Neuropath (32 page)

'Mia-Mia-Mia-Mia!' Thomas cried.

'Shut-up-shut-up-shut-up,' he exclaimed. 'I'm trying to think!'

Without warning they passed through a station. It opened like a white-tiled miracle. Thomas glimpsed a handful of astonished faces, gaping in the drab light.

'Did you see it?' Mia exclaimed.

'See what?'

'The fucking station! Did you see which station?'

'No.'

'Fuck!' Mia began bouncing up and down in his seat, punching and slapping the steering wheel. 'We're fucked!' he cried. Tears of frustration glittered in his eyes. 'We are well and truly fucked!'

Then Thomas remembered.

'Stop,' he said.

'What?'

'Stop the fucking truck! Stop!'

The Toyota slid sideways. Metal popped and crunched. They were wedged to an instant stop.

'We've bought ourselves a window,' Thomas said, reaching back to unbuckle his son. 'We have to hurry.'

Dumb luck. They left the Toyota a ticking ruin behind them, headlights squashed against looming tunnel walls. They humped over the soot-enameled tracks, then followed a series of closeted service tunnels to a miraculously unlocked door. The next station. Trying not to blink against the antiseptic light, they ambled beneath the security cameras with the other exiting travelers.

They climbed to the mighty surface, New York, then walked with urban purpose.

Breathless, they sheltered in an alley next to some kind of defunct club. Sirens seemed to claw the air from every direction. Mia held Frankie against his chest, rocking him and rubbing his back. He watched Thomas apprehensively. Like him, Thomas imagined he could see
them—
whoever they were—in his mind's eye, running bio-metric searches using various search criteria, replaying images from all the traffic cameras surrounding the subway exit they took—which they
knew
they took, because of the AI security system installed in the subways three years earlier.

Terrorist counter-measures. They had pinned the world down like a butterfly.

Thomas pulled an ivory business card from his inner pocket, used the phone that Neil had given him.

'Mr Gyges,' he said, shocked to hear his own voice distorted in the ear piece. 'It's me. It's Tho—'

'Don't say a word!' the billionaire snapped. 'Their networks can recognize names, even rudimentary contents, as easily as they can voices. And try to stay calm. They can even detect vocal stress patterns. They'll be scouring everything looking for you. Everything.'

'I-I don't understand.'

'I think you do. You wouldn't be using a modulator otherwise.'

'Listen… Mr Gyges, what you said back—'

'I don't need this kind of exposure. Not now.'

His thoughts raced.
Something-something
—

'Then why are you up? Why are you watching the news coverage?'

Silence.

'Look… Mr Gyges. I don't know where he is, but I will, very soon—'

'Just tell me where you are,' the gruff voice said. 'I'll send a car.'

Thomas gave him the nearest intersection and a description of the boarded-over bar. 'Please,' Thomas added, 'hurry.'

But the line had already clicked into silence.

He crouched in the darkness, astonished that he would ever find this much comfort in the absence of light. Then he sobbed, thinking of what Sam had said not three days before.

'
There are only martyrs now…
'

'Shhhh,' Mia murmured to his son. 'Shhhh, laddie.' The look he gave Thomas was wide and scared. He knew nothing would be the same after this, Thomas realized. He knew the stakes. 'You trust this asshole?'

'Yes,' Thomas said after a moment. 'In a sense, he's lost more than I have.'

They heard the roar of a wound out six-cylinder. A police cruiser flashed across the mouth of the alleyway, whipping up litter like leaves in its wake.

'I gotta feeling,' Thomas added lamely.

The car arrived several minutes afterward, a black beemer with tinted windows. It coasted to a stop at the mouth of the alley. The driver was East Indian, very smartly dressed. He simply stepped out of the still-running vehicle and began walking.

'I'm driving,' Mia said, hoisting Frankie to hand him over.

'No,' Thomas said. 'Once we get out of the city, I'll drop you off.'

'Are you fucking kidd—'

'I can't afford to spook Neil. You know that.'

Mia nodded, hitched Frankie higher onto his shoulder. They walked to the car together.

Neil was right. It took time to assess and to organize. You could still slip through so long as you didn't hesitate. They used Bill's television to guide them through the police cordon before it could be effectively closed. Then they tossed it out just to be safe. Who knew what the Feds could do?

Perhaps it was the beemer's soundproofing, or simply their post-adrenalin exhaustion, but a deceptive sense of normalcy crept into their drive out of the city. The sky was brightening in the east. Early-morning commuters were beginning to populate the roads. The world suddenly seemed orderly—servile even.

Thomas found himself thinking about coffee, even though he knew that his horror was likely just beginning.

'I hope they pick out a nice one,' Mia murmured at one point, staring out over the dark Hudson.

'Nice what?' Thomas asked.

'Picture. Sooner or later they're going to start flashing pictures of me and my old act.'

Thomas glanced at his Number One Neighbor.

Mia snorted. 'What did you think? That the morning
Post
would read "PSYCHOLOGIST AND
NEIGHBOR
ABDUCT BRAIN-DAMAGED SON"? It'll be "PSYCHOLOGIST AND
CROSS-DRESSER"
, trust me.'

'I hadn't even thought about it.'

'I'd bet my pink panty paycheck. Psychologists? Everyone knows you can't trust psychologists. You can't trust anyone who actually
knows
the rules. Once you know them, you can manipulate them. And cross-dressers… Well, they're just fucked up to begin with. They can't even dress right, let alone aim at the right hole.'

Thomas stared at the road in the headlights, at the lane-marking lines roping to either side, thinking of that word, 'right.' Humans were judging machines, hard-wired to conserve the beliefs and attitudes that were required to keep stone-age communities afloat. They condemned so quickly, so regularly, because once it was imperative for their survival. Now, it was little more than psychodrama, yet another set of maladapted reflexes. People like Mia were mocked and ridiculed not for
loving wrong
, but because
someone
had to be mocked and ridiculed.

'It could be a good thing though,' Thomas said after a pause.

'What are you talking about?'

'Not the ridicule. I mean the publicity. So long as we turn
ourselves
in, I'd be surprised if any of this made the courts.' Thomas breathed deep for what seemed the first time in weeks. 'There'll be threats, certainly. But there's a good chance we could simply get away with this.' He smiled, glancing away from the road. 'All thanks to your peculiar choice of evening attire.'

Mia didn't look convinced. 'You don't have family in Alabama,' he said.

The sun was full and low in the east when he dropped Mia off at an Exxon just outside Tarrytown. Everything, the dull-shining pumps, the gum-freckled pavement, possessed the air of cold things warming to the rush of daily life. Cars shot past, roaring as though driving across paste.

'Take care, Tommy,' Mia said, leaning into his window. He glanced at Frankie slumped in the back. 'That goes for him too.'

'I will.' Thomas swallowed at a pang in his throat. 'Remember, lie low for a day or so. Keep away from cameras—anything connected. Then turn yourself in.'

A pensive nod—reluctant even. 'Watch out for that bastard. Remember the Neil you knew is dead.'

Thomas gazed at the man, found himself, in spite of everything, begging with his eyes. 'Tell me this is going to work.'

Mia flinched. For a moment, he managed to smile in reassurance, but his expression faltered, became slack with admission. He looked like someone turned inside out for giving.

'What the fuck do I know, Tommy.'

A numb and breathless nod.

Mia pulled his arms from the door, backed away. 'This is crazy,' he said, his eyes brimming with tears. He pulled a hand through his hair. Though he stood straight and motionless, he looked as though he might be falling. 'Crazy-crazy.'

Thomas clicked the window, watched the tinted glass swallow his Number One Neighbor. He dropped the shift into drive, began pulling away. He didn't notice that Frankie's eyes had popped open.

Not until he began screaming.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

August 31st, 8.26 a.m.

All that separated luck from grace, Thomas's grandmother had told him once, was the sincerity of the prayer beforehand.

Car after car slipped past the shining black BMW, weaving between the elephantine eighteen-wheelers. Beautiful coeds, yakking and laughing on their palmtops. Resentful punks with buttoned lips, staring and scoffing at the German engineered lines. Old women, eyes fixed religiously forward, their hands 10 and 2 on the steering wheel. Sleek mothers. Wizened golfers. Cockpit businessmen. All of them propelled by soundless engines, skating the lines of utterly disconnected lives.

All of them oblivious to the leather-padded sarcophagus that whistled in their midst, sucking up scream after scream.

The road was little more than a whisper, the countryside a wobble, the world a brief windshield glare. Thomas Bible reached back to soothe his only son. Little-boy limbs cringed from his adult hand.

'You are mine, you know.'

Screaming, his mouth pulled into a chimpanzee grimace.

'They used me as bait to find Uncle Cass. Do you remember Sam, honey? Daddy's friend?'

Coughing, convulsing.

'Sam was going to sacrifice me.' He swallowed hard. 'When it seemed I might die on the altar, she sacrificed you as well.'

Small, warding hands scraping the leather-backed seats.

'You
are
mine, you know. No matter what Uncle Cass might say.'

Eyes rolling in bovine horror. Screaming.

'Sacrifice,' Thomas wept. 'Sacrifice makes fathers.'

He called Neil when he was supposed to. He always did what he was supposed to. According to Nora, it was one of the reasons she had left him. He was too much a part of the machinery—the fucking machinery.

With the road an abstraction in his periphery, he scrawled down the directions to the new location on a Taco Bell napkin—some place in Connecticut. 'How can I trust you?' he asked the distorted voice.

'It all comes down to guesses, Goodbook,' Neil said. 'The trick is deciding which ones are worth dying for.'

Thomas hung up, glanced at his shrieking son. He looked back to the summer-shining road, stared at the passing promised land, the parallax of asphalt and brick. As always, the horizon held the distances motionless while what was near whipped into the funnel behind him.

Control was long gone. All he had was a weeping litany: 'Frankie-shh-shh-please-Frankie-shh-shh-please.'

Empty words. Pathetic words. Words that could only wheeze and grovel before his son's terrible scream, before the most ancient prayer of all. The first great transmission.

Everything. Everything was stuck on absolute transmit. The mountains. The oceans. Even the stars. Nothing listened. Nothing. The skulls of a million lambs cracked in the jaws of a million lions. A billion human screams, and each one unheard. Nothing more than a flicker in the abyss. Even less…

No consequences outside the inevitable. No point to yank short the knife's never-ending edge.

Only children died—Thomas understood that now. Small. Helpless. Uncomprehending.

Everyone was an infant in the end.

It seemed almost normal. An old, upstate friend, waving from the porch. A summer wind whisking through the trees. A child who had to be lifted from the back seat.

Whatever voice Frankie possessed, he had screamed away a long time ago. Now he simply rasped and twitched the way a dying addict might. Only rolling eyes and an old-man grimace spoke of the horror that cycled through his soul.

This could not be his son.

This could not be.

Thomas climbed the cement steps, looked up across the white, colonial facade, squinted at the sparking sun. He blinked at Neil, his thoughts beyond hope or hate.

Buff smile. Pained eyes.

Neil pressed open the door so that he could carry Frankie into the polished gloom. Thomas felt a reassuring hand fall on his shoulder as he passed. There was a faint prick against the nape of his neck. Thomas turned, too exhausted to be alarmed, let alone startled. He simply looked at the monster who was his best friend. His knees cracked like wax. Frankie slid from his arms. Everything swayed, dust bunnies dancing about a vast existential broom.

'Ah, Goodbook,' the shadow said. 'You should know by now. No matter what the rule…'

The world collapsed into milk and watercolor.

'I go sideways.'

'The central nervous system of homo sapiens,' Neil was saying (though just when he had
started
saying this Thomas couldn't recall), 'isn't like the heart or the stomach. It isn't a distinct organ with discrete functions. So much of our brains' structure is determined by
other
brains. In a certain sense, there's only
one
brain, Goodbook, sprawled across the face of the planet, busily rewiring itself into a key that will unlock the universe. One central nervous system with eight billion synapses.'

Thomas was bolted to some kind of apparatus, almost upright. Something held his head immobile—profoundly immobile. There was no play of skin or hair against restraints. It was as though his skull had been screwed or welded into a building's architecture. Looking up, he could see some kind of metallic rim beyond his brow, but nothing more. The room before him was spare and spacious: cinder-block walls painted white, an unfinished ceiling above glaring fluorescent lights. From the surrounding angles he could tell he occupied the center of the room, but he could see nothing behind him. Cases had been stacked in a corner to his right, next to a fat-wheeled dolly. Two tables filled the space immediately before him, crowded with flat-screens, keyboards, and several devices he could not recognize. Wearing sandals and shorts, Neil had turned to hunch over an open case. Tubes glinted from dark foam slots.

Neil walked up to him, holding a syringe upright in a latex-sheathed hand. 'And right now, my friend, you and I are the only synapse that matters.' He leaned forward and Thomas felt a brittle prick in his jugular. Neil rubbed the spot with a cottonball. He winked. 'A little something to quicken your recovery from the anesthetic.'

'Frankie…' Thomas croaked. It seemed the only language he knew.

The handsome face darkened. 'There's been a small change in plan, Goodbook.'

'
Frankie!'
Thomas screamed. He began spitting and straining against the vice that held him.

Neil's look silenced him. It was something without limbs or prehensile appendages, something belonging to a snake soul, as unreachable as a grinning Nazi commandant or a glaring Hutu machete-man.

'There's no need to worry.'

'Wuh-worry?' Thomas cried, tears spilling from his eyes. 'What-the-fuck-do—'

Neil turned to a keyboard on the nearby table, began tapping keys. Thomas heard the hum of something overhead, like a printer standing by.

'You son of a bitch!' Thomas raved. 'You fucking
cunt!
I'll kill you! Kill yo—!'

But he paused, first in confusion, then in dawning realization. Neil was right. There was no need to worry. He breathed deeply and smiled. How could he be such an ass?

'Better?' Neil asked.

'Yes,' Thomas said, grinning. 'Much better. What did you do?'

'Not much. So you're not worried about Frankie?'

'Fuck him. He'll be fine.'

Neil shook his head. 'No, Goodbook, I'm afraid he won't.'

'No?'

'No. Actually he's dead.'

Thomas laughed. 'No kidding?'

'No kidding. There's only one procedure that can undo an affect feedback loop—at least the devilish way Mackenzie does it.'

'What's that?'

'A bullet to the head.'

Thomas snorted with genuine laughter. Intellectually, he knew it shouldn't be funny, but it
was
… And it seemed the most natural thing in the world that it should be. 'You always were crazy.'

Frankie. Poor little kid. He was going to miss the little bugger…

'So all this,' Neil asked curiously, 'seems normal to you?'

Thomas tried to shrug. 'Well, I suppose to an outsider it would
seem
strange, but it really is quite normal when you think about it.'

'How so?'

Thomas flashed him a bright
Are-you-stupid
? smile. 'We're longtime friends. We always play gags on each other. Though I suppose we're getting a little too old for this.'

Neil scratched behind his ear with a pen. 'But at some level you
know
what's happening, don't you? You know that I'm stimulating the neural circuits responsible for your feeling of normalcy and ambient wellbeing.'

Thomas frowned, happy and perplexed. 'What can I say? You always were elaborate.'

Neil shook his head the bemused way he always did whenever his cynicism was confirmed. 'This,' he said, wagging an I-told-you-so finger. 'This is the part that sold me, that made me
realize'

'You've lost me, Neil.'

'The confabulations. I mean, think about it, Goodbook,
I just shot your son in the head
, and you genuinely believe everything is right as rai—'

'C'mon,' Thomas interrupted, trying to shake his head. 'You're over-analyzing again. I-know-I-know, listen to the neurotic psychologist talking about over-analysis, but sometimes it really is just that simple. Sometimes you just gotta—'

'It was the same with the first terrorists I tweaked in this way,' Neil continued. 'You know I actually spent two days arguing with one, trying to get him to see how dire his situation was? Two fucking days! It was like the guy only had two buttons, shuffle and repeat. Did you know the brain has an entire module dedicated to the production of verbal rationalizations?'

'Yeah-yeah,' Thomas said, realizing how much he missed shooting the cerebral breeze with Neil. 'Yeah, Mackenzie babbled about that for a bit.'

An appraising look. 'Well, trust me, if you want to get a sense of just how much consciousness—
life
—is simply a mechanistic output, try going toe-to-toe with a rationalization module. I could literally spend the rest of my life arguing with you, and you would just come up with reason after reason why me shooting Frankie in the head is the most normal, sensible thing in the world.'

What was he talking about? Life was filled with contingencies—demands—that no one had any control over. Even the craziest shit in the world could be reasonable, given the right circumstances. 'Look,' Thomas said, 'I understand how it looks. But Neil, you of all people know that there's always more than what meets the eye.' Even as he said this, Thomas realized it was for naught. Neil was watching him with inward eyes, the look he always had when he was busy thinking about what to say next rather than listening. 'There's always more! Neil. Neil! That's all I'm saying.
Look deeper
.'

Neil waited with mock politeness, as though wanting to make sure it was safe to continue. 'Would you believe it was dinner at my parents' that finally let me put it all together?' he said. 'You know my Pop, always railing on about this and that, never letting you get a word in edgewise, and never,
never
acknowledging that he could be wrong. I was just sitting there—Mom had cooked a turkey—and I suddenly realized that his rationalization module was on overdrive, that the only real difference between him and my subjects was that he'd been
accidentally-wired
. I realized he was just another machine. And Mom too, clucking about how she didn't baste the bird enough. I sat there watching them cycle through their behavioral routines. Can you imagine, seeing your
mom
as a machine?'

Thomas cackled. 'C'mon, Neil. Listen to yourself! Your mom is
not
a machine. She's too fucking nutty!'

But Neil wasn't listening. 'I'd reached some kind of threshold, I think, working for the NSA. It had been happening for a while: I would just notice certain behaviors, and think to myself, their caudate nucleus is lighting up, feeding information forward to the prefrontal cortex, yadda-yadda. But after that turkey dinner, I began understanding
everything
others did in those terms…'

His look drifted inward.

'That was when I reread your book.'

Thomas snorted, though the absence of the accompanying head and hand movement made it sound odd. 'Now you're really scraping the bottom, don't you think?'

Neil's smile was at once skeptical and genuine. He turned back to the nearest table, lifted a beaten hardcover from a sheaf of papers. Thomas glimpsed
Through the Brain Darkly
embossed in gold across its black fabric spine. Neil opened it to one of several orange sticky notes that drooped like tongues from the closed pages. Holding it out and up like a preacher, he read, '"If we know anything, we know this: the regions of the brain implicated in consciousness can only access a minute fraction of the information processed by the brain as a whole. Conscious experience is not simply the product of the brain, it is the product of a brain
that can only see the merest sliver of itself
."' He looked up, eyebrows raised. 'So you no longer agree with that?'

Another unsuccessful attempt at a shrug. 'Facts are facts. Look, Neil—'

But he had continued reading.

'"The magician's magic depends on the audience remaining oblivious to her manipulations. As soon as we look over her shoulder, the magic vanishes. Consciousness is no different. Oblivious to the manipulations that make it possible, experience makes do with what can only be called illusions. Consciousness is always 'now' because the neural correlates of consciousness, though quite adept at processing time, cannot process the time of this processing. Consciousness is always unitary because the neural correlates of consciousness, though quite adept at differentiating environmental features, cannot differentiate their own processes. Again and again, the fundamental features of experience only make sense when we construe them as the result of various
incapacities
…"'

Neil closed the book, recited the rest from memory. '"And this is why consciousness disappears whenever we dare look over the brain's shoulder. We are little more than walking, talking coin tricks."'