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
in a month, Jack began to worry h drug dealing and violence surrounding
A les schools He became convinced they ing to be killed unless they
