Neuropath (6 page)

A strange moment passed between them as he stepped into the foyer, a memory of forgotten intimacy, perhaps. Their eyes locked.

'The San Francisco trip was bullshit, wasn't it?'

'Yes,' she said.

The exchange had been completely involuntary, or so it seemed to Thomas.

'Why, Nora? Why lie?' Resentment was back in the driver's seat.

Not like this… C'mon, you know better.

'Because…' Nora said lamely.

'
Because
… Christ, Nora, even fucking Frankie could do better than that.'

'Don't say that. Don't say "fucking Frankie".' You know I hate it when you say that.'

'How about San-fucking-Francisco? Or does that get under your skin too?'

'Screw you, Tommy,' Nora said. She turned toward the kitchen. She was wearing a light cotton dress, the kind that made men wish for gusts of naughty wind.

Thomas glanced down at his hands. They trembled ever so slightly. 'So what did you and Neil talk about?' he called.

'Not much,' Nora replied bitterly. She turned to address the granite counter-top. 'He didn't come to talk…' She laughed, as though marveling over carnal memories. Then she dared his astounded gaze, her expression tight with shame, resentment—all those things people use to digest their sins. 'He never does.'

Thomas stepped into the air-conditioned gloom.

It was funny how natural such things could seem, how easily you could convince yourself you knew all along. Even as he recoiled at the impossibility, buzzed through the slow-assembling implications, part of him whispered,
Of course
.

He forced the words past the hornet sting in the back of his throat. 'How long?' There was no certainty, no breath in his lungs, so he repeated himself just to be sure. 'How long have you been fucking my best friend?'

Nora and Neil… Neil and Nora…

Her eyes were swollen. She blinked tears and looked away, saying, 'You don't want to know.'

'While we were married,' Thomas said. 'Huh?'

Nora turned back, her expression somewhere between anguish and fury. 'I just… just needed him, Tommy. I just needed…' She struggled with her lips. 'More. I needed
more
.'

Thomas turned to the door, grabbed the handle.

'Have you seen him?' Nora called, her voice half-panicked. 'I m-mean… do you know where he is?'

She loved him. His ex-wife loved Neil Cassidy. His best friend.

He turned and grabbed her. 'You want to know where Neil is?' he cried. He cuffed her on the side of the face. He clenched his teeth and shook her. She would be so easy to break! He started pressing her backward. But then, in some strange corner of nowhere, he could hear himself whisper,
This is a jealousy response, an ancient adaptation meant to minimize the risk of reproductive losses
…

He dropped his hands, dumbfounded.

'Neil,' he spat. 'Let me tell you something about Neil, Nora. He's fucking snapped. He's started killing people and making videos to send to the FBI. Can you believe it? Yeah!
Our
Neil. The FBI visited me this morning, showed me some of his handiwork. Our Neil is a fucking monster! He makes the Chiropractor or whatever they're calling him look like a choirboy!'

He paused, struck breathless by the look of horror on her face. He lowered his hands, backed toward the door.

'You're crazy,' she gasped.

He turned to the door.

'You're lying!
Lying!'

He left the door open behind him.

The ground seemed to pitch beneath his feet. The walk to his car seemed more a controlled fall. He leaned against the door to catch his breath. The metal stung his palms, and he found himself thinking how when it came to heat, the whole world was a battery, sucking it up, then releasing it in a slow burn. A convertible rolled past, filled with teenagers shouting over subwoofers. He glared at them in a disconnected-from-consequences way.

Neil and Nora.

The Acura's interior was amniotic, the air was so hot.

He placed trembling hands on the steering wheel, caressed the leather. Then he punched the dash five times in rapid succession.

'FUCK!' he roared.

It seemed the world was ending. That the Argument—

'Professor Bible?' he heard someone call. A woman.

He squinted up at her beautiful face. 'Agent Logan,' he managed to reply.

She smiled cautiously.

'Professor Bible, I think we need to talk.'

CHAPTER FOUR

August 17th, 11.56 a.m.

Thoughts like wasps at the beach, nagging, threatening, never really stinging. That's what it had been like. Of course he'd worried about Neil and Nora on occasion, but he had always decided to err on the side of trust. Trust.

And now look at him: stung beyond sensation.

Agent Logan had followed him back to his house so that he could drop off his car. Now he sat beside her in her Mustang, numb in more ways than he would have thought possible. A wool-haired kid with a squeegee cleaned her windshield at an intersection, and Thomas found himself comforted by the sight of her rummaging through her purse for loose change. He even smiled at her gentle curses.

'Why you?' he asked after she had handed the kid several dimes and quarters.

'Pardon?'

'Why send
you
after me?'

'The boss thought I was your kind of people.'

'And what kind is that?'

'Honest,' she said with a wry smile. She looked away to make her left turn. 'Honest and confused.'

The bar was local, the kind of place that depended on the ebb and flow of the work day as much as the regularity of blacked-out sporting events. A TGIF, or something similar—Thomas literally couldn't remember. They paused at the entrance so that Sam could slip a five-dollar bill into a plastic Salvation Army donation bubble. Inside, one waitress stood at a faux-antique till, chatting with a woman who looked like the manager. It was completely deserted otherwise. Thomas followed Agent Logan to a front booth, feeling like an intruder despite all the signs of heavy human traffic. Compared to the sunny clamor of the street, the place seemed like a cave with dropped ceilings. It smelled of beer and sour cushions.

'So what happened back there?' Agent Logan asked, propping her elbows on their table.

Through the tinted window to her right, a parade of consumers marched along the sidewalk. A middle-class soccer mom. A brown-suited sales rep. A working-class
New Jersey Devils
fan. And on and on. Thomas pretended to be interested in them as he spoke.

'You know, I still remember what Neil told me at our wedding reception. He pulled me aside and pointed to Nora—she was dancing with her father, I think. "Now
that"
he said, "is a fine piece of tail, my friend."' Thomas ran a hand over his face and stared across the bar's murky expanse. His laugh was pained. 'He was speaking from experience, I guess.'

When he closed his eyes he could see them together. Neil and Nora.

Agent Logan studied him for a moment, her eyes wide and full of sympathy. 'You know, Professor Bible, the systematic deception of intimates is a red flag for—'

'No,' Thomas exclaimed. 'Please… spare me your FBI profiling crap. You know who I am, what I do. There's no need to insult me with half-remembered course notes from Quantico.'

Agent Logan turned her face to the window, her expression unreadable.

Thomas shook his head. 'Look, I'm sorry. I really am. It's just that…'

'Just what, Professor Bible?'

'Call me, Tommy. Please.' He paused as the waitress, a pink-faced blond, set down coasters and beers.

'Do you know what dreams are, Agent Logan?'

'I must have dozed through that part at Quantico,' she said drily.

'Well our brains are plastic networks.' He paused, then added, 'Plastic like "malleable", not like your shoes.'

'Ouch,' Samantha said, grinning.

'All the behaviors generated by our brains arise from different neural configurations. In turn, these configurations arise in response to different stimuli from our environments—it's kind of like mini-evolution: those behaviors that allow us to successfully cope with our environments are reinforced. Reproduced. Those that do not are discarded, at least ideally.'

Even as he said this, he realized he was speaking more for his own sake than for hers. Pain had a way of bending your words into circles. Had it really come to this? Sitting with a stranger in a franchise bar, spilling his guts. Was he really this alone?

'So what does this have to do with dreams?'

Thomas shrugged. 'Well, some say that dreams allow our neural networks to reconfigure themselves in
possible
as opposed to actual circumstances. By dreaming of different situations, our brain actually prepares itself for different possible eventualities. Dreams allow our brain to cope.'

'Like training simulations?'

'Exactly.'

Samantha frowned. 'So what does that have to do with anything?'

Thomas wiped angrily at his tears. 'Because I never, not once, dreamed that anything like this could happen.' The fist he raised to his forehead somehow became a wrist pressed against his temple. '
Fuck…
'
Neil and Nora
.

Thomas excused himself to make a call on his palmtop. He turned to watch Agent Logan from the middle of the abandoned dance floor. She stared out the window, the very picture of impatience and ambition—and all the more striking for it. Listening to the ring in the receiver, Thomas found himself wondering whether she had a significant other. Careerists tended to stay single—

'Hyu,' a rough voice answered.

'Hi, Mia,' Thomas said.

'Tommy, Jeeezus. I've been trying to reach you!'

A host of parental instincts came clutching. 'Phone was off. Why? What's wrong?'

'Nothing, really. It's just that Nora called and said she was coming to get the kids.'

'What did you tell her?'

'That I needed to talk to you first, and that I would call her back after.'

He heard Frankie shouting '
Daddy-Daddy-Daddeee
!' in the background. He imagined Ripley sitting by Mia's picture window, coloring, then an image of Cynthia Powski blotted her out.

'Forget she even called.'

'You sure? She sounded all weirded out on the phone. Wasn't she supposed to be in San Francisco?'

'She was. It turns out she was fucking an old friend instead.'

So easily spoken.

'Oh…'

'I have to go, Mia.'

'Are you okay, Tommy?'

'Can't talk now, Mia.'

He clicked the palmtop shut, slipped it into his blazer pocket. When he glanced up Agent Logan was watching him, her smile the sad smile of those stranded at the perimeter of painful events.

'Just had to check up on the kids,' he explained as he slid back into the booth.

Samantha smiled. 'Beautiful kids.'

He looked at her sharply.

'You need to ease up on the paranoia, Professor Bible. I followed you from Columbia, remember? I saw them on your neighbor's porch. Like I said, beautiful kids.'

Thomas scratched the back of his neck. 'Forgot about that. Why
did
you follow me, anyway?'

'I was desperate. Desperate for leads. I wanted to tell you, by the way, that I loved how you dealt with us in your office.' She laughed. 'Showing you the Blue-ray like that was a mistake. I told Shelley she'd regret it.'

'Agent Atta strikes me as a hard ass.'

Samantha shrugged. 'She has to be. Not easy being an Arab-American woman in the FBI…' She trailed to take a healthy swig of beer, then with a guilty grin added, 'My dad used to say the only thing worse than a bitch was a woman angry for good reason.'

Thomas laughed. Either Samantha Logan was real people or she was trying to present herself as such. Was this a tactic of some kind?

'Are you always so open with your views, Agent Logan?'

Pained smile. 'I figure it's useless to BS someone with a PhD in bullshit.'

'
That
would be a philosopher,' Thomas said. 'Me? I'm a psychologist.'

Thomas found himself laughing with her, struck by how quickly she had managed to turn his mood. There was something about her smile, a kind of open-mouthed honesty, that spoke of loving, irreverent parents and a childhood spent joking around the dinner table. He couldn't help but wonder how much they had in common. '
The boss thought I was your kind of people
.'

'Which is
why
,' Agent Logan said, ducking her head as she lingered on the word—an oddly endearing gesture, 'we could use your help on this case.'

He snorted skeptically. 'What you guys need is a neurologist.'

'A psychologist isn't close enough?'

Thomas shrugged. 'Neurology is the science of the brain. Psychology is the science of the mind. Simple enough, I suppose, but things get very complicated very fast when it comes to understanding the relationship between the two.'

'The relationship of the mind to the brain?'

Thomas nodded into his beer. 'Some say the mind and the brain are actually the same thing, but at different levels of description. Others say they're entirely different things. And still others say only the brain is real—that the mind, and therefore psychology, is bunk.'

'What do
you
say?'

'I honestly don't know. The scary thing for me is that as the years pass and neuroscience matures, the relationship between the two disciplines starts to seem more and more like that between astronomy and astrology, or chemistry and alchemy.'

'And why's that?'

He paused, struck by the selfless candor of her expression. In his never-ending effort to engage his students, he had memorized innumerable little 'factoids' regarding this or that freshman preoccupation. As a result, he knew far too much about the myths and details of attraction. He knew, for instance, that Sam possessed all the features that men in Western cultures found appealing: large eyes, slender nose, high cheeks and delicate jaw. He knew that, no matter what the circumstances, simply looking at her would light up the reward centers of most men's brains.

His own included.

'Because neurology is a
natural
science,' he replied after a glutinous cough. 'It looks at human behavior and consciousness as natural processes like any other process in the natural world. It actually provides causal explanations for what we are.'

'And psychology doesn't?'

'Not really, no. Psychology also involves something called "intentional explanations", which are pretty tricky from a scientific point of view.' He found himself breathing deeply, as though steeling himself for some arduous task. 'For instance, why did you take a sip of your beer just now?'

Samantha frowned, shrugged. 'Because I wanted to,' she said lamely.

'There you go. That's an intentional explanation. A
psychological
explanation. This is largely how human beings explain and understand themselves: in terms of intentions, desires, purposes, hopes, and so on. We use intentional explanations.'

'And they're not scientific?'

Her foot brushed his leg and a jolt passed through him. She was just kicking off her shoes, he realized.

'Not comfortably,' he replied, 'no. Before science, we largely understood the world in intentional terms. From the dawn of recorded history pretty much all of our explanations of the world were psychological. Then along comes science and
bang
: where storms were once understood in terms of angry gods and the like, they're understood in terms of high pressure cells and so on. Science has pretty much scrubbed psychology from the natural world.'

The disenchantment of the world. In his classes Thomas was always at pains to convey just how extraordinary this transformation was—is. Homeric Greece, Vedic India, biblical Israel: in terms of structure, these worlds were cut from the same cloth as Tolkien's Middle-earth. Sanctioned by tradition, yes, anchored in the assent of masses, certainly, but projections of human conceit all the same. Magical. What fact could be more extraordinary? The entire human race had spent the bulk of its tenure living in various fantasy worlds, pleading, kneeling, murdering, avenging, all in the name of make-believe. The whole of humanity deluded. And if Neil was right, precious little had changed.

'Until science,' he continued, 'we humans really had no way of distinguishing good claims from bad claims outside of tradition and self-interest. So why not confabulate? Make stuff up? Why not elaborate belief systems that cater to our vanity, to our need to keep everyone in line? It's no accident we've cooked up thousands of different religions, each peculiar to some distinct culture.'

Sam paused to take a drink, and to reorient herself, Thomas supposed. 'So then why have I always thought psychology was a science?'

'Because it is, in a sense. It uses many of the same tools and standards. It proceeds by hypothesis. The problem lies primarily in its subject matter.'

'The mind.'

'Yep. To put it bluntly, the mind's, well,
spooky
. The ancient Greek roots of "psychology" are
psūkē
and
logos
, literally "the discourse of the soul". The roots of "neurology", on the other hand, are
neuron
and
logos
, or "the discourse of the sinew". This pretty much sums up the crucial difference: neurology deals with the mechanics of the meat, whereas psychology deals with the syntax of the ineffable. You tell me which is more scientific.'

She laughed. 'You were wrong, professor.'

'About what?'

'You
are
a philosopher.'

He found himself laughing a little too hard—an out-of-joint response to out-of-joint circumstances. At some level, it was simply too absurd to take seriously: Neil a madman, Nora screwing him, and this FBI agent plying Thomas with beer in an effort to track him down.
Ha-ha, Neil is fucking Nora. Ha-ha, Neil is murdering innocents. Ha-ha-ha
…

Agent Logan's look told him that she understood this, if not explicitly, then at the level of obscure bodily cues. Suddenly he felt close to this stranger, even though he didn't know the first thing about her.

Go slow, Goodbook. It's been a long day.

Something about her had stirred that anxious, adolescent tickle—that almost desperate desire to be liked. It seemed he could hear Neil laughing in the background.

'Have you an arm like God?'

Samantha's eyes flashed as she took another drink. 'You really need to work with me on this, professor.'