Tunnel Vision (17 page)

“You mean he was more interested in heaven than earth.”

“Can we please change the subject?”

They were quiet for a few moments as he stared at the photos of him and Jake.

“They’re still breathing and living their lives,” she said.

“Who?”

“Those bastards. Volker’s a carpet salesman in Waltham. The other one moved to Connecticut. I can’t even drive that way without my stomach filling with acid.” She began to cry. Zack went over and put his arms around her. “I’m sorry,” she said, her mouth trembling. “It’s just so unfair. So unfair.”

He kissed her on the forehead. “I know.” And he felt the heat of rage rise up in him as it always did when he thought about Jake’s killers. They had beaten him with a tire iron.

“He’d done nothing to them.”

While he held her, his eyes rested on the urn. When the monk delivered it, he said that Brother Nicholas had died in his sleep, clutching his crucifix. A few weeks later, insurance money began arriving in bank checks. “He took the coward’s way out.”

His mother sat up. “Who?”

“Dad. It’s like one of those tabloid headlines:
MAN LOSES GAY SON TO KILLERS, LEAVES FAMILY, JOINS MONKERY, FINDS GOD. DIES.
”

*   *   *

They watched the evening news until Zack got tired and announced he was going to bed. He gave her a hug and kiss good night, then took a shower and got into bed. Someplace he had read that the average adult took about eight minutes to fall asleep. He probably dozed off in less than two. He slept deeply and dreamlessly until sometime after midnight, when he woke up. For some reason, his room was totally dark—no light seeping through the window blinds, no glow of his clock radio. Not even a light strip under his door from the hall night-light his mother still kept. Stranger still, he could smell the heavy salt air of the ocean. He could even hear waves gently lapping the shore in the black.

He tried to move, but his arms and legs wouldn’t respond. He strained his muscles to push off the blanket, but he couldn’t.
What’s wrong?
Then a thought shot up: He had had a stroke. Or an aneurysm. His brain was so screwed up that while he slept he’d suffered some kind of neurological collapse that had rendered him blind and paralyzed. He tried to call his mother, but only a faint cawing sound escaped him.
What the hell is happening to me?

He let a moment pass, then tried to scream but couldn’t get his lungs to respond. All that came out was a pathetic click. He tried again and this time couldn’t suck in air. Couldn’t fill his lungs.

A thought sliced across his mind like a blade:
I’m dead.

No. If you’re dead, how can you even think that?
Death was being completely nothinged. Worse than a coma, where voices filtered through. Being dead had none of sleep’s awareness of sleep. He wasn’t dead, because suddenly things changed.

And it wasn’t a dream.

Cold. Shivering. The core of his body had turned to ice. Fishy night air against his chest. Electrode suction cups. But this wasn’t a reality he recognized. A clammy alienness filled him.

Suddenly the sucking silence was shattered by a banshee blast.

Hands on him. Hands carrying him. Laying him down. In a hole. Then something landed on his face.

Sand.

28

Zack woke up spitting sand.

The room was dark but for the glow of the clock radio, which said 2:17. He was chilled but pushed off the blanket and sat up. He planted his feet on the rug and spit more sand. It peppered his skin and filled his scalp. He got up and flicked on the lamp, then pulled up the cover, expecting the sheet to be covered with beach sand. It wasn’t. And he had spit only air.

But his head was swimming, and his heart was jogging. He flopped back down, feeling cold and clammy. After several minutes, his head stopped whirling and he got up, slipped on a sweatshirt, and stepped out of his room. The landing at the top of the stairs was still dark but for the night-light that had burned since he and his brother were kids. He gently opened the door to his mother’s room. She was sleeping soundly. He closed the door and walked downstairs, steadying himself on the banister. Inside he was trembling.

He padded into the kitchen, flicked on a light, poured himself a glass of milk, and warmed it in the micro—something his father had taught him when he couldn’t sleep.

His father.

Since that day in the chamber when they deep-stimulated some lobe, he could not stop thinking about him, reliving sweet memories before everything turned horrible—days of playing ball, fishing in the canal, getting buried in the sand …

Outside, the streetlamp turned into a blinking red beacon across the water. In the distance he heard the moan of a foghorn.

He looked back at the kitchen, trying to get out of that dream. The foghorn faded, and he was leaning against the polished granite counter and trying to lose himself in the stainless-steel stove and fridge and other appliances. It worked. He glanced outside, and the red light was the old streetlamp again.

He leaned against the sink and took a few long breaths until he felt his insides settle back into place. Then he gulped down a mouthful of milk. Instantly, he spit it out, gagging over the drain. It was thick with salt. He sniffed it. Like fish water. He dumped the rest into the sink and opened the fridge. He removed the carton of orange juice. It smelled normal. He poured some in a glass and made a test sip. Orange juice. He guzzled a glass to flush the taste of ocean.

He headed back upstairs and dry-swallowed two tablets of Lunesta, hoping they’d knock him into a dreamless sleep. He closed the door and got into bed, lying in the dark, his body clenched against a sudden assault of visions.

But there were none, and relief soon passed through him.

He cleared his mind and tried to concentrate on the dark slurry seeping into his brain. He thought about Sarah Wyman and wondered if she was dating anyone.

He snuggled into the goose-down pillow, the filling making a soft cradle for his head. He pulled the blanket under his chin, then gave a little kick into the void. He would sleep undisturbed, he told himself as the heaviness spread throughout his body and the warm black cocooned around him.

The last thing he remembered before blacking out was a shovelful of sand landing on his face.

29

After closing the doors of his shop, Roman retired to the backroom office, where he went online and Googled LeAnn Cola and Thomas Pomeroy.

They had coauthored several articles on neurophysiology with long, complicated titles that meant little to him. The writing was highly technical, and he had to look up several phrases to get a general sense.

From what he learned, their research was aimed at perfecting ways of detecting microchanges in the electrical activity of the brain by use of a helmetlike device for the skull. Their objective was to help scientists better understand the function of different brain areas to diagnose and monitor diseases like epilepsy and dementia, but the same techniques could be used for personal identification. Signatures. The article went on to suggest security applications.

So what did that have to do with God or Satan?

He didn’t have a clue. And it really didn’t matter since he was thirty-five grand richer and didn’t have to worry.

And God’s in His heaven and all’s right with the world.

30

Zack’s brain was still tender from the nightmare when he awoke the next morning. It was seven thirty, and his mother had left to do some errands but had made him a breakfast of potato pancakes, turkey sausages, fruit compote, and a pot of French roast, which helped clear his head. He cleaned up and left her a note of thanks, thinking how she had gone through the fire and hadn’t run off to a nunnery. He took public transportation into town and spent the rest of the day at the Northeastern library working on his thesis.

That night he received a call from Dr. Luria. She wanted to do another test on him next Tuesday evening, if he was free. He was. In advance of that, she asked him to e-mail sample photographs of his family members, friends, pets, his home, and favorite places. Her explanation was that they were going to use them to establish a baseline for brain scans. Zack didn’t know what that meant, but he complied.

He also went online and Googled each of the key people in the lab.

Elizabeth Luria was a professor emerita of microbiology at Harvard Medical School with a long list of publications on brain plasticity and imaging in prestigious-sounding journals such as
The National Review of Neuroscience, Neuron, The Journal of Neuroscience.
A few were on functional MRI imaging with meaningless titles like “Temporal-Lobe Bursts and ‘Transcendent’ Experiences” and “Total Deafferentation of Posterior-Superior Parietal Lobules PSPL and Self-Transcendence.” The words
transcendent
and
parietal
jumped out at him.

Morris Stern was listed as a professor of behavioral neuroscience, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Tufts University School of Medicine. He was an expert on brain imaging and directed a lab investigating the neural basis of learning and memory. He had a long list of publications in the journal
Neuroimage and Neurobiology.

Byron Cates was a professor of computational neuroscience and health sciences and technology at MIT. From what Zack gathered, he was an expert on “neuropsychological recordings” and “mathematical modeling to establish definitions of anesthetic states.” That was as meaningless to Zack as was an impressive list of published titles.

They each had research and/or teaching jobs, so this sleep study was something they did on the side during the evenings.

Sarah Wyman’s Web site listed her as unmarried and a former nurse who was doing postdoctoral studies at Tufts. On a list of her publications was a paper called “The Role of Serotonin 5-HT (1A) Receptors in Spirituality,” published in
The American Journal of Psychiatry.

Spirituality?
That did not seem like a topic for a doctoral thesis in neurophysiology. But he was too sleepy on Lunesta to speculate and went to bed thinking of her.

31

At six
P.M.
that Tuesday, the same unfriendly Bruce picked up Zack at the corner of Huntington and Massachusetts Avenues. Same trip to the lab. Same ensemble music. But this time Zack was alone. Damian had not passed the screening. He said he didn’t mind. He also wasn’t drowning in debt.

Zack arrived a little before seven, this time prepared to sleep over. Again Drs. Luria, Stern, and Cates and Sarah Wyman met with him in the same office. Dr. Luria explained the evening’s plan. “This is going to be a different kind of procedure. We’re going to establish a baseline recognition pattern of various images, but we’re going to do it in a functional MRI machine. Have you ever had an MRI scan done?”

“Just on my shoulder some years ago.”

“What about on your head?”

Not while I was conscious.
“Nope.”

“Are you at all claustrophobic?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Good, because we’re going to position your head and shoulders in the MRI with a visible monitor that will project a series of randomly selected visuals. All you have to do is simply look at them. Okay?”

“How long will I be inside the tube?”

“Maybe forty minutes.”

“No problem.”

“If you feel the least bit uncomfortable, let us know,” Sarah said. “What we’re doing is trying to determine neuroelectrical signatures of your emotional states.”

“For what purpose?”

“Well,” Dr. Luria said, “in our next session—and hopefully you’ll agree—we will give you something to let you sleep, then do a scan of your brain activity.”

She went on with more technical language that didn’t clarify much. Zack’s main concern was another $250. “Fine,” he said, and followed them to another room.

Zack was startled by the size of the MRI machine—a giant white cube with a tube magnet and an attached gurney that slid into the bore. It must have taken some creative engineering to get it down here.

He changed into loose-fitting pajama bottoms behind a small screen, then lay on the gurney at the opening of the MRI tube. A computer monitor was attached to the lip of the tube for viewing from inside.

“The images will change every five seconds,” Sarah explained. “All you have to do is look at them. Don’t say anything, don’t move, just look at them. Okay?”

“Easy enough.”

Before they rolled him inside, Sarah and Byron Cates taped electrodes to his chest, chin, and scalp. A sensor was attached to his upper lip to measure temperature and airflow from his mouth and nose. Other sensors would measure body functions as well as the oxygen and carbon dioxide blood levels, his heart rate, breathing rate, and blood pressure. Elastic belts were placed around his chest and stomach to measure respiration. A clip to his earlobe measured oxygen levels.