The Touch (5 page)

Malcolm had been with Lara and her father on the night William Blair died. He had suffered from lung cancer. He had been a lifelong smoker—it was an irony that so many doctors who knew full well the destruction cigarettes could spread through the heart and lungs could still succumb to the habit—and despite many efforts to quit (once led by Malcolm, who had also smoked during college, and who offered to quit along with him; Malcolm had succeeded, but William went back to smoking after his wife died) had never been able to permanently shake the habit. When William lay in the hospital on what they all knew was the last night of his life, Malcolm whispered to him, “I wish we'd spent more time trying to beat cancer.”

But William had smiled then—actually smiled, behind the mask of the ventilator that kept his chest rising and falling—and shook his head; then his eyes turned to Lara, sitting in the chair beside the bed, and Malcolm knew exactly what that look meant, and what he would do for his dying friend and for his living daughter, as long as he would live himself.

Now Lara, seeing this new evidence of stupendous dexterity, tossed off the remainder of her lab gear and paced her office. Lara possessed the trait—some might call the affliction—of believing that if anything needed accomplishing, she had to acquire skill for it personally. But before her were the signs of a skill beyond any she could achieve herself; she knew that already, after a young lifetime of trying. She had never seen anything like the manual skill or the subtle artistry that the carvings demonstrated. The photo blow-ups made it even more evident than microscopic views of the carvings did.

Malcolm had also brought a folding file. He extended it to her. “Turns out we already had a file on the guy. He first came to our attention as a resident when his teachers started using terms like ‘virtuoso' about his surgical technique. But he passed on our interviews, told our recruiters he wanted to practice in Virginia. Ended up at the state university, near the town where he grew up.”

Brenda, who had served Lara's father as executive secretary for a few years after his previous secretary had retired, had read the file already. Brenda never forgot the details of any document she ever read, but she had clearly taken a special interest in this subject. “He lives in an apartment alone, gets paid ninety-two thousand a year, and has turned down offers for four times that. Teaches surgical residents and does double shifts in the Emergency Room—for no extra pay.”

Then Brenda held up a small leather-bound book. “We found this in his file too. He wrote poetry for the university literary publication, while he was a resident. Listen to this . . .” Brenda opened the book to a page she had marked—she had taken the book home with her the previous night to study it—and she read:

“. . . If love were a city on a hill,

with turrets tall and banners small,

where a king would die for his queen's soft sigh,

I could build it.

If love were a journey,

across the rage of slashing seas,

or through a wilderness of trees,

or across time . . .”

Brenda paused, to clear her throat.

“. . . or across time, without the promise

that one who starts will find the end

then I would take the first step now

though I know my heart

if it should break

will never mend.”

There was a pregnant silence in the room, broken by Malcolm. “There's an early picture of him in—”

Brenda lurched for the folder but Lara had already found the picture in the file; she plucked it out before Brenda could get to it, and studied it—a young doctor, virile and handsome. “Hmm,” Lara said.

Brenda snatched the picture from her fingers. Lara took the volume of poetry from Brenda's lap and thumbed through the pages. “And we don't know why he quit operating?”

“We're sending a recruiter—” Malcolm began.

“No,” Lara said sharply. “Find out if Dr. Jones is available for a personal meeting.”

“When?”

“I'll be there in an hour. Two at most.”

Brenda said, “I'm going with you.”

Lara pulled the picture away from her. “No, you're not.” Lara studied the picture again, and without taking her eyes from it, she said, “He has The Touch.”

* * *

Andrew Jones's earliest memories were of smothering. He was an infant when his parents discovered he was susceptible to asthma. He did not suffer from attacks when he was at his parent's house in town, but each time they drove deeper into the mountain country, to his grandmother's house where his mother had grown up, his lungs would close down and he would begin to wheeze; within a couple of hours his lungs could barely expand at all.

That situation, all by itself, was not painful; he could lie there and pant for hours, even days, on end, and as long as he kept sucking in the tiniest breaths of air he could survive. None of the medicines the doctors had could help him. They administered many tests for allergies in hopes they could find out what the source of the reaction was; the tests told them he was allergic to dust and to leaf mold, among many other things, and both were prevalent on the farm where his grandmother lived.

Maybe his parents didn't understand how awful it was for a boy who loved to run and laugh and climb trees and wrestle with his cousins to have to sit motionless; but the young Jones understood from the beginning that if he panicked, if he started fighting for a breath, if he sucked hard trying to open his sealed lungs, he would die. He understood that he had to sit, absolutely motionless.

His grandmother knew not only this but that the boy's mind was going, going, never stopping.

Once the attack fully hit him—and they always seemed worse at night—he could not lie down; that made the feeling of drowning all the stronger. So he sat up. And Grandmother sat up with him. She held him on her lap and he would stare into her eyes, the color of a clear sky, as she told him stories and sang to him. All night long. All night long. All night long.

When he grew, he was determined to be stronger. Back at his parents' home, when he wasn't having the attacks, he would lie on his back with a stack of encyclopedias on his chest, hoping he might strengthen his breathing muscles so that he could grow stronger than the attacks.

In the summers his parents traveled; his father was continually looking for more promising work, as the economy was perpetually poor in Appalachia, and his mother went with him because she battled back pain from a spinal deformation that might have been corrected when she was a girl, but doctors were as rare as speedboats in the mountains. So Andrew spent the warm months with Grandmother, and she would take him to tent revivals, where they sang hymns like “Nothing but the Blood of Jesus” and “He Leadeth Me” and “The Old Rugged Cross,” his grandmother's favorite. She would weep whenever they came to the line, “'Til my burdens at last I lay down,” and he would imagine it was either because she would never cry about any burden she bore, any other place except in church; or it was because the thought of dying meant, to her, the thought of reuniting with her husband, Jones's granddaddy Rufe, who had died the year he was born.

The encyclopedias didn't help his lungs, though maybe they helped his mind. But the attacks kept coming. And through them all, Jones had learned to sit very, very still.

6

Blair Bio-medical owned two corporate jets, down from the four the company used before Lara took formal control and partnered with Malcolm in a program of cost cutting. Some efficiency experts they had employed as consultants had told them that with the flow of information available from the Internet their executives and researchers didn't need to travel at all, but Lara's father had taught her that data was just one kind of information; there was the other kind that you sensed and felt, knowledge that you imagined, and the history of discovery was full of anecdotes of scientists whose great ideas came not from the scientific method but from something more human—or more divine. When the legendary apple bonked Newton on the head and he was struck with the notion of gravity, he was not in his laboratory. And Lara's father, while agnostic, was not a cynic.

So the company kept two of its jets, yet Lara had not been in either for over a year. She preached to her people the power of a lifestyle balanced by family and hobbies and play, but she had buried herself in work for months on end. Now, as the jet carried her south and she looked out over the tops of the clouds and the endless blue above them, she felt that somehow, in some way the scientific side of her mind could never explain, her life was opening up.

She was the only passenger. On her lap she held the volume of poetry that Malcolm brought her, written by the Dr. Jones she was flying now to meet. Lara's eyes shifted from the pristine white of the cloud tops to the words on the pages of the thin book she was holding, and she reread the passage:

If love were a journey,

across the rage of slashing seas,

or through a wilderness of trees,

or across time, without the promise

that one who starts will find the end

then I would take the first step now

though I know my heart

if it should break

will never mend.

Lara closed the book abruptly and shoved it into her bag, as if to remind herself that she must be objective, even ruthless. She turned to the magazines the lone flight attendant had spread out for her on the table beside her seat—journals of finance, research, business administration. But one cover caught her eye. It showed a couple walking away from the camera with their child dangling between them, from their outstretched hands. The picture was on the cover to announce a story on genetics. But Lara's eyes stared deep into that picture, at the form of the child, suspended in the air and moving toward a rising sun.

Lara snapped herself out of that reverie too and lifted a journal on “Exciting News in Alloys and Metallurgy.”

* * *

Down in Virginia, at an Emergency Room in Charlottesville, Dr. Andrew Jones was finishing stitching a four-inch gash in a truck driver's head. “Next time you hug your wife after five days on the road,” Jones said, clipping the last suture, “make sure you don't smell like a waitress's perfume, okay?”

“Thanks, Doc,” the teamster said, surprisingly sheepish for a man whose back was hairier than his head. “I'll remember that.”

“I bet you will,” Jones said, and both men laughed.

At that moment, at the main entrance of the University Hospital, Frank Willig was shaking hands with Lara Blair. Willig was the hospital's chief administrator, and in his efforts to keep UV at the leading edge of teaching hospitals, he had made many purchases from Blair Bio-Med. When he heard its owner was on her way, he was determined to be the first to greet her. “We're so pleased you'd visit us in person!” he said in a voice he considered quite musical—Willig loved to sing karaoke, though no one loved to hear him do it—as he led Lara down the polished main corridor. The sun had come out after several days of rain, and light was pouring through the skylights. “We use your company's equipment, of course,” Willig intoned, “and the grants from your Foundation are—”

“You're sure Dr. Jones is around this morning?” she interrupted, more harsh than she had meant to sound. She was determined to stay focused on her goals, but instead of feeling ruthless and businesslike she felt herself strangely nervous and unbalanced.

Just then they heard a call over the hospital's sound system: “Dr. Jones, Code 6!”

As Lara's eyes flicked to Willig he told her, “That's our emergency code for the operating theater.”

“Do you have an observation balcony?”

* * *

The surgical nurses were waiting for him in the sterile room, and they held up a blue gown to cover the hospital scrubs Jones was already wearing when he banged through the door. He washed his hands quickly, popped them through the sleeves, and stretched his fingers so they could glove him; as they slid on the cap and mask he snapped to them, “Who's cutting?”

“Stafford,” the head nurse shot back.

Jones had been running, but when he backed through the second door into an operating room full of tense young surgeons around a patient whose head was curtained off, he exuded an almost casual calm. He turned and seemed not to notice the panicked looks in the eyes of the surgical team, the only part of their faces visible between their caps and masks.

Twenty-seven feet above and behind the patient's curtained head, Lara Blair stood next to Willig, and from the moment she saw Jones enter she understood the leadership and the confidence he was spreading; she felt it even at this distance, separated by a double layer of soundproofing glass. The students around Jones had recognized the master.

The lead cutter, standing at the head of the patient whose brain was the object of the drama, shifted so that Jones could move in beside him. Jones's voice was smooth and even; Lara could hear it on the speaker at the base of the observation window: “Pulse and blood pressure?”

The anesthesiologist, whom Lara noticed was the most veteran of the surgical team below her, monitored the array of sensors attached to the patient's body. “Rising, 180 over 150,” he reported, and Lara understood his unspoken warning:
Not yet critical, but it soon will be.

Beside her, Willig dropped his voice into a smooth baritone that he hoped would sound not only professional but seductive, for he found Lara Blair intensely appealing; he rumbled to her, “They often call Dr. Jones in, if the patient presents unpredictably.”

Lara kept her eyes on the operating theater below her and thought about that phrase:
the patient presents unpredictably,
as if the person strapped to the operating table—the son or daughter of someone, husband or wife of someone, father or mother of someone—had somehow just up and decided to surprise the surgeons with a little extra challenge, what doctors called a “complication.” And for them it was a complication, because they had to scratch their heads and ponder and do paperwork afterwards; the patient simply died. Lara was used to hospital administrators talking to her as if she didn't understand the nuances of what went on in the practical life of hospitals; she was used to it but still it rankled.