2030_ The Real Story of What Happens to America - Albert Brooks [87]
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When Max Leonard got back to Indiana after his meeting with Walter Masters, something had changed in his personality. Kathy noticed it immediately. He was quiet, more pensive, kept more to himself. She tried to bring him out a bit, asking him all kinds of questions about the trip, but he didn’t seem to want to talk about it.
He and Kathy had been basically living together—he spent almost every night at her house—but when he returned from seeing Masters, he slept in his own bed. Kathy would call and ask if he wanted to eat dinner or come over and make love, anything, and for the first time in their short relationship he said no. She thought it was her. Did he meet someone in California? What happened out there that changed him? Is he falling out of love with me? But Max assured her that that wasn’t the case. He even bought her a beautiful bracelet and told her that he loved her more than ever; that if he seemed detached, it was only because he was in deep thought on how to “even things out,” as he put it; and that he was only sleeping at home because he was up half the night thinking and he didn’t want to bother her. She accepted this explanation.
Enough Is Enough didn’t have any more meetings scheduled, although Max was in constant communication with the five people he considered the brains of the group. He encouraged protests when the members wanted to show up somewhere, as when a hundred people went to Chicago to march against the biennial Social Security bump, but other than giving his okay, Max was preoccupied. It was only when Kathy came by his place unannounced one day that she got wind of what he was up to.
When she knocked on the door and no one answered, she walked around the back and looked inside. Max was in his bedroom. He had not pulled the shades down completely, and the position of the sun allowed her to see in without him being able to see out. What she saw terrified her.
Max had made an entire wall of Sam Mueller’s life. Pictures of his family, his parents, a flowchart of how he started Immunicate and all of the discoveries and patents he had been responsible for. He also had Mueller’s current speaking schedule and what he was planning for the future. The information covered the wall. If this were a graduate thesis on the man who cured cancer he would get an A, but Kathy had no idea what Max was doing. She decided to leave before he discovered her, but she knew she would have to bring this up at some appropriate time. Was he in love with the famous doctor? Did he want to become the famous doctor? Or was it something more sinister?
When she got home she saw Max’s face on her screen. He had left a message. “Hey, honey, do you want to have dinner tonight? Let me know. I’m working on something but I’m going to be hungry later. I love you.”
He picked her up and they went to a small café they both liked. Twelve tables, one waitress, dark lighting, and Cuban music, although the food was a combination of Mexican and Chinese. Tacos with duck meat, pot stickers with beef and cheese inside. The restaurant’s most famous dish was orange chicken enchiladas. When Max was hungry he could eat three of them.
As they were having sake, Kathy asked him what he had done that day. For the first time Max wasn’t silent. He wanted to talk. “I’ve been thinking about how to make an impression. How Enough Is Enough can use their time and resources in a way that people will notice.”
“What did you come up with?”
“When we went to see Sam Mueller speak it hit me, but I couldn’t figure it out just then. When I couldn’t convince Walter Masters to join, I realized we needed someone even bigger and more ingrained in the establishment. We need Sam Mueller to join our movement.”
Kathy was relieved that Max had brought up Mueller’s name, although she was still in the dark as to why someone would have to turn his bedroom into a shrine. “How would