It went very quiet.
The restaurant had been bustling and noisy, the sounds of the diners’ conversations and laughter, the clinking and ringing of delivered and collected porcelain and glass resonating in the high-ceilinged room. But now the restaurant had fallen silent.
Macbeth looked past Casey. Everyone was still, each in his or her private universe, trying to make sense of what had happened. Slowly, people returned to conversation, their voices low and quiet, concerned, as they shared their experiences.
“You all right?” he asked Casey.
“What the fuck was that?” Casey looked scared and something protective, almost paternal, sparked in Macbeth.
“Did you feel like really strong déjà vu?” asked Macbeth. Casey nodded vigorously, relieved his experience had been shared. “Exactly like …” He looked around. “Shit … everybody?”
“Everybody, as far as I can see.”
The buzz of conversation picked up in the restaurant. Urgent exchanges; desperate sharings.
“There’s something still not right,” said Casey.
“Like something’s changed? The temperature or the air quality?”
“Have you had this before?”
Macbeth nodded. “There’s more, Casey, Pete Corbin told me—”
It started as a tinkling. The glasses and bottles behind the long mahogany bar, as if rattled by a heavy truck or a train passing. Except there were no rail tracks anywhere near, and the streets in this part of Old Boston were too narrow for anything much bigger than a cargo van.
Again the restaurant fell quiet as everyone turned to the bar. A young, fresh-faced barkeeper stared back, white-faced and confused. The rattling ceased and there was an eternal second of stillness, a near-total silence broken only by the ticking of the huge, round Victorian bar clock. Macbeth was struck at how sharp and clear each measured tick was, as if his hearing had suddenly become enhanced.
Screams.
It was as if the whole world shuddered, trying to shrug them off its shoulders. Macbeth reached for Casey but was thrown from his chair, landing heavily on the polished wooden floor. He tried to get up but his balance was impossible to find as the floor shuddered and shifted beneath him. He fell again, this time his cheek and the side of his head slamming even harder onto the floorboards. He lay stunned for a moment, his ear pressed to polished oak, his newly acute vision picking up painfully sharp detail on the sparse flecks of dust and grime on the sedulously swept floor. And through the floor, he could hear the Earth. He heard it bellow and moan, crack asunder deafeningly. He felt every vibration, from the minutest to the most momentous, resonate through his body.
An earthquake. A major earthquake. They had to take shelter. He began to crawl around the table to Casey. When he found him, his brother was lying on his side, as Macbeth had been, bleeding from a head wound. Macbeth elbow-shuffled across the floor to his brother and checked the wound: it was superficial and Casey was conscious but confused.
“Casey!” Macbeth shouted over the clamor of other shrill voices. “Casey … We’ve got to get under the table!” He grabbed his brother by his jacket and pulled him towards him and into the shelter of the table.
“Shouldn’t we get out of here?” Casey yelled back. “If the building comes down, we’ll be buried!”
“We’re safer here. If we go out into the street we could be hit by falling masonry. We’ve got to sit tight. Wait it out.”
Casey nodded but didn’t look convinced. Everything around them shook and shuddered, but there was no sound of anything falling onto the table. The shaking intensified, the vibrations resounding in Macbeth’s skull, in every inch of bone.
It stopped. Again the restaurant was filled with desperate, terrified gasps and cries. But the shaking had stopped.
He felt the floor beneath them drop, as if they were in an elevator whose cable had snapped. Macbeth and Casey were thrown upwards and he simultaneously grabbed hold of his brother and the single central column leg of the table. They smashed into the floor as the direction was reversed and the world seemed to lunge viciously back at them. All around them there was renewed screaming.
The movement stopped. There was no more shaking.
His fingers biting protectively into his younger brother’s arm, Macbeth lay with his bruised cheek against the floor, trying to catch his breath.
It was over. Not just the earthquake.
Macbeth got to his feet, easing Casey up, righting his chair and sitting him down. His forehead was bleeding freely, but again Macbeth could see it was more abrasion than laceration. He took his pocket handkerchief, folded it, and guided Casey’s hand up to hold it in place.
“You okay?”
Casey nodded.
“I’ve got to go and see if anyone else needs help. Will you be okay here?”
“I’m fine … Go.”
Macbeth allowed his procedural memory once more to overwhelm every other mental function and he made his way around the room. By the end of his sweep, he had placed two head injuries in a recovery position and had strapped two fractures with ties and belts. Most people were simply in shock and none of the injuries, including the head traumas, were serious; Macbeth was content that he had everyone who needed attention comfortable until EMS arrived.
He noticed the young bartender was still at his station, his face bleached of color and the thousand-yard stare of acute stress reaction. Macbeth placed himself directly in the bartender’s line of sight, forcing him to focus.
“Are you all right, son? I’m a doctor … There’s help on its way.”
“Nothing …” The young bartender turned away from Macbeth and stared around himself in wonder, shaking his head and his eyes searching the gantries, the shelves of glasses, the rows of bottles. “I don’t believe it … nothing, not a single glass. How can we have had an earthquake and not a single glass get broken … ?”
Macbeth followed the bartender’s gaze, then turned and scanned the restaurant, looking beyond the distress of the diners. The bar clock, the large wall mirrors, the Victorian prints on the walls – all sat perfectly square, not a single frame askew. The only broken glass and crockery was where it had been knocked from tables by the diners as they fell to the ground. Apart from that there was no physical evidence of an earthquake having taken place.
As if it had never happened.
20
GEORG POULSEN. COPENHAGEN
Despite a sky the color of damp salt hanging dully over the car park, the grounds and the city beyond the window, Georg Poulsen told his wife it was a lovely day outside: a deceit he often performed. Sometimes he would tell Margarethe that it had been raining, but the garden had needed it and it was brightening up now. Mostly, he painted a bright and cheerful picture of the world that lay outside the small pool of her consciousness. It was as if Poulsen was trying to coax his wife out of the prison of her tube-bound body by simulating a better world and brighter reality.
Project One had been set up in the University’s Niels Bohr Institute on Blegdamsvej, literally next door to the Rigshospitalet. It meant Poulsen could visit his wife at lunchtimes and any other moments he could steal from his work. It also meant that he was constantly pulled in two directions: working as much and as long as he could to develop the interface program he believed would ultimately help Margarethe, while compelled to visit her as often as possible. And both were at the expense of any time for himself. A new reality to which Poulsen had committed totally.
Today, he had come straight from the Institute. He sat at Margarethe’s bedside and told her that his work was progressing better than expected, far ahead of schedule.
He told her what his work could mean: that another world awaited her. A world where she could walk and dance, where she could sing the way she always had while working in the garden.
A world where they could be together with the baby she didn’t know she had lost.
He meant everything he said, knowing that, if he was successful in all of
his aims, he would be able to offer Margarethe exactly that kind of world. But, like when he described the weather, he did not tell her that the home, the garden, the holidays she would enjoy – the Georg Poulsen and the baby she would be with – would be ersatz: a neurologically counterfeit existence that would stimulate her brain and deceive her into feeling the sun on her face.
“I know you want to live a full life again, Margarethe,” he told her. “I want you to know that when I am not here with you I am working on achieving exactly that for you. I love you and all I want is for you to be happy again.”
He stopped speaking for a moment. Another visiting-time deceit was always to seem cheerful; as if the horror of Margarethe being entombed in her own flesh was nothing more than a temporary setback. So, whenever he lost his composure, whenever the grief and misery and anger that tore at him each and every day threatened to show in his voice, as it did now, he fell quiet.
In the normal world, in the all-senses environment that most people lived in, Poulsen knew that an undertone in a voice could go unnoticed; and that, conversely, in the sensorially pared-down universe that Margarethe inhabited, his voice would be magnified, filling all space – meaning any defect, any subtlety would be amplified and detected instantly.
After a moment, he composed himself, opened the book on his lap and started to read. Avatars: a Futurist Fantasy had been another of Margarethe’s favorite finds; she had always sought out obscure gems in unlikely places, and this novel had been unearthed in an antiquarian bookstore one blustery Saturday afternoon in Larsbjørnsstræde. The author ‘Æ’, whose real name had been George William Russell, was known more through the writings of others than his own, even appearing as a character in James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Margarethe had once told Poulsen that she found it wonderfully ironic that the two protagonists in Russell’s novel were themselves never shown directly to the reader or spoke their own dialogue, but were represented exclusively through their description by other characters. She’d also told him that Russell, as a young art student, had begun to experience what he described as ‘waking dreams of astonishing power and vividness’, in which he saw other worlds and realities that he claimed had been placed into his consciousness by a mind other and greater than his own.
Poulsen spent two hours reading to his wife; as always investing as much life into the voices as his reading talents would allow.
He was such a frequent visitor that he had gotten to know all the regular members of the hospital staff and had forged something of an informal relationship with Larssen, the department’s chief physician, who was aware of Poulsen’s involvement in cognitive sciences and provided an interested audience whenever the scientist felt like discussing his work. However Larssen, like the rest of the hospital staff, got to understand that Georg Poulsen was a man of few words on any subject other than his wife’s condition and treatment.
About two months after his own discharge from the hospital, he had been in to see his wife when Larssen had asked him at the end of his visit to step into his office.
Larssen was a lanky arthropod-like man who seemed to be all angles, with dark hair, a sallow complexion and eyes that seemed ringed with grayish circles at all times of day. His office was not particularly small, but he seemed cramped behind his desk, spider-joint elbows resting on the blotter.
“Your wife’s condition has stabilized,” he told Poulsen. “There’s no immediate danger of a further bleed into the Pons, so there’s little risk of further neurological damage.”
“Meaning?”
“Your wife has made little to no progress over the last three and a half months. Many cases of LIS self-resolve, but these tend to be where the patient has been locked in for a week or less. The best recoveries are from patients who have been quadriplegic and anarthric – incapable of speech – for minutes or hours rather than weeks.”
“So you’re saying that you’ve given up hope on Margarethe? Is that it?”
“What I’m saying is that I feel we are looking at a condition of sustained morbidity. Locked-in patients, without complications, can live in that state for decades. If we don’t lose them within a month of the trauma, the average survival is over five years.”
“What’s your point?”
“Simply that we should now be looking at the best quality of life we can give your wife. In time, that life may even be outside this hospital. Perhaps even at home. There are many support services available from the state to help. We’re all aware of your commitment to your wife and I know that you would do everything you could to stimulate her. Bear in mind we’re a long way from making any firm decisions, but we really should at least start to think about the longer term. But don’t feel that it’s something you have to do. It’s a huge burden to take on …”
Poulsen sat quietly for a moment, imagining a new kind of life, a different kind of life. A new reality.
“When can she come home?” he asked, eventually.
21
JOSH HOBERMAN. MARYLAND
Josh Hoberman had daily conversations with Ward, the President’s personal physician. Despite his antipathy towards Ward being military – and being Ward – Hoberman felt that at least he was a man of science and the only person with whom he could discuss the President with some degree of frankness. Even with that, Hoberman realized early on that Elizabeth Yates had surrounded herself with people who would amplify her sense of ego and mission.
However, it had been Ward who’d called Hoberman in and who hadn’t protested at the psychiatrist’s more candid observations. Even with that, Hoberman remained cautious in how he approached some of the more sensitive issues surrounding the President’s state of mind.
He hadn’t been back in Aspen Lodge, the President’s residence, since that first night and most of his meetings with Yates and with Ward had been in Laurel Lodge. His sleeping quarters were in Dogwood Cabin, the walls of which were festooned with photographs of previous, eminently more important guests. Camp David was equipped with the most up-to-date technology, yet still had the feel of a nineteen-fifties upscale summer camp or country club, and as he sat under the gaze of foreign premiers past and present, it was by far the weirdest place he’d ever practiced psychiatry. He guessed it was an environment that reflected the mood and tone of its principal occupant. Under Elizabeth Yates, despite the deliberate bucolicism, that mood was less than cozy.
“Have you read the reports about this thing in Boston?” Ward asked.
“I’ve read them,” said Hoberman. “And the other events.”
“And?”
“And it would appear you were right – that we really are dealing with something that is pandemic, rather than focused on the President herself.”
“So why do I get the feeling you are not ready to sign this off?” asked Ward. He was in civilian clothes, a sweater over his shoulders, the sleeves tied in a loose knot at his chest, sipping single malt from a chunk of crystal. Hoberman tried to banish the unhelpful thought that the army doctor could make spare change modeling for glossy knitwear advertisements.
“Okay …” Hoberman sipped his own whiskey. “This is strictly between us? At the moment, at least?”
“Of course.”
“This goes beyond my original brief, but I think it has a bearing. Let’s say that these hallucinations the President has had are due to the same cause as the other reported cases. That would suggest that there is nothing particular to the President causing her to see what she sees, other than some kind of unidentified infection.”
“Go on …”
“My concern isn’t with the cause of the hallucinations, but with the effect they may have on the President’s underlying psychology.”
“Are you saying there is a pre-existing concern?”
Hoberman handed Ward three stapled-together sheets of printed paper. Putting his whiskey glass down on the side table, Ward read the notes.
“Do you see my concerns?” Hoberman asked after Ward had finished.<
br />
“I see them, but I dispute them. I have known President Yates for years. If she was exhibiting this kind of pathology, I would have noticed it.”
“Not necessarily. This personality type is very adept at concealing its full nature. And, let’s face it, some of the indicators of the condition can be taken as positive attributes in people who need to, well, be in charge …”
Ward said nothing, reading through the notes again.
“As you can see, I’ve isolated most of the key markers. She scores highly on all but the fourth facet – the antisocial facet. It could be that she has learned to conceal this better than the others.”
“You cannot be serious,” said Ward.
“I am serious. It is my firm opinion that Elizabeth Yates is a psychopath – an extremely high-functioning psychopath, but a psychopath none the less. I personally don’t think that this is uncommon in politicians, if I’m honest. But in the President’s case, her absolute and total belief in her own infallibility, combined with her impulsiveness and religious monomania, could lead her to make disastrous choices. I am seriously concerned that the religious or other interpretation she may put on a future hallucination could be the trigger for exactly that kind of disastrous choice.”
Ward again sat silently for a moment. “You’ve discussed this with no one else?”
“As I said, it’s between us for the time being.”
“I’d like you to keep it that way. Do you mind if I hang on to this?”
Hoberman thought for a moment. “Sure …”
22
JOHN MACBETH. BOSTON
In fifteen years as a psychiatrist, Macbeth had never experienced or heard of anything like it. The media was full of it the next day; not just in Massachusetts but across the States and around the world. The Phantom Boston Earthquake was how it was described in most headlines.
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