The Touch Page 16

  “Good for you. I’m quitting—have been for sixty years. So… you need a miracle.” He took a long drag on the cigarette, blew smoke up toward the gothic arches of the ceiling high above them, and nodded his head. “Want to hear mine?”

  Jones didn’t answer, but the priest went on anyway. “I have been a priest for fifty-seven years. I’ve seen this parish go from the center of the community, where the rich and powerful came to worship, to the fringes. Did you know that Jesus was crucified at a garbage dump?”

  “No, I didn’t know that.” Jones knew it was called Golgotha, but if they had told him in Sunday school that it was a garbage dump, Jones had forgotten it.

  The priest shrugged. “I thought that was interesting. Anyway, as this church grew less important to the community, I grew less important to myself. They didn’t value me, and I ceased to love them. I can tell you truly that for the last twenty years, I have felt no love at all. And I could not remember my last honest prayer, when I had a connection. Until just a few weeks ago.”

  Now the priest stopped and waited. Waited until Jones gave him a look to tell him to finish his story and go away. “I was collecting from the poor box,” the priest said. “The few coins that people toss in, most of them trying to buy luck, I imagine. But on this day I found a large envelope, full of money. More money than I had ever seen, certainly more than I ever held. No name. No note—except the words For the Poor on the envelope. I went back to my room and counted it. It was a million dollars.” He took another drag from his cigarette. “I took it to the bank, and they said it was real, not counterfeit. I called the police to find out if some amount like that had been stolen recently, but they knew of nothing. Somehow I was already sure it wasn’t stolen. That it really was intended for the poor.” He looked at Jones. “I see I have your attention now.”

  “So the money was your miracle,” Jones asked, only half certainly.

  “No. The money was the miracle for the poor. My miracle was what that act of charity did to me. Someone, capable enough in the ways of the world to have such a sum, decided that the best way they could think of to pass their charity to the poor was to hand it… to me. Why? Did they choose what was nearby? Comfortable? Convenient? Who knows? They chose. And suddenly my life was not wasted. Suddenly I was a priest again. I could pray. For them.” He glanced around at the poor, scattered here and there in cathedral. Then he looked back at Jones. “And for you.”

  The priest looked up at the stained glass windows, darkened by decades of airborne grime. He looked at the cross above the altar. Then once again he looked at Jones and said, “You offer your hand to God. Whether He uses it—whether your hand becomes His hand—is up to Him.”

  * * *

  All the Blair Bio-Med equipment was switched on and fully functional, the beams of lasers criss-crossing through the air, the sensors ready to feed data to the computers and screens in the newly connected monitoring room, where the technicians sat, their eyes reflecting the glow of the pixels.

  Only this time the patient was not made of molded polymers. She was a young woman of flesh and blood and spirit, Lara Blair, lying on her back on the padded table. Jones moved to her. Her eyes were half-open, dreamy.

  Jones looked at the anesthesiologist, Merrill. “Ready?” Merrill nodded. Hearing Jones’s voice, Lara whispered, “Jones…?” He leaned to her, putting his ear close to her lips. “This is not a drill,” she said. Then she reached up, squeezed his hand, and closed her eyes.

  26

  Jones lifted a surgical saw and began.

  Tears rolled down Brenda’s face, and sweat rolled down the faces of the technicians. Lara, sedated and strapped down so firmly that there was no chance of movement, lay like a corpse. Malcolm trembled. But Jones did not. His hands were sure, as he kept going, deeper, deeper…

  Then he too began to sweat, as he reached the first stage where the slightest wrong movement would kill her. He paused; he heard the monitor beeping with the beating of Lara’s heart, and he felt the beating of his own. He willed them to beat together, almost as one.

  And then the memories began to hit him. He saw blood dripping into his eyes as he staggered across the pavement and heard voices shouting, “Get a doctor! Get a doctor!”

  “I’m a doctor!” he heard in his memory and almost shouted it in the operating room now. But what had happened with Sam had prepared him for this; he had known the memories would come, had known that they had the power to torture his soul but did not have the power to move his hand. He also knew that he did not have the power to move his own hand.

  Before he had left the church, he had offered his hand to God.

  The Blair team had calculated that it would take more than two hours for him to weave the probes through the labyrinth of critical nerve fibers bundled in the central cortex of Lara’s brain; Jones was there in thirty minutes. They were astonished at his pace and might have panicked had they not been so surprised. But Jones’s hands seemed to flow, though their movements to the naked eye were imperceptible; it was the data rolling from the computers onto the monitor screens that showed his probes moving deeper, ever deeper into Lara’s brain.

  Jones did not mean to hurry, but he knew that he could not hold back either; the stem of the brain where he was working contained the physical mechanisms that controlled all the essential functions of Lara’s body, and the tiniest disruption in that area could cause the shut-down of any of those systems—or of every one of them; that is to say, death.

  Now he reached the most critical area: the monitors showed it; the technicians knew it. Jones paused again, and in that pause the nightmares kept coming, the horrific scenes of the accident flashing through his own brain just as his instruments penetrated hers, as he struggled to keep his hands still and his pounding heart steady. The memories came faster and faster, with more intensity.

  He looked down at Lara. Not at her brain, but at her, her closed eyes, above the mask that held the tubes that fed oxygen into her lungs. Breath. Life.

  In the monitoring cubicle next to the operating room, everyone was breathless; they knew he had stopped because he had reached the double aneurism and was at the point when he must perform the most critical movement, and do it now. “Make the clip,” Malcolm muttered under his breath. “Make the clip…”

  Brenda and the technicians too began mouthing the words in a soundless chant.

  Around the surgical table the other surgeons could do nothing; they knew this was it; they tried to will Jones forward. Merrill looked up from his readouts and said, “Her blood pressuring is falling. Dr. Jones? Her blood pressure…” After another moment he said, “Andrew…?”

  Jones was motionless; his mind was flashing back to Faith, dangling upside down in the wreckage of their jeep, opening her eyes to look at him.

  He fought to keep the image away.

  It was a fight he could not win.

  So he let the memories come. And in his flashback he saw something that did not happen in the actual event: he saw Faith smile at him.

  Inside the central monitor room, the equipment emitted a high-pitched, steady sound. Jones heard the monitors shrieking and glanced up for the first time since the operation began; through the glass window he saw Malcolm, Brenda, and all the others, feeling the cold grip of Lara’s imminent death.

  Jones made the clip, and just for a moment all the world went black.

  27

  The church in Charlottesville was quiet. Brenda sat with tears falling from her eyes, pressing a hand to her quivering lips to hold back her emotion. Malcolm, his face dead still, sat with eyes rimmed with tears. Nell had driven down from the mountains with the others from the clinic, and she sat crying in silence. Luca had flown all night from Rome and leaned forward in the pew, his head lowered, his heart to God.

  Mavis was there, with her husband and their daughter, her face now beautiful, her eyes full of tears.

  Lara stood there in her wedding dress, and Andrew Jones stood beside her as the mini
ster said, “I now pronounce you man and wife!”

  The congregation erupted, and the organist played Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”

  * * *

  Summer had settled fully on the Blue Ridge. The grass was lush and the clinic was blooming like the wildflowers on the mountainsides. Children cavorted on the swing sets and playground equipment around the barn. And in a rocking chair on the porch of the farmhouse, Lara finished nursing a baby. It was hard to tell which of them, mother or child, was more full of life. “There’s Daddy,” Lara said. “Let’s go say hello.”

  Lara walked with the swaddled baby over to Jones, who was at the side of the barn, assisted by the surgical staff from the University Hospital, all of them in their work clothes, carefully painting the barn’s broadest wall. Jones saw them coming and moved to meet them. He watched Lara’s face as she took in the picture they’d been painting on the barn.

  “There’s something I’ve meant to ask you,” he said. “When did you put the money into the poor box of the church down the street from your building?”

  “What church?” Lara said without looking at him. She smiled and handed him the baby.

  Andrew Jones looked down at his daughter. “Faith,” he said, “how do you like the artwork?” He turned the infant so that she could see, with her father and mother, what the clinic’s staff and the mountain people were painting on the side of the barn.

  It was a copy of Michelangelo’s Creation. It was a crude replica, painted with the kind of brushes people use for barns and houses, not for masterpieces. But it was a masterpiece all the same.

  In its center was The Touch between divinity and humanity, between God and His creation.

  An Interview with the Author

  You are probably best known for writing Braveheart. We understand that this screenplay came out of a low point in your life. Can you tell us about that?

  By the mid-1980s, I felt like my life was really starting to go well. I’d gotten married, we had two beautiful sons, and I’d won a multiyear contract with a thriving television company. Not too long after my second son was born, we bought a new home, and then six months later, the Writers Guild went on strike, which caused the company I worked for to void its contract with me. The strike went on forever, and when it was over, the company was barely there anymore. I was out of work, my savings were gone, and no one would return my phone calls.

  I kept trying, of course; I was always good at trying. But one day I was sitting at home, at my desk, staring at nothing, my stomach in a knot, my hands trembling, and I realized I was breaking down. I feared I was failing my family; my greatest fear was that I would fail my sons. I was afraid they would see me come apart, and it would be something they could never forget.

  I got down on my knees; I had nowhere else to go. And I prayed a simple prayer. I said, “Lord, all I care about right now are those two boys. And maybe they don’t need to grow up in a house with a tennis court and a swimming pool. Maybe they need a little house with one bathroom—or no bathrooms at all. Maybe they need to see what a man does when he gets knocked down, the way my father showed me. But I pray, if I go down, let me go down not on my knees, but with my flag flying.”

  And I got up, and I began to write the words that led me to Braveheart.

  This book is very different from some of the screenplays you’ve written—Braveheart, We Were Soldiers. Are there certain themes that run through all your stories?

  Above all, I think the central theme of all my stories is that hope matters, that courage works, that love prevails. All my life, I have been intrigued by the mechanism and the moment of transformation: What happens when what we call a miracle occurs? What happens when someone does something that no one else has ever done or that they themself have never done? What happens when someone stops doubting and starts believing?

  Talk about the heroes in your stories.

  The heroes in my stories are fighting monumental battles—the ones that are worth their blood—and we get to see what they’re willing to die for.

  How does your Christian worldview impact the stories you tell?

  I’m not trying to use my stories to convince someone else to share my understanding. My understanding is limited. What I want to share is my experience that hope matters, that courage works, that love prevails.

  Being a Christian doesn’t tip the scales one way or the other; people want a good story. I’ve always said that my inspiration for Braveheart was the New Testament, but biblical parallels aside, it stands on its own as a story. So often the term “Christian film” is synonymous with mediocrity because people ignore the fact that a story needs to entertain, not preach. The Touch carries a message, not a dogma.

  You’ve been involved in many great films. What made you decide to write a book?

  When I graduated, I didn’t want to be a doctor or a lawyer; I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to tell the kind of stories that would let a young man know who his ancestors were, who he might be. The kind of stories that might keep a child alive through a long night.

  I had my embarrassments and my setbacks, but I kept writing. Eventually I moved to Los Angeles, but it took a long time for me to really break through as a writer. I wrote songs, short stories, and screenplays.

  This is my eighth book. I wrote and published four novels before I ever sold a screenplay, and my original films have always had a companion book. I’ve never followed the Hollywood practice of using outside writers to novelize my screenplays; I’ve always written the novel version myself as a way to expand the story beyond what a movie can tell in two hours.

  Where did you get the idea for The Touch? What is your process for new story ideas? A flash of insight? A snippet of conversation? Inspiration from travel?

  I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of secret giving. My inspiration for stories comes from my personal experiences and fascinations.

  In this story, Faith leaves behind a legacy of “secret giving.” Where did that concept come from? Is there a connection here to your work with Habitat for Humanity?

  Certainly Jesus originated the message in His parables about giving and in His opposition to pride and public righteousness. Lloyd C. Douglas inspired me with Magnificent Obsession, his novel that became one of my mother’s favorite movies.

  Miracles are, by definition, beyond our control, but giving in secret opens us to miraculous possibilities.

  Habitat for Humanity is a perpetual-motion miracle, and the people who work with it and gain homes through it have given me far more than I have given them. With Habitat for Humanity, your hands get dirty and your heart gets clean.

  What do you want your readers to take away from this story?

  I want readers to come away more open to miraculous possibilities, feeling in touch with the source of miracles.

  How did you research the medical aspects of this story?

  I wrote the story first and then went back to research to see if what I’d postulated was actually possible. A quick check of the Internet will tell you that robotic surgery is at the forefront of medical technology. Regarding the double aneurism, I needed something that had confounded doctors to set as the obstacle, and this condition seemed particularly difficult to cure.

  In the story, Andrew makes microscopic sculptures. Where did you come up with this idea?

  Decades ago I came across an article about a man who made carvings so small you’d need a microscope to view them, and when I began writing The Touch, I remembered this amazing talent.

  Why did you decide to set this story in the South?

  I was born in Jackson, Tennessee, lived in Memphis as a child, and spent my teenage years in Lynchburg, Virginia. The University of Virginia and rural Appalachia are familiar settings and seemed the perfect locations for this story.

  You once said nothing can move an audience unless it moves you first. Is this true of The Touch? In what way did it move you?

  The Touch is sparse, plain, direct, like the people of the Blue
Ridge Mountains! I also wanted it to feel poetic, like the words of a hymn. When I read it, I feel what I felt when I sang the songs at revivals, standing next to my grandmother.

  Discussion Questions

  1. The story begins in the Sistine Chapel. In what ways is the famous painting The Creation of Adam woven through the story? Andrew’s touch is evident in his surgical ability. In what way does Faith have the touch? How is it different from Andrew’s?

  2. Andrew carries on Faith’s legacy of secret giving. How does it help him after losing Faith? Has anyone in your life passed on a legacy that you’ve been able to keep alive?

  3. Why is it important that the giving remain secret? In what ways does secret giving affect the giver? The receiver?

  4. How does that idea of giving in secret contrast with what Lara experiences when working with donors and attending fund-raisers?

  5. The young Andrew Jones suffered from asthma. How does he use what he learned from that illness to perfect his surgical procedures and make microscopic sculptures? Has God used anything in your life to teach you a special skill or lesson?

  6. Luca says, “There is a God, and that God loves us. That is all we need to know.” Andrew needs to believe those words, though he does not realize how much or how soon he will need to believe them—and that they will mean, literally, everything. How do Luca’s words play out for Andrew by the end of the story?

  7. Lara possesses the trait—some might call it the affliction—of believing that if anything needs accomplishing, she has to acquire the skills for it herself. Do you or anyone you know suffer from that same affliction? What happens if you or they give up control?

  8. What do you think Jones means when he says, “Come back with me to Faith’s clinic. Let’s stop trying to save the world, or even save ourselves. Just help. One person, one at a time. Maybe that’s salvation”? How is this a turning point for both Andrew and Lara?