CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Because he had suffered some nerve damage in addition to the spinal fracture, Jack required a longer course of therapy at Phoenix Rehabilitation Hospital than he had anticipated. As promised, Moshe Bloom taught him to make a friend of pain, to see it as evidence of rebuilding and recovery. By early July, four months from the day he had been shot down, gradually diminishing pain had been a constant companion for so long that it was not just a friend but a brother. On July seventeenth, when he was discharged from Phoenix, he was able to walk again, although he still required the assurance of not one but two canes. He seldom actually used both, sometimes neither, but was fearful of falling without them, especially on a staircase. Although slow, he was for the most part steady on his feet, however, influenced by an occasional vagrant nerve impulse, either leg could go entirely limp without warning, causing his knee to buckle. Those unpleasant surprises became less frequent by the week. He hoped to be rid of one cane by August and the other by September. Moshe Bloom, as solid as sculpted rock but still pearing to drift along as if propelled on a thin cushion of air, accompanied Jack to the front entrance, while Heather brought the car from the parking lot. The therapist was dressed all in white, as usual, but his skullcap was crocheted and colorful. "Listen, you be sure to keep up those daily exercises."
"All right."
"Even after you're able to give up the canes."
"I will."
"The tendency is to slack off. Sometimes when the patient gets most of the function back, regains his confidence, he decides he doesn't have to work at it any more. But the healing is still going on even if he doesn't realize it."
"I hear you." Holding open the front door for Jack, Moshe said, "Next thing you know, he has problems, has to come back here on an outpatient basis to gain back the ground he's lost."
"Not me," Jack assured him, glancing outside into the gloriously hot summer day. "Take your medication when you need it."
"I will."
"Don't try to tough it out."
"I won't."
"Hot baths with Epsom salts when you're sore." Jack nodded solemnly… "And I swear to God, every day I'll eat my chicken soup." Laughing, Moshe said, "I don't mean to mother you."
"Yes you do."
"No, not really."
"You've been mothering me for weeks."
"Have I? Yes, all right, I do mean to do it." Jack hooked one cane over his wrist so he could shake hands.
"Thank you, Moshe." The therapist shook hands, then hugged him.
"You've made a hell of a comeback. I'm proud of you."
"You're damned good at this job, my friend." As Heather and Toby pulled up in the car, Moshe grinned. "Of course I'm good at it. We Jews know all about suffering." For a few days, just being in his own home and sleeping in his own bed was such a delight that Jack needed to make no effort to sustain optimism. Sitting in his favorite armchair, eating meals whenever he wanted rather than when a rigid institutional schedule said he must, helping Heather to cook dinner, reading to Toby before bedtime, watching television after ten o'clock in the evening without having to wear headphones-these things were more satisfying to him than all the luxuries and pleasures to which a Saudi Arabian prince might be entitled. He remained concerned about family finances, but he had hope on that front too. He expected to be back at work in some capacity by August, at last earning a paycheck again.
Before he could return to duty on the street, however, he would be required to pass a rigorous department physical and a psychological evaluation to determine if he had been traumatized in any way that would affect his performance, consequently, for a number of weeks, he would have to serve at a desk. As the recession dragged on with few signs of a recovery, as every initiative by the government seemed devised solely to destroy more jobs, Heather stopped waiting for her widely seeded applications to bear fruit. While Jack had been in the rehab hospital, Heather had become an entrepreneur-"Howard Hughes without the insanity," she joked-doing business as Mcgarvey Associates. Ten years with IBM as a software designer gave her credibility. By the time Jack came home, Heather had signed a contract to design custom inventory-control and bookkeeping programs for the owner of a chain of eight taverns, one of the few enterprises thriving in the current economy was selling booze and a companionable atmosphere in which to drink it, and her client had lost the ability to monitor his increasingly busy saloons. Profit from her first contract wouldn't come close to replacing the salary she had stopped receiving the previous October. However, she seemed confident that good word of mouth would bring her more work if she did a first-rate job for the tavern owner. Jack was pleased to see her contentedly at work, her computers set up on a pair of large folding tables in the spare bedroom, where the mattress and springs of the bed now stood on end against one wall. She had always been happiest when busy, and his respect for her intelligence and industriousness was such that he wouldn't have been surprised to see the humble office of Mcgarvey.Associates grow, in time, to rival the corporate headquarters of Microsoft. On his fourth day at home, when he told her as much, she leaned back in her office chair and puffed out her chest as if swelling with pride. "Yep, that's me. Bill Gates without the nerd reputation."
Leaning against the doorway, already using only one cane, he said, "I prefer to think of you as Bill Gates with terrific legs."
"Sexist."
"Guilty."
"Besides, how do you know Bill Gates doesn't have better legs than mine? Have you seen his?"
"Okay, I take back everything. I should have said, As far as I'm concerned, you are every bit as much of a nerd as people think Bill Gates is."
"Thank you."
"You're welcome," he said. "Are they really terrific?"
"What?"
"My legs."
"You have legs?" Although he doubted that good word of mouth was going to boost her business fast enough to pay the bills and meet the mortgage, Jack didn't worry unduly about much of anything-until the twenty-fourth of July, when he had been home for a week and when his mood began to slide. When his characteristic optimism started to go, it didn't just crumble slowly but cracked all the way down the middle and soon thereafter shattered altogether. He couldn't sleep without dreams, which grew increasingly bloody night by night. He routinely woke in the middle of a panic attack three or four hours after he went to bed, and he was unable to doze off again no matter how desperately tired he was. A general malaise quickly set in. Food seemed to lose much of its flavor.
He stayed indoors because the summer sun became annoyingly bright, and the dry California heat that he had always loved now parched him and made him irritable.
Though he had always been a reader and owned an extensive book collection, he could find no writer-even among his old favorites- who appealed to him any more, every story, regardless of how liberally festooned with the praises of the critics, was uninvolving, and he often had to reread a paragraph three or even four times until the meaning penetrated his mental haze. He advanced from malaise to flat-out depression by the twenty-eighth, only eleven days out of rehabilitation. He found himself thinking about the future more than had ever been his habitand he could find no possible version of it that appealed to him.
Once an exuberant swimmer in an ocean of optimism, he became a huddled.and frightened creature in a backwater of despair. He was reading the daily newspaper too closely, brooding about current events too deeply, and spending far too much time watching television news. Wars, genocide, riots, terrorist attacks, political bombings, gang wars, drive-by shootings, child molestations, serial killers on the loose, carjackings, ecological doomsday scenarios, a young convenience-store clerk shot in the head for the lousy fifty bucks and change in his cashregister drawer, rapes and stabbings and strangulations. He knew modern life was more than this. Goodwill still existed, and good deeds were still done.