“Three,” I said, addressing Aya by her new nickname. Eddie was Two. “Three, you saved the world. Who cares about giving a little speech?”
Aya blushed. “Me.”
The Very Reverend Nadine Huxley of the National Cathedral was considerate enough to have a nurse ask if I would care to see her before entering my room. She brought along a meatball hoagie from Curtis and Jody’s Deli on Wisconsin. Curtis and Jody were from Alaska and their Tundra Special included elk and caribou meatballs. Extra peppers. Extra onions. Extra tomato sauce. Extra cheese.
“I was going to say no, Nadine. But I can’t turn down the Tundra Special.”
Nadine pulled up a chair. On the TV, CNN was showing a commercial jet from the United States landing at Orly Airport. American travelers welcome again in France. The Sixth Fleet had withdrawn from waters off North Africa. Roads in quarantined states were open. Supplies of Harlan Maas’s cure were making their way across the nation by rail, truck, car.
“Medical stocks are up,” said the economics correspondent. “The Dow went higher today than it had been before the outbreak.”
“I also brought a King James Bible,” Nadine said. “If you want it.”
“I think I’ve had enough prophets.”
The TV announcer said, “The search for Orrin Sykes centered today on Crystal Lake, Illinois, where the fugitive is believed to be hiding. He grew up there.”
“I haven’t changed my mind about God,” I said.
“Up to you. But millions of people are thanking the Lord for what you did.”
“I think we’ve had enough heavenly messages to last the next hundred years. Keep me out of it.”
Nadine unwrapped her sandwich. “Do you mind if I start first, Joe?” She took a bite. “I see a man who is alive, and triumphed, and who walked into my church and found answers. If that’s not a message, my friend, you tell me what is.”
“I’m too sick to have this conversation.”
“I think you have it with yourself all the time.”
“If you don’t shut up, I’ll tell the nurses to eject you. But I’ll keep both sandwiches.”
She smiled. She ate with healthy bites. She wiped her mouth with a napkin. She opened a couple of Dr. Brown orange sodas and put one on my tray. The TV was now showing the Sixth Prophet’s Cult compound, once a Quaker farm, then sold to the Defense Department, then auctioned off to the public during a budget-cutting bout.
“Tasty sandwich, Nadine. Thanks.”
“God willing.”
“He made the sandwiches, too?”
Nadine laughed. You could never faze her. She was one of those missionaries who would keep coming at you, but she was so good-natured about it that I didn’t mind. There was something solid about Nadine, and I appreciated her. She’d always protect a friend’s back, whether you agreed with her or not.
“He provides sandwiches, Joe. He even made you.”
TWENTY-THREE
I’ve always loved the first moment of spring in the Berkshires. It’s an almost instant rotation away from the winter world. One day, the trees are bare and gray and the soil muddy from snow melting. The air smells of wood smoke drifting from towns and weathered houses. The lake where I kayak is ringed with brownish trees, the waves have white caps, and the blue herons seem to shiver when they watch me pass, stork-like, perched atop dead beaver lodges.
And then, as if a switch was flicked, brown is green. The herons move more languidly. Bald eagles soar above the lake, near their nests in the tall pines. The bad-tempered moose who crosses my property at 5 A.M. each morning appears with the regularity of a clock. He disappears like a snowbird in the winter, and comes back in the spring.
It’s time to walk past Joe’s house again.
I could move around again. The scars and pucker marks remained, and sometimes I heard bones rub inside while I worked on the house. I repaired a water pipe that had cracked while I was away, cut a hole in a bedroom wall and severed six inches of copper, then welded in fresh tubing. I put new shingles on the roof. The deck needed painting. A couple of cathedral-style double-paned windows had fogged up inside with condensation. The airtight seals had weakened so I replaced them. I liked the physical work and went to bed each night exhausted. It was good to be out of rehab, or rather, good to be on the self-imposed kind, working the shoulder with a hammer, instead of having a stranger’s hands kneading it. Relearning the touch of a steering wheel while driving when there was no feeling in one finger. Taking pain pills without a nurse bringing them in a paper cup.
Sleeping in my own house.
I turned down the reporters who wanted to interview me. I shut down the investigators at a certain point, too. You can only go over the same story so many times. The only people that I allowed to come to the house after that were two men — different as night and day — scheduled to testify in the upcoming trials of the apprehended cult members. One of those experts was a forensic psychologist who worked for the defense team. The other was a man who had studied cults, and the damage they do, for the past twenty years. They both wished to question me about Harlan Maas. I wanted to talk to them, too. I wanted answers.
The psychologist arrived first, on a May afternoon, when mud season was over and the first buds bloomed on the birches outside. He was a kind-faced, soft-spoken man with penetrating eyes, wet lips, and an open, vulnerable manner — a Yale University professor who’d worked on numerous high-profile cases over ten years. He had testified in the trial case of a Minnesota man who’d sent letter bombs to Senators, a Kansas woman accused of kidnapping four thirteen-year-old girls, a Miami heir who had murdered his parents one night and burned their home to the ground, a respected major in the Army who had shot nine soldiers at Fort Bragg.
“You don’t believe evil exists?” I said, astounded. “You don’t believe that any of those people were guilty?”
“They did it,” the psychologist said as we sat on my deck. “They were not rational when they did. Something happens in the brain. It’s no different than any other physical disability. It’s chemistry. It drives you to do things. It’s clear that Harlan Maas was abused as a boy, severely. He grew up in a cult. He loved his abuser. The most traumatic event of his life was watching his abuser being arrested and led away. There was schizophrenia in his family to start with. He tried to live a normal life after the raid, was adopted by loving people, and it worked for a while, and then his adopted parents were killed in an accident and a college love affair went bad. Trauma triggers schizophrenia, and Maas was the right age. He thought he got a phone call from his adopted father one day at college, telling him he was calling from heaven. Remember, this boy didn’t grow up like you or me. He grew up being told by the people he trusted most in the world that the man who abused him every night was God.”
“A phone call from a dead guy?”
“In the lab. At SUNY. On an old-style table phone.”
“He really believed this?”
“The lawyers say I’m not supposed to go into more detail.”
“You want answers from me? Then talk.”
“Look, we can only reconstruct by talking to the people at SUNY. He thought it was a cruel joke at first. He went to the other students, demanding to know who was pretending to be his birth father on the phone. He was referred to the medical center. We’ve got the old reports. He thought he got a call at the medical center while he talked to a school psychiatrist, ordering him to get out. This is classic. Son of Sam — who shot couples in their cars in New York City — thought his orders came from a dog. Dennis Sweeney was a civil rights volunteer and big fan of Congressman Allard Lowenstein. But in 1980, he pumped five bullets into Lowenstein, believing that he’d received orders to do it through a radio receiver in his teeth. For Harlan Maas, it was phones. Old, clunky phones. He bought them at yard sales. It could have been a jam jar. It could have been a shoe. It could have been a magic coffee cup. That’s the definition of insane.”