Neuropath

by R. Scott Bakker

Thomas studied the shot-glass before him, the ring of hard light across the rim. 'It's not so simple.'

  'But it is, Goodbook. Desires arise from the deepest of the brain's mechanisms. It's like plastic surgery. There's what? Five high-production channels entirely devoted to plastic surgery on the web now? Evolution has hardwired us to assess the fitness of prospective mates in terms of visual appearances. Once our tools and techniques allow us to manipulate skin and bone, desire does the rest. The old taboos are gradually rinsed away, and before you know it, the cosmetic surgery industry is producing a quarter of the country's bio-waste, and makeovers require bone-saws instead of dainty little pencils and brushes. Where once we used to paint ourselves to conform to desire, now we recarve ourselves. Same with designer babies. Or gene-doping in sports. You name it. Neuromanipulation. Neurocosmetic surgery. Are you telling me you don't think it's inevitable?'

  Thomas glared at him, breathing evenly. 'No. I'm telling you I don't think it's right.'

  Neil shrugged. 'If you mean that most people would disapprove, then you're correct.' He had looked away while saying this. Now his eyes flashed dark and menacing. 'But why should I give a fuck?'

  Thomas belted down another shot, not because he wanted it, but because it seemed safer than replying. It was funny how easily a lifetime of learning could be forgotten, how all the layers of sophistication could be stripped away, leaving a wounded boy, a hurt and mystified friend.

  'Have you an arm like God?' Neil suddenly asked, obviously quoting something. He laughed.

  'I don't understand.'

  'It's his program,' Neil had said. 'So why not just enjoy the ride?'

  Booze was never a good thing when having conversations like this. The content came through loud and clear; it was the emotional significance that was filtered. Booze had a way of making sharp things fuzzy and fuzzy things sharp.

  'Why tell me this now?' Thomas asked.

  'Because,' Neil said, reapplying his mischievous smile, 'I've quit.'

  'But…' Thomas paused. Suddenly it dawned on him that Neil was doing far more than breaking a nondisclosure agreement, or even committing a felony for that matter. This stuff had to be classified—which meant his friend was committing treason. They were treading water in the deep end of the pool.

  Death-penalty deep.

  'Just like that?' Thomas asked.

  'Just like that.'

  'I didn't think they let you guys quit.'

  'No. They don't.'

  'But they're making an exception for you.'

  Another smile, a second coat of mischievousness. He ran a finger along a dark braid in the couch's upholstery. 'They have no choice.'

  'No choice,' Thomas repeated, looking with dread at the brimming shot of whiskey before him. 'Why?'

  'Because I've covered my bases,' Neil replied. 'I've been planning this for a long time.'

  Despite the booze, Thomas suddenly felt very alert. Something told him he needed to be careful.

  'So you do think it's wrong… what you did, I mean.'

  Neil leaned forward, elbows on knees like a basketball coach.

  'The world is on the brink, Goodbook. I'm simply the first to cross over.'

  Thomas knew what he was talking about, but for some reason found himself pretending otherwise. 'Brink. What brink?'

  Neil wasn't buying. 'Is it the kids?'

  'What are you talking about?'

  'Are they the reason?'

  'The reason for what?'

  'The reason you moved back into Disney World?'

  The confusion, the double-take disorientation, evaporated, and Thomas suddenly felt focused the way only whiskey and outrage could make possible. 'You're drunk, Neil. Leave them out of this.'

  Disney World was their pet term for the world as understood by the masses, one papered over with conceit after comforting conceit. A world anchored in psychological need rather than physical fact. A world with a billion heroes and happy endings, where the unknown was irrelevant and confronting your own weaknesses was the breakfast of losers.

  'You know, I find it hard to remember what it's like living with one foot in both worlds. To know, on the one hand, that paternal love is simply nature's way of duping us into perpetuating our genes—'

  'It's not duping… Look, Neil, you're really starting to piss me—'

  'Not duping? Hmm. Then you tell me, why do you love your son?'

  'Because he's my son.'

  'And that's an explanation?'

  Thomas had glared at his friend. 'The only one I need.'

  'Evolution wouldn't have it any other way,' Neil had said. 'It takes a lot of commitment to raise a child to reproductive age.'

  Thomas tossed back his shot, clenched his teeth in revulsion and dismay. What the fuck was going on?

  'Because you love your kids,' Neil continued, 'you expend tremendous resources on them, you train them, feed them, protect them, you would even die for them. You do all the things that your genes happen to require, and for reasons that have nothing to do with the harsh realities of natural selection.' Neil frowned, leaned back into the cushions. He hooked his toes on the coffee table. 'And that's not duping?'

  'They're just different descriptions of the same thing,' Thomas said. 'Different angles.'

  Neil paused to slam back his whiskey. 'C'mon,' he continued, gasping. 'This is your argument I'm making, Goodbook. Didn't you spend an entire chapter listing all the ways we bullshit ourselves to feel better? And how about your cognitive psych classes? Didn't you tell me that you spend the first two weeks discussing the relationship between gut feeling and socialization? How all those movies urging people to "follow their hearts" were simply another way for culture to reinforce the status qu—?'

  'Enough!' Thomas cried. 'What are you saying, Neil? Are you actually trying to talk me out of loving my children,'

  Again the one-shoulder shrug. 'Just saying,' he had said, his manner both offhand and nightmarish. Marilyn swam ethereally across his broad chest.

  'Just reminding you what you already know.'

  Speechless, Thomas did what most men did when at a loss for words: he turned on the TV. The lights automatically dimmed. The quiet seemed to sizzle beneath the television blare.

  He could feel Neil sitting on the couch to his left, watching him. That annoying Coca-Cola pop-up—the 'gurgle-gurgle' one his kids loved—flashed onto the screen. Surgical white flickered across the room. He clicked through the news sites, letting the fragments of info-chatter seal the hard moment that had passed between them. An update on the French eco-riots. A retrospect on the causes of the Chinese economic crisis. A tasteless story about Ray Kurzweil's recent death. Accusations that Wal-Mart had installed hidden low-field MRIs to monitor their employees.

  Neil reached out to pour them two more shots of whiskey. 'I guess you have no choice,' he said.

  Thomas gingerly raised the shot-glass, downed it. He was drinking mechanically now, a talent he had picked up in the final days of his marriage. 'What do you mean?' he asked, pretending to watch the screen. The high-definition images seemed to drain away all his anger, make his world as small and trivial as it actually was.

  'To rationalize. To set up shop in Disney World.'

  Thomas shook his head. 'Look. Neil. All this stuff was great in college. I mean we were soooo radical, even in Skeat's class, mopping the floor with lit majors, freaking people out around the bong…' A pained grimace. 'But now? C'mon. Give it a rest.'

  Neil was watching him carefully. 'That doesn't make it any less real, Goodbook.' He gestured to the TV, where lines of Muscovites stretching out into a haze of grey snow shared the screen with talking heads and warm studio lighting. 'Just look. It's ending, just as Skeat said it would. No virulent pandemic, no mass environmental collapse, no thermonuclear Armageddon, just mobs and mobs of people, hominids pretending to be angels, clutching at rules that don't exist, feeding, fighting, fucking…'

  Thomas snorted. 'Neil…'

  'So where are your knoc
kdown arguments? Outside the threat of coercion, why should anybody play along? Why should we help granny across the street? Because it feels right? Please. Anyone can train a cat to shit in a box. Because of what philosophers say? Double please. We can blah, blah, blah forever, come up with an endless stream of flattering bullshit, redefine this and redefine that, and in the end all we've done is confirm you cognitive psychologists and your Christmas catalogue of ways we bullshit to make ourselves feel better.'

  Thomas laughed. Emotionally, it always felt like standing on marbles when he was drunk. Annoyed one minute, amused another. In balance, and out.

  'So,' Neil pressed, 'where are your knockdown arguments?'

  'I have two,' Thomas said, raising the same number of thick-feeling fingers. 'Frankie and Ripley.'

  Neil shook his head and smiled. Now it was his turn to feign interest in the images tumbling across the TV. He cradled his beer between steepled fingers. For the first time, Thomas saw past his own irritation and disbelief, and realized just how much stress his best friend must be suffering.

  The NSA… unbelievable.

  On the screen, images of armed men shooting into the sky floated beneath a GE corporate banner: Islamic fighters in some breakaway Chinese province.

  'Theo-terrorists,' Neil said.

  'I think,' Thomas replied, 'the technical term would be "insurgents."'

  'Whatever. You know how we dealt with them in the Neuromanipulation Division?'

  Marilyn tittered at the edge of the pool on his T-shirt.

  'How?'

  'Love,' Neil said. 'We made them love us.'

  Thomas had stared blankly at the screen.

  'As easy as flicking a switch.'

  This had been the pattern, since their first days rooming together at Princeton. Neil with his questions. Neil with his demands. Neil with his mocking replies, his outrageous claims. All of it hedged with just-fucking-with-you glances and a what's-your-problem tone. Just as no two people are exactly equal in terms of capacities, no friendships are perfectly mutual. Neil had always been quicker, better looking, more articulate—inequities that had always expressed themselves through the complicated weave of their relationship.

  And Thomas had always been more forgiving.

  'But hey,' Neil drawled after a moment, 'I came here to celebrate, not to break your balls.'

  Thomas shot him a humorless look. Black-and-white Marilyn seemed to be drowning across his chest, but it was just a trick of the angle. 'I was beginning to think the two were indistinguishable.'

  'I'm sorry, man. Just a mood, you know. Here.' He splashed two more shots of whiskey, then raised his in a toast. After a reluctant heartbeat, Thomas raised his in turn. He could feel himself sway ever so slightly.

  'I've escaped,' Neil said. There was something embarrassingly direct about his blue-eyed gaze. 'I've completely escaped.'

  Thomas had been too afraid to ask which…

  The NSA or Disney World?

  CHAPTER THREE

  August 17th, 11.15 a.m.

  Plagued by a curious breathlessness, Thomas crowded off the MTA North with a dozen or so others, most of them chatty octogenarians. He'd lost count of how many times he'd shaken his head and pinched his eyes, but images of Cynthia Powski, her desire turned inside out, returned with every blink. Again and again, like an adolescent dream. He didn't begin shaking until he started crossing the hot-plate asphalt of the parking lot.

  Sunlight glared across a thousand windshields.

  Everything had pockets, hidden depths that could be plumbed but never quite emptied. A look, a friend, a skyscraper—it really didn't matter. Everything was more complicated than it seemed. Only ignorance and stupidity convinced people otherwise.

  There was something unreal about his house as it floated nearer around the curve. In the final days of their marriage, it had been a curious image of dread, a white-sided container filled with shouts and recriminations, and the long silences that cramp your gut. It had occurred to him that the real tragedy of marital breakdown was not so much the loss of love as the loss of place. 'Who are you?' he used to cry at Nora. It was one of the few refrains he meant genuinely, at least once the need to score points had climbed into the driver's seat. 'No. Really. Who are you?'

  It began as an entreaty, quickly became an accusation, then inevitably morphed into its most catastrophic implication: 'What are you doing here?'

  Here. My home.

  To drift across that final, fatal line was to be locked in a house with a stranger. Or even worse, to become that stranger.

  He could remember driving back the evening after she had moved out, rallying himself with thoughts of how peaceful it would be, how nice to finally have his home back. Kick back and crank the stereo. But when he opened the door, the bachelor bravado had dropped through the soles of his feet—of course. For a time he simply sat on the living room floor, as vacant as the rooms about him, listening to the eternal hum of the fridge. He remembered shouting at the kids to pipe down, even though they were gone. He had cried after that, long and hard.

  Home. Life to the pale of property lines.

  He had struggled hard to build something new, another place. It was partly why stupid things like plants or appliances could strike him with teary-eyed pride. He had worked so hard.

  And now this.

  He slammed the car into park, fairly ran across the lawn.

  'Neil!' he shouted as he burst through the doorway. He hadn't really expected anyone to answer: Neil's minivan was gone.

  Bartender growled and yawned, then trundled over to him, tail flapping. An old dog's greeting.

  'Uncle Cass is gone, Bart,' Thomas said softly. He peered across the living room gloom, at the showroom tidiness. The smell of spilled whiskey bruised the air.

  'Uncle Cass has fled the scene.'

  He stood motionless next to the sofa, the static in his head roaring loud, thoughts and images in parallel cascades, as though boundaries between times and channels had broken down. Cynthia Powski, as slick as seals, moaning. The Ocean Voice mentioning an argument. Neil saying, As easy as flicking the switch…

  The Ocean Voice mentioning an argument…

  It can't be. No way.

  He thought of Neil working for the NSA, rewiring living breathing people, cheerfully lying for all these years. He thought of their Princeton days, of the fateful class they took with Professor Skeat. He thought of how they used to argue the end of the world at parties, not the end that was coming, but the end that had already passed.

  He thought of the Argument.

  Ocean Voice. Neil. The FBI. Cynthia Powski.

  No fucking way.

  Thomas nearly cried out when the door bell rang.

  He peered through the curtains, saw Mia standing impatiently on the porch. Thomas opened the door, doing his best to look normal.

  'Hi, Mia.'

  Over his neighbor's shoulder, he glimpsed a white Ford—a new Mustang hybrid—driving slowly down the street.

  'Everything OK?' Mia asked. 'The kids saw your car in the driveway. I thought I should—'

  'No. Just forgot a couple of important things for a committee presentation this afternoon.' He leaned out the door, saw Frankie and Ripley standing on Mia's porch.

  'Daddeee!' Frankie called.

  Strange, the power of that word. Pretty much every kid used it, the same name on millions of innocent lips, over and over, and yet it seemed to thrive on this universality. You could feel sorry for all the Wangs and Smiths—who wanted to be one among millions?—but somehow 'Daddy' was different. Thomas had visited colleagues whose kids called them by name: 'Hey, Janice, can I have supper at Johnny's? Please-please?' There was something wrong about it, something that triggered an exchange of slack looks—a premonition of some budding rot.

  Dad. A single name on a billion lips, and nothing could undo it. No court order. No lifestyle choice. No divorce.

  Thomas blinked at the heat in his eyes, called back laughing to his son, a
sked him if he was being good for Mia. Frankie bounced up and down, as though he waved from a distant mountaintop.

  Maybe there were heroes after all.

  As much as he longed to spend a moment with his boy, he apologized to Mia and climbed back into his car. Among the wild peculiarities of the previous night's drinking session was something Neil had said about Nora, a throw-away comment really, about talking to her or something. But of course that was impossible, given that Nora was in San Francisco, which was why Thomas had the kids on this, the busiest of all summer weeks.

  What was it he had said? Something. Something… Enough to warrant sharing a word or two.

  He called out her name to his palmtop as he accelerated down the street, but all he got was her inbox recording. He told himself she might know something. At least that was what he allowed himself to think. The real concern, the worry that clamped his foot to the accelerator was altogether different.

  Maybe she was in danger.

  Think clear, he reminded himself. Think straight.

  The Argument.

  Ocean Voice had said he was making an argument, as well as 'making' love. But what argument? Was it the Argument?

  Was it Neil holding the camera? Was he the shadow behind the occluded frame?

  The Argument, as they would come to call it, was something from their undergraduate days at Princeton. Both he and Neil had been scholarship students, which meant they had no money for anything. Where their more affluent friends bar-hopped or jetted home for the holidays, they would buy a few bottles of Old English Malt Liquor, or 'Chateau Ghetto' as Neil used to call it, and get fucked up in their room.

  Everyone debated things in college. It was a reflex of sorts, an attempt to recover the certainty of childhood indoctrination for some, a kind of experimental drug for others. Neil and Thomas had definitely belonged to the latter group. Questions—that was how humans made ignorance visible, and the two of them would spend hours asking question after question. Grounds became flimsy stage props. Assumptions became religious chicanery.

  For a time it seemed that nothing survived. Nothing save the Argument.