Coming of Age: Volume 1: Eternal Life

by Thomas T. Thomas

  She had closed the door on a social life in favor of a professional life. But the stroke—what had Praxis called it? “Thunderbolt”?—had stolen her words and possibly even her career. The doctors could tell her what the mechanical part of her brain was doing, whether the new cells were alive and firing, but none of them could promise how much she would get back in terms of memory and ability. Oh, she would learn to read again. She might even be able to write her name and fill out the Social Security and Medicare forms, when the time came. But to regain her claim to the title of Best Damn Attorney? To be able to attract the high-profile clients, plan their cases, and deliver them to judge and jury? All of that was in the clouds, a future more filled with hope than based on evidence.

  Now that other door was cracking open again. Sure, it was stupid to build a future based on half a dozen meetings with a practical and charming man. The only thing they shared was a secret, a new procedure, a new kind of medicine, no more. And besides, he was married, with a wife of long standing—she had checked on that, too. Carolyn Boggs was a fountain of information when it came to the city’s social set, foundations, and fund raising. He had a family and obligations.

  Antigone Wells regretted that she would not be able to see him one more time, up on the rooftop. She would be discharged into the lingering morning fog, before the afternoon sunshine. No chance to say good-bye.

  But then, John Praxis wasn’t exactly going anywhere. He was in town, his roots were in San Francisco. And if he made good on that promise to put her old firm on retainer, she might even be able to wrangle him onto her client list. The senior partner, Ted … what was his name? Well, anyway, that man certainly owed her a favor. And the chance to meet Praxis again, to work alongside him, to share in his goals and dreams, at least a little bit, at second hand as it were, was incentive for her to work hard at becoming the Best Damned Attorney once more.

  * * *

  John Praxis waited on the roof for Antigone to come up from her physical therapy. At half an hour, then three-quarters past her usual time, he began to think she was not coming. But before he could decide what to do, stay or leave, Dr. Jamison appeared, leading a young woman who wore neither lab coat nor surgical scrubs and didn’t have a staff badge.

  “Mr. Praxis? I’d like to introduce Elpidia Hartzog, from the Chronicle. She’s doing a story on regenerative medicine in the Bay Area, and she wants to interview you as one of the first recipients of a whole-heart implant.”

  The woman nodded and smiled, and sat down on Antigone’s chaise longue. From her shoulder bag she took out a tape recorder, a pale-green steno pad, and a pencil.

  “Do I mind if we have someone from the Praxis Communications Department present?” he asked. “Just for clarification.”

  “I can come back, if you want,” Hartzog said. “But I’m not really interested in your company or its current situation. I understand you’re privately held—so no implications with the Securities & Exchange Commission. I’m just interested in your experience as a transplant recipient.”

  “Implant,” Jamison corrected. “As I’ve explained, there is no donor in this case.”

  “Right,” she agreed. “So … Mr. John Praxis, shall we start?” And she very obviously turned on the recorder.

  Praxis knew enough about the reportorial process that he could not expect to review or challenge her draft article. Everything he said was on record from this moment forward. He weighed possible damage to the company’s reputation—calculated as nil—compared with the reassurance that PE&C’s customers and employees might draw from hearing him say he felt fit and fine. “Go ahead,” he said.

  “So, how do you feel with a brand-new heart?”

  “I feel fit and fine,” he said. “Some discomfort early on, from a nine-inch-long incision and the cracking of my chest bone, but that happens with any heart surgery. Otherwise, no pain.”

  “I understand you were living with a ‘total artificial heart,’ made by CardioWest, for several weeks. What was that like?”

  “No offense to anyone at that company you mentioned—Cardio-something?—but that was not my favorite vacation.”

  “Why did you stay with it so long?”

  “My old heart was dead.” Praxis shrugged. “I was on the waiting list for a donor transplant. And then the doctors—including Dr. Jamison here—suggested this new treatment.”

  “How did you feel about trying a new and untested procedure?”

  “It wasn’t exactly untested,” Praxis said. “They’d been trying it out in animal models before I got my heart. And ‘clinical trials’ implies more than one patient. Considering my other prospects—extensive tissue matching, immune suppression, and then waiting for a suitable donor to … appear—I was thrilled to be chosen for this.”

  “Do you have any concerns about the ethics of the procedure?”

  “Ethics? In what respect? This heart was grown with my own stem cells, on an armature of synthetic materials. Seems to me, the ethics are between me and the doctors.”

  “Well, yes, but there are issues of equity here. The procedure is not covered by medical insurance. You got a new heart by participating in a selective clinical trial. But you’re also a wealthy man, so we can assume others will benefit only if they can buy their heart implant out of pocket. I’m left with the impression this is rich man’s medicine. The rest of us need not apply.”

  Praxis could feel Jamison stir beside him, but he put out a hand to stop the doctor from interrupting.

  “Of course, this is still a new procedure,” he said. “The ‘rest of us’ may have to wait until the trials are over, the results studied, and the procedure deemed safe and effective. All this was explained to me by Dr. Jamison here and his colleagues, both the people at this medical center and those who came up from Stanford. In that sense, I’m glad my experience could help prove the process.

  “But as I understand it, this procedure is more science than art. With all respect to my medical team, once all the steps are worked out and tested, then drawing the stem cells, inducing their potency, culturing them, and growing them on a collagen armature is a matter of protocol. Cookbook stuff that any medical technician can do. And if they happen to flub it up, they start over. The only real skill involved is the surgical team who cuts open my chest and attaches the new heart, same as in a traditional transplant.

  “This is medicine on the assembly line,” he concluded. “It’s how Henry Ford put America on wheels. In the long run, it will be the cheapest, most available kind of medicine.”

  “But don’t you worry,” Hartzog pressed on, “about the crisis this procedure will create in Social Security and Medicare? If we go around extending the lives of old people—”

  “Ye-ess?” he asked with the faint hiss of a rattlesnake.

  “—doesn’t that throw the actuarial tables into a tailspin?”

  “It depends on what you want. Old people who are healthy and productive? Or people who are sick and dying?”

  “What about those who won’t benefit—patients with dementia, Alzheimer’s, or brain damage? Do you want to extend their lives as well?”

  Praxis paused. “That is a question for the doctors and the families. I’m not qualified to answer.”

  “Did you know there’s a stroke patient in this hospital who received an implant procedure similar to yours? Antigone Wells, an attorney with the firm of Bryant Bridger & Wells? Didn’t she challenge your company over malfeasance in the St. Brigid’s hospital case?”

  He paused again. Gotcha! Every reporter had a gotcha! question lurking somewhere in the woods. But then, Natalie Petrovska, PE&C’s head of public relations, had drilled him well over the years. Watch my lips and count the actual lies!

  “Oh?” he said. “Well, if Ms. Wells had a stroke, it must have come sometime after my heart attack. Since then, I’ve been too busy to read the newspapers. The last time I saw the woman, she looked very well. But in any case I wish her a speedy recovery.”

  Elpi
dia Hartzog tapped her pencil against her teeth, studying the fragmentary notes on her pad. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Praxis.”

  “You’re welcome.” He turned to Dr. Jamison. “I think I’d like to go in now.”

  Part 2 – 2019:

  Run for Your Life

  1. Coming Home

  When the staff wheeled her out to the front entrance, Antigone Wells saw a woman standing there holding a placard with her name—just like a driver making a pickup at the airport. The woman was mid-forties, with brown hair going gray and tired, faded blue eyes, but she looked strong. Wells thought she might need such strength in the days ahead.

  “That’s me,” she said, raising her hand and then gripping the chair’s armrests to lift herself. The woman darted forward to assist, but Wells waved her away. “I just need to get my feet under me. Who are you?”

  “Jeanne Hale, ma’am, from the MaxStaff Agency.”

  “Do you have some identification?”

  Hale produced a wallet with cards, laminated certification as a licensed vocational nurse, and a work order from the agency.

  “Very good,” Wells said after examining them.

  The hospital staff had already arranged for a cab, and it drove the two women out to Wells’s apartment on Divisadero Street. She had the two upper floors and an attic loft in one of San Francisco’s “painted ladies”—those Victorian houses that had been elegantly restored to their original, gaudy color schemes.

  After paying off the driver, she turned to face the stairs: twenty-eight terrazzo-tiled steps up from the sidewalk to the outside door. Beyond that door, she knew, as many more steps went up the inside stairway to her apartment’s first floor. She once used to run up and down those two flights of stairs every day—as well as the third, between levels inside her apartment—and claimed the exercise kept her in shape. Now she took them slowly, holding the railing and favoring her right leg when it balked.

  “Maybe it’s time to move to a newer building,” Hale said as she followed behind, strategically positioned to catch Wells if she collapsed. “One with an elevator?”

  “If you think I’ll change my life around just because of a few scrambled wires in my head, you don’t know me.”

  “Yes, ma’am. … They all say that at first.”

  “Humph!” Wells climbed with renewed vigor.

  Inside her own space and looking around, she was pleased to see Maritsa had kept the place spotless. The living room spanned the width of the building in front, and Wells looked into the alcove created by the second bay window. She kept it shuttered to protect her orchids, arranged in banks of shelves against the wall, from too much direct sunlight. She cultivated the frilly Cymbidia, the delicate Phalaenopses, and the tiny, tubular Ludisiae. In a way, they were like her never-conceived children. Wells was glad to see Maritsa had maintained their feeding and lighting schedules, and only two had gone dormant.

  “How lovely!” Hale said, and Wells began to like her better.

  “Do you keep any kind of plants yourself?” she asked.

  “Oh, no. I’m out on assignment too often. No home life.”

  “That reminds me. Bedrooms are one flight up. You get the front, with the street noise, sorry”—she made a face—“because I’m already set up in the back, over the garden. Do you have luggage and such?”

  “I’ll pick it up as soon as we get you settled.”

  “I’m home now. What more do I need?”

  “Maybe a cup of tea?” Hale suggested.

  “No tea, just coffee. Kitchen’s through to the back. I’ll show you.”

  Maritsa had left the kitchen just as neat and with the cupboards fully stocked, including a bag of fresh-ground Major Dickason’s blend from Peet’s and a new carton of two-percent milk. In her secret stash Wells found an unopened bag of Milano cookies. In the process, Wells discovered that she didn’t need to read labels when she could recognize the packaging. In ten minutes the two women were seated at the dinette with a plate of cookies between them.

  “I’m really not here to socialize,” Hale began.

  “My home, my rules. You’ll do as I say so long as I’m paying.”

  The woman paused. “You understand, I’m not here to cook and clean, either.”

  “I have someone come in for that,” Wells replied. “I know, your job is to follow me around and pick me up when I fall down. Right?”

  “And administer meds and track your vitals.”

  “You can take my temperature later if you like.”

  The woman smiled and sipped her coffee.

  When the doorbell rang, Hale started to get up.

  “My job,” Wells said, and went to the intercom.

  “Auntie? Are you home? It’s Carolyn and Sully!”

  “Just got here,” she said into the speaker and pressed the lock release. “Come on up!” She turned to Hale with a grin. “Oh, damn! Now we don’t get to eat all the cookies.”

  In two minutes everyone was sitting around the kitchen table with full cups in front of them, and Wells was introducing her legal staff to her nursing aide. “Ms. Hale will be staying here with me for a while.”

  “Ma’am? You can call me Jeanne—if I can call you ‘Auntie,’ too.”

  “Sure,” Wells agreed. “No formality—or not much when it’s just us.” Then she turned to business with her associates. “So, what’s happened while I’ve been away?”

  “Caseload is really backing up,” Carolyn said. “Ted Bridger wants you back soonest so you can take up your share of the work.”

  “Bridger,” Wells repeated softly. So that was the senior partner’s name. A face floated up from memory: round and kindly, wrinkled, benevolent smile, silvery white hair, brown eyes as soft as stones from a riverbed. She wouldn’t forget him again. “What kind of cases are we getting?” she asked.

  “A lot of breach-of-contract,” Sully said. “Mostly customers going slow-pay, no-pay, or dragging their accounts payable out to a hundred-twenty or two-hundred-forty days. With the inflation, their supply and logistics contractors deliver in dollars and get paid off in virtual pennies.”

  “But aren’t there …” Wells groped for the word. “Clauses … with constant—?”

  “Oh yeah, the C-Dollar button,” Carolyn supplied. “Except these are all the old contracts, based on long-standing relationships—which are falling apart now that dollar devaluation has kicked up about a hundred percent. It’s busting a lot of businesses—which is good for us, of course.”

  Wells grimaced. “How are we getting paid?”

  “Percentage of the settlement,” Sully said. “Which even in constant terms is starting to erode before we can get out of the judge’s chambers.”

  “Bridger’s talking about changing our fee structure,” Carolyn said.

  “To what?” Wells asked. “Do we take something up front?”

  The associate nodded. “Payable in euros or yuan.”

  “Gold or diamonds,” Sully said.

  “Jesus!” Wells swore.

  “We need you badly, Auntie,” Carolyn said. “And, as a little incentive, we brought you a welcome-home gift.” She reached into her bag and brought out a package with no special wrapping. It was a late-model touch tablet.

  “I’ve already got one of those,” Wells said. “It’s nice to play with the icons and look at the pictures, but until my head clears up …” Ah, what the hell! She had to come clean sooner or later. “I’ve forgotten how to read,” she admitted quietly. “For a while, the Roman alphabet might as well have been the hash marks of ancient Sumerian. Now I can pick out some of the letters, guess at a few of the words. But …”

  “We know,” Carolyn Boggs said. “You’ll get it all back soon. In the meantime, this little fellah has an artificial intelligence that understands spoken language. You tell it what you want, and it will find the document or email, open it, and read it to you. Then it will transcribe your replies and send them off. Pretty neat, huh?”

  Wells trie
d to think through, in her head, how it was that she really worked. This AI gadget might be useful—if she already knew which emails she wanted to open, or which documents she needed next, and could call for them by name. But Wells was in the situation of a blind person working with a sighted assistant who knew no law and couldn’t anticipate her next move. Working at second hand might do, if someone like Carolyn or Sully were sitting at her elbow, fielding requests, making choices, and reading aloud. But would this glorified Speak ’n’ Spell be able to search and skim the texts of laws and precedents in a database like LexisNexis? And what about when she herself had only a hunch and didn’t know exactly what questions to ask? And the further trouble—the deep, dark secret Antigone Wells hardly dared think about—was that she still wasn’t sure how much law she knew anymore versus how much had disappeared into those dark areas of her brain scan.

  “That’s a really nice gift,” she said. “I’m sure it will be a big help.”

  She left the device on the table between herself and Carolyn.

  Instead, she lifted the plate and passed it around.

  “Does anyone want the last cookie?”

  * * *

  John Praxis went home to his wedding-cake Georgian mansion in the enclave of billionaires that lay west of the Golden Gate, in the Sea Cliff district. After weeks of overlooking the city’s high-rises from his hospital window or the rooftop garden in Mission Bay, he was surprised by how small and toylike everything appeared in his own neighborhood. His mansion—actually just five bedrooms and 6,000 square feet—nestled between a tiny Tudor-style brick-and-stone manor house and a Japanese lacquer-and-tile gift box, all set among billiard-table lawns and topiary trees. It was the Disneyland version of wealth and power.

  His immediate family had come home to receive him. Leonard and Richard took time off from their busy schedules, and Callie had flown in from the jobsite in Denver. Adele had asked the cook to prepare something special for lunch—a paella, which was Praxis’s favorite—and then wondered aloud whether all those fats and starches fit in with his new hospital-approved diet.