Neuropath

by R. Scott Bakker

  'Neil's simply showing us facts,' Thomas said. 'When our brains fire in particular ways, we have so-called spiritual experiences. It's as straightforward as that.'

  'You think he's right!' Gerard exclaimed. 'You actually agree wi—!'

  'It's not Neil I'm agreeing with,' Thomas snapped. 'He's not tricking us, or pulling the wool over our eyes. He's simply showing us how it is. If you were Halasz, you wouldn't think, "Oh, that bastard is forcing me to do this." You wouldn't experience his manipulation as a compulsion, as something external you couldn't overcome. You—you!—would be like Cynthia Powski. You would want to do those… those things. Don't you see? That's what you would choose. Gladly. Freely—as freely as you've chosen to do anything in your life. No alien spinal taps hijacking your body as you sit back helpless, paralyzed. Just you, because it was your brain he mucked with, and your brain is all that you are.'

  'Bullshit,' Gerard said, his face somehow pale and flushed at once. 'Total bullshit.'

  Thomas shook his head. 'Everybody thinks they're the exception, don't they? Even after they're diagnosed with schizophrenia, or Alzheimer's. "If I can just concentrate hard enough," they say, "I can conquer this." Don't you see? Don't you see what he's showing us? There's no such thing as the "triumph of the human spirit". There's no such thing as a human spirit! All of them—Gyges, Powski, Halasz, Forrest—have bootstrapped their way to success, more success than any of us here could reasonably expect. That takes moxy, doesn't it? That takes a will to succeed—far more than you could muster, agent. So what makes you think you'd be the exception?'

  'Now look, professor,' Atta said sharply. 'I've done some research on this. It's not the slam-dunk you make it sound like—'

  'Research, Shelley? Then tell me, what's Neil's argument?'

  She looked at him warily. 'That we're fundamentally biomechanical. That our choices are the result of physical processes over which we have no control, and so—' she shrugged—'aren't really choices.'

  'Then tell me, what are the contrary arguments?'

  'Well there's…' Atta paused, looking at once angered and uncertain.

  'Difficult to express, aren't they? They require rehearsal, training. All those cheesy, pragmatic redefinitions of freedom. All those fuzzy, quasi-quantum speculations on brain function. Blah-fucking-blah-blah. On the one hand, you have flattering hope and the "redefinition of traditional categories in the light of scientific knowledge"—never mind that anything can be redefined—and on the other you have Neil's claim which, despite running counter to our most cherished intuitions, is clear, direct, and forceful: consciousness is deceptive to the point of rendering all our concepts suspect, if not bankrupt. The apologists come and go while the unbearable conclusion remains. I'm not a betting man, agent, but—'

  Atta had started waving her hands. 'Okay, okay, look,' she said. 'You need to—'

  'You people make me sick,' Gerard snapped at Thomas.

  'Danny…' Atta said.

  'What kind of people might those be, Ger?'

  'Smart-ass, know-it-all, arrogant pricks, with their terrorist sympathies, their hobosexual neighbors—'

  'Hobosexual?'

  'Bum fuckers! Fags!'

  'Are you for fucking real?'

  'We're the only real thing on this sick planet! Things are going to be all washed away, real soon, trust me. Things are going to be sorted!'

  'Danny!'

  'Sorted,' Thomas laughed. 'And let me guess which pile you think you're going to end up on.' A derisive snort. 'I feel sorry for you, Ger.' He glanced at Sam, whose look said, Just leave it alone.

  'Sorry?' Agent Gerard said in a mocking falsetto. 'For me? That's rich.'

  Thomas shrugged. 'You know how many religions we humans have cooked up over the ages? Thousands… Thousands! Doesn't that worry you? Embarrass you? Think of that feeling you have, that sense of self-righteous indignation that you're struggling to hold onto right now, that you're using to squash the fact of your confusion and fear. I hate to break this to you, buddy, but it's as cheap as fucking dirt. Everybody uses it. Everybody thinks the great captain in the sky has picked them for the winning team, and why not? In the absence of evidence, all we have is our psychology, our needs, to anchor our beliefs. To feel safe. To feel special. You can stomp your foot all you want, wave your hands, pray and pray and pray, but in the end, you're just one more fucking Christian-Muslim-Hindu-Buddhist-Jew, just another hapless, dim-witted human, crying out, "Me-fucking-me-me! I'm the special one!"'

  All three FBI agents stared at him.

  Gerard didn't seem either convinced or outraged, just… calm. 'And what makes you any different?'

  'I know that I don't know shit.'

  'But you think Cassidy's right.'

  Thomas breathed deep. 'Look… How do you argue with science? How? Think of that feeling you get when one of your buddies tells you to "tell him how it is"? Do you ever tell him the truth? Not usually. But why? Because you know that he's just like you, that he needs to hear some ego-boosting bullshit, that he just wants to hear his flattering preconceptions confirmed. Left to our own devices, we bullshit, end of story. Humans are bullshitters. So, set aside the fact that science has allowed us to unleash the sun from a few grams of plutonium, the bottom line is that it's the only institution we've ever come up with that's given us ugly truths. It's the cruel stranger, the one who lays it out as it is. So tell me, Ger, why would you even want to argue against it? How could you honestly think your burning bush trumps thermonuclear tests in the Bikini Islands?'

  'You really think it,' Gerard grated, 'don't you? You really think Cassidy's right? That it's all fucking pointless.'

  Thomas swallowed. The urge to lie was almost overwhelming.

  Was this what Neil wanted? Someone to sing the aria for his lunatic opera.

  'I don't know what to think,' he said lamely.

  Gerard sneered. 'Then why should we, or even you for that matter, give a flying fuck about your son?'

  Silence.

  Tears filled Thomas's eyes. Not here please…

  'You ass,' Sam whispered. 'You pathetic ass.'

  'Give me a fucking break, Logan.'

  'She's right, Danny,' Atta said. 'You know she's right.' Thomas sat down on the recliner, feeling numb in a way he had never experienced before. Numb to his fingertips. Numb through to his heart. Even his eyelids felt insubstantial. He knew that he looked broken, but brokenness required substance, and he had none. He had been afraid of crying before these strangers, but crying no longer seemed a possibility. It was as though he'd become a condensed edition of himself, all crises and climaxes abridged.

  He thought of Nora, of her residue smeared across his thighs.

  Sam's hand settled indecisively on his shoulder. She wanted to comfort him, he knew, but was afraid of what the others would think. She was frail, like the rest.

  Only Neil was strong.

  Sam said something to him, then began berating Gerard some more, listing a series of recent, almost fuck-ups—including his interrogation of Nora. 'Gerard the Retard,' she concluded in disgust. 'Isn't that what they called you at Quantico?'

  'Come on, Sam,' Atta said. 'Danny? Both of you…'

  'You're such a bitch,' Gerard cried. 'Don't you see what's going on here? Don't you know what this means?'

  My son is dead.

  'Danny!' Agent Atta barked. She grabbed him by the elbow and directed him to the far corner of the room.

  Sam reached out and squeezed Thomas's hand. She tried to smile.

  'I thought nothing got to you, Danny,' Agent Atta was saying in low, personal-pep-talk tones. 'What is it you always say?'

  'That if you shit on my plate, I'd simply eat around it.'

  Atta laughed, but it sounded forced. 'Now that's the Danny Gerard I know…'

  Then, with the dull spark of revelations outdistanced by catastrophe, Thomas understood. Neil. Neil was pulling them under. Starved for resources by the public furor over the Chiropractor, barred from seeki
ng outside help by Neil's NSA past, unnerved and outwitted… They were out of their depth. They'd been treading water, and now that Thomas was drowning, they could no longer pretend to see the shore.

  Agent Atta turned with a brisk and dismissive air, apparently far more heartened by her words of encouragement than Gerard.

  'Listen, professor…'

  'Spare me the harangue, agent. I'm not one of your troops.'

  She stared at him for a thoughtful moment, then nodded. 'Just a question before I go.'

  Thomas rubbed the back of his neck. 'Shoot.'

  'We already know these abductions aren't random.'

  Thomas nodded. 'He's picking tokens, people who represent something.'

  'Exactly. With Gyges you suggested he was trying to undermine the notion of personhood. With Cynthia Powski, obviously, his target was pleasure, or suffering I guess, depending on how you look at it. With Congressman Halasz, he was gunning for the will and responsibility. And now with Reverend Forrest, spirituality.'

  'Humanity,' Thomas said. 'Each represents a fundamental characteristic of what we think it means to be human. But this is all old hat, agent; why rehash it now?'

  'Because it means we might be able to anticipate him. If we can figure out what characteristic or trait or whatever he's gunning for next, we might be able to draw up a list of potential…' She trailed, apparently troubled by Thomas's expression.

  'What is it, professor?'

  'Love,' Thomas said softly. 'His next target is love.'

  He pressed thumb and forefinger against his eyes.

  'How can you be so sure?'

  'Because,' Thomas said to his palm, 'he already has his token.'

  My son.

  That night he suffered through one of those skidding sleeps, where he fell in and out of dreams, some bizarre, some terrifying—all of them bad. He would wake up, his head and face throbbing, then slip back into a long argument with Neil about nothing in particular, certainly nothing to do with what was happening in the waking world. The prick would shrug and smile his what-am-I-going-to-do-with-you smile, then the nightmare proper would begin again. Gunshots. Dead little kids, refusing to behave, always refusing…

  Then ringing.

  His thoughts reeled at the groggy entrance to consciousness. He slapped at the alarm, but realized it was his phone.

  His eyes itched, his face felt sunburn swollen—from crying, he imagined. He fumbled in the darkness, managed to grab the receiver.

  'Hello.' He coughed to clear his throat.

  'Tom is that you?' Someone. Sam. 'Tom?'

  'Yeah, it's me, Sam.' He cleared his throat. 'What happened to you last—'

  'Listen, Tom, they've found him.'

  Breathlessness.

  'Frankie?'

  'They've found him, and he's alive. The EMTs think he's going to be fine.'

  'You found Frankie?' Thomas cried, his voice breaking.

  'They're taking him to St Luke's-Roosevelt right now.'

  'St Luke's?' His mind raced. Why would they take him there? Then he remembered all the hoopla from the university paper. St Luke's had recently completed a world-class neurosurgery center.

  No-no-no—

  'I'll be right there!'

  An audible sigh. 'Listen, Tom… I really think you should wait.'

  'Wait? What the fuck do you mean, wait? You said he's fine.'

  'Please, Tom. Trust me on this. Give the doctors—'

  'You said he was fine!'

  'He will be. I swear. He's in no immediate danger. You just—'

  'The bastard did something to my baby, didn't he? The fucker hurt him, didn't he?'

  'Shhhhh. Please, Tom. It'll be—'

  'What the fuck did he do to my baby?'

  'No one kno—'

  Thomas dropped the phone and flew down the stairs.

  The drive seemed little more than a crazed abstraction, after the fact. Lights, lines, and menace.

  The city, the snaking labyrinth, obdurate and overshadowing, laughing at yet one more white-knuckled father. The parking garage. The smoky concrete. The stupid, surly nurse, asking him to restrain himself.

  'Just tell me fucking where!'

  Elevator doors opening like stage curtains.

  What was that noise?

  Sam down the fluorescent hall, glancing, turning, hastening to prepare, to caution. Gerard glaring at the floor.

  'Tom… Tom… Tom…'

  Pressing past her, past all the professional faces, the smart shoes, the crisp white coats.

  'Tom… He's okay. Okay. H-he—'

  That noise…

  Through a door, down a windowed hall.

  'Tom, please!'

  Past pale-faced physicians.

  Pulled up short, as though by a leash chained to his heart.

  The lights. The bed. The starched sheets and soft cotton blankets. The restraints.

  His boy, his eyes as round as a coin trick, his mouth a yawning 'O', his body riven, curling about some unseen fire…

  Frankie.

  Sam clutching his shoulders. 'He can't stop screaming, Tom. He can't stop screaming.'

  That noise.

  The weak man wonders why he has been chosen. The strong man knows all along.

  Of course there are no words for this knowledge. No books.

  I find this convenient.

  You cry out when I touch. You gag when I strangle. You try to cover yourself with hands that are too small. It is strange this power I have over you—like a liquid. Your every surface is helpless, even those folds hidden within. And yet I can only pound you into shapes of your making.

  I turn you on your stomach, the way I always turn you on your stomach. I run a finger down the cleft of your back. My erection is immediate and insistent.

  I reach for the bolt cutters, my fingers sticky. I sever your spine at the base of the lumbar curve. Suddenly you are a doll from the waist down. A doll that shrieks and weeps.

  You do not feel me fuck you.

  I sever your spine again, this time at the base of your neck. Careful—careful—I must make sure you can still breathe. I roll you over, dab your hands in your blood. I use them to make prints across my body, welts where you never struck.

  Theories, please?

  I masturbate with your slack hands, your slick palms.

  I watch you watching me. Our silence is hooded. I see you realize. Before you were opaque, but now you are a window, transparent to my desire. Oh yes, I see you. As still as a magazine cover. As blank as a porn star between takes. So sweet. So sweet. At long last, you mean only what I want you to mean…

  Your blood is not so hot as my semen.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  August 29th, 10.15 a.m.

  Nora squeezed Thomas's hand so tight his fingers tingled.

  The office was supposed to be reassuring, to be what some decorator somewhere would call a 'positive emotive environment'. The personal items—the baseball cap, the family photos, the gift-shop knick-knacks—were meant to convey a sense of privacy, to mask the fact that only institutional transactions were possible in this room. The furnishings—the cherrywood bookcases, the vintage desk, the arabesque rug—were meant to convey a sense of affluence, because most everyone conflated wealth with competence. But Thomas knew otherwise. He could picture the cinder-block behind the wainscoted walls, as clearly as he could see it behind Dr Chadapaddai's expression.

  This was a room where people were told they were going to die.

  After some enigmatic tapping on his keyboard, the Chief of Neurosurgery at St Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital stood from his computer and walked to a series of panels on the wall. They flickered to life with old-fashioned reluctance, illuminating the haggard contours of his face. A three-dimensional fMRI of Frankie's brain materialized on the screen before him, looking far more like a textbook illustration than little Franklin Bible's soul.

  'If you look at this scan, here,' Dr Chadapaddai said, 'you can see that a device of some kind h
as been attached to both amygdalae.' He had the exhausted posture and build of a truck driver, yet he was immaculately groomed and dressed, like a corporate lawyer wearing a lab coat.

  'Device?' Thomas asked.

  The long-lashed eyes studied him.

  'A device,' the neurologist repeated. He pressed the remote and a square appeared on the screen. He zoomed to the base of Frankie's digitally reconstructed brain, then rotated the image. Something resembling a beetle blackened the back of the almond-shaped amygdala. 'It's attached to the central nucleus,' he said, fishing a pen from his pocket to circle the spot. 'As far as we can tell it's anchored to a web of nanotubules, electrically stimulating numerous efferent pathways'—he began drawing the tip out into different regions of Frankie's brain—'leading to the lateral hypothalamus, the parabrachial nucleus, and so on.'

  'All the regions dealing with fear,' Thomas said.

  Horror and wonder suffused him in equal measure, prickling him with sweat, swinging his stomach like a bucket. For all the scars Powski, Halasz, and the others had left on his psyche, they were little more than abstractions now. Nothing could be more real than the pastel graphics on the screen before him. His boy (Frankie!) rewired by his friend (Neil!-what-the-fuck-what-the-fuck—) to cycle through terror after terror after terror.

  A soul tweaked like an engine… His son's soul, programmed like a car stereo, the volume cranked, playing and replaying a misery as profound as anything God could dish out in hell.

  'You gotta take it out,' Nora exclaimed. 'It has to come out!'

  Dr Chadapaddai's look of compassion seemed a little too professional, and certainly too practiced. 'I don't think we can,' he said. 'The brain's own circulatory system has been hijacked to target various neural subsystems. Nano-wires fine enough to thread capillaries…'

  'Clean in, messy out,' Thomas said.

  The neurologist nodded. 'Of course, we'll eventually have to try something, and I can assure you that we're studying and preparing for every possible invasive option. But for the moment, Mr and Mrs Bible, your son's best hope lies in finding whoever did this.'

  Neil. Thomas could see him, sitting across from him on the couch, an apparition in the flat-screen glow, saying, 'I now know more about the brain than any man alive…'