For every strange event that had unfolded so far, Meg McGeary was the absent element. Was she pulling invisible strings? What gave her the right to? Ten years ago Meg didn’t stand out for any reason. She could easily have blended into the bustling holiday shoppers at the local outdoor mall. She was forty then, dressed in suburban style: gray parka with fake-fur trim around the hood, baggy jogging pants, and running shoes. Society was changing, so the absence of a wedding ring wouldn’t have made her stick out. One thing did, though. On a particular day in November, she was standing stock-still, her eyes fixed on the distance, as if mesmerized by the front of a Subway sandwich shop and the Nike store next door.
The sun was shining feebly through a patchwork of clouds. Shoppers were feeling flush—the Great Recession hadn’t yet burst the bubble—and nobody took notice as they walked around Meg. An alert passerby might have suspected that something was very wrong with a woman glued in place. Maybe she was having some kind of psychotic break that made her go catatonic. For now, though, the crowd parted and swirled around Meg like the sea swirling around a rock jutting out from the beach.
Meg wasn’t psychotic, but she wasn’t normal either. She was suffering from extreme disorientation—and with good reason. In her mind she was on her way to be crucified. Literally. Before noon, she would be hanging from a tall wooden cross. Roman soldiers were going to drive long iron nails through her hands. She could see the angry mob thirsty for her blood.
The “thing,” as she called it, started that morning. Her cat had woken her up from a bad dream by clawing at her chest through the coverlet. Outside, winter darkness had cleared. Meg’s bare feet hit the cold floor, searching for a pair of fuzzy slippers. She padded down a hallway to the bathroom and stared at herself in the medicine-cabinet mirror.
A puffy face with frowzy bed hair stared back. Yet she also saw an ancient biblical city in the mirror, as if two films were superimposed in a projector. Suddenly the ancient city came to life. People in robes lined the street, eager for a vicious spectacle. Like actors in a silent movie, they jeered at her without making a sound.
Meg was dimly aware that this was the same dream that had kept her awake all night. She splashed cold water on her face to make it go away, but it didn’t. Whether she looked in the mirror, out the bathroom window, or at the white-tiled walls, this other scene played—a hot day, the sun burning down from a clear sky, bystanders straight out of Sunday school illustrations. Meg’s feet were snug in her slippers, but the man’s feet wore sandals and felt hot. She was certain now, with waking clarity, that it was a man. His breathing was heavy as he gazed around at the mob, fighting against his fear. Meg could feel the pressure in his lungs. Was he carrying something heavy on his back? She suddenly felt an enormous weight.
Meg decided to call Clare, the closest of her two sisters. Back to the bedroom she walked, with nervous steps. The cat lay curled up by the radiator, opening one eye to watch Meg dig around in her purse for her cell phone. Yet the minute she pushed the button for Clare’s work number, she thought, Bad idea. She’s a worrier. This will ruin her day.
Before Meg could hang up, however, Clare answered. “Hey you,” she said, expectantly.
“Hey,” Meg mumbled mechanically.
“You sound sleepy.”
“I’m not sleepy.”
“Well, it’s nice to hear your voice. It’s been a madhouse with the kids out of school and me working.” Clare, who had moved to another city after she got married, was always in motion, building her realty business.
“If anyone can cope, it’s you,” said Meg. She was stalling, disoriented. The movie became twice as vivid now. The man stumbled to his knees under his crushing burden, then struggled to regain his footing. Meg could feel his back muscles cry out in pain. This wasn’t a movie. She was inside him.
Clare’s worry radar kicked in. “Sweetie, is something wrong? Why are you really calling?”
Luckily, a flickering gap appeared in the movie just then, which gave Meg an opening to think straight. “I was feeling a little lonely. We never connect the way we used to.”
“I know. It’s been weeks. I’m sorry.”
Her sister’s voice, which had anxiously risen a few notes, came back down. Clare was usually good about not losing touch. She was good about a lot of things.
“So maybe you should come for a visit?”
“I’d like that,” said Meg.
“You won’t mind the kids being underfoot?”
“No, it’s all great.” Meg desperately wanted the call to end.
“All right, sweetie. Love you.”
It was a relief to stop pretending, and the call hadn’t been a disaster. But as soon as she hung up, Meg was in pain again, gasping and bent over. She tried taking deep breaths, but it didn’t help. The movie in her head relentlessly unspooled. The man had regained his footing and was stumbling forward again, sweating heavily now.
Who else could she call? It was a depressingly short list. Nancy Ann, her other sister, would freak out. She rarely left the house without thinking that she had forgotten to lock the front door or left the gas on. Her mother was totally preoccupied with whatever her husband wanted. Some girlfriends came to mind, coworkers at the bank where Meg was assistant manager, but they’d probably laugh and hang up on her.
Meg began to panic. The four walls were closing in, suffocating her. She had to get back in control. A dose of reality might be the best medicine—inhaling the cold winter air, mixing with people. This idea sounded sane. She hastily threw on some clothes and rushed downstairs, squeezing past a bicycle and some moving boxes piled in the foyer. The smell of bacon frying in one of the apartments made her feel faintly sick, but the sensation of nausea distracted her from the movie. That must be a good sign, right? On her way out, Meg remembered to call her assistant and tell her she was taking a sick day.
It wasn’t far to the outdoor mall. Meg had gotten into the habit of wandering there after work. She didn’t do this out of loneliness. At forty, being single had settled in. It felt like something between a comfortable armchair and a stain on the wallpaper you can’t be bothered to fix.
She set a brisk pace. It was hard to keep her balance, though, trying to rush when he was struggling just to put one foot in front of the other. He looked up. A hill loomed in the distance. Two dangling silhouettes were outlined against the sun, already hanging from crosses. Meg shuddered, trying to get back into present time, and quickened her pace.
Five minutes later she was standing in the central square of the mall. Despite her parka, she was freezing. The wind cut through her, biting with wintry fangs.
Something new was happening in the movie. She could feel the ground sloping upward. He was climbing the hill. Behind him a soldier gave a hard shove. The centurion was anxious to return to barracks and get drunk. A third cross was outlined against the sun. The condemned man searched the waiting mob for a friendly face. One young girl was crying, and when he set eyes on her, she shifted her head scarf to hide her tears. He barely caught a glimpse of her, but all at once Meg felt a wave of relief wash over him. More than relief. A deep sense of peace entered him. It erased his fear, and he stopped struggling against what was to come.
The chants of the mob grew obscene, but the man’s sense of peace only deepened. The world and its terrifying images faded like a candle flickering invisibly in the noonday sun.
The procession arrived at its destination. He had only an instant to look back at the girl who felt pity for him. He wanted her to see that he was at peace, but she was gone. He didn’t think about the crushing finale of his drama. He only wondered what would become of her.
This is where the movie in Meg’s head jammed. The images stopped unspooling. The crosses on the hill vanished. Suddenly she was just herself, standing motionless in a crowd, with no idea of how long she had been frozen in place. Tilting her head back, she no longer saw two suns, only the feeble November sun of the present. There was no lingering fear. It was almost as if nothing had happened. But it had, undeniably. Meg noticed a few peculiar looks from people as they walked around her. Time to move on. So she did. A few minutes longer, and they’d be calling security to take her away.
Two weeks passed. Meg would have forgotten her road to Calvary if she could have. She did her best. Others noticed no blips in her daily routine at work. She still arrived every morning at seven thirty to open the bank. She still took her place at her big desk near the front and smiled reassuringly when young couples nervously approached her about taking out their first home loan. She was genuinely comfortable in her work, never a boss hater or a cause for the assistants she supervised to even remotely hate her.
If a surveillance camera had tracked her every movement, it would have recorded only one odd occurrence, a minor deviation from her normal routine. One night, after leaving the bank, she stopped at a pharmacy near her apartment building, where she asked for the strongest sleeping aid she could buy without a prescription. When she got home, she watched old reruns of Friends, ate a Lean Cuisine Chicken Parmesan, and took two of the pills before going to bed. Better to be in a faint chemical haze in the morning, Meg figured, than to revisit the terrible images of her hallucination.
But the echoes still sounded. She couldn’t ignore the faint cries of woe that came from inside her. They almost went away if she distracted herself with work and TV or if she turned up the car radio. But there are only so many ways to escape your inner world. The horrifying images in her vision were actually easier to bear. Meg had seen them every day on the walls of her old Catholic school during the Bible class run by the Sisters of St. Joseph. The problem was that now she had lived those images. Who did that? Only saints and psychotics, so far as Meg knew, and she didn’t fit into either category. She struggled to imagine a third possibility.
Anxiety comes equipped with a volume control, and the more Meg ignored the wailing voice inside her, the louder it became, little by little. By the third week, the volume of her anxiety was so loud, she could barely hear anything else. It was hard to keep her composure when she went to her parents’ house for Sunday dinner.
“You’re unusually quiet,” her mother commented at the table. “You’ve liked my corned beef and cabbage since the day you were born.”
Meg managed to smile, because this was only a slight exaggeration. Her mother said the smell of the dish brought back the green hills of Galway, although she hadn’t literally come from Ireland or even visited it. She came from near the railroad tracks in Pittsburgh. Still, corned beef and cabbage was like a light in the window, attracting the McGeary sisters home, no matter where they happened to be. This wasn’t really true anymore, ever since Clare had gone off to raise a family and Nancy Ann had gotten married to that handsome Tom Donovan. Nancy Ann was barely eighteen, the same age as her daughter Mare. Time was a thief.
It was just Meg and her parents at the table now. Since she never mentioned a man, her mother had to be content with how well her single daughter was doing at the bank. Her father kept her mother’s prying impulses in check, usually with a sharp glance if she strayed anywhere near the word “marriage.”
“I think I like your cooking more as I get older,” Meg offered. “You haven’t lost your touch.”
“What kind of touch do spuds take?”
Her mother smiled indulgently at the compliment and passed the potatoes. But really Meg was attempting a mild diversion, in case her inner state looked too obvious. It took all her strength not to tell her parents how worried and disoriented she felt. At any moment she could have a relapse. Worse, the movie in her head could pick up from where it had stalled. This was a possibility she didn’t dare think about.
After dinner, Meg walked to the bus stop. Her car was in the shop. She felt relieved nothing had gone amiss. The sky over the city was unusually clear, the stars giving a bright winter show. Meg glanced up, thinking that stars somehow become sharper when it was cold. This observation would have given her pleasure, but the stars suddenly seemed like the points of a million nails. She felt a wave of panic. The animal contentment of having a full stomach wasn’t calming her at all. A liquor store on the corner was still open—impulsively she rushed in.
Cheap vodka would be the fastest anesthesia, she figured, running her eye over the shelves. She wasn’t a drinker, but the need was urgent.
At the counter a bored clerk was watching a basketball game in overtime on a small TV. When Meg took off her mittens to count out the money, he glanced at her palms.
“I’d have that looked at if I was you, lady,” he said, cautiously taking the bills from her hand.
Meg looked down. Her palms were marked by two spots the size of a nickel, bright red and moist. She was sure they hadn’t been there at dinner. Her panic escalated, and she started swaying in place. She had to grip the counter to stay upright.
“Hey, are you okay?”
Unable to reply, she stared ahead with wide, frightened eyes. The clerk started to reach for the phone. Meg shook her head violently.
“Please, no,” she managed to whisper.
The clerk was no humanitarian; he was glad to get her out of his store with her bottle and eighty-nine cents change. Meg wouldn’t have stuck around for the 911 call anyway. She blindly headed for the bus stop, running to catch the bus waiting there. The driver paid no attention to her as she collapsed onto a seat near the front. Except for two older black ladies at the back, the bus was empty.
Her mind wasn’t working. Holding on tight was her only tactic now. Meg looked out the window at the passing dinginess of the city while the bus’s fluorescent lights flickered every time the driver pumped the brakes.
Once she got home, she stopped at the small table by the door where she kept her gloves and keys. If she took her gloves off slowly enough and wished hard enough, the round red spots would be gone. Magical thinking, the last resort, the final rung the mind clings to as it gazes into the black abyss. No magic this time. Meg gazed at the spots, which seemed redder than before, the moistness forming into a rivulet of blood.
But her mind didn’t let go of the last rung, and she didn’t plunge into blackness. She felt unusually calm, in fact, like a surgeon clinically examining a clean incision made by a scalpel. Once the blade slices open the skin, there’s no turning back, and with Meg it was the same. This was the point of no return. She knew what the spots meant. She knew about the stigmata. As a girl—ten, maybe eleven—she had gone through a brief period of religious devotion. She took to reading the lives of the saints in books with glossy, colored illustrations. Already an advanced reader, the suffering of saints mesmerized her.
Now, though, it was happening to her. The things that she couldn’t bear to see in her movie were now appearing on her body. Holy wounds. First the oozing blood where nails were driven into the hands. If the wounds kept going, there would be a wreath of bloody points around her forehead, a gash in her side, more blood from her feet. But even this didn’t disturb her calmness. Instead, she undressed for bed and looked at herself in the full-length mirror on her closet door. Nothing else had manifested, only the two red spots on her palms. Without bandaging them, she fell into bed, skipping the pills, ignoring the vodka. Instantly, she descended into a deep, dreamless sleep.