Doctor Sally Wheelan walked into her new office on the fourth floor of the Heritage County Medical Clinic at six-thirty. She did not intend to make a habit of arriving for work two and a half hours before seeing her first patient, but she wanted to get settled into her new working environment before confronting the inexorable flow of patients for which understaffed clinics were notorious. Besides, she thought, the police officer was right. No chance of having to run a gauntlet of protesters at this hour of the morning.
Wheelan flipped on the light switch just inside the doorway and took a quick look around the room. Not bad at all, she thought. It was an exterior office with a large picture window facing east, a bit on the narrow side from one wall to the other, but functionally appointed with new furniture. A desk of laminated wood finish with a low-backed swivel chair faced in from the window. A matching work table with a computer and a telephone already hooked up adjoined the desk on one side. Three gray metal file cabinets with four drawers apiece occupied the wall opposite the desk, with a floor-to-ceiling bookcase covering one side wall and two guest chairs positioned toward the desk in the center of the room. The remaining wall stood bare, awaiting the placement of a framed diploma or two, along with whatever pictures or personnel items a doctor might choose to display for the consideration of her visitors. Wheelan paused to consider the décor. It might not be the most impressive office to which a fifty-something doctor could aspire, she thought—there was not a trace of leather or mahogany to be found here, and more than three people in the room at once would feel crowded—but then again, she had not taken this job for the perks. Unlike some other doctors she had worked with in the past, Wheelan had never been particularly fussy about her office accommodations, and this one suited her fine. Perhaps it was even a little better than she had expected.
Wheelan set her briefcase and the plastic bag which she had carried from the convenience store on top of the desk, then she took off her overcoat and went to hang it in the closet a short distance down the hall. Upon returning to her office, she passed slowly around her new desk and settled herself into the chair. She swiveled back and forth in the seat a few times, trying it on for comfort, then rolled herself forward so that she could rest her elbows on the desktop. The fit was good, she thought, and the feeling brought a faint smile to her face. For a few moments she just sat there quietly, looking over the room, getting a sense of the true nature of the place before the daily bustle of activity, both inside and outside of the facility, broke its passive stillness. This was the pleasant first impression that she wanted imprinted on her memory—something to be called back and leant upon in the days ahead whenever the character of these surroundings might seem to have turned in untoward ways. She had once imagined that this affecting little ritual was the reserved rite of new college graduates upon undertaking the first job of their careers, but she had come to learn that the practice retained some appeal too for those who were well along in their life's work. There was promise here, she felt; the kind of promise that every new opportunity, no matter one's age, seemed to possess. She leaned back in her chair and savored it. The blank expanse of freshly painted drywall to her left, it would soon convey the message to her visitors that they were in experienced and competent hands; the empty filing cabinets that looked back at her from the far side of the room, the drawers waiting to be filled with the records of those who would come to her for help. She did not want to ever lose sight of the promise that these otherwise empty things held, no matter what challenges might present themselves here. Places in the past that had seemed just as inviting to her at first had eventually proven her wrong. She hoped that this place would be different.
Wheelan reached across her desk and pulled her briefcase toward her. She popped open the metal clasp on the front of the case and reached a hand inside. From beneath a thin sheaf of papers, and next to an assortment of pens, business cards and other items of professional necessity, she withdrew two framed photographs. Pulling out the arm on the back of each frame, she set the pictures up carefully and neatly next to each other on the left-hand side of the desk, adjusting them ever so slightly so as to avoid any obscuring glare from the lights in the ceiling. They would be the most meaningful personal items that she would display in this room, and they deserved a proper placement. After she was satisfied with their arrangement, Wheelan sat back in her chair and looked at them.
One photograph was taken recently, a professional studio portrait of her and her husband, each dressed for the sitting in their finest outfits: she in her favorite yellow print dress and he in a traditional dark suit and tie. She sat in the foreground of the picture while her husband sat just slightly behind her and to her left, his right shoulder visible just over her left. The two looked marvelously happy, each beaming a wide, unforced smile toward the camera. The photographer's fee had been paid for by their children, an anniversary present from the previous year for a keepsake which all agreed was long overdue. The couple had not sat together for a portrait since their wedding thirty years earlier, and this photograph showed clearly that nothing more important than a few gray hairs had changed between them in that time.
The other photograph was much older and smaller than the first. The paper upon which it was printed was aged and cracked in places around the edges, as if the photo had been rescued from an old, overstuffed shoebox somewhere before it was framed. It was a quaint and slightly corny picture, nothing extraordinary to anyone who did not know the people in it, not unlike countless other family photos which passed away the years in millions of old shoeboxes in the recesses of attics and bedroom closets everywhere. The image had been captured with a camera of marginal quality, and therefore lacked a good bit of clarity in the details, but it was neither the quality of the printing nor the sharpness of the image that made this particular picture special for Wheelan.
It was a simple black and white print showing two girls of rather different ages bundled up in winter coats and hats in the front yard of a house. The older girl appeared to be in her late teens, at least a couple of feet taller than the other, while the younger girl could not have been more than five. The older girl gripped the handle of a snow shovel in one gloved hand, the front edge of the blade placed against the ground like a prop, and she stood on a small patch of ground that had been cleared down to the grass of the snow that lay thick upon the rest of the yard. Standing atop a small, compacted mound of snow next to her was the younger girl, the snow piled up just high enough to bring them to equal height. The two girls leaned against each other, cheek to cheek, the younger one hugging the taller girl about the neck with both arms while the older girl wrapped her free arm around the smaller's waist. Smiles as broad and bright as the midday snow which shone all about them played across their faces, and the caption etched into the bottom of the silver frame said it all: Sisters Are Forever.
Wheelan stared reminiscently at the two photographs for a minute or so, seeming to draw a motivation from them that she would have been hard-pressed to put into words. Her work was not her life, she knew, but it undoubtedly made her life better, and more than any other possessions that she had, these two photographs gave silent and unimpeachable testimony to the importance of the work that she did.
She was one of the fortunate few, she realized—one of those for whom work was a calling and not just an occupation; one who saw the regular paycheck as the more minor form of reward which her work afforded her. She was serious about her work—more serious than most—for she had reached an age and a level of experience at which she could not afford to be unserious about such things. It was not just an easy and idle sanctimony that she embraced in convenience, only aloud and in the presence of others. She would in fact be paid less in this new position than she had earned at any time in the last twenty years, but that truly did not matter to her. Indeed, she had not even tried to negotiate a higher salary for herself, even though she knew that she probably could have done so. Instead, she had negotiated with her future employer for something else, and she had made it clear that she would not accept the job unless she got what she requested. Her terms were this: she would manage her practice under her own authority and no one else's. She alone would decide which patients she would see, what advice she would offer them, what procedures she would be able to perform. Corporate management could oversee the business side of her practice; she would not object to that. They could collect the bills and approve the expenditures, and she would be happy to work within just about any budgetary limits that they thought necessary. But they could not question her medical decisions and they could not, under any circumstances short of criminal liability, place themselves between herself and her patients. She had hired an attorney to draft specific language to this effect and had insisted that it be included in her employment contract. The executive director of the medical center had not put up much of an argument against it. He privately told Wheelan that he wished that he had had the foresight to procure such terms from his employers back when he was a practicing physician. It had not seemed quite so necessary at the time, he had said, but he knew that things were different now.
Yes, Wheelan had agreed. Things were different now.
She signed her employment contract with the Heritage County Medical Clinic with her desired clause as the first and only addendum to their standard contract. She saw it as a model document, one which she would be happy to share with other doctors, if any should happen to inquire about it. And for the emotional ballast which these kinds of legal and occupational protections brought to her, for the lessons which she had learned by watching the best people she had ever known confront such issues before she was forced to do so, she had no one to thank more than the loved ones who forever smiled back at her from the pictures to her left.
* * *
Turning away from the two photographs, Wheelan reached into the plastic bag on her desk and withdrew its contents: a blueberry bagel, a half pint of orange juice and a folded newspaper. She laid the paper out across the desktop and began to skim through it while she ate her breakfast. She moved quickly through the front section of the paper, pausing only briefly to read the main story about a hurricane which was moving up from the Caribbean and threatening the coastal areas of the Carolinas. The rest of the headlines—the normal assortment of political and international dispatches—didn't interest her enough to hold her attention for very long. As she was ready to fold up the front section and move on to the local news, however, a headline on the last page caught her eye.
"Boston Bombing Suspect Arraigned on Federal Charges," read the headline halfway down the last column of page A24. The story was not long, only two half-columns in all, but she read it with interest.
BOSTON—Senior officials from the Department of Justice today announced the filing of federal charges against the man suspected in the bombing of a Boston-area abortion clinic last month. George McAlister, 32, was arraigned in the Federal District Court of Boston on one count of conspiracy to commit a terrorist act in relation to the early morning bombing of the New England Women's Clinic in August. The federal charge, which is classified as a felony, carries the potential for a penalty of death under federal sentencing guidelines if the suspect is convicted.
At a news conference, Nathan Carso, chief prosecutor for the Justice Department's antiterrorism branch, stated that the Department would pursue the case as an act of domestic terrorism. "Planting and detonating an explosive device within a densely populated area is a terrorist act, pure and simple," Carso said. "There is only one conceivable motive for such an act, and that is to terrorize innocent people." Several new laws addressing this type of crime have been passed by Congress in the past few years. Given the recent enactment of these laws, however, many legal experts point out that their enforcement has yet to be tested with regard to any real case.
A major hurdle for the prosecutors in the Boston case, say some experts, is the applicability of laws against terrorism to the bombing of a building which is unoccupied, as the New England Women's Clinic was at the time of the bombing in question. McAlister's defense attorneys immediately questioned the validity of the federal charge.
"A building has no emotions," stated John Sherman, lead defense attorney for Mr. McAlister. "An empty building can not be terrorized. It can not experience fear or pain or any other human feelings. It seems pretty clear to me that, unless one or more persons were specifically endangered in a particular case, the charge of terrorism can not be deemed appropriate."
The ramifications of the debate over the applicability of the terrorism laws are enormous, according to legal scholars, not only for the defendant in this case, but for the ultimate application of the federal statutes across the country. Massachusetts, like eleven other states and the District of Columbia, has no enforceable death penalty statute. The maximum penalty that a convicted suspect would be likely to receive in this case under Massachusetts law, according to experts, would be up to twenty years in prison, with eligibility for parole after approximately five to seven years. Given the fact that no deaths or injuries resulted from the bombing, some legal experts doubt that any sentence greater than ten years would survive under appeal.
Mr. Carso went on to say that the FBI and local law enforcement agencies were "doing everything within our powers to ensure the safety of abortion clinic employees and their patients across the country." Other Justice Department officials, who spoke only under condition of anonymity, admitted that the terrorism charge against the suspect in this case would have a better chance in court if the prosecution could show that at least one individual was specifically targeted in the bombing, or if at least one death or injury had occurred as a result of the act.
The doctor refolded the newspaper, placed it on the side of her desk and leaned back in her chair. She took a long drink of orange juice as she washed down the last bite of her bagel.
* * *
Wheelan stared up at the ceiling while she rocked back in her chair and tried to think about anything other than the article she had just read. She was tired of it. Tired of worrying about it, tired of having to find new ways of avoiding it. She wanted to occupy her mind with other things, with more important things. She wanted to concentrate on the work that lay ahead of her in establishing her new practice and not be distracted by these problems.
She had hoped, perhaps a bit foolishly, that by moving herself and her work to a new city she might be able to leave a part of that past behind her, but this article reminded her of just how unrealistic that hope might prove. The issue could not be avoided, she told herself, no matter where she might go. Packing up her life and relocating herself to another place was all well and good, and may have been done for perfectly logical reasons, but certain unpleasant things would surely follow her wherever she went, and this was one of them. People were opinionated beings in all localities, Wheelan knew, so why should Bazelton be any different? She would surely encounter people here who would look upon her work with either praise or condemnation, and would judge her worth as an individual accordingly.
None of that would alter her own sense of the worth of her profession, but the fact that others would go out of their way to judge her, and more importantly, might take steps to impede her work, worried her greatly. She was a quiet person by nature, undesiring of any spotlight and unambitious in the direction of public policy, but she cared deeply about the wellbeing of her patients and she would not stand for any restrictions on her ability to administer to their needs. She did not like being at the focal point of such a heated and divisive debate. In some ways she might have preferred, as she had forced herself to admit so many times over the years, to have gone into some other branch of medicine, or to have pursued a career in some other field entirely, instead of doing this type of work. Laboratory research had its rewards, she often thought, and was every bit as important in its way. Nor was a career in management to be looked down upon, for even the most uncommercial of human endeavors could not succeed without the oversight of skilled administrators. But those were not occupations that addressed the needs that she felt within her, and they were not, despite their occasional attractiveness, what she still felt compelled to do now. She had wanted her work to answer for something. She wanted to be able to see with her own eyes that her efforts were making people's lives better. She wanted to know the names of the people she helped.
And so she had chosen a line of medicine that would allow her to do just that. The diplomas that she would soon hang on that empty wall would proclaim it to the world. She was an obstetrician and, when necessary, an abortionist, and she was proud of it. She spent her working hours counseling women about their pregnancies. She taught women about themselves. She looked inside of them, listened to and touched them at their very core, and told them of things that were happening there, things of which they were often unaware. She liked to think of herself as an extension of her patient's mind. She was a repository of information and knowledge and advice. She examined them, diagnosed them, offered them her best medical opinions and guidance without prejudice and without political motive. She was not, however, the uppermost decision maker. That responsibility resided elsewhere. These women, these fetuses, these uteri and ovaries and fallopian tubes, they were not hers. She did not own them and she did not control them. She did not—could not—force them to do, or not do, anything. And no one else rightly could.
But the idea of what she could do, of what she could empower her patients to be able to do—the notion of human beings actively intervening in the gestation of other human beings—this was a natural place for disagreement. It was seen as a sacred process by many, "miraculous" being the term most commonly used to describe it, even by those who did not consider themselves religious. And such sacredness to some people marked the true boundary beyond which the rightful reach of humankind to mettle did not extend, while to others it simply meant that a greater degree of care and consideration was due before prudent and justifiable actions were taken. Opinions varied widely, every bit as much as the people who held them. Throughout her career she had harbored a hope that someday, somewhere, she would be able to practice her profession in some sort of unnatural vacuum, wherein doctors and patients could interact in total privacy and honesty. But she had to remind herself that this was a false hope, not just for the present, but for a long time into the future. It might never happen, certainly not in her lifetime. Stories like the one she had just read served as her reminder.
And they were a reminder of another reality too: that she, and her patients, were vulnerable. "Doing everything in our powers," the Justice Department official had said. To exactly what "powers" was he referring? Thousands of clinics could not be protected around the clock forever. Despite the recent efforts of the local police department to watch over this particular clinic constantly, Wheelan knew that the will, not to mention the funding, required to maintain such vigilance was finite. Eventually, if a reasonable period of time passed in which no further trouble occurred at the clinic, the perceived need to continue such protective measures would diminish, and the protections would be scaled back. As long as the police were watching over the building, the antagonists on both sides of the issue would probably restrain themselves. But it would only be a temporary and artificial truce. In the face of perceived injustice, human passions had a capacity for resistance that could outlive even the most resolute of decreed enforcements.
Wheelan closed her eyes for a moment and let out a weary sigh, then she reopened them. And when she lowered her gaze from the ceiling, her eyes turned impulsively toward the smaller of the framed photographs on the corner of her desk.
It had been a warm, soggy Saturday in early spring. The afternoon temperature was forecast to approach sixty degrees, a welcome relief from the frigid grip of the winter just past, which had been long and brutally cold even by Buffalo standards. Large patches of half-melted slush still marked the shadier spots on the ground, the stubborn remnants of the enormous drifts of snow which had been blown up alongside every building and fence line and freestanding wall in town. The yard around her house was so sodden with the runoff that it squished when walked upon, and so Sally had chosen to stay inside that morning and watch cartoons on the family television set. Her mother was downstairs in the basement doing laundry and her father had gone to work a weekend shift at the docks. She had not yet seen her older sister Cindy that day. Still asleep in her room, Sally assumed, as she usually was on Saturday mornings.
Sally liked Saturdays because she was free to fend for herself. She awoke on her own schedule and was allowed to make her own breakfast. Toast and jam was her favorite, with a glass of milk or orange juice, and perhaps a cookie or two if she could sneak them out of the jar on the kitchen counter without her mother noticing. She loved to eat her breakfast in the living room, lying on the circular coil rug with her plate in front of her as she watched the characters frolic on the framed black and white tube which her family had just purchased. A super neat invention, she thought—one which made the muddiness of the grass in the backyard a much easier inconvenience to bear. Spring could take as long as it wished to dry out the winter's precipitation. As long as she had some cartoons to entertain her, she would gladly pass the day inside.
A knock on the front door interrupted the adventures of Crusader Rabbit. Sally ignored the sound at first. Maybe her mother would hear and come up from the basement to answer it. The second knock came a minute later, this time somewhat louder, more insistent. The cartoon broke into a commercial, so Sally pushed herself up off the rug and went to open the door.
The vision was as clear in her mind as if it had happened yesterday. Two men standing on the front porch, both dressed in gray suits. The older of them stood in front; heavy set, large jowls, balding. The other man was younger, skinnier. Sally stood in the doorway and looked up at them, saying nothing, the blank expression of a puzzled five-year-old on her face. She did not recognize either one of them.
"Is your mother or father at home?" the older man asked, somewhat gruffly.
Sally looked at the man quizzically. "Who are you?" she said. She was not being difficult, only curious. Strangers rarely came to their door.
"We're with the police department," came the reply. "We need to speak with your mother or your father please." The man apparently did not know how to smile.
"I'm watching cartoons," Sally stated matter-of-factly. She knew that Crusader Rabbit sometimes helped the police catch their man. She turned and pointed toward the living room. "You can come in and watch them with me if you want."
The older man looked down at her with a dour indifference. He did not seem the least bit interested in her invitation.
The younger man stepped forward at that point and squatted in the doorway. He gave her a smile as his face came down to meet hers. "That sounds like a lot of fun, sweetheart," he said warmly, "but unfortunately we don't have any time to watch cartoons with you right now. What we really need to do is talk with your Mom or your Dad. So could you please go and get one of them for us? Then you can go back and watch your cartoons, okay?"
Sally shrugged her shoulders. "Okay," she said. She turned and ran to the top of the stairs that led down into the basement. "Mom!" she called out into the sunken space below her. The sound of her voice echoed back from the bare concrete walls, fighting to rise above the angry, mechanized churning noise emanating from the washing machine. Sally was not sure if her mother had heard her. "Mom!"
She had tried to resume watching her cartoons that morning, but she could only pretend to do so. Her mother's outward anguish had broken her concentration and set her on edge, and even though her mother had managed to shoo her back into the living room when she had ventured into the kitchen to ask what was wrong, the woman could not mask from her youngest daughter the heartache which had just been delivered to her.
The messengers in gray suits did not leave very quickly that morning. They remained in the kitchen with her mother while she called down to the docks, and they stayed until her father made it home, then they talked a while longer with the both of them and then they left. Her mother cried; cried like young Sally had never heard anyone cry before. Not like she had scraped her knee on the sidewalk or been hit in the head with a snowball or something. She cried like she was sad, like she was beyond sad. She wept like her most favorite thing in the whole wide world had been taken away from her and she could never get it back. Her father put his arms around her and rocked her back and forth and tried to make it all better, but that only seemed to make her mother cry harder. She cried so hard that Sally was scared, and her cartoons were suddenly unimportant.
"Get your coat on, Sally," her father said to her. "We have to go somewhere."
Sally went and got her coat immediately. She knew that something had happened and that it would be best to do exactly as she was told, at least until her mother calmed down. She waited patiently by the front door while her father helped her mother into her own coat and walked her to the door with an arm around her shoulders. Sally waited until they were all in the car before she said anything.
"Where are we going, Daddy?" she asked from the backseat.
"Mommy and Daddy are going to see some people, dear," her father replied. "We're going to drop you off at your Aunt Margaret's house for a little while. We'll be back to pick you up this afternoon."
Sally thought about this for a few moments, and she became even more confused. This was not the normal Saturday routine at all, and her father's voice sounded strange, as if he was trying to control his own emotions as well. He kept looking over at her mother, holding her hand and telling her that they would get through this together. Sally was curious enough to venture one more question.
"What about Cindy?" she asked.
Her mother broke out into another fit of sobs, and Sally decided that she probably shouldn't ask any more questions.
In the years which followed, Wheelan had come to learn the truth. No one had known about her sister's condition at the time; she had been too frightened to tell anyone. When her boyfriend had learned of the situation, he had demanded that she put an end to it. Cindy had hesitated at first, but had convinced herself that she could not bear to lose him. Still, she didn't know how to go about it. She couldn't ask anyone she knew, they would only turn around and tell her parents. No problem, her boyfriend had said. He knew someone who could help. He had a friend who had been in the same situation a few months earlier. A guy he knew had done the job, and he would keep it quiet, too. Forty bucks was all he charged. He could pull together that much.
Her boyfriend would take her passing in stride. He had shown up at her wake wearing a shirt and a tie and no jacket. He stayed briefly to talk with some of their friends from school who were there, but he tactfully avoided the family. After ten minutes and a brief pause in front of the casket he slipped out of the funeral home, and Sally never saw him again. He graduated from high school that same year and moved out of town immediately afterward. Sally heard that he had married and divorced at least twice since then, and that he had had at least a couple of kids.
* * *
Wheelan leaned forward in her chair again and brought herself back to the present. She had read enough news for one day, she told herself, as she refolded the newspaper and put it aside. She turned her attention to a short stack of papers which were waiting for her on the right-hand side of her desk. She had specifically asked the clinic's director for a copy of all correspondence, medical, administrative or otherwise, both internal and external, which contained any information that she should know. As the newest member of the staff, she didn't want to appear ignorant of whatever issues might be on the minds of her coworkers. She wanted to be fully informed from the start.
She glanced quickly through a set of interoffice memos to the clinic staff—explanations of the reserved parking policy, the vacation policy, the procedures for ordering supplies and medications, and so on. These were followed by the minutes of the monthly meetings of the medical center's board of directors, which she read in detail. She was already familiar with most of the major topics discussed in the minutes, but it was always interesting to know where each director stood on each topic. She felt a measure of reassurance as she read through the documents. It had been only a few weeks earlier, a week after she had accepted her new position, that she first began to appreciate the extent of the civic unrest that had been brewing around this clinic. Although the directors had assured her that only minor and isolated disturbances had occurred both before and during her recruitment period, Wheelan had harbored a doubt. Experience had caused her to develop a skepticism of management which she knew would be long in dissipating. Now she saw that the directors had been honest with her. There was very little mention of any protests in the meeting minutes from the first of the year through the July meeting. In August, however, the issue dominated the meeting. The minutes for that month spanned twenty-two pages—more than three times the length of the minutes for the other meetings. Details about the protests and the protestors. Summaries of discussions with the chief of police and the hospital's private security company. The decision to place the clinic under twenty-four hour protection. Wheelan felt encouraged by the board's resolve in facing up to the situation. The directors appeared firm in their support of her plans to expand the women's health practice, including abortion services, and several members spoke highly of her experience and qualification for the job.
One director outwardly noted the correspondent timing between the escalation of the protests and the clinic's hiring of Doctor Wheelan. It was almost as if, he speculated aloud, the protestors had foreknowledge of their plans to expand the clinic's services, despite their efforts to keep those plans under wraps, at least until the new services were ready to be offered. The others agreed that it was an unsettling coincidence, but they noted that the information was destined to become public in due time anyway. Indeed, money had already been allocated in the budget for the advertisement of these services, and some even felt that the early revelation may have unintentionally worked to their benefit. Now, they said, the clinic could learn how to deal with the protests well before the first patients for the new services began arriving at the clinic door.
Wheelan liked that answer. It showed resolve. It showed the board's willingness to actively counter the protests in a positive way—not simply to outlast the protestors, but to outsmart them as well. It led her to believe that no amount of protest, civil or otherwise, was likely to dislodge her from her new position, and that, most assuredly, was a welcome relief.
Thus reassured, Wheelan felt a renewed sense of confidence. They may have driven her out of more lucrative jobs elsewhere, but they had not forced her out of her profession. Here she sat, empty filing cabinets and barren bookshelves all around, waiting for the opposition to appear once again and decry her arrival. Let them come, she thought. She had gotten in ahead of them and she was ready. They would not deter her from her calling. She was in her chosen place, and her work day was about to begin.
* * *
The final item in Wheelan's stack of correspondence was a letter dated three days earlier. Across the top margin the clinic director had written the following:
This just came in. We'll discuss at the staff meeting next week.
The letter was printed on the stationary of the mayor's office, had been sent via certified mail, and was addressed to the executive director personally.
Mr. Director,
In coordination with our town council, it is my duty as mayor to inform you of an action recently taken by the council. The council, acting in its capacity to protect the health and welfare of the citizens of Bazelton, has passed a referendum designating all human tissues which have been removed from any human being, living or dead, in the course of any health-related procedure, to be medically sensitive materials.
As a result of this action, any such tissues which your facility may produce in the course of its operations must be, as stated in the regulation, "preserved, catalogued, and turned over to the proper authorities or agents as designated by the council within ten days of removal."
The council has further identified the Office of the Medical Examiner as the agent for the collection of all such tissues. That office will contact you separately to arrange a schedule for transfer of the designated tissues.
This regulation is effective immediately upon your receipt of this letter. Failure to comply with this regulation will incur serious penalties, including the possible revocation of municipal licenses for the practice of medicine within the town limits.
I expect and appreciate your fullest cooperation in the implementation of these new regulations. Please contact my office if you should have any concerns.
Sincerely,
Calvin B. Farrell
Mayor of Bazelton
Wheelan felt a shiver travel up her spine. Perhaps she was not as well versed in the details of the abortion fight in Bazelton as she had thought. Here was an issue that she had not thought to consider previously, but which now struck her with great concern. The leanings of local politicians, especially the mayor, would be of paramount importance to the clinic in defending its rights going forward. The mayor's letter, clearly hostile, forced her to acknowledge that she knew almost nothing about the local politics. She flipped quickly back through the pages of the meeting minutes that she had just read. Nothing. Not a single word regarding the mayor's position on the protests, nor of that of any other public official, save for the chief of police. Strange, Wheelan thought, as she placed the papers back on her desk. Until that moment she had assumed, judging by the absence of his name from the discussion, that the mayor would be a neutral entity in the matter going forward. If, however, the mayor was set against them, and his letter certainly suggested that he was, then why was there no discussion of this in the board meetings? Certainly the directors would have wanted to discuss the depth of the mayor's opposition. Something was amiss, she thought, and a disturbing sense of doubt began to creep back into her mind.
Whatever the explanation might be, she was determined to ferret it out. She reached into her briefcase once again and pulled out her appointment book. The next staff meeting would take place on the following Monday, and she penciled in the date and time. She looked at the calendar and counted the days, then she looked again at the mayor's letter. She decided that it would be a good idea to spend a few hours at the local public library that weekend, searching through the archives and reading everything she could get her hands on about the mayor and his history in the politics of Bazelton.
Wheelan set her appointment book down on the desk and swiveled around slowly in her chair to take in the view from the window. The sun was still low in the sky slightly off to the south, and the soft morning light came almost horizontally through the wide panes of glass before her. It looked to be the making of a fine early-autumn day, clear and dry, with barely a wisp of a cloud to be seen anywhere in the sky. Most of the city lay within the panorama that was presented to her from this vantage point, thanks primarily to the fact that the park across the street laid claim to the opposing real estate, and so no tall buildings rose up from the foreground to abridge the view.
To the north, Wheelan could see all the way down to the river, which lay calm and mirror-like in its channel to the point of appearing motionless. Not a boat nor a bird nor a breeze of any kind rippled its surface or caused it to belie its essential fluidity. In its lazy way it simply rested there, a serpentine pond lacking all invigoration, whose waters came from nowhere and went nowhere, but casually and indifferently pointed in both directions at once.
At some distance off to the south, Wheelan's eyes beheld a great swath of greenery covering the earth—the top side of a thousand-year-old forest which had held out stubbornly over time against human encroachment. Hundreds of square miles of deep, thick foliage glistened with dew before the low-angled sun and handsomely accentuated its arrival. If she squinted her eyes just so, Wheelan could barely make out the thin, straight lines that cut across the fabric of the forest like seams in a piece of clothing. Occasionally a flickering, tightly coupled pair of lights would move as twins along one of those seams, and Wheelan saw them immediately as artificial elements amid the larger tableau which nature had written around them. They competed in their purposeful way with the carefree sparkle of the sunlight on the morning's moisture, but only briefly, as they traversed in haste their corded paths, caring not whether they were observed from afar with any proportionate sense of splendor or appreciation.
It was only when Wheelan looked directly to the east that her line of sight into the distance was broken, for it was there that the pointed crown of the enormous banyan tree rose up from below to breach the center of the horizon. There the tree positioned itself in the middle of the vista like an incorrigible showman, more assertive and ostentatious than its forested cousins to the south, its cock-like canopy obscuring whole blocks of buildings from her view. Only the highest branches of the tree, Wheelan noticed, reached to a height that surpassed that which she now attained in her office, and the thought occurred to her that any passing bird which might at that very moment choose to alight among those uppermost branches, thence to glance unsuspectingly to the west—toward that single square patch of glass which stood out in lighted relief against the darker panels of the rest of the building—that such a high winged creature's curiosity might be uncomfortably piqued by the sight of a solitary human observer who sat staring directly back at it from nearly its own level, and even more so by the steadfast and unblinking resolve which that entrenched stare held in great evidence.