Thomas on the bridge, reciting Bernie’s own words back to him: “ ‘The greatest tragedies can exist right beside us and we might never know!’ Those weren’t Cerletti’s words; those were yours.”
The voice of Thomas’s father coming back to him: “We thought it might be therapeutic.” “For him?” “For you.”
“When I was little,” said Thomas, “I played with a boy who’d been abused by the priests. That was you.”
A sad smile surfaced in Bernie. “You didn’t even remember my name.”
“We’ll still be friends, right?” That’s what Bernie had asked the last time they saw each other as children at Kingsley Hall.
“They put me in foster care,” said Bernie. “The priest was quietly reassigned and I was forgotten. The only thing I had going for me—the only thing—was this.” He tapped his temple. It was a gesture he’d learned from Thomas. “I thought my way out of the life I’d been given. And when we met again, after all those years, I kept waiting for you to remember me. It never happened, not even a glimmer. I wasn’t even in your father’s book. I was edited out. The Gospel According to Bernie wasn’t deemed worthy of further study.”
Thomas felt the world rise and fall beneath his feet. Mist curling above him, a river of ink below, and a single question left to ask and always the hardest to answer: “Why?”
Bernie in Tent City: facing fear. The pulse increases, blood pressure rises, palms grow clammy. The symptoms of fear are a physiological response originating in midbrain. Bernie, hands shaking when he takes out the syringe. We’re all just molecules, he tells himself. Bernie, taking off his overcoat, adjusting his lab jacket. People trust doctors the way they used to trust priests. The elderly man trembled as Bernie tied the rubber tourniquet, tapped out a vein. “You’re responding to fears you didn’t know you had,” Bernie explained. “There is something in my voice, my smile. There’s part of your brain, even one as atrophied and addled as yours, that is still picking up on signals, on tiny changes in facial expressions, in the slight shifts of tonal quality in my voice. That prickly sensation on your skin? That’s your amygdala trying to warn you. Everything we are, everything we are capable of, sadness and anger, panic and fear, lives in the synapses, in that tiny gap between the thalamus and the amygdala.” He smiled. “Remarkable, isn’t it?”
The primordium of fear, the primordium of love, the primordium of rage. These three we are born with, but the greatest of all is fear.
“Why did I do it?” asked Bernie, standing on the bridge, staring into Thomas. “I was trying to get God’s attention. But there was no response, Thomas. No answer, only an overwhelming absence. And I knew.”
“Knew what?”
“That He doesn’t exist. Or doesn’t care. And either way, the result is the same. There is no one waiting for us at the top of the tower, Thomas.” And with that, Bernie swung his body over the side of the railing.
“Don’t!”
“Think of it as a Bedlam baptism,” said Bernie. And he stepped off, into nothingness.
PART FOUR
* * *
IF BY CHANCE YOU SEE
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
BERNIE DIDN’T DIE. HE couldn’t even do that right. He was fished out of the water, sputtering and coughing, by a good Samaritan who waded in to save him. Bernie was rushed to Massachusetts General Hospital in the early stages of hypothermia.
Thomas had watched in horror as his friend disappeared into the water, the splash closing around him, the current carrying him away. He’d staggered back, called 911. “A body is in the river. He’s—he’s gone.”
“Who? Did you know him?” the dispatcher asked.
“No,” said Thomas, hollow-chested. “I didn’t know him . . .” He turned off his phone, stepped back.
Thomas wasn’t aware that Bernie had surfaced, wasn’t aware of any of that. He knew only this: Bernie was gone, and the experiment had to end.
• • •
At Kingsley Hall, the light in the corner tower was off. Thomas’s father was sleeping, and the night staff that let Thomas in were held to silence by a finger to his lips.
“Shhhh,” he said. Only that.
Up the stairs to his father’s study and the control room beyond. Thomas, turning off the monitors one by one. And back down the stairs to the main hall and another door, one leading into the labyrinth of mirrors behind the walls. Thomas, slipping in, locking the door behind him.
He passed the one-way mirror that looked into Eli’s room. Eli sat on his cot, restless and awake, his wrists once again attached to a canvas belt around his waist. (Eli had been put back in restraints following his outburst during the Hobo Wars incident.) The lights in the rooms had been dimmed. Someone must have recanted.
Thomas came to Sebastian’s window, opened the door quietly, entered the room. These doors locked automatically from the outside, and Thomas was careful to leave it open behind him. He had come to take Sebastian away.
“Wake up.”
Sebastian blinked himself awake to find Thomas standing above him in the half-light.
“This—this is all your fault,” said Thomas. “You realize that, don’t you? Everything that’s happened. This entire experiment, it was set up solely to cure you. And you didn’t even have the common courtesy to get better.”
Sebastian tried to speak, but Thomas stopped him.
“Where do you get off, claiming to be Jesus H. Fucking Christ? What arrogance.”
Sebastian tried to sit up, but Thomas shoved him back down.
“Tell me your name.”
Again Sebastian tried to rise. Again he was shoved down.
“Tell me your name.”
Sebastian looked up at Thomas with the tremulous gaze of a kicked dog. “I am Jesus. Son of—”
“Tell me your name.”
Thomas now pulled Sebastian up by the scruff of his bathrobe. He was surprised—thrilled, in a way—at how weak Sebastian was, how easy it would be to mistreat him, to hurt him, as though that were what he was made for.
“Pain can be therapeutic,” Thomas said, and with that he ran Amy’s brother headlong into the one-way mirror, headlong into his own reflection, the two rushing up to meet each other. A loud thud. The glass rattled loudly in its protective case. Nose and lip, spraying blood, droplets like paint, a perfect red. Thomas drove Sebastian full force into the mirror again. And again. A faint moan, nothing else.
“Take a good look!” Thomas forced Sebastian to face himself. “This is not the face of God. This—this is who you really are. A fucking imposter.”
Sebastian’s lip was split, his mouth was filling with blood. In the next room, the magician sat up, suddenly alert. “Sebastian?” He put his ear to the wall. “Thomas?”
In his own room, Eli was awake as well. “Sadducees!” he roared. “Release him!” He didn’t know who was in Room B with Sebastian, but he assumed it was the devil. And he was right.
Thomas could hear Eli’s muffled yells next door, but he didn’t care. He dragged Sebastian from the whitewashed confines of the room, splattered now with Pollock sprays of blood, and forced him down the narrow maze of hallways to the bathroom. “Ever heard of a Bedlam baptism?”
Sebastian was crying now. So was Thomas.
Thomas kicked open the bathroom door, ran Sebastian into that mirror as well. But this one was not encased in protective plastic, and it shattered with a crash, glass cascading onto the floor. Sebastian went down, blood streaming from his forehead.
Out of breath, Thomas locked the door, turned the bathtub faucet on full, closed the drain. Over the tumult of water, he yelled again, “Tell me your name!”
Sebastian began to sob. “I am the Son of Man.”
“Your real name. Tell me your real name!”
“Stop . . . please . . .”
In Room C, the magician was yelling. He had heard Thomas’s voice. “Thomas! What’s going on?” He ran his fingers around the edge of the door but could find no way to open it.
It was sealed, almost seamless.
In the next room, Eli struggled against his own restraints, twisting the straps into the flesh of his wrists. “Serpents! Serpents in the House of the Lord!” The straps twisted tighter till his hands turned red, almost blue. He was fighting his restraints like a man wrestling with madness, until—with a rend—the clasp broke, the belt fell away, and Eli was free.
He threw himself against the door, shoulder first. “Sadducees!” he bellowed. He raised his foot, slammed it directly into the plexiglass of the one-way mirror. The glass might have been covered in protective casing, but the wooden frame it sat upon was exactly that: a wooden frame. It splintered on the third pile drive from Eli’s leg, the entire window propelling outward, into the narrow hallway behind.
It was this noise that woke the orderlies, who in turn woke Dr. Rosanoff. They had first thought someone was breaking in—they didn’t realize that someone might be breaking out.
Thomas had forced Sebastian into the tub. He was so feeble, this thin Messiah, so insubstantial, this failed priest. Sebastian went under, sending water over the side and shards of glass swirling across the tiled floor.
He came up, gasping for air.
“Who are you?” Thomas demanded.
“I am Jesus, Son of—”
Down again, with Sebastian’s hands clawing at the air.
Back up. Same answer. Down again.
At the sound of the window being kicked out of its frame, the magician shouted, “Eli?” Hitting the one-way mirror in his own room with both hands, he cried, “Eli! Let me out!” The turn of a lock and Eli burst in, bewildered and enraged. “Where is he?” he roared, but the magician had already pushed past, and was running down the narrow maze of hallways to—dead end—he turned, ran into Eli coming up behind.
Back in the bathroom, Thomas had given up. He turned off the water, sat on the closed toilet, head down.
Sebastian, bathrobe sodden, slid out from the tub and onto the floor.
Thomas began to laugh, a manic exhalation of defeat that originated in his stomach and radiated outward through his chest and throat. It was the laugh of a condemned man, of a sinner in love with his sins. All for naught, all for naught. Thomas picked up a drinking glass from beside the sink, scooped some water out of the bathtub, drank deeply, eyes closed. He filled the glass again, handed it to Sebastian, who was now propped up on the floor against the side of the tub.
“I don’t know about you,” said Thomas, “but I could use a real drink right about now. Wine, please, if you’re up for it.”
Voices clamoured on the other side of the bathroom door. It was Eli and the magician. As the magician grappled with the lock, Eli was thundering away about Pharisees and pharaohs.
At this point, what did it matter?
In the distance, behind the outer doors, other voices, equally frantic. The orderlies were trying to get past the first obstacle, into the maze, as Dr. Rosanoff, in silk robes, urged them onward. Boxes within boxes.
The door to the bathroom shimmered violently, rattling on its hinges; Eli was apparently trying to break through this one as well. Thomas looked at the shards of mirror and pools of water on the floor. What did it matter?
And then . . .
Sebastian’s hand came up, trembling, holding out the drinking glass that Thomas had given him. The water inside slowly transformed. Thomas watched in disbelief as it turned into wine in front of his eyes, the crimson uncurling like smoke into water, like dye from a dropper. But no. Not wine. Blood.
Sebastian’s wrists had been slashed, and he fell, dropping the water glass at the very moment the bathroom door blew inward. Everything went silent—a vacuum that ended with a crash of voices. Thomas felt as though he were coming up for air. He grabbed a towel, put pressure on Sebastian’s wrists—and was immediately yanked backward as though on a rip cord. It was Eli, pulling him back. Eli, the Hammer of God. Eli, with one eye clouded, but the other perfectly clear. He clasped a meaty hand on either side of Thomas’s head, squeezed—hard. “Sadducee!” he yelled. “Worm! Judas! The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand! Howl! Howl at the judgment of the Lord!”
Eli dragged Thomas across the tiled floor like a rag doll, as the magician worked frantically to stem the flow from Sebastian’s wounds, twisting the towel into a tourniquet. The orderlies were still a long way off. Thomas was on his own.
“An eye for an eye!” Eli bellowed. “Eye for an eye!” And he pushed his thumbs up, under Thomas’s gaping gaze. “Physician, heal thyself!”
Thomas could feel the pressure under each eye socket. He could feel it coming, and he spoke: one word. The only word that could save him: “Mercy.”
“Pharisee!”
“Have mercy . . .”
Eli glowered down at Thomas, then released him from his grip. Thomas toppled onto the floor.
The door that led into the maze behind the mirrors flew outward as Dr. Rosanoff and the orderlies leapt back. It was Eli, carrying Sebastian in his arms, a blood-soaked towel knotted around dangling wrists. Eli, unrestrained.
And somewhere in the distance, the sound of sirens.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
HUMAN DESIRE MAY BEGIN in the hypothalamus, but it spreads out from there, saturating the entire brain. Fueled by dopamine reward circuits and opiate-like endorphins, love and desire unleash a wave of neurochemicals into the brain’s synapses. The strongest of these is oxytocin. One might say that oxytocin is the chemical formula for love. When a mother gives birth, oxytocin floods her brain, creating both a sense of euphoria and a powerful feeling of bonding. Oxytocin turns off our higher critical functions, dampens our sense of pain, reduces feelings of trepidation. This is the same exact neurochemical that is released in women during orgasm, equally intense, equally irrational—but not in men, alas. When we speak of a woman’s postcoital “glow,” we are speaking of oxytocin.
And not only with love, but with food as well. They all flow from the same chemical craving, the one found in gamblers and alcoholics, in heroin addicts and pack-a-day smokers. Indeed, love may be the original addiction, a chemically induced form of madness. From endorphins to dopamine, love was the brain urging itself onward with that same frantic message: Hit me. Again. Again.
From the first tingle of interest—the dilated pupils, the heightened sense of arousal—to the surf-crash of sexual climax to the postcoital cuddling, Thomas could chart the rise and fall of a lover’s hormones with a scientific precision. He could chart it in Amy’s warmed facial features and mottled skin, her shallow breathing, the growing urgency. It was the ebb and flow of desire. Chemistry in action.
“Thomas, what are you thinking about?” she had asked once, sleepily, when she saw him studying her face.
“Just how beautiful you are.”
Those relaxed facial muscles? Oxytocin, definitely oxytocin.
But what Thomas saw now was the opposite of oxytocin: not love but rage, pure and undiluted.
She came at him from across the emergency room, eyes crazed. In old movies, a lady would beat her frail fists against a man’s chest before collapsing into his embrace, but not Amy. She went right for the throat, right for the eyes, right for the heart. It was only the state of her nails, cut short for kiln work, that saved him from lacerations.
It took Dr. Rosanoff and two security guards to pry her away, and in the tussle Thomas caught the faint scent of paint thinner. Her hair was falling out of her scrunchy over eyes raw with grief—and in that single flicker, it was almost worth it, just to be close to her again, even in anger.
“You asshole son of a prick!” she screamed, lunging again at Thomas.
“Calm down,” said Dr. Rosanoff. “If you want to see your brother, you have to calm down.”
Nurses crashed past with a gurney, shouting instructions in the chaotic hallways of the hospital. Other emergencies, other lives. Sebastian was already recuperating.
“Your brother is under the care of my personal physician,” said Dr. Rosanoff. “We’re
moving him to a private suite, where he will be well taken care of.”
She turned, hatred in her gaze. “You did this,” she said.
“I did this?” Dr. Rosanoff raised an eyebrow. “This isn’t the first time, is it? He’s tried this sort of thing before, hasn’t he? Perhaps you did this, Amy. Perhaps society did it. Or perhaps, just perhaps, he did this to himself.”
“Fuck you.” She pushed past him to the admissions desk. “I’m family,” she said. “I want to see him. Now.”
Sebastian was sitting up in a softly lit room, wrists bandaged, clean gauze and fresh stitches crocheted along his forehead and lip.
Amy’s voice caught in her throat.
Her brother looked at her as though seeing her again for the first time. He smiled faintly. “Amy,” he said.
“Sebastian?”
He nodded.
She rushed over, held him. “I’ve missed you,” she sobbed. “I’ve missed you so much.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
THOMAS STAYED WITH THEM through the night and into the day. On seeing her brother returned, Amy’s rage subsided. She was now focused on keeping him here, in the real world, with her. We, the wounded, the damaged, the unrepairable.
Thomas watched as Amy tended to her sedated brother. Hushed voices. Medicines and meals rolled in on trays. Pillows and pills and slow unsteady walks to the en suite bathroom, IV wobbling alongside, a small nod to Thomas as he passed.
The sun through the window gradually shifted, throwing light across the floor and then reeling it back in. It felt as though Thomas were caught in a time-lapse photograph, a study in sun and shadow, and when Amy finally acknowledged his presence, it was only to say, “You can go now.” It was the closest she would come to saying, “I forgive you.”
• • •
At Kingsley Hall, Thomas walked down the long, echoing corridors, across terra-cotta tiles and up a sweep of stairs. The manor was quiet, as though slumbering, and Thomas entered his father’s study without knocking. No one was there, and Thomas picked up the wastebasket from beside his father’s desk, entered the soft glow of the control room beyond. The clipboards and binders, the reel-to-reel tapes and videocassettes: it all went into the wastebasket. Thomas even pulled the Post-it notes off the consoles and crumpled them into a fist of paper, tossed them in with the rest.