The Karma Booth

by Jeff Pearce

  Thérèse. The girl was talking about Thérèse. Again, he resisted the urge to ask how she could know anything of his life. Instead he shrugged and replied, “That happened a long time ago.”

  “Nooooo, it didn’t,” she said, her voice rising in a singsong. “Not really. Eight years ago, August twenty-fifth, you formally requested a transfer to Asia. It was after you knew you couldn’t help her. You blamed yourself for the breakup, and maybe if it hadn’t happened, she wouldn’t have gone out with the man who worked at the consulate in Lyon. He raped her after he lured her up to the embassy’s corporate hotel room off Rivoli, and he beat her, detaching her retina. She tested positive for HIV. It’s why you delayed visiting me. It’s why you feel conflicted about the Booth. You want punishment, but you also know terrible things change people forever. And you felt there was no pattern to life after Thérèse died in a car accident in Hamburg—”

  “I think you’ve made your point,” he whispered.

  Don’t ask how, he ordered himself, his mind racing. The how doesn’t matter right now because she obviously picked up this trick from wherever she went.

  He forced himself to consider the why of her spouting the details of his life. She hadn’t done it with the others who’d come with their clipboards full of questions.

  That meant she had singled him out for this mind game. It also meant he had an advantage, leverage. If only he could figure out what it was and how to use it.

  He sat very still, hoping his breathing wasn’t fast. He couldn’t hear it. He was only conscious of Mary Ash, still drawing but not looking at the paper.

  “I suppose you can tell me where I was August twenty-fifth last year,” he suggested, playing for time.

  “Not an interesting day. You got your teeth cleaned at the dentist’s in the morning. You were upset with a foreign exchange student in the afternoon lecture, a Chilean who thought the CIA was right to topple Allende.”

  “February sixteenth, 1985.”

  The pale green eyes blinked then held him steady as she recited, “You were twelve and still living in Chicago. It was cold. There was snow on the ground, and you kissed Heather Dershowitz in your family’s basement rec-room while working on a history project together about World War One. You were embarrassed because your erection pushed out your jeans. She was eleven and scared she might get pregnant, and you had to show her books that proved it was impossible.”

  She turned to look out her window briefly and added, “They call it hyperthymesia: the ability to recall vivid autobiographical detail according to dates. I don’t think it’s very impressive to remember stuff about yourself.”

  “So you remember it about others.”

  Her eyes fell gently on him again as she offered another fleeting smile. “Yes. You don’t have to worry, Mr. Cale. I’m not reading your mind, and the effect doesn’t last. And no, it has nothing to do with the physical contact when we shook hands either.”

  “You just meet a person and…?”

  “You know that quantum physics is responsible for how a television works, but you don’t know how. You still go on watching television, don’t you? Because you can.”

  “Do you know about quantum physics?”

  “Of course not!” she laughed.

  With a flash of insight, he leaned in as he asked in a murmur, “You grew your fingers back, didn’t you?”

  She lifted the charcoal pencil as she answered pleasantly, “Well, I do need my fingers, Mr. Cale.”

  He nodded without saying a word, taking it in.

  “I need to take a nap now, if you don’t mind,” she said.

  “All right. Thank you for talking to me, Mary.”

  “Not at all, you’re a very intelligent and interesting man,” she said as he rose to go. “You’ve been fortunate to see special things. You’ll get to see others.”

  “What other things?”

  She shrugged, just like a young woman trading casual gossip in the street, having run into an acquaintance. “I don’t know. I just know you’ll be near the center of it. You’ll feel better when you remember something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That when you’re here, you must be here, Mr. Cale.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t know how to explain it better. I volunteered at this daycare once. I went to help blind kids with a sculpture class, and I realized they’ve never seen red. So how do you explain what red is to them?”

  “Have you seen these things you’re talking about?”

  “No. Sorry. They’re for you. You’re still untainted.”

  He stared at her.

  Then she broke into a mischievous giggle. “I’m just messing with you, Mr. Cale. They didn’t send me back. But if I could know about your girlfriend in Paris, I could know about them, couldn’t I?”

  He was still staring at her.

  “You should be happy, Mr. Cale. You learned what you wanted. I had terrible things happen to me, and I’m not changed.”

  He stood in the doorway and saw the mother hovering at the top of the stairs, wearing the same anxious expression as she had in the living room. He had one more question for the girl, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask. It was too terrible.

  Mary Ash fixed him rigid in her stare, saying, “It’s all right, Mr. Cale. I told you I can’t read your mind, but you’re giving your question away on your face. It’s okay. No one else would bother to think of it, not because it’s wrong, but because they don’t have your way of seeing. And the answer’s no.”

  As he nodded his goodbye, he caught a quick glimpse of Mary Ash lowering the pad of paper.

  There was nothing on it. Blank.

  But he had heard the scratching of the charcoal. She had drawn, erased, sketched again and shaded with strokes.

  There was nothing on the paper.

  The mother waited until he was at the door before she asked what Mary meant. “She said ‘no’ to your last question, but you didn’t ask it. What did you want to ask her?”

  “It’s okay, Mrs. Ash,” he said. “I’m sorry I imposed on you.” He walked back to his car, wanting to get away from the house as quickly as possible.

  No, he wouldn’t burden the mother with the question that had been on his lips. The poor haunted woman didn’t deserve to agonize over that idea, and he barely wanted to consider it himself: whether Mary Ash had somehow actually chosen—from whatever mysterious place she inhabited—to “kill Emmett Nickelbaum back.” And if this was what had allowed her to return into their world.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The start of the Bolshevik Revolution.

  The ends of the First and Second World Wars.

  The polio vaccine.

  The John F. Kennedy assassination.

  The announcement of Mary Ash’s return was added to a unique and truly exclusive catalogue, each entry a marker of when people around the world took stock of their era and their place in it. The Apollo Moon landing. The horror of 9/11. Where were you when you heard? What were you doing when this happened? A murderer had been executed, which was nothing new, but for the first time in history, his victim had come back after this was done.

  The media dubbed the transposition equipment “The Karma Booth”—ignoring completely that two booths were used in the procedure.

  A couple of fundamentalist Muslim clerics in London were asked to comment on the Karma Booth and promised it would be exposed eventually as a fraud. Mullahs in Iran’s Assembly of Experts went further, calling it the work of the “Great Satan” and an abomination that could undo the work of countless martyrs. The logic of this official statement was reported without much critical commentary in the West.

  The Vatican withheld its judgment for a week and three days. Then at a Mass at St. Peter’s, the Pope made a reference to “a supposed scientific development that defies the natural balance of Holy Creation.” The condemnation was somewhat veiled, but in a later communiqué, the Vatican openly called for the booths to b
e dismantled and destroyed as an aberration against God and Nature.

  Two simultaneous riots broke out near the Quai D’Orsay in Paris and in one of its more infamous banlieues, its lower-income immigrant suburbs, simply because of an Internet rumor. Word had spread that the United States government was willing to export the booth technology to several of its key allies. By the time the French government issued a denial, two policemen were severely injured and five immigrants from Mali and Algeria were dead.

  Back in the States, several high-placed Republicans quickly suggested a bill be rushed through Congress that would put Karma Booth executions under federal authority. The rationale was that the Booth would prove too attractive for the state judicial system to resist, and technology of this magnitude should not be needlessly duplicated and therefore left open to potential abuse. The states’ rights argument barely rose above a whisper.

  A story ran in the Los Angeles Times that several Iraq War veterans in Oregon were fleeing across the border to Canada, fearing that the Booth would be used on them if they were ever found guilty of war crimes.

  Nothing had changed. And yet everything had changed. Because of fear, because of expectations, because the Karma Booth existed, because a new way of seeing had been created—even if the view was limited and it obscured and raised more questions than it answered. Nothing had changed, except for the possibility that certain people who were murdered could possibly one day be brought back to life.

  And none of them would be prophets.

  For the sake of security and to cope with the flood tide of media attention, the Karma Booth was carted onto a moving van and relocated to a federal building in White Plains. It was here that Tim, at Gary Weintraub’s invitation, saw the second use of the Booth. Weintraub was deliberately evasive over who the selected murderer was or who the scientists expected to emerge as the resurrected victim. “Let’s just see what happens.”

  Tim was late in getting his BMW on the road to Westchester, and only moments after he arrived and showed his ID to the guards outside the test room, he walked in as the process was unfolding. Once again, light carved into the body of a death row inmate, revealing a fissure of amazingly bright pinpoints and whorls inside—and then there was that revolting odor that washed through the room like an abattoir stench. There was enough of the horrified inmate for Tim to identify who was being torn apart. He recognized the young face, the shark-like dark eyes and the peach fuzz stubble on the upper lip and chin.

  It was Cody James, eighteen, and for three days of a single week about six months ago, he had been famous—particularly in Texas. In Austin, he had stolen a shotgun and a 9mm Glock pistol from the locked storage case at the home of a friend, whose father was a police officer. He then showed up at his old high school and began shooting. But unlike other school rampages and massacres, Cody James’s rage was not that of a nihilistic, disaffected outsider. He was considered a gentle, well-mannered boy. He played guard on the school’s championship-winning basketball team and was generally deemed an average if not always motivated student. No, something else had set him off.

  At the moment, however, his torment and his grudges didn’t seem to matter because his face and body were becoming comet trails and nebulae, changing to tiny stars and dazzling, colored rings. And then a blinding whiteness filled the chamber, gradually fading until all that he was disappeared.

  Tim walked briskly over to Gary Weintraub, his friend standing beside the arrogant young neurologist, Miller, watching another couple of scientists work the controls. “Gary, you picked Cody James?”

  It was Miller who rose to the defense. “We didn’t pick Cody James, man,” he said testily, running a hand through his halo of unruly brown hair. His worn sneaker tapped the floor tile impatiently as he kept one eye on the Karma Booth chambers. “We picked Geoff Shackleton, the geography teacher he blew away in a cafeteria. His doctor says he was healthy. Forty-two years old, jogged to the park every weekday morning, no psychological or cardiovascular issues we might have to think about. You know…the shock of coming back and everything. And then you got—”

  “Not my point,” snapped Tim, who went back to addressing Weintraub. “Gary, do you remember the story on the news?”

  Weintraub looked like he was going to answer, then made a half-hearted shrug and took out a cloth to polish his spectacles. His round, normally jovial face went blank. He either couldn’t recall the details or didn’t want to admit he knew them. In the second chamber, bright light was flashing and made its familiar strobe pattern behind the tinted glass. The “secondary effect” had begun.

  Tim knew the details of the school rampage well enough. They were sordid tabloid fare, all luridly chronicled before the trial of Cody James. It soon emerged that the young man was friends with one of the school’s seniors, Dustin “Dusty” Cavanaugh, who was sleeping with his English teacher—who also happened to be Geoff Shackleton’s twenty-seven-year-old wife, Nicole. Dustin Cavanaugh was known around school as “Perv” even without his classmates learning about his affair with a teacher. Young Cavanaugh’s sealed juvenile record also somehow made it into the headlines. The most pertinent details involved how at the age of fourteen, he sexually molested both a boy of twelve and a girl who was thirteen years old.

  He then played matchmaker between Cody James and Nicole Shackleton, who relieved him of his virginity. But after Cody slept with the teacher, Dustin insisted his friend repay him for the experience by sleeping with him in front of Nicole, who allegedly would find it “hot.”

  Cody, feeling used and humiliated, as well as sexually threatened, went to fetch the guns.

  Dustin Cavanaugh stopped laughing when the bullets slammed into his chest, but he lived because Cody hesitated as he pulled the trigger, fouling up his aim. He quickly regained his grim resolve and shot Amber Janssen, who was screaming and pulling out her phone as she rushed to the swinging doors. She survived, but was paralyzed from the waist down.

  Geoff Shackleton had no idea what sexual intrigues were going on involving his wife and just happened to be in the cafeteria, talking to a fellow teacher about the latest revised curriculum. He went to tackle Cody, who killed him on the spot with a blast that took off a third of the teacher’s skull, leaving a gruesome stain of blood on the floor with tiny bits of bone and brain matter. Cody fired two more shots to keep everyone back and afraid, and then he abandoned the rifle to go hunt for Nicole with the pistol.

  The vice-principal of the school had heard the shots, shouted to a student to call 911 on her cell phone, then smashed a trophy case and grabbed a hockey stick from a display. He slashed the stick across Cody James’s head as the boy stepped out of the cafeteria, knocking him down and making him drop the gun. Two of Cody’s football teammates nearly beat him to death before the vice-principal shouted for them to stop.

  Nicole Shackleton was sent to prison for the statutory rape involving Dustin Cavanaugh, who just barely escaped life beyond bars himself over a female student stepping forward with a rape charge that didn’t stick for lack of evidence. At her trial, Nicole claimed that her husband had been a closeted homosexual who only needed her for social appearances, and in her sexual frustration, she had turned to a student. It didn’t really matter what Geoff Shackleton’s proclivities were; he was dead, and she was going to jail.

  But now he was alive, naked and disoriented, half-stumbling out of the second chamber as the doctors ran up with a hospital gown and a syringe containing a sedative. Geoff Shackleton was a man entering middle age with a small paunch, a little gray at his temples. His eyes wide, he now asked, “Where…?”

  More words formed on his lips, but he lost consciousness. The sedative wasn’t really required.

  “He’s okay,” said Miller. Then with less confidence: “He looks okay. He’ll be okay…”

  He ruffled his hair again and kicked the floor with a sneaker, jubilant that the Karma Booth had demonstrated it would consistently work. Weintraub merely peered through his spectacles,
quietly absorbed as if he were watching fruit flies eating a plate of grapes.

  They were already wheeling Geoff Shackleton out to the new emergency ward set up for arrivals down the hall.

  Tim turned once more to Weintraub and Miller. “You do realize the life you’ve given back is in complete tatters! From what I’ve read, the poor bastard had no idea his wife was fucking students. He wasn’t gay or cruising bus stations as she claimed, but his rep at his workplace—and oh, keep in mind the guy worked down in Texas as a teacher—is ruined!”

  Miller was indifferent. “Come on! All that stuff would have come out if he had lived. She would have said the same shit.”

  “You don’t know that!” countered Tim. “And he would have been there to defend himself against her accusations. He tried to stop Cody James at the school, and he probably would have been treated like a hero, which would have mitigated her bullshit. The guy’s going to be devastated when he learns his wife is partly responsible for the whole nightmare!”

  “And again,” said Weintraub patiently, “the man still would have had to face those unpleasant facts had he simply been wounded. What would you have me say, Tim? Do I personally believe Nicole Shackleton and that young man, Cavanaugh, share responsibility? Without question, of course. But the wife and that boy didn’t go collect firearms and shoot them in a crowded school—Cody James did.”“Gary, you’re missing the point,” said Tim. “I don’t have sympathy for that boy. The shrinks called him disturbed and unbalanced, and my heart doesn’t weep for him at all. The girl he shot in the lunchroom never did a damn thing to him, and the witnesses say the little monster laughed. He got a kick out of causing destruction and pain. I don’t know what your Karma Booth is but I don’t think it’s justice! That girl, what’s her name, Amber… Amber Janssen. She’ll never walk again. What does the Booth do for her?”

  Miller stopped tapping his sneaker and folded his arms. In a calm and reasonable voice, he answered, “Nothing—you’re right. So you want to ignore what we can do for this guy? Shackleton is alive, and he will think, he’ll feel, he’ll go on with his existence despite the time gap.”