The Portable Veblen: Shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2016

“Yes, sir. Medics easily master tracheotomies in emergency situations. For testing we’d move from cadavers to live volunteers in these aforementioned conditions.”

“By volunteers, are we talking scores less than eight on the Glasgow Scale?”

“We’re looking at a number like that,” Paul said, having been warned by Cloris to keep this vague.

Cloris Hutmacher spoke up. “I’ve already met with Planning at the VA in Menlo Park and they’re ready to lease us Building 301, which is a fifteen-thousand-square-foot structure currently in disuse. Any of the WOO simulator systems would fit there.”

Richter took notes.

Paul cleared his throat. “If we succeed, which I believe we will—”

“People, this is huge,” said Cloris.

“Cloris has an eye for the huge,” pronounced Richter.

Cloris said, “It’s a cusp moment for all of us.”

Paul gazed around the oblong slab, at men and women who’d served the military and had undoubtedly been the trendsetters and thugs of their grade schools.

“This is clearly an opportunity of the highest order,” he heard himself declare. “To serve. My country.” He made methodical eye contact with each person present. “My father’s brother, PFC Richard Vreeland, Company C, Second Battalion Fifth Cavalry, First Cavalry Division, died of blast wounds to his head, chest, both legs, abdomen, and right hand in the ambush at Phu Ninh.” He had never mentioned his uncle’s annihilation to anyone before, and the expediency of doing it now shocked him, yet made him feel like maybe he could be a player after all. The room fell silent. “As soon as this meeting is over, I’m going to visit his name on the Wall. I want this as much for our country as I want it for him.”

A round of backslapping ensued. Cloris told him he was spectacular, and invited him to join some of the committee members for drinks. “Well, I’d like to, but I need to go by the Wall. My uncle,” he added.

“You really meant that?” An admiring glint flashed in her eyes. She was as thin as a whip.

“Of course I did.”

“Come with us now,” Cloris said. “Visit the Wall later.”

“But my flight leaves at nine.”

She whispered, “I won’t tell anyone you didn’t go to the Wall. Come on!”

They went to a noisy bar in Georgetown. Cloris spent her energy speaking closely into the large, open ear of Bradley Richter. Paul perspired heavily and drank too much. He didn’t end up visiting the Wall, but planned to tell his father he had. Or maybe not—maybe he’d tell his father he couldn’t, as he’d said all along. Well, it would make his father happy to think he’d tried. Throw the old man a bone. A cab returned him to Dulles within the hour, and he received the offer the next day by noon.

PAUL RETURNED from his tour of the VA grounds by nine A.M. In the lobby, an elfin woman in a yellow checkered skirt and a white blouse with a pin of a Scottish terrier on the collar stepped out and waved at him like a crossing guard.

“Dr. Vreeland!”

Susan Hinks had soft blond hair and cornflower blue eyes, a fine fuzz of blond on her cheeks, and an expression not of an embryo but of something quite fresh. A voyeur would know how to describe it. “Welcome. It’s great to meet you, Dr. Vreeland!” Her voice was charmingly nasal, with a mild midwestern twang, and her teeth were notably large and clean. “I’m your clinical coordinator and I’ll be providing support in all responsibilities related to the NIH and the DOD and Hutmacher. I’ll conduct follow-up evaluations, watch compliance with protocol, take care of the case reports. I’ll be your liaison with the Investigational Review Board, the IRB. We’ve been completely overwhelmed with volunteer applications—we’ve still got people calling and going around the usual channels to get in.”

Paul felt a surge of pride. “Seriously? Is this trial especially attractive for some reason?”

“Any trial is attractive,” Susan Hinks said. “They have to wait so long for treatment in the system. If they get into a trial, they get a lot of attention.”

He gave her a skeptical look.

“Are you trying to tell me these veterans are willing to get a hole punched in their skulls just to get a checkup?”

Unruffled, she said, “That’s the way it is, Dr. Vreeland. Let me show you what we’ve organized so far. I think you’ll be pleased.”

He’d recently reviewed the latest iteration of the World Medical Association’s policy statement, the Declaration of Helsinki, concerning the ethical principles for medical research involving human studies. Now he wanted to know: Had they followed the declaration to a T? Yes, Hinks told him. Had they filed all the paperwork disclosing his financial interest with Hutmacher?

“Form 3455, done.”

“Well! Great.” He followed her to the elevator, up a floor, down a corridor through some security doors that she opened with a code. A stooped man in a thin flannel shirt and jeans caked with cement pushed the blue button on a water cooler in the hallway; a woman in a butterscotch-colored sweater stood behind him. They eyed him timidly, and retreated to a room with a TV screen. “That’s the family room,” Hinks explained. “Since the volunteers began to arrive, we have some of the families spending all day here, thrilled to take part. Patriots to the bone.”

He winced at her word choice, while she opened a cabinet stocked with sterile aprons, masks, and gloves. “Here you go,” she said, and together they suited up.

The swinging doors let them through.

A gritty light touched on the ward, beds lined up military style. The cold echo of machinery bounced off the walls, along with the rhythmic hiss of chest cavities rising and falling on ventilators. A sharp whiff of ammonia penetrated his mask. Across the room, a nurse changed an IV bag, while an attendant mopped around a bed, gathering a pile of sheets bundled at the foot.

Paul grabbed the chart off the first footboard he came to. Flores, Daniel R. Injured by landmine, north of Kabul. He saw before him a twenty-four-year-old with a youthful hairline and an unblemished brow, missing the eyes, nose, and mouth beneath it. The roots of teeth poked from a band of purple tissue, and a breathing tube disappeared through a hole the size of a Life Saver, secured by a gasket. Where the boy’s arms had once been sprouted two fleshy buds, stippled with splinters of bone.

Paul looked at the chart attached to the next bed. Baker, Jeremiah J. Wounds suffered near Kandahar when his vehicle encountered an improvised explosive device. The young man’s eyes were open, and Paul bent over to make contact. The pupils were nonreactive. The eyes didn’t see.

“And we have wonderful volunteers who work with the families, a lot of attention, a lot of hope. It’s very uplifting.”

“There’s very little chance of—” He groped for ground.

“Dr. Vreeland, are you all right?”

Men missing parts of themselves forever, here to bolster his reputation and gain. Paul’s throat closed with shame.

“Who volunteered these volunteers?”

“Hartman is the CRO who recruits for us.”

“Could you tell me, what is a CRO?”

“Everything here has an acronym, you’ll get used to it. The CRO is the Contract Research Organization. They get volunteers and help us package our information for the FDA. Hartman is a little corporate but we’ve been very happy with them in clinic.”

He worried briefly about the hollow and ominous description of this corporate entity, and wanted to sputter Seropurulent!, which had been an ironic superlative they used in med school for terrible things that had to be overlooked. (By definition: a mixture of blood and pus.)

“Right. Okay. Have the cadavers arrived?”

“Yes, we have sixty-seven in the locker, and thirty-three arrive later this week. Would you like to see them?”

“No, that’s okay. I’ve seen plenty of cadavers.”

“Then let me show you our new MRI room.”

They went out through the ward on the other side, to a corridor, where Hinks took him into another room to see the sleek and massive multislice Somatom Definition Flash scanner.

“Excellent.” He reached out to pat it.

“Oh, Dr. Vreeland? Is this okay, we only have one technician authorized to operate this machine. So we’ll schedule together on that, okay?”

“Fine. Can we take a look at my office?” he asked.

“Of course, come this way.”

ARMORY SQUARE, 1865.

As they removed their gowns he peered back through the small window into the ward. The wounded forms in the cots looked no different from those he’d seen in photos of Civil War hospitals; he might as well have been peering through the window at Armory Square or Satterlee. The flag jutted from the wall. History repeats, repeats, repeats. By no means a rabid nationalist, as a schoolkid he’d nevertheless revered the custom of setting his hand on his heart and repeating the Pledge every morning, the ritualized blur of sounds. Antootherepublicforwitchitstands … These guys who really did stand for the country would never again stand for themselves.

Indivisible. As a kid he thought it was a stuttered invisible. And that it referred to the flag itself. Kids making pledges on misunderstandings. He’d thought it meant the flag flew invisibly over all.

THAT AFTERNOON Paul sat in his new office, fighting an unwelcome chill. The room was sensibly furnished with a teak desk and credenza, glass-fronted bookshelves that were empty except for the manuals for the computer and printer still packed in boxes on the floor, and a comfortable black leather chair that swiveled and reclined. Well, he’d reached a new high. He had brought his model schooner that he carried with him from desk to desk, and a picture of Veblen taken in San Francisco, which he removed from his briefcase and set on his bare desk. Her face was so trusting. He hoped he hadn’t upset some invisible balance by getting the squirrel trap, for he feared invisible balances lay like booby traps all around him. He loved to fall back into a warm evening in October when they’d pulled off Page Mill Road after a concert at the Almaden Winery and made love in the weeds, and her hair was full of burrs and she didn’t care. He thought at one point he’d been bitten by a snake, and he’d jumped up and she’d laughed. She was braver than he was!

All the more this past weekend, when he’d taken her up to the ski lodge at Tahoe to join Hans and the gang he used to hang with in the city—doctors, architects, financiers. He’d introduced her with satisfaction, and there were toasts to the engagement and plenty of lip service to what a hottie she was, but when they found out she wasn’t on a notable career path, they seemed unable to synthesize her into their social tableau, as if Paul had chosen a mail-order bride. Having Veblen along changed how he saw them; through the loud meals at a big table in which the conversation seemed all status and swag, Paul found himself hyperconscious of their crass concerns. There was Hans bragging about noteworthy CEOs he’d tweaked houses for, Tim the stockbroker gossiping about his favorite start-ups and upcoming IPOs, Daniel the city planner waxing about a welcome wave of demolition and gentrification south of Market, Lola and Jesse droning about furnishing their new place with everything high-end, until he thought if he heard the word high-end one more time he would retch. Hans’s wife, Uma, asked Veblen where she invested, and he heard her mumbling something about a checking account, to which Uma replied, “I’d be happy to review your portfolio and see if there’s anything I could suggest,” whereupon Veblen nodded and backed away, as if being cornered by a wolf.

By the time they said good-bye to everyone, he wondered if he’d ever want to see his old friends again, though Veblen remained cheerful all the way down from the mountains. To prove his loyalty to her, he made fun of Hans and Uma for buying their beautiful three-story Edwardian on Jackson Street in Pacific Heights, then duly gutting the place before moving in so that they had to stay nine months in an apartment, providing them with what could be considered a newlyweds’ adventure and many things to complain about, such as their unreliable contractor and the noisy tenants of the building they were renting in. Veblen appreciated that story, or his attitude about it anyway.

He also told her he saw his friends’ psychic wounds playing out in all this need for validation, and she seemed to like his analysis too.

True, there were things about Veblen that mystified him—her low-hanging job as a secretary, for one. (It wouldn’t seem right, after they married, for her to be a temp. He could support her then, she could look for real jobs, anything she wanted.) And her faith in people! She really believed they’d do their best.

Three large windows looked west to the coastal range, his new horizon. He sat back in his chair and closed his eyes and tried not to start rocking, his default when he was tense. He looked for that flat horizontal line he’d discovered whenever he was in a bad way as a child. With his eyes closed he contemplated the horizontal line as if it were a brilliant sunrise that would light up a terrific new day for him. His muscles relaxed. He brought air down to the bottom of his sternum. He visualized himself not as a weakling but as a dense little torpedo penetrating the bullshit of the world, and that always made him smile.

Good-bye to all he’d escaped. He’d never have fucking duck eggs again, with those bright yellow yolks, he’d have the regular, white, chicken kind, clean on the outside, not caked with green guano. He’d never have smelly beanbag chairs, or any kind of lumpy free-form thing splayed on the ground like a carcass. He’d have heat in his bathroom. He’d never run out of toilet paper, by god, and have to use fucking leaves. He’d have toilet paper stacked to the ceiling. He’d keep his place clean, without smoke or the creeping reek of bong juice. Unlike his parents, he’d never throw open-house parties in which guests could arrive any time of the day or night and stay for the rest of their lives. He wouldn’t have a guest room, period! He’d make barbed jokes about guests smelling like fish, so any potential guest would get paranoid. He’d never wear anything ethnic as long as he lived, he’d shop strictly at Brooks Brothers, down to his shorts. He’d invest in stocks and bonds and have a portfolio statement, not some sticky tie-dyed bag full of limp, resinous cash!

LATER IN THE DAY, there was a knock on his office door.

“Come in!”

Through the door came a short young guy with a goatee and heavily framed glasses. He wore baggy shorts revealing thick, shapeless legs.

“James Shalev,” he said, shaking Paul’s hand. He had a nickel slot between his incisors, which gave him the uncanny appearance of vulnerability and viciousness combined. “Welcome to Greenslopes. I do the VA newsletter and PR, and when you’ve had a chance to settle in, I’d like to do a profile. Mind if I take a quick shot now?”

Paul blinked in the flash.

Shalev took the extra chair and opened his satchel, to present Paul with a short stack of past newsletters. “Here’s what I do. It’s actually considered one of the best hospital newsletters in the country.”

“Yes, it’s impressive,” Paul said.

“We’ve won the Aster four times in the last seven years, honoring excellence in medical marketing. Look, each issue has a theme and variations, but it takes a careful reading to detect it.”

“News is marketing?”

Shalev blinked, as if Paul had just emerged from an ancient pod. “Yes, it is.”

The cover story was about the art exhibition in the lobby, and went on to list the names of the local artists who had contributed. On the inside page was an article on the free shuttle bus that operated continuously between Greenslopes and the Palo Alto Caltrain station. There was a picture of the little shuttle bus. The next page had a continuing feature called “Meet Our Specialists.” This month’s specialist was Dr. Burt Wallman, a psychiatrist who specialized in suicide prevention. Paul restlessly flipped through the pages, not able to detect a theme.

He noted the headline WIDOWS, WIDOWERS HONORED WITH DAFFODILS. It seemed the Daffodil Society of Greenslopes gave symbolic daffodils to the families of vets.

“Did you see it?” asked Shalev.

“See what?”

“You’re picking something up. Try to say what it is.”

“Man’s inhumanity to man?”

“Close. This month’s theme is regeneration, starting over, springtime.”

Paul said, “Why did you write this? As one of the leading clinical trials hospitals for veterans, Greenslopes is proud of the wonderful relationship it has forged with widows …?”

“Nothing wrong with it, is there? Here’s your dependent clause headed by your subordinating conjunction—”

“It implies that the clinical trials create widows.”

Shalev said, “The people in your trial, they’re either brain damaged or brain dead, aren’t they? But nobody stops hoping.”

“Nobody ever said this was about a cure.”

“Have you talked to any of the families?” Shalev prodded.

“What do they think?”

Shalev gathered the pile into his case. “Someone they love is laid out before them, trapped in an endless sleep. You ever loved someone in a coma?”

Paul shook his head.

“From what I’ve seen, when someone you love is in a coma, you simply want to believe. As long as they’re alive, there’s hope.” He snapped the latches on his satchel, and adjusted his glasses. “We had a trial in here last year with big funding, they extracted the essence of a tumor, gave it a whirl in a centrifuge, then injected a concentrated dose back into the patient.”

“Immune therapy, very cutting edge,” Paul said.

“The volunteers went extinct in a matter of weeks. But research-wise, hey, it was a big success. Doctors high-fiving each other all over the place.”

To extract more of Paul’s essence, they made plans to meet again. And after Shalev left him, Paul gauged he’d been spending too much time in the lab. Bedside manners had never been his strong suit. Maybe he could delegate them.

But the greats knew how to handle their patients. Look at the superstar neurologist Oliver Sacks. Patients adored him, stayed in touch for the rest of their lives. Paul recalled an interview in which Sacks said he loved to find the potential in people who “weren’t thought to have any.” That noble sentiment had haunted him since. Surely his commitment to medicine showed that he cared in his own way. Was it his job to deal with magical thinking too?

AND THEN TO TASSO STREET. Veblen had that tendency to try to coax some desired outcome from anything he told her, her face as bright as a daffodil, overpowering him with good cheer. She met him at the door and gave him a kiss. “So, how’d it go?”

“We’ll see,” he said.

“How’s your assistant? What’s she like?”

“Seems efficient.” He went to wash his hands in the sink. His lifelong habit, on the hour. Wash hands. Wash off the world.

“Everything all right?”

Paul grabbed a dish towel and twisted it. “It’s probably not fair to hate her for saying ‘in clinic,’ is it? ‘I’ll see you in clinic.’”

“She dropped the article? What a bitch.”

“Yeah. It sounds clammy and invasive, like she’s breathing on my genitals.”

Veblen backed off, took two beers from the refrigerator, popped the caps. “She’d better not.”

“Thanks.” Bottoms up. The beer tasted bitter, and landed heavily in his gut. “It’s a lot to absorb. They’ve had a big response to our call for volunteers.”

“That’s great, Paul. See? You deserve it.”

“The question remains, what ‘it’ is I deserve.” He sighed. “All these caring families are hanging around. It feels like a lot of pressure. I hope I know what I’m doing.”

“That must be unnerving. Take one day at a time,” Veblen said. “No one expects you to undo the damage of the military industrial complex overnight.”

“Ha!” He snorted. “Are you sure?” He finished his bottle. The foam bubbled on his lips, tickling like root beer and first kisses.