The Karma Booth

“What other things?”

She shrugged, just like a young woman trading casual gossip in the street, having run into an acquaintance. “I don’t know. I just know you’ll be near the center of it. You’ll feel better when you remember something.”

“What’s that?”

“That when you’re here, you must be here, Mr. Cale.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I don’t know how to explain it better. I volunteered at this daycare once. I went to help blind kids with a sculpture class, and I realized they’ve never seen red. So how do you explain what red is to them?”

“Have you seen these things you’re talking about?”

“No. Sorry. They’re for you. You’re still untainted.”

He stared at her.

Then she broke into a mischievous giggle. “I’m just messing with you, Mr. Cale. They didn’t send me back. But if I could know about your girlfriend in Paris, I could know about them, couldn’t I?”

He was still staring at her.

“You should be happy, Mr. Cale. You learned what you wanted. I had terrible things happen to me, and I’m not changed.”

He stood in the doorway and saw the mother hovering at the top of the stairs, wearing the same anxious expression as she had in the living room. He had one more question for the girl, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask. It was too terrible.

Mary Ash fixed him rigid in her stare, saying, “It’s all right, Mr. Cale. I told you I can’t read your mind, but you’re giving your question away on your face. It’s okay. No one else would bother to think of it, not because it’s wrong, but because they don’t have your way of seeing. And the answer’s no.”

As he nodded his goodbye, he caught a quick glimpse of Mary Ash lowering the pad of paper.

There was nothing on it. Blank.

But he had heard the scratching of the charcoal. She had drawn, erased, sketched again and shaded with strokes.

There was nothing on the paper.

The mother waited until he was at the door before she asked what Mary meant. “She said ‘no’ to your last question, but you didn’t ask it. What did you want to ask her?”

“It’s okay, Mrs. Ash,” he said. “I’m sorry I imposed on you.” He walked back to his car, wanting to get away from the house as quickly as possible.

No, he wouldn’t burden the mother with the question that had been on his lips. The poor haunted woman didn’t deserve to agonize over that idea, and he barely wanted to consider it himself: whether Mary Ash had somehow actually chosen—from whatever mysterious place she inhabited—to “kill Emmett Nickelbaum back.” And if this was what had allowed her to return into their world.

CHAPTER FOUR

The start of the Bolshevik Revolution.

The ends of the First and Second World Wars.

The polio vaccine.

The John F. Kennedy assassination.

The announcement of Mary Ash’s return was added to a unique and truly exclusive catalogue, each entry a marker of when people around the world took stock of their era and their place in it. The Apollo Moon landing. The horror of 9/11. Where were you when you heard? What were you doing when this happened? A murderer had been executed, which was nothing new, but for the first time in history, his victim had come back after this was done.

The media dubbed the transposition equipment “The Karma Booth”—ignoring completely that two booths were used in the procedure.

A couple of fundamentalist Muslim clerics in London were asked to comment on the Karma Booth and promised it would be exposed eventually as a fraud. Mullahs in Iran’s Assembly of Experts went further, calling it the work of the “Great Satan” and an abomination that could undo the work of countless martyrs. The logic of this official statement was reported without much critical commentary in the West.

The Vatican withheld its judgment for a week and three days. Then at a Mass at St. Peter’s, the Pope made a reference to “a supposed scientific development that defies the natural balance of Holy Creation.” The condemnation was somewhat veiled, but in a later communiqué, the Vatican openly called for the booths to be dismantled and destroyed as an aberration against God and Nature.

Two simultaneous riots broke out near the Quai D’Orsay in Paris and in one of its more infamous banlieues, its lower-income immigrant suburbs, simply because of an Internet rumor. Word had spread that the United States government was willing to export the booth technology to several of its key allies. By the time the French government issued a denial, two policemen were severely injured and five immigrants from Mali and Algeria were dead.

Back in the States, several high-placed Republicans quickly suggested a bill be rushed through Congress that would put Karma Booth executions under federal authority. The rationale was that the Booth would prove too attractive for the state judicial system to resist, and technology of this magnitude should not be needlessly duplicated and therefore left open to potential abuse. The states’ rights argument barely rose above a whisper.

A story ran in the Los Angeles Times that several Iraq War veterans in Oregon were fleeing across the border to Canada, fearing that the Booth would be used on them if they were ever found guilty of war crimes.

Nothing had changed. And yet everything had changed. Because of fear, because of expectations, because the Karma Booth existed, because a new way of seeing had been created—even if the view was limited and it obscured and raised more questions than it answered. Nothing had changed, except for the possibility that certain people who were murdered could possibly one day be brought back to life.

And none of them would be prophets.

For the sake of security and to cope with the flood tide of media attention, the Karma Booth was carted onto a moving van and relocated to a federal building in White Plains. It was here that Tim, at Gary Weintraub’s invitation, saw the second use of the Booth. Weintraub was deliberately evasive over who the selected murderer was or who the scientists expected to emerge as the resurrected victim. “Let’s just see what happens.”

Tim was late in getting his BMW on the road to Westchester, and only moments after he arrived and showed his ID to the guards outside the test room, he walked in as the process was unfolding. Once again, light carved into the body of a death row inmate, revealing a fissure of amazingly bright pinpoints and whorls inside—and then there was that revolting odor that washed through the room like an abattoir stench. There was enough of the horrified inmate for Tim to identify who was being torn apart. He recognized the young face, the shark-like dark eyes and the peach fuzz stubble on the upper lip and chin.

It was Cody James, eighteen, and for three days of a single week about six months ago, he had been famous—particularly in Texas. In Austin, he had stolen a shotgun and a 9mm Glock pistol from the locked storage case at the home of a friend, whose father was a police officer. He then showed up at his old high school and began shooting. But unlike other school rampages and massacres, Cody James’s rage was not that of a nihilistic, disaffected outsider. He was considered a gentle, well-mannered boy. He played guard on the school’s championship-winning basketball team and was generally deemed an average if not always motivated student. No, something else had set him off.

At the moment, however, his torment and his grudges didn’t seem to matter because his face and body were becoming comet trails and nebulae, changing to tiny stars and dazzling, colored rings. And then a blinding whiteness filled the chamber, gradually fading until all that he was disappeared.

Tim walked briskly over to Gary Weintraub, his friend standing beside the arrogant young neurologist, Miller, watching another couple of scientists work the controls. “Gary, you picked Cody James?”

It was Miller who rose to the defense. “We didn’t pick Cody James, man,” he said testily, running a hand through his halo of unruly brown hair. His worn sneaker tapped the floor tile impatiently as he kept one eye on the Karma Booth chambers. “We picked Geoff Shackleton, the geography teacher he blew away in a cafeteria. His doctor says he was healthy. Forty-two years old, jogged to the park every weekday morning, no psychological or cardiovascular issues we might have to think about. You know…the shock of coming back and everything. And then you got—”

“Not my point,” snapped Tim, who went back to addressing Weintraub. “Gary, do you remember the story on the news?”

Weintraub looked like he was going to answer, then made a half-hearted shrug and took out a cloth to polish his spectacles. His round, normally jovial face went blank. He either couldn’t recall the details or didn’t want to admit he knew them. In the second chamber, bright light was flashing and made its familiar strobe pattern behind the tinted glass. The “secondary effect” had begun.

Tim knew the details of the school rampage well enough. They were sordid tabloid fare, all luridly chronicled before the trial of Cody James. It soon emerged that the young man was friends with one of the school’s seniors, Dustin “Dusty” Cavanaugh, who was sleeping with his English teacher—who also happened to be Geoff Shackleton’s twenty-seven-year-old wife, Nicole. Dustin Cavanaugh was known around school as “Perv” even without his classmates learning about his affair with a teacher. Young Cavanaugh’s sealed juvenile record also somehow made it into the headlines. The most pertinent details involved how at the age of fourteen, he sexually molested both a boy of twelve and a girl who was thirteen years old.

He then played matchmaker between Cody James and Nicole Shackleton, who relieved him of his virginity. But after Cody slept with the teacher, Dustin insisted his friend repay him for the experience by sleeping with him in front of Nicole, who allegedly would find it “hot.”

Cody, feeling used and humiliated, as well as sexually threatened, went to fetch the guns.

Dustin Cavanaugh stopped laughing when the bullets slammed into his chest, but he lived because Cody hesitated as he pulled the trigger, fouling up his aim. He quickly regained his grim resolve and shot Amber Janssen, who was screaming and pulling out her phone as she rushed to the swinging doors. She survived, but was paralyzed from the waist down.

Geoff Shackleton had no idea what sexual intrigues were going on involving his wife and just happened to be in the cafeteria, talking to a fellow teacher about the latest revised curriculum. He went to tackle Cody, who killed him on the spot with a blast that took off a third of the teacher’s skull, leaving a gruesome stain of blood on the floor with tiny bits of bone and brain matter. Cody fired two more shots to keep everyone back and afraid, and then he abandoned the rifle to go hunt for Nicole with the pistol.

The vice-principal of the school had heard the shots, shouted to a student to call 911 on her cell phone, then smashed a trophy case and grabbed a hockey stick from a display. He slashed the stick across Cody James’s head as the boy stepped out of the cafeteria, knocking him down and making him drop the gun. Two of Cody’s football teammates nearly beat him to death before the vice-principal shouted for them to stop.

Nicole Shackleton was sent to prison for the statutory rape involving Dustin Cavanaugh, who just barely escaped life beyond bars himself over a female student stepping forward with a rape charge that didn’t stick for lack of evidence. At her trial, Nicole claimed that her husband had been a closeted homosexual who only needed her for social appearances, and in her sexual frustration, she had turned to a student. It didn’t really matter what Geoff Shackleton’s proclivities were; he was dead, and she was going to jail.

But now he was alive, naked and disoriented, half-stumbling out of the second chamber as the doctors ran up with a hospital gown and a syringe containing a sedative. Geoff Shackleton was a man entering middle age with a small paunch, a little gray at his temples. His eyes wide, he now asked, “Where…?”

More words formed on his lips, but he lost consciousness. The sedative wasn’t really required.

“He’s okay,” said Miller. Then with less confidence: “He looks okay. He’ll be okay…”

He ruffled his hair again and kicked the floor with a sneaker, jubilant that the Karma Booth had demonstrated it would consistently work. Weintraub merely peered through his spectacles, quietly absorbed as if he were watching fruit flies eating a plate of grapes.

They were already wheeling Geoff Shackleton out to the new emergency ward set up for arrivals down the hall.

Tim turned once more to Weintraub and Miller. “You do realize the life you’ve given back is in complete tatters! From what I’ve read, the poor bastard had no idea his wife was fucking students. He wasn’t gay or cruising bus stations as she claimed, but his rep at his workplace—and oh, keep in mind the guy worked down in Texas as a teacher—is ruined!”

Miller was indifferent. “Come on! All that stuff would have come out if he had lived. She would have said the same shit.”

“You don’t know that!” countered Tim. “And he would have been there to defend himself against her accusations. He tried to stop Cody James at the school, and he probably would have been treated like a hero, which would have mitigated her bullshit. The guy’s going to be devastated when he learns his wife is partly responsible for the whole nightmare!”

“And again,” said Weintraub patiently, “the man still would have had to face those unpleasant facts had he simply been wounded. What would you have me say, Tim? Do I personally believe Nicole Shackleton and that young man, Cavanaugh, share responsibility? Without question, of course. But the wife and that boy didn’t go collect firearms and shoot them in a crowded school—Cody James did.” “Gary, you’re missing the point,” said Tim. “I don’t have sympathy for that boy. The shrinks called him disturbed and unbalanced, and my heart doesn’t weep for him at all. The girl he shot in the lunchroom never did a damn thing to him, and the witnesses say the little monster laughed. He got a kick out of causing destruction and pain. I don’t know what your Karma Booth is but I don’t think it’s justice! That girl, what’s her name, Amber… Amber Janssen. She’ll never walk again. What does the Booth do for her?”

Miller stopped tapping his sneaker and folded his arms. In a calm and reasonable voice, he answered, “Nothing—you’re right. So you want to ignore what we can do for this guy? Shackleton is alive, and he will think, he’ll feel, he’ll go on with his existence despite the time gap.”

“But we’re not talking about minutes, we’re talking about months, and he could be different,” said Tim. Again, he appealed to Weintraub. “I went and saw Mary Ash, Gary. She’s not the same person.”

“Jesus, you know this after meeting her for the first time?” scoffed Miller.

“Her own mother is afraid of her.”

Tim broke off, realizing there was no point. The neurologist wasn’t in the mood to listen. Besides, he was learning nothing from this argument and something new had occurred to him—something he had almost forgotten in the light show of the Booth chambers.

“Hold on. Cody James hadn’t exhausted all his death row appeals.”

Weintraub and Miller exchanged a look, but both were curiously silent.

“How did you speed up the legal process?” asked Tim. He realized as he finished the question, he had his answer already. “You didn’t, did you? You didn’t have to. Did they just give you carte blanche to go ahead and use it for convictions?”

Still, the two scientists said nothing. At last, Weintraub shook his stubby fingers in a gesturing circle, confessing, “They’ve sanctioned the Booth for cases where the murders are beyond any factual mitigation or doubt, and yes, I know, Tim, you’ll ask who decides that, but we get authorization from the Attorney General. Look, given that you remember so much about the Cody James case, you must know that students at the school caught the shooting on their phone cams. He did it. He was clearly guilty. The appeals were nothing but a formality.”

“Oh God, Gary, is that why you did it?”

Weintraub sighed. “We needed to know.”

Tim understood: to know if the Karma Booth worked on its own laws, not on the laws of Man. And now they had their answer.

The Karma Booth remained a constant source of news, near-news and speculation. You couldn’t turn on the TV anymore without hearing discussion about it. It filled blogs and sold magazines. It inspired sick jokes on late night talk show monologues.

Two weeks after the lights flashed and dazzled in the test room in White Plains, Tim walked down Sixth Avenue in New York with Michael Benson, the under-secretary of Homeland Security who had got him involved. Benson was five years older than him, with a tuft of lank black hair at the front of his scalp while the rest had long since retreated. The man’s vanity was focused on his body, and he often bragged about four games of racquetball a week and his morning jogs.

“Little shit from the Congressional page staff beat me,” laughed Benson, rubbing the hair on the back of his head, still wet from his sports club’s shower. “Better play a couple more times a week.”

“What’s surprising is that you think you can still slaughter seventeen-year-olds on the court,” replied Tim.

“You go ahead and grow old gracefully, pal. I’m going to fight it every step of the way.”

Tim had known the exec as an ambitious player who had moved up through the management ranks of the CIA and then saw the potential in Homeland’s growing new department. It didn’t surprise him at all that Benson was taking point over something as controversial and explosive as the Karma Booth. The man had always liked keeping a hand in plots to hurt the credibility of the latest Saddam or Osama, and his ego loved a consult from State over how to flatter the newest French prime minister. The Karma Booth offered power over life and death—impossible for a political addict to resist.

“Enough chit-chat about your impending mid-life crisis,” said Tim. “Let’s talk about this rush you and your pals in the corridors of power have to set off a bomb.”

“What can I say, Tim? The Republicans had the Senate seats to pass the bill. It was rushed right through committee.”

“Then I’m even happier you couldn’t persuade me to move to Washington.”

It was a regular friendly and not-so friendly duel between them whenever he was summoned to the Beltway. He had no desire whatsoever to live in the capital. Benson always argued it would make life easier… for him. Tim always reminded him that he charged enough that his clients could, and should, damn well come to New York.

“So they’ve decided to use it, even though they still don’t know how it works.”

Benson was philosophical. “Nobody is ever sure how the biggest scientific breakthroughs—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, I know.” Tim sighed wearily, knowing Benson was about to drag out the penicillin defense again. He was getting so tired of that one. “So I take it my services are no longer needed. You certainly don’t need an ethics assessment.”

Benson pursed his lips, surprised. “On the contrary. We need your assessment more than ever now.”

“What on earth for?” Tim asked gently. And Benson’s face told him it was just as he feared. The final decider was politics. The technology had to be used because they did have it. He struggled for another tack. If they wanted him to do his job, they could at least clear a path for him.

“Look, if you don’t know how it works then tell me where you got the technology from. And I’m not going to buy that it’s the latest tech toy from the NSA or CIA.”

“It’s not,” said Benson, looking mildly embarrassed. “I suppose the best way to categorize it is… It was a gift.”

“A gift? A gift from who?”

“Does it matter?”

“You’re kidding, right?” replied Tim. “You’re telling me an earth-shattering technology is just given to American authorities? And no one bothers to do the necessary homework or get briefed on what it—”

“Weintraub was briefed,” Benson said tightly.

“He knew?” And as Benson nodded, Tim wondered aloud, “I cannot believe the government gave him carte blanche like this. How could they?”

He ran his hand through the straw-blond comma of hair over his forehead, always a classic sign that he was trying to work something through. It was unbelievable. The technology would be fascinating no matter how the booths had been developed, but to learn of this naïve, irresponsible adoption of them and then blindly putting them to use—

“Weintraub made his case for human trials,” Benson was saying.

“How? How could he make a case for human trials with absolutely no empirical evidence of his own to demonstrate what they can do?”

“The way I hear it, our good doctor told the cabinet secretaries something like this: ‘Put aside all the conspiracy theories, all the bullshit. Just imagine for a moment that there’s incontrovertible evidence that Oswald did shoot JFK in Dallas. And that you have the Karma Booth to fix that.”

Tim sighed in disbelief. “Aw, come on, that doesn’t fly. That whole hypothetical shows you exactly what problems we’re going to get with this thing. There are still doubts to this very day over Oswald’s involvement. Great! What happens when you do have a case that sparks public outrage but the evidence isn’t clear-cut?”

Benson offered a lopsided smirk. “Come on, Tim, that’s why they invented appeals. Yes, I know they fast-tracked the Cody James case, but they’ll come up with a new process. What? You think if they fried Oswald, and he didn’t do it—”

“Go ahead, tell me what happens.”

“Nothing happens!”

“Nothing happens? You’re sure? How do you know? How can you possibly know, Benson, until it happens?”

And as he saw Benson grapple with that one, he nudged the man’s elbow, urging them to keep walking. The walking always helped him to think. He just wished it worked for others. He didn’t want to be distracted into the tired arguments for or against capital punishment. Those in the pro-Booth camp had the ultimate trump card, and yet no one was pausing over the enormity of a far more humbling truth of the machines.

“Benson, listen to me,” Tim tried again. “I’m not a physicist or a medical doctor, but it baffles me that I should be the only person waving the red flag here. Let’s say these things work properly—they bring back a victim while they execute the murderer. Then we have physical laws of Nature that may actually follow a moral principle. Can you wrap your head around that one? Because I can’t!”

Benson licked his lips, eyes downcast, clearly wanting to speak some truth to the issue. “Tim, listen, the Booth can still be used,” he said slowly. “If it does follow a moral principle then we have scientific means to guide us in—”

Tim cut through him brutally. “Project past your wishful thinking. The Booth has this enormous power. It was built—by a man or a team—somewhere. That means somebody already has insight into how these mind-boggling principles work. They may even be able to manipulate these principles, whatever they are. You comfortable with that one, too?”

Benson allowed himself another long pause to consider. “Maybe that’s why the tech is a gift. The responsibility is so huge.”

“So I’ll ask again: Who gave it to you?”

“Orlando Braithewaite.” Benson waited for the surprise then nodded as he saw something else on Tim’s face. “That’s right, they say you met him once. Had some kind of enlightening special meeting with him and your dad.”

“I wouldn’t go so far as to call it that.”

Benson shrugged. “Call it whatever you want. Find him, and you’ll get your answers.”

“It’s not like I have Braithewaite on speed dial and can get an appointment.”