Myrna coughed, then cursed her cigarette. “That sounds funny,” she said. “Find out about that. What’s a nursery monitor doing in a house where there’s a seven-year-old deaf kid who’s not home? Could be nothing. Could be something. Could be nothing more than a day care, or a white-trash intercom. But find out. Get your investigator on that and the affair. How long had she been doing the deaf black guy? Did it start before or after the sign language lessons? Did Barney Bigot know about it? If so, when? Any domestic abuse calls? Divorce actions? How much do they hate each other? Regular marital hate, or the killing kind? Et cetera.”
“OK,” said Watson.
“Listen, I gotta go. I gotta find a way to keep one of my clients in jail because five different gangbangers want to kill him. Call me later about the pretrial motions. You gotta find a way to keep all this ‘nigger this’ and ‘nigger that’ horseshit out of evidence. Call me. Bye.”
/ / /
Tunnels and skyways took him over, under, and across the Orthogenic Institute for Mental Dissonance, the Ignatius Home for Qualified Client Bodies, and the Outpatient Cybercash booths, until he wound up in the lobby of the building called the Gage Institute for Neurosciences. Access to the elevators was controlled by a security desk, where he gave his name to the guard. Dr. Palmquist’s offices were in a secured area, where he needed a badge or an escort with a badge, so he took a seat in a stuffed vinyl chair while the guard called up.
Watson opened his briefcase and retrieved the most recent issue of the River City News. It had come out the same day as the first Post-Dispatch story, but Watson had missed seeing it, until Rachel Palmquist put him onto it. He had snagged a copy from the firm’s library en route to see Whitlow. Front page again: RIGHTS GROUPS DEMAND DEATH PENALTY FOR HATE KILLING. Next to the photo of Mr. Hate, a picture of the Mrs. streaming tears. “My husband refused to accept our son’s deafness. And he hated people of color. That’s why he killed Elvin,” said the quote next to the photo.
A spokesman from the NAACP and another from Klanwatch recited the latest statistics: upward of seven thousand hate crimes per year in the United States, 62 percent of which were directed at African-Americans.
A spokeswoman from Women Against Domestic Violence said it was another brutal expression of male sexual jealousy in the ongoing campaign to oppress and subjugate women. “Usually women are the victims of the jealous male’s violence. Mary Whitlow was lucky, that’s all.”
Deaf activists explained how the killing was a violent example of the usual cultural chauvinism of the hearing world, which assaults deaf culture daily by abolishing deaf residential schools, promoting cochlear implants, and failing to teach deaf children American Sign Language, the true language of the American deaf. “He couldn’t kill deafness in his own son,” said one deaf activist by way of an interpreter, “so he killed a deaf man instead.”
Two paragraphs covered the Terril Williams incident. No mention of Terril’s record of criminal assault. No mention of the drugs in his system. Instead, he was described as an “All-American, African-American running back who had been savagely attacked by James Whitlow during Whitlow’s junior year at Ignatius High.”
According to the News, the swastika incident had occurred at Southwest Missouri State after a drinking binge; the defendant had bet his fraternity brothers that he could scale the water tower at midnight. A former frat brother said that the swastika had been part of the dare, intended to prove that Whitlow had actually climbed the tower. Like the Post-Dispatch, the News played up Whitlow’s education at Ignatius High, a Jesuit prep school, after which he’d gone to computer technical school and then to work for a data processing company, until he was fired for computer sabotage.
Elevators opened and closed, an incessant paging system issued a stream of coded messages. He resolved to focus on Whitlow’s defense and not notice Rachel Palmquist’s wardrobe, her hair, her makeup. His new duty was to his client, not to his firm, not to a smart, witty, beautiful woman who was offering to teach him about criminal brains. He was here for one reason: to find out if her tests and her testimony about those tests could help him defend Mr. Jesus Hates Niggers.
She came out of an elevator at the opposite end of a lobby dwarfed by soaring white arches and sun-filled clerestories. All this true smiling would eventually lead to trouble, he thought, as they smiled at each other through the crowd and held the smile during her long walk across the lobby.
“Welcome to the Gage Institute for Neurosciences, Mr. Watson,” she said with her usual lilt of self-mockery.
“Nice place,” he said, rising from his vinyl chair and shaking her hand. “And look,” he said, showing her the headline, “I’m now a River City News reader.”
Maybe the new science of evolutionary psychology or some biology of beauty theory could explain just why he ignored his own resolution and studied her running shoes, her faded denims, a long white lab coat over a tight, black Lycra shirt, the shallow arc of pearls at the neck. Maybe it was all caused by pheromones, plumage, some as-yet-unidentified psychomagnetic brain wave of hers he was tuned into. RADIATION SCIENCES was stitched in red on the lab coat, just above the swell of the left breast—nice! “Swell,” as Wally Cleaver would say, even sweller than Watson remembered—and an ID badge with R. PALMQUIST, and below that LEVEL 5 CLEARANCE, PSYCHON PROJECT in bold black on an orange stripe. The makeup gone and no harm done; her hair indifferently bound, with stray wisps wreathing her smile. A pen stuck out of the tresses above her right ear. Her lips … had nothing to do with why he was here. “Big place!” he added, following her easy, loose-limbed lope to the mirrored elevator banks, extending his neck slightly and homing in on a faint whiff of perfume.
Five or six other white lab coats followed them into the elevator. She stood in front of the control panel and spoke in a conversational tone, as if they were alone. “I live on Five. That’s Neuroimaging. If we have time, I’ll take you down to Neuropsych on the third floor.”
“This whole building—it’s all brain science?” he said, as they stepped off on Five into a vestibule with a huge, square metal door.
She unclipped her ID badge and plugged it into a slot in the door.
“Neuropharmacology, neuropsychology, neurophysiology, neurobiology, neuroimaging, neuromagnetism. We just had the Decade of the Brain.” She chuckled. “Now, my colleagues and I are neuromaniacs in a building full of big brain toys.”
She led him down hallways and past signs: MAGNETIC RESONANCE PHYSICS, MAGNETIC RESONANCE SPECTROSCOPY, POSITRON EMISSION TOMOGRAPHY, FUNCTIONAL MRI, ELECTROPHYSIOLOGY, COMPUTED TOMOGRAPHY.
“And Mr. Whitlow,” said Watson. “I know what you want to do, but I’m unclear about just how it helps him.”
“You file a motion notifying the court and the government that at trial you intend to introduce expert testimony of the defendant’s mental condition. Let them think you’re going for a traditional mental defect or disease. You request that he be transferred to the Federal Medical Center in Rochester, Minnesota. It’s hooked up to Mayo’s. There, he is screened, scanned, and tested. We get the images and the test batteries piped back here via file transfer protocols and display them on our systems and monitors. Not only do you get free testing, you also get an extra forty-five days to accommodate the travel and the testing. After that, he comes back here for trial. They do the scans and the procedures, we interpret the results.”
“What kinds of tests?”
“Day one, cerebrospinal fluid, urine, hair sample for gas chromatography and drug testing, tissue biopsies for genetic and biological markers. Day two, we do the psychological testing and profiles: Wechsler, Halstead-Reitan Neuropsychological Battery, Bias Profiles, automaticity testing. Day three, neuroimaging, CAT, MRI, fMRI, PET, MEG, ABC, DEF, GHI … Do you know what any of this means?”
“Not really,” said Watson. “But, you’re looking for what? A disorder of some kind? Insanity? Oh!” he exclaimed, his palm to his forehead, “the seizures. He’s had seizures. He takes
medicine. Dilantin.”
“Nice,” she said. “That may help. Slim chance of a lesion. We can tell Arthur that’s what we’re looking for, or we can tell him we’re pursuing the seizure business.” She turned right down another corridor. “If we are lucky enough to find an abnormality, we have half a dozen neuropsychologists who could testify about the behavioral repercussions.”
“This guy is creepy,” said Watson, “but pitiful, at the same time. I can’t really describe— Well, he has this tattoo that says ‘Jesus Hates Niggers.’ ”
“Mmm,” she said, “possible religious delusions.”
“Yeah,” said Watson. “And he—”
“Quiet,” she said. “You’re telling me too much. I’ll get my data from the scans.”
They passed a vault with huge block red letters that said: CAUTION: EXTREMELY POWERFUL MAGNETIC FIELDS and a special icon resembling the radiation symbol.
“MRI,” she said with a wave. “Magnetic Resonance Imaging. We call them magnets. As for insanity, that’s what we call a ‘soft’ disorder. Most of them went out back around the era of the Twinkie defense. Remember the trial of Dan White for killing George Moscone, the mayor of San Francisco, and Harvey Milk, the city supervisor? Mr. White got three years for a double homicide, because his lawyer successfully argued that junk food had addled the defendant’s brain and predisposed him to murder. Then we went through the Menendez phase, where it was abuse that created killers, not Twinkies. But even there the defense was neurological. In the first Menendez trial, they had experts comparing the violent responses of the defendants to the gill-withdrawal reflex of sea urchins. But if all else fails, we could have one of our therapists elicit some soft recovered memories of abuse.”
She pointed at a vaulted door with block red letters. “Another magnet.”
“Can we go in and see one?” he asked.
She stopped suddenly and looked him up and down. “Pen, watch, belt, phone. You probably have keys. We’re talking about extremely powerful magnetic fields. The walls, ceilings, and floors around here are eight feet thick. If you have any metal components in a prosthesis, a pacemaker, orthopedic screws, shards of shrapnel in your eyes, those pretty much get ripped out of you. No, you can’t go in.”
Watson held on to the pens in his shirt pocket and walked on by.
“Then there was the Crocodile Man,” she said, “another real-life case. The defendant picked up two hitchhiking teenage girls and beat them over the head with a stonemason’s hammer, stopping just short of killing them. The defense called an expert witness from Harvard Medical School, who used a book called Violence and the Brain, written by two Harvard neurosurgeons, to argue that the defendant had an organic brain syndrome called ‘episodic dyscontrol syndrome.’ It was based on the old triune brain model. It doesn’t matter whether you call it super-ego, ego, and id, or neocortex, limbics, and brain stem, the theory is that there are violent urges from our collective reptilian unconscious hiding like trolls under the bridges of our higher brain parts. And when the neurological functions responsible for holding these paleopsychic urges in check malfunction, out comes the Crocodile Man. So it’s not attempted murder, it’s episodic dyscontrol.” She tittered. “The judge and jury’s eyes glazed over, they nodded their heads, and the defendant got a suspended sentence and six years’ probation for bashing in the skulls of two girls.”
Watson wondered if the syndrome could manifest itself sexually, in which case he could recall a few episodes of dyscontrol back in college. He pointed at a white vault emblazoned with PET in red. “I know it’s a scan of some kind,” he said, “but what does P-E-T stand for?”
“Positron Emission Tomography,” she said. “PET scanner. Probably one of the first scans they’ll do on your client. Imagine taking a big metal donut filled with radiation detectors and putting it around his head.” She made a circle around her head with her hands. “Then they inject a positron-emitting radioisotope into his veins, which allows them to take pictures of where all the blood is going in his brain and which parts are using sugar and oxygen, while he is, say, watching videotapes depicting scenes of graphic violence, scenes of children playing, scenes of couples engaged in sexual intercourse.”
“PET,” said Watson. “What about heavy petting—where’s that done?”
“In the primate labs,” she said, as if on cue, “where they keep your relatives. We have a couple of amorous baboons and a chimp named Cham, who gets it whenever he wants it by pushing a big red button with his girlfriend’s picture on it. I’ll take you down there, later … if you want.”
She continued leading him down hallways and past small cubicles where intense academics were hunched over computer keyboards and hemmed in by stacks of journals and printouts.
She opened a door. “My place,” she said, showing him a tower computer and two monitors on an L of worktables. Two of her four walls were crammed with books on shelves, including a fat tome entitled The Amygdala, which drew his attention more than the others.
“What’s the amygdala?” asked Watson, mispronouncing it and bending over to read the subtitle. “It’s an African antelope, right? No, wait, it’s a Chevy, came out after the Impala?”
“Remember the older, lower parts of your brain I was talking about?” Rachel said, grabbing a model of a human head, finally opening the hinged plastic skull, and removing colored brain parts, showing him two grape-shaped structures at the base of the brain. “Amygdala is Latin for ‘almond.’ Along with the hippocampus and the hypothalamus, it’s part of the limbic system. It’s kind of a switching station for powerful emotions—rage, violence, fear. Back in the sixties, it was all the—sorry—rage to insert electrodes into the amygdalae of violent criminals and stimulate them like rats.”
“And, what happened?” he asked.
“Irresistible urges for sex and violence,” she said, “or a total absence of urges for sex and violence, depending upon where the electrodes hit.”
“Electrodes?” he asked.
“Yup. Implanting electrodes went the way of lobotomies. Trying to stimulate something as complex as an amygdala with an electrode is a bit like trying to tweak the insides of a Pentium chip with a claw hammer.”
“Oh,” he said.
“Dramatic, fascinating results,” she added, “but wildly unpredictable. And if you can’t duplicate what you get, it ain’t science.”
She picked up one of her phones. “Hi, Walt. Hey, I’m bringing somebody down to see Cham.”
Watson retrieved The Amygdala and opened it, finding a lot of eight-syllable Latin derivatives fastened together like Legos.
“No,” she said, “he’s not a journalist and he’s not from the ethical groups. He’s a lawyer on our side. Do you have an estrus female? Good. Load the environment, and we’ll be down in ten or fifteen. Thanks.”
Watson returned The Amygdala to its niche on the shelf.
She regarded him with sham suspicion. “You’re not one of them whirling-dervish, bug-fucking animal-rights activists, are you?”
“I love animals,” he said. “Medium rare, rolled in olive oil, cracked black pepper, and chopped garlic.”
She laughed. “Leave your stuff here,” she said, pointing at the table. “We’ll tour.”
They walked past more red-lettered vaults and office spaces.
“Do you know what a CAT scan is?”
“Yes,” he said. “Of course I do. It’s … like X rays, only better, right?”
“I thought so,” she said. “The young, healthy, immortal male. Imagine I wanted to slice up your client’s brain into forty-eight very thin horizontal layers and look at them to see if there are any structural abnormalities or lesions. Now, imagine you can slice it on any plane, transverse, sagittal or sideways, coronal, even diagonal if we had to. We can do that.”
“Wow,” said Watson.
“That’s the boring part,” she said with a laugh. “Because now imagine shaving his brain into even thinner slices, but instead of static str
uctural images, you construct temporal images so you can observe function over a period of time, whether it’s measured in glucose uptake, oxygen consumption, blood flow, or electrical or magnetic activity, and then make a movie of various functions occurring in all these different slices.”
“Heavy wizardry,” said Watson.
“That’s still boring,” she said. “Because now take a scan of a slice with very precise structural detail, such as MRI, which has a spatial resolution approaching one to two millimeters, and then take another scan which is sensitive to function, like PET, and superimpose the PET picture showing function in the slice on top of the picture showing the structural detail, and voilà, you have a very good idea which neuronal groups are active at any given time.”
“A brain movie,” said Watson.
“Now,” she said, “cut to the chase. Suppose I administer some standard behavioral testing or cognitive testing, but I couple it with neuroimaging. I make a movie of the brain working while it solves problems or reacts to controlled stimuli. And from the data and the images we assemble a neurofunctional profile of your client’s brain. Then a powerful computer using recurrent networks compares his profile to thousands of other brains and profiles. We record the subject’s responses to, say, black faces as opposed to white ones, his capacity for empathy when confronted with images portraying human suffering, his attraction or revulsion to depictions of violence.”
“A Clockwork Orange,” said Watson.
“Better,” she said. “That was behavioral modification. Imaging techniques noninvasively detect and diagnose behavior at its source, inside the human brain.”
More labs, offices, testing booths. They stopped in front of an elevator bank and waited, while she paced and held her chin in her hand.
Brain Storm Page 10