“That’s it?” said Thomas. “A single shoe? You’re up against the entire weight of the scientific method, and all you can throw at it is a shoe?”
“How do you explain the shoe on the roof, then?”
“I don’t have to. It’s what we call an ‘anomalous experience.’ ”
“Tommy, everything we do is an anomalous experience. Being alive is an anomalous experience. That’s the problem with science; it always falls silent right when the questions start getting interesting.”
“Science isn’t simply the search for answers, Frances. But for better questions. Listen, the day you can put a human soul on a scale and measure it is the day I say, ‘By Jove, these Bronze Age myths might be on to something!’ But in the meantime, I’ll stick to those pesky little things called facts. And anyway, God is dead. Didn’t you get the memo?”
“I’ve read that obituary before,” she said. “He’s not dead, he’s sleeping.”
“Hell of a slumber.” Thomas placed his smartphone on the desk in front of him with the image of the magician still frozen on the screen. “Why would you dedicate your life to Bronze Age myths in the first place? Just So Stories told by semi-literate people who thought the world was flat and slavery was the natural order of things. You know he never condemned slavery, not once, not even in the Sermon on the Mount? Your man was perfectly happy to give the earth to the meek and blessings to the poor, but he didn’t once condemn slavery.”
“You’d almost think he was a product of his times.”
“Ah, but your man was supposed to transcend time!”
“And you,” she said, “should have been a lawyer.”
He grinned. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“Take it however you like. Just make sure you pick up the supplies I asked for. And as for him”—she nodded toward the image of the magician on Thomas’s phone—“I’d be careful if I were you. It’s dangerous fooling around with people’s identities like that, even if they are delusional.”
“Noted.” He tucked his phone back into his overcoat. “Let me ask you something else. You and my dad, you two ever . . . you know.”
“I’m a nun.”
“Still a woman.”
“A woman who’s a nun.”
“You haven’t answered my question,” he said.
A phone call rescued Frances. She shoved aside a pile of papers as she disentangled the cord of a clunky, old-fashioned receiver.
Do they even make those anymore?
Frances held up a finger for silence.
“Hello,” she said, “Sister Frances here.” She emphasized the “Sister” for Thomas’s sake.
But as she listened to the voice on the other end, her face went pale.
Shallow breaths. Lips, dry. Bad news.
She let the receiver fall away from her but didn’t hang up. She looked at Thomas. “It’s about Charlie. You remember Charlie?”
“The old guy? The one with the ants?”
“They found his body in Tent City. They’re calling it an overdose. There’s a detective on the phone, and she wants to talk to you.”
Music, faintly rising. Choral voices and a question: “Thomassss, remember me?”
“Tommy?”
Frances seemed far away.
“Tommy, she wants to talk to you.”
In a vivid haze, he took the phone, his hand moving as though underwater, grasping the receiver, bringing it to his ear. When he spoke, his voice sounded strange and detached. “Good evening,” he said. “This is Thomas Rosanoff speaking.” He couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow, unwittingly or otherwise, he was the cause of Charlie’s demise.
The phone call was a formality, the detective explained, so they could close the file. Thomas’s name was listed as the consulting physician on a prescription made out to the deceased.
“But I only ever changed his bedpan, helped with his dressings. . . . Where? Here, at the shelter. I was—I was helping out. I can’t write prescriptions. Not yet. I’m only a— Dr. Rosanoff? That’s my father. He must have been doing outreach with the homeless community, providing antipsychotic drugs. . . . Charlie was mentally ill, so if he was ever admitted to Massachusetts General then I suppose my father might have prescribed something. I really don’t know. . . .”
Thomas handed the phone back to Frances, still reeling from the news of Charlie’s death. As Frances spoke into the phone, he felt himself falling farther and farther away.
“Sister Frances here. . . . That’s right, we’re strictly a recovery centre. . . . Nursing, immediate concerns rather than long-term prognosis. . . . Oh, the usual. Pink eye, lice, bedsores, assorted wounds. . . . Ointments and creams, mainly. . . .”
Had Thomas only known.
He was a lot closer to the scene of the crime than he realized. Beside Charlie’s body, the police had found a postcard, and on the postcard was a question—a question aimed at Tommy. No address, only a question. But the detective never mentioned it and Thomas never asked, and the postcard was never delivered.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
ON THE SECOND-FLOOR REFERENCE room of the R. J. McMurphy Library, Thomas pulled out the largest biblical atlas he could find.
“Comprehensive, see? It says so right here: International Geographical Society Comprehensive Atlas of Biblical Times.”
The three men squeezed around him. They were dressed in identical white bathrobes, which—Thomas had to admit—did give them a certain prophetic air. Thomas had purchased the robes for them to wear around the house, but they wore them everywhere, cinched at the waist like overcoats. They’d caused a murmur of attention when they marched into the reference room, but Thomas didn’t care. They could wear whatever they wanted. It was what was inside their heads that needed to be addressed.
Thomas peeled back the oversized pages of the atlas.
“Here. A map of the Holy Land.” He ran a finger down the page. “Jericho . . . Jerusalem . . . The Dead Sea. . . . No Connecticut.”
Eli refused to give in. “This proves nothing.”
“What? This proves everything!”
“It absolutely does not.”
“It absolutely does too!”
Across the atrium from them, a security guard was hounding a wino out of the building—“C’mon. Out you go.” “I got rights!” “You’ve been harassing people. You have to leave.”—when the dishevelled man spotted Thomas and the others.
“Jeezly God!” he yelled, eyes wild and jubilant.
He squirmed free of the guard and hoofed it straight for Thomas and the others. Jaundiced eyes, matted hair, a voice so loud it drew the attention of people at other tables.
“Oh, no you don’t!” said the security guard. He tried to steer the wino back toward the elevators, but the man slipped past, grabbed Eli’s hand, shook it ferociously.
“It is you!” he chortled, mouth like a toothless comb. The man’s nose was flattened, his jaw misshapen. He needs reconstructive surgery, thought Thomas. That, and a good orthodontist.
“I seen you, and I said to myself, sure as shit that’s Eli!”
Thomas noticed an expression of anguish flit across Eli’s face, there and then gone, as the security guard wedged himself between them, sought a handhold on the wino’s stained jacket.
“They said you was dead, Eli! You rose again from the looks of it, eh?” Leaning closer, he said, “No hard feelings, eh, Eli?” He was referring to his broken facial features. “The jaw. The nose. Ribs and everything. No hard feelings, eh? That’s the way it goes, right?”
Thomas felt his stomach clench. Patient is not considered a danger to others, only to himself: This is what Thomas had written in Eli’s files. Eli, released from his restraints, allowed to wield a kitchen knife.
By now the security guard had grappled his way into a semblance of control and was frog-marching the man to the nearest elevator. As he was dragged off, the wino hollered back to Eli, “They was askin’ about you down in the Peg! They said you
went crazy! Got locked up! Crazy? I says, ‘Crazier is more like it,’ eh, Eli?”
Eli hadn’t said a word throughout this entire encounter, and in the vacuum of silence that followed, Thomas watched him, waited for a reaction. But there was none.
Finally, Thomas said, “You know that man?”
Eli nodded.
“The Peg? What is—?”
“Clothes Peg Alley,” said the magician. “It’s what we call the abandoned tenements across from Tent City.” Tent City was transitory; the Peg was more permanent.
Thomas had heard of it. “That’s where the squatters are, right?” He’d seen it on the news.
“Not squatters,” said the magician. “Residents.”
“It’s where I used to live,” Eli said, voice hollow and hoarse. “Before the scribes and the Pharisees got ahold of me. Before things . . . happened.”
Sebastian spoke, his voice like the flutter of a wing. “You were wrong, Mr. Rosanoff.”
Thomas looked at him. It was always surprising when Sebastian said anything. “What do you mean, wrong?”
“What you said. About Eli.” Sebastian was staring at the tabletop, avoiding eye contact. “You said Eli was homeless, but he’s not. He has a home.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
AN EARLY-EVENING INTERLUDE (or, reflections in a minor key): We often stumble through life cast as minor characters in other people’s stories (just as they exist as minor characters in ours). Given that it is the fate of many of us to be the background players in narratives larger than our own, let us consider one such secondary presence: a professor with a distinct widow’s peak, a lesser Caesar, an Ichabod figure walking alone under snowy streetlamps. It’s the first snow of the season: a faint dusting, soft as flour sifting down, but a chilly reminder nonetheless. Autumn was ending, summer was a long way gone, and winter was creeping in on cat’s feet.
When we are young, we live our lives in a kinetic whirlwind, a constantly unfolding now, an all-embracing present tense. But as we get older, we find ourselves adrift in a seaweed of “should’ve dones” and “might have beens,” where the future shrinks even as the past grows ever distant. This was where Anton Cerletti dwelled, lost between vanishing points.
His past was fading away, was losing its details, its textures, its taste. It was changing from a photograph to a daguerreotype, from a daguerreotype to a smudged charcoal outline. Not memories but the memory of memories. What is it like to go through life as a secondary character, as a supporting role in someone else’s biography? It’s like writing a diary in vanishing ink. It’s like looking the wrong way through a pinhole camera. It is like walking on a winter street alone, with no one watching.
And what is it that Professor Cerletti sees when he peers through the pinhole? What is it he sees as he trudges onward? A life lost along the way. Opportunities squandered, possibilities denied, colleagues who fell away, one by one, until only a single name remained: Dr. Thomas Rosanoff. We never took Tom seriously. How could we? He came from such thin stock, was so puffed up and self-important, even as a student. A rube with few social graces, yet he made up for it with his unwavering, self-preening confidence. That he would become the golden boy of their cohort? It was to laugh.
And what does Professor Cerletti glimpse as he moves soundlessly through the snow, skirting the edge of the down below, that realm of shopping-cart travellers and itinerant panhandlers? Cerletti has outwalked the snow, has gone much farther than he realized, somnolent as a sleepwalker in a self-induced fugue, when he sees, under the winter glow of the streetlamps, someone else, another figure, vaguely familiar, hurrying across the cobblestones in front of him. Or perhaps it was his own shadowy projection, a trick of the light. After all, light plays far more tricks on us than the darkness ever will.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
THE RAGTAG ASSORTMENT OF lean-tos and shanties looked almost biblical. Canvas tarps draped over tent poles, giving the appearance of nomadic encampments. The snows of last night had melted into mud, leaving a sharper chill hanging in the air and with it the wet scent of smoke and ash, and something reminiscent of sandalwood. Had a camel caravan loped past, Thomas wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised. Bodies moved down narrow pathways: underage runaways and beauty queen addicts, the sad and the lonely, the downcast and the dispossessed, an Ellis Island’s worth of lost souls. All those trajectories, ending here in Tent City.
Thomas should have been nervous, but he was too fascinated to be afraid. It was like walking through an open-air laboratory, a nature preserve of mental disorders: here a paranoid schizophrenic, there the walking embodiment of masochistic personality disorder, here a dominating delusional psychosis shouting madness at passersby, there a body dysmorphic disorder smeared in lipstick. You could stroll through Tent City with the SDM:III manual and check items off the list as you saw them. Cerletti should’ve had us take our practicums down here, rather than at the hospital.
Eli shepherded Thomas and the others past mounds of smouldering refuse and small gardens that had stubbornly taken root—tangles of tomatoes, leafy beds of lettuce—then across a muddy field littered with glints of glass and the occasional unravelled condom.
A pair of abandoned tenements—former vanguards of the Roxbury projects, windows broken, bricks scorched—formed a narrow canyon, and running down the length of it were the overlapping corrugated rooftops of Clothes Peg Alley.
They had come to the Peg to reclaim Eli’s belongings. The men were dressed in bathrobes, except for Thomas, of course, who had led them across the tracks below Roxbury Crossing like a mallard with her ducklings. Once they entered Tent City, though, Eli had taken over and was moving through with great purpose.
“When they arrested me,” Eli shouted over his shoulder, “the police wouldn’t let me go home to get my stuff. They dumped me into the lion’s den, said, ‘What home do you have to go back to anyway? Give us an address, give us an address.’ Well, I could damn well draw them a map, but I couldn’t give them an address, now, could I?” Then, under his breath: “Fuckers.”
The police, Thomas noted. Not Sadducees. Not the Pharaoh. The police. Madness might kick down the front door, but reality has a habit of escaping through the side window.
Eli held up his hand and they stopped in front of a collection of planks and particleboard that was held together mainly with chicken wire and wishful thinking. A shopping cart was parked out front, stuffed like a horn of plenty: broken radios and one-eyed dolls, lampshades and rags, egg cartons and reams of copper wiring.
“Do I know you?!” Eli bellowed at the man who was peering at him from inside the tumbledown shack.
“Eli,” the man pleaded. “You were dead, is what I heard. Others said they put you away, for good, but I figured no, sir, you’d never let ’em take you alive.”
“Where,” said Eli, “is the rest of my stuff?”
The squatter rubbed the back of his neck. “Your stuff? Most of it got tossed. Some of it’s still there in the cart.”
Sebastian was rocking back and forth on his heels, saying, “A home to the desolate, succour for the sickly, manna for the ill at heart. Psalms, that’s in Psalms. God will give a home to the desolate, succour for the sickly, manna for the ill at heart. . . .”
Eli rummaged through his cart. “Where’s my teleporter?”
“Teleporter?” said Thomas.
“For the angels,” he explained. “Weren’t you paying attention? The Pharisees, remember? If you dance the angels down, you have to use a teleporter to get back up. Everybody knows that. It’s common sense.” He shook his head at Thomas’s appalling lack of knowledge. “What are they teachin’ you at school?”
Thomas turned to the magician for help, but the magician was staring past Eli’s jerry-rigged shack to a row of card tables that had been set up in the muck at the end of the lane. Two young men in puffy jackets and baseball caps—they dress by rote, these men—held stacks of dollar bills sorted by denomination between their fingers
. They were peddling their wares to the residents of Clothes Peg Alley with the alacrity of auctioneers. Crystal meth and ecstasy. Plastic vials of illicit OxyContin. Nickel bags and angel dust. A veritable cornucopia of self-medication.
Eli looked at the dealers in the alley. “They’re back,” he said, flatly. “When?”
The other man shifted and twitched, scratched at his jaw. “Dunno. About a week, maybe more.”
Thomas felt his scientific detachment falter; he hadn’t planned on crossing paths with criminals. “Maybe we should go,” he said. “Eli, why don’t you grab your stuff and we’ll—”
But the magician was already striding toward the dealers’ tables, anger in every step.
“Thieves!” he yelled as he pushed his way through the jumble of bodies surrounding the tables. “Thieves in my Father’s house!”
The taller of the two dealers—a pockmarked fellow named Gustus; gold teeth and a thin grin—looked up from the transaction he was completing (crystal meth doled out to a woman with sores on her face). “What the fuck?” he said.
“In the name of the Father, I cast you out!”
Gold Tooth laughed, nudged his partner. “Hey, Des, check it out. Crazy fucker thinks he’s—”
But before he could finish his sentence, the magician was on him. He flipped the first table over, scattering baggies and vials and loose coins in the air—they seemed to hang there a moment before plunging down to the muddy ground—and then the next table and the next, and now, Thomas really was scared.
The commotion was instant. Voices clamouring. Bodies scrambling. Gustus and Desmond on their feet, ready to kill before the second table hit the ground. “What are you, a fuckin’ bat?” But then they spotted Eli, arms crossed, standing behind the magician, and their confidence faltered.
It was as though they’d seen a ghost, holy or otherwise. Eli didn’t say a word. Didn’t need to.