Tunnel Vision

His lips and tongue were numb. His eyes were burning. Their faces hung in watery blurs.

“Zack? Are you all right?”

“What are you doing?” Fear jerked his body. He tried to get up, but his limbs were wooden blocks. And his arms and chest were tangled in something.

“Don’t be afraid,” the younger woman said. “You’re doing fine.”

“Who are you?”

“Zack, it’s me, Sarah Wyman.” The woman pushed her face forward. “You remember me. And Dr. Luria and Dr. Cates.”

He tried to sit up but was heavy with wet sand and vegetation. And his head was thick with sludge. He flopped back down on the sand and looked up at the people. This woman and two men, one older, the other a younger black man. He had no idea who they were. He had no idea why they were calling him Zack.

With help from the younger woman, he sat up and blood drained from his head.

“Don’t you remember?” the older woman asked.

He shook his head. He remembered nothing.

“Tell me your name,” she said, her face looking tight and pale but for dried blood on her cheek. She looked vaguely familiar.

For a long moment, he stared into her eyes. Your name. Your name. “I don’t know.” He looked around but couldn’t see the beach or water. And the sky had been replaced with a ceiling, and the moon was panels of fluorescent lights.

Your name. He knew he had one. A history. A presence. Yet it was just beyond his grasp.

“You’d been asleep for an hour, don’t you remember? This is Elizabeth Luria and Morris Stern and Byron Cates. And me, Sarah. We were doing tests on you.”

The night beach had faded into a large white room with electronic equipment attached by wires to his head and arms, where the seaweed had been. Behind him was a large machine with a round opening. And three people. Then, like a Polaroid image developing, it all came back to him. “Zack … Kashian.”

“Good,” Sarah said, looking relieved. “Do you know why you’re here?”

“Yes.” And they asked him the usual questions to test the state of his memory.

Then Dr. Luria began a battery of other questions. “Do you remember anything—images or experiences, locales, other people—from when you were in suspension?”

Suspension? He wasn’t in suspension. He wasn’t asleep. “I think I was on a beach.”

“A beach?” Luria said.

His mind was foggy, and his recall faded rapidly. “Got sand in my face.”

“You were kind of spitting when you came through,” Sarah said.

“Recall what you were doing at the beach?” Luria asked, her face stiff with concern.

“No.”

“Any movements of any kind—walking, jumping, swimming, interacting with people?”

“I don’t recall anything.”

“What about the presence of other people?”

Zack shook his head. “I was alone.”

Byron Cates came over from the computer. “Zack, can you characterize your emotional state while at that beach?”

“My emotional state?” He thought for a moment, trying to summon the experience. Then he shook his head. “Not really. Just a blank.”

Cates glanced at Luria for a moment. “No sense of anxiety or fear?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. Why you asking?”

“Because your blood chemistry registered a high level of cortisol, which is a stress hormone secreted by the adrenal gland.”

Dr. Stern cut in. He had been studying feedback from the computer monitor he was at. “Zack, we’ve been doing these kinds of tests for a while, matching blood and neuroelectrical activities with subjective reports. There’s every indication your unconscious experience was borderline violent.”

“But I don’t remember any of it.”

“Just as well,” Stern said. “Because it appears you were fighting for your life.”

39

“Zachary Kashian,” Roman Pace whispered to himself. “Gotcha!”

The morning after his visit to the Devereux, Roman went to the Providence Public Library on Empire Street, where he Googled “coma,” “woke,” and “Jesus.” He came up with over 277,000 hits. He refined the search by adding “Massachusetts,” reducing it to 5,000 hits. At the top were recent reports about a Northeastern grad student who had gotten into a bicycling accident back in January and ended up in a coma for nearly three months, waking up this past Easter Sunday.

What held Roman’s attention was that during the coma, the kid had mysteriously muttered snippets of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, including the Lord’s Prayer, in the original language. That and how a lot of miracle- seeking religious fanatics had crashed his hospital room and had to be removed by security.

One of the doctors remarked that “given the severity of his trauma and the coma level,” his odds of recovery were “very slim”—borderline miraculous. Others were convinced that Kashian was channeling Jesus Christ. According to all reports, the kid had never been exposed to Aramaic. He was also a member of some college atheist club.

What made Roman’s heart leap was that a nurse’s aide, so taken by the “miracle,” had captured the mutterings on a cell phone video. She was subsequently fired for breach of confidentiality. But the clip had made it to YouTube, and Roman watched it over and over again.

Of course, the kid was emaciated and his head had been shaved and had wires coming out of it. And with his eyes closed, he looked like something this side of a corpse. Roman could not tell what he really looked like, but he froze the video and printed up a frame.

The likeness was made worse by the graininess. But it would do.

40

Sarah lived just off of Harvard Square in a second-floor apartment on Harvard Street, across from the Pennypacker dormitory. She met Zack at the door that Friday night, and they walked down the street to Massachusetts Avenue and to the Grafton Street Pub & Grill, where they got a table in view of the bar.

She was dressed in jeans, a cream-colored shirt, and a matching jacket. With her short auburn hair, she looked more like a French fashion model than a neuroscientist. A waiter hustled over and took their drink orders. Zack asked for a Guinness and Sarah a sauvignon blanc.

“So, what’s a nice girl like you doing in near-death experiences?” he asked her.

She chuckled. “Now, there’s an original line. Well, my grad work was with Morris Stern in his neurobiology lab at Tufts. He was working on enhancing molecular MRI imaging and ended up as my thesis adviser. He signed up with Dr. Luria, and later he asked me aboard.”

“What was your thesis on?”

“Neurotheology.”

“Ah, yes: ‘The Role of Serotonin … Receptors in Spirituality.’”

She nodded. “The neurological mechanisms active in spiritual and religious experiences.”

“Kind of what you’re doing with Dr. Luria—seeing if we’re hardwired for God.”