Summary:

An overweight, older man is referred by his family doctor to a hospital-based Diabetic Clinic. The patient may have "borderline" diabetes and requires a glucose tolerance test to confirm the diagnosis. He remembers to bring two important items to his appointment - an early morning sample of his urine and something to read. He chooses a volume of short stories by Anton Chekhov.

At the clinic, three things vie for the man's attention: the environment of the waiting room, the requirement of providing a sample of blood and urine every thirty minutes, and one of Chekhov's stories titled "The Beauties." As the patient reads the short story, the clinic surroundings fade away. The existing reality is temporarily doused.

After the testing is completed, he meets with the doctor. Their encounter is brief. The diagnosis is not diabetes but rather impaired glucose tolerance (a condition that might progress to diabetes). The doctor recommends a healthier diet and extra exercise. The man telephones his worried wife with the news that he is alright. Like Chekhov, the patient also understands and savors the drama that is present in ordinary life.

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The haptograph - an experimental device that mimicks ordinary feelings on the skin and stimulates previously unknown tactile sensations - sits in a locked room in the basement of a renowned scientific institution. It is 1889, and the reasearch facility is headed by the Wizard. He is a brilliant inventor who is cognizant of the importance of patents and profits. Multiple projects are ongoing, and the Wizard supervises all of them. One of his aims is to mechanically replicate each of the human senses.

The Wizard has many assistants. Kistenmacher, an electrical experimenter, is one of the best. His pet project is the haptograph. The machine consists of a body suit (covered by a network of wires, brass caps, and miniature electromagnets), battery, and unit containing replaceable cylinders. Two test subjects are enlisted. The research librarian (who tells the story in the form of diary entries) is a willing volunteer. Earnshaw, a stockroom clerk, is an unwilling participant.

Inside the suit, the librarian is impressed by a variety of familiar feelings of touch. When strange sensations - a total body caress, regeneration, an out-of-body event, and a sense of being suspended in air - are provoked, a new world is revealed to him. He experiences bliss. With ten times more funding and three additional researchers assigned to the venture, the haptograph could be commercially available in three years.

Dreams are smashed when Earnshaw deliberately wrecks the apparatus. The Wizard terminates the project and reassigns Kistenmacher to a more menial task. The librarian ponders the Wizard's motives in halting the development of the haptograph. Perhaps the gadget is too dangerous and even heretical. Possibly the public is not ready for it. Maybe the Wizard figures he cannot turn a profit from it.

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Squandering his wealth in an attempt to gain the affection of a beautiful woman, Federigo degli Alberighi is left with only a small farm and a magnificent falcon. Federigo loves Monna Giovanna, a young woman of nobility who is already married and has a son. After her wealthy husband dies, Monna and her son travel to their country estate near the farm where Federigo lives. The boy becomes friends with him and covets the prized falcon.

Soon the boy is sick. He has one request: "Mother, if you can arrange for me to have Federigo's falcon, I think I would get well quickly." (p. 427) Monna is well aware of Federigo's love for her, but she also realizes how attached the man is to the falcon. Monna makes an unannounced visit to Federigo's farm. Before she declares the purpose of her call, he decides to honor Monna with a meal.

Unfortunately, Federigo has nothing to serve her. He catches a glimpse of his falcon on its perch. He breaks its neck and has it roasted on a spit. Monna eats the bird unaware that it is the animal she has come to request for her son. After dining, she asks Federigo for his falcon. All he can do is weep. He then reveals that he sacrificed the creature to provide a meal worthy of Monna. A few days later, her son dies. After a period of sorrow and resentment, she marries Federigo.

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In the Emergency Room at 2 AM, a doctor tries to suture a laceration on the forehead of "a huge black man," brought in by the police. The man groans and strains; he won't hold still. Finally, the doctor becomes so angry that he sutures the patient's earlobes to the mattress. Not only that, he leans over the man's face and grins: "It is the cruelest grin of my life." Then he sutures the man's wound.

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The famed surgeon Douglas Stone flaunts his notorious affair with Lady Sannox, although his professional reputation begins to suffer. One night a mysterious Turk asks him to attend his wife, who has cut her lip on a poisoned dagger. The Turk insists that amputation offers the only hope of recovery. Anxious to pocket the proffered gold, and impatient to get to his mistress, Stone dismisses his professional misgivings. He excises the lower lip of the veiled, drugged woman--only to find that he was tricked into disfiguring Lady Sannox herself. Lord Sannox (disguised as the "Turk") thus gains his revenge, with his wife morally chastised (and forever after in seclusion), and Stone’s "great brain [thenceforth] about as valuable as a cap full of porridge."

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A Princeton professor has less than one night to live. His physician visits him in the hospital late in the evening. Dr. Dean is uncomfortable interacting with the dying man. He feigns optimism about the clinical situation and offers false hope but avoids eye contact with the professor and urgently exits the room. A compassionate nurse, Mrs. Roszel, is on duty. Before bedtime, she gves the professor a blue pill that dampens the constant pain in his stomach and also provides a pleasant sensation of weightlessness.

Out of nowhere, he hears a beautiful melody played on a violin. It is barely audible and imperceptible to the nurse. The professor has been a violinist since his youth, and the music triggers a flashback. Sixty years earlier, as a 15-year-old boy, he visited a small town in Italy. The silence of the village was punctured by heavenly violin music. Time slowed and then stopped. Light surrounded and permeated him before giving way to absolute darkness. Was it enlightenment or heatstroke? He awoke and saw a priest hovering over him.

Like that day long ago, the violin music now playing in his hospital room is still a revelation. The harmony reveals the mystery of the universe - the connection between time and space and light. Suddenly it is imperative that the professor shares this new knowledge before he dies. Calling fo Nurse Roszel, he attempts to impart to her what he has just discovered. She is baffled by the language but listens intently anyway.

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An already depressed second year medical student, Deborah, finds herself even more confused about the meaning of life after her aunt sustains a head injury and is in critical condition. Auntie Jenny’s convertible car collides with a utility pole and the impact ejects the woman (who was not wearing a seatbelt) onto the concrete road where she smacks her head. Five days later, Jenny remains in a vegetative state and connected to a ventilator. Deborah’s mother and Auntie Sal keep vigil over their unresponsive younger sister.

Deborah has been slacking – missing classes, sleeping a lot, and uninterested in most activities she formerly enjoyed. Previously she has suffered from insomnia and has fifteen barbiturate sleeping pills remaining. She questions the medical librarian as to how the drug works and the physiologic effects of an overdose. In the seventh grade, Deborah was hospitalized and out of school for one month with unexplained abdominal pain. In retrospect, her mother now admits that Deborah was likely suffering from depression as a child but no diagnosis was made and no treatment provided.

Jenny’s medical status remains unchanged. Deborah’s mother gives her an ultimatum: “You’ve got to make up your mind. The living or the dead” [p 119]. Deborah envies Jenny. No more worries about finding answers to important questions. Survival itself seems to be out of her control. Jenny’s fate rests in the hands of her close relatives who confer with the doctor about whether to continue artificial life support or “pull the plug.”

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Although doctors have told her that things will get better, Jyl’s odds of surviving cancer are only five percent. She lives alone in a mountain cabin and receives cancer treatments at the hospital in town. She sleeps much of the day. “Her intestines had been scalded, cauterized as if by volcanic flow” [p 67], and Jyl continues to experience problem with digestion. She feels fatigued and is easily short of breath.

Her closest neighbors are the Workman’s, a Christian fundamentalist family of seven. They live miles away in a mountain valley near the creek. Without telephone, electricity, or indoor plumbing, they live off the land and toil day and night. Jyl starts carving small boats toting messages to send down the creek for the Workman children to find. Soon 15-year-old Stephan and 7-year-old Shayna visit Jyl. The two children bring her food that the Workman’s have hunted and gathered. They cut and stack firewood for the recluse. Jyl teaches them about geology and gives them small gemstones that her father had collected. The children’s visits revitalize the ill woman.

When Stephan and Shayna do not return to see her, Jyl is overcome by loneliness. She acknowledges that being alone is far worse than any aspect of her disease and treatment. Jyl makes the difficult trek to the Workman’s property to call on the children but finds that the place is deserted. Nothing remains in their boarded-up cabin except a stack of the small boats that she had crafted. Jyl sits outside their cabin and cries. The falling snow and silence envelop everything.          

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The narrator, Meera, is an Asian Indian American with a "good life": a beautiful apartment in San Francisco, a challenging job at a bank, and an attractive, attentive, and successful boyfriend Richard. Despite her mother's constant urgings for marriage ("prelude to that all-important, all-consuming event--becoming a mother" [76]), Meera feels no compulsion to do so. Then one day her life is irreversibly changed when she finds, huddled under a stairwell in her apartment building, a young boy, who she take in and cares for as her own.

Fearful and wordless, the boy adapts to life with Meera, and she to him. Her friends, especially Richard, do not have a clue as to her intense attachment to Krishna, the name she has given him. Worried that she might lose him to child protective services, Meera goes through the process of becoming a foster parent without informing the authorities that she has Krishna living with her. When they find out, he is taken from her, placed in foster care elsewhere, and eventually runs away.

During the following year, Meera looks for him everywhere and grieves as a mother who had lost a child. She briefly considers moving back to India and taking her mother up on some of the men her mother had found for her, "if she could find me a widower with a little boy of about seven. Such a man, I reasoned, would understand about mother-love far more than Richard--or any other American male, for that matter--ever could." (106) But she does not, and eventually marries Richard, on the condition that they not have children.

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Dr. Aloysius Lana, a "Black Doctor" of Spanish ancestry, settled in a Lancashire town and courted Miss Frances Morton, a young woman of the local gentry. After he unexpectedly broke off their engagement, he was found dead, and Frances's brother was arrested. At the trial, Dr. Lana himself appeared: the corpse was instead his dissipated twin brother Ernest, dead of a heart attack. Ernest's secret arrival had forced Aloysius to dissolve his engagement, not wishing scandal; Ernest's death allowed Aloysius to create a new identity abroad, his future shattered. But, hearing that the death had been misdiagnosed as murder, Aloysius explained the situation, and he and the Mortons were reunited.

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