Neuropath

  Neil laughed, looked appreciatively at the largely invisible apparatus that held Thomas. 'You can see why we used to call her Mary, Mother of God.'

  Thomas tried to speak, but could not.

  'Some things are untouchable, though, just as you predicted in Through the Brain. The experiences are always unitary, and they're always now, as you would expect, given that they're the by-products of what the brain lacks.'

  Thomas tried to speak again, but could only cough.

  Neil smiled. 'Nothing to worry about. Just a little neurotransmitter backwash. You might feel dopey for a couple of days, but nothing more.'

  'Ah…' Thomas rasped. 'Ah-ah…' He breathed deep, shuddered, and tried again. 'Ah… bomination…'

  'Yesss,' Neil drawled. 'The future.'

  His body buzzing, boneless and immobile. Neil humming some tuneless song, swinging his chair between computers.

  C'mon, Goodbook. Get a handle… Think clear…

  Think straight.

  Frankie was dead. As hard as that thought clenched his chest, Thomas knew he had to seal it away, concentrate on the now. Neil was mad. In-fucking-sane. That meant his priorities were all his own, that his thought processes possessed their own alien logic. If he was going to survive, Thomas knew, he would have to figure out what that logic was. Everyone was predictable, in the end. Even lunatics followed rules.

  'You—' he started, only to be interrupted by a fit of coughing. He could feel Mary's screws bracing his skull. He cleared his throat, blinked tears from his eyes.

  Frankie… The little king, pronouncing his love through a mouthful of Cheerios.

  'I have powers, Daddy… soooper powers. If there was a truck, and it was going to run you over, I would save you, Daddy. I would punch that truck and BOOM!'

  Thomas glared at Neil's back. 'So what do you gain, huh, Neil? What does your brain win?'

  Neil spun about in his chair. 'You're supposing the world can be divided into winners and losers.'

  'A game without winners or losers is theatre,' Thomas said in a tone void of all spirit. 'You know that.'

  'Game?' Neil chortled. 'Dude, there's no one keeping score.'

  Thomas leaned against the screws that bound him. 'We are, Neil. I am.'

  His best friend's face became blank with something resembling pity.

  'Like I said. No one.'

  At that instant, Thomas suffered a kind of power outage of the heart. He felt like a dead man breathing.

  He murdered my son… His son…

  'You,' Neil continued, his voice thinned by an implacable sincerity. 'You're the illusion. Think about it, Goodbook. You want to believe I'm doing things to you, when in fact I'm doing things with you. The only reason I can play your thoughts and experiences like a sock puppet is because that's what you are. I'm just slipping my hand over the world's knuckles.'

  Neil had turned away to enter yet more cryptic command strings into the keyboard. 'You want to think,' he was saying, 'that I'm some kind of invader, that ordinarily you occupy the control room. But you know better. The control room's empty; it always has been. Since it lies outside the information horizon of your thalamocortical system, it simply doesn't exist for your consciousness, which is why your thalamocortical system thinks itself an unmoved mover, the floating origin of all your actions.'

  And these seemed the most heartbreaking words of all. It was the Blind Brain Hypothesis, his own argument from Through the Brain Darkly, not simply paraphrased, but enacted. Neil had transformed him into the demonstration of his own outrageous claim. All of it, everything from meaning to self to morality, illusory artifacts of a brain duped by its inability to see itself as a brain. Even these thoughts… Even this very moment!

  He was nothing more than a fragment of something vast and terrible with complexity—something dead. A fragment that could not but see itself as a whole. A ruin that styled itself a little god.

  No-no-no-no-no …

  He couldn't be right. No. No. Not in this!

  'Why are you doing this? Neil! Neil! It's meeeeee. It's fucking Tommy! Why are you doing this to me? What did I do?'

  A vice clamped his throat. Something animal sobbed and snuffled from his chest.

  'Shhhh,' Neil said. 'Easy there, Goodbook. C'mon. Look at me now. No crying. Look at me.'

  Thomas raised his bleary eyes.

  'This isn't punishment. This isn't the expression of some pathological hate or repressed sexual desire. This is love, Thomas. True love—love that knows it's an illusion. I can plug myself into the low-field if you want to see. This brain loves you, that's why it's gone to all this trouble. I think it thinks your brain is its brother, its only brother. I think it's trying to set your brain free.'

  'But Frankeeee,' Thomas keened in a low murmur.

  Frankie …

  'Come,' Neil said. 'It's time you understood why I sent you for Frankie.'

  A moment of heart-stopping hate.

  Neil disappeared behind him. 'You see, I needed time,' he said from the blackness. 'You caught me before I had everything in place.' There was a snap—the release of some kind of mechanism shivered through the apparatus. There was a high-pitched squeal, and Thomas watched the room spin about his axis. Neil had turned him some 30 degrees to the right…

  … so that he could see her laying unconscious on an upright bench like his own.

  Nora.

  He began shaking uncontrollably.

  'No,' Thomas said, but what he heard was little more than an inarticulate gurgle.

  She was dressed in her cougar best: a silky red tank-top and white 'pubic plunge' shorts that were all the rage among college girls. Like him, she was strapped to what looked like a stainless-steel mortuary table spot-welded to a revolving base. A device resembling an upside-down toilet finned with exposed circuit boards hunched over her, obscuring part of her scalp. A cage set with thumbscrews rimmed its nethers, fixing Nora's skull in place. Little lights glared like gargoyle eyes.

  Another Marionette.

  'She's quite all right,' Neil said, opening her eyes and checking her pupil dilation with a pen light.

  'Y-you said,' Thomas managed to exclaim. 'B-but you said! Tha-that this wasn't puh-puh-punishment!'

  Neil frowned. 'I told you already. Our brains are social. They wire themselves in response to the brains around them. Why do you think divorce or bereavement is so disorienting, so painful? Our brains form networks. What do you think happened to us at Princeton? Why do you think it took me so long to see my way past the illusions? It was you, Goodbook. My love for you. Despite all my work, despite Professor Skeat and your book, despite everything, my brain simply couldn't accept that my love for you was meaningless—not for the longest time, anyway. The evolutionary defaults governing loyalty and solidarity, the cooperative bonds that allowed our stone-age ancestors to survive, were too strong.'

  'What the fuck?' Thomas cried. 'What the fuck does that have to do with anything?'

  'Well, that's why I started sleeping with her, for one. I knew that as strong as those evolutionary defaults were, the ones governing sex were even stronger. All my brain needed was an excuse. I seduced her, knowing that afterward, the defaults governing rationalization would take over. I literally played various modules of my brain against one another. Its hard-wired tendencies toward infidelity and self-justifying rationalization against its hard-wired tendency toward loyalty… It wasn't much of a fight, I'm afraid.'

  Thomas's thoughts raced. Something. Something. I have to think of something—

  Neil smiled the way he always did whenever he caught himself in an inaccuracy. 'Of course, it wasn't "me" doing any of this. I was little more than along for the ride. In point of fact, my brain overcame itself.'

  'And my brain can too, Neil. Neil! You don't need all this elaborate hocus pocus. Look, let her go, shut the theater down, and let's you and I get down to business.'

  'Nice try,' Neil replied with a chuckle. 'You need to be decoupled, Goodbook. The others—Powsk
i, Halasz, Forrest and Gyges—they were meant to get your brain processing the Argument again, to reacquaint you in the most urgent and intimate way with the force of your own logic. I had to let you steep, like a cup of fucking tea.'

  'No,' Thomas murmured, thinking of the gallery of obscenities he had witnessed, of all the arguments he had made for the Argument in between. Neil had known he would do this, that he, like most everyone else, would be seduced by the sound of his own voice. 'Never!'

  Neil crinkled his nose, as though smelling a bad joke. 'C'mon, Goodbook. I'm tracking your cortical processes as we speak. You know the score: MRIs tell no lies, my friend.'

  If he could have hung his head, Thomas would have. Even the posture of defeat was denied him.

  Neil grinned with canine pity. 'Your brain needs to process the actual loss of its network, it needs to sec it crash. Only then will it be able to accept, to see through the cartoon mind it confuses for itself.' He squinted as though in sorrow. 'You're just too attached to your imaginary family.'

  Family? The thought almost punched vomit from his stomach.

  Ripper.

  'It was easy enough to lure Nora up here,' the madman continued. 'I left an old cell in her junk drawer a couple of weeks back, something I knew the Feds would overlook. Called her. As you can see, she entertained some notion of seducing me—for Frankie's sake, I imagine. She was part of the plan all along…' He said this last with a preoccupied air: something on the screen to his left had snared his attention. 'Every rebirth requires a baptism, Goodbook.'

  Something strange happened then, something he, as a psychology professor, should have been able to recognize, but could not. A strange buoyancy filled everything, made candy of all the sharp edges. It suddenly seemed that he watched a rubber world, a place filled with foam simulacra.

  That wasn't the woman who had cried tears of joy at their wedding. That wasn't his old roommate. None of this actually happened… There was simply no way. There were no roads between this place and where he lived.

  Neil had returned to his computer terminal. 'Suffering some kind of dissociative fugue, are we?' he called over his shoulder. 'You're lucky I didn't rotate your rack the other way.'

  What was he talking about?

  Then Nora said, 'Tommy?'

  She was weeping.

  He suffered that old rush of protective instincts. Once, before the kids had been born, they had gone to the fair drunk. At the end of one of the rides, she had simply jumped the fence rather than queue with him and the others at the exit: for an instant she had teetered at the blurred fringe of the neighboring Tilt-a-whirl, a bug in the shadow of hammers, and Thomas had felt her peril with more immediacy than he could ever feel his own. He had literally doubled over with relief when she stumbled back out of harm's way.

  But there was no place for her to stumble this time. And he could only double into himself, into a haze of panic that would not let go.

  She was dead. As dead as he was.

  'Shush,' Thomas gasped. 'We'll figure something out.'

  'No… No. There's something you need to know. Something I have to tell you.' Her voice cracked with tears. 'I love you Tommy. I love you so much! How could you ever forgive me?'

  Thomas clamped his eyes shut, tried to will her out of this nightmare. 'He's controlling you.'

  'Who? What do you mean? This is me saying this, Tommy. Me.'

  Thomas felt his face crumple. In the corner of his eye, he could see new lights flicker across the schematic of his brain on Neil's computer. 'But you said you didn't love me. You said you never loved me.'

  'I… didn't. I couldn't…'

  'He's just fucking with you, Nora. Manipulating you.'

  'No-no! You just have to listen for a minute. Okay, Tommy? This is something I have to say. I have to, Tommy, please! I do love you. I don't know why or how, but I can see it now. I can feel it. Oh, Tommy, my heart feels like it's going to explode I love you so much!'

  'Nora. Listen to me carefully, hon—'

  'Why do you do this? Every time! Like it's a mechanical reflex or something. Every time we start exploring our feelings, it's like you… you shrink. Like you're allergic.' Her smile was both persecuted and beatific, as though she were a mother trying to share the glory of Jesus with an atheist son. 'Thomas John Bible,' she cried in a goddamn-you tone. 'I'm telling you that I love you! All you have to do is listen.'

  'But where's that feeling coming from? Huh, Nora? You're bolted to a machine for Christ—'

  'Stop, Tommy, stop! Who cares where it comes from? Really! If you found a winning lottery ticket in your pocket, what would you do? Fret about where it came from, or cash it in? Really, Tommy. It's as simple as that!'

  A cold pit of realization. You spent your whole life with a person, sharing the same inside, too immersed in the intricacies of the relationship to ever clearly comprehend it. It was as if a kind of incapacity was the true measure of belonging to another person, an inability to see the other against the frame of larger events, an inability that found its culmination in the self. All humans belonged to one another in this sense.

  But the woman speaking to him from across the room—she was not his wife; she was not the bundle of encompassing hopes and anxieties that populated his memories. She was scarcely human.

  She was a doll. A machine plugged into a machine.

  'Nora. Please. This is madness.'

  'All the important things are, Tommy! You know that better than anyone.'

  He looked to the monster, his friend, who had turned in his chair to watch their exchange. 'Neil. Stop this, Neil.'

  'You're going to throw that in my face?' Nora cried. 'Him?'

  Thomas paused, struggled with a confusion that was at once a recognition. She wasn't simply a doll. She was a broken one.

  'He's right there, Nora.'

  A kind of concentrated desperation had seized her expression. 'Look. I know I fucked up, Tommy. I know I don't… I don't deserve you. Please. Please, you have to forgive me. I'm not that… that… person. That wasn't me! It was just some lonely, fucked up insecure version of me.'

  'Nora.'

  'She can't see me,' Neil said. 'I've shut down the left hemispheric circuits involved in constructing extrapersonal space. That means she can't see anything on her right side. She can't even see that she doesn't see. Where I'm standing simply doesn't exist for her brain, not even as an absence.'

  'Neil?' Nora said, her passion crimped by alarm. 'Where are you?'

  'Do I need to tell you what you already know?' Neil continued, watching Nora but obviously speaking to Thomas. 'Everything that happens in the brain of someone who truly loves is happening in her brain right now. Every neurochemical transfer. Every storm of synaptic firings.' He smiled as though she were a prized zoo exhibit as he said this. He turned to Thomas, his eyes bright with arrogance and jubilation, the way they always were when he scored some incontrovertible point.

  'True love, Goodbook. She's offering you true love.'

  'Neil?' Nora said. 'Where are you? I'm…'

  'There's nothing true about this,' Thomas spat. 'Nothing. You're controlling her. Forcing her to love.'

  His friend shrugged. 'So? What earthly difference does that make? If it wasn't me who tipped the equilibrium in her brain toward the manifestation of bonding behavior, then what would it be other than an accidental collection of stimuli? A rose brought to the door. A lingering kiss. Heartfelt words. A smile. What does it matter if the world pulls her strings directly, or if it pulls her strings through me?'

  'I'm confused,' Nora murmured. 'I… I…'

  'It matters,' Thomas said.

  'Does it?' Neil sprang from his seat and walked toward Nora, paused just to her right. Nothing about her eyes or expression registered his presence. 'There's a million circumstances that would produce this particular output with this particular brain… love. This'—he held his hands out to the room—'is just one more. Just as natural. Just as meaningless.'

  'Neil? You're
close. I can hear you! Where are you?'

  'Natural?' Thomas asked with savage incredulity. 'What could be natural about this?'

  Laughter. 'Our brains are manipulating machines, Goodbook, each the result of millions of years of evolutionary adaptation to its environment, its world. That it should reach out and manipulate itself is as natural as can be. Just think! After grasping and grasping through hundreds of millions of years, it's finally touched the bottom of the bag. Don't blame me if it's empty.'

  'I don't…' Nora called, her tone eerily like the one she had used to break into their debates back in the old days. 'I don't know what's going on. But I am feeling these things, Tommy! No one's forcing me. Especially not Neil.'

  'Nora…'

  'Aw, sweetheart,' Neil said. 'It just seems that—'

  'But I feel it! It's the most certain thing I've ever…' Her face was pinned beneath looming circuitry, lines of blood trailing from the bolts that fixed her skull, and yet her expression was one of maudlin yearning, as though she were some teenage diva emoting for the camera. The absurdity of it jarred a wave of nausea from his gut. 'I mean, why did it take me so long to see? I love. I love!'

  Experience, she was saying. Pure and bone deep. What could be more true than that? What could be more true than the feelings that underwrite our very existence?

  'Amor vincit omnia,' Neil said. 'Is that it, Nora? Is that your theory? Love conquers all?'

  'Leave her out of this, Neil!'

  He stood directly before her, lingering just far enough to her right to remain entirely unseen. 'I suppose you think that you make meaning, right?' He stepped back to his worktable, leaned over one of the vermillion-screened laptops. 'Tell me,' he said, his fingers sprinting across the keyboard, 'which "you" would that be, Nora?' He turned to beam a vicious grin that she could not see. 'This one?'