The Footprints of God (26 page)

She pointed through the windshield. "There's Caryville. And I-75. Are we going north or south?"

"Pull over."

She slowed gradually, then turned the wheel and stopped on the shoulder, just short of the northbound on-ramp.

"I'm trying to escape from myself," I thought aloud. "To do that, we have to make utterly random choices. But how random can my choices be? I suppose we could flip a coin every time we come to an intersection like this."

Rachel was shaking her head. "They don't have a scan of
my
brain. They can't predict anything I would do. I'll just make the choices from now on." She saw doubt in my eyes. "You still don't trust me?"

"It's not that. But by now Geli Bauer knows everything there is to know about you. She knows things even you don't remember."

Rachel's lips compressed into a white line. "I hate her. I hate her, and I don't even know her."

"I know. But hate's not going to save us."

"Why can't we just disappear into nowhere? Pay cash at a no-name motel in a no-name town? Back this truck up to a fence and go to sleep for three days. America is a big place. Even for the NSA."

"You ever watch
America's Most Wanted?
They catch criminals every week who try what you just suggested. Television makes America a lot smaller than you think."

I leaned back in my seat and tried to let instinct take over. Cars and trucks passed in both directions, some slowly, others shaking the truck with the wind they threw off. As I sat there, the situation began to clarify itself.

In three days, we would get a chance to see the president. Our problem was staying alive long enough to talk to him. The odds of that were long and getting longer. Even if we did reach Matthews, I'd have to convince him that I was telling the truth and that everyone else involved in Project Trinity was lying. To do that, I needed hard evidence. And I had none. My other option—going public—would only convince the president that I was the loose cannon everyone at Trinity claimed I was and alienate the one man who could save us.
Three days . . .

"How long are we going to sit here?" Rachel asked.

"Give me a minute."

Hiding was not the answer. Running wasn't either. Not in any conventional way. We needed to take a step so radical that no entity in the world could predict it. But what?

As I stared through the windshield at the oncoming traffic, I realized I was sitting here with Rachel for one reason: my dreams. My dreams had brought us together. Without my dreams, we would both have been shot back at my house. Yet I was no closer to understanding them than I had been on the day I first walked into Rachel's office.

For months they had progressed, like a persistent message being sent from a distant radio source. In the beginning, the incomprehensible images had troubled and even frightened me. But over time—and especially during the past three weeks—a conviction had begun to crystallize within me that something important was being communicated to me. Of course, schizophrenics felt the same conviction. What separated me from them?

I closed my eyes and tried to blank my mind, but the opposite happened. I suddenly saw a walled city on a hill, its stones glowing yellow in the sun. There was a gate set in its face.

The eastern gate,
whispered a voice in my head.
Jerusalem.

Never had I experienced a vision while awake. I opened my eyes and saw Rachel staring at the dashboard. I closed my eyes again, but the city vanished like the afterimage of a flashbulb.

"David? What's wrong with your eyes?"

"Nothing."

I rubbed my temples and tried to open my mind to whatever was coming. I'd felt drawn to specific places before. During my twenties, I'd traveled a lot, and while I was usually driven by student wanderlust, there were times when something deeper had pulled me off my planned track.

While visiting Oxford University, I'd awakened one morning with a feeling that I needed to get to Stonehenge—not just to see it, but to be in the presence of the sarsen stones. My companion assured me that there was no rush; the stones had been standing for five thousand years and would surely wait another few days. But still I rented a car and drove south until I reached Salisbury Plain. After darkness fell, I approached the ancient ring alone and did what tourists can do no longer: walked among the stones in the moonlight and lay upon the sacrificial altar. I was no New Age dilettante, but a medical student from the University of Virginia, looking toward a stable career. Yet this wasn't the only time such a thing had happened. I was drawn to Chichen Itza the same way. And on a drive to the Grand Canyon, I changed course and camped at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico for a week instead. In Greece it was Delphi over Athens. In all these situations I had felt an external pull, as though something were calling me to a specific place.

What I felt now was different, an internal compulsion to travel to Jerusalem, whatever the consequences. That the city was sacred to three great religions was irrelevant. I had nothing in common with the faithful millions planning pilgrimages to the Holy Land. I sensed only that the city held answers for me, answers that could be found nowhere else.

"Where are we going?" Rachel asked irritably.

"Israel," I said.

"What?"

"Jerusalem."

"David—"

"It's because—"

"Don't tell me. Because of your hallucinations, right?"

"Yes."

She reached out and lifted my chin, then looked deeply into my eyes. "David, people are trying to kill us. The
government
is trying to kill us. You've been having hallucinations for reasons we don't understand, but which may have been caused by damage to your brain. And you want to use those hallucinations to guide you in trying to save our lives?"

"Whoever will save his life shall lose it."

"What?"

I turned up my palms. "I'm not saying this will save our lives. I'm saying that if I'm going to be hunted down and killed, I'd rather it happen while I'm trying to learn the meaning of something I believe
has
meaning."

"You truly believe your hallucinations have meaning?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"I can't explain it logically. It's just something I know. Like a bird flying south."

She sighed like an exhausted mother talking to a child.
"Try,
okay? Try to explain."

I closed my eyes and searched for words to explain the inexplicable. "I feel as though I've been chosen."

"For what?"

"I'm not sure."

"Chosen by whom?"

"God."

"God
God?"

"Yes."

She took a deep breath and folded her hands in her lap. She was clearly struggling to remain calm. "I think it's time you told me what these recent hallucinations have been about. Are you still dreaming that you're Jesus?"

"Yes."

"What's different about these visions as compared to the older ones? Why have you hidden them from me?"

We'd finally arrived at the line between sanity and the rubber room. I was glad we were in a truck on a highway and not in Rachel's office. There was no one she could call to have me committed. "Because I no longer believe they're hallucinations. Or dreams. I think they're memories."

She expelled air in a frustrated rush.
"Memories?
My God, David. What's happening in these dreams?"

"I'm reliving parts of Jesus' life. His travels to Jerusalem. His experiences there. I hear voices. My own . . . the disciples. Rachel, what I see in my head is more real than what I see around me. And events are moving rapidly. I'm approaching the crucifixion."

She was shaking her head in disbelief. "How could you have two-thousand-year-old memories that only entered your mind in the past six months?"

"I don't know."

"These dreams make you feel some urgency to get to Israel?"

I hadn't thought of my feeling as urgency before, but that was what it was. What I'd perceived as generalized anxiety was really a slowly developing compulsion to travel to the setting of my dreams.

"To the Holy Land," I said. "Yes."

"Are you afraid you'll die in real life if you don't get there before you dream of the crucifixion?"

"Maybe. Mainly I have a sense that if I don't get there soon, I'll lose the chance to understand what my dreams are trying to tell me."

Rachel stared at the oncoming traffic, her head rocking back and forth. Then she suddenly turned to me, her eyes bright and wide.

"Do you realize what day it is?"

"No."

"We're less than a week away from the Easter holiday."

I blinked. "So?"

"We're approaching the traditional dates of Jesus' death and resurrection. Not only in your dreams, but also in the real world."

"You're saying the two are connected?"

"Of course. Somehow, the approach of Easter is causing you to have these dreams, this anxiety. You're like the people who thought the world would end when the millennium turned. Don't you see? This is
all
part of a delusional system."

I shook my head and smiled. "You're wrong. But you're right about the dates. They could be important."

Rachel was watching me as she would someone who was playing an elaborate joke on her. "What about meeting the president?"

"We'll do it when we get back. What difference does a couple of days make? Especially if it keeps us alive?"

She closed her eyes and spoke softly. "Did you tell Andrew Fielding about your hallucinations?"

"Yes."

"What did he say?"

"He told me to pay attention to them. Fielding always said that in trying to build Trinity, we were walking in the footprints of God. He didn't know how right he was."

"Perfect. Two peas in a pod." Rachel put her hands on the wheel as though to pull onto the road, but she left the truck in park. "You really intend to follow these hallucinations to Israel?"

"Yes."

"And you admit they might be the result of brain damage?"

"Not brain damage, as you think of it." I thought of Fielding's excitement as he expounded his theory of consciousness. "Disturbances to the quantum processes in my brain."

Rachel was squeezing the steering wheel so hard that her knuckles were white. "You're like someone who dreamed he was once a pharaoh deciding to go to Egypt to find the meaning of his life!"

"I suppose I am. I know how crazy it sounds. The thing is, we don't have a better alternative. If it makes you feel better, we're going because we need to do something the Trinity computer can't possibly predict."

"It can't predict you'd go to Israel?"

"No. It was my Super-MRI scan that caused my dreams to start. My neuromodel has no memory of dreams that occurred after that. There's not even any mention of Jerusalem in your medical records, because I stopped going to you before the city took center stage in my dreams."

Rachel looked thoughtful. "Going to Israel isn't like going to Paris, you know. The country's in a permanent state of war. I've been there. They pay close attention to who goes in and out. El Al has four times the security of other airlines. And we're being hunted by the American government. As soon as we tried to book a ticket, they'd be waiting for us at the airport."

"You're right. We need fake passports."

She laughed bitterly. "You say that like 'We need to pick up some bread and milk on the way home.'"

"I have eighteen thousand dollars left. There has to be a way to get fake passports with that."

"Fake passports won't cut it in Israel. Those people deal with terrorists every day."

"Being jailed in Israel is better than being murdered here."

Rachel leaned back in her seat and sighed. "You've got a point."

"I'm going to New York. With eighteen grand, I can find a fake passport there. I know it."

"What about me?"

"You can go. You can not go. It's up to you."

She nodded as though she'd expected this. "I see. What will happen to me if I don't?"

I thought about Geli Bauer. "You want me to lie to you?"

Rachel put the truck in gear and pulled onto the northbound on-ramp, accelerating fast.

"New York?" I asked.

"No."

"Where, then?"

She looked at me, her face less guarded than I'd ever seen it. "Do you want me to come with you or not?"

I did. More than that, I felt she was
supposed
to go with me. "I want you with me, Rachel. For a lot of reasons."

She laughed dryly. "That's good, because you couldn't make it without me. Passing out by yourself in the street isn't very healthy. If I'd left you back there in the truck, you'd be dead now."

"I know that. Are you coming?"

She passed a tanker truck and eased back into the right lane. "If you want to go to Israel, we have to go to Washington, D.C., first."

I stiffened in my seat. All my doubts about her had returned in a nauseating rush. "Why Washington?"

"Because I know someone there who can help us."

"Who?"

I wanted to probe her eyes for deception, but she kept them on the road. "I treated a lot of women when I practiced in New York. Mostly women, actually."

"And?"

"Some of them had problems with their husbands."

"And?"

"Sometimes the courts gave husbands access to their children despite evidence of physical abuse. Some of the wives were so afraid of what might happen that they felt they had no alternative but to run."

I felt a tingle in my palms. "You're talking about custody situations. Kidnapping your own children."

She nodded. "It's not difficult to hide from the police if you're alone. But with children it's tough. You have to enroll them in school, get medical care, things like that." She glanced at me, her face taut. "These women have a network. Sort of an underground railroad. That takes resources."

"New identities," I said.

"Yes. For a child, the foundation of a new identity is a birth certificate. For an adult, a social security card and a passport. I don't know many details, but I know that the people who help these women are in Washington."