“You were here before I came up onto the roof, Gabriel. You were here fifteen minutes ago when the police called me. You were here fifteen minutes before that when the security guard called the police. I couldn’t see you then, but you were here, weren’t you?”
And before that, thought Macbeth, remembering the taxi driver’s account of the distracted passenger he’d taken to Christian Science Plaza.
The young man frowned. “I remember being here fifteen minutes ago. I remember being before you looked at me. But I am remembering that now. That memory of existence has been generated in this moment. Maybe it’s the present memory that’s real, not the past existence. Because I remember being here fifteen minutes ago doesn’t mean I really was here fifteen minutes ago.”
“Do you know something, Gabriel?” said Corbin. “I don’t like heights. I mean, I really don’t like heights. Never have. Why don’t you step back from the edge? Just a little bit …” Corbin glanced meaningfully over to the cops standing beside Macbeth. “No one is going to come close. It’s just so that we can talk. You know, without me being all scared about the height.”
“Height is a dimension, a measure. It isn’t the measure you’re scared of, you’re afraid of the force the measure exerts on your mass. Gravity. And gravity is nothing to be afraid of.”
“I don’t know about that, Gabriel,” said Corbin, “I’ve seen gravity make a real mess of people falling from a height lower than this.”
“Of the four fundamental forces of the universe, gravity is the weakest. By far the weakest. The other three forces push it around. Bend it and twist it and fuck it up. If you want to be afraid of a force, Doc, be afraid of electromagnetism, or the strong nuclear force. Be afraid of the forces you can’t see or feel but hold you together and can tear you apart. Not gravity.” Gabriel sighed. “If you don’t like heights, you can step farther back. I like it here. Is Father Mullachy still here?”
“I am still here, my son.” The priest stood up, casting a nervous eye over the building’s edge.
“What’s your name, Father? I mean your first name.”
“Paul,” said the priest. “My name is Paul.”
The naked man laughed. “Peter, Paul and Gabriel … two saints and an angel. Do you believe in angels, Father?”
“I believe God is manifest in many ways, Gabriel. Many ways to many people.”
“I didn’t ask if you believed in God. I didn’t ask a vague question for you to give me a vague answer. I asked you specifically if you believed in angels … you know, anthropomorphic beings with giant wings growing out of their backs.”
“That’s not what an angel is, my son,” said the priest. “An angel is a messenger of God, or even the message itself. More a being of spirit than—”
“Do you believe in angels, Gabriel?” Corbin cut the priest off.
Gabriel laughed bitterly. “Believe? I believe in nothing. But the funny thing is that the nothing I believe in is a nothing where absolutely everything is possible. All things, all ideas, all possibilities. Even angels. If you’re a psychiatrist, Peter, then you’ll know that angels are real. Not to everybody, but to some. I bet you’ve had patients who believe totally, completely, that they’ve seen angels. The fact that the angels exist only in their minds and no one else’s doesn’t mean they’re not real. Angels, demons, ghosts …” He paused, his tone becoming troubled. “And monsters. I bet you’ve seen them all, treated them, cured them. Am I right? Have you cured people of their belief in angels?”
“I’ve helped patients with delusional disorders, if that’s what you mean.”
There was a pause. Gabriel’s gaze remained fixed on the farin-the-distance something invisible to everyone else. “You’ve been very busy recently, haven’t you, Peter?” he said eventually. “You’ve had to chase away a lot more angels and ghosts of late. Many, many more than usual … Am I right?”
There was another pause, this time Corbin standing quiet. Something in that silence troubled Macbeth.
“Why do you say that?” said Corbin.
“I’m right, aren’t I? There are more people than usual seeking a cure for their visions. What do you tell them? Do you tell them they’re mad? Or has it begun with you too? Maybe just the odd thing out of the corner of your eye? Those are the worst. Those are the ones that drive you crazy … they’re never still there when you turn. Has that been happening to you, Peter? Are you already a seer of visions yourself? Do you now tell your patients that they were right all along? Do you tell them the angels are coming?”
Again Macbeth noticed that Corbin paused before answering. In the silence he could hear the city sounds of traffic in the dark; distant shouting and laughter. Noises off.
“Do you see angels?” asked Corbin. “Is that what you’re seeing now, in the sky?”
Gabriel laughed. “Stop reflecting. Deflecting. I want to know if you ever wondered about the reality your patients describe … Have you ever lain in bed at night, in the dark, and questioned whether their reality is the valid one and yours the false? I mean, you must encounter as many people with their own version of reality as those who share the standard version.”
“We all know what true reality is, Gabriel.”
The naked man laughed. “You mean consensual reality? Reality is reality if enough people believe in it? What if everybody … and I mean everybody … started to have visions? Everybody except you? Would that mean that you were delusional? Let’s put it this way: Father Mullachy here has devoted his life to serve a supernatural entity. But that’s acceptable because there’s a history to his fantasy and there’s still some consensus behind it. But if he devoted himself in exactly the same way to exactly the same set of beliefs, but said it was a giant mouse who lives hidden in the clouds that commanded his presence here, because the giant mouse is worried about my spiritual wellbeing, that wouldn’t be acceptable. You would say he was delusional. Big question, isn’t it?”
“The only question I’m interested in at the moment is why you are here, Gabriel.”
There was another elastic silence before Gabriel spoke. “Have you ever seen a Golden Dart Frog? They’re beautiful: bright, beautiful colors, not just gold. And so tiny – less than half an inch long. Do you know what I can’t understand about the Golden Dart Frog? Why such a tiny, beautiful creature is the most deadly poisonous animal on the planet. One frog – one half-inch-long frog – could kill five African elephants stone dead inside of a minute. Or twenty to thirty humans. If you put your bare hand on a branch where one has been sitting an hour before, its skin secretions could still kill you. I just don’t get it … Hey, Father, you got an answer to that? Why God made something so beautiful then made it so toxic?”
“There is room in God’s creation for all kinds of thing, Gabriel,” said the priest. “There are wonders we may never understand. His reasons may forever be beyond our grasp.”
Gabriel laughed and as he did so, his naked body swayed again. Macbeth saw Corbin tense.
“That’s good … I like that … ‘wonders we may never understand’. The Pope’s get-out-of-jail-free card,” said Gabriel. “But we really try to understand, don’t we? I mean, of the eight or nine million species on this planet, we are the only one trying to make sense of it all. You see, the Golden Dart Frog makes no sense to me because it carries a thousand times more poison than it would ever need to kill any of its natural predators. And you know something? We’re exactly the same. We don’t make sense, either. I mean, why are we so smart? We don’t need all of this intelligence.”
“I don’t get you,” said Corbin.
“Just like the Golden Dart Frog’s been overloaded with poison, we’re overloaded with all this brainpower. Brainpower we don’t really need to hang on to our place at the top of the pile. Look at all of this …” He swept an arm to indicate Boston glittering in the night. “All of this created by an ape. Art, science, music … none of it makes any sense. It’s absurd. Everything is absurd. What do you think, Peter? You gauge and measure
and probe the human mind … What’s your take on it?”
“Human intelligence?” As he answered, Corbin took a clumsily casual step closer. He was now halfway between Macbeth and the naked man. “Like you said, we’re top of the evolutionary tree; it’s our intelligence that’s put us there.”
“Now that’s just not true, Peter, and you know it,” said Gabriel. “What about dinosaurs? One hundred and thirty million years at the top of the tree. Infinitely more successful than us. They didn’t need technology or civilization or culture. Our intelligence is actually an evolutionary threat, not an advantage – it has brought us close to extinction at our own hands within what? Two hundred thousand years of modern humans? Fifty thousand years of behavioral modernity? I mean, that’s not even a blink of the evolutionary eye. But in that tiny space of time we have pretty much succeeded in fucking up the planet we depend on and have developed the weapons we need to wipe ourselves out several times over. Yep, Pete … dinosaurs have us beat, all right.” Again he waved an arm to indicate the city spread out below. “They had all this beat.”
“I can answer your question, Gabriel.” The priest moved closer, uncertainly, again casting a nervous eye over the parapet’s edge. “Our wisdom, our inquiry, is God-given. He gave it to us so that we may seek to understand Him. And come to know our sins – the nature of sin. So that we can strive to know God.”
“What if I told you,” Gabriel said to the priest, “that I know God? That I know God in a way that you could never, ever understand? That I completely, totally understand the true nature of God?”
“No you don’t, my son,” said the priest.
“But I do,” said Gabriel, for the first time with feeling in his voice. Almost pain. “You’re the one who’s deluded. I’ve seen the answer, the truth, Father. And it’s a big, big truth. A truth so big and so beyond the imaginings of your tiny superstition that you’re incapable of understanding it.” He paused, and seemed to survey the lights of the city again. “So big I can’t bear it …”
An upcurrent from the Plaza below lifted and ruffled the fringe of fair hair. Gabriel leaned forward slightly and looked down. Macbeth held his breath and sensed the two cops next to him do the same. Pete Corbin moved forward then checked himself.
Then, unexpectedly, Gabriel stepped back: off the parapet and away from the edge. Father Mullachy looked across to Corbin with an expression of undisguised triumph.
“Better get a blanket,” the sergeant told the younger cop and started to cross the roof. In the meantime, the young priest had taken a step towards Gabriel and placed his hand reassuringly on his naked shoulder.
“Everything’s going to be fine, my son,” said Father Mullachy.
“You don’t understand, Paul,” said Gabriel and his voice was suddenly clearer, more determined. “We are becoming. We are becoming.”
“We are becoming what?” the priest frowned.
Macbeth realized he had seen it first. Everyone else was involved in his allocated role while Macbeth was simply an observer. And he observed. He observed the sudden shift in Gabriel’s demeanor; he observed the sudden animation in the until then emotionless face and gestureless body.
“You see, Father Paul,” said Gabriel, “all your life you’ve been asking the wrong question. You’ve been asking who God is. There is no who. There is no who or what or where. The truth is knowing when God is. I know when God is. We are becoming … We are becoming …” Gabriel, smiling, stepped forward and embraced the young priest in a bear hug. “Come and see …”
By now, Corbin was running towards them, the two cops and Macbeth behind him. They all froze as Gabriel, his arms still locked around Mullachy, hurled himself and the priest sideways.
The low crenellated parapet that edged the roof caught both men mid-calf and they toppled sideways over the edge and out of sight: Gabriel silent, Mullachy screaming in primal terror.
6
JOSH HOBERMAN. VIRGINIA
Josh Hoberman sat in the back of the black car and felt sick.
As they cruised along the long track to the road, he watched the dark velvet of the trees swallow up his home and douse the porch light he had forgotten to switch off. The track to the main road was unpaved and Hoberman had bought an SUV to make the daily trip from his home to the rail station where he made the thrice-weekly commute to his clinic in DC. The rest of the week he worked at home, in isolation. The Crown Vic’s suspension evened out the bumps and ruts in the road into gentler lunges and lurches, and the turbulence was mirrored in Hoberman’s gut.
“Where are we going?” he asked Roesler, who sat in the rear with him, the other two agents suited, silent ciphers in the front. Why had they sent three agents?
“I guess you’re going to DC, sir, but I wouldn’t know for sure,” said Roesler with the same perfunctory politeness. Hoberman realized that to Roesler he was a package for delivery, nothing more. “We’re only taking you as far as Culpeper airbase. You’re being picked up by helicopter there.”
“To go to Washington? It’s only an hour and a half by car …”
“I really don’t know where your final destination is, Professor Hoberman. I guess they’ll be able to better inform you at Culpeper.”
They were on the main highway now and Hoberman sat back in the leather and reflected on the nature of inherited memory and cultural memes. Hoberman was a Jew collected in the middle of the night by armed government officials who wouldn’t tell him where his final destination lay; the grandson of a long-dead Jew collected in the middle of the night by armed government officials who wouldn’t tell him where his final destination lay.
The rest of the half-hour journey was silent other than when the suit in the front seat made a call to say they were ‘nearing rendezvous’. Hoberman was only mildly surprised to see that Culpeper Regional Airport was closed at that time of night, but the security man gave a small salute and let the car pass through the gates.
Gleaming under the airfield lights like some giant beetle, a large black helicopter sat on the runway, rotors already slugging into motion as the car pulled up. Roesler and one of the other agents guided Hoberman with irresistible courtesy beneath the swish of blades to where steps led up to the door. The man standing framed in the doorway was casually dressed in a black short-sleeve polo shirt, light-colored cargo pants and an overdone smile.
“Professor Hoberman?” He extended his hand and his smile. “Thanks for coming at such an ungodly hour. I’m Agent Bundy. Let’s get you comfortable.”
“Bundy?”
“No relation …” the secret serviceman said automatically, still smiling amiably, and stood back to allow Hoberman access to a small space between the pilot’s cabin and an opposing door, which Bundy slid open. Hoberman noticed that he was tanned and muscular: the professional muscles of someone whose job required brawn as well as brain. He also noticed that Bundy had the most striking eyes. Dual-colored: the irises banded bright blue on the outside and pale hazel-brown around the pupils.
“This way, Professor Hoberman,” said Bundy.
The passenger cabin of the helicopter took Hoberman by surprise. It was bright and luxurious, with cream leather armchairs unlike anything he had seen in any airliner, whatever the class of seating. There was another man in the cabin whom Bundy introduced as Bob Ryerson. Ryerson was wearing a dark, expensive-looking suit and was indecently well-groomed and fresh for the time of night. His physique came out of the same box as Bundy’s.
“Is this Marine One?” Hoberman asked. Bundy laughed.
“No sir, the main helicopter used as Marine One is a bigger craft than this. But Marine One is any helicopter that has the President on board, and only if the President is on board. But you’re right to think that this is an HMX-1 craft: Marine Helicopter Squadron One … Presidential executive transport. Please, take a seat and buckle up for takeoff, Professor Hoberman.”
“So you and Bob here,” said Hoberman without taking his seat. “What are you? CIA? NSA? FBI? DHS? Or
have I missed something in our fine nation’s clandestine alphabet soup?”
“You could say all of the above,” said Bundy, smile still in place. “I am officially an FBI Special Agent, but my job description has become … flexible. Everything’s become a little more integrated post-nine-eleven. But Bob and I are both tasked with Presidential security and protection, if that’s what you mean. Please, Professor Hoberman, sit down and buckle up and we’ll get under way.”
“Under way where?” Hoberman remained standing as resolutely as he could manage. “And why? I have a right to know where the hell you’re taking me and for what reason.”
Bundy smiled indulgently. “I believe you received a note …”
“That only told me the who, not the where and why.”
“I can answer your first question, Doctor,” Ryerson answered. Hoberman noticed his demeanor was less convivial than Bundy’s car-salesman cheeriness. “We’re flying to Camp David in Maryland. As for your second question, neither of us know why you’ve been summoned, but we were told to give you this.” He removed a dossier from a black leather attaché case and handed it to Hoberman.
The dossier was fastened shut by an unbroken Presidential seal. Hoberman stared at it the same way he’d stared at the gun in his hand. Alien, out of place. Hoberman, standing in the luxury of a Presidential fleet helicopter with its immaculate cream leather seats, cherrywood drinks table and green curtains, felt alien and out of place himself.
“Now, Professor Hoberman …” said Bundy, extending his hand towards one of the seats. “If you don’t mind …”
7
JOHN MACBETH. BOSTON
When it came to the naked man, pronouncing life extinct didn’t stretch Macbeth’s medical training.
Gabriel had hit the flagstones head first and a gray-flecked halo of blood bloomed around his shattered skull; viscous clots oozed from each nostril and one eye remained wide open, gazing up at the night sky, while the other was half closed, the lid like a carelessly pulled down window blind.
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