The Quick. Laura Spinney

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