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.
This time, it took almost thirty minutes for the doctor to find that scarce and precious moment when exhaustion and sherry allowed him to fade out of the Clinic and into the place where his mind could rage against the borders of rationality. The place where, he knew from experience, the most radical breakthroughs were conceived.
Unfortunately, the doctor rarely had enough time or solitude these days to roam out into the frontier of his imagination. He was a man of staggering responsibilities. Few could know the enormity of his obligations and fewer still could discharge them. And while some mundane satisfaction derived from executing one’s duty, the cost was considerable — an ongoing sacrifice of the hours and the privacy needed to dream well and deeply.
But with his tools at hand and the right combination of sleeplessness and Manzanilla, Dr. Peck could dive down into a level of thought where language and history were increasingly irrelevant. These submersions tended to ravage him, like the pearl diver who plunges beyond all good sense in search of the ultimate gem. The pressure on the lungs and the temples becomes more severe with each additional foot of depth. The danger of dislocation more acute. The risk of remaining forever submerged, extraordinary. But Peck, like all visionaries, knew that there was no such thing as true exploration without true risk. In fact, that was where the thrill of discovery resided — in the heart of the peril. It was not work for cautious men, which is why it fell to the doctor. Whatever other traits his blood harbored, timidity was not among them.
Peck took a last long swallow of sherry and put the bottle down on the floor. He could feel himself arriving into that moment when discovery was possible. In the end, he knew, this was what he lived for: that instant of pure, galloping potential, that feeling of downrushing epiphany.
But calling forth fresh thought was, like summoning demons, a precarious process. And, for Dr. Peck, it required an instinctual blending of the right amounts of whimsy, research, fatigue, daydream, alcohol, and stress. It also required the right environment — the cupola was the only place that the notions would deign to be born. Finally, the summoning required a marriage of humility and patience that could allow the idea to reveal itself in its own manner and time. The idea, it must be understood, is always in charge.
From adolescence through the first years of his medical practice, Dr. Peck had believed that new knowledge was born of a specific process, reflection and experimentation coupling to yield results that were quantifiable, repeatable, and capable of being shared. But up here, in this womb at the top of the Clinic, in his boyhood sanctuary, he had learned otherwise. Genuine revelation, he determined, was nothing less than an explosion of new consciousness, a reconception of the mind itself. It did not accrete, building slowly and steadily upon existing information and tradition. It was, rather, a revolution and a rapture, a concussion that obliterated the past and re-created the world in the radiant light of newborn vision.
Seeking refuge from a spectral and unimpressed father and, later, a scornful and depressive wife and, later still, a daughter he loved too much, Peck had spent countless sleepless nights in the cupola, looking out over the ocean of pines and trying to dream his way into epiphany or, failing that, oblivion. Over time, the cupola had become a kind of petri dish or incubator, the glass uterus where the notions were conceived and matured. Peck had come to feel this was a place of holy asylum.
Once, years ago, Alice had found him on the window seat, calling out in his sleep, locked into one of those slow-motion nightmares in which the terror is inversely proportionate to the mundane image that triggers it. She was fourteen or so at the time, with hair trimmed short for the summer. Upon being woken, still tormented by his dreams, Peck had mistaken her for his son and struck her across the cheek. Shocked, she had dropped to her knees, eyes open and staring throughout the fall, her skin reddening with the prints of his fingers. When Peck realized his mistake, he pulled the girl into his arms and held her, too tightly, until sometime before dawn, both of them weeping with what the father wanted to believe was a shared understanding regarding the cost of genius.
On that night, Peck realized that the calling to medicine — at least the kind of visionary medicine to which he aspired — was more than a vocation; it was destiny. And as such, it called for a radical lifestyle. Doctors, like monks, were forever at risk of infiltration by the domestic world. He concluded, much too late, that they should be solitary, if not entirely celibate, creatures. A people, as the saying goes, set apart. The modern clinic, he now understood, was the contemporary monastery, its labs the chapels where communion could be reinvented perpetually. In the case of the Peck Clinic, it would be a communion with the sleepers.
On impulse, Peck reached down into the terrarium for Rene, caught the sallie gently inside his fist, and lifted it out of the glass bowl. Bringing his mouth close to his cupped hand, Peck spoke into it.
“My apologies. Did I interrupt a dream?”
The doctor’s query was nothing but a polite greeting, something to set the tone and begin the session. He knew that salamanders lived day for night. Through the latex, he could feel the newt move against his skin, a sensation he found comforting. The gloves were for the creature’s protection, certain toxins in the human epidermis being poisonous to newts.
Peck reached down with his free hand, grabbed one of the filmy brain scans and laid it on his bare chest. He placed Rene on the scan and the newt remained there, frozen, staring up into the sky of the doctor’s face.