by Gary Braver
When he was fully psyched, he pushed with all his might to raise the bar to full extension, where his bones would lock in place. His arms shook as the blood swelled his arms and shoulders and bulged the arteries along the sides of his neck.
Just as he reached that position, a voice cut through the earplugs.
“Billy.”
His eyes opened as his heart nearly burst from his chest.
In the dim light, he saw a reflection in the mirrored wall at his feet—a dark figure standing directly behind his head. “Wha-wha-wha,” was all Billy could say.
Then he heard a whispery voice mutter something else.
But before it registered, his arms collapsed to his sides, slamming the bar onto the ridge of his nose and eyes, then rolling down his face to rest on the soft pocket of his neck.
It happened in such a violent blur that he could barely process that the bar was crushing his windpipe, pressing impossibly hard toward the floor, instantly cutting air from his lungs and blood to his brain.
He could not scream. He could not see for the blood flooding his eye sockets. He could not breathe.
He thrashed with his arms and bucked with his hips, but the bar weighted impossibly against his throat, pinning him to the bench. And the more he struggled, the more his brain dimmed and the strength seeped out of his muscles.
In the microsecond of awareness, he tried to see the face of his killer, but he was not even certain anyone was there or if the figure was in his head. It made no difference, because night filled his brain, and the next moment he was dead.
51
It took several minutes for Zack to break through.
They had given him a shot of norepinephrine, but he was still stuck in a small, dim space, staring at the face of the man he had killed.
He could smell the terror in his breath, like burned garbage. He could still hear himself utter the man’s name. He could still feel his hands locked in a grip around the bar, spaced outside of where the man’s hands bent backward, trying to push the bar from his throat.
Zack focused on the man’s eyes, which bulged like hens’ eggs from jagged sockets of bone. The more he pressed, the more the hydrostatic pressure forced blood to spurt from the eyeholes and nostrils, mixing with snot. His lips moved as if to say something, but there was no sound—just the slapping of his shoes against the floor as he danced in the last throes of his life.
Zack watched as the kicking and flailing came to a halt and the man’s mouth went slack and strings of red saliva dripped to the floor, his tongue protruding through his bloodied teeth like a slug.
Zack made a final full-weight heave on the bar and with grim satisfaction watched the man die, his final breath caught in a deep-chest gurgle from a collapsed throat, blood streaming from the rut across his eyes and nose and puddling on the floor.
Zack bolted upright into a sitting position on the gurney, his face snapping around the room, eyes sucking in the bright fluorescence to flood the horrible images in his head.
Four faces stared at him—Sarah, Luria, Stern, and Cates.
“You all right?” someone asked, maybe Sarah. “What happened?”
He looked down at his hands, still frozen in their grip. He shook his head but couldn’t answer.
“You’re still coming out of it,” Luria said.
Zack rubbed his eyes. A soupy horror filled his head, as if he had just returned from the scene of a murder. One he had committed.
He lay back down on the gurney. His hands were trembling uncontrollably. He could see the concern on Dr. Luria’s face. He wanted to say he was all right, but he felt that at any moment he might break down.
He glanced at the heart rate monitor, which read 138 beats per minute. His blood pressure was registering at 185 over 105. The EKG machine was spiking like crazy.
“Give him some time to settle down,” Stern said.
Zack closed his eyes again and recited pi to fifty places, then started over again. He recited the lyrics of songs in his head, the Gettysburg Address, which he had memorized in the fifth grade, the Pledge of Allegiance, stanzas from Poe’s “The Raven.”
“He’s coming down,” Byron Cates announced after a few minutes. “One forty over ninety-four. Pulse ninety-two.”
After several more minutes he felt calmer, more centered. He opened his eyes. Sarah was by his side. She took his hand.
“Zack, what happened?”
He filled his lungs with air, then let it out slowly. He sat up again. Luria and Stern were staring at him on the other side of the gurney. Byron Cates was glancing at him from the computers.
“What is it?” Sarah asked.
Bad trip. “Still groggy.”
“Take your time,” Dr. Luria said. “Can you recall anything?”
He shook his head, trying to force his face into neutral against the assault of those images. “Nope. Nothing.”
Dr. Luria moved closer to him. “Zack, tell me what you experienced.”
He shook his head again. He didn’t want to put it into words. He didn’t want to fix it with images for fear of haunting his brain with them. He just wanted to go home and fall into a deep sleep. “Want to leave.”
“Okay, that’s fine,” Sarah said.
But Luria cut in. “In a moment.” And she shot Sarah a sharp look, then poured herself a cup of black coffee. She took a sip while studying Zack, then clicked on the overhead monitor and moved the mouse until an image of Zack’s brain filled the screen. She hit some keys and ran the images of neuroactivity from the moment he went under until he was awakened.
Sarah got him a bottle of water while he waited. A weird buzzing in the fore of his brain was creating a sense of vertigo. “I’d like to go.”
“You crossed over.” Dr. Luria’s words were barely audible. “This time we’re sure.”
“What?” He looked at Stern. “Is that right?”
Stern took a deep breath and let the air out slowly. “What I can tell you is that there’s parity with the last few sessions, but of greater intensity. The activity in neuron clusters of your frontal and parietal lobes don’t appear related to unconscious neuroelectrical activity.”
“Meaning what?”
“This may be a first,” Stern said, “but your consciousness appears to have separated from your brain.”
“A near-death experience.”
“Yes, but there’s anomalous data we need to crank through the algorithms.”
Zack was almost too numb to let that sink in.
“Do you remember anything more specific while you were under? Any sense of place or who was with you or what you were doing?”
“No.” Zack’s sense of unease was mounting. He slid off the gurney and went behind the screen and changed. “Someone take me home or I’m going to call a cab.”
“I’ll take him,” Sarah said.
Something crossed Luria’s face. “Fine. I’ll call you in a few days, Zack.” She stuffed a check in his shirt pocket.
The woman was relentless, but Zack said nothing and left with Sarah.
52
“I killed a man.”
“What?”
“In suspension, I ended up in some guy’s workout room and choked him to death with a barbell.”
It was sometime after eleven, and Sarah was driving in the northbound lane of Route 128.
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“Because Luria would have pumped me the rest of the night.”
“But that’s the point—to learn what you experienced.”
“Except I’m not doing any more.”
“Was it that bad?”
“Yeah, and as real as riding in this car. What scares me is how I felt. Volcanic rage. I wanted to press the life out of him. I can still feel it. And I haven’t got a clue who the guy is.”
“How awful.”
“It’s also the second time. I didn’t know that woman either, not a clue. But I wanted to kill her, too.”
“I don’t
know what to say.”
“That’s the other thing. These weren’t some eye-in-the-sky OBEs. My hands were on the friggin’ barbell, the guy’s face staring at me upside down because I was behind him. I saw him die up close and from my point of view—the killer’s point of view. Same with the woman. I looked her in the eye, then turned the car on her. What the hell happened?”
“I don’t know, but now I’m getting scared.”
“Yeah, and I’ve had enough tunnel visions for the rest of my life,” Zack said. “I don’t need the money this badly.”
Sarah put her hand on his leg. “I understand. I’ll tell Elizabeth.”
“I’ll call and explain myself. Sorry if this screws up your research, but I’m not going around wondering if I’m a killer.”
Or worse.
Zack didn’t believe in the supernatural. He didn’t believe in the afterlife. He didn’t believe in spirits, ghosts, ESP, or other paranormal phenomena. Miracles were just good luck, like his waking from a coma. All else was fantasy, driven by ignorance, including good poker hunches, root beer logos, and reciting Jesus. But he was beginning to wonder if maybe he did cross over and tap into the psyche of some homicidal maniac.
Please let there be a more rational explanation.
“Maybe it’s just a bad reaction to the anesthetic,” he said. “That’s possible, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it’s possible.”
Sarah kept her eyes on the road, but in the flickering light of the traffic Zack could see that she wasn’t convinced. After a few moments, he said, “Sarah, what’s turning over in your head? And please, no more bullshit.”
She continued driving without response. Then she said, “I don’t understand it, but given the neurological activity and your running blood chart, whatever you experienced took place in real time.”
“What?”
“It wasn’t a flash dream just before you woke up.”
“You mean an OBE.”
She nodded. “That’s one of the things we’ll be looking for—the possibility you encountered another awareness.”
Another awareness. Zack felt a frigid ripple pass through him. “Jesus!”
“I know how you don’t want to go through another suspension. I really do.”
“No.”
She looked at him. “Might be the only way to figure out what’s going on.”
“You mean you don’t want me to blow your chances for an article.”
Sarah flared instantly. “That’s not my motive, Zack. I’m not doing this to get published. This is virgin territory, and that’s why I’m here, dammit.”
They rode in silence for a few moments. “Sorry.”
“Accepted.”
It was a little after midnight when he entered his apartment. He was exhausted and anxious and dreading going to bed for fear of being assaulted by more homicidal flashes. But Luria was right. This had none of the feel of a dream, even more so than the beach visions. It was disturbingly real and raw, and he feared it would all rise up as soon as he fell asleep. So he forced himself to stay awake.
His brain was too weary to allow him to work on his thesis or read. So he turned on the television and tried to lose himself in David Letterman. But every time the camera focused on someone’s face, his brain tripped on flashes of that guy’s eyes popping out of a bloody, ruined face. He could also still feel his fingers clawed around the bar and pushing against Volker’s windpipe. It was awful—as if his brain had been infected by some psychic miasma.
Worse was the alien rage that had surged through him as the guy flailed and kicked. He had murdered the man with hot satisfaction. And while he had no idea who he was, just beneath the threshold of awareness he sensed a disturbing familiarity. But nothing he could grasp.
He shuffled around the apartment, walking from room to room. His bedroom was a mess, so he put away clothes and straightened out the bed, fussing to make hospital corners and flatten the covers. When he finished, he cleaned up the kitchen and then moved to the bathroom, where he washed the tub and folded towels. When he felt himself grow sleepy, he took a Haldol and a double dose of Lunesta. It was probably dumb to combine the two, but he wanted a night of oblivion.
He began to wash his face, but as he looked into the mirror, another face stared back at him. A whimper rose in his throat, but in a blink the stranger’s face was gone and staring back at him was his own, looking gaunt and tight with fright. “What the hell’s happening to me?” he said aloud.
What did they put in that drug?
What did they do to my brain?
He wiped his face and returned to the living room and sat at his laptop to read e-mails. Notes from Damian, Anthony, other friends, one from his mother. University notices and spam. He opened the latest from Damian, who wanted to know where he had been, how the sleep study was going. One from Sarah apologizing for tonight’s run. He appreciated that. Luria was obsessed, intent on proving her theories and telling the world.
But he’d be her guinea pig no more.
53
Roman found a listing for Zachary Kashian on a site devoted to “miracle people.”
He scanned through a bunch of newspaper articles, including “Miracle? Coma Victim ‘Resurrected from the Dead.’” And “He Spoke the Words of Jesus from a Coma” and “Doctors Baffled by Miracle Man.”
He also read blogs from people who had been at Zack’s bedside, some claiming to see images of Jesus in wall shadows or smelling roses of the Holy Virgin. There were nonsense examples of autosuggestion, of course. Besides, nobody knew what Jesus looked like or Mary’s favorite flower. However, some claims couldn’t be dismissed.
“We believe that signs and wonders were evident with Zack. He manifested unexplainable wounds on his body like those of Jesus Christ. His hands and feet. The bruise on his side. I felt the presence of Jesus in that room.”
Another claimed, “St. Paul has told us that suffering is our way of continuing Christ’s redemptive suffering.… I believe that Zachary was doing this for us—uniting his suffering to Christ the Lord.”
“I came because my daughter has leukemia and I wanted Jesus to help her. When I entered Zack’s room, I felt the Lord’s presence.…”
“I believe the Lord spoke through Zack, giving us a sign of hope and mercy. And he chose Zack because he was broken in body and in a state of total purity of spirit. Jesus spoke through him. I believe this with all my heart.”
There were many more of the same.
But down the Google list were other, darker responses—warnings that these miracle-seeking faithful were being brutally misled, and not by wishful thinking or autosuggestion, but by Satan himself.
“Remember the warning of the scriptures, Second Corinthians 11:14: ‘Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.’ And let’s not forget that Zachary Kashian is a professed atheist and member of the Secular Humanist Society of his university.
“I’m telling you that Satan’s deceptions are much like a kaleidoscope: As the tube is rotated, the same bits of colored glass will form new design. Those who claim seeing Jesus in that young man’s room are the devil’s dupes. That was not Jesus or the Blessed Virgin, but Satan himself—the Great Deceiver.”
The words sounded familiar to Roman, but he dismissed them as stock religious attacks—theological chestnuts. Likewise the name of the blogger meant nothing to him: Norman Babcock, director of the Fraternity of Jesus.
But what kept pecking at him was that the kid was born on the sixth of June, 1986. Were Roman a superstitious man, he would have wondered at the significance of those numbers: 666. The number of the beast.
For a moment Roman, too, was lost in the possibilities of what may have transpired in that hospital room—whether Zachary Kashian was channeling Jesus Christ or the Antichrist. Whichever, maybe it was time to meet this “miracle” man.
54
“We think he’s merged with another mind.”
“What? What? Who?”
“We don�
��t know who. And there’s no way that can be determined,” said Morris Stern. “But we’re certain it’s a bona fide merger.”
“Glory hallelujah,” Warren Gladstone said. “Thank you, sweet Lord. Thank you.”
They were back in Warren’s suite at the Taj. Morris Stern maneuvered the mouse until a video image of the MRI of Zack’s brain appeared. “Here are images of the electrical activity in his first NDE. You can see discrete signature patterns consistent with the mathematical analysis. Now look at this.” The next screen showed other pulsing blotches in superimposition of the first.
“Oh my,” Warren said.
With a pen, Stern pointed out the new configurations. “This activity here and here and here were not present in the original NDE. They’re a completely foreign imprint.”
“We’re looking at the mind of God,” Gladstone declared.
“More likely the mind of someone else.”
“But from the other side.”
“That I don’t know,” Stern said.
That was the most he was going to concede. “Why not God?”
“Because we don’t have God’s profile on file.”
“But you’re telling me that the boy was in communication with someone from the other side. So why not God? Why couldn’t his mind have merged with the Lord’s?” Warren could barely contain himself.
Stern shook his head. “I didn’t say from the other side—”
“Warren,” Elizabeth broke in, “what we picked up was clearly an intrusive electrical presence imposed on his own activity. It’s a huge leap to claim merging with God. More likely he mind-merged with someone now deceased, which is nonetheless still remarkable. A first!”
“Hallelujah.”
Warren had seen the videos of the other test subjects, including several college kids; he had listened to their accounts of near-death experiences, some so full of detail and passion that he was nearly convinced. He had even allowed Luria to set up their lab in his own minister’s home, which they’d had to gut to install their MRI machine. He had spent $10 million of ministry money, an investment that had turned some board directors against him. And after all the years of expense and false hope, after all the brain scans and videos of people in suspension—this was the first time that Elizabeth Luria and company had shown actual evidence of spiritual contact.
