“Be still, my foolish heart.” He closed his eyes on her smile as she powered him into the MRI tube.
His last thought before Sarah depressed the plunger was, Dad, be there.
* * *
Zack did not recognize the car. Or the street. Nothing about the locale meant anything to him. Nor did the fact he was driving somewhere in the country with very few houses and deep forests right up to the road. Nothing had any meaning except for the figure far down the road. A woman jogging in a pink outfit.
She wore headphones and was pumping hard along the same side of the road. Sunlight splashed through the canopy of leaves. He slowed to the speed of the jogger, who was too lost in her music and running to notice him pace her a hundred feet back.
Two cars came the other way and disappeared in his rearview mirror. Ahead, the road was a straight cut through the trees with no houses or cars approaching. He pulled alongside the woman. Without breaking her stride, she turned her face toward him. She wore sunglasses with large white frames. He lowered the passenger window as if to ask directions.
It took a few moments, but her face registered fear and she stopped in her tracks.
In a lightning move, he put the car in reverse and then jammed it into drive. Before she could move, he turned the wheel sharply and drove into her. She let out a cry as she tumbled onto the soft shoulder. When she saw him back up and then shift into drive, she let out a scream, cut off as he drove over her body and felt the heavy crunch of bones beneath the wheels.
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.