Biblical (39 page)

It was not an environment that relaxed Macbeth. He hated airports more than planes; and he hated planes with a passion. It wasn’t that he had a fear of flying, he loathed the hours of waiting, the stress of delays, cancellations and connections; the empty and often openly hostile faces behind check-in desks or at the TSA security gates; the total, desolate soullessness of it all. It seemed strange to him that a place so full of people should be so empty of humanity.

He sat in the departure lounge and called his brother from his cellphone and told him about Brian Newcombe’s insistent offer that he join the THS investigation team, and how the epidemiologist
had not taken Macbeth’s equally insistent refusal well. “You’re maybe better out of all of this in Copenhagen,” Casey said. “Phone me when you get in.”

“It’ll be late …”

“I don’t care, call me. By the way, I’ve been looking at your laptop—”

“And I’ve been looking at the one you lent me,” Macbeth interrupted his brother. “That damned folder is back.”

There was a silence at the other end.

“Casey?”

“The folder has appeared on the new laptop?” asked Casey eventually.

“That’s what I said …”

“When did it appear?”

“I was checking my emails and I just saw it sitting there. I still can’t open it. I thought—”

“Listen … I got in touch with Jimmy Mrozek – my IT guy at MIT – the one I told you about. I was going to give him your laptop to check over, but the folder has gone. Disappeared.”

“What?” said Macbeth. “You mean it’s jumped magically from one computer to the next?”

“Maybe exactly that. It sounds like it appeared again on the new laptop as soon as you connected to the Internet.”

“Weird.”

“And it gets weirder … Jimmy – the IT guy – told me that it was the second time someone asked him to look into a mysterious folder they couldn’t open. Exactly the same as what you’ve got. But he didn’t get a chance to look at that one either.”

“It spontaneously disappeared too?”

“No John, the folder didn’t spontaneously disappear … the computer and its owner did. It belonged to Professor Steven Gillman.”

It was Macbeth’s turn to be silent.

“Like I said …” Casey’s voice on the phone was tight, anxious.
“Make sure to let me know just as soon as you’re safe in your apartment.”

*

With no direct flight to Copenhagen from Logan International, Macbeth was flying British Airways via London Heathrow. He recalculated the misery in his head: another hour and a half before boarding, providing there were no delays, six hours twenty minutes to London, another three hours ten minutes waiting for his connection, then one hour fifty-five minutes to Copenhagen. A total of not less than twelve hours and fifty-five minutes, not accounting for delays, EU Immigration or waiting at the luggage carousel. He would spend most of that time using the technology he normally eschewed to isolate himself from his environment: his MP3 player, eBook reader and laptop providing him with an earphone-encapsulated realm in which to confine his consciousness and restrict his awareness of his surroundings. And contact with his fellow passengers.

There was a commotion somewhere further up the departure hall, a couple of gates up. A woman shouting, then another screaming. Macbeth, along with several other waiting passengers, stood up and looked across towards the noise, which seemed to come from somewhere over by the window. It was something else about airports that was now truly global: in the post-nine-eleven world any disturbance in an airport, any hint of official response, provoked immediate alarm. No one spoke, just craned necks to try to see what was going on. Whatever it was, it was out of sight, a curtain of travelers gathering around the commotion and obscuring Macbeth’s view.

Three transit security officers and a heavy-hipped female BPD cop trotted purposefully past his gate and towards whatever was going on. The knot of people by the window parted for them then closed behind them. There was the distance-muffled sound of a heated debate, of vehement protest, of authoritative tones. Some of the other passengers remained standing and watching,
but Macbeth retook his seat. After a few minutes the uniforms came back, escorting two women in their thirties, both of whom were clearly distressed.

“But I’m telling you, we both saw it …” one of the women said in pleading protest to the female cop, who ignored her. “Both of us.”

As they passed, Macbeth noticed that the other woman was silent with a glazed, empty look and he realized she was in some kind of shock. All eyes followed the small group’s progress until it disappeared from the hall. Then slowly and with shrugs to one another, the passengers sat back down.

People were becoming used to bizarre behavior, Macbeth realized.

A new addition arrived, a middle-aged Englishman in a crumpled suit, who picked his way through legs and hand luggage to an empty seat. When he had gotten himself settled he took out his cellphone, hit a key and started to have one of those inappropriately loud and personally detailed conversations that so many people seemed to feel free to make in airports. It was a phenomenon that interested Macbeth as a psychiatrist: the anonymity some people feel in a crowd of strangers, as if they are surrounded by philosophical zombies. The Englishman spoke with one of those nasal accents that sounded whiny and Macbeth tried to shut out his chatter as he griped on his phone to his wife about having to take a later flight.

But despite himself, Macbeth found himself eavesdropping on the latter part of the Englishman’s half of the conversation.

“I think I’ve just seen one of these weird happenings we’ve read about … yes, the hallucination thing. Yeah, here at the airport, a few minutes ago … These two women … well, they went mad. It started when one of them complained to ground staff that no one was telling passengers if their flight was going to be delayed because of the fog. ‘What fog?’ says the airline woman. ‘What do you mean, what fog?’ they start shouting. ‘Look out of the window,’ they say. ‘That fog!’ Well, I’m telling
you, it’s a bright sunny day here, not even a cloud in the sky, but these two loonies start raving about this low-lying fog, saying it’s lying like a blanket over the runways and, according to them, you wouldn’t be able to see five feet in front of you if you were at ground level … What? … Yeah, I know … No, they were American. Anyway, that’s not the end of it. One of them starts screaming her head off. Then the other. Bloody hysterical. They said they’d both just seen a plane crash and of course that gets the other passengers all excited … What? No, of course there wasn’t … They start going on about this plane that they’ve just seen crash as it came in to land. No one else can see any plane … but they start bawling and screaming, saying that the plane has crashed in the fog … They said they saw it above the fog then it flew into it and exploded over at the sea end of the runway. Mental. Everybody’s all worked up now and trying to see what they’re talking about, but there’s nothing to see – no crash, no fog, nothing. No one else sees a thing … No, I’m not making it up … It was bloody weird. Anyway, they get in such a state and start screaming so much that they get themselves arrested … Yeah, I know …”

The conversation turned to more personal things, still shared with everyone within earshot, and Macbeth tuned out of it. He thought about what the two distraught women had claimed to have seen, and a memory nagged at him. A memory from early childhood. It had been late July, 1973. He’d been at his grandparents’ house watching TV when the news came on: fuzzy images of debris scattered at the seawall end of the runway, a fogbank still lurking maliciously just offshore in Boston Harbor.

A real past event. Repeated in a hallucination, just like Brian Newcombe had said.

He looked at his watch, then in the direction the two women with their official escort had taken, then at the information board above the gate.

With a sigh, he took out his cellphone and called Newcombe.

Georg Poulsen sat in the living room of his house. The only sounds in the space he occupied came from outside; and even they were few and ignored, the house being set back from the road, facing out over the quiet, tree-fringed inlet of water. There was no TV, no radio on, no music playing. A book sat on the coffee table, but it was not there for Poulsen’s enjoyment. This was his house, not his home. The day he’d returned here alone from the hospital, it had ceased to be anything more than a space to be occupied between the important businesses of his life. Somewhere he slept, somewhere he waited: a bridge between one task and the next, between the bright, hard focus of his work and the painful joy of his time with Margarethe at the hospital.

But if what Larssen had told him was true, all that was about to change: this structure, this meaningless assembly of rooms and halls, would again become the center of his life. If Margarethe came back. If her care really could be transferred there, then it could soon become their home again. In the meantime he waited, and the house waited.

Margarethe had loved this house at first sight. It was neither grand nor architecturally distinguished: a single-story, traditional red-brick-and-pantiles Danish cottage, when seen from the road. But the previous owners had added a large, more modern extension at the back, which faced south and towards the small fiord, installing large picture windows and effectively
shifting the orientation of the building. Those large windows continuously changed the entire nature of the house: Margarethe had always said that it wasn’t just the light they let into the house, but the seasons too: changing the interior with shifts of color and tone, in phase with the shifts of Nature and time of year. It had been an environment that enlivened and calmed; that had given them the moment to enjoy and the future to imagine. It had been their place in the world, apart from the world. And, with the large, bright room with the pale blue walls at the end of the main hall, it would be their baby’s place in the world too.

Except now there would be no baby.

As soon as Larssen had made the suggestion, Poulsen had set about making plans. The baby’s room would be ideal for Margarethe, and he had already had additional power points installed to cater for the technology that would be an essential part of her day-to-day existence. But he would paint the walls a different color.

Picking up the book from the coffee table, he stared at it apprehensively. He would start reading it to his wife tonight. It had been another of those titles that Margarethe, who was infinitely more literary-minded than her husband, had told him about years before. It had taken him a month of scouring his memory and the Internet to track it down.

“There is no such thing as an original idea,” Margarethe had once told him. “Whatever you can think of, someone, somewhere, will already have thought of it – in another form, maybe, but they will have thought of it. The challenge is what you do with the idea.”

She had said all of this when she had told him about the book. It was called simply, he had eventually remembered,
We
. And the Internet had restored the author’s name to his recall. Yevgeny Zamyatin.

We
, Margarethe had explained, was a dystopian masterpiece
written in 1921, banned in Russia for over sixty years, but translated into every other major language. The novel was set in a future where all buildings were made of glass, so that the seemingly perpetually content populace could be kept under the constant and purportedly beneficent surveillance of the all-seeing ‘Benefactor’ who enforces his will through ‘Guardians’. The first major review had been by the English writer George Orwell, inspiring him to write
Nineteen Eighty-four
.

Poulsen felt insistent fingers of doubt and fear creep around his heart: what if it was the wrong book? What if she had read it so often she wouldn’t want Poulsen to read it to her again? And, worst of all, what if she could not hear his reading?

Larssen had explained that there was the possibility of damage to Margarethe’s reticular activating system, located at the top of the brainstem and close to where the bleed had been detected on the MRI. Poulsen knew that the reticular activating system was what governed states of arousal; it determined when and how much you were awake, gave the rhythm to the cycle of sleep and wakefulness. Maybe Margarethe slept through every visit when he read to her. Perhaps she hung permanently suspended in the eternal twilight between sleep and wakefulness.

It was entirely possible that Margarethe had never heard a single word he had uttered.

Even that wasn’t Georg Poulsen’s greatest fear. In a universe of terrifying possibilities, the specter that haunted him most was that he may never solve the brain–computer interface problem, or solve it too late for it to be any use to Margarethe.

Others in the Project were astounded by Poulsen’s candor: that he freely and openly shared, in his monthly press briefings, every advance the team had made. Everyone knew that, although it should be above such considerations, science was an athleticism of the mind and you constantly competed against others. There were Nobels to be won, careers and
reputations to be made – yet Project Director Poulsen was committed to the most astonishing, absolute transparency. To be fair, he was as candid in his demands of other researchers that they reciprocate by sharing their progress and findings.

“There is no such thing as an original idea. Whatever you can think of, someone, somewhere, will already have thought of it – in another form, maybe, but they will have thought of it. The challenge is what you do with the idea.” Margarethe’s comment on literary creativity had become the central tenet of Poulsen’s scientific method.

Even before, he had never been a believer in the heroic theory of scientific discovery. It was extremely rare, he knew, for one person working alone to unlock a secret hidden from the rest of science: Wallace had proposed evolution at exactly the same time as Darwin; Leibnitz formulated calculus at the same time as Newton; von Ohain, Campini and Whittle all developed the jet engine independently and concurrently.