Wake-Up Call. Joaquin De Torres
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When you’re finished, come back to my office. Okay?” He nodded again, this time with total understanding.
I returned to my office and ate the food Doogie prepared for me on my desk. I then called Dr. Livancic to tell her Doogie and I would be in Orinda before noon. She said that Professor Snow had already arrived and was looking over some case files. Everything was set; all we needed to do was show up. I prepared my notes and told Linda that I’d be out of the office most of the day. I set my daily schedule of tasks for my four interns on the computer, and was checking their results from last week’s schedule when Doogie walked in.
He was a new man. He stood before me, smelling fragrant and totally dressed in the clothes I purchased. I had picked out black slacks, a blue and white-striped button-down shirt, and a light brown jacket from the Plus-sizes collection at Goodwill. I was also lucky enough to find some pretty decent socks and boat shoes in his size. As far as underwear, I was even luckier as I found brand new, in-the-package briefs with t-shirt sets all for extra-large men. I bought several packs, including other sundry pieces of clothes for him.
I moved around the desk and did a walk-around of Doogie, very satisfied with how he looked. His hair was still wet, but I had forgotten to buy him a comb, so I took one from my desk, some of my gel and called Linda in.
“WOW!” she exclaimed as she entered. “Who is this handsome guy?” Doogie’s eyes brightened when he saw her.
“L-L-L-LIN-D-D-DA!”
“Linda, can you do anything with his hair?” I looked at Doogie. “She’s a hair stylist on the weekends!” Linda left the office and reappeared with a large leather bag. She brought Doogie over to the couch and pulled a haircutting apron around his shoulders and neck. She pulled out some styling scissors that were rolled in their special case with other beautician tools. It took only few minutes for Linda turn Doogie’s overgrown black bush into a short, clean debonair cut. And with another minute, she shaved his face and neck clean with foam and a barber’s razor. He looked like any overweight teenager about to enter prep-school.
“There you go, Doogie!” Linda announced. “On the house!” She took out a hand mirror and showed him. His eyes bulged as he touched his smooth face and hair gently. At first he didn’t know how to react.
“W-W-W-WH-O-O-O D-D-D AT?” He pointed at his reflection.
“Dat is you, Doogie!” I chuckled.
“And you look great!” followed Linda as she started placing her equipment back into the bag. I grabbed my hand-vac from the closet and cleaned up the hair on the floor and on Doogie’s shoulders and pants.
“Thank you, Linda! Hey, tomorrow’s Friday, right?”
“Yes.”
“Call Selma and tell her I need her to do the data input tomorrow for the interns, and start entering the quarterly file recordings in the database.” Linda looked puzzled.
“Javier, I can do all that after I finish my daily inputs.” I narrowed my eyes at her smugly.
“Not when I’m giving you a day off.” Her eyes grew large, as did her smile.
“And, I believe Charles has a doctor’s appointment tomorrow morning, right?” I winked hard. Linda’s mouth opened large again. I looked at Doogie who was following the conversation with his head as if watching a tennis match. “Linda and Charles are together,” I told him. I turned back to Linda who was blushing.
“Tell him to take care of himself and don’t even bother coming in after the appointment. I don’t want anyone catching any viruses!”
“I’ll let Selma know!”
“Now, you and Charles get outta here and have a great weekend.”
“Thank you, Javier!” She rushed up and kissed me, then turned to Doogie. “You look great, Doogie. Welcome to our home!” She caressed his cheek and left the room.
* * *
Ivana Livancic had everything prepared for Dr. Flores’ visit. The information in front of her: the files, write-ups, photos, videos, and drawings-all, were amazing and unique in their contents. They were also troubling, even disturbing. These records and items that lay across her large mahogany desk, were the foundation of her special project that took flight just three weeks earlier. But despite the thoroughness of her findings they had ramifications, repercussions that she had yet to understand.
She also considered the probability that what she had wasn’t even remotely close to a completed project. There was much more to this, and many missing pieces, perhaps more than her analytic mind could conceive-or even, accept. She sipped her tea silently, in deep thought. This was disconcerting, indeed. Was there an absolute truth in this? Or, was this just an ongoing experiment in the clinical halls of her practice with no real end? Just a pursuit of some time-consuming mystery that would prove fruitless? What really seemed to bother her lay within her heart, and not so much her mind. What she had laying on the desk was proof of something. Abject proof! And it was something larger than herself. But could it be infinitely larger than that? Going over all the data until committed to memory, she felt somewhat threatened; a subtle but escalating feeling that the threat was not to her findings, or to her expertise, but to her own belief system.
Since she was a girl, she wondered why God would inflict so much pain and suffering on people that He supposedly created with love and ‘in His own image’. Really? she would scoff. Were those inflicted with paralysis because of mental illness truly created in His image? Why did criminals with perfectly developed minds and bodies prey on the weak, and walk away unpunished from their heinous crimes? Conversely, why were innocent children born with catastrophic physical and mental diseases, left frozen in time, never knowing what it was to love, feel joy, or even more cruelly-to move? How could God give them no chance to experience even the most simplest of life’s joys, but remain in hospitals only to endure a lifetime of bed sores, filth, agony, and the humiliation of bearing it all in silence? Perhaps more importantly, if a compassionate God did exist, why were never such cases reversed or cured? Why were her patients, and those of hundreds of other doctors, unhealed after over a hundred years of medical innovation, billions in therapy research, and the advancement of modern technology?
There only seemed to be the goal and satisfaction of ‘pursuit’ in her field; trial and error with no real results; no wondrous ways to heal those she had chosen to devote her life to. And if by chance there were to be a way to cure all those with Paralytic Autism, Encephalitis Lethargica, Catalepsy, or Catatonia, would it come from God at all? Or, could there be another way of delivering the healing touch that was needed in the dark world of mental trauma?
Dr. Ivana Livancic, a professor of Cognitive Psychology, had no trouble believing and dedicating oneself to hard work that actuated progress; what she did have trouble with was believing in miracles. God didn’t grant them; but neither did Man. Victories in her field were rare; and only realized through years of self-less work and scientific procedures-not prayers, masses or the wave of a priest’s hand. She’d seen too many clergymen trace crosses of “holy water” onto her patients’ foreheads at their families’ requests. She’d seen whole congregations of parish believers read passages from the Bible over writhing, blabbering, twisted or frozen patients with not a single positive effect. There was no God for these people, nor for her. And ever if there were, she hated Him anyway for His indifferent silence, His obtuse indolence, and His abject cruelty.
But within the past three weeks, she started to believe that someone, or something knew a way to heal her patients. And although she didn’t want to give in to such hope, she began to reconsider the thought that miracles should not be so utterly discarded. She entertained the possible existence of miracles because evidence of it was sitting on her desk. A stack of folders, a veritable Holy Grail of proof, that she didn’t understand. That’s why she called someone whom she believed had the best chance of understanding it. She looked at the woman sitting on the other side of the desk, sipping her coffee silently as she read over the contents of the folders. That woman didn’t believe in miracles either; but that’s why Livancic had sent for