were packed along the sides of the patient, and Jonas personally opened
the knife wound to search for-and repair-the damage that would foil
reanimation.
He might have known at the time why he wanted so desperately to save
Jeremy, but afterwards he was never able to understand his motivations
Because he was my son, Jonas sometimes thought, and was therefore my
responsibility.
But what parental responsibility did he owe to the slaughterer of his
daughter and wife?
I saved him to ask him why, to pry from him an explanation, Jonas told
himself at other times.
But he knew there was no answer that would make sense. Neither
œphilosophers nor psychologists-not even the murderers themselves had
ever, in all of history, been able to provide an adequate explanation
for a single act of monstrous sociopathic violence.
The only cogent answer, really, was that the human species was
imperfect, stained, and carried within itself the seeds of its own
destruction. The Church would call it the legacy of the Serpent, dating
back to the Garden and the Fall. Scientists would refer to the
mysteries of genetics, biochemistry, the fundamental actions of
nucleotides. Maybe they were both talking about the same thing, merely
describing it in different terms. To Jonas it seemed that this answer,
whether provided by scientists or theologians, was always unsatisfying
in precisely the same way and to the same degree, for it suggested no
solution, prescribed no preventative. Except faith in God or in the
potential of science.
Regardless of his reasons for taking the action he did, Jonas had saved
Jeremy.
The boy had been dead for eighty-one minutes, not an absolute record
even in those days, because the young girl in Utah had already been
resuscitating after being in the arms of Death for eighty minutes. But
she’d been severely hypothermic, while Jeremy had died warm, which made
the feat a record of one kind, and was’. Actually, revival after eighty
one minutes of warm death was as famous as revival after eighty minutes
of cold death. His own son and Hatch Harrison were Jonas’s most amazing
subjects to date-if the first one q as a s.
For ten months Jeremy lay in a coma, feeding intravenously but able to
breathe on his own and otherwise in need of no life-support machines.
Early in that period, he was moved from the hospital to a high-quality
nursing home.
During those months, Jonas could have petitioned a court to have the boy
removed from the intravenous feed. But Jeremy would have perished from
starvation or dehydration, and sometimes even a comatose patient might
suffer pain from such a crewel death, depending on the depth of his
stupor. Jonas was not prepared to be the cause of that pain. More
insidiously, on a level so deep that even he did not it until much
later, he suffered from the egotistic notion that he still might extract
from the boy supposing the boy ever woke an explanation of sociopathic
behavior that had eluded all other seekers in the history of mankind.
Perhaps he thought he would have greater insight owing to his unique
experience with the madness of his father and his son, orphaned and
wounded bythellrst, widowed by the second. In any event he paid the
nursing-home bills. And every Sunday afternoon, he sat at his son’s
bedside, staring at the pale, placid face in which he could see so much
of himself.
After ten months, Jeremy regained consciousness. Brain damage had left
him aphasic, without the power to speak or read. He had not known his
name or how he had gotten to be where he was. He reacted to his face in
the mirror as if it were that of a stranger, and he did not recognize
his father. When the police came to question him, he exhibited neither
guilt nor comprehension. He had awakened as a dullard, his intellectual
capacity severely reduced from what it had been, his attention span
short, easily confused.
With gestures, he complained vigorously of severe eye pain and
sensitivity to bright light. An ophthalmological examination revealed a
curious indeed, inexplicable-degeneration of the irises. The
contractile membrane seemed to have been partially eaten away. The