Page 14 of Thin Ice

"Have you ever met my mother?"

We rode down in the main elevator together. It was original to the building, brass, walnut, and slow. It wasn't much larger than a phone booth. Nolan smelled like cedar and clean cotton. I took a deeper breath than necessary as the doors opened.

"Whatever the work thing is," he said, "go be interesting."

Doyle's guy was waiting at the car by the curb. Nolan climbed in, and I watched it pull off onto Euclid.

***

I walked the eight blocks to the event and entered the atrium of a research building on the medical campus. As soon as I arrived, I scanned for exits out of habit.

Tarn ran across the sponsor wall by the door in a font so serene it could have sold spa memberships. Below it, in smaller type: The science of recovery.

The atrium smelled faintly of lilies. A string trio played a hushed version of Pachelbel's Canon in D near the stairs, and servers moved through the crowd Michael had promised: surgeons, department chairs, and a few development officers hunting the room in pairs.

I hadn't been in a room like it in four years. Somebody two conversations away said proprioceptive deficit, and I turned my head.

I worked the edges of the room first. I had three questions: who ran Tarn's business side, what the facility four blocks from the Colchester was for, and what Doc Reis was like away from the cameras and microphones.

A hand surgeon told me a story about saving a pitcher's career with a skin graft. Tarn referred imaging to her group. "Good people over there," she said. "Fast, and they don't oversell."

The mysterious St. Louis Tarn facility never came up. Nobody in the room had a reason to mention it. That was a data point.

I heard raucous laughter. Through a gap in the small crowd I got my first glimpse of Dr. Reis in the flesh. Silver-haired, blocky through the shoulders, with his jacket open. One hand illustrated the story, and the other held a beer, not wine. When his line landed and the laughter rose again, he grinned like the joke had been on him.

I'd read Doc Reis for a decade before I'd ever heard of Nolan Mercer. Cited him twice myself.

I didn't approach, preferring to let the room come to me as the evening unfolded. Along the atrium's south side, I saw a woman who drew my attention.

She stood apart from Reis's orbit. Tall, gray-blond, wearing glasses and a dark, expertly tailored suit, she wasn't working the room. She was watching it, patiently.

For a moment, we looked at each other from at least fifty feet away. Then a man walked up to her shoulder with something on a phone, and she turned to focus on it. I moved on.

I listened to a cardiologist complain about the event with one eye still on Reis's crowd. A young man cut through the crowd and leaned in at Reis's shoulder. He said something brief, and Reis's head turned. He looked across the atrium, broke from his group mid-story, and walked up to me with his hand extended.

"Elias Ward," he said. "You're the kick-mechanics guy. This has made my entire night."

His handshake was dry and hard, unexpected for the man who sold serenity in airports.

"Your piece. Two thousand—what was it, seventeen? Asymmetric force decay in the underwater dolphin. I made my fellows read it. One of them cried."

"That was a strong reaction."

"She was a rower. Everything made her cry." He let go of my hand and pointed the beer at me. "You know what I liked about that paper? You didn't do what everybody does, which is measure the kick and write down the measurement like that's science. You asked why the decay ran asymmetric when the anatomy was symmetric. You asked the body a question it didn't want to answer." He grinned. "Then you quit, and I never got the sequel. What the hell happened?"

"The academy happened. Committees. I did my best to squeeze it in around arguments about parking."

Reis laughed from the chest, a big unguarded sound, and just like that we were off.

It wasn't flattery. Flattery has a smell, and events like this were drenched in it. What Reis did was engagement. He asked me questions. They were real, and each one built on my previous answer.

What did I think proprioception actually was?

Had I ever seen an elite athlete whose sense of his own body was simply wrong?

When a swimmer shaves four hundredths off a turn, where does it come from, flesh or psychology?

I'd forgotten about the intellectual rush, what happens when two minds chase a common thread. For a decade, this was my native territory. I dropped back into it effortlessly.