The Karma Booth

He racked up a lot of billable hours and air miles casually exposing frauds when he wasn’t tapping out reports on stem cell research. He prospered. He didn’t think too often about the village near the Indian border. He tried not to think about why the strangers in robes had selected him to be their witness. Receptive, they had called him. Whatever that was supposed to mean, it made his flesh crawl.

And now the booths.

The government had brought him into this mess because of what had happened in Bihar. But the border incident years ago fell under the category of the supernatural. These amazing transposition booths were science. “Doesn’t matter,” he was told on the phone. “You are the only sane American we’ve got who’s had experience with, well, for lack of a better word, resurrection.”

Word of the booths didn’t follow anyone’s schedule, least of all the one Weintraub had. Yes, he had an announcement ready in case of a leak, but he argued the biggest issue to resolve before breaking the news was organizing what little concrete data they had.

“Wrong,” countered Tim, who argued there was a more urgent priority. “They’ll come at you like jackals. But they’ll descend even more on the girl.”

On Mary Ash. Reporters would expect her to have answers, and Tim guaranteed they would form a mob outside the Ash family residence until they got their clips and their quotes and their background stories on poor Mary’s high-school romances, her college ambitions and her day-to-day habits, what music she listened to and who she voted for and any other scrap of useless info to fuel further speculation. Nickelbaum’s victim, Tim argued, needed privacy to recover. She was entitled to it.

But the compassionate grace of fate was too much to hope for. By Thursday of the following week, the BBC broke the story first on their investigative show, Panorama, admitting they had been tipped off to a possible new execution method that bypassed federal and state requirements. CNN was next, and then Fox News weighed in, suggesting a cover-up. Great, Rupert Murdoch’s crew is taking its usual hysterical approach, Tim grumbled to himself.

Matilda, his personal assistant, came into his office without knocking as usual and switched on the news. “You’ll want to see this,” she told him. More often than not she anticipated Tim’s needs correctly, but she had the knack of making it sound like a command, which always amused him.

She was plump and graying, the least likely woman of fifty-eight you would expect to know how to score pot to help her friends handle chemotherapy. Tim hired her on the spot at the end of her job interview—right after she noticed Shelby Foote’s three-volume history of the Civil War on his bookshelf and told him how, for a high-school essay, she had tracked down an extremely elderly aunt, blind and half deaf, who recalled Sherman’s March to the Sea. Matilda was brusque and opinionated, but she made sure Tim was on time for his appointments. She cleared his desk and kept him organized. She was his secret weapon and professional treasure.

Tim sat back in his leather office chair and deferred to her wisdom in switching the mute button off and changing the channel. Gary Weintraub was on, a weed patch of microphones surrounding him, giving a clue as to how enormous the media scrum was. But Gary was in his element. Tim once teased him about seeking the spotlight, and Gary Weintraub had given him a cockeyed grin and arched his eyebrows.

“Of course, I do, and you should be glad I do,” he insisted, jutting his sausage fingers in a tight fist, thumb on top, as if he needed to push an elevator button right away. “You know why the majority of teenagers come out of the secondary education system, and they can’t solve a basic algebra equation or know five elements on the periodic table? Because there are so few superstars in science. These children come out with dreams of being in the NBA and the NFL. Nobody wants to be in science. It’s all government subsidized or academically funded or pharmaceutical-based. Group endeavor. Now I ask you, Tim, who would want to be a part of that?”

But these days, Weintraub could have it both ways. Even those who never watched PBS or read Scientific American knew who Gary Weintraub was—their lovably eccentric moon-faced TV “uncle” who hosted shows about space and dolphins. They probably assumed the breaking news was about a discovery of his own. Those who knew better likely felt he was the best of all possible front men.

Tim couldn’t help but notice the neurologist, that kid with the cloud of shoulder-length brown hair—what was his name? Miller. He stood behind Weintraub, wearing a lab coat and a self-satisfied grin, enjoying the spectacle. Ambitious enough to learn exactly where the cameras would include him.

“—subject is female, yes,” Weintraub was confirming now for the reporters. A question from the scrum was muffled and got lost, but his reply explained what it was. “In her early twenties. No, I don’t think it’s prudent to specify more than that—”

“Are you denying then that it’s—” A reporter threw out the name of another one of Nickelbaum’s victims.

For the first time, Tim detected the exasperation in his friend’s voice. “I am not confirming it, nor am I denying it,” he said with a nervous laugh.

“Come on, Professor Weintraub, there’s only one victim he was ever convicted of murdering!” piped up a more aggressive reporter. It didn’t take much logic to narrow the possibilities down to Mary Ash.

“All I can tell you at the moment is that the subject is recuperating with the help of doctors and her immediate family.”

The reporters weren’t ready to let it go. “If it is her, is there a correlation then between the legal system and what the equipment does?”

“Good gracious, no!” said Weintraub, forgetting himself for an instant. “That is to say, we don’t know that, and there is nothing so far to even remotely suggest that idea.” He began to walk away from the microphones.

“Yes, but—”

“Jesus, people,” said Miller with a hand on Gary’s shoulder. “He’s a physicist, not a metaphysicist!”

There was a ripple of laughter from the scrum. You could tell what would be the top clip used from the news conference on the six o’clock cast, and Tim had to admit it was a good line. Ten points for the smartass.

“Son of a bitch,” Matilda muttered under her breath as she stood beside Tim’s desk. “This is incredible. And you saw this happen? This is the big thing you couldn’t talk about yet?”

“This is it,” said Tim, still frowning pensively at the screen. “And so far the wolf pack is keeping to the script.”

“What do you mean?”

He waved a lazy hand towards the television set. “They’re all asking about the girl. They want to know where she came from, how she came back.”

“So do I!” replied Matilda. She sounded mildly affronted that he shouldn’t agree with the obvious.

“But no one’s asking about him.”

“Him who?”

“Nickelbaum,” answered Tim. “They’re not bothering to ask what happened to him.”

She stared at him blankly.

“Where did he go?” he prompted, not really expecting an answer.

He waited, knowing it would sink in after a second. He watched her expression and saw exactly what was going through her mind. It would be the same if he asked a dozen of his students or people on the street. Nickelbaum had been dismissed, ignored, forgotten, because he had always been scheduled to die, to be extinguished. Of course, the return of Mary Ash was more interesting; it was downright fascinating and compelling. And Tim had no more pity for Nickelbaum than others, but—

“He’s the other half of the equation,” he pointed out, as Matilda looked vaguely embarrassed at forgetting this detail.

“When he went,” she started tentatively, “she came back. So there must be…” She trailed off with a shrug.

“A connection? Sure, but what kind? People are working on a couple of very tenuous assumptions.”

“But he’s gone now, and the girl came back from the dead!”

“Which means what exactly?” asked Tim. “Where is ‘dead’? How the hell do we even define ‘dead’ anymore? How did his execution bring her back? There’s no logic to it, not at all, because we don’t have sufficient information yet. And if Nickelbaum went to the same place his victim was in, then Weintraub’s right, and a court decision and our standard morality might play no factor at all in the actual process. Chew on that one for a while! But okay, sure, suppose he went somewhere else. Suppose he went down there. That’s if you want to get biblical about it. We’re still left with a whole mess of problems.”

Matilda frowned, trying to think it through, looking at him innocently as she ventured, “I don’t see why. Should make the Christians ecstatic.”

Tim let the air out of his lungs, lacing his fingers in front of his chin. “Don’t bet on it. Again, you’re assuming our Miss Ash was busy with the angels. We now have a technology that rudely—perhaps even cruelly—yanked her out of Heaven, presuming that exists, and you’re presuming she came from there. That means we’re messing around with the grand plan. No, Matty, I don’t think they’re going to be happy about this one at all. This is going to get worse.”

After a moment, Matilda crossed her arms and said with a faint note of mischief, knowing her employer’s views, “You don’t think she came from Heaven.”

“No, I don’t.”

“She was dead,” said Matilda gently.

“Yes, she was. And then she wasn’t. Which is another thing that troubles me.”

Her eyes widened, already guessing his fresh point.

“If she can be dead and then suddenly not dead, who says Nickelbaum will stay where he is?”

CHAPTER THREE (#u857d0de1-d5fe-5a18-9aa6-1c5e02da8da3)

Weintraub sent him an email with an attachment—his preliminary report for the government on how the equipment was thought to work. In the body of the email itself, Gary had informed him in his usual rushed, sloppy typing style: “WE DON’T DARE TAKE THING APART BE A DISASTER.”

Okay, thought Tim. They’re afraid if they dismantle it, they won’t be able to get it to work again. They choose, instead, to learn all they can from experimental use. And they wonder why I’m concerned.