The Touch (6 page)

She heard through the monitor speakers the voices from the operating theater below her as the surgeon told Jones, “It seemed straightforward. Then we found a second aneurism, hemorrhaging behind the first . . .” The young surgeon's voice was tense, fragile.

“One thing at a time,” Jones said, as easily as he might describe a play in rugby or pickup basketball. “You can do this, Ben. Retractor!”

The nurse extended an instrument to Jones.

“Not to me, to Dr. Stafford,” he said. “Put it in your left hand, Ben. . . . Your other left hand.” As the surgeon shifted the instruments that had suddenly become so unfamiliar to his fingers, Jones peered through the surgical magnifiers trained at the brain open below them. Lara could not see Jones's eyes, but she noticed the sudden stillness of his body, as if he'd put himself into a trance. Stepping back from the magnifiers he said, gently and firmly, “Now look at the brain. See what is. And see what has to be.”

Stafford, the surgeon, pressed his face to the eye ports. “The first artery . . .”

“Right, it has to be clamped. So do it. Right now.”

Lara could tell Stafford's fingers were trembling, though it may not have been her eyes but her gut that told her so—just as she could tell that Jones's hand was perfectly steady as he gripped Stafford's wrist and moved it into position. Then Jones drew his own hand away. “Shift the artery clear, then clamp it,” he ordered.

Stafford had frozen. He just could not get his hand to move.

Then Jones surprised everyone in the operating room and on the observation balcony, including Lara. He looked away from the patient, directly into the eyes of the frozen surgeon, and said, “Hey, Ben, you hear about those two drunks staggering home one night, when one of 'em says . . .” Jones leaned closer to the young surgeon and dropped his voice, so that no one outside the operating team could hear his voice again until he said, casually yet firmly, “Clamp it, Ben.”

Stafford made a move and inserted a clamp.

“Good. Now the second artery!” Jones said clearly, and his voice dropped again and picked up the quiet narrative he had begun. Lara, Willig, and the others on the observation balcony strained to hear, but all they could catch were occasional words. Lara thought she heard him say, “. . . stinking drunks . . .” and “. . . the lady wouldn't open the door . . .” And Lara began to smile.

“What's he doing?” Willig wondered aloud beside her.

“He's telling a joke,” Lara whispered. “Probably a bawdy one.”

Down below her, Jones lifted his voice again, enough so that Stafford heard the next instruction without tensing. “Scalpel,” Jones said, then dropped back into his easy narrative as Stafford began what Lara knew was an even more delicate maneuver inside the patient's brain. Jones's eyes flicked to catch every move the rookie surgeon made, yet Jones never broke stride in his narration.

And Lara never took her eyes from Jones, while Willig squirmed a bit next to her, no doubt uncomfortable about the apparent impropriety of a bawdy story during a life-and-death procedure. But Lara had the opposite reaction; she watched in reverent wonder. She had spent all of her professional life working at the limits of human ability; she carried within her the skepticism of the scientist, yet even deeper in her heart she harbored the secret hope of wanting to matter, to live, to save. She knew that doubt and hope were at war within the young surgeon, and that Jones was using all the tools of his own courage to distract the doubt and let the hope, the patient, and even the young surgeon blossom into life.

“Now listen, this is good!” Jones was saying. And he lowered his voice again until he said strongly, “Good. Clamp.”

Stafford was nearly hyperventilating as he readied himself for the most crucial move inside the patient's brain. Jones watched his movements, knowing what was about to happen before it happened, while unrolling his story like a buddy at a ball game. All Lara could make out was the punch line: “He staggers off the porch and his buddy says, ‘When did she say they open up again?' And the second drunk says, ‘I think she said ‘Thhhhhhhursday,' but her breath was so bad I didn't want her to repeat it!'”

Stafford made the cut; Jones handed him the second clamp and Stafford instantly inserted it into the brain. Jones and Stafford looked at the anesthesiologist, who checked his sensors and nodded. The patient's vital signs were all showing strength; the operation was a complete success.

Stafford stepped back from the table, relief flooding so fully from his heart that his legs buckled slightly. Then he looked at Jones. “Thhhhursday?!” Stafford exploded. And all the surgeons burst into laughter.

In the observation balcony, Willig was flushing with embarrassment.

Lara Blair was transfixed.

* * *

Jones was a self-contained man who attended few of the formal functions of the medical school faculty and tended not to return phone calls pertaining to paperwork and bookkeeping, so a few years back the administration had provided him with a bright young secretary named Janet. Jones liked her and referred to her as his electronic dog collar. Janet's office—Jones refused to call it his own—was on the basement floor of the Med School, closest to the surgical center. As Jones entered and moved past Janet's desk in the outer office, she said, “Dr. Jones, you have a—”

“I know, I know, but I gotta have some breakfast, or—whoa, it's almost dinner time. I gotta get something to eat.” He continued without stopping into his office, stripping off both the surgical gowns that covered his filthy T-shirt and bloody, muddy rugby shorts over his skinned-up knees. He was tossing the surgical gown onto the hook on the back of the door when he realized he was not alone in the office; a beautiful, elegantly dressed stranger—Lara—was sitting on the chair in the corner, waiting for him.

“Doctor Jones?” she asked, as if she weren't already sure it was he.

“Uh, no!” he sputtered. “Jones, he's uh . . .”

But before Jones could escape his embarrassment, Janet took delight in calling through the open doorway, “You have a visitor,
Dr. Jone
s
!”

“Thank you, Janet,” he said sharply.

Janet almost sang it, in a soprano that would have matched Willig's baritone: “You're welcome, Dr. Jones!”

Lara had taken in every fragment of this exchange; her eyes were such a cold blue they added to the impression that her stare was frozen, but Jones had seen that miss-nothing look only on the faces of the brightest people he had ever met; Lara's eyes reminded him of another pair of eyes he tried never to think about. Lara rose easily from her chair. “I'm Lara Blair. I'm with Blair Bio-Medical Engineering. I'm sorry to barge in on you—I understood you'd be available for a few minutes after your rounds.”

“Uh . . . could I get you some coffee or anything?” he asked.

“Your secretary already offered, thank you.”

“Yes, she's very efficient,” Jones said in a tone he knew Janet would notice.

“Thank you, Dr. Jones!” Janet sang from her outer office.

Jones shut the door and moved to his desk, he and Lara studying each other, taking each other in. “Laura Blair?”

“It's Lara, actually. But yes, Blair. My father started the company.”

“Your father is William Blair? He was a brilliant surgeon. I studied his techniques and learned on instruments he designed.”

“He died four years ago and left me the Bio-Med devices company, and also the Blair Foundation, through which we fund surgical research.”

Jones had dealt with many offers to work for development companies, and he sensed where this was leading. “I'm a teacher now.”

“You're the best micro-manipulator we've ever seen. You may be the best anybody's ever seen.” She opened her briefcase and lifted up the acrylic box containing the tiny sculpture Malcolm's scouts had brought her. “One of our scouts came across this a few days ago. Dr. Jones, I have degrees in medicine, engineering, and microsurgery. I'm as good as anyone in our company—probably better. But I can't do what you can do. I'm working on a device that would save lives—and make a lot of money. We need your skills.”

Jones moved behind his desk, as if it were a wall. “. . . Well, I'm sorry for you to waste the trip, but—”

“Before you give me your answer, could I show you some scans?” She pulled a scan from her bag. Jones hesitated, then popped the scan onto the lightbox on the wall behind his desk. The scan displayed the interior of a patient's brain, with light and dark areas that even many doctors could not have made sense of.

Jones sized up the scan in an instant. “A double aneurism. Clip one off, the other blows out. Finally somebody developed the simultaneous clipping technique. That, I believe, was your father, William Blair.”

Lara handed him a second scan. Jones needed only a glance. “This is the fool's gold of brain surgery. The patient spends two hundred thousand dollars and six months of recovery on a procedure that gives 'em four more years of life—but they would've had five without the surgery because the procedure weakens the artery walls.”

“My company's just developed a titanium shunt that reroutes the blood flow from the problem area so that the prognosis is, essentially, normal life.”

“That's a great idea; who came up with that?”

“I did; what about this?” she said quickly, handing him another scan.

Jones took the translucent scan from her hand, slid it into his viewing box, and stared at it for a long moment. She drifted up beside him to study the scan—and his reaction. He was silent for a moment, almost reverent, before he spoke. “I've seen two of these in my whole career. The condition is congenital. It manifests like a tumor and confuses Radiology when they can't find one. The problem has to do with this artery here. It could be shunted off and made normal, except that getting to it requires passing through twisting canals of bone and artery, and then through this area that controls all brain function, and threading instruments through that region destroys the patient's brain.”

Janet poked her head into the office. “They want you in the pediatric ICU,” she said.

The next moment confirmed for Lara Blair her initial instinct about Jones: that nothing he did was casual, lacking the sharp edge of intensity. She watched him grab for his surgical gown, and she was already picking up her bag.

* * *

Jones hurried down the hallway with big strides, wrestling back into his surgical gown as he went. Lara rushed to keep up, talking as they walked. “Could you work a needle probe into that area?” She knew he understood the area of the brain she was talking about, the one that no surgeon had ever penetrated without destroying the brain he was trying to save.

“Me? No,” Jones said, never slowing.

“I mean someone with your skill, someone who possessed your ability. Could it be done?”

“Maybe,” Jones said, still not looking at her. “But it wouldn't do much good.”

“But if you—if anyone could get a probe into that area—”

“It's not just a probe; the thing has to be clipped. A tumor you can freeze, but an aneurism is a weak vein—”

“I know what an aneurism is.”

“Then you know what you're talking about is impossible.” They turned a corner and were almost to the door of the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit. Jones glanced at Lara, still following him, refusing to give up. “Nearly.”

“You're hooked! Aren't you!”

Jones banged through the door of the pediatric unit, Lara right behind, then scrambling alongside him and arguing to answer his unspoken protests, her voice both insisting and excited. “Yes, you are. Yes, you are!” But she stopped talking as his eyes, bright with concern, darted to an empty incubator.

Jones looked to the pediatric nurse, concern, almost panic, registering on his face, but she was calm, almost but not quite smiling.

For a moment to Lara, whose every sense and every instinct were fully charged to read Andrew Jones, he seemed out of sync, the nurse's peace at odds with the sense of emergency that had driven him down the hallway. Then the nurse's eyes directed his attention to the other side of the room.

There a fifteen-year-old mother, cradled in a new coat, was holding her baby as before she had held the doll, and was staring down at her real child.

Jones moved to the nurse. Lara stayed back, but she could hear the nurse whisper to him, “She walked in here this morning and said she wanted to hold her baby. I thought it was something you'd want to see.”

The baby emitted a feeble but healthy cry. The young mother looked up to the nurse, who had just warmed a bottle and now carried it over, showing the girl how to feed her baby.

Jones stood quite still and watched the girl tuck the bottle between the lips of her baby.

He looked at her in the same way he would look at sacred art, for though a mother feeding a newborn was something that happened millions of times a year throughout the world, there was something in this that was holy; Lara studied him, and she knew something out of the ordinary had happened there, though she could not have said what, she could not have known that something in this was even greater than what Jones had once seen at the Sistine Chapel, for this was alive, this was the Hand of God to Andrew Jones. But one can stare at the holy only for so long, and one cannot watch a fifteen-year-old mother for too long either, without making her feel uncomfortable. Jones glanced to Lara, and they moved back out into the corridor together, easily, as if they'd already found a bond.

“Look,” she said, “I'm sorry to dog you about this. Last year, worldwide, 128 people died of the condition I showed you. In three years that's like a jumbo jet crash, and nobody else is working on the problem. We're perfecting a computer-mechanical interface, we've created a practice environment—we're so close! Just . . . before you say no, will you let me buy you dinner?”