Biblical (15 page)

“I remember …” Macbeth sounded suddenly gloomy. “I still text him, you know. Dad, I mean. Just to tell him small things about my day, that kind of thing.”

“John …” Casey’s tone was balanced between sympathy and warning.

“I know. It’s unhealthy and more than a little bit weird. It’s just that people exist electronically now. We all have a ‘presence’ out there in cyberland …” Macbeth waved his free hand in the air. “It just helps me to imagine there’s still something of him out there. Like I say, nuts.”

“I miss him too,” said Casey. “We all have different ways of coping, I guess.”

The brothers fell into a silence for a moment, each trying to find a way out of the dark corner they’d strayed into.

“Tell me more about Blackwell’s huge discovery …” Macbeth said at last, with forced cheeriness.

“Basically he’s been using simulations to look back in time. Actually to look past time – to whatever there was before that ten-to-the-minus-forty-three seconds after the Big Bang or whatever it was that kick-started the universe and time itself. Everybody is speculating about it but no one knows for sure what he’s going to announce.” Casey picked up his glass and took a long sip. “Now, tell me what’s bothering you. You said something happened last night. What?”

Macbeth sighed, then ran through the events of the night before. He told his brother that the jumper was dead and the priest was still fighting for life. He even told him about his depersonalization episode at the scene while he had been working to save Mullachy’s life.

“God, that’s awful,” said Casey. “You could have called tonight off. I had no idea.”

“No, I needed tonight. By the way, this is a long shot, but there’s a chance you may know the jumper.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah – a guy called Gabriel Rees. He was an MIT …” Macbeth let the sentence die when he saw the reaction on Casey’s face.

Sweep. One. Two. Sweep. One, two. Sweep. One, two. Three. Sweep. One, two, three. Right foot first step. Forward. Back. One, two, three. Left foot forward. Back.

She knew there were people looking at her, some laughing, others shuffling in that uneasy way of those confronted with bizarre behavior, as they watched her carry out her small ritual in the store doorway. There were impatient sounds, concerned noises from behind. A man blustered past, muttering something unpleasant and forcing her to one side. Because she had one foot ritually raised, she lost her balance, hopping on the other until the shoulder of her expensive coat came to rest against the sandstone of the store’s entry arch. Panicked, she brushed furiously at the material.

That ruined it. She’d have to start at the beginning and go through the whole thing again. Straightening up, she allowed the clot of shoppers in the department store’s doorway to uncongeal past her. Eyes lowered, Karen avoided their puzzled or contemptuous looks.

Sweep. She raised her right arm above her head, slicing the air in an arc. One. She swept the arm diagonally down in front of her, left to right. Two. She raised her left arm and performed a mirror reflection of the first sequence of movements. Sweep. She fluttered her hands in front of her, as if winding cotton, starting low to the ground and moving up to eye level. Three. She made flat hand circles before her face, as if cleaning an
invisible window. Four. She stepped off the entrance step with her right foot, retracted it. Five. Repeating the action with the left foot, which she planted firmly on the sidewalk, Karen performed two final arcing gestures with her arms: one right, the other left. Six.

She stepped fully out of the doorway and onto the street. With that, Karen Robertson instantly and totally became normal once more, making her way along the sidewalk with the same city-morning purposefulness as the other pedestrians.

Karen Robertson
was
normal. She was perfectly sane. She knew that her behavior in subway cars, under bridge arches, in doorways, was bizarre. She despised the rituals she was forced to perform, and subway cars and bridge arches were places she quite successfully avoided. But doorways – store doorways, taxi and bus doorways, elevator doorways – were impossible to avoid.

People often laughed at her to her face. The odd thing was that she saw how ridiculous her pantomime was; whenever she undertook it, she became totally detached from herself, from the experience, a scornful observer herself.

Karen Robertson had everything. She was a very attractive, successful, thirty-five-year-old lawyer with one of the better-known law firms in Boston, having qualified from Harvard in the top one per cent; she came from a family of New England bluebloods; she bought her clothes in Newbury Street and had the height and figure to carry them off; she drove a Lexus sports convertible; she could have her pick of men; she lived in a sprawling Back Bay apartment. She was clever and ambitious and shone with the gleam of the well-born self-assured.

Karen Robertson had everything, all right. Including a score of twenty-nine on the Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale. Severe.

Her psychiatrist, Dr Corbin, had tried to isolate the exact origin of her fear of insects. There had been one event, when
Karen had been a teenager: her school had been one of the oldest private girls’ schools in Massachusetts; one of those tradition-for-tradition’s-sake places where if a pupil skinned a knee she’d bleed blue. Classics, Latin and Ancient History featured pretty high on the curriculum, teaching the patrician classes of today about the patrician classes of antiquity. Karen had hated it. Even then, she had been focused on a business career, and had tired quickly of the school’s constant obsession with a distant world that had nothing to do with the reality she lived in.

This particular day, however, the Classics teacher had been bleating on about the aftermath of some battle or other. A young Persian soldier, Mithridates, had been boasting about killing a prince from the opposing army while his own king, Artaxerxes, claimed the kill as his own and sentenced the boastful young soldier to ‘death by boats’. The teacher explained that the historian Plutarch had described this form of execution – scaphism – in detail. Mithridates was encased in two boats of exactly matching size, one laid on top of the other and sealed. Mithridates’s head, hands and feet were left to project out of the boats, the rest of him inside. His captors force-fed him milk and honey until his belly was full to bursting, then smeared his face, hands and feet with a thick coating of honey, turning his head to the sun. By midday, his face was a single writhing mass of spiders, flies, wasps and bees, biting and stinging. As his wounds infected, other insects ate through his body and found their way inside the boats. Some simply ate his living flesh, others burrowed deep into it to lay their eggs. According to Plutarch, it took Mithridates seventeen days to die, and when they opened the boats, there was a black swarm of thousands of insects—

Karen’s scream had ended the teacher’s gleeful lecture. It also started Karen’s panic attack, emptying her lungs of air, filling her universe with imagined shadows of scurrying things
all around her. Eventually, and despite panicked classmates gathering around her, Karen had passed out, sinking into a scuttling, slithering darkness.

After that, Karen had not been able to even think of an insect, to hear a description or see an image of one, without being plunged into a convulsive, suffocating aftershock attack.

*

While unable to pin down the exact origin of her entomophobia, Dr Corbin had used rationalization and exposure therapy to bring her fear within a range of responses that could be considered remotely normal. But her nightmares were still haunted by monstrous ants with huge sideways jaws, long-legged spiders and scuttling, shiny black beetles.

One aspect of her phobia had endured and had blossomed into her obsessive compulsion: her fear of walking into a spider’s web.

This obsession elaborated into the preventative ritual she now undertook every time she passed through a portal or any other situation where an arachnid may have spun a trap for her. In every doorway, she would mechanically perform the same sequence of bizarre sweeping movements to ensure there were no invisible strands of spider silk into which she could walk. Her focus was her face: any other part of her body would cause panic, but the idea of getting a spider web on her face could bring her to the brink of vomiting.

Her rituals were ridiculous, embarrassing, irrational. Like most obsessive-compulsives, Karen knew and acknowledged all of these facts. Dr Corbin had told her that obsessive compulsion was not a psychosis: there were no delusions, no belief by the sufferer that his or her behavior was normal and the rest of the world was out of kilter. Obsessive compulsives knew their behavior was bizarre.

The root of Karen’s compulsions lay in rational fears, Dr Corbin had explained, blown up to irrational proportions.
Anxieties could be deferred; unrelated worries and stresses from work or family crises the trigger for panic attacks and obsessive behavior.

Maybe Corbin had been right. The Halverson account was taking up a lot of her time and mental space; for the first time in her corporate law career, Karen felt stressed about a project. And the fear of looking an idiot in front of the client was a big part of it.

And there had been the other thing.

It had happened a week ago, one morning when her doorway rituals had made her late for a meeting with Jack Court to discuss Halverson and she had picked up pace as she strode along the sidewalk.

Karen experienced the strangest feeling of déjà vu. Or something like déjà vu yet subtly different. The city around her had seemed changed, as if suddenly a different time of day. The feeling intensified and she became aware that the sidewalk and the roadway seemed emptier. Over on the other side of the street, where it bordered the park, she saw a small girl dressed in the kind of dress Karen had had when she was ten or eleven. The girl had looked straight at her.

And stepped out onto the roadway.

Karen gave a start, worried that the child would be hit by a car. There was a gap in the traffic and Karen stepped off the curb.

She hadn’t been aware of the man who had had to do a quick sidestep to avoid walking into her until she felt his fingers dig into her elbow as he yanked her backwards. Something blasted deafeningly in her ears and a large truck flashed by.

The volume of traffic was suddenly back. The light had returned to a spring morning in Boston. She searched where the girl had stood in the carriageway, the sidewalk behind, scanned the street in both directions. She was gone.

Karen turned to the man who had pulled her out of the path
of the truck and looked at him blankly, dazed. He was an attractive, sophisticated-looking man about her age, with dark hair, a pale complexion and green eyes.

“I thought …” Karen pointed vaguely to where the little girl had been, where she could never have been, and let the sentence die.

“Are you okay?”

Karen nodded numbly.

“You should take more care in traffic,” he had said. Karen had nodded again and the man turned and headed off down the street, turning at the next corner. She’d stood for a moment composing herself, trying to resolve two nagging questions in her head: how could she possibly have seen what she thought she saw? And the man who had pulled her back …

She was sure she’d seen him before.

“You knew him?”

Casey didn’t answer for a moment, frowning as he tried to make sense of what his brother had told him. “Gabriel? Not that well, but what I do know of him would make me think he’d be the last person to commit suicide.”

“Well, I’m afraid there’s no doubt about it being suicide. I saw him jump and take Father Mullachy with him. He was clearly very disturbed.”

Casey stared at Macbeth disbelievingly. “Taking his own life is one thing, taking someone else’s is quite another. I’m telling you John, Gabriel Rees was as well balanced as I am. Bad example … he was much better balanced than me. You say he was spouting religious stuff?”

“It sounded like it could have been religious. And the focus of his attention certainly was on the priest.”

“That doesn’t sound right on two levels.” Casey shook his head and again palmed the lock of hair back from his eyes. Macbeth thought about how often he’d told his kid brother to get a decent haircut. “First, Gabriel was devout all right … a devout atheist. Second, although he was certainly no lover of clerics, he wouldn’t have hurt a fly. Mind you, I haven’t seen him other than in passing for months. In fact the last time I saw him even in passing was a few weeks back. I just can’t believe it.”

“And you hadn’t heard of a member of the MIT community having committed suicide?”

“I haven’t been in or spoken to anyone today. And you know I don’t do news.”

“Yes,” said Macbeth, “I know you don’t do news.” He glanced around his brother’s immaculate apartment. No TV. There was a sophisticated and expensive music system that had been sophisticated and expensive in 1979. Casey preferred his music on vinyl and he had spent his spare time repairing and replacing, tinkering and fine-tuning until it looked brand new and sounded, Macbeth had to admit, even better than his own painfully expensive Bang & Olufsen digital system. Macbeth knew Casey’s radio was permanently tuned to 99.5, Boston’s classical music station. Even his computer, which Macbeth knew was much more powerful than any domestic PC, looked compact and innocuous and was only ever used in connection with his brother’s research. Any news Casey happened to give half his attention to came between Shostakovich and Steve Reich, or fractals and wave-function equations.

“The police said that Gabriel was somebody important in particle physics,” said Macbeth.

“Not really. I mean Gabriel is bright. Real bright. I mean he was … but generally, he was just another doctoral student. The only thing was that he also worked as a researcher for Professor Gillman.”

“That’s significant?”

“Gillman is one of Professor Blackwell’s research partners. The Gillman Modeling Project is part of the Prometheus jigsaw being worked on here, at MIT. I’m not involved directly, but I know that like Blackwell Gillman’s pretty secretive about his work.”