The Touch Page 10

  Lara just shook her head, smiled, and said, “Everything.”

  * * *

  They set up a new trial with the replica brain in the laboratory, and once Lara was in the hot seat, braced in a new chair of her own design, one she had fitted with fluid dampeners—shock absorbers, essentially—to try to minimize the beating of her own heart as she attempted to thread her surgical probes through the impossible passages of the practice brain, she was ready to try again. “Motion recorders ready?” she asked.

  “Ready.” The lead technician’s voice came from the systems monitoring room, separated from the trial lab by a glass wall that insulated the surgical team from the heat and sound of the computers and tracking screens. The setup had always reminded visitors of a NASA launch, and in fact in their previous setup Blair Bio-Med utilized ten thousand times more computing power than had served the original astronauts who had walked on the moon. Now they had more than doubled that capacity; Malcolm and his teams of technicians had been busy since Lara’s last attempt.

  “Visual and ambient monitors ready?”

  “All in sync, Dr. Blair.”

  “Alarms?”

  “Set to 90 percent sensitivity.”

  “Go to a hundred.”

  Malcolm and Brenda stood in the systems monitoring room, watching through the glass wall. Stools waited there for them, but they did not sit. When Lara called for maximum sensitivity in the trial—eliminating all possible margin of error in her attempt before the sensors screamed FAILURE—they glanced at each other.

  After a moment, the lead tech’s voice came back to Lara: “We are go.”

  Lara reached for her instruments, only this time she was not using the same tools she had worked with before; she had ordered the exact tools she had seen at Jones’s bench, the ones he used for carving his figurines. She lifted the smallest of them and began.

  Sensors in Lara’s instruments, lasers in the replica brain cavity, and even a grid of monitors within Roscoe, the dummy itself, measured every microscopic movement, and the bank of equipment behind Malcolm and Brenda recorded it all. Both of them found it hard to breathe. Even the technicians seemed tense, and the joke around the building had always been that the technicians would make good Roscoes because none of them had a discernible pulse.

  Lara reached a critical area, the spot where she had failed in her last three attempts, and she paused. Hesitation was unlike Lara, and in the monitoring room, Malcolm whispered to Brenda, “What’s she doing?”

  Brenda watched Lara for a moment and whispered back, “Jones, the guy in Virginia? He told her about feeling her heartbeat. I think she’s doing that.”

  Brenda was right. Lara was withdrawing into herself. She listened for her own heartbeat… became attuned to its rhythm… and began to move again…

  Flanking the lead tech were four other scan specialists—it took that many to watch over the vast streams of data flooding into their computers during a lab trial, and their concentration was legendary. They could recall the readouts—numbers up to five digits—from trials they had monitored from five years before; but they never spoke, never seemed to carry any emotional investment in what was happening in the lab. Or so Malcolm believed—until he heard one of them say, “We’ve never been this far before.”

  That’s when Malcolm began to hold his breath.

  Lara kept going… deeper and deeper into the replica brain. And she too could feel the breakthrough coming…

  Then the alarms shrieked.

  The sound of the Klaxon and the flashing of the lights were even more jarring and disappointing now. They had failed again. Malcolm and Brenda felt it, the technicians felt it.

  But nobody felt it as intensely as Lara. She threw down her instruments and walked out of the lab.

  * * *

  She entered her office, struggling not to yell, struggling not to cry. Emotions she had contained for many years were boiling up inside her. Lara could smother an employee’s despair with a single look, but her own tears were not afraid of her; as they started to come, she buried her face in her hands, then stiffened and acted as if nothing was wrong when Malcolm and Brenda arrived at her door. They entered slowly, and Malcolm said in a low voice, “We went further than ever. We won’t give up. We won’t ever give up.”

  When Lara didn’t respond, he turned and walked out of the room, with as much purpose and optimism as he could manage. Brenda sat down and, with a gesture, invited Lara to talk; instead Lara stared out the window. Brenda said, “Lara, as both your corporate advisor and your personal friend, I have to ask if you’re being as ruthless as you need to be here.”

  “Ruthless, Brenda?”

  “I know you see me as a bleeding heart, but I can be quite ruthless, especially in male-female dynamics.”

  “Is that why you’ve been married four times?”

  “Now that was ruthless. What I’m talking about is this surgeon friend of yours, in Virginia.”

  “He’s not a friend.”

  “Exactly.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You want him to be more than a friend! And because you do, you won’t push him, you won’t go at him like you do anyone else who gets in the way of what you want to accomplish!”

  “That’s bull!”

  Their voices were carrying to the secretaries in the outer office. Juliet cocked her head toward the door; two more of her secretary friends moved up to try to eavesdrop. They heard Brenda’s voice rise to match Lara’s: “Is it?! The big boys come at you—corporate heads, Wall Street cannibals—and sweet little Lara gets everything she wants and leaves their greedy carcasses bleeding on the floor! Now Mr. Sensitive poet-sculptor-surgeon down in Virginia says naw to you one time and you fly back home like a little bird. Since when did you take no for an answer?!”

  “I saw he was a waste of time!” Lara responded, only slightly less loudly.

  In the outer office a FedEx worker dropped off a package at Juliet’s desk; she waved for him to leave it; then she noticed the package’s return address.

  In Lara’s inner office, Brenda was exploding. “A waste of time?! Personally? Or professionally?!”

  “‘Personally’ has got nothing to do with it!”

  Brenda would not be cowed. “You’ve been staring out windows ever since you came back!”

  Lara lowered her voice, and the secretaries in the outer office could not hear her when she said, “Brenda. You’re a friend. And I know you mean well. But nothing happened in Virginia. Nothing… significant. To him or to—”

  Juliet stuck her head in the door. “Dr. Blair—”

  “We’re having a discussion, Juliet!” Lara shouted.

  “I know, Dr. Blair, but—”

  “A private discussion!”

  “I know, but—something just came for you that I thought you’d want to see right away.” She put the package on Lara’s desk. “It’s from Virginia.” Juliet drew out the name of the state: Vir-GIN-i-a!

  Brenda gave Lara a look; and Juliet stayed put.

  Lara glared at them both. “You’re just gonna stand there and watch me open it?”

  “Well… yeah!” Brenda answered, without a trace of guilt.

  Lara opened the box, with Brenda and Juliet looking on; the other secretaries watched through the slot of the door.

  From the protective paper, Lara pulled a tiny display case, the kind that Jones used to hold his micro sculptures.

  * * *

  Lara placed the slide into the viewing slit of the microscope and dialed it into focus. Brenda and Juliet stood behind her, Brenda biting her lips and Juliet’s thumbs skimming back and forth across the ends of her fingers. She had typed and texted so much in her life that emotions radiated through her fingertips.

  Through the twin eyepieces of the microscope, the new sculpture became visible for Lara. She saw a remarkably graceful carving… And as she worked the microscope dials to shift the microscope’s tray she realized it was a sculpture of
a woman. She dialed again, scanning up to the face of the sculpture…

  Lara pulled back sharply from the eyepieces.

  “What?” Brenda sang, like a girl watching a favorite sister open a package on Christmas morning. “What is it?”

  Lara did not answer, just stood back from the microscope, her eyes turned away and fixed on a far corner of the room, so Brenda and Juliet scrambled for a look themselves, each pulling at an eyepiece so both could view at once.

  What they saw was a carving of Lara.

  Jones had carved her holding a cellular phone up to her ear.

  “It’s you!” Juliet said, her fingertips flying in all directions at once.

  Brenda said nothing; she just pulled back from the eyepiece and looked smugly at Lara.

  14

  Jones, followed by two young medical residents, entered Sam’s hospital room, carrying the reports on all the tests Jones had ordered run on him. Jones held the folder easily in his left hand, and the ease was part of what he was teaching the students: What is on a paper may be data, it may be scientific numbers—but it is not fact. The only fact a patient cares about is whether they are going to live through whatever has brought them to the hospital, and that fact is influenced by how much confidence they have in their doctor, so always, always stay relaxed.

  Sam was lying on his back, staring up at the ceiling, with his old buddy Allen at his bedside. When Jones entered, Allen was saying, “And since we been gone for a few days, all the fish in the lake will have got fatter, and they’ll be good eatin’. That’s right, Sam; that’s right. We’ll catch all of ’em. And the gophers will have got lazy, and we’ll shoot all of ’em. Things’ll be better’n ever, once we get you home.”

  Allen was looking up at the ceiling too, as if he could see the images of home he was projecting there for Sam. Both mountaineers turned and looked at Jones as he moved to Sam’s bedside, and the residents stood respectfully behind him.

  “All the tests have come back,” Jones said.

  “Give it to me straight,” Sam said.

  “You have what’s called—something in Latin. It’s a blockage in the main artery in your neck that feeds your brain.”

  Allen slapped his right hand on his own knee and said, “I knew it. He ain’t been gettin’ blood up there for some time.”

  Sam’s blue eyes, watery yet sharp, snapped in Allen’s direction. “I ain’t been gettin’ blood in a lot of places, but they ain’t fell off yet.”

  “It will,” Allen answered, “just give it time.”

  Jones sat down on the edge of the bed. The two residents shifted over by the window, where there sat a potted plant, grown in the window of the mountain clinic and sent down with Sam when Allen drove him down. “The blockage itself is operable,” Jones said. “The odds of surviving are actually pretty good.”

  “There’s a but in there someplace,” Sam said, and in that moment he reminded Jones of every man he’d ever known from the mountains, the kind of men who didn’t want to know how you hoped something would be, but how it was. In that moment Jones missed his father.

  “Your heart’s arrhythmic,” Jones answered, “it doesn’t beat just right. We can put you on machines for the operation, but that bounces your blood pressure, and that affects your third condition. It shows in the scans.” Jones opened the folder and took out a sheet of film, holding it up to the light so Sam could see. “These thin artery walls caused your little stroke. They’re ready to cause a big stroke.”

  “Sounds like we ought’a go down to the bank, and you take out a biiiiiig loan,” Allen said, still squinting up at the ceiling even after Jones had put the film back into the folder.

  “There’s not much anybody can do,” Jones said.

  “Not much, or nothin’ a’tall?” Sam demanded.

  Jones put his hand on the old man’s shoulder. Always touch the patients, he had told the residents; people need human contact, especially when they’re old, especially when they’re sick. Don’t just tell them you care, let them feel it. “Let’s see if medication will help.”

  A voice on the intercom called, “Dr. Jones, line four…”

  Jones left the residents to confer with Sam about the medication and moved out into the hospital corridor, where he picked up a wall phone and said, “Jones.”

  He heard Lara say, “The cell phone was a nice touch.” Her voice was softer, happier, more relaxed than he had ever heard it. He guessed that she was somewhere away from the office, because it wasn’t an office voice he heard at the other end of the line. In fact she had stepped into her private apartment to make the call.

  “I thought you’d like that,” he said.

  For a moment he heard only silence, but in that silence he heard—no, he felt, in the same way a patient felt a doctor’s true caring—her smiling. Then she said, “Dr. Jones, I think we may have a solution here. We’ve used scans of an actual patient coupled with mapping techniques we got from NASA to construct a model brain that mirrors precisely the condition we’re facing. We call it Roscoe. Now this replica contains microscopic sensors that alert us to any mistake. You with me so far?”

  “You nearly lost me at Roscoe but I think I’m muddling through.”

  “What if you did the operation on the model?”

  “What good would it do? Even if you could duplicate my moves exactly—”

  “That’s just it—we can! Roscoe’s sensors transmit to hard drives that collect every nuance of the surgeon’s movements—and that’s only half our equation. The other half is that we can replicate those movements with absolute precision.”

  “Roscoe must have a lot of sensors,” Jones said into the phone, laughing.

  “I think the scientific term for it is ‘oodles,’” Lara said. “Somewhere between ‘scads’ and ‘a truck load.’” Lara, leaning back on the white couch in her apartment in the office building, realized in that moment that she had not joked with anyone for a long, long time—for longer than she could remember. She looked out over the city beyond her windows, at the clouds above the city, at the sky above the clouds. How long had she been looking down? She ran her fingers over the silken fabric of the couch. Who buys a white couch, anyway? she thought. And when did my life become so sterile? She stood and walked to the window. “We do the operation until we get it right. Then we make our machine repeat it.”

  “Your machine,” Jones said.

  “You know that device Thomas Jefferson invented, to duplicate the motions his hand made in writing, so he could make copies of his letters? Our machine works on the same principle.”

  “His machine didn’t work.”

  “Ours didn’t either, at first. But now we have magic computers and space age materials, and sensors that can feel a gnat’s eyelash. Roscoe isn’t alive. But you are. So how about it, hotshot? How good are you?”

  * * *

  It was a gray morning in Charlottesville when Jones stepped out of the cab onto the airport tarmac and carried his overnight bag to the Blair jet. A slender young woman in a white shirt with epaulets waited at the ladder. “Dr. Jones, I’m Angelica, your pilot,” she said. “Since you’re the only passenger you can fly in the cockpit if you’d prefer.” She turned and led the way up the steps into the jet.

  Jones smiled. This is gonna be fun, he thought.

  Two minutes later he had buckled himself into the seat beside Angelica, and they were taxiing on the runway. She pushed the throttles forward and the plane accelerated with a suddenness Jones had never experienced in an aircraft. “Where’d you learn to fly, Angelica?” he asked, not with the greatest of ease.

  “The navy,” she said, pulling her radio headset off one ear so she could hear him better. “I flew fighters off carriers—’til I got bored.” She pulled back on the controls and the plane took off, shooting almost straight up.” Then she looked at Jones and grinned. “Just kidding,” she said. “I used to be a receptionist.” Angelica threw back her head and laughed. Jones, the doctor with the broad
shoulders, gripped the leather of his armrests with hands that had turned utterly pale.

  * * *

  Instead of a cab waiting at the private airport where they landed, it was a limo, long, sleek and black, stopped precisely beside the spot where the plane taxied to a halt. As the plane door opened Jones staggered out, held up by a grinning Angelica. “Thanks, Angelica,” he said. “Anytime I don’t like what I had for breakfast, I’ll be sure to call you.” He even managed a smile.

  The limo driver opened its rear door for him, and as he stepped from the daylight into the softly lit passenger compartment, he found Lara. Her legs were crossed; she was wearing high heels and a cashmere overcoat. She looked more than beautiful; she looked happy. “Thank you for coming,” she said.

  Jones settled into the seat beside her and shrugged. “I wanted to try your jet. I’ve been in the market for a new one.”

  “When you fix Roscoe you’ll be able to afford one.”

  “You’re mighty optimistic.”

  “And you’re mighty confident.”

  “I’m operating on a dummy.”

  “Oh, but he’s a very smart dummy,” Lara said, her voice musical as the limo rolled smoothly out the gate of the private airfield and the driver pointed its polished nose toward the highrise cluster of downtown Chicago. And it was not only Jones who recognized how newly happy Lara seemed; Lara herself noticed it too.

  * * *

  On the way into the city they chatted easily. She asked about the clinic in the mountains, and he told her about Sam. She probed for the specifics of his condition, her questions perceptive and incisive. Jones had known already that she was extremely intelligent but he had assumed her approach to medicine would be mostly theoretical since she worked in the field of research and inventions; now he saw that her knowledge was deeply practical as well.

  Once again, something about all this reminded him of someone else he had known, someone he had loved more than he loved life. When he realized that he was thinking of Faith, he grew quiet and had trouble looking directly at Lara.