“Is that it, Creepo? Is that why—”
The impact hurt Fabian’s fist. There was an ugly grinding noise from Maartens’s teeth and the bully staggered back, shocked and with the sun still in his face. Fabian hit him again, this time in the nose. Maartens’s backwards stagger meant that the blow didn’t have the force of the first and Fabian hit him again, and again. Maartens stumbled and fell onto his back and Fabian dropped onto his chest, raining blows down on his face. A dark impulse beyond his control drove Fabian on, a thrill rising in him. He was, he realized, enjoying this. Something deep and dark and ancient had stirred within him; something from a history he had not known he had.
Realizing that Maartens, when he recovered his wits, could easily throw the lighter boy off his chest and regain the advantage, Fabian jumped up from him. As Maartens began to rise, Fabian swung a kick into the side of his face. The careful deliberation, the aiming of the kick, shocked Fabian: he had placed it to do as much damage as possible without hurting his foot through his sneakers. He kicked Maartens again, in the mouth. He could see the bigger boy was now seriously dazed, his face smeared with blood; Fabian grabbed him by his hooded top and spun him around so he was face down. Grabbing a handful of hair, he pushed Maartens’s face into the sand. He leaned in, whispering into the prone bully’s ear.
“If you ever, ever, follow me again, you or any of your buddies, I’ll put you in hospital. And in school … any smart remarks from any of your posse and I’ll wait till I get you alone. You got that?”
Maartens said something in a pleading, sand-muffled voice and Fabian stood up and back from him, ready to strike again if the bigger boy made any move. But he could see not only was there no fight left in Maartens, there never really had been any. Like most bullies, Maartens was a coward. He was crying, his face a paste of sand and tears and blood.
“You got that?” Fabian yelled at him, taking a threatening step forward.
Maartens nodded vigorously before turning tail and running back along the beach. Fabian watched him run, then looked down at his hands: skin reddened and puffed, blood from a split on one knuckle. Shaking.
Where had that come from? Where had that terrible rage been hidden? He sank back onto the sand, sitting with his elbows resting on his knees, his hands loose and fingers still trembling.
He felt vaguely sick and dizzy, his heart pounding in his chest. He remembered the feeling he had had, the feeling just before Maartens had arrived. Like déjà vu, but stronger, deeper.
Fabian closed his eyes and sank back onto the beach, looking up once more at the sky, digging his fingers deep into the sand. He closed his eyes. The pain in his hands faded more quickly than he thought it would, the nausea and the panicky feeling in his chest disappeared with equal suddenness.
It was then that he was jolted by a sharp push in the ribs. He sat up, shielding his eyes as he peered up at the shadow above him.
“So this is where you hide, is it?” Henkje Maartens sneered. His face was unbruised, unbloodied, unmarked.
Fabian stood up, dusting off the sand from his jeans. He looked at his own hands, suddenly healed: no redness, no swelling, no splits. It made no sense at all. But it made perfect sense. In that moment, Fabian knew he was visiting his own history.
He balled his hands into fists and launched himself at Maartens with an inhuman scream.
18
JOSH HOBERMAN. MARYLAND
“The Abrahamic tradition is revelatory,” Josh Hoberman said. “All Judeo-Christian religions, Islam included, believe in a God whose presence is parallel to the world of Man and a Truth that will eventually be revealed to the faithful. Interaction between Man and his God – every biblical theophany – takes the form of visions: burning bushes, pillars of smoke …”
“And your point?” President Yates walked beside Hoberman, her eyes pathward, her expression serious as she considered the psychiatrist’s words. It was for all the world like two friends combining a philosophical debate with a leisurely stroll through the park; except they were not friends and this was no park but Camp David and they were followed, at something short of a discreet distance, by Bundy, the secret-serviceman with the strangely dual-colored eyes.
“Just that you define yourself very much through your faith. It could be that the nature of your faith, your belief in revelation through visions, is making you susceptible to these episodes.”
“You think that because God has revealed himself to others I’m deluding myself into believing He’s revealing himself to me?” Yates shook her head. “Then why am I not seeing something dramatic or majestic? Visions of President Taft in his shirtsleeves or of a nineteen-seventies White House intern are hardly divine revelations.”
“But you have expressed to me your belief that the visions are perhaps divine in origin …”
“I know that you’ll probably hold my beliefs in contempt, but they are my beliefs. More than that, they are the truth and, like you said, that truth will ultimately be revealed. You worry that I maybe think the Lord has a special message for me and this is His way of communicating it. But that’s not what I believe. All things that happen in this universe happen at the Lord’s command. All of Nature and all in it is of God’s creation, these visions included. But I know that they are not a message directly for me, but for everyone. There have been more reports – visions happening all over the world. I’ll make sure you’re given access to them …” She cast a commanding glance over her shoulder at Bundy. “One in particular, a girl in France, has very interesting overtones.” She stopped walking and turned to the psychiatrist. “You see, if it’s not me … if it’s everyone who’s having these visions, then that is what I would take as the hand of God in our affairs. If that’s the case, then I know we may be facing a time of final judgment. If that is the case, then I tell you this, Professor Hoberman: I shall not be found wanting.”
There it was again: that focus. And that uneasy feeling in Hoberman’s gut.
During their discussions over the preceding days, Hoberman had been able to glimpse something of what lay behind Yates’s commanding authority and homespun sagacities. And what he had seen had terrified him. To start with, it had been like trespassing on a movie set, peeking behind the building façades to see that there was nothing there other than support beams: Elizabeth Yates was a woman completely, absolutely, astonishingly devoid of personality. Hoberman had sat in on meetings, observed her with others, and seen how her demeanor changed subtly according to whomever she interacted with. He realized that she had mastered the projection of attributes that were not there. She was clearly not a stupid woman, but Hoberman had soon come to realize that her intellectual gifts were modest. It was just that she somehow managed to simulate what was not there and magnify what was, depending on the context and what she wanted to get out of it.
But it hadn’t been Yates’s lack of intellectual or personal depth that had terrified Hoberman. He had kept their talks informal, general, conversational: but in each discussion he had sneaked in a seemingly innocuous question or observation, each a disguised diagnostic tool. The picture that had emerged was of a woman of singular vision, of unshakeable will, of adamantine faith; all potential virtues in a world leader. They were also potential indicators of something darker.
If there was one thing about the President that was exceptional, it was her focus; and that focus was firmly fixed on a mission founded on the shifting sands of narrow nationalism, superstition and righteous bigotry. In describing her world view, Yates repeatedly used the pronouns ‘us’ and ‘we’, ‘they’ and ‘them’. The first person plural extended no farther than the frontiers of the United States, and he got the idea that many within its borders fell into the category ‘them’ – a subset Hoberman suspected he himself belonged to.
They walked on. Apart from a helipad and a couple of more modern and functional buildings tucked out of view, Camp David was a spread-out collection of timber lodges and cabins set in thick oak and hickory woodland, loope
d and connected by intersecting forest trails. Not for the first time Hoberman felt strangely claustrophobic in the open air, as if hemmed in by the dense Catoctin forest.
“I take it you have no faith?” Yates asked him after twenty yards of silence.
“I’m a Humanist. I don’t share your faith, but that doesn’t mean I lack belief.”
“But you don’t believe in God?”
“No. I think the universe is too wonderful and mysterious to be explained away so simplistically. Glibly, almost. If you don’t mind me saying, Madame President.”
“Everyone is entitled to their opinion, Professor Hoberman.”
“Are they?”
Yates looked at him for a moment. “So your beliefs are founded in science, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“Science is a tool,” said Yates. “A facility given to us by God. Science and technology are means to an end, not an end in themselves, yet so many treat science as a religion. There are high priests, evangelists and bigots in science, just as there are in every religion.”
“I don’t see science in that way. I believe it is the only way of understanding ourselves and our universe. But my belief or lack of it isn’t the question. It’s yours that’s important and whether it’s in any way linked to these visions.” Hoberman paused for a moment. He watched a Broad-winged Hawk traverse with a single beat of wing the span of blue between the swathes of hickory. “What concerns me most is how you may interpret any future hallucinations. Attribute some meaning that isn’t there.”
“Are you saying that I’m unfit for office?” Yates stopped again and held him in her professionally honed gaze. “It strikes me that you are commenting on the beliefs and personality that were in place before these episodes began.”
“The phenomena and your personality are inextricably linked; it’s impossible to evaluate one without considering the other. As for your fitness for office, I can only comment clinically – anything else is for others to decide.”
“Indeed it is, Professor Hoberman. It’s for the American people to decide, and they have already made their will known. I have been charged with steering this great country, perhaps the only nation that knows the Lord’s blessing, through the trials that lie ahead.”
Again something sparkled cold and dark in the bright blue of her eyes. She broke the gaze, smiled and continued their walk.
“The weather seems to be smiling on us,” she said conversationally, switching mode as he had seen her do so many times in the last few days.
“It does indeed,” said Hoberman, looking into the sky above the path, where the Broad-winged Hawk again appeared briefly as it performed a beatless arc, scouring the forest for prey.
19
JOHN MACBETH. BOSTON
The priest died the next day.
Macbeth was browsing in the big bookstore on Harvard Place, wondering – as he passed the huge display of e-readers – how much longer books would be books; things you could touch page by page, when his cellphone rang and Pete Corbin told him the news.
“He wouldn’t have lived so long if it hadn’t been for you, John. You gave him the best chance of making it.”
“Not a good enough chance, obviously,” said Macbeth. “By the way, Casey did know Gabriel – not well, but he knew him.” Macbeth relayed to Corbin what his brother had told him about the young doctoral student. As physicians, both Macbeth and Corbin had learned to encounter death dispassionately, but there was something about their experience on the roof that was different. Macbeth guessed Corbin was struggling as much as he was to make sense of it.
“How much longer are you staying in Boston?” Corbin asked.
“Till the end of next week. I’m spending Monday and Tuesday at the Schilder Institute – that’s my official reason for being here. Why do you ask?”
“There’s a patient at Belmont I want you to see. I’ve done all of the clearances … I think you’d be very interested, given your research work. When would suit you?”
“I’ve got dinner with Casey tonight, but other than that I’m free till Monday.”
“Friday morning then. Ten-thirty. That okay?”
“Sure, I’ll be there.”
“See you then. And John?”
“Yeah?”
“I really am sorry Mullachy didn’t make it.”
*
That evening, Macbeth met Casey for dinner in a purposefully jocund, mahogany-paneled, beer-garden-type place close to the Common. As he waited a beer’s length for Casey to arrive, Macbeth cast his eyes around the restaurant: waiters, dressed in waistcoats and long white aprons and carrying trays singlehanded and shoulder-high, wheeled and weaved between the tables delivering steins of bier and heavily laden plates. Again Macbeth reflected on the comforting absurdity of a simulation of another culture, another country and another time, but somehow the compulsory cheeriness was welcome. Necessary.
Casey arrived at the door and scanned the hall, grinning across the cluster of tables when he spotted Macbeth. The smile was uniquely Casey: boyish, mischievous, bright and ingenuous; a smile that Macbeth knew he had grown up seeing, that had been a constant accompaniment to their play together, but it bothered him to the point of small panic that he could not remember any single incident of that smile; that his memory of it, like his memory of almost everything, was general rather than specific.
“I thought we were having dinner, not planning a putsch,” said Casey with a wry smile as he looked around before responding to Macbeth’s offered handshake with a hug.
“I felt in need of some Gemütlichkeit …” Macbeth waved to attract a waiter’s attention and ordered a pitcher of beer.
“Tough day?”
Macbeth told Casey about the priest’s death and asked if he’d been able to find out any more about Gabriel Rees’s recent history.
“There’s not much to tell,” Casey explained. “Everybody says the same thing: Gabriel was so wrapped up in his work with Professor Gillman that he hadn’t done much in the way of socializing, but any that he did, he seemed fine. No hint of him being in any way troubled.”
“How well do you know Gillman?”
“Well enough, I suppose, but I haven’t seen him for a while. Gillman isn’t the most approachable of people. Spiky, is the best way of describing him. That or a bit of an asshole. He’s traveling to Oxford with me for the Blackwell symposium.”
“Really? If you get a chance ask him about Gabriel, see if he knew anything about him being disturbed.”
Casey frowned. “God knows how many patient suicides you must have had to deal with over the years, what is it about this one that’s got you so curious?”
“Firstly, thanks for the vote of confidence in my clinical skills – it may surprise you that only one of my patients killed himself. And he was my last patient in clinical practice.”
“Shit, I’m sorry, John. That was a crass thing for me to say. I forgot about him.”
“That’s okay. Truth is, something about Gabriel reminded me of that last patient at McLean. Not that their delusions were in any way similar – my patient was suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder, or at least that was my diagnosis, even if I got my ass in a sling for it. There was no hint of Gabriel believing he was anyone other than himself.” Macbeth shrugged. “I don’t know, there was just something about Gabriel’s calm that reminded me of that case. Maybe that’s it. I really don’t know.”
They sank into silence for a moment.
“Did you bring your laptop?” asked Casey.
Macbeth reached down and lifted the small case that rested at his feet.
“I’ll have a look when we get back to my apartment … see what I can do.”
“I’ve never really gotten into computers, despite the work I’m doing on the Project.”
“Sometimes I think you were born into the wrong decade. The wrong century.”
“I’d be weird whatever century I was born in.” Macbeth shrugged. “Go back too many
centuries and they’d have burned me at the stake.”
“I can see this is going to be a fun evening,” Casey said over his beer.
“Sorry. It’s been a trying couple of days.”
Casey nodded, then looked around again at the beer hall. “How did you find this place? It’s not your usual speed.”
“Melissa brought me years ago. I think she was trying to be ironic. That was before she discovered I didn’t do ironic.”
“I was sorry when it didn’t work out with you and Melissa. She was good for you.”
“It doesn’t seem to work out with me and anybody.” Macbeth took a sip of his beer and looked at his glass contemplatively. “Do you know what Melissa said to me? That she was tired of me not being there, even when I was.”
“What was that supposed to mean?”
“Come on, Casey, you know exactly what she meant. We both do. There’s something missing with me, some tiny gap that seems to become a chasm when people get to know me. What Melissa meant was she was tired of coming home to an empty room, even when I was in it.”
“Jesus … you are in a great mood tonight.”
“Sorry. Like I said, I—” Macbeth broke off mid-sentence, a strange feeling seizing him: the same powerful feeling of déjà vu he’d felt in the Common. But even more intense this time, and accompanied by a feeling of being off-balance. He gripped the edge of the table, staring at his pressure-whitened fingertips. This was happening too often. This wasn’t déjà vu; this wasn’t one of his typical episodes. He was having some kind of cerebral incident: a TIA or something similar. He needed medical attention.
And then he saw Casey’s face.
Casey was looking directly at Macbeth but wasn’t seeing him. He was frowning in concentration, trying to make sense of some experience personal to him. Macbeth realized that whatever was happening to him was happening to Casey too.
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