But she needed him.
'Call me in the morning, agent.'
And she looked so very right.
It took some rummaging, but he eventually found an old air mattress in the basement. He sat on the couch, his eyes fixed on the TV screen as he blew the thing up. Various news-models muttered in low volume. Apparently a bloody vertebrae had been found in a Long Island mail box, someplace far from the camera grid.
After finishing with the air mattress, he went upstairs and peeled some sheets and his comforter from the bed. Arms heaped, the air mattress bobbing back and forth, he went to the kids' room. Frankie and Ripley were fast asleep. Standing at the door, he paused to savor the magic of children bundled beneath blankets—warm, clean, and safe. Then he laid the air mattress on the floor between them, made his impromptu bed. He angled himself close to the rose-colored night-light, as if he planned to read. He stared at a broken crayon and the shadow it cast across the carpet. He tried to guess its color.
The little bubble in his gut suddenly yawned, became vast with fear and remorse and self-pity. Alone on the floor, he hugged his shoulders, clenched his teeth. He felt like a macaque monkey cringing desolate in the corner of some greater cage, watching the rest of the troop with wide, uncomprehending eyes.
Neil and Nora…
But his kids. He had his kids. They were the totem, the charm. Something his and not his—something all their own—which was what made having them so meaningful. Something to die for in a life, a world, where sacrifices had evaporated into commercial chatter.
Above, Frankie kicked and rolled in his sleep. Bart's tail thumped the mattress four times. Thomas smiled, thinking of their exultant faces when they found him in the morning. Here. Between them.
Daddeeeeee!
So long as he had them, he would never be alone.
Two strangers in a driveway, only one pretending to he human.
'My mother,' you say.
'What about her?'
'She's always telling me not to do things like this.'
People like you don't believe in people like me. Not on this side of the glass.
'I'll stay here, then. Really, it's no problem.'
'And what, bleed all over the sidewalk? Come come, don't be silly.'
I smile, neglect to tell you the blood isn't mine.
Instead I say, 'I feel so stupid.'
When you turn to lead the way, my eyes make maps of what comes next. You even hold open the door, such an eager, illustrated cow.
'You should know,' I say in a carefree-friendly way, 'I only fuck the meat.'
And now look at you.
I mean, I hate you, and at the same time, I really don't care. I think of Dahmer opening his fridge, arranging the baking soda just so. It's no longer a mystery to me, how he felt, what he thought, cataloguing his milk-cold trophies. I know he saw the horror the same as I do. He saw you, the same as me, and some part of him recoiled, rolled knees to chest in remorse. Part of him cried, What-have-I-done-what-have-I-done…
But you see, he just
didn't
care.
You were everything. Squirming, screaming, the human cut from the animal, the animal battered into the doll. You were everything that mattered. The spit of taste, the tingle of touch, the spark of sight, curved hot against his belly. The one true thing.
And he didn't care.
CHAPTER SEVEN
August 18th, 8.39 a.m.
'So it must be strange knowing people the way you do.'
These were Sam's first words as they pulled away from Thomas's driveway the following morning. She had arrived in the midst of the morning pandemonium. Frankie was in one of his more murderous, brattish moods, where his endless declarations of 'No!' took on Shakespearean dimensions. You might almost think he was shouting at God Almighty. Thomas fairly dragged him crying over to Mia's while Sam watched from the driveway, leaning against her Mustang. 'Just a sec,' Thomas called, glancing at her in exasperated apology. Ripley, of course, was at her angelic best. She was no Frankie, and she made sure Sam knew as much by beaming a sunny 'Why, hello!' while her brother wailed. Mia leaned out his screen door, entirely unimpressed with Frankie's tantrum. He made no secret of his interest in Sam as the kids hustled past him.
'Frankie's having a bad morning,' Thomas said, though Mia had yet to look at him. 'I mean bad bad. I feel like I should mow your lawn or something.'
'I feel like I should mow your lawn,' Mia said, scrutinizing Sam the way a horny truck-driver might. He smiled and waved.
'Um, it's on the wrong side of the fence, don't you think?'
Mia laughed. 'I still get drunk from time to time—shoo, shoo. Go be investigated.'
Thomas shook his head, smiling. 'She is a babe, isn't she?'
Frankie was yelling at Ripley from somewhere in the house.
'Oh no, not her. She's a fox.'
'So it's good I'm a chicken, you think?'
Mia had ignored him, calling out to Sam instead. 'Traffic-wise you might want to drive out to the 87!' Thomas had turned in time to see her smile and nod in dubious thanks.
Now, sitting in the passenger seat, he pondered her question, trying to look past her glamor. Sunlight streamed across her, shorn of its glare by the windshield. Bunched about her waist and hips, her charcoal skirt and suit jacket looked hot to the touch. She seemed fresh and new—even the fabric-in-sun smell of her tickled him with a sense of novelty.
'I'm not so sure that I do "know people",' he said, glancing out his window at a passing brick bungalow. A mother in gardening clothes whisked by. She was scolding a crying girl, who held a broken-necked flower. 'Not anymore.'
And just like that, he was depressed.
There was regret in Sam's smile. All verbal roads led to Neil; she had to know as much.
'Well,' she said lamely, 'there's knowing and then there's knowing.'
A nice thing about being a cognitive psychologist was that you could skip the questions that people typically asked in difficult situations—especially all the versions of 'How could I be so stupid?' Thomas knew exactly how: he was human, and humans were particularly horrible when it came to esteem-related beliefs. The tendency to believe flattering claims—that one pretty much knew everything they needed to know, that one was generally more intelligent than others, more moral, more skilled, and so on—was universal.
Thomas had never suspected Neil because he'd always thought he had one up on him. Everyone thought they had one up on everyone else, and they tended to get freaked when things seemed otherwise. As much as he loved Neil, Thomas had always felt sorry for him—sorry! Neil had seemed hapless with his misplaced self-confidence, his narrow focus on career, his inability to grow up. Like everyone else, Thomas had made himself into a walking, talking yardstick of what was right and true, and Neil, poor Neil, just didn't measure up.
What a fucking joke.
Peekskill slipped past the windows, a tubular panorama of tar and concrete, franchise signs like flyswatters against the sky. A wild urge to scream kicked through Thomas. This was crazy, throwing himself into the maelstrom like this. He couldn't blink without seeing Cynthia Powski—or even worse, Peter Halasz and Bobbie Sawyer. What did you do when the world became unhinged? What did any sensible person do? You retreated, you hunkered down where you were safe—home— with those few souls you knew you could depend on, and who depended on you.
What was he doing here, anyway? Chasing a skirt? Was it as crass as that?
As stupid?
'Helloooo?' Sam was saying. 'Umm, professor?'
Thomas cleared his throat, ran a hand across his face. He studied her profile for what seemed a long, frozen heartbeat. Her wide blue eyes regarded the road, flat with concern. In the sunlight, wisps of hair glowed like fiberoptic filaments over her slightly upturned nose.
Thomas breathed. She smelled like cherries.
'Sorry, agent.'
I should've stayed with the kids.
'I'm afraid I need to pick your brain a bit
more,' Sam said, staring at the sunny terrain before them. The satellite radio was turned low. A talk-show voice fluttered over the ambient sounds of the road: someone talking about the Chinese economic meltdown.
'… self-regulating systems require transparency and flexibility.'
'You mean democracy.'
'Well… maybe before the information technolog—'
Thomas idly watched an Exxon-Mobil station slide past, as bright and shiny as a child's toy beneath a dark crowd of conifers. Rather than replying, he found himself thinking about fossil fuels, dinosaurs, then archeologists tramping through the Gobi dust.
'Feel like some Fritos?' Sam asked in the wake of his silence. She fished a small, crackling bag from her oversized purse, dangled it like he was a sulky ten-year-old.
Good old Fritos.
'No thanks,' Thomas said.
'Are you shooooor,'
Thomas shook his head and chuckled. 'What would you like to know, agent?'
She set the bag down and shrugged. 'Neil, Neil, and more Neil, I'm afraid. What you shrinks call an obsession, we Feds call "paying the rent".' She paused, as though realizing that her bantering tone was simply making things worse. 'I need to know the world he lives in,' she continued more seriously. 'I need to crawl into his headspace.'
'No easy feat,' Thomas said. After a moment's hesitation he added, 'You understand the Argument well enough, don't you?'
'I think so,' Sam said pensively. 'I just don't understand how anyone could… could…'
'Believe in it.'
Sam nodded. 'According to what you said yesterday, Neil sees himself as some kind of missionary bent on spreading the Bad News. That's why I was so excited. I mean, as important as motives are to you psychologists, they're pretty much the end-all-be-all for us investigators. Without a motive, nothing makes sense.'
'And so?'
'Well I was thinking last night… Neil can't be a missionary, can he? Wouldn't that mean he actually had a point? And isn't that what your Argument is all about, the fact that everything is pointless?'
Thomas watched her for a bemused moment, debating the futility of what he was about to say. People were hardwired not only to be biased and closed-minded, but to think they were the most unbiased and open-minded person they knew. Humans were literally designed to be easily and irrevocably programmed. Knowing this made precious little difference. No matter how much research you showed them, they continued to fault the other guy, the other claim, the other book, what have you, with the regularity you might expect from a machine.
He wanted to think Sam was different—almost as much as he wanted to think he was different.
'Like I said, crawling into Neil's head won't be easy.'
'It never is.'
Thomas paused, searching for the right words. The muttering voice on the radio said, '… and that sparked the foreign reserve crisis.'
'Remember what I told you in the bar,' he started, his tone thoughtful, 'about the brain and evolution?'
'How we should expect consciousness to be a deceptive mess? Because of its youth or something, right?'
'Exactly. Evolution's a messy, opportunistic process, one that requires eons to work out the kinks. As a relatively recent adaptation, you would expect conscious experience, or whatever it is you and I are sharing this very moment, to be a relatively crude, low-resolution affair. And like it or not, this is exactly what cognitive science is discovering.'
Thomas paused, mentally rummaging through the bag of tricks he used to make this point to his students. 'Just for instance, tell me how much of your visual field is in color.'
Sam frowned and shrugged. 'All of it. Why?'
Thomas fished one of his pens out of his blazer pocket. 'Don't look,' he said, 'just keep staring at the road and try to tell me what color my pen is.' He held it up in her periphery: a Bic made in India.
Sam smiled, staring with corner-of-her-eye concentration. 'It is tough,' she said, 'but I'm pretty sure it's blue… Yep. It's blue. It's gotta be.'
Thomas handed it to her. It was bright red.
'We actually live in a primarily black and white world, with a narrow ring of color immediately before us. Our brain fills in the rest.' He spent several minutes explaining how the discovery of things like inattentional blindness, change blindness, masking, perceptual asynchrony, processing lags, and so on had overturned millennia of speculation in just two decades. 'You could make a career out of cataloguing all the ways in which consciousness is either blinkered or outright deceptive,' he said. 'The gap between the environmental information we think we take in, and the actual information we have access to is nothing short of staggering. It's so bad that most cognitive scientists refer to the experience you're having now—your sensorium as they like to call it—as the "Grand Illusion".'
Just then an eighteen-wheeler pulled onto the road a short distance ahead, forcing Sam to break to a crawl. Dust rolled over the car. 'If it's as bad as all that,' she asked, obviously irritated, 'then why doesn't it seem that way?'
'But how could it seem otherwise? It's the only frame of reference you have.'
He could tell from her gaze that she wasn't so much watching the eighteen-wheeler's towering rump as she was watching herself watching it. He could remember his own reaction to these facts in his freshman psychology class. He'd always been a reflective kid, but for the first time he found himself staring at his experience rather than the things within it. He could remember probing his visual field in particular, trying to understand how it could simply 'run out' without having any visible edge. Everything suddenly seemed at once fictional and impossible, like paint splashed across something monstrous. And quick, terrifyingly quick. Psychologists called such episodes 'derealization'. The irony was that they used the term to describe a kind of disorder, when it was about as accurate as any conscious experience could get.
It had certainly freaked him out—so much so he had sworn off dope for three months.
'Consciousness is an end-user,' Thomas continued, 'and a poor one at that. Out of all the information our brains crunch every second, only a tiny sliver makes it to conscious experience—less than a millionth, by some estimates.'
Sam, her eyes still blank, shook her head. 'But it doesn't feel that way. I mean, here I am, in the real world, seeing everything I need to see, driving to meet Mackenzie, listening to your madness…'
'Have you ever heard of something called "Hindsight"?'
She shot him a quick Yes-I'm-an-idiot grin. 'I saw it in a kung fu movie, I think. Blind people who can see, somehow, right?'
'It's a real phenomena, suffered by people with damage to their primary visual cortex. Some can navigate rooms despite the complete absence of visual experience, or duck if you throw pillows at them. There's even cases of people who can draw pictures they can't see.'
Thomas referenced these examples so often that they had come to seem commonplace. But every so often—like now—something deep within him balked. How could it be possible to draw something you couldn't see, or write something you couldn't read? The discipline was littered with examples like these: bizarre pathologies that cut against our deepest assumptions regarding self and experience.
'So you're saying their brains can see, even though they can't?' A plaintive note had entered her voice. 'Like the way Gyges's brain could recognize Neil's face even though Gyges himself couldn't.'
'Exactly.'
'Too, too weird.'
'There's other forms as well. People who tap their toes, even though they find music unintelligible. People who grimace in agony, even though they feel no pain.'
Thomas looked out his window, glimpsed several children disappearing beneath the bowers of the woods that made a canyon of the road. He craned his head to peer between the trunks, but the trail—or whatever it was they followed—dropped away too quickly.
'There's actually no one place where consciousness comes together in the brain,' he continued, 'but in terms of the information it can access, it'
s very localized. It seems particularly hard for us North Americans to swallow given our bogus can-do indoctrination, but if you really attend to the decisions you make, even things like dragging your ass off the couch, you can clearly see how after the fact conscious experience is. You wanna get off the couch, then suddenly you are off the couch, and you credit yourself after the fact. So much of what we do—all of it in fact—simply pops into conscious experience, where "we" take credit for it.'
'But it can't be as bad as all that,' Sam said. 'It just can't. I mean I think, therefore I am, right? I feel stupid saying it, but doesn't that have to be true?'
'I'll admit it certainly seems to be the case. But it's a philosophical claim, and scientific research suggests otherwise. Something like "it thinks, therefore I was," would probably be more accurate.'
Sam seemed to scowl in slow motion. 'We're back to the self again, aren't we?'
Her voice had an edge.
They drove in silence for several moments.
'So really think about it now,' Thomas continued. 'Everything you live, everything you see and touch and hear and taste, everything you think, belongs to this little slice of mush, this little wedge in your brain called the thalamo-cortical system. For you, the road is as wide as a country road should be, the sky is as wide as can be. But in fact your visual connection to these things is smaller than the nail of your pinky. When I clutch your hand, your experience comes hundreds of milliseconds after the fact. And all the neural processing that makes these experiences possible—we're talking about the most complicated machinery in the known universe—is utterly invisible. This is where we stand in the Great Circuit that embraces us: out of sync, deceived, as fragile as cobwebs, entombed in a hardwired cage: powerless. This expansive, far-reaching experience of yours is nothing more than a mote, an inexplicable glow, hurtling through some impossible black. You're steering through a dream, Sam, through smoke and mirr—'
Suddenly they were slowing, veering onto the shoulder.
Gravel popped and crunched. Tall summer grasses whisked along the composite panels.
'Ooookay,' Sam said as she pressed the car into park, 'that was just a little too freaky.'
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