Tunnel Vision

39

“Zachary Kashian,” Roman Pace whispered to himself. “Gotcha!”

The morning after his visit to the Devereux, Roman went to the Providence Public Library on Empire Street, where he Googled “coma,” “woke,” and “Jesus.” He came up with over 277,000 hits. He refined the search by adding “Massachusetts,” reducing it to 5,000 hits. At the top were recent reports about a Northeastern grad student who had gotten into a bicycling accident back in January and ended up in a coma for nearly three months, waking up this past Easter Sunday.

What held Roman’s attention was that during the coma, the kid had mysteriously muttered snippets of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, including the Lord’s Prayer, in the original language. That and how a lot of miracle-seeking religious fanatics had crashed his hospital room and had to be removed by security.

One of the doctors remarked that “given the severity of his trauma and the coma level,” his odds of recovery were “very slim”—borderline miraculous. Others were convinced that Kashian was channeling Jesus Christ. According to all reports, the kid had never been exposed to Aramaic. He was also a member of some college atheist club.

What made Roman’s heart leap was that a nurse’s aide, so taken by the “miracle,” had captured the mutterings on a cell phone video. She was subsequently fired for breach of confidentiality. But the clip had made it to YouTube, and Roman watched it over and over again.

Of course, the kid was emaciated and his head had been shaved and had wires coming out of it. And with his eyes closed, he looked like something this side of a corpse. Roman could not tell what he really looked like, but he froze the video and printed up a frame.

The likeness was made worse by the graininess. But it would do.