Neuropath (7 page)

Thomas shook his head, his thoughts immersed in a fog of competing demands and confusions. Too much was happening too fast. 'Like I said, I'm not a neurologist. I'll tell you anything you want to know, but otherwise, I'm just a frumpy academic.'

'Professor—'

'Tom. Call me Tom.'

'Tom, then. Look, with everything going on…' She hesitated. 'Did you know that since the North Atlantic Drift collapsed, the number of eco-terrorist attacks against American targets has tripled?'

By coincidence, Thomas had glanced at the television over the bar as she said this: CNN images of the freak blizzard in northern France. A blizzard before September. Of course everyone was blaming America and her former love affair with SUVs.

'The Bureau's resources,' Samantha continued, 'were already stretched to breaking point by the anti-terrorism campaign. And now the Chiropractor is loose in the city—worse even than the Son of Sam. How many agents do you think Washington has assigned to hunt down Neil Cassidy?'

'I have no idea.'

'Eighteen, most of them part time. There's only the three of us—Shelley, Danny, and myself—here in New York City, along with some loaners from the NYPD. Everyone else is working on the Chiropractor case. We need your help, Tom. Honestly.'

So there it was, her motive for this friendly beer. She wanted him to profile his best friend, provide a framework they could use to explain, and perhaps even anticipate, his moves. Thomas studied her face, this time trying to look past the hum of her beauty. She looked all of twenty-five, but something about her demeanor said she was at least thirty.

'Look, Agent Logan, I—'

'What about vengeance, professor?' she asked sharply. 'What about nailing the man who nailed your wife?'

There it was. She had taken the shortcut.

He should have been offended but… He seemed to have no room for more fury.

'The Argument,' he said, his eyes drawn once again to the TV.

She scowled and shook her head. 'I don't understand.'

Images of snow plows were replaced by that of rioters in frozen Paris streets. Howling Gallic faces, collars up, their fear and anger condensed in their exhalations. The more pessimistic climatologists had been right: global warming had tipped the climatic equilibrium, flooding the oceans with fresh water from the ice-caps, and the North Atlantic Drift, which had warmed Europe from Lisbon to Moscow—or what was left of Moscow—had simply disappeared. Given its latitude, Europe was slowly turning into a version of the Canadian Arctic.

What have we done?

'Yoo hoo, professor?'

Thomas cleared his throat, drew a sweaty hand across his cheek and jaw. 'On that BD you guys showed me this morning. When the girl asked him what he was doing, the voice—Neil, I suppose—said he was making an argument.'

'Yeah, so?'

'Well, I think I know what that argument is. I think I know Neil's motive.'

'You gotta understand: Neil and I were close in college. Real close.'

'No offense, but I have to ask: were you lovers?'

Thomas smiled. 'He punched me in the asshole once while playing "drunk WWE", but that's pretty much as romantic as it got.'

Samantha laughed. 'I've had worse dates. Trust me.'

'We weren't lovers,' he said, 'but only because the physical attraction wasn't there. We were like brothers, twin brothers, who just knew what the other was thinking, who just…' Thomas shook his head. 'Trusted.'
Even then, Neil? Were you fucking me over even then
? 'So what does this have to do with the argument?' He took a quick drink, more to organize his thoughts than anything else. 'Well, Neil and I weren't fascinated so much with each other as we were fascinated by the same things—the same topics. We used to debate stuff endlessly, from nuclear weapons to NAFTA. Then we took this philosophy class on eschatology—on all things apocalyptic—taught by this Vietnam-era burnout who was obsessed with the end of the world: Professor Skeat. Professor Walter J. Skeat.' He told her about the course, how it moved from the nuclear to the biblical to the environmental apocalypse, remembering as he did so all the youthful flares of insight that had made the class into a kind of religious experience. Everything became fraught with significance when the world was on its deathbed. Every word became a last word.

'But what really caught our attention,' he said, his gaze lost between memories, 'and what old Skeat spent half the time talking about, was something he called the
semantic
apocalypse, the apocalypse of meaning.'

'Why did it interest you so?'

Thomas took refuge in another drink, suddenly conscious of her scrutiny. Did she find him anywhere near as attractive as he found her? Women were just as keyed to facial symmetry as men, but their preference for infantile versus masculine features tended to vary with their menstrual cycle—which was to say, fertility. Thomas supposed he had the symmetry nailed—he liked to think he was a handsome dog—but he was definitely on the juvenile end when it came to his features. A true blue baby face.

Was that why Nora had betrayed him? Had Neil simply caught her ovulating?

'Because,' he said, struggling to recover his previous train of thought, 'Skeat claimed the semantic apocalypse had
already
happened. That was how the Argument started.'

Samantha frowned. '
The
Argument?'

'That's what we called it.'

'So what was it?'

'Remember how I said science had scrubbed the world of purpose? For some reason, wherever science encounters intention or purpose in the world, it snuffs it out. The world as described by science is arbitrary and random. There's innumerable causes for everything, but no reasons for anything.'

'Sure,' Samantha said. 'Shit happens. There's no…' She paused and cocked her head, her look appreciative. 'There's no meaning to what happens. What happens just… happens.'

Thomas smiled, impressed. Of course she was nowhere near agreeing with him—the Argument cut across the grain of too much hardwiring and socialization for that—but she had the versatility to at least entertain the idea. He could see why her superiors would grant her the latitude for something like this, sharing a beer with a possible material witness. A true professional, she was bent on understanding rather than forcing her own views. The
truth
of the Argument was irrelevant, here.

Wasn't it?

'Exactly,' he replied. 'The "will of God" or what have you is indistinguishable from dumb luck. That's why car insurance companies don't give a damn how much you pray—let alone to whom. It often seems otherwise, but once you factor in our penchant for self-serving interpretation and cherry-picking, it becomes painfully clear that we're deluding ourselves.'

'You mean with religion?'

Thomas paused over his beer. People were painfully credulous, capable of believing anything. And once they did believe, they had innumerable strategies for skewing and dismissing, all the while convinced they were the most open-minded and even-handed person they knew. They rewrote memories. They made up rationalizations, then believed them with religious conviction. When they didn't miss counter-evidence altogether, they warped it into further proof of their own cherished views. The brain was a spin doctor, plain and simple. The experimental evidence for this was out and out incontrovertible, but thanks to a culture bent on pseudo-empowerment, scarcely a peep could be heard above the self-congratulatory roar. Nobody, from truck drivers to cancer researchers, wanted to hear how self-absorbed and error-prone they were. Why bother with a scientific tongue-lashing when you could have a corporate hand-job?

'Everyone thinks they've won the Magical Belief Lottery, Agent Logan.'

'Which is?'

He nodded at the parade of passers-by beyond the plate-glass window. 'Everyone thinks they more or less have a handle on things, that they, as opposed to the billions who disagree with them, have somehow
lucked
into the one true belief system.'

Her face crooked into a rueful smile. 'I've seen my fair share of delusions, trust me. The people we hunt burn them for fuel.'

'Not just the people you hunt, Agent Logan.
All
of us.'

'All of us?' she repeated. Something about her tone told Thomas that the distinction between her and her quarry was important to her. No surprise there, given the things she must have witnessed over the years.

He leaned back, holding her gaze. 'You do realize that every thought, every experience, every element of your consciousness is a product of various neural processes? We know this because of cases of brain damage. All I have to do is press a coat hanger past your eye, wriggle it around a little, and you'd be utterly changed.' This description never failed to provoke expressions of disgust in his classroom, but Agent Logan seemed unimpressed.

'So?'

'You're right. In a sense it's a trivial point. Every time you take an aspirin you're assuming you're a biomechanism, something that can be tweaked with chemicals. But think about what I said. Your
every experience
is a product of neural processes.'

It seemed he could sense Neil leaning over his shoulder as he said this, a grinning aura, knowing full well the destination, but morbidly curious as to the path old Goodbook would take. Neil looked at heads the way ill-tempered children looked at toys—as things to be fucked with.

'I'm not following you, professor.'

Thomas hooked his shoulders and palms in a professorial
you're-not-going-to-like-this
gesture. 'Well, how about free will? That's a kind of experience, isn't it?'

'Of course.'

'Which means free will is a product of neural processes.'

A wary pause. 'It has to be, I guess.'

'So then how is it free? I mean, if it's a product, and it
is
a product—I could show you case studies of brain damaged patients who think they will
everything
that happens, who think they command the clouds on the horizon, the birds in the trees. If the will is a product of neural functioning then how could it be free?'

Frowning, Sam suddenly swigged her beer, head back, the way a truck driver might. Thomas watched her slender throat, as white as a barked sapling, flex as she swallowed.

She gasped and said, 'I just
chose
to drink, didn't I?'

'I don't know. Did you?'

For the first time her face crinkled into a look that was openly incredulous. 'Of course. What else could it be?'

'Well, as a matter of
fact
—fact, unfortunately, not speculation—your brain simply processed a chain of sensory inputs, me yapping, then generated a particular behavioral output, you drinking.'

'But…' She trailed.

'That's not the way it feels,' Thomas said, completing her sentence. 'It's pretty clear that our sense of willing things is… well, illusory. It started with a variety of experiments showing how easy it is to fool people into thinking that they're willing things they actually have no control over. That laid the groundwork. Then, when the costs of neuro-imaging began to plummet—remember all the hoopla about low-field MRIs several years back?—more and more researchers demonstrated they could actually determine their subject's choices
before
they were conscious of making them. Willing, it turns out, is an addon of some kind, something that comes to us after the fact.'

Now she seemed genuinely troubled. Thomas had seen the same look on a thousand undergraduate faces, the look of a brain, Neil would have said, at odds with itself—one whose knowledge could not be reconciled with its experience.

The brain, it turned out, could wrap itself around most everything but itself, which was why it invented minds… souls.

'But that can't be…' Sam started. 'I mean, if we don't really make choices, then how could…'

Thomas grimaced in sympathy. 'How could anything be right or wrong? Good or evil?'

'Exactly. Morality. Doesn't morality mean we
have
to have free will?'

'Who said morality was real?'

She worked her bottom lip for a moment, then added, 'Bullshit. It's gotta be…'

A crimson eighteen-wheeler roared down the street outside the window, hauling who knew what to who knew where. Its diesel roar faded into the sound of a crowd cheering through the tin of television speakers. The Braves, a canned voice said, were on the warpath once again.

'I mean, I make decisions, all the time.'

She was arguing now, Thomas realized, not simply entertaining academic claptrap for the purposes of tracking down Neil. The Argument had a way of doing that to people. He could remember the horror it had engendered in him years ago in Skeat's class. The sense that some kind of atrocity had been committed, though without date or location. More than a few times he and Neil had made the mistake of debating it while catastrophically stoned—a mistake for Thomas, anyway. He had simply sat rigid, crowded by paranoias, his eyes poking and probing the tissue that had once been his thoughtless foundation, while Neil had laughed and chortled, pacing the room as if it were a cage. Thomas could see him, hair askew, ducking to peer into his face. 'Whoa, dude… Think about it. You're a
machine
—a machine!—dreaming that you have a soul. None of this is real, man, and they can fucking
prove
it.'

Thomas rubbed his eyes. 'In controlled circumstances, researchers can determine the choices we make before we're even conscious of making them. The first experiments were crude and hotly contested—pioneered by a guy called Libet. But over the years, as techniques improved and the fidelity of neuro-imaging increased, so did the ability to pin down the precursors of decision making. Now…' Thomas trailed with an apologetic shrug. 'What can I say? People still argue, of course—they always will when it comes to cherished beliefs.'

'Free will is an illusion,' Sam said in a strange tone. 'Even now, everything I'm saying…'

Thomas swallowed, suddenly apprehensive. He had been carefully folding his napkin as he talked; now he set it like a tiny white book on the table before him. 'Only a small fraction of your brain is involved in conscious experience, which is why so much of what we do is unconscious. The bulk of your brain's processing falls outside what you can experience; it simply doesn't exist for your consciousness, not even as an absence. That's why your thoughts simply come out of nowhere, apparently uncontrolled, undetermined… Yours and yours alone.'