The Resurrectionist

18

To get to the Peck residence from inside the Clinic one had to walk a long corridor off the third floor that bridged the main house to the east wing. There were no rooms off the corridor and no windows, just one narrow, tunnellike expanse piled with discarded rehab equipment. Everything was old and bulky-looking, wooden wheelchairs and tarnished brass walkers and even a few bell jars. Behind a mattress that was leaning against the wall, Sweeney spotted several prosthetic legs.

Alice had her key out before they got to the door.

“There’s a separate entrance from outside,” she said. “Normally, that’s what I’d use. I like some division between work and home. But with the rain and all. .”

She let the sentence trail off as she tried to work the lock.

“Can I help you with that?” Sweeney asked as she turned the bolt and opened the door onto a large, dome-ceilinged room. Sweeney crossed the threshold first. Alice snapped on the lights and locked up behind herself.

The room was a library, the walls book-lined and the floor covered with an enormous Indian rug over dark hardwood. The furniture was antique but masculine — English club chairs and a big Kipling desk devoid of photos or knickknacks, except for a glass terrarium in which a salamander sat so rigidly that for a second Sweeney thought it was made of porcelain.

“My father’s study,” Alice said.

“That would have been my guess,” Sweeney said.

“He’s out tonight. He still lectures at the med school.”

He nodded and looked past her. Behind the desk, on the only wall not given over to shelving and books, was an oil painting, a formal portrait, dark and severe. The woman depicted was blond and a bit too fragile to be called beautiful. Sweeney looked from the painting to Alice and said, “Your mother?”

“My mother,” Alice said. “She died when I was a child.”

There was a credenza stationed beneath the portrait, and on top of it, a row of books, thick volumes, uniformly bound in red leather. Sweeney read the gilt titling on the spine and saw they were all copies of the same text—Perchance to Wake: On the Causes and Treatments of Coma. By W. Micah Peck.

“What’s the W stand for?” Sweeney asked.

“William.”

“What’s he got against the name William?”

“Only his parents called him William,” Alice said. “We should really go downstairs. My father doesn’t like people in his study.”

Sweeney followed her out of the room and down two flights of a semigrand staircase to the first floor. In the foyer, they came upon a small, wide woman struggling into a yellow rain slicker. There were two bulging plastic bags resting near her feet.

“Maneja con cuidado, Lucila,” Alice said.

The woman pulled a hood up over her head and lifted her bags.

“El cordero está en el horno,” she said. “Te veo el lunes.”

Alice opened the front door for her and Sweeney could see the storm had picked up. The woman ran out to a battered Volvo in the driveway. Alice waited until Lucila was in the car before she closed the door.

“Our housekeeper,” she said. “She’s from Miravago.”

She led him to the dining room, talking as she went.

“Her people disappeared years ago. Father and I are all the family she has left.”

The dining room was small and, like what he’d seen of the rest of the house, dark and Victorian. A hearth on the interior wall had a fire blazing in it.

“But she doesn’t live with you?” Sweeney said.

“She’s got a place in the city,” Alice said, and then put a hand out toward the table. “Sit. Get comfortable. I’ll be right back.” She started for the door, stopped, and turned back to him. “Do you eat lamb?”

“Lamb’s great,” Sweeney said. “Thank you. This is really nice of you.”

“I eat alone much too often,” she said and moved into the kitchen.

Sweeney walked to the hearth, thought about taking the poker and stoking the logs, but found himself, instead, studying the paintings that lined the walls. They were all portraits, all done in the same style as the one in the study, some of them, maybe, done by the same artist. The house, Sweeney realized, looking at all the pale and bony faces, was a museum to the Peck gene pool. There was probably a historical register up in Daddy’s library that would trace a fairly straight bloodline of doctors and scientists. A few founders of cities and banks with maybe a hemophiliac or two dangling from the family tree.

He heard the clatter of china and then Alice backed her way into the room, pushing through the swinging door. She was carrying a serving tray that held plates, glasses of wine, and napkins full of silver. She placed the tray on the table, said, “Be right back,” and vanished again into the kitchen.

Sweeney inspected the meal. A single, overlarge lamb chop was on each plate, and he knew they’d been cut from a full rack. Each chop was drizzled with a brown glaze and accompanied by a few tiny red potatoes, three stalks of asparagus, and a spoonful of mint jelly.

Alice returned with quilted placemats and a large box of stick matches. Sweeney hadn’t seen matches like these in years. She set their places, transferred the plates and crystal from the tray to the mats, removed the tray to a sideboy, and lit two candles that rested in simple pewter holders at the center of the table.

“I hope the wine is okay,” she said.

“I’m sure it’s fine,” Sweeney said.

Alice smiled, motioned for him to sit, and said, “No, I mean, I know you’re working later.”

“Actually,” Sweeney said. “I’m off tonight. Unless you heard something different.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t make out the staff schedules.”

He couldn’t tell if she was joking. They sat down and he raised his glass to her.

“Thanks again.”

“You’re welcome,” she said. “Honestly, it’s a pleasure to have some company. Half my meals, I read patient files.”

He cut a piece of meat and put it in his mouth. It was tender but flavorless and he wondered what was the purpose of the glaze.

“This is delicious,” he said.

Alice nodded, finished chewing, and said, “Lucila is a marvelous cook.” She took a sip of wine and added, “There’s more in the kitchen.”

Sweeney speared a potato and glanced around the table for a salt or pepper shaker. There were none.

“You’ve lived here your whole life?”

“I was raised here,” nodding and sipping. “I went away for college and medical school.”

“You always knew you wanted to be a doctor?”

“It’s in the blood,” Alice said.

“I know what you mean,” Sweeney said. “My father was a druggist. That’s what he always called himself — a druggist. And my wife was one also. But the tradition comes to an end with me.”

It was a stupid thing to say and he was embarrassed it had slipped out. They gave up a few seconds of silence and drank their wine. Sweeney clinked his crystal against his plate as he set the glass back on the table.

“Well,” Alice said. “I’m in the same position.”

He looked across the table at her and she smiled. And then it dawned on her what she’d said. She brought a hand to her mouth, then took it away.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Of course, I’m not in the same position at all. I didn’t mean—”

“It’s okay,” Sweeney said. “Relax.”

“That was a foolish thing to say,” she said. “What I meant was there’s no one to. .”

He started to let her struggle and realized he didn’t want that.

“No heir,” he said. “You meant that there’s no heir. No one to carry on the Peck tradition.”

She nodded, shook her head, tilted it back.

“You can see,” she said, “why I dine alone.”

“I can see,” he said, and pointed with his fork to the portraits rimming the room, “why tradition could be a concern.”

Alice smiled, and it seemed genuine and grateful. She brought her napkin up from her lap and dabbed at her lips and said, “Can we start over?”

“There’s no need,” Sweeney said. “We’re doing fine.”

Then she surprised him by saying, “So what really happened to your hands?”

He forked a stalk of asparagus and said, “Told you. I fell down in the parking lot. But in case you’re worried, I’m not going to sue.”

“You looked like you were having some difficulties this morning.”

“I’m not a morning person,” he said. “So why won’t there be any Peck heirs?”

His question was a little harsh, maybe, but it sent the right message — we both have things we don’t want to discuss. She finished the wine in her glass and said, “I should’ve brought the bottle in.”

Sweeney rose and said, “Allow me,” and Alice didn’t object. He pushed through the swinging door and into the kitchen. It was large and old. Soapstone sinks and wainscoting and bad lighting. The Merlot was sitting next to a greasy roasting pan that held the rest of the chops. He grabbed the wine, moved back into the dining room, and filled Alice’s glass to just below the brim.

He returned to his seat, topped off his glass and said, “You come up with an answer yet?”

“Nothing witty,” she said. “Just the truth.”

“And that is?”

“That the days when you could be married to medicine and raise a family on the side are gone.”

“I knew a lot of doctors back in Ohio,” Sweeney said. “And most of them were married and had kids.”

Alice shrugged. “There’s practicing medicine,” she said. “And then there’s the way the Pecks practice medicine.”

Sweeney put on a mock grimace and said, “Excuse me.” The wine made the words more sarcastic than he’d intended.

“I know what that sounds like,” Alice said. “But like my father told me on my first day of med school, obsession is a requirement.”

“And you still think Dad is right?”

“I know he’s right,” all kidding and flirting gone from her voice suddenly. “My father’s always right.”

Sweeney stayed silent, let the last words hang there, hoping she’d laugh at them. Instead, Alice continued.

“We’re not bonesetters, Sweeney. We’re out on the edge. Part of what my father and I do, maybe the most important part of what we do, is draw maps of the human mind. Our patients are helping us redefine beliefs about consciousness. Where it begins and where it ends and what it is.”

“I’m glad,” Sweeney said, “that Danny could assist you.”

It was a snide comment but she’d been running toward pompous and he didn’t like it. It made her resemble her father.

“I’m not trying to hurt you or offend you,” she said. “And I’m certainly not trying to hurt your son. But you came to us because we’re doing things that no one else in the field is doing.”

“I came to you,” Sweeney said, “because I was told you could help my son. I don’t care what you do or don’t discover in the process. And you don’t have to talk to me like I’m on some grant committee.”

“We don’t take a dime,” she said, rigid now, as if it were a point of honor, “from the federal government. Or from any private foundations. Or from the drug companies. We’re funded exclusively by patients’ fees, contributions, and the Peck Family Trust.”

He’d touched some kind of nerve so he probed a little.

“And the reason for that would be?”

She looked at him as if the answer were obvious.

“We’re not beholden to anyone,” she said. “Outside of fulfilling our licensing and accreditation requirements, we can run the Clinic as we see fit.”

“So independence is important to you,” he said.

“In this area of research,” preaching now, “it’s crucial.”

He worked his tongue to free a piece of gristle from between two teeth, then said, “Why?”

She repeated the word and he nodded and said, “I don’t mean any disrespect, Alice. I really don’t. But for almost a year now I’ve been hearing about this place. People talk in a kind of reverent way about the Peck”—she smiled at that—“like it’s Lourdes, or something. Dr. Lawton said if I could get Danny into the Peck, I shouldn’t hesitate. I had to go. So I read everything I could find on you people and I made application. And now here I am, and Danny’s got a bed, and I’m having dinner with his neurologist. And I’ve still got no idea why this place is considered the Mecca.”

“But you know about our results—” she began and he cut her off.

“You’ve had two arousals,” he said.

She squinted at him, as if he’d wandered into a language she couldn’t comprehend.

“That’s right,” she said. “And they were both persistent and semivegetative cases.”

“And how do you know you were responsible for those wakings?”

“How do we know?” she said, stunned by the recklessness of the question. “For God’s sake, we’re scientists, Sweeney. We monitor our results scrupulously. We test and retest. We don’t make claims we can’t validate.”

“Then why haven’t the full case studies been published?”

“They will be published,” she said. “Of course they’ll be published. But there are procedures. These things take a lot of time. For precisely that reason, so results can be confirmed definitively. So we don’t give false hope.”

“I understand that,” he said, more frustrated than he expected. “And I’m not suggesting the arousals were spontaneous. I’m sure they weren’t. But you said yourself that your patients are helping you redefine your techniques—”

“Beliefs,” she corrected. “I said beliefs.”

He hurried so he wouldn’t lose the thought.

“And my son is one of those patients now. And I have no idea what your beliefs, or your techniques for that matter, are. I’m his father. And I have no idea. What are you doing here that isn’t being done elsewhere?”

She looked at him for a while as if trying to decide something, then took her napkin from her lap and put it on the table. She looked at her wristwatch and said, “You’re not working tonight?”

He shook his head.

“Then let’s do this,” she said. “I’ll clear the plates and you go into the living room and pour a couple of brandies and we’ll talk some more.”

She got up and started collecting the china before he could answer.

The living room was off the other side of the foyer. There were no ancestors here, but hung over the mantel was a gargantuan photo of the Clinic, matted and framed, pressed under heavy glass and dating, Sweeney guessed, from the turn of the last century. The building had been photographed at either dawn or dusk and the trees that today surrounded it had yet to be planted. As a result, the picture looked like a still from some early German horror film and he wondered what would possess anyone to make it the showpiece of the room.

On the opposite wall, hanging over an uncomfortable-looking couch that was too small for the room, was a family portrait, done in heavy oils. The portrait featured a young Dr. Peck, his wife, toddler Alice, and a scrawny preteen boy, who had to be an unmentioned son and brother. For such a young clan, and despite the artist’s best efforts, the family looked so deeply unhappy that after a few minutes, Sweeney realized he preferred the photo of the Clinic above the mantel.

Logs were stacked on the grate of the fireplace but they hadn’t been lit. He saw another box of kitchen matches on the mantel but decided to see if Alice wanted a fire. Next to the hearth was an antique grandfather clock and next to the clock, a small built-in closet with glass panel doors. He opened it and inspected the bottles inside, took down a cognac and filled the bottom of two snifters.

She came in and caught him with his nose above one of the glasses.

“Are you a connoisseur?”

“If you only knew,” handing her a glass, “how funny that question would be to a lot of people back home.”

She put her drink on the mantel and grabbed the matches, kneeled down before the grate and, in seconds, had a fire building.

“I would’ve done that,” Sweeney said and helped her to her feet.

“It’s fussy,” she said. “Takes a special touch.”

She held onto his hand and led him to the couch but they sat at opposite ends.

He took a sip of cognac and swallowed too quickly and in a second his eyes started to water. He blinked a few times and when he looked up she was staring at him.

“I know what you want,” she said. “And it’s impossible.”

He let himself wipe at his eyes and said, “It is?”

“You want what they all want. All the loved ones. All the family members. Especially the parents. It’s completely natural and completely unreasonable.”

“I’m glad to know I’m not alone,” he said.

She placed her glass atop a felt coaster on the coffee table and came forward to lean on her knees. “All right,” she said. “Let’s get into it then.” She straightened her skirt over her knees and put her hands together as if to pray. “You want me to take a lifetime’s worth of highly specialized research and give it to you in ten minutes. You want it jargon-free, translated into layman’s terms. And you want the end result of that translation to be an answer to your prayers.”

He took another drink and made an effort this time to swallow correctly.

“You make it sound like a chore,” he said.

“Am I wrong?” But it wasn’t really a question. He looked across the room to see that the fire had already died out.

“I doubt,” he said, “that the Pecks are wrong very often.”

When she ignored the comment and launched her spiel, he understood that she agreed with him.

“Here’s the problem. We’re dealing with an extremely emotional issue. And yet, in order to accomplish anything at all, I have to be blunt. From your point of view, your son has been stolen from you.”

“From my point of view,” he repeated but she just went on.

“It’s as if he’s been kidnapped. And in a real sense, he has been. One instant, Danny was a normal, healthy six-year-old. And in the next instant, he’s something else altogether.”

“He’s still Danny,” he said but there wasn’t much conviction in it.

“Okay,” Alice said, “this is where it gets tough. Is he really? Can we honestly say he’s still Danny?”

He bit down on the impulse to defend his son. He said, “I’m not sure I’m following.”

“We’re talking about basic questions of identity, Sweeney. Who we are is, in large part, determined by how we perceive our world.”

He shook his head. “So if Danny doesn’t perceive the world, what? He doesn’t exist?”

“You’re going off track,” she said. “You’re trying to jump ahead of me. I didn’t say that.”

“Jesus, Alice. You’re making my son into a game for stoners.”

“Try to stick with me,” she said. “Listen to what I’m saying.”

“If Danny falls in the woods,” he said, “and I’m not there to hear him—”

“Calm down,” Alice said. “You’re not listening. One of the reasons that coma is so frustrating — and fascinating — is that it forces us to deal with some root beliefs. And this,” coming down on the word, “is exactly where the Peck differs from every other facility I know of.”

She let herself take a drink.

“The majority opinion would say that in most stages of coma, our sensory apparatus is shut down. Some sort of trauma causes the brain to turn off most of the higher functions. The patient exists in a state of profound unconsciousness.”

He was listening but he was also thinking of Danny pre-accident. Flashing back to their last Saturday, the day of the accident. Thinking of his son, for some reason, propped up on a booster seat in the barber’s chair, getting his hair cut. The barber was trying to ask him what he thought of the Indians this year, but Danny wouldn’t answer. The boy just stared across the short distance between himself and Sweeney, his head looking so small above the tent of a blue nylon sheet that covered his body.

“What I’m saying is that the patient’s brain is no longer receiving information along the sense pathways. So the patient is sent into a void. He’s in a black hole. I know this is hard but it’s necessary.”

He mimicked Alice’s actions, brought his drink to his lips and let a little brandy into his mouth. He heard her words and he understood them. He nodded to acknowledge this understanding. But he was thinking of Danny in a barber’s chair.

“The average neurologist would tell you that soon after he arrives in that void, that black hole, the average coma patient becomes a vegetable. They lose any vestige of sentience.”

There was nothing special about this trip to the barber’s. There was nothing, no incident good or bad, that should have impressed such a vivid memory. But there it was, as clear, in this moment, as the woman lecturing before him. Danny, his mouth set in a manner that could turn, at any instant, into a smile or a frown, as flakes of his fine, soft hair floated down around him to rest on his nose and on the blue sheet.

“But there are two things wrong with this notion. The first is that there’s no such thing as an average coma patient. And the second is that no neurologist that I know of has ever visited that black hole. So what they’re telling us is conjecture.”

Father and son never broke eye contact throughout the duration of the haircut. At points, Sweeney felt as if Danny were trying to tell him something. But mostly, in the midst of this mundane Saturday morning, this common and forgettable trip to the barbershop, he felt there was a moment of unexplained and binding love, radiating back and forth between the two of them.

Alice took another sip, looked across the room at the fireplace, then back at Sweeney.

“Everything that my father and I have discovered over the course of our careers tells us that those doctors have no right to their conjectures. The brain is a stunningly versatile organ. And the mind is an entity that we understand only in the most infantile ways.”

And then the haircut was over and Barber Ray spun Danny in the chair, broke their eye contact. But only for an instant because Danny found Dad again in the mirror, watched his father rise and come forward to stand behind his son. He watched his father place a hand on the nylon sheet — Sweeney could feel it now, cool and silky against his skin — and barely squeeze the bony shoulder beneath. And Barber Ray was brushing off the cuttings, the small feathers of kid hair, as he asked Danny how he liked the haircut. And Danny said, “Good”—just the one word and not very loud. But he continued to stare at his father in the mirror. To look at the face, the eyes. As if to say, I dreamed of you before I knew you.

“What I believe, and what my father believes, is that if you shut down all sensory information to the brain, you do, in fact, separate the patient from our universe. From consensual reality, I’ll call it. And maybe there is a period of passage through a void. A black hole. But I don’t believe the patient’s mind, their consciousness, dies. I don’t believe they reside permanently in the void.”

Her last words pulled him loose from the memory and he said, “Then where do they reside?”

“I think,” she said, “they construct another reality. Another universe. One that doesn’t need the prompts of touch and taste and smell and sight and sound.”

“And what,” he asked, “do they build that universe out of?”

“Who knows? I don’t know. To say I do would be worse than arrogant. It would be a lie. But I can guess that, whatever the building materials, the comatose universe is entirely alien to our own.”

Sweeney got up without being asked, moved to the fireplace, sat down on the floor and started to rearrange the logs.

“It’s an interesting theory,” he said. “But how does it help Danny? How do I get him back into my universe?”

“I want to answer your question,” she said, “with another question. But it’s a hard one for you to hear.”

She got up from the couch and joined him, but left her shoes under the coffee table. She sat down on her heels and he watched her skirt ride up her thighs.

“I’m guessing,” he said, “that I’ve withstood worse.”

“How do you know,” she said, “that he wants to come back?”

He lit a match, held it beneath a piece of kindling, and watched strands of wood start to glow. “He wants to come back,” he said, “because he wants to be with me. Because his father loves him more than his own life.”

“And he knows that?”

It seemed like a test, so even though he felt the anger coming on, he tried to keep ahead of it.

“He knows that, yes.”

She didn’t respond, just opened her eyes a little wider. It made her face lose a good deal of its beauty and he shook out the match just before it burned his finger. Then he lit another.

“He knows because before the accident I showed him every day. And since the accident, I’ve stayed next to him as much as I could and I’ve told him that I love him.”

“There’s a good chance,” Alice said, “that he doesn’t hear you.”

He felt himself slip a bit, felt the defensiveness pushing its way into his voice. He said, “He hears me,” and felt her shrug even though he didn’t see her shoulders move.

“He’s stage six,” she said. “I’m not saying it isn’t possible. But it isn’t probable.”

“Danny hears me when I talk to him.”

“Do you think I’m being cruel?”

“You’re being,” Sweeney said, pausing, “a doctor.”

“I’m preparing you,” she said. “You’re going to be invited to the first team assessment soon. It can be a difficult experience for the families.”

“I’ll cope.”

She finished her drink and said, “I’m not so sure. You’re functioning under some really debilitating stress. That takes its toll on everyone over time.”

“I’ve spent a year being patronized by the best neurologists in Ohio,” he said. “I’ll handle the meeting.”

In a week, he hoped, he’d be back in Cleveland, visiting Danny at the St. Joseph every day, working third shift at a Wonder Drug or an independent. Taking his medication and waiting for it to build up in his system. Waiting for the drug to accumulate enough power in his brain to numb down the rage and the fear.

“I’ll help you out,” Alice said, “as best I can. In spite of what I’ve said, I think Danny’s a promising candidate for waking.”

“Let’s say the rest of the team agrees with you. What happens then?”

“Danny would be put in the RAT program.”

He stared at her.

“Radical Arousal Therapies,” she said. “We’ve gotten approval recently to start using a new battery of drugs and procedures. If Danny’s recommended for the program, I’ll go over all of them with you.”

“And if he’s not recommended?” he asked because he thought she’d expect it.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself. Let’s wait and see what happens at the assessment.”

The second match managed to burn him. He dropped it and put his thumb in his mouth. She took his wrist, pulled the hand to her, and inspected the damage.

“Do you want me to get some ointment?”

He shook his head and she released his hand and he wiped the thumb on his pants leg and nodded toward the logs.

“I don’t think it’s going to catch,” he said.

Alice hugged her knees. “There’s something wrong with the flue. It’s never worked right. I guess my mother was the only one who could make a fire in here.”

“How old were you when she died?”

“I was about Danny’s age,” she said. “About six. I’ve got a few memories.”

“Was it sudden?”

He watched her look down on her knees.

“It was to me,” and she let out a small and awkward laugh. “She spent a year stockpiling Valium. And then she took them all in a single night.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, and thought of all the times he’d heard the same, feeble words.

“I guess she had a problem with it. I was a child. I didn’t know anything. She went away once for treatment. But it didn’t take.”

“In my family,” he said, “they called it the creature.”

Her face lightened. “The creature,” she said. “I like that.”

Sweeney nodded. “It works,” he said. “I had a couple of uncles. They were legendary.”

“It’s a genetic malady,” Alice said. “People like you and me need to be careful.”

He wondered if she’d smelled the beer off him this morning. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s never done much for me one way or the other.”

She gave him a long look that he thought was going to evolve into another lecture. But then she smiled and turned her body and stretched out on her back on the floor next to him. It would have been a surprise move had there been a fire burning before them. Without the blaze, he found it just short of bizarre. She closed her eyes for a second, opened them, reached out, and put a hand on his knee.

That it made him feel like an adolescent was off-putting. But the sight of her, in the tight skirt and the silk blouse and the thin gold chain around the neck, was making him hard for the first time in a year.

And so, before he could think, before he could remind himself that he planned on running home in the next week, he leaned over and kissed her. Her eyes closed again and her hand found his head and the fingers plowed through the hair over his ears and he kissed harder, leaned lower, and brought a hand to the side of her waist. And then her tongue was easing into his mouth and they were like high school kids, panicked and thrilled by the rush of enzymes and hormones, sweat breaking, noises building in the throat. He swung a leg over her, straddled her, and came down chest to chest. He felt her wedge a hand between them and grab at his crotch through his pants.

He reared up in a kind of amazed fear, born of both the realization that he was still functional and the lack of control that he’d never before known. His hand pushed down her thigh, found the hem of her skirt, and started up again and the sensation of touching the warm, silken skin brought him, almost instantly, to the verge of coming. He began to clench and something changed and she began to push him off her body. Then he heard the car door slam in the drive outside and understood that her alarm had nothing to do with his hesitation and everything to do with the return of her father.

“You’ve got to go,” she was saying, a panic in her voice that made her sound like a teenager. “It’s Daddy.”

She shoved him off and stood up, began straightening her clothing and hunting down her shoes. He looked around the room, helpless, infected by Alice’s alarm. She was hopping on one foot, storklike, an arm behind her trying to jam toes into a shoe.

“Up to the study,” she said, trying to yell through a whisper. “Leave the way we came in.”

He ran for the stairs and on the second landing heard the front door open. Then he stopped running and walked, small steps, balls of his feet, to Dr. Peck’s study. He let himself in and moved for the opposite door that led back to the Clinic. But before he stepped into the hallway, he took another look at the portrait of the doctor’s wife, then helped himself to a copy of the doctor’s book.

He closed the door to the study and looked out on the long, narrow corridor stretching in front of him. In that instant, the booze coupled with his exhaustion, and the hall began to tilt and expand. Sweeney placed a hand against the wall to steady himself. And as he did, the doctor’s text fell open and the comic book pressed inside dropped to the floor.

Going down on one knee, he picked up the comic and stared at its cover, which featured the strongman, Bruno Seboldt, lying on a patch of straw and dirt, in a vast puddle of his own scarlet blood. The issue was in pristine condition, as if it had never been read. Used only, perhaps, as a place marker in the fat medical tome.

The surprise of finding the comic inside Dr. Peck’s book gave way almost immediately to that reflexive fear, that compulsive desire to check in on Danny. As if the discovery of the comic were an omen. Sweeney stood up slowly and placed the issue back where he had found it, tucked the text under his arm and hurried down the corridor. And, in seconds, he was lost.

The route that Alice had taken from hospital to residence had been relatively short and direct, and Sweeney was certain that he had retraced it correctly. But at some point, he’d gotten himself turned around and ended up in a dim and narrow passage that dead-ended in an eaves that was crowded with dusty file boxes. He reversed direction and tried to work his way back to familiar ground. In minutes, he was completely disoriented and fighting a small panic.

And just when he was beginning to consider heading back to the Peck home, he found what he knew was the correct hallway and jogged to the door at its end. He pulled it open to find Romeo, the janitor, standing like a statue, his hands tight around a mop handle and a smile on his face as if he’d been expecting Sweeney.

“You out exploring again?” Romeo asked.

Sweeney stared at him for a second and then ran past him, sprinting all the way to Danny’s room.

He found his son in his bed, clean and warm and safe. Sweeney sat down on the ward’s empty middle bed and tried to breathe normally and stop his hands from shaking. After a time, as if it were the only way to calm himself, he pulled the issue of Limbo from Dr. Peck’s book, lay back, and began to read.