He wondered for a second if this might be true. Then, more quickly than he intended, he said, “You can’t have my son. I won’t let that happen. You’ll have to kill me first.”
“For a pharmacist,” Nadia said, “you’re a dramatic little fucker. No one wants to kill you, Sweeney. You know that now, don’t you? You’ve been there. You’ve talked to Danny. You know it’s real.”
He shook his head and felt his stomach seize up.
“I don’t know what that word means anymore,” he said and the weight of the fact made his whole body slump, as if it were about to cave in on itself.
“That’s progress,” Nadia said, nothing flippant or ironic in her voice. “But you still have to make a move here. You no longer have the luxury of being stuck, Sweeney. You need to make some choices. Right now.”
“I throw in with you—” he said.
“Or you throw in with Peck,” she finished.
“Either, or,” he said, as if repeating the lyric of a well-known ballad.
“What would Danny want you to do?” Nadia asked. “What did he tell you?”
He struggled to sit up and they stared at each other.
“The Sheep told me,” Sweeney said. “About the way things work. How you move from clinic to clinic. How you harvest from the patients till they’re all used up.”
She nodded. “I told him to tell you.”
“But why?”
“So that when the time came,” she said, “you’d be able to make the right decision. For yourself and for the boy.”
One of her eyes twitched and Sweeney sensed that the depth of her exhaustion rivaled his own. And at the heart of the exhaustion was a desperate impatience that she was straining to contain.
“And you’re telling me the time has come,” he said, pushing her.
“There’s a window,” Nadia said, “when each coma patient is viable. That’s not my fault. You can only draw for so long from any given source. We don’t know why that is, though the Sheep has some interesting theories.”
“And after that window closes?” Sweeney asked.
“The soup becomes progressively less potent. Until it expires completely. Until it just doesn’t work anymore. That’s why we have to move from clinic to clinic.”
“And what happens to the patient at this point?”
Another shrug.
“And Danny?” Sweeney asked. “Is he about finished as a source?”
“It’s hard to say. He could last another week or another year.”
“And once he’s finished—”
“He’s finished,” Nadia said. “Once you deplete the source, it’s retired. There’s no more contact. He can’t wake into this world,” indicating the bedroom with her hands, “and he can’t bring you into his world. The patient can’t commune.”
Coming from her mouth, the last word sounded like a medical term somehow. As if it were a natural function of the body, a reflex, some thoughtless response of the nervous system.
“I just want him back,” was all Sweeney could think to say.
“You can visit with your boy,” Nadia said. “We’ve shown you that.”
“But I want him back permanently,” Sweeney said. “In my world. The way he was.”
“That,” Nadia said, “you can’t have.”
“I could still give him to Peck. Let Peck perform the procedure.”
“You could,” Nadia said, unfazed. “You could let the doctor put his needle in Danny’s brain. Shoot the head full of stem cells and the rest of his shit. Might even work. But who would Danny be when he woke up?”
“He’d be my son,” Sweeney said.
“No he wouldn’t,” Nadia snapped, her impatience breaking through. “Restoring consciousness doesn’t restore Danny. It doesn’t. Danny knows that. He told you that. Look, Sweeney, I don’t know what else to do with you. We showed you the other side. You met with your son. What more do you need?”
“But Peck—”
“Peck can’t help you, Sweeney. You leave the boy with Peck and you’ll lose him. Period. You’re out of time. Listen to your boy if you can’t listen to me. They’re upstairs now, sharpening the knives.”
And he had no idea if she meant this literally.
“But I haven’t signed the release,” he said and realized, as the words came out, how foolish they sounded.
Nadia waited a few beats and then, in a low voice, she said, “C’mon, Sweeney, make the fucking leap already.”
He took a breath and held it, ran his tongue around the dry well of his mouth. He thought about Danny. He thought about his son on the last day of his old life, enraged at a story that didn’t turn out the way he wanted. He imagined his son, encased in feathers and waiting for a father who would not return.
He said, “Get me up. Then you can help me pack while you tell me what I have to do.”
Nadia stood and smiled as she pulled back the covers. Sweeney looked past her and saw that his bags were already waiting by the door.
29
Peck had placed the terrarium on the metal cart next to him, among the rest of his tools. From this vantage, Rene, the salamander, had a fine view of the procedure as it began to unfold. To some degree, the newt’s vision was affected by the curve of the glass bowl, which bent the light a bit and added just a touch of magnification.
The doctors were dressed in deep green gowns and caps. Their masks hung down at their necks, leaving their faces visible. The younger doctor seemed slightly manic, too jovial, bouncing on his feet, his gloved hands clasped tightly behind his back. The older doctor was serious if not severe. He stood at the head of the slab, a safety razor in one hand. The other hand held a swatch of gauze that he used to dab away the shaving cream.
“I’ve never trusted a surgeon,” Peck said to Tannenbaum, “who doesn’t personally shave his patient.”
Tannenbaum mumbled his agreement, but his focus was on the structure framing and confining the child’s skull.
“Everything today is about speed,” Dr. Peck said. “About efficiency and economy.”
The skull was held rigid within a gleaming metal halo that circled around the forehead, just above the delicate ears and the blond eyebrows.
“You’d think we were accountants,” Peck said, a touch dreamily, but still in his lecture voice, “or train conductors.”
The halo, in turn, connected to a series of metal rods, which formed an open cube and bolted to the surgical slab. The device was, Tannenbaum knew, the doctor’s own invention and construction. Just as he knew that he would be acting as little more than instrument nurse throughout the procedure.
As if reading his thoughts, Peck handed his aide the straight razor and foamy gauze, then left his cutting hand extended, all the while continuing to stare at the boy’s skull, as if it were a newly discovered planet. Tannenbaum took the refuse and placed it on the cart, grabbed a fat marking pen and slapped it into the doctor’s waiting palm.
Peck uncapped the pen and brought its tip to the bare scalp, drew a crosshair in the appropriate location and darkened its intersection with a bull’s-eye.
“Science has been degraded,” Peck said to the room. “What was once a vocation has become a profession.”
He recapped the pen, returned it to Tannenbaum. On the instrument cart, resting on a sheet of emerald cotton next to Danny’s bulging medical file, was a collection of Peck family heirlooms — the straight razor with its scrimshaw handle, the steel cannula that had been brought back from a trip to Germany in the ’30s, and the 150-year-old glass syringe, its bulging crystal bulb full of raw potentiality.
While he had hoped to use only Father’s instruments for this procedure, in the end Peck had chosen a state-of-the-art Kopf stereotactic drill to bore through the skull. It was a beautiful piece of equipment — a hand unit, battery operated, with a flexible shaft and a speed range up to fourteen thousand revolutions per minute. The drill weighed only five ounces and accepted a wide variety of shanks and bits. For this case, the doctor had selected a diamond bit to make the opening.