Biblical (9 page)

Hoberman laughed. “Only if you call it something other than a task force. And what do you mean, ‘something broader’?”

“I mean if there is some kind of connection with other incidents, like the airplane crash. I had to ask you to come here because we need to assess and if necessary treat the President on the move, as it were. This is a critical point in her Presidency. You know, of course, about the Deeper Integration Act that’s going through the European Parliament, and the Quartet Peace Accord brokered with Israel?”

“Of course I do. I watch the news.”

“For the first time since the formation of the State of Israel, we may be about to see a lasting, even permanent peace and possible accession to the EU of Israel, the Palestinian State and Lebanon. I don’t need to tell you that such events are changing the political map of the world in a way we haven’t seen since the fall of the Berlin Wall. US interests could be compromised if there’s not a steady hand at the tiller. When you read the Michigan crash report, you’ll see that there’s a concern that some kind of neurological agent may have been used. We have to consider the possibility of some agency seeking to destabilize the US leadership.”

“You believe the President may have been exposed to some kind of hallucinogen?” Hoberman asked.

“It’s unlikely – there’s been nothing in toxicology to indicate the presence of an agent – but it’s entirely possible. I’ve no idea
what
could be causing a stable mind like the President’s to manifest hallucinations. That’s what I’d like you to help me find out.”

Hoberman sighed and again looked out the window. There was now a golden tinge to the light as dawn took a less vague shape.

“In that case,” he said, “I guess I’d better see the patient …”

It was two-thirty in the morning by the time they were through with the police. Macbeth and Corbin sat in the canteen of the Downtown District A1 station on Sudbury, drinking something that could only have been tangentially described as coffee.

“Don’t say I can’t organize a memorable night out,” Corbin said wearily as he pushed the paper cup around the brushed aluminum of the table top, avoiding drinking its contents. If Corbin had seemed worn out in the bar, he now looked barely alive.

Macbeth smiled and nodded, too drained to frame a witty response.

“What happened out there?” Corbin asked without looking up from his cup.

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. You had some kind of absence or altered state. The way you worked on the priest: very efficient, but very detached. What is it, John? Simple Partial Seizure epilepsy?”

Macbeth shook his head.

“Then what?”

“It’s like SPS in some ways … I get derealization episodes. Depersonalization. I’ve had them all my life. Or as long as I can remember.” Macbeth caught Corbin’s expression and laughed tiredly. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you’re assessing a patient.”

“Have you sought help with this? Apart from self-diagnosis, I mean?”

“Of course I have. God knows how many scans and neuroimaging. But unless an episode is actually taking place during imaging, it’s almost impossible to isolate the cause. Temporal lobe epilepsy’s been ruled out, they’re not migraines, I don’t have any lesions or tumors or edemas … Stress seems to bring it on, mostly. Like tonight. The weird thing is that it doesn’t affect function. In fact, sometimes it even enhances it. If you’re detached from a crisis you tend to respond calmly.”

“No other symptoms? Other than the derealization, I mean.”

“Nope.” Macbeth made a face. “Well, I do tend to have lucid dreams more than most. Vivid and lucid.”

“Not to the extent of confusing them with reality, I take it?” asked Corbin.

Macbeth laughed. “Going to write me a script for Thorazine, Doctor? No, like I said, my dreams tend to be lucid: when I’m dreaming I know I’m dreaming. Which I suppose, in itself, is quite unusual. But the nature of the dreams is odd too.”

“In what way odd?”

“I don’t dream about me. About my life. Most people’s dreams can be traced back to experiences, worries or other stuff that’s current in their minds. My dreams are about things I’ve read, things I’ve learned, instead of what’s actually going on in my life – like I’m borrowing data to dream, instead of using my own emotions and memories. And I’m never
me
in the dreams. I’m always someone else who’s somehow closer to the events I dream about.” Macbeth laughed. “I actually dream in third person.”

“You do realize that your dreaming style could be linked to your waking derealization episodes?”

“You think?” Macbeth made a sarcastic face.

“You know, John, if there’s no underlying physical cause,
it may have a psychological basis. Maybe some kind of trauma …”

Macbeth laughed and shook his head. “Like what? I’m not bipolar or suffering from any form of anxiety disorder; I’m generally content with my lot, I had a happy childhood … Well, my mom died when I was really small, but I grew up accustomed to it and other than that, I’ve had a pretty stable and traumafree life. Dull, almost.”

“That you can remember,” said Corbin, looking even more awkward. “Your memory … well, it’s not the most reliable and that, in itself, could be indicative of you trying to distance yourself from something. Some kind of trauma you’ve buried.”

Again Macbeth shook his head. “I think it’s more to do with cognitive function. My recall is actually excellent, almost eidetic, when it comes to semantic memory. But my autobiographical memory is crap. It’s real life I struggle with … It’s something I work around. My brother Casey’s the same. Not as bad, but his head is never in the here and now, either.”

“Well,” said Corbin. “If you ever need—”

“Thanks, Pete, I’ll bear it in mind. But now that I’ve shown you mine, you show me yours.”

“What do you mean?” asked Corbin.

Macbeth took a sip of his coffee and grimaced. “My God, do they use this stuff to get confessions?” He put the cup down. “I’m talking about you being so strung out and tired; about whatever it is that’s going on with your work and that you spent half the evening avoiding talking about. And before he jumped, all of that stuff Gabriel was feeding you about angels and visions. I could have sworn he hit a nerve.”

Corbin gazed into his coffee cup for a moment. “You’ve done some work with psychiatric epidemiology, right?” he asked. “I mean before you got into the brain-mapping thing?”

“Some, yeah. Why?”

“Well … I’ve never before come across case clustering like
this. There’s been this weird sudden upswing in presentations of a particular set of symptoms. Like some kind of outbreak. If I were a virologist or even an oncologist, I’d look for environmental factors to explain it, but that’s just not something you come across that much as a psychiatrist.”

“What’s been presenting?” Macbeth asked.

“Delusions. More hallucinations than delusions, I suppose … and in people with no history of psychological or psychiatric problems.”

“And the delusions are similar in nature?”

“Yeah. Completely different in content, but similar in nature. Visions. Ghosts.”

“Ghosts?” Macbeth pushed a laugh through the curtain of his tiredness.

“Not just ghosts. All the presentations involve the subject seeing events, items or people from the past. The descriptions of the episodes all begin with a feeling like déjà vu, but instead of it remaining a sensation or a state of mind, they experience what can only be a hallucination, but is completely indistinguishable from reality.”

“How many are we talking about?”

“Over five hundred in the last two months within Boston city limits.”

“What? That’s an average of eight or nine a day …” said Macbeth. “And the patients presenting … there’s no obvious connection between them?”

“Nope. Different ages, ethnicities, classes, professions. The cases are spread out pretty evenly across Boston and there’s no developmental timeline. No epidemiological evidence of a source. No Patient Zero.”

“And you say the delusions are different in content?”

“One case was an elderly man. He’s lived in the same house for the past forty years and his wife died five years ago. Retired Boston beat cop, not the neurotic type or given to emotion and
a person of very regular routines: up at six-thirty every morning, breakfast at seven. Except he comes down one morning and finds his wife alive and well in the kitchen, preparing breakfast. But not his wife as she was before she died, but the way she had been when they first married and moved into the house. Like I said, this guy is not the emotional type, but seeing his long-lost bride nearly cracked him up.”

“Yeah, well, Pete, you know only too well that seeing a recently deceased loved one, or hearing their voice, is by far the most common form of hallucination. And not a sign of any kind of mental health issue.”

“But I told you – his wife’s been dead for five years. She’s not recently deceased, so why would he start to hallucinate her presence now? And bereavement hallucinations tend to be fleeting. This was sustained and vivid. And it wasn’t just his young bride he saw … he swears the kitchen had changed back to the way it was when they first got married.”

“Did he speak with his wife?” asked Macbeth. “Interact with her?”

“A common element of these hallucinations is that there’s little or no interaction between the patient and the people or events visualized.”

They both turned as a couple of uniformed cops came in noisily, making their way to the coffee machine.

“So the hallucination is purely visual?’ Macbeth asked after they had gone.

“No … there’s usually an auditory element. In fact, most describe the hallucination as a full sensory experience. The retired cop said he could smell the ham she was frying.”

“But there’s never any interaction?”

“No direct interaction, but occasionally a sense that the observed in the phenomenon is aware of the observer. Even that is very rare. Generally, the experience is described as like watching a scene being played out, like with the widower
watching his wife prepare breakfast. But I did have this one case where the patient claims to have seen herself – but herself as she was over a decade earlier. She also claims that she actually recalls the event from the other point of view … the observed rather than the observer. She says she remembers nearly bumping into an older version of herself at exactly the same spot fifteen years before.” Corbin broke off, reading something troubled in Macbeth’s expression. “What is it?”

“Mmm? Nothing … it’s just it reminds me of something. But it wasn’t the same …” Macbeth shook the thought off. “It sounds to me like subjective Capgras Delusion.”

“But it’s not, John.” Corbin shook his head in frustration. “This woman doesn’t believe she saw a subjective double … that this other self is leading an independent life contemporaneous to hers. What she does believe is that the person she saw is wholly, completely
her
. An integrated identity, not a divided one. She believes that she saw herself from the past.”

Macbeth examined his coffee cup. Corbin’s description of the case troubled him; and it had reminded him of something: not a patient; something much closer to home. Eventually he said: “Maybe it’s just that your patient has had this experience all those years ago, where she’s seen someone who looked like an older version of herself, and the idea has lodged in her unconscious. Then, for whatever reason, it has manifested itself in this déjà vu type experience. I’m guessing you’ve ruled out schizophrenia?”

“No schizophrenia, no epilepsy, no psychotic depression, no neurological abnormalities … and, as far as I can see, no underlying medical conditions.”

“It could simply be that she is a high-functioning, monothematic delusional, Pete. You know it happens – patients with perfectly normal everyday lives except for a single, very particular, very persistent obsession or delusion.”

“But don’t you see?” There was frustration in Corbin’s tone.
“She’s not delusional because she
knows
the event can’t have happened. Anyway, it’s not just her. A half-dozen cases are referred to me every week. It’s always the same: the patient’s upset because they’ve had a single, temporary delusional episode that they recognize as a hallucination – then life goes on as normal without any repetition of the event.”

“So what are you saying? There’s some kind of delusional bug going around?” Macbeth laughed. “Twenty-four-hour hallucinogenic flu?”

“Why not? It’s like an epidemic. Maybe the cause does lie in a virus of some kind.”

“Any reports from anywhere else? I mean outside Boston?”

“I’ve put out a Commonwealth-wide enquiry and been in touch with the federal statistical office, but haven’t got anything back yet. You see, some of these cases are so …” he struggled for the word, “ … so
subtle
, that they very nearly weren’t reported. God knows how many more have just been dismissed or not even noticed. I mean, if you see a dog chasing a Frisbee in the park, you don’t ask yourself if the dog or the Frisbee are really there or not.”

“Know something?” said Macbeth. “I think I heard of another case. Just before we met up tonight, my taxi driver told me about a fare who yelled at him to stop because he thought he’d seen a kid in the middle of the road. But there was no kid. The fare was on his way to the Christian Science Church.”

“Gabriel?”

Macbeth shrugged.

Corbin remained silent for a moment, bony shoulders hunched in his tweed jacket, elbows resting on the canteen table. “There’s something else, John. Something much nearer to home. Literally.”

“Okay …” said Macbeth. “Let’s have it.”

“It’s not just the increased workload that’s been running me ragged. I’ve not been sleeping much. Nor has Joanna. It’s the house …”

“The one you’re fixing up in Beacon Hill?”

“Yeah. And I don’t mean the work or stress of fixing it up. I mean things that go bump in the night.” He paused, looking at Macbeth almost as if judging whether he could trust him. “You remember the story I told you about the house? Marjorie Glaiston?”