All-Day Breakfast (51 page)

“We're changed people!” Clint leapt to his feet, jostling the pole-lamp. “In fact I'm sick of this fucking puzzle! Let's just get out of here!”

“No, no, we cannot swear—”

“Can Grammy come and watch?” Ray suddenly asked, blond and blinking.

Evadare reached for her crocheting bag. “She sleeps after lunch.”

“Don't make any plans for tomorrow, kids,” I said.

“Why not?” said Josie.

“I figure we'll go horseback riding.”

“
Really
?” said Ray.

“Maybe,” I said.

They found one of their crap Japanese cartoons, and I may've dozed off.

“Holy crow,” Megan said at one point. “My arms feel really…solid, I guess?”

I opened my eyes at the end of the cartoon as all of the rag-tag characters assembled in a perfectly flat green field, a soundtrack of wailing guitars playing over their impossibly wide smiles. The monkey-in-a-diaper character rolled at their feet and all of the spiky-haired characters laughed. Josie slid out from under nose-picking Ray and stepped gingerly to the carpet.

“Ow,” she said.

“What's wrong?”

“Leg's asleep.”

She hopped across the rug and flopped into my lap, tucking her brown head, with its silver penguin barrette, neatly under my chin.

The guitars wailed over the credits. Hundreds of names flashed across.

“I couldn't keep track of all that,” I said. “Did it have a happy ending?”

“Sure. It's a kids' show.”

Mouth hard like a penny, Evadare hit mute on the remote and the suddenness of the silence made Ray withdraw his finger. She brought her eyebrows down against the top of her glasses.

“Did you hear it? That's strange.”

“Hear what?” I asked.

She tilted her head, gray eyes twitching as she listened to the house.

“It sounded like the bead curtain.”

Nineteen months later

The wireless microphone
tugged my lapel down an inch, but I was the only one who'd look closely enough to notice—I gave an audience other things to gawk at. The lights up on their aerial racks made the studio hot as an August baseball diamond, and the pancake makeup worked hard to mask the sweat beading at my hairline. On the stool beside mine, Mary Warner momentarily thrust her arms out in front of her, maybe straightening her suit jacket, then gave me a nod, clutched her stack of note cards and addressed the red light atop the camera. The shuffling studio guys were only silhouettes behind it—someone could look right at them and never guess the mounds of desiccated corpses in their minds' eyes.

I practiced my quick-and-easy smile while my face bent toward my buckled Berg loafers padded with orthotic toes.

“It's 8:07 on
Nebraska in the Morning
, and we're joined by Peter Giller, Rotary International's Nebraskan of the Year.” She twitched just enough for her curls to shimmer. “And I'd venture to call him our
Newsmaker
of the Year, wouldn't you, Harold?”

The
tv
monitor at our feet cut from Mary to the portly weatherman, chortling on the other side of the sky-blue studio.

“He's certainly made an impact,” he nodded. “On my family and so many others.”

The producer cut back to the two-shot of Mary and me—from such a wide angle, my anatomical design choices weren't obvious, I just looked like a guy with longish hair and a wide-shouldered suit. Alice had flown a tailor in from Naples who specialized in transhumeral amputees, a bona fide Neapolitan, so according to Josie and Ray I now had a closetful of ice-cream suits. Mary jostled a pantyhosed leg.

“Thank you for making this time for us, Peter.”

“Oh, it's a pleasure, Mary. I've enjoyed your work for a long time.”

I especially enjoyed it that she'd arrived in Gage County after Harv and Franny had already sunk to the bottom of the Republican River.

“Well, thank
you
! So, two years ago you were a small-town science teacher out in Hoover, now our changing world has to scramble more than
ever
just to keep up with
your
changes.”

She glanced from the camera to me, smiling just enough to produce a dimple. PI's mermaid logo suddenly hovered beside my head on the monitor. I'd negotiated with the producer to get that.

“Um,” I said, “is that a question?”

“What exactly
was
your path from little old Hoover to heading research and development at Penzler Innovations out in Ohio? I understand the story has its dark side, and I've also heard of teachers becoming
principals
, but…”

How many times had I provided the summary? Maybe a hundred since the day the National Health Service had signed our contracts in England, the US Health Department a week after that, Center for Disease Control, Centers for Medicare Services and all the other federal departments, me in a boardroom summarizing Shamanski in my ice-cream suit for the
New York Times
and
The Economist
, or via e-mail for the
Des Moines Register
in my Hulk T-shirt and no bottoms. Below our faces on the monitor, the scrolling titles read
next hour: white house: after congo, what?

“Well.” I scratched the back of my head so, to the folks at home, I must've looked like a chimp. “I'd visited Penzler's Velouria facility, right here in Nebraska, in a teaching capacity, and made enough connections that I was in touch with Alice Penzler just prior to all the tragedies that befell her company, just a horrible, horrible string of events.”

Mary pressed her hand to my kneecap. “Those explosions in Ohio. Just tragic.”

“An incredible loss. An incalculable loss.” Was I honestly trying to—what?—quantify the emotion of those days, for the umpteenth time? Impossible and stupid? Yet my mouth went on talking. “Alice's father, he passed away in that lab accident, dozens of staff lost their lives in a related incident, and as the
ceo
Alice needed to rebuild Penzler, not just for the sake of its investors but to be able to give something back to those families that had lost so much. It might sound a little, you know, pie in the sky,” I smiled, “but Alice set out to make the world a better place, and I found myself in a position to contribute.”

“You'd seen tragedy of your own.” She glanced gravely at the camera. “Tell us about that.”

I'd yet to create sufficient distance between the talking me and the me that had watched PBF burn. I looked across at Harold, his sausage hands folded in his lap, and imagined sinking my teeth into his cheek.

“Yes,” I said, “a number of students from Hoover lost their lives on a field trip, a research trip, really, to brainstorm how they wanted the world of their future to look. But there was a fire—your viewers will remember, I'm sure, it was on a farm just outside Lincoln—and all of the steps I've taken since then have been to honor their memories. With my science background prior to my teaching career, I found myself in a position to contribute, through Alice and everyone else at Penzler.”

“Most of us have seen the coverage on CNN, but can you tell us in
your own words
what you've contributed?”

“Well, to anyone not familiar with it, this might sound like a fairytale, but at Penzler R & D we've isolated a compound that, over the long-term, looks like it may be able to heal just about any wound, to halt any disease, but, as always, I must stress that Shamanski is only effective in very small doses administered over many months. I took the very unscientific step of administering it to myself at one point in development and, well, you see the results.” I shrugged an armless shoulder. “Patients think that if it's some miracle drug they ought to take as much as they can as quickly as they can, but fortunately I'm here as the poster child for the side effects of that scenario. Whether the patient's a kid with muscular dystrophy or a wounded soldier back from the Congo, we've already sent hundreds of people back to work, back to school, back to productive lives with their families, but I have to tell each of them, ‘You want to hold onto your arms and ears, you take it slow.' ”

“Everything in moderation.” Mary tilted her head at the camera. “Even miracles.”

“In fact.” I quickly licked my lips, which my mom had said was my bad habit on camera. “Harold and I were talking just a minute ago, and he told me—is this all right to mention?”

“You go right ahead,” Harold nodded, the lights flashing off his glasses.

“Harold told me that for years his dad had been in care for Parkinson's, but he was involved with our second round of trials and now he's been back at home for, what is it, four months?”

“Three.” He nodded again. “Baking up a storm.”

“Is
that
where those little lemon pies keep coming from?” asked Mary.

“Yes, it is!”

“Well,” she beamed at the camera, “we will break for these messages while my waistline tears a strip off Harold, how about that?”

I smiled too, then lifted my hand six inches in a vague farewell.

“Okay,” a silhouette announced. “Two minutes.”

I slid off the stool onto the floor, swirling with green floral patterns from the lights, and unclipped my microphone. It slid out of my fingers to bounce off the tile.

“Ow!” a man in headphones called. “Put that back on, sir!”

“We aren't done yet,” Mary said without moving her lips as a boy with a shaved head brushed powder across her cheeks.

“Wasn't I on for just the three minutes or whatever they said?”

“Oh, it
was
, I'm sorry, I guess nobody mentioned—the biggest pig in Burroughs County refuses to come through the service bay, so we'll do her in the parking lot as a button and that gives you three more minutes, that all right?”

As I climbed back up I saw the tattoo on the makeup kid's shoulder: Uncle Sam, his face gray and rotten like that half-eaten apple under Ray's bed, above the tricolor caption
i want bacon.
My stomach gave a lurch and I had to grip the edge of the stool.

“Nice—nice ink,” I said. “What's the connection there, zombies and bacon?”

“It's
disgusting
.” Mary's lips bunched up into a bee. “He has to hide it when my kids are here.”

“No connection.” He smiled thinly as he surveyed my complexion, his gaze never once darting toward where my ears ought to have been. “My friends and I were pretty drunk and we were like, ‘It'd be awesome if zombies ate bacon, like instead of brains?' They'd still shamble around for our entertainment, nobody gets hurt.”

The headphone guy adjusted my microphone.

“Nobody except the biggest pig in Burroughs County,” I said.

Mary lifted her bottom to straighten her skirt. “Her name's Hermione.”

“Listen,” Makeup went on quietly, eyebrows climbing his forehead, “my cousin's
hiv
-positive and she's real excited about this stuff—about your medicine.”

“She ought to be. It's early days for us treating
hiv
and
aids,
but with timing and dosage it'll work. Where's she live?”

“Indy.”

“There'll be a free clinic first week in July. Tell her to look after herself in the meantime, really.”

“Cool,” he said, collecting his tool kit.

“Peter,” Mary murmured, her lips still hardly moving, “are you seeing anyone?”

“Not at the moment,” I said, because that seemed less pathetic than
no
. Then to be polite I asked, “Are you?”

“Okay,” said the silhouette. “In five.”

I watched Mary take a deep breath, then realized I ought to face the camera. I didn't want to also be Ogler of the Year.

“Welcome back to
Nebraska in the Morning
, it's now 8:15. What have we got coming after 8:30, Harold?”

“Another taste of the weird and wacky,” Harold said to his camera. “A man out in Ohio, unemployed since a workplace fire eighteen months ago, claims that this past weekend his arms simply dropped off!”

The picture cut to a freckled man in thick glasses, too close to the camera and his eyes open very wide.

“I looked down at the ping-pong table,” he said, “and there they were.”

“Well!” Mary said. “I guess he can give up on that job search once and for all!”

“Reminds me of that California story, a couple of weeks ago.” Harold frowned. “The gentleman out in the strawberry field.”

“Oh, Harold Sayers, our investigative journalist! You missed your calling!”

They cut from Harold grinding his teeth back to me.

“Well, right now we are so fortunate to have with us medical researcher and philanthropist Peter Giller! Good morning, Peter.”

I craved one of Harold's dad's lemon pies, wanted them smeared in my armpits.

“Hello again,” I said.

“Now, I saw your picture in the
Journal Star
yesterday and I told the kids I'd be talking to you, so little Joshua asked me—”

“Oh,” said Harold, his fist, hilariously, to his brow. “Oh, Joshua.”

“He gives us plenty to talk about, yeah,” Mary smiled. “So he wanted to know, if you've lost an arm, why don't you wear a prosthetic? ‘A fake one' is what he said.”

“Oh, okay. It's amazing how seldom I get asked that, I guess most people…okay, one reason is that I've entirely lost the humerus—”

“But not your sense of humor!” yelled Harold.

I had taken this hour from my precious life to appear on
Nebraska in the Morning
because our funding gurus, the Buffett Foundation, had decreed that Shamanski would need a human face if the typical American was ever going to see it as more than voodoo. We'd had 825 prospective patients in Des Moines, yes, but we'd prepped for five thousand.

“—so I'd have very little control over a conventional prosthesis. The military's made amazing strides with artificial limbs tapping into the nervous system—robotics, really—but what's more important to me is keeping my eyes on the prize of improving Shamanski to the point that I'll actually be able to get my arm
back
, and to—”

“You,” Mary stammered, “you mean to say you still
have
the arm?”

Anyone who hiccups while imagining a severed limb has never spent time as a zombie.

“No. Our vision is that one day Shamanski might induce the body to regrow entire appendages. That may be promising more than we can ultimately deliver, but if Penzler doesn't dream about it, who will?” The corporate bumper sticker.

Mary tilted her chin meaningfully. “Ever since the name was first bandied around, Peter, I've wanted to ask, ‘Why Shamanski?' ”

“Shamanski was a very close friend of both Alice and mine.”
And without the key ingredient of a flying horse's cloned brain tissue
, I failed to tell the audience at home,
we'd still be creating full-blown zombies from town to town, state to state
,
it's ninety-one percent more effective a stabilizing agent than the nitrate booster we mixed in initially.
“He passed away just as this was getting started and we owe him a great deal.”

“Okay, now, we only have two minutes left with you, Peter, before you need to be on your way.” She gazed at my widowed shoulder—maybe her mind had already gone to the next segment. “One point we haven't touched on is that Rotary's guidelines for selecting their Nebraskan of the Year talk a lot about volunteerism and giving to the community. Can you expand on your role there?”

“Sure. First off, there are thousands of Nebraskans doing absolutely unflagging work for the public good, year in and year out, whether it's candy stripers in hospitals, Meals on Wheels
bringing breakfasts into schools or volunteers working with wounded veterans—”