The Portable Veblen (38 page)

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.

      19

M
AYBE
Y
ES
, M
AYBE
N
O

V
eblen, miserable all night, rose at dawn trying to imagine her life without Paul, while trying to clear her mind of the prejudices that might be clouding what she needed most to see.

She cradled her broken portrait of Mr. Thorstein Veblen. “Why didn’t you say something sooner?”

His face looked three-dimensional all of a sudden, as if he were about to erupt with words, and she smelled bacon in his mustache.

In Palo Alto, as all over northern California, there existed a phenomenon in which dried autumn leaves still clung to the trees in spring, even as the meristems began to bud. She could hear the old leaves rustling, being pushed aside.

She was on the brink of something, a break from the harness, with the possibility of new life at the margins.

•   •   •

I
N LESS THAN
an hour she was at the beach, after taking the narrow road over the mountains where fog huddled at the crest,
winding down the other side to Pescadero. It was the same route Thorstein Veblen would take to the coast in his cart, pulled by Beauty. In 1929, his ashes had been scattered at this beach by a group of his closest friends, and for that reason, when she dug her hands into the sand, she was sure that there were still bits of him there, and that she was touching him. She wrote her name in the sand, and watched it erased by an indifferent wind.

The beach was long and sandy, broken up by coves of ancient lime and sandstone, always hollowing. Could the word
erosion
be related to
eros
? Love, doomed to cave in? (Later, when she had a chance to look it up, she found that
erosion
wasn’t related to
eros
at all, but to
rodere
—to those who gnaw, to rodents!)

She remembered something Robert Reich once said: “Ordinarily, I’d never recommend you take a book by an economist to the beach. I wouldn’t even recommend you take an economist to the beach. The exception is Thorstein Veblen, and his book is
The Theory of the Leisure Class
. Veblen wrote this classic in 1899, near the end of the Gilded Age when robber barons ran wild, but the book is just as fresh and relevant today. . . . We’re in America’s second Gilded Age. So take Veblen to the beach and learn more about it—but don’t expect him to give you much social status: He’s in paperback and he’s cheap.”

Well, she didn’t need to take him. He was already here.

Gulls screamed and flew close. In the sand she found a shard of glass.

Was it possible to love the contradictions in somebody? Was it all but impossible to find somebody without them?

Had her mother made of her a ragged-edged shard without a fit?

The ocean was rolling in sheets.

Endlessly remaking the ocean bed. Endlessly full of sand.

She wanted Paul, she loved him. He’d do the right thing, given time to think. She’d overwhelmed him with negativity about Cloris, the way her mother always overwhelmed her with negativity about everything. When overwhelmed with negativity, one had to resist; it was a law of nature.

Something had been hovering in her thoughts, and she called her mother from the small furrow she’d made for herself in the sand.

“No, Linus, I need to speak to her
now,
” she said.

Her mother came on the line expecting a crisis. “What is it, Veblen? What’s wrong?”

The air was as salty and unfathomable as the sea.

“Why did you name me Veblen?” she asked sternly, without explanation.

“What on earth? My heart is probably going two hundred beats a minute. What is this about?”

“You always told me you put your values and ideals before any man,” Veblen said, eyeing the gray horizon. “That there was nothing more important.”

“What are you trying to say?” said her mother. “Have you and Paul ended it?”

She gouged the sand with the shard. She wrote
MAYBE YES, MAYBE NO
with it, then obliterated the words. “You made it seem like your values were so important that you named me after Thorstein Veblen,” Veblen said, remaining focused.

“Am I under oath here?” said Melanie.

“So tell me now or never,” she pressed on, as a long procession of noble pelicans winged past. “Could there have been another reason you named me Veblen?”

At this her mother declined to respond, and the silence was long and maddening.

“Mom?”

“What, Veblen?”

“Didn’t you name me Veblen for another reason?” she asked, a little more gently.

“I don’t know what you mean,” said her mother.

“After you got upset about me taking the typewriter,” Veblen said, “I remembered it was your PhD adviser who gave it to you. How often does that happen? I suddenly thought. Then I remembered other stuff, like the time we went to hear that lecture in Berkeley about Veblen’s writings on the ‘quasi-personal fringe,’ which I thought might be a euphemism for pubic hair, by the way, and then you wanted to say something to the professor when the talk was over, but his wife and daughter ran up and all of a sudden we rushed out of there. And in the car you cried.”

“How could you possibly remember that,” Melanie said.

Veblen said, “You loved him, right?”

Melanie was quiet again. But finally she said, “I suppose I did.”

“Professor George Twaddle?”

“Mmm.”

Professor Twaddle. A married man, unavailable, twice Melanie’s age. Veblen didn’t want to hear the details, except: “Rudgear’s still my father, right?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“You’re sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. That’s why I worry about your sanity.”

“Well, I don’t care about that. But I care that you didn’t name
me after Thorstein Veblen because of Veblen’s philosophy. It was because you loved Professor Twaddle.”

“It wasn’t a good situation,” Melanie said.

“No, how could it be?”

“Be glad I didn’t name you Twaddle,” Melanie said.

“You misled me!”

“Veblen, he and I shared great admiration for Thorstein Veblen. It’s what drew us together. Don’t act like this is a shocking discovery.”

Veblen yelled, “It’s like my whole life is built on a smokescreen!”

“Veblen!” cried her mother. “That’s ridiculous. It was all tied together, can’t you understand that?”

“Why did I believe you?” Veblen cried. “I always believed everything you said, like it was the final word.”

“I really don’t understand the problem,” Melanie said, “and I don’t know why you’re trying to make me feel guilty. I think I’ve said enough.”

“You’d better not be harboring some feeling that Twaddle would have been better than Linus,” said Veblen, viciously. “If you think that, in any part of yourself, then—you’re a total fool.”

And having said what she had to say, she ended the call.

•   •   •

V
EBLEN DROVE BACK
over the mountains, aiming straight for the VA. She would surprise Paul at his office. She’d tell him she was emerging from a lifelong delusion about her identity and priorities. She’d tell him she might need some time, it might take awhile to unravel, but she wanted to and that’s what mattered.

And when she parked under a splendid old oak with many branches, there came a call from Garberville, but she thought,
Not now.

Climbing out of the old yellow Volvo, she received another call from Bill and Marion’s number. She ignored it still.

She started to run, feeling the warmth of the sun and the rub of the grass under her soles, remembering how running used to make her pretend to be Mighty Mouse, shouting,
“Here I come to save the day!”
and later on, Maria singing,
“The hills are alive . . .”
and then thinking it very strange that she could not run across grass without pretending to be someone other than herself, for even now she found herself in search of something to think when running across grass. But now there was a beehive in her pocket—an unknown number this time, which she decided to intercept.

“Hi, is this Veblen? This is Susan Hinks, I’m Dr. Vreeland’s assistant at the VA. I’m so sorry, I have some serious news.”

“What?” Veblen said, standing on the grass at the VA, looking around.

“Dr. Vreeland is in the hospital. He was hit by a car.”

“What?”

“We don’t know all the details yet. He was taken into the VA hospital and now he’s been moved to Stanford.”

“Is he okay?”

“We’ll know more soon. He’s breathing.”

“Just
breathing
?”

“I’ve also called his parents,” said Susan Hinks. “We’re all praying for him.”

“Oh,” mumbled Veblen. A crow cackled in the oak.

“It’s all very confusing. Cloris Hutmacher was driving, you see.”

“Driving? The car that hit Paul?” Veblen choked.

“Yes. It’s not a happy day for us. She seems to have known about Dr. Vreeland’s letter.”

“What letter?”

“Well, you see, Dr. Vreeland wrote a letter about some questionable steps Hutmacher may have taken to rush the trial, and then next thing we know she’s hitting him with her car, so we’re all a little bit in shock.”

“Oh my god!”

As she stood there absorbing the news, her mother called.

“Veblen, dear, Paul’s parents just called us. Have you talked to them?”

“I know what happened.”

“Veblen, he’s a strong man and I think he’s going to be all right.”

“How do you know?” cried Veblen.

“I asked to speak to one of the doctors,” said her mother. “Marion Vreeland called me because they couldn’t reach you. She was very calm and it was extremely good of her to call and tell me.”

“Who cares if she called you?” Veblen cried out. There was a time when abreacting to her mother was out of the question, untenable. The slightest ripple between them terrified her. She was aware that her mother had trained her to turn herself inside out, like a pocket to be inspected for pilfered change.

“Get a hold of yourself! We’re coming down right away.”

The oak leaves shivered around her.

      20

S
OMETHING
B
AD
M
UST
H
AVE
H
APPENED

V
eblen navigated the ICU, where murmurs from the frail human chain rose softly in every room. Just having to name Paul at the nurses’ station flooded her with emotion.

She found him lying thirty degrees semiupright behind a curtain, intubated, breathing on a ventilator. Mounted on the wall above his head was a screen with the running script of his functions. Wires crisscrossed to many parts of Paul. To one side of the bed was an IV stand holding up a dangling bladder of fluid, which drained through a clear tube connected to a starfish of plastic taped to his hand. A small box mounted on another stand directed more wires at Paul’s head, half mummified in an inverted funnel of bandages, and an ICP monitor ran to the suboccipital burr hole in his skull. Foam cylinders expanded and contracted slowly around each leg.