by Glenn Cooper
The living room grew quieter. Some were mute, others spoke in small knots; and then Alex stood and spoke to them, hands deep in his pockets, his head slightly bowed. He suddenly felt tired. “Hi. Wow. This is something else, isn’t it? I know you’ve just gone through some profound stuff and you may want to be on your own to reflect on it, but I think it’s important for us to stay together for a while to compare notes, to talk about it. That’s how we’ll learn. That’s how we’ll become enlightened.”
The stories began and as they circled the room, speaking in hushed tones and shedding tears, the weightiness of the night kept tipping the scales.
It was all the same.
Each and every one of them described the same journey down to the smallest details.
The only divergence was the man, woman, or child on the other side of the river of light. For Spangler, it was his brother, Phil, who’d died in Vietnam. For Sam, it was his father, killed in a mugging when Sam was a boy. For Gelb, it was his elderly mother, who’d died of a stroke fifteen years earlier. For Lilly, it was her grandmother, passed ten years now, in Taiwan. For Erica, it was her favorite aunt, who’d doted on her until her recent cancer death. For Davis, it was his granddad, Clark, the kindest man he’d ever known; and Virginia tearfully told everyone about her twin’s long-ago plunge through an icy pond and the hurt she still felt every day of her life. All of them too talked about the same sensation: of something else out there beyond the limitless plain; something wonderful, something important.
Only Frank Sacco refused to speak, his lips as tight as an unshucked oyster, his posture cramped and uncomfortable. Alex passed over him gently, but he kept sneaking glances Frank’s way for the rest of the evening, wondering what was going on behind the young man’s diffident mask.
When the last of them had spoken Erica raised her head. “You know what that was? It was bliss … pure bliss.”
Amid murmurs of assent, Spangler stood up, his stiff knees audibly crackling. “For Christ’s sake, Weller, I’ve pretty much been an atheist my entire adult life but do you know what I think?”
Alex shook his head and waited for Spangler to go on.
The man gruffly wiped the tears from the corners of his eyes. “I’m the last person on earth to say this, but I think tonight, right here, in this place, we’ve just proven that there’s an afterlife.”
Twenty-one
Virginia Tinley had trouble getting her house keys from her pocketbook, her hands were shaking so. Once she negotiated the double locks she turned on the lights and went straight to her bedroom. She was a meticulous bedmaker: perfectly aligned peach bedspread, three rows of frilly pillows, and a stuffed moose that had been her twin’s dearest childhood toy.
She had no concern what a man would think of a thirty-five year old with a stuffed animal on her bed because she’d never had one over. Not that she lacked desire—there were two partners in her law firm whom she quite fancied—rather, men didn’t appear to be attracted to her. She’d long since stopped worrying about that though, instead filling her life with things that made her happy: books, films, her annual holiday to St. Barts, and this weirdly wonderful Uroboros Society that gave her a pathway to explore her spiritual side.
She’d surprised herself by agreeing to take Alex’s drug. Every time he’d offer up a chemical substance for the group she’d taken a pass, even on marijuana. She didn’t like the feeling of being high and would become paranoid about getting into trouble, losing her bar license and her job. Yet something about the wild look of excitement in Alex’s eyes made her throw caution to the wind that night. She had a deep feeling about these crystals of his, and though it was definitely un-Ginnylike, she had, in the end, opened her mouth and sprinkled them in.
Now she kicked off her shoes, slid across the bed and nestled among the pillows, drawing the plush moose to her chest. It smelled of age and childhood, the smells she remembered of her sister. Her glasses were still on. She removed them and carelessly tossed them toward the foot of the bed. They bounced off but she didn’t care.
When she closed her eyes she was back, emerging from the tunnel onto the green plain and walking expectantly toward the sounds of the river. The joy of it! The rapture! Her body shuddered; and when she replayed the vision of her perfect little sister, close across the river, the feelings of pleasure became so intense they began to hurt.
Patty!
There she was! A happy ten year old, jumping up and down on the riverbank as though it were Christmas morning, exuberantly waving at Ginny with both arms. She looked as fresh and pretty as the day she fell through the ice, never to return.
Virginia opened her eyes and was back in her bedroom. She thought she was going to cry again but she didn’t. Instead she sat up and started to undress and when she was naked she started to run a bath. She added bubbles and watched them froth.
She never walked naked around her flat even when alone, but she did this time and made herself an herbal tea while the bathtub filled.
She carefully stepped into the water and slowly submerged herself to the neck before lifting her arm above the bubbles for the teacup she’d placed on the side of the tub.
She smiled. Perfect pleasure: the hot soapy water, the zesty orange tea, the visions of her beaming sister. For the first time in her life she felt completely happy.
A kitchen paring knife was beside the teacup. She grasped it and without a moment’s hesitation made a deep cut through her wrist until blood came out under pressure. She let her wrist sink and the bubbles quickly turned pink.
It didn’t hurt.
It felt wonderful.
“I’m coming, Patty,” she said. “I’m coming.”
Twenty-two
“She doesn’t want any more chemo. I don’t want her to go through another course,” Marian said stubbornly.
Cyrus squeezed the telephone as if it were Marian’s neck. He tried to modulate his voice. If he blew up, she’d blow up and the conversation would be over. “But you said her MRI looked worse.”
The astrocytoma was growing again, resistant to the drugs.
“We’ve gone through this before, Cyrus. They’ve got nothing else for her.”
“There’s new things every day. You’re the Internet expert. Aren’t your goddamn brain cancer blogs talking about new things?”
“There’s nothing left,” she said. She started crying with the intensity of a burst dam. “Why can’t you understand that … There’s nothing left!”
With that she hung up, beating him to the punch.
He stared at the phone and returned it to the cradle. Severe sunlight was pouring through his office windows; he had zero interest in seeing the cold blue sky so he louvered all the shades closed.
The files on the head drillings sat untouched on his desk. The case wasn’t cold, but it was cooling. He had nothing on Alex Weller beyond deep suspicion. A string of bank robberies on the South Shore had risen to the top of his pile. Unfortunately, he and Avakian had to interview a bank manager in an hour. He’d have to try to tuck Tara away into a place in his mind that allowed him to keep functioning. He didn’t feel good about it but what else was he supposed to do? Shut down, take a medical leave, sit in his rotten apartment and get drunk at noon with a book in his lap?
Alex had spent the day after the Uroboros salon in a state of giddiness bordering on agitation. The Sunday paper was left in its plastic wrapper. He and Jessie hardly ate. When they tired of rehashing the events of the previous night Jessie had begged Alex to let her take one of the remaining straws. As he watched over her, he furiously jotted more notes into one of his bound lab notebooks. There needed to be a record, a scientific record of what had happened the previous night.
Someday, he thought, looking at Jessie’s flickering eyelids, people will look back on that Saturday night in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as one of the great days in human history. He’d caught himself at that notion and snorted at its pomposity; but then again, was it really that grandiose?
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br /> Mankind had been obsessed with concepts of life after death since the dawn of history and probably earlier. Despite the greatest Western philosophers—Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel—the only “proof” of the existence of God rested upon clever arguments printed on paper. If you were a believer, that belief welled up from cultural and religious springs, certainly not from empiricism.
Saturday night changed all that, hadn’t it? How else could a rational mind reconcile that a group of dissimilar men and women with such vastly differing belief systems all shared a common—no, a nearly identical—experience under the influence of a drug derived from the human brain at the moment of death?
Yet, amid the heady excitement, he’d been troubled by something and now, on Monday morning, he was still troubled. As his lab buzzed with activity, he sequestered himself in his office, hunched over, sorting through online science journals, copiously writing notes, jotting down references, ideas.
Why was the afterlife experience more intense with the natural chemical? No one who took the synthetic compound had gotten beyond the midpoint of the river. Why? And why was his and Jessie’s perception of a Godly presence so much more vivid with the natural substance? And the bliss, to use Erica’s word—why had the bliss they’d felt been even greater?
He kept coming back to Miguel Cifuentes’ comments about isomers. The answer, he thought, had to lie there. Cifuentes had taken his best guess about the most likely of a dozen or more isomers of the peptide based on nothing more than physical chemistry and probability. He could have chosen the wrong one. Or perhaps it was even more complicated. What if the brain in the throes of death produced a mixture of isomers?
The telephone interrupted his train of thought. He looked at it with irritation, was going to let it ring through to voice mail, then noticed the caller ID and responded, “Davis, how are you?”
Davis Fox sounded upset. “Alex, have you heard?”
“Heard what?”
“Ginny’s dead!”
Alex sucked in hard. “What happened?”
“Erica called me. She found out from Liam. She slit her wrists. A friend of hers, not one of us, found her last night when she couldn’t get through. Christ, Alex, are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“That it was the drug?”
“Yeah.”
Alex’s mind raced. He couldn’t shake the déjà vu. In retrospect, he’d expected it; it was almost as if he knew it had already occurred. He avoided Davis’s question. “Who else knows? In Uroboros?”
“I’m not sure. I’ll call around if you want me to.”
“Do it. Then phone me back.”
Davis didn’t hang up right away. He clearly wanted to say something else. “Alex, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Saturday night. Maybe Ginny did the right thing.”
Alex grunted a nonresponse, hung up, and grabbed his coat. It was too stuffy. He had to take a walk, do some thinking in the cold air. His Chinese postdocs smiled at him as he strode through the lab. Frank Sacco furtively looked up then buried his head back in his work. He’d avoided Alex all morning just as he’d done on Saturday night, when he’d slinked off without a word.
Alex did a few circuits of the quad, his hiking boots grinding into the granular ice melt. Before Saturday, he hadn’t given Ginny two thoughts. She was bright enough, he supposed, but boring, a milquetoast. She wasn’t well-read in the fields that interested him and rarely added anything meaningful to the group’s conversations. Her only compelling attribute was that she was a card-carrying member of the near death society. Her NDE was a “good one.” It gave her credibility.
Ginny. A suicide!
He’d been riveted by her exaggerated reaction to the drug. She was an outlier, and in science one learned from outliers. She’d been out longer than the others, was wilder when she returned, half crazed. She desperately wanted to go back to her twin. She’d begged him.
Now she’s gone and done it, he thought, she’s bloody well gone and done it. He sighed and thought back to the moments he’d spent holding a sharp letter opener, contemplating doing precisely what she had done.
He kept walking until the rims of his ears were numb from wind chill. Back in his cramped office he sat down, his body heavy and wooden. There was so much to do: so many questions, so many experiments. He’d get busy in the evening when the lab cleared out—away from prying eyes. He’d come to enjoy night work.
His knuckles skimmed the spine of his lab notebook, which he’d carelessly left out in the open. There was an old coffee mug in his credenza filled with rubber bands. He tipped it out and retrieved the little brass key hidden among them. The key opened the lower locking drawer of his desk. When he deposited the notebook he saw it was missing.
The bottle of peptide—gone!
In a frenzy, he searched the drawer, then his desk, then his office. He felt his throat tighten. It had to be here! No one else knew about it. No one had a key. That bottle had been there Saturday morning when he’d come in to weigh out individual doses for the salon later that evening. He was absolutely certain he’d returned it and locked the drawer. He’d been more than careful. He’d been paranoid about it, as he had been about everything since he’d drifted to murder. He tried to control his breathing while he searched the office again.
Then it slammed him. Frank.
Who else but Frank?
He had access. Since Saturday he knew about the drug. Moreover, he’d been acting strangely all morning. Alex opened the door and called the young man in, trying to sound as matter-of-fact as his dry voice would allow.
“What’s up, Alex?” Frank asked, looking down at his shoes.
“Something’s missing from my office. Know anything about it?”
“Missing? What?” Frank asked defensively.
“Never mind what. Have you been in my office?”
“No.”
“Have you been in my desk?”
“No!”
“Were you in the lab yesterday?”
“No! What are you accusing me of, Alex?”
“If you’re lying, Frank, so help me God …”
“I’m not lying. Can I go now?”
Alex stared at the man even though he was refusing eye contact. “Let me ask you something, Frank. On Saturday night, everyone spoke except you. What was your experience like?”
“It was good.”
“Good?”
“Yeah, same as everyone else. Pretty much like the others.”
“Ginny Tinley’s dead. She killed herself.”
Frank finally looked at Alex square on. “No shit.”
“Yeah, Frank. No shit.”
“Can I go? It’s lunchtime.”
Alex made two phone calls. The first was to the security desk in the lobby. He asked the guard on duty if she could check the log to see if one of his employees had come in on Sunday. The guard replied that she didn’t have logon access to the weekend data. She’d call her supervisor if Dr. Weller wanted to see if he could help. Alex recoiled at the suggestion. He had no interest in drawing attention. No, he replied, she could drop it. It wasn’t important.
The second call was long distance.
The resonant voice of Miguel Cifuentes was on the line. “Alex Weller! Happy New Year!”
“You too, Miguel, how’s life back home, mate?”
They chatted for a couple of minutes, Alex struggling through the banalities. Finally, he asked how close he was to having his lab set up in Mexico City.
“I’m already up and running. Why?”
“You know the pentapeptide you made me?”
“Sure.”
“I’m going to need more of it. Right away.”
“How much more, my friend?”
Alex pursed his lips then said, “All you can make.”
Twenty-three
The next one was the easiest.
This time Alex had no internal debate about right and wrong, good and evil. He was on a mission. He had the val
idation he needed to wash away sticky moral qualms. He awoke every morning with a mounting sense that he was at the center of greatness. Standing like Faustus in his magic circle, he felt that another world was being revealed to him, a confluence of science, faith, religion and philosophy. Grand ideas, giant visions dwarfed a small, single life. And besides, there was no doubt, none whatsoever, that his victim would thank him if she knew what lay in store for her a mere four minutes after her heart stopped beating.
The girl was sleepy from drugs and kept nodding off in the car. He asked her how old she was. She said eighteen but she looked younger. He hoped she was. In his garage, when he got back in the car after closing the door, her eyes were closed, her chin on her chest. He didn’t wake her. As soon as he put on his gloves he strangled her. His technique had improved and maybe his hand strength too. She had the most spindly neck of any of them. Her struggles were light and she went down fast. He laid her down beside the car, got his samples then put her in his polythene-lined trunk and drove off.
When he backed out of the driveway he looked up at their bedroom window. The lights were off. Jessie was there, dreaming. He was tired. He wished he was curled against her. She was a lovely sleeper.
This time he paid more attention to the disposal. He didn’t want to deal with Cyrus O’Malley again. There were more important things to do. This girl would have to stay hidden longer.
He drove south into Rhode Island. His plan drew on his memory of a beach walk he and Jessie had taken two Novembers earlier. Isolated seasonal cottages in Narragansett, dolefully shuttered for the winter. In the dark, he found a cottage cluster, chose one and forced a door. With plastic bags rubber-banded around his feet to avoid footprints, he dragged the girl’s body into a bedroom and shoved it under a stripped bed where it would freeze. No odors till the spring. Spring was a long way off.