Randall Wallace: The Touch

Luca laughed again. “I see it in many different ways, every moment of every day. I believe, I doubt; I laugh, I cry.” He took a sip of wine, shook his head, got lost in thought and then said, “But it doesn’t matter. I don’t need to understand. Nobody does. There are only two things anyone must know: there is a God, and that God loves us. That is all we need to know.”

At that moment, hearing those words and the way they were spoken, Andrew Jones felt joy. Not the kind of joy that makes a person weep, but the kind that makes one laugh. He felt happy, in love, affirmed in all he had hoped and dreamed. He looked at Faith and saw her smile radiating love to him, to the whole world. He glanced back at Luca and saw him grinning.

“I think,” Faith said, standing, “that says everything that ever needs to be said. So I’m going to take this opportunity to go to the Ladies’ Room!” She kissed Jones on the lips, then kissed Luca on the crown of his head full of lustrous black hair. Both men watched her walk away.

Luca’s eyes, deep brown and playful as a Labrador puppy, darted to Jones. “You are a blessed man,” the Italian said and lifted his wine glass in a toast.

“Yes. Yes, I am,” Jones said quietly. He smiled again. “Women love you, Luca. They all light up when you’re around, and Faith’s already running through her whole list of friends for all the ones she wants to set you up with. Why aren’t you married yet?”

Luca wiped his face top to bottom with the palm of his hand and shook his head with a great sigh. “Many times!” he said, throwing both hands into the air. “Many times I fall in love. But she is always too young for me, too old, too rich, too far away, too lost in her work, or I am too lost in mine. It is a disaster!”

To Jones it sounded as if Luca had said, “Eeet ees’a deeSAAAHster!” and he struggled not to smile—but he smiled anyway.

Luca smiled too. But then he studied Jones as he might look at a fresh painting from a young artist. “What did you do?” he asked. “How did you two make it work?”

Jones nodded at the sincerity of the question and pondered it a moment. “I didn’t do anything,” he said. “What I mean is, I wasn’t trying. I didn’t have to try. I mean, at first. Because she wasn’t trying. You know how you meet someone and they seem attractive and you think you’d like somebody like that so you try to be nice and right for them and you hope the magic happens. But soon you’re trying more and the magic is less.”

Jones glanced toward the rear of the restaurant, where Faith was stepping from the doors leading to the restrooms. She had stopped to talk with one of the waitresses; apparently Faith had complimented her on her earrings, and the two of them were examining each other’s jewelry and laughing and oohing like sisters. That was Faith’s touch—she loved everybody, and everybody loved her. “At night, I stop sometimes and look up at the stars. Everybody does that, I guess, but the thoughts we have when we do it, they feel so much like ours alone. When I was getting to know Faith, she looked up at the stars one night and she said, ‘It’s as if God made the universe and was so excited about it He just scattered sparkles of joy into the sky.’”

“Wow,” Luca said.

“Yes. Wow. And I would’ve never said that, but it expressed exactly the wonder and the joy I was feeling. I knew then she was the one I wanted. Always.”

Faith made her way back to the table. “What are you boys talking about?” she asked, her eyes bright with happiness.

“Nothing,” Jones said.

“And everything,” Luca added.

There is a God, and that God loves us. That is all we need to know. Jones had thought of those words a few times before Faith’s death and almost every day afterwards. The words made him angry. The words made him sad. But he could not let go of them, not because he believed them, but because Faith did.

Jones needed to believe those words, though he did not realize how much or how soon he would need to believe them, and that they would mean, literally, everything.

Blair Bio-Medical Engineering owned its own high-rise building, surrounded by some of the finest real estate in Chicago. They were a relatively young company, compared to the other businesses headquartered nearby, but in their field they were one of the oldest, their founder having been a pioneer in the development of machines that would make impossible surgeries not only possible but practical.

From the outside the building looked unremarkable, a tower of glass and steel with enough stonework to give it the stateliness of a business based on heritage, like a bank or an insurance company. But inside the building, where the labs and engineering workrooms formed the true heart of the company, Blair Bio-Med was a dazzling dance of lights, crisscrossed by lasers, encircled by computer screens, even sparkling with arc welders as their design teams not only devised but built the original prototypes of their inventions.

Those research rooms occupied the upper-central core of the buildings, and they were the building’s heart. And in the very core of the research center was Dr. Blair’s Surgical Sciences Suite. Dr. Blair—not the old Dr. Blair, who had founded the company, for he had passed away several years ago, but the new Dr. Blair, who had inherited all of his talents and all of his drive to succeed, not to mention all of the company he had founded—worked in these rooms every day and most every night. Dr. Blair was brilliant, and Dr. Blair was driven. And Dr. Blair was a woman.

Everyone who worked at the company—and there were some brilliant people at Blair Bio-Med—knew who the boss was, and they understood she was the boss not because the legal documents of her father’s will but because of the force of her own will and her ability to turn will into action. They watched every action she made, as they watched now, when she lifted her gloved hand and signaled for an experiment to begin.

Technicians in the control room, separated by a double wall of glass from the surgical research table where Dr. Blair stood, ran their fingers over banks of buttons that sent power into lasers, shooting micro-thin beams in precisely aimed crisscrosses, an intricate maze of intense light that seemed to scan every particle of air in the space around the doctor and the work in front of her. Monitors on the wall directly beyond the surgical table displayed data updated thousands of times per second.

A human hand—Dr. Blair’s delicate, feminine hand, made ghostlike by a surgical glove—slipped liquidly into a precision sleeve that fit like a second skin, containing sensors that recorded every movement of her arm, wrist, knuckles, fingertips.

She flexed her fingers. The microscopic sensors imbedded in both the surgical glove and the matching sleeve, spewed data that flashed onto the monitor screens and poured onto the computer hard drives arranged to collect it.

The woman at the center of all this was Lara Blair. Lara, without a “u.” Her mother, a poet, had seen the film Doctor Zhivago, featuring a character named Lara whose lover was both doctor and poet. The new Lara had lost her mother early and had become a doctor, like her father. Now she wore full surgical attire: gown, mask, cap, clear medical goggles. Her eyes were striking—deadly serious, intense.

“I’m ready,” she said, the words puffing against her mask.

An unseen technician’s reply came to her through a speaker. “We are go.”

Droplets of sweat glistened around the sockets of Lara’s eyes. What she was doing had the gravity of life and death. She lifted a probe with a chiseled, razor point. She pressed her face into a set of surgical magnifiers that mimicked her movements and brought microscopic vision to her eyes. Using both hands to steady the probe, she threaded it through the matrix of lasers… and moved it down… down…