The Touch Read online

  “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. Jones!”

  “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 ho
ly 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?”

  She watched him, and the longer he hesitated, the better she felt.

  “Can I take a shower first?” he asked.

  Lara smiled—and it was the happiest smile that had played across her face since she was a child, before she knew her mother was dying, before she knew anyone, anywhere, ever had to die at all.

  7

  Lara had already picked the place and made a reservation for a quiet table for two in the restaurant of the Jeffersonian Hotel, Charlottesville’s finest. Starched white tablecloths and six wineglasses were already on the tables when she scouted the setup that afternoon, and she pointed out to the maitre d’ an area close enough to the fireplace to be cozy and not so close as to feel intentionally romantic. Lara had spent every day of her business life threading the needle through an ever-narrowing space between drawing men close enough to negotiate and keeping them far enough away to remain professional.

  She had also booked a room for herself in the Jeffersonian and had her flight crew staying at the much more modern hotel out near the airport; they were always prepared to take off within an hour if Lara’s plans should change. Now her schedule was uncertain, but her plan was not: she was there to recruit Dr. Andrew Jones into her company, regardless of the effort, regardless of the cost, and her determination to succeed had grown with every minute she had been around him. She admired his focus, almost fierce in its intensity; yet he had a playful balance, and his grace under fire was downright inspiring. Her scouts had searched the world for a person who could do what she needed done, and here he was, just a short plane ride from Chicago—if only she could find a way to overcome whatever the demons were that had kept him from applying his great skill on living patients.

  Lara was not prepared to take no for an answer. But there was something else she was not prepared for, and that was the effect Jones had on her secret self. Lara considered herself the ultimate pragmatist; she did not believe in a soul. She understood the word as a poetic concept, of course, a metaphor for the quiet and pleasant emotions she allowed herself to indulge in at the rarest of moments. She considered these lapses into peace and awe and a sense of being a part of something beyond the capacities of her intellect to be dangerous. Whenever she experienced such moments—a brush with unexpected beauty, a sense of a message of love coming to her when she heard no voice and believed in no Speaker—she accepted them absolutely, during the very moment when she felt them. But afterwards she always told herself she had felt nothing except her own longings, and those longings she considered pitiful at best and dangerous at worst. She tried to keep such longings—for connection, for union, for peace, and… yes, for love—out of her mind and out of her life. That’s why they were her secret self.

  Something about Jones spoke to that secret self. And while Lara had always been careful to keep men far enough from her own attractiveness so that she could do business with them, she now felt she must keep herself far enough from Jones so that she would not do something stupid and even potentially disastrous, something like falling in love.

  So she showered and washed her hair and brushed it back simply and kept the makeup to a minimum and wore a navy blue jacket with slacks and low heels and only a strand of pearls, the ones her father had brought back to her from a trip to Japan, and she told herself she was dressed in a thoroughly businesslike way; but she did look at herself in the mirror for a long time, and used a fingernail to perfect the lipstick at the corner of her mouth, and brushed her hair again and checked herself in the full-length mirror beside the door of her room before she headed downstairs.

  When she stepped into the lobby, Jones surprised her by being there already, standing by the windows, looking out into the night. As he saw her reflection he turned to her and smiled. He had showered too—his hair still looked a bit damp—and now sporting a coat and tie, he looked great. “Hi. I…” she began, and for the first time since they met, she seemed unsure what to say next. But indecision never lasted long with Lara; she told him, “We have a few minutes before our reservation and I’ve been sitting most of the day. Do you mind if we walk around the block before dinner?”

  “Not at all,” he said. “I could use some fresh air myself.”

  They turned to the door and bumped into each other as he moved to hold it open for her. They both laughed.

  * * *

  The sharp cold of a cloudless November night in Virginia stung their faces and the air prickled as it filled their lungs; the temptation to turn right around and go back inside could have been strong, but both Lara and Jones were smiling as they breathed deep and took in the black sky blazing with billions of stars. Lara could not remember ever having seen so many, and silently she told herself, Don’t start doing that, Lara; don’t be looking at the stars and thinking you’ve never seen them so bright. They strolled along the sidewalk of Charlottesville’s central street, and Lara said, “The Jeffersonian Hotel, Jefferson Restaurant, Jefferson Muffler-and-Mule Feed.… Does this town have a fetish?”

  “Jefferson set the tone for Virginia with designs he built here. Monticello, the University…”

  “Did you carve him too?”

  “He’s my favorite. ‘I have sworn, upon the altar of God, eternal enmity—’”

  She finished the quote: “‘—against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.’”

  He looked at her in surprise. She smiled.

  “You like Virginia?” she asked.

  “I love Virginia. Especially this part, the Piedmont, the ‘foot of the mountains,’ where the coastal plain collides with the Blue Ridge. Virginia has such rich history—the first permanent colony of Europeans landed at Jamestown in 1607; the Pilgrims in Massachusetts had better publicists, but Virginia was first. So many of the great men of America’s past were Virginians—Jefferson, Washington, James Madison, Patrick Henry, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson—they were all Virginians. But it’s the common people I really love, the ones that came over as indentured servants and pushed their way into those mountains when there were no roads, no towns, nothing to depend on except themselves and God, and they did it because they were determined to choose their own path and not be ruled by someone else.” Jones paused, saw that she was listening eagerly, and went on. “During the Revolutionary War, when Washington was losing every battle, he said, ‘If this war continues to go badly I will withdraw into the Blue Ridge Mountains and plant my flag among the Scots-Irish, who will not submit to tyranny as long as there is a man alive to pull a trigger.’”

  Lara saw the energy alive in Jones, the passion burning so brightly that it seemed for a moment to blot out the stars. She watched him in fascination; she had never met any man like him. But the moment she realized that, another voice inside her told her to be careful; men, especially the ones who had intrigued her, had always disappointed her in the end.

  Then she noticed that Jones had stopped as if he too had caught himself and was turning inward. Maybe he thought he was talking too much. Maybe he thought he was enjoying himself too much. Lara wasn’t sure. “Please don’t stop talking,” she pleaded. “This is the first interesting conversation I’ve had in five years.” As she said this she patted his shoulder and was surprised that it was hard as a bowling ball; most doctors, if they exercised at all, jogged or swam to keep their hearts healthy; Jones felt like a boxer.

  Jones smiled—he seemed to Lara to be enjoying himself—but he did stop talkin
g for a moment, and led her across the quiet street, and they strolled in the opposite direction, past more antique shops and hardware stores and small businesses that sold drapery and wallpaper. Then Lara looked up again and halted; one of the streetlamps was out, and in that deeper darkness the stars showed in even greater numbers. Jones gazed up too and said, “Yeah. That’s another thing about Virginia: we have great stars, especially this time of year.”

  “I don’t look at them enough,” Lara said and immediately regretted it because she was being too personal, opening up too much. For two days she had been excited in anticipation of meeting him, excited for reasons that were anything but professional. Over and over she had reminded herself that this evening was all about Dr. Jones and getting him to do what she needed him to do.

  But she kept having the feeling that he was as isolated in his life as she was in hers, and as hungry to talk about the wonders that lay beyond the boundaries of work and career. As they strolled back toward the restaurant he said, “I heard something recently about the Hubble Telescope.” He paused, as if unsure about letting the conversation wander.

  “The Hubble? What about it?” Lara asked. “I’m like every girl; I love the stars.”

  “The director of the Hubble project, as one of the perks of being director, gets a little time each month to point the telescope anywhere he chooses. So one month he decided he wanted to explore a tiny piece of the cosmos that was totally black. I believe it was somewhere within the Big Dipper but I’m not sure; wherever it was, it had been the accepted wisdom of every astronomer in the world that there was nothing there. And his fellow scientists in the project all urged him not to waste his time, because they’d pointed many telescopes at that spot before, and they’d found nothing but black emptiness. But the director said he wanted to hold the Hubble on the spot and do a long time exposure and see what they came up with. And he was the director and it was his privilege so they did it. And they discovered that empty hole in the heavens had—are you listening?—two thousand galaxies. Not two thousand stars—two thousand galaxies! And get this: the size of the spot we’re talking about is the area you’d cover if you took a grain of sand and held it at arm’s length against the night sky. That small. Two thousand galaxies. Billions and billions of stars. That’s how much our science had missed.”