by Gen LaGreca
The sun shone on the Earth. The mortals rejoiced. A corps of ballerinas joined the first men of Earth in a jubilant dance of life. With a trembling hand, Pandora touched Prometheus’s arm, his hair, his face. She moved about him with the fragility of a ballerina and the sensuality of a woman. He lifted her high in the air to begin their final pas de deux.
The playbill for the hit Broadway show Triumph concluded: “Man discovers woman and enters an age of innocence, goodness, and joy.”
The audience clapped, whistled, and roared. A radiant Nicole Hudson bowed appreciatively, threw her fans kisses, and gathered the bundles of flowers lovingly tossed to her on the stage. As she smiled at the people she had stirred with her dancing, she, in turn, was moved by their cheering. She felt a burning rush of liquid fill her eyes and wondered why happiness could hurt. Basking in the warmth of the spotlight, she knew that finally she, like Pandora, had entered a period of innocence, goodness, and joy, and that nothing greater was possible to her.
Backstage she leaped into the waiting arms of David Lang. He raised her off her feet and whirled her around. In him she had found a new passion, one that was never sated but grew more intense the more she indulged it, like a sweet addiction nourished on itself.
A taxi took David and Nicole to the restaurant in the park where they had spent their first date. It was a place that held a special fascination for the couple. This time it was Nicole who described to David the enchanting scene outside the glass walls. She could now understand the exciting mystery of the woods that David had so vividly imagined on their first visit. However, the park no longer contained the bare shrubs and barren grounds that David had seen the previous autumn. The wooded patch now held lush trees with delicate spring leaves of yellow-green, along with fragrant bushes and tulips in full bloom. Many changes had occurred between autumn and spring.
The charges against David of cruelty to animals were quietly dropped. And no one ever arrived to punish him for performing Nicole’s illegal surgery.
The day that Nicole regained her sight was not a good one for Governor Burrow. His agencies had banned a revolutionary new treatment and arrested a surgeon who had to break the law to make medical history. “OOPS!” read a glaring headline over Burrow’s picture in New York City’s leading newspaper. In the aftermath of David’s wild success, the governor’s popularity, always precarious, plummeted. Six days later at the polls, a dispirited Mack Burrow lost his bid for reelection.
The voters also defeated a referendum calling for new taxes to bail out the financially troubled CareFree. A failure to meet its payroll, combined with further curtailments in service, threw the agency into chaos and enraged the citizens. Following David’s example, other doctors began ignoring the rules and providing their own independent services. A cottage industry of private medicine was developing, and the politicians, intimidated by the popularity of the new movement, were forced to ignore the lawbreakers. The steady deterioration of Burrow’s pet program and the rumors of its imminent collapse sent shockwaves through the CareFree-created physician groups, such as Reliant Care, which released half of its doctors. One of its employees, the recently divorced Dr. Marie Donnelly Lang, was a casualty of the layoffs.
With the financial backing of drug company president Phil Morgan, David and Randy leased a small, closed hospital and reopened it as the Lang-Morgan Institute for Neurological Research and Surgery. There was no public announcement of its opening because it technically did not exist. More accurately, it existed in violation of countless regulations. It had no permits or licenses. It passed no inspections, save the rigorous ones of its vigilant owners. “We’ll just work until somebody comes to arrest us,” David said to his partners. No one did.
Somehow the people of the city heard about the establishment despite the lack of signs, advertising, and announcements of any kind. Ambulances carried victims of spinal cord injury, stroke, and other nerve trauma to the institute. As if they were abandoning children at the doorstep of a church, the ambulances dropped the patients off secretly, then quickly sped away. Word spread beyond the city of the revolutionary work being performed. Desperate patients flew to New York, their plane seats replaced by stretchers, to reach the place that did not exist.
Like a death-row prisoner never knowing which meal might be his last, David ravenously performed his nerve-repair surgeries. He feasted on this new banquet of his life. As the first spring crocuses broke through the soil, he completed the second operation on his first wave of patients. Hopelessly injured people were amazingly restored to normal lives. One was a young quadriplegic who had been living on a respirator after a football injury. After David’s treatment, he breathed and walked normally. He took his first tearful steps toward David, whom he almost crushed in an embrace. Other victims of paralysis stood up, folded their wheelchairs, and walked away. A teenage victim of a stab wound that severed his optic nerve regained sight through David’s new treatment.
Neurosurgeons began going to the institute to learn the new technique. With Phil Morgan’s backing, Randy’s business management, and David’s clinical skills, the institution that did not exist was rapidly becoming famous.
Contrary to CareFree’s policies, the patients at the institute paid for their treatment. For those on a budget, Randy offered financing plans to make medical care as affordable as automobiles, furniture, and other widely purchased goods. He had viable ideas for low-cost insurance, which he said was not the kind mandated by a myriad of regulations, making the premiums soar, but the kind offering a myriad of innovations, real choices, and solid financial protection against a serious health problem. Contrary to the CareFree way, the rich received special treatment at the new institute, with luxurious private rooms, gourmet food, and other amenities—and they paid extra for it. Their money increased the profitability of the institute, which benefited all patients, as well as employees and owners. The institute also practiced private charity. The greater its success, the more it could afford to be generous. The only people it would not consider as candidates for charity were those who claimed they had a right to it. Treatment at a reduced fee was available from surgeons learning the new procedures, with their work performed under supervised conditions that were safe for the patients. These policies were molding a top-notch clinical institution that was also a profitable company.
Each time David successfully completed a case, Nicole sent flowers to him at work. As his accomplishments multiplied, his office became a solid blanket of blooms. “This place smells like a brothel,” Phil Morgan commented on one visit.
After their dinner in the park that spring evening, with the scent of lilacs heavy in the garden outside Nicole’s brownstone, the couple climbed the stairs to her apartment. When the door closed behind them, David faced her in the foyer, her short hair glowing like newly minted gold, his eyes burning like liquid metal. Through every bite of their food, every dance, every sound of her laughter that evening, he ached to crush her body against his. He grabbed her by the waist, confessing a desire that had become the urgent need of his life. His mouth covered hers. She felt her head falling back, her mouth opening to his, as she traced the firm lines of his body, from his hips to his chest to his neck. She flung her arms around him with an urgency that answered his. She felt the exciting thrill of his hands dancing over her back, her hips, her stomach, her breasts. She felt his mouth hot against her face, her hair, her neck.
He no longer had to vanish as he had done on their first date. He lifted her in his arms and carried her into the apartment. The lights burning on the theater marquees and in skyscrapers beyond their window were the majestic fire of their gods and a backdrop to their own glorious celebration of a new spring.
THE END
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About the Author
Genevieve (Gen) LaGreca is a Chicago writer whose first novel is Noble Vision. The novel
won a ForeWord magazine Book-of-the-Year Award and was a finalist in the Writer’s Digest International Book Awards---two of the most prestigious national literary honors in independent publishing.
Gen is a former pharmaceutical chemist and healthcare writer. Aside from fiction, she also writes social commentary. Her articles have appeared in the Orange County Register, Daily Caller, Real Clear Markets, Gainesville Sun, and other publications. She has been a lively guest, discussing her writings on talk-radio programs.
Asked what moved her to write Noble Vision, Gen replies, “After years of working in the healthcare industry, I feel as if I’m witnessing the slow death of something great, something that shouldn’t be allowed to die---America’s gold standard of medicine.” Why did she choose to write fiction? “Ever since I read Gone With the Wind at age 13, I’ve been enthralled by sweeping novels that capture a historic moment in an unforgettable way. I wanted to tell the story of what’s happening in medicine today---how it, too, could be gone with the wind---through the spellbinding magic of fiction.”
Gen is currently working on two more novels, and she has completed the screenplay adaptation of Noble Vision. For more information, see: www.wingedvictorypress.com.
You can contact Gen at [email protected].
For the print version of Noble Vision in quality paperback and hardcover, order on AMAZON, or from the publisher:
Winged Victory Press
P.O. Box 16730
Chicago, IL 60616-0730
www.wingedvictorypress.com
[email protected]
