The Shoe on the Roof Read online

  “And then transferred here? How did someone like Eli end up in a private facility?”

  The orderly read further, then looked up. “You should know,” he said. “You’re the one who had him committed.”

  “Let me see that.”

  The orderly pointed to the second page. “ ‘Dr. Rosanoff.’ That is your signature, right?” His eyes narrowed. “You are Dr. Rosanoff, right?”

  “That’s my father. He’s at Massachusetts General. He must have signed for it.”

  “Rosanoff?” He thought about this a moment. “Any relation to—”

  “No. No relation. We’re a completely different line of Rosanoffs,” he lied.

  In the background, stifled by the walls between them, but still audible, Eli was shouting.

  “Philistines! Fornicators! Sons of whores! Damnation is at hand!”

  Thomas and the orderly began the long walk back to the main foyer.

  “Too bad it didn’t work out,” the orderly said. “Your experiment, I mean. Bringing the two of ’em together, face-to-face. Doomed from the start.”

  “I suppose . . .”

  But another possibility was forming in Thomas’s mind. Synapses were firing, neurotransmitters were rushing in: an idea was taking hold. An idea—and an image. One of a street corner saviour holding a sign.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  IT LOOKED LIKE A Bedouin camp. The haze of dust. The filaments of smoke uncurling above cooking fires.

  Tent City reeked of wet rot, was wreathed in a permanent dusk no matter what the time of day. A figure moved through, lightly, like a shadow that had drifted out of a nightmare and attached itself onto this world. Down the narrow pathways between tarps. Amid the tubercular coughs and mad ravings, past the bottle-pickers and lost souls, down to an addled arrangement of planks and plastic sheeting of somebody’s home. The figure slipped inside.

  The interior was dark and cramped. It smelled of dank wool, of fermenting straw. The elderly man inside looked up at the shadow standing above him. “Ants,” he said. “They’re everywhere. They come in at night.”

  “Hello, Charlie.”

  The old man’s eyes slowly focused. “I know you. You were down here before.”

  The figure smiled, eyes shining, like an incubus sitting on someone’s chest, like an angel, descending. “I’m here for you, Charlie. I’m here to help.”

  “Is that what you are?” the old man asked. “An angel?”

  “An angel? Why, yes, I suppose I am.” Left unstated was what type of angel.

  Later, when the body was found (an OD, by the looks of it, a common enough occurrence in Tent City), the police would take perfunctory statements from the ragged denizens. “Witnesses report seeing a ‘mysterious figure,’ dressed in black. Others say, in white. Their accounts are unreliable: residents couldn’t even state whether the figure was male or female.”

  But the police report was only a summary of what had been described. Had the officers recorded these accounts word for word, they might have reconsidered their initial, and as it turns out final, assessment. The medical examination concluded: “Probable cause of death: methadone overdose.” Never mind that Charlie never took narcotics. Never mind that the witnesses didn’t say black/white. They said, dressed in black “like a priest.” In white, “like a doctor.”

  “So there were two figures?”

  “No, just the one.”

  Evil is real. It has a pungent body odour all its own, and the residents of Tent City could feel it, could taste it, could smell it, nearby, ever present.

  • • •

  The rain had stopped and the city was pooled with puddles. Church spires and cobblestones. The liquid leap of squirrels. A flurry of birds scattering across the sky.

  Most of the leaves had fallen, raked away by the rain, and the magician was now lying on his side. Eyes half closed. Blanket falling off his shoulders. His breathing was laboured; the cold weather and his vigil had taken their toll. The cup out front was dotted with coins, pennies mostly, and next to the cup was a water-stained Bible, corners well-thumbed. The cardboard sign proclaiming his identity was now almost illegible. On an overturned crate, three creased playing cards were lined up, but there were no takers.

  “I’ve seen you,” Thomas said, crouching beside him. “At the station, playing three-card monte. Sleight-of-hand parlour tricks.” Thomas looked at the sad squalor that surrounded the magician, the greasy cards, the coins in the cup. “Times are tough, I guess. I only have one question. Who are you? I need to know.”

  The magician’s hand stretched out, asking for alms. His wrist was as thin as a sparrow’s bones.

  Thomas snapped a crisp $100 bill from his wallet. “This—is yours. All you have to do is tell me you are not the Messiah.”

  The hand withdrew.

  Thomas nodded, satisfied. He tucked the bill back into his wallet and the wallet into his coat.

  “I’ve come here because I need your help,” said Thomas. “There’s a young priest I’d like you to meet. His name is Sebastian and he has a problem. He thinks he’s you.”

  PART TWO

  * * *

  GOD OF THE GAPS

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE HAWTHORNE INSTITUTE AT Harvard Medical, midmorning. The clouded windows of a soporific lecture hall. Sunlight through falling dust. A stupor of students, the drone-buzz of fluorescent lights, and Anton Cerletti in front presiding in all his Ichabod glory. . . .

  “There are many Bibles out there,” Cerletti intones, voice sonorous and slathered with authority. “This one”—he hefts a mammoth textbook onto the lectern—“is ours.”

  A click of PowerPoint and the book’s title appeared on the screen behind him.

  “The SDM:III. Standardized Diagnostic Manual of Mental Disorders: Third Edition, Revised. Eight hundred pages. More than a million copies sold. Retails for ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents.”

  (The students welcomed the PowerPoint; the professor’s handwriting on the white board was as hard to decipher as it was distinct. It was as though he had his own form of cursive, comprehensible only to himself.)

  “When it comes to treating patients,” said Cerletti, “this is the primary medical reference. Clinical psychiatrists. Family therapists. Psychologists. Counsellors. Lawyers for the defence. Lawyers for the prosecution. Drug companies looking to fine-tune medications for specific disorders. This is the manual they rely on.”

  A few of the more attentive students jotted this down.

  “And all of it prepared under the directives”—he gave a tight smile—“of our illustrious alumnus, Chairman Emeritus of the National Psychiatric Society, Dr. Thomas Rosanoff. Some of you may be familiar with his work on early childhood development.”

  Scattered nods of recognition.

  “Dr. Rosanoff has been so kind as to allow a few lesser mortals, such as myself, to oversee certain sections of the revised edition. If you look under ‘Electroconvulsive Therapy,’ you will find my own modest contribution.”

  At which point Professor Cerletti spotted Thomas at the back of the classroom, trying to slip in unnoticed.

  “Speak of the devil,” Cerletti said, and, with an operatic gesture to the back of the class: “Students, we should feel honoured! Dr. Rosanoff’s namesake has decided to grace us with his presence.”

  Voices rippled through the classroom. Students craned in their seats to gawp.

  Professor Cerletti smiled, but not with his eyes. “Yes. There he is. Very much alive. As you can see, the rumours of his demise were greatly exaggerated. Not sure why he’s attending one of our lowly first-year graduate classes, but always welcome. Mind you”—and here the professor’s smile took on a serrated edge—“at the rate young Thomas is progressing, I imagine some of you here may catch up to him by the time he graduates. If he graduates. Thomas is one of our more permanent students. Now then”—annoyed at the interruption—“back to our Bible.”

  After the class ended, and as the
students filed out, stealing glances at Thomas as they went, Thomas approached Professor Cerletti.

  “My father called?”

  Cerletti nodded. “Your father called.”

  “I have something new.”

  “You always have something new.”

  “But this one is exciting.” Thomas could barely contain his enthusiasm, had to fight against allowing it to run free like a tongue-lolling dog. “It’s not exactly neuroscience and it’s not exactly bio-psych. It’s more like a . . . like a new form of identity therapy. So, I won’t be able to make it to the lab this week. I’ll be too busy setting up the—”

  “You’re hardly in the lab now as it is. We have experiments that are running without you.”

  “I know. And I apologize, but this one is big. Really big. I’ll be operating out of my apartment, because it’s not really a laboratorial situation.”

  “ ‘What’s It Like to Be a Bat?’ by T. Nagel. Have you read it? It was on the required-reading list. A fascinating essay. Nagel argues that, as minutely detailed and precise as we’re able to quantify the consciousness of other beings, we will never truly know what it’s like to be them. We may understand the mechanics of echolocation, but we will never know what it’s like to be a bat. Tell me, what’s it like to be you, Thomas? To waltz through life with every obstacle preemptively cleared out of the way, everything taken care of, never having to worry, never having to follow through—on anything. What’s that like? It must be remarkable.”

  Thomas felt his face grow hot. “Professor, with all due respect . . .”

  “Yes, Thomas, your father called. And yes, your thesis has been extended again. Bravo. Well done.” The professor crammed the heavy SDM:III manual into his attaché case.

  “I haven’t had a chance to put together a formal proposal yet,” said Thomas. “I’m still waiting to make sure the test subjects are available, but as soon as I do—”

  “Oh, there’s no need for that. You carry on, merrily, merrily. And when this latest scheme of yours fails—as it undoubtedly will—have Daddy give us a call and we’ll work something out. We always do.” And with that, he left, waving aside the proffered, “Thank you, sir, you won’t regret this!” that Thomas lobbed at his back.

  Thomas stood quietly in the silence of the classroom, excited, insulted, but mainly relieved. He was about to leave when he heard—faint, but unmistakably—the sound of distant music. Not music. Voices. A choir. It rose in unison, then dropped away into an echoing emptiness. Thomas saw something out of the corner of his eye, spun around, but there was no one else in the room, only Thomas.

  He took a deep, steadying breath. “Fatigue,” he said. A dearth of sleep, a spike in dopamine, memories misfiring in the auditory cortex. Only that, nothing more.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THE TOWER OF BABEL is an Old Testament tale in which the descendants of Noah, having settled on the Plains of Shinar, declare, “Come, let us build a city with a great tower that will reach to the Heavens! Let us make a name for ourselves!” Brick by brick, layer by layer, they build their tower. It rises, higher and higher . . . until the Lord intervenes. He confuses and confounds them with the curse of different languages, leaves them speaking incompatible tongues and then scatters them to the four winds. The tower lies in ruins, becomes the focus of pagan rituals and false gods, a testament to grandiose plans gone wrong.

  The Tower of Babel was not accidentally sacrilegious; it was conceived from the start as an affront to God. This was its very aim. But although presented as a tale of hubris, the real fear was not that God would strike people down as they neared his realm but that on reaching those heady heights, there would be no one there to greet them. It was not a wrathful God they feared, but an absent one.

  The Case of Simon Morin is equally unsettling. Simon Morin was a heretic imprisoned in Paris in the 1660s, and his story is recounted in Voltaire’s commentary on crime and punishment. Voltaire writes that Simon Morin “was a deranged man who believed he saw visions, and even carried this folly so far as to imagine that he was sent from God, proclaiming that he was, in fact, Jesus Christ.”

  Sentenced to a lunatic asylum, the most remarkable thing happened: “There was at that time, confined in the same madhouse, another crazed man who called himself the Eternal Father Christ. Upon meeting him, Simon Morin was so struck with the folly of his companion, that his eyes were opened to the truth of his own condition. Having recovered his right senses, and having made known his penitence to the magistrates of the city, Simon Morin was granted release from his confinement.”

  Nor was this the only case of competing religious identities being used to break the logjam of a delusion. In the 1950s, at a mental institute in Maryland, two women, each claiming to be Mary, Mother of God, ran into each other on the hospital grounds. A tense but polite conversation occurred, after which one of the women—the older of the two—recanted. She must have been mistaken in her claims, she said. Perhaps she was the other woman’s mother, the mother of the Mother of God. Having worked it out between them, that only one was the True Mary, and the other was her mother, the two remained on good terms. Soon after, the older woman shed that identity as well. She began to respond to treatment and was later discharged.

  When Thomas uncovered these tales deep in the university archives, he hurried away, almost giddy, as though he’d stumbled upon something clandestine, pushing past other scholars and students buzzard-hunched over library tables, academics shovelling research into books, books that would never be read. (They are dancing for no one, these academics.)

  The tale of Simon Morin in the 1660s and the two Marys of 1955 were notable in the redemptively shattering effect they had upon their subjects. But neither experiment—if you could call them that—was achieved in any systematic or scientific way. Thomas would change that. Two identities cannot occupy the same space; one—or both—have to cede ground. He could feel his skin tremble, a galvanic response, tangible, real, and measurable.

  Sadly, there was a postscript to the tale of Simon Morin, one which threw the entire story into a more cautionary vein. But Thomas was too jubilant, too self-assured, too giddy, to take proper note of this warning, a warning that was reaching out to him from across four centuries, a warning he should have heeded. Simon Morin, you see, would relapse. This time, he would declare himself a prophet and would once again be arrested. Charged with blasphemy, there would be no reprieve. He was burned at the stake.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  IS IDENTITY IMMUTABLE? OR is it malleable? Is it transitory and temporary—something to be donned or discarded at whim—or is it woven into our DNA? Does it even exist? Perhaps identity is simply an agreed-upon fiction, a conglomerate of traits.

  Thomas knew full well that the defining characteristic of our interconnected online age isn’t anonymity but reinvention. You don’t cloak who you are: you change who you are. In the either/or of binary equations, you can hide in plain sight, can dress yourself in layers: a dance of the seven veils in reverse. You can even claim the identity of someone else entirely. Your father’s, say.

  Two weeks, tops. That was how much time Thomas figured he would need. A provisional custody order (one month, on review) would be more than sufficient. How much time do you need to jolt someone out of a falsely held identity?

  He was equally sure that the request would go through without a ripple. Why wouldn’t it? It wasn’t as though people were constantly stealing mental patients. Far from it. Hospitals were always looking for people to take custody of intractable cases—family, relatives, halfway homes, community groups. It was a matter of paperwork, of filling in the right forms, clicking on the right boxes. No one would step back to look at the larger picture. No one would ask why a patient was being released into the care of one Thomas Aaron Rosanoff.

  He was nervous nonetheless. Everything depended on this . . . deception? No. This misdirection. It was sleight of hand, only that. And as Thomas had long known, it was always easier to a
sk for forgiveness after the fact than permission before it.

  He came out of his downstairs bathroom drying his hands on a towel.

  The magician was standing beside Thomas’s desk, looking out the window to the church spire in the distance.

  “You can use this bathroom,” Thomas said. “There are fresh robes and towels in the linen closet. There’s a pair of toothbrushes. Pick whichever one you like. Sebastian will be here soon. I bought some clothes as well, T-shirts, sweatpants. If they don’t fit, let me know.” He pulled up a chair. “Please, have a seat.”

  It was awkward, but it had to be done. He opened a portable blood collection unit—it looked like a bait case—and took out a rubber tourniquet and alcohol swab. “We need to make sure everything is okay before we start. So, if that’s all right with you . . .”

  The magician rolled up a sleeve of his frayed sweater. “Please. Be my guest.” These were the first words Thomas had heard him speak, and the voice was unnaturally calm.

  Thomas cleared his throat, pulled on a pair of latex gloves, tied the tourniquet, tapped out a vein. He could see the scars of older needle tracks along the magician’s forearm but said nothing.

  Blood filled the vial. Thomas withdrew the needle, labelled the sample, pressure-taped a tuft of cotton onto the magician’s arm.

  “You’re good at this,” said the magician. He spoke with so little inflection his words seemed almost disembodied. “I barely felt it.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Your apartment is quite nice as well. Ikea?”

  “No, not Ikea.” Thomas held up a pen in front of the magician’s face. “Please follow the tip with your eyes.” He moved it slowly across the magician’s field of view, but the magician stared at Thomas instead.

  “Please follow the—”