Fallen Masters (6 page)

“It’s right there, right on the curb, not ten feet away. And you don’t see it? It’s right—” POTUS paused in midsentence. “It’s gone. Where did it go?”

Win smiled. “Darling, don’t let anyone else know you are seeing things. Otherwise, I fear they might start questioning your sanity.”

A moment later the car turned off East Market onto Convention Way. There were several people being held behind a rope line by police officers. Here, too, were three signs.

WE LOVE YOU, MR. PRESIDENT

THANK YOU FOR COMING TO SAN ANTONIO

WELCOME, MR. PRESIDENT!

“Do you see those signs?” POTUS asked.

“Yes.”

“Why do you see them? Because these are ‘good’ signs?”

“No, I see the signs because they are there.”

“Uh-huh,” POTUS said.

“Mr. President, there is a side entrance where we can take Mrs. Jackson and Marcus Jr., so they’ll be only about a hundred feet from their box,” Freddy said. “Tim and Mick will meet them there.” Tim and Mick were two other members of the Secret Service detail.

“Good. Can you take me there as well?” POTUS joked.

“I’m afraid not, sir. As you can see, there is an honor guard waiting for you,” Freddy said. “You and I will be getting out here.”

POTUS looked through the window and saw an honor guard of twelve; six on either side. The honor guard of ten men and two women was made up of veterans wearing the uniforms that represented “their” war, including every war from World War II (an old veteran, standing tall and proud in his ribbon-bedecked olive drab Ike jacket) to Afghanistan.

A Korean War vet in his “pinks and greens” uniform, with the silver leaves of a lieutenant colonel on his epaulets, called out as POTUS approached. “Present arms!” His voice was still strong and commanding.

As one, the honor guard brought their highly polished M1 rifles to the present arms position, holding them trigger guard facing out, with the stacking swivel even with their eyes. As a soldier himself, POTUS was impressed with the precision of this mismatched group of veterans. He saluted as he started through the corridor.

Then time turned once more on its eternal wheel.…

CHAPTER

11

Atlanta

“Are you sure he’s a doctor? Or is he an actor sent here to portray a doctor?” one of the new nurses asked Rae Loona, the head nurse at St. Agnes Hospital. She was talking about Dr. Tyler Michaels. “He’s a dreamboat!”

It was funny that Dr. Michaels would be compared to television doctors, because his future was charted for him when, as a boy, he became entranced with the TV show
M*A*S*H,
which in its day was even more popular than
Grey’s Anatomy
. Others watched the show for the black humor, or the political satire, or even because of its military theme.

But young Tyler had been intrigued with the life-and-death decisions Hawkeye, Trapper, B.J., and Colonel Potter, his old-time TV heroes, had to make every episode. He knew that someday he was going to have to make those same decisions—not in the army, he had no intention of joining the army or any other branch of military service. He would be making those life-and-death decisions in a civilian hospital.

Tyler had attended Vanderbilt University for undergrad and medical school. “You are as good a student as I have ever encountered,” Dr. George Gibson, one of his professors told him, shortly before he graduated. “But you are too full of yourself.”

“I don’t consider confidence as being tantamount to conceit,” Tyler said. “And don’t you think that a doctor, especially a surgeon, who is about to cut into a person, should have confidence in what he is doing?”

“Find some way to tone it down, Mr. Michaels,” Dr. Gibson said. “Confidence in the operating room is one thing. Conceit in life is something altogether different.”

Tyler was forty-four years old, but a healthful diet, a workout regimen, and—he would be the first to admit—being born with good genes caused many of the nurses, as well as some of his patients to have, as one young woman put it during a break, “thoughts that were not pure.”

The other nurses had laughed because she said aloud what many of them kept to themselves.

Dr. Tyler Michaels drove a mint-condition 1967 Corvette. It was black, and the scooped side panels were red. The vanity plate read
CUT
. He had thought of having it say
HEALER
, but that was already taken.

One could perhaps forgive Tyler for having a God complex. He seemed to have it all: He was living his dream, acknowledged without question as the best surgeon in St. Agnes Hospital, many said the best in all of Atlanta. And the ones making such claims were other doctors and nurses, people who could validate their claims.

Tyler did not use the word
surgery
when he spoke to his patients. Instead he preferred to term his procedures “positive invasive techniques.”

Some might even consider it ironic that
Tyler
had a “God complex” because he was an atheist. Both his parents were atheists: his mother, who was a lawyer working for an appellate judge, and his father, who was a physicist. They taught Tyler to set unsubstantiated belief aside, to adopt what they called the “scientific approach” to existence.

“No creaky, old bearded man sitting on a throne in the clouds gave me anything,” Tyler liked to say. “Everything I have ever earned is by the sweat of my brow and the power of my intellect.”

“What makes you think that those of us who believe in God picture him as some bearded old man sitting on a throne in the clouds?” Karen asked.

Karen, Tyler’s wife of seven years, who was eight months pregnant with their first child, had an unwavering faith, and she desperately wanted Tyler to find a faith—any faith. It didn’t have to be Mormon like hers; she just wanted to know that her child would be raised by two parents of faith.

Karen Michaels felt that Tyler’s parents had done him an injustice by raising him as a nonbeliever. She made him promise that he wouldn’t stop her from giving their child both: a love of science and a love of God.

“I won’t stop you from trying to indoctrinate him in your faith,” Tyler said. “But when I think he is old enough to understand, I intend to inculcate him in the beauty of science. And he will learn, quickly, that science and God are incompatible concepts.”

“Not according to Emanuel Swedenborg,” Karen said, surprising Tyler. She was always tuned into forward thinking and the latest in New Age and metaphysical thinking. It drove him nuts, of course.

“Who is he? Some TV evangelist?” Tyler bowed his head, closed his eyes, and extended his arm, palm out. Then, assuming the singsong voice of an evangelist preacher, he said, “Send me one hundred dollars-uh, and I will send you a genuine prayer cloth-uh, that has a picture of Jesus Christ with eyes that glow in the dark-uh!”

“Stop it,” Karen said. “That’s sacrilegious. Even though I know you’re kidding—aren’t you?” She went on, seriously: “Emanuel Swedenborg was a cool seventeenth-century scientist and inventor, and one of the most important persons in Swedish history. Geez, I can’t believe you don’t know this. His early life was devoted to science—and he made a ton of discoveries—but as he got older, he focused on the spiritual aspects of life, where he experienced dreams and visions.”

“Dreams and visions? Get real. He might have been a scientist early in his life, but if you ask me, he turned into a kook—or a drug addict,” Tyler scoffed.

“Just promise me that you won’t try to poison our son’s mind against religion, that you will let him grow old enough to make up his own mind,” Karen said.

Tyler wanted to tell her that she would be doing exactly what she was asking him not to do, but he knew how important her faith was to her, so he gave in to her entreaty.

Tyler was a true workaholic who spent more time at the hospital than he did at home. Karen loved him very much, and learned to accept his commitment to work by focusing on the coming baby, and also by writing and illustrating what she hoped would be the first of many children’s books. She was an experienced editor herself, having edited both adult and children’s books, and now she was going to move over to the other side of the desk in hopes of being an author. She had also attended three or four writers’ conferences where she took classes on writing and, more importantly, was able to convene with many writers who were successfully published, as well as editorial colleagues in the business.

She was writing her first book for their unborn son, Jeremy Tyler Michaels, and planned to have it finished and ready for submission on the very day she and Tyler brought their baby home together.

Karen had a rare talent for planning—and for following through with her plans.

“We will bring him home together, won’t we?” she asked Tyler. “Even if you are on call, you will take enough time off to bring our baby home.”

It was Christmas Eve, and Tyler and Karen were curled up on the leather couch in front of the fireplace, listening to a CD of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing
“Lux Aurumque.”
Tyler might be an atheist, but he did have an appreciation of beautiful music.

“We will bring him home together,” Tyler promised.

Karen smiled at him. “You are making that promise on Christmas Eve,” she said. “And any promise made on Christmas Eve can’t be broken.”

“You mean like a ‘spitting in the palm of your hand’ promise can’t be broken?” Tyler teased.

“If that’s what it takes,” Karen said.

Tyler made the motion of spitting his hand; then he rubbed it on her protruding belly. “Here,” he said. “I’m making the promise to both of you.”

Karen laughed, then lifted his hand from her stomach and kissed it. “It isn’t just bringing him home, you know,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Tyler, I so much want you to be a part of the baby’s life. Please, try to be more present after he is born—if not for me—then for him.”

“I’m well ahead of you, my love,” Tyler said.

“What do you mean?”

“The baby is due the first week of January. I have already told the hospital that I intend to take a four-day holiday over the New Year’s weekend. No pager, no patients, no calls, no surgeries.”

Karen’s face lit up. “Oh, Tyler, do you promise?” she asked.

“I promise.”

With the baby scheduled to be born in the first week of January, Karen was well aware that the New Year would bring all sorts of life changes. It was, she knew, going to be a new transition for both her and Tyler. How would Tyler handle it? Would he realize that he had new responsibilities, and that the child’s very future would be shaped by Tyler’s actions? She could only hope and pray that Tyler would rise to the occasion and become as incredible a father as he was a surgeon.

CHAPTER

12

Being on staff rather than a visiting physician had one perk that Tyler especially appreciated: He had a marked parking spot, and though he was senior enough to have taken one of the spots nearest the physician’s entrance to the hospital, he chose one over in the corner instead. On one side was the brick wall of the hospital building, and on the other side was the utility building that housed the air-conditioning unit. That way there was very little opportunity for someone to misjudge their parking place and damage his car. Also, it kept his car out of sight. The Corvette was worth, conservatively, sixty thousand dollars. It would be quite a tempting target for an automobile thief.

Tyler parked in his spot, then completing his parking ritual, fitted it with the canvas car cover that he kept in the trunk. With the car covered, and out of harm’s way, he entered the hospital by the physicians’ entrance. Tom Claiborne was working on a circuit-breaker panel.

“Ready to sell that Vette, yet, Doc?” Claiborne asked.

“Not yet,” Tyler said.

“I’ll give you an arm and leg for it,” Claiborne said. “In fact, if you wait for a moment, I’ll give you the leg right now.”

That was Claiborne’s sense of humor. He had lost his left leg below the knee in an industrial accident but had so mastered the use of his prosthetic limb that Tyler knew him for two months before he realized he had an artificial leg.

“Now tell me, Tom, just what would I do with an extra leg?”

“Well, seein’ as how your chief of surgery is always ridin’ you, you could stick a boot up his ass and still have two legs left,” Claiborne said.

Tyler laughed. There were some who worried that Tom Claiborne’s dark sense of humor might harbor some deep-seated psychological problem, but Tyler had visited with Claiborne more than anyone else in the hospital, and he believed that it was just the guy’s way of coping with it.

When he stopped by the nurses’s station on the recovery floor, he saw the chief of nurses making an entry in the computer, tapping the keys with two fingers as fast as the average person could type using the QWERTY method.

Rae Loona was a fifty-eight-year-old African-American woman with a cartoon-print six-inch headband and an Afro that, according to her, had not gone out of style and never would.

“When are you going to learn to type?” he asked.

“When you learn to rap,” Rae shot back without looking away from the monitor.

Tyler picked up the file folders that were lying in the “rounds” basket.

“How was Mr. Underhill’s night?” he asked.

“The night nurse said he was quiet,” Rae said. Finishing whatever she had been typing, she sent it to the printer then stood up and came over to the counter. “How is Karen?”

“She’s tired of being pregnant,” Tyler said. “I told her to stop being such a baby.”

“What did she say to that?”

“She told me she would stop being such a baby when I carried one in my belly for nine months.”

Rae laughed out loud and slapped her hand down on the countertop. She pointed at Tyler. “She got your little pink ass with that one.”

“How do you know my ass is pink?”

“You’re a white boy, aren’t you? You think in my thirty-five years of being a nurse, I haven’t seen ten thousand pink asses?”