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FOUR

We drove in silence, the Acura moving swiftly through the dusk. At this time of evening, it was a quick ride from my suburb to Andrew Fielding’s house near the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Rachel didn’t understand my demand for silence, and I didn’t expect her to. When I first became involved in Trinity, the xenophobic level of security had stunned me. The other scientists—Fielding included—had worked on defense-related projects before and accepted the intrusive security as a necessary inconvenience. But eventually, even the veterans complained that we were enduring something unprecedented. Surveillance was all-pervasive and reached far beyond the lab complex. Protests were met with a curt reminder that the scientists on the Manhattan Project had been forced to live behind barbed wire to ensure the security of “the device.” The freedom we enjoyed came with a price—or so went the party line.

Fielding didn’t buy it. “Random” polygraph tests occurred almost weekly, and surveillance extended even into our homes. Before I could begin my video today, I’d had to plug pinholes in my walls that concealed tiny microphones. Fielding discovered them with a special scanner he’d built at home and marked the bugs with tiny pins. He had made something of a hobby out of evading Trinity surveillance. He warned me that speaking confidentially in cars was impossible. Automobiles were simple to bug, and even clean vehicles could be covered from a distance, using special high-tech microphones. The Englishman’s cat-and-mouse game with the NSA had amused me at times, but there was no doubt about who had got the last laugh.

I looked over at Rachel. It felt strange to be in a car with her. In the five years since my wife’s death, I’d had relationships with two women, both before my assignment to Trinity. My time with Rachel wasn’t a “relationship” in the romantic sense. Two hours per week for the past three months, I had sat in a room with her and discussed the most disturbing aspect of my life—my dreams. Through her questions and interpretations, she had probably revealed more about herself than she had learned about me, yet much remained hidden.

She’d come down from New York Presbyterian to accept the faculty position at Duke, where she taught a small cadre of psychiatry residents Jungian analysis, a dying art in the world of modern pharmacological psychiatry. She also saw private patients and carried out psychiatric research. After two years of virtual solitude working on Trinity, I would have found contact with any intelligent woman provocative. But Rachel had far more than intelligence to offer. Sitting in her leather chair, dressed impeccably, her dark hair pulled up in a French braid, she would watch me with unblinking concentration, as though peering into depths of my mind that even I had not plumbed. Sometimes her face—and particularly her eyes—became the whole room for me. They were the environment I occupied, the audience I confided in, the judgment I awaited. But those eyes were slow to judge, at least in the beginning. She would question me about certain images, then question the answers I gave. She sometimes offered interpretations of my dreams, but unlike the NSA psychiatrists I had seen, she never spoke with a tone of infallibility. She seemed to be searching for meaning along with me, prodding me to interpret the images myself.

“David, you don’t have to drive around all night,” she said. “I’m not going to hold this against you.”

Right, I thought. What’s wrong with delusions of a secret government conspiracy? “Be patient,” I told her. “It’s not much farther.”

She looked at me in the semidark, her eyes skeptical. “What’s the monetary award for a Nobel Prize?”

“About a million U.S. Fielding got a little less than Ravi Nara, because …” I trailed off, realizing that she was only probing again, trying to puncture my “delusion.”

I focused on the road, knowing that in a few minutes she would have to admit that my paranoia was at least partially grounded in fact. What would she think then? Would she open her mind to my interpretation of my dreams, however irrational it might sound?

From our first session, Rachel had argued that she could not make valid interpretations of my “hallucinations” without knowing intimate details of my past and my work. But I couldn’t tell much. Fielding had warned me that the NSA would consider anyone who knew anything about Trinity or its principals to be a potential threat. Beyond this concern, I felt that what I saw during my narcoleptic episodes had nothing to do with my past. The images seemed to be coming from outside my mind. Not in the sense of hearing alien voices, which was a marker for schizophrenia, but in the classical sense of visions. Revealed visions, like those described by prophets. For a man who had not believed in God since he was a boy, it was a singularly disturbing state of affairs.

My dreams had not begun with the first narcoleptic attacks. The first episodes were true blackouts. Holes in my life. Gaps of time, lost forever. I would be working at my office computer, then suddenly become aware of a high-pitched vibration in my body. Generalized at first, it would quickly localize to my teeth. This was a classic onset symptom of narcolepsy. I’d begin to feel drowsy, then suddenly jerk awake in my chair and find that forty minutes had passed. It was like going under anesthesia. No memory at all.

The dreams began after a week of blackouts. The first one was always the same, a recurring nightmare that frightened me more than the blackouts had. I remember how intrigued Rachel was when I first recounted it, and how uncharacteristically sure she was that she understood the image. I sat in the deeply padded chair opposite her desk, closed my eyes, and described what I had seen so often.

I’m sitting in a dark room. There’s no light at all. No sound. I can feel my eyes with my fingers, my ears, too, but I see and hear nothing. I remember nothing. I have no past. And because I see and hear nothing, I have no present. I simply am. That’s my reality. I AM. I feel like a stroke victim imprisoned within a body and brain that no longer function. I can think, but not of any specific images. I feel more than I think. And what I feel is this: Who am I? Where did I come from? Why am I alone? Was I always here? Will I always be here? These thoughts don’t merely fill my mind. They are my mind. There’s no time as we know it, only the questions changing from one to another. Eventually, the questions resolve into a single mantra: Where did I come from? Where did I come from? I’m a brain-damaged man sitting in a room for eternity, asking one question of the darkness.

“Don’t you see?” Rachel had said. “You haven’t fully dealt with the deaths of your wife and daughter. Their loss cut you off from the world, and from yourself. You are damaged. You are wounded. The man walking around in the world of light is an act. The real David Tennant is sitting in that dark room, unable to think or feel. No one feels his grief or his pain.”

“That’s not it,” I told her. “I did a psychiatry rotation, for God’s sake. This isn’t unresolved grief.”

She sighed and shook her head. “Doctors always make the worst patients.”

A week later, I told her the dream had changed.

“There’s something in the room with me now.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. I can’t see it.”

“But you know it’s there?”

“Yes.”

“Is it a person?”

“No. It’s very small. A sphere, floating in space. A black golf ball floating in the dark.”

“How do you know it’s there?”

“It’s like a deeper darkness at the center of the dark. And it pulls at me.”

“Pulls how?”

“I don’t know. Like gravity. Emotional gravity. But I know this. It knows the answer to my questions. It knows who I am and why I’m stuck in that dark room.”

And so it went, with slight variations, until the dream changed again. When it did, it changed profoundly. One night, while reading at home, I “went under” in the usual way. I found myself sitting in the familiar lightless room, asking my question of the black ball. Then, without warning, the ball exploded into retina-scorching light. After so much darkness, the striking of a match would have seemed an explosion, but this was no match. It blasted outward in all directions with the magnitude of a hydrogen bomb. Only this explosion did not suck back into itself and blossom into a mushroom cloud. It expanded with infinite power and speed, and I had the horrifying sense of being devoured by it, devoured but not destroyed. As the blinding light consumed the darkness, which was me, I somehow knew that this could go on for billions of years without destroying me altogether. Yet still I was afraid.

Rachel didn’t know what to make of this dream. Over the next three weeks, she listened as I described the births of stars and galaxies, their lives and deaths: black holes, supernovas, flashes of nebulae like powdered diamonds flung into the blackness, planets born and dying. I seemed to see from one end of the universe to the other, all objects at once as they expanded into me at the speed of light.

“Have you seen images like these before?” she asked me. “In waking life?”

“How could I?”

“Have you seen photographs taken by the Hubble space telescope?”

“Of course.”

“They’re very much like what you’re describing.”

Frustration crept into my voice. “You don’t understand. I’m not just seeing this. I’m feeling it. The way I might feel watching children, or combat, or lovers together. It’s not merely a visual display.”

“Go on.”

That was what she always said. I closed my eyes and submerged myself in my most recent dream.

“I’m watching a planet. Hovering above it. There are clouds, but not as we know them. They’re green like acid, and tortured by storms. I’m diving now, diving down through the clouds, like a satellite image zooming in to ground level. There’s an ocean below, but it’s not blue. It’s red, and boiling. I plunge through its surface, deep into the red. I’m looking for something, but it’s not there. This ocean is empty.”

“A lot of things came to me when you described that,” Rachel said. “The color imagery first. Red could be important. The empty ocean is a symbol of barrenness, which expresses your aggrieved state.” She hesitated. “What are you looking for in that ocean?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think you do.”

“I’m not looking for Karen and Zooey.”

“David.” A hint of irritation in her voice. “If you don’t think these images are symbolic, why are you here?”

I opened my eyes and looked at her perfectly composed face. A curtain of professionalism obscured her empathy, but I saw the truth. She was projecting her sense of loss about her own family onto me.

“I’m here because I can’t find answers on my own,” I said. “Because I’ve read a mountain of books, and they haven’t helped.”

She nodded gravely. “How do you remember the hallucinations in such detail? Do you write them down when you wake up?”

“No. They aren’t like normal dreams, where the harder you try to remember, the less you can. These are indelible. Isn’t that a feature of narcoleptic dreams?”

“Yes,” she said softly. “All right. Karen and Zooey died in water. They both drowned. Karen probably bled a good bit from her hands, and where she hit her head on the steering wheel. That would give us red water.” Rachel reclined her chair and looked at the ceiling tiles. “These hallucinations have no people in them, yet you experience strong emotional reactions. You mentioned combat. Have you ever been in combat?”

“No.”

“But you know that Karen fought to save Zooey. She fought to stay alive. You told me that.”

I shut my eyes. I didn’t like to think about that part of it, but sometimes I couldn’t banish the thoughts. When Karen’s car flipped into the pond, it had landed on its roof and sunk into a foot of soft mud. The electric windows shorted out, and the doors were impossible to open. Broken bones in Karen’s hands and feet testified to the fury with which she had fought to smash the windows. She was a small woman, not physically strong, but she had not given up. A paramedic from the accident scene told me that when the car was finally winched out of the muck and its doors opened, he found her in the backseat, one arm wrapped tightly around Zooey, the other arm floating free, that hand shattered and lacerated over the knuckles.

What had happened was clear. As water filled the car and Karen fought to break the windows, Zooey had panicked. Anyone would, and especially a child. At that point, some mothers would have kept fighting while their child screamed in terror. Others would have comforted their child and prayed for help to come. But Karen had pulled Zooey tight against her, promised her that everything was going to be all right, and then with her feet fought to her last breath to escape the waterbound coffin. For her to cling to Zooey while suffering the agony of anoxia testified to a love stronger than terror, and that knowledge had helped bring me some peace.

“Green clouds and a red ocean have nothing to do with a car accident five years ago,” I said.

“No? Then I think you should tell me more about your childhood.”

“It’s not relevant.”

“You can’t know that,” Rachel insisted.

“I do.”

“Tell me about your work, then.”

“I teach medical ethics.”

“You took a leave of absence over a year ago.”

I whipped my head toward her and opened my eyes. “How do you know that?”

“I heard it at the hospital.”

“Who said it?”

“I don’t remember. I overheard it. You’re very well known in the medical community. Physicians at Duke refer to your book all the time. They did at New York Presbyterian, too. So, is it true? Did you take a leave of absence from the medical school?”

“Let’s stick to the dreams, okay? It’s safer for both of us.”

“Safer how?”

I didn’t answer.

By the next week’s appointment, the dreams had changed again.

“I’m looking at the Earth. Suspended in space. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Blue and green with swirling white clouds. It’s a living thing, a perfect closed system. I dive through the clouds, a hundred-mile swan dive into deep blue ocean. It’s bursting with life. Giant molecules, multicelled creatures, jellyfish, squid, serpents, sharks. The land, too, is teeming. Covered with jungle. A symphony of green. On the shore, fish flop out of the waves and grow legs. Strange crabs scuttle onto the sand and change into other animals I’ve never seen. Time is running in fast-forward, like evolution run through a projector at a million times natural speed. Dinosaurs morph into birds, rodents into mammals. Primates lose their hair. Ice sheets flatten the jungles and then melt into savannah. Twenty thousand years pass in one breath—”

“Take it slow,” Rachel advised. “You’re getting agitated.”

“How could I be seeing all that?”

“You know the answer. Your mind can create any conceivable image and make it real. That photograph of the earth from space is an icon of modern culture. It moves everyone who sees it, and you must have seen it fifty times since childhood.”

“My mind can create animals I’ve never seen? Realistic-looking animals?”

“Of course. You’ve seen Hieronymus Bosch paintings. And I’ve seen the kind of time-lapse images you’re describing on television. In the old days, Life magazine did things like that in print. ‘The Ascent of Man,’ like that. The question is, why are you seeing these things?”

“That’s what I’m here to find out.”

“Are you present in this surreal landscape?”

“No.”

“What do you feel?”

“I’m still looking for something.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. I’m like a bird scanning the earth and sea for … something.”

“Are you a bird in the dream?”

She sounded hopeful. Birds must mean something in the lexicon of dream interpretation. “No.”

“What are you?”

“Nothing, really. A pair of eyes.”

“An observer.”

“Yes. A disembodied observer. T. J. Eckleburg.”

“Who?”

“Nothing. Something from Scott Fitzgerald.”

“Oh. I remember.” She put the end of her pen in her mouth and bit it. An unusual gesture for her. “Do you have an opinion about why you’re seeing all this?”

“Yes.” I knew my next words would surprise her. “I believe someone is showing it to me.”

Her eyes widened, practically histrionics from Rachel Weiss. “Really?”

“Yes.”

“Who is showing this to you?”

“I have no idea. Why do you think I’m seeing it?”

She moved her head from side to side. I could almost see her neurons firing, processing my words through the filters that education and experience had embedded in her brain. “Evolution is change,” she said. “You’re seeing change sped up to unnatural velocity. Uncontrollable change. I sense this may have something to do with your work.”

You could be right, I thought, but I didn’t say that. I simply moved on. My silence was her only protection. In the end, it didn’t matter, because the theme of evolution died, and what came to dominate my sleeping mind shook me to the core.

There were people in my new dreams. They couldn’t see me, and I only saw flashes of them. It was as though I were watching damaged strips of film cobbled together out of order. A woman walking with a baby on her hip. A man drawing water from a well. A soldier in uniform, carrying a short sword, the gladius I had learned about in Mrs. Whaley’s eighth-grade Latin class. A Roman soldier. That was my first real clue that this was no random series of images, but scenes from a particular era. I saw oxen pulling plows. A young woman selling herself on the street. Men exchanging money. Gold and copper coins with the imperious profile of an emperor upon them. And a name. Tiberius. The name triggered something in my mind, so I checked the Internet. The successor of Augustus, Tiberius was a former commander of legions who spent much of his reign leading military campaigns in Germania. One of the few important events of his rule—seen through the lens of hindsight—was the execution of a Jewish peasant said to have claimed to be king of the Jews.

“Was your father deeply religious?” Rachel asked, upon hearing about these new images.

“No. He was … he looked at the world in a more fundamental way.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“It’s not relevant.”

An exasperated sigh. “Your mother, then?”

“She had faith in something greater than humanity, but she wasn’t big on organized religion.”

“You had no religious indoctrination as a child?”

“Sunday school for a couple of years. It didn’t take.”

“What denomination?”

“Methodist. It was the closest church to our house.”

“Did they show films about Jesus’s life?”

“It’s possible. I don’t remember.”

“You grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, right? It’s more probable than not. And of course we’ve all seen the grand biblical epics from the fifties. The Ten Commandments. Ben-Hur. Those things.”

“What are you saying?”

“Only that the accoutrements of these hallucinations have been sitting in your subconscious for years. They’re in all of us. But your dreams seem to be moving toward something. And that something may be Jesus of Nazareth.”

“Have you heard of dreams like this before?” I asked.

“Of course. Many people dream of Jesus. Of personal interactions with him, receiving messages from him. But your dream progression has a certain logic to it, and a naturalistic tone rather than the wildness of obsessive fantasy. Also, you claim to be an atheist. Or at least agnostic. I’m very interested to see where this goes.”

I appreciated her interest, but I was tired of waiting for answers. “But what do you think it means?”

She pursed her lips, then shook her head. “I’m no longer convinced that this has to do with the loss of your wife and daughter. But the truth is, I simply don’t know enough about your life to make an informed evaluation.”

We were at a stalemate. I still didn’t believe that my past had anything to do with my dreams. Yet as the days passed, the scarred strips of film in my head began to clear, and certain dream characters to reappear. The faces I saw became familiar, like friends. Then more familiar than friends. A feeling was growing in me that I remembered these faces, and not merely from previous dreams. I described them for Rachel as accurately as I could.

I’m sitting in the midst of a circle, rapt bearded faces watching me. I know I’m speaking, because they’re obviously listening to me, yet I can’t hear my own words.

I see a woman’s face, angelic yet common, and a pair of eyes I know like those of my mother. They don’t belong to my mother, though, not the mother who raised me in Oak Ridge. Yet they watch me with pure love. A bearded man stands behind her, watching me with a father’s pride. But my father was clean shaven all his life …

I see donkeys … a date palm. Naked children. A brown river. I feel the cold, jarring shock of immersion, the beat of my feet on sand. I see a young girl, beautiful and dark-haired, leaning toward my face for a kiss, then blushing and running away. I’m walking among adults. Their faces say, This child is not like other children. A wild-eyed man stands waist deep in water, a line of men and women awaiting their turn to be submerged, while others come up from the water coughing and sputtering, their eyes wide.

Sometimes the dreams had no logic, but were only disjointed fragments. When logic finally returned, it frightened me.

I’m sitting beside the bed of a small boy. He can’t move. His eyes are closed. He’s been paralyzed for two days. His mother and aunt sit with me. They bring food, cool water, oil to anoint the boy. I speak softly in his ear. I tell the women to hold his hands. Then I lean down and speak his name. His eyes squeeze tight, expressing mucus. Then they open and light up with recognition of his mother. His mother gasps, then screams that his hand moved. She lifts him up, and he hugs her. The women weep with happiness …

I’m eating with a group of women. Olives and flat bread. Some women won’t meet my eyes. After the meal, they take me into a bedroom, where a pregnant girl lies on the bed. They tell me the baby has been inside her too long. Labor will not begin. They fear the child is dead. I ask the women to leave. The young mother fears me. I calm her with soft words, then lift the blanket and lay my hands on her belly. It’s distended, tight as a drum. I leave my hands there for a long time, gently urging, speaking softly to her. I can’t understand what I’m saying. It’s like a soft chant. After a time, her mouth opens. She’s felt a kick. She cries out for the other women. “My baby is alive!” The women lay their hands on me, trying to touch me as if I possess some invisible power. “Surely he is the one,” they say.

“These are stories from the Bible,” Rachel said, “known by millions of schoolchildren. There’s nothing unique about them.”

“I’ve been reading the New Testament,” I told her. “There’s no record of Jesus healing a little boy of paralysis. No description of him eating a meal with only women, then inducing labor.”

“But those are both healing images. “And you’re a physician. Your subconscious seems to be casting Jesus in your image. Or vice versa. Perhaps the problem really is your work. Have you moved further away from pure medicine? I’ve known doctors who fell into depression after giving up hands-on patient care for pure research. Perhaps this is something like that?”

She’d guessed correctly about my moving away from patient care, but my lucid dreams weren’t some strange expression of nostalgia for my days in the white coat.

“There’s another possibility,” she suggested. “One more in line with my original interpretation. These images of divine healing could be subconscious wishes that you could bring Karen and Zooey back. Think about it. What were two of Jesus’ most notable miracles?”

I nodded reluctantly. “Raising Lazarus from the dead.”

“Yes. And he also resurrected a little girl, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Yes. But I don’t think that’s the significance of these dreams.”

Rachel smiled with infinite patience. “Well, one thing is certain. Eventually, your subconscious will make its message clear.”

That turned out to be our last session. Because that night, my dreams changed again, and I had no intention of telling Rachel how.

The new dream was clearer than any that had come before, and though I was speaking in a foreign language, I could understand my words. I was walking down a sandy road. I came to a well. The water was low in the well, and I had nothing to draw it with. After a time, a woman came with an urn on a rope. I asked if she would draw me some water. She appeared surprised that I would speak to her, and I sensed that we were of different tribes. I told her the water in the well would not cure her thirst. We talked for a time, and she began to look at me with appraising eyes.

“I can see you are a prophet,” she said. “You see many things that are hidden.”

“I’m no prophet,” I told her.

She watched me in silence for a while. Then she said, “They speak of a Messiah who will come someday to tell us things. What do you think of that?”

I looked at the ground, but words of profound conviction rose unbidden into my throat. I looked at the woman and said, “I that speak to you am he.”

The woman did not laugh. She knelt and touched my knee, then walked away, looking back over her shoulder again and again.

When I snapped out of that dream, I was soaked in sweat. I didn’t lift the phone and call Rachel for an emergency appointment. I saw no point. I no longer believed any dream interpretation could help me, because I was not dreaming. I was remembering.

“What are you thinking about?” Rachel asked from the passenger seat.

We were nearing the UNC campus. “How you got here.”

She shifted in her seat and gave me a concerned look. “I’m here because you missed three sessions, and you wouldn’t have done that unless things had taken a turn for the worse. I think your hallucinations have changed again, and they’ve scared the hell out of you.”

I gripped the wheel tighter but didn’t speak. Somewhere, the NSA was listening.

“Why don’t you tell me?” she said. “What could be the harm?”

“This isn’t the time. Or the place.”

The UNC theater was up ahead on the left. To our right the Forest Amphitheater lay in the trees below the road. I made a hard right and coasted down a dark hill on a street that ran between two rows of stately homes, a single-entrance neighborhood that housed tenured professors and affluent young professionals. Fielding had lived in a small, two-story house set well back from the street. Perfect for him and the Chinese wife he hoped to bring to America.

“Where are we?” Rachel asked.

“Fielding’s house is right up here.”

I looked in the direction of the house but saw only darkness. I’d expected to find the place ablaze with light, as my own had been after I lost Karen and Zooey. I had a moment of panic, a premonition that I’d driven into one of those 1970s conspiracy films where you walk up to a familiar house and find it vacant. Or worse, with an entirely new family living there.

A porch light clicked on thirty yards from the street. Lu Li must have been watching from a darkened window. I turned my head and scanned the street for suspicious vehicles. I frequently spotted the NSA surveillance cars assigned to tail me. Either the security teams didn’t care if we saw them or, more likely, they wanted us to know we were being watched. Tonight I saw nothing suspicious, but I did sense that something wasn’t as it should be. Perhaps there were watchers who did not want to be seen. I turned into Fielding’s driveway and pulled up to the closed garage door.

“A Nobel laureate lives here?” Rachel asked, gesturing at the modest house.

“Lived,” I corrected. “Stay here. I’m going to the door alone.”

“For God’s sake,” she snapped. “This is ridiculous. Just admit this is all a charade, and let’s go get some coffee and talk about it.”

I grabbed her arm and looked hard into her eyes. “Listen to me, damn it. It’s probably okay, but this is the way we’re going to do it. I’ll whistle when it’s all right for you to come up.”

I walked up to the front door of my dead friend’s house, my hands in plain sight, my mind on the .38 in my pocket.