“I think had a concussion. For a while there… I wasn’t sure who I was or where.”
“Have you seen a staff doctor since you’ve been back?”
“Not yet, sir.”
“Well, you’d better!” Deall ordered. “Go directly after this meeting, and have them send me a report.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You certainly look like you’ve been through the wringer,” Rickman pointed out. He did not say it sympathetically. It was just an observation of fact.
Farris had dyed his hair that morning back to something approximating the color of his roots, but it was still shorter than he’d once worn it. His eyebrows had not completely grown back. His face was haggard. There was nothing he could do about the minor surgery he’d done to slant his eyes.
“What I don’t understand is why you now believe this case has nothing of interest when a little more than a week ago you were insisting it was a matter of vital importance to national security.”
“I reviewed the case while making my way back here and again last night preparing to make my report. I can see now that I was… overzealous. I don’t believe Dr. Talcott was working on anything of interest to us. In fact, I believe she is simply… a flake, sir.”
Ricker raised a patronizing eyebrow. “You might have figured that out earlier, Lieutenant, if you had showed what you were working on to our people. I had several physicists look over the scanty material you’d procured and they were unimpressed. Dr. Everett said that without seeing Dr. Talcott’s so-called equation he could only surmise that the simulator results had been rigged and that her brief notes about a ‘universal wave’ were either delusions of grandeur or an attempt to perpetuate a hoax.”
“I don’t see how you could be so taken in, Lieutenant. You were trained better than that,” Deall said, disappointed.
“I have no excuse except that I’d allowed myself to get too obsessed with my work. It had been a long time since I’d taken a vacation. If you decide to allow me to continue my job, a short leave of absence would probably be in order.”
Deall huffed. “Allow you to continue? Do you know how much alarm you caused? Let me tell you, Lieutenant… ”
The rest of the meeting they lectured him. Farris took it, shoulders straight, hands clasped in front of him on the table. He didn’t think they were serious about reassigning him. Calder Farris had not been liked, but he had without doubt been useful over the years. A great emphasis would be put on the results of the doctor’s examination, but Farris was not concerned. He knew he could convince a physician, given the very real bump on his skull, that he had met with a mind-altering accident recently.
Deall left the office first, still pissed off. Rickman was slower to gather his things, kept eyeing him. Farris sat, back straight, looking out the window at the sun.
Rickman suddenly leaned forward over the table, staring. That old feeling of being different, of being found out, assaulted Farris. He kept his face impassive.
“Look at me,” Rickman said.
Farris did. Rickman gazed at him searchingly from behind John Lennon spectacles.
“My god, Farris, what happened to your eyes?”
Farris clenched his teeth. “I had a little cosmetic surgery. I did it months ago.”
The scars were there, behind the ears, should anyone ask him to prove it. It was a strange thing to do, strange enough to go on his record as questionable, but not strange enough to get him committed.
Rickman looked puzzled, his gaze going back and forth between Farris’s eyes.
“Did you? Whatever for? But… no, that’s not it.” Rickman’s face cleared. “I see. You’re wearing colored contacts. They’re quite an improvement, if you don’t mind my saying so. Make you look more… approachable.” Rickman flushed, as if embarrassed to have brought up the subject. “Well, good luck with the doctor.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Before reporting to Medical, Calder stopped at the men’s room. A man with a penis remarkably like his own was using the urinal. He finished and left, hardly giving Farris a glance. When he was alone, Calder studied his face in the mirror.
Rickman was right. He wasn’t sure when it had happened, but his white-blue eyes, the eyes that had always spooked others, had darkened. They were now a shade resembling the blue of sunlit skies.
24
Between the two sides of these divided strands [the white and black faces of God] is the pathway of initiation, the middle path, the path of opposites in harmony. There, all is reconciled and understood. There, only good triumphs and evil is no longer. This pathway is that of supreme balance and is called the last judgment of God.
When matter and antimatter collide, they neutralize each other and release enormous energy.
On the morning of his first day back at Aish HaTorah, Aharon arrived early. The hallways and office were quiet as he went to work. He gathered up his binder of code printouts and then Binyamin’s. He ripped off the binder covers and threw them in the trash. He took the two-foot stack of printouts that remained and carried them down the hall to the school office, where he set the papers on the floor and began to shred them. Feeding them to the machine was like feeding one’s own children to a dragon. But when it was over a huge burden had been lifted. He gathered up the heaps of shredded waste and went back down the hall.
Binyamin was inside his office. He was standing over the trash can holding the torn binder covers and wearing a look of sheer panic. His jaw dropped farther when he saw the confetti in Aharon’s arms—and Aharon’s bare face.
“Come!” Aharon said. “And bring the matches.”
They went down to the back alley. There, to the consternation of the passersby, Aharon lit the paper scraps. They went up quickly, making a frightening fire against the cobblestones before it faltered into ash.
“I don’t get it,” Binyamin said, picking at the scraggly hairs on his chin.
“Listen…” Aharon put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. Lord, he had missed even Binyamin! The smell, no; the spirit, yes. “Do you know what I think?”
“No.”
“I think that it just might be possible that some of God’s secrets, Binyamin, some of them are supposed to remain secret.”
Binyamin stared at him suspiciously.
Aharon clapped a hand on his shoulder. “Swear to me one thing. Swear not to say the name Kobinski to anyone, not ever.”
Binyamin hesitated, then looked at Aharon’s beardless chin, at the ashes swirling around on the stones. “If you say so, Rabbi. I swear.”
“Good! Now I believe I will attend to some very neglected students, if I even have any left.”
When they came for him that afternoon, Aharon went willingly. He was escorted to the office of Shimon Norowitz, a place he had never been invited to before. The man who belonged in that office was a Norowitz he had never seen before, either—hard and angry, an enemy.
Norowitz wanted to know where he had been, what he had found out about Dr. Jill Talcott, and what had happened in Auschwitz.
“Dr. Talcott is an old friend,” Aharon said, pretending surprise that Norowitz was interested in his actions. “I heard on the news that she was in trouble, so naturally, I had to go see if I could help.”
Norowitz’s eyes were like ice. “And you just happened to help that old friend escape the FBI and then, coincidentally, you took her to visit Kobinski’s closest follower in Auschwitz.”
“No. I had contacted the old man earlier. I wanted to interview him about Kobinski. So when Dr. Talcott needed to get away for a while I decided to kill two birds with one stone and take her with me. It was no big deal.”