The Resurrectionist

6

Over the last year, Dr. Peck had become devoted to the sherry. It was a Manzanilla and had been shipped to the Clinic straight from Spain by Mr. Moore, the husband of the patient in 103. Peck had found it an odd choice for a Christmas gift and, upon sampling the first bottle, decided it was too pungent for his taste. He’d thought about giving the whole case to the housekeeper but Alice had discouraged him and, upon further consideration, Peck had come to agree with his daughter. Such a gesture would have been inappropriate. But in the end, after several more samplings, the doctor had grown accustomed to and, ultimately, quite fond of the wine.

Now he swirled it in his grandmother’s antique copita, as he climbed up the brief curve of stairwell that led to the tiny cupola above his study. This was where he learned to appreciate the Manzanilla, sitting under the low, copper-domed roof after a night of reading. The little round room was sealed but fitted floor-to-ceiling with glass, like a lighthouse, and on full moon nights, Peck loved the way the rays lit up the amber tinge of his wine. The room appeared designed for children, two, perhaps three of them at most, and Peck had spent a large percentage of his childhood here. The space limitation always produced a calming effect on the doctor. He liked to lounge on the narrow window seat and look down over the grounds of the Clinic as if gazing out on a vast sea. On a windy night, the pines that spread out across his acreage rippled like a black ocean. And when he spent enough time staring at the patterns of the waves, he sometimes reached a state of higher thinking, that realm in which the breakthroughs could come.

Tonight, as he sipped and brooded, Dr. Peck was thinking about his newest patient, Daniel Sweeney. It looked like Ohio was right. Everything indicated that the boy would be a premier candidate for arousal. Aside from the immediate area of brain trauma, he was young and strong and healthy. And the father, the pharmacist, was the perfect profile — devoted and unstable, desperate and drowning in guilt. The man was pliable and would be easily convinced. The trick was always to give them more hope than information. If you overwhelmed the families with the realities of procedure, you only confused them. Confusion led, inexorably, into fear. And though fear, on occasion, could be used as a persuasive tool, the more frightened the loved ones, the harder they were to control.

Everything requires balance, as the universe chronically reminds. The doctor needs to sense when to be authoritarian and when to be sympathetic. When to offer possibility and when to pull it away. When to be available but silent, and when to be absent but hovering as an unseen presence in the wardroom. The ghost with the only solution. The redeemer with magic scalpel and syringe.

Family tradition and a lifetime of study had taught Dr. Peck that neurologists were the priests of modern consciousness. He regularly reminded his daughter of this truth and pointed out that, like a priest, one must tend his flock with a rigorousness that others might define as inhumane. It was an irony the doctor could appreciate only after his third glass of sherry.

We are mapping the location of the human mind, he would tell his daughter and his colleagues and his students at the medical school. And our maps are not aligning with the received wisdom.

As a groundbreaker in a field that operated on the slippery edge of both medical science and philosophy, Dr. Peck could make such statements without apology. At the age of twenty, Peck had removed the brain of a salamander, transferred the brain into the animal’s tail fin, studied the creature for six weeks, then replanted the brain in the cranium and watched the salamander reassume all its normal functions, as if the operation had never taken place.

Peck first reported the results of his experiment to his father, who responded with a wry smile and the question, “Are you telling me that you plan to specialize in salamanders?”

Since the day that question was asked, Peck had cut out, divided, rotated, transposed, and shuffled thousands of brain parts of thousands of salamanders. Also of mice, rats, turtles, gerbils, chickens, cats, and rhesus monkeys. Between all of the cutting and rearranging, he had written some of the most radical and hotly debated papers in the young history of the neuro-transplantation field.

On nights like this one, safe in the cupola, brooding and sipping his sherry and looking out on the pattern of the wind, the doctor was beginning to realize that his life had been one long and steady journey. A pilgrimage to a place of certain, verifiable truth about the human mind. About what the mind is and where it can be found. About how, once stolen, the mind might be reclaimed.

Peck’s father had been too much the Yankee to speak, at least publicly, of a belief in the idea of personal destiny. But while Peck had inherited his progenitor’s brilliance — and then some, he knew — he had claimed none of the man’s modesty. And that was a fine and lucky thing. Modesty had no place in the high drama of revolution.

Peck’s wife, in the midst of one of the later binges that had made her stunningly crude, had called her husband a dickless genius. He seized on the term as a perverse badge of honor and never touched the woman again. That was the night he first slept in the cupola. His daughter had found him in the morning, curled up and shivering, dreaming of patterns and waves and the shuffled brains of salamanders.

Draining the last of the sherry, he heard movement below in his study, leaned his head over the stairwell, and called down, “Alice?”

She hesitated before answering.

“I was looking for a file,” she said.

“The Sweeney boy?” he asked and already knowing her answer he added, “I’ve got it here. Come join me. And bring the bottle from my desk.”

He listened closely, heard her approach the bend of stairs and begin to ascend. And then she was before him, looking like her mother before ruin, the moonlight making her face even softer, younger. She was still wearing her lab coat, but she’d let her hair down. Peck leaned back, held out his glass with one hand, and patted the files on the window seat next to him with the other.

Alice poured and said, “It’s cold up here.”

“You didn’t bring a glass for yourself,” Peck said. “It’s all right. We can share.”

Alice lifted the Sweeney file and sat down next to her father.

“Have you spoken to Lawton?” she asked.

Her father squinted.

“What for?”

“To touch base,” Alice suggested. “Let him know they arrived safe and sound.”

“I’m not a travel agent, Allie,” Peck said and sipped. “And the boy is no longer under Dr. Lawton’s care.”

Alice looked at him, hoping for a smile. When one failed to materialize, she opened the file in her lap and turned to read its contents in the moonlight.

“Everything seems to check out,” she said. “Precipitating incident was a fall that caused cerebral trauma. Buildup of blood on top of the brain caused compression of the brain surface. MRI revealed subdural hematoma.”

“No retention of consciousness since the incident,” her father said, taking over from memory. “No response to pain, temperature, or touch. No pupil reaction to light. CT scan reveals herniation of the right cerebral hemisphere across the midline and into the left cranium. But no apparent damage to the brain stem or spinal column.”

Alice nodded as she turned pages and read. “Weaned off the respirator and transferred from the admitting hospital to St. Joseph’s one week after the incident. The assessment team, under the direction of Dr. Lawton, found the patient totally unresponsive and requiring full nursing care, tube feeding, frequent turning, suctioning—”

Peck interrupted again. “They doused the boy with methylphenidate. Ten milligrams, twice a day, with no results. His GCS score has remained at four, unchanged for the last year.”

He took a sip of sherry, licked his upper lip, and added, “Lawton went through the motions. As he tends to do.”

“Well,” said Alice, “he’s ours now.”

“Another exile,” said Peck.

And his daughter responded, “Ten thousand strong and growing.”

This was as close to a motto as the Doctors Peck had yet to find. It referred to the fact that at any given time, some ten thousand individuals across the country were being maintained in a condition of profound unconsciousness, in some degree of coma or vegetative state.

“If it’s all right with you,” Alice said, “I’d like to head up the assessment.”

Peck put on a surprised look.

“I thought your plate was full,” he said. “I was going to ask Tannenbaum.”

“I’d rather handle it, if you don’t mind. I already met the boy and the father.”

Peck didn’t say yes or no. He rubbed across one of his overgrown eyebrows with a free index finger and said, “What about the mother?”

Alice was taken aback for a second.

“As you know,” she said, getting nervous and, so, too clinical, “the mother is deceased.”

“Does it say in that file,” asked her father, “the cause of death?”

“In the file?” she repeated and he didn’t wait for her to go on.

“The mother killed herself,” Peck said, “six months after the boy’s incident. Lawton said she opened her wrists in the bathtub.”

“Lawton?” Alice said. “I thought you hadn’t talked to Lawton?”

“I didn’t say that. I said that I hadn’t called him.”

She was beginning to feel claustrophobic in the tiny room, as if the copper dome above her head had been inching downward while she wasn’t looking.

“Did Dr. Lawton say anything else,” she asked, “that was pertinent?”

“He warned me to watch out for the father. That he’s ready to explode.”

“And we put him in charge of our drug room?”

“It was an appropriate incentive,” Peck said.

Alice shook her head, suddenly finding it difficult to keep her thoughts ordered.

“The man has lost his wife and his son,” she said. “He’s suffering catastrophic stress. Do you really think Tannenbaum is the right person to steer him through the process?”

Peck put the sherry on the floor between his feet, unfinished. He straightened up and reached out to put his hand on the back of his daughter’s neck.

“Allie,” he said, “if you want to handle this case, you know it’s yours.”

“Thank you, Poppa,” Alice said. “It’s just that the boy, Danny. . Have you taken a good look at him?”

Peck didn’t say anything but he took his hand away.

“He looks,” Alice said, “a lot like Alvin did at that age.”

And the hand came back up and Peck slapped his daughter across the face.

The action was as controlled and neat as the voice that followed it.

“We don’t mention that name,” Peck said.

Alice kept herself from touching the cheek, she nodded and tried to breathe, but the claustrophobic feeling was flooding through her now.

“Enough shop talk,” Peck said, putting both hands on his daughter’s shoulders and positioning her away from him on the window seat, so that he could come up against her back and wrap his arms around her. He let his chin rest on her shoulder, brought his nose into her neck, and took in her scent.

“Look at how beautiful the woods are tonight,” he said. “It’s like we’re the only people left in the world.”