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in on a friend, Art Avedisian, in Harvard’s Department of Near Eastern Languages.”
    Bob taught French literature at Wellesley College. “Yeah?”
    “Well, he showed him the video of Zack.”
    Maggie was suddenly alert. “Yeah.”
    “It wasn’t glossolalia.”
    “Of course not. It was plain gibberish.”
    “Actually, it wasn’t gibberish. It was Aramaic.”
    “Aramaic? Isn’t that some ancient language?”
    “Yes, and the native tongue of Jesus Christ.”
    “What?”
    “According to Bob’s friend, who’s a scholar and an expert on Aramaic, it’s still spoken in small parts of the Middle East. He says Zack spoke it in an older dialect.”
    All Maggie could say was, “What?”
    Kate nodded. “That’s what he claims.”
    “Well, that’s not possible. He’s wrong. Zack doesn’t know any ancient languages. That’s absurd.”
    “I’m just telling you what he said. He also translated what he could make out.” She removed a notepad from her handbag. “I guess he was repeating several phrases: ‘Father, with You everything is possible. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what You will.’ Then Zack recited the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic.”
    “I don’t believe this.”
    “I know. But according to Avedisian, that’s what it was, an excerpt from the Sermon on the Mount in the original dialect.”
    “W-what?… How?”
    “I don’t know,” Kate said. “As far as you know, did he ever take a course in Aramaic?”
    “No, and why would he?”
    “I don’t know. And I guess it’s not your basic college elective. According to Art, the only place you can find such a course in New England is the grad school at Harvard. And we know he never did that. Nor is Aramaic something you can pick up on Rosetta Stone.”
    “Then the guy’s wrong. That’s not what it was,” Maggie insisted.
    “I guess. Even if you wanted to, where would you find Aramaic versions of Jesus’s sermons?”
    Maggie felt a rash of gooseflesh flash up her arms. “He’s not even religious.”
    “I know, but how do you explain it?”
    “The guy is wrong. Dead wrong.”
    Kate nodded and sipped her coffee.
    And Maggie rubbed her arms against the chill.
    *   *   *
     
    Later at home, Maggie listened to the tape over and over again. She could make no sense of the language, of course. It sounded a bit like Arabic crossed with Greek. But what stayed with her as she lay on her pillow in the dark was not the language, but the voice.
    All she could hear was Nick.

13
     
    Beetles were eating his brain.
    He could hear them just inside his ears—a high-pitched electric chittering as they munched their way through the gray matter to the core of his head.
    Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. He could feel their thrumming just below his skull, nearly blinding him with distraction. He could barely restrain himself from making a scene in the back of the bus, from screaming and ramming his head into the balance pole.
    As he did every morning at daybreak, he walked to Harvard Square from Boston and boarded the number 350 bus that took him down Massachusetts Avenue to the Alewife stop at the Cambridge/Arlington line, where he’d get off and walk half a mile to the intersection of Routes 16 and 2, his territory to panhandle the line of cars at the stoplight. It was a good place for handouts—maybe a buck or two for every twenty cars.
    But this morning was the worst. The crackling and high-pitched chit-chit sounds and images of their little pincers boring tunnels had grown worse over the last week, so much so that he could barely hold up his cardboard sign:
     
    PLEASE HELP
    SICK AND HOMELESS
    GOD BLESS
    He could barely concentrate on his little walk up the worn path from the traffic lights along the line of stopped cars. Usually he’d eye the drivers, hoping they’d not pretend he was invisible and lower the window with a handout.
    The lunatic scrabble on the inside of his skull had been going on for days, but today it was worse