Biblical (4 page)

That was how Macbeth felt driving through Boston: he should have had a sense of being at home, but he did not. His patient, whose disconnection from the world was pathological and total, had learned not just to accept her condition, but to embrace it, to see it as a gift. For her, the world and every day in it was a discovery and she could see her life with an objectivity all others lacked. Macbeth, on the other hand, just felt lost.

After a few blocks, the taxi came to a halt in traffic suddenly thick and unmoving.

“Terrible, this thing in San Francisco. You hear about that?” the driver asked his rearview mirror. The world over, it seemed to Macbeth, the silver lining on any cloud of human suffering was that tragedy always gave cabbies a conversation opener.

“I heard something about it. It’s a terrible thing, all right.”

“Now what would make a bunch of young people like that want to throw themselves off the Golden Gate?”

As a psychiatrist, Macbeth had half a dozen hypotheses he could have put forward; instead he said: “Beats me.”

“I just don’t get why people pick one place specially to do themselves in,” continued the cabbie, eagerly disconsolate. “I mean, why the Golden Gate? And why that forest in Japan? That’s the number two spot for suicide in the world, you know, after the Golden Gate … I just don’t get it.”

“Me neither.”

“An awful shame, whatever they did it for.” The driver shook his head, then, with a dissonantly cheerful change of tone, asked: “You an out-of-towner?”

“Yeah. Well, no … From Boston but I’ve lived abroad for a few years.”

“Back seeing folks?”

“More business, but I do have a brother here. You any idea what the hold-up is?”

“Can’t see. Just got to sit it out. It doesn’t usually last long. Listen, don’t I know you from somewhere?”

“Don’t think so,” said Macbeth. Here it came: the conversation he had had so many times was starting again. It troubled him that his face seemed familiar to so many people; combined with his poor autobiographical memory it meant he was never entirely sure if he really had met them before or not.

“Sure …” said the cab driver to his rearview. “Sure I do. As soon as you got in the cab I recognized you, but I can’t think where from.”

“Maybe I’ve been in your cab before,” Macbeth said.

“No …” The cabbie frowned in frustrated concentration as his recall failed him. Macbeth decided to ride it out, like he always did. “No … it wasn’t in the cab. Shit, I can’t place you but I know you.”

“I get that a lot,” said Macbeth. “I guess I’ve just got one of those faces.”

“It’s not just your face …” The taxi driver was now even more emphatic. “Before you spoke I knew what your voice was going to sound like. Like I really know you from somewhere.”

“I get that a lot too. There’s just something about me that people think they recognize. Maybe I’m some kind of Jungian archetype.” He laughed.

“Huh?”

“Never mind.” Macbeth leaned forward and peered through the Perspex divider between him and the cabbie and the windshield between them both and the world outside. “No sign of what the hold-up is?”

“Maybe it’s a full moon. You know if it’s a full moon tonight?”

“No idea. What’s the moon got to do with traffic?”

“Everything. Ask any cop,” said the cabbie. “Or delivery driver. Traffic goes all to hell. Not just traffic … any ER nurse or kindergarten teacher’ll tell you that. People act different when there’s a full moon. Not so much crazy as just different. They make bad choices, take wrong turnings. I’m telling you, when there’s a full moon there are more accidents, more jams. Maybe that’s what’s causing the hold-up. Maybe it’s going to be a full moon tonight.”

“Like I said, I wouldn’t know,” said Macbeth.

“Sure it is. I had a guy in the cab, two fares before you. Wanted me to take him to the Christian Science Church – why he’d want to go there this time of night beats me – anyway, he’s the quiet type and doesn’t say much. Then, all of a sudden, he starts screaming at me that there’s a kid in front of the cab. So I leave half my tread on the blacktop and nearly get rearended by a bus. Now I’m telling you, there was no kid. But I can see he really believed he saw one. Funny thing is he’s all shook up for a moment then goes all calm again, like he understood why he was mistaken. Full moon. Must be.”

The traffic started moving again and Macbeth and the driver fell back into silence.

By the time the taxi pulled up outside the green-canopied bar, the sun had sunk lower in the sky and dressed downtown Boston in red gilt edging and velvet shadow. It was the type of light that awoke something in Macbeth: something deep buried and long forgotten. He felt a kind of melancholy as he looked down along Beacon Street to where the evening light softened the Georgian geometry of King’s Chapel.

“You sure I don’t know you from somewhere?” asked the cabbie as he took the fare and tip from Macbeth.

“I’m sure.”

*

Macbeth couldn’t remember exactly where and when he had first met Pete Corbin, but it must have been when they had been at Harvard med school together. As he recalled it, they hadn’t been friends then: Corbin had been part of a different set and they hadn’t encountered each other that often. But years afterwards, after a joint internship at Beth-Israel Deaconess and when both Corbin and Macbeth had settled into their shared specialty of psychiatry and had worked together at McLean, they had become friends. Or maybe just acquaintances. Macbeth was never very sure where the defining line between the two lay. Pete Corbin was one of those people you gave a call when you were in town and shared a few drinks or a meal with. You talked medicine, you talked hospital politics and you talked mutual acquaintances and shook hands heartily at the end of the night but you did not really, at the heart of it all, know each other. It was the similitude of friendship: just one of the threads spun through society’s web and you clung on to it.

So, when Macbeth knew he was going to be back in Boston, he’d given Corbin a call and they had arranged to meet for a meal.

The Gathering Stone was supposed to be Scottish-themed, but with its facing of Portland brownstone and ornate blue-green ironwork curlicuing around the huge windows, its name emblazoned in gold Celtic-style lettering, and its sidewalk A-frame blackboards with names and prices of beers and whis-keys chalked on them, The Gathering Stone did not do much to distinguish itself from the default Boston mock-Irish. Inside, it was all exposed brick, knotty pine and posters of Edinburgh Castle and sword-waving red-headed men in plaid, instead of the usual bicycles outside rural Irish pubs. It was the kind of place that was an undisguised feigning of something else: an honest simulation that wasn’t intended to be anything other, or for you to expect anything more, than a simulation. Theme-park ethnicity.

When they had first gotten to know each other, Pete Corbin had commented that Macbeth’s surname clearly hinted at some Scottish ancestry. Based on this tenuous logic, it had become the accepted thing that they meet at The Gathering Stone.

Macbeth found Corbin nursing a single malt in a booth beneath a framed print of a vaguely desolate-looking mountain and loch scene. A tall, lanky type with a web of thinning blond hair stretched over a high-domed head, Corbin was wearing a tweed jacket, pale chinos and a blue button-down open at the collar. He had mastered, with deliberate and studied intent, that casual look of the academic. It was a look Macbeth had never tried to emulate: his European tailoring, like so many other things, marking him as an outsider here, in his home city.

“Hi, John …” Corbin stood up a little sluggishly and shook Macbeth’s hand. “Great to see you again. You’re looking as well-groomed as ever.”

“You okay?” Macbeth asked as he slid into the booth opposite his former colleague. He’d noticed something weary wearing at the edges of Corbin’s broad grin of welcome.

“Me? I’m fine. Just a little overworked. You know … same ol’ same ol’.” Corbin smiled. “You? How’s Europe?”

“Far away. Other. But good. It’s nice to be home for a while though. It gives me a chance to catch up with Casey,” Macbeth referred to his younger brother, who still lived in Boston. “I hear you’re doing well for yourself, Pete. A teaching post at McLean …”

“Two years now.” Corbin gave another fatigued smile.

“I’m impressed,” said Macbeth. A teaching post at McLean Hospital in Belmont was pretty much the top end of the psychiatry game. Macbeth’s own time at McLean, some years before, had been his last involvement with patient care before his move into research. McLean was something he knew looked good on a résumé. A door-opener. It had opened doors in Copenhagen for him.

Corbin beckoned to a pretty waitress with thick auburn hair who came over and took Macbeth’s order for a glass of Pinot Grigio. As she did so she smiled at Macbeth in the way a lot of women smiled at him; since he turned fifteen girls had smiled at him that way. He’d never worked out why: he didn’t have movie-star looks, wasn’t the most confident of men or have the smartest way with words, but there was something about him that seemed to attract women. Or maybe they just thought that they’d seen him somewhere before.

“Sure you’re okay, Pete?” he asked Corbin after the waitress brought his wine.

“I’m fine. Joanna and I have just moved into a townhouse in Beacon Hill …”

“You
are
doing well for yourself.” Macbeth raised his glass in a toast.

“I guess. Joanna’s folks helped us out. To be honest, they’re loaded and we couldn’t have bought in Beacon Hill without them. Anyway, it’s an old historic house and needs a lot of work. It’s been more hassle than we thought. An interesting place though. Loaded with dark Boston history.”

“Oh?”

“It used to be the home of Marjorie Glaiston. You heard of her?”

“Can’t say I have.”

“Really? The Glaiston scandal was almost as notorious as the Albert Tirrell case.”

Macbeth shrugged.

“Anyway,” continued Corbin, undeterred, “the Glaistons owned half of Boston back in the late eighteen hundreds. Marjorie was a famed beauty and socialite. Until she got herself murdered. On our staircase no less …”

“She was killed in your house?”

“Yeah. It’s funny …” Corbin laughed joylessly. “If it had been a house anywhere other than Beacon Hill, and the murder had
happened a year ago instead of a century ago, then no one would have been able to sell it. Seems homicide becomes romantic and marketable with the passing of time. Adds to the value. Or at least it sure seemed to when we were trying to buy the house. Truth is, fixing it up’s been a real hassle …”

“And that’s why you’re so tired?”

“Not just that. Like I said, work’s been crazy the last couple of months.”

“I thought that’s what our work was supposed to be … crazy.”

“Not crazy like this.” Corbin shook the thought off. “Anyway, let’s not talk shop. Or at least, if we’re going to talk shop, then it should be your shop we talk. This Copenhagen thing sounds amazing.”

“It’s cool, I can say that for it.”

“But do you think it really can be done?” asked Corbin. “Deconstructing human intelligence?”

“I don’t know if that’s what we’re doing,” said Macbeth. “Trying to understand human intelligence, yes.”

“But I read in
Nature
that the whole aim of the Copenhagen Project was to reverse-engineer human cognition to help technologists develop artificial intelligences on the same model. Basically simulating a human mind.”

“That’s only part of it, Pete. My area is pretty focused.”

“Focused on what?”

“Like you said, Project One is a computer simulation of the human brain – limbic system, neocortex, the lot – built neuron by neuron and cell by cell. Or really virtual neuron by virtual neuron. My side of it’s about programming in disorders and watching the changes in neural activity.”

“Isn’t there a danger that it’ll, well, start to
think
?”

“That’s an aim, not a danger. Or at least some level of self-awareness. It’s probably inevitable, anyway – if we recreate the architecture of a real brain, consciousness will automatically
self-generate. Think about it, Pete … we’ll be able to simulate psychiatric conditions and map the neural activity specific to them. For the first time ever we’ll be able to watch a mind working. It’ll revolutionize psychiatry.”

Corbin frowned. “I don’t know, John … what you’re creating will be indistinguishable from a human mind, and you’re talking about infecting that mind with neuroses and psychoses.”

“We’ve thought through the moral implications and the project protocols clearly define what constitutes personhood. Anyway, we’ll be working with parts of consciousness, not the whole. But if Project One does simply ‘wake up’, we have strict guidelines on how to proceed.”

Corbin made a face that again indicated doubt. “But we’re all wired to our bodies – connected to lymphatic, digestive and endocrine systems. Our state of mind has as much to do with hormone levels, whether we’ve had a good night’s sleep or what we had for lunch, as with our brains. Your synthetic consciousness is connected to nothing.”

“We’ve taken that into account,” said Macbeth. “The program simulates circadian rhythms and endocrine balances and replicates the effects of environment, diet and physiology. It will be connected to a
virtual
body.”

“But not to the world … surely if your synthesized brain becomes self-aware, it’s going to wake up into a world of sensory deprivation. You’ve read Josh Hoberman on the psychotomimetic effects of sensory deprivation and the research done by University College in London. Subjects placed in light-sealed, anechoic chambers started to hallucinate after as little as fifteen minutes – seeing an environment and people that weren’t there. Seems if there isn’t a real world around us, we invent one – I see your project brain doing the same thing. I don’t think you’ll have to worry about introducing psychiatric conditions – your baby’s going to be born with them.”

“Of course we’ve thought of that. If Project One self-initiates
full awareness, we have programs to simulate sensory input.”