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:
Brenda paused, to clear her throat.
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:
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.