Syndrome E

by Franck Thilliez

  “Let’s go see your uncle.”

  Atef hesitated a long time.

  “I’d really like to help you, in memory of my brother. But this I should do alone. I’d rather remain careful and not be seen with you. We’ll meet again tomorrow, in front of the Saladin Citadel overlooking the Necropolis, an hour and a half after the call to prayer. Six a.m., at the foot of the left minaret. I’ll be there with your information.”

  Atef downed half his beer.

  “I’m going to stay a bit longer. You go now. And especially…”

  Sharko finally picked up his glass of whiskey and emptied it in one gulp.

  “I know, not a word. See you tomorrow.”

  Once outside, the cop intentionally lost himself in the streets of Cairo, carried along by the human flow, the colors and smells.

  He might have a lead.

  The temperature had dropped a good fifteen degrees, and the sweat from the club grew cool along his scalp and ears. The cop didn’t feel like going back to his deathly little room and confronting what was inside his head. The city carried him, guided him in its whirlwinds of mystery. He discovered improbable cafés hidden between two buildings, and hookah joints lit by Chinese lanterns among which people glided, carrying reddened coals. He crossed paths with wandering vendors of vinyl wallets and paper handkerchiefs, dove into atmospheres whose very existence he would never have suspected. He smoked and drank without worrying about the water the tea was made from, without fearing the tourista. Somewhere back in the Muslim portion of the city, carried along by drunkenness, he watched the slaughter of three young bulls, their throats slit in the middle of the street, which butchers hacked into pieces before wrapping them in pouches ready for distribution. In the heart of the night, human waves unfurled: poor people, children with bare feet, women with black veils, while a well-dressed man in a suit handed out political pamphlets. Bags of meat were being tossed to the crowd along with the advertising; people elbowed each other and shouted. The whole city vibrated like a single being.

  In the midst of his euphoria, Sharko suddenly felt a surge of nausea and squinted his eyes. Over there, standing apart from the crowd, was a man plunged in darkness, wearing a mustache and a hat that looked like a beret.

  Hassan Noureddine.

  The man stepped to the side and disappeared down a street.

  The Frenchman tried to open a path toward him, but the human flow jostled him. He forced his way through the crowd, the tide of arms, and began running. When he arrived at the square, the police chief had vanished. Sharko moved forward into the deserted alleyways, turned in every direction, then finally stopped, alone in the middle of the silent houses.

  They were following him. Even here. What did that mean?

  And what if he’d just been dreaming? What if that silhouette had only been a vision, like Eugenie?

  Sharko turned back. The air here seemed frozen. This silence, this darkness, the blackness of the building facades. He quickened his pace and finally rejoined the hubbub of the main street. Somewhere else, the buzzing was getting louder; the inimitable chants of the women filled the air, to the rhythm of clacking castanets and tabla drums. Sharko was in Egypt; he was discovering people so open that they drank from the same glass at the table, that they lived outside and cooked their bread on the sidewalk.

  But in the midst of that jubilant crowd, a monster had struck.

  A bloodthirsty ghoul, who had leapt from neighborhood to neighborhood to spread darkness.

  That was more than fifteen years ago.

  Alone in room 16, which overlooked Mohamed Farid Street, wrapped like an Egyptian in his sheets to ward off mosquitoes, Sharko crushed his hands against his ears. Eugenie was flinging cocktail sauce all over the walls and yelling at him. She didn’t want any more corpses or horrors; she cried and pulled at her hair with shrill screams. And the moment Sharko dozed off, dying from exhaustion, she clapped her hands sharply and he jerked awake again.

  “All those people are watching you. They’re spying on us, dear Franck, through the window, through the keyhole. They’re following us, sniffing out our scent. We have to go back home before they do us harm. You want them to torture me like Eloise and Suzanne? Remember Suzanne, naked, her rounded belly, tied up on a wooden table? Her screams? She was begging you, Franck. She was begging you. Why weren’t you there to save her? Why, dear Franck?”

  The Wernicke’s area in Sharko’s brain was throbbing. He got up and glanced into the street. He saw the tops of people’s heads, white robes swaying in the thick air. Not a trace of the arrogant fat cop. Then he double-checked that the door and shutters were locked tight. The paranoia remained, swarming beneath his flesh, and Eugenie still refused to leave. At the end of his rope, the schizophrenic policeman rushed toward the small refrigerator, gathered up all the ice cubes, and threw them into the bathtub. Shut in the bathroom, he ran the cold water and sank below the surface, breath taken away, body freezing. The tall enameled edges threw up familiar ramparts, reassuring him. The world seemed to shrink onto his body and mash up everything around it.

  He ended up falling asleep in the empty tub, curled up and trembling like an old dog, alone, so far from home, with his inner phantoms. Against his chest he held the little locomotive, O-gauge Ova Hornby, with its black car for wood and coal.

  He never realized he was crying.

  23

  The chronically jammed Brussels ring road was dumping its last batch of workers into the city’s outskirts. After the strong heat of the previous days, a yellowish haze tarnished the sky, despite various antipollution initiatives. Armed with a GPS, Lucie and her boss easily found their way to the University of Saint-Luc health services, located in a suburb of the Belgian capital. With their tree-lined surroundings and meticulous, linear architecture, the buildings gave off a sense of peace and strength. From what Kashmareck understood, the clinic, in addition to its role as a hospital, also performed specialized research, supported by an up-to-the-minute technological infrastructure. Among other things, it was involved in neuromarketing, the main point of which was to gain a better understanding of consumer behavior by identifying how the brain worked at the time of purchase.

  Georges Beckers was waiting for the detectives in the medical imaging department, located on the basement level of the university hospital. Short and stout, the man wore a jovial face, with puffy jowls and a collar of white beard. There was nothing to suggest that he was at the forefront of neuroimaging research, assuming it was possible to have an archetypal researcher. He briefly explained that, between medical consults, his department leased out the scanners for advertising purposes—something that was strictly prohibited in France.

  As they walked down the hallway, the police captain steered the conversation toward their case.

  “When did you first meet Claude Poignet?”

  Beckers answered in a thick Belgian accent:

  “It was about ten years ago, at a conference in Brussels on the evolution of imagery since the Age of Enlightenment. Claude was very interested in the way images traveled from generation to generation. In illustrated books, films, photographs, and even collective memory. I’d gone there for science, and he for film. We hit it off immediately. It’s really tragic, what happened to him.”

  “Did you get together often?”

  “I’d say two or three times a year. But we were in constant touch by e-mail or telephone. He followed my work on the brain closely and he taught me a great deal about how movies work.”

  At the end of the corridor, they halted before some wide windows. On the other side lay a cylinder, located in the middle of a white room. Before the scanner stood a kind of table on tracks, fitted with a kind of hoop used to hold the head in place.

  “This scanner is one of the most cutting-edge machines in existence. Three teslas of magnetic field, a picture of the brain every demi-second, powerful statistical analysis system…I hope you’re not claustrophobic, Captain?”

  “No, why?”<
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  “In that case, you’re the one who’ll go in the scanner, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  Kashmareck’s face darkened.

  “We came to see about the film. On the phone, it sounded like you’d discovered something.”

  “Indeed I did. But explanation works best with demonstration. The machine is free this evening, so we might as well take advantage of it. An MRI in a machine that costs millions of euros is not an opportunity that comes along every day.”

  The man was apparently obsessed with science and aching to use his little toys. Like it or not, Kashmareck was going to serve as guinea pig and no doubt feed the statistics that researchers delighted in. Lucie patted her boss’s shoulder and gave him a smile.

  “He’s right. Nothing like a good shower of X-rays.”

  The captain grunted and gave in. Beckers provided the explanations:

  “Have you seen the film?”

  “Haven’t had time yet—we’ve just downloaded it onto our servers. But my colleague here described it to me in the car.”

  “Perfect. This will give you a chance to see it. But you’re going to do it from inside the scanner. My assistant is waiting. Do you have any dental fillings or body piercings?”

  “Uh…yes…”

  He looked at Lucie, hesitant.

  “Here, on my navel…”

  Lucie brought her hand to her mouth to keep from laughing. She turned around and pretended to be inspecting the machines, while the scientist pursued his explanations.

  “Take it out. We’ll get you settled and give you glasses that are actually two pixelated screens. During the viewing of the film, the apparatus will record your brain activity. Please…”

  Kashmareck sighed. “Jesus, if my wife could only see this!”

  The cop moved away and joined a man in a lab coat in the room below. Lucie and the scientist headed to a kind of control room loaded with screens, computers, and colored buttons. It looked like the main deck of the starship Enterprise. While they were settling Kashmareck in, Lucie voiced the question she’d been dying to ask:

  “What happens now?”

  “We’re going to watch the movie at the same time as him, but directly, inside his brain.”

  Beckers took a moment to enjoy the astonishment on her face.

  “Today, my dear lieutenant, we’re going to explore important mysteries of the brain, especially with regard to images and sounds. The oldest card trick in the book—divination—is about to be relegated to the attic.”

  “How so?”

  “If you show your colleague a playing card while he’s in the scanner, I’d be able to guess which it is just by looking at his brain activity.”

  In the room below them, the captain lay stretched out on the table, not feeling very reassured. The assistant had just fitted him with strange glasses with square frames and opaque lenses.

  “Are you telling me that you can read people’s minds?”

  “Let’s say it’s no longer a fantasy. Today, we’re able to project simple visual thoughts onscreen. When you see a specific image, thousands of tiny areas of the visual cortex, which we call voxels, light up in an almost unique way and identify the relevant image. Thanks to complex mathematical treatments, we can then associate an image with a cerebral cartography, and we record all of it in a database. Thus, at any given moment, we could use the system in the opposite direction: to each group of voxels visualized by the MRI, there corresponds an image, at least in theory. If the image is in our database, we can reconstruct it, and thus display your thoughts.”

  “That’s astounding.”

  “Isn’t it? Unfortunately, the voxel, our smallest unit, measures fifty cubic millimeters and already contains around five million neurons. Despite the power of our scanner, it’s like seeing the outline of a city from up in the sky, without being able to make out the pattern of the streets or the architecture of its buildings. But it’s already a giant step. Ever since one brilliant scientist had the idea, a few years ago, to make people drink Coke and Pepsi in a scanner, the possibilities have become limitless. They were blindfolded and asked which soft drink they preferred before tasting it. Most answered Coke. But in the blind test, the same people said they preferred the taste of Pepsi. The scanner showed that an area in the brain, called putamen, reacted more strongly for Pepsi than for Coke. Putamen is the seat of immediate, instinctive pleasures.”

  “So the ad campaign for Coke claims that people prefer it, while in reality their bodies prefer Pepsi.”

  “Precisely. Today all the big advertising firms are clamoring for our scanners. Neuromarketing allows them to increase brand preference, maximize the impact of an advertising slogan, and optimize its memorization. We’ve been able to highlight areas of the brain involved in the purchasing process, like the insula, which is the site of pain and pricing, as well as the median prefrontal cortex, the putamen, and the cuneus. Soon all an ad will have to do is enter your visual or auditory field to have an impact. Even if your eyes and ears aren’t paying attention, it will be studied so as to stimulate the memory circuits and the purchasing process.”

  “That’s terrifying.”

  “It’s the future. What do you do when you’re tired, my dear lieutenant? Life is increasingly demanding and exhausting, so to relax you settle in at home, in front of your screens. You open your mind to images like a faucet, with your awareness lowered, almost asleep. And at that moment you become the perfect target, and they inject whatever they want into your head.”

  It was both staggering and horrible. A world governed by images and the control of the subconscious, in which the barriers of rationality were bypassed. Could one still speak of free will? Seeing all these perfected tools working on the brain, Lucie was reminded of the fantasy of the optogram: they were in the heart of the matter, and it wasn’t so fantastic after all.

  “So I’m not entirely off the mark if I say that an image can leave an imprint in the brain?”

  “That’s exactly right—you’ve understood the basis of our work. You study fingerprints; we study brain prints. Every action leaves a trace, whatever it might be. The whole trick lies in knowing how to detect it, and having the tools that let you exploit it.”

  Lucie thought of all the investigative techniques the crime lab used when dealing with a case. Here they did the same thing, but with gray matter.

  “Obviously, we’re still in the Middle Ages of technology, but in a few years we’ll probably have machines that will allow you to visualize dreams. Do you know that in the United States they’re already talking about installing scanners in courtrooms? Imagine those machines projecting a defendant’s memories. No more lies; verdicts that are always reliable…And I’m not even talking about other fields, like medicine, psychiatry, or business. There’s also neuropolitics, which offers the possibility of accessing voters’ deep-seated feelings toward a given candidate.”

  Lucie recalled the film Minority Report. It was a dizzying prospect, but this was the reality of tomorrow. A rape of consciousness. The director from 1955, with his subliminal images, was already part of the process. Perhaps he had understood, well before his time, the function of certain areas of the brain.

  On the other side of the glass, the poor captain disappeared into the magnetic tunnel. Lucie was pleased to have avoided that bit of pure anxiety. Watching the film was already trying enough.

  “What do you think of the film from 1955?” she asked.

  “Impressive, on all fronts. I don’t know who the director was, but he was a genius, an innovator. With his use of subliminal imagery and multiple exposures, he was already acting on areas of the primitive brain. Pleasure, fear, the desire to confront taboos. In 1955, such a process was completely unheard of. Even advertisers came to it later on. And the man who can beat advertising to the punch is hands down a genius.”

  The same words had come out of Claude Poignet’s mouth.

  “And what about the mutilated woman and the bull? Special effects?”<
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  “No idea. That’s not really my specialty—I was more interested in how the film was put together, not its content…Excuse me a moment, my assistant is signaling that all’s ready.”

  Beckers turned toward the monitors. On the screen Lucie saw what was supposed to be her boss’s brain. A throbbing ball, the seat of emotions, memory, character, and lived experience. On another screen, Lucie could see the first image from the digitized film, set on PAUSE. The scientist made several adjustments.

  “Let’s get started…The principle is simple. Once activated, neurons consume oxygen. The MRI simply colors this consumption.”

  The film progressed. The captain’s brain activity was haloed with colors; the organ seemed to be gliding over a rainbow that veered from blue to red. Certain areas lit up, faded, moved around like fluids in translucent tubes.

  “Do you think Szpilman did the same thing with your former director two years ago?” Lucie asked. “Use the machines to dissect the film?”

  “Most likely, yes. As I told your boss on the phone, the director had talked a little about the experiment at the time. And about a very strange film. But I really hadn’t thought much more about it.”

  Beckers returned to his screen and began commenting in real time:

  “Every image that enters your visual field is extremely complex. It’s first treated by the retina, then transformed into a nerve impulse that the optic nerve carries to the back of your brain, to the visual cortex. At that stage, multiple specialized zones analyze the various properties of the image. Its colors, forms, movement, and also its nature: violent, comic, neutral, sad. What you see there certainly does not allow us to guess what image the witness is observing, but the data do allow us to identify some of the parameters I just mentioned. These days, experts in neuroimagery have fun guessing the nature of a film just by analyzing these masses of colors. Comedy, drama, suspense…”

  “And how would you analyze this film?”

  “Overall, extreme violence. Concentrate on those areas…”

  He pointed his finger to certain places on the electronic depiction of the brain.