TWO

NICOLAE WAS INVIGORATED by the stress test, which he could tell impressed the doctor. It appeared the man had something to say but was apparently saving it until all the results were in. For now he shuttled his patient off to the optical wing.

Besides all the typical tests, a young female aide supervised Nicolae’s eye-chart exam. She lowered the cumbersome mechanism to his eyes and had him look through clear holes as she flashed the chart on the wall. It bore eight lines of increasingly smaller type from top to bottom.

“What is the smallest line you can read?” she said.

Nicolae moved the apparatus from his eyes and turned to face her.

“Through the holes,” she said. “I’ll try different lens strengths in a moment.”

“No need,” he said. And without looking back at the wall, Nicolae recited the entire chart from top to bottom, then added, “ ‘Not to be copied without permission. All rights reserved.’ ”

“Where’d that come from?” the aide said.

“The very last line.”

She moved to the wall and squinted. “That type can’t be larger than four points. This is a trick. You’re from the company that makes the charts.”

“I assure you I am not.”

“How’d you do that?”

“It is a gift, young lady.”

She eyed him warily. “I’m finding this hard to believe. You’ve never seen this chart before?”

“I would have remembered.”

“I have no doubt. You realize that besides being able to memorize fifty-six letters in perfect order in just seconds, being able to read all the lines puts your vision at, like, twenty-ten. And being able to read that copyright line would make you, like, twenty-five. That means you can read from twenty feet away what the normal person can read from five feet away.”

“Is that so?” Carpathia flashed her his best smile, and he could see its effect.

Young and nubile, she had been eyeing him. His peripheral vision was good too. It was a strange thing about women, though. While he appreciated good looks and was attracted to lithe bodies, he had no desire for a real relationship. The truth was, beyond their ability to satisfy him physically, women bored him. There was no doubt of his sexual preference, but in every other respect he found men much more fascinating. Nicolae loved to psyche men out, read them, size them up, decide whether they were worthy of respect or disdain, deference or condescension. Women, on the other hand, were playthings.

While he assumed this young woman was ripe for the picking, he had little need to pursue this class of pleasure. He had long had his choice of women of any socioeconomic class or age. And he never wanted them more than once.

Now this was weird. Rayford sat on the couch across from Irene in the wee hours of the morning, his head in his hands. It had been one thing to acknowledge that maybe, yes, he had needed help from the Almighty in the face of death—and he still intended to make good on his end of the bargain. But her story? Oh, please.

“So you got saved?”

“I’m not entirely sure what to call it, Rayford. I got convinced; I’ll tell you that. The little brochure and all the things Jackie had been talking about—even when she was coming on too strong—all kind of pushed me to look in our Bible. Do you remember that we have one?”

“Somebody gave us one for our wedding, didn’t they?”

“You’re kidding, right?” she said.

“No. What? I know we have one. Where’d we get it?”

“I can’t believe you forgot.”

“So sue me, Irene. And pray tell.”

“You got it for me for our first anniversary.”

“I did? I did, didn’t I?”

She nodded. “I read a lot in the New Testament, Rafe. It can be confusing in a lot of places, but on this subject, it’s really quite clear.”

“This subject?”

“Salvation.”

“Do we have to talk about this?” He could tell that had pierced her.

“It’s only the most important thing that’s ever happened to me, Rayford. I should think, especially in light of what you’ve just been through—”

“I prayed and God helped me, Irene. I’m not ready to become a Holy Roller and dance in the aisles of the church. Next you’ll be expecting me to speak in tongues or get healed or something.”

She stared at him. “How did we jump from this to that?”

“You’re just sounding a little severe is all,” he said. “I’m a Christian. I believe in God. I’m going to be better about going to church whenever I’m in town, and I will pray. Okay?”

She nodded. “It’s a start,” she said, holding the brochure out to him. “Would you just read this and think about it?”

He pointedly ignored it.

“There’s more, Rafe. We need to acknowledge that we’re sinners and that we can’t get to God on our own. We have to—”

“Now, see? That’s what I’m talking about. Nothing I ever say or do is quite enough, is it? Do we have to become extremists? Do you want to become known as a fundamentalist? Wars are fought over this stuff, Irene. Terrorist attacks are blamed on it.”

“What?”

“What’s the difference between a zealous Christian and a zealous terrorist who believes God or Allah or whoever has told him to bomb buildings or kill people?”

“Rafe!”

“What? Tell me. What’s the difference?”

“Well, for one thing, have you ever heard of a terrorist attack by a born-again Christian, claiming God told him to do it?”

“Have you ever heard of the Crusades?”

“The Crusades? Rayford, come on! That’s like comparing true Christians to Hitler or the Ku Klux Klan.”

“That’s what people are going to think of you, Irene.”

“You’re tired. You should get some sleep, and we can talk more about this later.”

He stood. “You’re right. I should get some sleep. But do we have to talk more about this?”

“It’s important to me.”

“I can see that. I’d like it to be just a little less important to you. Can’t you get involved with something—anything—without it consuming you? Remember your Tupperware phase?”

“I made some money.”

“Of course you did. You were a Tupperware dream. You going to become a nun now?”

“Rayford, we’re not even Catholic.”

“Okay, a saint then?”

“Go to bed.”

At the end of the day the doctor sat across from Nicolae, seeming to study him. The young man couldn’t wait to be lauded for his physicality, and he wished the doctor would get on with it. He had places to go, people to see.

“We test everyone here,” the doctor said. “Men and women of all ages, shapes, and sizes. This is where our Olympic athletes are screened. You should see the numbers produced by marathoners, sprinters, decathletes.”

“Should I?”

“Yes, because yours outstrip them all. It took forever to get you up to the heart rate we needed for the stress test, and you maintained it nearly twice as long as anyone else ever has. Your recovery time was minuscule, meaning your cardiovascular system is off the charts.

“You have the strength of someone twice your size. And of course I was informed of your visual acuity. The young woman wants to know if you are single, by the way.”

“Not interested.”

“How about I say unavailable?”

“Even better.”

“Mr. Carpathia, what will you do with this superhuman body of yours?”

“What do you suggest I do with it, Doctor?”

“Become an Olympian or a professional athlete.”

Nicolae waved dismissively. “No challenge. I ran a fifteen-hundred-meter race in physical education in college that would have won me a bronze at the Olympics, and I had never run one before, never competed on a track team.”

“Impossible.”

“You doubt me?”

“After today? No. I’m just saying . . .”

“I had all kinds of pressure to pursue track and field. A coach tried me out in various events. I could high-jump, pole-vault, throw the discus and the shot, run the hurdles.”

“Then why not?”

“What is the challenge?”

“For the glory of Romania then?”

Nicolae sat back. Was the doctor serious? Actually doing something for the benefit of his country had never crossed his mind. It was a strange notion. He too would benefit from the visibility, but having to share the glory with a nation? It didn’t compute.

“How about IQ tests?” the doctor said.

“I have taken them all,” Nicolae said.

“And how did you do?”

“No problems.”

“Meaning?”

“Except that the results were delayed while they pondered the implausibility of my scores, I was gratified to have apparently broken some records.”

“I don’t suppose you recall which tests you took?”

“Do I recall?” Nicolae said, smiling. He reached for a pad of paper on the doctor’s desk and pulled a pen from his pocket. “Not only do I recall them, but four years later, I can reproduce them. All of them. Every question and every multiple-choice answer. I will not waste our time doing them all, but here is an example.”

Nicolae scribbled furiously, perfectly reproducing three consecutive questions in the spatial-cognition portion, including five intricate drawings. At the end he wrote the name of the test, the company that produced it, and the full copyright line.

The doctor pressed his lips together and nodded as he read. “I know your reputation as a businessman, Mr. Carpathia. But you really have much more to offer. I realize this is outside my purview as your physician, so forgive me if I am crossing the line. But don’t you have any lofty goals, any plan to benefit mankind, to better the world?”

“As a matter of fact, I do,” Nicolae said. “I plan to take it over.”

The doctor leaned back and roared. “And a sense of humor to boot! Well, I’ll be looking for you on the cover of Global Weekly one of these days.”

Nicolae wasn’t laughing.

Rayford busied himself with Chloe and Raymie that Sunday to avoid any more uncomfortable talk with Irene. She seemed positively serene, not to mention eager to get to church. To his horror, she had her Bible tucked under her arm.

“They flash the verse on the screen,” he said in the car.

“I know, but Jackie says the best sound in her church is the rustling of the pages when the passage is announced.”

“Thank God we’re not going to her church.”

“That’s blasphemous, Rayford. Using God’s name to—”

“I was being serious. I do thank Him we’re going to our own church, but you’re going to be the only one with a Bible.”

“It should embarrass me to carry a Bible to church?”

“I just think it seems a little over the top, that’s all.”

Usually Irene worried what others thought. She might as well have been wearing a sandwich board announcing that the end of the world was near.

“We have only one, sometimes two verses on the screen for an entire sermon,” she said. “This way I can at least study them in context.”

“Isn’t that the pastor’s job?” Rayford said. “To put it in context?”

__

As he had promised in his airborne foxhole, Rayford tried to pray every day. When he forgot, he reminded himself as he was drifting off at the end of the day. He thanked God for protecting him and asked God to take care of Irene and the kids. And to make him a better man. He wasn’t sure how possible that was, not that he wanted to brag. But he was doing all right for himself, and most people thought he was a pretty cool guy.

He was doing what he had always wanted to do. He had everything he had ever hoped to have. His wife was great and would be even better when this superreligious phase passed. And of course Rayford loved his kids.

To top it all off, he was fulfilling his promise to God, and here he sat in church. That was not new, except that only he and Irene knew he intended it to be the first of many Sundays when he would do the same.