Jack O'Connell - The Resurrectionist

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.