As he pressed shut his eyes, Billy thought,
He adjusted his grip on the cross-hatchings until he was fully comfortable. He lifted the bar from the spotter above his face, feeling the full exertion, then lowered it to his chest, where he let it rest a moment.
When he was fully psyched, he pushed with all his might to raise the bar to full extension, where his bones would lock in place. His arms shook as the blood swelled his arms and shoulders and bulged the arteries along the sides of his neck.
Just as he reached that position, a voice cut through the earplugs.
His eyes opened as his heart nearly burst from his chest.
In the dim light, he saw a reflection in the mirrored wall at his feet—a dark figure standing directly behind his head. “Wha-wha-wha,” was all Billy could say.
Then he heard a whispery voice mutter something else.
But before it registered, his arms collapsed to his sides, slamming the bar onto the ridge of his nose and eyes, then rolling down his face to rest on the soft pocket of his neck.
It happened in such a violent blur that he could barely process that the bar was crushing his windpipe, pressing impossibly hard toward the floor, instantly cutting air from his lungs and blood to his brain.
He could not scream. He could not see for the blood flooding his eye sockets. He could not breathe.
He thrashed with his arms and bucked with his hips, but the bar weighted impossibly against his throat, pinning him to the bench. And the more he struggled, the more his brain dimmed and the strength seeped out of his muscles.
In the microsecond of awareness, he tried to see the face of his killer, but he was not even certain anyone was there or if the figure was in his head. It made no difference, because night filled his brain, and the next moment he was dead.
51
It took several minutes for Zack to break through.
They had given him a shot of norepinephrine, but he was still stuck in a small, dim space, staring at the face of the man he had killed.
He could smell the terror in his breath, like burned garbage. He could still hear himself utter the man’s name. He could still feel his hands locked in a grip around the bar, spaced outside of where the man’s hands bent backward, trying to push the bar from his throat.
Zack focused on the man’s eyes, which bulged like hens’ eggs from jagged sockets of bone. The more he pressed, the more the hydrostatic pressure forced blood to spurt from the eyeholes and nostrils, mixing with snot. His lips moved as if to say something, but there was no sound—just the slapping of his shoes against the floor as he danced in the last throes of his life.
Zack watched as the kicking and flailing came to a halt and the man’s mouth went slack and strings of red saliva dripped to the floor, his tongue protruding through his bloodied teeth like a slug.
Zack made a final full-weight heave on the bar and with grim satisfaction watched the man die, his final breath caught in a deep-chest gurgle from a collapsed throat, blood streaming from the rut across his eyes and nose and puddling on the floor.
Zack bolted upright into a sitting position on the gurney, his face snapping around the room, eyes sucking in the bright fluorescence to flood the horrible images in his head.
Four faces stared at him—Sarah, Luria, Stern, and Cates.
“You all right?” someone asked, maybe Sarah. “What happened?”
He looked down at his hands, still frozen in their grip. He shook his head but couldn’t answer.
“You’re still coming out of it,” Luria said.
Zack rubbed his eyes. A soupy horror filled his head, as if he had just returned from the scene of a murder. One he had committed.
He lay back down on the gurney. His hands were trembling uncontrollably. He could see the concern on Dr. Luria’s face. He wanted to say he was all right, but he felt that at any moment he might break down.
He glanced at the heart rate monitor, which read 138 beats per minute. His blood pressure was registering at 185 over 105. The EKG machine was spiking like crazy.
“Give him some time to settle down,” Stern said.
Zack closed his eyes again and recited pi to fifty places, then started over again. He recited the lyrics of songs in his head, the Gettysburg Address, which he had memorized in the fifth grade, the Pledge of Allegiance, stanzas from Poe’s “The Raven.”
“He’s coming down,” Byron Cates announced after a few minutes. “One forty over ninety-four. Pulse ninety- two.”
After several more minutes he felt calmer, more centered. He opened his eyes. Sarah was by his side. She took his hand.
“Zack, what happened?”
He filled his lungs with air, then let it out slowly. He sat up again. Luria and Stern were staring at him on the other side of the gurney. Byron Cates was glancing at him from the computers.
“What is it?” Sarah asked.
“Take your time,” Dr. Luria said. “Can you recall anything?”
He shook his head, trying to force his face into neutral against the assault of those images. “Nope. Nothing.”
Dr. Luria moved closer to him. “Zack, tell me what you experienced.”
He shook his head again. He didn’t want to put it into words. He didn’t want to fix it with images for fear of haunting his brain with them. He just wanted to go home and fall into a deep sleep. “Want to leave.”
“Okay, that’s fine,” Sarah said.
But Luria cut in. “In a moment.” And she shot Sarah a sharp look, then poured herself a cup of black coffee. She took a sip while studying Zack, then clicked on the overhead monitor and moved the mouse until an image of Zack’s brain filled the screen. She hit some keys and ran the images of neuroactivity from the moment he went under until he was awakened.
Sarah got him a bottle of water while he waited. A weird buzzing in the fore of his brain was creating a sense of vertigo. “I’d like to go.”
“You crossed over.” Dr. Luria’s words were barely audible. “This time we’re sure.”
“What?” He looked at Stern. “Is that right?”
Stern took a deep breath and let the air out slowly. “What I can tell you is that there’s parity with the last few sessions, but of greater intensity. The activity in neuron clusters of your frontal and parietal lobes don’t appear related to unconscious neuroelectrical activity.”
“Meaning what?”
“This may be a first,” Stern said, “but your consciousness appears to have separated from your brain.”
“A near-death experience.”
“Yes, but there’s anomalous data we need to crank through the algorithms.”
Zack was almost too numb to let that sink in.
“Do you remember anything more specific while you were under? Any sense of place or who was with you or what you were doing?”
“No.” Zack’s sense of unease was mounting. He slid off the gurney and went behind the screen and changed. “Someone take me home or I’m going to call a cab.”
“I’ll take him,” Sarah said.
Something crossed Luria’s face. “Fine. I’ll call you in a few days, Zack.” She stuffed a check in his shirt pocket.
