The Quick. Laura Spinney

a select few of them will rise to neurological stardom.

      My name would often be included among the authors of such a paper. My long list of publications, all of them in prestigious journals, earned me the right to organise my time as I saw fit, and not to have to venture too often above the second floor. On the rare occasions that I did, I was accompanied by a consultant, various other specialists and, of course, my two assistants. With this retinue making constant demands on my attention, asking my opinion on this or that, I had little opportunity to look to left or right. Blinkered as I was, I failed to notice the patient who lay three floors above my office, unable to move or speak, whose doctors considered beyond my help. In hindsight, it seems only right that Mezzanotte should have been the one to draw her to my attention, he who always knew where to look for the most interesting question, and then how to go about answering it.

      2

      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