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Misty hasn’t seen one of her pictures since Tabbi died. She says, “Where do you take them?”

“Someplace safe,” he says.

Her period is almost a week late. From starvation. She doesn’t need to pee on any pregnancy test sticks. Peter’s done his job, getting her here.

And the doctor says, “You can start.” His hand closes around hers, and pulls it forward to touch the rough, tight cloth already prepped with a coat of rabbit-skin glue.

The Jewish Essenes, he says, were originally a band of Persian anchorites that worshiped the sun.

Anchorites. This is what they called the women sealed alive in the basements of cathedrals. Sealed in to give the building a soul. The crazy history of building contractors. Sealing whiskey and women and cats inside walls. Her husband included.

You.

Misty, trapped in her attic room, her heavy cast keeping her here. The door kept locked from the outside. The doctor always ready with a syringe of something if she gets uppity. Oh, Misty could write a book about anchorites.

The Essenes, Dr. Touchet says, lived away from the regular world. They trained themselves by enduring sickness and torture. They abandoned their families and property. They suffered in the belief that immortal souls from heaven were baited to come down and take a physical form in order to have sex, drink, take drugs, overeat.

Essenes taught the young Jesus Christ. They taught John the Baptist.

They called themselves healers and performed all of Christ’s miracles—curing the sick, reviving the dead, casting out demons—for centuries before Lazarus. The Jains turned water into wine centuries before the Essenes, who did it centuries before Jesus.

“You can repeat the same miracles over and over as long as no one remembers the last time,” the doctor says. “You remember that.”

The same way Christ called himself a stone rejected by masons, the Jain hermits had called themselves logs rejected by all carpenters.

“Their idea,” the doctor says, “is that the visionary must live apart from the normal world, and reject pleasure and comfort and conformity in order to connect with the divine.”

Paulette brings lunch on a tray, but Misty doesn’t want food. Behind her closed eyelids, she hears the doctor eating. The scrape of the knife and fork on the china plate. The ice rattling in the glass of water.

He says, “Paulette?” His voice full of food, he says, “Can you take those pictures there, by the door, and put them in the dining room with the others?”

Someplace safe.

You can smell ham and garlic. There’s something chocolate, too, pudding or cake. You can hear the doctor chew, and the wet sound of each swallow.

“The interesting part,” the doctor says, “is when you look at pain as a spiritual tool.”

Pain and deprivation. The Buddhist monks sit on roofs, fasting and sleepless until they reach enlightenment. Isolated and exposed to the wind and sun. Compare them to Saint Simeon, who rotted on his pillar. Or the centuries of standing yogis. Or Native Americans who wandered on vision quests. Or the starving girls in nineteenth-century America who fasted to death out of piety. Or Saint Veronica, whose only food was five orange seeds, chewed in memory of the five wounds of Christ. Or Lord Byron, who fasted and purged and made his heroic swim of the Hellespont. A romantic anorexic. Moses and Elijah, who fasted to receive visions in the Old Testament. English witches of the seventeenth century who fasted to cast their spells. Or whirling dervishes, exhausting themselves for enlightenment.

The doctor just goes on and on and on.

All these mystics, throughout history, all over the world, they all found their way to enlightenment by physical suffering.

And Misty just keeps on painting.

“Here’s where it gets interesting,” the doctor’s voice says. “According to split-brain physiology, your brain is divided like a walnut into two halves.”

The left half of your brain deals with logic, language, calculation, and reason, he says. This is the half people perceive as their personal identity. This is the conscious, rational, everyday basis of our reality.

The right side of your brain, the doctor tells her, is the center of your intuition, emotion, insight, and pattern recognition skills. Your subconscious.

“Your left brain is a scientist,” the doctor says. “Your right brain is an artist.”

He says people live their lives out of the left half of their brains. It’s only when someone is in extreme pain, or upset or sick, that their subconscious can slip into their conscious. When someone’s injured or sick or mourning or depressed, the right brain can take over for a flash, just an instant, and give them access to divine inspiration.

A flash of inspiration. A moment of insight.

The French psychologist Pierre Janet called this condition “the lowering of the mental threshold.”

Dr. Touchet says, “Abaissement du niveau mental.”

When we’re tired or depressed or hungry or hurting.