In the corridor outside the OR, Malcolm kept checking his watch. Brenda walked up, pale. “I’ve checked the doctor’s lounge, the chapel, even called his hotel,” she said. “Where is he?”
Malcolm shook his head. “He walked through about ten minutes ago, looked into the surgical room, then walked out the front door. Said he needed some air. He must have—”
Brenda put an arm on his shoulder to stop him, as nurses pushed Lara, now on a gurney, toward the surgical holding room. As Lara passed Malcolm and Brenda she looked up at them and said, “He’ll be here.”
But Malcolm wasn’t sure; neither was Brenda.
While Lara lay on the gurney in the surgical holding room, and Malcolm and Brenda paced in the corridor, and the surgical team from Virginia checked the clock on the wall of the operating room, Jones walked the streets outside the Blair Bio-Med Building. He wandered, with no thought of where he was. Churning. Lost. Utterly alone.
He saw, across the street from the pub, an old and dingy cathedral.
Jones walked in. He moved slowly. Candles burned in the votive boxes, brightening the shadowy corners of the old sanctuary. A few people were scattered around praying, as well as a wino or two, asleep on the pews.
Jones took a seat in a pew, near the middle of the church. And he tried to pray. But he couldn’t. He could not connect, could not feel a part of this place, could not find a channel to God. He gripped the back of the pew in front of him in frustration.
For the first time in his life, he felt his hands trembling.
Sitting not far from him was a gray-haired man in a worn black coat and a frayed white clerical collar. He was kneeling in prayer; he noticed Jones.
As Jones hung his head, the old priest moved over and sat beside him. “Are you in trouble?” the old priest asked.
“I think you could say that.”
“Do you want to pray?”
“I can’t connect, I can’t pray…”
“Then I will pray for you. What do you need?”
“A miracle,” Jones told him, as honest as he had ever been.
The priest reached into his robes for a pack of cigarettes. He lit one, right there in the old cathedral, and offered the pack to Jones. Jones declined.
“Good for you. I’m quitting—have been for sixty years. So… you need a miracle.” He took a long drag on the cigarette, blew smoke up toward the gothic arches of the ceiling high above them, and nodded his head. “Want to hear mine?”
Jones didn’t answer, but the priest went on anyway. “I have been a priest for fifty-seven years. I’ve seen this parish go from the center of the community, where the rich and powerful came to worship, to the fringes. Did you know that Jesus was crucified at a garbage dump?”
“No, I didn’t know that.” Jones knew it was called Golgotha, but if they had told him in Sunday school that it was a garbage dump, Jones had forgotten it.
The priest shrugged. “I thought that was interesting. Anyway, as this church grew less important to the community, I grew less important to myself. They didn’t value me, and I ceased to love them. I can tell you truly that for the last twenty years, I have felt no love at all. And I could not remember my last honest prayer, when I had a connection. Until just a few weeks ago.”
Now the priest stopped and waited. Waited until Jones gave him a look to tell him to finish his story and go away. “I was collecting from the poor box,” the priest said. “The few coins that people toss in, most of them trying to buy luck, I imagine. But on this day I found a large envelope, full of money. More money than I had ever seen, certainly more than I ever held. No name. No note—except the words For the Poor on the envelope. I went back to my room and counted it. It was a million dollars.” He took another drag from his cigarette. “I took it to the bank, and they said it was real, not counterfeit. I called the police to find out if some amount like that had been stolen recently, but they knew of nothing. Somehow I was already sure it wasn’t stolen. That it really was intended for the poor.” He looked at Jones. “I see I have your attention now.”
“So the money was your miracle,” Jones asked, only half certainly.
“No. The money was the miracle for the poor. My miracle was what that act of charity did to me. Someone, capable enough in the ways of the world to have such a sum, decided that the best way they could think of to pass their charity to the poor was to hand it… to me. Why? Did they choose what was nearby? Comfortable? Convenient? Who knows? They chose. And suddenly my life was not wasted. Suddenly I was a priest again. I could pray. For them.” He glanced around at the poor, scattered here and there in cathedral. Then he looked back at Jones. “And for you.”
The priest looked up at the stained glass windows, darkened by decades of airborne grime. He looked at the cross above the altar. Then once again he looked at Jones and said, “You offer your hand to God. Whether He uses it—whether your hand becomes His hand—is up to Him.”
All the Blair Bio-Med equipment was switched on and fully functional, the beams of lasers criss-crossing through the air, the sensors ready to feed data to the computers and screens in the newly connected monitoring room, where the technicians sat, their eyes reflecting the glow of the pixels.
Only this time the patient was not made of molded polymers. She was a young woman of flesh and blood and spirit, Lara Blair, lying on her back on the padded table. Jones moved to her. Her eyes were half-open, dreamy.
Jones looked at the anesthesiologist, Merrill. “Ready?” Merrill nodded. Hearing Jones’s voice, Lara whispered, “Jones…?” He leaned to her, putting his ear close to her lips. “This is not a drill,” she said. Then she reached up, squeezed his hand, and closed her eyes.
26
Jones lifted a surgical saw and began.
Tears rolled down Brenda’s face, and sweat rolled down the faces of the technicians. Lara, sedated and strapped down so firmly that there was no chance of movement, lay like a corpse. Malcolm trembled. But Jones did not. His hands were sure, as he kept going, deeper, deeper…
Then he too began to sweat, as he reached the first stage where the slightest wrong movement would kill her. He paused; he heard the monitor beeping with the beating of Lara’s heart, and he felt the beating of his own. He willed them to beat together, almost as one.
And then the memories began to hit him. He saw blood dripping into his eyes as he staggered across the pavement and heard voices shouting, “Get a doctor! Get a doctor!”
“I’m a doctor!” he heard in his memory and almost shouted it in the operating room now. But what had happened with Sam had prepared him for this; he had known the memories would come, had known that they had the power to torture his soul but did not have the power to move his hand. He also knew that he did not have the power to move his own hand.
Before he had left the church, he had offered his hand to God.
The Blair team had calculated that it would take more than two hours for him to weave the probes through the labyrinth of critical nerve fibers bundled in the central cortex of Lara’s brain; Jones was there in thirty minutes. They were astonished at his pace and might have panicked had they not been so surprised. But Jones’s hands seemed to flow, though their movements to the naked eye were imperceptible; it was the data rolling from the computers onto the monitor screens that showed his probes moving deeper, ever deeper into Lara’s brain.
Jones did not mean to hurry, but he knew that he could not hold back either; the stem of the brain where he was working contained the physical mechanisms that controlled all the essential functions of Lara’s body, and the tiniest disruption in that area could cause the shut-down of any of those systems—or of every one of them; that is to say, death.