'Fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck!' he hissed under his breath.
'Where's Mommy?' Frankie cried.
Thomas crept to the window, glimpsed Mia on the porch, wearing cut-off shorts, a tank, and fluffy-white slippers. Nosy prick, he thought, unable to repress a grin.
He reluctantly opened the door.
'No work today?' Mia asked, leaning against the frame.
'I called in sick. Thought I'd give you a break from the kids.'
Mia nodded, his look one of cartoon-skepticism. 'So,' he said pleasantly, 'the FBI was here…'
'And then some,' Thomas said.
'They interrogate you all night?'
Thomas closed his eyes, smiled, then surrendered to the inevitable. 'C'mon in, Mia,' he said. 'I'll tell you all about it.' He couldn't resist adding, 'You're as transparent as a negligee, you know that?'
Eyebrows raised, Mia shot him the finger as he stepped inside.
'Mia!' Frankie and Ripley cried as one.
While Thomas exchanged his bathrobe and boxers for jeans, a shirt and a blazer, Mia managed to settle the kids in front of the TV. Thomas brewed some fresh coffee, then joined his Number One Neighbor at the kitchen table. They spent an hour or so discussing the previous two days. Though in many ways Mia had become his best friend since the divorce, Thomas avoided any mention of Nora's affair with Neil—or of his night with Sam. He needed to sort things out for himself first—or so he thought.
Afterward, Mia breathed deep, then said, 'Wow.'
'Pretty intense, isn't it?'
'You think?' He pawed his face as though trying to scrape off the madness. 'Well, you know what Marx says.'
'Do I ever?' Thomas asked. Mia quoted Marx the way others quoted Dr Phil.
'"With man, the root of the matter is always man himself."' He snorted as though at a half-funny thought. 'I don't think he meant grey matter, though.'
'Neil's sick,' Thomas said sourly.
'You don't sound convinced.'
Something about this comment made his scalp prickle. 'How can I be? He's simply walking the talk, isn't he? Shit just happens. Tornados wipe out trailer parks. Bombs go off in coffee shops. Cancers spread. Arteries clog. Every breath, every heartbeat, is a crap shoot. That's just the way the world works; it's only our psychological shortcomings that make it seem otherwise. All Neil's saying is that the same goes with our neurons. That our every thought, every experience is just another synaptic roll of the dice. Statistical, not meaningful.'
'Certainly doesn't feel that way.'
'Why should it? Our brains evolved to process inputs, perceptions and the like, into effective outputs—the things we do. We see oncoming cars and traffic lights, and our foot depresses the brake pedal. What we don't see are all the neurophysiological processes involved. Our brain is essentially blind to itself, far more geared to external events than internal.'
Mia toyed with a lock of hair, contemplative and crosseyed. 'So?'
Thomas breathed deep, smelled sun-on-dust and the memory of breakfast bacon. 'So, when we choose, or decide, or hope, or fear, or whatever, it's the same as when we see or hear: the brain drops out of the picture. We don't experience what makes experience possible. All the neurophysiological machinery that generates choosing, hoping, hearing, and so on, processes without itself being processed. For us, each thought comes from nowhere, constitutes a kind of… absolute beginning, so that it seems we somehow stand outside the nets of cause and effect that entangle everything about us, including our brain. Consciousness is like a hamster wheel, always moving, but somehow stationary as well. For us, it's always now, always here. We always feel we could have done otherwise because our choices always seem to stand at the beginning of events, rather than the middle.'
'Ooookaay,' Mia said dubiously.
'Here, look,' Thomas said, reaching back and dragging a quarter from the counter-top. 'Watch.' He opened his hands to show Mia they were empty, then closed them. When he opened them the second time, the quarter gleamed dully in the center of his right palm.
Mia laughed. 'Cool,' he said.
'Seems like magic, right?'
Mia nodded, his expression suddenly thoughtful. 'Like you pulled something from nowhere.'
'Now watch,' Thomas said, doing the trick again, this time at a right angle so that Mia could follow the quarter the whole time. 'Our thoughts are no different. They seem to spring from nowhere, but only because of a neurophysiological sleight of hand, because the brain is baffled by its own tricks. They seem magic. Special. Supernatural.
Spiritual. Pull aside the veil of bone, and that magic evaporates.'
'But there is a difference,' Mia said. 'We are our thoughts.'
Thomas nodded. 'Exactly. That's what we are. Brains glimpsing themselves through peepholes, seeing magic where none exists.'
Mia seemed to stare past him, as though testing his words against the immediacy of his own experience. 'So you and I, sitting here…'
'Are just two biomechanisms, processing inputs, churning out behavioral outputs, which in turn become further inputs. All the reason, the purpose, the meaning, is simply the result of the fact that the neural machinery responsible for consciousness has access to a mere sliver of what our brains process—a sliver that it confuses for everything. Outside that sliver, there's no reason, no point, no meaning. Just…' He shrugged. 'Just shit happening.'
Scowling, Mia regarded him for a long moment. 'So when I go to the mall, I'm surrounded by herds of… biomechanisms? They only seem like people?'
Thomas wondered what Neil would say. Would he tell stories of how he had played this or that alleged terrorist like a puppet without them having the faintest clue? Or would he simply grab Mia and give him a first-hand demonstration?
Thomas pinched the bridge of his nose. 'They only seem like people because you can't access the processes that make them tick. So they become floating instigators, things that can only be tracked and predicted via your own neural systems. Our brains are exquisitely attuned to one another, to the point where everything you do or say triggers the same patterns of neuronal activity in my brain as in yours. They network by continually mirroring each other's processes. But since consciousness can't access these processes, we simply "get it".' Thomas hooked his lips in a mock smile. 'People seem like people for the same reason we seem to be free thinking, act-initiating selves.'
'Because our brains,' Mia said slowly, 'can't see what's going on inside themselves. Because they constantly confuse the middle for the beginning.'
Thomas nodded. 'Thus the illusion that we stand outside of the arrow of time. That we somehow transcend the statistical clockwork around us.' He watched his thumb trace the rim of his coffee cup, glanced back up at his Number One Neighbor. 'That we possess souls.'
Mia was no longer looking at him or through him or anywhere for that matter. He had fallen back in his chair, his hands poised between a gesture of warding and disgust. 'So all of this… this right here right now… is a kind of magic trick? A dream,'
Thomas stared down at his socked feet, cursed himself for wondering, once again, what Neil would say.
'Tommy? This isn't true, is it?'
'Neil certainly thinks so,' he replied without looking up. 'And no one knows the science like him.'
'It's just more reductive scientific bullshit,' Mia declared with an air of angry resolution. Like most Marxists, he possessed the unsettling ability to take abstractions personally. 'They can't even figure out what foods are fucking healthy.'
Thomas stared at him for a moment, fending the urge to argue, to press and pin. He could tell Mia it wasn't about what was more fundamental than what, but about which kinds of claims people could take seriously. He could remind him of Hiroshima, or any of the other horrors and wonders that so set science apart. He could remind him that other claim-making institutions, including those that reduced scientific fact to 'social constructs',
'Language games', or the work of Mammon, had no way of arbitrating any of their asse
rtions.
Instead he asked, 'How's your coffee?'
'No you don't,' Mia exclaimed. 'I know that look—'
'Daddy! Daddy!' Frankie cried out from the living room.
Thomas turned to see his son come thumping into the kitchen.
'I found Sam's underwear!' he proudly declared. He waved Samantha's white panties over his head, panty-liner and all.
'Herr Doktor?' Mia drawled in mock astonishment.
Thomas snatched the panties from Frankie and stuffed them in his blazer pocket. He flashed Mia a grim smile.
'So tell me,' his neighbor asked slyly. Mia always turned up the volume on his Alabama accent whenever what he called the 'devil' got the best of him. 'What's it like?'
'What's what like?'
'Getting nailed by the Law.'
Mia left shortly afterward, explaining that, contrary to appearances, he did have a 'jaawb'. The rest of the day passed without incident, with the exception of Frankie cracking his bean on the barbecue. The three of them had been playing catch in the backyard. The little bugger had crawled under the side-burner to retrieve the ball, then simply stood up. Bam! Thomas had watched the whole thing happen, and though he knew it was nothing serious, there had been this moment of distilled horror… Frankie on his rump clutching his scalp, a line of blood falling from his maul of black hair. The backyard had roared with the sound of unseen collapses, of great pylons or piers failing, as though the world were but a floor in some building's fatal cascade.
How had everything become so fragile?
Though Frankie insisted he needed to go to the hospital for 'Sergio' (Thomas had no clue where that one had come from), he took them both to the park and hiked down into the gully. Despite his turmoil, the giddy swings between horror (the thought of Neil coming back), thrill (the thought of Sam wriggling out of her panties), and rage (the thought of Nora gasping against Neil's cheek), he actually managed to have fun with the kids. They cleaned up the dozen or so crushed beer cans they found amongst the ferns. In the grotto cool, they counted the waterbugs skating across the creek's rippled back, and he explained surface tension to them. 'Just like Jesus,' Ripley said with a pundit's certitude. (Thomas had no idea where that had come from either).
Small wonder so many parents were bent on cloistering their children. It out and out terrified Thomas, thinking of his two kids panning for gold in America's cultural river. There were just so many sewage pipes, so many shades of Neil. But with things becoming ever more fractured and sycophantic, sending them to private schools seemed like one more contribution to an even more deluded and tribalized future. There had to be some common ground, it seemed to him, no matter how fucked up. People had to relate.
After tucking the buggers into bed and kissing Frankie's 'owwie' a dozen times, Thomas kicked his legs up on the couch and watched an old Seinfeld on Nickelodeon. But he found it impossible to laugh. He browsed several personal channels, or 'perches' as they were called, as much to reassure himself of his sanity as anything else. A billion bewildered people, all pounding their fists in the simulacrum of certainty, each with their own peculiar menu of scapegoat cheese. Then he surfed the news-sites, flashing between commercial broadcasts that pandered to mainstream prejudices (information, like any other commodity, was primarily geared toward customer satisfaction) and cash-strapped PBS. Images flashed, and the living room gleamed, darkened, and changed color in three-dimensional counterpoint.
No matter how many times he flattened his palms across his thighs, he always caught himself wringing his hands.
Sam didn't call.
No mention, national or local, was made of Neil or his crimes. Thomas wasn't surprised. The Chiropractor had struck yet again, this time with a cryptic letter to the New York Times. Several senators crossed the aisle on the issue of gasoline subsidies. The Russian economy, teetering after the destruction of southern Moscow, seemed to be riding some kind of petrol yo-yo. Of course, there were more eco-riots in Europe—poor shivering bastards. And some 'good' news here and there: bumper crops in Texas, more miraculous rain in the Sahara, church attendance up worldwide.
The world ends here, begins there. But it was never, Thomas reflected, quite the same.
He heard a rattle in the kitchen, jerked his head up over the back of the couch. The kitchen was black. Pale blue danced across the walls. His heart hammered. He heard shifting. A click.
What the fuck?
Over the course of the day, his innumerable fears had roamed the baffles of whatever he happened to be doing. Now they focused on this one thing, became very intense. Heart hammering, he blinked, stared into the black maw of his kitchen, saw nothing. He knew, given the disposition of rods and cones across his retina, that the center of his visual field was less sensitive to light than his immediate periphery, so he tried staring slightly off to his right.
But all he saw was Cynthia Powski diddling herself with I broken glass.
He almost yelled in terror when Bart ambled from the blackness. People might forget dogs were predators, but primates never did.
'Jeezus, Bart. I damn near shit myself.'
Bartender trotted to the couch and laid his chin on the '; fabric, his eyes limpid and imploring.
Thomas curled on the cushions and hugged his big, hapless dog tight.
'No Frankie tonight, Bart?' he murmured into the dank fur. 'Figured you'd chum with the old man?'
Bart's tail slapped against the coffee table, once, twice, then knocked over Thomas's Rolling Rock.
Cursing, Thomas sent his dog scampering away. The beer had been almost empty, but the mess was big enough to warrant a trip to the kitchen. He paused before the black entrance, realizing for the first time that the fluorescent light over the sink was out. Weren't those things i supposed to last forever? At this time of night, the kitchen ; was usually a nook of illumination in an otherwise darkened house. Silver shining in sterile light.
There was a sharp rap on the door to his right.
This time he did cry out.
He clutched his chest as he peered through the window.
It was Sam.
He yanked open the door and she was on him. Fierce kisses. Desperate breaths.
'You let me down,' she gasped. 'Twice you've let me down.' ;
'Sorry,' he said.
'No sorrys,' she said, pausing to stare at him. She smiled mischievously. 'Reparations.'
These are the rules.
I watch.
You set your groceries down, rummage through your purse, looking for your keys.
A man on a bicycle glances at your skirt line as he labors down the street. He likes his legs long and pale.
A bird sings with consumer confidence.
The leaves wave deep green, slow as though underwater. One twitters to the ground, spinning like a dollar bill.
Your door opens into the blackness of air-conditioned spaces.
The sun pricks the eyes of the children playing next door.
You steer your groceries through the dark slot. Recycled plastic rustles against the frame.
I follow.
Closer than your shadow.
Farther than your bones.
Now you lie there, watching my shadow grunt on your back, listening to my animal glory. The blood pools around your lips, your nostrils, as warm as cooling engine oil. You smell it, your life, as pungent as any excretion, and just as slick. You can feel yourself raining across your cheek. Raining down.
You lie there dying, without recognition, without resolve.
Neck broken, you weep without your body.
Meat.
These. These are the rules.
CHAPTER TEN
August 24th, 8.55 p.m.
Why did Daddy have to go?
The air mattress beneath him felt cold and wobbly, unsteady like his belly.
'Why did Daddy have to go?' he asked Ripley.
'Because I told you,' was her pouty reply. 'There isn't room, Frankie. Daddy's too big for the tent.'
'You said you wanted to sleep out here alone.'
'No I didn't.'
Ripley beat her arms against her sleeping bag in frustration. 'Yesss, you did. I heard you, Frankie. Now go to sleep.'
'But I change my mind, Ripley.'
'Frankeee!'
'But why,'
When Ripley refused to answer he wriggled away from his sister, stared wide-eyed at the shadows cast by the flashlight across the bellied ceiling. The air smelled end-of-summer cool. Soon he would go to preschool. But the outside was dark, big, and hollow, filled with great nothings and terrible anythings. He heard a dog barking in the distance. It sounded angry.
'Where's Bart?'
'In-side,' Ripley said in her dangerous voice.
She thought she was soooo big. But soon he would be bigger, and no one would tell him what to do, and he would save little kids from bad cornfields and booby bullets and dinosaurs. Even psychos would be afraid of him. Last week, Mia had fallen asleep waiting for Dad to come pick them up, and he and Ripley had watched a show on psychos—a cool show. They had even seen crime scene photographs, with blood hanging like spaghetti from the walls. Sickos, Ripley had called them. Bad-bad men, just like Uncle Cass.
Frankie giggled to himself, whispered 'Sickos!' He liked that word, he decided. 'Sickos!' he hissed again. 'Sick-sickos!'
Then he thought he heard a rattle beyond the nylon, and he was frightened again. What if it was a sicko? He swallowed, thinking how big and empty and dark the outside was. A sicko could be anywhere, and Frankie wouldn't know. How could you know if you couldn't see? Maybe that was what the dog was barking at, some sick-sicko hiding in the hole between buildings, waiting to make spaghetti of somebody.
Frankie didn't want to be spaghetti.
'I wanna go see Bart,' he said. Dad said Bart had super senses.
'Quit your whining!' Ripley said like a little Mom. .
'You're not Mom,' he mumbled.
Then he heard it. The sound of feet swishing through dewy grass. Swish-thump. Swish-thump…
'Ripley!' he gasped.
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