Black Horizon

by Robert Masello

  Quillerman, whose brain it had been, had served twenty-four years of his life sentence, before being murdered himself—for reasons unknown—in the prison yard at Attica. Quillerman's crimes had been well documented a quarter of a century earlier in papers all over the United States. For six months, he'd gone on a random killing spree, from Maine to Maryland; four victims were found, all of them bludgeoned to death and then dumped in the nearest body of water (once a swimming pool). He claimed that there'd been two more, but he couldn't remember enough details of who they were or where he'd killed them to offer any proof. The four documented cases, however, were sufficient to put him away for life.

  Sprague had interviewed him often, as part of his clinical research. What were the deep-seated psychological factors that led a person to commit serial murders? Was there a particular behavioral matrix from which such killers emerged? Could such aberrant development be predicted, or in any way guarded against? Sprague had studied dozens of murderers over the years, and asked them all the same questions, given them all the same batteries of tests, testified as an authority in several of the more celebrated cases. He was well known for his work in the field. But he still didn't feel any closer to the ultimate truths.

  More and more, he'd become convinced that the answers lay in the physical brain itself, somewhere in that spongy lump of twelve billion nerve cells, of reptile stem and primate cortex. Everything else was too subjective, too vague, too contradictory: for every killer who had inordinately loved his mother, there was another who'd hated his; for every one who'd been abused in childhood, there was another who'd been spoiled and pampered. Sprague wanted answers now—hard answers, verifiable, observable—to the big questions. And those he felt he could find in only one place—the brain—and in its astonishing capabilities.

  Placing Quillerman's brain in a shallow glass dish, he weighed it (subtracting the standard ten ounces for the dish); measured it (just slightly above the average circumference); took several Polaroids to record color and anything else he might have overlooked in his preliminary examination. With a pair of stainless-steel calipers, he lifted the brain and fixed it in place on his dissecting table, then drew up his stool.

  The moment of truth—that was how he always thought of it. The moment when, with scalpel in hand, he would begin to uncover the inner structures, the secret compartments, the telling anomalies of the single most complex mechanism in the known universe. He punched the red button on the portable tape recorder he kept on the shelf above the table.

  “December 7, 1988,” he said. “Dissection of the brain of Theodore Quillerman.” He simply left the tape running; there was a two-hour cassette in it.

  “Statistical information.” He recited the measurements he'd taken. “Composition and hue, good. Approximately eighty hours since Quillerman's death, by violent misadventure.”

  Now then. He placed the scalpel at the back of the brain, just where the deep midline groove began. Humming the theme from Mozart's “Jupiter” Symphony, he drew the blade forward, gently but firmly, along the groove, splitting the cerebrum into two neat hemispheres. Residual blood oozed up and out of the gray outer layer, two-millimeters-thick, and from the whiter mass of nerve fibers clustered just below. The corpus callosum, still partially integrated, he pried apart with his fingertips; the severed strands dangled like spaghetti hanging through the bottom of a colander. Completing the separation, Sprague lifted the right hemisphere up and away from the rest of the brain, then set it down on an examination tray nestled by his elbow.

  “Sagittal cross-section,” he said, “reveals intact, though marginally hypertrophied, cerebellum and pituitary. Hypothalamus appears normal.”

  He leaned back on his stool for a moment, to observe his handiwork. A clean job of it, done, he confirmed with a glance at his wristwatch, in less than fifteen minutes. He should have had observers; skills like his should not go unapplauded. He leaned forward again, eagerly, his face hovering just above the now halved brain.

  There it all was, he thought, laid out before his eyes, just waiting to be probed, cultured, subjected to microscopic exploration. It excited him just to think of it. Because somewhere in there, tucked away among the hundreds of thousands of gyri—folds—and sulci—furrows—were the reasons for everything, the motivations, the memories, the mechanisms of self. The amygdala hung like a glistening acorn from the front of the specimen—that, Sprague thought, is where Quillerman first felt the need to commit aggression, the blind compulsion to arm himself and kill.

  And here, just anterior to it, was the thalamus, shaped like two tiny footballs, but acting as a relay center for those murderous impulses.

  Behind that, the mesencephalon, or midbrain, with its four distinctive bumps—these were the visual and auditory nuclei. Courtesy of these, Quillerman had seen his victims try to flee and struggle to defend themselves; one woman, he had boasted in his confession, had spontaneously stripped off her clothes, hoping to distract him from murder with rape. Courtesy of these innocent-looking bumps, Quillerman had listened to his victims’ final pleas, and the subsequent crunch of the bludgeon. (A steel pipe, from a refrigeration assembly, had been his weapon of choice.)

  And here below them, roughly the size and shape of a clenched fist, was the cerebellum, one of the brain's oldest—in evolutionary terms—components. This was the sensory-motor hub, the primary switchboard where information was processed, and actions ordered. From its fissures, heavily convoluted and compressed, came the delicate manipulations Quillerman had gone through to break into his victims’ homes and apartments, as well as the tight grip on the pipe, the frenzied swing of it through the air, the careful mopping up of the blood. It was all here, Sprague thought, surveying the brain, all of it, somewhere in this collection of glands and fibers and porous tissue . . .

  For several hours, he worked on, oblivious to the time, completing his dissections along the coronal and horizontal planes. He made slides of cellular structures at thirty-six sites, recited copious observations into supplementary cassettes, sectioned and labeled and preserved, for later study, samples of everything from the basal ganglia to the optic tract. When he'd finally finished, and the brain lay, like a disassembled engine, on the table before him, he sat back again, his back aching, his hands shaking from the intense control he'd had to exert. He'd made a thorough and precise dissection; nothing had been overlooked or neglected. There were weeks of work ahead, just examining and analyzing the cultures and slides he'd prepared tonight. He could only congratulate himself on a job well done . . . and yet there was something else that he felt as well.

  Sprague was familiar with the sensation—he'd experienced it many times before. That nagging sense of missing something, of not fully comprehending, of not seeing the forest for the trees. He'd done it all, every step, by the book—but the book left out what he most wanted to know. Where, in all this bloody clutter before him, were the elusive intangibles—grief and happiness, fury and lust? Where, precisely, was personality? Where was Quillerman in all this carnage? The heart, of course, pumped the blood—but this, the brain, housed the secrets, of thought and emotion and, possibly, mortality. How much of Quillerman was now contained in Sprague's slides and vials and tubes? Did it all die in the prison yard at Attica—or was it still, some essence of individual life, distilled in these tissues, latent but undiscovered?

  Did Quillerman, to come to the point, have a soul? If so, Sprague wondered, where had it gone? That question, more than any other, virtually consumed him. If people indeed had something called souls, then what precisely were they? And why couldn't he, Sprague, a man who'd tried the soft humanistic approach, and now the hard facts-and-physiology tack, why couldn't he be the one to find out? There had to be an answer, some way of knowing once and for all what really happened at the moment of death. Transcendence or extinction? Sprague had his suspicions, but suspicions weren't enough. No one had ever won a Nobel Prize for his suspicions. Sprague needed to know for sure . . . so he could then be
the one to tell the whole, waiting world.

  Chapter Six

  BECAUSE BROADWAY CLOSES down on Monday night, Jack called his grandparents’ place in New Jersey that afternoon, and said he'd come out for dinner. His grandmother said she'd make his favorite—roast leg of lamb with mint jelly—and his grandfather said, as usual, not much. “That hell-hole"—meaning New York—"getting to be too much for you?” They lived ten minutes outside of the city, in Weehawken, New Jersey, but treated New York as if it were the capital of some dangerous third-world country. Growing up in their house, and looking across the Hudson at the shimmering Manhattan skyline, Jack had always both feared, and been secretly drawn to, whatever it was that lay on that far shore.

  Their house was nearly identical to dozens of others mat lined both sides of the street—it was two stories high, in need of a fresh coat of white paint, with a front porch just large enough to accommodate in summertime two aluminum lawn chairs; at this time of year, it was barren except for a dented snow shovel and a brown-bristle doormat.

  “That's the same snow shovel I used to use when I was a kid,” said Jack when his grandfather answered the door.

  His grandfather glanced at it, said nothing, stepped back to let Jack pass.

  “Is Mam upstairs?” For some reason long since forgotten, his grandmother had always been called Mam, by both of them; his grandfather was Clancy, to everyone.

  “She's resting,” the old man replied. He was shorter and heavier set than Jack, but had the same deep green eyes; the cardigan sweater he was wearing bore traces of cigarette ash all down its front.

  “Asleep?”

  “Nah, just resting.” The TV was on in the front parlor (Mam had dubbed it that, resolutely refusing to say “living room") and Jack could hear a game-show host exhorting a contestant to take a chance on something. “Go on up,” Clancy said, heading for his recliner. “Tell her the timer went off on the stove.”

  Nothing had changed, Jack reflected, as he once again hung his overcoat on the peg in the hall: the house had the same still and vaguely unwelcoming air to it that he remembered from his boyhood. He had always avoided bringing his friends home from school with him, because he knew that they felt it, too. It was as if Clancy's dour attitude had colored the very walls.

  Just outside the door to his grandmother's bedroom—Clancy slept in his own room, at the end of the upstairs hall—stood an antique grandfather clock, made of burnished oak from County Cork. For over 150 years, the weighted gold rods had swung back and forth beneath the beveled glass front: at the top, a pale yellow moon had endlessly waxed and waned above a painted panel of an old stone church and graveyard. Tonight, the moon was three-quarters full.

  “Jackie?” Her voice was thin and breathy.

  “Me, Mam,” and he went into her room.

  She was sitting up in bed, against a pile of white lace pillows. The table at her elbow was littered with tissues, plastic prescription bottles, a copy of Catholic Golden Age Digest.

  “Clancy told me to tell you the timer went off.” He kissed her on the cheek; her skin was dry and brittle as parchment, and smelled faintly of Johnson's Baby Powder.

  “We'll give it a few more minutes,” she said, patting the bed for him to sit down. “You always liked it a bit crispy.”

  “How're you feeling?”

  She waved the question away with the back of her hand. “Same as always. Tell me about that show you're in. Has it started?” Mam had always been foggy about dates and details.

  Jack told her it had opened the week before, that the reviews had been mixed, that for as long as it lasted he'd be making a good salary. Mam listened, with what passed for rapt attention, her eyes fixed on him, one hand resting on his. But Jack knew most of what he said was just vanishing on the air, that even what she did take in would soon be forgotten. She was happy just to see him, to have him sitting on the bed beside her; all of her attention was concentrated on that, and what he had to say, regardless of its importance, was purely incidental.

  “That's good to hear,” she said, patting his hand (he had just explained that the show's advance sale was comparatively low). “And what about Stephanie? You should have brought her with you. She sent me a very nice card after you were out here the last time.”

  “I've been meaning to tell you,” Jack said, thinking now was as good a time as any, “Stephanie and I aren't seeing each other anymore. We broke up a few weeks ago.”

  Things like breaking up, things having to do with dating, had never made much sense to Mam; she continued to look at Jack expectantly, as if still waiting to hear when he would next be bringing Stephanie to Weehawken.

  “We aren't going out anymore,” Jack repeated. “She met somebody else, and she and I split up. I don't even really talk to her anymore.”

  Not strictly true, he thought; in his mind, he talked to her all the time. There was no end to the things he said to her in his mind. “That relationship's all over.” Relationship—another word Mam had never fully grasped. For that matter, Jack thought ruefully, neither had he.

  But this time Mam had indeed heard him. “Oh,” she said, “I'm sorry. I thought she seemed like such a nice girl. I hate to think of you always living all alone over there in New York. I want to know somebody's taking care of you there.”

  “I can take care of myself,” Jack assured her. “I even learned how to roll my socks last week.” She smiled. “But I'm gonna starve if I don't get some dinner soon. What do you say?”

  He got up from the bed; Mam pulled the coverlet away from her legs. She was wearing one of her housecoats—this one a burnt orange—and a pair of woolen socks. Balancing herself with one hand on Jack's shoulder, she stepped into her backless slippers, and then followed him down the stairs.

  Clancy had the evening news on now. Whenever a commercial came on, he used the remote-control to switch the station.

  “Timer went off half an hour ago,” he grumbled as they passed through the parlor.

  “Oh, it did not,” Mam shot back. “It's been no more man ten minutes.”

  The kitchen table was already set. Clancy lumbered in when he heard the oven door close: he was carrying his favorite beer mug, the glass one that had printed on it “What a beautiful day! Now watch some bastard go and louse it up.” It was one of the novelty gifts he'd been given at his retirement dinner, by the guys on his shift at the plant. Their big gift had been the color TV—which stayed on all through dinner, even though it was in the next room and out of sight.

  Jack remembered these dinners well; there used to be a portable TV on the counter right behind where he sat. Clancy would watch it over his shoulder, while Mam passed the dishes around and asked him about his day at school. Clancy had only wanted to know if he'd made the football team; Jack, who couldn't have been less interested in football, was a constant disappointment to him.

  “Makin’ any money yet?” Clancy asked him now, ladling a smooth coat of mint jelly over his slab of lamb.

  “Some,” Jack replied.

  “Not what you'd have made if you'd come into the union.”

  “I am in the union.”

  “Musicians’ union. That doesn't mean a damn thing.”

  Jack knew better than to argue the point. Mam put another boiled potato on his plate.

  “Jack's in a new show that's doing very well,” she said.

  Shows didn't interest Clancy; in his book, they weren't proper work for a man.

  “Christ, did you hear that?” he said; he was referring to a report on the TV news. Something about Vietnam veterans, victims of Agent Orange, protesting in Washington. “What the hell else do they want? My best buddy got both his legs shot off at Normandy Beach—and he wasn't out protesting for the rest of his life. What do they want? Some kind of guarantee—you go to war and you won't get hurt? What the hell did they think they were doing over there?”

  This, too, was a familiar diatribe. Anything that smacked of the sixties, Vietnam, drugs, and political protest see
med to touch a special nerve in Clancy; Jack figured it was somehow connected to his mother. From a couple of snapshots he'd seen, and from what Mam had said over the years, Jack gathered that his mother had been involved in all that. In one shot, taken on the boardwalk in Asbury Park, she was wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt and flashing two fingers, in the shape of a V, at the camera. Jack remembered asking his grandmother what that gesture had meant.

  “It meant peace,” Mam said, and her fingers had lightly touched the border of the picture.

  “I'd have loved her a lot, wouldn't I, Mam?”

  “Yes, you would have,” she had said, before turning the page in the photo album, “very much.”

  Clancy refused ever to speak of her.

  Dinner ended when Dan Rather signed off. Jack helped Mam clear the table. Later, they joined Clancy in the front parlor to watch a couple of sitcoms. Clancy had calmed down now; he was, for Clancy, sociable, laughing once or twice at the shows, offering Jack possession of the remote control. When he decided to step outside for a cigarette—smoking around Mam had been strictly forbidden by her doctors—Jack said he ought to catch the next bus back, and kissed Mam good night.

  “Find yourself a nice girl,” she said, as he pulled on his overcoat. “You shouldn't always be living alone like that.”