Neuropath (20 page)

Relax.

It dawned on him that he had caved to the kids more to prove that everything was back to normal than anything else.

'Nah,' he said, suddenly uncomfortable. 'Nothing serious.'

Mia stared at him thoughtfully. 'Why so coy, Tom? I know it's not because it's me. After all the years talking relationship shop, what
haven't we
discussed?'

Mia was right. What was the problem?

'It's just that…' Thomas hesitated. 'It's just that everything seems so… so fucking fragile, you know?'

Mia nodded. 'Like if you talk about it, you make it real, and if you make it real Thomas smiled, recognizing his own advice.

'It
is
real,' he said. 'It's not perfect, but it's real.' Thomas took a nervous drink. 'She
so
wants me to be an active part of the case—you have no idea. I discuss it with her, give her what insights I can, but I can tell she's disappointed deep down. I sometimes worry she thinks I'm a coward. Sounds stupid, doesn't it? But here's Neil on this killing spree, mutilating and torturing innocent people—even children for fuck's sake—and all I can think about is… is…'

Nora.

Thomas had been looking down at his beer. He dared Mia's friendly gaze.

'I've never felt so… so
beaten
before, Mia. All this time, he's been banging Nora, dodging around through the darkness behind my back. All this time, making a fool out of me. And instead of hating him, all I want to do is curl into a little ball.' He blinked, saw Cynthia Powski, sweat-slick and gasping between climaxes. 'Truth be told, I
am
terrified. More frightened than I've been in my entire life.'

'Me too,' Mia said. 'And I'm just the neighbor.'

He wasn't joking, Thomas realized. Psychopaths belonged to movies, salacious news exposes and clinical studies, not quiet Peekskill neighborhoods. Culture had a code for other types of threats, storylines that provided neighbors a measure of comfort. Estranged husbands murdered wives and children, but respected property lines. Fugitive gangsters left town in the middle of the night. Terrorists shaved their beards, forgot to water their lawns but otherwise tried to keep a low profile.

Psychopaths were something altogether different.

'Some fucked up shit, huh, Mia?'

'Fiercely fucked up, my friend.'

Thomas breathed deeply, steepled his fingers about his beer. 'Listen, I know I have no reason to say this, but I need you to keep this stuff under your hat.'

'About you and Sam? Or Neil?'

'All of it.'

Mia snorted. 'I've been wondering why none of this has made the news. Just Chiropractor, Chiropractor, and more Chiropractor.'

'Neil was NSA. I told you that.'

'So why is the FBI hunting him?'

'Because it's domestic.'

Mia nodded in a yah-yah manner. 'With all the madness going on, I imagine they're spread pretty thin.' He tossed a cap, sent it clinking across the patio stones.

'So they keep telling me.'

Thomas had always measured his friendships by the silences they could absorb. As roommates, he and Neil had literally spent hours together without speaking a word. With Mia the gaps between jokes or questions or observations were never as long, but they seemed more profound for some reason, more indicative, a product of common appreciation rather than boredom or distraction.

'Did I ever tell you,' Mia ventured after two or three contemplative drinks, 'that I worked for the Department of Fatherland Security?'

Thomas nearly choked on his beer. 'You gotta be fucking kidding me,' he said, drawing a sleeve across his mouth. The man held more surprises than a magician's pocket.

'Just technical contracts,' Mia said, staring into the night. 'Different stuff, for the NSA, CIA, even helped the FBI with some troubleshooting.'

Thomas gawked. 'A self-proclaimed Marxist, working for the CIA.'

'Don't forget that I'm also an old queen,' Mia said, copping his coquette drawl. 'I've spent the better part of my life undercover.'

Laughter, then another long, but comfortable silence. A million questions crowded Thomas's thoughts, not the least of which was why Mia had never told him about working for the DoHS. But he knew the answer. Everywhere you turned now, you were signing away your right to say this or that, especially in commercial contracts involving the most powerful corporation of all, the US government. It was one of those things the pundits squawked about from time to time, the Commercialization of Speech they sometimes called it. Issues like this genuinely concerned Thomas, but in the way of wars in unvisited countries. It was like the 'Expression Biometrics' issue with retail employees: sure, the idea of computers watching to make sure all clerks and cashiers continually smiled was creepy, but it was kind of nice from the customer's point of view. Even Thomas had to admit that shopping at Wal-Mart was more pleasant than at Target.

And, truth be told, it was nice living in a world where people kept their mouths shut.

'So far it's been all me-me-me,' Thomas said finally. 'How about Mia-Mia-Mia?'

It was an old joke of theirs. 'Great,' his Number One Neighbor said, shrugging his shoulders. 'Bill and I have been great. Too much going on at the Bibles for those little things to seem important.' He paused, frowning as though struck by something both sad and humorous. 'I hate to say it, but back when you and Nora were fighting all the time…' He trailed, looking guilty.

Thomas shook his head, chuckled.

'You really should be miserable more often,' Mia continued.

'Things were that good?'

'No, our sex was that good.'

Thomas groaned. Though Mia made light of the fact that he was gay, the sheer frequency of the references told Thomas that issues remained. For not the first time, Thomas found himself wondering how open Mia really was. Sure, he was embarrassingly frank about his relationship with Bill, but he almost never mentioned his past before moving to New York. The sheer audacity of his personal revelations, it sometimes seemed, was nothing but a subtle form of misdirection, like the flourish of a magician's hand.

Perhaps this was what made the ensuing silence brittle.

'I imagine you need me to look after the kids next week,' Mia eventually said.

Thomas sighed. 'I'll get something figured out, Mia. It's just—'

'Don't worry about it. School starts soon. Besides…'

'Besides what?'

'I never thought I'd say this, but, well… I love it.' He looked away with uncharacteristic embarrassment. 'I mean, I love
them
. I never saw myself as the paternal type, you know, what with dressing up like a girl and all, but…'

He looked at Thomas apologetically. Sometimes it seemed Mia was always apologizing.

'They get under your skin,' Thomas said.

'They get under your skin.'

Thomas held up his beer. 'Here's to them,' he declared softly, nodding to the shadowy pup-tent.

The clink of bottles warmed the night.

After Mia left, Thomas set his air mattress and sleeping bag across the patio. He'd agreed to let the kids camp out only after crumbling under relentless pressure. He sure as hell wasn't about to leave them alone, even if the FBI thought that Neil had relocated to the Gulf Coast. Besides, it had been a long, long time since he had last slept beneath the stars. And he rather liked the idea of standing guard over his children.

He kicked off his shoes, then crawled in, jeans, shirt, and all. He huddled to conserve warmth, stared at the great bowl of the night sky. Things seemed clear enough, the black gaping between pinpoints of white, so much so it was hard to believe they were abandoning all the earth-based telescopes because of the way jet exhausts hazed the upper atmosphere. There seemed to be plenty of stars.

He stared and breathed. But no matter how deep he peered into the cavernous light years, the sense of awe he was searching for eluded him. Instead, all the lunatic images from the previous week crowded through the turnstile of his mind's eye. Glimpses of Cynthia Powski blurred into images of the widowed Cream writhing about the porn minister's cock. Fingertips pinching nipples. Glass unzipping skin. On and on, no matter how hard he blinked.

Abyss upon abyss. The psychological spread across the cosmological.

He groaned aloud, rubbed his face furiously. What was his problem?

The easy answer was that he was suffering from some kind of mild post-traumatic disorder. The brain actually possessed two ways of laying down long-term memories: a high-resolution, detail-intensive path processed through the cortex, and a low-resolution, emotion-intensive path processed through the amygdala. Traumatic events usually produced memories of the second variety: it was one of the brain's rapid-response mechanisms. The problem was that the system could be easily fooled, generating intense emotional reactions in harmless situations—which was why so many Iraq War veterans heard gunfire instead of firecrackers, car bombs instead of thunder. For the sake of reaction time, their brains simply weren't taking any chances.

But then why was it
Cynthia Powski
who haunted him in the small moments of his day, and not the horror of Peter Halasz chewing a little girl to the core?

Was it simply because she was a
porn star
?

The idea, Thomas knew, wasn't as preposterous as it seemed. For heterosexual men, simply glancing at a beautiful woman lit up the reward systems of the brain. Neuromarketing firms had funded hundreds of so-called 'endogenous opoid' studies, trying to unravel the alchemy of images and the male erection—adding layer after layer of cultural reinforcement to what was at best a basic tendency. Then there was the unnerving discovery of neural mechanisms dedicated to assessing the sexual vulnerability of women. Or the notorious study that mapped the brains of men watching Jodie Foster's rape scene in
The Accused
, suggesting that they found it even more titillating than run-of-the-mill pornography. The now infamous
Time
magazine headline, IS EVERY MAN A RAPIST? still surfaced from time to time in the press.

Was the image of a porn star slicing her way to bliss a kind of visual narcotic? Could that be it? Had it simply turned him on in some dark and primal way? Hatred and lust, after all, predated mammalian love by a few hundred million years.

Thomas cursed, rubbed his eyes again. What a fucked up animal a human being was. Well and truly.

The Thomas Bible animal in particular.

Stars
, he chided himself.
You came out here to enjoy the fucking stars
.

They
were
beautiful, like motes in morning sunlight, forever falling in vast gravitational drafts.

Watch the fuckers, then. Absorb the awe and beauty…

Breathe deep.

Absorb
…

He nearly jumped out of his skin when he heard clicking at the patio door. He cursed himself when he realized he'd forgotten to let out Bart.

Mia was right. He was more than jumpy. Jumpy-jumpy.

'Why couldn't you remind me I'm an idiot
before
I warmed up?' he said, fighting his way free of his sleeping bag. In the gloom, Bartender was little more than an imbecilic, Cheshire grin. Thomas absently scratched the old boy's ears, then crawled back into his cotton and polyester cocoon.

His heart hammered in his ears.

Calm down. Everything's fine. You're safe.

Safe.

So much of the so-called 'modern malaise' could be chalked up to the differences between the modern and the stone-age environment the human brain had evolved to thrive in. What had been advantageous in highly interdependent communities of 200 or so souls had since become at best trivial, and at worst species-threatening liabilities. When energy-rich fatty foods were scarce, a hankering for them was adaptive. When work was mandatory for survival, slacking was recuperative. Most people lived in a kind of media-constructed, virtual stone age, indulging their ancient yens for sex, gossip, violence, simplicity and certainty, flattery and competition—those things humans in small, highly interdependent communities required in the great reproductive scrum called evolution. They lived in worlds that indulged and reflected their weaknesses, and that only incidentally captured the complexity and indifference of the real thing. Disney Worlds. And since ignorance was invisible (Neil used to always say that making ignorance invisible was God's idea of a one-liner), they thought they more or less
saw it all
.

Small wonder, Thomas thought, we humans were so jumpy, so arrogant, so defensive. Small wonder the internet, which was supposed to blow the doors off of narrow, parochial views of the world, had simply turned into a supermarket of bigotries, a place where any hatred or hope could find bogus rationalization. For the human brain, it was like living in a schizophrenic world, a paradise of plenty where any second now, something really bad was going to happen.

In a sense, that's all popular culture was, a modern, market-driven prosthetic for the paleolithic brain. How could such a culture
not
be seduced by the psychopath? By Neil.

Lurking in every shadow, following housewives home from the grocery store, stealing schoolgirls through bedroom windows, pulling over for hitchhikers, scoping out prostitutes through tinted windows…

This was a bad thing in a stone-age village of 200 people. A very dangerous thing.

Making up the rules as they went along. Taking no shit no way no how. And of course, getting laid with a capital 'L'.

In a Disney World of 9 billion, few things could be as cool.

For Professor Skeat, psychopaths were nothing less than the horsemen of the apocalypse. Contemporary culture had digested the meaninglessness of natural events, the fact they were indifferent to all things human. A few stubborn fools still shook their fists at God, but most simply shrugged their shoulders. Most knew better, no matter how ardently they prayed. What made psychopaths so indigestible, Skeat claimed, what drove culture to slather them with layer after layer of cinematic and textual pearl, was that they were
humans
that were indifferent to all things human. They were natural disasters personified.