Jack O'Connell - The Resurrectionist

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “You want me to just leave the vault open? Are you nuts?”

“Ernesto used to do it all the time.”

“What the hell kind of place is this?” he said and she understood that he wasn’t looking for an answer.

“This is not a big deal, Sweeney.”

He lifted an arm, let it fall back and slap his thigh.

“Like almost choking someone to death isn’t a big deal.”

“God,” she said, “you are tense.”

“What is it you have to tell me about Danny?”

She just shook her head.

He sighed, exhausted. His stomach was churning.

“What’s the name of this place?” he asked. “This bar?”

“It’s called,” she said, “Gehenna.”

He stared at her. She widened her black eyes.

“You’re kidding me,” he said.

“Is there a problem?” she asked.

They stared at each other for a few seconds until he realized that she wasn’t going to say anything else.

“Can we go after shift? I mean, it’s open all night, right?”

She thought about it.

“I want to hear what you have to say,” he said, “but I’m not going to walk out and leave the vault open.”

She knew there was no use arguing.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll meet you in the lot at 7:15.”

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.