“I won’t keep you in suspense any longer,” Peck said to Rene. “The harvest was a success. As you know, I had my doubts about the fetal source. But I feel certain now that we were within the nine-week limit.”
While it is true that salamanders are deaf to airborne sounds, the doctor was confident that his confessor received and processed the vibrations of voice in some satisfactory manner.
“The oldest irony,” Peck said. “We must go to the gutter in order to reach the stars.”
When drunk, Dr. Peck had a tendency toward the theatrical. Rene, for his part, did not seem to mind. There was little cruelty in artifice and, in small amounts, the doctor’s affectations could verge on the charming.
“Light out of darkness,” Peck intoned, like some hammy Victorian actor, ready to reach for a skull or break into song. “Life out of death. Consciousness out of profound stupor. As Bishop Berkeley said to his sallie, These are the miracles we work in the Clinic.”
He belched, and then, taking in some air, laughed at his own performance. Rene quivered slightly on his chest.
“It’s good to have a place,” the doctor said, “where we can let down our guard. You and I are fortunate. For all that we sacrifice in our pursuit, we always know where we reside. We’ll always have the cupola.”
He brought his hand up slowly and stroked the newt along its back with his index finger.
“But the mind,” he said, “the poor, lost mind, has no idea where it resides. The Greeks housed it in the stomach, you know. As good an address as any other. I once knew a physicist. Said he could move his mind into his shoulder or his big toe. A lunatic, I agree, though not without his appeal. But in the end, I seem to return to our favorite poet.”
He stared down at the sallie and smiled.
“Would you like a taste?”
The newt remained impassive. Peck grabbed the volume from the floor, propped it on his belly, and opened it to a page bookmarked with a torn sheet of pulp — a garish piece of comic art. He lifted the bookmark. It was a scene of dark romance, featuring a sinister-looking man — a magician, perhaps, or an undertaker — dark-eyed and gaunt, dressed in a flowing black cape that gave just a hint of its brilliant red lining. The man wore black boots with long pointy toes. He sat cross-legged, halfway up an enormous cliff, in a notch between two boulders. A cobra’s head cane rested across his lap. His elbows were planted on his knees, his chin cupped in his braced hands. And he appeared to be in the grip of some sort of trance, looking out over a raging sea, terrifying whitecaps breaking over the rocks below him.
Peck studied the image for a moment, frowned at it, unable to recall from where it had come. Then he dropped the bookmark to the floor and read, rendering the English from the old French:
Languor is a tendency to relax and be motionless,
and this is experienced in all the members;
like tremors, it proceeds from the fact
that sufficient animal spirits do not get into the nerves.
A swoon, however, is not far removed from death,
for death results when the fire
which is in our heart
is extinguished altogether,
and we only fall into a faint
when it is stifled in such a way
that there still remains some traces of heat,
which, afterward, may rekindle.
A pause to let the words have their effect.
“As you might imagine,” Peck said, “and like everything else, it loses something in the translation.”
The doctor took great pleasure in reading to Rene. It reminded him of those lost Sundays, years ago, when Alice would sit on his lap downstairs in the study rocker and he would perform her favorite story, shamelessly acting out the dialogue of the princess and the prince and the evil witch with her poisoned apple.
Now he dropped the book onto the floor and put his hands behind his head.
“But the point remains,” he said. “Just like you, my friend. Theories come and theories go. But the salamander remains. Take Tannenbaum, for instance. Been here how long now? But still he believes — he insists — that consciousness is a collection of patterns residing in known space and time. Everything for him comes down to the firing of neurons. Transmission and reception.”
A belch.
“Smug son of a bitch,” looking down at the sallie. “There is a kind of doctor, you know. More common than you’d imagine. Never known a day of doubt. But, tell me, Rene, if you’ve never known doubt, how can you know true faith?”
Peck wanted to roll on his side but the newt looked so comfortable.
“I’ve had years composed of nothing but doubt. Two arousals, Rene,” holding up fingers to illustrate, “two arousals in ten years. In all that time, the only thing I haven’t doubted is the existence of my own mind. But make no mistake, self-awareness is both boon and curse.”
He lifted his head to focus in on his confidant.
“Sometimes I think I amuse you with my confessions. But I can’t help this sense that the mind has its own cupola. Its own refuge. And if I can locate the refuge of consciousness, I can break inside. If not through the front door, then through the back. If not through the back, then through a window. If I can find its lair, I can poke it. And if I can poke it, I can wake it up.”
Suddenly invigorated by his own pep talk, he returned the newt to the glass bowl, then grabbed the flashlight from the floor. Sitting up, he peeled Daniel Sweeney’s latest brain scan from his chest and fixed the film against the cupola window. He thumbed on the flashlight — it was a diver’s lamp and its hundred-thousand-candlepower beam passed through the film and projected the image of the boy’s sleeping brain out over the sea of pines. As the trees rippled in patterns with the wind, the brain itself, enlarged to ten times its true size, also appeared to ruffle and wave.
Peck studied the organ’s topography as he spoke to Rene.
“Our problem, of course, is the father. Always the father.”
He stopped himself and stared at the undulating map of the child’s brain and in the long silence that followed, the newt began to lash his tail back and forth and excrete his toxins into the drying moss at the bottom of his bowl.
“But I promise you that we will deal with the pharmacist,” Peck said. “And one way or another, I will step out onto that ocean and walk upon that water,” face grimacing and fully theatrical now, as he used his finger to mark the places where he would cut open the child’s skull and poke the brain with his monk’s harpoon, spreading the new seed and birthing a new world.
But Rene was no longer listening. He had stopped at that moment when the makeshift bookmark had floated to the floor next to his bowl. And the caped sorcerer caught the salamander’s eye and began to work his dark mesmerism across those vast expanses of myriad dimensions.
LIMBO COMICS: FROM ISSUE # 7: “A Bloody Ordeal”
. . Needless to say, following the murder of Lazarus Cole, the freaks and their strongman moved through that first night of the Jubilee in a state of stunned disbelief. And yet, they seemed to be the only ones who experienced the aftershock of witnessing such a degenerate and orchestrated killing.
“But remember,” Chick said to them just before the sideshow annex was opened for business, “the Jubilee comes through Mach’pella every year. And according to the bannerline, Lazarus Cole has been with them for seven seasons now.”