“Yes, and the native tongue of Jesus Christ.”
“What?”
“According to Bob’s friend, who’s a scholar and an expert on Aramaic, it’s still spoken in small parts of the Middle East. He says Zack spoke it in an older dialect.”
All Maggie could say was, “What?”
Kate nodded. “That’s what he claims.”
“Well, that’s not possible. He’s wrong. Zack doesn’t know any ancient languages. That’s absurd.”
“I’m just telling you what he said. He also translated what he could make out.” She removed a notepad from her handbag. “I guess he was repeating several phrases: ‘Father, with You everything is possible. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what You will.’ Then Zack recited the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic.”
“I don’t believe this.”
“I know. But according to Avedisian, that’s what it was, an excerpt from the Sermon on the Mount in the original dialect.”
“W-what?… How?”
“I don’t know,” Kate said. “As far as you know, did he ever take a course in Aramaic?”
“No, and why would he?”
“I don’t know. And I guess it’s not your basic college elective. According to Art, the only place you can find such a course in New England is the grad school at Harvard. And we know he never did that. Nor is Aramaic something you can pick up on Rosetta Stone.”
“Then the guy’s wrong. That’s not what it was,” Maggie insisted.
“I guess. Even if you wanted to, where would you find Aramaic versions of Jesus’s sermons?”
Maggie felt a rash of gooseflesh flash up her arms. “He’s not even religious.”
“I know, but how do you explain it?”
“The guy is wrong. Dead wrong.”
Kate nodded and sipped her coffee.
And Maggie rubbed her arms against the chill.
* * *
Later at home, Maggie listened to the tape over and over again. She could make no sense of the language, of course. It sounded a bit like Arabic crossed with Greek. But what stayed with her as she lay on her pillow in the dark was not the language, but the voice.
All she could hear was Nick.
13
Beetles were eating his brain.
He could hear them just inside his ears—a high-pitched electric chittering as they munched their way through the gray matter to the core of his head.
Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. He could feel their thrumming just below his skull, nearly blinding him with distraction. He could barely restrain himself from making a scene in the back of the bus, from screaming and ramming his head into the balance pole.
As he did every morning at daybreak, he walked to Harvard Square from Boston and boarded the number 350 bus that took him down Massachusetts Avenue to the Alewife stop at the Cambridge/Arlington line, where he’d get off and walk half a mile to the intersection of Routes 16 and 2, his territory to panhandle the line of cars at the stoplight. It was a good place for handouts—maybe a buck or two for every twenty cars.
But this morning was the worst. The crackling and high-pitched chit-chit sounds and images of their little pincers boring tunnels had grown worse over the last week, so much so that he could barely hold up his cardboard sign:
PLEASE HELP
SICK AND HOMELESS
GOD BLESS
He could barely concentrate on his little walk up the worn path from the traffic lights along the line of stopped cars. Usually he’d eye the drivers, hoping they’d not pretend he was invisible and lower the window with a handout.
The lunatic scrabble on the inside of his skull had been going on for days, but today it was worse than ever —as if he had been slipped some bad tripping mushrooms. Then last night, he had a dream about falling off his bed and into a large dark funnel, moving at breakneck speed toward a misty gray light at the end. But it didn’t feel like a dream because he heard an electric crackling sound that got louder as he shot down the tube toward an end that he did not want to reach. As he neared the light, he tried to stop himself by dragging his hands and feet against the sides but broke through the end into a black pit buzzing with beetles.
When he woke, he stumbled his way to the bus stop, trying to shake the sensation that they were inside his head and threatening to eat their way out of his ears. By the time he got off at Alewife, the chittering had intensified to an insane level, leaving him rubbing his face and batting his ears. His whole world had been reduced to those little shiny bodies with pincer jaws beginning to stream out of his ears and nose.
He stumbled along the traffic line, frantically trying to wipe the things off his face and head, spitting and gasping for air against the hot drilling buzz.
He stumbled to the ground, totally unaware of the drivers trying to watch the lights while not being distracted by the spectacle of Wally, yelping and insanely tearing his hair from his scalp and skin from his face.
Through the crack of his eyes, he saw a huge green dump truck idling at the light, the large double wheels filling his vision.
At the moment the light changed and the traffic began to move again, Wally scuttled onto the road and pushed his head under the rear tires.
14
Maggie had no idea how Zack ended up muttering Jesus’s words in Aramaic.
The only thing that made sense was that somewhere in his studies he had read it or heard a tape and committed it to memory, consciously or unconsciously. But that raised even more questions, like where did one find such recordings? Even if he could, why would Zack, who took pride in being a secular humanist, be interested? Or commit to memory the Lord’s Prayer in the original? Not to mention how and why he’d muttered the passages from a coma.
The other possibility was Nick. During his decline, he had become fanatically religious, maybe to the point of reading the Bible in Aramaic. Possibly without her knowledge, he had taught it to Zack as a child.
Whatever the explanation, Zack was now in an undisclosed room with a staff sworn to secrecy and an around-the-clock guard—an arrangement made by the hospital, which was terrified that Maggie might sue for violation of her son’s right to privacy. Stephanie, the nurse’s aide, had been fired for posting the video.
Although the major media had by now dropped the story, online religious groups complained about people being barred from divine healing. Photographs of Zack still circulated on the Internet, as did the video. There was also a fuzzy shot of a water stain on the wall above his bed that was reported to be the face of Jesus.
To Maggie it looked like a water stain. A dead dull water stain.
15
The death notice of Thomas Pomeroy was on the obituary pages in the form of a lengthy article about the man and his life. And Roman read it with interest.
Pomeroy had been found dead on his living room couch by a housekeeper. The autopsy report claimed that he had died from “cardiac arrest”—words that filled Roman with pride.
