Neuropath

by R. Scott Bakker

  Dead weight.

  'What are you taking?' Neil abruptly asked.

  'Ativan,' Thomas said mildly.

  His best friend rooted through one of his rucksacks, tossed a beer-tinted pill bottle that bounced against his chest, rolled into his lap.

  'A neuroleptic,' Neil explained. 'Experimental. Think of it as Pepto-Bismol for the brain.'

  'I-I need…' Thomas said. 'I n-need to clear my head.'

  The gun maintained its vigil.

  'Exactly. You have to drive to New York and snatch Frankie. You have to bring him back to me ASAP.'

  'Tonight?' Thomas asked, almost overcome by a peculiar drowsiness. His limbs had become heavy—drowning-victim heavy.

  Critical incident stress. Need to… to…

  'Goodbook, listen to me. These people are smart; they figure out things quickly. Right now, their disorientation is our only advantage. But even more, there's Frankie to think about. You know the rule. Neurons that fire together wire together. Even as we speak, Mackenzie's affect feedback implant is wearing deeper and deeper tracks into his brain. It needs to come out now.'

  There was Sam, over there, cold and nude and unshivering on the floor. Reflections of walls and furniture gleamed upside-down in her blood. Lives, he thought, were like property lines. And Neil was driving crosscountry. Who could say where he would turn?

  'But you're a madman,' Thomas said.

  'You know that's not true,' Neil replied with a shrug. 'You only say it because you find sanity unbearable.'

  Pull the trigger. Jesus-jesus just pull the MOTHERFUCKING TRIGGER-

  His hand lowered the gun.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  August 30th, 11.39 p.m.

  There was a roaring, and he opened his eyes to the sterile flare of headlights, an oncoming car swerving, something too profound to he an impact, metal imploding, the car frame snapping, air-hag deploying, sharp things sheering, everything whipping about a deranged axis. A crash louder than sound.

  He was wet and motionless. Soaking wet.

  Something was wrong with his jaw. It was missing.

  Thomas awoke to the thud and shudder of his Acura plowing through the median. He cried out, hit the brakes, felt the tires churn up turf and hummocks. He sat there for several moments, idling, weeping, until another car pulling onto the shoulder—some Samaritan making sure he was okay, he supposed—reminded him of the police.

  And Frankie.

  The car bucked and shuddered. The undercarriage sledged through gravel, then he was accelerating down the highway, cringing at the memory of his dream.

  It meant nothing.

  'Thank God!' Mia cried, running across the lawn into the yellow circle of the driveway lights. 'Thank fucking Gawd!' Thomas popped the car into park. 'Mia,' was all he could say to the face bobbing in his window. The oil-stain smell of the freeway still hung in the air.

  'Fuck, Tommy. Fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck!' His Number One Neighbor swatted at tears. 'I so thought you were dead. Jesus Christ, I literally thought you were fucking dead!'

  Thomas nodded, stared blankly into Mia's frantic eyes. Control was good—for the moment.

  'I need—' Something painful hooked his voice into silence. 'I need your help, Mia. I don't think I can do this alone.'

  'Whatever, Tommy! Whatever you need!'

  'We have to bring Frankie to Neil.'

  'Neil—' Mia began but halted, his expression at once astonished and aghast. Thomas studied his face: the thoughtful drift in the line of his nose, the cynical depth of his crow's feet—all those things that Theodoros Gyges could see, but could never recognize.

  The face of a friend.

  For no reason either could fathom, they took Bill's ancient Toyota 4x4. 'Feels like sitting on a toilet,' Mia cracked after settling behind the wheel. The cab's floors were incredibly shallow—to increase clearance, Thomas supposed—forcing them to sit with their knees high. 'No wonder Bill takes a dump on me when he gets home.'.

  Peekskill was sedate in the manner of shining cars cruising past glowing franchise food outlets. Streetlights kicked like chorus girls across the hood and windshield—a never-ending line of them. Staring into curiously steady hands, Thomas described the afternoon's events the way a journalist might: faithful to the details, indifferent to the implications.

  'You shot her?' Mia cried at one point. 'Jeezus, Tommy!'

  'Pow,' Thomas said, holding his finger out like a gun.

  He could still see her fall back into the cloud of blood and hair. Her gun trailing ceilingward. Her breasts rising with free-fall buoyancy. It seemed that he both wept and cackled, though his face remained professionally blank and to-the-point.

  'Are you on drugs?' Mia shouted, sounding for all the world like a tank driver. 'Nawt fucking funny!' He always went Alabama when he was frantic. Always went native. 'You killed an—Oh sweet Christ! You killed her with my gun? He pressed a palm flat against his brow. 'An FBI agent?

  Thomas found himself setting his teeth in guilt, despite the layers of pharmaceutical lacquer. Mia was a spectator, someone who had tripped on stage from the front row. Only Thomas's firm hand held him in the floodlights. Only Thomas's need. And why should that bind him? This was no natural disaster. There would be no correspondents in rain-slickers, no hands-to-the-ear or teleprompters, no camera-eye to impress. The days of overlapping obligations were long gone. The soft tissue of community had shrunk to the bone of property lines; the world had become a great quilt of demilitarized zones. A circumcision for every heart. A burqa thrown over every window. Neighbors need not care, so long as the grass was cut and the volume was turned low.

  Thomas was using Mia, plain and simple. He was banking on the disconnect between love and its evolutionary rationale, the fact that Mia's brain had confused Frankie for someone belonging to the same genetic cooperative. But giving his Number One Neighbor an out simply wasn't an option. Captain Cassidy had given Thomas a White Whale of a mission. Someone had to row while he teetered with the harpoon.

  He continued explaining—why they had no choice but to abduct his son, how Neil had given him a specially scrambled phone, how he was supposed to call to find out where to bring Frankie. He answered Mia's subsequent questions with grim patience, like a clinician deciphering the ghosts of cancer on an X-ray.

  When Mia asked the question, the question of how he could trust a monster, Thomas simply said, 'Because Frankie's his son.'

  His Number One Neighbor said nothing for a long while. The tires hummed, annoyed by the lack of mountains and mud.

  Control… Thomas could feel it, a cold and clammy hand wrapped about his limbic system. People weren't heroes, he realized. They just weren't.

  Only moments of insanity made them seem that way.

  Manhattan towered, serene with distance, surreal with innumerable lights. The nimbus of each formed interlocking rings across the windshield, slowing migrating to the curve of the highway. Somewhere, buried among the clefts in the horizon, a little boy lay strapped to his bed, twitching and screaming.

  Thomas rocked in his seat, clutched his knees.

  'What if he's right?' he asked. It was one of those questions that only became real in the asking. Part of him, he realized, didn't trust Mia to be alone with his thoughts.

  'Who?' Mia replied. 'Neil?'

  'We thought we were the center of the universe. We were wrong. We thought we were made in God's image. We were wrong. Now we think we're the source of all meaning… We think that we're real'

  'That's just one more perspective,' Mia said. 'One more word game. Look around you, Tom. Nobody has a fucking clue what's going on. Least of all Neil. It's just power plays all the way down.'

  Thomas shook his head. The tragedy wasn't that words had no bottom: that was just a way for English professors to flatter themselves into thinking the world was just more Shakespeare, something tailor-made for them and their skills. No. The tragedy was that the bottom was unspeakable.

  Unlivable.

 
'We have clues,' he said, gesturing not so much to the rising city as to the knowledge propping it up. 'We just can't bear following them.'

  Mia snorted. 'You're like Woody Allen without a punchline, you know that?'

  Thomas pursed his lips. He was pressing Mia when he should be reassuring—he knew as much. But in the glamour cast by Neil's day-glo narcoleptic, this was simply a matter of course. Something relentless inhabited him, something see-it-through…

  No matter what the end.

  'You don't understand, Mia. We've come to the limit. We're standing at the brink. We really are. You know that feeling you have, that feeling of making things happen, of being responsible? That's just a product, something generated by your brain. It simply accompanies your actions, your decisions. Neil's shut it down. He hasn't made a decision or willed anything to happen in fucking years. He experiences decisions, just minus the sensation of willing them. They simply happen.'

  'Yeah, well, small fucking wonder he's gone bonkers.'

  'Has he? Has he gone bonkers? Or has he gone sane in a world of madmen? This isn't speculation, Mia. It's fact. The will is an illusion—fact. No different than the facts that make this car possible, or New York possible, or vaccinations or nose-jobs or polyester pants. We're the illusion! That's how fucking crazy the world has become. And Neil is the first man to see his way past it, to see his way—'

  'Look, Tommy,' Mia interrupted, his eyes clicking between him and the freeway. 'You've been through a lot so I'm going to say this gently, okay? Three words… Shut. The-fuck-up. Cocksucker.'

  Thomas looked back to the city piling black and gold on the horizon.

  'Did you hear that, Tommy? Do you understand what I'm saying?'

  'You know that virtual news anchor on MSNBC?' Thomas continued, 'Peter Farmer, the one they morphed using real-time brain imaging feedback to give him the most pleasing voice, the most pleasing appearance, and so—'

  'Shut-the-fuck-up,' Mia sang. 'Shut-the-fuck-aaawwwp—'

  'No. Look, Mia, fuck. Just listen. Our society is basically a giant version of Farmer: an immense flattery feedback mechanism, a machine tuned to cater to our wants, spiritual, social, material. Our wants, not our needs. So we run around, sticking our dicks into mouth after mouth, and whenever someone comes along wanting to talk, not suck, we say, "Excuse me, buddy, but I'm like, getting a blowjob over here." How can facts compete? We think we can believe whatever we fucking want, that reason and evidence are simply different sections of the grocery store, that we don't have to answer to those scratching their heads, let alone to the world. And because we can't see what we don't know, we all think that we more or less have it sewn up—never mind that in three thousand years, we'll sound every bit as ludicrous to our descendants as our ancestors sound to—'

  Thomas stopped, shouted down by the roar of the Toyota wandering across the rumble-strips.

  Mia jerked the SUV back into the center of the lane. 'It's not that I don't find this interesting, Tommy. Hell, I pretty much agree with you, word for fucking word. It's just that right now I really don't give a flying fuck.' He hit the blinker, slowed onto the exit ramp. 'We got bigger fish to fry, neighbor. And this illusion, for one, does not want to find his taut, athletic ass in prison.' A quick glance. 'We clear?'

  Thomas blinked, surprised by the hot tears that dropped down his cheeks.

  'Clear,' he said, looking to the road. The trash in the concrete sockets. The endless oil-stains, blurred into bands of smoke by the speed. The off ramp seemed to peel him away from something essential, like skin from the stalk.

  That noise. He would do anything to stop hearing that noise. Even if it meant driving on the rumble-strips for the rest of his life.

  No more screams, Frankie.

  Daddy promises.

  When they pulled up to the hospital, Thomas half-expected Mia to tell him to get out, then peel down the street. When he didn't, when he actually led the way toward the white, fishbowl world beyond the glass doors, Thomas could feel the ground wobble.

  We're coming, son… Both of us.

  'Lordy-lordy,' Mia murmured as they paused in the hospital's gothic shadow.

  Their plan was simple, but it depended on who-knew-how-many-variables going their way.

  'Ready?' Thomas said, biting his lip.

  'Like spaghetti,' Mia replied.

  The lobby was all but abandoned. He felt almost no apprehension approaching the metal-detector and its bored, sleep-deprived guard. Mia strode through briskly, with nary a second glance from the bull-chested man, who seemed more interested in the small backpack Thomas carried. Thomas swung it across the detector's threshold, dropped it into the guard's waiting hand, before stepping through himself. The guard had already peeled it open when the metal detector chirped in a polite yet insistent way.

  Thomas felt his heart stop.

  'Again,' the guard said without even looking at him. He pawed through Frankie's clothes with a big black hand. Thomas took two steps back, then once more stepped across the threshold. He heard the second chirp more with his skin than his ears.

  Still not making eye contact, the guard simply murmured, 'Arms out,' then began waving his wand along the contours of his body. Thomas could swear he was being beaten with sticks, though at no point did the man touch him. The wand followed the X of his form, starting with his right arm, then moving down to his right ankle. The guard then panned up along the outside of his left leg. The wand let out a wiry whistle as it passed over the left pocket of his blazer.

  Eye contact at last, though the man looked far more bored than concerned. 'Your pocket, sir,' he said. 'Do you have anything in your pocket?'

  Breathless and immobile, Thomas said, 'Not that I know of…'

  The guard reached in with thick fingers, withdrew what Thomas mistook for a handkerchief, then recognized as Sam's white cotton panties.

  The guard smiled and scowled at once.

  'You dawwg,' Mia drawled.

  Then a bullet rolled from the panty-liner, made a perfect, tuning-fork ping against the tiled floor.

  The guard frowned at it for a moment, raised hard eyes…

  Mia's foot took him in the jaw. He staggered back, uncomprehending, utterly unprepared for the second foot, which sent him toppling. His keys jangled, then all was silent.

  Thomas gaped at his neighbor, who rolled his head from his left to his right shoulder.

  'A little piece of advice,' Mia said, kneeling next to the unconscious guard. 'If you're a man, learn how to kick ass before you put on a dress.' He held out his hand, snapped his fingers impatiently.

  'What?' Thomas asked, scarcely able to breathe.

  'The duct tape,' Mia said. 'Remember?'

  Numb, Thomas pawed his empty right pocket, looked to his neighbor helplessly. He'd forgotten the tape at the cottage. Cursing, Mia grabbed the panties, brandished them as though making a statement about his priorities. 'Boxers are too big to stuff into pockets,' he said. 'C'mon. We have to get this lug out of sight. If anyone's monitoring those cameras'—he nodded at an abstract point above and behind Thomas—'we might be fucked already.'

  They tucked the guard in an out-of-the-way bathroom.

  'It's not like the movies,' Thomas said, standing over the slumped form. 'He needs to see a doctor as soon as possible. He could be reall—'

  'I don't know about you,' his neighbor said, 'but I came to bet on Frankie.'

  The most Thomas could do was nod. Control was slipping.

  They passed two nightshirt nurses who seemed too caught up gossiping to notice their presence. The air in the elevator was fever-hot. They stared like idiots at the Air France commercial on the screen. Thomas found himself looking for the embedded sexual cues that all advertisers used to catch wandering eyes. A millisecond glimpse up a business traveller's skirt. The background cleavage of two teenage backpackers stowing their overhead gear. All of it sealed with a family-friendly smile.

  Like an idiot, Thomas found himself thinking, Come fly the fuck
able sky…

  The elevator doors rattled open.

  Thomas beamed a tired smile at the neurological observation unit's duty nurse—a once-pretty woman named Skye, if he remembered correctly. He leaned over the counter to swallow as much of her periphery as he could. He could neither hear nor see Mia, which was a good thing.

  'Professor Bible,' she said, her voice silky with compassion. She knew he was divorced, and with professional women now vastly outnumbering men—the 'Great Gender Role Reversal' the pundits were calling it—guys like Thomas, ones who had actually studied in college rather than turfing out in a haze of dope and video games, were something of a rare commodity.

  He played the part. The exhausted father, the grieving father, desperate for feminine comfort and support. One who flirted because he had nothing else, no other spark to warm his thick, ringless fingers…

  A monitor alerted her that Frankie had been disconnected. She looked up in almost comical alarm.

  'Is that Frankie?' he asked with feigned horror.

  'H-his sedative must have worn off.'

  He chose that moment to swing the backpack onto the counter before her.

  'Don't move!' he barked.

  Of course she froze; it was instinct.

  'You know about directed motion detectors, don't you, Skye?—don't nod! Just blink if you understand me.'

  Two tears fell when she did so, inking her cheeks with mascara.

  'Well, one of them is aimed right at you… and it's connected to a bomb in this bag. Any movement or loud noise could set it off. Even your lips. Do you understand?'

  Again tears accompanied her blink. She was shaking like a little human centrifuge, enough to trigger a dozen shopping-mall doors. Nausea wheeled through Thomas—from the shame, he imagined, though Neil's pills had Saran Wrapped his every emotion.

  He leaned back from the counter, slowly, as though scared of his own diabolical device. He saw Mia running down the hall with Frankie. He took his unconscious boy in his arms.

  He held his little body tight. Kissed his cheek. Sobbed against his shaved scalp.