Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Readers’ Club
About the Author
Acknowledgments
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
One
He looked down and was half-blinded by the white glare of a huge overhead light. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. It was as if time had slowed down, and his shock and disbelief were stalling any attempt to understand what was happening. It was simply not possible that the face of the patient on the operating table was his own.
John Logan’s eighteen years of life had been without major incident or injury. In fact, recently, he had never felt more alive, never happier. It seemed like only moments ago that he had been holding Jennifer Miller––the girl he had fallen in love with as they danced in the heaving atmosphere of O’Donnell’s pub on a band night. His last memory was of her face close to his, the scent of her perfume hanging heavy in the damp air of a New York summer’s rainfall, the sparkle in her eyes, the parting of her lips and his desire to claim them, to claim her. Then, abruptly, darkness had fallen over everything, and he could remember nothing more.
Now all he could smell in the forced air of the operating room was something far less pleasant, like that of burning hair but many times worse. He felt as though he was standing in the center of the operating table, in the center of all the activity. Except he wasn’t standing, he was floating, just looking, observing. There was nothing to him––just space, just air––yet somehow, he was there.
He looked down, disbelieving, at his body on the table, his view framed by the tilted heads of the huddled surgical team, their scrubs seeming to merge into the drapes over him and the linings of the instrument trays, forming a sea of pristine green material. At the center of it all, directly below him, was the focus of all the seamless, urgent, and precise interactions in the room: an exposed and brightly lit section of his once-perfect adolescent skin now marred by a vicious, rip-like wound.
The lead surgeon, differentiated from her team by both her obvious command and brightly colored scrub cap, was slicing through and cauterizing the flesh of his abdomen with some kind of heated scalpel. As she cut, the acrid fumes curled upward, and metal clamps pulled apart the seared edges to expose the extent of the damage beneath.
John tried calling out to her for help, for an explanation. But to no avail; with no voice, his attempts were silent, as he was invisible to her and the others in the room. His astonishment was forced to give way to fresh memories. They reared up unexpectedly, disjointed and fragmented: Jennifer falling to the ground; his own collapse with sudden, burning pain in his midsection; the sight of his pooling blood and Jennifer’s immobile body; the feel of the sidewalk against the side of his face, gritty, wet, and still warm from the day’s sun. Then, more and more voices, the wailing of sirens and bass-deep air horn blasts, pulses of colored light all around him, illuminating faces, uniforms, and the backs of dozens of smartphones raised by a thickening crowd of onlookers.
Shouts of “BP?” and “96 systolic” dragged his attention back to the harsh brightness of the operating room. Still looking down onto his body beneath him, shock and confusion dulled any revulsion he may have had to the sight of his open abdomen. A strong metallic odor had replaced the smell of burning as gloved hands, sheathed crimson from his blood, stitched together the sides of a gaping cut in a flat, shiny-brown organ. He recognized it as his liver and looked back at the patient’s face. It was still his face––shut down and bleak with the corner of his mouth pulled down by an invading tube. To think, just three months earlier, he had worn a constant smile of excitement about his and his father’s life-changing move from Dublin to New York. His biggest concern had been about how he’d fit in as a high school senior at his new school in Brooklyn.
An alarm suddenly sounded.
“BP dropping,” warned a technician.
“We’re losing him,” the lead surgeon said as she quickened the pace of her stitching. “If I can just close…” she added.
Long minutes passed. The alarm continued. John looked on helplessly, his fear mounting.
“BP dropping. Systolic now 80,” the technician advised.
The lead surgeon finally closed the knife wound to the liver with one last suture and ordered the release of the clamps.
“BP still dropping.”
“Shit! There must be a wound somewhere else. I’m not losing this boy! Clamps!” the surgeon demanded as she noticed a rupture in the hepatic artery, which was spewing blood now that it was no longer deprived of it. “Re-clamp here,” she said, directing an assistant, who quickly re-administered the clamps.
“BP still dropping!” the technician informed her.
The words caused John’s state of shock to be compounded by a sudden and terrifying realization about his new state. He was the patient and yet he was completely disconnected from every action occurring in the room. The sound of the frantic activity below him seemed to fade away as a profound emptiness and silent panic engulfed him.
Although he couldn’t possibly know it, John was on the precipice of extraordinary change.
Two
John’s view of the world suddenly began to change. The scene with his body lying on the operating table was dwarfed into insignificance, as if he were zooming outward on a satellite image of his location. Something phenomenal was happening––his senses and his ability to process information were expanding beyond anything he could have possibly imagined. He
