Authors: Gen LaGreca
They remained holding each other after the music had stopped. Then he led her to a window looking out at the park.
“You can see the skyscrapers in the distance, above the shrubs.”
She stood in front of him, feeling the glass before her. He raised her hand, tracing the objects that he described, as if drawing her a picture.
“It’s a clear night, with a full moon and a sky dense with stars. The buildings are tall and bold against the bright sky. They look as if they’re stretching up to mingle with the stars. The city looks proud tonight.”
She leaned back against him as he spoke. He slipped an arm around her waist. She rested her head against his chest and felt his words brush the top of her hair.
“The park is peaceful. It looks as if winter has already passed and it’s time for spring. There are wooden benches on a stone walk surrounding a fountain. Maybe the water will spurt at any moment and the birds will come to drink. And I think I see your princess dancing in the woods.”
“David, you seem happier tonight.”
He thought of two bandaged cats with lively optic nerves firing impulses. “Tonight I break with the Phantom. I’m having no more of his bitterness and discouragement. I look out and see opportunity and hope tonight. The Phantom is too negative a guy for me.”
She turned to face him. “I’m thrilled that you’re happy, David, but you’re wrong about the Phantom. He’s had a terrible struggle that’s left him disillusioned. I think he’s the most desperate man in the city. But I hope it’s only temporary. I think he has a great capacity for happiness, so that’s why I can’t let you call him a negative guy,” she reprimanded.
Against her will, her hand brushed his face again. She discovered a reaction his silence had not shared with her. He was grinning.
When they entered the foyer of her apartment, they stood facing each other in one of their long, wordless pauses.
Finally, Nicole spoke. “Thank you, David, for making me feel . . . alive.”
She knew he had not intended it. She sensed him turning toward the door to leave when he suddenly grabbed her by the waist and pressed his mouth against hers. Her head fell back, her mouth opened to his, her hands traced the slender lines of his taut body from his hips to his chest to his neck. Her arms flung around him with the same urgency that she felt in his grip. His hands memorized the soft patterns of her naked back, her hips, her stomach, her breasts, and his mouth was hot against her face, her hair, her neck.
Then, suddenly, he pushed away. The front door swung open, and like the Phantom, he vanished.
He drove to the lab, fighting a desire to return to the welcoming arms in the foyer. The delirious scent of her perfume lingered on his clothes, tormenting him to return. He had managed to bear his own desire since the first letter that he had sent to her. But it was beyond his endurance to feel her body answering his, surrendering to his will, inviting him to do anything he pleased. He reminded himself that he must perform brain surgery on the source of his torture. He must remain cool, calm, clinical—just the opposite of the way he felt then. The scientist in him prevailed. The moment passed; he would not return.
He slid through the creaking door of the William Mead Research Center. In the dead silence, he passed the laboratory where the scientist charged with cruelty to animals had been removed in handcuffs. He thought of the many laws that he was violating— experimenting illegally, performing multiple surgeries on the same animal, operating without the presence of a veterinarian and without an approved OR, keeping the animals outside of the proper holding area. Then he thought of the dainty, sensitive creature he had held in his arms, and his fears vanished, replaced by a ruthless determination to accomplish his aim. He would prepare for Nicole’s surgery as thoroughly as he could. He had three cats and six optic nerves left to practice on. He would perform one surgery that Sunday night, two on Monday night, and then be ready for Nicole on Tuesday.
As he entered the windowless lab on the second floor, he paused to play with his newly sighted cats, the most important felines on Earth because they held the answer to the mystery of the nervous system. Stronger now, they eagerly eyed their toy mouse and jabbed at it. He thought of Nicole laughing on stage. Her precious life would soon be restored.
He placed a mask over the third cat’s face, and the creature fell limp on the lab counter. He dripped an anesthetic into its veins, placed a breathing tube down its throat, hooked it up to a monitor, shaved its head, and began the surgery. He could see Nicole in Pandora’s costume. Her white ballet slippers would be brushing against a Broadway stage once again.
He opened the cat’s brain and examined the optic nerves. They had grown back! So had the strangling scar tissue. With the music from Nicole’s show playing in his mind, he painstakingly removed all of the scar. The cat’s vital signs were fine. Its heart beat steadily. The respirator hummed rhythmically. Everything was completely normal. He took a syringe full of the scar inhibitor and injected it onto the nerves.
A screeching alarm pierced the silence. Sudden, erratic readings distorted the monitor. The cat’s blood pressure plummeted. Its heart beat irregularly. The animal was in dire trouble. David threw off the cloths covering it and for a few frantic minutes tried every remedy possible to restart the rapidly failing heart, but to no avail. The animal died on the table.
Chapter 27
The Raise
Bright-colored heads of hair bobbed like new flowers before Randall Lang. His wife, Beth, and their three children, the blondes and redheads of his life, assembled in his home office for a monthly family ritual. A tall stack of checks placed before him on his desk swayed precariously with every breeze. It was the last Sunday of October: time to pay the bills.
Each month Beth prepared the checks, then passed them to her husband to sign, because she could refuse the children nothing. Each month Randy objected to the small mountain of bills, ranting about the family’s spending. But he, too, could subtract nothing from the bulging budget. Although he protested loudly, like a kettle boiling over and losing its steam, he ultimately signed all of the checks.
“I figured we could get this over with early, Dad,” explained thirteen-year-old Stephen Lang, “so I gathered the troops when you didn’t leave to play racquetball with Uncle David this morning.”
As he was bringing the stack of checks closer to him, Randy’s hand stopped at the mention of his brother.
“Are you guys still playing?” asked Stephen. “I can’t remember a Sunday that you ever missed, until this month.”
There was a pause.
“No, we’re not playing,” Randy finally whispered.
He had told no one, not even Beth, about the rift with his brother. The family members glanced curiously at each other. Something was wrong, they sensed.
“Daddy, now try not to get upset when you see my coach’s bill.” Stephen’s twin, Victoria, began the familiar chorus. “The extra ice-skating lessons were absolutely essential to prepare for my next competition.”
Randy looked at his daughter listlessly.
“And, Dad, I know you’re gonna have a fit when you see the concert tickets on my credit card,” said the young pianist, Stephen. “But my teacher wanted me to see those performances in addition to taking lessons. I tried to get matinees, which are cheaper.”
Randy nodded numbly.
“And, honey,” said Beth, “you’ll also see a bill for Michelle’s new computer. I can explain . . .”
Beth stopped talking because her husband was not listening. He was signing the checks without protest or commotion. The family members looked at each other incredulously.
Since Randy had begun campaigning for Governor Burrow, Riverview Hospital had entered a propitious period. After a lengthy battle for government permission to reopen its old Stanton Pavilion, its request had suddenly been granted. After another long struggle, it had received permission from the Bureau of Medicine to obtain a new scanner. The agency also had approved the hospital’s long-standing request to redesign the Emergency Department. And CareFree surprisingly had paid eighty thousand dollars in claims previously denied, which the hospital had been contesting.
The board of directors, elated with this turn of fortune, had voted Randy a hefty raise and bonus. “We always knew you had a brilliant business mind, Randall,” Charles Hodgeman, the chairman of the board, had said, handing Randy a bonus check. “Now you have the proper attitude and focus to lead us in the right direction.” Randy had accepted the check with the enthusiasm of a motorist getting a speeding ticket.
His perplexed family watched him sign the first to last check without a whimper.
“Aren’t you gonna yell at us today, Daddy?” asked seven-year-old Michelle.
“No, honey.”
“But, Daddy, I don’t get it.” Victoria stretched her long neck to see the papers on the desk. “Are you sure my bills are in there?”
“They’re there, Victoria.”
“Hey, Dad, do you have a fever or something?” asked Stephen.
“No, kids, I’m okay. I got a raise and a bonus,” he said quietly. Even Beth looked surprised. In the manner of hiding a guilty secret, Randy had told no one, not even his wife. “So now we have the cash flow to cover all this.”
The group looked dumbfounded. They waited, but Randy volunteered nothing more.
“That’s good, isn’t it?” asked Stephen.
“I suppose,” said Randy.
Slowly the family filed out of the office, their bowed heads appropriate for leaving a sick man’s bedside.
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In a windowless lab of the William Mead Research Center, an unshaven David Lang had spent a sleepless night trying to answer the question throwing his life into code blue. Two sighted cats watched him; two blinded cats felt his presence; one dead cat held a secret that tormented him.
Still dressed in surgical scrubs from the operation of the previous night, David sat hunched on a stool on that last Monday morning of October, his elbows propped on the lab counter, his eyes swollen from lack of sleep, his hands holding up his head. He read and reread the medical records of his laboratory cats. He traced and retraced every step in the fatal surgery on his third experimental feline. He asked himself the same questions repeatedly: What was the cat’s physiology? What were the changes in the animal’s blood pressure? Was a blood vessel cut? Could there have been bleeding? Was there swelling in the brain? Could the cat have had a stroke? What could account for the shockingly rare occurrence of a living creature dying on the table under his knife? He found no answer.
He considered the new drug used in his second nerve-repair surgery, the scar inhibitor, which he had introduced to the cat’s brain immediately before its death. Could something have contaminated the drug? Did anyone break into the lab? Did someone tamper with the substance? In a small chemical lab on another floor of the building, he tested the vial of the scar inhibitor used on the third cat. The results compared exactly to previous analyses, with no trace of a contaminant.
Then he tested the blood of the two cats that had survived the second nerve-repair surgery and compared the results with those for the blood of the cat that had died. He found an unusual chromatographic band in the blood of the dead cat that was absent from the blood of the live ones. He collected that band in a sample jar and carried it across campus to Danzer Hall, home of the university’s chemistry department, for analysis by a chemist in a better-equipped lab.
David walked through piles of stiff fallen leaves covering the grassy field between the buildings. He’d neglected to wear a coat, oblivious to the chilly air cutting through his thin surgical scrubs and to the odd stares from passersby in overcoats. He was relieved that he had not scheduled any surgeries or appointments that week, save for Nicole’s case. Knowing CareFree, he was prepared to trace his paperwork personally through a maze of departments to obtain final approval for the dancer’s treatment. While walking, David telephoned Mrs. Trimbell to postpone Nicole’s appointment with him and hospital admission from that Monday until the following day. At Danzer Hall, too impatient to wait for the elevator, he climbed steps three at a time to the office of his friend, chemistry professor John Kendall. David presented the unknown substance in the sample jar and asked Kendall to identify it. Hearing the panic in David’s voice, the stocky chemist with the black-rimmed glasses and the kind face agreed to test the substance immediately and to call with the result.
“The sample you gave me contains benzyl alcohol,” Kendall told him later on the telephone. “David? Are you okay?”
Benzyl alcohol! David was speechless. Benzyl alcohol was highly toxic to brain tissue. A small amount of it could denature the brain’s protein and halt its biological activity. And like an explosion razing a building, the devastation from benzyl alcohol was irreversible.
David drew cerebrospinal fluid from the two sighted cats, whose surgeries were successful, and also from the dead one. He asked Kendall to test the serumlike fluid, which circulates through the brain and spinal cord. The analyses yielded normal results for the live animals, but the dead cat’s cerebrospinal fluid contained, in a greater concentration than in its blood, the same deadly poison, benzyl alcohol.