Brain Storm

by Richard Dooling

  She craned her neck and took a look at the monitors. “We have olfactory,” she said.

  “It smells good,” said Watson, “but—”

  “Bodies cast shadows,” she said. “Brains throw off consciousness. But consciousness doesn’t control your brain any more than your shadow tells your body what to do.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “But—”

  “Your vocalizations, your moral reasoning, your sham protests are all what we call epiphenomena—accessory events, secondary artifact. Your brain wants to make you feel better about something it decided to do on its own, without your permission.”

  She bent over him, still alongside, her hand manipulating him expertly to orgasm. He looked over her shoulder, through her dark tresses, through the booth window, and saw the colored tectonic plates of the graphic representation of his head turn red and orange.

  He felt her warm chuckle in his ear. She put her head alongside his and watched the monitors.

  “Generalized muscular tension, perineal contractions, involuntary pelvic thrusting with a periodicity of zero-point-eight seconds, white-hot medial preoptic.” She giggled. “The lateral hypothalamus brings accessory networks into play,” she whispered. “Houston, we have bursts of impulses in the hypothalamic supraoptic and paraventricular nuclei, down the axon terminals. Heart rate climbing. Skin flushed. Vasodilation. Muscle spasms. Involuntary vocalizations … Aaaand … Boom! Massive discharge of oxytocin from the posterior pituitary gland.”

  He turned his head, panted, and moaned.

  “Neuroscience,” she said. And kissed him.

  CHAPTER 10

  Not only had he missed dinner, he had missed baths. Dinner he missed two or three times a week, but missing the kids’ baths was a marital war crime. If there were Codes or National Situations at the firm, he missed baths, and paid dearly in downtime given over to fielding incessant remonstrations from the Memsahib. He heard her upstairs, already doing bedtime reading. He knew he was in for a look that was older than time, the same look that paleowife Lucy and her hunter-gatherer sisters probably gave to their protohuman husbands when the roistering cads returned late from the hunt with meager results, a look that said: I know a few similarly ranked males who bring home twice the meat with half the effort, and then devote their leisure time to mentoring and nurturing the children.

  To make things worse, he’d been pawed at, nuzzled, and slavered on by a rival female whose scent was smeared all over him. Sandra was not the jealous type, but he’d seen some pretty ferocious displays over the reported infidelities of their married friends.

  “Is that you?” she called down, her tone suggesting she’d be just as happy with a gentleman burglar or a competent baby-sitter.

  “What’s left of me,” said Watson, seized by a sudden urge for cold beer, wondering if this desire for a depressant in beverage form had erupted somewhere in his preconscious, which was causing his hand to automatically grab the refrigerator door, open it, tear the pop-top … and other parts of his brain were not stopping that impulse.

  “I met with those doctors who want to scan my appointed guy, then I had to go back to the office for a Code Orange in L.A.,” he loudly explained, neatly omitting the return visit and the hand job he’d received from a gorgeous neuroscientist.

  Danger made him trust his instincts. And his instincts told him to come up with entirely new subject matter for the Code Orange, because a description of Gateway and Mikey would come too near the topic of sexual behavior. “They wouldn’t let us off-line in L.A. It was a hostile takeover, we were trolling the information services doing due diligence all night, looking for white knights, greenmail, poison pills, shark repellent.”

  “FEED THE DOGS,” she yelled, then continued reading to the children. “ ‘ “I know some new tricks,” said the Cat in the Hat. “A lot of good tricks. I will show them to you. Your mother will not mind at all if I do.” ’ ”

  The truth was he’d blown off the Code Orange and left Nancy Slattery behind to explain the cases he’d found, while he ran off to see Dr. Palmquist. And Boron was just the sort to keep his list, check it twice, and enter naughty on the upcoming performance evaluation.

  He grabbed the phone and called into the firm’s voice mail; the synthetic operator told him he had twelve minutes of messages. He started the playback, with his finger on the SKIP button.

  Arthur came on and told him to report on his meeting at the Neuroscience Center. (Maybe he’d visited the place himself and wanted to compare notes.) Then he started in again on plea bargaining. “I know people in the U.S. Attorney’s office,” he said. “I specifically instructed you that I wanted to know immediately if anyone called you to discuss a plea.”

  Watson froze. “Fuck!”

  “Please!” Sandra hollered down from upstairs.

  “Sorry, San,” he said. He had forgotten to tell Arthur about Harper’s call! Deep shit was one thing—now he was under full fathom five.

  SKIP.

  In-house counsel from PizzaFax, re: discovery matters, SKIP.

  He heard Sandra’s voice again: “ ‘But our fish said, “No! No! Make that cat go away! Tell that Cat in the Hat you do not want to play. He should not be here. He should not be about. He should not be here when your mother is out!” ’ ”

  Boron with Spike McGinnis on speaker, going ahead with the summary judgment motion. “What about cases analyzing whether transsexuality—wait,” said Boron the Moron. “Which is he, Spike?” he asked, his voice fading as he turned from the speaker. “Which one has to do with clothes?” His voice came back full: “Yeah, not the clothes one, whether the other one, transsexuality, is considered a handicap under Illinois law? Since we can’t find favorable stuff on trans-, trans-, whatever. You get the idea. Would those be relevant?”

  “No, ass-wipe!” said Watson. “We talked about that at the Code Orange briefing.” SKIP.

  “Who are you swearing at down there?” Sandra asked shrilly. “Are you on the phone again? Will you stop the language!”

  “No one,” he said. “No! Yes, I will stop the language.” I’ll get a Glock 19 semiautomatic instead.

  “Did you feed the dogs?”

  The next message began. “Attorney Watson? This is James Whitlow. They don’t let me use the phone much. I got cut off from you. I did not hang up. I don’t know if they tape or bug these calls, but I had another idea to tell you why I ain’t guilty of discrimination. I have seen many Afro-Americans and many hearing-impaired people and have never tried to kill them, until I seen one trying to fuck my wife. Plus my own boy is hearing-impaired and I ain’t tried to kill him yet. Are they saying I only try to kill people who are both hearing-impaired and African-American? In fact, I had seen the deaf … I mean, the hearing-impaired African-American several times before and had never tried to kill him, but I guess they would say it was because when I seen him it was in church.

  “Anyway … Oh, yeah. I talked to Buck and some of my friends, and I think I told you we got some good money. Anyway, even though Buck has good money, Buck’s lawyer says I might be better off with you as my lawyer, at least until we get to trial, because there are so many legal theories on this hate stuff that need sorting out and lots of research, which would be very expensive, and, what do you call them? Motions, yeah, motions. I wrote this stuff down. And, anyway, Buck’s lawyer said you might be pretty good at that part of the business being as how you were on law journal and because you work at such a big firm, and you would be free, too. They said worry about trial later. Or maybe, they could get another lawyer to help you later, a good criminal lawyer. And Buck and his lawyer said to let them know if you need extra money for investigators or medical experts or whatever, or maybe even some extra money for yourself. Whatever. But of course if the government asks, we both know I ain’t got no money. Right? And even if I could get some money, I might forget that because of that traumatic amnesia we was talking about. I’m running on, so, never mind, I will call tomorrow in the morning if they l
et me.”

  Watson’s spider sense tingled. “Buck’s lawyer says I might be better off with you as my lawyer”? Sap alert! Now he was being used as a patsy to do research! “And you would be free, too”? “Shit,” he said, and promptly heard his wife’s foot stomp over his head. “Extra money? Or maybe some extra money for yourself”?

  “Oh, yeah,” Whitlow’s message continued, “I’m getting pills for the infection, and they are giving me the Dilantin, too. They said something about could they get the medical records from the doctor who prescribed the medicine for the infection when I was still … before I was in jail. I don’t think they should have those because that is private shit. So can we just tell them no?

  “I have thought about what you said about how you don’t want to know nothing yet, but I still say, what would you do if you come home to that one day? Anyway, I will see you in the morning.”

  Watson pushed PAUSE, then replayed the message. The other lawyer, the extra money, the medical records. And, there it was again—Whitlow asking him, “What would you do?”

  He resumed voice mail where he’d left off.

  A message from Rachel Palmquist, whose voice tripped a circuit and opened his pores, so he could bathe in the sebaceous slime of the guilty. A power surge in his autonomic nervous system triggered irregular heart rhythms. Pitter-pat and butterflies for the young and single; mortal terror and angina for adulterers with children.

  “I’m not chasing you,” she said. “I called to tell you I got a slot for your man. I called the Psychon Project director in Minnesota. I made a place for your guy, and I’m supposed to provide any support you need for your Rule Twelve motion. As for your own criminal, neurofunctional profile, I reviewed the films of the big event right after you left. Hot pink and electric orange, high magnetic fields in the medial preoptic region of your hypothalamus, indicating extremely aggressive, male-typical sexual behavior—mounting, pelvic thrusting … I think you need a doctor to take a look at it for you. Permission to seek confirmation with a PET scan and functional MRI? See ya.”

  While his cheeks burned, he heard his wife’s voice again.

  “ ‘Then our mother came in and she said to us two, “Did you have any fun? Tell me. What did you do?” ’

  “ ‘Should we tell her about it? Now, what should we do? Well … What would you do if your mother asked you?’ ”

  It was too late to go up and offer token assistance. The Battle of Putting the Kids to Bed was over; the vanquished had surrendered in tears, taken baths, brushed their teeth, relinquished toys, fallen under the spell of reading. Now Papa, a pacifist and stranger to the toils of bedtime civil war, had shown up for the spoils and the goodnight kisses, and lessons in the use of foul language. Instead, he went through the mail and discovered that some of the concerned citizens and Post-Dispatch readers had looked up his home address in the phone book:

  Dear Attorney Watson:

  I know there are a lot of fancy legal theories what you will use to try and keep James Whitlow from getting what he deserves.

  Lawyers forget that true laws are simple. One of them is: HATE IS ALWAYS WRONG.

  Your client don’t deserve death—what he needs is SLOW DEATH, which I would watch if I could. Better, I could help with the torture aspects, because that would make me feel better.

  When I get to heaven, I will look over the railing and see you and James Whitlow burning in Hell.

  Remember. HATE IS WRONG. Period.

  Gabriel

  The next one came in an envelope on the letterhead of the American Association of Handicapped Americans, featuring a logo of Sisyphus in a loincloth pushing a rock up a hill, or maybe it was Atlas trying to climb a mountain while carrying the world on his shoulders.

  Dear Mr. Watson:

  I have spent twenty years of my life as an advocate for citizens with special needs. I have seen the indomitable spirit of the disabled and I have seen the hatred and disregard of the rest of our society for those with special or different abilities. James Whitlow hates anybody and anything different than a phenotype of a white, low-intellect, extremist mentality, which is to say he hates everybody but himself and a few other tattooed, militia-minded thugs who shoot pool in bars and like to beat up people with different abilities or lifestyles.

  My deaf clients consider Mr. Whitlow’s intentional use of violence against a deaf person and his public disdain for American Sign Language to be an affront to their culture and their self-esteem, and a threat to their very existence. This morning we will be mailing 5,000 letters to Senator Bond and Congressman Gephardt asking them to be certain this administration and the federal prosecutors in this case settle for nothing short of the death penalty.

  Yours very truly,

  Amanda Wright

  Vice President

  American Association of Handicapped Americans

  In the shower, he thought about Pontius Pilate and Lady Macbeth, even though it wasn’t his hands he was washing. Afterward he peed, drank three glasses of water, scrubbed his face again, clipped his fingernails, brushed, flossed, finished brushing, swabbed cerumen out of his ears with Q-tips, peed again, and trimmed his nasal hairs. The flurry of purification rituals did nothing to assuage his contamination anxieties. Irrational, neurotic fears to be sure. Diseases from a hand job? Yes! What about the monkeys and rats she was always handling? He should have stopped her and insisted on a latex glove. “I don’t want you to do this, but if you do it, please use a latex glove.”

  At bedside, he turned around three times looking for his reading light, his glasses, his book, then got under the covers. He had a sudden urge to retrieve his subnotebook and defrag its hard drive. Run a new antivirus utility he’d downloaded at work. Update the video driver with a beta version that had just come out. But he’d left his machine in the car. Nothing but trouble if he went and fetched it. She’d probably find a gun.

  Instead, he stared up at the dark ceiling and tried to think of himself as a complex animal, a distant relative of Cham, an organism fitted out with a brain that was evolution’s crowning glory, a biochemical marvel refined by centuries of neural Darwinism and programmed to do whatever was necessary to protect and transmit his genes into the next generation. That’s it, he thought, I’m a male biological force. Females can produce, at most, one child per year; it behooves them to be highly selective when mating. But males have every evolutionary incentive to mate with the highest number of desirable females and create as many offspring as possible.

  In other words, adultery made perfect sense, biologically, and he was only fulfilling his genetic destiny by chasing a beautiful brain scientist. Honey, don’t blame me! Get Darwin on the line and tear him a new asshole.

  But wait, he thought, calming himself. True to form, he was overreacting. A semivoluntary hand job, adultery? A prelude to adultery, perhaps. Certainly not sexual intercourse. Petting, the nuns would have called it. A teenage infraction, worse than staying out past curfew to be sure, but not adultery. Not a mortal sin.

  His father’s words rang in his ears: “Are you ready to be faithful to one woman?”

  He recalled a vivid, recurring dream, in which he was making love to … well, not Sandra. An old girlfriend, a secretary, a stranger. And on waking, the dream changed into a nightmare, because for a half-minute space of time, his heart squirming in his chest, he knew and could recall being unfaithful to his wife many, many times, separate episodes, graphic details. But because he had such morbid, Catholic fears of committing adultery, he had blocked the memories of these indiscretions from his conscious mind. Only the recurring nightmares provided glimpses into his true bestial nature. In these very brief, waking moments, he saw his real self and felt … How did the renegade Catholic Jimmy Joyce put it? “I had sunk to the state of a beast that licks his chaps after meat.” (This from a guy who thought he was throwing off mind-forged manacles?)

  Formerly, Watson could always wake up from these persistent nightmares and breathe deeply of the consolatio
ns of the real world. It was only a dream! He was still a good and faithful husband. Could he still say that? Maybe not. Now he had to settle for some specious ratiocinations about how adultery made perfect evolutionary sense.

  Next to him in their queen-size bed there would soon be another complex animal with advanced language capabilities. He jumped when she sat on the edge of the bed. She had a different satin teddy on, this one a rose-petal pink. She set the alarm on her clock radio by stabbing the button repeatedly.

  “It’s your turn if they wake up,” she said curtly. “There’s a bottle in the refrigerator. Don’t forget to change him or the bed will be wet.”

  Still angry about him being late? But why the teddy? Not the usual cotton T-shirt? Did she just grab it? Or was she in the mood? Again? That would not be good, because what if he couldn’t so soon? Or what if the turmoil of guilt jangling his nerves kept him from—? What if he said no? She would suspect something. Home very late, and then turning down sex? Her husband, Joe Watson? She wouldn’t suspect, she would know.

  “Arthur called,” she said irritably, slipping under the covers. “Did I tell you that?”

  “No,” he said, suddenly unable to breathe. “What did he want?”

  “He was looking for you,” she said. “Where were you?”

  “When?” asked Watson. “I was at the brain place. Then, I was back at the firm. I was probably still there; he just couldn’t find me. That’s happened before.”

  “He said you weren’t there. He tried you on the communicator. And he paged you.”

  “Then I was at the hospital. I had to leave the communicator in the doctor’s office because of radiation and magnetic fields.”

  She sighed long and hard.

  “I’m not making dinner anymore, unless you call and tell me before four o’clock that you will be home before eight-thirty.”

  “Fine,” he said. “Once this appointed case is over, I’ll be getting home by seven every night.”