The Shoe on the Roof

  Ahead of him, Eli and the others crashed into the underbrush, through brambles and branches so thick they were almost cross-hatched.

  “Wait!” said Thomas. “Wait, you bastards!”

  Sock feet on bare pebbles. “Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow!”

  He caught up to them in a clearing. Everyone was breathing hard in ragged gasps, trying to be quiet. Thomas pulled his clothes back on, peered through the foliage to see if the police were still there.

  “I think they’re gone,” he said.

  And immediately the spotlight was upon them. The branches lit up as though caught in a flare’s glare over no-man’s-land. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  Thomas pulled on his shoes and ran, laces loose, through the thornbushes as the siren grew more strident. He lost track of the others, came to a pond, crouched down under scant cover. Trapped! He could hear the patrol car roll to a stop behind him. Could hear the doors open, could see the first bobbing beams of the flashlights sweeping the edge of the area he was hiding in.

  On the other side of the pond, across the water from Thomas, the three Christs stood safe—and dry. They were waving for him to join them. Ripples were spreading across the surface of the water. How did they get there? They must have walked. Impossible. And yet . . .

  “Hurry!” Eli shouted.

  The flashlights were closing in.

  What if . . . ?

  Thomas Rosanoff made the leap of faith. He ran out onto the water—and immediately plunged in. He came up, soaked and sputtering, choking.

  “The rocks, the rocks. Use the rocks!”

  Thomas floundered onto his feet, shin deep, saw a series of stone pilings that formed stepping-stones along one side of the pond. He pulled himself onto them, slipping and sliding across the water as the flashlights hit him. He reached the other side. Ran like hell.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  WHEN THOMAS CAME DOWN in his bathrobe, hair still damp from the shower, Eli and the magician broke into applause.

  “Well done!”

  “That was some fine dancing!” said Eli. “Very diversionary!”

  Sebastian hesitated, then joined in as well, clapping with a halting rhythm, rocking back and forth.

  “Well, I hope you assholes are satisfied. I was almost arrested.”

  Eli remained magnanimous in victory. “I just wanna say, to everyone involved, that this evening went splendidly in every way. This is the first time in a long while, longer than when I was born or when I created the world, that I can count three friends among my acquaintances.” (That was the problem with being the world’s saviour. When you’re busy saving everyone else, who will save you?)

  Thomas: mutter, mutter. “Glad you’re happy. . . . Connecticut in the Bible. . . . Use the rocks, use the rocks. . . .” He picked up his phone, scrolled through nearby restaurants. “I’m starving.” At which point he spotted his box of microscope slides on the kitchen counter, shoved in every which way, blatantly out of order. “Jesus Christ.”

  All three looked up on hearing their name.

  “Not you.” Thomas made a sound somewhere between a sigh and a snarl. “Stop messing around with these, okay? They’re expensive.” He tried to straighten the slides, gave up. “So what do you guys want? Chinese? Italian?”

  They considered the question.

  “Well?”

  “Loaves. Fish,” said the magician.

  “Fish,” said Sebastian.

  “Loaves,” said Eli.

  “Fish and loaves,” said the magician.

  Thomas looked at them. “So. Pizza and anchovies?”

  They nodded. Sure. Close enough.

  “Fish and loaves it is.”

  Thomas ordered two extra-large pizzas, one with anchovies and one with feta and olives. He could almost hear Bernie asking, “Who the hell puts olives on a pizza?” And he thought how exhilarating it was to have escaped a police dragnet. (It was actually a single patrol car with two officers, but that is not how Thomas would tell it. Over the years, he would layer the story with more and more embellishments until eventually he was fleeing across open water as bullets flew past him.) Memory, after all, is a reconstruction, and even the simplest of events becomes papier-mâchéd with myth as the years go by. It was a process as old as time. It was how gods were made. Thomas found it vaguely disconcerting, the malleability of memory: Was Amy herself even real anymore, or was she slipping into myth as well? He remembered Amy in a snowstorm, winter melting on her lashes, was startled to realize that it couldn’t have been Amy, had to have been Wendy. Yet he could recall Amy there, vividly. Could remember her turning toward him, folding herself into his embrace.

  Remember me. It was a message he longed to send.

  The latest anonymous postcard was waiting for Thomas when he and his three Messiahs had returned from their road trip to the Saint Mathurin seminary. “Remember me.” No question mark this time: a small shift, but a significant one, and one Thomas should have paid more attention to. With that single change in punctuation, the message had shifted from a question to a command; it went from pleading for attention to demanding it. Remember me. Everything turned on this: a single question mark, or a lack thereof. Yet Thomas missed the implications of this. He was distracted by life (as we all are).

  Thomas finished drying his hair, threw the towel over the back of a chair. The magician was standing in front of the main bookshelf: floor-to-ceiling with science and psychiatry.

  Pulling out a hardcover of The Good Son, the magician studied the cover. “First edition. Must be rare. May I?”

  Thomas shrugged. He didn’t care.

  The magician flipped through the pages as though looking for a pressed leaf or a ticket stub, something tucked between the pages, forgotten. “I’ve read this,” he said. “Your story. In bits and pieces over the years.”

  “And?”

  He looked up at Thomas. “That wasn’t a childhood. That was a hostage-taking.”

  “It wasn’t that bad,” said Thomas.

  “We have a lot in common, you and I.”

  A street-corner magician and a Harvard medical man? “How so?”

  “We both have public biographies. Our lives are, quite literally, open books.”

  “I suppose.” Except yours is delusional and mine actually happened.

  Back in the kitchen, Sebastian and Eli were setting the table for pizza. They were being very thorough: forks, knives, butter knives, soup spoons, pickle stabbers, fondue forks, salad tongs. Sebastian was lining each one up with absolute precision. Eli was complaining that Sebastian wasn’t doing it right.

  The magician had a question for Thomas. “Why is Sebastian so important to you? Why does it matter what he believes?”

  “Sebastian has a mental illness. He needs help.”

  “What some might call a mental illness, others might consider a spiritual test. A crisis, perhaps. Or an awakening of angels.”

  “Angels? Really, now you’re talking angels?”

  “We all carry angels inside us. And demons. They usually slumber undisturbed but they can awaken, and they do. We go through life catching colds and missing buses. An unexpected encounter, a leaf falling at a certain angle, a puddle avoided, a parking ticket issued, and either one might appear—the angel or the other.”

  “People don’t have spiritual crises anymore,” said Thomas. “They have chemical imbalances. Every emotion, every phobic fixation, every memory leaves a chemical trail in the brain. Neurons that fire together, wire together. That’s a central maxim of neuroscience. Repetition strengthens belief, and beliefs strengthen neural connections. Yell at a child long enough and you will alter not only her sense of self, but the actual physical properties of her brain. Sebastian is caught in a feedback loop, both chemical and cognitive, each bolstering the other.”

  The magician thought about this for a moment. “Do you know what I think Sebastian’s problem is?”

  “I would love to hear your diagnosis. Possessed by evil spirits, per
haps? Shaved his beard on the Sabbath? Had the unabashed effrontery to wear mixed fabrics in the presence of a menstruating woman?”

  “I don’t think he has an illness. I think he has a sob, caught in his throat.”

  “A sob?”

  “Like a fish bone. I think Sebastian is just very, very sad. And being sad, that’s not a mental disorder, is it?”

  “Listen. Sebastian’s problem isn’t that his life has no meaning. It’s the exact opposite. We’re not talking clinical depression, we’re talking schizophrenia. And with schizophrenia everything has meaning. Hyperconnectivity. You see patterns and portents, omens and hidden messages in every detail, no matter how fleeting. It can heighten creativity, but it can also lead to paranoia and panic, seeing cabals and conspiracies where there are none. Eli being a case in point.”

  “Eli is only trying to—”

  “What do we know about Jesus of Nazareth? He was a healer. A doctor, I suppose. But we also know he heard voices, had visions, was deeply delusional. He believed he was on a divine mission from God. Textbook schizophrenia. Today, we’d put him on 400 mg of Seroquel and be spared the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.”

  “Thomas, I assure you, when I was preaching the Gospel in Galilee—”

  “Enough, okay? Enough.” Thomas steadied his gaze on the magician. “Who are you? Really.”

  “You know who I am.”

  Thomas smiled. “That’s the thing about delusional disorders. Such conviction! They believe it so deeply, and after awhile, others start to believe it too, and they follow them into their madness. Do you know why we always find God on a mountaintop?”

  “Closer to heaven?”

  “Oxygen depletion. Shimmering lights, the dizzying floating sensation, the fear and awe, the sensed presence: mountain climbers experience these same symptoms at high altitudes. The scientific definition of God? A delusion of the mind.”

  “And the mind?”

  “A delusion of the brain.”

  “I see. Elephants all the way down.”

  “Listen. Mind is a by-product of the brain. Mind is what the brain does. The brain itself is simply organic circuitry, electrical currents firing inside a jelly bowl. Revelations are the brain talking to itself. A neurobiological process, nothing more. So when Sebastian hears voices, it’s his own tortured mind he’s hearing. Like I said, he’s caught in a feedback loop.”

  “And God? Where does He fit into this?”

  “He doesn’t. As I said, the equations work perfectly fine without that variable. It is, quite literary, all in your head. It’s in here.” He tapped his temple.

  The magician slid the hardcover back into the shelf, turned to face Thomas. “Perhaps. But what kind of God would it be who only pushed the world from the outside?”

  Thomas sighed. “Don’t you find it odd that the more we know about the world, the fewer miracles there are? Miracles used to happen all the time. Now? Not so much. Rainbows were once a magical covenant with God; now they’re just light refracting through the atmosphere after a rain. Religion used to explain everything, now it explains very little. Haven’t you noticed that God’s realm keeps getting smaller and smaller, until now it only covers those narrow gaps that we haven’t yet filled in? Is that what we’re left with? A god of the gaps? And if that’s the case, what’s the point?”

  “Maybe,” said the magician, “God is the gap.”

  Talk him out of his madness? Thomas couldn’t even talk him out of religious superstitions.

  “Tell me about your father,” said the magician.

  “My dad? Well, he’s not as accomplished as yours,” Thomas said. He was about to make another sortie against the magician’s defences when the apartment buzzer sounded.

  “Get the door!” Eli hollered. “It’s pizza time!”

  “This isn’t over,” said Thomas, holding up a cautionary finger at the magician.

  He walked through the kitchen, grabbing his wallet and cinching his bathrobe. He opened the door and . . . standing there before him was not a pizza deliveryman, but an Easter Island figure, risen up: Thomas’s father. Dr. Rosanoff was holding a folder from the San Hendrin mental facility, and he didn’t look happy.

  “Tommy,” he said. “We need to talk.”

  PART THREE

  * * *

  THE CESSATION OF MIRACLES

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  MEMORIES OF AMY.

  The blue of the veins on the back of her wrists, the connect-the-dot constellation of freckles along her collarbone, the way she sneezed when she stepped into bright light, those stubborn traces of paint under her nails, the manner in which her hair never seemed to hold a scrunchy for longer than 16.4 minutes (he timed it), her snorting laugh, her laughing snorts, the way she insisted on pronouncing “extraordinary” as though it were two distinct words (even though he’d corrected her, repeatedly).

  Thomas had found her on the rooftop of her building once, telescope angled haphazardly at the moon. “I’m not really sure how to use this,” she admitted. “It was a gift from my brother. It used to be his. He was president of our school’s astrology club. I know, major dork, right?”

  “Your brother? The one you told me about? The priest?”

  “That was before he joined the seminary.”

  “I thought telescopes didn’t work in the city. I thought the glare of streetlights and buildings washed out the stars.”

  “That’s not true. You just need to know where to look,” she said.

  “And do you know where to look?”

  “Nope.”

  She’d given up on the stars at this point and was examining the moon through her lens the way one might examine pores in a vanity mirror.

  It reminded Thomas of his own Ladner XII microscope, a gift from his father, and it seemed to him, as he watched Amy fiddle with the focus of her brother’s telescope, that the only way to look at the world was to either come closer or step back, zoom in or zoom out. Anything else and you would be lost forever in the middle ground, caught between vanishing points, the first unimaginably large, the other unimaginably small.

  Amy on the roof: peering at the moon with the same seriousness with which she had once searched for perfect blue.

  “Anyone sees you out here,” Thomas warned, “they’re going to think you’re some kind of pervert, spying on people.”

  She pulled back her hair with her hand (the scrunchy had already come out) and gave him a sly, sidelong glance. “Why should I worry? You’re the one they’ll grab. You already have the name and everything. Peeping Thomas.”

  “Condemned on the basis of my name alone!” he cried. “Story of my life.” And then: “So how about it? Wanna peek in some bedroom windows?”

  “No!” she said. “Well, maybe.”

  They never did peer into anyone’s bedroom, but they did screw ferociously on the tar-paper rooftop, Amy bending at the waist, hands against the door like she was being arrested, Thomas with his head craned back, eyes blurring, a full moon looking down on them like a polished lens.

  That was gone now.

  Amy had slipped away to the far side (of love, the moon, everything) and Thomas was alone, down here on earth, squinting up at her through the wrong end of the telescope.

  In the days After Amy, Bernie had asked, “What is love anyway?”

  They’d been walking across the squat stolidity of the Harvard Bridge, darkness pressing in and the Charles River sliding silently below. The bridge was anchored at either end by a cluster of lights; it seemed to be floating both on and above the water.

  Thomas was moping and Bernie, in his way, was trying to comfort him. “Think of it in terms of drive reduction,” said Bernie. “What are our primary drives? Hunger, thirst, sex. These are basic human urges. And how do we defuse them? We eat, we drink, get drunk, sleep with strangers. So think of love as—as the emotional correlate of this. Falling in love is an exercise in drive reduction.”

  “That’s the
dumbest thing I’ve ever—”

  “Or look at it as a mathematical formula. Romantic love is simply: p x d + pa. Proximity times duration plus physical attraction. With Amy gone, proximity and time have been removed from the equation. So drive reduction is no longer necessary. The various factors cancel out. See? Problem solved.”

  “You can stop comforting me anytime,” said Thomas.

  They came to a small, balcony-like abutment that jutted out from the side of the bridge. It was apparently meant to act as a scenic viewing platform of sorts.

  “Ah yes,” said Bernie. “These extra two feet really open up the view, in the same way that jumping gets you closer to the sun.”

  Thomas looked at the river flowing below, felt that familiar vertigo appeal of high places as the mind tries to close the gap, tries to reconcile a skewed sense of perspective. Part of him wanted to step over the edge, part of him wanted to step back.

  “I was thinking of asking Wendy out,” said Bernie. “You remember Wendy?”

  “Who? Oh, right. How is she?” Thomas was barely listening. He was watching the river sliding past. “Go for it, Bernie. Wendy’s great.”

  “Alas, she’s with somebody else. She wanted me to tell you that she’s happy now. She wanted me to use those exact words: she’s very happy without you.”

  Thomas laughed. “I’m sure she did and I’m sure she is. Too bad for you, though.”

  “See? I can’t even get to heartbreak.”

  “How’s your gut?” Thomas asked.

  “Not so good.” He laid his hands on his stomach. Bernie had been haunting the upscale oyster bars on the pier recently in an attempt at meeting women, even though oysters didn’t agree with him. “I figured any woman who’s up for eating oysters has a sense of adventure.” And Bernie was only too happy to be somebody’s bad decision.

  “Fair enough,” said Thomas. “How’s it working out?”

  “Not so good,” he said. “Their sense of adventure seems to end with the oysters. I’ve eaten buckets of bivalves.” And it showed. He was looking sickly.