Free Dimiter by William Peter Blatty Page A

hands.” The Child glanced around at the students who were rapidly scribbling on their clipboards and pads. “Now can someone tell me why?” he asked them benignly. A young woman with violet hair raised a tattooed hand that was clenched in a fist, and when it opened a pure white dove fluttered out. “Yes?” the Child said to her, his eyebrows curving upward expectantly.
    “Oh, well, even if the blindness was psychosomatic,” she began . . .” But the formerly blind man’s eyes flared open and he cut her off.
    “Are you calling me a liar?” he angrily challenged. Above the group the white dove was now circling and diving, making random, quick pecking attacks that drew blood.
    “No,” the student responded; “I’m just saying that the cause wouldn’t matter. After many years of blindness, you still wouldn’t have had any depth perception or be able to synthesize shape or form. Remember how it hurt when you opened your eyes? How all you saw was just a spinning mass of lights and bright colors? Sure, your eyes were repaired but your brain still hadn’t learned how to process their data. It takes a month of hard work just to be able to distinguish a few simple objects.” Here the blind man looked mollified, lowering his gaze and mutely nodding in agreement. “No, of
course
you’re not lying,” the student summed up. “It’s
only
if you’d really had your sight restored in that first attempt at a cure that you would have seen men who looked like trees. If the whole thing was a lie you’d have said you saw perfectly the
first
time you were cured.”
    Here suddenly the dove swooped down with stunning speed and bit the Christ Child’s pale soft cheek. A gout of blood gushed out of the puncture, splashing on the whiteness of the blind man’s bed and from there to the floor in pumping streams as the dove became a bloodstained winged hypodermic syringe flapping swiftly away to the end of the hall, where it sharply turned a corner and, gleaming, vanished. Then abruptly, and ending the dream, the violet-haired student was standing in front of Mayo dressed in Victorian widow’s weeds. She raised her arm and her hand unclasped to reveal three bright green dew-glistened fruits while her other hand held out a folded-up newspaper. “ ‘Cousin Harriet,’ ” she mournfully intoned, “ ‘here is the
Boston Evening Transcript’
and some lovely poisoned figs
.”
    Mayo put a finger to his lips and nodded, thinking that he knew what might have triggered the dream. He’d recently pondered this very episode in the gospel of St. Mark in which the blind man cured at the Pool of Bethesda could at first see only men who looked like “trees that are walking around,” and only saw perfectly and clearly after Christ had repeated the healing action. An avowed agnostic—though the mystery of design in the human body had nagged him to belief in an amorphous intelligence at large in the world, which he would sometimes refer to as “Maurice”—Mayo found the gospel passage baffling. And unnerving. In the time of Christ, cures for blindness were medically unknown. So if the healing at Bethesda hadn’t actually happened, how could Mark have known the symptoms of post-blind syndrome? Mayo lifted a hand and looked at his fingernails as he nodded his head a little. Yes, the dream had regurgitated his musings.
    But the winged syringe? The blood? Poisoned figs?
    The neurologist finished his waking ablutions, dressed, andboiled water on a single-burner hot plate for the brewing of a heavily sugared tea in an oversized thick white porcelain mug which he carried with him out into the dimly lit hall where, for a time, he stood silent and still, irresolute, his head bowed down in thought and a hand in the pocket of a medical jacket that, just as with his rumpled baggy trousers, was much too large for his sticklike frame. He seemed not to wear his clothes but to inhabit them. “Miracles,” he muttered. They’d been suddenly as