Coming of Age: Volume 1: Eternal Life

by Thomas T. Thomas

  “I think I’m allowed to eat anything I want,” he grumbled. “I’ve got a whole new set of arteries in there.”

  “But your weight, John? Dr. Jamison wants you to lose twenty pounds.”

  “I’m down ten since the surgery,” he replied. “And I spent half an hour on the treadmill this morning before they discharged me. This is the first real food I’ve had in three months, so please let me enjoy it in peace.”

  Adele retreated with trembling lips to her wine glass.

  Callie shot him a dark glance, then looked away.

  The two boys remained oblivious, of course.

  “So … how’s business?” he asked the table in general.

  Richard glanced at Leonard. Leonard shrugged and continued eating. Only Callie put down her fork.

  “How much have you been following the news, Dad?”

  “Nurses turned the television off whenever it came on. Said they didn’t want to upset me.” But he was healthy now, and he was home. It was time to face the real world again. “What did I miss?”

  “The money situation has gotten much worse since your … episode,” his daughter said. “Nobody knows how bad, really, because the government isn’t publishing the figures anymore. Even if they did, nobody would believe them. Stores don’t put price stickers on anything, just barcodes with the product identification. You find out how much it costs at the cash register—unless you’ve got an app that reads the code and looks up the price online. Even then, it might change while you’re walking to the front of the store.”

  “We’ve got the whole company on quarterly personnel reviews and salary adjustments,” Richard said quietly. “Our labor costs are up about three hundred percent in six weeks.”

  “Ye gods! Are we still in business?” Praxis asked.

  “Sure, because our contracts are all on a sliding scale,” said Leonard, PE&C’s president and chief operating officer. “Revenues are up three hundred and twelve percent in that time, just from inflation alone.”

  “Then the Fed or somebody rings a little bell,” Callie said, deadpan, “and we all move the decimal point three places to the left on our calculators, to round out the zeroes. That makes it easier to keep track.”

  “Actually,” said Richard, the chief financial officer, “revenues aren’t that good.”

  “Not now, please,” Leonard told his brother and sister with a warning frown.

  Callie ignored him. “Everybody has gone slow-pay,” she said. “And most of our projects are proceeding in slow motion.”

  “Slow motion?” Praxis said. “What does that mean, exactly?”

  “Nobody gathers a pile of cash to build straight up anymore,” his daughter explained. “And no bank or consortium will give them a construction loan, even on a balloon payment, knowing it will only get paid off in peanuts. That’s because we overran the constant-dollar calculations months ago.

  “So now, if a client gets a few bucks together,” she continued, “they buy the building site, maybe do architectural design and some of the structural engineering to satisfy the building permits, take receipt of the drawings, and walk away. A few months or a year later, when they’ve collected more cash, they come back for demolition and excavation, and then say sayonara again over a hole in the ground. Later still, they come back to pour the foundation. After that, it’s a year before they put up the steel—and get it all cocooned in foam and plastic against the weather. It might be two more years before they’ll commit to floor pads and curtain walls. And God knows when the elevators and HVAC will be commissioned. It’s like some banana republic, paying off in pesos or bolivars that melt before you can get them to the bank.”

  “It’s not quite that bad,” Richard protested.

  “Then it soon will be,” Callie assured him.

  “How long can this go on?” Praxis wondered.

  “Well …” she paused. “Until it can’t, is my guess.”

  Praxis was frowning heavily. Parceling out construction funds in little dribs and drabs of effort might be the smart move financially, but it made for bad projects and worse buildings. It broke up engineering and construction teams and destroyed any kind of corporate memory as to who had done what and who promised to do how much by when. It blew the schedule of deliverables all to hell and smashed any accounting for the time value of money—which he now guessed wasn’t so important when the money was melting like ice cream in the July sun. You couldn’t plan anything, but instead you rushed blindly forward, expending your effort before it became worthless. Praxis just knew there had to be a better way to cope with the problem.

  “I think I’d better start coming into the office,” he said.

  His daughter and middle son looked at their older brother. “Leonard’s moved up to the thirty-eighth floor,” Callie said, head down, talking to her plate.

  “Only because it’s more convenient to handle the chairman’s business out of the chairman’s suite,” Leonard said. “Honestly, we didn’t know when you would be coming back.”

  “Or even if,” Richard put in.

  “Shush!” Callie hissed at him.

  “Really,” Leonard said. “There’s no need for you to rush back, Dad. We’ve got everything under control. The currency situation is just like riding a tiger—”

  “—you hang on tight to its ears,” Callie finished the old proverb.

  “We just want you to get well, Dad.”

  “Think of it as early retirement—a well-earned rest.”

  “You’ll get to do all the fun things you and Mom never had time for.”

  * * *

  “Congratulations!” said Jocelyn, her speech therapist, after administering one of her many tests. “It looks like you’re now reading at the sixth-grade comprehension level.”

  “So I’ll be on my way to high school soon?” Wells joked.

  “The rest is just practice—and learning new words, of course.”

  “I know and understand the words while I’m reading them,” Wells said, “but when I stop reading, and close my eyes, they just seem to go away. I’m afraid I won’t remember—won’t get them back.”

  “Does your house go away after you lock the door and stop thinking about it? Does your job as a lawyer go away when you leave the office and stop worrying about your cases?”

  “I don’t know if I’m still an attorney or not,” Wells said quietly.

  “Do you go away when you lie down to sleep and shut your eyes?”

  “Well, I hope not, but after the stroke, I’m just not sure anymore.”

  “You have to believe that you are a real person, that you exist.” The therapist paused. “You are actually doing very well, Antigone. Much better than the average stroke patient.”

  “I know. I’m learning much faster than I remember from my schooldays.”

  “Oh, that’s because you already know how to read. You’ve got the principles stored away in other parts of your brain. You know how to deduce the meaning of unfamiliar words from context in a sentence, or by triangulation from the Latin, Greek, French, and Anglo-Saxon roots of the words you already know. The brain stores information in many different places and in many different ways. You’re simply rewiring it and reconnecting with what you already know in other circumstances.”

  Wells drew some comfort from that—the notion that her brain had places untouched by the stroke’s annihilating darkness. That as much as she was learning new words, she was also re-creating, compiling, refreshing, and filing them away.

  “Some psychologists,” Jocelyn said, “think the brain’s cognitive functions work compositely, like a hologram, rather by than the linear recording of data, like a compact disk. That is, the brain breaks our experiences up into related pieces—visual fragments of what we saw, aural fragments from what we heard, as well as smells, feelings, and the words we used to describe them. Each of these pieces goes off into a different part of the cerebral cortex but remains linked to the others by the unifying experience.”

&
nbsp; “Wait …” Wells tried to remember back to an earlier conversation. “When I first met John Praxis on the rooftop, and didn’t recognize him, you said that was because I associated his face and name with my legal work. When I lost the words for that work, I lost my memory of him. Now you’re saying that associations can actually bring back the words?”

  “We don’t fully understand how the brain works,” Jocelyn said, “and these are just theories. When you met that man on the roof, your brain was still in shock and repairing itself. I imagine the effects of your aphasia were dominating the encounter. But now your brain is healing, compensating, settling down. Links through association should strengthen over time.”

  Wells thought about that. Could the hologram thing be true as well for the principles of the law? Perhaps the exact language and interpretation of specific precedents, cases, and statutes lay just beyond the reach of her mind and tongue, still waiting to be learned or re-assimilated. But might the underlying structure live somewhere else deep inside her, as fragments of experience and understanding: the operations of parity, reciprocity, reparation, and retribution; the rules of evidence, examination, and cross-examination; the workings of trial and appellate courts, legislative bodies, and regulatory agencies; and all the other mental processes, upon which the mere words and intentions of statute and case law were hung like ornaments upon a tree—all still alive in there? Wells could hope these relationships were still part of her mind’s organization, just as the appreciation of spatial relationships, strengths in tension and compression, and flow of forces lived in and shaped the mind of an engineer, or as appreciation of color, form, line, depth, and incidental and reflected lighting shaped the vision of an artist.

  She tried to describe all this to Jocelyn, and that sparked an idea.

  “Would you like to try some art therapy?” the woman asked.

  “I never was any good at drawing,” Wells said quietly.

  “That’s not the point,” Jocelyn replied. “The attempt will exercise the right side of your brain, and that might stimulate some activity and associations on the left side. As you try to manipulate lines and colors for effect, the effort might stimulate the way you previously manipulated words and symbols.”

  “I’ll try anything once. But the results won’t be pretty.”

  Jocelyn took her hand. What seemed to start as a personal gesture became a clinical examination of her wrist, forearm, upper arm, and shoulder.

  “What?” Wells said defensively.

  “You’re all stiff. Have you been keeping up with your physical therapy?”

  “Treadmills.” Wells made a face. “Dumbbells.”

  “You should be doing some kind of organized movement activity. Next time, I’ll bring you some brochures for local yoga and modern dance classes.”

  “That won’t be pretty, either.”

  * * *

  After a week of sitting around at home, keeping up with his exercise program and pretending to catch up on his reading, John Praxis decided one morning it was time to get back to work. He woke at his usual time—which these days was closer to seven-thirty than his old workday schedule of five o’clock—and went down to breakfast with Adele.

  “Think I’ll go into the office today,” he said as he buttered his toast.

  His wife put down her coffee cup. “So soon? Do you think that’s wise?”

  “I feel fine,” he said, then checked himself. “Better than fine, actually.”

  When he went up to shower and dress, Praxis was still thinking about his physical condition. He felt stronger and more alert than he had in a couple of years. The enforced hospital regimen of sleep and diet, plus his new level of physical activity, combining treadmill, elliptical, and weight machine instead of one morning a week walking the fairways behind a little white ball—and often as not riding an electric cart up to each lie—had done wonders for his body.

  As he stepped out of the shower, it was a younger man who nodded back from the mirror, whose steamy surface blurred his wrinkles and filled out his thinning hair. He still had that ugly gash of a scar running down his sternum and into his stomach, and the slashes, lower down, where the connections for the artificial heart had entered his abdomen. But the redness was already fading, and soon he would have just cold, white lines as reminders of his surgeries.

  When he put on one of his business suits, he was dismayed—pleased, certainly, but also distressed, because he liked to look neat and sharp—to find that the waistband of the trousers had four inches of slack flapping over his belly. He had to fold and tuck in the excess at the back and hold it with his belt—unless he wanted to postpone his return and wait for a tailor. His dress shirts also bagged around his midsection. And his single-breasted jacket now had enough material to wear double-breasted—if he’d had the buttonholes and buttons for it.

  Once dressed with the help of a few discreet safety pins, he went downstairs to kiss his wife good-bye, rolled his Obsidian Black E-class Mercedes out of the garage, and headed downtown. He arrived at the headquarters garage at a quarter past ten. He didn’t think anything of the time, because he knew his parking space was reserved. But when he pulled around on the first level, the chairman and chief executive’s space held Leonard’s blue F-type Jaguar. All the other reserved spaces were filled—even Callie’s, with a car he didn’t recognize. So Praxis had to swing around, out and in again, and draw a visitor’s ticket, which cost ten dollars for twenty minutes. He fought down a surge of annoyance. Oh well, someone upstairs can stamp it for me.

  He took the executive elevator to the thirty-eighth floor with his personal key and walked past the receptionist’s stealthily armored desk. Behind it was a young woman he didn’t recognize, but he didn’t give her more than a passing glance.

  “Sir! Sir!” she called behind him. “You have to sign in!”

  As he turned, she came running after him. Blonde, with hair bobbed and lacquered. Pretty—under the Urban Assault makeup that was all bruised blues and grays. Dressed in a tailored suit with miniskirt and stiletto heels. Slender enough to be a fashion model herself, but making suspiciously good time on those heels. The only thing out of place was the bulky lump under the jacket below her left breast.

  “You don’t have to worry about me, darling,” he said. “I own this place.”

  She frowned and her eyebrows came together, clearly recalling a mug book she had memorized. Then her face smoothed. “Oh, Mr. Praxis—the elder,” she added by way of mnemonic. “I’m sorry. I didn’t recognize you.”

  “No reason you should,” he said. “I imagine I’m from before your time.”

  He continued up to the electrically locked doors that provided entry to the inner offices, and the woman got back to her desk just in time to buzz him through.

  No one on that floor paid attention as he walked down to the chairman’s corner. The desk outside for his executive assistant, Ivy Blake, was empty, so he unlocked the double doors to his office and went in.

  Nothing was the same. His pair of Modigliani ladies no longer graced the inner walls, having been replaced by a triptych of hideous modern art in glaring yellows and reds that would not look out of place at the local Holiday Inn. His engineering degrees and honorary doctorate were gone. There was a three-foot-high Chinese vase in the corner holding a spray of purple-dyed pampas grass. The telephone had been moved from the right-hand side of the desk to the left.

  Well, Callie did try to warn me. Leonard had certainly settled in—like a tick on a dog.

  “Oh, Mr. Praxis!” Ivy said behind him. “No one told me you were coming.”

  He turned to face her, and she rushed up to give him a quick hug. Twenty years of fielding his calls, managing his correspondence, and keeping his schedule—not to mention his secrets—gave her privileges.

  “I probably should have called ahead,” he said. “Where’s Leonard?”

  “He’s out,” she paused. “Entertaining the Millbank delegation.”

  “I’ll jus
t get to work then. Please load the current backlog onto my tablet, along with the most recent emails, and then—” He paused when he saw her bite her lip. “What is it?”

  “Mr. Leonard is keeping the job reports now, sir.”

  “Well, of course. But now that I’m back—”

  “I report to Mr. Leonard now,” she said, clearly torn between loyalties. “They’ve set up a new office for you, down on Thirty-Seven—the ‘Emeritus Suite,’ they call it. And you’ll be working with a new admin, Kay Sheffield—from the pool.”

  “When did all this start?” he asked icily.

  “About a week after your heart attack.”

  “I see. Maybe you’d better show me.”

  Ivy led him back along the row of senior executive offices, through the security doors, past the reception desk—where the young woman nodded gravely at him—and down one elevator button to the floor with the international vice presidents. Ivy took him over to a barren, three-quarter glass cubicle fronting a narrow office in the middle of the back row.

  That office had a single outside window which gave a limited view of gray high-rises on the building’s landward side, rather than his familiar panorama of the Bay Bridge, the Embarcadero, and Treasure Island. It had a desk but no phone, no chair, and no decoration, except for his two Modiglianis hanging side by side on the wall—with no lock on the door to protect them. Maybe the ladies were too obscure, too modern and crude-looking, for anyone to think about stealing them.

  The desk out in front had Kay Sheffield’s name plaque, but there wasn’t any identification on his own door. “Emeritus” was clearly a temporary position—one way or another.

  “What am I supposed to do down here while Leonard plays chairman?”

  “I don’t know, sir. Really. You’ll have to discuss it with him.”

  “When’s he due back in the office? I’ll see him then.”

  “He won’t be back until tomorrow morning.”

  “Then I’ve wasted a day, haven’t I?”

  “It seems so, sir. I am sorry.”

  * * *

  At her first art therapy class, as recommended by her speech therapist and held at the local community center, the instructor gave Antigone Wells a box of colored pencils and chalks, three sheets of heavy vellum paper, and the suggestion that she “express your feelings, perceptions, and imagination … whatever comes to mind, from wherever inside you.”