Brain Storm

by Richard Dooling

  When she regained control, she said, “The kids will be staying at my folks’ house until criminals and criminal lawyers are out of our lives.”

  What could he say to that? Don’t do that, honey. I think early exposure to criminals and the lawyers who represent them is an important civics lesson.

  “This will all be over in a couple months,” he said. “I promise. I have to meet with the medical experts pretty intensively for the next week or so. The scanning and the neurological tests are very high tech. I have to explain them to the court and to my client. I need to … We have an investigator now. And money. The client has collected a retainer from family and friends.”

  “I thought Arthur told you to get rid of the case, or plead guilty? What if you got rid of it—would Arthur give you your job back?”

  “Sandra, I can’t plead a guy to life in prison, just to keep my job. That’s unethical.” Nothing like murder or adultery, he thought, but ethically questionable, to be sure.

  “We’ll be at Mom and Dad’s,” she said, and hung up.

  Was she bluffing? What hope would he have of reasoning with a person who was moving out over a phone call from a client? Besides, if Mary Whitlow was telling the truth, “they” were going to kill his client, probably information he should pass along as soon as possible. He could go home later and throw himself on the floor of her temple, do penance, make amends.

  He fed more coins into the antique phone and called his former employer. A Stern, Pale receptionist cheerfully and professionally gave him the phone number James Whitlow had left for him. Without overtly referring to the unsavory topic of his abrupt termination, she asked for a forwarding address and phone. Watson fished Myrna Schweich’s card out of his pants pocket and read it to her.

  “Good,” she said, “because we have a package here for you. Do you want me to hold it for you or forward it by mail?”

  “Does it have a return address?” he asked, holding his breath, wondering just for a moment if Buck’s lawyer had thoughtfully anticipated his request.

  “Yes it does,” she said. “Michael Harper, Esquire. Office of the United States Attorney.”

  “Oh,” he said. “OK. Yeah. Please, just forward it to me at Myrna Schweich’s office.”

  He charged the call to Whitlow on his firm calling card out of spite. Federal medical center personnel told him that Whitlow was in a holding cell down in Radiology, and forwarded his call. He listened to a recorded message about how he should help safeguard our country’s future by investing in United States Savings Bonds.

  He felt joy and relief at the sound of his client’s voice. The accused was safe and unharmed.

  “James?” said Watson.

  “You saved my life, lawyer,” said Whitlow.

  “I … did,” said Watson, flattening the intonation, so that it came out a statement, instead of the intended question.

  “The brothers were coming for me. I’d be fucked in the ass and picking up pieces of my skull if you hadn’ta got me outta Des Peres. And if the coloreds wouldn’ta got me, these other ugly white motherfuckers would have. Open season on me. How’d you do it? How’d you get me out?”

  “I … just … Well, the testing,” said Watson. “We needed to do the testing, right? So I got the government to sign on to that, and then—”

  “You saved my Christian fucking neck, lawyer,” he said. “The block captain on the midnights was a huge … uh … Afro-American from Mississippi. Somebody told him about the tattoo. I woke up at three A.M. and he was standing over me, looking at it with a flashlight. He says, ‘Friday nights ain’t nobody down in that cell block station after lockup ’cept me.’ Then he says out loud, ‘Any a you niggers read the newspapers ’bout this white piece of shit we got in here with us?’ And the whole block breaks out whooping and crawling up and down the bars like a bunch of … well, like Afro-Americans sometimes do. And then he puts his flashlight under his face, like a boot camp drill sergeant, and he says, ‘Friday night, motherfucker. Midnight.’ ”

  “A guard threatened you?” asked Watson. “A prison employee?”

  “Threatened me?” yelled Whitlow. “No threat about it. Fucking kill me was what he had in mind. I’da been dead last night at midnight if you hadn’ta got me outta there.”

  “I did what I could,” said Watson, so professionally that he almost convinced himself he’d had something to do with it. “Now listen to me. You’re in a government facility. You’re being tested by doctors and psychologists who work for the government. We’ll get the raw data back here by computer right away, but I need to have experts analyze the stuff and keep the government honest. I was fired from the big firm for putting too much time in on this case. So Dr. Green’s fees are already too high, and I want to make sure we have all the experts we need. And I need to work on your case only, without worrying about working for other clients.”

  “You done me right,” said Whitlow. “You won’t be sorry for sticking with me, Joe.”

  “Yeah,” said Watson, “I don’t want to be sorry. And your wife tried to call me. She left me a message. She kept talking about somebody ‘they,’ and that ‘they’ would kill both of you unless you gave back something you took.”

  “Well, no shit!” he whispered hoarsely. “Tell her no fucking shit they will kill us. Who does she think she is fucking with? They’ll kill her first, which is OK by me! And me? I’m lookin’ at death row here. Everybody wants to kill me! She gonna scare me with that?”

  “Who is they and what is it that she says you took?” asked Watson. “And is it related to the charges here? Or your defense?”

  “No,” he said savagely. “Completely unrelated. Got nothing to do with nothing. She’s the cunt who is trying to kill me!”

  “Easy,” said Watson. “Let’s wait and talk when we get together again.”

  “I’m staying here,” said Whitlow. “Just tell me what I got to do to stay here or go to another jail hospital. If I go back to a Missouri jail, I die. Understand?”

  “I’ll talk to the doctors,” said Watson, “or the judge. I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Good,” said Whitlow. “And when you talk to them, ask them what they are doing to me up here. I’m gettin’ put into X-ray machines and scanners,” said Whitlow. “They’re showing me pictures of nig— of Afro-Americans. I’m looking at words and puzzles. They show me pictures while I’m in a X-ray machine and ask me to tell stories about what I’m seeing. They put wires and patches all over me, then they put my head inside these big metal donuts and show me pictures of snakes and wars and mothers holding their kids. It’s some weird psycho-shit they are doing on me. I don’t like it.”

  “Take the tests,” said Watson. “We need the data. I’ll talk to the doctors about keeping you out of Missouri for as long as possible. But, I mean, sooner or later, you gotta come back for trial. Right?”

  “Ain’t they got a brain hospital back there?” Whitlow whined. “Like this one? And maybe they could post some big, white guards outside the door. Ah, never mind,” he said. “Cunt! This nigger stuff was not supposed to come up. It’s a big fuck in the ass, with her in charge. She’s fucking me good! This was not the plan.”

  “What plan?” asked Watson.

  He heard a hissing sigh on the other end.

  “Never mind,” he said. “Just tell me if she says any more shit to the newspapers or to the government about me hating niggers.”

  “She—” began Watson.

  “I didn’t say ‘nigger,’ ” said Whitlow. “She said ‘nigger,’ OK? I ain’t stupid enough to say ‘nigger’ in front of a cop. That’s her saying it. Not me.”

  “You didn’t use the word nigger?”

  “What?” he asked. “You mean ever?”

  The sound of a metal door slamming came over the line. Men talking.

  “Look,” said Whitlow, “the guard’s sticking his face in here sayin’ I got to get off so they can put my head in another scanning machine. What are they looking for? Yo
u find that out, and we’ll take care of Dr. Green’s fees.”

  CHAPTER 18

  He grabbed a wad of Buck’s lawyer’s money out of the trunk of the Honda and bought a fat red rose with petals as big as tongues, and a thirty-dollar French red (plastic corkscrew included) at the wine store next to the florist. Loose and dangerous living. Most guys fuck up either their home lives or their careers, not both at once. He felt himself slipping into the daredevil, nothing-left-to-lose zone, conveniently omitting Sheila and Benjy from the equation, probably because of the bomber he smoked with Myrna Schweich, which had settled like a fog over whatever he had been thinking about … something about the children?

  He called the institute and apologized to her voice mail for being late, then paused and added, “I’m on my way.”

  A disinterested observer would probably conclude that it was all Sandra’s fault, right? Hauling their kids out of the house? Calling up the inlaw calvary? Decrying his career choices? Siding with Arthur and alienating his affections? Driving him into the arms of a neuroscientist in waiting?

  As he parked the Honda and floated into the Gage Institute, he had constructed a plausible tissue of explanations he could live with long enough to put himself in charm’s way. The rose and booze were business gifts, not tokens of affection. Where was he supposed to go? To Sandra’s folks’ house? Too many fires to put out, too many guns going off. Triage. First things first. Namely get the appointed case under control, then his career, then the good provider could go home on his hands and knees and promise to be a sensitive, quality-time parent from there on out. If he begged for a reprieve prematurely, he then would have to head right back out the door to save his criminal and chase his neuroscientist, and the domestic turmoil would begin again.

  The lobby was empty, except for her and her true smile.

  “You look somewhat merrily deranged,” she said. “Alcohol? Drugs? I smell something.”

  “How about termination?” he asked. “Can you smell that?”

  Up in her office, they leaned together over one of her worktables. Homer would have admired Watson’s tale of his last stand against the evil Arthur—armor ringing around foes, insults given and taken, honor compromised, cloven helmets, parting oaths. Next, breathless updates on Whitlow and his journey to Rochester. She had inside Psychon dope, he had Judge Stang stories to tell. He told her about his new office next door to Myrna, how Sandra had found Sheila and Benjy on the phone with Whitlow.

  The anecdotal reappearance of the children gave momentary pause. She tapped on the worktable with a Gage Institute pencil embellished with the NIH Decade of the Brain logo, then pulled a paper out of Whitlow’s file and read it.

  “ ‘The personality profiles on Mr. Whitlow show repetitive, destructive behaviors characterized by impulsivity, intense emotional arousal, self-stimulation, lack of self-control. He does not appreciate the ethical implications of his own behavior.’ ”

  Her office door was open, and they heard some other obsessed, diligent, late-night-Saturday neuroscientist close a door down the hall. Footsteps, faint at first, grew louder, approaching. She twirled the shaft of the pencil between her pursed lips, then glanced up and noticed him watching her mouth. Time’s winged chariot stopped; only the footsteps drew nearer. His mouth fell open. She touched her breast through her lab coat, right under the badge that said LEVEL 5 CLEARANCE, PSYCHON PROJECT. His eyes dropped to where her fingers had been, the echoing footfalls grew louder, she pulled a stray ringlet behind her ear and resumed talking.

  “For a jury instruction on antisocial personalities, I like The Merck Manual. It’s mainstream and unobjectionable.” She pulled a sheet of paper out of a folder and read aloud again: “ ‘This personality type often is associated with a history of alcoholism, drug addiction, imprisonment, occupational failure, sexual deviation, or promiscuity.’ ”

  She smiled and rubbed her legs together, the swish of her hose sending synaptic brushfire through his nervous system.

  The approaching steps paused, and Watson heard another door close.

  Then he felt the outside of her ankle slide up the inside of his leg and the nylon arch of her foot wrap itself deftly around his erection.

  “Goodnight, Dr. Palmquist,” said a male voice softly in the hall, passing by without stopping.

  “Goodnight,” she called briskly, the voice of science, reading from her paper. While her warm foot prodded under the table, she gave him the business end of her voice: “ ‘These persons are impulsive, irresponsible, amoral, and unable to forgo immediate gratification. They cannot form sustained affectionate relationships with others, but their charm and plausibility may be highly developed and skillfully used for their own ends. They tolerate frustration poorly, and opposition is likely to elicit hostility, aggression, or serious violence. Their antisocial behavior shows little foresight and is not associated with remorse or guilt, since these people seem to have a keen capacity for rationalizing and for blaming their irresponsible behavior on others.’ ”

  A door opened somewhere down at the opposite end of the hallway, and closed. Silence. They stared into each other’s eyes across the table.

  “I have a keen capacity for rationalizing and for blaming my irresponsible behavior on others,” he said. “This is all your fault. None of this was my idea.”

  They met halfway across the table, grabbing at each other’s body parts through their clothing. He opened her lab coat, unbuttoned the blouse, pulled frantically at a pewter-colored, strapless underwire bra.

  She froze in mid–heavy breath. “We need to go somewhere,” she said. “Now.”

  Watson smoothed shirt flaps over the rise in his pants while she made herself presentable for the journey. The hallways were dark, lit only by utility lights and exit signs.

  “Where are we going?” he whispered.

  “The storage room,” she said. “Behind the primate labs.”

  Downstairs, they nervously searched the high-ceilinged lab for signs of human beings and crept among the cages, making their way to the back of the lab. She opened a heavy steel door, then slammed and locked it behind them and cut the lights, leaving only glowing yellow horizontal bars streaming in through the ventilation slots from the primate labs. They pulled at each other’s clothes again and sank slowly onto a padded mat.

  She straddled him and prepared to make the necessary port connections, male and female adapters ready, I/O enabled, server/client, master/slave. Just a couple of high-end biological machines preparing to hot-dock with cable modems and access each other’s front-end processors.

  Over the low roar of ventilation fans from the next room, Watson could hear the ululations of macaques, baboons, chimps, and vervets shrieking and catcalling as if they knew exactly where their betters had headed. Elsa and Cham were their neighbors, and the whole primate community was having a real howl fest over the arrival of this new hairless species who had to put on airs and reproduce in private.

  She dismounted and used his chest as a pillow, panting softly against his sternum. “Let’s suffer for a minute.”

  She sat back on smooth oval haunches and swayed slightly. He had been lip-biting and sucking through the pewter lace, which looked frilly and fragile as ashes and had somehow survived mutual disrobing. She reared back, freeing her hands, grasping the underwires and undoing the front clasp, so he could have at his two globular obsessions.

  Her scents, her perfume, mingled with the ancestral odors wafting in from the primate labs—the reek of monkey urine and the ripe aroma of fermenting banana peels. Water trickled through troughs and drains leading from the hosed-down cages. For just a moment, he was able to see Palmquist as nothing more than a really smart animal. Her odors, her breathing, stray moans, soft grunts of pleasure. A certain avidity or concupiscence, which aroused him at first then put him off when it acquired the ardor of selfish aggression.

  This is the way it happens, he thought, momentarily having an out-of-body view of two primates grappling and clawin
g at each other. Put yourself in a certain circumstance, then a spark touches off combustible passions.

  The adultery nightmares would be true from now on. “Are you ready to be faithful to one woman?” His father would have his answer now. “I had sunk to the state of a beast that licks his chaps after meat.” More monkey calls from the next room. He was sure he picked out Cham’s voice, howling, even though his head was immobilized in its crown vise. “I know you, Watson!” he was saying in monkey talk.

  He felt a chill spread inward from his extremities. He would live the rest of his life inside this very small braincase, behind two eyes, where he would never be able to escape self-loathing inspired by what he was about to do. He had a sudden desire to wait just a minute or two. See if he could recapture the reckless abandon that had brought him here in the first place.

  She sensed something was wrong and energetically headed south to remedy the situation.

  “Momentary systems failure,” he warned. “I need to think for a minute.”

  “He’s thinking again,” she said. “And I don’t have my equipment down here. Where’s a gal’s functional MRI scanner and CRAY T3E supercomputer when she needs it?”

  She settled herself alongside him and touched her head to his.

  “Why?” he said into a clump of dark, fragrant, damp tresses just behind her ear. “This never happened before.”

  “Somehow that makes me feel worse,” she said.

  “I mean,” he protested, “I normally don’t think about it while I’m doing it. But this time, I’m asking myself—”

  “This’ll be good,” she murmured into his chest, “especially if you’re looking for an answer anywhere above the waist or outside the septal pleasure centers.”

  “Well,” he said. “I mean … Why?”

  She sighed and laughed into his flesh. “I think we will have an easier time figuring out why Mr. Whitlow shot the hearing-impaired African-American. I think you’re trying to commit a hate crime against your wife, but your central nervous system lost its, uh, nerve at the last minute.”