Gray Matter

by Gary Braver

  Not getting any reaction, Nicole pressed herself against his groin. He drew back because it hurt. “W-w-why are you doing this? I didn’t c-come here for this.”

  “Because I f-f-felt like it.” She made a mirthless laugh. “I remember how you looked at me the other night in my room.”

  That was a phony response—one reserved for the legions of normal heterosexual males whose hopeful glances told them she was “hot.” That was not his look. He did not have the hunger. Nor could he imagine that she liked him. They weren’t friends, nor had she ever shown him any interest except to make fun of his stuttering. In fact, whenever she addressed him he felt as if he were being razor-gashed. Besides, being the looker she was, Nicole should be pursuing the alpha studs—those cool, smart jocky dudes everybody else looked up to. He was surely not one of those. Yes, he was smart and tall, but two hundred and sixty pounds of baby fat surmounted by a long shiny black ponytail, braces, facial blemishes, and enough tics to make the Top Ten Geek List. Nicole did not give herself away for nothing. No, it wasn’t how he had looked at her in the bedroom. It was what he had seen in there.

  Suddenly she took his hand and put it on her crotch.

  My God! He thought. The Mound of Venus. The Delta of Desire. Ad glorium pudendum. And his mind flooded with lines from a dozen erotic poems.

  It was the first time he had ever touched female genitalia, but he felt nothing inside—not a bloody damn flicker. He could have been fondling her kneecap.

  She planted her mouth on his and pushed her tongue through his teeth, moving in deliberate cadence with the grinding motion against his hand.

  “Orange juice,” he said. “You t-taste of orange juice.”

  “Because I just had a glass, asshole.”

  acetaldehyde

  alpha terpineol

  ethyl decanoate

  “Did you know that orange juice contains over two hundred different chemical compounds?”

  pentane diethal ether

  myrcene

  “No, and please don’t tell me,” she said, grinding her pubis against him.

  valencene

  methylene chloride

  limonene

  3-ethanoxy 1-propanol

  He wished he had not mentioned the orange juice, because his mind was now ticking off a slew of hydrocarbons, alcohols, aldehydes, and esters.

  2-methyl propanic acid

  methal octanoate

  He squeezed down to force the runoff into a rear-brain compartment, which he sealed off and bolted. Then he strained to get back to the moment. But that was the real problem, because although he could recite the most obscure facts, he did not know how to react to Nicole. He knew he was supposed to “feel” things, to enjoy a flood of emotions, but he could not react accordingly.

  ethyl butyrate

  4-vinyl guaiacol

  And, yet, he was fascinated by her performance. While she came on as sexually precocious, her moves seemed studied. Her lips, which were full and fleshy, opened and closed around his like a suckerfish in the throes of some mating ritual. Part of him liked the bizarre, almost nursing, sensation—something she had cultivated in her considerable experience. However, he was not sure he liked her tongue swabbing out his mouth. He could faintly detect the orange juice behind other tastes.

  As he feared, his mind filled with biology-class videos of microbes teeming in human saliva. Then he became fixed on the disgusting white bacterial gunk that collects on the back of human tongues from the lack of oxygen and makes for sulfur-foul breath.

  Then he saw her as one of those colored anatomy-book drawings of the digestive system—her insides a pack of shiny red organs and alimentary tubes leading from her mouth down through twenty feet of twisty yellow intestines partly full of feces.

  He squeezed down on those images, pressed them into a small box, and stomped it with his heel. And for a blessed moment, the assault was over.

  As Nicole moved against his hand and closed her eyes to groaning sounds, Brendan could not help but think that he was engaged in one of the highest fantasies of the male breed: fondling the sex of a gorgeous, compliant sixteen-year-old. He knew he should feel special, even privileged—for some men would kill for the opportunity. And while he watched Nicole writhe, he could not help but wonder at human sexuality—how in the zoological kingdom we were the only species that copulated face-to-face: An evolutionary marvel whose anatomy had evolved for the look of love-face-to-face, man to woman: passion by design.

  And he had none.

  “Do you like that?”

  No, he thought. “Mmmm,” he mumbled.

  “How ‘bout this?” And she then slipped to her knees and lowered his shorts.

  God, this too?

  His penis stuck out from his pubic hairs like an overgrown slug. It was mortifying. Here was Nicole DaFoe, the teenage equivalent to the Whore of Babylon, his own momentary Lolita on her knees performing the supreme male fantasy, and he couldn’t even summon a glandular twitch.

  God, if you can hear me, PLEASE!

  Nicole tried everything, rubbing her breasts against him, twiddling him, even kissing him. Still nothing, though he was straining with all he had to engorge himself with blood. But nothing. It was awful. Where were the fires of spring? The eternal fever? Andrew Marvell’s “rough strife”?

  She did everything possible—humming, moaning and groaning. It was horrible—the ultimate curse, but for old men, like Richard, not a healthy adolescent who should be pulsing with magma heat.

  As he pushed with all he had to stiffen himself, fighting the damning humiliation, a side-pocket awareness struck him: Not how experienced Nicole was, but how rote her movement. As he watched her head move below him, she appeared to him as a mechanical doll running through a naughty little program, not aroused, just studied. Robotic. Even her kissing lacked genuine heat. She didn’t even breathe heavily.

  He was about to push her head away, when in the light his eyes caught something in her hair. He put his hands on her head pretending to caress her. As he spread her hair, he could see a cluster of small white nubbinlike scars barely visible about an inch behind her forehead hairline and running across the side of her head.

  Suddenly Nicole froze. “What are you doing?” Instantly she was upright.

  “Y-you’ve got the same scars I have.”

  Nicole’s face shifted as if trying to land on the right expression. “What?”

  He lowered his head and parted his hair where the nurse had shaved. “See?” he said, showing her in the mirror. Then he moved his hand to show her what he’d seen under her hair, but she pulled away. “Let me show you.”

  “Get out,” she said. He could not tell if the blaze in her eyes meant that she was angry with him for the aborted sex, or scared.

  “Let me show you. Th-they’re little white dots.”

  “From chicken pox.”

  “Chicken pox? No,” he insisted. “Ch-chicken pox scars would be r-r-random. These are bunched together. And they’re in the same place as mine.”

  Nicole’s face hardened. “I told you I had chicken pox. I remember it was all over my face and head.”

  Brendan shook his head. “Not chicken pox.”

  “Then what are they?”

  “Somebody did something to our heads when we were kids.”

  “Shut up. Scars are long lines not little white dots.”

  “I don’t know how, but somebody did something—to both of us. I have images and d-dreams of hospital rooms, of w-w-white lights and monitors, of people with surgical masks. And you’ve got the same scars and that t-t-tattoo I keep seeing. Elephants with hands grabbing at me.”

  She started away. “That’s your problem.”

  He caught her arm. “N-no. It’s too much of a coincidence. I’m t-telling you we’re c-connected somehow. Maybe we were out of hand, and they did some kind of lobotomy or s-something on us.”

  Nicole’s eyes got very small, like ball bearings. “You’re nuts. You’re also
a faggot.”

  “No I’m not.”

  “You’re a goddamn faggot, and that’s what this is all about.” It was the first time he heard a tinge of emotion in her voice. But he wasn’t sure if it was anger or fear.

  “No.” I’m nothing, a voice in his head whispered.

  “Between the desire

  And the spasm …

  Falls the Shadow”

  “That’s not it.” He pulled his pants back up and zipped his fly.

  “You’re gay, and you’re giving me all this other shit.”

  “No, I’m not gay.”

  I am a hollow man.

  “Then you’re a chickenshit virgin. The big love-poetry guy can’t get it up for a first-class BJ.”

  It wasn’t her bluntness that surprised him, but the edge in her words.

  As she started away again, he said, “What about you? Is it worth it?”

  Her head snapped around for an explanation. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I know why you’re doing this, because I saw you with your teacher. This is your way of b-b-buying my silence.”

  Nicole opened her mouth to protest, but caught herself.

  “If the word got out you were having an affair with your teacher, you’d lose your grade, and the award, and he’d be out of a job. That’s what this is all about. Not because you like me, or even sex.”

  Expressions flitted across her face like the things that scurried under a rock in damp soil. In a low menacing voice, she said, “Don’t you dare say anything.” When he didn’t respond, she said, “Ever!” And she gave his genitals a hard squeeze.

  The wincing pain nearly took his breath away. She wrapped a towel around herself. “You d-d-d-don’t even enjoy it.”

  “Enjoy what?”

  “S-sex.”

  “What do you know?”

  “I th-think you don’t. I th-think you don’t enjoy this. I th-think sex is just how you g-g-get what you want. How you end up number one.”

  “I’m where I’m at because I’ve got a brain and know how to use it.”

  “But you don’t feel anything.”

  “Get out of here.”

  “You weren’t even breathing hard. You weren’t even excited.”

  “Because you don’t turn me on. Because you’re a fat ugly shit.”

  “M-m-maybe so, but I think you’re a f-f-fake. I think you’re like me—impotent. Dead. That you j-j-just go through the motions like a robot, pretending, experimenting with other people’s emotions because you’ve got none of your own.”

  “I have emotions,” she said. But her voice was void of protest. Dead.

  She started to leave, but he took her arm. “Nicole, somebody messed with our heads. I don’t know who or why, but we’re different. I’ve got a brain that won’t let me forget anything. I can quote you a hundred poems from start to finish but I can’t feel them, Nicole. I CAN’T FEEL THEM! I can’t feel anything. Like I’m emotionally dead. Like I’m another species.” He fought down the urge to confess how he actually contemplated killing Richard just to see if he’d feel remorse.

  “That’s your problem.”

  “You know exactly what I’m talking about.” He slid back the mirrored panel on the side wall and pulled out a bag full of prescription vials—all serotonin-reuptake inhibiting (SRI) drugs : Luvox, Zoloft, Paxil, Prozac, Anafranil—drugs for depression, obsessive-compulsive disorders, seizures, for “bad thoughts”—all with her name on them, all old friends to Brendan. “It’s why we’re taking all this crap: We’re damaged goods, Nicole. We’re freaks. We’re freaks.”

  She swiped the bag from his hand and tossed it on the shelf. “Get out of here!” Her eyes clouded over but not with tears, because she was incapable of them—something else.

  He stepped out onto the landing at the top of the stairs. “They did something to our heads and left us dead inside.”

  She did not respond—as if someone had pulled her plug out of the wall.

  He stepped back from her, and for a long moment before he started down the stairs, she glared wordlessly at him through unmoving orbs of ice.

  “One must have a mind of winter to behold the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is …”

  42

  “Middlesex University English professor Vanessa Rizzo Watts and her son Julian, fourteen, were found dead in their Hawthorne home in what police say appears to be a murder-suicide initiated by Professor Watts …”

  Lucius Malenko muted the radio as he rolled down the window to pay the toll. It was the middle of the next morning, and he was at the New Hampshire border on northbound 1-95. In seconds, he had the Porsche purring at eighty-five in the fast lane again. He unmuted the radio as a country club official claimed that the Blake excerpt was not part of the original sent by the university. “My only guess is that somebody swapped videos with the intention of embarrassing Professor Watts. We don’t know who or why, but we’re looking into it.”

  “You do that,” Malenko said and changed stations.

  The world was abuzz with the story—headline news in The Boston Globe and The Boston Herald, the radio-news lead. Throughout the day experts on criminology and psychology would try to make sense of “the terrible family tragedy” that had hit affluent Hawthorne where such things just don’t happen. Fuzzy-haired pundits would speculate about the severe competition to publish within institutions of higher learning; others would hold forth on the evils of the patriarchal academic establishment whose excessive pressure on women invariably led to such disasters. Others still would wonder why so bright and talented a woman as Professor Watts would need to plagiarize.

  Malenko had expected a resolution, but not a double death—convenient as it was. The intention was to send her a definitive statement that her actions must desist immediately. He knew that the woman was fragile, at the edge with misgivings about her son. Clearly the public humiliation had pushed her over—more than he had hoped for. And it took the proverbial two birds with one stone.

  Eighteen months ago, she had complained that Julian was not right, that he could not free himself of his obsessions—how he would slice his food into neat little cubes before eating them; how he had to do things just so, according to his little odd rituals; how he counted everything—cars on the street, birds, houses, telephone poles, dots. The worst of his obsessions was his pointillist paintings. She complained that he’d work hours on end, sometimes skipping sleep. That he wore his teeth to stumps.

  Malenko could not be certain that such obsessions were the consequence of enhancement. In spite of his suspicions, he claimed that Julian’s OC behavior was genetic.

  Yes, they had had their failures—mostly from the early vintage of clients, before Malenko had perfected multiple stereotaxic insertions. Although they had been rendered brilliant, some developed unfortunate behavior problems. Three years ago, the son of an airline executive committed suicide, apparently having developed temporal lobe epilepsy. Another, a female, died of an embolism. Another still was convicted of murdering his parents, claiming that beetles were eating his brain.

  But those were sad exceptions. Most enhanced children developed into highly intelligent and socially adjusted people—the summum bonum of the species. In his office, Malenko had a private photo album of “his children” who were scattered across the continent and beyond. Only a few lived in the area, and they were doing well. One was still at Bloomfield—Nicole DaFoe, whose high cerebral wattage was matched by genuine beauty. She wanted to be a physician when she grew up, possibly even a neurosurgeon. There was also young Lucinda MacPhearson—another prodigy, skilled in computers.

  Because the brain is a black box of wonders, something went wrong with Julian Watts—perhaps some collateral damage from probes into the right frontal lobe. Nonetheless, the symptoms were treatable with medication, and Malenko had prescribed a variety. But the boy had refused, complaining that they just dulled his senses and diffused his focus. Then his mother threatened to take
him to other neurophysicians to see what could be done. Although enhancement was too subtle to detect by any scans, he feared she would tell all. That could not be, and Malenko had reminded her of their contractual agreement, her escrow bond, and her willingness to accept any risks to enhance her son. “I don’t care about that!” she had declared. “I want my son back!” That was when they sent the anonymous package to Professor Joshua Blake containing side-by-side photocopies of his book and hers.

  Experience had taught him the hard way to protect his security against bigmouthed parents. Some years ago, after a difficult couple made noise about going to the authorities because their little darling was acting oddly, Malenko resorted to Oliver’s “wet work” skills. They were eliminated in a car accident one icy Christmas Eve. From that moment on, there were no more mistakes.

  Now in screening candidates, they investigated strengths—ideological and financial—as well as useful weaknesses—legal, financial, marital, psychological, even medical—as backup insurance against sudden impulses to blow the whistle. Dirty little secrets—fathers who liked young girls or who had some business indiscretions; mothers who cheated or who had problems with drugs or alcohol. Whatever would dampen impulses to blab.

  The background check on Vanessa Rizzo Watts had revealed that as a graduate student she had been suspended for plagiarism. Because she had been a popular TA, the episode made the student newspaper, a copy of which was attainable from the archives of the L. U. News by Malenko’s private investigator Oliver Vines, a doggedly persistent agent. Although Ms. Rizzo had been reinstated, that episode told the story of a bright but driven woman who needed to prove herself, who needed to excel, perhaps to overcome deep-seated suspicions that she was not as clever as she appeared on paper. And human nature being what it is, Malenko had a hunch that she would revert to her old habits in pursuit of recognition and easy success.