Change of Heart Read online

  "What you want," I corrected, "is for me to tell you whether or not he's really performing miracles."

  The priest nodded slowly. "I guess that's true."

  Some had already been leaked to the press; I imagined the rest would be brought to light sooner or later. I told him what I'd seen with my own eyes, and by the time I was finished, Father Michael was frowning slightly. "Does he go around saying he's God?"

  "No," I joked. "That would be Crash."

  "Lucius," the priest asked, "do you believe Shay is God?"

  "You need to back up, Father, because I don't believe in God. I quit around the same time one of your esteemed colleagues told me that AIDS was my punishment for sinning." To be honest, I had split religion along the seam of secular and nonsecular; choosing to concentrate on the beauty of a Caravaggio without noticing the Madonna and child; or finding the best lamb recipe for a lavish Easter dinner, without thinking about the Passion. Religion gave hope to people who knew the end wasn't going to be pretty. It was why inmates started praying in prison and why patients started praying when the doctors said terminal. Religion was supposed to be a blanket drawn up to your chin to keep you warm, a promise that when it came to the end, you wouldn't die alone--but it could just as easily leave you shivering out in the cold, if what you believed became more important than the fact that you believed.

  I stared at him. "I don't believe in God. But I do believe in Shay."

  "Thank you for your time, Lucius," the priest said softly, and he walked down the tier.

  He may have been a priest, but he was looking for his miracles in the wrong place. That day with the gum, for example. I had seen the coverage on the news--it was reported that Shay had somehow taken one tiny rectangle of Bazooka gum and multiplied it. But ask someone who'd been there--like me, or Crash, or Texas--and you'd know there weren't suddenly seven pieces of bubble gum. It was more like this: when the piece was fished underneath our cell doors, instead of taking as much as we could, we made do with less instead.

  The gum was magically replicated. But we--the blatantly greedy--balanced the needs of the other seven guys and in that instant found them just as worthy as our own.

  Which, if you asked me, was an even greater miracle.

  MICHAEL

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  The Holy Father has an entire office at the Vatican devoted to analyzing alleged miracles and passing judgment on their authenticity. They scrutinize statues and busts, scrape Crisco out of the corners of supposedly bleeding eyes, track scented oil on walls that emit the smell of roses. I was nowhere as experienced as those priests, but then again, there was a crowd of nearly five hundred people outside the state prison calling Shay Bourne a savior--and I wasn't going to let people give up on Jesus that easily.

  To that end, I was now ensconced in a lab on the Dartmouth campus, with a graduate student named Ahmed who was trying to explain to me the results of the test he'd run on the soil sample taken from the vicinity of the pipes that ran into I-tier. "The reason the prison couldn't get a conclusive explanation is because they were looking in the pipes, not outside them," Ahmed said. "So the water tested positive for something that looked like alcohol, but only in certain pipes. And you'll never guess what's growing near those pipes: rye."

  "Rye? Like the grain?"

  "Yeah," Ahmed said. "Which accounts for the concentration of ergot into the water. It's a fungal disease of rye. I'm not sure what brings it on--I'm not a botanist--but I bet it had something to do with the amount of rain we've had, and there was a hairline crack in the piping they found when they first investigated, which accounts for the transmission in the first place. Ergot was the first kind of chemical warfare. The Assyrians used it in the seventh century B.C. to poison water supplies." He smiled. "I double-majored in chemistry and ancient history."

  "It's deadly?"

  Ahmed shrugged. "In repeated doses. But at first, it's a hallucinogen that's related to LSD."

  "So, the prisoners on I-tier might not have been drunk ..." I said carefully.

  "Right," Ahmed replied. "Just tripping."

  I turned over the vial with the soil sample. "You think the water got contaminated?"

  "That would be my bet."

  But Shay Bourne, in prison, would not have been able to know that there was a fungus growing near the pipes that led into I-tier, would he?

  I suddenly remembered something else: the following morning, those same inmates on I-tier had ingested the same water and had not acted out of the ordinary. "So how did it get uncontaminated?"

  "Now that," Ahmed said, "I haven't quite figured out."

  "There are a number of reasons that an advanced AIDS patient with a particularly low CD4 count and high viral load might suddenly appear to get better," Dr. Perego said. An autoimmune disease specialist at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, he also served as the doctor for HIV/AIDS patients at the state prison and knew all about Lucius and his recovery. He didn't have time for a formal talk, but was perfectly willing to chat if I wanted to walk with him from his office to a meeting at the other end of the hospital--as long as I realized that he couldn't violate doctor-patient confidentiality. "If a patient is hoarding meds, for example, and suddenly decides to start taking them, sores will disappear and health will improve. Although we draw blood every three months from AIDS patients, sometimes we'll get a guy who refuses to have his blood drawn--and again, what looks like sudden improvement is actually a slow turn for the better."

  "Alma, the nurse at the prison, told me Lucius hasn't had his blood drawn in over six months," I said.

  "Which means we can't be quite sure what his recent viral count was." We had reached the conference room. Doctors in white coats milled into the room, taking their seats. "I'm not sure what you wanted to hear," Dr. Perego said, smiling ruefully. "That he's special ... or that he's not."

  "I'm not sure either," I admitted, and I shook his hand. "Thanks for your time."

  The doctor slipped into the meeting, and I started back down the hall toward the parking garage. I was waiting at the elevator, grinning down at a baby in a stroller with a patch over her right eye, when I felt a hand on my shoulder. Dr. Perego was standing there. "I'm glad I caught you," he said. "Have you got a moment?"

  I watched the baby's mother push the stroller onto the yawning elevator. "Sure."

  "This is what I didn't tell you," Dr. Perego said. "And you didn't hear it from me."

  I nodded, understanding.

  "HIV causes cognitive impairment--a permanent loss of memory and concentration. We can literally see this on an MRI, and DuFresne's brain scan showed irreparable damage when he first entered the state prison. However, another MRI brain scan was done on him yesterday--and it shows a reversal of that atrophy." He looked at me, waiting for this to sink in. "There's no physical evidence of dementia anymore."

  "What could cause that?"

  Dr. Perego shook his head. "Absolutely nothing," he admitted.

  The second time I went to meet with Shay Bourne, he was lying on his bunk, asleep. Not wanting to disturb him, I started to back away, but he spoke to me without opening his eyes. "I'm awake," he said. "Are you?"

  "Last time I checked," I answered.

  He sat up, swinging his legs over the side of his bunk. "Wow. I dreamed that I was struck by lightning, and all of a sudden I had the power to locate anyone in the world, anytime. So the government cut a deal with me--find bin Laden, and you're free."

  "I used to dream that I had a watch, and turning the hands could take you backward in time," I said. "I always wanted to be a pirate, or a Viking."

  "Sounds pretty bloodthirsty for a priest."

  "Well, I wasn't born with a collar on."

  He looked me in the eye. "If I could turn back time, I'd go out fly-fishing with my grandfather."

  I glanced up. "I used to do that with my grandfather, too."

  I wondered how two boys--like Shay and me--could begin our lives at the same point and somehow t