Intuition by Allegra Goodman Read Free Book Online Page A

while she stayed. They didn't mind. Giving in seemed a fair trade for speaking about her as a person who still had likes and dislikes and would actually benefit from minestrone. Dr. Glass never spoke of Lucia as a patient, only as herself—their daughter and granddaughter. A young woman still very much alive.
    The residents looked on in disbelief. They did not entirely understand the alchemy of authority, charm, and chutzpah that Glass employed. Clutching their empty notebooks, they followed him out of the lounge. There were few notes to take when Glass rounded in the hospital. He breezed through the corridors; never dwelt too long on patients' charts. He let his residents grapple with medications, doses, side effects—and delivering bad news. They hated him for the way he sent them in with test results—the tumors were back; the cancer had spread; the chemo was not working—while he breezed in later, after the storm. He was nothing if not smooth. The young doctors followed him down the hall in silence, still stunned by how quickly he'd won the Fiorellis over. This was Glass's magic, but unfortunately it was unteachable. As all residents who trained with Glass soon learned, his lessons were of the most ethereal kind.
    He could not cure his patients. He rarely changed a prognosis in the long term. Perhaps, in the end, he would not save lives, but he always knew what tone to take.
    “Look, we're all terminal,” he told one breast cancer patient. “We're all predead.”
    “Time? What is time?” he opined to an elderly man, a professor emeritus from MIT who demanded to know how much time he had left. “Who knows how much time any of us has?” Sandy shrugged. “Haven't the physicists been bending time for years? Isn't it true the Hopi Indians think time is space? See, that's why I don't like the question. I could give you a number—but then you'd have to call me a liar later on.”
    “Give me a ballpark,” the professor growled at Sandy from his bed.
    “That's my point,” said Sandy. “Once you start talking about ballparks—there's no difference in life expectancy between you and anybody else. We're all in the same ballpark together.”
    Sandy conned his patients, but he also spoke the truth. He embraced the truth of mortality, along with the deep-held fallacy that you and I are exceptions to the rule. He acknowledged that the idea of death would be terrifying, if life itself were not so absorbing. He implied that, moment to moment, even time in the hospital might bend and stretch into something longer, better, happier. He demonstrated this in the huge impact he made in just a few minutes with each patient on rounds. A direct look in the eye, a warm handshake—he always treated the deathly ill as if they were still among the living. This above all: he never looked away as though his heart might break.
             
    By noon, Sandy was powering out of the hospital and across BU Bridge. He'd had a productive morning, given Asha and the rest their marching orders. But now, driving into Cambridge, as the winter sun was silvering the Charles, Sandy could only think about the lab and Marion. She'd called and told him about Cliff's mice.
    He parked his white Mercedes tenderly in the pocked and muddy Philpott lot, and hurried up the front steps of the Victorian building, its arches and turrets faced in ruddy stone. Could this be the day they'd been waiting for? He looked for Marion in the office, but she wasn't there. After years of slow progress and false starts, had they finally found a better path?
    He burst into the lab, which was gloriously lit with afternoon sun. The arching tops of two great windows graced the space, along with part of an inscription that had been painted in 1887: KEEP BACK THY SERVANT ALSO. The building had once been the Cambridge Manual Training School for boys, and it was full of such vermilion words, fragments of scripture selected to inspire and at the same time chasten the vocational