The Footprints of God: A Novel Read online

  Geli closed her eyes and began to breathe deeply. She had made the case to Godin for taking out Tennant along with Fielding, but the old man had resisted. Yes, Godin conceded, Tennant had broken regulations and spent time with Fielding outside the facility. Yes, Tennant had supported Fielding’s effort to suspend the project. And it was Tennant’s tie to the president that had made that suspension a reality. But there was no proof that Tennant was part of the Englishman’s campaign to sabotage the project, or that he was privy to any of the dangerous information Fielding possessed. Since Geli did not know what that information was, she could not judge the risk of letting Tennant live. She had reminded Godin of the maxim “Better safe than sorry,” but Godin did not relent. He would though. Soon.

  Geli said, “JPEG, Fielding, Lu Li.” An image of a dark-haired Asian woman appeared on her monitor. Born Lu Li Cheng, reared in Canton Province, Communist China. Forty years old. Advanced degrees in applied physics.

  “Another mistake,” Geli muttered. Lu Li Cheng had no business inside the borders of the United States, much less in the inner circle of the most sensitive scientific project in the country. Geli touched the key that connected her to Thomas Corelli in the surveillance car outside the Fielding house. “You see anything strange over there?”

  “No.”

  “How easily could you search Tennant’s car when he arrives?”

  “Depends on where he parks.”

  “If you see a FedEx envelope in the car, break in, read it, then put it back. And I want video of their arrival.”

  “No problem. What are you looking for?”

  “I’m not sure. Just get it.”

  Geli removed a pack of Gauloises from her desk, took out a cigarette, and broke off its filter. In the flare of the match she caught her reflection in her computer monitor. A veil of blonde hair, high cheekbones, steel-blue eyes, nasty burn scar. She considered the ugly ridged tissue on her left cheek as much a part of her face as her eyes or mouth. A plastic surgeon had once offered to remove the discolored mark at no cost, but she’d turned him down. Scars had a purpose: to remind their bearer of wounds. The wound that had caused that scar she would never let herself forget.

  She punched a key and routed the signals from the microphones in the Fielding house to her headset. Then she drew deeply on her cigarette, settled back in her chair, and blew a stream of harsh smoke toward the ceiling. Geli Bauer hated many things, but most of all she hated waiting.

  Chapter

  4

  We drove in silence, the Acura moving swiftly through the dusk. At this time of evening, it was a quick ride from my suburb to Andrew Fielding’s house near the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Rachel didn’t understand my demand for silence, and I didn’t expect her to. When I first became involved in Trinity, the xenophobic level of security had stunned me. The other scientists—Fielding included—had worked on defense-related projects before and accepted the intrusive security as a necessary inconvenience. But eventually, even the veterans complained that we were enduring something unprecedented. Surveillance was all-pervasive and reached far beyond the lab complex. Protests were met with a curt reminder that the scientists on the Manhattan Project had been forced to live behind barbed wire to ensure the security of “the device.” The freedom we enjoyed came with a price—or so went the party line.

  Fielding didn’t buy it. “Random” polygraph tests occurred almost weekly, and surveillance extended even into our homes. Before I could begin my video today, I’d had to plug pinholes in my walls that concealed tiny microphones. Fielding discovered them with a special scanner he’d built at home and marked the bugs with tiny pins. He had made something of a hobby out of evading Trinity surveillance. He warned me that speaking confidentially in cars was impossible. Automobiles were simple to bug, and even clean vehicles could be covered from a distance, using special high-tech microphones. The Englishman’s cat-and-mouse game with the NSA had amused me at times, but there was no doubt about who had got the last laugh.

  I looked over at Rachel. It felt strange to be in a car with her. In the five years since my wife’s death, I’d had relationships with two women, both before my assignment to Trinity. My time with Rachel wasn’t a “relationship” in the romantic sense. Two hours per week for the past three months, I had sat in a room with her and discussed the most disturbing aspect of my life—my dreams. Through her questions and interpretations, she had probably revealed more about herself than she had learned about me, yet much remained hidden.

  She’d come down from New York Presbyterian to accept the faculty position at Duke, where she taught a small cadre of psychiatry residents Jungian analysis, a dying art in the world of modern pharmacological psychiatry. She also saw private patients and carried out psychiatric research. After two years of virtual solitude working on Trinity, I would have found contact with any intelligent woman provocative. But Rachel had far more than intelligence to offer. Sitting in her leather chair, dressed impeccably, her dark hair pulled up in a French braid, she would watch me with unblinking concentration, as though peering into depths of my mind that even I had not plumbed. Sometimes her face—and particularly her eyes—became the whole room for me. They were the environment I occupied, the audience I confided in, the judgment I awaited. But those eyes were slow to judge, at least in the beginning. She would question me about certain images, then question the answers I gave. She sometimes offered interpretations of my dreams, but unlike the NSA psychiatrists I had seen, she never spoke with a tone of infallibility. She seemed to be searching for meaning along with me, prodding me to interpret the images myself.

  “David, you don’t have to drive around all night,” she said. “I’m not going to hold this against you.”

  Right, I thought. What’s wrong with delusions of a secret government conspiracy? “Be patient,” I told her. “It’s not much farther.”

  She looked at me in the semidark, her eyes skeptical. “What’s the monetary award for a Nobel Prize?”

  “About a million U.S. Fielding got a little less than Ravi Nara, because…” I trailed off, realizing that she was only probing again, trying to puncture my “delusion.”

  I focused on the road, knowing that in a few minutes she would have to admit that my paranoia was at least partially grounded in fact. What would she think then? Would she open her mind to my interpretation of my dreams, however irrational it might sound?

  From our first session, Rachel had argued that she could not make valid interpretations of my “hallucinations” without knowing intimate details of my past and my work. But I couldn’t tell much. Fielding had warned me that the NSA would consider anyone who knew anything about Trinity or its principals to be a potential threat. Beyond this concern, I felt that what I saw during my narcoleptic episodes had nothing to do with my past. The images seemed to be coming from outside my mind. Not in the sense of hearing alien voices, which was a marker for schizophrenia, but in the classical sense of visions. Revealed visions, like those described by prophets. For a man who had not believed in God since he was a boy, it was a singularly disturbing state of affairs.

  My dreams had not begun with the first narcoleptic attacks. The first episodes were true blackouts. Holes in my life. Gaps of time, lost forever. I would be working at my office computer, then suddenly become aware of a high-pitched vibration in my body. Generalized at first, it would quickly localize to my teeth. This was a classic onset symptom of narcolepsy. I’d begin to feel drowsy, then suddenly jerk awake in my chair and find that forty minutes had passed. It was like going under anesthesia. No memory at all.

  The dreams began after a week of blackouts. The first one was always the same, a recurring nightmare that frightened me more than the blackouts had. I remember how intrigued Rachel was when I first recounted it, and how uncharacteristically sure she was that she understood the image. I sat in the deeply padded chair opposite her desk, closed my eyes, and described what I had seen so often.

  I’m sitti
ng in a dark room. There’s no light at all. No sound. I can feel my eyes with my fingers, my ears, too, but I see and hear nothing. I remember nothing. I have no past. And because I see and hear nothing, I have no present. I simply am. That’s my reality. I AM. I feel like a stroke victim imprisoned within a body and brain that no longer function. I can think, but not of any specific images. I feel more than I think. And what I feel is this: Who am I? Where did I come from? Why am I alone? Was I always here? Will I always be here? These thoughts don’t merely fill my mind. They are my mind. There’s no time as we know it, only the questions changing from one to another. Eventually, the questions resolve into a single mantra: Where did I come from? Where did I come from? I’m a brain-damaged man sitting in a room for eternity, asking one question of the darkness.

  “Don’t you see?” Rachel had said. “You haven’t fully dealt with the deaths of your wife and daughter. Their loss cut you off from the world, and from yourself. You are damaged. You are wounded. The man walking around in the world of light is an act. The real David Tennant is sitting in that dark room, unable to think or feel. No one feels his grief or his pain.”

  “That’s not it,” I told her. “I did a psychiatry rotation, for God’s sake. This isn’t unresolved grief.”

  She sighed and shook her head. “Doctors always make the worst patients.”

  A week later, I told her the dream had changed.

  “There’s something in the room with me now.”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t see it.”

  “But you know it’s there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it a person?”

  “No. It’s very small. A sphere, floating in space. A black golf ball floating in the dark.”

  “How do you know it’s there?”

  “It’s like a deeper darkness at the center of the dark. And it pulls at me.”

  “Pulls how?”

  “I don’t know. Like gravity. Emotional gravity. But I know this. It knows the answer to my questions. It knows who I am and why I’m stuck in that dark room.”

  And so it went, with slight variations, until the dream changed again. When it did, it changed profoundly. One night, while reading at home, I “went under” in the usual way. I found myself sitting in the familiar lightless room, asking my question of the black ball. Then, without warning, the ball exploded into retina-scorching light. After so much darkness, the striking of a match would have seemed an explosion, but this was no match. It blasted outward in all directions with the magnitude of a hydrogen bomb. Only this explosion did not suck back into itself and blossom into a mushroom cloud. It expanded with infinite power and speed, and I had the horrifying sense of being devoured by it, devoured but not destroyed. As the blinding light consumed the darkness, which was me, I somehow knew that this could go on for billions of years without destroying me altogether. Yet still I was afraid.

  Rachel didn’t know what to make of this dream. Over the next three weeks, she listened as I described the births of stars and galaxies, their lives and deaths: black holes, supernovas, flashes of nebulae like powdered diamonds flung into the blackness, planets born and dying. I seemed to see from one end of the universe to the other, all objects at once as they expanded into me at the speed of light.

  “Have you seen images like these before?” she asked me. “In waking life?”

  “How could I?”

  “Have you seen photographs taken by the Hubble space telescope?”

  “Of course.”

  “They’re very much like what you’re describing.”

  Frustration crept into my voice. “You don’t understand. I’m not just seeing this. I’m feeling it. The way I might feel watching children, or combat, or lovers together. It’s not merely a visual display.”

  “Go on.”

  That was what she always said. I closed my eyes and submerged myself in my most recent dream.

  “I’m watching a planet. Hovering above it. There are clouds, but not as we know them. They’re green like acid, and tortured by storms. I’m diving now, diving down through the clouds, like a satellite image zooming in to ground level. There’s an ocean below, but it’s not blue. It’s red, and boiling. I plunge through its surface, deep into the red. I’m looking for something, but it’s not there. This ocean is empty.”

  “A lot of things came to me when you described that,” Rachel said. “The color imagery first. Red could be important. The empty ocean is a symbol of barrenness, which expresses your aggrieved state.” She hesitated. “What are you looking for in that ocean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I think you do.”

  “I’m not looking for Karen and Zooey.”

  “David.” A hint of irritation in her voice. “If you don’t think these images are symbolic, why are you here?”

  I opened my eyes and looked at her perfectly composed face. A curtain of professionalism obscured her empathy, but I saw the truth. She was projecting her sense of loss about her own family onto me.

  “I’m here because I can’t find answers on my own,” I said. “Because I’ve read a mountain of books, and they haven’t helped.”

  She nodded gravely. “How do you remember the hallucinations in such detail? Do you write them down when you wake up?”

  “No. They aren’t like normal dreams, where the harder you try to remember, the less you can. These are indelible. Isn’t that a feature of narcoleptic dreams?”

  “Yes,” she said softly. “All right. Karen and Zooey died in water. They both drowned. Karen probably bled a good bit from her hands, and where she hit her head on the steering wheel. That would give us red water.” Rachel reclined her chair and looked at the ceiling tiles. “These hallucinations have no people in them, yet you experience strong emotional reactions. You mentioned combat. Have you ever been in combat?”

  “No.”

  “But you know that Karen fought to save Zooey. She fought to stay alive. You told me that.”

  I shut my eyes. I didn’t like to think about that part of it, but sometimes I couldn’t banish the thoughts. When Karen’s car flipped into the pond, it had landed on its roof and sunk into a foot of soft mud. The electric windows shorted out, and the doors were impossible to open. Broken bones in Karen’s hands and feet testified to the fury with which she had fought to smash the windows. She was a small woman, not physically strong, but she had not given up. A paramedic from the accident scene told me that when the car was finally winched out of the muck and its doors opened, he found her in the backseat, one arm wrapped tightly around Zooey, the other arm floating free, that hand shattered and lacerated over the knuckles.

  What had happened was clear. As water filled the car and Karen fought to break the windows, Zooey had panicked. Anyone would, and especially a child. At that point, some mothers would have kept fighting while their child screamed in terror. Others would have comforted their child and prayed for help to come. But Karen had pulled Zooey tight against her, promised her that everything was going to be all right, and then with her feet fought to her last breath to escape the waterbound coffin. For her to cling to Zooey while suffering the agony of anoxia testified to a love stronger than terror, and that knowledge had helped bring me some peace.

  “Green clouds and a red ocean have nothing to do with a car accident five years ago,” I said.

  “No? Then I think you should tell me more about your childhood.”

  “It’s not relevant.”

  “You can’t know that,” Rachel insisted.

  “I do.”

  “Tell me about your work, then.”

  “I teach medical ethics.”

  “You took a leave of absence over a year ago.”

  I whipped my head toward her and opened my eyes. “How do you know that?”

  “I heard it at the hospital.”

  “Who said it?”

  “I don’t remember. I overheard it. You’re very well known in the medical commu
nity. Physicians at Duke refer to your book all the time. They did at New York Presbyterian, too. So, is it true? Did you take a leave of absence from the medical school?”

  “Let’s stick to the dreams, okay? It’s safer for both of us.”

  “Safer how?”

  I didn’t answer.

  By the next week’s appointment, the dreams had changed again.

  “I’m looking at the Earth. Suspended in space. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Blue and green with swirling white clouds. It’s a living thing, a perfect closed system. I dive through the clouds, a hundred-mile swan dive into deep blue ocean. It’s bursting with life. Giant molecules, multicelled creatures, jellyfish, squid, serpents, sharks. The land, too, is teeming. Covered with jungle. A symphony of green. On the shore, fish flop out of the waves and grow legs. Strange crabs scuttle onto the sand and change into other animals I’ve never seen. Time is running in fast-forward, like evolution run through a projector at a million times natural speed. Dinosaurs morph into birds, rodents into mammals. Primates lose their hair. Ice sheets flatten the jungles and then melt into savannah. Twenty thousand years pass in one breath—”