The Enthusiast

by Charlie Haas

  Inside, the lady at the desk looked at my face and asked if I was looking for the emergency room. I told her we were there for Barney. “He’s in neurology, on three,” she said, “but you still want to get that looked at.”

  The waiting room was across from the elevator, and Patti saw us come off and ran to meet me. We held each other, taking turns saying it was okay. When we let go I said, “This is Jeff. This is Jillian. This is my wife Patti.” Something weightless fell into place.

  Jillian squeezed Patti’s hand and said, “I’m sorry we’re meeting like this. We’ll have to do it over.” Patti nodded. “We should get going,” Jillian said. “Let me know what happens.”

  I pulled Patti aside on the way to the waiting room and asked if she’d told anyone about Freebird chasing me. She said she hadn’t, and I told her we should keep it that way. I could picture a chat room’s worth of Freebird enthusiasts hearing that Barney was the target and coming to finish the job.

  Mom, Dad, and Barney’s son, Michael, were in the waiting room, along with two other patients’ families. Mom and Dad looked composed, but Mom’s left hand was squeezing a Kleenex into diamonds. Michael looked terrified and stuck close to Mom.

  They asked if I was okay and I said yes. My story was that I’d arrived at the conference center, gone looking for Barney, and immediately gotten lost. I was a little annoyed at how readily everyone believed it.

  “Deirdre’s in with him now, and then you can go in if you want,” Dad said. “They said it’s helpful to talk to him.”

  A guy in a BULLS T-shirt, from one of the other families, leaned toward us and said, “It’s definitely helpful. They think they’re taking everything in. They said to talk to them positively.”

  I asked where Pearl was. “Pearl stays in there,” Michael said.

  “Do they know what happened?” I said.

  “He fell off the thing he was using,” Dad said. “A zip liner?” I saw it: Barney hearing the noises, twisting toward them, letting go of the handle, and falling into the gorge.

  Deirdre came to the doorway and said, “Henry, hi. Could I talk to you?”

  I followed her into the corridor, where nurses were walking around exhausted and the hospital smells of steamed rice and Lysol fought it out. “What happened?” she said. “Were you there?”

  I shook my head. “I was looking for him but I got lost.”

  “But why was he up on that thing? He doesn’t do things like that.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “How’s Pearl?”

  She did an “okay, considering” thing with her head and led me to Barney’s room. “Pearl, Uncle Henry’s here,” she said as we went in.

  It was a semi-private room but Barney was the only patient, his bed near the window, his eyes closed and mouth slightly open. Both legs and one arm were in inflatable casts and his head was half covered in bandages. A swarm of wires connected him to monitors flashing numbers and sawtooths. Pearl sat in a chair by the bed, crying softly as if she’d cried loudly for a day or two first. She looked up at me for only a second before her eyes went back to Barney. Deirdre squeezed her as if that had been going on for a few days too, then left us.

  I went over to the bed. “Barney, hey,” I said. “It’s Henry. Hi. Barney, it’s Henry. You look great. I was worried, because you’re in the hospital, but you look great. You’re doing really well.” I paused, heard the machines hiss and Pearl sobbing, and started again. “Mom and Dad are here, and Deirdre and Patti, and Michael, and Pearl’s right here. We’re all here to see you when you wake up. We’re in Illinois. You were at a conference here and you had an accident, but you’re fine now. When you wake up you’ll be fine.”

  One of the monitors beeped and I jumped, but its lights stayed green and it didn’t do it again. “You’re doing great, Barney. The thing is for you to just rest and not worry about anything, because everything’s fine.” I was terrible at this. “We’re all right here.”

  I went back to the waiting room, borrowed Patti’s phone, and called my office from the corridor. “Jesus, where are you?” Walter said. “Tom’s really pissed. Copter Hunting is completely fucked up.”

  I told him about Barney being in the hospital and then, with my voice lowered, about Freebird chasing me. “Fuck. Okay, that’s amazing,” he said. “Let me tell Tom that.” I made him promise not to. “Okay, if you’re sure,” he said. “I’ll give him the family emergency, but I’d love to have this too.”

  Patti and I picked up my rental car at the conference center and returned it in town. On the way back to the hospital I told her what Barney had told me about Pearl. “God,” she said. “Poor Pearl now.”

  I went to the emergency room, showed my Clean Page health card, and got steroid cream and Prednisone. In the lobby I bought a St. Louis Post-Dispatch and took it back to the waiting room. The follow-up coverage of Freebird’s capture included a backgrounder on his “strange odyssey” to the moody loner hall of fame. He’d been identified as “Martin,” who’d been with Fundament House in Lawrence for two months, but the group said they’d had no knowledge of his true identity or his violent actions. They were praying for him and his victims, retaining a lawyer just in case, and suspending demonstrations at the lab for two weeks as a good-faith gesture to the community.

  There was also a boxed story on the two park rangers who’d caught him:

  By a unique turn of events, it was the snake migration, a twice-annual event in the Shawnee Forest, that led Rangers Dugan and Micetti to capture a fugitive who had eluded federal law enforcement for years.

  Since 1972, rangers have closed a forest road to auto traffic for two months in spring and again in autumn, so that cottonmouths, moccasins, and more than thirty other species of snake can migrate between cliff caves and swampland without being hit by cars. Because the collecting of snakes is prohibited, park regulations forbid the carrying of snake hooks, snake bags, pillowcases, or even Ziploc bags.

  “This individual was holding a Ziploc bag and behaving in a furtive manner,” Micetti said. “That turned out to be something he was eating out of, but we took a look in his pack for snake paraphernalia and we found some other stuff”—a handgun, as well as homemade detonator tubes, explosive hematite powder, and other potential bomb-making materials. “At that point, we constrained him there.” The rangers turned the suspect over to county sheriff’s deputies, and were back at their visitor center in time to give a slide show on mushroom identification that afternoon.

  The next day Barney was still in a coma. Patti got Pearl to take a walk with her, the first time she’d left his room. I went in and talked to him three times, doing the same material as before and some childhood anecdotes that never came to a point. In between, I worked on my laptop in the waiting room and made phone calls under the portico outside, exchanging unsmiling looks with the IV guy while he smoked.

  The following day Barney was the same, and I went to a coffee place with Wi-Fi to answer e-mail and edit copy. The Four Seasons was starting on their stereo for the third time when Patti called to say Barney’s eyes were open.

  When I got there everyone was standing around Barney’s bed but Michael, who stood back by the wall looking scared. Deirdre was holding one of Barney’s hands, Pearl the other. His eyes were open but not looking at anyone, his lips fluttering around an oval of teeth. A doctor came in, leaned over him, and said, “Dr. Bay? Barney? Hey, it’s Dr. Milgrim, and your family’s all here as well. How are you doing?”

  For a second Barney followed the doctor’s eyes. Then a soft thready noise came from his throat, the first sound he’d made since the injury, and I had to steady myself on the bedrail. “This is good stuff, folks,” the doctor said. “Very promising stuff.”

  Deirdre held Barney’s hand to her chest and started to cry. When the doctor left we waited for Barney to make the sound again, but he fell asleep.

  Patti and I had a room at the Major Edmunds Hotel, where a sign in the lobby advertised dancing till 9:30 in the fo
urth-floor Skyline Room. Our room had forty-year footpaths in the carpet and cigarette burns on the furniture, faded Clayton glory a few towns from the real thing. I lay down on the bumpy bedspread and Patti got next to me.

  “I should have known who the guy was,” I said. “I should have gotten Barney out of the woods. I should have helped him more.”

  “You helped him a lot,” she said. “For years. It’s like me and Kris Santangelo.”

  I turned to look at her. “How do you mean?”

  “You know. They have their little specialty, but they need us to even get out the door.”

  We kissed, then started slipping out of our clothes and kicking them off the bed. A few kisses later she paused. “We can go out the door too,” she said. “No one’s stopping us.”

  Two days later Barney was making eye contact with all of us, and Pearl was sure she understood the sounds he made even though no one else did. “That was ‘Deirdre’! Mom, he said, ‘Deirdre’! That was either ‘hi’ or ‘fine.’ He said, ‘love’! Grandma, did you hear it?”

  The next day Mom, Dad, and Patti flew home to work. When I walked into Barney’s room three days later he looked at me and said, “Eh-ree,” too clearly to be anyone’s imagination. Michael gasped, Pearl yelled “Yes!” and Deirdre asked a nurse to get the doctor.

  Barney slurred out our names some more and looked baffled by our thrilled reactions. The doctor came in and said, “Barney, I’m Stu Milgrim. I’m your doctor here in Edmundstown. Edmundstown, Illinois.”

  “Noy?”

  “Illinois. Yes. You had an accident. You hit your head. You’re in the hospital, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “You were unconscious for a while but you’re doing really well now. You’re recognizing people and talking and it’s all good quality stuff. We just need you to keep resting and going along the way you’re going, okay?”

  Barney nodded, looked around the room, frowned, and said, “Hotel?”

  His speech got clearer every day, but he couldn’t retain what had happened or where he was. He knew where he lived, but not what year it was or who was president.

  Deirdre called someone she knew at the hospital in Lawrence, and two days later a neurologist came from St. Louis. He had the high-end doctor look that says, “I went into this because I’m immensely compassionate, but you’ll have to take my word for that because I only sleep three hours a night and I’m going to smack the next person who asks me something stupid.”

  He let Deirdre and me come into Barney’s room with him. When he asked Barney what kind of work he did, Barney thought for a minute and said, “Lemma?”

  “Science. Yes. You’re a cell biologist.”

  “Yeah,” Barney said, a child’s trusting “Yeah” that was all wrong for him.

  “You lost some neural cells in an accident. Your scan is showing me low activity in the diencephalon and the medial frontal cortex. You know where the diencephalon is?” Barney waved his good arm at his head. “Good. Okay. I’ll be back to see you soon.”

  In the hall the neurologist said that short-term memory loss often happened with concussion, that Barney had a lot of old memories available but that new ones were melting like snowflakes, and that a patient’s brain, hating not to know things, would jump into the gaps with guesses, dream material, or memories from eight or eighteen years ago. Sometimes people recovered.

  I stayed two more days, till I couldn’t put off Walter any longer and booked a flight home. The day I left, the neurologist told Deirdre about a rehab place in Houston that got good results. I went into Barney’s room and said, “I have to go back to California now, Barney, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll come see you in a couple weeks. You might be in a different place then, where they’ll help you get better. Barney, don’t pull on that, okay? That’s part of the equipment.”

  “Okay.”

  “You’ll be better soon. You can run in the desert.”

  “Desert areas.”

  “That’s right. I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?”

  “Give me a call,” he said.

  “I will. Don’t pull on that, okay? There you go.”

  “There you go,” he said. I picked up his hand and told him how great he was doing till I missed my plane.

  The one I took got in late, and Patti met me at the airport. We hugged in the same boarding area where we’d hugged hello and goodbye every weekend of our Fun Fare courtship, two airport remodels ago. The hugging then had been all horny naiveté, but this was romance too, the idea that something as haywire as love would get us through this.

  I called Barney every morning, first in Edmundstown and then Houston, and listened to his lax new voice say things like “We’re at the hotel in Canada” or “I have to go to the lab now. There’s a meeting.” When I hung up and went to the office I was almost normal, except for a continuous stomachache and a tendency to ask people how they were too often, because I now expected the bottom to drop out of everyone and everything.

  The day before I went to Houston, Walter and I met with Tom Patrick to go over our plans for Zip-Line World. When we were wrapping up, Walter said, “Tell Tom what happened to you. With the guy.” I said no but he insisted, and I told Patrick how I’d gotten away from Freebird.

  “That’s impressive,” Patrick said. “Have you talked to any media?”

  “No. I’m kind of trying to be quiet about it.”

  “Nice,” Patrick said, although his expression suggested I was an idiot. “Walter said you’ve got someone who’s braindamaged?”

  “Head-injured,” I said.

  “Right. You know who that happened to?” he said to Walter.

  “Bob DeBonis. I don’t think they’ve made any progress with him. I hope yours works out, though.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and stood up to go. “I met someone who said to say hello to you.”

  I gave him the ex–vice president’s regards. Patrick rolled his eyes. “Him and the mad bomber,” he said. “Boy, can you pick ’em.”

  16

  I flew overnight to Houston, rented an Accent, and drove to the Starling Center for Rehabilitation, a tan hacienda in a medical complex shaded by carob trees whose dry pods crackled underfoot. I’d worried about finding a locked ward, but the lobby looked like the conversation area of a savings and loan. There were ten patients there, one talking to himself in a speeding whisper and another tearing page after page from a magazine, but most of them quietly watching TV. A few were paired with staff people. The uniform was a peach polo shirt with a picture of a starling poised for flight.

  I was almost at the desk when a woman in her sixties rushed up to me, grabbed my arm, and thrust her baffled face close to mine. Terrible breath poured from her mouth as she said, “Where’s my Ted?”

  A polo-shirt woman came over, eased my forearm free, and said, “I don’t think he knows that, Grace. I’ll tell you what, let’s have a seat over here with Frances.” As she led Grace away she gave me a smile that said, “You know how it is.” I wanted to have no idea how it was. I told the guy at the desk I was there to see Barney, and he said to try the patio.

  He was out there, whispering to himself in a wheelchair under a pepper tree, in a floppy tennis hat, shorts, and a T-shirt from the dads’ club of Pearl and Michael’s school. His hands were on his knees, palms up and fingers fluttering. There were older patients on either side of him, snoozing in the sun. When he saw me he smiled, said, “Henry!” rose halfway out of the wheelchair, and fell back in. His fractures were healing but the brain injury had screwed up his balance and he was relearning how to walk. “Is sister here?”

  “Patti? No, she had to work. But Dad is coming.”

  He beamed at me. “That’s wonderful.”

  A polo-shirt guy came out and said it was time for lunch. I wheeled Barney into a dining room of round Formica tables, with patients’ shaky artwork on the walls. Over tomato soup the patient across from us asked if we were brothers. �
�I can always tell if people are brothers,” she said, “but I need to see them both.”

  “Dad!” Barney said. I looked up and saw my father walking toward us in another perfect suit, this one blue. “That’s terrific,” Barney said, “that we’re all staying here.”

  “I know,” Dad said, squeezing Barney’s shoulder. “It worked out great.”

  After lunch we took Barney to physical therapy, left him with the trainer, and sat down outside. “I brought him this,” Dad said. “I think it might help.”

  He handed me a spiral-bound datebook with a smiling picture of himself on the cover and a time-management tip from him on every page. I looked from the picture to the real dad in front of me, and was about to ask him why he would give a schedule book to someone whose schedule had been obliterated, when he misread my look and said, “Oh, I brought one for you too. It’s in the car.”

  We took Barney to his room, where the furniture was white and the walls powder blue. Every day an attendant pinned up a flyer with Barney’s name and age, the date, where he was, what had happened to him, and seasonal clip art of people throwing footballs and raking leaves.

  Dad and Barney sat at the desk with the datebook open in front of them. “Okay,” Dad said, “what’s something you might have to do this afternoon?”

  “Go to a meeting,” Barney said.

  “Okay. So you write that in there.”

  Barney scrawled meeting in the 3:00 P.M. slot. “We’re going to have a country,” he said. “We have some farmers coming, and some horseshoe guys.”

  “Blacksmiths?” Dad said.

  “Yes,” Barney said. “So we get liberty. And we wear wigs in the room.” Next to meeting he started a jagged drawing of a standing man. “We have people coming in boats from their old countries, because God is too strict. God is scaring the kids. That’s one of the things, for our meeting.”