Neuropath

by R. Scott Bakker

  'You said you wanted to know how Neil thinks.'

  'My brain may have said that,' she said, scowling. 'I'm not sure I meant a word of it.'

  Thomas laughed.

  She slumped back into her seat, raised a hand to her forehead. Sunlight flashed from her clear-coated fingernails. 'So all this—the highway, the trees, my pounding heart—is simply in my head?'

  'Afraid so.'

  'But… But doesn't that mean my head is also in my head?'

  'Yep.'

  Her eyes lost focus. 'None of this makes any sense.'

  'Why should it? Why should we experience experience as it is? Given its complexity and consciousness's evolutionary youth, we should expect quite the opposite. As I said, we should expect experience to be profoundly deceptive. As far as nature is concerned, any old crap will do, so long as the resulting behaviors are effective.'

  'And by "crap" you mean stuff like meaning and purpose and morality. You know, the crap crap.'

  Thomas hitched his brows into pained arches, smiled. 'Well, it certainly explains why we humans are con-genitally puzzled about them. Think about it. Thousands of years, busting our nuts trying to figure out our souls, both social and personal, and we're just as baffled as ever. Exactly what you would expect… Exactly.'

  He couldn't believe he was making these arguments again after so many years. The return of the college bull session. He could even feel that aura of uncertainty, that out-of-your-depth tingle that had made those days so sharp, so young.

  And somehow he knew this was exactly what Neil wanted.

  Sam was shaking her head, her lips pressed into a cold line. 'You're saying there's no such thing as consciousness, aren't you?'

  Thomas shrugged. 'Who knows? Certainly not as it intuitively understands itself.'

  The car was still running—a sub-audible purr. The radio voices had given way to some inane NPR jingle. The blinker ticked like a cartoon bomb.

  'It's all a dream,' she said, more to herself than to Thomas, it seemed. 'All of it, from the pyramids to Shakespeare to…'

  Thomas didn't know what to say.

  There was something genuinely sad about her smile. 'How about you, professor? Are you for real?'

  Her eyes held him, wet and open.

  'Only if you want me to be, Sam.'

  Another one of her friendly, skeptical scowls. She began pulling back onto the road. The eighteen-wheeler had become a toy in the distance.

  No more lies, he promised himself.

  They drove in silence for several moments. Sam stared blankly out the windshield, while Thomas hugged his shoulders in apprehension.

  'So Neil…' Sam said, trailing.

  'Is unlike anyone you've ever hunted, Sam.'

  Her look was pure you're-telling-me. 'This is what you meant at the restaurant, isn't it? When you said that Neil thinks of himself as a brain rather than a person.'

  'I guess so. I didn't really think it through until now, though.'

  'So we're talking about a man without motives? Is that it?'

  'No. Motives, goals, reasons—these are just ways we make sense of ourselves and each other. Even if they're deceptive, they still work, which means they're still applicable to him, probably. The difference is that he no longer thinks in these terms.'

  'Then just how does he think?'

  'My guess is that he sees himself just… doing things. That he's suffering some kind of extreme depersonalization.'

  'Depersonalization,' she repeated. 'You say that like it's a disease, but it's not, is it? It's more like some kind of… revelation or something.'

  'I suppose so.'

  'So what? Should I be thinking of him as a machine executing some kind of aberrant program?'

  'Perhaps.'

  'Help me out here, Tom. Every time I start thinking I have a handle on this crazy fucker, you throw me another fuzz ball.'

  She was being too insistent, trying to force something actionable out of paralyzing facts. 'You asked me what Neil's world was like. I'm trying to tell you that he's passed beyond the veil, that he thinks he's seen his way through the illusions of consciousness. Since I'm stuck in the Lie the same as you, all I can really do is speculate about what Neil isn't.'

  She scowled, her eyes reading the road. 'C'mon, professor. Speculation only becomes a problem when you confuse it for fact. You of all people should know that.'

  Thomas exhaled, pinched the bridge of his nose.

  'Think of it in these terms, then. For him, this is all probably like one of those movies where everyone's trapped in a mansion with hollow walls, where he has complete freedom of movement even though we think the doors are all lock—'

  'You're saying we should try to draw him out?'

  'No,' he replied. 'My point is that he sees us—all of us—as innately deceived by a consciousness that is at once dim, deluded, and ad hoc. He sees us as crippled by our evolutionary inheritance, our reliance on selves and rules and purposes. He thinks we're waging war from a dreamworld.'

  Disney World.

  Just thinking about it filled him with a vague, aimless worry, like that twinge of manly inadequacy you feel when shaking a hand more callused than your own.

  'So he's underestimating us? Do you think we could exploit this somehow?'

  Thomas rubbed his face, waved a hand. 'No. Look, agent, I appreciate that your job requires you to squeeze something practical out of whatever I say, but I'm thinking out loud as much as anything else. Let's just try to brainstorm for a bit, okay?'

  From her expression, Thomas expected some kind of angry retort, but she seemed to catch herself. 'I'm sorry. It's just that this case—'

  'Is important to you, I understand.'

  She pursed her lips. 'I was going to say that it's unlike any case I've worked before. I've never been so… freaked like this. Your buddy-boy has a way of crawling under the skin.'

  Thomas scratched his head. 'Probably because that's exactly what he's doing. It's a truism to say that most psychopaths have their own peculiar logic, something that makes them tick, something that we can puzzle through.'

  He watched the scenery fall through his reflection in the passenger window. He spent a listless moment imagining Neil and Nora 'ticking' in his bed.

  'But for Neil?' Sam prompted.

  Thomas glanced back at her. 'It's reason itself he's murdering.'

  As a psychologist, Thomas knew well the unspoken agreements that governed so much of what passed between people. At some point, mentioning Neil simply ceased being an option for either of them. His end of the bargain was easy enough to figure out: who wanted to talk about the best friend who had banged his wife? But for Sam, Neil was the only reason to talk—why she would collect a paycheck at the end of the week. And yet, here they were trading jokes and childhood anecdotes, discussing everything but Neil.

  She told him about a particularly troubling case she had worked in Atlanta: a serial killer who was dumping the corpses of his victims—prostitutes and crystal meth addicts mostly—across south-central Georgia. Some were missing their heads, others their arms or legs or even their genitalia. She had been instrumental in breaking the case, but only because she had linked it to the much larger local investigation of missing pooches in Conyers. It turned out their SUB had been making his own mythological creatures in a creative yet misguided attempt to father the Anti-Christ. And even though she had needed sleeping pills and several months of counseling afterward, the source of her enduring outrage wasn't so much what she and her partner had found as it was the way the missing dogs and not the missing sex-trade workers had dominated the local media during the investigation.

  'Can you explain that to me, professor? Huh?' she asked, trying to smile around a hateful fact. 'How pets merit more airtime than mutilated women?'

  'It's yet another reflex,' he replied, knowing full well how lame anything he said would sound. 'Pets start to seem like our children because our brains use the same inference systems to understand them. If you thi
nk about it in those terms—missing sons versus missing junkies—it makes more sense.'

  'Of course,' she replied, her tone vigilante cold. She wiped at the outer corners of her eyes with a pinky, swore under her breath. She wished she was stronger, he realized—like pretty much everyone else in the developed world. Some social roles demanded far more than others, and Thomas could imagine few more exacting than the FBI. The only difference between her and a soldier, he supposed, was that she defended decency instead of geography, innocents instead of agendas.

  It sobered him, somehow, seeing her in this broader light. She had seen things, survived things—more than enough to command his respect and admiration. But there was an emotional honesty to what she said, an almost confessional air, which turned it into more than an ordinary this-is-what-I-do story. It made part of him wonder whether she did in fact 'like' him.

  Since he and Nora had separated, he had gone out on only a couple of dates, both of them with faculty members from other departments, both of them predictably intellectual—just enough to prevent any real communication from slipping through—and both of them simultaneously consummated and terminated with a bout of hasty, cold-handed sex. They were enough for him to realize that he was no ladies' man, even though he had seemed to get laid enough back in college.

  Because of Neil, of course. Neil had pretty much had a finger in all of his fucking. Metaphorically and otherwise.

  It had even been a joke of Neil's at one point, asking Thomas if he would like another 'Neil-me-down'. The man collected old girlfriends the way others gathered recyclables. Where everyone else talked about 'hooking up', Neil talked about 'plugging in', insisting that sex was the only circuit that mattered. According to Neil, men were bullets, fired from pussies at pussies. 'Time to meet your maker!' he would cry out at the bar, steering Thomas toward some new quarry. How could Thomas not be an avid accomplice? Insecure. Tipsy with testosterone. He even congratulated himself from time to time for 'anchoring' Neil's rather high-flying team.

  One of their female friends, Marilyn Kogawa, used to rake them over the coals about their sexual habits and attitudes. Even though it was 'them', Thomas always understood that Neil was her real target, that she simply spread the blame to avoid making her personal stake too obvious. Neil had slept with her as well, several times, playing on the emotional margins of that wondrously ambivalent phrase, 'fuck-buddy.'

  'What are you doing?' Thomas had asked him once (probably because he was nursing his own crush—Marilyn, as it turned out, would be another 'Neil-me-down'). 'Can't you see that she loves you,'

  'I don't make the rules,' he replied. 'I just play the game.' Apparently the whole 'fuck-buddy' thing had been Marilyn's idea.

  'But you're hurting her.'

  Neil had winked. 'Well, she does howl a lot.'

  At the time, Thomas had chalked up this insensitivity to what he referred to as 'Neil's strange obliviousness.' But now he could see that this was what Neil had always done in every aspect of his life: worked the rules to his own advantage. Things like embarrassment, hurt, or the fear of confrontation were simply tools to him. If you could catch him on a technical violation he would apologize readily enough, and in a manner that made you feel like a hard-ass for crying foul in the first place. But he was utterly deaf to anything that appealed to the spirit of the game. If friends or lovers got hurt, then they should mind the fucking rules.

  The more Thomas thought about it, the more he realized that Sam was probably right. Neil had been a high-functioning psychopath, even back then.

  And now, not even the rules mattered.

  Sam and Thomas fell silent upon reaching Washington's outskirts, out of verbal exhaustion more than anything else. Thomas imagined that Sam, like him, was busy soaking in the underclass ironies of their nation's capital. It dawned on him that he knew nothing of her politics, but he decided that he didn't care. It all just felt like a futile reflex now. He could remember reading somewhere that Martin Luther King Jr was the last true citizen to visit Washington, that it had been tourists and businesspeople ever since. Thomas imagined that he was no exception.

  The bar where they were to meet Dr Mackenzie was just off K Street, not far from Georgetown University, in a neighborhood planners would have called 'medium density mixed residential and commercial'. Thomas could smell the Potomac gnawing on tin and granite when he stepped out onto the sidewalk.

  Sam gave him a hasty briefing as they walked up to the bar. Thomas could tell she was angry at herself for not doing so earlier; he could sense a gestalt shift in her attitude toward him, as though she were remembering some promise she had made to herself. Suddenly she was brisk and professional, if a little harried. Even so, she found time to answer a panhandler's upraised palm—one of those bums straight out of the old movies, all stained whiskers and clothes leathered with grime. Once again, Thomas waited on the guilty sidelines while she pawed through her purse. She ended up giving the old man a five, pinching the corner of the bill as though she were feeding something with teeth that snapped.

  Dr Mackenzie, she explained with mnemonic intensity, was 68, an employee of the NSA for sixteen years, a widower for eight. He had a reputation for brilliance, though oddly enough, he had no publications whatsoever. She cast him a lingering look as they trotted up the steps to make sure, Thomas supposed, he had absorbed the significance of that last tidbit.

  'Remember,' she said, 'try to read between the lines.'

  Thomas smiled despite the lump in his throat. Why was he anxious all of a sudden? He almost felt like one of Neil's newly jilted lovers about to confront the first ex-wife. Neil, Thomas realized, had likely betrayed Mackenzie every bit as profoundly as he had betrayed him.

  Thomas recognized the man the instant they stepped into the pub-worn interior. The place had a quaint teahouse atmosphere that not only belied its name, Blowhards, but all the telltale signs of hardcore barroom crowds: the cracked panes of glass, the carved initials distressing the already 'distressed' decor, and the smell of spilled booze and—oddly enough—cigar smoke. In theory-speak he would have said that its identity-claims contradicted its behavioral residue. In normal speak he would have said that it looked like a place where the high and mighty got down and dirty.

  Mackenzie sat in a high-backed stall to their right, pondering his palmtop. He looked like a bald, diminutive grandfather, someone who should be wearing overalls rather than a lobbyist's slick K Street attire, a black pinstriped Armani by the look of it, with a hint of zoot in the cut of the jacket. When he spotted them, his face fairly exploded with affable good humor.

  'Good-good!' he cried. 'I was getting worried I'd confused the times.'

  He seemed a very happy ex-wife.

  After the obligatory introductions, Sam slid against the wall and Thomas settled next to her. She laid the tips of all ten fingers on the manila file folder she had placed before her. It seemed quaint, like something from the innumerable crime movies Thomas had watched as a child.

  I'm actually part of an investigation… The FBI for chrissakes!

  'My,' Mackenzie said, tilting his head in Sam's direction, 'aren't you a striking beauty.'

  Ordinarily, a statement like this would have sounded sexist, but for some reason, his age and festive disposition seemed to render him exempt. It was like he had a 'dirty old joker badge' or something.

  Rather than blush, Sam smiled and looked down. His expression mild, Mackenzie retrieved a pack of Winstons from the inside pocket of his suit jacket. The lighter he seemed to conjure from nowhere.

  'A nasty habit I've never been able to shake,' he explained in the midst of billowing smoke. 'Lucky for me, this place casts a blind eye.'

  'A speakeasy for smokers,' Thomas said, finding himself, despite all his earlier apprehensions, quite disarmed. Mackenzie, he realized, was a classic rogue, someone who used charm and impish good humor to run roughshod over even the most exacting social niceties.

  'For every Prohibition,' the old man declared, 'the
re are a thousand blind eyes, I assure you.'

  Sam raised her eyebrows, pursed her it-girl lips. 'I do work in law enforcement, Dr Mackenzie.'

  'I suppose,' the impish old man replied. 'But then you need me far more than otherwise, Agent Logan.' He looked at Thomas, shot him a friendly blink. 'Game Theory 101,' he said. 'Strike, or be struck.'

  Sam leaned back from the wires of curling blue smoke, clearly annoyed. Smiling, Thomas reminded himself not to be taken in by the old charmer. Given what this man did for a living—he quite literally 'hacked' brains (in both senses of the word)—there could be little doubt that he, like Neil, was some kind of sociopath. Lacking the circuitry for the social anxieties that plagued everyone else, he doubtlessly found putting people at ease quite effortless. A former colleague of Thomas's had spent a better part of her career studying psychopathy. The biggest challenge, she had said on more than one occasion, was immunizing her research assistants against their charms.

  Sam pressed on. 'What exactly was the nature of your work, Dr Mackenzie?'

  'I'm afraid that's classified.'

  The expected answer. Sam continued without missing a beat.

  'It says here that you were Dr Cassidy's immediate subordinate—his second-in-command, in effect. Is that true?'

  An apologetic look, mawkish because of the agility of his face. 'I'm afraid that's classified as well.'

  Thomas frowned, wondering how it could be at once classified and in Sam's FBI dossier. He was about to say as much, but was pulled up short by a small flash of insight. 'Tell me, doctor,' he asked, 'did Neil ever mention the Argument?'

  The bright eyes dropped to the table. For a moment he looked like something between a smiling Buddha and an Irish drunk.

  'Oh, that.'

  Thomas could feel Sam stiffen beside him. 'So he did talk about it,' she said.

  'On occasion.'

  'Would you mind relating the substance of those occasions?' she pressed.

  'I'm afraid that's classified.'

  Thomas frowned. 'Is it now?'