The Touch Read online

  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.

  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 a
nd 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—”