Tunnel Vision

75

For several minutes, Roman didn’t know what to do. Elizabeth Luria was dead. So were Stern and others who had put together that lab. He didn’t care about those he didn’t know about. The project was dead.

And the Kashian kid was missing.

Roman had spent the previous night and that morning poring over data in Morris Stern’s laptop. The mathematical stuff meant nothing to him. But the videos and explanations of the neuroimages of Kashian kept playing in Roman’s brain. And as he drove back to Boston, an idea began to grow. A very good idea. No, a brilliant idea. In fact, an epiphany.

Epiphany.

The term had shot up from the recesses of his memory. From his fretful days at St. Luke’s. Epiphany. As in Day of Epiphany. A revelation. A vision. A sudden miraculous insight.

When he was a kid suffering through sermons, he remembered one Sunday in January when Father Infantino held forth on the meaning of the Day of Epiphany, when Christ’s divinity was revealed to the Magi. He went on about how each of us must find meaning in our lives and must listen to the yearnings of our souls, just like a lot of famous people who had made a difference in the world—Mother Teresa, President Kennedy, Martin Luther King. He hammered on about how each had experienced a revelation of how they should dedicate their lives—of how they were driven by higher missions from the rest of us. But the only difference between them and ordinary people was that they had discovered a clear purpose that they had embraced with fierce determination.

Back then, Roman’s only yearning was for Father Infantino to wrap up so he could go to Goodwin Park and play ball with the other kids.

But as he headed north on 95 toward Watertown, Roman experienced his own little epiphany, and it flickered in his head like a votive candle.