Neuropath

by R. Scott Bakker

  'Do I? You have hundreds hunting for the Chiropractor, and just a handful—'

  'I mean it's not fair to hold us responsible. Do you know how much sleep we've been averaging?'

  Thomas matched her angry gaze. 'So just who's responsible, hmm, Sam? The invisible asses Atta always seems to be kissing?'

  She shrugged. 'I dunno. Maybe. The bottom line is—'

  'You know what?' Thomas exclaimed. 'Just fuck it. I've been an idiot to listen to you people. My son is not a matter of National Security. What a fucking joke! This isn't about protecting national interests in a time of crisis; it's about a handful of bureaucrats trying to cover their asses. I should've gone to the net with this the morning he went missing. Even earlier!'

  'No,' Sam said. 'You shouldn't have.'

  'How can you say that?' Thomas cried. 'How can you say that? You know damn well this would have gone worldwide! Sam. Sam. What's more important to you, Frankie or—'

  'You don't understand,' Sam said, her face blank.

  'Don't understand what? That the whole nation could be hunting for Neil right now, instead of a rag-tag band of second-stringers? That Frankie…' His voice broke. 'That Frankie could be upstairs arguing with Ripley right now?'

  He looked at her beseechingly. Please be who I think you are.

  'Don't be so naive,' she said in a curiously hollow voice. 'None of that would've happened. Everything's sifted. Everything's flagged. Everything, Tom. Nothing about Neil would've made the mainstream net. Nothing will.' She took a drink, stared at him angrily. 'And you'd be punished for your troubles, believe me. Kiddie porn on your computer. Crystal meth in your car. Or worse, branded an eco-terrorist, arraigned and sentenced in a closed court, then poof, nowhere to be found. Trust me, Tom, I know these people. I've worked counter-intelligence.'

  Thomas simply stared, dumbfounded as much by her tone as by what she said. 'You're just saying—'

  'No, Tom,' she interrupted. 'You can't cross these people, not in any of the old ways, and certainly not by running to the papers. This is the twenty-first century, for Chrissakes. Their net-scrubbers can comprehend and collate a billion conversations a second. And the effectiveness of their tools doubles every eighteen months, while we humans just stay the same. Watch the news. There's only martyrs now. That's the only way left.. Everything else is just the appearance of conflict.'

  Thomas opened his mouth to respond, then closed it. What was she saying? That he was living in a police state? Measures had been taken, certainly, but there was no way—

  'Tom, we're all that's been given, and all that you're gonna get. So if you're serious about finding Neil—serious about saving Frankie—you need to get a handle on yourself. You call us second-stringers? Maybe so. But so far you've been little more than dead weight to this investigation. You hear me? Dead. Weight.'

  Thomas blinked, as shamed by his own 'second-stringer' comment as by her accusation. He lowered his face into his hands. Women, it seemed, were often desperate in their anger, as though pained by the suspicion that men needed less and so had less to lose. But not always. Sometimes they lashed out with a certainty indistinguishable from honesty—absolute honesty.

  For men, honesty was always a matter of degree.

  Sam's expression was inscrutable, her demeanor relentless, so different from the hesitancy and ambitiousness that had characterized her until now.

  I raped her, Thomas thought.

  No, something different. And the same.

  'Look, Tom,' she said. 'I'm a spaced chick. It's like I'm continually at war with the urge to please whatever guy I happen to be attracted to. And you know what? I usually find it simple. With most guys, everything can be boiled down to feed me, fuck me, or flatter m—'

  'How about,' Thomas found himself saying, 'marry me?'

  I'm losing my mind …

  Sam looked away, blinking. 'That's just the condensed version,' she said.

  Neil was doing this. Neil. Neil. Neil.

  'You're scaring me, Tom. I mean, you're so fucking complicated. I don't know what to do, I don't know what to say… Christ, I don't even know what my own motives are anymore.'

  Miraculously, it seemed, she was kneeling before him, resting her chin on his naked knee. So beautiful…

  Take a step back Think clear. Think straight.

  She was right. He knew she was right. Somehow he'd let self-pity get the upper hand. Somehow, he'd allowed himself to start mourning his son.

  Mourning when he should have been fighting.

  He breathed deep, pressed his palms down to his knees. 'I'm suffering what's called a major depressive episode,' he said, clearing phlegm from his throat. 'A common response to bereavement'—he swallowed—'characterized by morbid thoughts, despondency, irregular sleep…'

  A sense of worthlessness.

  Sam shook her head. 'There's grief, and then there's grief. But with you… I mean, Neil keeps kicking you and kicking you, and you just lie there. It's like you're suffering from… from abused wife syndrome or something.'

  Dead. Weight.

  Thomas blinked more tears from his eyes.

  'It's called conditioned helplessness,' he said.

  'What?'

  'Conditioned helplessness,' he repeated. 'People stranded in circumstances over which they have no control eventually become conditioned to think themselves helpless. Even when circumstances change.' He looked at her, his heart itching with an odd sense of wonder. All along he'd known what was wrong, but without knowing. 'It's a crucial component of depressive disorders.'

  'Well that's it, then,' Sam said. 'Circumstances have changed. You gotta shake this off!'

  He laughed bitterly. 'But that's the irony, Sam. People simply assume that depression skews a person's outlook. But it's not so.'

  'What do you mean?'

  'You'd think depressives would consistently underestimate how much control they have over events, but it turns out the exact opposite is true. In tests, they're surprisingly accurate in their estimations. It's the well-adjusted who are deluded. They consistently overestimate their control over events.'

  Sam flashed him a go-figure smile. 'Do we now?' she said.

  Thomas looked down. 'Turns out you have to be deluded to be happy.'

  Could the world be any more fucked up?

  He was crying now, and she was watching. It was okay. Expected. There was the grief that clenched, and the grief that let go, that opened all the little cages hidden in our souls. It seemed he could feel things fall through him in sheets, the remorse, the shame, the rage… All the little animals.

  He could feel himself empty.

  Sam watched him. When he looked at her, she seemed to shine with a high-altitude clarity. He held out his hand the way a beggar would, his face his only sign.

  She laughed, then did what she always did.

  She gave.

  He awoke to the light of the television, Sam's naked body crowded against his own on the couch. Images of what must have been the latest Chiropractor crime scene floated in the darkness. For a while he remained absolutely still, watching the parade of images the way tired children sometimes do, blinking and staring thoughtlessly, as though stuck between channels.

  He remembered Ripley, cursed himself for an idiot, though he was too drowsy, too numb, to feel any real regret. Mia would understand—even with Sam's car in the driveway. A shot of a harnessed German Shepherd snarling at a French eco-protester stirred thoughts of Bartender. He squeezed tears from his eyes with thumb and forefinger. Poor Bart. What was he going to tell Frankie?

  His brain wasn't wired the way ours is, son. He had no awareness, no experience. He was just a blind machine that your Uncle Cass broke.

  No, he definitely couldn't say that. What? Tell a boy that his dog lacked the neural integration required to possess experience? That he was unconscious through-and-through, dead all along? Most adults couldn't wrap their heads around that one.

  Couldn't save him, son. Just like I couldn't save you. T
he old man was too busy getting laid.

  Shame, like a hammer to the chest. Cold and hard.

  Too busy being dead weight…

  He sobbed into Sam's hair. 'No,' he muttered.

  Need to take control…

  Sam moaned and arched against him. 'Time for bed,' she murmured.

  Need to think… to take control.

  She sat up and stared with eyes that refused to focus. She rubbed a palm against her cheek. 'You coming?'

  Control! Control!

  'Yes,' he gasped.

  He turned off the screen and helped steady her up the stairs. But when she turned toward the bedroom, he continued straight into the bathroom. The light pricked his eyes. He tugged open the medicine cabinet and fished with clumsy fingers through old prescriptions and over-the-counter remedies, remembering how Nora had fairly cleaned the cabinet out when she moved, and wondering how the hell he'd managed to fill the damn thing up again.

  Then at last he found it. Control.

  The label read:

  BIBLE, THOMAS

  Lorazepram 1mg

  90 TAB APX Dr Bruno, Gene

  TAKE HALF TABLET WHEN NEEDED UP TO THREE TIMES DAILY

  Once, when things with Nora were real bad, Ripley had caught him taking one. 'Papa's little helpers,' Nora had explained to their daughter, shooting him a scathing glance. Everything had become a pretext by that point. If they weren't sniping, they were scrounging for ammunition.

  Thomas cracked the lid and tapped a pill onto his sweaty palm. A jewel of condensed powder against whorls of skin. He popped it and washed it down with water from the tap. He stuffed the bottle behind some Deep Ice, then slapped the mirror shut.

  'Nerves of fucking steel,' he promised his haggard reflection.

  How Neil would laugh.

  There is so much scripture written into little things.

  You hear your dog die first, stamped like a can beneath my hard, hard heel. It twitches like a Chinese toy. You come running. Oh-my-God, what's happened? You stop, dumbstruck, when you see me in the living room, unable to make sense of this, me, the stranger in your home. Your mouth opens, moist and hollow, and I decide to fill it when you're dead. Who? you want to cry, but you already know. You were born with knowledge of me, just like everyone else. No! you want to scream, but truth brooks no contradiction.

  Truth brooks no contradiction.

  I say the words, knowing their meaning will elude you until your final post-coital twitch. Only as your pupils slacken will you see their bulldozer finality, their crowbar penetration…

  I have broken into you. There is no refuge remaining.

  There never was.

  I say the words. 'Just the meat… I promise.'

  Then comes the beating. Then comes the blood.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  August 30th, 8.55 a.m.

  It seemed like his first sleep in years, decades even.

  Morning light filtered through the sheers. He simply breathed at first, blinking and staring at the swirls of white across the bedroom ceiling. From the tangle of cool sheets beside him, he knew Sam was already up. Images of a Toyota commercial he saw somewhere—one of many aimed against the New Environmental Accountability Act—plagued him while he dozed. When he closed his eyes, he saw a fleet of vehicles driving across the back of a great fissured glacier. 'Because tomorrow,' the voiceover purred, 'is the most important destination of all…'

  Then he remembered Frankie. By time he rolled clear of the blankets, he was shaking.

  He took another lorazepram before jumping into the shower. By time he was dressed, he could feel the pharmaceutical calm steeping through him, shrinking the horror to a vague uncertainty, the kind that makes you continually check your pockets for your keys. Thomas had always been one to lose things in his pockets, to toss the house looking for things hidden on his person. Always forgetting to remember.

  Sam was sitting at the kitchen table reading the paper in lemon morning sunlight. Though dressed in her FBI best—a charcoal skirt and jacket—she still had that fresh out-of-the-shower look. Her hair blonded around the edges as it dried.

  'Sooooo?' she asked with an apprehensive smile. Illuminated from behind, the page she held sported the shadow of a giant, inverted 0.9%.

  'Fucking forgot Ripley,' he croaked, making for the coffee pot.

  Her expression confirmed that she was referring to their argument from the previous afternoon. She was looking, Thomas supposed, for some flicker of something. Determination or resolution.

  Not more dead weight.

  'I'm sure Mia doesn't mind,' she said as he poured his coffee.

  'It's not Mia I'm worried about,' he replied, doing his best to purge the accusation from his tone. 'The last thing Ripley needs is to be d-ditched…' His throat seemed to spasm about the word. 'Ditched,' he repeated like an idiot.

  The doorbell interrupted her sigh.

  Mia, no doubt.

  'Time to take my medicine,' Thomas muttered, setting down his coffee. But he heard the doorknob twisting before he'd taken his second step. Mia never tested the door—never. He paused, looked to Sam in alarm. The buried crunch of the key was nothing short of thunderous.

  'Does he—' was the most Sam managed to say before the lock clicked. Thomas didn't need to ask who she meant by 'he'. The door swung open on a pale band of sunlight, and for a mad instant the shadow it revealed simply was the man who had haunted his every thought since that mad morning mere weeks ago.

  Neil…

  Until it became Nora, digging through her purse as she stepped into the living room. She gasped in surprise when she saw them.

  'Tommy,' she said, swallowing, drawing her hand down from her breastbone. Then, after a pause, she added, 'Agent Logan.'

  'What are you doing, Nora?' Thomas asked.

  There was a long, racing silence. This was bad, Thomas realized—catastrophic, even. Sam could lose her job.

  She's going to fuck us, he thought. That was what Nora did. Even when their marriage was good, he used to joke that if she were a nuclear power, the world would have been destroyed at some point in her early twenties. Hand her a lash and she would find an out.

  Nora laughed nervously. 'I'm here to pick up Ripley… So that we could show her Frankie together like we said…' She blinked, brought a finger to her fluttering left eye. 'Remember?'

  He did remember—now. Ripley needed to visit her brother before any of her wilder imaginings could take hold. She had always been such a wonderfully skeptical brat, even before the divorce. Words would not be enough. They had thought that if they both brought her, they could cushion the shock somewhat. Even at the time, Thomas couldn't fathom precisely why he had thought it would help. Perhaps he had hoped the illusion of something mended—Mommy and Daddy together—could compensate for the reality of her broken brother.

  'Tommy?' Nora asked.

  'I'm sorry, Nora. I forgot all about it.' He cleared his throat. 'Rip's over at Mia's.'

  'I see.' She looked directly at Sam. 'Too busy, I suppose.'

  'It's not what you, think, Nora.'

  Nora laughed in the caustic way that always made him ball his fists. 'Now that's a relief,' she said. 'Here I was thinking you'd left Ripley at Mia's so that you could bang the lovely agent here.'

  Dead silence. Thomas glanced at Sam, thanked Christ she was staring at the floor.

  'You have a choice here, Nora.'

  'Don't I know it,' she snapped. 'I can't decide which to do first. Call Agent Atta and let her know that one of her underlings is fucking one of the victims' fathers.' She smiled with cheerful malice. 'Or spit in your face.'

  The regret struck even before he opened his mouth. 'But that's what you always do, isn't it? Make things worse.'

  Her hesitation told him he'd succeeded, struck bone, even though it was the last thing he wanted to do. Nora had more than her measure of secret self-undermining fears. In marriage you shared everything, even the keys to the gun cabinet.

  'If
that was true,' Nora said blankly, 'I would have told her'—she made a point of gazing directly at Sam—'how you fucked me just last week.'

  The two women locked eyes. A truck passed outside. The roar tumbled through the open door, the rattle of ancient cylinders and shafts, then drained away.

  Still seated, Sam remained very still, her expression inscrutable save for a look of concentration. Nora sneered, as though unsettled by the woman's refusal to retaliate.

  'Nora…' Thomas tried once again.

  'Hellooooooo?' a masculine voice called from the front porch. Mia?

  'Mommy!' Ripley cried, her skirts flouncing as she raced through the door. She flew at Nora, wrapped herself about her waist. 'Mia let me watch Aliens! Is it true you named me after her, Mommy? The hero? Is it?'

  Mia followed after a ceremonial knock, dressed in cutoffs and an orange tank. 'Ooooh,' he cooed in his best Alabama gay, 'what dooo we have here? A pawwteee?' Then he turned to see Thomas and Sam in the kitchen. 'Oh…'

  Nora crumbled in her daughter's arms. Grimacing, she tried to fumble free of Ripley's embrace. A sob kicked through her, then another. 'S-sorry, hon-honey,' she gasped as she pulled clear of Ripley's arms. 'Mum-m-mummy can't-can't…'

  She fled through the door.

  Thomas stood dumbstruck. Somewhere, it seemed, he could feel the remorse, as fingers-to-toes as nausea. But the greater part of him remained remote, as though he were really just part of the audience disguised in the lead's costume.

  Control was good.

  'Hi, Sam,' Mia said haplessly. He waved with the nervousness of a pear-shaped fourteen-year-old.

  Without acknowledging him, Sam stood and walked to the front window, pulled aside the sheers to better look out. She was watching Nora, Thomas realized. Through the gauze he glimpsed the shadow of his ex-wife disappear into the shadow of her Nissan.

  'Will she be all right?' Sam asked as Thomas joined her.

  'Aw, fuck,' Mia said, breaking for the open door. For some reason, Thomas lacked the will to pull the cotton sheers aside. He watched his neighbor's gracile shadow lope across the lawn toward Nora's car. There was a burst of shrill voices as Mia's form closed on the car. Then the overgunned Nissan pulled away. His Number One Neighbor waved his arms in exasperation, then turned to the house, scratching his head. After a moment's hesitation, he began walking toward the property line, becoming more and more ghostlike with every step.