Syndrome

dream.'

Chapter 31

Friday, April 10

7:04a.m.

Stone felt his consciousness returning as the blast of an engine cut through his sedative-induced reverie. Where was he? There were vibrations all around him and a deafening roar that was slowly spiraling upward in frequency and volume.

As the haze that engulfed his mind slowly began to dissipate, he wondered if this wasn't more of the fantasy he'd been having, of flying through some kind of multicolored space-time continuum. Or was he waking up to something spectacularly real?

As he opened his eyes and looked around, he realized it was no dream. He was in a cramped airline seat, strapped in with a black seat belt. His head was gently secured to a headrest by a soft cotton scarf, but his hands were free, lying in his lap.

Somebody had lifted him into the seat and strapped him down.

On his left was a Plexiglas window, and when he looked out, he saw the earth beneath him begin falling away.

My God.

Then he realized he was in a white-and-gray helicopter that had just lifted off from a rooftop helo pad. He watched spellbound quickly coming awake, as the craft quickly began a flight path that circled around and past the lower end of Manhattan.

Then he heard the pilot speaking curtly to an air controller somewhere and he looked up and realized it was the same samurai bastard who’d slugged him on the street and then aided in his kidnapping.

But that had to be yesterday, or God knows how many days ago. He was realizing he’d just lost a chunk of his life.

And now he was being taken somewhere. In a very big hurry.

'Being up here always seems like being closer to God' came a voice from behind him. He recognized it with a jolt. It was the man who thought hewasGod.

Shakily he removed the scarf that had been holding his head and turned around. Winston Bartlett was gazing down through his own plastic window, seemingly talking to himself.

'What. . what the hell is going on?' He could barely get the words out.

'Oh,' Bartlett said turning to look at him. 'Good. I particularly wanted you to see this. It should help make my point.'

Stone struggled to comprehend what was happening. He was with the man he had wanted to callFatherfor nearly four decades, whether he could admit that to himself or not. It could be the beginning of the kind of bonding he had always hungered for, but he didn't want it like this. They finally had a relationship, and it was completely antagonistic. He had just been drugged and kidnapped by his own father, this after being threatened and fired. Again, Daddy dearest.

So what wasthisevolving chapter about? Winston Bartlett, he knew, could be ruthless, but he also was a visionary in his own way.

Then he remembered what had happened. He'd been trying to track down Kristen.

'Where. . where are we going?'

'We're going to the place you seem to find so interesting,' Bartlett declared over the din of the engine. 'But I was hoping that we could have a rational discourse along the way. What's been happening thus far doesn't serve either of us. I'm hoping things have cooled down a bit and we can call a truce.'

Stone was still trying to clear his head, get the cobwebs away. It was difficult. He'd lost consciousness in a town house in the Village, on solid ground, and regained it here, where the earth itself seemed in motion. And now Bartlett was trying out another bargaining style, so even the rules appeared to be in flux.

'Look, down there.' Bartlett was projecting through the din around them and pointing toward the wide expanse of New York Harbor. 'This McDonnell Douglas is my Zendo, my monastery, and the world below is my contemplative garden. I come up here to find peace. This is an intersection of the great forces of nature, one of a finite number on earth, where a mighty river returns to the salt sea from which it came. These waters have flowed in the same cycle for millions, billions of years, mingling, evaporating, separating again-just as life on this planet continually replicates itself, growing and aging and dying, but not before producing the seeds of its replacement. How can something be at once both timeless and constantly changing? I ponder that a lot and I always end up thinking of this river meeting the sea. Down there, nature is a force unto itself, oblivious to good or evil, to human desires or human laws.'

Bartlett was doing a riff on some obsession of his own, Stone decided. Or maybe it was some of the Zen philosophy that went along with acquiring a world-class collection of samurai swords (if you believed the published profiles).

All the same, looking down at the sprawling city and the harbor full of ships, it was hard not to feel omnipotent and humble at the same time. The thing Bartlett seemed to be getting at, though, was that nature could not be told what to do. And he seemed to be on the verge of declaring himself a part of that unbridled natural force, also powerful enough to do whatever he pleased.

Now they were heading up the Hudson, teeming with early-bird tourist cruises and small single-masted sailboats. Bartlett paused to take in the view with satisfaction. Finally he continued his monologue.

'I know we've had our differences, but I'm prepared to try to get past that. I want to talk to you about something I always think of when I fly across this river. Time. I call my obsession Time and the River. Physicists will tell you that time should be thought of as a kind of fourth dimension. Things are always at a certain place in three dimensions, but when you describe the location of a subatomic particle, for example, you also have to say when it was there. To locate it accurately, you need four dimensions. We think of them all as rigid but what if one of them could be made fluid? What if you could alter the character of time?'

In spite of himself, Stone took the bait. 'I don't know what this has to do with anything. Nobody can alter the pace of time.' He found himself recalling a snippet of verse by John Donne:

O how feeble is man's power,

That if good fortune fall,

Cannot add another hour,

Nor a lost hour recall!

'Strictly speaking, that's true,' Bartlett said gravely, turning away again to stare out the Plexiglas window, down into the morning space below them. The Hudson was now a giant ribbon of blue heading north into the mist. 'But what if we could alter the clocks in our body to make them run slower?' He smiled then pointed off to his left. 'All this below us has happened in a couple of hundred years. What will it look like down there in another hundred years? Will we still need these puny machines to fly, or will there be teleportation? Whatever it is, what would you give to be around to see that? To have your own time slow down while the world around you went on?'

Stone was looking out into space, wondering. . notwhetherWinston Bartlett was an egomaniacal madman but ratherhowtruly mad he really was.

Flying in the helicopter, he felt like Faust being shown the world by Mephistopheles. Except here Satan was his own father, offering him a teasing prospect of what it would be like to live on and on.

It would make a hell of a story. The problem was, miracles always came with some kind of terrible price. What was the price this time?

Then he had another thought. Was that what had happened to Kristen? Was she paying the price for some kind of hubris that pushed nature too far? Nobody had claimed she had any kind of medical condition that necessitated a stem cell intervention. So had she been experimenting with some other procedure? Had