“I hope the cases have labels, to make it easier. ‘For Mr. K, For Mr. Premier, For Mr. Timur.’ Each with ‘Greetings from the Forbidden City’ on a postcard inside.”
Timur ignored Cono’s remark and rapped on the darkened window of the Mercedes. He took a cell phone from each of the employees inside. “These little things are dangerous,” he said to Cono. “More dangerous than guns. And a little hard to get in my dear country. Losing one is like having your dick cut off.”
Timur stuffed the phones into his coat. He pointed his dark eyes at Cono’s. “The Kitais know that if they help me they can play both sides. The minister and the premier, split or no split. Isn’t that worth a little compensation?”
“A man of your talents—why would the Kitais pay anyone but you? The trouble is, one side or the other, either the minister or the premier, is trying to rub you out. And I hope they don’t succeed, at least not until the wildcat princess is free from your safe-keeping.”
Timur walked over to the beige stone wall encircling the monumental baths and sat on it. He lit a cigarette as Cono sat next to him. More old men sauntered past, Kazaks and Russians, to climb the broad steps nearby. Timur took a hip flask from his coat and quickly jerked it to his lips; then it disappeared again.
“It’s a delicate situation, Cono. Minister Kurgat is grabbing more and more power, and tightening his grip on the oil contracts; he’s become too powerful for the premier’s comfort. And there’s a court case in the U.S. that is complicating things here. A longtime American adviser to our government has been indicted for corrupt operations, or whatever they call it—just normal grease for oil contracts. The case could bring out a few details that reflect poorly on our fine leaders. This will hurt bidding prices, both the ones on the record and the ones off the record, because the sows are following the story every day and they don’t want to end up in court in their own countries. That’s why we’ve gone back to the Stone Age, like apes, carrying money in suitcases and trucks. It all has to be untraceable.”
“And the unflattering details, like the American grease case, get no play in the papers here at home, I guess.”
Timur snorted. “Little brother, sometimes I think you’ll never learn. All the press is under the regime’s thumb. There won’t be any coverage of it here. And if it did somehow get out, the people would just write it off as an American scheme to insult all Kazaks. So what if the chief is taking his cut, and is a tyrant, and plenty brutal? The people need a strong leader. They feel insecure if they don’t know who to fear. Isn’t that why god was invented?”
Cono laughed at his friend’s distillation of human nature.
“The premier wants to deal with the Americans through diplomacy,” Timur said, “which means buying as many politicians in Washington as he can. Getting the American oil companies to crank up the pressure at home on his behalf. And maybe leasing some land to their air force. Then there’s Minister Kurgat.”
Timur sucked his cigarette again and exhaled the smoke slowly. “Kurgat has other ideas. He wants to box, to stick it to the Americans. And with help from Beijing, he might just be able to knock our premier out of the ring. How convenient for him.”
“If he clears away a few obstacles—like you—in advance?”
“I’ve got you to thank for that, Cono. The run-in at the Svezda to save your tart, with my squad and the Chinese Embassy team all together like we’re having some fuckeen Politburo meeting, and the hotel staff swarming around? Fuckeen mess. No way Kurgat wouldn’t know about it and suspect I’m trying to cut my own deal with Beijing.”
“Aren’t you?”
Timur ignored the comment and stepped toward the waiting car. “You’ll have to walk to your date with the Kitais, Cono. Take a roundabout way, and try not to get robbed. Almaty is a dangerous place—nothing’s nailed down in my country. I’ll be waiting nearby, not too close. I would send someone else to pick you up, but they might take the money themselves and dump your corpse on the side of the road. Both results would be unpleasant. Put the cases under the trees by the drive-up to the museum and tell the Kitais to go away. Then wait. No one’s ever there, except for the old guy who sweeps the place. He’s my uncle—worse scum than my old man.”
Timur got into the Mercedes and drove off.
Cono looked south and upward, toward the Tian Shan range, the mountains catching the afternoon sun on their iced and glowing edges. He turned and walked north, down sloping Karl Marx Street, then east beyond the central avenues where the high-end-business fronts behind the trees wore new façades of fake marble and chrome. Each was lettered with big Cyrillic signs—banks and medical suppliers, apparel shops and travel agents, followed by more modest stores selling industrial pumps, electrical fixtures, and spooled cables.
With almost two hours on his hands, Cono found himself wandering without direction, replaying the events of the day in his head—his old friend’s request for help with the bribes; the assassination attempt; the promise that Xiao Li’s whereabouts would be revealed; the bullet wound that caused less discomfort than being called a freak.
Freak. Cono had been trying to get used to that word ever since the doctors had first spoken it a decade ago.
The clinic physician in São Paulo who had started it all had no idea what he had set into motion. He had been treating Cono for recurring headaches, and was intrigued by the results of the neurological exams he performed on the unusual, ragtag young man who had just returned to Brazil after years of roaming alone across several continents.
In order to satisfy his own curiosity, and to get his name on a case report in a prestigious medical journal, the Brazilian doctor offered, at his own expense, to send Cono to a medical-research lab at Stanford University, in Palo Alto, California. The intention was for Cono to spend a few days there to determine which rare syndrome he exhibited, then return to Brazil. But the stay in California dragged on and on.
It was in the first battery of tests that Cono learned of his susceptibility to certain types of lights. The scientists asked him to give the exact count of rapid flickers he was being exposed to, in intervals as infinitesimal as hundredths of a second. Cono’s count was always accurate. They tested the flashing lights over a wide range of frequencies, and at different distances. Once, when a high-frequency light was positioned an arm’s length away from Cono’s face, it had thrown him into a seizure. Afterward, when he had regained consciousness and was connected to an intravenous line, Cono was told by two of the self-assured doctors that they had predicted this response.
They tested reaction times—visual, motor, auditory, even tactile and gustatory. There were endless variations of tests employing video screens, but the videos’ standard scanning speed of thirty images per second was too easy—Cono could pick out variations in each individual frame, even though it gave him a dull pain deep in his brain. They brought in faster equipment, which flashed visual scenes at forty, fifty, sixty images per second and more. The machines hit their limit, and Cono suggested to the frustrated scientists that they give him a glass of water and an aspirin and then show him a real situation, like a falling orange that he could catch and stuff into his pocket before anyone saw. Or a bird he could snatch with his hand as it flew by.
One of the doctors, a patient older man, asked Cono how well he slept at night, and what his dreams were like. The doctor explained why he was asking: dreaming was the brain’s way of re-equilibrating after a day of sensory inputs; the sensory overload of Cono’s hyper-fast perception might require longer and deeper dreaming in order to re-equilibrate his cortex at night. And the dreams might be different in character than those of a normal person—more intense, more vivid, faster, or the opposite of all of these; he didn’t know. Of course Cono also couldn’t know, because he had no way to compare his dreams to the dreams of others. But the older doctor’s questioning brought out several findings. Cono’s dreams often replayed real events with high fidelity to all the senses, not just the visual. He needed much more sleep
than the average person, and a shortfall in sleep over a few days could cripple him, distorting his perceptions and clouding his thoughts. Cono told the doctor he had discovered that he could temper this need for long sleep by falling into deep meditation for short intervals; there had been times during his years of traveling when the technique had been necessary for survival. Out of desperation he had tried amphetamines, too, but they had a paradoxical effect and made him even more stuporous.
Geneticists were brought in to evaluate the strange young man. They spoke of genes called timeless, FoxP2, STX1A and others—genes they thought controlled the cycle times of the brains of various animal species unfamiliar to Cono. They were eager to know if these genes exerted the same control in humans. The geneticists analyzed Cono’s blood; later they could say only that they’d found a mutation they’d never seen, in a yet unnamed gene that they proudly asserted must be the regulator of sequential awareness. One of the geneticists speculated that Cono might have a version of this gene similar to that of a shark or a falcon or a reptile, a version that had been lost somewhere along the march into mammalian evolution.
This theory was immediately contested by another geneticist, who said it was likely that one or more of Cono’s brain-regulating genes located on the long arm of the seventh chromosome had undergone spontaneous mutations that somehow resulted in “this freakishly faster cycling.” The scientists argued over the competing theories, but finally agreed that regardless of the source of the genetic aberration, the result was analogous to the evolutionary progression of computers—new machines steadily came out in faster and faster models, doubling their cycle-times every year or two. But so far among humans, there were only two models—Cono and everyone else.
“It’s inevitable that new genetic anomalies like this will crop up as we get better at detecting them,” explained a bearded doctor in horn-rimmed glasses and a bow tie. “A lab in Europe just worked out the reason for a Finnish sports hero being unbeatable in cross-country skiing back in the ’60s. He has a mutation in a gene that controls red-blood-cell production. His body cranks out red blood cells in overdrive—very handy when your muscles are aching for more oxygen. And recently there was a baby born in Germany who looks like a body builder. The kid’s myostatin gene is mutated so that it doesn’t restrain muscle growth like it should. No doubt he’ll grow up to be abnormally strong. There are a handful of people in the world who cannot feel pain because of a defect in a single one of their genes. And you’ve probably heard of perfect pitch—I’m betting it’s the result of a genetic alteration we haven’t pinned down yet. You, Cono, are part of a new trend of uncovering the genetic basis of human performance anomalies.”
Cono was concentrating hard to understand all the English words, sometimes stopping the doctor for clarification. “Other person, someone, fast, making time slow down like me?” he asked.
“We’ve had a few cases of abnormally fast reaction times in patients with a disease called Tourette’s, but at most we see a doubling of speed of movement. You are way beyond that. And in you, both motion and perception are accelerated.” The doctor paused in thought. “Some, but not all, of your reaction times suggest that your brain is routing signals through a shorter pathway for sensation and response, via the amygdala. Amygdala means ‘almond’ in Latin, and that’s what this part of the brain looks like.” Cono was frowning as he tried to comprehend all the words. “There are two amygdalae,” the doctor continued, “deep in your brain, above the roof of your mouth, one on each side. They play a role in emotions and aggression. Signals routed through them can be so fast that they are complete even before you have any conscious awareness of them. It’s analogous to me tapping on your knee. Your quadriceps contract and your leg kicks out before you have any knowledge of the action. But I must say, your case is considerably more complex.”
After three weeks of examining Cono, the doctors sat down and gave him an overview of their findings. Cono had already soaked up a great deal more English. Following their summary, he recalled the seizure that had been provoked by the flickering lights and said, “Well, so, that explain why hard it is to watch TV for me.” The doctors all laughed, guardedly. They looked around the room at one another; too much, Cono thought. They were unusually gracious toward him, and he noted minuscule, fleeting contractions around their eyes and instantaneous shivers near their lips when they gave bland answers to his questions.
The scientists wanted more. They wanted to test Cono’s biological relatives and their genes, and to study Cono’s physiology in much greater detail. “After all, who knows the bodily consequences of a brain ticking so fast,” one of them said. “Maybe it shortens life expectancy.” A woman wearing a pinstriped dress said it was essential that they test the effect of Cono’s mutations on language acquisition, because of the probability that an increased cycle time would facilitate linguistic processing. Another specialist in the room said they had prepared a laboratory to study his dream patterns. Cono laughed at these proposals as he reached across the table to place his hand near the chief doctor’s ear, and plucked a Brazilian real coin from it. He flipped it into the air with his thumb, observing their faces and the tumbling coin at the same time. The coin was gone with a swipe of his arm that the scientists never saw. “The Freakish say no thanks.”
Cono made that his last day with the doctors. He had to change motels twice to evade their aggressive pursuit. But he didn’t leave Palo Alto immediately. He had agreed to meet a young oddball video technician named Todd who had slipped him a note on that last day. Todd had run the machines for most of the perceptual tests that Cono had endured, and he wrote in the note that he had important things to discuss with Cono.
When the goateed young man wasn’t running the visual equipment at the medical labs, he was working on his doctorate in mathematics. He wanted to put Cono’s way of seeing things into equations. “I’m into data compression,” he explained. That seemed to be the only thing Todd was into. He had no interest in women or men, and was barely sociable. He was neuter, it seemed, except for the near-orgasmic pleasure he took from his formulas. Cono guessed that only a person who didn’t really care for people could find personalities in equations, and friends in matrices. Todd spoke of datasets as if they were current or future lovers. Cono admired him for his ability to find joy beyond the secretory impulses that controlled most humans.
The two developed a friendship of sorts and worked together each night for weeks at sandwich shops and a joint called Michael’s Café. Cono had no money left, so Todd let him sleep on the floor of his flimsy-walled apartment, between stacks of computer magazines.
Todd asked in a dozen ways exactly what Cono saw in the split-second images that appeared in his mind as he watched something moving. Cono explained that the stationary objects would melt into the background, and he would actively perceive only what was moving, the edges especially. The rest could be black, or empty; it didn’t matter, because, “If I see that part once and it makes no move, I don’t need to see it again. I have it.”
Todd’s eyes pointed upward into his lids, so that Cono saw only the white sclera. When his pupils returned, Todd grinned and licked his lips. He started writing furiously on a notepad. Finally he spoke. “Stationary image fields are condensed, pocketed away by the math, so more strenuous formulas can work on the moving parts. Just think of a movie, Cono.” Cono replied that he didn’t watch movies; they gave him a headache. “Well, in movies, most of what you see is not moving much, but those pixels still choke up the data stream. So we’ll carve them out and stuff them away temporarily, and give them five-hertz updates. It frees up gobs of processing muscle.”
“Gobs?” Cono said.
“You know, lots, big amount, truckloads. Got it?”
“Got it. I learn gobs of English from my friend Todd.”
Todd smiled, briefly. “What about color? D’you see everything in color?” He thumped his bright-yellow pencil on the table. Then he twirled it around his thumb repeat
edly—a little acrobatic trick he did when he was impatient, which was often.
Cono stared at the twirling pencil against the background of the green napkin Todd’s hand rested on.
“I know the pencil is yellow, but when it moves fast like that, it’s just gray. The napkin stays green.”
Todd picked up the napkin and waved it quickly back and forth. “Green?”
“Gray.”
“And now?” Todd stopped his waving.
“Now it’s green.”
Todd bit the eraser end of the pencil. “Maybe normal humans are just like you, Seven Q. The color disappears when something moves fast, and they just don’t notice the color’s gone. But you, you can see the change because, well, you know …”
“Normal? What is normal, Todd? Are you normal? And what is Seven Q?”
“I guess the docs didn’t tell you. They nicknamed you Seven Q because they think your mutations are on the long arm of your seventh chromosome. Chromosomes have a long arm and a short arm. The long one is called Q. They write it like this …”
Todd wrote “7q” on his notepad. “Kinda funny, huh?”
“My name is Cono, not Seven Q.”
Cono’s comment was lost on his friend, who was back to scribbling equations.
Todd looked up. “If it’s true and we can cut color from any fast movement in the display, that’s a 66 percent bit reduction, limited of course to the moving parts of the field, but those are the processor hogs anyway.”
“Hogs?”
“Pigs. Eat a lot. We’ll have to see if it pans out in normals, but if it does, it’ll be a great data stuffer, and easy to deal with—just some eigenvector transformations.”
Todd was immersed in his formulas again when Cono reached beneath the table, pulled a box out of a sack and placed it next to the notepad. It was a mini Sony video camera, the latest. Cono nudged it forward to get Todd’s attention.
Performance Anomalies Page 6
