Rainbows End (4 page)

“Hey!” Robert tried again to turn in his chair. Maybe those kids were friends of
his!
Cara was teasing after all. He slumped down in the chair. There was the smell of honey. Bushes seemed to hang low above them. The houses were gray and greenish blurs. “Some tour!” he groused. “I can’t see a Dam Ned thing.”

The wheelchair abruptly slowed. “Really?” The little wretch was all but chortling. “Don’t worry, Robert! There’s some devious twiddling that can fix your eyes.”

 

Grump
. “A pair of glasses would fix them, Cara.” Maybe she was hiding them from him.

There was something about the brightness and the dry wind that swept these streets — wherever this was. It made him wonder what he was doing tied down to a wheelchair. They toured around a couple more blocks. Cara fussed endlessly over him. “Are you too warm, Robert? Maybe you don’t need that blanket.”

“The sun is going to burn your head, Robert. Let me tilt your cap down a little bit.” At one point there were no houses. It seemed that they were on the edge of a long slope. Cara claimed they were looking off toward the mountains — but all Robert could see was a hazy line of tan and faded ochre. They were nothing like the mountains that shouldered into the sky above Bishop, California, U.S.A.

Then they were back indoors, in the house they had started from. Things were as dark and gloomy as ever, the room lights swallowed up in darkness. Cara’s bright voice was gone. She was off to study for her classes, she said. No classes for Robert. The thug was feeding him. He still claimed to be Robert’s son. But he was so big. Afterward there was another ignominious potty stop, more like a police interrogation than a trip to the can. And then Robert was left mercifully alone, in the darkness. These people didn’t even have television. There was just the silence, and the dim and faraway electric lights.

I should be sleepy
. He had a vague memory of nights fading off into nights fading off into years, of drowsing sleep that came right after dinner. And then later waking, walking through strange rooms and trying to find home. Arguing with Lena. Tonight was… different. He was still awake. Tonight he was thinking of things that had just happened. Maybe that was because he had made it partway home.
Cara
. So he hadn’t found his folks’ house on Crombie Street and the bedroom that looked out on the old pine tree and the little cabin he had built in its branches. But Cara was part of all that, and she was here. He sat for a long time, his thoughts slowly crunching forward. Across the room, a single lamp was kind of a whirlpool in the darkness. Barely visible, the thug was sitting by the wall. He was talking to someone, but Robert couldn’t see who.

Robert ignored the guy, and thought hard. After a while he remembered something very scary. Cara Gu had died in 2006. They hadn’t said a word to each other for years before that.

 

And when she died, Cara had been fifty-one years old.

West Fallbrook had been a handy place in the early years of the century. Busy too. Right next to Camp Pendleton, it had been the base’s largest civilian community. A new generation of marines had grown up here… and prosecuted a new generation of war. Robert Gu, Jr., had seen the tail end of that frenzy, arriving at a time when Chinese-American officers were welcomed back to positions of trust. Those had been high and bittersweet days.
Now the town was bigger, but the marines weren’t nearly such a large part of it. Military life had become a lot more complicated. Between little bits of war, Lieutenant Colonel Gu found that West Fallbrook was a nice place to raise a daughter.

“I still think it’s a mistake for Miri to call him ‘Robert.’” Alice Gu looked up from her work. “We’ve been over this before, dear. It’s how we’ve brought her up. We’re ‘Bob’ and ‘Alice,’ not ‘Ma’ and ‘Pa’ or whatever silliness is currently approved. And Robert is ‘Robert,’ not ‘Grandpapa.’ ” Colonel Alice Gong Gu was short and round-faced and — when she wasn’t deadly stressed — motherly. She had graduated numero uno from Annapolis, back when being short and round-faced and motherly were definite career minuses. She’d be a general officer by now except that higher authority had discovered more productive and dangerous work for her. That accounted for some of her kookie ideas. But not this one; she had always insisted that Miri address her parents as if they were all just pals.

“Hey, Alice, I’ve never minded that Miri calls us by our first names. There’ll come a time when besides loving us, the Little General will also be our peer, maybe our boss. But this is just confusing my old man — ” Bob jerked a thumb at where Robert Senior sat, half slumped and staring. “Play back the way Dad was acting this afternoon. See how he lit up. He thinks Miri is my aunt Cara, when they were little kids!”

Alice didn’t answer right away. Where she was, it was midmorning. Sunlight glittered off the harbor behind her. She was running support for the U.S. delegation in Jakarta. Indonesia was joining the Indo-European Alliance. Japan was already a member of that bizarrely named club. The joke was that the “Indo-Europeans” would soon have the world surrounded. There was a time when China and the U.S.A. would not have taken that as a joke. But the world had changed. Both China and the U.S. were relieved by the development. It left them with more time to worry about real problems.

Alice’s eyes flickered this way and that as she nodded at an introduction, laughed at some witty comment. She walked a short distance with a couple of self-important types, chattering all the while in Bahasa and Mandarin and Goodenuf English, of which only the English was intelligible to Bob. Then she was alone again. She leaned a little toward him, and gave him a big grin. “Well that sounds like a good thing!” she said. “Your father has been beyond all rational discourse for how many years? And now suddenly he’s engaged enough to have a good time. You should be thrilled. From here, he’ll only get better. You’ll have your father back!”

“… Yes.” Yesterday, he’d said goodbye to the last of the in-home caregivers. Dad should improve very fast now. The only reason he was still in a wheelchair was that the docs wanted to make sure his bone regeneration was complete before they let him loose in the neighborhood.

She saw the expression on his face, and cocked her head to one side. “Are you chicken?” He glanced at his father. The Paraguay operation was just a few weeks away. A covert op at the edge of the world. The prospect was coming to seem almost attractive. “Maybe.”

 

“Then let our Little General do her thing and don’t worry.” She turned and waved at someone beyond his vision. “Oops.” Her image flickered out and there was only silent messaging —

 

Alice — > Bob: Gotta go. I’m already covering for Secretary Martinez, and local custom does
not
approve of timesharing.

Bob sat for a moment in the quiet living room. Miri was upstairs, studying. Outside, the late afternoon slid into evening. A peaceful time. Back when he was a kid, this was when Dad would bring out the poetry books, and Dad and Mom and little Bobby would have a readalong. Actually, Bob felt a happy nostalgia for those evenings. He looked back at his father. “Dad?” No answer. Bob leaned forward and tried to shout diffidently. “Dad? Is there enough light for you? I can make it lots brighter.”
The old man shook his head distractedly. Maybe he even understood the question, but he gave no other indication. He just sat there, slumped to the side. His right hand rubbed again and again at the wrist of his left. And yet, this was a big improvement. Robert Gu, Sr., had been down to eighty pounds, a barely living vegetable, when UCSF Medical School took him on for their new treatment. It turned out the UCSF Alzheimer’s cure worked where the years of conventional treatment had failed.

Bob did a few errands on base, checked the plans for the upcoming Paraguay operation… and then sat back and just watched his father for a few minutes.

 

I didn’t always hate you
.

As a child, he had never hated his old man. Maybe that wasn’t surprising. A kid has very little to compare to. Robert was strict and demanding, on that little Bobby had been very clear. For even though Robert Senior had often and loudly blamed himself for being such an easygoing parent, sometimes that seemed to contradict what Bob saw at his friends’ homes. But it had never seemed mistreatment to Bob.

Even when Mom left Dad, even that hadn’t turned Bob against the old man. Lena Gu had taken years of subtle abuse and she couldn’t take any more, but little Bobby had been oblivious of it all. It wasn’t till later, talking to Aunt Cara, that he realized how much worse Robert treated others than he had ever treated Bob.

For Lieutenant Colonel Robert Gu, Jr., this should be a joyous time. His father, one of America’s most beloved poets, was returning from an extended campout in the valley of the shadow of death. Bob took a long look at Robert’s still, relaxed features. No, if this were cinema, it would be a Western and the title would be
The Return of the SOB
.

A Minefield Made in Heaven

“My eyeballs are… fizzing!”
“This shouldn’t be painful. Do they actually hurt?”

“… No.” But the light was so bright that Robert saw fiery color even in the shadows. “It’s all still a blur, but I haven’t seen this well in…” he didn’t know how long; time itself had been a darkness “… in years.” A woman spoke from right behind his shoulder. “You’ve been on the retinal meds for about a week, Robert. Today we felt we had a working population of cells present, so we decided to turn them on.” Another woman’s voice: “And we can cure your blurred vision even more easily. Reed?”

“Yes, Doctor.” This voice came from the man-shaped blur directly in front of him. The figure leaned near. “Let me put this over your eyes, Robert. There’ll be a little numbness.” Big gentle hands slipped glasses across Robert’s face. At least this was familiar; he was getting new lenses fitted. But then his face went numb and he couldn’t close his eyes.

“Just relax and look to the front.” Relaxing was one thing, but there was no choice about looking to the front. And then…
God
, it was like watching a picture come up on a really slow computer, the blurs sharpening into finer and finer detail. Robert would have jerked back, but the numbness had spread to his neck and shoulders.

“The cell map in the right retina looks good. Let’s do the left.” A few more seconds passed, and there was a second miracle.

The man sitting in front of him eased the “glasses” off Robert’s head. There was a smile on his middle-aged face. He wore a white cotton shirt. The pocket was embroidered with blue stitching: “Physician’s Assistant Reed Weber.”
I can see every thread of it
! He looked over the man’s shoulder. The walls of the clinic were slightly out of focus. Maybe he’d have to wear glasses out-of-doors. The thought set him laughing. And then he recognized the pictures on the walls. This was not a clinic. Those wall hangings were the calligraphy that Lena had bought for their house in Palo Alto.
Where am I
?

There was a fireplace; there were sliding glass doors that opened onto a lawn. Not a book in sight; this was no place he had ever lived. The numbness in his shoulders was almost gone. Robert looked around the room. The two female voices — they weren’t attached to anything visible. But Reed Weber wasn’t the only person in sight. A heavyset fellow stood on his left, arms akimbo, a broad smile on his face. Robert’s look caught his, and the smile faltered. The man gave him a nod and said, “Dad.”

“… Bob.” It wasn’t so much that memory suddenly returned as that he noticed a fact that had been there all along. Bobby had grown up.

 

“I’ll talk to you later, Dad. For now I’ll let you wrap things up with Dr. Aquino and her people.” He nodded at the thin air by Robert’s right shoulder — and left the room.

The thin air said, “Actually, Robert, that’s about all we intended to do today. You have a lot to do over the next few weeks, but it will be less chaotic if we take things one step at a time. We’ll be keeping watch for any problems.”

Robert pretended to see something in the air. “Right. See you around.”
He heard friendly laughter. “Quite right! Reed can help you with that.”

Reed Weber nodded, and now Robert had the feeling that he and Weber were truly alone in the room. The physician’s assistant packed away the glasses, and various other pieces of loose equipment. Most were plain plastic boxes, prosaic throwaways except for the miracles they had made. Weber noticed his look, and smiled. “Just tools of the trade, the humdrum ones. It’s the meds and machines that are floating around inside you that are really interesting.” He stowed the last of the bricklike objects and looked up. “You’re a very lucky guy, do you know that?”

I am in daylight now, where before it was night since forever. I wonder where Lena is
? Then he thought about the other’s question. “How do you mean?”

“You picked all the right diseases!” He laughed. “Modern medicine is kind of like a minefield made in heaven. We can cure a lot of things: Alzheimer’s, even though you almost missed the boat there. You and I both had Alzheimer’s; I had the normal kind, cured at earliest onset. Lots of other things are just as fatal or crippling as ever. We still can’t do much with strokes. Some cancers can’t be cured. There are forms of osteoporosis that are as gruesome as ever. But all your major infirmities are things we have slam-dunk fixes for. Your bones are as good as a fifty-year-old’s now. Today we did your eyes. In a week or so we’ll start reinforcing your peripheral nervous system.” Reed laughed. “You know, you’ve even got the skin and fat biochemistry that responds to Venn-Kurasawa treatments. It’s not one person in a thousand who steps on that heavenly landmine; you’re even going to
look
a lot younger.”

“Next you’ll be having me playing video games.”

 

“Ah!” Weber reached into his equipment bag and pulled out a slip of paper. “We can’t forget that.”

Robert took the paper and unfolded it all the way. It was really quite large, almost the size of foolscap. This appeared to be letterhead stationery. At the top was a logo, and in a fancy font the words “Crick’s Clinic, Geriatrics Division.” The rest was some kind of outline, the main categories being: “Microsoft Family,”