The Enthusiast

by Charlie Haas

  “To take up,” Dad said.

  “Yeah.”

  “So we make that a bullet item.”

  Dad pointed to where the bullet items went. Barney nodded but kept drawing the man, who was holding a sledgehammer now. “It doesn’t matter how late we stay up,” he said. “We have to finish. And then we’ll all stand in line and sign it. Then we’ll take questions, if anyone has questions.”

  A polo-shirt woman came to the door. “Barney,” she said, “it’s almost three o’clock. Time for that meeting.”

  The meeting was a memory class. Barney’s fellow students were a guy who’d gone through a windshield, a woman who’d been without oxygen to her brain for ten minutes after a heart attack, a guy who’d crashed his motorcycle, a guy who’d confused his wife’s once-a-day pills with his three-a-days, and a woman who’d almost drowned.

  “Who had ‘meeting’ in their book for today?” the teacher asked.

  Barney and the half-drowned woman held their datebooks up. The motorcycle guy giggled, clapped, and said, “All right, Barney! All right, Celeste!”

  Paula looked at Barney’s book. “‘Meeting,’ good, and that’s a nice drawing,” she said. “Who is that?”

  Barney stared at the drawing. Dad whispered, “Blacksmith.”

  “Sshh,” Barney said to Dad. “He’s the village smithy,” he told Paula. “His funding required him to hammer all day. His arms were so big from using the hammer that he didn’t even need the hammer anymore. He said, ‘Get that hammer out of here. That hammer’s gonna be the death of me.’”

  “All right, Barney!” the motorcycle guy said.

  Dad and I had dinner at his hotel, a fancy one near Herrman Park. We didn’t talk about Barney. I told him about the strange animals at Species Showcase and he told me about helping a brass quintet in Seattle set long-term goals. In the morning we ate toaster waffles and banana chunks with Barney, and then Dad said, “I’d better get going. I have a thing in Minnesota.”

  We wheeled Barney to the lobby. “This is all good, what’s happening,” Dad said.

  “Yeah?” Barney said.

  “Definitely. You’re making a lot of progress.”

  “Sometimes there’s nothing for a while,” Barney said, “and we’ll attack it another way.”

  “Sure,” Dad said. “You need to approach it freshly.”

  “You used to give people extensions for that,” Barney said.

  “Like for the ailerons.”

  “I did when I could,” Dad said. “See, you remember that. Your memory’s good.”

  “Yeah,” Barney said.

  Dad leaned down to hug him and said, “You can have all the extensions you need. You just take your time.”

  “Okay. Thank you very much,” Barney said.

  Dad stood up, clapped my shoulder, and went out the door. Barney watched him walk to his car and said, “I think he’s got a lot weighing on him now.”

  The relatives talked on the phone all the time. What did the specialist say, no, his exact words, where are we on activities of daily living, did the physical therapy lady look happy? The specialist’s exact words were “You know those weird thoughts you have just before you fall asleep, a whole situation you think is real, and then you realize it isn’t as you’re going under? That’s where your brother is all the time.”

  I could see that when I sat with Barney, his bewilderment forcing his eyes a little farther back into his face each time I visited. I couldn’t take it for long, and a half-hour errand was a luxury vacation—gum and underwear at Target, a hospital cafeteria with salt-flavored gravy on everything—but then I’d hurry back to him, and when the visit was over I couldn’t stand to leave. I split the difference by crying in the rent-a-car before driving to the airport, my shoulders shaking limp in a broad cross-section of the American rental fleet as the months went by. I’d come back as soon as I could, and when Barney was at music therapy I’d make business calls from the William P. Starling Courtyard, where people who didn’t know where they were would draw close to me and nod at what I was saying to Walter Denise, just to have something to agree with.

  The flyers in Barney’s room were illustrated with snowmen now, and he’d lost another five pounds he couldn’t spare. As I wheeled him out of memory class he talked to me from the side of his mouth, conspiring: “I’ll give you five bucks if you get me out of here.”

  I said, “Barney, you’re joking.”

  “Yeah, you don’t have to get me out of here. It’s okay.”

  “No, I mean you’re making jokes now. I think that’s good.”

  “It makes Michael less nervous,” he said. “It makes Henry less nervous.”

  When we got to his room the mail was there, drawings from Pearl and Michael and a sixteen-page article, “Neurotrophic Improvement of Synaptic Transmission,” by Barnard Bay, University of Kansas, and Parmalit Singh, Johns Hopkins, with a handwritten note that said, “Barney, here’s our offprint, as promised. I enjoyed our phone call. I can tell you’re knitting cells together in the hippocampus a mile a minute. I’m sure we will be yelling at one another about quantifying data before the snows melt. Fondest regards, Pat.”

  Barney flipped through the article, whispering over the charts and tables. When he finished he wheeled himself to the door and said, “I have to go downstairs now. We’re presenting this.”

  “Wait,” I said. “That’s not what we’re doing now.”

  “I have to go,” he said, trying to wheel past me.

  “We’re in Houston, Barney,” I said, jumping to block the wheelchair. He had a nice Paralympics feint going. “We’re at the rehab place.” I jumped too hard and knocked into the doorjamb.

  A polo-shirt guy, one of the bigger ones, came in and said, “How are we doing here?”

  “People are waiting!” Barney said, standing out of the wheelchair and grabbing my arm.

  “Okay, you know what, that’s not appropriate,” the polo-shirt guy said. “Let’s get you settled down here.” He tried to ease Barney into the wheelchair, but Barney pushed him away, knocking over a jar of jellybeans from a well-wisher at Stanford. When a second polo-shirt guy came in, Barney gave up and fell into the wheelchair, out of breath.

  “How we doing, big guy?” the second one said. “Little better?”

  “Yeah,” Barney said.

  The first one waved me into the hall and closed the door to the room. “This isn’t that unusual of a thing,” he said. “They might need to dial his medication a little. Probably the best thing is if you come in tomorrow.”

  “I have to go home tonight,” I said. I had a Fun Fare.

  I got in the car and drove toward the airport, but a few blocks before I got there I pulled into the parking lot of a liquor store. It was dusk, the air full of neon, jet fumes, and rippling heat waves.

  I’d promised Patti, Mom, and Deirdre that I’d call them, but I called Information instead and asked for Parmalit Singh in Baltimore. When he answered I introduced myself and thanked him for sending the article. “It meant a lot to him,” I said.

  “No, of course,” he said, in a mild accent, South Asia giving way to Eastern Shore. “He should see his work. He should reap the fruits. How is he responding?”

  “Really well,” I said. “I think he’ll be out of there soon.”

  “That’s terrific. Please say hello for me, will you?”

  “Sure. Okay. I won’t keep you.”

  “No, that’s fine,” he said. “It’s good to get the news.”

  I pressed the phone harder to my ear. I could hear the sounds of his house in the background, a string quartet on the stereo and a little kid laughing. It was the opposite of where I was: warm light on wooden floors in some University Park or Hill or Commons. I could even hear the sounds outside his window, a rough-engined car downshifting and college kids laughing on their way somewhere.

  Actually, I couldn’t hear any of that. I’d heard only his voice, and the silence after his polite goodnight. My bra
in, like my brother’s, leapt to fill in the spaces.

  In February Barney went home to Lawrence. He’d been there three weeks when I visited, landing late in the morning and renting a Fit. The sun glared like camera flashes on six inches of snow, and a fresh blizzard was expected that night.

  Deirdre let me in and gave me limited neck and shoulder. She looked okay, but her forbearing smile was worn to nothing.

  Barney was in the living room, sitting on the couch in his grays and browns. He’d gained a few pounds back and replaced the wheelchair with a walking stick. Just after I got there the kids came home from school, hugged me, and then sat on the couch with Barney, who pulled them close and said, “What are you working on?”

  “Atoms,” Michael said, opening his binder to show Barney his homework.

  “That’s very good,” Barney said. “Henry, look at this.” He held up Michael’s drawing of an “Our Friend the Atom” atom, with particles making hood-ornament ovals around the nucleus.

  “I was in the desert for this,” Barney told Michael. “In New Mexico. I couldn’t tell you and Pearl what I was doing there. I apologize for that. They said, ‘Go to the hotel in Santa Fe and someone will get in touch with you, but don’t tell anyone what you’re doing. Tell them you’re there for your health. For the desert air.’

  “I waited for three days and then a Jeep came for me. The driver said, ‘What are you guys doing out there?’ I told him we were from the USO. I said we were writing music for the soldiers. The driver said”—Barney’s face lit up—“‘You passed, buddy! You passed the test!’

  “But now we’re out there and we never stop working. The president keeps calling up to ask how it’s going. People say we’re killing people but we’re not. We’re saving them. It’s called Little Boy but it’s not a real little boy, so don’t worry, okay? Pearl?”

  “Okay,” Pearl said.

  He kissed her head and pulled them both closer. The kids were nervous now, stuck on the couch with the broken national memory, but in the months since his injury they’d turned the humoring skills of children everywhere into superpowers.

  “When we go out there, I’m with a guy next to me,” Barney said. “I go, ‘We’re playing God here. We’re playing Trinity.’ He goes, ‘Yeah, and Trinity’s unbeaten.’ He’s always kidding. And then we watched it with sunglasses. We said, ‘We’re like Shiva, because we have all the arms now.’” He pointed across the room. “There.”

  He watched the explosion, the cloud rising and the glare speeding over the sand. The dread on his face, a forecast of lifelong haunting, was everything it would have been.

  Deirdre, in the doorway, said, “Barney?”

  He looked up at her, New Mexico gone. The bomb had never happened. Decades of history relaxed. “Do you want to help with dinner?” she said.

  “Sure.”

  Deirdre ran the cooking the way Barney had before, asking him and the kids to measure tofu and barley. She and Pearl steered him away from knives and the stove. They’d stopped weighing the portions.

  The next morning Barney had a visit from his lab colleague Ralph Dreher, a stubby guy in his fifties with giant eyebrows. He handed Barney a scientific paper and said, “This is pretty interesting, the alloantigen stuff. I’ll come back with Dick in a few days and we’ll talk about it.”

  The doorbell rang again that afternoon, when Deirdre and Michael were at the store, Pearl was doing homework in the kitchen, and Barney was listening to a samba CD Dad had sent him. I opened the door to find a guy in his thirties holding an airport thriller and a book of crossword puzzles.

  “Hi,” he said. “I just brought some things by for Dr. Bay to pass the time with. I thought I might say hi to him if it’s a good time. Did I meet you before?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Kind of.” He held the books out. I hesitated, then took them. I said, “This might not be a—”

  “Who’s here?” Barney said, coming up behind me with his cane.

  “Hey, Dr. Bay. How are you doing?”

  “I’m fine. How are you?”

  “I’m good. Thank you. I don’t know if you remember me. Last time we saw each other we had quite a discussion. I was lying down on your car. We were waiting for the security folks to come haul me out of there. They were busy with a dog problem right then, so you and I had a little time to talk.”

  “I remember the dog,” Barney said. “It was a short-haired dog.”

  “I don’t think you saw it then. But you could have seen it another time. That could have easily happened.”

  “Were you sick?”

  “When? Oh, as far as the lying down. No, that was something where we had a difference of opinion. We don’t need to talk about that now. I just wanted to say I hope you’re feeling better. We’re sorry about what happened. We’ve got people praying over you.” Barney looked up. “I mean—”

  “Thank you for coming,” Pearl said from the doorway. “We have to ask you to leave now. My dad is tired.”

  I came back in April with Patti. The day we got there Deirdre said we could all go for a walk when the kids got home. “Barney can go half a mile now.”

  “We could take a walk on Higuera Street,” Barney said. He still sat on the couch most of the day, but his voice was stronger and his fingers didn’t twitch.

  “That’s in California, sweetie,” Deirdre said. “That’s where you went to college. We’re in Lawrence now.”

  “Yeah.”

  The radio was on low, tuned to the day’s bad news. Patti said, “Can I turn this off?”

  “Yes,” Barney said. “It’s more depressing than a big dance number.”

  Deirdre said, “Okay, sweetie, but a big dance number wouldn’t be depressing.”

  “Yes, it would,” Patti said. “They’re completely depressing.”

  “Sister’s right,” Barney said.

  “What’s her name?” Deirdre said.

  “Patti.”

  “Good,” Deirdre said.

  Barney picked up the TV remote, turned it on, and found an adventure show where people were rock-climbing. He said, “Henry and I did that, in Colorado. He almost dropped me but then he caught me.”

  Deirdre, keeping her voice light, said, “Did you guys really do that, Henry?”

  I looked at Barney. He shrugged. “Yes,” I said.

  Deirdre said, “Jesus, Henry,” and walked out of the room.

  Barney said, “What did Henry do?”

  I followed her into the hall. She said, “I asked you this at the hospital. You said, ‘Gee, I don’t know, Deirdre, Barney doesn’t do things like that.’” Her eyes teared up.

  I said, “Could we go back in there?”

  In the living room I turned the TV off and said, “Barney, Deirdre wants to hear about the sports you did. Is that okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  I told them about his ice-climbing, desert-running, whitewater rafting and roller-skiing, the mountain-biking and bouldering we did together, my meeting with Freebird, the websites, the Ernie guy—everything I knew. When I finished Barney said, “Wow.”

  Deirdre sat next to him on the couch and said, “Did you really do all those things?”

  “I think so,” he said.

  She put her arms around him. “You could have hurt yourself.”

  “No, I did hurt myself.”

  “Do you remember hurting yourself?”

  He thought for a minute. “I think so.”

  “That’s good,” she said.

  When I went back in June, Barney was withdrawn, sitting on the couch, scowling at dust in a sunbeam, and rarely talking. “The neurologist says it’s a normal phase,” Deirdre said.

  I sat with him in silence most of the day. The party I wished to speak to wasn’t available, and when he had been available I hadn’t said a number of things I should have.

  That night I called Gerald, whom I hadn’t talked to since Species Showcase, and told him about Barney.

  “God, I’m sorry,” he said.
“How’s he doing?”

  “They think better. It’s hard to tell right now.”

  “Do you stay there or go back and forth?”

  “Back and forth,” I said. “I’ll be home tomorrow night.”

  “Good. I’d like to see you. We’re getting ready to move back to New York.”

  “How come?”

  “I miss my guys there. I think my coffee guy here disapproves of coffee.”

  In the morning Barney still wasn’t talking, but at noon, when Ralph Dreher came by with Dick Tagaki, another guy from the lab, Barney waved them in and said, “We can spread our stuff out here.”

  They covered the coffee table with notes and printouts. “Dick’s got a new angle on this motor neuron business,” Dreher said.

  “I don’t know if it’s really an angle,” Tagaki said, handing Barney some papers. He was thirty, with a madras shirt and a brush cut. “This is with neuroepithelials from BG02.”

  Barney read the papers, his lips moving over the phrases. When he finished he looked up and said, “This should tell us what to do next. It should tell us what to ask.”

  “Sure,” Dreher said.

  Barney looked lost and spoke in a whisper: “I don’t know how.”

  “You will, though,” Tagaki said. Barney shook his head.

  It was quiet for a minute, and then Dreher said, “I think that’s good for today.” Barney nodded and handed him the papers. When they left I followed them outside and asked how they thought he was doing.

  “Better,” Tagaki said. “The recoveries on these take a long time.”

  “I know there’s no magic wand,” I said.

  “No,” Dreher said. “That’s what we’re working on.”

  I went back inside. Barney had fallen asleep, but when I came in he opened his eyes and said, “Henry. Hi.”

  “Hi,” I said. “Do you want to take a nap?”

  “No, that’s okay. How are you doing? Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I said.