The Touch (15 page)

Lara rose and moved to the podium and the microphone, while everyone applauded vigorously yet politely, as they would—or so Jones thought—for someone they did not really know.

At the podium Lara said, “On behalf of everyone at Blair Bio-Med and Foundation, thank you.” And that was it. She shook hands with the lady who had introduced her and handed her a check, as a group of photographers snapped pictures and everyone applauded again.

During the applause Lara looked at Jones, and this time she was not smiling at all.

An hour later the band was playing and the guests were dancing beneath the stars. Lara and Jones strolled the veranda, Lara greeting guests. “Senator, how are you?” she said to a man with waves of white hair.

“Congratulations, Lara,” the senator said. “Well deserved!” As Lara introduced Jones and he and the senator shook hands, Jones noticed the polished patches of skin in front of the senator's ears and the wide-eyed stare that revealed the senator had had a face lift. Jones had never met a senator, and after ten seconds of talking with this one he did not want to meet any others.

What Jones did want to do was to talk with Lara. Lara felt this and stopped at the stone railing surrounding the veranda, to look out over the grounds stretching below and the party swirling everywhere. “You have a nice little house,” he said.

“I'm not here much. It's more of a summer retreat.”

“Yeah. Like my uncle Toad's Winnebago.”

She laughed. “You have an Uncle Toad?”

“That's not his real name, of course, but nobody really knows his real name since everybody, even Aunt Betty, calls him Toad.”

“How did—?”

“When he was a baby, so they say, he didn't crawl like normal young'uns, he scooched across the floor like a toad.” He glanced at her laughing and said, “What, you don't have an Uncle Toad?”

She chuckled for a while, then said, “No, I didn't have an Uncle Toad.”

“I guess guys that get called Toad live in cottages that are less than twenty thousand square feet.”

She looked away and took a deep breath. Jones was sure she was thinking about her childhood. “My father bought this estate,” she said. “The company keeps it now as a place for corporate retreats and intimate little gatherings like this one, to receive honors I've been awarded for having given publicly to charity.” She paused, and Jones knew she had more to say so he did not rush to fill the space. Then she said, “I found out something, on my trip down to see you.”

“What's that?”

“Faith was right.” Lara's gaze drifted across her garden, full of the wealthiest people in Chicago. “When my father left me Blair Bio-Med, I was twenty-four years old and still in med school. In the first year I doubled the size of the research staff, and doubled it again a year later, after we pioneered seven new techniques in heart surgery and patented all the devices that made them possible. We went public last April. At the close of the first day's trading, my net worth had increased by 82 million dollars. And I give to charity because it's better than advertising, it makes my company look good, it brings us attention, contacts, investors, it makes me more money.” Still not looking at him, she added, “The people I give to, they do good work . . . I'm sure they do. But I don't really see it, and I don't really feel it; I don't experience the good it does. What I do experience is that giving to the Lara Blair Foundation, and having people like the senator praise me for it, makes me feel oddly dirty.”

Jones said nothing. He realized, when Lara looked at him, that he was staring at her.

“That was an interesting sculpture you sent me,” she said.

“I thought you'd like it. It was to say thank you, for something that happened just after you left.”

“What was that?”

“I visited Faith's grave. And then I went to bed. And slept.”

Jones could not believe what he had just done; he had resolved to say nothing about Faith, and here it was, almost the first thing out of his mouth.

Their eyes held on each other.

“You wouldn't want to dance, would you?” he asked.

They walked together out into the middle of the dance floor and Lara allowed herself to settle into his arms; he embraced her lightly and they swayed to the music, and it seemed in those moments as if all the burdens both of them had felt now slid from their shoulders, and the world had grown beautiful in the glow of each other's gaze.

The next day they would do the test, with Jones operating on Roscoe.

15

The whole lab was in a state of tension. The technicians checked and rechecked the computers and motion recorders, and as they sat at their monitoring panels they found their hands sweating. Lara Blair could be a demanding boss, and many times she had hammered into them a standard of perfection: what good would it do them if they found a flawless surgical performance and their instruments had failed to record it properly? Lara did not tolerate mistakes in this room; she allowed nothing but the best. Years ago they had brought in other surgeons to attempt the operation on previous Roscoes, but once Lara had discovered that none of them were as skilled as she was, let alone better, she had made all the subsequent attempts herself. But now, for the first time in years, she was bringing in this Dr. Jones from Virginia, a man none of them had ever heard of. They knew he had to be something special. Along with their anxiety to get everything right was their curiosity:
Just how good is this guy?

Malcolm and Brenda were in the control room, edgy with the same question.

Jones stood in the center of all this, surrounded by fluoroscopes and magnetic resonance imagers and three-dimensional monitors and some other equipment that even he didn't know the names of. He was gowned and gloved and looked around at everything with some amusement.

Lara was beside him, making sure everything was perfect for him. When she was sure the surgical instruments were all laid out to his liking, she glanced to the glass wall and asked, “Motion recorders ready?”

“Ready,” said the tech's voice, from the speaker by the glass.

“Visual and ambient monitors ready?”

“All in sync, Dr. Blair.”

“And the alarms?”

Suddenly the alarms sounded and the warning lights flashed in demonstration. It was a jarring experience, and Jones grimaced and looked at Lara. “They go off when your instruments touch any of the areas that would damage the brain,” she said. “We made them unpleasant, to remind us that mistakes are lethal.”

“We are all go, Dr. Blair,” the lead tech said through the speaker.

Jones snapped his rubber gloves and smiled. “Let's go,” he said.

Lara looked down at the replicated cranium and brain on the surgical table. “Roscoe, you ready? I guess we're all ready. Good luck.” Without another look to Jones, she moved into the monitor room.

Had she looked at him, Jones might have thought she was confident; but the way she left the surgical lab told him how anxious she was about what he was attempting. And with their boss so nervous, the tension of the others in the lab—Malcolm, Brenda, the technicians leaning over the monitors and control panels—was extreme.

Jones lifted a scalpel. And dropped it. “Ow!” he shouted, hopping as if the blade had hit him in the foot, and he bumped into the instrument tray, making a slapstick clatter. Everyone in the monitoring room—all except Lara—looked through the glass in open-mouthed horror.

But Lara was already smiling when Jones picked up the scalpel, flipped it in a rapid spin, and caught the razor-sharp instrument between two fingers. “Come on, guys, loosen up,” Jones said, and as they realized he was poking fun at them, he lifted his mask, spat on the scalpel blade and wiped it on his sleeve. “Okay, Roscoe, all sterile! Here we go.” He turned to the replica brain on the table and made a quick, sure incision.

From that moment on, Jones was all business. And Lara, Malcolm, Brenda, and all the others watched quietly, transfixed by the sureness of his technique. In the laboratory control room they could speak without Jones hearing; still their voices were muted, in awe. Brenda leaned close to Lara and whispered, “Why is he going so fast?”

“He's already done it in his own mind. He just lets his hands go, so his thoughts won't intrude.”

They watched Jones's remarkably steady hands work their way into the crucial area of the test brain. “You guys keeping up in there?” he called.

Lara reached to the control panel in front of the lead tech and hit the talkback button. “We're hanging on. And there's no need for you to shout. We can hear you just fine.”

“I was just trying to wake Roscoe up; he seems a little unenthusiastic to me.” Jones paused to look at the replica brain, then at the scans of the real brain that Roscoe was made from, displayed in high definition on a huge monitor placed at the foot of the surgical table so that Jones could see it with the slightest shift of his eyes. “Well,” Jones said, “here's where we separate the men from the boys. Or the girls. That's a joke.”

“Just get on with it, please. Our instruments are recording, and I'm the one who has to pay our electric bill this month.”

“I'm entering the cortex.”

Now all the playfulness disappeared. Jones's eyes settled into a trancelike stare and he began to work the probe in minuscule movements.

On the control room's monitors the movements showed in massive magnification. One of the assistant lab techs noticed something, and wondered aloud, “He's moving like . . . in pulses.”

“He moves between heartbeats,” Lara said, her voice stronger than she felt.

The lead tech read his monitors, then checked them again to be sure. “He's reached the failure point of our best attempt,” he said.

Jones kept moving . . . kept moving . . . and then paused. Holding the handle of his probe absolutely motionless and moving only his lips, he said, “Show me your last trial at this section.”

The techs stabbed buttons; flashing onto the screens in front of Jones were three views of Lara's last attempt—a wider view of her, a closer external view of her instruments on Roscoe, and the view of the optical fiber cameras in the simulated brain. Jones watched the replay, watched Lara's instruments trying to negotiate a turn through the same passage of synthetic blood and bone as his instruments were about to attempt. On that recording the failure lights suddenly flashed, and in the recorded replay Lara turned in frustration to glare at the camera.

“Okay,” Jones said, “give me real time again.”

They switched his monitors back to displaying his current attempt, and Jones drew in another long, slow breath and then continued, resuming his rhythmic, trancelike state.

In the control room they watched him breathlessly, as their monitors showed his probes working ever deeper into the replica brain.

The lead tech glanced up at Lara's back; she was motionless, staring through the glass at Jones. “We've never been this far before,” the tech said.

“What's the threshold level on the death sensors?” Malcolm asked.

“Ninety-five percent of fatality level,” the tech answered.

“Make it a hundred five! We're talking a human life here!” Malcolm snapped.

“I have no ego in this, Malcolm,” Lara said evenly. “He's not competing with me.” She turned back to the glass, stared through it for a moment and added, “It's more like he's competing with God.”

Jones had reached the most critical area. Lara had never made it that far before—no surgeon ever had cut that deep, except on an autopsy. In the history of brain science it had been thought impossible for any doctor to thread surgical instruments through such critical areas of a living brain and have that brain survive. Lara Blair's father had tried for decades to do it and had failed; Lara had spent years in the same quest and had built on her father's work to go even further, but ultimately she too had reached the point where all her knowledge, all her skill, and all her hopes could not take her beyond those limits. Now Jones was standing almost within reach of what had become for Lara the Holy Grail.

Jones inserted a second tiny instrument—a wire of gold so fine that most surgeons could not even lift it without breaking it—into the channel of the first probe he had pushed into place; he paused for the space of a heartbeat and then made a move . . .

A sudden noise exploded the silence. But it was not the alarm: it was a bell, and with it, a steady green light burning above the control panel.

“What is that?” Brenda said, angry that everyone else seemed to know but she didn't.

Jones pulled down his mask and looked at Lara.

Lara began to walk, very slowly at first, across the control room, through the door into the surgical lab.

Malcolm, watching Lara, said to Brenda, “He's done it.”

Lara moved into the lab, faster and faster until she was running into Jones's arms, laughing and shouting: “Yes! Yes!!!!!”

16

One of the techs had an old boom box in his locker, and he had placed it top of the control panel; it was blaring “Start Me Up” by the Rolling Stones. Champagne corks were popping and researchers from other parts of the company as well as executives and secretaries were joining the excitement as the celebration spilled through the rear doors of the control room and out into the hallways. Only the surgical lab itself, where Roscoe now lay with a new smile drawn on his face in Magic Marker, was off-limits. This was a day for the whole company to taste victory.

On the monitors of the control room the techs were replaying Jones's work for their fellow geeks, marveling at what he had accomplished. “Look at this margin!” one of the techs said, over the music and the laughter. “You know how close that is to the death sensor?!”

“Two micrometers,” his fellow geek said.