HELVELIUS
62-year-old chief of neurosurgery at Fletcher Memorial Medical Center, and leader of the research team that created the SIPNI device . . .
. . . The god of the neurosurgical operating suite.
. . . Professor of Neurosurgery. Fellow of the American Academy of Sciences. Past President of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons. Twenty-six years of school and specialty training. Over ninety thousand operations performed. Two hundred and seventeen journal articles and book chapters. Over three hundred residents who had learned the art of surgery at his hand.
. . . Ali had wondered at his discipline. She had never known a man so completely the master of himself . . . With scalpel in hand, he became the scalpel. Helvelius himself ceased to exist.
Born in South Dakota. Lost the index finger of his right hand in a farm accident. MD degree from University of Minnesota. Speaks with a slight stutter, which disappears while lecturing . . .
. . . A shock of gray hair, still bearing traces of black, wagged over his high forehead. Even his face's anchor, his grand patrician nose, came alive, nostrils flaring.
Divorced, childless. In recent weeks, the monastic solitude of his personal life has been turned upside down by his falling in love with Ali.
Helvelius: "I'm an old dog. Surgery has been my wife, my kids. It's what I've lived for all these years. But now . . . now I want more. So much more."
. . . Eleven years together, and in all that time, Ali had never once thought of Helvelius as a lover. To her, he had been scarcely a physical being at all . . . He seemed content with his solitary life. Surgery was his only passion. But there came a day when she learned to see him in a different light . . . "I, too, know what loneliness is," he said. And with these words, Richard Helvelius had ceased to be a paragon, and became a man.
Alas, his relationship with Ali has made him the bull's-eye of her estranged husband's vengeful fantasies . . .
Kevin: "An example must be made. For the great Doctor's sins are not only of the mind. It wasn't enough to reduce me to peonage — no, he had to reach out his grasping hand for the one thing I had left. Remember the ancient Droit du Seigneur?. . . He thought me such a worm that he thought he could get away with fucking my wife."
Kevin: "Guess what? Your day has come, you nine-fingered sack of shit!"
