Brain Storm (50 page)

“You see?” said Crowell. “Pretty rough.”

“You see pretty Ralph”
appeared on the screen.

Then Crowell spoke even slower with more emphatic pauses. “It does better if you speak carefully and use simple words. Period.”

Watson watched the machine display:
“It dozen better if you speak careful and used simple words.”

When Crowell began speaking normally again, the screen filled with near gibberish. He turned off the device. “It also only recognizes words in its database of common speech. It does not transcribe profanity, slang, esoteric words, and the like. Watch.” He powered the unit back on. “Fuck you, asshole.”

“Frog you gas hole”
appeared on the screen.

“Our customers who lease these provide them for their deaf employees to help satisfy the reasonable accommodation requirements of the handicap laws. And the technology does
help
deaf people communicate with hearing people who don’t know sign language. When attempting communication with someone who knows no sign language, deaf people get most of their information from lip-reading and from the speaker’s facial expressions. This device really provides them with just another uncertain set of clues to help them guess what is being said by a hearing person. Watch my lips,” he commanded. “What’s that big loud noise. What’s that big loud noise.

“Now, watch my lips again,” he said. “What’s that pig outdoors. What’s that pig outdoors. See? To a deaf person, they look exactly the same on the lips. Now …” He powered on the VTD.

“
BEGIN TRANSCRIPTION
,
LISTENING
 …” said the screen.

“What’s that big loud noise,” said Crowell. “What’s that pig outdoors.”

Watson watched the screen as
“What sat big loud noise what sat pig outdoors”
appeared.

“See,” said Crowell. “It helps, but it’s far from accurate.” He powered off the machine and returned it to the shelf.

“The technology depends on very sophisticated hardware and software. Skeptics would say it has been just around the corner for three decades, and still not here. Every time a CEO or a lawyer or anybody else who dictates for a living hears about it, they want it, because they think it will replace their secretary and save them from learning to type. Unfortunately, the proof isn’t in the pudding. Yet,” continued Crowell, with a wry smile, “because it’s still just around the corner. Until then, if the thing is being used for dictation, somebody must go back and edit the transcription. You can appreciate the hurdles in speech transcription if you imagine a device capable of accurately transcribing a Boston accent, a North Carolina drawl, and Jamaican Creole. It’s all English, but tough to teach a computer.”

Crowell snapped on a pair of rubber gloves and removed the back of Elvin Brawley’s machine. He installed a fresh battery pack, then pushed the power button. Watson held his breath and watched the LCD come to life.

“
AUTOSAVE ON SHUTDOWN
,” said the screen, “
THE SESSION DATED
14
JUNE
2002
WAS SAVED AT
17:45
ON SHUTDOWN
.”

“That’s it,” said Watson. “The day of the … The day it happened.”

“Somebody turned the machine off before the battery died,” said Crowell.

“
PRESS
‘
Y
’
NOW IF YOU WANT TO RETRIEVE THE TRANSCRIPTION SESSION TIME AND DATE STAMPED FRIDAY
14
JUNE
2002
AT
17:45.”

Crowell touched
Y
.

“Looks like the only saved session,” he said, “which isn’t unusual. The system resources required to store and run the program itself don’t leave much room for storing multiple long sessions. Users are encouraged to offload to their PCs if they want to save multiple sessions.”

“But we do have at least one session?” asked Watson.

“Looks that way,” said the technician, as they watched the screen fill with characters:

“His should be the caps,” said Crowell. “The caps should be what he is typing back to her in response to her comments.”

The session continued scrolling by on the screen:

Watson and Crowell replayed the session.

“That’s it?” asked Watson. “Can we print it?”

“Sure,” said Crowell, turning in his chair and grabbing a bubble jet printer from a nearby table, then cabling it to the VTD.

While Watson waited for the printout, he imagined Mary and Elvin in her living room. Her saying something like the lowercase words. Elvin typing the uppercase ones. And Whitlow, who was outside with a nursery monitor would hear—what? Only whatever Mary was saying, and not what Brawley was typing. In other words, when Elvin had typed: “
YOU SAID YOUR HUSBAND GO
?” Whitlow would have heard only “Gone yes.” When Elvin had typed: “
YOU SAID YOU WANT ME TOUCH YOU
?” Whitlow would have heard “Yes.”

Watson looked at the time entries printed in the margin of the sheet. “Would the times be accurate?”

“Should be,” said Crowell. “Probably the most reliable information on the screen.”

Watson studied the three time entries. The first, lengthy series of comments about expensive lessons apparently took about one minute, separated by 17:41 and 17:42, which seemed about right if one factored in lags for doing the keypad work and reading the screen.

“Would they be sitting together turning the thing back and forth? The way we are now?” asked Watson.

“Probably,” said Crowell, “especially since he’s typing back to her.”

The second batch of comments was about one third the length of the first, but it began at 17:42 and ended at 17:45, when, according to the machine, Mary Whitlow said repeatedly: “James help me vinegar is common anthony.”

“Why does the long series of comments take one minute and the second short one take three minutes?” asked Watson.

Crowell looked at the printout. “Well, during the second session, they were either communicating really slowly,” he said, noting the time discrepancies with a pencil, “or, judging from the first patch, they communicated for half a minute with two and a half minutes worth of silence in there somewhere.”

Watson imagined Elvin and Mary sitting at the table looking at his VTD screen:
YOUR HUSBAND GO
?
And Mary says,
“Yes.”
And Whitlow, sitting out in his Ford Taurus with the nursery monitor hears his wife say,
“Yes,”
and thinks,
Maybe he asked her for a light?
He does not hear:
YOU WANT ME TOUCH YOU
?
Only
“Yes”
and
“Yes and I will too.”

For the first time, Watson considered Elvin.
What about Elvin? What would Elvin hear?

“I can send you lists of the most likely near hits on these words that don’t seem to fit.
Vinegar, common, anthony.
She probably said something else. Sometimes it helps to look at others in the same phonic spectrum. For instance,
common
gets mixed up with
come on, coming, calm down
, and so on. Maybe that would help.”

Watson looked down at
vinegar
and felt sick to his stomach. Two minutes of silence after Mary said she wanted him to touch her?
And what would Elvin hear?
What if he couldn’t even see her face? What if he was busy touching her, or she was busy touching him, and not looking at the VTD? Elvin would hear nothing. And unless he could see her face or the VTD, he wouldn’t even know she was talking.

Vinegar is common anthony.

For no apparent reason, he suddenly recalled one of the articles retrieved by his Internet spider named Rachel: “Are Animals Capable of Deception?” The answer: an emphatic yes, as evidenced by Frans de Waal, who observed subordinate male chimpanzees after they had furtively sought and obtained sexual favors from adult females who “belonged” to dominant males. If the alpha males discovered their subordinates in flagrante delicto, the young bucks covered their erect penises and made nice.
Just talking, Boss. Watercooler stuff. No big.
Watson could vividly imagine himself covering his penis with his hands if Arthur, R. J. Connally, Judge Stang, or his faithful father caught him at the portals of Palmquist’s pearly pink gates.
“No, really, I was just looking out for the interests of my client.”

“That would help a lot, if you would fax the other possible matches to me,” said Watson. “I’ll just go back and work on them in my office. But”—he looked at his watch, feeling his stomach cramp, pretending he had just noticed the time—“uh, I have to file something in court,” he lied.

“Most of it looks fairly reliable,” Crowell said, staring at the screen, “especially the simple words. But, even if you figure out what she said when the machine typed
vinegar common anthony
, it would be tough to prove it in court.”

“Yeah,” said Watson. “I see what you mean.” He thought of Mary Whitlow squirming in Myrna’s office. Vengeance pinching her doughface into lobes and blisters of rage.
“Jimmy never did say what would happen if he fucked around on me. I guess he knows now.”

A chill gripped the insides of his ribs, along with a sudden irresistible urge to think of his client and his avenging wife the way Dr. Palmquist thought of them: big mice. Or maybe white-trash vervet monkeys.

He thanked Crowell and walked out to his Honda, looking around at the minimalls and movie theaters teeming with other primates going about their monkey business. Material brains in material girls and boys, programmed and being programmed to survive. The human race seemed to regress before his eyes, and he was slouching backward with them. The Whitlows were troglodytes fresh from the caves. And he was—what? Before long he would be a small-brained, small-minded (is there a difference?) moral dinosaur gasping in the poisonous atmosphere of modern ideas. Nature has a brain, and Watson and the Whitlows and Myrna and Judge Stang were all just a small bundle of neurons
in an organism that lived forever and was populated by humans, and other animals—diseases, growths infesting the earth’s skin.

As he took the ramp back onto Highway 40, he thought about Mary Whitlow. Her statements—from field reports and TDD printouts, in person, on the VTD—bobbed like corpses in the swamp of his thoughts, and sank again, taking with them his opinion of the human race.

The day after she found out her husband had cavalierly administered VD to her during a session of love-making, she typed a message to Elvin Brawley: “I just want us to be alone together. And next week, James will be gone to Nevada. I want to see you and have you touch me with your signs.”

To the MP in the emergency room: “I was with my boyfriend. I was getting ready to go down on him. His pants were unzipped. My husband came home and shot him. He made me call the police and tell them it was a rape.”

“James help me vinegar is common anthony.”

His car took the exit to the Gage Institute at Ignatius Medical Center. He hadn’t thought about going there, really, it just sort of happened. If the nuns were to put him on trial for driving his car to this location, perhaps he could formulate a defense based upon a mental defect or disease. He clearly knew and appreciated the difference between right and wrong, but he was unable to conform his behavior to his own moral code. Episodic dyscontrol? Mental defect? Irresistible impulse?

Call her what you will, he found the target of his irresistible impulse sitting in the L of her worktables, hunched over her keyboard and a tray containing a pink organ, about the size of a big garlic bulb, suspended in solution. She glanced up at him and said, “Oh. Hold a sec.” She addressed her monitor and continued clicking and adjusting entries in the dialogue box of a database matrix.

A part of his brain asked the other parts,
Why am I here?
He was sleepwalking, a melody stuck in a repetitive, self-destructive fugue. His optic nerves translated images of her near-perfect, biology-of-beauty face back somewhere in his visual cortex. Fears from too many different parts of his life were swarming like bugs on the surface of the pond called consciousness, the same swamp containing Mary’s vinegar and lies. The fold of her lab coat opened on another tight Lycra sweater
(navy blue, this time), revealing the rondure of her right breast—plump, gibbous, swelling in the shadows. He spotted another floral motif straining under the sweater. Probably from a new line of lingerie called the Near Occasion of Sin. His spinal cord sprouted what felt like an extra column of lumbar disks in his pants.
I’m ready now.

His nose quivered at the faint odor of pickling solution. Formaldehyde? Formalin? He studied the fleshy-looking specimen, which was shaped like a very small trussed raw turkey—covered by the same pinkish-white wrinkled skin with permanent goose bumps—suspended by wires in the solution, with a couple of clear tubes running into it.

“What is …?” began Watson, his queasiness approaching nausea again, hoping whatever it was had not come from a human being.