Neuropath

by R. Scott Bakker

  'About the Argument. I mean, he is right, isn't he? Why would Neil bother making the Argument if there's no chance of convincing anybody?'

  'Yeah…'

  'You don't sound impressed.'

  Thomas shrugged. 'It's a perfectly reasonable question.'

  'And that's a problem?'

  Thomas sighed, disappointed by this sudden return to seriousness. 'We're in way over our heads here, Sam. Who the fuck knows what Neil's up to? He was NSA, for Chrissakes, a neuroscientific spook, rewiring brains in the name of National Security. That's crazy enough…' They were sailing past another eighteen-wheeler, this one with lights proclaiming JESUS SAVES like a Christmas decoration. He resisted a strange compulsion to gaze into the roaring wheels once again. 'Now? He's off the map altogether, charting territory we probably can't even imagine.'

  'Like an explorer,' Sam said, hitting the blinker.

  They stopped at a Flying-J for fuel and dinner shortly afterward. 'My Dad was a trucker,' Sam explained as they pulled onto the exit ramp. 'Besides, I'm addicted to Krispy Kremes.' Once inside, Sam succumbed to the call of yet another donation box, this one for some obscure environmental coalition. Some celebrity whose name Thomas couldn't remember gazed up from the cardboard planes, the money-slot in the center of his forehead.

  'I gotta ask…' he said as they trolled for a table. 'What's with all the impulse charity?'

  She shrugged, seemed to make a point of avoiding his gaze. 'When you have a job like mine, mistakes have consequences.'

  Something in her tone warned him not to pursue the matter.

  They both spent thirty minutes or so on their palmtops, Thomas with Mia and the kids, who seemed to have fully recovered from the morning's mayhem, and Sam with Agent Atta, who seemed to be quite upset about Mackenzie turning into a dead end.

  'I tried to blame you,' Sam said with an okay-that-wasn't-so-good grimace. 'But the boss isn't having any of it.'

  His elbows on the lime-green tabletop, Thomas rubbed his temples. 'But it was my fault, wasn't it?'

  Sam scowled. 'What do you mean?'

  'I just, ah… assumed you thought it was my fault.'

  'Mackenzie? Please. If the prick was stupid, I'd be inclined to assign blame—to me, not to you. But the fact is, he's smart, scary smart like you, and with people like that, it's either a total crapshoot or a foregone conclusion. Trust me.'

  Thomas looked down to the tabletop, began counting crumbs. She was right. Mackenzie had been a foregone conclusion, almost as though the interview had been scripted. He was meeting his fears halfway, he realized, or 'negative scripting' as some therapists called it. He heard Sam sigh affectionately.

  'Feeling down on ourselves, huh?'

  Thomas smiled. 'No, thank you. I don't need any Fritos, Agent Logan.'

  She regarded him with good-natured impatience. 'You're a good man, professor. A good man, and in a world that doesn't make any sense.'

  His eyes actually burned. He blinked, made a point of not looking up.

  'Call me Tom.'

  'Okay,' she said, but reluctantly, as though the prospect frightened her.

  Thomas dared glance at her eyes. The honesty of her smile embarrassed them both into silence.

  Something changed after that. Sam did start calling him 'Tom,' though she slipped back into 'professor' now and again. But there was more—an air of familiarity, charged to be sure, but wonderfully relaxed all the same. Their dialogue took on an eager, exploratory air. At times it almost seemed a race to say, 'I know! Exactly!'

  Sam, it turned out, not only had a past similar to his—he'd guessed and confirmed as much already—but also shared many of the same attitudes. She was skeptical by inclination, and sanguine by dint of work. She blamed herself more readily than others. She believed in hard work. She had never voted Republican, never would, but she couldn't stand the Democrats.

  Thomas wasn't surprised. The fact that he was attracted to her said precious little: she was a fox, after all, and he was in the middle of the most emotionally tumultuous episode of his life. But she was also attracted to him—he was certain of it now—even though she was an FBI field investigator and he was a material witness, or so he supposed. She was attracted to him despite their circumstances. The old adage about 'opposites attracting' was largely untrue; the vast majority of people tended to fall for versions of themselves. People were like gravitational fields: sooner or later everything fell back to the earth of selfhood—hallucination or not.

  Which was precisely the problem. He was simply medicating, he realized, using her to suture the wound inflicted by Neil and Nora. He was being the greedy one, the inconsiderate bastard. He was using her to prove that he still had what it took, that the whole cuckoldry thing was just a fluke. Sam, on the other hand, was simply wandering off the beaten track one step at a time, hoping she would find herself too far gone to turn back.

  This was no joke, he realized. She was gambling with her career.

  Nevertheless, when they pulled up to the driveway and she offered to help him carry the kids over from Mia's, he found himself saying yes. Drawn by some neighborly sixth sense, Mia met them at the door. Feeling breathless, Thomas formally introduced him to Sam.

  'Hallo,' he said with admirable restraint as they stepped into the kitchen. Usually, Mia found coloring his tone with innuendos irresistible. 'Long drive, huh?'

  'Oh yeah.'

  'The professor talk your ear off? Stuff your head with creepy facts.'

  Sam's smile was dazzling in the overhead light. 'Ooooooh yeah.'

  The kids were crashed on the couch in their PJs, bathed in cartoon illumination. Thomas peeled Frankie from the cushions and handed him to Sam. Though she looked wonderful holding him, Thomas realized that his kids were just as much a liability as Sam's job. Not once in the course of their conversations had Sam mentioned anything about motherhood, let alone surrogate motherhood. Parenting wasn't among her talking points, and whenever Thomas mentioned it, she always steered the discussion elsewhere.

  It just wasn't going to work.

  But then, after carrying the kids over and putting them down, after sharing several wide-eyed this-is-too-conjugal looks, Sam asked him for a cup of coffee.

  'It's still a long drive down to New York,' she explained.

  At once cursing and congratulating himself, Thomas left her rubbing her feet on the living room couch. He filled the kettle and was surprised by the sound of the TV when he turned off the tap: the homogenized drone of an anchorman's voice discussing the Nasdaq. The voice disappeared, and he heard Sam laugh as he rooted through his cupboard for the instant decaf.

  'What's so funny?' he called out, suddenly feeling as though he were back with Nora. Suddenly feeling good.

  'Movie on a porn channel,' floated back to him, 'called Weapons of Ass Destruction 14.'

  Thomas laughed. He found the coffee. 'Starring Agent Gerard?'

  'That would be Ass with Destructive Weapons,' Sam said with mock seriousness. 'What's your code?'

  He shouted the numbers to her one by one as he prepared her cup. His heart racing, he thought about Mackenzie and his final, enigmatic look. He was a perceptive old asshole, Thomas had to give him that.

  She was curled up on the couch when he came out with the coffees, flicking between different channels, most of them full penetration—and various combinations thereof.

  'All they have is gonzo,' she complained.

  'Ah, an old-fashioned gal,' Thomas said, feeling himself stiffen. Anything goes, he supposed, after a day like today.

  'Did you know that gonzo was actually how porn started off in the 1920s? Money shots and all. They called them "loops".'

  Sam laughed in a kind of anxious, this-isn't-happening-way, curled her feet beside her. 'When I was fourteen my boyfriend and I would skip out and watch my dad's pornos. Pretty tame compared to all this… cock-slave stuff. I mean look at it.'

  Thomas smiled, his heart racing. The scene flashed to a graphic close-up.
r />   'No internet?' he asked. He shuddered to think of all the dirty cookies his computer had accumulated when he was fourteen.

  'Too poor,' she said, crinkling her nose at the screen. She brought her feet to the floor, leaned forward with a skeptical frown. 'Now that looks about as sexy as stuffing a turkey.'

  'Yeah, but it shows the spoons. Very sexy.'

  'The spoons?'

  'Yeah, where the bum meets the…' He swallowed, then said, 'It would be easier to show you.'

  Her knees drifted a finger's-breadth apart. 'Show me, then,' she said, her voice thick, her eyes bright with an oh-my-God-I'm-doing-this look.

  Thomas pushed the coffee table aside and knelt before her.

  A low-volume 'fuck-me-fuck-me-fuck-me-fuck-me' floated through the living room.

  He placed his palms on her knees. She sighed. Parting her legs, he slowly pressed his hands under her skirt, sliding his thumbs past her knees, across bare skin, down into the hollow of her inner thighs.

  'There,' he whispered, resting his thumbs in the divits to either side of her panties. 'The sexiest part of the female anatomy,' he said. 'The spoons.'

  Her look was at once drunk, playful, and terrified. She squirmed, as though seeking his thumbs with her heat.

  'You learn something new every day,' she gasped, her voice shaking.

  Thomas hooked his thumbs beneath her panties, slowly rolled them down her legs.

  This can't be happening…

  He glanced at the TV screen. The scene had changed. Now a powerfully built man dressed as a priest was unbuttoning a veiled widow's blouse. Beneath the black gauze, her crimson lips pouted in sexual sorrow. Her breasts seemed shockingly white against the black silk, her nipples pubescent pink.

  'Ever play sex-charades?' he asked, more joking than hoping. His face burned.

  'You mean fuck-alongs?' Sam replied, joining him on the carpet. 'Growing up, all the boys I knew were porn freaks. Every one.'

  Thomas laughed, then yanked her around—perhaps more forcefully than he intended. He tore her blouse open to catch up with the priest. Sam giggled as much as groaned through much of the foreplay, and Thomas found himself relaxing. She was honest both to her humor and her hunger, and she seemed entirely uninhibited.

  They were here to play.

  Finally the priest hoisted the widow, long pale legs askew, onto his bureau, and Thomas thrust deep into Agent Logan. It was like sinking into moist lightning. She was perfect.

  'Mmm, Jesussss,' Sam moaned.

  'Now fuck me, Father,' the widow gasped beneath her black veil. 'Fuck me…'

  Thomas hesitated. His whole body trembled.

  'It's been a long time,' he said.

  'What about all those perky coeds?' Sam murmured.

  'They don't like my brand of birth control.'

  'And what brand is that?'

  'Scruples.'

  She drew a shining finger along his cheek, as though tracing the path of a tear. 'It's the end of the world, professor. They don't sell scruples anymore.'

  They kissed for the first time.

  After he came across Sam's breasts, the camera focused on the widow. She smeared pearl across her nipples then lifted her veil to lick her fingertips. Her face was at once hooker-hard and high-school soft. Beautiful, yet plain in the way of abused children—

  'My God,' Thomas whispered.

  'What?'

  'It's her… Unfuckingbelieveable.'

  'Who?'

  'Cream,' he replied in a dead voice. 'Cynthia Powski.'

  Thomas woke with a start, his heart hammering. It was still dark. Sam was slender and warm beside him. His right ear ached. His pillow felt like an old woman's lap.

  With his ears, he searched the dark hollows of his house for sound, heard nothing but hardwood quiet.

  He closed his eyes, saw Cynthia Powski, her tongue trailing semen.

  He felt a weight, as though a child stood upon his chest.

  Shame.

  Shame for weakness. Shame for stupid stupid lies. Shame for fucking a stranger while his children slept.

  Shame for Cynthia Powski, for watching her as he…

  With thumb and forefinger, he pinched tears from his eyes.

  Shame for all those years. All those years!

  All those years fucking. Being fucked.

  Neil and Nora.

  For a moment, it seemed he couldn't breathe.

  Groaning, Thomas threw his feet over the side of the bed. He sat for a moment, slowly rubbed his chest.

  He was a psychologist. He knew shame. He knew it was a so-called 'social emotion', that unlike guilt it involved one's self rather than one's acts. Shame was global, guilt local. This was why shame was typically unwarranted, a response all out of proportion to its situational triggers. Shame always had causes, but rarely any reasons. How many waifish, therapy-hungry undergrads had he told this to?

  Knowledge—this was the heart of humanistic psychology. The faith that self-knowledge somehow made a difference. That knowing could heal…

  Perhaps this was bullshit as well.

  He stood in the darkness. His skin pimpled in the cool. He walked to the doorway, grasped the frame and leaned out as though over a balcony. The weight in his chest would not ease.

  My heart is leaden, he thought inanely. Like people, it weighed more dead than alive.

  The source of the shame—the real shame—was obvious enough. He was a cuckold. He'd had few illusions about his marriage with Nora, but fidelity was one of them. In their 15 years together he hadn't once cheated on her, and he'd simply assumed that this, which had been an unspoken point of pride for him, had been duly noted and reciprocated by her. Unlike so many men, he deserved her fidelity. Didn't he?

  What had he done?

  Betrayal was a funny thing. In tests, subjects consistently rated threats involving betrayal as more dangerous than threats involving happenstance, no matter what the degree of objective risk'. This was why people feared psychopaths more than driving to the corner store, even though the latter was thousands of times more likely to kill. Betrayal struck deeper than statistics. Perhaps because its losses had no measure. Perhaps because people were fucking idiots.

  But Neil and Nora. Why should he feel shamed by their betrayal? Where was the self-righteous indignation? Where was the rage that blackened eyes and pulled triggers? The shame was theirs! Wasn't it?

  How could they? he cried to no one. How could they, unless he had somehow deserved it? Was that it?

  Still hanging from his door frame, he wept for a time. What did I do?

  Then he gathered himself thoughtlessly, in the way of train wreck survivors, and walked down the hall.

  Numb, he stared at his children in the night-light gloom. Bartender, who always slept with Frankie now, watched him with brown, infinitely wise eyes. His tail thumped the mattress.

  Frankie had kicked his covers off and slept, as usual, with one hand shoved down the front of his pyjama pants. No kid alive was as protective of his balls. Ripley lay on her side, her hands folded as though in prayer. She looked frighteningly old with her hair undone and thrown across cheek and pillow. Like her mother.

  Smiling, Thomas closed his eyes, and the thought—no the warmth—of them swept him away.

  He could hear them breathe. Really truly breathe.

  Could anything be more miraculous?

  New tears branched across his cheeks.

  'Who've I betrayed?' he whispered aloud.

  No one. Not them, the only ones that mattered.

  He'd been a fool, sure.

  But no more.

  You come home late.

  While waiting, I peruse the books on your shelves. Freud and Nietzsche. Sedgewick and Irigaray. I like that you are educated. Will there be time for interpretation? I wonder. Will I be something more than what I am? A principle? A metaphor?

  Am I broken, mutilated… or am I simply honest?

  I find a photo tucked between Updike and DeLillo.


  It's you. I know this because you're everywhere: on the television, blissfully unaware of the cleft in your panties; on the magazine racks, a playful thumb hooked in your bikini bottoms; on the billboards, your tongue testing your teeth. You are the center of the eye's gravity. The universal solvent.

  White. Female. Skinny-as-a-rail.

  I retreat at the sound of keys. I love the feel of your carpet between my toes. I grin the grin of children ducking in ambush.

  Will you outrun me with concepts? Will you declare me a symptom or a disease?

  I watch you undress from the gloom of your closet. I wonder what your theories think of your thong, of the razors you draw to the very edge of your skin. What would they make of your smooth-skinned glory, twenty-eight going on fourteen?

  How could they know I would be watching?

  You scratch your buttocks with clear-coated nails, curse your wool skirt. I catch my breath when you turn to my hiding place, striding with thoughtless candor…

  Once I used to wonder how people could abuse their pets. Now I understand.

  They turn them into little people.

  CHAPTER NINE

  August 19th, 7.20 a.m.

  Thomas dragged a raw cheek across his pillow, snuffled and groaned. True to form, Frankie and Ripley were arguing in the bathroom. How early was it? Before his alarm, anyway, the little bastards.

  'Ripley!' Frankie was complaining. 'When it's yellow, let it mellow—'

  'You're a piglet.'

  '—when it's brown, flush it down. That's what Mia says!'

  So. Fucking. Tired. Why couldn't they ever sleep in? Just once.

  He heard a breathy groan. A warm hand brushed his back.

  That's right… Sam.

  'Morning,' she croaked as she stumbled by naked, searching for her clothes. Thomas watched her through bleary eyes, wondered at her perfect, figure-skater ass. Sunlight streamed through the sheers, making marble of her skin, illuminating her edges with otherwise invisible hair. It seemed the shape of her had been stamped into him—a million years of evolution, a lifetime of social conditioning—this one perfect woman. There was something glorious about that.

  In the daily headline of his life, he thought, today's would read: