Neuropath

by R. Scott Bakker

  Mackenzie raised his small hands as though in surrender. His grin was contagious. His eyes fairly chirped with glee.

  'Well it's should be.'

  'And why's that, Dr Mackenzie?'

  'Because it's true and because it's scary as all hell. What do you think secrets are for, Professor Bible?'

  'In my experience,' Thomas said, 'truth is rarely as dangerous as people seem to think.'

  'Ah,' Mackenzie beamed, 'so you're a cognitive psychologist.' Glancing at Sam's perplexed frown, he explained, 'Professor Bible doesn't think the Argument is dangerous because he doesn't believe the greater part of humanity is capable of believing it.'

  'He's right,' Thomas said in response to Sam's questioning look. 'But not for the reasons you might think. It's not because people are too stupid—'

  'Well,' Mackenzie interjected, 'not all of them, anyway.'

  Thomas scowled and smirked. 'It's just that we suffer from so many biases. We like things to be simple. We have no stomach for uncertainty; just think of the way people throw snap judgments at their televisions. We're out-and-out addicted to praise. We cherry-pick evidence that confirms our beliefs and selectively ignore disconfirming evidence—'

  'We rationalize,' Mackenzie interrupted once again, as though to simplify things for Sam's poor feminine brain. 'Why do you think science was so difficult for our ancestors to come by? It pretty much turns human psychology on its head, doesn't it, Professor Bible?'

  You mean the soul, Thomas wanted to say. It turns our soul on its head. Instead he continued as though Mackenzie hadn't spoken—a petty punishment for his speaking out of turn. 'We do these things all the time—all of us. But the biggest thing, hands down, is that we confuse agreement with argumentative strength, or even worse, intelligence. Since we can only judge things in terms of our prior judgments, we make what we already believe the yardstick for what's right or wrong.'

  Mackenzie chortled. 'Certainly explains the present political situation, wouldn't you say, agent?'

  Of course the president was a Democrat.

  Sam's face broke into an upside-down smile. 'I'm not sure I—'

  'Oh my,' Mackenzie interrupted, turning to Thomas. 'You would love to know what we're working on, wouldn't you? A cognitive psychologist? We've been forced to completely abandon all the folk psychological assumptions. The old eliminativists were right! None of the traditional categories are adequate—things are much stranger than you can imagine! I mean, take language—oh-ho! We experience nothing but smoke, nothing but smoke!'

  Dr Mackenzie, Thomas realized, had a true passion for his work; he simply assumed that Thomas must feel the same. As it happened, this was another common human bias, sometimes called the 'consensus fallacy'.

  'Just for example, we've completely isolated the rationalization module in the left hemisphere.'

  'Rationalization module…' Sam repeated dubiously. 'Huh?'

  'If you shut down the mitigating circuitry,' Mackenzie continued, 'you wouldn't believe the confabulations it generates. Lies, lies, endless lies, each of them completely true as far as the subject is concerned. It's as though each of us has a psychopathic liar built right into our heads! Can you imagine? I mean the evolutionary rationale is plain enough: reproductive success is tied to social status is tied to verbal competition, and so on and so on…' With these last words, he rocked his head from side to side.

  'So Ramachandran was wrong?' Thomas asked.

  'Ramachandran?' Mackenzie exclaimed. 'Wrong? Please, that's like saying ancient Greek medicine was wrong. "Wrong" is entirely beside the point, at least at this juncture. We've moved so far beyond that, so—'

  He suddenly stopped, his open-eyed enthusiasm narrowing into something at once shrewd and sly. He didn't laugh so much as snicker.

  'You should be commended,' he said to Sam while waving a finger. 'Bringing another academic with you. You knew that I would be more likely to open up if I could talk shop, now didn't you? I imagine we eggheads are rather predictably vain, hmm?'

  He stubbed out his cigarette with his thumb.

  Sam smiled and shook her head. She seemed to make a point of avoiding Thomas's gaze.

  Of course, Thomas thought. Why else would she bring him? For his legendary powers of observation?

  He knew the resentment he felt was more a function of the past couple of days than anything else. Hadn't she told him to read between the lines? More importantly, didn't she have an obligation to use every means at her disposal to prevent another Cynthia Powski or Peter Halasz? Coddling Thomas wouldn't be high on her list of priorities simply because it couldn't be.

  'Tell me,' Sam asked in a queer voice, 'did you ever operate on Neil, Dr Mackenzie?' It was a question that only seemed obvious after she had asked it. Something had to explain Neil's turn to the unthinkable.

  Things were moving too quickly.

  'Never,' Mackenzie said. 'Why do you ask?'

  Thomas stared at him. 'That's the answer you have to give, isn't it?'

  'Please… You and I know how this works.'

  'Let's just cut to the chase, then,' Thomas said. He knew he was speaking out of anger, that he needed to keep his trap shut, but the words easily outran his horse sense. 'What can you tell us, Dr Mackenzie?'

  Mackenzie leaned back into his seat, his appraising look shocking for its sudden seriousness. He reached out and withdrew another cigarette. One for the road, as it turned out.

  'You know what?' he said, squinting as he ignited it. 'Now that I think about it, precious little.'

  'Let me guess,' Sam said. 'It's all classified.'

  A burst of infectious laughter, framed in roiling smoke. 'Not at all, Agent Logan. Not at all'

  'Then what's the problem?'

  'Well, agent, here's the thing. I genuinely like Neil Cassidy. He's the most brilliant man I've ever known.' His eyes became round with apologetic surprise, as though he'd just stumbled across a disconcerting fact. 'And I've decided that I don't quite like you…'

  'But don't you feel betrayed?' Thomas blurted. How had things turned south so quickly?

  'Exactly,' Sam added. 'If any of this gets out, you could find yourself without a career, or even worse.'

  'Perhaps that wouldn't be such a bad thing,' Mackenzie replied without missing a beat. 'But I think you and I know the chances of that are pretty slim.'

  Thomas looked to Sam, not quite sure what to make of this last comment. Just who was talking shop with whom? But she simply stared at the man, as if weighing some kind of dreadful decision.

  Without warning, Dr Mackenzie was on his feet, smoking no-hands, stuffing his Winstons into his suit jacket.

  'Well, I'm off,' he said, speaking as though they had just shared a plate of fish and chips. He turned on his heel and made for the door.

  Thomas was dumbstruck. 'Mackenzie!' he cried out.

  He paid no attention to the other faces in the bar, though he was sure they had all turned toward him. Mackenzie spun, crooked his face forward attentively, waiting to hear what he had to say. 'You do know that'—Thomas glanced nervously at the other patrons—'people, real people, could be hurt if you walk out on us?'

  Slow blink. Sad smile. And a response that completely evaded his question.

  'Ask yourself, Professor Bible, if you're so certain that the masses have no hope of grasping the Argument, then why is our friend Neil making it? He never struck me as particularly optimistic.'

  The old man turned to hustle out the entrance, but paused, dragged around by a wagging finger.

  'Oh, and Professor Bible…'

  'Yes?'

  'You should know that I actually envy you, in my way.'

  'How so?'

  The roguish eyes clicked to Sam, then back. 'Everyone knows psychologists are simply madmen turned inside out. All that glamor. We neuroscientists, on the other hand; we're just mere technicians.'

  Somehow Thomas knew it was another eye-twinkling lie.

  'You envy me?'

  Another draw o
n his cigarette, deep enough to rim the bags beneath his eyes with orange light. The glow shined across both irises.

  'In my way.'

  Then he was gone.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  August 18th, 2.58 p.m.

  Coming along had been a mistake, Thomas realized as they walked back to Sam's Mustang. He was too close to the principals to bring much more than an alienating intensity to the table. And Mackenzie? The man was obviously a player from way back—and connected as well. Sam might as well have been a mail carrier for all the respect he showed her position.

  'So what the hell was that all about?' Sam said as she started the car. The way she kept her eyes fixed on the street made him certain she was thinking the same thing he was.

  'A narcissistic demonstration of entitlement,' Thomas replied.

  'Which means?'

  'He blew us off to prove to himself that he could blow us off. By showing us he didn't need us, he was affirming a congratulatory self-image.'

  'Well, he should trim the old nostril hairs before congratulating himself too much. Did you see how orange they were?'

  Thomas hadn't noticed. 'I thought he was quite dapper.'

  'It was like taffy or something,' she continued in a ranting monologue tone, 'only with nicotine.' Thomas imagined that this was how she sounded when driving with Gerard. This was Sam, he realized, uncut.

  'Gawd,' she exclaimed, 'I hate fucking smokers.' With a quick glance at her mirrors, she accelerated toward K Street. 'And what was that "I-envy-you-in-my-way" bullshit about?'

  Thomas cleared his throat. 'You… I think.'

  'Me?'

  A tingling suffused his face. 'I think he thought I was going to… you know.'

  Sam looked at him in shock, then burst out laughing—far harder than was necessary Thomas thought.

  'Sorry, professor,' she said without a wisp of embarrassment. 'I like you and all, but…'

  'But what?' Thomas cried.

  'I love my job.'

  'Yeah, well, I have my moments, you know.'

  Sam braked at the intersection. Against an embattled retail backdrop, traffic whisked through the sun's glare, flashing as though through a searchlight. Thomas found himself staring down the treed rows of a Wal-Mart parking lot, twisting in the absence of any reply.

  'So what's the plan?' he asked when it became apparent she had nothing to say.

  'I'm not sure,' she admitted after a pensive moment. 'I need to talk to Shelley, to see if there's any way to apply real pressure.'

  'On Mackenzie, you mean.'

  'The man knows way more than he's letting on, don't you think?'

  By chance, Thomas glimpsed the dome of the Capitol above the sliding streetscape. It seemed impossible that the soap opera on the nightly news was playing out right now, there, with real people who had hangnails and itchy asses just like everyone else.

  Neil had said it himself: whether it was Washington,

  Beijing, or the human brain, spies were drawn to the smell of decisions.

  'Men like him always do,' Thomas said.

  The drive back seemed far longer. They floated down the freeway, trading this cohort of vehicles for that. In the lulls between topics, Thomas found himself staring out the window, wondering whether he really had fumbled the ball with Mackenzie, and thinking about Nora… about the crash of anesthesia that had accompanied her confession, about the mechanical insincerity of his rage.

  Revelations were strange things. They rewrote consequences, sure, but what really distinguished them from garden variety insights was the way they revised the past. True revelations never came all at once. No, they gnawed, and gnawed, working their way through the soft tissue of memory, redigesting everything relevant. Not an hour would pass, it seemed, without some memory of Nora returning, like some old piece of machinery requiring a retrofit in light of the latest technical information.

  In the wake of Neil, everything about their relationship had been transformed. Nora had always been critical. After their divorce a number of his male and female friends had admitted thinking she was something of a bitch. But for whatever reason, he had never seemed particularly troubled by her complaints, perhaps because he had fooled himself into thinking he knew where they came from. There was nothing quite like 'understanding' when it came to plastering over character flaws for the sake of emotional convenience.

  There had been no catastrophic turn in their relationship: it had seemed to shake itself apart rather than spiral down from the skies. But even before the divorce, in one of those rare, honest reveries that punctuate any marital breakdown, Thomas had put his finger on a crucial change in the character of her complaints. At some point, her criticisms had shifted from things he did to things he was. And now that Thomas knew she was using Neil as her measuring tape, the inventory of her accusations, which at the time had so bewildered him, became sinister with implication. Of course he couldn't 'make her feel desired'. Of course he was 'incapable of meeting her emotional needs'.

  How could he be when she was bobbing for apples in his best friend's pants?

  It was like Mackenzie said: everyone had a little rationalizer in their head, a gob of neural machinery devoted to getting them off the hook. Their very own blame-thrower. If Nora found herself attracted to Neil, well then, it simply had to mean something was wrong with their marriage: after-all, happily married women never strayed. And if their marriage wasn't happy, then it had to be Thomas's fault, because the Lord knows how hard she tried to make it work.

  Another man's cock… Now that was a revelation.

  'How are you doing, professor?' Sam asked once they made the Jersey Turnpike. 'You're awfully quiet over there.'

  'Neil,' he said, knowing it would be enough.

  It was strange the way names could become explanations.

  Thomas reflected how odd it was, the way the hooks of sexual attraction had carried him so far only to drop him like a rock when she had made her lack of interest clear. Everything seemed fogged with irrelevance.

  They drove in silence for quite some time. At first it was the kitchen-table quiet after a night of bad dreams—a kind of willful silence. Sam sorted through several satellite radio stations, but gave up after sampling a half-dozen different genres, everything from bluegrass to death metal. Nothing, it seemed, could trump the whisking roar of the highway. The sound of nature. It wasn't until the sun bellied in the west, drawing eighty-mile-an-hour shadows across the lanes, that the funk, or whatever it was Mackenzie had tainted them with, finally lifted.

  Gazing forward, Sam slowly reached between their seats. 'Would you like some Freeeeeeetos?' she cooed, once again dangling the shiny little bag between them. She glanced at him, her eyes round with mock wonder.

  Thomas sputtered with laughter. 'You're a nut-bar, you know that?'

  'Is that your professional opinion?'

  And just like that, everything was back to normal. They rehearsed the Argument a la Neil once more, trying to graph his possible motivations in the ether of conversation. But they only managed to paraphrase their conclusions from yesterday: Gyges had something to do with recognition, Powski had something to do with pleasure and/or desire, and Halasz had something to do with free will. Neil was stripping away the illusions, trying to reveal the meat puppet within.

  'What about your book?' Sam eventually asked.

  'My book?'

  'Yeah, you know, Through the Brain Darkly.'

  'You been researching me, agent?'

  She cocked her head like a teenager. 'Uh, like, it's my job you know.'

  Thomas smiled, looked out the passenger window. Night had fallen. An eighteen-wheeler towered over them, and he found himself peering past the running lights into its grime-greased recesses: the roaring wheels, as tall as his door; the black-iron linkages, clacking to the bounce and grind of impossible loads; the pavement, rushing like a crimson river beneath the tractor's taillights. He looked away, overcome by a peculiar sense of vulnerability, as though he had le
aned too far over a balcony railing. All he needed to do was reach out his hand and he would be yanked from the world, stamped and spun into dripping oblivion.

  'I don't know what to say,' he replied, scratching his eyebrow. 'I mean, the book got me tenure, but it was one of those things that only seem to impress the people who already know you. Hopes were high. The reviews were harsh. It went out of print.' Now it's little more than a joke passed down through generation after generation of graduate students.'

  'Bible's Bible,' Sam said.

  Thomas would have laughed, but there was a note of genuine pity in her otherwise rueful tone. 'What do you mean?'

  'That's what they call it. The grad students at Columbia.'

  'You've been interviewing people about me?'

  Sam looked at him for what seemed a perilously long time, given her 80 mph cruising speed. A conspiracy of lights from the HUD and the dash made her seem almost supernaturally beautiful. Shining lips. Swales of blue and yellow along her cheek and neck. Suddenly the truck's headlights flashed through the rear window, bleaching all the inviting tenderness from her look. For an instant, she seemed more statue than human, with wet marbles for eyes.

  'This is for real, professor. You do understand that?'

  'It's starting to sink in,' Thomas replied.

  Her gaze clicked back to the floating corridor of taillights before them. Several moments passed in encapsulated silence.

  'So why the sudden interest in my book?' Thomas finally asked.

  Sam shrugged. 'Because I find it curious.'

  'Find what curious?'

  'Well, the Argument is actually yours, not Neil's.'

  Thomas snorted through his nose. 'Not anymore.'

  'Why's that?'

  Thomas frowned and smiled. 'Maybe someday you'll have kids.'

  Sam laughed and shook her head.

  'What's wrong with that?' he continued. 'A gun-packing momma. For a single-parent divorcee like me, it doesn't get much hotter than that.'

  Sam beamed, but continued shaking her head. 'What did you make of Mackenzie's question?' she asked, obviously trying to change the subject.

  Thomas studied her for a mischievous, tongue-against-the-teeth moment. 'Which one was that?'