Dreamer of Dune

by Brian Herbert

  The following day Mom telephoned Jan, and expressed concern that now she wouldn’t feel well enough to help with our baby, which was due in October or November. There had been plans for my thirteen-year-old daughter Julie to stay in Port Townsend that summer as well, and now they would have to be canceled. Mom had been knitting a tiny white sweater for the baby, and doubted if she would have the energy to complete it.

  On her first day in the hospital, Mom looked good, and told us she was feeling better than the night before, when she had been congested. I sat by the bed and held her hand for a moment. Her hand was warm, and she squeezed mine reassuringly.

  In ensuing days I took a bag lunch and ate with her in her room, while she complained about the steamed hospital fare and picked at it. One day I brought along a file folder of cartoons from my office funny files, since Mom so enjoyed ones I had mailed to her in the past. Sometimes Jan and I brought her treats for her sweet tooth, such as a fluffy raspberry mousse in a glass dish. On other occasions we brought her balloons and boxes of Frango Mints, her favorite chocolate candy, and a chocolate milkshake. Mom drank the milkshake too quickly, and it caused a coughing spell that worried us. Maybe it was the temperature of the drink, or the milk. Dad sent the nurse to get Cepacol throat lozenges, but the coughing subsided before the lozenges arrived.

  Mom was sent by cabulance to Seattle for tests at another facility, and then back to Redmond. After three days she was released from the hospital, but would have to return the following week for pericardial surgery, at which time surgeons would open the chest cavity and determine whether portions of the pericardium needed to be removed.

  Back in 1974, Mom had received four thousand rads of radiation to her left lung, without shielding of the heart. The treatment had been administered through a single anterior port, according to the best technology of the day. Subsequent studies determined, however, that patients undergoing such a procedure had a high chance of sustaining damage to the pericardium such as pericardial effusion (the leaking of fluids into a body cavity). It would have been safer to have administered lower doses of radiation through multiple anterior and posterior ports, with shielding of the heart.

  On Sunday, August 9, 1981, Dad checked Mom into Group Health Hospital in Redmond. She seemed to be much better, and we were told that the doctors planned to operate Monday or Tuesday. But late that afternoon her condition worsened. She was diagnosed with cardiac tamponade, a condition in which her heart was compressed due to an accumulation of fluids in the pericardium. Doctors were using pericardiocentesis to remove the excess fluids and stabilize her. We soon learned that she would need to have most of her pericardium removed surgically at University Hospital in Seattle, where they could give her more specialized heart treatment. She was taken to Seattle and placed in a Critical Care Unit.

  Two days later, Mom underwent surgery. They removed approximately two-thirds of her pericardium, in what was called a pericardiectomy. I did not learn until later that she experienced cardiopulmonary arrest just as she was being transferred from the operating room. Her trauma involved an excessively rapid heartbeat and uncontrolled twitching and quivering of the heart ventricles, with low blood pressure. Medical personnel administered nearly twenty minutes of CPR on her, with the aid of drugs, and finally her vital signs improved.

  She was in a glassed-in room, and over the next couple of days, Jan and I were not permitted inside. We could only look in, while she slept for much of the time. It was difficult for me to write anything about it. I scrawled some rough, often unintelligible notes on scraps of paper. We brought her cheerful balloons and a big pink rose. Mom had catheter tubes in her upper chest to drain fluids that might remain after the surgery. She was uncomfortable from the tubes, but reportedly was recovering well. She looked weak and thin, and had a tender, wan smile as she gazed at us. When we were finally able to squeeze her hand she squeezed back feebly, but there wasn’t much said.

  It wasn’t a time for words. It was a time for prayers.

  During most of the period that Mom was hospitalized, Dad stayed with us. He slept in the carriage house over our garage, on a Japanese futon. I recall seeing him in our bathroom in boxer shorts one morning, flossing his teeth. He had always taken care of his teeth. They were perfect, without a cavity. He said he didn’t sleep well the night before, and that when he drifted off he snored more than usual, and it kept waking him up. His back was bothering him a little, too, though he propped a big pillow under the head of the mattress as he normally did. We offered him some aspirin for the pain, but he said he was all right.

  Most mornings, by the time I got up, Dad had already gone to the hospital. Sometimes he was so tired when he got home that he climbed the separate stairway to the carriage house and went directly to bed. On other days he insisted upon cooking a gourmet meal for us. He even bought cooking utensils and left them for us, since he didn’t like to cook with our comparatively primitive equipment. One evening when we arrived home we found a note from Dad. He had misplaced his key to our house, but got in by climbing through an unlocked laundry room window. He did his laundry and ours and then returned to the hospital. The note said he would make dinner for all of us when he returned.

  Dad spent entire days in the hospital with Mom, except for errands, such as an hour and a half to get a haircut. One day he had to return to Xanadu for things they had forgotten, clothes, books and other articles that Mom wanted. It was no small task going back and forth to Port Townsend, with the main bridge being out of commission, but when it came to doing things for my mother, Dad knew no bounds.

  In her hospital room they talked, read and played the two-hand version of Hearts that they had made up during their honeymoon. It seemed fitting to me that these people who loved one another so fiercely played a game called Hearts, and a special version of it no one else in the world knew.

  When we visited Mom one evening, Dad was seated in his usual place beside her bed eating Cha Shu Bao—steamed Cantonese barbecued pork that he had picked up at a delicatessen near the hospital and heated in the nursing station’s microwave. Another day when he went to a friend’s house for dinner, he called the hospital every hour to check on Mom. Some nights he stayed with her in her room, sleeping in the chair by her bed. It was exhausting for him, and he wasn’t able to write at all.

  Late one evening Dad returned to our house with a Dune movie treatment under his arm. He said it arrived that morning, delivered to him at the hospital. It had been written by director and screenplay writer David Lynch. He was a third of the way through it, and I asked him his reaction. He made a circular “perfect” sign with his fingers, and said, “Beautiful. They’ve got it toned into shape and are saving the original.”

  By the middle of August, Mom looked considerably stronger. She smiled a lot and said she was looking forward to returning home, and was worried about whether a pretty red-breasted nuthatch would ever return to the bird feeder outside her office window. It had been coming by for weeks, and had been a delight for her to watch. Now, with no seed in the feeder, it might not.

  She was so much better and receiving such excellent care that Dad told us not to worry, and that we should go ahead and take a short trip out of town we had been planning. In our absence he stayed in our home, where he entertained David Lynch and a team of Hollywood writers, all working on the Dune movie script. They played volleyball in our backyard and created quite a stir among neighborhood children, who somehow got the idea that Lynch was George Lucas.

  Soon Mom was released from the hospital, and she continued to improve. Within a month it was as doctors had hoped, and her tests showed rapid recovery from pericardial surgery, with improving checkups every week. Still, the doctor told her he wanted her to be more active. She was getting tired too easily.

  We had dinner with my parents at a Seattle restaurant, and my mother had to ask the hostess to slow down as she led us to our table. That evening, Mom and Dad stayed in a nearby hotel, where we visited them. She sat on the bed
with pillows propped behind her and a blanket over her lap, knitting a little white baby sweater. She said she really messed it up in the hospital while on medication, and now she was redoing much of it. Jan was due to deliver in two months.

  When we were leaving I commented to Dad, “Congratulations on your book contract, and on the most important thing of all—Mom.”

  “Doesn’t she look great?” Dad said, looking at her as she sat on the bed with her knitting.

  And she did look better to me, with good color in her face. She smiled at me, in a gentle way.

  As we drove home, however, Jan and I agreed that Mom was acting as if she were on heavy medication—a little foggy and forgetful. Somewhat like an old person, breaking off in midsentence to speak about silly matters and not always returning to her original thought. We thought she might still be depressed. It was her second major health crisis.

  We fell silent as we crossed the old Mercer Island floating bridge that spanned Lake Washington, with the lights of oncoming cars and houses along the shoreline ahead. Lately I had been having second thoughts about the Boswell role in which I had placed myself, chronicling the life of Frank Herbert and the people around him. It hadn’t started out that way in September 1978, a halcyon time when I only jotted brief notes on the backs of wine labels. By 1980, however, the information gathering process had grown out of control, to the point where I was obsessed with a full-fledged journal.

  Gradually the journal became a looking glass into the goodness of my father, which far and away was his most significant character trait. The things he did for my mother in her hours of need were beyond anything I could have imagined him capable of. Day after day he sat with her in hospital rooms, lifting her spirits, telling her he loved her, obtaining anything she needed or wanted.

  But it was excruciatingly difficult for me to write about the sufferings of my mother, and this had become a terrible weight upon my mind. I was more than a man writing in a journal. These were people I loved, my own flesh and blood. I wasn’t just a reporter; I was a participant, drawn like those around me along a powerful, uncontrollable current, not knowing what lay ahead.

  Another week passed, and during a telephone conversation with my father he said he was in the midst of a lot of tax work that Mom was too tired to do. She hadn’t been eating well, didn’t seem to have much of an appetite, and was suffering from nausea and indigestion. Some of the medicines she had been taking, particularly the systemic diuretic Lasix, seemed to disagree with her, and he was talking with the doctors to get the medications adjusted. In the meantime, she was refusing to take the Lasix.

  Dad wanted to get up to his study and work on his book, The White Plague, but couldn’t.

  On October 2, 1981, while I was at work in my insurance office, my agent Clyde Taylor called from New York City to say that Berkley Books had made an offer to publish Sidney’s Comet…including the payment of a modest advance.

  I called Jan first, but she already knew, from talking with Clyde. “Great, honey!” she said. I had Mom and Dad on the phone seconds later, congratulating me. He was in his study, back at work on The White Plague, while she was at the phone in the greenhouse. Mom had been taking a new combination of medication, making her feel much better.

  Still, whenever we got together to share a meal, Mom said she couldn’t entirely enjoy it yet, as something funny had been happening with her sense of taste, something to do with her continuing recovery from the heart operation. Her breathing and cardiovascular strength were improving to the point where she could swim two and a half lengths of the swimming pool now—around thirty-five meters—before Dad had to jump in and help her. She could also climb two flights of stairs at a time, whereas before surgery she’d had to rest after each half flight. So she was improving—but she lamented times only a few years before when she could swim forty lengths nonstop. Mom looked good, but complained of bothersome itches from the surgery.

  A fine toast was raised to my novel sale, and more toasts followed, to Mom’s improving health, to my parents’ birthdays coming up that month, and to Dad’s tremendous success. After we toasted Mom’s health, Dad put his arm around her and with a sweet smile said, “I don’t know why I love this woman so much.”

  She nuzzled against his chest.

  Finally the Dune movie was under way. David Lynch had created a fine screenplay, in Dad’s opinion, very close to the novel. Lynch and the film producers were thinking of filming the desert scenes in Mexico’s Sonora Desert, a picturesque region that would have the added benefit of cost-effectiveness, from the devalued Mexican peso. They were talking with, of all people, George Lucas to do the special effects. This bit of irony was of some concern to my father, considering alleged “borrowings” in Star Wars from Dune, but he decided to stay out of the matter.

  From various projects Dad was scheduled to receive an astronomical sum of money in the next ninety days—a much-needed infusion of cash to pay the contractors in Hawaii and Mom’s medical expenses, which were not all covered by insurance.

  Mom said he was often writing before dawn on his Irish story, The White Plague. He hadn’t started until mid-August, and now—less than two months later—he was already.

  Before beginning the book, extensive DNA research had been required, since Dad had in mind a story about a DNA experiment gone bad, in which a dangerous virus was released into the populace. He read as many books as he could get his hands on about recombinant DNA, spoke with scientists and doctors, and went a step beyond. To see how easy it might be for an unbalanced, dangerous person to obtain the ingredients and materials necessary for recombinant DNA research, he impersonated a doctor and telephoned medical suppliers.

  “This is Dr. Herbert,” Dad said. “What does my purchasing department need to do to obtain boxes of XR-27 and enzyme applicators?”

  Because of the potential for misuse of such items, Dad expected to encounter difficulty. Instead, to his amazement, he was told that he only had to send in a check for the proper amount. When the check cleared, the items would be shipped, no questions asked.

  He developed what he thought could be an actual deadly plague, and considered including details of it in the book. Mom and I told him we didn’t think he should do that, since the wrong people might obtain the “recipe.” After consideration, he said he would follow our advice and only specify fragments of information—too little for anyone to put together.

  Several days later a friend of my father’s told me, “Frank doesn’t look well.” I responded that I assumed Dad was just short of sleep. I dropped a humorous card in the mail to my father, telling him I loved him.

  Two days later Mom called me at work. She said Dad had been up since 3:00 A.M. typing, and he hadn’t eaten a regular meal in all that time or said much to her. I repeated the friend’s comment to her, and she insisted Dad was fine, just tired. He was of The White Plague. He was trying to meet an October 31 deadline—only three days away—but it had been made nigh impossible because of the time he’d taken off for her illness.

  She said G. P. Putnam’s Sons had already arranged for the book’s publicity, and a special boxed edition of signed copies at fifty dollars apiece had been promised, in addition to the regular printing. It was like a newspaper deadline for him, she said, a reminder of years he had spent working as a newsman while writing in his spare time. He was obsessed with meeting the deadline.

  They planned to leave for Hawaii on November 27, waiting until after Thanksgiving so that we could spend the holiday together. I knew they were delaying departure for another reason as well. They wanted to meet the newest Herbert, due to emerge from a private world into a more populated one around November 13.

  On Tuesday, November 3, Dad came out of his cocoon and phoned me. He was out of a projected 550. Some of it was first draft, he said, but most was second. I marveled at his incredible pace. He could really put it in high gear when he wanted to.

  I told him I was having trouble getting going on my new novel, The Ga
rbage Chronicles. I had a general plot in mind and some of the characterizations, but little more. He said not to bother too much with small details at this point, syntax and the like, that I should try to write through to the end of the story—even if it was sketchy—and then go back and fill in the details. I took his advice, and it helped speed my progress.

  While he usually did not discuss particulars of his works in progress, preferring to save his energy for writing, he said The White Plague was about a man whose wife and children have been killed in Ireland in a terrorist bomb attack. The man, a molecular biologist, decides to avenge himself by setting loose a terrible plague. After Dad selected the title for the book, he learned it had been used previously, for a book in the 1930s about tuberculosis. It didn’t matter, he said, since titles normally couldn’t be copyrighted anyway.

  He spoke of his schedule. Later that month, on the day before Thanksgiving, he had a date at a recording studio in Seattle to read from God Emperor of Dune for a phonograph album being produced by Caedmon Records. He also mentioned that around December 15 he was going to meet Bill Ransom in Hawaii to begin their sequel to The Jesus Incident. The collaboration was expected to take three or four months.

  The following week I called him regarding our upcoming Thanksgiving dinner, saying I had made reservations at a nice restaurant. “Great,” he said, but he went on to say he was having trouble with his Kawaloa house plans. He had included a number of features to make the structure accessible to a heart patient, but the Maui Land Use and Codes Department was giving him trouble, citing nonconforming construction. They were making him jump through hoops, and he had to modify the plans to comply with their requirements. He was also obtaining a letter from a doctor concerning Mom’s medical condition, which he would send to the planning department.