“Who’s there with you?”
He hesitated for a spell, trying to identify the sensation, which kept fading and returning. Suddenly it got very strong, and he turned his head as if trying to track the intruder. He didn’t feel fear or pleasure, just the awareness of a presence—like entering the woods and feeling as if you’re being watched. The next moment he was at a great height, like a bird riding thermals. He wanted to narrate but couldn’t. Then he began to dive through the gloom—zooming downward through space toward a pinpoint of light. As he glided closer, the spot took on form—a young boy atop a flight of stairs wearing a red shirt and holding a baseball glove—himself. And climbing toward him with open arms was a man.
“Hey, sport, want to play catch?”
“Dad.”
The sound of his own voice startled him back to the moment—sitting blindfolded and wired in a chair with a contraption on his head. He pulled off the blinders as a light went on.
A disembodied female voice said, “Are you okay?”
He could see her standing before him, and for a split second he had no idea who she was or why he was in a chair in a booth. Then it all rushed back. And the swelling joy of seeing his father so full and vital suddenly turned black, like a film exposed to light.
Sarah Wyman was asking how he was. He nodded but couldn’t speak. Grief turned his chest into a hollowed cavity.
They unhooked him and led him out and into the office, where he took a seat. He had been in the booth for a little less than an hour, but it seemed timeless. Sarah got him a bottle of water, and he sipped on it while he found his center again. Then he forced a thin smile. “What did you do? I felt like I was on an acid trip.”
“We stimulated sections of your temporal and frontal lobes.”
Dr. Luria entered the booth. “You said you sensed someone in the room with you.”
He nodded.
“Did you recognize who it was?”
He guessed that the various monitors had picked up an emotional change, blood pressure or EKG quickening or whatever, so there was no point in denial. “My father.”
Luria gave him a penetrating look. “Your father? Can you elaborate? Where were you? What he was doing?”
He described the image of his father climbing the stairs to him.
“And how did your father look? How was he dressed?” Luria asked.
Zack didn’t know why that was important. “Happy to see me. I don’t remember how he was dressed. But normal, I think—shirt and pants.”
And he was alive.
“How did you feel seeing him?”
He took a deep breath to center himself. “Happy at first.” Zack felt the press of tears behind his eyes. “I was glad to see him. Then he seemed to disappear as he got closer.”
“Closer to you. And then?”
“And then I was standing all alone.” His throat thickened by the second. He took in a deep breath and in his head began reciting the value of pi to keep from breaking down.
“Are you okay?”
He nodded, but his eyes filled up as melancholy hollowed out his chest. No, grief—what had assaulted him whenever he dreamed of his father, leaving him with deep, racking sobs and an aching in his soul. The dreams were all similar—his dad making a surprise return home, or showing up after school let out, or climbing the stairs where Zack waited for him.
“Hey, sport, want to hit a few?”
“Sorry we put you through that,” Dr. Luria said, her eyes black with pupils. She looked fascinated with the results.
A sudden weariness weighed on him. “Think I’m ready to go home,” he said, trying to sound neutral.
“Of course. But if it’s okay, we’d like to run some more tests on you. Of course, at the same fee.”
Zack nodded. Only if you could put me back on those stairs.
“What are good times for you?”
“Tuesdays and Thursdays.”
She handed him a check and led him out. Damian was already in the car with the driver. “So, how’d it go?” Damian asked as the car pulled away.
They had signed a nondisclosure form and sworn not to talk about their experiences even with each other. So all Zack said was, “I could barely stay awake.”
“You mean you didn’t get anything?”
“Just a little dizzy.” Zack didn’t want to talk. He just wanted to fall into a deep sleep. “What about you?”
“Nothing, nada,” said Damian. “But I’m two hundred and fifty bucks better off.”
Zack nodded. At the moment, he was too drained to think about money. Whatever had occurred had left him with a sadness not felt in years. And something else: a weird and disturbing sense of his father’s presence that went beyond dreams.
26
“‘When little men cast long shadows you know the sun is setting.’”
Norman Babcock couldn’t recall where he had heard that, but it described to a tee Warren Gladstone, whose fat evil face filled the screen of his laptop. He was at the wheel of the Dori-Anne, his forty-six-foot powerboat, late out of winter storage in Newport, Rhode Island. It was a glorious May day, and he was trying out his sea legs.
Norm had been boating since he was eleven, learning to sail at St. Andrews Prep. But it was powerboats that he loved. And this was his third. Beside him sat Father Timothy Callahan, newly appointed priest of St. Pius Church. Tim was half Norm’s age and thirty pounds lighter. He had a full head of chestnut brown hair, whereas Norm Babcock was as bald as a cue ball. Today Father Tim was dressed in a green golf shirt and shorts. His usual attire was all black with a white collar. Or clerical robes, which some weeks ago Norm had donned to hold “confession” with one Roman Pace.
“The man is a bloody snake,” said Babcock, looking at the monitor.
“Yes,” Father Tim replied, his voice weak, barely audible.
While Gladstone pounded on his podium in perfect Evangelical self-righteousness, Norm turned up the volume so his sermon could be heard over the groan of the engines.
“The day of the Lord is coming, I’m telling you. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. No, I’m not talking about the so-called End time, the Day of Doom. I’m talking about the Day of Jubilation. A day we will all rejoice. A day of eternal light.”
Norm veered toward Peddocks Island as they headed out to open sea. He knew all about Gladstone—a rube from the backwoods of Tennessee who followed in his father’s footsteps to become a backwoods preacher. In time, the established clergy—other Protestants and Catholics alike—called him a fraud: just another Bible-thumping “evanghoul” getting fat and powerful off the dollars of destitute trailer parkers desperate for hope. His following at first was small because he was competing with dozens of other teleministries around the country and had no distinction—no hook.
“The day of greatness is coming, and you and I will be there to bear witness.”
But then his sermons shaded into the occult—near-death experiences. Hundreds of books on the subject had been written over the decades—and all basically the same blather. Someone is pronounced dead from a heart attack, an accident, gunshot, whatever. The victim floats out of his or her body to go moving down a tunnel toward a celestial light, where he or she meets spirits of dead relatives and “beings of light.” To bolster “authenticity,” Gladstone claimed to have suffered a near fatal asthma attack; then, while paramedics attended him, he reported moving down a tunnel to a garden where the Lord Jesus Christ himself welcomed him to paradise. He woke up in a hospital, alert to the glorious possibilities, and wrote a book, self-published, of course, and peddled it to his congregation as evidence of God’s truth—for only $9.99. The same old charlatan but with spiritually toxic snake oil.