by Lyle Howard
The elderly couple locked hands, and it was Barbara Walker that was the first to speak. “What sort of nerve damage, Doctor? Is our grandson going to be paralyzed or something?”
Soto turned the model so that the lateral, or side, of the head was now visible. “What the tests tell us is that Matthew has sustained sensory damage…here.”
“Sensory damage?” David Walker asked.
With his makeshift pointer, Soto traced a gaggle of nerves that ran from the base of the skull and spread to both ears. “I can think of no way of saying this tactfully, so I’m just going to come out and say it. We believe that your grandson has lost the ability to hear.”
David Walker could feel his wife wilting in the chair next to him.
“As of now,” Soto continued, “we’re not sure of any other effects the blow to the head has caused. There is significant swelling that we expect to subside over the next few days. This is normal. But your grandson has suffered a sensory-neural loss, which simply means that there was damage to the sensors, or nerve fibers, which connect the inner ear to the hearing center in the brain. Since these nerve fibers are incredibly delicate and do not regenerate or repair themselves like other parts of the body, I’m afraid the extent of the damage is permanent.”
“What about...another operation when the swelling goes down?” Barbara Walker stammered.
The Doctor shook his head regretfully. “I only wish we had that option, Mrs. Walker. Unfortunately, at the present time, surgery cannot correct the hearing loss. There would normally be options like a hearing aid or even a cochlear implant to regain some hearing loss, but in this case, the nerve damage is far too severe.”
The office became as silent as a mausoleum, with both grandparents suddenly turning introspective, and the doctor sitting across from them, wondering how these two elderly people would care for a young child with whom they could no longer communicate normally. Soto waited patiently for the deluge of questions he would typically expect, but to his surprise, there were none. Perhaps they just needed some time alone. He hesitated as he got up to leave. “If you have any questions later, or need any advice,” he said, picking one of his business cards out of the holder on the desk and sliding it in the Walkers’ direction, “this is where you can reach me. Please don’t hesitate; I’m only a phone call away, and I know specialists that might be able to help you. Again,” he added, with a caring hand on each of their shoulders, “I’m very sorry for your loss, but your grandson needs you now more than ever. Please feel free to use my office for as long as you need.”
“God bless you, Doctor,” David Walker said, without looking up. “We’ll manage just fine.”
Soto paused in the doorway and turned back to say something, but caught himself. As he mournfully observed the old couple quietly hugging each other and rocking back and forth to comfort one another, he knew that their lives would never be the same again.
2
Dodge Island, Port of Miami
The headquarters of Mason Cruise Lines sat on a small man-made promontory at the eastern edge of Dodge Island, far from the bustling activity on the small chain of islands that had long ago become the Port of Miami. The eight-story triangular glass building pointed eastward toward the horizon, greeting the sunrise each morning. While huge cranes and noisy derricks loaded and unloaded container ships from every corner of the earth, passenger terminals busily filled and emptied their human cargo to and from some of the grandest ocean liners to ever cruise the world’s mighty oceans.
The Port of Miami was rated as the largest passenger seaport in the world, so it was only fitting that the Mason Corporation would set up their headquarters there, though there were also additional offices in Jacksonville that were becoming a greater focus of the company as it expanded its fleet.
A self-made billionaire, Peter Mason came from a sketchy background, to say the least. His father was one of the infamous Cocaine Cowboys who, in the nineteen-seventies, made millions smuggling the white powder from Columbia into the United States through Everglades City, a small fishing village on the southern tip of the Florida Peninsula. His father had been caught and jailed like so many others, but not before stashing most of his illegal windfall in an offshore account in the Cayman Islands. His father was one of the few men who actually profited from those years of hell-raising and living with impunity. The old man eventually died in a Federal prison in upstate Florida in nineteen eighty-two, but not without leaving a safety deposit key for his son to receive on his eighteenth birthday.
Seemingly overnight, Peter Mason went from being a Marine Architecture student on a partial-tuition baseball scholarship at the University of North Florida to a cruise line magnate. He did it by staying under the radar just like his father had. In the early nineties, he purchased and renovated three retired cruise ships and operated them for overnight gambling junkets to the Bahamas. With the Bahamian Islands the shortest distance from Miami to legal gambling, business was lucrative. It was less than ten years before he was able to have the Norwegians build his first brand new ship, the Tempest. Now he owned a fleet of five hundred-ton ships, sailing out of Miami and ports in Europe, but that would never be enough for him. His aspirations were much higher. He wanted to expand. He wanted to create something newer, something different, something better. He wanted to combine both of his life’s passions—and now he was about to.
There were only two offices on the eighth floor of the MCL building. The larger, triangular room was the conference room, massive in size and lit brilliantly by the morning sun. The other office, while still large by any standard, was Peter Mason’s private office. Mason meticulously signed the contract on his desk, closed the manila folder, and took a deep breath. The day he had been waiting for had finally arrived, and he wasn’t going to let this opportunity slip through his fingers again. He stood up and walked over to the full-length mirror on the western wall. He stood an even six feet tall, and although there was nothing exceptional about his looks, he’d managed to keep up his physique by working out daily and watching his caloric intake. He was a role model for his employee, never afraid to help load a piece of luggage while touring the dock or jump into a forklift to move a pallet of perishables aboard one of his ships. He was well-liked by his workers and staff, but more importantly, he was respected.
He stood straight in the mirror and pressed down the lapels on his gray jacket. He jiggled the knot in his maroon tie and ran both hands through his salt and pepper hair. He was ready…
The mood in the conference room was subdued as he entered the meeting. He wasn’t expecting a twenty-one gun salute, but the tension in the room seemed palpable. Each of the sixteen seats at the oblong mahogany table was filled by his executive board. From lawyers to engineers, financial professionals to human resource specialists, each had their own area of expertise. Neither sex nor culture nor ethnicity mattered to Mason, as long as the best person for the job was sitting in one of those chairs.
Along each of the glass walls, which merged into a point at the far end of the massive room, stood a large pedestal—each containing a scale model of Mason’s vision of the future. Each podium was set far enough away from the wall that you could walk around the model to admire the attention to detail. On the northern wall, a model of the Hydra sat under a glass box lit by small spotlights on each side. Nearly ten feet in length, the model pointed east, out toward the sea. She was a fantastic ship, still under construction, but almost complete. She was like no other ship to cruise the oceans. She was a hydrofoil about half the size of an average cruise ship. While other cruise lines were going larger, Mason was thinking smarter. His logic seemed worth the gamble. A faster, more luxurious vessel for those elite passengers who enjoyed being on the ocean, but didn’t want to be there eternally; for those who enjoyed the first class amenities that a cruise ship offered, but for much less time. He was going to cater to those people who wanted to reach their destinations in
a reasonable time, without the cramped confines and hassles of present-day air travel.
A hydrofoil is, by definition, a ship that doesn’t travel in the water insomuch as it moves above the water. Nothing of this magnitude had ever been attempted, and many of the naysayers had warned him that the size and tonnage of the ship alone made the physics impossible…but they were wrong.
The Hydra was being built with a catamaran—a dual style hull. Two hulls, each buoyed by seven independent double-skinned inflated tubes that, once inflated upon departure, lifted the ship ten feet out of the water. The importance of this design was a priority for Mason. He’d had an entire team of designers work out the worst scenarios should one of these tubes rupture while the ship was at full speed. The initial trials met with disaster, with the models pin-wheeling and flipping in the experimental test tank. It took almost two years to develop the technology for the double-skinned flotation tubes. Now, if a tube should rupture, it would be instantaneously ejected, and the inner tube would inflate in its place. Long nights and ingenious thinking had finally developed a system that worked.
The next hurdle in the development of the Hydra was how to lift a sixty-ton ship ten feet out of the water. This innovation took the design team years of sleepless nights. The resulting amalgam of concepts from his team culminated in what the staff had, for lack of a better name, called the fanbines. Two rows of three turbine driven fans, each twenty-five feet across, pumped out the equivalent of a category five hurricane in a downward force that literally boiled the water surrounding the ship and lifted it to the required height. Behind the ship, two more fanbines provided momentum and steering. While the average modern cruise ship could sail at a top speed of around twenty-five knots, the Hydra would do seventy-five without breaking a sweat.
Another advantage the Hydra would have over the competition was comfort and luxury. An ordinary cruise liner might hold three thousand passengers, and some of the larger ones even more. The Hydra was limited to one thousand passengers and crew, maximum. This enabled Mason to focus on relaxation, service, and safety. The mere fact that it traveled over ten-foot seas instead of plowing through it would relieve motion sickness by an estimated ninety percent—a factor that, in a recent survey, was the number one reason people hesitated to sail.
As he circled the model, the only thing missing was a last minute addition. He wanted a clear, enclosed glass walkway on both sides of the ship. Unlike a regular cruise ship, where passengers were able to stroll leisurely around the deck, the Hydra would be traveling so fast that it would turn a simple walk into a life-threatening event. Hence the enclosed walkways, where a person would be shielded from the wind, but could literally walk above the water.
As impressive as the replica of the Hydra was, it wasn’t his favorite model in the room. His staff turned their heads in unison as he walked around the head of the table silently to gaze at his most beloved achievement: a miniature representation of The Mason Cruise Lines Ballpark.
This was his greatest dream. There was only one thing that transcended his love of the ocean, and that was his love of America’s greatest pastime. During Major League Baseball’s last expansion, he lost out to a guy that ran a garbage collection and videotape rental empire. That was a tough pill to swallow. If that wasn’t bad enough, Mason watched as the Florida Marlins grew in popularity in his own backyard and won not one but two World Series titles. While he shared the city’s pride in the team’s success, this was unacceptable to him. Now he would be getting the chance to actually own a major league team. His plan to purchase one of the least successful current franchises was on track. He would build the new ballpark in Jacksonville. Obviously, Jacksonville wasn’t his first choice to locate the new team, but the city had already proven it could provide a strong fan base with the National Football League’s Jaguars.
Jacksonville also boasted Jaxport, one of the newest and busiest seaports in the United States. While he had no intention of moving his corporate headquarters to Northeastern Florida, Jacksonville being the largest city in the state in population and by area would prove a first-class home port for the Hydra.
Mason looked up from behind the model of the domed stadium to see his entire staff staring at him.
“Is there something in my teeth?” He chuckled.
It was only then that he acknowledged the second empty chair. “Where’s Frank Walker?”
His staff looked at each other uncomfortably.
“Why isn’t Walker here? The deadline for the stadium vote is today!”
David Jannick, the Vice-President of Marketing, pushed himself back from the table and stood up. With his fingertips pressed downward on the table, he was barely able to utter the words. “Frank Walker is dead, Peter.”
Mason looked around the room incredulously and shook his head. “What do you mean he’s dead? How…when?”
Jannick took a deep breath to regain his composure. He was very close friends with Frank Walker. Their kids even attended the same private school in Orlando. “Don’t you listen to the news, Peter?” He asked with his eyes welling up.
“Not today I haven’t. What happened? Why didn’t someone notify me before this?
Jannick rubbed his forehead. He couldn’t speak anymore.
Jane Rutledge, the Head of Human Resources, spoke up without leaving her chair. She was relatively new to the firm, but Frank Walker was a stand-up guy and had quickly befriended her and made her feel welcome. He didn’t have an enemy in the world as far as she knew. “It was a home invasion.”
“The house was being robbed?” Mason asked. “I’ve been to their house. The security system is state of the art. How is that even possible?”
Jannick sat back down and bowed his head. “His wife was killed too…lying beside him as they slept.”
Peter Mason strolled to the head of the table and took his seat. For more than a minute he stared to his left at the empty chair. “Weren’t they supposed to be celebrating his birthday this weekend?”
“This world has gone insane,” Jannick muttered under his breath. “Frank was one of the good ones. He’d give you the shirt off his back.”
Peter Mason drummed his fingers on the table. “Frank Walker was an invaluable asset for the Mason Cruise Line organization. We have to do everything necessary to make sure that his family is taken care of. He has children, doesn’t he?”
Jane Rutledge spoke up. “They have a son. He was beaten and left for dead too. They say he is in critical condition, but he’ll probably survive.”
Peter Mason stared across the table at her. “Their son was home too? Didn’t you say that he attended school with your daughter in Orlando, David?”
Jannick nodded. “He had come in for the birthday party. Frank didn’t know. It was supposed to be a surprise. The poor kid was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Peter Mason put his hands together as if in prayer. “This is horrible, two lives gone, one young child hanging on by a thread. David,” he said, pointing across the table at Jannick. “You take the lead on this. Anything the family needs—medically, financially—you make it happen.”
Jannick nodded. “Under the circumstances, I think we should postpone this meeting. I think I can speak for all of us when I say we need to each take the time to grieve in our own way and pay respects to the family. I believe Frank’s parents have come to town to look after Matthew.”
Mason let out a heavy sigh but then shook his head. “I don’t mean to sound disrespectful or callous, but this vote needs to happen, and it needs to happen today—now. I too plan on paying my personal respects to the family, but this company is greater than any individual board member. We’ve been discussing the benefits and the drawbacks to the ballpark proposal ad nauseam. The City of Jacksonville is expecting an answer from me, so whether you feel I’m morbid, discourteous, or any other adjective you want to describe me with, this vote must be taken.�
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The fifteen executives at the table exchanged skeptical glances, hoping one would speak up. Ronald Kim, the Vice-President of Engineering and Development, took it upon himself to break the silence. Disrespect for the dead was unheard of in his culture. “How are we supposed to vote without the entire board present?” He asked. “Doesn’t every department need to be represented?”
“We have a quorum,” Mason snapped back. “Let’s just do this, people. The sooner we vote, the sooner we can adjourn and pay our respects to the family.”
Kim shook his head in disgust. Not only would they be demeaning Frank Walker’s significance, but everyone sitting at this table knew that he would have cast the deciding vote against the project. More than once, he had argued against the expenditure of capital funds for something so entirely out of the realm of the company’s comfort zone. He had made it crystal clear that he thought this enterprise would be a huge risk, considering it could take ten years or more to come to fruition. There were so many hurdles to overcome: researching a suitable location, zoning, finding an existing franchise willing to relocate, city support, not to mention the actual cost of building a brand new stadium. This wouldn’t happen overnight.
Gerald Banks, the corporation’s Chief Financial Officer, who always sat on Mason’s immediate right, spoke up. “So I guess now you’re the deciding vote, Peter.”
“Let’s see a show of hands then.” Mason requested. He tried his best to look melancholy as he counted the raised hands. He saved his own hand for last. “Then it’s official. The new Mason Cruise Line Ballpark project in the City of Jacksonville is a go.”
Man’s mind, stretched to a new idea, never goes back to its original dimensions.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
