“He’s a firebrand.” Harold grins. “One of the finest businessmen I know. He finally gave in and joined my board.”
They all know each other, of course. This is the nature of society as Michael is given to understand it. A nebulous flow of acquaintance and event. A rigorously upheld air of casualness, coincidence, serendipity—of gleefully “running into” one another. To circulate among them is to witness finely wrought identities held aloft by mutual scrutiny. In every exchanged glance is a judgment of financial prowess, social capability, personal fulfillment. Michael is both repulsed and fascinated by it all. Mostly, he is grateful to be spared, ensconced in a comfortable, unassuming home kept presentable by his wife. He has never gone in for the usual pretentions. It would feel like a lie, trying too hard to please. He is not from this world and would not pretend otherwise.
And being in the presence of these men, complacent upon their moneyed peaks, makes him uneasy. Indeed, he is most admired by his colleagues for the phenomenon of his success out of dingy beginnings. His life story, having leaked somehow to the hospital staff, has become legend: his father’s sudden brain hemorrhage when Michael was twelve; his widowed mother cleaning houses, going on food stamps. The consensus is that Michael was activated by poverty’s humiliation to rise above his station. Given the nature of his father’s death, it seemed logical—and admirable—that he would pursue medicine, and neurosurgery in particular.
Now, he stands upon a square of flagstone on Pelican Point and watches in horror as his host retreats into the mass of guests, leaving him alone with the art insurgent. There is a long, vacant moment during which it occurs to Michael that it must be his duty as the lower-ranked male to carry the conversational burden.
“What’s your line of work?” he finally ventures.
“Banking,” Bill Gregory says, his focus snapping back. Despite the relaxed stance and soft-jowled face, despite the pink shirt and navy blazer—that uniform of the ages—there is something hawklike about him.
Michael mirrors his stance, one hand in a pocket, the other holding a tumbler of Scotch. “Rough time lately?”
“It’s a memorable moment, that’s for sure.” Twinkling smile. Of course no one of Gregory’s rank would feel a pinch of any kind. They are the ones delivering pinches.
Michael considers, for a brief moment, whether to ask this man’s advice about gold bars. Most likely he has his own cache. Anyone with insight into the current financial debacle would know how to hedge—and gold, after all, is the hedge of all hedges, the only sure thing. When the crunch comes, no one will want to see a dollar bill. Anyone with a stock certificate or government bond will get a laugh in the face. If anyone would know this, it’s Bill Gregory.
“Hell, I hate talking shop,” Gregory says. “But now Harold tells me you’re quite a prodigy with the scalpel. I heard you saved a girl’s life? Some new type of surgery?”
“A hemispherectomy. Not new, but unusual. The disconnection of an entire hemisphere of the brain.”
Bill Gregory nods. “Yes, that’s right. That’s what I heard. She was almost gone, she was seeing angels, and you brought her back.”
This is what everyone has heard. It has become less about the procedure, less about Michael’s life-saving work, than about his patient’s glimpse of the afterlife on his operating table. There was a national magazine feature about it, which mentioned Michael’s name only in passing. There was no praise for the heroism of modern medicine, or of the surgeon who yanked the little girl back from the brink and secured a semi-normal life for her. Rather, the article went into raptures about the existence of God, as proven definitively by the words of a child.
The girl gave everyone what they wanted. She hovered near the OR ceiling, traveled to the waiting room and observed her anxious parents. She floated to a night sky and passed the planets of the solar system—Saturn was a floating ball of milk ringed with ribbons, she said—and beyond. Then the light and tunnel. She entered this light, of course, and felt the usual sense of warmth, perfect peace. She met the relatives she’d never known in life, all of whom fluttered with wings. The long-dead grandmother turned her around and sent her back to her body.
It would have seemed petty to contradict all this, to offer the probable scientific explanations: The malfunctioning of the girl’s remaining parietal cortex would have created a feeling of union with the universe and the sensation of flying. Adrenaline from a distressed brain would have dilated the pupils, causing the appearance of bright light. The diminishing supply of oxygen would have been to blame for the closing of the girl’s peripheral vision field and her trip down the quintessential tunnel.