Coming of Age: Volume 1: Eternal Life

by Thomas T. Thomas

  Well, Praxis decided, as they gave him the injections that would make him sleep, he already had a damned tick-tock mechanism going on inside him. … Maybe the stem cell wizards and their heart made of velvet and sawdust would be an improvement. … Quieter, at least, with no more whirr-click, whirr-click … whirr-click …

  5. Afternoons on a Rooftop

  Why anyone would build a garden on a rooftop in San Francisco was beyond the understanding of John Praxis. The city had only two seasons: cold and drizzly winter, cold and foggy summer. The only time you would hunger to sit outdoors under a warm and smiling sun came in May and October, although random days might come during that nominal summer when the fog would burn off by noon and the onshore breeze would not start blowing it back again until three or four o’clock. And then the nurses at the Mission Bay medical center herded their convalescent patients, like a little boy chasing pigeons across a plaza, up onto the roof “to get some fresh air.”

  Come to think of it, he wondered as he settled into a chaise longue, why didn’t the city’s pigeons ever flock up here? The glass walls surrounding the garden were no barrier, being open at the top. Visitors, if not the patients themselves, usually brought food, were not stingy about sharing it, and sometimes carelessly dropped wrappers full of crumbs and bits. It must have been the hawks, Praxis decided. Hawks lived high up, so they could dive on their prey. Every major city had its population of red-tailed hawks that stooped on the pigeons from ledges and cornices. As a new architectural feature, his daughter had shown him a dozen websites with dedicated cameras following the real-time lives of these predators and their nestlings, including the rending of smaller, gray-feathered carcasses. Probably the pigeons had learned not to fly so high anymore.

  While Praxis sat and mulled this problem in urban ecology, a woman came over and took the chaise next to him. She moved stiffly and reached forward with both hands to lift her right calf up onto the long seat. Something wrong with the joints in her leg or back, he supposed. She wore a bright-blue sweat shirt and matching pants, as well as low-cut sneakers, so he guessed she had just come from physical therapy. But her head and hair were covered with a long silk scarf worn as a turban. The cloth’s background was peacock blue, which color-coordinated with her sweats, but was streaked through with various greens, from forest green to aquamarine to iridescent emerald. Anywhere else, that scarf would have suggested “good taste” or “fashion sense,” but here it whispered “chemotherapy.”

  Then he glanced at her profile, not meaning to intrude, and must have made some small, sudden movement in surprise.

  “Hello?” the woman said, questioning him with agate-gray eyes.

  So now Praxis felt free to look her full in the face. He saw the same strong jaw and cheekbones, the same straight nose and generous mouth. He had seen that face mostly in profile or from slightly behind, while she spoke in court addressing witnesses and the jury. But it was a memorable face. Where the turban now coiled tightly, he knew she once had worn a broad sweep of ash-blonde hair.

  “Ms. Wells!” he said, inanely. “Hello!”

  She smiled faintly. “Have we met before?”

  Praxis supposed that the rigors of a massive heart attack, the near-death experience, and two surgeries might have changed his own face. But not that much. Adele and the children kept assuring him he looked the same as ever. So this failure of recognition—in the woman who had single-handedly taken a chunk out of his company to the tune of a third of a gigabuck—must have meant something else.

  “Only briefly,” he replied. “Well, on a half-dozen occasions,” he corrected. “With plenty of other people in the room.”

  He watched her eyes as she tried—and obviously failed—to place him. “Are you an attorney?” she asked.

  “No. Ah, what’s the word in a civil case? ‘Respondent’?”

  “Defendant,” she said. “I’m guessing I didn’t represent you.”

  “No, ma’am. If you had, I think we would have won.”

  She smiled at that. “But I still don’t know you.”

  “John Praxis,” he said. “We were the engineers who built Saint Brigid’s.”

  “Oh, yes!” she said, although it was clear from her eyes she still didn’t know him. “I get confused about faces and names these days,” she apologized.

  “Chemotherapy?” he suggested, touching his own head to indicate the turban.

  “What?” Her hand went up to the cloth in response. “Oh! No. Brain surgery.”

  “That’ll do it, too.” His mind turned over the remaining possibilities. “Stroke?”

  “Aneurysm,” she agreed. “Tiny little artery, but it blew out all sorts of things.”

  “You seem to be doing really well,” he said. “I mean, considering that it must have happened sometime after my Thunderbolt. And that was just a couple of months ago.”

  “Thunderbolt?”

  “You didn’t hear? It was while the case was still at trial. I had a heart attack. Big one, on the golf course. My heart just … died.”

  “I’m sorry. If I knew that, I don’t remember. But—‘died,’ you said? And they arranged a transplant so soon? You look like you just came in from a jog.”

  Praxis glanced down at his own clothing: gray sweatpants, tee shirt from the company picnic, microfiber fleece jacket with PE&C logo on the left breast, lace-up cross trainers with waffle-stomper soles. “Well, the treadmill,” he said. “Downstairs.”

  “They must have you on a very aggressive program.”

  “You have no idea,” he replied.

  * * *

  Antigone Wells had a new appreciation for how “ductile” and “resilient”—in the words of one of those Stanford doctors—the brain could be. Especially with a refreshment of what she had come to think of, in the words of Hercule Poirot, as “the little gray cells.”

  A month—no, five weeks now—after the operation to sow activated stem cells into the darkened areas of her brain, her body had recovered nearly all of its old control and most of its strength. Daily bouts with Gary, her physical therapist, were building muscle tone and dexterity. Her mind and tongue had recovered enough of her words—at least the easy ones—so that she could speak almost normally and survive without embarrassment in light social conversation. Jocelyn, her speech and language pathologist, had her working on fluency in her verbal processing and on phonetics in her visual processing. Soon she would graduate from flip-card exercises, “A-ah-apple … B-buh-ball … C-kah-cat,” to actual sentences and then on to Dick and Jane. But written words were coming along more slowly than spoken words.

  Jocelyn seemed pleased that Wells was meeting a mysterious gentleman on the roof every day it was sunny. “Tell me about him.”

  “He says he knows me.”

  “But you don’t remember him?”

  “No. Not really. Not the voice. Not his face.”

  “So how does he know you?” Jocelyn asked.

  “It was a case I worked on—right before my stroke.”

  “Was he your client? Did you have a personal relationship?”

  “No, not personal. He was the other side, defending. … I don’t know.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Jocelyn said. “Our brains process memories in many different ways.

  “In your career, as a lawyer,” she went on, “you worked with words as much or more than with sounds or visual images—and written words as much or more than spoken words. You’re in the class of people I would call ‘hyper-literate.’ Anything you remember about his court case would be linked strongly to the text of briefs or dockets or whatever. And you’ve handled a lot of cases, haven’t you, over the years? So I would guess you might only recall this man’s face and name in relation to those documents, rather than in any emotional context.”

  “He’s a stranger to me.” Wells paused. “So … should I stop visiting with him?”

  “Oh, no. It’s good for you. He might even help you bring back some of those words. Did he give yo
u his name?”

  “John Praxis …” she said, still trying to place the name in some context other than the rooftop.

  “Well, then!” Jocelyn said delightedly. “You two have something in common, something to talk about. He’s a bit famous around here, you know. Praxis is one of the first recipients of an artificial human heart. Wait—I’ve got that wrong—not ‘artificial’ so much as grown in a test tube. They call it an ‘implant’ rather than a ‘transplant,’ because it was grown from his own stem cells instead of being donated from another person. It’s the same way that your brain is rebuilding itself from stem cells.”

  “Uh-huh,” Wells said. “So he’s a what you call … celebrity?”

  “In medical terms, at least.”

  That afternoon the sun was shining, and Antigone Wells looked forward to going up on the rooftop. She sought out the man with the close-cropped silver hair, the white eyebrows that shadowed his enigmatic brown eyes like an eagle’s, and the nose whose bridge came straight down with nostrils curving back around, like a beak. The deck chair next to his was empty and she settled into it as gracefully as she could.

  “I understand we share a secret, you and I,” she began.

  “Hello, Ms. Wells! And what secret is that?”

  “They’re rebuilding both of us from spare parts.”

  “You mean, like Frankenstein’s monster?”

  “No, our stem cells. My brain. Your heart.”

  “Someone told you about that, did they?”

  “Everyone here is really quite proud of you,” she said.

  “Nothing I did personally. I just signed their damned papers.”

  “But you’re advancing so fast! I wouldn’t even know you were sick.”

  “My doctors say organ regeneration’s the wave of the future. All I know is that without it, I’d still be on a waiting list. Or dead.”

  “And I’d be …” She paused.

  “What? What would you be?”

  “Different. … Dull witted. Crippled. Pathetic.”

  “You could never be dull or pathetic, Ms. Wells.”

  That made her smile. “Please, call me Antigone.”

  “Antigone!” John Praxis said with a smile that was warm and bright. He seemed so delighted to be allowed to use her Christian name that he reached across, took hold of her crippled right hand, and squeezed it.

  And Wells was so shocked by the personal contact—something no man had offered her in a long, too long, a time—that, rather than withdraw her hand in ladylike fashion, she returned the squeeze and held it, twined her fingers through his, and locked them.

  After a moment, they let go together and withdrew slowly.

  “I’m so glad,” she began. “You’re not … Did I hurt you badly? In the case?”

  “You were brilliant.” He sighed. “You, you really ruined us—”

  “I’m so sorry!” she said. “I want to be your friend.”

  “—but, but it’s only money, Antigone.”

  * * *

  John Praxis was flattered that this woman—who was beautiful, elegant, talented, and younger than him by at least a decade—would seek him out on the rooftop every afternoon. He put aside, for the moment, what that might mean in terms of his marriage to Adele or the fact that, so far, he hadn’t mentioned to anyone the growing emotional attachment between himself and Antigone Wells. For now, they were two shipwrecks cast up on the beach, existing in an isolated world of aftermath and recovery.

  Their talk consisted of comparing notes about their differing stem-cell procedures, the differences in their physical therapy regimens, and the sameness of the hospital food. They talked about the medical center’s unfamiliar routines, the antiseptic but still strangely biological smells, and the distant, anonymous courtesy of the professional staff. Their relationship—his and Antigone’s—lived in the contrived world of the hospital. In fact, it did not actually live inside the hospital itself, because she came up from the Neurology Department and he from Cardiology. He did not even know what floor she lived on. And he had never told her about Adele and his family, nor asked her about a possible husband or companion. Those were topics for outside, in the real world.

  At their fourth or fifth meeting, Antigone had hesitated after sitting down, then reached up and untied the blue-and-green scarf. She dipped her head shyly behind it as the cloth unraveled. Praxis expected either a cleanly shaved scalp or a buzz cut. But when she dropped the scarf, her head was covered in short, overlapping layers of her pale yellow hair, like rose petals clinging to her scalp.

  “That’s really pretty,” he said.

  “You probably remember it being longer.”

  “I do remember. But this is nice, too.”

  “The surgeons didn’t have to take all of it off, you know. Just in patches where they planned to drill their burr holes. Then the hospital stylists did the best they could with the rest.”

  “You look lovely,” he assured her.

  Still, she sat with an uncertain expression on her face.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Some time ago, you said I had ‘ruined’ you,” she began slowly. “I need to know … well, if you need money, I make a really good salary and have something put away. I could help you—”

  “Antigone!” He laughed. “It was all corporate stuff. We carry liability insurance. And we have a really strong backlog right now. It all evens out.”

  “But I looked you up. Yours is a private company. At some point, that money comes out of your pocket.”

  “No,” he said, “just a little less money goes in—and that’s over a span of years. Don’t worry about it. When I said ‘ruined,’ I really didn’t mean financially. You just wiped the floor with us, is all. You did the technical homework that my supply chain team failed to do in the first place.”

  “I’ll try to believe that …”

  “No need to worry. In fact, I think I’ll put Bryant Bridger & Wells on retainer for future liability cases.”

  “Who?” she asked blankly.

  “That’s your firm, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, right! Yes … it is.”

  * * *

  Six weeks after her operation, Dr. Bajwa came to Wells’s room after the routine morning brain scan. In his hands he carried a set of film images, which he spread out on her tray table.

  “We’re are very happy with these,” the doctor said. He took out a pen and pointed to various color-matched focuses: splotches of active reds and yellows, surrounded by quiescent greens and blues, which were distributed over both hemispheres. Together, she and her doctors had watched the left hemisphere light up over the past couple of weeks. “Although we have no previous baseline of your brain to compare them with,” he said, “the activity is almost normal for a woman your age.”

  “I’m glad …” Wells said. She waited for the “but.” Announcements like this usually led up to a complication.

  “Any stroke patient doing as well as you, we would have been discharged weeks ago—to a skilled nursing facility, or home if you have someone to care for you. We’ve only kept you in the hospital this long because your procedure is relatively new. We wanted to track your progress and, frankly, to guard against any adverse reactions.”

  “What would be an adverse reaction? Headaches? Hot flashes?”

  “Another stroke,” he said. “Failure of the new cells to thrive.”

  “And you’re saying you don’t see any of that here?”

  “No, as far as we’re concerned, you are good to go.”

  “Then why don’t I have all my words?” she asked.

  He paused. “You have new brain cells. They have survived and responded to the process that induced their new growth potential—a process that is still a matter of some controversy. Those cells are now growing well, adapting, and perhaps even integrating with the old neurons. So you have all the mechanical equipment. But it takes time for them to learn new functions, for the brain itself to adapt and grow, to he
al itself. That’s why we’ll keep you on a schedule of speech and reading therapy, and physical therapy as necessary.”

  “When were you planning to send me home?”

  “We can process the discharge in an hour or so.”

  “That soon?” Wells wasn’t prepared for the rush.

  “Do you have adequate care and support at home?”

  “I have a housekeeper, Maritsa. She comes in to clean Tuesdays and Thursdays.” In the last ten weeks, Wells had also asked her to collect the snail mail, scan her personal email, and refer anything important to Carolyn Boggs, who had her power of attorney.

  “We’d like to have someone with you full time, at least while you’re awake.”

  “I don’t have …” Suddenly, her life choices were catching up with her.

  It had been twenty-eight years since Antigone Wells made her final resolution: to stay at Boalt Hall, dedicate herself to the law, and become the Best Damn Attorney in San Francisco. Another Melvin Belli. Another Gloria Allred or Leslie Abramson. She knew that would be at the expense of becoming lover, wife, mother—and she accepted the sacrifice. So she had said good-bye to her insistent young man of the moment, Steve … what was his name?

  “We can arrange a practical nurse to come stay with you,” Dr. Bajwa said. “Do you have a guest bedroom or study where—”

  “It’s a big enough apartment. There’s room.”

  “Very good. I’ll start the paperwork on that, too.”

  “Can you delay all this processing until after lunch?”

  “This isn’t a hotel, Ms. Wells. We do have other patients.”

  “Of course, I understand.”