Tunnel Vision

69

Roman’s first impulse was to follow the woman out of the Neuroscience Research Center building. She was beautiful and shapely, and it would be fun tailing her butt. Except he knew who she was—Sarah Wyman, a postdoctoral research assistant at Tufts. Also a part-timer at a lab that, according to Norman Babcock, conducted the NDE project in a converted preacher’s home on the grounds of Gladstone’s church in Medfield.

It was the old guy in the office upstairs who held his interest. The name on the door said, “Dr. Morris J. Stern.” He didn’t know the nature of her relationship with him, but the way she looked when she left suggested that they’d had something of a dustup.

Whatever, Roman had some time on his hands, and keeping tabs on Stern seemed like a good idea. So he went back down to the lobby, where he hid behind a book he’d picked up on near-death experiences. He had never experienced one but wondered if there was anything to them. What he read sounded pretty silly—people floating around, looking down on their near-dead selves, and feeling love-happy. They all sounded similar yet deadly sincere. Nearly every one claimed that their dying wasn’t awful but wonderful, using words like “blissful,” “sweet,” “tender,” “sensuous,” “tranquil”—as though it felt so good, they didn’t want to go back to life.

But Roman was confused. While he gladly took Babcock’s money, he couldn’t understand Babcock’s outrage. Nearly every account went on about glorious encounters with beings of light, communicating mind to mind with “a loving omniscient presence,” which some called God and others Jesus. And they all claimed that the experiences transformed their lives for the better—made them more spiritual, loving, kinder, more in tune with the universe. Some NDEs even turned agnostics and atheists into believers.

So where was the blasphemy? Where was old Satan in all this?