He must have held the young priest in his unrelenting embrace all the way to the ground, because the two men now lay entangled. Corbin and Macbeth turned their attention to Father Mullachy, who lay partly across Gabriel’s chest. The priest also stared up at the dark sky, but his chest pulsed rapidly in short, shallow heaves.
“Can you hear me?” asked Corbin. “Father Mullachy? Can you hear me Father Mullachy?”
The priest said nothing, his gaze remaining fixed on the stars above, his breathing still fast and shallow. Corbin pressed an ear to the injured man’s chest, first one side, then the other.
“Get an ambulance!” Corbin called over his shoulder to the policemen, then turned back to Macbeth. “How’s your emergency medicine?”
“Rusty …” Macbeth lied. Emergency procedures were exactly the kind of thing that he remembered. Perfectly. How to do things, processes, facts and methods he had learned; taxonomies, systems, structured knowledge – these were the memories that were catalogued, indexed and filed, dusted and maintained in the warehouse in his brain labeled Procedural Memory and could be brought back into his recall shining bright and working like new. In contrast, when it came to his Autobiographical Memory, Macbeth found himself in an ill-lit storeroom of cluttered shelves that he could never quite find his way around. Real-life remembrances had to be dusted off before he could examine their faded images. Even then he was never sure what truly belonged to his life and what had been borrowed from others.
Corbin was clearly aware of Macbeth’s recall of procedure, because he made a ‘help yourself’ gesture towards the injured man. Macbeth ran his hands over the priest’s body, like a cop frisking a suspect. Old skills came back in an instant and as he felt each fracture beneath his fingertips, he announced it to Corbin. When Macbeth examined his ribs, Mullachy made a short moaning sound, the only protest he could manage between breaths; then again, louder, when Macbeth felt around the hips. Shattered pelvis. The good thing was that Mullachy could feel the pain in his lower body, meaning his spinal cord was intact. Macbeth checked the distal pulses then worked his way back to the chest. Carefully removing the priest’s dog collar, he inspected his neck: no deformations or serious swelling. Mullachy must have landed in a way that prevented serious injury to his head and spine, the most common cause of death in falls. As Macbeth examined the priest’s throat, he saw a rash of small, raised bumps on the skin, like an extreme form of gooseflesh. Whenever he touched a bump, it moved or popped beneath his fingers, the skin flattening but other bumps appearing elsewhere.
“Rice Krispies?” asked Corbin over Macbeth’s shoulder.
Macbeth nodded. “Snap, crackle and pop all right … Sub-Q air. If the ambulance doesn’t arrive soon, we’re going to have to improvise a chest tube.”
There was now an urgent wheezing to the priest’s breathing. He spoke urgently between shallow breaths.
“Unction …” he gasped. “Last … rites …”
“Don’t talk, Father,” said Macbeth. “Save your breath. You’re going to be fine.” He turned to Corbin. “Go see if one of the cops has got a pocket knife and a ballpoint pen.”
“You’re going to tube him here?”
“Not if I can avoid it. The last thing I want to do is attempt some kind of Boy Scout thoracostomy.” Macbeth sighed. He looked past Corbin to the lights of the surrounding high buildings; the glass globes of the streetlamps that lined the Plaza. They seemed to sparkle brighter, look sharper, harder-edged. Crystalline. There were patterns in things, in everything, and Macbeth was beginning to see them again.
Not now, he told himself. Not now. Focus.
“I just want to be ready if the ambulance takes too long. His thorax is pretty rigid already. He’s bleeding out into his pleural cavity. See if the cops have anything I can use …”
Corbin nodded and ran over to where the sergeant was herding back, with impatient sweeps of his arms, a small group of onlookers.
“I’m ready …” the priest said between breaths. “I’m ready.”
“Ready for what, Paul?” Macbeth leaned in close. Even in the streetlight he could see the blue tinge to Mullachy’s pallor, his lips darker now. “Save your breath. We’re going to get you sorted out.”
Something gargled in the priest’s throat. Macbeth felt a tap on his shoulder and turned to see the older cop.
“Any news on the ambulance?” Macbeth asked the BPD sergeant.
“On its way,” the sergeant said. “There’s been some kind of incident on the Common and the traffic’s snarled up. What do you need the pen and knife for?”
“Father Mullachy is showing signs that at least one lung has been ruptured and his pleural cavity is filling with air and blood. I reckon there’s bleeding lower down as well. There are air bubbles under the skin of his neck and throat. If he doesn’t get a chest tube in soon, the pressure’s going to squeeze his heart into cardiac arrest.”
“And you’re going to fix it with a fuckin’ ballpoint?” The cop frowned disbelievingly.
“Unless you’ve got something better.”
“There’s a responder kit in the cruiser … first aid.”
“Get me that. But hurry – we don’t have much time. And chase up that ambulance.”
The cop turned and trotted towards the cruiser, barking into his radio as he ran. Macbeth knelt back down beside the two tangled bodies. Between them, Corbin and Macbeth managed to unravel the naked man’s legs from Mullachy’s. The dead man now served as a pillow beneath the injured priest and the two doctors had better access to his injuries. Corbin eased open the front of Mullachy’s black shirt.
“I’m going to have to go in anteriorly,” said Macbeth. “We can’t risk turning him over or sitting him up without getting a neck brace on him.”
“I’m ready … I’m ready …” Mullachy repeated it like a rosary, but Macbeth knew the priest wasn’t talking about his preparedness for his improvised surgery.
“Just stay focused and stay awake, Father.” Macbeth brought his face down so they could make eye contact. “I know it’s distressing to have to fight for breath, but that will ease soon. Listen to me: you’re going to make it. You’re going to be all right.”
Mullachy shook his head in tiny, careful movements. “You … don’t … believe … do you?” he asked between pained gasps.
“You … think … it’s … all … a lie …”
“Let’s leave the theological discussions until we’ve got you breathing more comfortably, Father,” said Macbeth. “Hush now and save your breath.”
The sergeant came back with a large blue holdall. Corbin scrabbled through it and handed a pack of latex gloves and four antiseptic wound wipes to Macbeth, who snapped on the gloves and spread one of the wound wipes on the ground, using another to wipe down the skin on the priest’s bloated abdomen.
“Better than a penknife …” said Corbin as he handed Macbeth the disposable sterile scalpel he had found in the kit.
“Any tubing?” asked Macbeth as he unwrapped the scalpel, watching his hands move as if they belonged to someone else.
Corbin scrambled through the bag again. “Nope.”
Another tap on the shoulder. This time when Macbeth turned, the sergeant held out a ballpoint pen in his huge hand.
“I hope you know what you’re doing Doc.”
Macbeth took the pen and stripped out the ballpoint and refill, leaving the empty sleeve. Corbin handed him a plastic bottle of sterile water and he sluiced out the pen sleeve, wiping it down with a fresh antiseptic wipe before laying it on the one he had spread out on the ground. As he did so, Macbeth felt as if something indefinable had changed in his environment; a subtle shift in lighting, or air pressure, or a vague scent suddenly carried in the air. Not now.
The priest was now wheezing loudly, urgently, his eyes filled with tears.
“Is … it … true? Is … it … true?”
“Easy, Father,” said Corbin, laying his hand on the injured man’s forehead. “We’ll ha
ve you breathing easy in a moment.”
Macbeth felt it coming. He always felt it coming, as if his mind had to prepare itself. The feeling he had – that something had shifted in the spectrum of his surroundings – was always the prelude to an episode. He knew it was the stress of the situation that was bringing it on. Stress he no longer felt directly as the episode started to form. He looked across at Corbin’s anxious face, then back down to the patient who would die if he didn’t act decisively. Immediately.
Everything around Macbeth was now harder and brighter and even more sharp-edged, as if his eyes had been refocused beyond the physically possible. He looked out across the Plaza towards the Reflection Pool. Everything sparkled on its black water, the mirrored lights of the Prudential Center, One-Eleven Huntington and the other surrounding buildings becoming dancing diamonds on its surface. He knew that none of it was real. These weren’t real people. The architecture around him didn’t really exist.
He heard Corbin talk to him, his voice sharp and clear, but the words, the syllables, meaningless as language became an absurdly abstract concept.
Macbeth didn’t exist.
He had arrived at the heart of the event; to the place it always took him. To the same absolute, incontrovertible conclusion: he did not exist. Like Corbin, like everyone else, he was a fiction.
He realized in that moment, as he had realized in all of the moments like it before, that there was a reason why he had such a bad memory for biographical events. His were the patchy remembrances of an invented, sketched-out life.
He looked down at hands so totally disconnected from him that he was surprised when they started moving. One hand held the skin of the priest’s chest, exactly at the fifth intercostal space, and pulled it taut between thumb and forefinger while the other made an inch-and-a-half-long incision, cutting deep through the subcutaneous layers. The priest moaned as the hands slid the pen-sleeve tube into the cut.
There was a wet, hissing sound as air and blood syphoned from Mullachy’s chest. Corbin jumped back as the blood splashed onto the flagstones.
“Jesus!” shouted the sergeant. “What the fuck you done? He’s bleeding to death!”
“It’s already spent blood,” Corbin told the cop, and Macbeth realized he could understand language again. “He’s bled it into his chest cavity already. He could have lost as much as half of his blood supply and you wouldn’t have seen a drop.”
Macbeth heard the priest take a deep, pained breath, then utter a moan, before beginning to breathe more normally.
Mullachy looked up, locking his eyes with Macbeth’s. He grabbed Macbeth’s suit collar and pulled him close. The breathing had eased, but his eyes were no less wild, no less desperate.
“I saw it …” the priest hissed into Macbeth’s face.
“Saw it? Saw what?”
“I saw it,” said Mullachy earnestly. “When he jumped … when he took me with him … he said he would show me. He showed me. I saw it …”
“I don’t—” There was the sound of sirens and Macbeth became aware of the presence of two men in Boston EMS outfits easing in beside him. One of them was black and with the strange detached observance of detail that came with one of his episodes, Macbeth noticed that the service number on his ID shield started with a one, instead of a four, five or six, denoting that he was a fully trained paramedic rather than an EMT.
“What we got?” asked the black guy. Macbeth stared at him blankly, noticing he had a beard of black stubble strips, separated by shaved bands, giving the impression of a tilled field. Cornrows. Why did he do that? thought Macbeth. Why do people do that? Whenever he was in this state of detachment, Macbeth found the tiny orthodoxies of everyday life bizarre; inexplicable.
“What we got?” repeated the paramedic from under a frown. “You are a doctor, aren’t you?”
Macbeth nodded. The world started to make sense again, to settle into its accepted groove, and he knew the episode was ending. Still, his own voice sounded alien to him as, with the emotional content of a weather report, he ran through the facts.
“One fatality on impact: the jumper. He took the priest with him. Father Mullachy doesn’t seem to have significant head or neck injuries but he’s suffered a major high-energy thoracic trauma with multiple costal fractures and costochondral separation. I heard crepitus during palpation. Reduced breath sounds on the right and significant tension hemopneumothorax, causing tachypnea and subcutaneous emphysema around the neck, which I’ve eased with an improvised chest tube. Suspected additional subpulmonic pleural effusion. Other significant injuries include an ilium wing fracture and probably other pelvic damage.”
“Okay, we got it from here,’ said the paramedic. The EMS men put a cervical collar on the priest and placed an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth. Holding him as rigidly as they could, the paramedics eased him off of the other man’s body and rolled him onto his side, slipping the long spine board beneath him and strapping him to it.
As Macbeth viewed it all, he still felt detached from everything that was happening, the lack of feeling from his episode lingering. He watched as the EMS crew ratcheted up the gurney. The young priest looked at Macbeth, his earnest, pleading eyes now glossed with tears.
“What kept you?” the younger cop asked the paramedics.
“The traffic was crazy. Backed up all the way here. Couldn’t get moving, even with the sirens and lights. Don’t ask me why the traffic got snarled up this time of night.”
Macbeth looked up at the night sky.
“It’s a full moon …” he said. “That’s why …”
8
JOSH HOBERMAN. MARYLAND
Hoberman knew little about military ranks, but he knew enough to recognize that the eagle on the officer’s epaulette marked him as a full-bird colonel, just as the Asclepian Staff at the center of his Air Force wings identified him as a doctor.
“Hi, Professor Hoberman. Thanks for coming at such short notice and at such an ungodly hour. I’m Jack Ward, Director of the White House Medical Office and Personal Physician to the President.”
Hoberman nodded, a little lost for words. He stood with the Air Force doctor in front of a rustic chimney breast of rough-hewn rock that formed the centerpiece of what was, basically, a sprawling wooden cabin. Their surroundings were purposefully bucolic and homey, and had the feel of some upscale but out-of-date summer camp. The name Naval Support Facility Thurmont certainly did not fit with them, which was why they were unofficially but much better known as Camp David.
Bundy and Ryerson had shown Hoberman from the helipad to the Aspen Lodge, the President’s quarters, and Ward dismissed them with a “Thanks guys.”
Once they were alone, Ward shook Hoberman’s hand with what the psychiatrist imagined was military firmness. Maybe, he thought, they had drills in handshaking at West Point or Maxwell or Colorado Springs or wherever the hell these people learned to do things like use the right fork or kill people with a paperclip. Ward was annoyingly, predictably, stereotypically handsome, lean and athletic-looking. It also felt to Hoberman that the President’s doctor was a foot taller than he was. On the strength of this evidence, Hoberman decided not to equivocate and hate the guy from the outset.
“I guess you know why you’re here.” Ward nodded to the black-bound dossier in Hoberman’s hand. “Please, Professor Hoberman … take a seat.”
He sat in a club chair that swallowed him up and Ward sat opposite, his expression suddenly serious.
“I take it I don’t need to explain the sensitivity of the material you have just read.”
“No, you sure don’t,” said Hoberman. “Who else knows about this?”
“The President approached me directly and I compiled the dossier myself. So the answer is, at this time, only three people: you, me and the President.”
“Why me?”
“I’ve read several of your papers, particularly on stimulant psychosis and therapeutic psychotomimetics – and I was very impressed with your book on sen
sory deprivation-induced delusions. Given what you’ve read in the dossier, I’m sure you can see why you were the obvious choice.”
Hoberman shrugged. “There are others equally qualified …”
Ward shook his head. “No there’s not. This is highly sensitive and could not be more important to national security and we need the best brains on it. There were only two choices as far as I was concerned: yourself and John Macbeth, but Dr Macbeth is currently involved in research work in Copenhagen, Denmark.”
Hoberman nodded, dismissing the thought that Ward’s confidence in him didn’t extend to him working out that the Copenhagen to which he referred was the capital of Denmark and not the one in Idaho.
“I can see why you thought of John too.” He paused, considering what he had read in the dossier as the government helicopter had swept over the dark Maryland landscape. “What’s your take on it, Colonel Ward?”
“I have been the President’s personal physician for three years. You get to know a person pretty well in that period. Physically, President Yates is in tip-top condition for a woman of her age; and psychologically, she possesses a very down-to-earth, practical and calm personality. I can also state that there has been absolutely no record of mental illness or instability. I’ve gone through her entire family history: no indicators of any genetic predisposition to psychiatric conditions.”
“Mmm …” Hoberman paused, framing his next question carefully. “President Yates has a reputation for – how can I put it? – for profound religious belief. Some may say worryingly profound.”
“I don’t see …”
“One man’s godly zeal is another man’s religiomania.”
“President Yates has her faith, yes, Professor Hoberman. But, as I said, she is also a very grounded person. Her God is not one who manifests himself, or others, through visions. She is deeply concerned about what she has experienced. But there’s more …”
Ward crossed the room to a sideboard and lifted a black attaché case identical to the one Bundy had had in the helicopter. While Ward fetched the case, Hoberman looked out through the large sliding glass doors. Dawn was beginning to push gray fingers through the Camp David trees and he could see the outline of a kidney-shaped swimming pool, a diving board at the far end. He reflected for a moment on all of those who had sat where he was sitting, looking out at the pool as dawn broke, discussing in measured but urgent tones landing men on the moon, missiles on their way to Cuba, convention center break-ins, a wall coming down in Germany, towers crashing to the ground in downtown New York …
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