Tunnel Vision

by Gary Braver

  Roman moved into the next room and filled a syringe with 4cc curare. When he returned, he knelt beside Pomeroy on the couch. “Before I leave, I have a couple of questions. Is there anything in your research that would be a problem to the Catholic Church?”

  “No, I told you that.”

  “How about any government agency or whatever?”

  “No.”

  “Any personal enemies or associates?”

  “Not that I can think of.”

  He could see Pomeroy relax into the expectation that it would be over soon, that Roman would wrap up the break-in scene and leave. In his head, Roman rehearsed the next step. “One more thing…”

  “What?”

  “Shouldn’t have lost your faith.” In one smooth move, he threw himself full length onto Pomeroy’s body, jamming the needle deep into his left nostril and depressing the syringe with his thumb. Pomeroy’s body jolted under Roman as he let out a thin scream. Roman pulled the needle out of his face while trying to keep his body from bucking him onto the floor. The washcloth and bungee slid off Pomeroy’s face in the thrashing, and Roman did all he could to prevent the man from leaving any telltale bruises for the coroner to ponder.

  Because the compound was rated six out of six in toxicity, in less than a minute Pomeroy’s torso and legs stiffened. His eyes bulged like cue balls and his mouth went slack, incapable of sucking in a breath. In seconds he had turned into a warm corpse, his legs giving an occasional twitch and his eyelids settling to slits of jelly.

  Roman spread him out on the couch. He removed the tethers and adjusted Pomeroy’s clothing and feet until he looked like a man who had died from a heart attack while reading a magazine. He removed a copy of Time from the coffee table and positioned it on the floor. When he was finished, Roman looked back at the dead man. “So how come you’re Satan’s doorman?” Whatever. Roman did not feel closer to God, just twenty grand richer. He disarmed the rear door and slipped out into the night.

  Half an hour later, he pulled into the scenic parking area along Route 6A.

  During the day, dozens of fishermen would be perched on the rocks below, casting their lines for stripers. At ten at night, only one diehard kept at it. Motoring down the canal from the waters of Boston Harbor was a long, sleek sailing vessel. One of these days, he would buy himself a piece like that and set course for Bermuda. Roman pulled out the secure cell phone provided him by the guy in the confessional and punched in the number given to him.

  A male voice answered with a simple, flat, “Yes?”

  “Mission accomplished.”

  “Good. And in the manner prescribed?”

  The voice sounded like that of Father X. “Yes.”

  “We’re very grateful for your service. And so is the Lord God. You’re cleansing your soul and moving closer to eternal life, my brother.”

  Roman felt something quicken inside, and it wasn’t the priestly kind of talk that embarrassed him as a kid. “Mean we’re not done?”

  “In a few days you’ll hear from us. Thank you, my son.” And the man clicked off.

  For a moment, Roman stared at the dead cell phone in disbelief. Then he folded it and slipped it into his jacket pocket. So there was more.

  Below, the fisherman reeled in a striper. Working in the lights of the parking lot, he held the line with one hand, netting it with the other and hauling it onto the rocks. It looked under regulation size, twenty-nine inches, but after removing the hook from its mouth, he tossed it into a cooler.

  Roman took a swig of his bottled water. As he watched the yacht slide down the dark expanse of the canal, the thought of a second assignment set off a giddy sensation in his gut. Maybe another fifteen grand. And maybe another millennium in paradise.

  He looked out over the water, the shore lights on the far bank reflecting off the black surface. He thought about how interesting life had become of late. He raised his eyes to the sky. Above the black eastern horizon, stars began to emerge in the dark as if blown in by the sea. He sucked in the crisp salt air and took in the night. Above the far horizon, he saw a shooting star.

  Thank you, God.

  12

  “The last thing I need is a bunch of religious fanatics flocking around him like he’s Our Lady of Lourdes,” Maggie said.

  “Well, they won’t get to him anymore,” Kate said.

  They were sitting in the hospital café the morning after the incident. Zack had been moved to another room in a different ward, known only to a handful of staff and family. At Maggie’s insistence, the hospital had posted a guard outside his room around the clock. “If he was such a healing force, you’d think it’d occur to them that he’d wake himself up.”

  “Logic doesn’t appear to be their strong suit,” Kate said, sipping her coffee.

  “Whatever. I’m not sure I’ll be by Sunday.” That was Easter, and Kate usually hosted a meal, less as a religious celebration than as an occasion for a family gathering.

  “Maybe you can stop by for dessert after the hospital.”

  Maggie nodded, distracted by something in her sister’s manner. And she was certain that missing Easter dinner wasn’t the issue. “Is everything okay?”

  Kate looked at her for a moment as she turned something over in her head. “Yesterday Bob dropped in on a friend, Art Avedisian, in Harvard’s Department of Near Eastern Languages.”

  Bob taught French literature at Wellesley College. “Yeah?”

  “Well, he showed him the video of Zack.”

  Maggie was suddenly alert. “Yeah.”

  “It wasn’t glossolalia.”

  “Of course not. It was plain gibberish.”

  “Actually, it wasn’t gibberish. It was Aramaic.”

  “Aramaic? Isn’t that some ancient language?”

  “Yes, and the native tongue of Jesus Christ.”

  “What?”

  “According to Bob’s friend, who’s a scholar and an expert on Aramaic, it’s still spoken in small parts of the Middle East. He says Zack spoke it in an older dialect.”

  All Maggie could say was, “What?”

  Kate nodded. “That’s what he claims.”

  “Well, that’s not possible. He’s wrong. Zack doesn’t know any ancient languages. That’s absurd.”

  “I’m just telling you what he said. He also translated what he could make out.” She removed a notepad from her handbag. “I guess he was repeating several phrases: ‘Father, with You everything is possible. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what You will.’ Then Zack recited the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic.”

  “I don’t believe this.”

  “I know. But according to Avedisian, that’s what it was, an excerpt from the Sermon on the Mount in the original dialect.”

  “W-what?… How?”

  “I don’t know,” Kate said. “As far as you know, did he ever take a course in Aramaic?”

  “No, and why would he?”

  “I don’t know. And I guess it’s not your basic college elective. According to Art, the only place you can find such a course in New England is the grad school at Harvard. And we know he never did that. Nor is Aramaic something you can pick up on Rosetta Stone.”

  “Then the guy’s wrong. That’s not what it was,” Maggie insisted.

  “I guess. Even if you wanted to, where would you find Aramaic versions of Jesus’s sermons?”

  Maggie felt a rash of gooseflesh flash up her arms. “He’s not even religious.”

  “I know, but how do you explain it?”

  “The guy is wrong. Dead wrong.”

  Kate nodded and sipped her coffee.

  And Maggie rubbed her arms against the chill.

  * * *

  Later at home, Maggie listened to the tape over and over again. She could make no sense of the language, of course. It sounded a bit like Arabic crossed with Greek. But what stayed with her as she lay on her pillow in the dark was not the language, but the voice.

  All she could hear was Nick.
r />   13

  Beetles were eating his brain.

  He could hear them just inside his ears—a high-pitched electric chittering as they munched their way through the gray matter to the core of his head.

  Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. He could feel their thrumming just below his skull, nearly blinding him with distraction. He could barely restrain himself from making a scene in the back of the bus, from screaming and ramming his head into the balance pole.

  As he did every morning at daybreak, he walked to Harvard Square from Boston and boarded the number 350 bus that took him down Massachusetts Avenue to the Alewife stop at the Cambridge/Arlington line, where he’d get off and walk half a mile to the intersection of Routes 16 and 2, his territory to panhandle the line of cars at the stoplight. It was a good place for handouts—maybe a buck or two for every twenty cars.

  But this morning was the worst. The crackling and high-pitched chit-chit sounds and images of their little pincers boring tunnels had grown worse over the last week, so much so that he could barely hold up his cardboard sign:

  PLEASE HELP

  SICK AND HOMELESS

  GOD BLESS

  He could barely concentrate on his little walk up the worn path from the traffic lights along the line of stopped cars. Usually he’d eye the drivers, hoping they’d not pretend he was invisible and lower the window with a handout.

  The lunatic scrabble on the inside of his skull had been going on for days, but today it was worse than ever—as if he had been slipped some bad tripping mushrooms. Then last night, he had a dream about falling off his bed and into a large dark funnel, moving at breakneck speed toward a misty gray light at the end. But it didn’t feel like a dream because he heard an electric crackling sound that got louder as he shot down the tube toward an end that he did not want to reach. As he neared the light, he tried to stop himself by dragging his hands and feet against the sides but broke through the end into a black pit buzzing with beetles.

  When he woke, he stumbled his way to the bus stop, trying to shake the sensation that they were inside his head and threatening to eat their way out of his ears. By the time he got off at Alewife, the chittering had intensified to an insane level, leaving him rubbing his face and batting his ears. His whole world had been reduced to those little shiny bodies with pincer jaws beginning to stream out of his ears and nose.

  He stumbled along the traffic line, frantically trying to wipe the things off his face and head, spitting and gasping for air against the hot drilling buzz.

  He stumbled to the ground, totally unaware of the drivers trying to watch the lights while not being distracted by the spectacle of Wally, yelping and insanely tearing his hair from his scalp and skin from his face.

  Through the crack of his eyes, he saw a huge green dump truck idling at the light, the large double wheels filling his vision.

  At the moment the light changed and the traffic began to move again, Wally scuttled onto the road and pushed his head under the rear tires.

  14

  Maggie had no idea how Zack ended up muttering Jesus’s words in Aramaic.

  The only thing that made sense was that somewhere in his studies he had read it or heard a tape and committed it to memory, consciously or unconsciously. But that raised even more questions, like where did one find such recordings? Even if he could, why would Zack, who took pride in being a secular humanist, be interested? Or commit to memory the Lord’s Prayer in the original? Not to mention how and why he’d muttered the passages from a coma.

  The other possibility was Nick. During his decline, he had become fanatically religious, maybe to the point of reading the Bible in Aramaic. Possibly without her knowledge, he had taught it to Zack as a child.

  Whatever the explanation, Zack was now in an undisclosed room with a staff sworn to secrecy and an around-the-clock guard—an arrangement made by the hospital, which was terrified that Maggie might sue for violation of her son’s right to privacy. Stephanie, the nurse’s aide, had been fired for posting the video.

  Although the major media had by now dropped the story, online religious groups complained about people being barred from divine healing. Photographs of Zack still circulated on the Internet, as did the video. There was also a fuzzy shot of a water stain on the wall above his bed that was reported to be the face of Jesus.

  To Maggie it looked like a water stain. A dead dull water stain.

  15

  The death notice of Thomas Pomeroy was on the obituary pages in the form of a lengthy article about the man and his life. And Roman read it with interest.

  Pomeroy had been found dead on his living room couch by a housekeeper. The autopsy report claimed that he had died from “cardiac arrest”—words that filled Roman with pride.

  According to the paper, Pomeroy had been lauded for his role in the “development of high resolution of magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI. Although MRI instruments have been available since the early 1980s, Dr. Pomeroy’s contribution greatly enhanced the imaging capabilities for viewing individual clusters of brain cells, which aided the monitoring of the progress of brain tumors.…”

  Colleagues and family members went on to say that his contribution to medical physics and the practice of radiological diagnostics was invaluable. All his fancy schools and awards were listed among his accomplishments and how he left a daughter and three grandchildren in Phoenix, blah, blah, blah.

  Roman took a sip of Red Bull, thinking how good he was at his trade and how he hadn’t lost the touch after all these years. He could still dispatch a subject without qualms or mercy, made all the more resolute now that he was working for a higher cause. The highest, in fact. Like St. Michael himself.

  In the past, Roman maintained professional respect for client privacy. He rarely knew those he was working for. Likewise, he never inquired into the lives of those he dispatched. Not only was he disinterested, he understood that it was not a good idea to know his targets. Curiosity might weaken his resolve about putting a bullet through the brain of some guy who was a Little League coach and had a bunch of kids. Likewise, asking about a target’s background could endanger his own life. So he had plied his trade with total anonymity.

  But the Pomeroy assignment began to eat at him. Why would someone want to assassinate a famous medical physicist?

  And why someone in the service of God?

  16

  Emma Roderick did not personally know Stephanie Glass, the nurse’s aide she had replaced, but she had heard about the firing. Until the other day, Emma had been on a gerontology ward, where most of her patients were suffering dementia and a laundry list of physical ailments associated with advanced age. The patients here were under fifty and in various stages of rehabilitation from an assortment of neurological afflictions—strokes, aneurysms, head injuries, drug overdoses.

  What she knew was that on orders of upper administration, Zack Kashian had been moved here to hide him from the press and public, because religious fanatics had crashed his room last week, claiming that God was talking through him and dispensing miracles. She had seen the cell phone video and believed none of the claims. Like her dementia patients, the poor guy mumbled nonsense syllables and people overreacted, claiming it was God and the face of Jesus on the wall and a statue of the Virgin Mary crying tears of blood, the air thick with the scent of roses.

  Unfortunately, people will believe what they want to believe, Emma told herself. But the hard fact was that Zachary Kashian’s Glasgow coma rating was level two, meaning he would probably remain in a profound sleep for a long time, if not until death. Already caseworkers were talking with his family about moving him to a private rehab facility.

  Because Emma was new, she worked the eleven-to-seven graveyard shift and on holidays such as today, Easter Sunday.

  It was midafternoon, and she would celebrate the holiday in the evening this year. Her parents were completely understanding, especially her mother, who would appreciate not having to get up at the crack of dawn to prepar
e the meal—the traditional leg of lamb and homemade mint jelly. Her sister and sister-in-law would bring the baked beans, potatoes au gratin, asparagus, and carrots, plus a rhubarb-strawberry pie, her father’s favorite.

  “Dad.”

  For a moment, Emma thought she had uttered the syllable without awareness.

  She turned her head toward the bed, and a bolt of electricity shot through her chest. Zack Kashian’s eyes were open and staring at her.

  “Dad,” he whispered.

  “Oh, my God!” she gasped, as if the guy had emerged from the grave. “Wait. Wait,” she said, and bolted from the room to get Heather, the duty nurse, and Seth Andrew, the resident physician.

  When they returned, Zack was still staring ahead.

  Heather had been on the ward for years and had seen patients wake from comas before, so she instantly took over. “Hi, Zack. My name is Heather and I’m your nurse. And this is Seth, he’s your doctor, and this is Emma. Can you hear me?”

  Zack looked straight up at her but gave no response.

  “Zack, I want you to listen to me, okay?” She moved from side to side to determine if he was tracking her. He was. “Good, Zack. I know this is confusing to you, but I want you to tell me your name.”

  Incredibly, Zack looked directly at Heather and said in a voice rough from disuse, “Zack.”

  “That’s great. Now tell me your full name, last name, too.”

  “Zachary Kashian.” Then he rolled his eyes toward Emma. “Where’s my dad?”

  Emma tried to repress the tremors passing through her. “Your dad?” she squealed.