Skyscape by Michael Cadnum

where the musicians lipsynched and people spent all night making close-ups of model space ships.
    He made sure the woman was okay, made sure she was conscious and smiling—weakly, but it was a smile. It was a brave smile—emotion had swept her. She thought she was happy.
    Patterson felt the familiar inner refrain: got to do something different.
    Can’t go on like this.
    He shook hands, wrestled his arm back out of one frenzied grasp after another, smiled all the while. He couldn’t believe himself. Here he was, smiling, waving, and he knew the risk.
    He snaked his way to the limo, tangled with the CBS security like a running back shoving his own blockers ahead of him. People everywhere. This was tight security? This was a slow, steady riot.
    Jesus, it was starting to hurt, that rictus he kept for all comers. He had made it to the automobile, but the car door was blocked by photographers, squinting up at him, cameras whining.
    â€œGet that door open!” someone was bellowing. “Open the door!”
    This was controlled hysteria, the forces of order barely more coherent than the citizens themselves. The station had beefed up its complement of uniforms, but the result was that the usual mob was simply increased in size, in weight.
    The door was open at last, and Patterson was pushed inside, someone’s hand pressed down on the top of his head, to protect it from the top of the doorframe, a gesture both solicitous and commanding: you go here now.
    Patterson was on the seat, arm on an armrest, and now the door wasn’t closing, slammed against an ankle or a briefcase. The engine started, but there were cries of “Hold it! Hold it!” People were in the way, tangled around the car, in the door handle, the bumpers, the street a mass of people shouting and taking pictures.
    Patterson had wanted to be a doctor. What did he mean wanted to be . He was a doctor. An M.D. His drawings of the bones of the hand had been sold and framed. He had published articles on the spleen when he was only a resident at Oakland’s Highland Hospital, probing gunshot wounds for the pumper, the trauma-severed artery that was spurting life.
    He knew quite enough about bullets, soft-nosed, high-velocity, every sort of projectile. He had been continually amazed and horrified at the power of guns, the abrupt, unnatural navel of the entry wound giving way to the blossom-burst of the bullet’s exit. He had contemplated a career of research or clinical, hands-on medicine before drifting into psychiatry because, if the truth were told, he was afraid of having patients who might die.
    Disease terrified him—not that he was entirely squeamish. He admired the graceful, thread-thin vine of the lymphatic system, the lovely, burgundy lobes of the liver, the busy brain-gray plumbing of the guts. As an intern he saw people dying, and he felt abashed in the face of pain, in the face of the grief-stunned family, and had hoped for living patients, people who were likely to survive.
    â€œPlease move so we can shut the door please,” a voice was calling. It was Poole.
    Patterson could have chosen urology, with its reservoirs and ducts, or podiatry with its faith in bone to heal, like living wood, chalk fusing with chalk. But he believed in hope, an invisible, airy presence in the body. He wanted to be a physician. He wanted to be a living doctor, with living patients. He wanted to be a therapist.
    The door would not shut. Someone was trying to thrust something in through the half-closed space, a bunch of color, reds, yellows—flowers. Patterson reached for the bouquet, and called out that it was all right, but security guards had the woman—if it was a woman—and the flowers were snatched away, scattered.
    People responded to the logic of the times. It made sense. It was what happened when you became famous: people wanted you dead.
    Everything comes to an end: the door was slammed. The limo parted people, guards,