BACK AT THE HOSPITAL

They rushed me into the emergency room, and the doctors came and went, one after another, each more baffled than the last.

No one could tell me what was wrong.

A brilliant light was pouring into my vision from every side. A trembling energy ran through my body like current through a wire. And with it came a feeling I could not explain and could not resist: an overwhelming need to touch someone. Anyone. Another living being.

As the orderlies wheeled my gurney down a crowded corridor from one room to the next, we passed a woman sitting in a wheelchair against the wall.

I reached out with my right hand and took hold of her arm.

At once, the migraine was gone. The trembling stopped. The light went out like a switched-off lamp.

And the woman in the wheelchair stood up.

A nurse dropped a tray. Someone called for a doctor. The woman stood there in the corridor, holding the arm of her chair, staring down at her own legs as if they belonged to someone else. Every physician on that floor knew her case. A car accident years earlier had severed her spinal cord. She had been paralyzed from the waist down ever since.

She was never supposed to walk again.

What had happened was medically impossible and scientifically inexplicable.

That was why Dr. Banks called the neurologist who flew in from Johns Hopkins to see me.

His name was Dr. Xu Yun.

From the moment he walked into my room, he never really left. Within a few weeks, he had moved into a cell at Dharma Mountain so that he could study my brain every day. He sat beside me through my meditations, monitoring my temporal lobes with EEGs. Later he compared the tracings with my MRI scans. He filled notebook after notebook. He cross-referenced every published case he could find, working through the night while the rest of us slept.

He never once used his helmet on me.

“You don’t give steroids to Samson,” he said.

Unfortunately, word of what had happened at Redding Hospital spread faster than any of us could have imagined. Within a month, television crews had set up camp at the foot of Deshan’s mountain. Soon after came the sick and the dying. Hundreds of them. They lined the road to the monastery gate, day and night, hoping I could cure them of everything from blindness to AIDS.

One network ran a special. They called it The New Savior. Its centerpiece was grainy footage, shot without my knowledge, of me laying my hand on a hemophiliac boy who was hemorrhaging, and of the bleeding stopping.

Three thousand miles away, in a dark, cramped room in Boston, the same footage was playing on a small television set.

The man watching it was young, lanky, and thin, with red hair that stood up in spikes.

He recognized me at once.

He hurled his wine bottle at the screen. The picture tube exploded in a shower of glass and sparks, and a small fire flickered up from the back of the set.

He did not bother to put it out.

He knew where to find me now.

And he would stop at nothing until he did.