They watched the evening news until Zack got tired and announced he was going to bed. He gave her a hug and kiss good night, then took a shower and got into bed. Someplace he had read that the average adult took about eight minutes to fall asleep. He probably dozed off in less than two. He slept deeply and dreamlessly until sometime after midnight, when he woke up. For some reason, his room was totally dark—no light seeping through the window blinds, no glow of his clock radio. Not even a light strip under his door from the hall night-light his mother still kept. Stranger still, he could smell the heavy salt air of the ocean. He could even hear waves gently lapping the shore in the black.
He tried to move, but his arms and legs wouldn’t respond. He strained his muscles to push off the blanket, but he couldn’t.
He let a moment pass, then tried to scream but couldn’t get his lungs to respond. All that came out was a pathetic click. He tried again and this time couldn’t suck in air. Couldn’t fill his lungs.
A thought sliced across his mind like a blade:
And it wasn’t a dream.
Cold. Shivering. The core of his body had turned to ice. Fishy night air against his chest. Electrode suction cups. But this wasn’t a reality he recognized. A clammy alienness filled him.
Suddenly the sucking silence was shattered by a banshee blast.
Hands on him. Hands carrying him. Laying him down. In a hole. Then something landed on his face.
28
Zack woke up spitting sand.
The room was dark but for the glow of the clock radio, which said 2:17. He was chilled but pushed off the blanket and sat up. He planted his feet on the rug and spit more sand. It peppered his skin and filled his scalp. He got up and flicked on the lamp, then pulled up the cover, expecting the sheet to be covered with beach sand. It wasn’t. And he had spit only air.
But his head was swimming, and his heart was jogging. He flopped back down, feeling cold and clammy. After several minutes, his head stopped whirling and he got up, slipped on a sweatshirt, and stepped out of his room. The landing at the top of the stairs was still dark but for the night-light that had burned since he and his brother were kids. He gently opened the door to his mother’s room. She was sleeping soundly. He closed the door and walked downstairs, steadying himself on the banister. Inside he was trembling.
He padded into the kitchen, flicked on a light, poured himself a glass of milk, and warmed it in the micro— something his father had taught him when he couldn’t sleep.
His father.
Since that day in the chamber when they deep-stimulated some lobe, he could not stop thinking about him, reliving sweet memories before everything turned horrible—days of playing ball, fishing in the canal, getting buried in the sand …
Outside, the streetlamp turned into a blinking red beacon across the water. In the distance he heard the moan of a foghorn.
He looked back at the kitchen, trying to get out of that dream. The foghorn faded, and he was leaning against the polished granite counter and trying to lose himself in the stainless-steel stove and fridge and other appliances. It worked. He glanced outside, and the red light was the old streetlamp again.
He leaned against the sink and took a few long breaths until he felt his insides settle back into place. Then he gulped down a mouthful of milk. Instantly, he spit it out, gagging over the drain. It was thick with salt. He sniffed it. Like fish water. He dumped the rest into the sink and opened the fridge. He removed the carton of orange juice. It smelled normal. He poured some in a glass and made a test sip. Orange juice. He guzzled a glass to flush the taste of ocean.
He headed back upstairs and dry-swallowed two tablets of Lunesta, hoping they’d knock him into a dreamless sleep. He closed the door and got into bed, lying in the dark, his body clenched against a sudden assault of visions.
But there were none, and relief soon passed through him.
He cleared his mind and tried to concentrate on the dark slurry seeping into his brain. He thought about Sarah Wyman and wondered if she was dating anyone.
He snuggled into the goose-down pillow, the filling making a soft cradle for his head. He pulled the blanket under his chin, then gave a little kick into the void. He would sleep undisturbed, he told himself as the heaviness spread throughout his body and the warm black cocooned around him.
The last thing he remembered before blacking out was a shovelful of sand landing on his face.
29
After closing the doors of his shop, Roman retired to the backroom office, where he went online and Googled LeAnn Cola and Thomas Pomeroy.
They had coauthored several articles on neurophysiology with long, complicated titles that meant little to him. The writing was highly technical, and he had to look up several phrases to get a general sense.
From what he learned, their research was aimed at perfecting ways of detecting microchanges in the electrical activity of the brain by use of a helmetlike device for the skull. Their objective was to help scientists better understand the function of different brain areas to diagnose and monitor diseases like epilepsy and dementia, but the same techniques could be used for personal identification. Signatures. The article went on to suggest security applications.
So what did that have to do with God or Satan?
He didn’t have a clue. And it really didn’t matter since he was thirty-five grand richer and didn’t have to worry.
30
Zack’s brain was still tender from the nightmare when he awoke the next morning. It was seven thirty, and his mother had left to do some errands but had made him a breakfast of potato pancakes, turkey sausages, fruit compote, and a pot of French roast, which helped clear his head. He cleaned up and left her a note of thanks, thinking how she had gone through the fire and hadn’t run off to a nunnery. He took public transportation into town and spent the rest of the day at the Northeastern library working on his thesis.
That night he received a call from Dr. Luria. She wanted to do another test on him next Tuesday evening, if he was free. He was. In advance of that, she asked him to e-mail sample photographs of his family members, friends, pets, his home, and favorite places. Her explanation was that they were going to use them to establish a baseline for brain scans. Zack didn’t know what that meant, but he complied.
He also went online and Googled each of the key people in the lab.
Elizabeth Luria was a professor emerita of microbiology at Harvard Medical School with a long list of publications on brain plasticity and imaging in prestigious-sounding journals such as
