She folded her arms across her chest. She looked darker in the light of the vault. She looked, he thought, like a gypsy. And he was struck, for the first time, by the magnitude of her foreignness and her beauty.
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” she said.
Sweeney waited for her to go on and when she didn’t, he said, “I don’t understand.”
“My note,” Nadia said. “Didn’t you get my note?”
“The note,” Sweeney repeated. “Of course, the note. I got it. Yes. You wanted to talk. About Danny.”
“I thought for a minute you didn’t get the note.”
“Is Danny okay?” he asked. He had repeated this question so many times in the last year that at some point it began to feel like a prayer or a pledge.
“Not in here,” Nadia said. “We can’t talk here.”
He looked around the vault and nodded.
“You want to go down to the cafeteria?”
Now she laughed.
“No,” she said. “I mean I’m not comfortable talking here at work. In the Clinic.”
She gave him a chance to suggest something and he failed.
“Listen,” Nadia said, “I know a place near here. This little bar. It’s open all night. Why don’t I meet you around the back lot in fifteen minutes? Can we take your car? I got a ride in.”
He looked at her, then up at the wall clock, and then back.
“What are you talking about? Shift just started.”
“That’s not a problem,” she said. “Debbie will cover for me.”
“I can’t just leave here,” he said.
He saw the indulgent smile and shook his head in response.
“You want me to just leave the drug room? On my second night of the job?”
“Oh, please,” she said. “What? You’re more essential than I am?”
“No, that’s not what I’m saying. I just can’t leave the room unmanned.”
She walked to his in-box and lifted maybe three scripts.
“You waiting for the rush?”
“That’s not the point.”
“Sweeney, everyone knows where everything is. Just leave a note that you got called away. You had an emergency. They’ll find whatever they need.”
“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.”
14
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.