“It is that, ma’am. You all together? A group?”
“Yes … yes we are.” She frowned insincere concern. “Are we in breach of a city ordinance?”
“No, you’re fine. Are you some kind of club?”
“We all work together. I’m the CEO … we decided yesterday to take this walk together and watch the sun come up. Is that okay?”
“Sure … I didn’t mean to disturb you.” Ramirez examined her more closely: as a company CEO, the woman looked too young, too wrong. Wrong clothes, wrong type. “What is it your company does?” he asked, still smiling, still keeping his tone conversational.
“Gaming.”
“Gaming?”
“Computer games. We design them. These guys are my best teams.”
“Shoot-em-up games, that kind of thing?” Ramirez asked. The phrase sat clumsily in his mouth; it was something he’d heard his eldest say.
The woman laughed and shook her head. “No, nothing like that. Alternate reality games, mostly … We do stuff like this to remind ourselves that there’s a real world out there.”
“Like teambuilding, that kind of thing?” he asked.
“Something like. I didn’t think we needed to ask permission.” The young woman looked right to Ramirez now. Dot-com-social-network-type right. A world he didn’t have much time for and which had sneaked a generation gap in between him and his kids.
“You don’t,” he said. “Well, you enjoy sunup. Have a good day, ma’am.”
“And you, officer.” She smiled at him again.
Climbing back into the Explorer, Ramirez watched the group walk on. They all had a careless glow about them – of youth or of the sunrise or both – and he felt a pang of envy. Yet he counted lamp poles. Counting lamp poles was something you learned to do if you were a cop attached to the Bridge, but these were not the type you needed to count lamp poles for.
Shaking the thought from his head, Ramirez switched off the bar lights and started up the engine. As he drove past, the young woman who probably made in a month what he made in a year waved at him.
What was it? What was wrong?
The thought nagged him to another halt and he watched them in his side mirror. The clump of walkers had become a string that stretched along the sidewalk. They stopped. And lamp pole sixty-nine was at the middle. She was in the middle. She was standing at lamp pole sixty-nine. Sixty-nine.
The pole you counted most.
The Golden Gate Bridge was an icon. People from across the country, from around the world, were drawn to its strange beauty; and most of all they were drawn to the view from pole sixty-nine.
He got out of the Explorer and started back.
“Excuse me, ma’am …” he called and waved to the young woman. She waved back as, in unison, she and her colleagues climbed over the safety railing and down onto the three-feet-wide girder that Ramirez knew was just over the barrier, about two feet below walkway level.
Jesus … Ramirez broke into a sprint. Jesus Christ … there must be thirty of them. As he ran he could see the flashing lights of other vehicles, alerted by the Bridge authority, racing towards them. Too far. Too late.
Pole sixty-nine.
The Golden Gate Bridge demanded a special kind of cop, because the Golden Gate Bridge was the world’s number one location for suicide. Every year, scores of people came to the bridge to cross over something more than San Francisco Bay. They came from all over the country, some from abroad, to walk out onto the Bridge’s span where death was always just a four-and-a-half-feet climb over the sidewalk safety barrier and a four-second, seventy-five-mile-an-hour drop. At that speed, impact on water felt like impact on concrete. Hardly anyone drowned: ninety per cent plus died of massive internal injuries, their bones and organs smashed. On average, the Bridge had one known jumper every week-and-a-half with more than thirty known deaths a year; and, of course, there were those who managed to jump without being spotted, their dust-covered cars found abandoned in the car parks.
Of the Bridge’s one hundred and twenty-eight lamp poles, it was pole sixty-nine that had felt the last touches of most.
He vaulted over the traffic barrier and onto the walkway. Trained in a whole range of strategies for talking to potential suicides, Ramirez also knew a dozen practiced maneuvers for grabbing and securing an indecisive jumper. But there were too many of them.
“Don’t!” he shouted. “For God’s sake don’t!”
He was near the railing, close to where the young woman stood looking down at the water. He could see them now, all standing on the girder, holding hands.
The young woman turned her head to look at him over her shoulder.
“It’s all right,” she said, smiling again, this time sincerely, kindly. “It’s not your fault, there was nothing you could do. It’s all right … we are becoming.”
As if by a wordless command, without hesitation, they all stepped off in unison.
Ramirez made it to the barrier just in time to see them hit the water. Everything seemed unreal, as if what he had just witnessed could not possibly have happened and he must have imagined the young people on the Bridge just seconds before. He heard his own voice as if it belonged to someone else as he radioed it in, calling for the Fort Baker Coastguard rescue boat. The Bridge security vehicle and the SFPD cruiser pulled up beside him, and the urgent, questioning voices of the other officers came to Ramirez like radio messages from a distant planet.
He turned away from the safety railing and looked at the Bridge, at the graceful sweep and arch of its back, at the red of its soaring towers made redder by the rising sun. For the second time that day he saw the Bridge for what it was, what it symbolized, saw all of its beauty.
And he hated it.
part one
IN THE BEGINNING
By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.
Hebrews 11:3
The senses deceive from time to time, and it is prudent never to trust wholly those who have deceived us even once.
René Descartes
Anyone not shocked by quantum mechanics has not yet understood it.
Niels Bohr
1
THE BEGINNING
It all began with the staring.
But there were many other things before the staring, before it began. Strange accounts from distant places:
A man in New York died of malnutrition in a luxurious Central Park apartment empty of food but filled with vitamin pills. There was an inexplicable epidemic of suicides: twenty-seven young people jumping in unison from the Golden Gate Bridge; fifty Japanese students camping out deep in the huge Aokigahara forest – the Sea of Trees at the foot of Mount Fuji – sharing food and singing songs around campfires before wandering separately into the dark of the forest to open their arteries; four notable suicides in Berlin on the same day – three scientists and a writer. A Russian physicist turned neo-pagan mystic purported to be the Son of God. A French teenager claimed to have had a vision of Joan of Arc being burned at the stake. A middle-aged woman calmly sat down in the middle of the road at the entrance of the CERN complex in Switzerland, then just as calmly doused her clothing in kerosene and set fire to herself. A Hollywood effects studio was firebombed. A fundamentalist Christian sect kidnapped and murdered a geneticist.
Then there was the graffito WE ARE BECOMING appearing in fifty languages, in every major city around the world. On government buildings, on bridges, sprayed over advertising hoardings.
And people started to talk about John Astor.
No one knew for sure if he really existed or not, but there were rumors that the FBI was after him. And, of course, there was the spreading urban myth about the manuscript of Astor’s book, Phantoms of Our Own Making, that drove mad anyone who found and read it.
All of these things happened before it began.
But it really began with the staring.
2
JOHN
MACBETH. BOSTON
Psychiatrists deal in the weird. In the odd. The very nature of their work means they encounter the aberrant and the abnormal on a daily basis. They are in the business of confronting skewed perceptions of reality.
So the fact that the entire world was changing – that everything he’d held up to that point to be true about the nature of things was about to be turned on its head – had pretty much passed Dr John Macbeth by.
But the world did change. And it began with the staring.
Like with the news stories, it was only in the weeks and months that followed that Macbeth began to piece together the clues that had been there all the time. But there had been other clues that he had missed, that had not registered on the scope of his professional radar. But afterwards he remembered just how many people he had seen, without really noticing them: in the streets, on the subway, in the park.
Staring.
There had been only a few in those first days: people gazing into empty space, faces blank or creased in frowned confusion or flashed with unease. They had the same effect on others that cats have when they stare past you, over your shoulder, at something you turn around to see but cannot. Unsettling.
Of course, at the beginning, at the beginning of the staring, no one had come up with a name for it, medical or otherwise. The starers were yet to be called Dreamers.
It was only afterwards that Macbeth remembered the first one he had encountered, an attractive, expensively dressed woman in her mid-thirties. It had happened on his first day back in Boston: he had been walking behind her in the downtown street on that sunny but cold late spring morning. She had walked with city-sidewalk purposefulness, just as he had, but then she had suddenly, unaccountably, come to an abrupt halt. Macbeth almost walked smack into her and had to dance-step a dodge around her. The woman simply stood there, at the edge of the sidewalk, feet planted, gazing at something that wasn’t there across the street. Then, as she pointed a vague finger towards the nothing that had caught her attention, she stepped off the curb and into the traffic. Macbeth grabbed her elbow and hauled her back and out of the way of a truck that flashed past with an angry horn blast.
“I thought …” she had said, the words dying on her lips and her eyes now searching for something lost in the distance.
Macbeth had asked the woman if she was okay, admonished her to pay more attention to traffic and walked on.
It was hardly an incident: just a distracted woman making an error in roadside judgment. Something you saw almost every day in any city around the world.
It was only later, after the other events, that significance began to attach and he started to wonder what it had been that the woman had seen in the street; that had almost pulled her into the path of the truck.
*
It was a good room. Not great, but better than okay. The architecture that surrounded him was always unusually important to John Macbeth: its proportions, materials, decor, amount of light.
Macbeth had woken up that morning and the room had frightened him with its unfamiliarity. He had awoken not knowing who he was, what he did for a living, where he was and why he was there. For a full minute and a half, he had experienced complete existential panic: the bright burning star at the heart of his amnesiac darkness being the knowledge that he should know who he was, where he was and what he was doing there.
His memory, his identity had fallen back into place: not all at once, but in ill-fitting segments he had to piece together. It had happened before, he began to remember – many times before, especially when he was in a strange place. Terrifying moments of depersonalized isolation before he remembered he was Dr John Macbeth, that he was a psychiatrist and cognitive neuroscientist trying to make sense of his own psychology by seeking to understand others. He worked, he now remembered, on Project One in Copenhagen, Denmark, and that he was in Boston on Project business. And he had suffered derealization and depersonalization episodes all his life; he remembered that too.
Eventually, he had made sense of the room and the room had made sense of him. That was why environments were so important to him. But, for those ninety terrifying seconds, he could have been as equally convinced by his surroundings that he was someone, somewhere and sometime else.
The room was on the third floor of the hotel that had looked just right on the website but hadn’t looked quite as right in up-close reality. It was large, and a tall traditional sash-type window looked out over the street. Macbeth had opened the window, creating at the bottom a breezeless four-inch gap.
Now, sitting in the armchair by the window in the quiet room, his identity and purpose restored to him, Macbeth listened to the sounds beyond. It was something he often did and, like so many aspects of his personality, others would probably have considered him odd because of it. Where most people in hotel rooms would switch on the TV or radio, filling the space around them with expected sounds, or closing in even tighter the borders of their awareness with an MP3 player and earphones, John Macbeth would sit, still and silent, listening outward. With everything quiet in his room, he attended the sounds beyond: from neighboring rooms, from the street beyond the window, from the city beyond the street. Sounds off, they called them in the theater: the pretense of some reality beyond, some action unseen.
Like everyone else, Macbeth had a cellphone and a laptop computer, but used them only when compelled to. Technology was a central part of his work, an unavoidable part of everyday life, but he did not interact well with it. Computer and video games, which he could in any case never understand adults playing, gave him motion sickness, and any sustained interaction with electronics seemed to make him restless and irritated. The problem he was having with his computer was a good example: a folder he could not remember creating and which refused to open for him, no matter what he did – including hitting the keyboard harder with an angry fingertip, as if a virtual object would yield to real-world physics. The folder had been there for over a month, sitting on his computer’s desktop, taunting his technological incompetence.
My brother Casey will sort you out, he had threatened it – out loud – on more than one occasion.
Ironically, Macbeth’s work brought him into contact with the world’s most sophisticated computer technology: he was on an interdisciplinary team of some of the finest brains on the planet, yet more than half their thinking was done for them by machines. And the whole aim of Project One was, indeed, to create a machine that could simulate the neural activity of the human brain, perhaps even think for itself. Outside his work, however, Macbeth eschewed technology as much as was practicable in modern life. His avoidance wasn’t founded on some philosophical or moral objection: it was just that technology seemed to make his problem worse; loosen his grasp on who and where he was in the world.
So John Macbeth chose to connect with the real universe rather than the virtual, listening to sounds outside the room to reassure himself that he really was in the room; that he was there, his mind reaching out into the world and not turned in on itself. It was a meditation he had done since boyhood: before-dark Cape Cod summer bedtimes listening to the sounds of birds or waves or distant trains beyond curtains that glowed amber and red with the low sun. He remembered so little from his childhood, but he remembered those curtains glowing with bold colors and strong patterns.
For the duration of his stay in Boston, Macbeth had booked into a hotel that matched his style but overstretched the budget allocated by the university. It wasn’t that he went for conspicuously ritzy places full of gilt-edged reminders that they were well beyond the reach of the ordinary working stiff; he preferred quality designer hotels and boutique B&Bs – places with character, history, or ideally both. Macbeth’s surroundings had to be right. Always. The colors, smells, textures and tastes that surrounded him, even his clothes, were enormously important. A refined materialism that probably seemed superficial. But there was nothing superficial about it: Macbeth had a real need to be in an environment that soothed him, offered some k
ind of harmony; reconciled his internal and external worlds. It was at the same time meditative and a reassurance of identity. And it had a lot to do, he knew, with his memories. Or lack of them.
Whatever motivated it, he needed it the same way the observant Catholic needed rosary beads.
*
Boston was Macbeth’s hometown. He’d been sent there to represent Project One by the University of Copenhagen. Despite the protests of Poulsen, the Project’s director and Macbeth’s boss, the university had been keen to use him as a poster boy, seeming to think that Macbeth had a look and manner that most people would not associate with a research scientist, or psychiatrist, and – as an American – he was perfectly suited for liaison with the Project’s Boston partner, the Schilder Neuroscience Research Institute.
Macbeth didn’t see himself as an ideal ambassador. He knew he could be sociable and witty, but for as long as he could remember he’d been aware of his detachment from others, his emotional and intellectual self-containment. As a psychiatrist, he had studied and understood the ‘problem of other minds’; he’d understood it, but had never fully resolved it for himself.
“You okay, Karen?” A rich, authoritative male voice drifted up from the street. “I need you to be okay for the Halverson presentation.”
“I’m fine.” A woman’s voice. Young, refined, educated, defiant. “I told you before. I’m fine …”
The voices faded and were replaced by others. Macbeth sat and speculated what the Halverson presentation could be about, what problem the woman had that compelled the man to seek reassurance. From an incomplete and incoherent fragment of reality, he extrapolated a complete and coherent fiction.
Maybe I should become a writer, he told himself. Macbeth the psychiatrist knew that storytelling and mental disorder grew from the same seed: writers scored highly as nonpathological schizotypes. The higher the score, the more disposed they were to magical thinking, the more creative the writing.
Biblical Page 2