Brain Storm

by Richard Dooling

  “Seizures,” she mused aloud. “Very nice. Maybe we can argue he has Tourette’s syndrome.” She assumed a lawyerly demeanor. “ ‘He calls everybody a nigger, Your Honor. He can’t help it.’ ” Her eyes opened wide. “We could put him on the stand and have him call me a nigger, you a nigger, the judge a nigger. ‘What’s more, Your Honor, he is afflicted with religious delusions. He thinks Jesus will save everyone except for us niggers.’ Did he say how many seizures he had?”

  “Sounded like not very many and they’ve been controlled with medication for six or seven years.”

  “Did he stop taking his meds?” she asked. “Did he take them the day before? The day of?”

  “I asked him that,” said Watson. “He, uh, doesn’t remember.”

  “Oh, good,” she said warmly. “We not only have a lawyer smart enough to ask, we have a client astute enough to not remember.”

  They rode the elevator to the second floor. She put her badge in another white door. This one said PRIMATE LABS, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

  They entered a huge, high-ceilinged room, warm and humid—unlike the air-conditioned chill in the rest of the building—and lit by blazing drumlights. He heard screeching and smelled urine before he saw the deep cages lining the walls: a sauntering baboon, a pair of orangutans grooming each other, chimpanzees hurling monkey epithets at him from perches in artificial trees. Ventilation fans hummed overhead. Four-foot-high interlocking partitions divided the cavernous room into examination areas and controlled environments.

  He followed her to a large glass booth. Someone had taped a printout page on the booth’s door with CHAM’S HOUSE written in black marker. Inside, he saw stacks of computer equipment, monitors on steel shelves, and the back of what looked like a barber chair with hairy limbs strapped to it.

  Rachel walked around to the front of the chair and smiled at Watson as he followed her.

  “Meet Cham,” she said proudly.

  Watson was unprepared for the sight—the merciless drumlights made the monkey strapped in the chair glow in vibrant, unnatural colors: purple skin, mother-of-pearl teeth, a textured, vermilion tongue. Eight Velcro cuff restraints, one for the upper and lower parts of each limb, and a thick Velcro belt restrained a male chimpanzee bolt upright in the straight-backed chair. The legs were spread, the arms strapped to retractable slats. A steel crown vice had immobilized the cranium with four bolts screwed into the chimp’s shaved head. Absolutely painless, Dr. Palmquist insisted. The bare skull was studded with hundreds of dental-cemented electrodes sprouting color-coded wires, which rose up like a surreal fright wig of rubber hair in neon hues and then spun up into an armature overhead.

  The chimp laughed at Watson, an expression of emotion that seemed oddly contrived, because only the mouth and eyes moved; the rest of him was motionless. With all the wires, electrodes, leads, sensors, cuffs, and tubes coming out of him, Cham looked like the mutant offspring of a mother chimp who’d done it with a Cray supercomputer, a hideous crossbreed from a modern bestiary, a high-tech hippogriff or a silicon centaur, half computer chips and wires, half organic flesh.

  Watson felt his gorge rise, tugging his lunch up behind it.

  Cham’s right hand rested on a small console of big buttons. A few feet in front of them was a sheet metal partition with closed chutes and what appeared to be a door for a four-foot dwarf.

  Rachel picked up a phone. “Walt?” she said, looking at the sheet metal wall. “You got everything loaded on the other side?… Elsa will be fine.… Great. We’ll start.”

  Rachel stepped up behind a small, elevated worktable that looked down on Cham. She flicked a switch, and the console under Cham’s right hand lit up. Each of the big buttons or keys had a colorful backlit graphic: a banana, a toy, a chimpanzee’s face, a glass of water, a smiley face.

  “What are the buttons for?” asked Watson.

  “I’ll show you,” she said, swiveling on a lab stool and bringing a bank of big color monitors to life with a touch of a pointing device. Her fingers clattered expertly on the keyboard.

  Watson stepped up next to her, tuned in to her perfume again, and settled in for a view that included the dark plumage of her hair and her smooth, capable hands.

  “What would you like Cham to be?” she asked.

  “Be?” asked Watson. “You mean, like, would I like him to be a marriage counselor or a tax lawyer?”

  “No,” she said. “Do you want him to be horny? Hungry? Happy? Thirsty? Violent?”

  “Hungry,” said Watson, trying to be delicate, even though “horny” sounded more interesting.

  She selected a sliding gauge on the computer screen with her mouse pointer and elevated it by clicking and dragging.

  “Let’s make Cham hungry,” she said, as if she could make him anything she wanted.

  She brought up a red three-dimensional grid in the shape of a brain and rotated it on the screen using her mouse. “We use computer algorithms to warp the data from Cham’s brain and fit it into a standardized model of a chimp brain space. Then we select coordinates for areas of stimulation, creating electrical impulses in the neural bundles of the brain, very similar to the impulses generated by the brain itself.”

  She clicked on a small cube in the lower half of the grid, and it lit up.

  “That’s the hypothalamus, which contains neural networks intimately associated with hunger, among many other things.”

  Cham hooted and shrieked, again without moving, though his lips parted, showing a row of teeth the size of Chiclets. Then his index finger extended and pressed the banana button. One of the sheet metal chutes opened, and a large fake banana attached to a telescoping armature extended itself and stopped directly in front of his mouth.

  “It’s hollow plastic,” she said, “filled with banana mash.”

  Cham wrapped his lips around the nozzle and snarfed banana mash with gusto. When he sucked and got nothing, he screamed at the plastic banana and sucked again. The armature retracted, the chute closed.

  “Wow,” said Watson.

  “Now what?” she asked. “As if I don’t know.” She clicked open a few menus and dialogue boxes on her screen.

  “Pay attention,” she said. “Learn something about sex and the brain.”

  She flicked a switch, and the four-foot door in the sheet metal wall slid open, exposing another chimp, a female, without scalp electrodes, but similarly restrained in an identical chair, genitals swollen and exposed.

  “Hi, Elsa,” said Rachel. “Are we feeling romantic?”

  Watson noticed for the first time a steel track embedded in the floor and running between the two chairs.

  “Cham gets it fairly regular,” she said, “so the sight and smell of an estrus female is mildly arousing, but, as you can see, he does not press the button with his girlfriend’s picture on it. And we pick up impulses just slightly above baseline in the medial preoptic area of the hypothalamus.”

  “Medial optic what?” asked Watson.

  “The medial preoptic area of the hypothalamus. Part of the limbics, which we talked about earlier. Remember the four F’s?” She giggled and winked at him. “I said, pay attention. The medial preoptic area modulates male sexual behavior: mounting, pelvic thrusting. It’s very sensitive to visual and olfactory stimuli. I’ll show you.”

  She flicked the switch, and the small door slid shut, concealing Elsa again. “And we ventilate,” she added, flicking another switch, which set a large exhaust fan whirring overhead, “to remove any lingering scent of estrus.”

  “And now,” she said, moving the cursor of her tracking device to another cube on the grid, and then to a sliding bar at the periphery of the screen, “we juice him with millivoltage to the medial preoptic area. We attempt to mimic the same sort of impulses his brain would produce if he were engaging in sexual behavior.”

  Cham, stirring slightly under his restraints, cooed and gave a couple of hoots.

  “We receive a pleasurable response. But, as you can see, he st
ill does not push the Elsa button.”

  “Now,” she said, opening Elsa’s door with a flick of the switch. “We present estrus Elsa, and we stimulate the medial preoptic area.” She clicked and dragged a sliding bar.

  Cham’s index finger promptly punched the red button with the chimp face on it, and Elsa’s chair moved along the steel track toward Cham. Watson watched Cham’s purple tool stir in the hairy undergrowth of his pelvis.

  “And we begin picking up impulses of fifty or more per second from the cells we are monitoring in Cham’s hypothalamus.”

  Watson noticed there were cutouts for the chimps’ legs in both chairs, allowing the chairs to come flush together, permitting copulation in situ.

  Cham tilted his pelvis and shrieked. Watson felt light-headed, as if his brain, not Cham’s, were suspended in space by colored wires.

  Rachel said, “I want you to appreciate the biotechnical obstacles we had to overcome to get this right. The electrodes allow us to stimulate or record. And we are one of the first labs to successfully monitor the electrical activity of individual hypothalamic neurons while the animal is engaging in sexual behavior. Energetic sexuality usually dislodges the microelectrodes from their placement coordinates. But here the cranium is immobilized, so we can get stable recordings, even during orgasm, which”—she moved her mouse and clicked—“should be happening any second now.”

  Watson felt sweat bleeding from his pores as he watched the immobilized chimps struggling against each other and shrieking.

  “Sexual behavior is complex,” she said. “Even in males,” she added with a titter. “The medial preoptic area does not simply produce a motor pattern—mounting, let’s say—but instead seems to generate a mind-set which is exquisitely sensitive to sexual messages from the female.”

  As he stood looking over her shoulder and the aromatic swath of her dark hair, she moved the tracking device, and her elbow brushed the upper part of his thigh.

  “If an estrus female gives the proper cues, stimulation produces mounting and pelvic thrusting.”

  Watson inhaled her perfume and felt a curious mixture of nausea and arousal, as he watched the chimps bumping their restrained pelvises together.

  “Simon LeVay wrote a book called The Sexual Brain,” she said, “describing an experiment very similar to this one, first performed at Kyushu University in Japan. His conclusion: ‘Love will find a way.’ No slight intended to the song as sung by William Bell, Jackie DeShannon, or Amy Grant. Ah,” she said, just as Cham’s and Elsa’s grunting achieved a crescendo. “There it is. The big O. During copulation, the neuronal discharge rate actually falls and then ceases altogether after ejaculation.”

  Watson did his best to lean against her arm in the confines of the booth.

  “Well,” she said, clicking and dragging, opening and closing boxes on her screen, “Cham and Elsa are ready for cigarettes, and we better get back upstairs to finish the tour.”

  Watson stepped down and looked at Cham, still panting from exertion. Elsa’s door opened, and her chair went through the partition on the steel track. Cham’s spent erection slowly wilted like a dying tuber.

  “Thanks, Walt,” called Rachel.

  “No problem” came the voice of Walt through the sheet metal.

  Three shrill beeps erupted from Watson’s personal communicator. He retrieved it from the inside pocket of his suit, opened it, and read the message displayed in liquid crystals on a gray pop-up screen:

  JTW SLO. ORG. WL4, BC A1-A4.

  “Fuck,” said Watson.

  “We can do that,” she said. “We make fuck happen all the time around here. We can put you in Cham’s chair and bring Elsa back.”

  “Code Orange,” said Watson, and then deciphered the abbreviations aloud: “Joseph T. Watson, St. Louis office, Westlaw expertise level 4, billing code first-year associate to fourth-year associate. I need to go back downtown and log on. A partner needs emergency computerized legal research.”

  “We’re not done,” she said. “The tour is incomplete. You haven’t finished telling me how the interview went. Can’t you call them and tell them to get somebody else?”

  “Whoa,” said Watson with a cautionary shake of his head. “Not done. You respond to a Code Orange first, and argue about it later. I have to go.” He let her know with a doleful grimace how much he wanted to stay.

  “Well,” she said, “you have to come back. That’s all.”

  “I will,” said Watson, summoning his calendar onto the screen of the communicator. “When?”

  “Tonight,” she said, lifting one eyebrow in a parody of mischief. If he was not mistaken, she beamed one of those true smiles at him from her stool at the console.

  “Tonight?” he said. “It’s a Code Orange. I might be down there till midnight.”

  “Well, if we’re going to play ‘Who Works the Most?’ I live here,” she said happily. “So there. And you’re still loafing along at the glacial pace of the civil law. Remember the speedy trial provisions from your law school courses? I’ve been an expert witness enough to know that civil law moves like a bus in a school zone, and now you’re on the freeway of federal criminal law, with the cops after you and your client.”

  “Shit,” said Watson.

  “If you can’t make it, call,” she said. “But we really should … finish up.”

  “I’ll call,” said Watson, putting the communicator back in his pocket and looking for his folder.

  “Joe,” she said.

  Joe? he thought. Yes, of course, Joe. It was turning into a big date. “What?” he said.

  “Before I shut this down. Do you want to see what your boy looked like on the day of the murder?”

  “What?” asked Watson. “You mean Whitlow?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Watch Cham. I’ll show you exactly what happened to your client.”

  Cham was still breathing deeply, murmuring contentedly, and drooling banana paste from one corner of his mouth.

  Watson heard a single mouse click and watched Cham’s entire body buckle violently under the restraints. His bared teeth opened in a violent, ear-piercing shriek. Arcs of contracting muscles rose from his neck and shoulders, tendons stretched under his hide like twisted ropes. The skin of his immobile, shaved scalp crawled and bunched itself in wrinkles where the bolts held his skull. Watson lost his breath and felt the visceral impact of Cham’s rage, channeled into the only parts of the monkey’s body that could still move freely—vocal cords and facial muscles. Another primal shriek, this one so loud he was forced to cover his ears.

  “Hey,” yelled Walt from the other side of the partition. “Lay off the amygdala, would ya?”

  Watson panted for air and swallowed, then tore his gaze from the spectacle of Cham’s shrieking, grimacing face.

  “That’s your man,” she said grimly, the colored light from the monitors swathing her features in the chiaroscuros and morbidezzas of a painted Venus.

  “You’re warped!” he said. “Don’t do that again!”

  “Hey,” she said. “You asked me about the amygdala. I showed you the amygdala.”

  CHAPTER 8

  SEE ME. AFM.

  Arthur’s note was a yellow sticky stuck on another St. Louis Post-Dispatch article—the third one in a row!—page A4: COURT APPOINTS LAWYER TO DEFEND ACCUSED HATE CRIMINAL. The clipping teetered on the precipice of Westlaw printouts that overlooked Watson’s desk and several adjacent mesas of draft motions, buttes of research summaries, cliffs of photocopied cases—all research that he had compiled during the last three days on the issue of hate crimes, penalty-enhancement statutes, and First Amendment challenges thereto.

  His hands shook as he scoured the boxed twin columns of newsprint from page A4:

  Federal District Judge Whittaker Stang appointed attorney Joseph T. Watson, of the St. Louis firm of Stern, Pale & Covin, to serve as counsel for the indigent defendant, James F. Whitlow, who was taken into custody last week.

  He flushed with pride at s
eeing his own name in print, but his cheeks burned for another reason when he read the next paragraph:

  Attempts to reach Mr. Watson were answered by Arthur Mahoney, the Chairman of Stern, Pale’s litigation department, who explained the district court’s long tradition of appointing private attorneys to represent indigent clients.

  “Neither Stern, Pale nor Mr. Watson has any expertise in this area of the criminal law, but we will strive to provide the best possible representation for this client because the court has ordered us to do so. At the same time, we will petition the court to reconsider its appointment of a first-year associate to represent an accused murderer facing the possibility of the death penalty.”

  Mr. Mahoney was unable to comment further on the case.

  Watson set the article aside and instantly noticed that the cross-hatched heaps of hate crime cases, statutes, and law review articles he’d left scattered all over his desk had been disturbed—snooped into?—then reconfigured. By …? His secretary never touched documents unless they were in the IN, OUT, or FILING baskets, which meant …

  He’d recently completed a memo for Abulia Systems (one of Arthur’s clients) on a private employer’s near absolute right to search the workplace, including an employee’s desk—a virtual desktop made of software or a real one made of metal and wood. Never once, during its research or composition, had Watson thought about his own files being ransacked. Intracorporate espionage is perfectly legal, he had concluded in his summary to Abulia’s Human Resources Department, especially if the personnel manuals contain proper warnings, thereby removing any mistaken expectation of privacy. And only now did it occur to him that just about everybody else in Stern, Pale’s litigation department had at least one locked file drawer.

  Surveying his desk for a moment through Arthur’s eyes, Watson saw stacks of work product bearing the client-matter name and numbers for U.S. v. Whitlow—paper evidence of excessive nonbillable hours scattered everywhere.

  Line one trilled twice. Inside call.