Biblical (3 page)

Then there was the graffito
WE ARE BECOMING
appearing in fifty languages, in every major city around the world. On government buildings, on bridges, sprayed over advertising hoardings.

And people started to talk about John Astor.

No one knew for sure if he really existed or not, but there were rumors that the FBI was after him. And, of course, there was the spreading urban myth about the manuscript of Astor’s book,
Phantoms of Our Own Making
, that drove mad anyone who found and read it.

All of these things happened before it began.

But it really began with the staring.

Psychiatrists deal in the weird. In the odd. The very nature of their work means they encounter the aberrant and the abnormal on a daily basis. They are in the business of confronting skewed perceptions of reality.

So the fact that the entire world was changing – that everything he’d held up to that point to be true about the nature of things was about to be turned on its head – had pretty much passed Dr John Macbeth by.

But the world did change. And it began with the staring.

Like with the news stories, it was only in the weeks and months that followed that Macbeth began to piece together the clues that had been there all the time. But there had been other clues that he had missed, that had not registered on the scope of his professional radar. But afterwards he remembered just how many people he had seen, without really noticing them: in the streets, on the subway, in the park.

Staring.

There had been only a few in those first days: people gazing into empty space, faces blank or creased in frowned confusion or flashed with unease. They had the same effect on others that cats have when they stare past you, over your shoulder, at something you turn around to see but cannot. Unsettling.

Of course, at the beginning, at the beginning of the staring, no one had come up with a name for it, medical or otherwise. The starers were yet to be called Dreamers.

It was only afterwards that Macbeth remembered the first one he had encountered, an attractive, expensively dressed woman in her mid-thirties. It had happened on his first day back in Boston: he had been walking behind her in the downtown street on that sunny but cold late spring morning. She had walked with city-sidewalk purposefulness, just as he had, but then she had suddenly, unaccountably, come to an abrupt halt. Macbeth almost walked smack into her and had to dance-step a dodge around her. The woman simply stood there, at the edge of the sidewalk, feet planted, gazing at something that wasn’t there across the street. Then, as she pointed a vague finger towards the nothing that had caught her attention, she stepped off the curb and into the traffic. Macbeth grabbed her elbow and hauled her back and out of the way of a truck that flashed past with an angry horn blast.

“I thought …” she had said, the words dying on her lips and her eyes now searching for something lost in the distance.

Macbeth had asked the woman if she was okay, admonished her to pay more attention to traffic and walked on.

It was hardly an incident: just a distracted woman making an error in roadside judgment. Something you saw almost every day in any city around the world.

It was only later, after the other events, that significance began to attach and he started to wonder what it had been that the woman had seen in the street; that had almost pulled her into the path of the truck.

*

It was a good room. Not great, but better than okay. The architecture that surrounded him was always unusually important to John Macbeth: its proportions, materials, decor, amount of light.

Macbeth had woken up that morning and the room had frightened him with its unfamiliarity. He had awoken not knowing who he was, what he did for a living, where he was
and why he was there. For a full minute and a half, he had experienced complete existential panic: the bright burning star at the heart of his amnesiac darkness being the knowledge that he should know who he was, where he was and what he was doing there.

His memory, his identity had fallen back into place: not all at once, but in ill-fitting segments he had to piece together. It had happened before, he began to remember – many times before, especially when he was in a strange place. Terrifying moments of depersonalized isolation before he remembered he was Dr John Macbeth, that he was a psychiatrist and cognitive neuroscientist trying to make sense of his own psychology by seeking to understand others. He worked, he now remembered, on Project One in Copenhagen, Denmark, and that he was in Boston on Project business. And he had suffered derealization and depersonalization episodes all his life; he remembered that too.

Eventually, he had made sense of the room and the room had made sense of him. That was why environments were so important to him. But, for those ninety terrifying seconds, he could have been as equally convinced by his surroundings that he was someone, somewhere and sometime else.

The room was on the third floor of the hotel that had looked just right on the website but hadn’t looked quite as right in up-close reality. It was large, and a tall traditional sash-type window looked out over the street. Macbeth had opened the window, creating at the bottom a breezeless four-inch gap.

Now, sitting in the armchair by the window in the quiet room, his identity and purpose restored to him, Macbeth listened to the sounds beyond. It was something he often did and, like so many aspects of his personality, others would probably have considered him odd because of it. Where most people in hotel rooms would switch on the TV or radio, filling the space around them with expected sounds, or closing in even
tighter the borders of their awareness with an MP3 player and earphones, John Macbeth would sit, still and silent, listening outward. With everything quiet in his room, he attended the sounds beyond: from neighboring rooms, from the street beyond the window, from the city beyond the street. Sounds off, they called them in the theater: the pretense of some reality beyond, some action unseen.

Like everyone else, Macbeth had a cellphone and a laptop computer, but used them only when compelled to. Technology was a central part of his work, an unavoidable part of everyday life, but he did not interact well with it. Computer and video games, which he could in any case never understand adults playing, gave him motion sickness, and any sustained interaction with electronics seemed to make him restless and irritated. The problem he was having with his computer was a good example: a folder he could not remember creating and which refused to open for him, no matter what he did – including hitting the keyboard harder with an angry fingertip, as if a virtual object would yield to real-world physics. The folder had been there for over a month, sitting on his computer’s desktop, taunting his technological incompetence.

My brother Casey will sort you out, he had threatened it – out loud – on more than one occasion.

Ironically, Macbeth’s work brought him into contact with the world’s most sophisticated computer technology: he was on an interdisciplinary team of some of the finest brains on the planet, yet more than half their thinking was done for them by machines. And the whole aim of Project One was, indeed, to create a machine that could simulate the neural activity of the human brain, perhaps even think for itself. Outside his work, however, Macbeth eschewed technology as much as was practicable in modern life. His avoidance wasn’t founded on some philosophical or moral objection: it was just that technology seemed to make his
problem
worse; loosen his grasp on who and where he was in the world.

So John Macbeth chose to connect with the real universe rather than the virtual, listening to sounds outside the room to reassure himself that he really was in the room; that he was there, his mind reaching out into the world and not turned in on itself. It was a meditation he had done since boyhood: before-dark Cape Cod summer bedtimes listening to the sounds of birds or waves or distant trains beyond curtains that glowed amber and red with the low sun. He remembered so little from his childhood, but he remembered those curtains glowing with bold colors and strong patterns.

For the duration of his stay in Boston, Macbeth had booked into a hotel that matched his style but overstretched the budget allocated by the university. It wasn’t that he went for conspicuously ritzy places full of gilt-edged reminders that they were well beyond the reach of the ordinary working stiff; he preferred quality designer hotels and boutique B&Bs – places with character, history, or ideally both. Macbeth’s surroundings had to be right. Always. The colors, smells, textures and tastes that surrounded him, even his clothes, were enormously important. A refined materialism that probably seemed superficial. But there was nothing superficial about it: Macbeth had a real need to be in an environment that soothed him, offered some kind of harmony; reconciled his internal and external worlds. It was at the same time meditative and a reassurance of identity. And it had a lot to do, he knew, with his memories. Or lack of them.

Whatever motivated it, he needed it the same way the observant Catholic needed rosary beads.

*

Boston was Macbeth’s hometown. He’d been sent there to represent Project One by the University of Copenhagen. Despite the protests of Poulsen, the Project’s director and Macbeth’s boss, the university had been keen to use him as a poster boy, seeming to think that Macbeth had a look and manner that most people would not associate with a research scientist, or psychiatrist,
and – as an American – he was perfectly suited for liaison with the Project’s Boston partner, the Schilder Neuroscience Research Institute.

Macbeth didn’t see himself as an ideal ambassador. He knew he could be sociable and witty, but for as long as he could remember he’d been aware of his detachment from others, his emotional and intellectual self-containment. As a psychiatrist, he had studied and understood the ‘problem of other minds’; he’d understood it, but had never fully resolved it for himself.

“You okay, Karen?” A rich, authoritative male voice drifted up from the street. “I need you to be okay for the Halverson presentation.”

“I’m fine.” A woman’s voice. Young, refined, educated, defiant. “I told you before. I’m fine …”

The voices faded and were replaced by others. Macbeth sat and speculated what the Halverson presentation could be about, what problem the woman had that compelled the man to seek reassurance. From an incomplete and incoherent fragment of reality, he extrapolated a complete and coherent fiction.

Maybe I should become a writer, he told himself. Macbeth the psychiatrist knew that storytelling and mental disorder grew from the same seed: writers scored highly as nonpathological schizotypes. The higher the score, the more disposed they were to magical thinking, the more creative the writing.

He checked his watch: he himself had an appointment to keep.

Phoning down to the front desk, he asked them to call a cab, telling them he’d be right down. Out in the hallway, the heavy door clunked shut behind him and he slipped the plastic card-key into his pocket. The hotel was an old building and the doors looked original. Macbeth imagined the craftsmen who had carved and carpentered them, who had forged and fitted
the brass door furniture. He thought how impossible it would have been for these four generations-dead artisans to imagine that one day their doors would lock and unlock with a contactless microchip sweep. It was another form of elaborating a whole from a fragment. Most people got lost in thought, Macbeth told himself often; the difference was sometimes he couldn’t find his way back.

He made his way towards the elevator at the far end of the corridor. A pillar midway down the hall blocked the view of the doors, but as he headed towards it, Macbeth saw a tall man standing at the end of the hall, clearly waiting for the elevator car to arrive. A dark man: dark hair unfashionably long, dark beard unfashionably full, dark suit unfashionably cut.

Something about the man, the corridor, the light, provoked a feeling of déjà vu in Macbeth. He shook it off and called to him.

“Hey … could you hold that for me?”

The dark man didn’t turn or acknowledge Macbeth’s request. Instead, he remained blank-faced toward the elevator before stepping forward and out of view behind the pillar.

“Thanks a lot, friend,” muttered Macbeth and he hurried along the hall. But when he reached the doors, he found them closed and the electronic display above them indicated that the elevator was on the ground floor. And unmoving. Macbeth stared at the doors, at the LED display and back along the hall to where he had been when he had called out to the dark man, as if there was a calculation to be done; an equation to make sense of the experience.

He shook the puzzle from his head and stabbed the button to summon the car.

Macbeth told the driver where he wanted to go.

“The Scotch place on Beacon Street?” The cabbie Boston-brogued his terminal consonants out of existence. Macbeth always found odd how much he noticed the accent whenever he came back from Europe.

“That’s the place,” he said.

“Sure thing …” The driver executed one of those rear-view mirror assessments of his passenger that Boston cabbies always seemed to do. He frowned in concentration and Macbeth sighed, knowing that the driver was trying to work out where he had seen him before. People were always trying to work out where they had seen him before, but they never could because they never had. Like all the others, the cabbie and the psychiatrist would never really have crossed paths, but Macbeth knew the questioning would start. Sooner or later.

Macbeth sat in the back of the cab in silence, watching the familiar-unfamiliar Boston cityscape slide by, troubled by his lack of connection to an environment he should have felt connected to. Jamais vu, the opposite of déjà vu.

He remembered treating a woman whose brain lesion had left her with permanent derealization and jamais vu: everything she had known, had grown up with, had lived with, suddenly ceased to be recognizable. There had been no amnesia: her memories were left intact, but the wiring that connected what she saw with what she remembered had been burned
out. The result was that every time she stepped into the apartment she had lived in for five years – and despite knowing her address and that it was indeed her apartment – she would gaze at the furniture, the décor, the pictures on the wall as if she were viewing a home to rent for the first time; nothing seeming in the least familiar.