Neuropath

by R. Scott Bakker

  When neither of them volunteered any information, Dr Chadapaddai bit his lower lip. 'None of us has ever seen anything like this. Nothing.'

  Thomas knew first hand what it was like to have a field of knowledge dominate his life: the strange feeling of estate and insecurity, like making home in a far greater mansion. With information reproducing like bacteria, no specialist could hope to master all the details of even their own specialty. Still, you liked to think you had at least a rough sense of the floor plan. You liked to think you at least knew what you didn't know.

  Dismay struck the breath from Thomas, almost sent him slumping to the floor. Only Neil. Only Neil could undo this. Only Neil could remove the horror he had planted in Frankie.

  'Have you an arm like God?'

  'But you're going to do something?' Nora said. 'Right? I mean, someone put that thing in there. You can take it out.'

  The neurologist brushed a lick of raven-black hair from his forehead, then lowered his hand in sudden self-consciousness. He was frightened, Thomas realized. Frightened by the FBI and their demand for confidentiality.

  Frightened by the images on the wall behind him. Frightened by the little boy screaming in the Neurological Observation Unit. It spoke to his professionalism that he recovered his equilibrium so quickly.

  'Mrs Bible, look. You have to understand that for the moment, your boy isn't in any danger. That means we have time, and that means we have no choice but to be as cautious as possible. Whoeve—'

  'But he's screaming!' she shouted. 'My baby's screaming!'

  'Nora, please!' Thomas exclaimed. 'You don't understand.' He glanced at the doctor. 'The amygdala simply controls the scream reflex—the reflex, honey.'

  Nora regarded him with wide, tearful eyes. 'So he's not terrified?'

  Thomas shook his head. 'It's just an uncontrollable reflex that keeps firing over and over again. Like the hiccups. Inside he's the same boy we know and love, scared by all the fuss, frustrated by his inability to stop screaming, but nothing more.'

  'No,' Nora said, as though chastising herself for her fears. She looked penitently down to her palms. 'No. Neil wouldn't do that. Not to our baby.' When she looked up, tears coursed freely down her cheeks. 'He was your best friend, Tommy. Your best friend!'

  And your lover.

  Dr Chadapaddai handed her some tissues, then stepped back, his face professionally blank.

  'Come,' Thomas said to her, standing up. 'I'll drive you home.'

  Nora wiped her eyes, laughed. 'I'm not leaving him.' She stood, looked about in a witless, frantic manner, then began shaking her hands from her wrists. 'I'm… I'm…'

  'Ask my administrative assistant,' the Chief Neurologist said, opening the door. 'He'll show you to the restroom, Mrs Bible.'

  Thomas lingered, telling Nora he'd meet her in the hall. One of them had to go home, look after Ripley. They would have to arrange shifts or something…

  'You do know—' Dr Chadapaddai began after the door closed behind her.

  'I know,' Thomas interrupted. Frankie experienced every iota of the terror expressed in his screams. Thomas had thought his lie well-intentioned, as a means to help Nora cope, but he realized he was primarily interested in managing her response, no different than Chadapaddai, he supposed. It occurred to him that this was something he had always done. Intercept and reinterpret…

  'Bad idea,' the neurologist said.

  'If this was all we had on our plate, I'd agree,' Thomas replied, wiping a tear from his cheek. 'You saw her. Knowing that Frankie actually… actually…'

  The neurologist looked down in embarrassment, pursed his lips. 'But you don't understand. I have to tell her. Otherwise I'd be treating her son under false pretenses. It's not simply an ethical matter, Mr Bible, it's legal.'

  Fucking lawyers. Even when they weren't in the room, they were in the room, which meant they were everywhere.

  'I'll tell her,' Thomas said drily. 'Nora always blames the messenger.'

  When Dr Chadapaddai raised his eyebrows, Thomas added, 'She already hates me.'

  They fought in the hall, one of those high-intensity hissing matches with the volume just low enough that everyone could pretend not to hear. When he told her she was using Frankie as an excuse to feel sorry for herself, she actually struck him. Driving home, he could swear he felt blood trickling in his right ear, but every time he poked around, his fingertip was clean.

  Everything was falling apart.

  The plan had been to go to Mia's to collect Ripley. It was important, one of the doctors had said, for at least one of them to spend time with her, so he and Nora had agreed to stay with Frankie in shifts. The thought of his little boy alone and derelict in the hospital was nothing short of overwhelming. It was like someone shoveling hot beach sand into his chest and gut. Wave after wave. Shovel after shovel.

  Ripley, he told himself. Be strong for Ripley.

  But after pulling into the driveway, he found himself walking to his own door, wandering into the air-conditioned gloom of his living room. He sat on the couch, suffused with a body-wide hum of distress, everything wired to the fragility in his eyes. He stared into the silence. The fridge clicked on in the kitchen.

  Something… He had to do something. Keeping vigil was not an option.

  He didn't hear the knocking at first, though afterward it seemed he had jumped at the sound. He caught his breath at the glimpse of a shadow through his window. He rubbed palms across his face, hooked fingers through his hair. The clinician in him laughed, thinking this was what people did when they were about to fall apart: try to clutch themselves together.

  He pulled the door open, confused, hot with a cold sweat.

  Theodoros Gyges stared at him, a dapper version of the disheveled wreck Thomas had first met several days earlier. He wore the too-studied casual attire of someone wealthy trying to blend with the middle classes: a yellow, short-sleeved dress-shirt and blue jeans cinched too high on his thick waist. He both looked and smelled clean, like a born-again Christian.

  'Could I speak to Professor Thomas Bible?' he said politely.

  A surreal moment passed, silent except for the sunny noise of birds, kids, and traffic from the nearby parkway—the noise he heard every time he opened his door in summer.

  'Yeah,' Thomas replied. 'I mean, it's me, Mr Gyges.'

  Something like an anguished grin creased the man's bristle-brush beard. 'I've been waiting for you to return,' he said, nodding toward a Porsche parked on the sun-bleached street. 'I knew it was you, but then, when I saw your face…' He hesitated. 'As you know, I only see strangers.'

  'How can I help you?' Thomas asked.

  'I heard about your son, Professor Bible. I…' The billionaire licked his lips in hesitation. 'I wanted to say that I'm sorry.'

  Thomas blinked, suddenly found himself despising the man.

  'To be honest, I didn't have you pegged as the sorry sort, Mr Gyges.'

  The man's eyes narrowed in appreciation. 'I understand, Professor Bible. I really do. You came to me seeking help, and I turned you out.' He let go a thin-winded, patrician sigh. 'But…'

  'But what, Mr Gyges?'

  'Listen. You and I know this whole investigation, this task force, is bullshit. They want your friend, sure, but they want him to stay a secret far more. This has nothing to do with justice…' He glanced to either side, as though suddenly conscious of eavesdroppers. He leaned close.

  'It's a matter of hygiene.'

  Thomas nodded, felt the hatred drop out the bottom of him. 'So what are you suggesting? That we go to the papers?' Part of his fight with Nora had involved going to the net with their story—something Thomas had dismissed outright. The FBI was all they had, and he for one was not about to fall for the delusional conviction that he 'knew better than…' People always thought they knew better, despite the astronomical odds.

  'You don't think I've rattled the chain?' Gyges said. 'I'm a connected man, Mr Bible, a man with leverage. What they say about the Golden Rule is
true, believe you me. But you'd need the arms of God to ring the bell on this one. I've had old friends, senators, tell me to never call them again. And I've been told…'

  Gyges trailed into frowning silence.

  'Told what?' A tingle had crept into his cheeks. 'Just what are you saying?'

  The man's face, which was about as handsome as a bearded baseball glove, went blank. 'Nothing,' he said.

  'Then why are you here?'

  Gyges ran his tongue across his teeth. 'I was just an ante,' he finally said. 'But you, Mr Bible, you've been dealt a hand at this game.'

  'So?'

  'So, I'm a man of resources. More than people like you can believe. I just want you to know that for me this is a matter of justice. Fuck hygiene.'

  He produced an ivory card from his breast pocket, held it out to Thomas.

  'Every player needs a banker, Mr Bible. Every serious player.'

  Gyges turned and trotted down the steps. Regretting his hostility, Thomas called out to him as he crossed the lawn.

  'How are you doing, Mr Gyges?'

  The man turned and looked at him as though he were a stranger.

  'Better, Professor Bible.' His smile was big and Greek. 'I'm trying to win back my wife.'

  'Making amends?'

  A scowl darkened the broad face. 'You're not a priest.'

  Winded by the encounter, he went upstairs to the kids' room and curled into a ball on Frankie's bed. He hugged the sheets tight, as though holding onto a shed skin. He could smell him, his boy, his dancing little body fresh out of the shower, all questions and movie quips. When he closed his eyes, it seemed that he floated in some strange amoebic world, a place where touch and pain were all that was.

  So much dark… How could anything be so small as a helpless father?

  Once again, he prayed or begged or haggled or whatever it was called, offering anything to anyone on the great Ebay of the soul. And even though he believed none of it, he did so with more conviction than he had done anything in his entire life. Please, uttered with such inner force, it seemed his chest and head and limbs would split open, peel inside-out in offering. Anything! Of course he knew the reasons. He knew that some nameless ancestor had suffered a mutation, a happy madness allowing him or her to extend social and psychological categories to the world, to theorize. He knew that Thomas Bible was a human and that humans were hard-wired to anthropomorphize.

  To see people in dead things.

  Please… Give me back my boy.

  Give.

  Him.

  Back.

  He lay thoughtless for a time, drawing in oxygen, metabolizing. He stirred when images of Cynthia Powski began crowding his thoughts. Pouting pleasure, nipples pressed hard against sail-tight linen…

  Somehow he found himself on the living room couch, watching news. There was nothing so desolate, it seemed, as watching the tube out of a sense of futility. The drying pupils, the nervous limbs. The stationary dementia, the world flickering so bright and so fast in rooms of silence and gloom. And the screen, as supple and as insidious as language, but without any truth-preserving rules, stacking image after image, wiring and rewiring a billion visual cortices.

  His own included.

  Once again, the Chiropractor dominated the leads, even though events elsewhere were murdering thousands. Apparently several blood-caked vertebrae had been found in a subway car. On the obligatory news conference clip, a task force official described the find as a 'major break'. They were compiling the biometric data even as she spoke, she said, and everyone who rode the car in question would be interviewed within a matter of days.

  Thomas felt like spitting.

  A quick search found him a forty-five-second piece on Peter Halasz. They were now treating the case as a homicide, a federal agent said. They now believed the 'telegenic congressman' had been the victim of a 'random act of violence'. Clever, as far as bullshit went. Few things had as little meaning as random acts of violence anymore. Thomas wondered if anyone in the Bureau appreciated the irony.

  After bouncing around a bit, he stopped on CNN, arrested by some eerie post-apocalyptic footage of southern Moscow. The story covered the furor caused by a company called EA Games that was 'typing' the images for use in its latest 'real-time-topical' first-person shooter game. Soon, for $74.95 you could hunt Dagestanis (or Russians, depending on your sympathies) in the rubble before radiation sickness claimed the last real-world victims. He wondered what the earthly difference could be between that and the newscast itself, with its smoldering blue Volkswagen banner.

  The following story chronicled the latest twist in the intellectual property dispute over Lucille's Balls, the wildly successful porno that used CGI versions of Lucy and Ricky to explore the mysteries of female ejaculation. Since the makers of the film couldn't be found, the plaintiffs were seeking damages from the sex-toy manufacturers who had paid, via blind offshore accounts, for product placements.

  Something about that made him laugh.

  He paused to watch Peter Farmer, MSNBC's notorious all-CGI anchor, interview some senator about the recent passage of the Biometrics Integration Act, which would link all public surveillance cameras to real-time online feeds. Certainly the recent Moscow disaster, the senator argued, underscored the need for even greater vigilance. 'Imagine,' he said, 'them making video-games of New York or Washington.'

  Thomas lay breathless, pinned by the interplay of furious images and light banter, trying to summon the will to go collect Ripley. Marines with their SMAWS swinging heavy from their shoulders. Formations of drone helicopters sweeping across Iranian hillsides. Bottles of Coke morphing into extreme athletes. He did a search for something on Jackie Forrest and found a piece from a local Nashville station. Sure enough, a spokeswoman for the Nashville police insisted they were treating his case as a homicide. They feared the 'popular evangelical preacher' had fallen victim to a 'random act of violence'.

  Thomas almost laughed. Why make the effort to be creative or ingenious, he realized, when you didn't have to?

  When he was thirteen his mother had dragged him to church on several occasions, apparently overcome by the need to tame her precocious son. It seemed he could still smell the people and the pews. She forced him, as shy as he was, to sing the hymns with the others. The trick, Thomas had learned, was to pitch your voice low into the background drone—like humming with the tires of a car. That way no one could hear you.

  Especially God.

  Dreams of backbones and scalpels. He awoke disoriented, frightened.

  Frankie?

  'Shhh,' a warm voice said. 'It's just me. Everything's okay.'

  Sam was kneeling beside the couch, stroking his hair, looking down into him as though he were a pool. She smiled sadly.

  'Wha—' He cleared his throat. 'What time is it?'

  'Five thirty or so,' Sam replied. 'What time did you fall asleep?'

  'Dunno,' Thomas croaked, rubbing his face. He rolled onto his back. 'Oh-oh,' he said sheepishly. 'Everything's fucked up. Truly fucked up.'

  'How so?'

  'Piss hard-on first thing in the evening… See?'

  She laughed and reached down, grabbed him through his Dockers.

  'This is all wrong,' she said.

  'Well, you're the FBI agent.'

  'So?'

  'So that's your job isn't it? Righting wrongs…'

  They undressed, and she straddled him. Their love-making was tender in the way of weary people, excitement mellowed by familiarity, each movement for its own sake, each touch void of self-consciousness, the way bone-tired museum goers might trail their hands across ivory or diorite—not to get closer, not even to feel, but simply to confirm.

  Then she began murmuring, 'That's it,' over and over, 'That's it, mmm,' as though he were a son uncertain of a long and frightening task. For some reason, this both angered and impassioned him. He began lunging harder, faster, until she gasped, 'Ugh… Not so deep, please Tom…'

  He clutched her about the wai
st and sitting up, leaned and swept everything from the coffee table. He hoisted her from the couch and slammed her across it.

  'Tom?' she cried.

  But he was fucking her now, making her whimper and writhe around pounding iron. When she started crying out he clamped a hand across her mouth, rammed into her again and again.

  Then she was slapping and clawing. He withdrew. He gripped the coffee table and dumped it. She flopped scrambling onto the floor.

  'Why aren't you wearing your underwear?' Frankie asked.

  'NEIL!' Thomas shrieked. 'NEIL!'

  Then he fell to his hands and knees, crumpled into the carpet, sobbing.

  'I was always just a project for Tommy, I think…'

  Sam curled on the recliner, wearing her blouse and panties. With swollen eyes, she studied the Scotch Thomas had given her. She wiped her tears away with her thumb.

  'I've been hate-fucked before,' she said, 'but that was just too creepy.'

  Thomas sat naked at the edge of the couch, elbows on knees, head hanging.

  She looked at him, at once angry and indecisive. 'Just what are you doing, Tom?'

  'I don't know,' he whispered.

  'Don't know?' Sam exclaimed.' You don't know?'

  'That's what I said.'

  'But you're the fucking psychology professor, aren't you?'

  He looked at her angrily. 'Heal thyself? Is that it?' He huddled against another shiver.

  'Tom…'

  'I'm losing my mind here, Sam.' He wiped his eyes on the back of his wrist. 'I'm losing my fucking mind.'

  Sam set her drink down, clasped Thomas's hands. 'Look, Tom. You gotta get a handle on this. You gotta take a step back. You gotta look at yourself as a textbook anecdote, a case study or something.'

  'I gotta get a handle on this?' he replied, rubbing the back of his neck. 'That's a fucking joke.'

  'What do you mean?'

  Thomas glared at her. 'You know exactly what I mean. The way for me to get a handle on this is for you, Atta, and that clown Gerard to catch Neil.'

  'That's not fair, professor. You know it.'