Tunnel Vision (28 page)

He woke up to the sound of his own scream.

*   *   *

But nobody in the lab heard it.

Sometime later, he was in a chair in the lab office, drinking black coffee. Sarah, Luria, Stern, Cates, and a technician at the video camera listened to him.

“Did you know the woman?” Luria asked.

“I never saw her before.”

“Or where you were?”

“No.”

“Or why you hit her?”

“No. It didn’t even feel like me driving.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t explain. It just didn’t feel like my emotions.” Silence settled over the room like fog. “It was like someone else’s nightmare.”

On the computer monitors, colored splotches danced across the schematic of his brain. After a moment, Dr. Luria said, “Zack, you didn’t have a dream or nightmare. Your brain was incapable of dreaming on the anesthetic.”

He looked at her without response.

“Every indication points to a transcendence. The data’s still raw, but at the intercellular level the sensory centers of your brain experienced external stimuli—vision, hearing, touch, spatial maneuvering.”

“We still have hours of analysis ahead of us,” said Dr. Stern.

“But you think it was a transcendence?” Zack asked.

“I’m not ready to jump to conclusions yet.”

Sarah said nothing, but Zack suspected that she agreed with Stern. Luria made a dismissive gesture with her hand and moved to another monitor beside Byron Cates. “Your blood profile shows a dramatic spike in epinephrine, another name for adrenaline. And that means your brain experienced a fight-or-flight response signaling your heart to pump harder and your blood pressure to increase. Do you remember feeling any fear?”

“No. Not at all.”

“What about anger or rage?”

He stood up. “I think I’ve had enough.” He looked to Sarah. “I’m ready to go.”

“Zack, I understand how this may be upsetting,” Dr. Luria said. “Maybe next time—”

But he cut her off. “I don’t think there will be a next time.”

“What? Why?”

“I’m not sure I want to do this again.”

“Why not?” Luria proclaimed. “We’re making great progress with each run.”

Zack shook his head. “Sorry.”

“If it’s the money, we’ll pay you more.”

“It’s not the money.” Zack got his stuff and headed toward the door.

“Zack, please don’t go,” Luria whined.

But he continued out the door and into the security area of the lobby. Sarah was right behind him. So was Byron Cates, who caught up to him and handed him a slip of paper. “Just in case,” he said. It was a prescription for Haldol.

Sarah had her belongings and was ready to drive him home. Right behind her was Dr. Luria. “Zack, listen to me. You may have experienced total transcendence.” She took his arm. “Don’t you understand? You may have glimpsed the afterlife and returned. You owe it to us … to the world.” She stammered against disbelief and anger. Her eyes were huge, and her face filled with blood.

“If there’s an afterlife, I’ll take my chances the traditional way.”

And he walked out the door with Sarah behind him.

49

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Sarah had said as she drove him home. “Yours is the first suspension that comes close to possible transcendence.”

“What about all the other subjects?”

“I’ve only been on the project a few months.”

“But you must have seen the records.”

“A few and nothing very promising. Only one or two were possible OBEs. But no follow-ups like yours.”

That was far from comforting. “So you’re saying my mind separated from my body and experienced me running down that woman.”

“I’m saying the raw data shows a highly intense experience. As for the hit-and-run scenario, that could be something created in your own head—a flash dream.”

“And what about the possibility these suspensions are fucking up my brain? Did anyone think of that?” he snapped. “That all the toxins and flatlining are making me loony.”

“You’ve had bad nightmares before, we all have. But you didn’t lose your mind because of them, right?”

“So you’re saying it could be some weird nightmare vision.”

“I’m echoing Morris here, but yeah. Stuff in your unconsciousness got activated just as you emerged from flatline.”

He couldn’t tell if she really believed that or was trying to placate him. “But you said the stimuli was recorded in real time while I was suspended.”

“Yes.” She was silent for a moment. “Zack, I really don’t have a good answer.”

“But if you were me, would you submit to another suspension?”

“I can’t answer that. It depends on how disturbing the experience was and how much of a risk you want to take of having another.”

In a flash, he saw his father in his monk’s robe standing in the woods before a large rock.
Time for big-boy talk.
“I’ll think about it.”

By the time she dropped him off, he was feeling more settled. Before he got out, she gave him a hug.

“Want to come up?”

“Not tonight. I’ve got a ton of work.”

He kissed her good night and went up to his apartment. He took two sleeping pills, and before fading into a dreamless night, he again saw his father standing in the long brown robe before a large rock outcropping.
Big-boy talk.

The next day, Friday, he called Sarah to say he would submit to another suspension next Tuesday. She was free that night, and Damian didn’t need his car all weekend, so Zack took Sarah to the waterfront, where they took a ferryboat cruise at Boston Harbor.

Over the weekend, he worked on his thesis. At Byron Cates’s suggestion, he filled the prescription for the antipsychotic Haldol, which apparently did the trick—no more dreams of crawling in sand. No psychotic visions of running anyone down in a car. No weird out-of-the-blue flashes.

That Tuesday night, Sarah picked him up and drove to the lab. Everybody was delighted, especially Dr. Luria, who could barely contain her relief.

He was prepped and ready to be rolled into the MRI machine. His last thought was,
Dad, please be there.

50

This would be a night to remember for Billy—one he’d mark the calendar from. Breaking his own personal best.

He had converted his garage to a home gym, adding a rack of free weights, two benches, one tilted, one that lay flat. He also had a used Cybex machine for his back and shoulders.

He still belonged to the local health club, but he liked having his own workout space where he could do his routines without a lot of other people around. In fact, he preferred to work out alone. His wife was visiting her parents in Albany, so he had the place to himself and could pump in peace and quiet. His hope tonight was pushing his bench press to the next plateau.

Billy was proud of how his upper body was bulking up. He was doing forty-pound curls and seventy-pound shrugs. But he had to work on his chest. He wanted bigger, chiseled pecs like some athletes and movie stars. And the way to do it was to bench regularly and increase his maximum, which meant finding the weakest part of his lift and focusing on that.

His weakest was at hoisting the weight off his chest, so he’d concentrate on lifting the bar no more than six inches. Workout videos recommended going slowly, bringing the bar negative all the way and not cheating by bouncing off the pecs. His goal was to get ripped for the beach now that summer was here. His favorite uncle was a lawyer who owned a place on Martha’s Vineyard where he and his wife stayed for a week every July.

He warmed up at two hundred and forty, doing three sets fairly easily. After a rest and some water, he did a set at two sixty. That went well, and he felt strong. So strong that he slipped another two ten pounds on each end of the barbell, bringing the total to two eighty—twenty pounds higher than his max. Yes, he was pushing it, but all he wanted was one full lift to break his record.

He planted his feet firmly on either side of the bench, then raised his arms and gripped the bar as it sat in the spotter stand. This was more weight than he had pushed, and he was aware of the effort to hold it in place at arm’s length. So much of bodybuilding was in the head. The trick was to be totally in the moment, to focus on particular muscles to take to the next level.

Toward that end, he turned off his cell phone, dimmed the lights, and inserted earplugs to block ambient noise—cars going up the street, dogs barking, planes overhead. So as he lay on the bench, gripping the bar, he concentrated like a laser on his pectorals, tuning out everything else until he became those muscles.

He closed his eyes in total concentration, feeling his arms extend, his pecs harden. As the training videos said, he imagined a stronger, more powerful Billy. He imagined himself leaving his own body and entering his ideal body.

As he pressed shut his eyes, Billy thought,
Strong
.
Powerful
. He thought,
I can do this
.
I am my all-muscle self.

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.

“Billy.”

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.