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worshipped.
    Billy knew his nightmare would resume the moment the sun rose into the sky Sunday morning. But he still needed the anesthesia to get him through the night.
    Like a serpent, her lips touched his, and he felt the numbness once again.
     

Chapter 7
     
    Dr. Dash Naqui never rested on the Sabbath, always arriving to his medical practice at exactly seven in the morning. His office normally provided him solace, but following a week where his skeletons escaped from his closet and appeared on the national news, it became a fortress to barricade himself behind.
    He removed his white lab coat and hung it on the chair behind his large mahogany desk. He loosened his tie, and then began meticulously rubbing his temples, twisting his dark skin. He was a wiry, thin man who looked much younger than his sixty-five years of age, and anybody who ever came in contact with Dr. Naqui would tell you he had the energy of a twenty-five-year-old med student. But this week had drained his energy supply, and added more salt to his salt-and-pepper colored hair. He rubbed his temples harder.
    His parents had emigrated from Pakistan to Jersey City, where Dash was born. The name on his birth certificate was Siddique, but his parents began calling him Dash for the way he “dashed” around their one-room apartment with boundless energy, and it stuck. He couldn’t remember the last time anyone called him Siddique.
    Dash was also one of the few English words his parents knew, and being first generation American, he bought hook-line-and-sinker into the ideal of the American dream. That being, a great work ethic, combined with a sense of patriotism and sacrifice, a man could rise up and become whatever he chose, no matter if he were born to privilege or what his ethnic background was. Dash Naqui was living proof such a dream existed.
    He rotated his swivel chair and peered out from his twelfth floor window at the peaceful Sunday morning in Manhattan. His eyes then drifted down onto Park Place. As a child, his family used to play the board game Monopoly, and he knew that if you landed on Park Place, then you’d arrived. Dash Naqui had definitely made it, establishing himself over the past quarter of a century as one of the world’s leading neurologists.
    He was widely recognized as one of the most respected voices on such neurological disorders as Bells Palsy, Epilepsy, and Tourette’s Syndrome. He published books that became bibles on numerous pain disorders and once had a 60 Minutes segment dedicated to him, based on the countless hours of pro bono medical treatment he provided his fellow veterans from Vietnam. But in recent years, he had focused his passion on trying to find a cure for Parkinson’s disease. An insidious ailment that his beloved wife, Claire, had suffered with for the past eight years.
    Last week Naqui was in Albany to testify before the New York State Senate, lobbying for a bill to fund stem cell research, including the controversial embryonic stem cell research. Naqui believed this could be the key to finding the cure for Parkinson’s, along with other afflictions. He countered testimony by groups who claimed to fight for something called “Right to Life.” In Naqui’s mind, there was no such thing. Life was not a right, but an honored privilege. And when given such a privilege, he believed a society must be willing to sacrifice life for the greater good. Whether that was in relation to science, battle, or whatever was the next challenge thrown at mankind.
    He didn’t get back to his home in Ridgewood, New Jersey, until almost midnight. He barely got a wink of sleep, staying up with Claire to the wee morning hours. She had what many in his profession would flippantly call her “bad days.” They never lived it, so they would never understand. But Naqui was never one to wallow in his own misery, and was back at his lower Manhattan office this morning by his usual seven, seeing his first patient at eight. But as the