Tunnel Vision

72

“You don’t even know if he’s alive,” Sarah said.

“I think he is,” Zack said as he drove. “And I think he’s dying.”

“Based on what?”

“The last NDE—Gretch shot him in the side. And I felt it. I still do.” He pulled up his shirt to show clear, unbroken skin. “But it hurts, and I think he needs help.” He headed down Huntington Avenue and took a left onto Forsyth and from there to Storrow Drive, heading east, feeling a dim hum in his mind just above the threshold of awareness.

“This is crazy. You said yourself the toxin creates delusions.”

“That was him in the video.”

“But it was grainy. You couldn’t see his face. Besides, that was three years ago.”

Zack felt a blister of petulance rise. “Sarah, I recognize the shape of his head. I also saw him dig himself out,” he said. “And I saw him kill those people.” At the end of Storrow Drive, near Mass General Hospital, he turned into the lane for Route 93 North. “I felt the bullet go into him, like it was me.”

“You heard Morris. They could be just scraps in your unconscious—things you put together. Flash dream stuff.”

“He also said my mind merged with another.”

“But that wasn’t confirmed.”

Her insistence that he was yielding to some mystical instinct was making him anxious. “Then tell me how I knew about those deaths?”

“Your suspensions happened after they died. So maybe you read about them and forgot, and maybe you thought you experienced them in suspension.”

The traffic had slowed to a crawl just before the turnoff to 93 North. To their right was Massachusetts General Hospital. Except for the coma, the only other time Zack had been in a hospital was at his birth twenty-five years ago. His mother said he had been born with a caul. She also said that according to legend, people born with cauls were supposed to be mystical, have special powers. “Maybe.”

Not so long ago, Sarah had sat across from him at the Grafton Street Pub & Grill and talked about the wondrous possibilities of transcending the physical world, of there being no death. And now she was telling him it was probably delusions. And that whatever instinct he was following was just his imagination. “Then how do you explain Luria’s claim? She said they’d identified his neuroprofile and that I merged with him last night.”

“I wasn’t there. I didn’t see them.”

“So she’s delusional, too?”

“No, but it’s possible that she’s lining things up to fit a predetermined conclusion.” Then she added, “Look, Elizabeth Luria came into this project hoping to prove there’s an afterlife, and she got huge support from a televangelist. So scientific objectivity may not have been her bottom line, okay? Yes, they had your father’s neuropatterns. But what they found could also be an anomaly.”

“So if a tree falls in the forest and Sarah’s not there, it didn’t fall.”

“I didn’t say that, and frankly I don’t like your tone.”

“And frankly I don’t like your automatic dismissal of other possibilities. I’m getting painful flares in my side, so how do you explain that?”

She looked out the window for a moment to cool the air. Then she said, “Since there’s no evidence you got injured, I’d say you’re experiencing some kind of psychosomatic effect. You imagined or dreamed your father was shot, and this is just a case of autosuggestion or sympathetic delusion.”

Autosuggestion. Sympathetic delusion. Such silky words, such silky reasoning, he thought. After all that talk about telepathy and the Overmind. Now it’s all New Age crap. “You’ve got a rational explanation for everything, haven’t you?”

“And so did you once.”

“Well, maybe this card-carrying reductionist is seeing other possibilities.” He felt another flare in his side, and he shot through the tunnel onto the northbound ramp of 93 and straight up the Zakim Bridge.

“Will you please tell me where we’re going?”

“I think I’ll know when we get there.” Ahead was the sign for a down-ramp that would take them back to Cambridge. “Still want to come?”

“Only if you tell me where.”

“Call it ESP, call it telepathy, call it cosmic fucking sentience—but I want to get to him before he dies for real. If I’m wrong, I’m an asshole. If not, I get to see him one more time.” He slowed down and pulled into the right lane for the turnoff. Sarah saw it approach.

“What’s up 93?”

“Maine.”

“Maine? Zack, will you please tell me something definite?”

“Okay,” he said, trying to flush away the festering irritation that she might be right: that he was talking himself into believing his father was beckoning him. “When my father was young, his father purchased a tract of land in the woods of southwestern Maine. He built a little hunting and fishing cabin on the property, where my father was taken as a kid. When he got older, he’d hole up there for weeks on end.”

“By himself?”

The exit was upon them. “Should I turn?”

“No.”

He swerved back into the ongoing lane heading north on 93. “There’s another exit two minutes up.” Then he continued. “Yeah, by himself. He was a loner, and he loved the wilderness and learned survivalist skills. After college, he lived there for a year without seeing another person. It was his hideaway.”

“Have you ever been there?”

“Once, but I was four or five. All I remember is woods and a small cabin. My mother didn’t like it because it was too isolated and primitive—no electricity and well water.”

“Do you know where it is?”

“Off of 95, somewhere in the vicinity of the New Hampshire border.”

“Gee, that narrows it down nicely.”

He let her sarcasm pass. “I think I’ll know where to go when we get there.” They drove for a few more miles without saying anything. Then he turned his head toward her. “There’s one more exit before we get to 95. I can still take you home.”

“Do you want me to come?”

“Yeah, I do. And if I’m not delusional, he’ll need medical attention.”

“I was a nurse for only ten months, and that was five years ago.”

“Beats my experience.”

“Does this place have a name?”

“Magog Woods.”

“Magog Woods? Sounds vaguely familiar.”

“That was the name back then. It may not even be called that or on any map.”

“So, it’s been twenty years. Chances are old landmarks might be gone.”

“Most likely.”

“Then how will you know how to find it?”

“I’m not sure,” he said. “I’m hoping I’ll just know.”

“I feel like a character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” She looked into the cargo space, where Zack had packed sleeping bags for them and a duffel bag of clothes. “All I have is what I’m wearing.”

“You can get what you need up there. There are outlets everywhere.” They were closing in on Exit 36, Montvale Ave./Stoneham. “I can still take you back.”

Just short of the turnoff, Sarah said, “Keep going.”

Zack felt his internal organs unfist themselves. “Thanks,” he said, thinking, Oh, one more thing. Yesterday, on a hunch, he had found an online obit for Raymond Perkins, the hotshot lawyer who had gotten Volker and Gretch acquitted. Billy Volker’s uncle, in fact. He was found four weeks ago with an ax embedded in the back of his head.

Zack kept that to himself and shot into the passing lane.