A couple of days later, I brought a brain from a new suicide over to Murray. As I was hurrying my pizza bag and its contents back to the ME, I got an urgent message from him. He’d found something.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE SUICIDE CENTER
July 1983
The locus ceruleus is a pile of nerve cells that looks like a blue birthmark. There’s one on each side of the pons, the bridge which connects the brain to the spinal cord.
“That’s the left locus ceruleus,” Murray said, his hand shaking a little. What he was pointing to was a dime-sized spot, kind of transparent looking, on the MRI slices coming down from the brain and working their way to the spinal cord. “Nothing wrong with this one. Now I’m going to scroll over to the other side.”
Pretty soon the right locus ceruleus drifted into view and Murray magnified it, like in the movies when a train or a plane starts out as a speck and comes toward you, getting bigger and bigger all the time. Murray didn’t have to explain. Same outline as the one on the left, but there was something different about it. It looked like a tarnished dime, mottled and gray. Not blue.
“Never seen anything like it,” he said. Now I knew why his hand was shaking. “See how it stays the same, the deeper I scroll into the pons?” Boy, did I want to believe him. But until we checked with the microscope, the strange right locus might have nothing to do with a suicide center at all.
A few minutes later, Murray and I were standing in one of the smaller autopsy rooms of the ME. The brain I’d just brought back was sitting on a dissection table, looking like a plump white cat, head burrowed under its paws. On the walk over there together, I began to feel more upbeat. Hadn’t I figured my center might be hiding out in a dull suburb like the pons? Besides, it’s common knowledge that there’s a private detective in the brain, specializing in confidential matters like anxiety and fear. And who’s that? The locus ceruleus, as it happens. All in all, I couldn’t think of a better place for a mysterious outfit like a suicide center to sublet a quiet little apartment.
The pathologist on duty was Peter Bishop. Born in England, trained at Hopkins. Young-looking, with a red face and prematurely white hair. One of those forever boyish Brits. In my mind they’re always in shorts and rugby shirts. Lucky he was around that night. The sharpest of them all, but an expert at taking the piss. One of the blood sports of his native country; not only putting the victim down, but focusing on the part of him that can least afford it. As Murray was putting the MRI images on the viewbox, “please don’t let him shake,” I thought. When we started looking at the pictures, Peter began to address him in measured tones and perfect pitch. As if he was reading the Magna Carta to an English-as-a third-language immigrant. “And what have we here…” he asked, pointing first to the viewbox, then to the brain glistening under the surgical overhead light, “…art imitating death?”
Never was so little said in so many words. (Unconfirmed attribution: Churchill, Winston. 1941.) Before he could go into one of those endless riffs of his, I jumped in. “Cut the shit, Peter. Just look at what Murray has to show you.”
Peter was a quick study. I don’t think he’d ever seen an MRI before, but he understood right away what we were trying to get at. All business now, he began his dissection. A few minutes later, he showed us what we’d come to see. The locus ceruleus, the blue spot; first the right one, and then its twin on the left. Both looked normal. They never do microscopics of the locus at the ME; no call for it. But this was a different story. Either the microscopics were going to tie up with what was on the MRI, or Murray and I had a lot of explaining to do.
The next morning I got up even earlier than usual. Didn’t sleep well anyway; too much handicapping what the microscopics were going to show. When I got to the ME around seven, Peter was already there. With his arms hugging the microscope, he looked like one of those morons who keep a stranglehold on their girls as they walk them down the street. As soon as he saw me, he put on the teaching head so we could look at the slides together. First he showed me cuts of the left locus, then the right.
“No question about it,” he said, sounding less Old Britannia for a change, and more Newyorknewyork urgent.
“The left one looks completely normal. But can you see the difference? The right is darker, and its nerve cells are dissolved, with their walls all broken up.” He was right. You didn’t have to be a pathologist to understand what he was talking about. “What do you make of it?” I asked.
“These changes are quite specific. I’ve seen them elsewhere in the brain in just two situations.”
“And they are…?”
Peter got up and began to rummage through his bookcase. After a while, he pulled a reprint of an article out of a manila envelope.
“A few years ago, I got to study the brains of people executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing. Look at the pictures of the slides. And here are some I took from the microscopics of people who were killed by lightning. Now give our locus ceruleus another look. Can’t tell them apart, can you, except that they’re in a different part of the brain? What this all means,” Peter continued, “is that the severe damage to the nerve cells all comes from the same source. An electrical burn.”
“How do you know that for sure?”
“Because part of the brain fries after it’s struck by lightning.”
“Yes, so?”
“Well then if the brains of the ones who died in the electric chair, and of people who were struck by lightning, and now the locus ceruleus of our case,” he waved in the general direction of the microscope, “all show the same changes, it stands to reason that…”
“They all come from electrical burns.”
“Very good,” he said, as if talking to an idiot child.
Maybe what Murray had was catching. My own hands shook a bit too as I was thumbing through the chart, looking for the sheet that gave some information about this suicide’s past. Sometimes you draw a blank. No relatives or friends, no clinic notes, found floating in the river without ID. But I was in luck. Forty-yearold Caucasian housewife with two teenage children. Husband a technical writer working at home. No previous attempts, no history of depression. Found dead in her bathtub, early the morning before.
Slit her wrists during the night, hour undetermined.
The story put her in with the amateurs, and her right locus ceruleus was somehow involved in an electrical fire. I’d have to come up with a solid explanation for the fire. Was it an overloaded circuit, or a spark at the wrong time, that started things off?
CHAPTER NINE
I SPILL THE BEANS
February 1984
The Chief’s earlobes were getting redder by the second. To anybody who’s ever been around him, that means the early stages of pissed off. Doesn’t appreciate surprises at his conferences. Makes it look like he doesn’t have 100% of everything under his control, 100% of the time. I soon realized I’d have to make my pitch very convincing, to avoid a five or six on the Richter scale from him. Persian Pete looking at me sideways. Bryce Gillespie, the Chief Resident – the way WASPs name their kids, could just as well be Gillespie Bryce – looking thoughtful. In a holding pattern until he can figure out what facial expression works best for his plot to become The Chief’s associate.
But the first case was no fluke. After that one, we’d gotten three more. Same deformed right locus on MRI and microscopic, amateurs from the looks of their history sheets.
This time around, nobody could accuse me of only talking a good game. I showed the slides and MRIs of all four. Four sudden suicides, four abnormal MRIs and microscopics of not just any locus, just the right one. I was onto something the brain was planning to keep to itself forever. They knew it, I knew it.
A few lousy slides and I was rehabilitated. Richter scale aborted. Chief calm; Chief Resident outright grinning, nudging his sleepy charges to “show some interest, for crissake.” Pete’s right thumb bobbing up and down like in a vigorous session of you know what. Happy for me? No
way. At that moment everybody there was calculating how to hitch a ride with me. And even how to make off with the car, while I was busy taking a leak by the side of the road.
It’s always good to hold something back. Women know that. Give it all up at the beginning? A sure way to get treated like shit. That’s why I didn’t spill all the beans at once. Makes everybody wait for the other shoe to drop. Drives them nuts.
CHAPTER TEN
THE PARTHENON
February 1984
After the weekly conference, on the way to my office at the County, I make my first visit of the day to the Parthenon Coffee Shop. It’s located on First Avenue, the main drag of the neighborhood. Which is mostly made up of the two huge hospitals, plus a whole bunch of nothing-special red brick, cookie-cutter apartment houses. The Parthenon has dark walls and weak lighting; never warm enough in the winter and torrid in the summer. And the smell! Essence of fried onions, steamed cabbage and hamburgers cooked in old grease.
But what’s good about the Parthenon is it’s halfway between my office and where I live, on 29th Street. What’s bad about it is that every time I go there (which is a few times a day) I have to pass the County Psycho on the way. I’ve never been inside, but the place spooks me, even from the outside. Regular hospital buildings show a lot of activity – people walking in and out, windows open and lit up at night. This one is completely stumm, not a peep out of it, all the windows covered with mesh. Every time I walk by I listen for a cry – “Get me out of here, I’m not crazy” – or somebody trying to bust through the window so they can jump. It’s as if the building itself is mentally disturbed, not just the poor suckers inside.
At the Parthenon, George and Theo – probably the owners under some complicated Greek arrangement – know what I want to eat even before I do. And here’s another thing: Sometimes, late at night, after a bout with one of my kinky-haired social workers, with the blood rushing back to my stomach after an emergency bypass below, I get hungry and call up the Parthenon for a pizza. Could be Persian Pete serves something fancier, like champagne and caviar, to his dates after the main event. He’d have to, if he ever wanted to have another go at them; the jerk. Anyway, ten minutes later, on the button every time, Phil (real name Pheidippides, the night waiter at the Parthenon) rings the bell. Short and wiry, a spitting image of the pictures of the guys who kept running around with the flame in ancient Greece. I ask you, where else in New York City, except in some super fancy hotel, can a guy get 24-hour room service?
A good deal all around, except for one thing. The Parthenon has lousy bagels. They’re all swollen-looking and pale; so soft you can sink your fingers into them. They have no taste whatsoever. When you bite into one, it’s like trying to chew moist cotton. No use toasting them. That’s when they look and taste like burned cardboard. Don’t expect any help from the schmier, either.
I sit down in my usual booth, second from the door, with a direct southerly view down First Avenue. Customary bagel with cyclops eye staring at me, daring me not to eat it. Coffee, little plastic cup of creamer, and dispenser of artificial sweetener, all laid out for me like instruments in the OR.
For a couple of weeks, I was spending a lot of my time composing the little talk I’d just given at the conference. The patter modest enough on the outside. But to those in the know, a few well-placed fuckyous to people who shouldn’t have lost faith in me in the first place. Still, by going public, I opened myself up to something else. People on the outside were sure to get hold of the little bit of information I’d come up with, and use it for their own purposes. That’s the way it is in research. News spreads as fast as small-town gossip when the parson is caught exchanging confidential organ materials with the lady who plays the eponymous at the village church. Meaning I had to hurry up and figure out the electrical fire business.
Arson was always a possibility.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
RAT TIME
April 1984
So, I said to myself, how about if the locus ceruleus gets burned to the ground because a burst of electricity – an epileptic seizure – hits it head on, like lightning striking a house? That made a lot of sense. But, if it’s a seizure that brings on all the damage, where does it come from, what makes it happen? Not to speak of how does a smoking, gutted locus ceruleus translate itself into a spur-of-the-moment suicide?
The way I began to figure it, we’re all born with a suicide center, only it’s equipped with a safety switch that is permanently in the “off” position. With almost everybody, the center has zero function all our lives, and dies the same time we do. But in some people – oftentimes blood relatives, which means they share some genes – there’s an electrical storm, a seizure, in the center. In all the excitement, the safety switch gets unlocked. The countdown starts right then for the index finger to pull the trigger, for the legs to take their last ever jump.
There was only one way to show if this theory of mine wasn’t just another pretty face. What I had to do was talk a suicide center into doing its specialty fire-swallowing act, then let the brain take care of the rest.
I still had some grant money for the Beethoven and Babe Ruth project. This meant I could cheat for a while, use the money to finance the suicide project instead. I knew there’d be hell to pay afterwards, when the Genius Foundation (no kidding, that’s what it’s called) found out I’d siphoned off their dough. Sort of like using the in-laws’ wedding present to buy a diamond bracelet for the girl you’re fucking on the side.
My lab was in the basement of the County. Not an elegant address, but enough out of the way to discourage drop-ins. I also had an office up on the neurosurgery floor of the hospital. That’s where I worked at my official job, holding the hands of the trainees. The grimy halls and weak lighting in the basement made you feel you were walking into an old-time coal mine. Inside, not too bad. In a little anteroom, Marian, my long-time devoted lab assistantreceptionist, had her desk. It was also a waiting area, with a few chairs lined up against the wall. Most afternoons her four children sat there. Too young to go home after school, and the County doesn’t pay enough to cover babysitters. The lab was good-sized, with an alcove up front that had plenty of room for the animal cages. That still left some space for the electrical equipment.
It didn’t take long to get going, starting off on the cheap: a hundred high-grade white rats, plus some variable voltage electrical stimulators. I didn’t even have to hire any extra personnel. Which was good, seeing as I didn’t want too many people knowing what I was up to. Marian could feed the rats and serve as an extra pair of hands.. No worry there.
Rats have a locus ceruleus, same as humans. But whether they have a suicide center was up for grabs when I started the experiment. The idea was to zap one or the other locus with enough electricity to set up a seizure, then see what happens.
Over the next couple of months, I tried all kinds of combinations. So much and so much voltage to one locus or another – or both – for each rat. But what if I came in one morning and found one of the rats dead? How would I know if it was just a rat thing, or that it killed itself? The Genius Foundation had to come up with even more money, so I could buy a video system for 24-hour surveillance of the rats. For a while, that didn’t pay off. They kept sitting around looking cheerful, eating up the feed, and not doing what they were supposed to do; namely, knock themselves off. I had to find a better way to spark the seizures.
Up in the OR, we’d been fiddling around with high-voltage lasers to loosen up scar tissue and stop the bleeding from tiny little vessels in the brain, the one you can’t get at with a clamp. The discharge from a laser comes in focused bursts, not all at once. That way the area where the beam hits doesn’t get damaged. Like staying in the hot sun all day long, versus ducking in and out of the shade. One’ll get you a hell of a sunburn; the other, a nice tan.
Louie Rosenkrantz is in charge of lasers at the County. If you need one, or the one you have goes bad, he’s your man. A balding beanpole in his thir
ties, he comes to work with a lunch pail, the kind little kids used to carry to school. Never left home, still lives with his mother. But when he’s working with lasers, he’s John Wayne and Einstein put together. I explained my problem to him and he came through like a champ. He made some changes in one of the lasers they used for eye surgery, and pretty soon I was in business. Not only did he lend me a machine, but he also pointed me in the right direction. Explained that the wavelength of the beam the laser sends out can be adjusted. He suggested I use different voltages and different wavelengths when I aimed the beam at the rats’ heads.
Pretty soon I had to buy another two hundred rats. This voltage, that frequency, to the right or left focus. The bookkeeping alone, what I gave to each rat, took a couple of hours a day. Marian had to work overtime just to feed the rats, water them and clean the cages. If anything good was going to happen, now was the time.
One morning, we found one of the rats dead. Blood on his fur, and a broken neck. Buying the TV camera turned out to be a good investment. The tape showed everything that happened. During the night, he stayed quiet. Until, all of a sudden, he started running full force at the bars of the cage. Kept banging his head against them. To me, it looked a lot like the amateur suicides. No warning; then deadly violence aimed inwards. I pulled out the records and checked animal number, voltage, and wavelength, and whether it was the right or left locus. My notes showed four hundred volts with a wavelength of 3904 Angstroms. That measurement put it in the range of ultraviolet light. The locus? The right one, just like the amateur suicides we’d worked on at the ME!
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