The Touch Page 2

  To Jones it sounded as if Luca had said, “Eeet ees’a deeSAAAHster!” and he struggled not to smile—but he smiled anyway.

  Luca smiled too. But then he studied Jones as he might look at a fresh painting from a young artist. “What did you do?” he asked. “How did you two make it work?”

  Jones nodded at the sincerity of the question and pondered it a moment. “I didn’t do anything,” he said. “What I mean is, I wasn’t trying. I didn’t have to try. I mean, at first. Because she wasn’t trying. You know how you meet someone and they seem attractive and you think you’d like somebody like that so you try to be nice and right for them and you hope the magic happens. But soon you’re trying more and the magic is less.”

  Jones glanced toward the rear of the restaurant, where Faith was stepping from the doors leading to the restrooms. She had stopped to talk with one of the waitresses; apparently Faith had complimented her on her earrings, and the two of them were examining each other’s jewelry and laughing and oohing like sisters. That was Faith’s touch—she loved everybody, and everybody loved her. “At night, I stop sometimes and look up at the stars. Everybody does that, I guess, but the thoughts we have when we do it, they feel so much like ours alone. When I was getting to know Faith, she looked up at the stars one night and she said, ‘It’s as if God made the universe and was so excited about it He just scattered sparkles of joy into the sky.’”

  “Wow,” Luca said.

  “Yes. Wow. And I would’ve never said that, but it expressed exactly the wonder and the joy I was feeling. I knew then she was the one I wanted. Always.”

  Faith made her way back to the table. “What are you boys talking about?” she asked, her eyes bright with happiness.

  “Nothing,” Jones said.

  “And everything,” Luca added.

  There is a God, and that God loves us. That is all we need to know. Jones had thought of those words a few times before Faith’s death and almost every day afterwards. The words made him angry. The words made him sad. But he could not let go of them, not because he believed them, but because Faith did.

  Jones needed to believe those words, though he did not realize how much or how soon he would need to believe them, and that they would mean, literally, everything.

  3

  Blair Bio-Medical Engineering owned its own high-rise building, surrounded by some of the finest real estate in Chicago. They were a relatively young company, compared to the other businesses headquartered nearby, but in their field they were one of the oldest, their founder having been a pioneer in the development of machines that would make impossible surgeries not only possible but practical.

  From the outside the building looked unremarkable, a tower of glass and steel with enough stonework to give it the stateliness of a business based on heritage, like a bank or an insurance company. But inside the building, where the labs and engineering workrooms formed the true heart of the company, Blair Bio-Med was a dazzling dance of lights, crisscrossed by lasers, encircled by computer screens, even sparkling with arc welders as their design teams not only devised but built the original prototypes of their inventions.

  Those research rooms occupied the upper-central core of the buildings, and they were the building’s heart. And in the very core of the research center was Dr. Blair’s Surgical Sciences Suite. Dr. Blair—not the old Dr. Blair, who had founded the company, for he had passed away several years ago, but the new Dr. Blair, who had inherited all of his talents and all of his drive to succeed, not to mention all of the company he had founded—worked in these rooms every day and most every night. Dr. Blair was brilliant, and Dr. Blair was driven. And Dr. Blair was a woman.

  Everyone who worked at the company—and there were some brilliant people at Blair Bio-Med—knew who the boss was, and they understood she was the boss not because the legal documents of her father’s will but because of the force of her own will and her ability to turn will into action. They watched every action she made, as they watched now, when she lifted her gloved hand and signaled for an experiment to begin.

  Technicians in the control room, separated by a double wall of glass from the surgical research table where Dr. Blair stood, ran their fingers over banks of buttons that sent power into lasers, shooting micro-thin beams in precisely aimed crisscrosses, an intricate maze of intense light that seemed to scan every particle of air in the space around the doctor and the work in front of her. Monitors on the wall directly beyond the surgical table displayed data updated thousands of times per second.

  A human hand—Dr. Blair’s delicate, feminine hand, made ghostlike by a surgical glove—slipped liquidly into a precision sleeve that fit like a second skin, containing sensors that recorded every movement of her arm, wrist, knuckles, fingertips.

  She flexed her fingers. The microscopic sensors imbedded in both the surgical glove and the matching sleeve, spewed data that flashed onto the monitor screens and poured onto the computer hard drives arranged to collect it.

  The woman at the center of all this was Lara Blair. Lara, without a “u.” Her mother, a poet, had seen the film Doctor Zhivago, featuring a character named Lara whose lover was both doctor and poet. The new Lara had lost her mother early and had become a doctor, like her father. Now she wore full surgical attire: gown, mask, cap, clear medical goggles. Her eyes were striking—deadly serious, intense.

  “I’m ready,” she said, the words puffing against her mask.

  An unseen technician’s reply came to her through a speaker. “We are go.”

  Droplets of sweat glistened around the sockets of Lara’s eyes. What she was doing had the gravity of life and death. She lifted a probe with a chiseled, razor point. She pressed her face into a set of surgical magnifiers that mimicked her movements and brought microscopic vision to her eyes. Using both hands to steady the probe, she threaded it through the matrix of lasers… and moved it down… down…

  Into a brain.

  Except this brain wasn’t living. It was remarkably lifelike and was in fact an exact replica of a human brain exposed by the removal of a disc of skull at the base of a spine, but there was no body connected to all of this, and no blood. The micro lasers were aimed into and through the matter—mostly polymers of various densities—that made up the replica brain.

  Standing in the back of the control room, behind the technicians riveted to their monitors, were a man and woman, both in business suits. The man was Malcolm; slender, gray-haired and handsome in his late fifties, he had been the elder Dr. Blair’s best friend, and would have been Lara’s godfather, had her father believed in God. The woman was Brenda, who, at thirty-five, was seven years Lara’s senior. Brenda had held various titles throughout her career, whatever Malcolm concocted for the company’s board of directors to justify her salary, but what Brenda actually did was to watch over Lara like the sister she had never had, to bring an empathetic female presence into her life, to find the ways to nurture and protect her that Malcolm might miss. Malcolm had felt helpless as the elder Dr. Blair had worked himself to death, and he was determined not to let that happen to Lara. Malcolm and Brenda stood looking through the laboratory’s observation windows, and they knew the stakes of the surgical trial Lara was about to attempt. They could barely watch.

  And of all the focused people in the Surgical Sciences Suite, Lara Blair was most intense of all, her eyes dead still, transfixed as she shifted her instruments in tiny movements, deeper and deeper into the replica brain.

  Then Lara froze. She had reached the section of the brain where she, and every other surgeon who had attempted such a procedure, had failed in all their attempts.

  The technicians in the control room looked at each other.

  Malcolm and Brenda held their breath; then they too looked at each other.

  Still Lara did not move.

  A technician’s voice came softly through the speaker mounted beside the camera array above Lara’s head. “Dr. Blair…?”

  “Yes!” she snapped, swift and tense. S
he took a deep, long breath and closed her eyes for a moment, struggling down through the layers of her consciousness to reach a state of transcendent poise. Since her last failed attempt she had spent endless hours studying meditation and yoga to mold her body, mind, and spirit into a unified, balanced whole. She focused on her lungs, and inwardly she chanted, breathe… breathe… breathe…

  She opened her eyes… burned her attention through the microscopic lens… and moved the probe.

  Alarms screamed.

  Lights flashed.

  The monitors flickered on and off, and all of it shouted FAILURE.

  The shrieking and flashing were obnoxious. The technicians sagged back in their seats. Lara slid her arm from the sensor sleeve, raked off the cap and mask, and took another deep breath, this one a full sigh of frustration. The door to the observation booth opened, and Malcolm and Brenda appeared beside her. Lara glanced up and shared a frustrated shake of the head with them.

  An aide in a sports coat moved quickly up to Malcolm and whispered in his ear, “Sir, one of our scouts just brought in something that you really have to see.”

  As Malcolm followed the aide out of the lab, Brenda looked down at the simulated body on the table with the penetrated skull and exposed brain. “Sorry, Roscoe. She’s killed you again.” Brenda wore her hair long, curly, and unkempt—she claimed the static electricity of brushing was bad for the brain—and now she shook her wild curls and made a face, bugging her eyes behind her round glasses.

  Lara shot her a stiff look. But if it weren’t for Brenda’s laughter, turning one more failure into just another bump in the road, Lara didn’t know how she’d keep going. Even with her encouragement, with Malcolm and all the others—the best in the world—around her, she felt defeat eating her hopes. For the first time in her life she had begun to feel despair.

  * * *

  The conference room of Blair Bio-Medical Engineering, with the view of Lake Michigan outside the high-rise windows and the company logo carved in onyx on the back wall, suggested a company that had seldom known failure—an extremely lucrative company that hadn’t lost the originality of its core business. Drawings of new bio-medical inventions lined the wall spaces; mock-ups of works-in-progress were handy on the cabinet behind Lara’s chair as she took her place at the head of the table.

  Gathered around the long polished mahogany surface in front of her were the company’s lawyers, accountants, and media advisors. All of them wore suits; her engineers, researchers, and the physicians on her staff were the only ones who dressed casually in the Blair Bio-Med Building.

  Lara still wore her medical gear, having just come from the operating simulator. Freed from the cap, mask, and goggles, she was elegant, her dark hair luxuriant and her blue eyes strikingly bright, and yet she had no self-consciousness of her appearance, as if beauty was something she had never had time to consider. She was still dwelling on the failure of their attempt, staring out the window as one of her techs began the post-experiment analysis. He was one of her younger techs, two years out of MIT; Lara’s father had started the tradition of bringing new perspectives into old problems.

  “The difficulty occurs in the turn around the cortex,” the young tech said and paused because he had no idea where the real difficulty occurred; nobody did.

  “And how many attempts have we made?” Edwards, from Accounting, asked him.

  As the young tech began checking his file to be sure, Lara snapped the answer: “Fifteen.”

  “From the point of view of strict cost-effectiveness—”

  “Retreat is not an option,” Lara said in a voice that allowed no discussion.

  “We’ll reconstruct the event and reformulate the route,” the young tech answered.

  Lara dismissed him with a tiny nod. One of her Finance executives cleared his throat for some new business. “We’ve encountered a serious pricing issue. We spent four years and 12 million dollars to develop our heart shunt. We knew what we’d have to sell it for to make a profit. But Marketing has a problem—”

  “It’s not Marketing’s problem,” her Chief of Sales broke in. “It’s the company’s problem. The national magazines are touting a new study that suggests—”

  “Suggests?” Finance shot back.

  “We have to take it seriously! It suggests Hispanics have this condition at an occurrence rate five times the national average. For us to charge—”

  “We’re a business!”

  “So we can’t look like gougers!”

  Lara stood and moved to the windows, still lost in thought as the arguing continued behind her. Only Malcolm and Brenda, in the whole company, believed they could succeed with the project that had failed again that morning. The rest of the executive board was content to let Lara amuse herself as long as she wished, as long as they could keep the profits rolling in from the company’s past inventions.

  “So we explain our costs,” the Finance guy said.

  “No matter how much truth we tell,” the Chief of Sales argued, “it won’t matter. The public is emotional. We’ve had record profits—”

  “—that we’ve earned through medical breakthroughs! Lara, obviously you’re going to have to settle this. Lara…? Lara.”

  She glanced toward her executives, then stared out the window again. To them it seemed she had heard nothing of what they had been discussing. Then she said, “We trust the doctors.” Everyone at the table tried to catch up with her thinking, and they were still sitting there blinking when she added, “Most doctors in this country do work they never bill for. And they know which patients have insurance and which don’t. For anyone who can’t afford the device, we provide it free—through their doctor. We also make a donation from our charity budget to a victims’ fund, and host a fund-raiser.”

  “We’re off the hook,” the Chief of Sales said. “We look great.”

  “And we make a profit,” Finance agreed and whispered, “Why didn’t we think of that?”

  Sales whispered back, “Because we don’t own the company.”

  A breathless, excited Malcolm appeared at the conference room door. “Lara!” he called. “You’ve got to see this!”

  Lara immediately left the meeting and followed Malcolm down a long corridor of cubicles to the stairway—Malcolm hated elevators—and they headed down two flights to the lab, while Lara’s assistant Juliet called from the upper landing, “You have a financials conference in five minutes!”

  “And I need your approval on the new graphics for the AMA Journal!” pleaded the copywriter who was waiting outside the boardroom. Lara and Malcolm disappeared into The Egg—the lab floor, where their new projects hatched. Malcolm struggled to contain his excitement. “For the last two years we’ve been beating the bushes looking for exceptional degrees of micro-manual dexterity to help with the Roscoe project. One of our scouts came across something at an art museum.”

  “An art museum?”

  “I know what you’re thinking, our scouts shouldn’t be wasting time looking at art, and I wish I could tell you it was part of our master plan to expand into unconventional areas to find unconventional talent, but the truth is, the guy was traveling around from one university hospital to another and kept being told time after time that the surgeon capable of the microscopic manipulations we’re looking for just doesn’t exist. So he took a break and walked into an art museum. And there they had an exhibition called ‘The Grandeur of the Small.’”

  “He just stumbled onto it?”

  “Fell face first into it.”

  They stopped outside a windowed laboratory where several researchers worked. The activity inside was modern Bride of Frankenstein: high-tech instruments with an inventor’s disarray. Malcolm couldn’t explain further, he had to show her. He pushed open the airlock door and led her into a room bright with white enamel and chrome. His briefcase—Lara gave it to him on his birthday, the first year she took over the company after her father’s death—was lying on one of the lab tables. The briefcase was
the company’s version of a safe; anything Malcolm put into it was not to be touched. Malcolm flipped open the brass latches and withdrew a protective box of polished chrome. He opened the box. It appeared to be empty.

  Malcolm lifted a pair of tweezers, and used them to withdraw an almost invisible object and place it on the slide of a microscope station. The microscope there was capable of sweeping views of the object on the slide. Malcolm dialed in adjustments—he was both physician and engineer, as her father was—then stepped back; Lara moved to the microscope.

  She looked through the eyepiece, stepped back, caught her breath, and looked again. What she saw through the eyepiece of the microscope was a sculpture of Abraham Lincoln standing instead of sitting at the Lincoln Memorial. When she stepped back again, her thoughts were racing. And Malcolm was grinning.

  She wasn’t. “Exactly how small is this?” she snapped.

  “It would fit inside the eye of a needle,” Malcolm answered. Still grinning.

  Lara looked back into the eyepiece. To the naked eye the object Malcolm held in the cushioned tweezers was no larger than a period in pica type. In the eyepiece Lincoln was majestic, chiseled as if from granite. There was emotion on the face of the Lincoln sculpture. Even discounting the carving’s super miniaturization, it was a work of art, portraying the noble President having risen to his feet as if in outrage at the world he saw now. “And it’s handmade?” Lara marveled, not quite able to believe what she was seeing.

  “Not just that,” she heard Malcolm say beside her. “It’s handmade… by a doctor.”

  She backed away from the eyepiece.

  “Using surgical instruments,” Malcolm added.

  She dipped her head once again to the microscope’s eyepiece, to take in the magnificence of the minuscule carving. “A man capable of making this…”

  “That’s right. Could do anything.”

  She straightened and faced Malcolm. “What’s the catch? Why isn’t he here already?”

  “We’re checking him out now. But it seems this doctor, this…” He glanced to the notes his scouts brought him. “…this Andrew Jones? He quit operating. He supervises and teaches now, but he hasn’t cut in two years. We’ll work up a profile on him. Judging from the artistry of his work, this young doctor is deeply thoughtful… sensitive… a delicate man…”