All-Day Breakfast

by Adam Lewis Schroeder

  Anyone who hiccups while imagining a severed limb has never spent time as a zombie.

  “No. Our vision is that one day Shamanski might induce the body to regrow entire appendages. That may be promising more than we can ultimately deliver, but if Penzler doesn’t dream about it, who will?” The corporate bumper sticker.

  Mary tilted her chin meaningfully. “Ever since the name was first bandied around, Peter, I’ve wanted to ask, ‘Why Shamanski?’ ”

  “Shamanski was a very close friend of both Alice and mine.” And without the key ingredient of a flying horse’s cloned brain tissue, I failed to tell the audience at home, we’d still be creating full-blown zombies from town to town, state to state, it’s ninety-one percent more effective a stabilizing agent than the nitrate booster we mixed in initially. “He passed away just as this was getting started and we owe him a great deal.”

  “Okay, now, we only have two minutes left with you, Peter, before you need to be on your way.” She gazed at my widowed shoulder—maybe her mind had already gone to the next segment. “One point we haven’t touched on is that Rotary’s guidelines for selecting their Nebraskan of the Year talk a lot about volunteerism and giving to the community. Can you expand on your role there?”

  “Sure. First off, there are thousands of Nebraskans doing absolutely unflagging work for the public good, year in and year out, whether it’s candy stripers in hospitals, Meals on Wheels bringing breakfasts into schools or volunteers working with wounded veterans—”

  Her eyes darted toward the silhouettes—I was eating too much time.

  “—and keeping in that spirit, since January we’ve been able to offer clinics in many larger centers on a pay-what-you-can basis, teaming up with gps and state agencies to make sure people are getting the right dosages for their specific disorders, making sure they aren’t getting too much too soon, and of course that they’re receiving the proper variant of Shamanski, because the formula for rheumatoid arthritis, for example, is not going to be as effective in treating, say, breast cancer, but the reason we’ve—”

  “Sorry, if I can just jump in, yeah? You have a cure for cancer?”

  I might’ve been teetering atop the stool but my mind was level as a bowling alley.

  “To the best of our knowledge, yes. It may be that remission is not entirely permanent, that years down the road we’ll—”

  “But how could it get approval so quickly?” Were her eyes misting up now? I immediately thought of her kids. She had a sick kid. “Doesn’t the FDA need five years, ten years to decide if a drug’s really safe?”

  “It’s certainly crossed my mind that we’ve been fast-tracked, and there’s no doubt that Steve Balfa at the FDA has been a huge proponent from the first. He’s taken the stance that the gains from freeing people of these diseases, whether or not they’re terminal, just entirely outweigh the risks. Even in enabling us to bypass the traditionally huge markup of more-established pharmaceutical companies, they’ve really been squarely in our corner, and I haven’t taken that for granted.”

  Actually, Alice’s first hire had been an it girl to blow through the half-assed security on Carver’s laptop a week after I dug it out of that locker at Lincoln Airport, and though the full import of his client files weren’t immediately clear to us, the names on his invoices were enough to convince the feds that we could do each other favors. The CIA had paid Carver to recruit international investors for the Congolese LRA, for instance, a bare month before the LRA started mangling American personnel. Curing cancer must’ve been preferable to reading Carver’s e-mails in the Washington Post.

  “Okay.” Nodding, chin trembling, Mary produced a Kleenex and dabbed the corners of her eyes more quickly than viewers could’ve followed.

  “But most importantly,” I said as my ass fell asleep, “we get people started with the process, because frankly most of us are terribly intimidated by the medical system, too intimidated to take the necessary steps because of the sheer bureaucracy involved, so I started setting tents up in parks on a given Saturday, there’s always a band, kids dance around, tables with juice, spanakopita, people just relax, they walk in and say, ‘Hey, I’ve had this problem a long time’ or ‘I’ve just been diagnosed, is it true you can help me out?’ They walk in under their own power or we’ll bus them in on a shuttle. I see the phone number for more information across the screen there, we’ll be in Omaha next weekend starting at 9:30 for—”

  “Say, Peter,” Harold called, “when I told my kids you’d be on, they said to thank you for wrapping things up so neatly in the Congo!”

  “Now that’s not fair, Mr. Sophistication,” smiled Mary. “Your kids are way older than mine!”

  “Um,” I said, “Of course I’m overjoyed the guerrillas have been overpowered, our troops are on their way home and the Congolese finally face, uh, a peaceful future, but Penzler hasn’t played any role in that.”

  Harold lowered his jowls accusingly.

  “No?”

  “What could we have done?”

  “There was that footage, a week, maybe two weeks—”

  “Peter, have you been back to Hoover recently?” Mary consulted a bent card. “There must be crowds there who’d love to congratulate you on this award.”

  On the monitor my mouth hung open as if my jaw once again had its own agenda.

  “Hoover? No,” I told her, “not recently. But I’ll actually be there this afternoon to watch the high school graduation. Can’t wait.”

  “Oh, wonderful—Hoover, break out another folding chair! Thanks so much for joining us, Peter.”

  “It’s been my pleasure.”

  The Penzler Healing Communities number disappeared as the monitor cut me out of the shot. Beside the camera, someone lifted a whiteboard crammed with text.

  “That’s Peter Giller, our Rotary Nebraskan of the Year. A luncheon in his honor is being held Friday at the Embassy Suites Hotel right here in Lincoln, tickets are twenty-five dollars and are available first-come, first-served.”

  “Yum,” smiled Harold. “If anybody asks, I am always game for a twenty-five dollar luncheon.”

  “That is a well-documented fact. And what do we have after the break?”

  “Well, Mary, the Omaha woman who spent twenty-four hours down a manhole in January says she’s ready to get back in the dating game!”

  We sat with rictus smiles. The monitor scrolled congo: what turned the tide?

  “Ninety seconds,” announced the silhouette.

  I slid down again and waited for the headphone guy to unclip me, but he was busy sniffing a clipboard. The former Miss Nebraska stayed up on her stool, hands clasped around one knee, an ankle caressing the air.

  “Peter.” Her voice cracked the slightest bit, but she gave me her dimpled smile so to Harold it might’ve looked like we were benignly discussing the Steelers’ recent and resounding Super Bowl victory. “I need a really big favor,” she whispered. “My, my pap smear came back as irregular. I know that could be anything but I have a really bad feeling, and I know I should just call your number but—”

  “Okay, you won’t have to do it on your own, remind yourself that, but first I need you to go in and hear the diagnosis, all right?” I put my hand around her wrist. “You’re tough, yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  She bit her lip, chewing on that word diagnosis as we all will eventually, then straightened up and looked entirely stoic as the makeup guy materialized to dab her temples with a foam triangle. Cervical cancer, presumably, and she had young kids at home. But I was not as helpless in this situation as I’d once been. The headphone guy reclaimed my microphone, whistling through his teeth.

  “Thank you for having me, guys,” I said.

  “Oh!” Mary Warner beamed duplicitously. “Thanks for coming on!”

  I hopped over a nest of cables and hurried down a barely lit corrido
r, crowded with ladders, toward the green room. The floor producer hissed something but I wasn’t listening to these assholes anymore. I could go for weeks at a time seeing Shamanski as merely the greatest thing to ever happen to the human race, my smile wide as time zones, but whenever a young mother with cancer walked through my peripheral, I felt the same brick jammed under my ribs, and I’d shake my one mighty fist at God and demand He switch this young mother with my Lydia so my Lydia could instead be diagnosed in an epoch when a cure existed. It’d never occurred to me that anybody who’d lost a loved one to some horrific infection must’ve been even more pissed once Alexander Fleming started handing out penicillin to everybody in the ward who’d managed to hang on for one more lung-shredding day. That was what Alice and I had created: a line across history, before the flood and after.

  So I pivoted on the ball of my shoe, squeaking the lino, and jogged back toward the pink wash of studio lights.

  “One of the state’s biggest events,” Mary Warner was saying adoringly to the camera, “the Comstock Rock Festival at the Second Wind Ranch, is breezing ahead into another four-day happening this July.”

  Skipping from beside the blinking camera, the floor producer flicked his little headset microphone up beside his temple.

  “What can I do for you?” he whispered.

  I shook my head, slid my wallet out of my inside pocket as I walked past him into the wash, and produced her passport photo, creased from one-handed mishandling. Had I said Sorry to barge back in? The monitor showed Harold, smiling and wiping his chin with a knuckle.

  “Oh,” said Mary. “Here’s Mr. Giller again.”

  “Please put that phone number back onscreen,” I said to the camera. “Thank you, that’s Shamanski. People have to call this number. This picture’s small but it’s my wife Lydia, she died two years ago from a liver cancer that didn’t respond to chemo. If she’d been diagnosed now, today—” The number flashed at the bottom of the screen, already seconds from expiring. “So if you’re sick, call. Give yourself a chance to fight.”

  On the monitor my fingers tightened into focus but Lydia somehow stayed blurry.

  “Thank you!” I barked, and smiled up at the lights, at the silhouettes around the camera, before skipping over the cables and back into the dark. In the canals of my ears I heard my heart pounding. The technicians all faced away and the air smelled of hot dust, like that shimmering bubble back at Dickside Synthetics.

  “More good advice from our Nebraskan of the Year,” Mary told the world.

  A bald guy peered out of a glassed-in booth and showed me a thumbs-up.

  Just inside the spray-painted exit door, my driver Mark stood in a charcoal pinstripe, displaying his glamorous scar that cut across both lips. Once he’d driven me in an ambulance to the Lamplighter Motel.

  “We’re boxed in, Boss, got to hold up a minute.” His scars compacted into waxen lumps as he smiled ever so graciously, as if at the end of that minute I’d be meeting the Pope. “I know you’ve got that thing to get to, but there’s a swine the size of an elephant across our bumper.”

  Did I slug him, then pull the fire ax out of the glass case and start taking pieces out of the pig until we could steer around her? No, because I’d renounced violence. Wasn’t the way to move the human race forward.

  “Her name’s Hermione,” I said.

  “Huh. Well, guy said the forklift’s nearly here.”

  From the far wall, the gray Hoover Hooves mustang looked down on the rows of expectant chairs facing the stage. The gymnasium was a mass of navy blue streamers dangling from the walls, the bleachers, the rafters twenty feet up, and I imagined the stacks of requisitions Cam must’ve filled out to get a scissor-lift that’d go that high. Great-aunts with walkers and brace-faced siblings filled every fire exit while the purple-gowned graduates adjusted and readjusted their mortarboards—because what in their lives could’ve prepared them for squares of cardboard on their heads?—and smiled for the many dads’ many cameras. A younger brother with long bangs and acne had a cartoon baboon with wings flying across his chest. war is over, the shirt said. I kept my hand in my pants pocket and sidled between the groups. Everything smelled like lemony deodorant.

  Life is a highway, blared the school-wide pa, I’m going to ride it all night long, yeah yeah yeah yeah—

  Carnal knowledge of a highway? I smiled at a young dad with Coke-bottle glasses as he told someone that the hail hadn’t bothered his winter wheat, you kidding? Not having the outsides of my ears—the pinnae—made it impossible to differentiate where sounds were coming from, so I looked over my shoulder a lot.

  “Holy smuts!” said Cam Vincent, detaching himself from a photo-op with two girls in massive yellow sunglasses. “The prodigal sub returns!”

  The feds had assured me that everything was clear between Hoover and me—families paid generous settlements, no blame attached to the school or to me personally—but I still had a recurring daydream wherein Cam held me against a locker while the affected parents popped steak knives into my belly. A dozen beloved kids had died but now it was eighteen months later and here came Mr. Vincent with a goofy grin and a beard so long and fluffy that he looked like one of the Steelers’ defensive ends.

  “Holy smuts,” I agreed, “is that a Super Bowl mvp Brett Keisel tribute beard?”

  “Oh, buddy.” He put a hairy arm around me—he was taller than I’d remembered. “Nobody else gets it. Nobody does. You heard a couple of yours are valedictorians?”

  “Seriously, Megan and Clint?”

  I could narrow it down quickly because they were the only ones left. The graduates around us went on laughing and taking pictures of each other’s butts but a lot of the adults were looking our way, and though I looked for venomous stares beneath the bald heads and ballcaps, I couldn’t spot any. I was a miracle worker for the downtrodden. There in the old gym where that Asperger’s kid had knocked himself unconscious with a basketball, I felt more self-conscious of my floppy hair and Italian three-button than I did of the missing arm and ears. Most of the chuckling grandpas were missing at least a finger or thumb. Threshing accidents.

  The “Life is a Highway” backup singers competed with hundreds of voices to drown each other out.

  “You heard George Reid never came back either?” Cam kept his arm tight around me. “Maybe he’ll roll in too!”

  That was a lovely image. His aquarium cart.

  “Hadn’t heard anything about him,” I said.

  “Yeah, so we had to hire Kirsten full-time—she and I are expecting in August!”

  “Jeez,” I said, “the full-time position must look different than I thought.”

  “You might’ve been a beautiful mother if you’d given it a chance. Say, you ever quit your worldwide tours long enough to put your feet up, drink some beer?”

  “Sure. My mom and kids are at a place up north, a little lake.”

  A bob-haired Asian woman, clutching the strap of a white purse, took a seat on a folding chair right in front of the stage. Dreaper, the now-beardless math teacher, materialized to tap her shoulder and direct her to the chairs at the back. “Life is a Highway” concluded mid-riff, so I could suddenly hear every cowboy-boot heel clonking against the hardwood.

  “There a school up there, up north?” asked Cam.

  “Homeschooling. My mom. They build volcanoes.”

  He rolled his eyes, then lifted his beard amiably at someone behind me.

  “It’s not about the education, really,” I said. “I want them near at hand.”

  “Oh, they came along?” His eyebrows went up, which his beard somehow exaggerated—the beard was ridiculous. “Steer ’em over here!”

  “I didn’t bring them.”

  “Oh, good, well, that makes sense. Guess I better get this thing started.” He lifted his arm away. “There’ll be a memorial for your elevens, you want to say so
mething?”

  “There’s a memorial this year?”

  “They would’ve been graduating.”

  “But there wasn’t one last year?”

  “There was one last year.”

  He stared at me dully, then turned, winked at a mom who’d been pulling hay out of her pant cuff, then made his way through the crowd, stroking his beard and squeezing every shoulder he passed. He made it look easy. I couldn’t imagine the number of people he must’ve been ready to strangle when he heard about PBF, twelve of his eleventh-graders burned to death.

  He climbed onstage and thudded his finger against the microphone.

  “All right, grads, showtime. Alphabetical order like we practiced.”

  Every eye was off me by then. While the kids in robes bobbed from one seat to another across the front, I waited for the families to settle themselves on the rear folding chairs, then I took a seat two in from the back corner. The Asian woman, still clutching that purse strap with her white knuckles, dropped onto the chair beside me.

  “Are you Peter Giller?” she asked quietly. “Okay if I sit here? I’m Helen Bradford, I’m Grace’s mom. You remember Grace?”

  She raised her thin eyebrows, against the expectation that no one in Hoover would recall Grace. Really, Grace?

  So I imagined the heat and light in that pig-farm walk-in cooler—the last sensations Grace ever had of this world. How she must’ve wanted her mom then. Wanted her, wanted her, then the bright light, too much heat for a nervous system to even register.

  Thanks to that line of thought I folded up, put my face in my hand and let go a sob that shuddered up from under my kidneys. Snot streamed out of my nose and down my shirt cuff, and my ribs heaved because I couldn’t get air in. Helen Bradford’s light hand moved up and down my back. But Cam was welcoming all the parents and hangers-on by then, making a joke about the basketball team that got laughs and applause, so I didn’t imagine anyone was paying me much attention. Just another wigged-out parent afraid to watch his chicks fly. The grads woo-hooed.