Winter Moon

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.

But the media focused on the grimmest aspects of every issue, and so

Though he tried to leave the the TV off, he was drawn to of the

latest tragedies and outrage the hottle or a compulsive yambl citement

of the racetrack The despair inspired by the news was a down escalator

from which he seemed unable to escape. And it was picking up speed

When Heather casually mentioned that Toby would be entering third grade