,” he said. “Good man. Is there milk?”

  I nodded. “Jesse milked.”

  Irena, from Art, came out shivering in two sweaters and a watch cap pulled low. “Oh, Henry, you’re great,” she said. “Coffee. That’s arduous. Rudy, can I have a cigarette?”

  He gave her one. She lit it, took a drag, and said, “These are good.”

  “Thanks,” Rudy said. “Yeah, you know what it was before? I was curing it too hot.”

  I went back inside, made coffee, finished calving, and started on worming. My computer ran out of solar at three and I had to pedal the bicycle generator for twenty minutes to get it back up.

  On my way out after work I passed the ad sales guys having a sorrel wine happy hour. “Now, he was a man,” one of them was saying. “He could sell two pages to a stranger at a cattle auction. I’ve seen him do it one time.” They raised the jar at me, but I said no thanks. I had to attend a class outside.

  My third day there, I’d gotten lost on the farm roads and come in late. Thad Anderson, who owned both the farm and the magazine, had responded by putting me in charge of the “Survive It Yourself” column, written by a retired forest ranger in Montana. Every Friday Thad gave a wilderness lesson to me and whoever else was interested. So far we’d covered edible weeds and learned how to improvise splints and poultices.

  Tonight there were five of us. Thad shined his flashlight at the Big Dipper on a star map and said, “Somebody show me that in the sky.” He was fifty and barrel shaped, in overalls, canvas coat, and Carl Perkins hair.

  Rick, from Production, pointed at the sky. “Okay,” Thad said. “You go up from those two stars on the edge of the cup, about five times as far as they are from each other, and there’s the North Star. Everyone got it?”

  I nodded, but I could never pick out constellations or understand how the ancient audience had convinced themselves they were up there. My mind was on dinner at the Indian taco place in Destination’s two-block downtown, where it would be warm.

  “Good,” Thad said. “And that’ll always be north.” He drew a circle in the snow with his finger. “Say you want to go east. The star’s north, so east is here.” He poked a hole in the snow. “You start walking, and you keep checking on that star as you go, so you stay in one direction. Every year you hear about some guy that died half a mile from the trail, just going around in circles.”

  The cold eased up a few weeks later, and Thad gave a morning woodlore lesson wearing fleece instead of down. “It’s false spring, but I’ll take it,” he said, showing Rudy and me how to find directions in the daytime by putting a wristwatch on the ground and sticking a twig into the dirt beside it.

  “The stick makes a shadow so you can line up the sun with the hour hand,” Thad said. “Halfway between the hands is south.” I wrote it down, and when I looked up from my pad he met my eyes. “I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news here, Henry. We’re going to have to let a few people go.”

  I nodded. I was used to layoffs, and as the last hired I’d be the first to leave.

  “Haven’t had the greatest circulation this year,” Thad said.

  “Some years it starts shooting up in April, and by June you can’t believe the size of it. It’s from people in cities, thinking, ‘What in God’s name are we doing sitting here in traffic for five hours to go to the seashore? Oughta buy some land and put up a dome.’”

  “Newsstand gets up to here,” Rudy said, stretching his arm toward the sky. “This wasn’t one of those years, though.”

  “Well, it’s weather,” Thad said. “Everything’s weather.”

  I told them not to worry about it, and after lunch I went home to start calling around for work. Four days later I was in Trask, Oklahoma, shaking hands with Dean Laswell.

  “Hell, did I go and hire you?” he greeted me. “Your résumé sounds like a man of experience, but you’re a kid. You’re from the kiddie brigade. You’re a young kid.”

  He owned and edited The Short Sheet, a monthly for shortwave radio enthusiasts, and had written thirty-two books about medical breakthroughs being kept from the public, the hard science proving that all NASA missions were faked, and the unconstitutionality of child support. Laswell published the books himself and sold them by mail to conspiracy buffs and easily amused college kids. He was in his loud, hearty sixties and came to work every day in green corduroy pants and an ARMY sweatshirt. Like one of my professors at Los Nietos, he wore a full beard and no moustache, a look that Gerald said “puts the ‘Amish’ in ‘squeamish.’” Everything in the office, down to the pencils, had STOLEN FROM DEAN LASWELL printed on it.

  The first nine pages of every Short Sheet were devoted to Laswell’s editorials, which mentioned shortwave only occasionally. They were illustrated with photos of Laswell trying to look pensive, taken by Perry the one-man art department, a scowling burnout whose previous credit was airbrushing T-shirts on the boardwalk in Virginia Beach.

  Between the editorials and his books, Laswell wrote thirty pages a day. The shortwave radio was always on, its high-frequency squeals sawing at my brainstem as I fought it out with his spelling and punctuation.

  A “new world order”? Laswell wrote. Sorry, no joy. Try “invisible old order” and you’re a-speak-a my language, pilgrims. All the agencies that have their greasy thumbs in this thing, from the Joint Chiefs on over to the Federal Reserve, are shot through with 33rd-degree Masons, straight up the chain of command—you could look it up. A secret handshake is one thing, campers. A secret stranglehold is a whole ’nother kettle of grouper. His assistant, Cheryl, forty and pale, talked nonstop about recipes, the weather, and Brinkman’s department store having some nice things but being way over in Crowder’s Ridge, distracting me from the shortwave that distracted me from work.

  Laswell got up every half hour to change the station, skipping past the Catalan Friendship Hour to the ranters in the clandestine part of the shortwave band. In a good week he pulled in Freemen, militias, survivalists, income-tax deniers, Holocaust deniers, moon-shot deniers, dollar-bill decipherers, and a lady who hated the Bureau of Weights and Measures. His favorite was a guy with a flat western accent and a colleague named Ernie, who either was off mike or didn’t exist.

  “Big news story, Ernie,” the guy said one day. “This is all they’re talking about. One of these white-coat boys was in his lab, somebody mailed him a little present, and the present blew up on him. Feebs thinks this guy Freebird did it, but there’s a lot of these lone rangers out here, it could be—what, Ernie? Ernie thinks I’m talking about the guy that had Tonto. No, this—these are people, they’re working on their own hook, okay? Not mixers. No one can tell on ’em ’cause nobody knows.

  “But these white-coat boys, they’re getting called to account now. They’ve been working on all these fun deals like cloning animals and tracking everyone’s whereabouts, and the sheeple out there, they see that white coat, they don’t ask any questions. That’s science, okay; leave that alone. Only guy I ever see in a white coat’s the doctor. You see that white coat, the rubber glove’s not far behind, it’s right behind. That’s what all these boys are up to. Quit laughing, Ernie. This is serious business here.”

  I bought a newspaper on the way home. A mail bomb had been sent to a human genome sequencing lab, killing the lead computer programmer. The front-page photo of cratered lab benches and fried instruments looked like Barney’s room at home after an airstrike on Rancho Cahuenga. Freebird was suspected, but there’d been no communiqué yet.

  I went online, where Freebird was an industry. First I found the chat rooms where people said they agreed with his theories but deplored his methods, and then, with a sinking feeling of discovery, the ones where people said his methods were the part that rocked.
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  It wasn’t just Freebird or the shortwave guy who hated the white-coat boys. There was one website after another about scientists playing God and enslaving the trusting sheeple. I thought of the kids at the science fair in Chicago, the ones Barney relaxed around, who got giggly talking about nonferrous magnets. They were guileless, a bunch of absentminded professors in waiting, the mildest crowd of enthusiasts I’d ever seen overrun a Marriott. Whose enemy could they be?

  Someone’s. The bright boys were concocting designer plagues, I read, cloning livers for rich drunks and heating up the climate so the usual bankers could snap up the failed farms. They needed a good shot to the head. They needed their names and home addresses listed online, with a line through the genome guy who’d gotten the bomb, a list that kept getting shut down till it moved to a server in a no-questions-ocracy where free speech was still for sale. Barney wasn’t on the list, but was that Asian name the polypeptide girl from the science fair, or that Jewish one the Bronx Science guy, the kids we’d run down the stairwells with?

  I had a hobby. I hated looking but I kept going back, night after night. Only a few people could have believed the doctrines on my screen, but how many did you need?

  I called Barney. He said, “Yeah, we got a thing that said to verify packages before we open them. They had security guys at the last few conferences. I don’t know what else you can do.” I called the FBI, too, to ask if they were seeing what I was. The bored lady at the 800 number took down what I told her, but answered my questions by telling me what information they didn’t give out until I felt like a bad pet named Sir.

  Two weeks later I arrived for work at The Short Sheet and found Cheryl and Perry out in the hall looking at a padlocked door and a notice saying the premises had been secured by the Sheriff’s Department for nonpayment of debts. Cheryl turned to me with tears in her eyes and said, “They’ve silenced him.”