Brain Storm (18 page)

Harper chuckled again. “I don’t know what you do over there at that big, fancy law firm you work at, but I make my living in federal court talking to juries. Think about it.”

“Fair enough, Mr. Harper. You talk to juries. I make my living writing appellate briefs. I make my living on Westlaw finding cases that say you can’t put half of this bullshit into evidence. How about your jury verdict getting reversed on appeal? Think about it.”

Watson heard clapping at the other end of the line. “Good speech, kid,” said Harper, “and on short notice, too. I want to hear you give a speech like that when you’ve got twelve heads and twenty-four eyeballs staring you in the face. Tell your boy he can take life, or he can hold his breath for a week at trial and see if the jury wants to roll up his sleeve for the big needle.”

H
e tried to call Whitlow back at Des Peres County Correctional Center but failed to rouse a human being. Then he left his transvestite research on Nancy’s desk with a note—probably not proper Code Orange protocol, but he wanted to avoid another forty-five-minute conference with Boron the Moron and Spike. He snuck out down the back stairwell at 6:15
P
.
M
.—lunch hour for Stern, Pale associates—and left.

Once in his Honda, he put Rachel Palmquist on cellular speed dial—an act the nuns would have called malice aforethought. He also needed to call Whitlow. His client was a power user when it came to gall. He seemed to think he could accept the services of an appointed lawyer and supplement them by hiring pretrial services with cash from his pals. When he made it through to the jail on the third try, he got a taped message about telephone privileges and client contact hours.

Still plenty of traffic. It was only six-thirty. He could be home by seven. Early for a change! And if the nuns were riding in the backseat, they would say, “Yes, go home!” He had plenty of socially acceptable tasks to perform. He could do something obsessive and harmless, and forget about doing something obsessive and dangerous.

He had done his duty to his client. Now all he had to do was go home. He speed-dialed Palmquist, resolving to tell her he would not be able
to make it tonight. They could finish up some other time during normal daylit business hours, instead of planning the second half of a date, meeting under cover of darkness, after flirting with each other all day. She was too much the babe. Too smart. Too funny. Too irresistible. And he was terrified of what he might find if he undid the clasps over Dr. Palmquist’s backbone. Even a small chance of something happening was too great a risk. He manfully focused his thoughts on Sheila and Benjy. Think about them, he told himself, conjuring up images of their happy faces. How those faces would look if they became specular reflections of adultery and marital discord. The incoherent bitterness of abandoned innocence. Think about them.

No gas, he realized with a glance at the gauge. No money either. And the credit cards were stacked. He went back around the block to an ATM. His first transaction was a request for a balance—$42.86: the mortgage payment had been automatically withdrawn. He took out ten and hoped Sandra hadn’t written any more checks. He put five in at the pump and stared at the lone five left in his billfold.

The wolf was at the door, and his name was Credit. Thank God Watson took care of the bills himself—Sandra would go cardiac if she spent a day in the credit control tower with him, rotating money among bank and credit card accounts, checks flying blind, interest rate turbulence, dizzy excess, stock accounts only points away from crashing into margin calls.

The nuns had also taught him a concept called “avoiding the near occasion of sin,” which was what he needed to do right now. All he had to do was pick up the phone, push her cellular speed-dial button, and tell her that he absolutely had to go home. He picked up the phone. Pushed the cellular speed dial once again. The charmed third try found Dr. Palmquist via the institute’s paging system. His lips parted. He inhaled. He spoke.

“En route,” he said.

“Cham?” she said. “Is that you?”

He heard her laugh softly in his ear, and he squirmed in his car seat to accommodate the vascular events in his lap. His foot felt the floor under the gas pedal, and the Honda’s pistons sang in their cylinders.

“My name,” he said, soaring up the ramp onto Highway 40, “is Australopithecus Robustus. Similarly ranked males call me Rob. Females call me Mr. Robustus. Elsa, is that you?”

They traded wild, stupid laughs over the airwaves.

“I’ll go down to the lobby and wait for you. Bye.”

Harmless, he told himself. Just a meeting. It’ll be over in an hour, and he could go home and help put the kids to bed.

The campus, the buildings, the lobby, were all easier to find the second time, and so was her increasingly familiar manner. If he was not mistaken, she’d found time to freshen her perfume.

“Another grant proposal funded,” she gushed.

“Congratulations!” cheered Watson. Should he—what? Playfully cuff her on the shoulder? Shake her hand? Would a hug be overkill? “Nice work, Dr. Palmquist. What’s the research on?”

“The brain chemistry of violence and aggression,” she said. “In this case, we are studying genetic aberrations in the brains of aggressive mice. Male mice to be precise—did I need to add that? The defective gene makes them so violent they kill all the other rodents in the cage if you leave them together overnight.”

“These are Mafia mice?” asked Watson. “Crips and Bloods mice?” He took a look around at the dim corridors and dark rooms. “Just how late do you work?”

“As late as I want,” she said. “No kids. I got rid of the big kid I married. And I won’t have my own kids until I get myself a wife.” She slipped into an antic John Wayne brawl. “A good little cook with a strong back. One a them there househusbands, is what I want. I wanna be like you. A mother at home nurturing the children, while I go out to conquer and acquire.”

They walked into an elevator and rode to her floor.

“I talked to my client, and I talked to the prosecutor, and I have concluded that my client is probably a person of hatred,” Watson said.

“Not a crime as far as I know,” she said. “Not a medical condition, either—yet.”

“Think about it,” she continued, marching along and waving her hands, her running shoes squeaking on the marble floors. “Hate could be important to the evolution of the species. What if, as some have suggested, the species evolves with optimum efficiency when there is a very exquisite balance between love and hate, good and evil, predators and victims, positive and negative emotions? What if, without hate to compete with, love gets fat, lazy, and self-interested?”

“Now wait a minute,” he protested.

“Neurotechnology will soon give us the tools to make a very precise, efficient excision of the circuits in the human brain that are responsible for hatred and violence. Biomedical, pharmaceutical, radiological, microlaser surgery—pick your technology—it’s going to happen. Should we do it? Should we reformat human neural networks with gamma knives? It’s no longer a question of
whether
we will figure out how to erase or neutralize hatred. We will. But should we? What if the networks enabling desirable aggression and undesirable violence are the same? What if low serotonin not only provokes serial killers, but also stimulates fearless soldiers and brave cops?”

“And what sort of person would Whitlow be without his hatred?” Watson asked. He patted his folio. “I brought my notes from my interview with him.”

“I don’t need to know anything else about Mr. Whitlow,” she said. “Not from you, anyway.”

Watson was flabbergasted. “But I thought you said you wanted to hear about the interview?”

“A ploy to get you back here,” she said bluntly and merrily. “When I testify about Mr. Whitlow, I’ll be speaking on the basis of what I learn from his neuropsychological test batteries, his neurofunctional profiles, his personality profiles, his genetic and biological markers, his medical history, and so on. I will be testifying that I have never met Mr. Whitlow. I have not interviewed Mr. Whitlow. I have not received any extraneous information about Mr. Whitlow from anyone, except maybe the
River City News.
I will know more about Mr. Whitlow than he does, or you do, without ever meeting him.” She turned right down a short hallway and opened a white door that said
MAGNETOENCEPHALOGRAPHY
.

“There’s a fresh toy in here,” she said, leading him into a room with a big, square box that looked like a bank vault with thick glass windows. There was a console against one of the windows. She turned a wheel on the door and opened it.

“Those other rooms I showed you are designed to keep powerful magnetic fields generated by the MRI devices in. This room is designed to keep magnetic fields out.”

Inside, it felt like a dentist’s examination room, except that the reclining patient’s chair sat under what looked like the hood of a monster hair dryer that rose eight feet up in a space-age white column.

“What is it?” asked Watson, bending over and looking up into the hood and inside a helmet fitted out with an array of shiny disks.

“You are looking at a Neuromag 278-channel whole-head magnetometer. It measures magnetic fields in the human brain, the cerebral cortex mainly, but more channels allow us to see deeper. We call it the ten-million-dollar hair dryer. It picks up even very weak fields from the brain—that’s why we keep all the other magnetic fields out with these walls. After analog filtering and analog-to-digital conversion, the computer makes pictures from the magnetic fields called magnetoencephalography, a direct measure of activity in different parts of the brain. It’s completely noninvasive. Have a seat,” she said, gesturing toward the chair.

Watson felt slightly claustrophobic. The walls seemed to absorb all sound, her words seemed to die in the air before he could hear them.

“I’ll show you some pictures of your brain moving your finger.”

Through a window in the wall, he could see the console flanked by a series of twenty-eight-inch monitors displaying images of transverse and sagittal sections of brains, some black-and-white, some glowing with eerie splotches of color, like fluorescent Rorschach inkblots, some showing geometric shapes, planes, vectors, and arrows, looking almost like tectonic plates on brain grids.

“First,” she said, “we’ve got to get you away from dated, wrong-headed ideas about how the brain works. I’ll start with a concept that may become a building block in our neuroscientific theory of your case. It’s called the delay of conscious intention.”

“Philosophy?” asked Watson.

“Neurophilosophy,” she said. “Most of what we do every day is unconscious behavior,
automatic
would be a better word, and I’m not talking about sleep. Whole portions of our brains are devoted to activities we are not consciously monitoring, like absent-mindedly brushing our teeth, driving on autopilot right past the interstate exit we wanted, because we usually get off at the next one. Dialing an old phone number. Calling your wife by your secretary’s name. It happens in the brain, the brain directs the body to perform the action, and the action is accomplished, all before the so-called subjective consciousness is aware of it. At such times we smack ourselves in the head and say, ‘What was I thinking?’ or ‘Why did I do that?’ ”

“You mean, like why am I listening to you instead of just pleading our prisoner out?”

She picked up a twisted cable of colored wires that ended in a tangled
net of electrodes. “Hold that thought,” she said. “I’ll come back to it later.

“How long does it take to shoot a man?” she asked.

Watson opened his mouth.

“Don’t answer,” she said. “First, let’s shave the event into slices of neurological time. Be careful—” she giggled, wagging a finger at him “—you might hurt yourself. This is heavy-duty, state-of-the-art, cognitive neuroscience. It’s not for amateurs.”

“In that case,” said Watson, “it’s not for the jury. But go ahead.”

She paced in front of him. He settled back into the device’s chair, put his head under the scanner, and enjoyed the view.

“Now, as you’ve said, you and the other members of the jury know nothing about brain science. You are what we call ‘folk psychologists.’ You imagine a fictional mental construct called ‘free will,’ which is kind of like believing in leprechauns or UFOs to a cognitive neuroscientist. You still believe in what we call Cartesian dualism, meaning you believe there is a material world, including your material brain in that material world, but you also believe that somewhere inside that material brain is a central processing arena—call it the mind, the pineal body, the spirit or soul, the third eye, the Cartesian theater—a place where a unified consciousness reviews stimuli from the external world and then makes decisions and issues commands to your physical body, the place where you experience the sensation of ‘I.’ ‘I want to rob a bank.’ ‘I want to cheat on my wife.’ ‘I want to be a lawyer.’ ”

Watson visibly flinched under the impact of proposition two. Did she wink at him?

“As a dualist,” she continued, “meaning one who believes the mind and the body are two different, albeit inseparable things, you believe that shooting a man goes something like this. One, the defendant—his mind, his soul, his central processing unit, his ‘I’ or his pineal body, whatever—intends to kill the victim. Two, a burst of neural activity in the motor cortex of the defendant’s brain initiates movement by sending a message to the trigger finger. Three, the trigger finger actually moves.”

Watson mulled that one over and watched her plugging leads into the sensor net of electrodes, a kind of hair net with disks imbedded in it, with wires from each disk leading to the cable, which spooled around an armature and up into a socket in the wall.

“Sounds good,” he said.

“Sounds good is right,” she said. “But it has no basis in fact. It’s been disproved by dozens of experiments and fifty years of neuroscience.

“If I put one electrode in your brain,” she said. “Here.” She reached up and touched a spot somewhere on the apex of his skull. The reclining chair of the imaging device put his head even with her chest; when she leaned over him a fold opened in the white lab coat and one of the Lycra-bound breasts nuzzled his cheek for a fraction of a second. The sudden warmth made his face flush in a backdraft of perfume. He stared at two plump, blood-warm, shapely near occasions of sin. His nightmare: contending breasts adorning a woman every bit as beautiful and interesting as his wife.