The Resurrectionist

14

Motionless in his terrarium, silent but wide awake in the dimness of the study, the salamander waited. It was a blue-spotted newt, of the Ambystomatidae family, about five inches long, with splayed toes and a black belly. Its name was Rene and it had been last year’s birthday gift from Alice Peck to her father.

An endangered species, the blue-spotted newt was typically found in the swamps and marshes of the American Northeast, where it fed on mealworms, beetles, millipedes, and aphids. Freedom, of course, has a price, and in its natural environment, a sallie’s life expectancy was less than ten years. But here in the study, safe and well tended, Rene might live twice that long.

It was difficult at best, insane at worst, to ascribe emotion to a creature as inscrutable as a salamander. But, if forced, Alice might have said that she sensed from Rene a certain serenity, a contentedness, born of life in her father’s study. Alice kept the terrarium tidy, filled it regularly with fresh moss scraped from the trees that lined the hill below the Clinic. Dutiful and vigilant, a good daughter, she misted the interior of the bowl each morning before her rounds and cleaned away any shed skin that Rene had failed to consume during the night.

For his part, Dr. Peck had come to consider Rene a necessary presence in the study, as essential to his work as the texts that rimmed the walls or the bottle of sherry in the bottom drawer of his desk. Over the course of the last year, Peck had discovered intriguing similarities between newt and neurologist. Both were naturally nocturnal. Both were deaf to conventional wisdom. Both were regenerators, magicians who could raise up that which had been lost or damaged or cut away. And both, Peck had become convinced of late, were the last mystics in this world — enigmatic shamans who could bend and shape consciousness itself. Which is to say, reality itself.

It might have appeared a contradiction, to label a man of science — a man whose life had been founded on and guided by logic, rationality, provability — a mystic and a shaman. But what Dr. Peck had come to understand, by way of hard, shaping experience, was that his work required terrifying leaps of faith into counterintuitive realms. What the doctor had learned about the human mind over the last decade had reconfigured everything he thought he knew about the way the world was put together. Now, like his blue-spotted confessor, he understood that the universe, the fabric of reality, was composed of nothing more than particles of longing, a kind of quantum desire for absolute connection. Dr. Peck understood that, from moment to moment, we are profoundly asleep and, so, profoundly alone. Like Rene, we are locked inside the glass terrariums of our lives. What the doctor needed to discover was how to wake us up. The path to that discovery began, he was certain, inside the craniums of his patients.

He knew that every arousal he achieved would bring him closer to answers that had more to do with the nature of consciousness than of coma. Every new patient was a fresh opportunity, one more chance to sound the alarm that would awaken the world itself. Which was why he had run from the surgical theater, down to the incinerator, and on to the study in the middle of the night. To share the latest good news with the newt. And to meditate, together, across the bounds of language and species, on what that news might mean.

Peck entered the study from the rear corridor that connected his residence to the Clinic proper. He was wearing his scrubs and carrying the black leather satchel. He moved to his desk, placed the satchel on his blotter, next to the terrarium, and stripped off his gown, cap, and mask. As he balled them together, he took note of the single drop of blood on the hem of the gown, then deposited the soiled laundry into the empty satchel for collection by Alice in the morning.

He left the latex gloves stretched over his hands, and when he felt the first tremor, he leaned forward and braced himself against the desk. Clad now only in his boxer shorts and slippers, he felt the chill more powerfully. He let himself tremble, let the small earthquake pass through his nervous system. It was happening more frequently of late, always after a session in surgery. He would not mention it to Alice — no need to worry the girl. It was, most likely, nothing more than a release of tension and stress, coupled with too many nights without any sleep.

As his body worked its way through the final few spasms, the doctor tried to recall the last time he had been to bed. But tonight, exhaustion had taken a toll on his short-term memory as well. So he waited for the episode to pass. And when it did, he began to collect the items he needed for his postoperative recovery. Rene, he knew, was waiting to hear the details. And the doctor was anxious to supply them.

From one desk drawer, he took the bottle of Manzanilla and the first edition of Les passions de l’ame, a volume that he had purchased to mark and celebrate his first arousal. From another drawer he removed the oversized gray envelope that contained his newest patient’s films — the latest scans, sent up by Dr. Tannenbaum yesterday afternoon — and a scuba diver’s flashlight. He tucked book, bottle, flashlight, and envelope under his arms in order to free both of his hands. Then, gingerly, he lifted the terrarium, nestled it against his chest and climbed the spiral staircase that led to the cupola.

Halfway up, he stopped, as he often did, to study the painting of his long-dead wife. Practically life-size, she was captured in heavy oils and boxed inside a thick gilt frame. The darkness of the composition made her look willowy and ethereal, a spirit leisurely slipping free from the trap of the body. Only her eyes retained the piercing, hateful focus, which had never quite been tranquilized by the many medications. It still surprised Peck that he had chosen this woman for a mate.

“Look at her,” the doctor said to Rene before moving on. “She wanted nothing more out of life than a prolonged nap.”

Up in his perch, his nest at the top of the world, he carefully placed each item on the floor below the window seat, then lay down on the seat itself, stretched out on its red velvet cushion. He closed his eyes for a moment and pushed his nose against the cool glass of the window. Reaching down to the floor, he found the bottle of sherry, clutched it and brought it to his mouth. Eyes still closed, he guzzled until he needed air. Then he cradled the bottle and opened his eyes quickly, looking out on the pines. Lit up by a half-moon, the trees that sloped along the hill below the Clinic were swaying with the wind so that they looked like the waves of some alien ocean.

This time, it took almost thirty minutes for the doctor to find that scarce and precious moment when exhaustion and sherry allowed him to fade out of the Clinic and into the place where his mind could rage against the borders of rationality. The place where, he knew from experience, the most radical breakthroughs were conceived.

Unfortunately, the doctor rarely had enough time or solitude these days to roam out into the frontier of his imagination. He was a man of staggering responsibilities. Few could know the enormity of his obligations and fewer still could discharge them. And while some mundane satisfaction derived from executing one’s duty, the cost was considerable — an ongoing sacrifice of the hours and the privacy needed to dream well and deeply.

But with his tools at hand and the right combination of sleeplessness and Manzanilla, Dr. Peck could dive down into a level of thought where language and history were increasingly irrelevant. These submersions tended to ravage him, like the pearl diver who plunges beyond all good sense in search of the ultimate gem. The pressure on the lungs and the temples becomes more severe with each additional foot of depth. The danger of dislocation more acute. The risk of remaining forever submerged, extraordinary. But Peck, like all visionaries, knew that there was no such thing as true exploration without true risk. In fact, that was where the thrill of discovery resided — in the heart of the peril. It was not work for cautious men, which is why it fell to the doctor. Whatever other traits his blood harbored, timidity was not among them.

Peck took a last long swallow of sherry and put the bottle down on the floor. He could feel himself arriving into that moment when discovery was possible. In the end, he knew, this was what he lived for: that instant of pure, galloping potential, that feeling of downrushing epiphany.

But calling forth fresh thought was, like summoning demons, a precarious process. And, for Dr. Peck, it required an instinctual blending of the right amounts of whimsy, research, fatigue, daydream, alcohol, and stress. It also required the right environment — the cupola was the only place that the notions would deign to be born. Finally, the summoning required a marriage of humility and patience that could allow the idea to reveal itself in its own manner and time. The idea, it must be understood, is always in charge.

From adolescence through the first years of his medical practice, Dr. Peck had believed that new knowledge was born of a specific process, reflection and experimentation coupling to yield results that were quantifiable, repeatable, and capable of being shared. But up here, in this womb at the top of the Clinic, in his boyhood sanctuary, he had learned otherwise. Genuine revelation, he determined, was nothing less than an explosion of new consciousness, a reconception of the mind itself. It did not accrete, building slowly and steadily upon existing information and tradition. It was, rather, a revolution and a rapture, a concussion that obliterated the past and re-created the world in the radiant light of newborn vision.

Seeking refuge from a spectral and unimpressed father and, later, a scornful and depressive wife and, later still, a daughter he loved too much, Peck had spent countless sleepless nights in the cupola, looking out over the ocean of pines and trying to dream his way into epiphany or, failing that, oblivion. Over time, the cupola had become a kind of petri dish or incubator, the glass uterus where the notions were conceived and matured. Peck had come to feel this was a place of holy asylum.

Once, years ago, Alice had found him on the window seat, calling out in his sleep, locked into one of those slow-motion nightmares in which the terror is inversely proportionate to the mundane image that triggers it. She was fourteen or so at the time, with hair trimmed short for the summer. Upon being woken, still tormented by his dreams, Peck had mistaken her for his son and struck her across the cheek. Shocked, she had dropped to her knees, eyes open and staring throughout the fall, her skin reddening with the prints of his fingers. When Peck realized his mistake, he pulled the girl into his arms and held her, too tightly, until sometime before dawn, both of them weeping with what the father wanted to believe was a shared understanding regarding the cost of genius.

On that night, Peck realized that the calling to medicine — at least the kind of visionary medicine to which he aspired — was more than a vocation; it was destiny. And as such, it called for a radical lifestyle. Doctors, like monks, were forever at risk of infiltration by the domestic world. He concluded, much too late, that they should be solitary, if not entirely celibate, creatures. A people, as the saying goes, set apart. The modern clinic, he now understood, was the contemporary monastery, its labs the chapels where communion could be reinvented perpetually. In the case of the Peck Clinic, it would be a communion with the sleepers.

On impulse, Peck reached down into the terrarium for Rene, caught the sallie gently inside his fist, and lifted it out of the glass bowl. Bringing his mouth close to his cupped hand, Peck spoke into it.

“My apologies. Did I interrupt a dream?”

The doctor’s query was nothing but a polite greeting, something to set the tone and begin the session. He knew that salamanders lived day for night. Through the latex, he could feel the newt move against his skin, a sensation he found comforting. The gloves were for the creature’s protection, certain toxins in the human epidermis being poisonous to newts.

Peck reached down with his free hand, grabbed one of the filmy brain scans and laid it on his bare chest. He placed Rene on the scan and the newt remained there, frozen, staring up into the sky of the doctor’s face.

“I won’t keep you in suspense any longer,” Peck said to Rene. “The harvest was a success. As you know, I had my doubts about the fetal source. But I feel certain now that we were within the nine-week limit.”

While it is true that salamanders are deaf to airborne sounds, the doctor was confident that his confessor received and processed the vibrations of voice in some satisfactory manner.

“The oldest irony,” Peck said. “We must go to the gutter in order to reach the stars.”

When drunk, Dr. Peck had a tendency toward the theatrical. Rene, for his part, did not seem to mind. There was little cruelty in artifice and, in small amounts, the doctor’s affectations could verge on the charming.

“Light out of darkness,” Peck intoned, like some hammy Victorian actor, ready to reach for a skull or break into song. “Life out of death. Consciousness out of profound stupor. As Bishop Berkeley said to his sallie, These are the miracles we work in the Clinic.”

He belched, and then, taking in some air, laughed at his own performance. Rene quivered slightly on his chest.

“It’s good to have a place,” the doctor said, “where we can let down our guard. You and I are fortunate. For all that we sacrifice in our pursuit, we always know where we reside. We’ll always have the cupola.”

He brought his hand up slowly and stroked the newt along its back with his index finger.

“But the mind,” he said, “the poor, lost mind, has no idea where it resides. The Greeks housed it in the stomach, you know. As good an address as any other. I once knew a physicist. Said he could move his mind into his shoulder or his big toe. A lunatic, I agree, though not without his appeal. But in the end, I seem to return to our favorite poet.”

He stared down at the sallie and smiled.

“Would you like a taste?”

The newt remained impassive. Peck grabbed the volume from the floor, propped it on his belly, and opened it to a page bookmarked with a torn sheet of pulp — a garish piece of comic art. He lifted the bookmark. It was a scene of dark romance, featuring a sinister-looking man — a magician, perhaps, or an undertaker — dark-eyed and gaunt, dressed in a flowing black cape that gave just a hint of its brilliant red lining. The man wore black boots with long pointy toes. He sat cross-legged, halfway up an enormous cliff, in a notch between two boulders. A cobra’s head cane rested across his lap. His elbows were planted on his knees, his chin cupped in his braced hands. And he appeared to be in the grip of some sort of trance, looking out over a raging sea, terrifying whitecaps breaking over the rocks below him.

Peck studied the image for a moment, frowned at it, unable to recall from where it had come. Then he dropped the bookmark to the floor and read, rendering the English from the old French:

Languor is a tendency to relax and be motionless,

and this is experienced in all the members;

like tremors, it proceeds from the fact

that sufficient animal spirits do not get into the nerves.

A swoon, however, is not far removed from death,

for death results when the fire

which is in our heart

is extinguished altogether,

and we only fall into a faint

when it is stifled in such a way

that there still remains some traces of heat,

which, afterward, may rekindle.

A pause to let the words have their effect.

“As you might imagine,” Peck said, “and like everything else, it loses something in the translation.”

The doctor took great pleasure in reading to Rene. It reminded him of those lost Sundays, years ago, when Alice would sit on his lap downstairs in the study rocker and he would perform her favorite story, shamelessly acting out the dialogue of the princess and the prince and the evil witch with her poisoned apple.

Now he dropped the book onto the floor and put his hands behind his head.

“But the point remains,” he said. “Just like you, my friend. Theories come and theories go. But the salamander remains. Take Tannenbaum, for instance. Been here how long now? But still he believes — he insists — that consciousness is a collection of patterns residing in known space and time. Everything for him comes down to the firing of neurons. Transmission and reception.”

A belch.

“Smug son of a bitch,” looking down at the sallie. “There is a kind of doctor, you know. More common than you’d imagine. Never known a day of doubt. But, tell me, Rene, if you’ve never known doubt, how can you know true faith?”

Peck wanted to roll on his side but the newt looked so comfortable.

“I’ve had years composed of nothing but doubt. Two arousals, Rene,” holding up fingers to illustrate, “two arousals in ten years. In all that time, the only thing I haven’t doubted is the existence of my own mind. But make no mistake, self-awareness is both boon and curse.”

He lifted his head to focus in on his confidant.

“Sometimes I think I amuse you with my confessions. But I can’t help this sense that the mind has its own cupola. Its own refuge. And if I can locate the refuge of consciousness, I can break inside. If not through the front door, then through the back. If not through the back, then through a window. If I can find its lair, I can poke it. And if I can poke it, I can wake it up.”

Suddenly invigorated by his own pep talk, he returned the newt to the glass bowl, then grabbed the flashlight from the floor. Sitting up, he peeled Daniel Sweeney’s latest brain scan from his chest and fixed the film against the cupola window. He thumbed on the flashlight — it was a diver’s lamp and its hundred-thousand-candlepower beam passed through the film and projected the image of the boy’s sleeping brain out over the sea of pines. As the trees rippled in patterns with the wind, the brain itself, enlarged to ten times its true size, also appeared to ruffle and wave.

Peck studied the organ’s topography as he spoke to Rene.

“Our problem, of course, is the father. Always the father.”

He stopped himself and stared at the undulating map of the child’s brain and in the long silence that followed, the newt began to lash his tail back and forth and excrete his toxins into the drying moss at the bottom of his bowl.

“But I promise you that we will deal with the pharmacist,” Peck said. “And one way or another, I will step out onto that ocean and walk upon that water,” face grimacing and fully theatrical now, as he used his finger to mark the places where he would cut open the child’s skull and poke the brain with his monk’s harpoon, spreading the new seed and birthing a new world.

But Rene was no longer listening. He had stopped at that moment when the makeshift bookmark had floated to the floor next to his bowl. And the caped sorcerer caught the salamander’s eye and began to work his dark mesmerism across those vast expanses of myriad dimensions.