The Touch Page 9

  There was no further word until they checked their cell phones first thing the next morning and found text messages telling them their boss was flying back. Both of them drove straight to work. As soon as Brenda learned that Lara had arrived in the building she hurried down the corridor to her office.

  As she reached the door Malcolm, just coming out, passed her, muttering.

  Brenda entered the reception area of Lara’s office and walked by Juliet, Lara’s secretary; they exchanged conspiratorial glances, and Juliet shook her head. Brenda moved on into Lara’s main office and found her at her desk, trying to lose herself in brain scans and schematics for machine designs. Brenda bounced in and plopped down in a chair. “Soooo? How’d it go?”

  Lara did not look up. “He can’t do it.”

  “Can’t? Or won’t?”

  “Won’t, can’t, what’s the difference?” Lara said flatly, still sorting through her paperwork.

  “So what’s he like?”

  Lara shot her an impatient look. “I wasn’t there to find out what he was like. I was there to recruit him for our surgical development program.”

  “You were there a long time.” Brenda waited, but got no response. “You look tired. Was the hotel bad? Because I tried to call you several times through the night, and they said you weren’t there.”

  “We were in a car.”

  “In a car.”

  “On a drive. Out in the country…”

  “Out in the country! Sounds like a wonderful time! Sounds romantic. Sounds like a date!”

  “No, it—he can’t do it, Brenda. He can’t. Now if you’ll excuse me, we have experiments to set up.” Lara strode out of the room.

  THE GIFT

  11

  Two weeks after Lara Blair came to Virginia and drove up into the mountains to visit the Blue Ridge clinic with Jones, old Sam finally came down from the mountains and showed up at the Charlottesville hospital.

  Sam had lived for the last fifty years in an Appalachian valley—the locals called it a holler—so isolated that he had no electricity and no running water; in all that time he had not journeyed to what he call the flatlands. Jones welcomed him and arranged for him to be admitted, though the paperwork was an issue since Sam had never filed for anything from the government and their only records of his life were a driver’s license and the records he had filled out when he joined the Army in World War II. Jones found a place for Allen to stay—Allen said he would be content with the couch in Jones’s office, since he planned to spend every moment making sure his oldest and only friend was not poisoned or poked to death by a nurse—and the hospital staff immediately began running tests on Sam.

  It was the MRI that scared Sam the most; to be strapped to a moving slab and slid into a coffinlike space that rattled and screamed like the mouth of hell did not comfort Sam; when Jones dropped in to see him just before the procedure, Sam told him, “I don’t want to see the Immer Eye.”

  Jones realized Sam thought the doctors had been talking about something monstrous and tried to reassure him, saying, “Sam, I know the Immer Eye… the MRI… it sounds bad but there’s not a thing this machine can do that will hurt you.”

  “The feller that wheeled me down here from the room told me to leave my watch cause the Immer Eye would jerk it right outer my pocket and even if it didn’t my watch wouldn’t never work again if it even got in the same room with the Immer Eye.”

  “It won’t hurt you, Sam. I promise.” When Jones saw Sam’s eyes, watery and blue like a mountain sky on a foggy morning, look up into his, Jones patted the old man’s boney shoulder and said, “Trust me, Sam. I won’t let anyone hurt you.”

  Jones stood and watched as they wheeled Sam into the scanning room. As the door closed Jones was left alone, and his thoughts drifted. To Lara.

  * * *

  At the moment that Sam was being slid into the Immer Eye and was yelling out to Allen, waiting for him in the control room, that to him it looked more an Immer Anus, Lara was working at her lab.

  Since returning from Virginia she had been even more driven than before—and less patient. No one, least of all Lara herself, doubted that the discovery of the microscopic figurines had given them all reasons to hope that the techniques they had spent so much time and money and effort trying to develop might be more than theoretically possible, but were actually within their grasp. The frustration of that hope had left Lara angry and sensitive to the shortcomings of her staff. The researchers around her—most of them with medical or engineering degrees, or both—had begun to strike her as absorbed, uncaring, even selfish. It did not help her mood when she realized that it was she herself whom she most suspected of such failings.

  This afternoon, finding herself unable to concentrate, she shooed everyone away from her; then, left alone, she looked down at a medical journal on her desk. The picture on the cover was of a baby. Lara stared at its eyes, then walked to the window and looked out the window at the clouds, high above her.

  * * *

  Jones stood beside the printers in the scanner’s photo annex and studied Sam’s scans. He waved the radiologist over and pointed to a place on the scan. As the radiologist left him, Jones stared at the scans, and the areas of light and dark on the film were like clouds.

  * * *

  Lara worked late at her lab, long after she had told everyone else to quit and go home. She had spent the last several days studying replays of all her failed attempts with the replica brain, and as if that weren’t depressing enough she gathered all the Roscoe brains and began taking them apart in order to try to see the problem from the inside out. At least that’s what she told everybody; the truth was, she did not know what else to do. It was past midnight when she finally shoved back from her desk, pressed her palms into the sockets of her eyes, stood and moved to the door, shut out the lights, and stepped into the hallway.

  She was too tired to take the stairs. She rode the elevator to the top floor, then moved down an empty corridor to the door past her office, where her office apartment lay tucked away. She walked inside, passed directly through the sitting room without turning on the lights, walked into the bedroom, and lay down on the bed. All alone, she stared at the ceiling.

  In Lara’s lifetime she had studied many topics: biology, mathematics, chemistry, engineering; but she had read poetry too, had learned about art, and some history. She had done a good deal of thinking about ideas and the internal processes of invention, but her investigations of how to open the mind to new thoughts left her feeling as blank and empty as she had felt in disassembling the replica brains in her laboratory. She did not deny the existence of ideas, even now, when she had no new ones; but even when she had fresh inspirations she had never been able to tell where they had come from.

  She did feel sure—and thought this plainly as she lay on the bed of her office apartment and gazed at the acoustic tiles on the ceiling—that one crucial ingredient in having an idea was the belief that some better way of thinking, some truer way of seeing the world, existed. It seemed to Lara that no one could even recognize a good idea if they already believed that no improvement, no positive change, no breakthrough innovation was even possible. She realized for the thousandth time since she had visited Virginia how much her encounter with Jones and his different approach to living had affected her. She could almost see his face in the ceiling above her bed, could almost hear him say, Believe is a stronger word than know.

  Lara asked herself what she believed. And the answer seemed to be: nothing.

  For years she had hoped—hoped without truly believing—that she would solve the great riddle of brain surgery that had stumped the great researchers who had come before her, that had even stumped her father. She did not examine her hope because it was impossible to keep going without it.

  But now, here in the darkness, she asked herself how she could live, hoping for nothing and believing in nothing.

  And then she began to think about what Jones had told her that Faith bel
ieved.

  * * *

  Jones walked alone through the park where he played rugby. He looked up; the stars were shining overhead… and the moon was full above the mountains. He stared up at it.

  He took a scrap of paper from his pocket and began to write something down.

  12

  After his shift in the Emergency Room—it was a quiet night and he got to nap on his cot there—Jones began the morning in his makeshift carving room, supervising three young surgical residents as they worked on their microscopic technique. He sensed trouble when Stafford entered and moved up to him quietly. “Dr. Jones…?” Stafford began, then hesitated.

  “Hi, Stafford. What’s up?”

  “I’ve got a patient, eighty-three years old, on life support. Her brain activity stopped this morning.”

  Jones put down his carving tools. He looked at Stafford, liking him for caring enough to ponder such a question, to come and ask it. Jones moved him away from the residents, toward the counter where they left all the carved miniatures to dry, and said, “Somebody’s got to tell her family to turn off the machines. And the hospital wants you to do it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you want me to do it.”

  “No. Yeah. No. I just… need some advice.”

  “You take the weight off the family. Tell them there’s no hope if she stays on the machines, but if you turn them off there’s the tiniest chance that her body will come back on its own. Then you give the patient enough morphine that you’re sure, for the rest of your life, that she could feel no pain. And you turn off the machines… . Do you want me to do it?”

  “No. I’ll do it.” Stafford started to walk away.

  “Stafford.” Stafford stopped, and looked back to Jones. “Whenever you think back on it, remember the peace you gave them. And the price you paid to do it.”

  Stafford nodded and walked away. Jones watched him go, and the weight of the moment, of what he had just felt and said, caused him to pause.

  He sat down at one of the empty carving stations. He switched on the microscope light and picked up the carving instruments.

  * * *

  Lara walked out of the Blair Bio-Med Building, onto a Chicago sidewalk, the medical complex behind her and office buildings in the other three directions. She found herself squinting against the sunlight; it had been a while since she had been outside.

  She walked alone down the street. She seemed to remember that there was a church somewhere in the neighborhood, a relic built more than a hundred years ago and spared for its architecture. Halfway down the block she found it—a small cathedral, now stained through years of neglect. She stood on the sidewalk and stared at it for a long moment. An ornamental iron fence surrounded it, but the gate was wide open, and Lara walked inside.

  Lara was unfamiliar with the surroundings within the sanctuary; she looked around like any stranger might, taking it all in. The sanctuary was empty except for a few older women saying prayers and a couple of winos sleeping in the pews.

  Not far from the rear doors was a box, marked “For the Poor.”

  Lara moved up beside it. She glanced around to be sure no one was watching, then withdrew a large envelope from her purse and slipped it into the poor box.

  Then she walked out, into the spring sunshine.

  Lara walked back toward the Blair Bio-Med Building. There was something different about her—or was it that something was different about the world around her? She noticed the bustle, the people, the energy everywhere; she closed her eyes and felt the sun on her face.

  As she reached the building, she noticed that in the planter boxes beside the entrance, the trees were budding, and there, on one, she saw the first blossom of spring.

  She stopped to admire that first blossom, to appreciate it, like a prayer.

  * * *

  Just before sunset an old priest stubbed out a cigarette in the ashtray beside the holy water and entered the sanctuary. Mechanically he tossed a new carton of candles onto the votive boxes and emptied its coin box, like any other broken-down vender making his rounds.

  Working his way to the rear of the church, impatiently waving a drunk out of his way, he reached the poor box and unlocked it. He found the envelope, opened it… and stopped short. The envelope was full of thousand-dollar bills.

  13

  When Lara arrived at her headquarters building the next morning, she felt—felt before she thought it—that something was different around her. Everyone, from the wiry Salvadoran attendant who handled the jumble of cars in their underground parking structure, to Amos, the security guard who stood by the entrance into the main foyer, to the just-out-of-college interns who rode the elevator up with her—all of them seemed changed. Then it struck Lara that the change was in her. Ever since the night before, when she had left the envelope in the poor box, she had felt a surging thrill, had felt it from the moment the envelope had slid from her hand into the dark slit and thudded onto the wood of the bare bottom of the box. She had no name for this feeling; she had never known its sensations, or its perspectives. Last night the world was vivid, and she saw it with clarity. She had thought this to be a temporary elation, brought on by the adrenaline of a new adventure and the sense of the unknown that came with the gift.

  Then she had slept with more peace than she had known in years. And now here she was this morning, feeling the same way; and the people around her did look happier, brighter, more optimistic, as if somehow, beyond some vast horizon, hope waited for them—all of them, for through some dynamic that Lara did not begin to understand, her gift, unknown to everyone in the world but her, had united her with everybody, even strangers. Hope. Lara had not known real hope for a long, long time. She did not know Hope’s true absence, until she felt its coming.

  * * *

  It was not just that Lara noticed something different about everyone else; everyone else noticed a change in her. The people at Blair Bio-Medical were like any other herd of humans; they drew their mood from their leader, and most of the time that process was subtle and unconscious, but this morning the transformation in Lara from the heaviness that had smothered her spirit in the last weeks to the lightness that lifted her along as she moved down the corridors was unmistakable. The girls at the clerical desks, most of whom dreamed of being like Lara someday, were the first to talk about it, but the men noticed it too and exchanged glances with each other after Lara had passed.

  Lara went to her office and met with Malcolm and Brenda to discuss their agenda for the days ahead; it was not uncommon for any of them to show up for work with new suggestions, for all of them kept thinking of their shared goals even when they weren’t in the building, so when Lara said, “I’ve been thinking…” Malcolm and Brenda were not surprised.

  But the internal qualities of that thinking, the way Lara now seemed to let thoughts develop rather than drive them forward—that did surprise them. She let her mind drift, and had they met Jones they might have recognized that the flow of Lara’s mental processes matched a feeling that had begun when she and Jones were walking beneath the stars in Virginia. “It seems to me…” Lara went on, slowly and inwardly, “that maybe we have more resources than we know.” Malcolm and Brenda glanced at each other, but Lara was not distracted by their lack of understanding—what resources is she talking about?—and accepted that her understanding was evolving, that it didn’t have to be perfectly formed and rigid. “What I mean is, maybe instead of seeing our inability to recruit Dr. Jones as some kind of failure—which it really isn’t, since if he couldn’t work for us, that’s not our fault or even his fault, it’s just a fact—we could see it as an opportunity.” Lara lifted her eyes to her friends, these people she knew—with absolutely certainty—loved her, and Lara’s eyes were full of light. “I learned something from him. I learned a lot from him. He showed me his approach, and he also showed me that I could draw from that approach. We need to make modifications. We need to try again. Malcolm, I want you to go assemble the whol
e design team down in the lab. The Roscoes can stay the same, but we’re going to change the equipment, the setting, and most of all our approach to the work. Things will be different because I’m going to be different.”

  “Yes, ma’am!” Malcolm said and hurried out happily.

  Brenda stayed behind, staring at Lara and smiling. “Tell me about it,” Brenda said. “What’s changed?”

  And in that moment, Lara faced the most subtle and yet most dangerous temptation; she wanted to tell Brenda about the gift. And what would be the harm if she did tell her? Brenda was a generous and loving friend; she oversaw all of Blair Bio-Med’s charitable activities. Wouldn’t she be the perfect person to tell? Wouldn’t she benefit from knowing the secret of giving in secret? Why not tell her?

  But Lara knew immediately why not. If she told, she would be violating something: not the rule, but the spirit of the rule, the power of keeping her pride inside a prison of integrity. That’s how Lara had come to think of it all: the secret of secret giving is that it keeps your pride in prison.