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