Point of Balance

by J. G. Jurado

  Laughter filled the room, the energy shared by accomplices who know they have arrived and are wallowing in it.

  “Our brain has only one goal: survival at all costs. And to get there it makes up for all the data it lacks with wishful thinking. Like the existence of an afterlife. For our brain, it is more important to tell a consistent story than a true one. Anybody ever have a tiff with the girlfriend?”

  More laughter.

  “Then you know what I mean. Questions?” he said with a wide sweeping gesture.

  “You mean to say heaven is no more than a defense mechanism for the brain?” a guy spoke up, quite put out.

  “The obviousness of that question will earn you several more hours on call.”

  The residents clammed up and bowed their heads. I had listened enraptured to the whole sermon, which struck me as being as provocative as it was offensive. I couldn’t help but raise my hand.

  “If we are merely machines that allow our genes to copy themselves, if our allergies are no more than chemical reactions, and if life was not created for any purpose, then why go on living?”

  “Well, I see we have a novice with more than half a brain. What’s your name?”

  “Evans,” I replied, proud of myself. I didn’t know then that he asked my name not to distinguish me but to mark me. He wasn’t overly fond of thinkers. All he wanted was obedient, servile ­cohorts.

  “Many find these assertions distasteful. It upsets them if you prod them out of their cocoon of willful ignorance. I think that attitude is wholly mistaken. Only when you have no bounds can you live to the full.”

  “But then existence is punishment.”

  “Think of Sisyphus, the mortal condemned by the Greek gods to roll a huge boulder uphill. As soon as he got to the top, the boulder rolled back down again. And so on, forever. But as Camus would say, I can only imagine Sisyphus to be happy. Because within the bounds of his punishment, there were no gods.”

  Murmurs of approval sounded behind me. The way we let Hockstetter’s dime-store nihilism dupe us in those early days! We were still wet behind the ears and hadn’t read widely or really pondered life. For him it all came down to physicality, but I tell you, there is more to be learned about the human condition in twenty minutes in the emergency room than in twenty months’ residency in neurosurgery with Dr. Hockstetter.

  “Sadly, within the bounds of your punishment,” he went on, and pointed at us, “there is a God, and that’s me.”

  “My dear David,” Hockstetter trilled from my office door. “How’s tricks?”

  “Good afternoon, doctor,” I replied formally, and didn’t bother to answer his question. First, because I am very choosy over who I am on first-name terms with, and second because he didn’t give a rat’s ass. I even found it unpleasant to say his name. Hockstetter. Sounded like somebody clearing his throat.

  I was not surprised to see him there. As soon as they told me somebody had edged me out, I knew he was behind it.

  He came over to my desk. We didn’t shake hands, nor did I get up to welcome him.

  “Great to catch up after all these years. I’m thrilled to see you’ve settled into your new, um, position,” he said, and looked around. “Very commodious. You guys obviously live large. Nice work if you can get it.”

  Meaning: your office is bigger than mine because yours is an inferior, undemanding hospital. I wasn’t about to let such a heavy-handed opening unsettle me.

  “Well, it’s to you I owe the great good fortune of being here. Don’t think I don’t appreciate it.”

  “My dear ex-novice, the sages say rancor is hatred that stretches into eternity. It’s an insane way to live. Above all when we bear in mind it was your mistakes with Mrs. Desmond that got you fired.”

  I smiled, slowly and sadly. Oftentimes I had gone over in my head how I could get him back for what he’d done to me. He and I alone, no consequences. And now that I could, I didn’t feel like it, didn’t have the energy.

  “You know perfectly well what happened to Mrs. Desmond, Dr. Hockstetter. You screwed up, in front of six others. They were all too intimidated to second-guess you.”

  It had been a lengthy operation on a middle-aged woman with a multiple myeloma on her spine. I had been on the job eight months, and by then the differences between Hockstetter and me were irreconcilable. It wasn’t merely that we saw surgery, medicine and even life from diametrically opposed standpoints, but that we simply couldn’t stand the sight of each other. Any resident in any field must build character by taking the knocks that come with the job, even humiliation doled out by superiors. But there are limits.

  He had tried to throw me off the program three times, but his golden opportunity didn’t come knocking until Mrs. Desmond’s op. It was I who prepared the area for surgery and exposed the spine, ready to remove the tumor. It was he who overdid it with an inaccurate incision—most unlike him, it must be said—which left the patient hemiplegic. Guess who Hockstetter blamed, amid my colleagues’ thunderous silence?

  I wanted the whole business to go to court, to force those who were there to tell all, but that asshole Hockstetter persuaded Mrs. Desmond not to sue, because she would destroy an inexperienced young man’s career. The poor woman was so grateful her life had been saved that she didn’t mind spending the rest of it in a wheelchair. The disciplinary board wasn’t so lenient. It wouldn’t do to besmirch their star surgeon’s fame, so they had my ass in a sling.

  Luckily, the former St. Clement’s manager was familiar with Hockstetter’s wiles and let me finish my residency there. What was set to be a few months’ trial became a long-term contract. I didn’t come off too badly, all told. Hockstetter was a great surgeon, 99 percent of the time, but when he messed up, he did so in a big way, so it suited him to have throwaway residents at hand. A bunch of others who’d worked with that skunk had been fall guys for his ham-­fistedness, but they hadn’t landed on their feet. One of my classmates gave up medicine after Hockstetter slapped her with a malpractice suit. She now runs a vacuum cleaner store in a mall on the outskirts of Augusta.

  “Poor David. Are you still ridiculously in denial?”

  “Someday, one of those kids you use for cannon fodder won’t take the fall. You can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”

  Hockstetter smiled, but it wasn’t one of those “Look what your dog’s doing on my lawn” pouts he used to pull years before. He had now perfected the look and turned it into a poster-boy smile.

  “I’m afraid this isn’t the occasion for chitchat, my dear ex-novice. I’ve come out of professional courtesy to take on the transfer of a certain patient’s records.”

  “You’ve come to rub my nose in it, doctor. Be honest for once. It won’t kill you. Probably.”

  His smile wobbled slightly. Then he leaned his head back to pretend I’d offended him.

  “David, I’ve come to you in good faith, instead of asking you to FedEx me the case history. I would like to smooth things over. Maybe I wasn’t the greatest boss in the world, but you’ve had time to lick your wounds, haven’t you?”

  I would have liked to hit him with some witty repartee along the lines of “Good thing you didn’t treat them,” or “Tell Mrs. Desmond that,” but at that moment I didn’t have the luxury of time to think up one-liners. So I confined myself to slapping the Patient’s file down, with the flash drive on top, and crossed my arms. I was itching to ask him how he’d talked the First Lady into switching surgeons but didn’t dare show unseemly interest. Nevertheless I needed to know. What was White’s plan really? And where did I fit into it all? If he truly wanted Hockstetter to operate on the president, why take Julia? Was White blackmailing him, too? If so, it certainly didn’t look that way.

  “Here you go. Just tell me one thing. Will you operate at Bethesda?” I finally dared to ask.

  Hockstetter shrugged while he leafed through th
e Patient’s case history.

  “I would have to be a very capricious or very insecure doctor not to accept the special conditions attached to this kind of case. By the way, what kind of approach were you thinking of for the Broca’s area?”

  His gall flabbergasted me.

  “You wouldn’t seriously be asking for my opinion, would you, Hockstetter?”

  “No, not really.”

  He went to the door, but when he had his hand on the knob, he turned to face me.

  “You know something, David? You’re right about one thing. I really did come to rub your nose in it. As soon as they knew I was willing to operate, they kicked your ass out. Who would want a ­second-rate surgeon when they could have the head of Neuro at Johns Hopkins?” he said, lifting up the folder and waving it dismissively. “Again, it merely goes to show you have nothing I can’t whisk away.”

  He waltzed off, leaving the door open.

  I sat and stared at the cell, which taunted me from the table.

  “Well, White. What now?”

  The answer wasn’t long in coming.

  WE NEED TO TALK.

  MARBLESTONE 11 P.M.

  Kate

  The long wait was excruciating.

  Kate marked time with her back against the shed wall and her gun aimed at the door, and ran over events, again and again, wondering whether she had been wrong to get caught in a trap like that. Waiting there troubled her all the more. To go uphill to the street without knowing whether anybody else was lying in wait would be madness. She thought of answering David’s text but didn’t want to take her eye off the ball for a second.

  With no warning, there was a rasping noise, a smoker’s cough. Then a voice could be heard on the other side of the door, speaking in English this time. Kate stuck her ear to the shed wall and could make out the housebreaker’s every word.

  “No, couldn’t call before. No, cell not work. Yes, understand. Company problem. I tell you, phone is crap.”

  Silence.

  “I tell you we look all over. Dejan and my brother look in neighborhood, no suspicious car, van, nothing.”

  Silence.

  “Yes, yes, understand. Search house all over again. But nobody here. I know because I set blind trap, hair stuck to outside door. Hair fall if door open, but hair still there. See?”

  More silence.

  “Yes, remember Istanbul. No my fault.”

  Silence again, longer this time.

  “Your money,” the intruder said in a very tense voice.

  They’ll turn the place over again. If they see the open padlock, in they come. I can shoot down the first one, but the others won’t be so stupid. They’ll fire through the shed walls, like shooting fish in a barrel. This flimsy plastic wouldn’t stop a gnat.

  But Kate could do nothing except wait, with her finger on the trigger.

  Outside, the drizzle became an all-out downpour. The raindrops crashed onto the shed roof like ball bearings falling into a beach bucket. Kate thought she heard a car start up a couple of times but couldn’t be sure.

  Nobody entered the shed and no more sounds could be heard in the yard. Time drifted away in the choking darkness, which made her think of Julia and the hell she must be suffering. She waited for two seemingly eternal hours, feeling useless and powerless. She realized that all her training, all the bravado she showed, her stalwart stance—all that depended on how others saw her. She was Secret Service Special Agent Robson. Telling suspects that put the fear of God in them, not solely because she was a strong woman with a gun but because she was the face of the beast. To touch her was like pulling on Superman’s cape or spitting into the wind. Nobody messes with the Secret Service.

  Even so, acting under cover and out of fear, she was no more than the victim’s frightened relative. She began to wonder whether going along with David wasn’t crazy.

  Finally, she decided the trespassers could not possibly still be in the house. She stood up, her muscles cramped after hours spent on her haunches. She stretched her arms and legs several times before she stepped out. She had to loosen up if she was to hit the street as quickly as possible.

  The extent of her failure overwhelmed her. Her plan had been a train wreck. She was about to leave without a thorough search of the house, but to turn on the jammer again and reenter the place was a no-no. That trick wouldn’t work twice; it would arouse too much suspicion.

  She picked up the gadget and was about to go through the door when an idea came to her and she turned around. The Evanses’ recycling bin was in the shed, where they separated aluminum, plastic and paper. The recycling truck came to Silver Spring once a week.

  Maybe they’ve overlooked it. Come on, please. We simply need a little stroke of luck . . .

  She opened the top and took out the blue bag from the paper section. It was featherweight.

  Not very promising, but better than nothing.

  She opened the door, replaced the padlock and ran back to her car under the rain, wondering whether something in that handful of wastepaper would lead to her kidnapped niece.

  Marblestone Diner, Silver Spring

  Mr. White watched David Evans enter the diner. What he saw gave him a pleasurable sensation of victory. The person only yards away from him was a completely changed man from the one he had confronted the day before. His attitude was transformed; his eyes no longer burned with yesterday’s ardor and fury.

  David was capable of staying calm in the midst of chaos but ducked confrontations. He never put up a fight if he could help it but hid behind his sense of humor and intellectual superiority. These were obstacles White had steamrollered over in the last few hours.

  Human beings are naturally conditioned to help the young of their species because they are born weak, and they feel responsible for offsetting that weakness. That’s why babies’ crying is so unbearable, especially in enclosed spaces such as airplanes.

  David’s bond with his daughter had fed his need to collaborate, but intense pressure was still required to break his professional conditioning.

  Nevertheless, White still had his doubts. David’s reactions were sometimes unexpected. He wondered whether he wasn’t mistaken and there were more people like Dr. Evans out there. Men who cast doubt on his current personality types. Maybe together they could make up a new category. The very idea gave him a shiver of anticipation but irritated him at the same time. He didn’t like to get things wrong.

  He had to think clearly. The main thing now was to get back in control of his tool. White hadn’t expected the Hockstetter business, and when he heard Dr. Wong tell David he wouldn’t operate, he felt momentarily hemmed in. But on reflection he reckoned that setback could be a good way to strengthen his hold over David. He needed only to make him think it was all part of his plan. With the right lies, the subject’s illusion that White was all-powerful would remain unaltered. He had to pull the right levers in his brain.

  Bring him back to the tipping point.

  It was almost a decade since White had set up his lucrative business. In the first few months he had made a fairly startling discovery: that public knowledge, news and headlines, were not winnowed into truth and lies. Just palatable lies.

  At bottom, it made sense. Nobody wants the truth, because it is too knotty and unpleasant. Humans accept as true the most outrageous falsehoods, simply because they came gift-wrapped. Sunflowers don’t follow the sun, the Great Wall of China cannot be seen from space, and neither do we use only 10 percent of our brain.

  The same could be said for the economic crisis, the Occupy Wall Street movement, Benedict XVI’s resignation or the Osama bin Laden hit. The truth behind the official façade was deeply inconvenient. White himself had had a hand in some of those deeds, had moved pieces in the dark that had changed the world stage. Often he’d been hired by the same man who had put out the current contract, a man h
e’d never met but who had done much to enlighten him. Somebody whose immense power was based on other people’s trust, and to whom he owed some of his most worthy creations. That said, never before had White gone after a piece as big and valuable as the one he would take at nine on Friday morning.

  White pondered whether the inherent human need to take the part for the whole could work in his favor at that moment. The tool would be more than willing to be put in harm’s way if he thought it was part of the plan from the outset.

  He would have to play it by ear it for the next few hours until he could sort things out. To see the ante raised filled him with an emotion he hadn’t felt before. Total planning made for more certainty but took the fun out of his projects. Using David Evans to assassinate the president had been a risky choice, but doubtless much more stimulating than the other four he had weighed up.

  He had to put the surgeon right back at the point of balance. The point that never moves, no matter how the arms swing.

  21

  “A Hawaiian Punch, please. Lemon Berry Squeeze. And for you, doctor?”

  “Black coffee, Juanita. Double, please.”

  The waitress smiled and went for the drinks.

  “I picked this diner for our meetings because they have Hawaiian Punch,” White said. “It’s not easy to find outside of supermarkets. Nowadays it’s all Coke or Pepsi. If only people knew what they pay for each time they drink down one of those brews.”

  “You wouldn’t be turning all conspiranoid on me, now, would you?”

  White looked at me, amused.

  “Not at all. Conspiracies don’t exist.”

  Juanita’s arrival with the tray took the sting out of how ridiculous he had just made me feel.

  “Human beings are very simple,” White went on, touching his thumb and forefinger to make a circle. “Take the waitress, Dave. She dreams of being Mariah Carey, she longs to meet Simon Cowell. When she gets home she curses her swollen ankles.”