Gray Matter

by Shirley Kennett

  “She’s just after the milk, slop-face. And don’t start with me about not being alone. Megabite doesn’t count. I could call your dad today, and you could fly out over the weekend.”

  “I don’t want to go stay with Dad.” His face took on a determined look.

  “Why not? It would just be for the summer, maybe just a month or so. I’m sure he would be happy to see you.”

  “I don’t think so. He and Carla like privacy. They don’t like having a kid around.”

  What, they’re doing it on the kitchen table? “You could go out a lot, visit some of your old friends in Denver.”

  “I just don’t want to go. I don’t like being around Dad anymore.”

  Uh oh. “Can you tell me why not?”

  “I guess I’m mad at him. What did he need Carla for, anyway? He had us. We were a family. Besides, he said some really nasty stuff about you. He blamed you a lot, and tried to make me think bad things about you. I know now that wasn’t right.”

  PJ tried to hold back her anger. She and Steven had agreed early on that neither would disparage the other to Thomas. She had held up her end of the bargain, sometimes having to bite her tongue. She was disappointed to learn that Steven had not made the effort. She reached across the table and took both of Thomas’s hands in her own.

  “I’m sorry you got involved in that way,” she said. “He’s still your father. He’s going through a difficult time, like the rest of us. I’m not trying to excuse what he did or said, but I know he still loves you.”

  “Mom, I don’t want to see him now.”

  Searching her son’s face, she knew that he was telling the truth. It saddened her, but she hoped that he would be willing to resume his relationship with his father sometime in the future. It wouldn’t be wise to press it on him now.

  “All right,” she said. “But we need some other alternatives. I wasn’t kidding when I said I don’t like the idea of you here by yourself. Let’s both work on it.”

  “I will, Mom. Actually, I’ve got an idea,” he said, “but I have to check some things out first.”

  The HMD Mike had given PJ wasn’t the sleek commercial type. It didn’t have smooth black plastic and lightning decals down the sides. It looked more like something you would drain pasta in, and it was heavy and uncomfortable to wear. The balance was off, so that it listed to one side. After repeated use, the wearer’s neck muscles began to ache from constantly correcting.

  All morning, PJ had been working on isolated bits of the playback, in order to get the headset meshed with her software. When she first tried it, the virtual world that was placed in front of her eyes by the dual displays on the headset was flat and unconvincing, the motion jerky, the perspectives not right, and the response from the data gloves was practically nonexistent. Her software routines that handled the input from the gloves had only been tested a couple of times before, and that was three years ago with different hardware. But she found that her routines were basically sound, and simply needed tweaking. Small changes led to big improvements. Finally she was ready for a full run-through. She chose Burton’s apartment and immersed herself in the recreation of his murder. She used manual mode, so that she, rather than the computer, was directing the action.

  After a while, PJ took the headset off. Her heart was thumping in her chest, and her lungs ached as though something had sucked all the air from them. She stood up and circled her desk a couple of times, reorienting herself, pulling her familiar office around her like a blanket.

  She hadn’t been able to get very far into the simulation. Even though she knew that she was actually facing a wall of her office, her mind told her she was walking up the steps to Burton’s apartment. Her hands, which she held in front of her body, carried a box of long-stem roses. She could look “down” and see the box. It was too real. When she swung her arm toward Burton’s head, her hand tightly clutching a short length of pipe, and saw him crumple at her feet, she didn’t want to continue.

  She wondered if she should go back to the simpler screen simulations, without the headset and gloves that put her into the scene. What was to be gained by playing the part of the killer? Would it help the investigation, or was it a sick voyeurism, a desire on her part to vicariously murder someone?

  Ridiculous. Get a grip, woman. This is a tool, nothing more, she told herself. She was about to put the headset back on when there was a knock at the door.

  “It’s open,” she said. She couldn’t deny her relief when she put the headset on the desk.

  Schultz came in, dropped into a folding chair which barely survived the experience, and looked curiously at the hardware on her desk. Then his gaze shifted to the gloves she was still wearing, with their webbed network of wires and sensing terminals.

  Letting him wonder about it, she asked what he wanted.

  He cleared his throat. “The medical examiner says there was a blow to Armor’s head, apparently not hard enough to be the cause of death. Left some very odd impressions in the skin, little spike points in a pattern of two rows. She has no idea what the weapon might have been. Didn’t take kindly to my suggestion that Armor was whacked in the head with a golf shoe.”

  “I can understand that.”

  “My next suggestion was a meat tenderizer, one of those kitchen tools you use to pound a tough cut into something edible. Julia swears by them. Or used to, at any rate. Now she just swears.”

  “Have you spoken to her?”

  “Yeah. She’s living with her sister in Chicago. Didn’t even ask about Rick the last time I talked with her. I can’t figure it, Doc. I thought she left because I wouldn’t get Rick off the hook. Now I think that’s just part of it, and a small part at that. It seems she was about ready to give Rick the boot herself. Maybe she was just waiting for some excuse to get out of the marriage.”

  PJ didn’t know how much she should involve herself in Schultz’s private life. He seemed to want to talk about it, so she played her part. “Have there been problems before this?”

  He folded his arms over his ample belly and began to talk.

  “When we were first married, we acted like silly kids. We were in love, very romantic. Holding hands, kissing in public, six phone calls a day, that kind of thing. Hard to picture, isn’t it?” Schultz didn’t wait for an answer. “After Rick was born, we grew up a lot. We still loved each other, but it was a quieter kind of love. I was working long hours, didn’t spend a lot of time with her and the kid. But I made up for it when I could. Lots of fathers are like that, aren’t they?”

  PJ nodded, not wanting to interrupt the flow, but she was thinking about how different her own father was from the kind of person Schultz was describing.

  “Julia and I drifted apart. She had her friends, I had mine. Mine were all cops. I hadn’t realized how far apart we were until that time my partner got killed. I needed all the support I could get, but I couldn’t even talk to her about it. From then on, we’ve just been two people living in the same house. She fixes the meals, I take out the trash.”

  PJ felt a hollowness inside herself. She knew firsthand how it felt when intimacy died. In his case, it had been a gradual process, hardly noticeable over the years, until that moment when his heart twanged and he realized it was all gone. It was like a garden slowly overtaken with weeds until the fine straight rows of flowers and vegetables were no longer visible. No longer harvestable either; they had been choked out. For her, the process had been telescoped into a few days, maybe a few hours within those terrible days.

  “But we got along OK. Not a lot of fights. Like a couple of well-adjusted roommates, we knew what not to say to each other. It wasn’t so bad. At least there was some companionship, somebody sitting across the table at breakfast. Then I had to go and stir things up about Rick.”

  “If it hadn’t been that, it would have been something else,” PJ said. “Once the slide begins, it’s hard to crawl back up.”

  Schultz shook himself in his chair. “How’d we get on this, anyway?
Christ, I sound like a sad drunk.”

  “I think it started with a meat tenderizer,” PJ said.

  “Oh, yeah. Mind telling me what that stuff is on your desk?”

  “That,” she said, pointing, “is a personal dilemma, Detective. Maybe you can help me out.”

  “Shoot.”

  “When I gave you that first demonstration of the crime scene simulation, I mentioned that there were two ways virtual reality could work. You can watch from the outside, or put yourself right in the action. This gadget,” she said, picking up the headset, “puts you in the world. The gloves I’m wearing allow you to manipulate objects in that world.”

  “So what’s the dilemma? Did you rip these off from a video arcade? Officer, I’ve never stolen anything before, I just don’t know what came over me?’ ”

  PJ laughed. It felt good to laugh, so she did it again. “These aren’t in your run-of-the-mill arcade, although they probably will be in a few years. No, the problem is worse than that. I’ve created a monster.”

  “This is getting interesting. Go on.”

  “My simulation turned out to be so real looking, it scared me.”

  “Not for the squeamish, huh?”

  PJ nodded. “Plus there’s a question that just occurred to me this morning. If I can act out what the killer does, doesn’t that make me, on some level, just like the killer?”

  “Shit, no. Re-enactment is part of every detective’s method, or it should be. I act out a crime on paper, in my head, and at the original scene. Sometimes I get an obliging fellow cop to play the victim. Anita and I have already been out to Armor’s place, and we’ll probably go back. I had her sit in the chair the Armor woman was in, but she would have bopped me one if I’d tried to tie her to it.”

  “And it doesn’t give you the creeps?”

  “No. It’s my job.”

  PJ felt that there was more to it than that. It had to do with what she had sensed before about Schultz, that he connected to the killer in some way. As a psychologist, she had heard terrible things from her patients. She had experienced a whole range of vicarious emotions: fear and hatred and lust. But she was detached. She never opened herself to fully experiencing what her patients did. She knew that Schultz was willing to do that, willing to set up that vulnerability in himself, to risk understanding on a visceral basis. Again, that connection.

  “So would you like to try it?” PJ asked.

  “Said the spider to the fly. Why not?”

  CHAPTER 23

  SCHULTZ CLEARED HIS MIND. He wanted to give PJ’s creation his full attention. After three murders, he was willing to look at just about anything.

  At her direction, he pulled on the gloves. They felt like steel mesh, although they didn’t seem to limit the movement of his fingers. He made sure the office door was closed before putting on the headset. He didn’t want anyone else to see him wearing the contraption.

  “I’m going to run a little demo before we get into the crime scene. Have you ever been skiing, Detective?”

  “Do I look like the type to risk my neck going down a hill on a couple of match sticks?”

  “Well, this should be quite an experience, then. It works better if you’re standing up. There you go. The demo’s automatic, so you don’t have to do anything with the gloves. Just watch.”

  Abruptly an image formed in front of Schultz’s eyes. It was all-encompassing; the headset blocked input from outside, both visual and auditory, and replaced it with a computer-generated world. The first thing that registered was whiteness; then it resolved itself into a snowy scene, a pine forest. Straight ahead was a narrow path through the trees. For a few seconds everything was frozen in place, like a 3D still picture. Given that time to study the scene, he could tell that it wasn’t real: a tree had jagged edges, a mound of snow was too circular, the colors were a little too true, not the blended shades of the natural world. Everything had a diamond-like sharpness, a clarity that didn’t exist in reality or in the human mind.

  In front of him on the path was a rear view of a person in ski clothing. There was a moment of disorientation as the scene was set in motion. The skier in front moved arms and legs rhythmically. Trees approached, grew even with Schultz, and passed by, falling beyond the range of his peripheral vision. He became aware of a swishing sound, the sound of skis moving over snow in a quiet forest. He turned his head to the left to see what happened to the trees as they passed behind him. The scene changed smoothly with his head motion, and he could see trees behind him.

  Then he looked down, and got a terrific shock. He saw the front of his body, clothed in a winter outfit, arms pumping, feet encased in ski boots, gliding along in a double track in the snow laid down by the skier ahead. His body sense, his muscles, told him that he was not moving.

  His eyes and ears told him otherwise.

  Looking ahead, he saw the skier in front of him vanish over a rise. Soon he reached the same rise, topped it, and found himself looking down a long hill. In the distance, the other skier was moving fast, crouched, poles tucked under his arms, easily swooping around widely spaced trees. Now Schultz felt his muscles tense, his legs brace themselves. He didn’t want to go down that hill. But he moved relentlessly forward, picking up speed. When the first tree approached, he flung his arms out to prevent the crash that seemed certain. Instead, he swung smoothly around the tree, and headed for another. By the time he got to the bottom of the slope his heart was racing. He was barely aware of the headset being lifted off.

  “What did you think?”

  The glare of the snow was gone. He was standing in PJ’s office, just outside the bright cone of light from her desk lamp. “That was amazing,” he said.

  “Draws you in, doesn’t it? That was a promotional program from a company that’s developing exercise equipment linked with VR scenery. You get on your cross-country ski machine in your basement, pop on the headset, and poof, you’re on a scenic trail. This one is considerably slicker than my simulations. They’ve got some big money interested. Mine aren’t quite as convincing, but unfortunately my imagination filled in what was lacking.”

  “Amazing,” Schultz said.

  “I noticed you turning your head. They have good peripheral flow, better than mine, and an excellent sense of virtual presence. You really feel like you’re in that pine forest, don’t you? I understand they’re looking into adding a pine smell and a fan to blow air over your face like the wind. The production version will respond to your motion on the exercise equipment. If you move your legs faster, you speed up on the trail.”

  “I was more concerned about stopping than speeding up.”

  “You did look a little…anxious. Trust me, you never left the office. Are you ready to try being a killer?”

  “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

  “Let me explain how to use the gloves first. If you look down, you’ll see a simulation of your own hands, minus the gloves. If you want to pick something up, just do what comes naturally. If you want to move around, first look in the direction you want to go, then tap your left palm with the fingers of your right hand, like this.” She demonstrated a clapping motion. “You’ll move forward into the scene one step for each tap. Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as moving backward yet. You have to turn completely around, facing where you came from, and move forward. There’s another method in the works, a kind of treadmill on which you stand and actually move your feet in the direction you want to move in the virtual world. But that’s really cutting-edge, and I consider myself lucky to get these gloves.”

  Schultz nodded, and she helped him put the headset back on. The dual miniature monitors showed only a pleasant blue null screen. He heard some clicks as PJ started up the crime scene simulation, and then the image formed.

  He was at the bottom of the stairs that led to Burton’s apartment from the rear alley. Looking down, he saw the front of his body—a Genman body that didn’t have his bulk—and his arms and hands. Floating in front of his hands was the
box of roses. He reached out and picked it up with both hands. For a moment he thought how ludicrous he must look to PJ, pawing thin air. Then he let himself become immersed. Looking up at the stairs, he wondered how he was supposed to tap his right fingers to his left palm if he was holding the box of roses. PJ’s directions hadn’t been clear. So he just did it—tapped one time while looking up the staircase. The scene changed slightly; he had climbed the first step. Looking down, he saw his hands still grasping the box. He climbed the rest of the stairs and rang the doorbell.

  It didn’t take him long to get the hang of moving around in the world the computer spread out in front of him. He was aware that PJ’s simulation was not as good as the commercial one with the skiers, but it was certainly convincing. He acted out the rest of the scene as he had done several times in his mind. It was eerie and deeply disturbing to see everything from the killer’s viewpoint, but he did not have the same qualms about it that PJ seemed to have. Schultz was accustomed to putting himself in a criminal’s place, trying to fathom the actions of those on the edge of humanity. He was fascinated in spite of his distrust of computers.

  At one point during the simulation he went over to the ornate mirror that was right inside Burton’s door. It topped a small table, the kind that would be used for keys or the mail. When he stood in front of the mirror, he saw a startling reflection: Genman’s face, smeared with blood, features stilled into a primitive mask. He wondered if the killer had glimpsed himself like this, as a heart-stopping vision of savagery, the bounds of civilized behavior loosened and then cast off.

  When he finally removed the headset, he discovered that he wasn’t in the same position in the room. He had moved several feet, to the limit of the cables connecting him to PJ’s desktop computer, and was facing a different direction. At some point during the simulation, he must have actually been moving rather than just looking and tapping. When he turned around, he saw that PJ had fallen asleep at her desk, head down on her folded arms. Glancing at the Mickey Mouse clock on her desk, he was startled to see than an hour had elapsed. He put the headset and gloves on her desk. As he was tiptoeing out, she woke up.