Читать книгу The Quick - Laura Spinney - Страница 4

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That hospital, detached though it was from the city it served, represented my ideal of modern medicine. The people who ran it, the director and her deputies, didn’t parade through the corridors inspecting the work in progress. They were discreet, in fact we never saw them, but their competence was evident in its smooth running. Patients always left better off than when they had entered, unless there was nothing that could be done for them, or unless they left via the cremator -ium chimney, which was the only other possible exit. Everything that happened happened for a reason, and being able to count myself among its several hundred employees, I admit, only added to my sense of its rightness.

I preferred to be in my office than in the small flat that had been provided for me nearby. I went home to sleep, to change my clothes and pick up my post. If I was obliged to wait around there in the day, to receive a delivery, say, or because it was Sunday, I quickly began to feel restless. I preferred to walk the short distance to the theatres, pick one at random and lose myself in a fictional world for a few hours. But above all, I longed to be back in my office. It was a source of great pleasure to me to turn my chair to face the window, to see beyond it the facing side of the north wing, which enclosed our little garden.

My office was small, but comfortable. It was painted white, and there was room for the desk, a couple of armchairs and some bookshelves. On the wall by the door, in two symmetrical rows, were arranged the framed certificates which, with ribbons and seals, announced my membership of various professional organisations. I would have to step right up to the window to look down on the garden, on the mosaic of lawn, flower beds and paths lined with benches and ornamental fruit trees. But it was enough for me to know it was there. The paediatric and geriatric wings were too small to have gardens. But the north wing did, and that lent it a certain grandeur. It made it the spiritual heart of the hospital; its soul. More than that, the lighted windows on the third floor of the other side appealed to my liking for symmetry.

The reason was that those squares of frosted glass belonged to the operating theatres. Behind them, under the bright theatre lights, faceless surgeons in green overalls, caps and masks drilled through cranium, lifted flaps of bone and scooped out tumours. They inserted grafts, or probes, applied pulses of electricity, then retreated through tough, transparent curtains of membrane, stitching them up behind them as they went. They repaired the hardware, and after the patient had spent a little time recuperating on the wards, I would start the slow process of reprogramming it. I made good on their promises. Our efforts complemented each other entirely.

And so it went on. For three long years, between us, we sculpted the material at our disposal and sent it back into the world, to use the frightful jargon, in a more highly functioning state. There was no let-up in the work. As the recognised authority on every kind of brain disease, we were supplied by hospitals all over the country – those hospitals I had worked in previously, at earlier stages of my career – and even hospitals in Europe and further afield.

If there was ever a pause in my daily schedule, perhaps because a patient had failed to turn up for an appointment, or died in the night, I would lean back in my chair, close my eyes and let my mind wander. Often, in those rare, peaceful moments, I would think of Mezzanotte. We hadn’t spoken since I had taken up my post (it was he who tipped me off, by telephone, before I received the official letter of invitation), but I felt his exacting, enquiring presence all around me. He was, in fact, less than a kilometre away as the crow flies, in a large, light office at the top of one of the architects’ new follies – a rhomboid in glass and steel. From there, he commanded six hundred square metres of state-of-the-art laboratory and all those who laboured in it.

My debt to Mezzanotte was so great that it could never be repaid. I first went to work for him almost by chance. I simply answered an advertisement in one of our professional journals, not knowing who had placed it. At the time he was interested in the question of why we sleep, and hunting for clues among the human sleep anomalies: insomnia, narcolepsy, incubi or night terrors. But mainly insomnia. Even then, he ran a large group and I forget who it was who interviewed me. But I was accepted and my duties were explained to me. I was to interview the patients, note their symptoms and perform the various psychological tests. Last but not least, I had to make sure they understood they weren’t being offered a cure.

For this task I was allocated one of the old teaching rooms in the university’s Department of Anatomy, a few streets away from the hospital. It was lonely work, and back then I was still inexperienced. In my field, in the medical profession as a whole, you have to develop an immunity to human suffering or the first hard-luck story will pierce you through. But my outer casing hadn’t sealed over yet and I quickly discovered what a lack of sleep could do to people. In the most extreme cases, it turned them into monsters. A procession of unravelled men and women trooped through my room, red-eyed and raw, and told me such tales of woe that at the end of every day I would break down in tears.

My contract lasted three months, and during that time I never once spoke to Mezzanotte or even stood in the same room as him. I saw him occasionally, from a distance, striding across a street, his head turned away from me. He wore an ivory silk scarf wound tightly round his neck, and his left hand was always tucked into his jacket pocket, as if he were concealing something there. I had seen his picture, of course, many times, though he was still some way off the height of his fame – not yet a household name. He was forty-five years old. A tall man, slightly stooped, he wore beautifully cut tweed jackets a little too long beyond their natural lifetime. In the olive-skinned oval of his face burned two dark, soulful eyes. He had a high brow framed by thick brown curls, and soft, full lips. A passionate-looking Mediterranean, but reserved – some would say, cold as ice. The passion lay in the features he had been given, not in the way he used them. His face was curiously expressionless, and the general view in scientific circles, though it was only whispered, was that his brilliance hid a lack of human feeling – something I later found to be not quite accurate.

What I knew about the professor at that time necessarily came to me second-hand. He was born of mixed stock, of an aristocratic Italian father and a mother of unknown origin, possibly Hungarian. Mezzanotte spoke five languages, but understood or read several more; he was knowledgeable about sixteenth-century Italian art, and had built up his own collection of paintings which circulated on permanent loan, since he himself was of no fixed abode. By that I mean that he moved around the world, led by the latest question that obsessed him and the location of the tools and people he needed to answer it. He was at home anywhere in Europe and had lived happily in the Arizona desert too. He had left behind laboratories in Trieste, Copenhagen, Tucson and Tokyo, all of which continued to thrive, and his name had been mentioned in the same breath as the Nobel Prize – though back then, he had yet to win it.

He had what you might call the Midas touch when it came to his science, and though there was certainly a ruthlessness to his pursuit of the truth, most of the rumours about him – that he manipulated his data, that he harassed his female students, then fired them for his own mistakes – had not stood up to scrutiny. There were stories of women who had come close to him, of men too, but even if they were true the affairs can’t have lasted long because I never heard the same name repeated twice. He was the object of great admiration, but also, inevitably, of envy. The head of the anatomy department explained to me, not unkindly, that my part in the sleep project mattered very little to the maestro. He was far more deeply involved in another series of experiments, the brainchild of a brilliant young student from East Germany, which involved tweaking the circadian rhythms of mice, sending them to sleep and waking them up again with the wave of a chemical wand.

Later he moved on to other questions. How much of the world do our waking brains perceive? Do we log every new detail, every change in our environment, or are we more slapdash? Do we sample it crudely and fill in the gaps from memory, from imagination? But those experiments, the ones with the sleeping mice, were the ones for which he would be remembered. They won him the prize and secured him the directorship of the new brain sciences institute. A certain type of patient came to see him as their hero and saviour. People in the street, even the healthy ones, knew his name – but only long after his work had already changed their lives in subtle ways they could never imagine.

What happened to the East German prodigy, Franz Kalb, I don’t know. I never heard of him again. My insomniacs fell by the wayside, but perhaps my hard work was noticed, or perhaps (as I prefer to think) I unwittingly offered Mezzanotte some small insight that prodded him along the road to fame, because I was handsomely rewarded for my efforts. Once a year, sometimes less often, sometimes more, he would invite me back to work for him, to census and survey a certain patient population, or even just to observe and describe a single, unusual case. Even after I had left the city, the summons would find me, whichever town I happened to be working in at the time. I accepted without a second thought, working overtime so as not to annoy my boss. I could always count on the work being interesting, and even if I was kept in the dark as to where it was leading, I felt myself a part of something grand and momentous; a universal movement towards the light. Because I knew in a general sense what the adventure held for me, the day the summons arrived was always a day of great joy. I would walk around the hospital with a smile on my lips and a feeling that I had been singled out for some special purpose.

The professor and I never spoke more than was necessary, we met only to discuss the work, but I remember every detail of those meetings: how he reclined in his chair and pressed his clasped hands down on his springy brown curls when meditating on a problem; the greedy look that came into his eye when he thought he had found the solution; his habit, when the solution eluded him, of standing up suddenly, circling the desk and coming to a halt somewhere behind me. There he would linger for a few minutes, quite still and without making a sound – like one of those hawks you see hovering over the motorway verge, waiting for a small woodland creature to stray into the space beneath its talons. I don’t know if he was looking at me, or if he was even aware of my presence, but the hairs on the back of my neck would stand up anyway. I came to recognise those moments as the calm before the storm, the brief interlude during which he dismantled his conscious mind and waited for some insight to well up from the depths. I would sit perfectly still, not daring to move in case I broke the spell. It was rare that an idea didn’t occur to him, but on the few occasions that happened I would be summarily dismissed, without explanation or platitudes. In the early days I used to wonder why he asked me there at all, so little did I contribute. But it seems that in some strange way I was necessary to him, if only as a sounding board, a witness.

Over the years I thought I discerned a subtle change in his attitude towards me: an increase in warmth. At some point he started to call me by my first name, Sarah, but even then it didn’t occur to me to call him by anything other than his proper title. Our relationship was rooted firmly in the old-fashioned, continental tradition of respect for your elders; of maintaining a formal distance between master and pupil. Only once did I venture too close. During one of our meetings I was distracted, and when he asked me where my mind was I blurted out news of a tragic event that had happened to me, the loss of someone I had loved. He merely turned to gaze out of the window, and when he spoke again, it was to continue the scientific discussion where we had left it off.

That was early on, when I was still soft in places. I didn’t know what I had done to offend him, I was in turmoil for days, and he never enlightened me. I had the impression that he was a very private, if ambitious man. My admiration for him anyway verged on the unconditional, not only because he provided me with a lifeline during those dull years in the sticks, but also because I had seen him at work, and known myself to be in the presence of a great mind. Some time later, after I had taken the decision to throw myself into my work, to make that the focus of my life, things changed. Rather, my view of him changed. It came to me out of the blue one day: without knowing anything about him, I was probably the person closest to him in the world, and vice versa.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I had been at the hospital three years, and in that time I hadn’t heard a whisper from him. It was a longer silence than usual, but that didn’t worry me. I felt sure, though he had never explicitly told me, that he followed my work closely through the journals, perhaps also through word of mouth. He never neglected to congratulate me on a paper that had received polite reviews, and his praise was a source of great pride to me. I ran over it in my mind for days afterwards, savouring every word. He watched my star steadily rise, and I strove not to disappoint him. I knew also that as sure as summer follows spring, I would one day receive a note from him, asking me to return to what he called my ‘real’ work.

At last it came. It was a cold afternoon towards the end of January, the last in a week of freezing fogs and snowstorms. The sky beyond the window was darkening, the lights across the way burned more brightly than usual. I was working on a difficult case, a lawyer from Cardiff who, following a car accident and a mild concussion, had reported seeing things: ants filing across his pillow, bears crouching in corners. He suffered from hallucinations, all right, but since his accident he had become immune to the common-or-garden visual illusions – the Necker cube, Escher’s reversible staircase or some of the other ambiguous images.

My intuition told me that this was one of those rare gems that had something important to teach me, something fundamental about the nature of consciousness, and I felt the stirrings of excitement. What switch had been thrown in the lawyer’s brain, that illusion had become reality and reality illusion for him? If fate hadn’t intervened, it might have been that lawyer, rather than Patient DL, with whom my destiny was to become entangled. But Mezzanotte decreed otherwise. As I sat at my desk on that winter afternoon, poring over my papers, oblivious to the approaching storm, one of my assistants came into my office and handed me a note. It was unsigned, but I recognised the handwriting immediately. Without a word to my assistant, I put aside the lawyer’s file and walked out of the room.

The first snowflake fell as I turned into one of the narrow tunnels that led to the outside world and, just as I emerged into the city traffic, the blizzard broke. I hurried through the swirling air, groping my way along the familiar route, until the snowstorm began to subside and I found myself standing in front of the new institute, which towered above me like a beacon against the purple sky, its giant windows ablaze. When I entered I found myself at the centre of a swarming, excited crowd. A symposium seemed to have just broken up and young men and women were flinging themselves through the sprung doors of the lecture theatre and dispersing in all directions, as if in a hurry to put what they had just learned into effect.

I stopped a young man with starry, bespectacled eyes who told me I would find the professor in his office. He had excused himself from the lecture on the grounds that he was tied up with an important experiment. I took the lift to the top floor, nodded at the two secretaries whose desks flanked his door, and knocked. Hearing no response, at a signal from the senior of the two ladies, I opened the door slightly, put my head around it and caught my breath. Across a large expanse of blue carpet, the professor was seated behind his desk, his back to a window beyond which the whole city was laid out, sparkling. The river kinked just there, beneath him, a black hole in the centre of the picture which drew to its edges the densest part of the galaxy of light. The disembodied dome of the cathedral gleamed beyond his left shoulder, and cranes loomed over the landscape like ponderous dinosaurs, lit up by Christmas lights. He was beckoning to me with a long, slender finger, then carrying it to his lips to indicate that I should not speak.

I approached his desk and stood there, waiting for him to finish. I took the opportunity to observe him. He was, by then, in his mid-sixties. His curls had turned white and fanned back from his noble forehead in a crenellated shock, lending him an air of distinction that was accentuated by the ivory cravat. Since I had seen him last, new creases had scored his forehead and lines ran down from the corners of his eyes like guy ropes. They seemed to lend his now rather gaunt face a new mobility, as if a mask had been peeled away or melted. The eyes were as dark and soulful as ever. A number of rubber pads were attached to his forehead and temples, and from these sprouted plastic-coated wires. Around him, on the desk, were arranged various grey metal boxes covered with knobs, dials and colourful, blinking lights. The professor was staring intently at a computer monitor whose greenish light threw into sharp relief the deep fissures in his face.

After a few minutes, with a sigh of expended effort, he pushed the monitor round so that I could read the words that were written there: ‘Good afternoon, Sarah. I, Mezzanotte, invite you humbly, and through the medium of my slow cortical potentials, to immerse yourself once again in your work.’

It hadn’t escaped my notice that there was no keyboard on the desk, and for a moment I was confused. How had he magicked the words on to the screen? He watched me, a little smile playing about his lips. And then he opened his arms as if to embrace the grey boxes scattered around him. These, he informed me, represented the culmination of three years’ work. He had been following a hunch, and if it turned out to be correct, it would draw all the other threads of his scientific enquiry together; it would make sense of his life’s work. He considered it the greatest idea of his career; more important than his sleep experiments, and far more audacious. He had proved it in principle (here he nodded towards the screen), and now the time had come to test it in the real world – the task for which he had summoned me.

‘Here I am,’ I said, my pulse quickening. ‘Give me my instructions.’

At a sign from him I dragged a chair to the desk, sat down and rested my elbows on top of it. He lowered his head towards mine. And for the next hour, perhaps two, I listened in mounting awe as he explained the conception, gestation and birth of a revolutionary device – one he had developed secretly, and whose potential, he hinted, could not even be dreamed at.