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.