The Shoe on the Roof
“Enough.”
It was the magician. Or rather, it was Jeff Keshen, recovering addict, aging college dropout, former birthday party entertainer.
“I am not the Messiah, and neither is Eli or Sebastian.”
And with that, Dr. Rosanoff killed the feed. He leaned in, pressed the intercom. “Thank you, Mr. Keshen.”
The sound of Eli sobbing and Sebastian’s mantra slowly gave way to silence.
“And that,” said Dr. Rosanoff, turning to face his son, “is how it’s done.”
Thomas fell back into his chair. He felt like he was going to faint.
“Let’s play them something soothing, shall we?” said Dr. Rosanoff. “Vivaldi, maybe. Or perhaps some Peruvian pan flute. Grab a cassette. They’re on the shelf above the fuse box.”
Thomas turned, numb but compliant, picked up several tapes, looked them over. He was about to open one, when he saw the label, written in the distinctly confident handwriting of his father: CHORAL ARRANGEMENT #49.
It took a moment to register. Thomas looked to his father, still numb, and said, “You played church music?” It was less a question than a statement.
“Hmm? Oh, that. Yes, we tried various inputs. Tested different types of music on you to see if there were any measurable differences. We wanted to see whether spirituality was innate, if you would respond to, say, choir music over nursery rhymes. Nothing much came of it, though. We even brought in an Orthodox priest to chant with you, had a rabbi recite the Torah, you even had a playmate who’d been abused by the clergy. We thought it might be therapeutic.”
“For him?”
“For you.” He looked at Thomas, genuinely puzzled, as though it were obvious. “That was to teach you empathy. Kids from broken homes, foster families. I didn’t include it in the book because the results were inconclusive. Now then, about that music I asked for? To soothe the savage beast.”
“Here,” Thomas said. “Play this one.”
Dr. Rosanoff checked the label in the light of the monitor. “Interesting choice. Let’s see where it takes us.”
Thomas knew. He knew before his father put the cassette in, before he hit PLAY, before the first voice appeared. It was the music he’d been hearing, surfacing like a riddle from long ago. Where do you bury the survivors? A choir of voices rising up. What he’d thought was a memory of his mother was only this: a cassette played over the intercoms of his youth while men in white lab coats watched behind mirrors.
“Thomas? Are you all right?”
But Thomas didn’t answer. He listened to the music, eyes wet. Smiling. Sad.
“Thomas?”
“It’s breast,” he said. “Not beast. Music soothes the savage breast. You got it wrong.”
Something moved then, just below the surface like a vein under skin. . . . Thomas could see a memory forming in front of him, lighting up in the neural pathways of his brain, interwoven and intertwined, a vision of dendrites and nerve endings branching outward like skeletal trees, the synapses firing and misfiring, and perhaps madness, like creation, begins on this, with a stutter, with a misfiring of the mind, in the flash-frame lightning of electrical currents, in the voices striving to be heard, desperate messengers rendered mute, mouthing the words, pointing at their throats, as silent and strident as the sewn-mouthed screams of a lost choir, and he could see the conduits opening up before him in the amygdala, could see his thoughts and ideas made manifest, the neural nebulae taking form, stars coalescing, a storm in the cortical tissues, in the limbic nuclei that hold our fears, in the cumulus luminosities that hold our hopes and inward dreams, born of that divine stutter, a misfiring in the brain, the dendrites and neurons reaching outward, ever outward, until they touched the face of nothingness. At which point his knees gave out and his legs fell from under him.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
NOT FATHER PATRICE—WHO had studied to be a doctor—but the other one, the younger priest, the one who had leaned forward with a pained expression on his face. What was it he’d said? “Among some members of the clergy, a nervous breakdown is considered a sign of sincerity.”
DEPERSONALIZATION DISORDER (from SDM:III, pg. 378): DP Disorder is marked by heightened sensory perceptions and a sense of detachment from one’s body. Patients often remain aware that what they are experiencing is altered reality, and this in turn may inculcate feelings of panic. Sometimes accompanied by auditory and/or visual hallucinations, depersonalization disorder can also induce a sense of “heightened meaning,” whereby mundane events are imbued with a significance not warranted by actualities.
Dr. Rosanoff, however, had diagnosed simple fatigue. “Go back to your apartment. Sleep. Take a couple of days to reset your brain.” But what if Thomas was not suffering from fatigue or a personality disorder, but from a surfeit of sincerity, as he’d been warned about by that priest at Saint Mathurin’s, not Father Patrice, but the other one, the younger one?
Everything was tumbling together in Thomas’s mind: he could barely recall being helped down the stairs or into the waiting sedan, could hardly recall the slow drive across the bridge, above the river, to his apartment. Could barely remember falling asleep or waking up to darkness.
A text from his father: “Will send someone to check on you in the morning. Until then, the prescription is rest, relax, repeat.”
And now, here he was, alone in an apartment without Amy—nothing left, not even her scent—standing slack-limbed in front of his desk, unsure of what to do. On the shelf above, the lava lamp of the brain floated in formaldehyde, but no visions of neurons and dendrites danced in front of his eyes. He missed these visions already, could see how addictive these hallucinations might become.
The other brain, the educational brain, the plastic brain that opened like a book, sat atop a stack of textbooks. How long since he’d been to class? How long since he’d attended a lecture or been in a lab? Had it been only a week or two? It felt longer.
Barefoot in boxers, hair dishevelled, Thomas padded across the open-concept of his tubular world, rummaged around in his fridge—leftover fish sticks and milk only slightly past the expiration date. He drank from the carton, sniffed the fish sticks. Decided against it. He could hear the murmur of voices next door, conversations on the other side of the wall—and a postcard on the counter, demanding of him only this: REMEMBER ME.
Madness is a phone that keeps ringing until you are compelled to answer. The murmurs on the other side of the wall grew louder. Thomas tried to ignore them, even hummed a low, droning note to drown them out, to no avail. He finally threw on a bathrobe and stomped out of his apartment to pound on his neighbour’s door.
A face appeared, confused and blinking. The man had clearly just woken up. “What do you want?” He was trying to sound gruff, but the quaver in his voice betrayed him. Thomas could see the cellphone at the man’s side, thumb poised above EMERGENCY CALL.
Thomas shook his head, stepped back. “Wrong door.” No apology. He crossed the hall, pounded on his other neighbour’s apartment.
“Keep it down in there!” he shouted.
No answer.
He hammered his fist again and heard a dead bolt turning. An elderly woman peered out from behind the chain. She looked frightened.
Dammit.
“Wrong door,” he said.
The hallway became distorted, like the entrance to a fairground fun house, the floor and ceiling torquing against their own lines of perspective. Thomas stood, listened. Nothing. But as he reached for his own door handle, it seemed to pull away from him even as his arm elongated to reach it. He heard his name again. Faint, but undeniable. Thomas wheeled around, hoping to nab the culprit, but there was no one there. Only an empty hallway closing in on itself.
I can’t even blame this on the fish, he thought, and then laughed. Loudly. Too loudly. Fuck you, voice in my head.
Thomas retreated into his apartment, locked the door, began turning on lights until the windows became mirrors. He took a deep breath, and then??
?
A knock.
Thomas froze. Stared at the door. Another knock, and this time he knew it was no hallucination. Who could it be, this time of night? How incredibly inconsiderate. “Go ’way!” he shouted, but it came out chafed and unconvincing. So he tiptoed across on exaggerated steps, unlocked the door, flung it open to confront his tormentors.
A pair of beaming smiles greeted him.
“Good evening!”
A well-scrubbed woman in a dark woolen skirt and an equally well-scrubbed man in a suit and tie stood on his threshold. The woman cradled a stack of religious pamphlets against her chest, the young man held a Holy Bible in both hands, title out.
Thomas leaned out of his door, looked down the hallway and then back at the pamphleteers. “It’s late. How did you get in?”
“We were buzzed in.”
“By who?”
“They didn’t say.” The woman smiled as though their entry were a sign from God, a minor (but significant) miracle rather than a lapse in judgment by one of the tenants.
“We were dropping off literature.”
“Sliding it under the doors.”
“And we couldn’t help notice—”
“Your light.”
“It was still on.”
“And we thought maybe we might share the gospel of Our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Thomas stared back at them, as though from across a vast divide. They were waiting for his answer. “You want to talk about God,” he said.
They bobbed their heads with disarming enthusiasm.
Boy, did you pick the wrong fuckin’ door.
With a manic grin, Thomas said, “Do I want to talk about God? You bet I do! Come in, come in!”
Thomas hustled them inside before they could object. “Have a seat.” He pulled up a pair of chairs to his cluttered kitchen counter.
“You wanna talk about God? I know all about God. Wait here.”
He hurried across the brightly lit living room to his desk, came back with the floating brain under one arm. Their smiles had taken on a more strained appearance.
“I can show you God.” He unscrewed the top of the jar, reached in, and slooped the brain out onto the kitchen cutting board. “Here. In the right temporal lobe. That’s where spiritual beliefs are generated. You’ve been looking for God? Well, there he is. And the devil? He’s even deeper down, buried in the darkest reaches of our inner medulla. Here . . .” He pulled out a large knife, the same one Eli had used to slice vegetables. “Let me show you.”
But the Witnesses had already fled, if they ever existed at all.
“Hey!” shouted Thomas as he ran after them. “It’s not like I’m using a Ginsu knife! Those things can cut through anything!” Nothing. He was left hollering down an empty hallway to an audience of one.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
IT REMINDED THOMAS OF a Bedouin camp. The heat of day. The haze of dust. The smoke uncurling above the cooking fires.
What’s it like to be a bat?
Thomas pushed through the narrow confines of Tent City. Along the way, he gathered a surreptitious following, men who shadowed him with dark intent. He didn’t care. He had left his wallet in the car and the car in a secure parking garage. Thomas pressed on, propelled by a single question that chewed on his bones: Why did they say “bat”?
He feared he already knew the answer.
Thomas found them in their narrow canyon between the tenements, selling their wares. Fistfuls of money passing hands, crystal meth and OxyContin, hollow-cheeked customers and open sores, a pair of brothers presiding: Gus and Desmond, dancing in a den of thieves.
When they saw him coming, they momentarily panicked, expecting Eli to appear as well. But it was only Thomas.
“Why did you say ‘bat’?” he shouted, forty paces out, closing the gap with every step. “Why did you say ‘bat’?”
“Bat? What the fuck are you—”
“When Eli was here, when the magician turned over the tables. You said, ‘What are you, a bat?’ ” Thomas was out of breath. His face was raw and red.
Gustus shrugged. “It’s somethin’ they say down here.”
“Why?”
The two of them might have knocked Thomas down then and there, but the spectre of Eli lingered.
“Because . . . I don’t know.”
“It was Charlie,” said the other one. “The night he died. He was shouting, ‘I’m not a bat! I’m not a bat!’ ”
“People could hear him yelling,” said Gustus. “Thought it was funny. It’s what people say now when you go crazy down here. Charlie must have been on something. He OD’d, but it wasn’t us. That goofball couldn’t pay. We comped him a couple times, but not that night. Not the night he died, yelling out, ‘I’m not a bat!’ ”
“It was the devil,” said Des. “Running loose in Tent City. That’s what they were sayin’, anyway. Someone dressed in black.”
“Not in black,” said Gustus. “In white.”
Like a doctor. Like a priest.
“Whoever it was visited Charlie under his tarp. That’s what people are saying. Don’t know why Charlie was yelling like that.”
But I do.
“He was asked a question,” said Thomas. “He was scared and he was trying to answer it. This—this person who visited Charlie. Did he have a widow’s peak? A streak of white in his hair?”
“No idea. Didn’t see him.”
Thomas turned and faced the crowd that had gathered behind him—a crowd that was dangerously close to becoming a mob. He could see several men hanging back, waiting. People die in Tent City all the time. But Thomas held his ground, addressed the crowd directly. “I come here under the protection of Eli Wasser, the Hammer of God! What you do to me, you do to him!”
And with that, Thomas waded into the crowd, defying the men in the shadows to stop him. No one did.
CHAPTER FIFTY
BERNIE SIGHED.
Professor Cerletti had been calling, trying to find out what Thomas was up to, and Bernie had let the phone in the hall go to voicemail. A few moments later, Bernie’s cellphone trilled. Then a text. Next thing, Cerletti would be dropping letters in Bernie’s mailbox or sending out a fleet of carrier pigeons.
“Thomas has disappeared,” went the message. “What is going on?”
But of course, Thomas hadn’t disappeared; he just wasn’t attending Cerletti’s seminars, hadn’t submitted an abstract or any updates. To a professor, that was the same thing as falling off the edge of the known world.
Bernie, in the small room he rented in the access alley behind the semiliterate Dunkin’ Donuts sign. Bernie, with his partial view of Fenway on the other side of the turnpike. A world away from Thomas, a world away from Kingsley Hall.
Bernie opened his fridge for the fourth time, even though he’d memorized every packet of ketchup, every pickled egg, every limp salad roll. He considered a midnight run to the pizza place near the bridge, decided against it; was probably closed by now anyway. He stood at his window instead, staring out at the glowing billboards of Fenway rising above the warehouses like stone tablets. He couldn’t see the stadium from his thin slice of alley—it was cut off from view by the turnpike—but he could hear it. Night games were the worst: the crack and roar of a run brought in, a base stolen, an anthem ending. Why was Professor Cerletti so obsessed with Thomas’s latest experiment? Faint alarm bells were ringing in the back of Bernie’s head. Had Cerletti stumbled upon the MRI log, noticed the late-night entry from three weeks before? Or (more likely) was he simply keeping close tabs on Thomas in the hopes of snaring the damnable son of his former protégé, Dr. Tom Rosanoff?
Bernie: alone, exhausted, unsettled.
On the long trudge home, across the bridge onto Massachusetts Avenue, he thought he saw someone who looked like Father Patrice crossing the street below. Father Patrice, unindicted, still free. Hadn’t he been a doctor as well? The two worlds seemed interrelated: hospital wards and confessionals, parishioners and pati
ents. Was that why Bernie had gone into medicine in the first place? Was it because of Father Patrice? And where had he been, all these years? Not that it mattered; the man Bernie saw hadn’t been Father Patrice but only the haunted memory of him, tripping down the alleyway. And what was Dr. Rosanoff doing in Tent City anyway? Bernie had spotted Thomas’s dad leaving the streets of the down below. Why?
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
“A BEDLAM BAPTISM?” PROFESSOR Cerletti chuckled. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
The student lowered her hand, mildly embarrassed.
“We’ll get to that, I promise. But first—”
With a showman’s flourish, he pulled aside a draped cloth to reveal an electroshock machine. “Straight out of Frankenstein, I know,” he said with a small laugh. The table was set at a 45-degree angle so that the patient could lean back into it. “Once the wrists and legs are restrained, the table is unlocked and then swung back to a fully perpendicular position, at which point electrodes are attached to the patient’s temples.”
The students were backlit by high windows. An assemblage of silhouettes, watching.
“Electroconvulsive therapy,” said Professor Cerletti, “better known as electroshock, conjures up images of the ‘bad old days.’ Clenched jaws. Compression fractures. Cracked vertebrae. But that’s changed. It’s much more humane now. The public is still a bit squeamish, of course, so it’s not something we like to advertise, but electroconvulsive therapy is still a commonly prescribed procedure. And perfectly safe. Today, we can pass 400 Volts directly through the human brain without so much as a single chipped tooth.”
Cerletti tapped the screen on his tablet, launched a PowerPoint presentation on the whiteboard behind him. The opening images were of Victorian woodblock depictions of an insane asylum.