Neuropath

by R. Scott Bakker

  'So they run some tests, and it turns out that Gyges can't recognize any faces, not even his own. Creepy stuff.'

  'Sounds like some kind of prosopagnosia,' Thomas said. Face blindness had been known since antiquity, but it wasn't until the nineties that damage to the fusiform face area in the visual cortex was identified as the culprit. In his classes, Thomas regularly used it as an example of how the brain was a grab-bag of special purpose devices, not the monolithic soul machine that so many undergraduates assumed it to be. 'I'd like to see the file.'

  She flashed him a triumphant grin. 'Welcome to the good guys, professor.' As though unable to repress herself, she reached out to bop her fist against his.

  'Anyway,' Sam continued, 'a couple of weeks ago someone in the Counterintelligence Division—I have no idea who—reads about this in the New York Times, and immediately draws the connection to their missing neurologist, Neil Cassidy. They send someone up from Washington with Cassidy's picture—'

  'Which was useless, of course.'

  Sam smiled and wagged a finger. 'Not at all. Like everyone else, the Bureau's up to its elbows in the Great Wetware Revolution. Haven't you read Time magazine? It's revolutionized forensics.'

  Thomas nodded. 'Lemme guess. You showed Gyges Neil's picture while scanning him with a low-field MRI. The neuronal circuits dealing with facial recognition lit up.'

  'Exactly. Gyges's brain recognized Cassidy just fine, and in a manner consistent with a traumatic encounter. Just the circuitry relaying this information to his consciousness had been damaged. It turns out that Cassidy isn't quite so clever after all.'

  Thomas said nothing. They had no idea whom they were dealing with, he realized.

  It is you, isn't it, Neil?

  'And that,' Sam continued, 'was when the gears started turning. The Chiropractor investigation was gobbling up resources at every jurisdictional level, so the NYPD brass were only too happy to turn over their ongoing investigation to the Bureau—especially now that it carried a National Security stigma. Shelley, who was the NCAVC coordinator for the ongoing NYPD circus, was made Investigator-in-Charge of our meager Task Force. As it stands now, everything is pretty much ad hoc. Our Department of Justice and State's Attorney advisors are little more than interns, and as far as I know, our public affairs officer is a moonlighter from the Chiropractor Task Force. Our organizational flowchart looks like tossed spaghetti.'

  She paused, as though troubled by her own cynicism. 'But we have a suspect, a known subject. Things tend to straighten themselves out when you have a SUB.'

  Thomas listened to the hum-ker-chunk of wheels over pavement, wondering how it could sound so ancient, so this-is-the-way-it's-always-been. The world beyond the tinted windshields seemed autumn sunny and surreal. Oblivious.

  None of this could be happening. Nora and Neil.

  'It's him, professor,' Sam said softly. 'Neil Cassidy is our man.'

  They swept off the entry ramp and merged into traffic. The first I-87 sign that Thomas glimpsed sported a rust-rimmed bullet-hole.

  'I just need to check up on the kids,' Thomas said, fishing through his blazer for his palmtop.

  He let Mia's phone ring five times. He hung up rather than leave a message.

  They're probably out back.

  'No luck?' Sam asked, her eyes fixed on the road.

  'I seem to be batting a thousand.'

  She spared him a mischievous glance. 'Me too.'

  Thomas could think of nothing further to say, so he stared at his thumbs for several pointless moments, studied the bruised nail he'd earned playing squash the week before. Gotta work on those sidewall shots, he thought inanely.

  If Sam found the silence awkward, she didn't show it. She whisked them down the freeway, bobbing in and out of traffic. Thomas found his eyes darting between the digital speedometer and the encapsulated drivers surrounding them. She drove like a veteran commuter, playing slim margins of error in order to slowly advance. She leaned on those slowing her down by riding their ass, and punished those riding her ass by slowing down. She also—intentionally it seemed to Thomas—lingered in others' blindspots.

  'You drive like my ex-wife,' Thomas finally remarked.

  Sam grinned wickedly. 'She was that good, was she?'

  'She was an asshole,' he heard himself snap. 'Could you ease up a bit, you think?'

  Sam shot him a blank look. Without warning, she yanked the Mustang behind a rust-laced U-Haul in the right lane, then braked so hard that Thomas's belt locked. For a moment, she seemed to study the van's giant $79.95 decal reflected across the hood of her car. 'You know, professor,' she finally said, 'I've been holding back because I knew you were upset.'

  Thomas tried not to look at her. 'No need to pull your punches, Agent Logan. I'm a big boy.'

  'There's several things that have me puzzled.'

  Thomas's stomach lurched. 'Such as?'

  Why did you lie?

  'Why did you rush home immediately after speaking with us this morning?'

  'I wanted to call Neil. No, I needed to call him. To confront him. I thought I had his number at home.'

  'Did you?'

  Thomas shrugged. 'I couldn't find it.'

  'Some close friend.'

  'He moved about three months ago,' Thomas explained. 'When he called to give me his new number I wrote it on a scrap of paper. What can I say? I guess I am a bad friend.'

  The part about the move was true. At least, Neil had said as much. Who knew what was true anymore?

  'So why did you rush over to your ex-wife's house immediately after that?'

  'Because when I tried calling her for the number, she hung up.'

  Stupid thing to say, he realized. They no longer needed warrants for phone records. Ever since the drought, when a cadre of homegrown Islamic extremists had criss-crossed the Southwest setting wildfires, the American public had enthusiastically surrendered their constitutional scruples. Thomas had been all for it back then, watching the parade of hellish landscapes night after night, not to mention the satellite photos, where it seemed the very map of America was being burned. The smoke had reached the high atmosphere, turning several days into crimson nights, even as far away as New York. He had been too young to fully appreciate 9/11, but Burning Hills… It had rattled something deep.

  'Hung up, huh?'

  Thomas stared hard at her beautiful profile, understanding that she had become Agent Logan again. People were like polarized glass, transparent and opaque by turns. Cooperators one minute, competitors the next.

  'Nora thought I was making it up. Your visit. The Blue-ray. She accused me of playing another sadistic head game.'

  Sam frowned. 'Why would she think that? Neil's your best friend, isn't he? Why would she think you'd make something like that up?'

  'My question exactly. I was dumbfounded. Which is why I drove to her place.'

  How could it be so easy? How could he just look into her eyes and make shit up? With a kind of numb wonder, he realized that he was actually good at it. The dead look, as though simply reading the script of his memory. The tilt of the head, as though to say, It sounds strange I know, but what can I do? For his entire life Thomas had always pegged himself as someone who would choke in clutch situations.

  Choke for the truth.

  Sam glanced at him apologetically. Just doing my job, her eyes said. Business…

  'When I arrived,' he continued, 'she was more frightened than furious. She thought I was making it up because I'd found out the two of them had… had been… When she told me as much, the shit well and truly hit the fan.'

  He knew he sounded convincing. Even so, his chest tightened, his thoughts buzzed. Sooner or later they would interview Nora. After all, she was banging their perp. I'm fucking myself.

  'Sorry, professor,' Sam said. She looked at him searchingly, as though afraid she had lost something. 'I mean, Tom.'

  He nodded as though to reassure her.

  When had he developed such a facility for lies?
/>
  Everybody's fucking everybody.

  Sam spent the rest of the drive into Manhattan briefing Thomas on the details of the Gyges and Powski abductions. Gyges, a retail magnate, had simply never returned from an early morning jog in Central Park. Witnesses reported seeing him chatting to someone in a silver BMW, nothing more. When Thomas asked how it was a billionaire like Gyges would do anything without some kind of security, she replied, 'He was one of those guys.'

  'What kind of guy is that?'

  'You know, the kind of guy who pisses two paces back from the urinal.'

  Thomas laughed. 'Because he's got a big dick?'

  'No. The exact opposite. Because his dick is small.'

  'I'm not sure I understand.'

  Sam's smile was dazzling in the sunlight. 'Having a small dick is one thing. Not giving a damn about it is something different altogether. Broadcast your weaknesses, and people think you strong.'

  'Or,' Thomas added, 'that you suffer delusions of penile grandeur.'

  Sam cackled. 'That describes most men I know.'

  Cynthia Powski, 'Cream' of Vivid Digital fame, had disappeared in the parking lot of her luxury condominium complex after visiting 'friends'. No witnesses. The lot security cameras had been knocked out by supposed vandals the previous night. They knew she made it to the parking lot—or at least they thought they knew—because her Porsche was parked the way she always parked it, kitty-corner across two spots. They knew she never made it to her condo because of her boyfriend, whom the Escondido authorities had considered their prime suspect until the BD arrived in Quantico.

  Though Thomas listened patiently, and even asked several pointed questions, dozens of worries and recriminations bubbled through his thoughts. After teaching for so many years, he'd found he could listen to, even answer, his students' questions while remaining entirely distracted. He never realized just how functionally distracted he could be until his divorce. How many anti-Nora zingers had he hatched while explaining this or that staple psychological concept to his class?

  Special Agent Samantha Logan talked and he listened, all the while wracking his brains.

  Why lie?

  To protect Neil?

  But why? Not only had the guy flipped his lid, he'd been screwing Nora. Screwing him. Why protect Neil now?

  Back in Princeton, he and Neil had once rented The Exorcist as a lark, expecting to be more amused than anything else. The movie had scared them shitless, even though neither believed in God, demons—or even priests for that matter. After smoking several bowls contemplating the contradiction, they came up with what they called the 'Exorcist Effect', the disconnect between knowing and conditioning. They knew demonic possession was bullshit, but they had been conditioned to be terrified—habitualized.

  So much of therapeutic psychology, Thomas would later discover, involved resisting the Exorcist Effect.

  So much of what it meant to be human.

  My closest friend …

  He protected Neil out of habit. Goddamn habit.

  And yet, even after he realized this, he continued listening to Sam rattle off fact after fact. Amiable. Attentive. Once, when a pinch in traffic forced her to fall silent, he fairly screamed at himself to come clean. Just tell her! he inwardly cried. Just say, 'Samantha, I lied… Your SUB just happened to pop by last night'

  Instead he said, 'Traffic's a bitch.'

  Somehow they had found their way to the West Side Highway. As they paced the Hudson River, Thomas stared at the far shore, watched Jersey sulk beneath a senescent sun. It seemed impossible that mere centuries ago that shore marked the limit of literate civilization. The limit of knowledge. He could see them, the Dutch and then the English, wandering into the emerald deeps, between trees like temple pillars, across a continental Karnak.

  How many had gone mad? How many, like Neil, had repudiated everything they had known, had adopted first the ways and then the horrors of what lay beyond knowledge?

  Neil as Kurtz, he thought wryly. Me as Marlowe…

  How flattering was that?

  Not very, he realized a moment later. Not at all.

  'You were only able to identify Neil,' Thomas found himself saying, 'because he wanted you to.'

  'What do you mean?' Sam asked.

  'What you said before, about Gyges's brain remembering Neil, even though Gyges didn't. I'm no neurosurgeon, but my guess is that it's far easier to wipe out face recognition altogether rather than selectively.'

  'So what are you saying?'

  'That Gyges is part of Neil's argument. He's saying something.'

  'Saying something. Saying what?'

  'You've read Gyges's statement, I take it.'

  'Only about fifty fucking times.'

  For some reason it thrilled him every time she swore. Probably because he'd spent his entire adolescence chasing chicks who swore. Or trying to, anyway.

  As bad as people were at unconscious first impressions, studies showed they were astonishingly accurate when they paused to actually think about the stranger before them. Special Agent Logan, Thomas knew, had been raised in a working-class household. Non-religious. Stable. She had become conscious of her sexuality at a young age—had probably lost her cherry to a neighbor kid in her early teens. Like him, she was part of the so-called 'Webporn' generation, that crop of sex-desensitized kids who found wanton intercourse an irresistible short-cut to status and adulthood—giving rise to the recreational promiscuity that Thomas's Gen-X father had openly envied, and destroying what used to be sound psychological generalizations regarding teen sexual activity.

  She was a post-party-girl woman, Thomas decided, goal-oriented and rule-averse, cynical and hang-up-free, who would use the tools God gave her, tradition-be-damned. That was the role that she had chosen from the rack of identities modern society offered. Even so, there was a reserve to her manner, an earnest anxiousness that belied her brassy talk. A whiff of naive idealism. For whatever reason, being cool and conscientious never seemed a comfortable fit.

  'Does Gyges recall any mention of the Argument?' Thomas asked.

  'No. But then we never asked.'

  'So there's a chance…'

  Her eyes probed her mirrors, and she tapped her blinker. 'There's one way to find out,' she said.

  Gyges, it turned out, lived in The Beresford, on the Upper West Side overlooking Central Park. Thomas found himself craning his neck like a yokel as they walked to the entrance, intrigued by the uneasy marriage of industrial dimensions and Italian renaissance motifs. When Sam flashed her FBI badge, the doorman simply shrugged as though he were a palm-reader confronted by yet another extraordinary inevitability. People were hard to surprise, nowadays.

  'Do you get air miles with that?' Thomas quipped as they marched through the posh lobby.

  Sam smiled, once again rummaging through her purse for charitable change: a UNICEF box had been set on a table between the lifts. 'Just miles,' she replied, punching the elevator pad with pennies in hand.

  The air was scented—the smell of rich wives, shopping to and fro, Thomas imagined. He studied his distorted reflection in the elevator's brass doors, wondered whether the motto set into the ornamental shield, Fronta Nulla Fides, wasn't some kind of joke on the residents. A screen in the elevator featured CNNet clips of all the top stories, from the chaos in Europe, the Iraqi civil war, to the latest Chiropractor details. Apparently another spineless body had been found, this time in Queens. Live. On-the-scene. It was like watching murder through a fish tank, Thomas thought.

  The man who greeted them at the penthouse door was short, barrel-chested, and sported one of those dark, heavy beards that always made Thomas think of hairy backs. His eyes were red-rimmed. He wore his blue jeans pulled up too high on his waist. Thomas knew instantly he was one of those guys who spend far too much time sucking in their gut in front of the mirror.

  'Thank you, Mr Gyges. I know—'

  'Hello, Agent Logan.'

  Thomas raised his eyebrows. He hadn't been sure
what to expect—certainly not decisive recognition.

  'I never forget a voice,' Gyges said, reading his mind. 'Otherwise, I've never seen her before in my life.'

  'But you have,' Sam said.

  Gyges shrugged. 'If you say so… And you? Have I seen you before?'

  'No, Mr Gyges. I'm Thomas Bible.'

  Gyges nodded warily.

  'Dr Bible is a psychology professor over at Columbia, Mr Gyges. He has a few questions he'd like to ask.'

  'Do you now? Forensic or therapeutic?'

  'The two can sometimes be the same. But I'm not a boo-hoo grief counsellor, if that's what you mean.' Thomas paused, licked his lips. 'I'm a friend of Neil Cassidy.'

  Gyges's face went blank. 'Please come in,' he said.

  They followed him through a marbled foyer into a palatial living room designed and decorated in the archipelago style all the rage among the rich and famous: monumental rooms broken into various 'intimacy convergence zones'. But the effect—whatever it was supposed to be—was undone by the trash scattered about the furniture. The man certainly liked his local Subway outlet.

  'You must forgive the Spartan inhospitality,' he said, motioning to a U-shaped sofa. 'I dismissed all of my staff. I found them… unrecognizable.'

  Thomas joined Sam opposite the ailing billionaire. There was something anti-climactic about the moment, as if the billionaire and his environment had fallen short of his expectations. Too many movies, no doubt. The whole world fell short now that CGI was waving the cinematic yardstick. Not even the super-rich could measure up.

  'Drink?' Gyges asked. 'All I have is Scotch, I'm afraid.'

  Sam waved no. Thomas asked for one on the rocks.

  'So,' Gyges asked on his way to the bar, 'what questions could a friend of Mr Cassidy have for me?'

  Thomas breathed deep. Given Sam's description in the car, he had decided to strike a conciliatory note, something that would set the man at ease. 'Many. But I thought you might have questions of your own.'