Biblical Read Free Page B

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 wasand 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 eventighter 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