Chapter 50: Planning Changes and Changes in Plans

End of December

On Monday, Wilson and Nadine rented a car and went off to their first meeting; today it was to the State Department to see Evan Masters, who was now an under secretary. When Wilson had told him that he’d be in the D.C. area during the holiday period, Masters asked if he and Nadine could meet with a number of cultural specialists at the agency to answer a number of questions about life in Haiti. And the Haitian ambassador to the U.S. would be there too; he wanted to meet Wilson and Nadine.

In late afternoon on Monday, Tamara, who was staying with Peter’s family during the holiday break, called Nadine to find out about her day but the call went to voice mail. Fifteen minutes later, Nadine called her back and they spoke for a while.

Peter came in after doing an errand for his mother as Tamara was finishing up her phone conversation. She disconnected and turned to Peter with a big smile.

“That was Mom. She’s at Westphalia just now—they offered her that anthropology position!”

Peter hugged her. “Wow, and she accepted, right?” Tamara nodded, smiling. “However did she wind up at Westphalia?”

“So Mom and Dad were at the State Department for a two-hour meet-and-greet and lunch that Mr Masters had set up. He and Dad had hit it off when they first met and Dad kept in touch with him—actually, Masters did a lot for my family. Anyway, before they left D.C. after lunch with Masters, Dad decided to do a little exploring and they were driving around south of the Capitol when Mom got a call from Greta. She was at their council meeting and wanted to ask Mom some questions. While they were talking, Greta found out that they were driving around in D.C. and told them that they could get to the campus in about a half hour.

“So they drove over there and Mom met with a few of the council people who had stayed to meet her. Greta told her that this definitely wasn’t the normal recruitment procedure, but she hadn’t found any suitable candidates after six months of searching, even in Europe. She had read Mom’s dissertation and thought it was excellent work and that Mom was a perfect fit. The other council members also gave Mom their approval. Greta brought Mom to her department and took her around, introducing her to a number of faculty members who were there. Greta told Mom that the last step would be approval from the Anthropology faculty but, she said, that step would be a formality; the department members were letting the choice for the position be Greta’s and the council’s, since the position was chiefly for the Institute.”

“Cool. So they’re coming back now?” Peter asked.

“Uh huh. They’re stopping at the hotel first. They know to come here for dinner,” Tamara said. “Oh, and tomorrow, I heard that Dad’s lunch with the Defense guys got another person added. The Navy corpsman who served with Dad in the Marines works at Walter Reed now and Dad’s kept in touch with him by email ever since they reconnected on the hospital ship.”

When dinnertime arrived, so did the Alexanders and both sets of grandparents. Greta wanted to talk to Nadine about the Westphalia offer, and the Richardsons wanted to congratulate Nadine. After dinner, Greta told Nadine that she had spoken to both the university provost and president about Nadine’s withheld degree.

“I told them that their doing that to you was mean-spirited and academically dishonest. If you were unable to register and the only step left for you to complete the degree was your defense, which is a token formality anyway—the copy of the dissertation had the approval signatures of your committee members—then they should have found a way to accommodate you. So Westphalia University will contact Universidad de San Juan and make certain that they award your degree. I know that you are aware that President Gerston is to be Columbia Institute’s president when he leaves office. If the university has any problems with them, Gerston can get their attention,” Greta chuckled. “So I’ll be in close touch with you when you return home. We can give you two months to get your personal stuff in order and then we’d want you here. Can you do that?”

“I’ll make it work,” Nadine answered.

“Nadine’s biggest issue is letting her congregation know she’s leaving and closing her temple,” Wilson said. “All the rest I can handle if it takes longer than two months. We’ll need to look for a place here, too, but I’m not too concerned about that. And I can look for a job here when we have a place to stay.”

“I don’t want you to think I’m ignoring you when I offered the job to Nadine, Wilson,” Greta said. “I’ve also been looking around to see about tradesman’s jobs and asked in the Facilities department if they know of any positions for mechanical tradesmen and...”

Scott had popped his head into the room. “I’m letting everyone know that dessert and coffee’s ready, but what’s that about mechanical trades jobs?”

“Greta was talking about looking for possible mechanic’s jobs,” Wilson told him. “I take care of the heavy equipment, stationary or mobile, for Miami-Dade. Any other mechanicals too, in fact.”

Scott came into the room. “That’s right, we were so focused on Nadine that we didn’t think of your job, Wilson. You’re an auto mechanic, then, right?”

“Actually more of a general mechanic. I repair anything with any kind of motor or engine, pretty much anything mechanical. I’ve even worked on the county’s watercraft and birds—ah, rotary-wing craft, but for those, the FAA-licensed mechanics need to supervise my work. But an engine is an engine and a tranny is a tranny. I also work on generators, refrigeration systems, and vacuum pumps—anything that has moving parts, actually. Ah, sorry for all the detail. I’m not trying to brag.”

“So I have a thought,” Scott mused. “A good mechanic can get a job easily around here, but you’ve got really diversified experience. You’d probably be bored with working in an auto shop. Out at the APL, we have a bunch of mechanics but they’re all really specialized. I wonder if the facilities chief would consider looking at you to bring on board. The APL has a huge amount of facility-associated mechanical systems plus all of the mechanical systems we build for the research projects. Have you done any electrical or electronic work?”

“Oh sure. In vehicles, all the time. Much of the repair work needed on modern vehicles is on the vehicle electronics, and in modern tractor rigs, there’s miles of wiring. Police vehicles, fire equipment, ambulances, they have all kinds of electronics. The county has three heavy-rescue rigs and I’ve worked on them. Reefer trailers, the refrigeration controls are complicated. I can read schematics and use electronic test equipment—well, not the stuff like Tamara used in the medical school, but I’ve been known to use a frequency analyzer a time or two to troubleshoot a system.”

“Sounds good, Wilson,” Scott said. “How about you put a resume together and get it to me? I can’t promise anything, but with Greta and me, we’ll look at opportunities. Oh, and Claire can see if there’s anything at the Naval Academy. As a vet, you’d have a preferred shot at any opening there.”

They gathered at the dining room table again for dessert and told the others what had been discussed. Then Werner looked at Wilson and Nadine with a smile.

“It looks like the whole family here has jumped on the ‘help the Alexandres’ bandwagon, so let me put an oar into the stew, to mix some metaphors pretty badly,” he remarked and the others laughed. “I may be in commercial real estate, but I ‘know people,’” he made finger-quotes. “Nadine, just let me know what you’re looking for in a new home. You can let Wilson give suggestions, but we all know that the final choice is yours.”

Everyone laughed and Wilson said, “How true.”

“I’ll get my account executives on it—give ‘em a challenge, in fact, to find good residential properties with a good deal. And I know people from some national chains who can help you with your Miami property, too. That way you both can concentrate on the stuff that only you two can do. Sound good?”

Wilson got up and went over to shake Werner’s hand.

“Many thanks,” Wilson told him. “Your family’s been wonderful to us.”

Nadine hugged him and went to Greta to hug her.

She whispered in Greta’s ear, “ ... and thanks for making it so I’ll get to see Tamara more. We’ve been so close while she grew up and I miss her closeness.”

Greta nodded. “I’m glad it worked out.”

The following day, the Alexandres and Peter drove to Arlington. They were meeting a group put together by Secretary O’Rourke for lunch at a steakhouse a short distance away from the Pentagon. The group was supposed to be made up of some people who wanted to meet the Alexandres.

It turned out to be several families, and the group had been put in a private dining room. O’Rourke was there with his wife, but the big surprise was that Master Chief Gilbert Bronson was there too, with his family. There also were several of Wilson’s old unit members; a few had retired to the D.C. area and several were still on active duty, well advanced in rank, and now assigned to staff jobs in the Pentagon.

But it was Bronson who Wilson was most interested in. They had kept in touch by occasional email exchanges and Wilson knew that Bronson was now assigned to Walter Reed. He didn’t know what the assignment was, however, and was amazed to learn that his old comrade was now the command senior enlisted leader of Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda. He was at the head of the medical center’s administration, together with the center’s director and the chief of staff.

Bronson introduced Wilson to his family; Doris was a college freshman at the University of Virginia, the twins Iris and Ivy were high school juniors, and Jonas was in eighth grade.

Jonas greeted Wilson with big eyes. “Dad and Mom named me after you ‘cause you saved him,” he said. “So how come your name’s Wilson?”

“Ah, there’s a story there, Jonas. Your dad only knew me by my middle name—Jonas. I did a kinda bad thing; I falsified my age to get into the Corps. See, my mom passed away while I was still a minor and I had no dad, so the state was talking about putting me with foster parents. I didn’t want that. But I always wanted to be a Marine, so I got some fake ID and was able to get signed up. That’s something you should never do, but I did it all for good reasons, see?”

“Yeah, okay. And Dad said you got the Medal of Honor for when you saved him.”

Bronson came over and put his hand on Jonas’ shoulder.

“Son, he saved more than just me back then. He personally saved two Marines from sure death, saved about 35 more Marines in his platoon by leading the defense of our position, and saved hundreds of Afghan civilians and U.N. personnel in the town we were guarding. Wilson’s a true hero.”

Wilson was blushing as Nadine took his arm. “He also helped Haiti by getting rid of a political threat,” she told Bronson.

“Yes, I know about that, too,” Bronson answered. “Good man.”

Wilson, with Nadine in tow, went on to talk to his other unit members and their wives, making this an emotional reunion, while Tamara and Peter were regaling Bronson’s kids with tales about their high school and college life. Doris wanted to study medicine; the twins were completely undecided, and Jonas wanted to follow his father in a career in the Navy. But after meeting Wilson, he admitted that possibly the Marines would be okay too.

They spent a few hours at the restaurant, socializing after their lunch, and then people began to leave. Wilson now had a number of additional contacts from the area.

The Alexandres spent a quiet New Year’s Eve with the Winsbergs and the kids and then left for the airport the next day. They would have a busy month or two packing and closing out their Miami affairs. Nadine was still considering whether to continue her part-time manbo ministry after they moved.

Applied Physics Laboratory, North Laurel, Maryland: early January

During the week after the new year began, Tamara’s new employees, an electrical engineer named Betty Miskin and an engineering tech named Saul Freeberg, had joined the research group in Emma’s lab and were assisting the techs in Emma’s lab in working on collecting the magnet coil data that Emma had requested. Fox was showing the new people the other projects which Tamara had in progress. Tamara herself was completing the final checks on her high-resolution MRI coil. Her experiments on the volunteer subjects would begin in three weeks. It was the intersession period, so she was spending all her time at Emma’s APL lab, which the APL administration had enlarged somewhat by shuffling room assignments, giving her additional space. Tamara was talking to Fox when Davy Foster, the lab’s MRI tech, stopped by the lab at the beginning of the second intersession week.

“The system’s all calibrated for using your new coil,” he told her. “But the T1-weighted and T2-weighted scans that were set with the phantom are kinda approximate—I can see that the resolution is way, way up but there’s no blood flow or cellular structure in the phantom.”

“Yeah, okay, but can you still use the standard TR and TE times for the T1 and T2 scans? And did you try the Flair sequence?”

“Oh sure. That gives the highest contrast—but I think you’ll need to limit Flair with your coil. The very high contrast might drop out fine detail.”

“Hmm, good point. I’m thinking we need to do a few runs with an actual brain, not a phantom brain,” Tamara said.

“Hey, I’m not volunteering,” Fox laughed. “What’s all the jargon, anyway? Those letters.”

“They’re just shorthand for the MRI pulse sequences,” Tamara said. “You know tissues have different densities and amounts of free water and that means different free hydrogen nuclei concentrations, the MRI-visible ones, that is—it’s called the proton density. The T1 and T2 sequences give us the ability to look at structures within each tissue slice where greater and lesser dense tissues are shown in the image with different contrast. So we get the T1-weighted images by using short TE and TR times. TE is the ‘time to echo,’ the time between when the RF pulse is produced and when the coil receives the echoed signal, and TR is ‘repetition time’; it’s the amount of time between each pulse sequence delivered to the same tissue slice.

“Now, the T1 and T2 relaxation rates are related to the amount of water in particular tissues. The T1-weighted images highlight the returned proton signals from fatty tissues of the body while the T2 images show the proton signals from both fatty and water-based body tissues. And finally, think of the ‘Flair’ sequence as a super-long T2 one that increases the T2-image contrast. The bright areas on the images that the computer generates represent strong signals. Enough?”

Fox nodded, grinning. “I think I got it. X-ray images are bright for dense tissue like bone and MRI images are bright for high levels of returned RF signals.”

“Exactly. So the operator sets the signal timing and capture details based on the kind of study. That’s all stored in the machine program which runs it automatically. The system needs to be tuned for the pulse generator and signal receiver properties and that’s what Davy was doing. Then the chosen settings can be stored. This is a research unit, not like one you’d see in a hospital, so all the functions are individually adjustable. So Davy, we need to get a human guinea pig?”

“Yeah. For maybe two hours. That’s enough time for the fine tuning.”

“Okay, I’ve spent a ton of time as an MRI subject,” Tamara told him. “We don’t need contrast, I’m assuming.”

“Correct. We don’t do that here at the APL, typically, even though they have those new non-toxic fMRI agents based on calcium, manganese, and iron.”

“Fine, I’ll need to call the Research and Exploratory Development office and clear my being a phantom stand-in with them. Emma stressed my following the lab’s rules, after all.”

She contacted the office and wound up speaking to the department head, who gave her permission to do the final calibration.

The following day, Tamara went to the building where the MRI unit was located and Emma went along. She was interested in seeing how the external coil was used in an actual fMRI study.

Tamara explained to her, “You know that the basis of fMRI, when it was first developed, was that MRI could detect the diffusion of the hydrogen nuclei from the water in the brain from blood vessels to cells and also the movement of blood in vessels in the brain.”

Emma nodded.

“So early on, an effect was noticed with deoxygenated hemoglobin in the blood, there was a drop in the T2 signal, both natural and effective—you know what that is?”

“Yep. The T2 and T2✱ signals. Got those basics when I designed the magnet. Go ahead.”

“Good. So that drop is known as the ‘BOLD effect,’ for blood oxygenation level-dependent. The BOLD effect is weird and completely counterintuitive. When neural activity increases in a part of the brain, not only does the blood flow to that region increase, but also the blood flowing to that area becomes more highly oxygenated than blood moving to other areas. Now, deoxygenated hemoglobin is paramagnetic; it’s weakly attracted to magnetic fields. And oxygenated hemoglobin is the opposite, a magnetic field has a slight repulsive effect—that’s diamagnetism—and in this case, it makes the MRI signal slightly stronger. That diamagnetism is what makes fMRI work. We see the actual structures which are using the oxygen, which means their activity’s increased. And knowing what the subject is doing, allows us to link physical or mental actions with specific parts of the brain.”

Emma chuckled. “Lecture mode off?”

Tamara blushed. “You do that too, Emma!”

“So true. And you’re set for the first volunteers in two weeks, then?”

“Uh huh. But the test today should show the coil’s best spatial resolution. The current fMRI best, with a 3 tesla magnet, is approximately one to two millimeters. I think we can get down to maybe ten to twenty micrometers and that’s about the size of a nerve cell body. Theoretically, we might even be able to see activity at the synaptic clefts between neurons in the brain and that’s a thousandfold smaller, 20 to 30 nanometers. In reality, though, with the molecular noise at those dimensions, I’d expect just to see clusters of synapses being activated.”