Brain Storm (20 page)

Watson swallowed moisture down the wrong pipe and coughed violently. He struggled again—mentally more than physically.

“Maybe we should stop now,” he said unconvincingly.

“Move a left finger,” she said.

He did.

“Move a right finger,” she said.

He did.

“Southpaw,” she said. “Heavy Pavlovian circuits laid down in the right hemisphere. Were you a Portnoy?”

“I don’t know …”

“Don’t get mad,” she said, strolling to the chair and bending over him, her eyes peering into his. “I’ll do us both a favor,” she offered, grabbing another jelly packet.

He tried to move, for no particular reason, and failed.

“Do you know the hoops I’d have to go through to get permission
from the FDA to obtain a magnetoencephalographic record of an event like this in a human male experimental subject? Four years, at least, to get it approved. With your help, I can get it in about four minutes.”

“Look,” he said, protesting a little too little and late. “I don’t want to do this. I’m married.”

“I know,” she said, squeezing clear jelly onto the fingertips of her right hand. “We can see that on the monitors. In male brains it shows up as washed-out splotches in the limbics. We lose resolution at that depth, it shows up as gray or beige, June Cleaver’s meat loaf. It indicates a stimulation deficit associated with chronic monogamy, a fundamental lack of diversity in sexual partners and experiences. It’s treatable.”

His forearms bulged under the thick Velcro pads and straps.

“In male rats,” she added brightly, “we call it the Coolidge effect. A male rat who has just ejaculated will mount a new female more speedily than he will remount the same female with whom he has just copulated. What do you think of that?”

“I need to think …” he said.

“Do,” she said. “We’re into that around here.”

She touched him carefully, tenderly.

“Control lost,” she observed with a friendly smile. “Your neural networks are phase-locked. Resistance is down. Rheostats open. You’re servomechanical. IRQ. IRQ. IRQ. IR-ACK. We have bus connection to the joy port. I’m sampling directly across the modal-spectrum of sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems.”

Her voice was soothing and sincere, a warm reverberation in his spine. Cool jelly. Smooth hand. “A single … stroke,” she murmured, “and the circuits open, and they are all one-way.”

He took a few deep breaths and watched the tip of her tongue move across her upper lip. She settled herself against him on the arm of the chair.

She undid whatever was holding her hair together and shook it loose.

“Breathe through your nose,” she said.

She craned her neck and took a look at the monitors. “We have olfactory,” she said.

“It smells good,” said Watson, “but—”

“Bodies cast shadows,” she said. “Brains throw off consciousness. But consciousness doesn’t control your brain any more than your shadow tells your body what to do.”

“Yeah,” he said. “But—”

“Your vocalizations, your moral reasoning, your sham protests are all what we call epiphenomena—accessory events, secondary artifact. Your brain wants to make you feel better about something it decided to do on its own, without your permission.”

She bent over him, still alongside, her hand manipulating him expertly to orgasm. He looked over her shoulder, through her dark tresses, through the booth window, and saw the colored tectonic plates of the graphic representation of his head turn red and orange.

He felt her warm chuckle in his ear. She put her head alongside his and watched the monitors.

“Generalized muscular tension, perineal contractions, involuntary pelvic thrusting with a periodicity of zero-point-eight seconds, white-hot medial preoptic.” She giggled. “The lateral hypothalamus brings accessory networks into play,” she whispered. “Houston, we have bursts of impulses in the hypothalamic supraoptic and paraventricular nuclei, down the axon terminals. Heart rate climbing. Skin flushed. Vasodilation. Muscle spasms. Involuntary vocalizations … 
Aaaand
 … Boom! Massive discharge of oxytocin from the posterior pituitary gland.”

He turned his head, panted, and moaned.

“Neuroscience,” she said. And kissed him.

N
ot only had he missed dinner, he had missed baths. Dinner he missed two or three times a week, but missing the kids’ baths was a marital war crime. If there were Codes or National Situations at the firm, he missed baths, and paid dearly in downtime given over to fielding incessant remonstrations from the Memsahib. He heard her upstairs, already doing bedtime reading. He knew he was in for a look that was older than time, the same look that paleowife Lucy and her hunter-gatherer sisters probably gave to their protohuman husbands when the roistering cads returned late from the hunt with meager results, a look that said:
I know a few similarly ranked males who bring home twice the meat with half the effort, and then devote their leisure time to mentoring and nurturing the children.

To make things worse, he’d been pawed at, nuzzled, and slavered on by a rival female whose scent was smeared all over him. Sandra was not the jealous type, but he’d seen some pretty ferocious displays over the reported infidelities of their married friends.

“Is that you?” she called down, her tone suggesting she’d be just as happy with a gentleman burglar or a competent baby-sitter.

“What’s left of me,” said Watson, seized by a sudden urge for cold beer, wondering if this desire for a depressant in beverage form had
erupted somewhere in his preconscious, which was causing his hand to automatically grab the refrigerator door, open it, tear the pop-top … and other parts of his brain were not stopping that impulse.

“I met with those doctors who want to scan my appointed guy, then I had to go back to the office for a Code Orange in L.A.,” he loudly explained, neatly omitting the return visit and the hand job he’d received from a gorgeous neuroscientist.

Danger made him trust his instincts. And his instincts told him to come up with entirely new subject matter for the Code Orange, because a description of Gateway and Mikey would come too near the topic of sexual behavior. “They wouldn’t let us off-line in L.A. It was a hostile takeover, we were trolling the information services doing due diligence all night, looking for white knights, greenmail, poison pills, shark repellent.”

“FEED THE DOGS,” she yelled, then continued reading to the children. “ ‘ “I know some new tricks,” said the Cat in the Hat. “A lot of good tricks. I will show them to you. Your mother will not mind at all if I do.” ’ ”

The truth was he’d blown off the Code Orange and left Nancy Slattery behind to explain the cases he’d found, while he ran off to see Dr. Palmquist. And Boron was just the sort to keep his list, check it twice, and enter
naughty
on the upcoming performance evaluation.

He grabbed the phone and called into the firm’s voice mail; the synthetic operator told him he had twelve minutes of messages. He started the playback, with his finger on the
SKIP
button.

Arthur came on and told him to report on his meeting at the Neuroscience Center. (Maybe he’d visited the place himself and wanted to compare notes.) Then he started in again on plea bargaining. “I know people in the U.S. Attorney’s office,” he said. “I specifically instructed you that I wanted to know immediately if anyone called you to discuss a plea.”

Watson froze. “Fuck!”

“Please!” Sandra hollered down from upstairs.

“Sorry, San,” he said. He had forgotten to tell Arthur about Harper’s call! Deep shit was one thing—now he was under full fathom five.

SKIP
.

In-house counsel from PizzaFax, re: discovery matters,
SKIP
.

He heard Sandra’s voice again: “ ‘But our fish said, “No! No! Make that cat go away! Tell that Cat in the Hat you do
not
want to play. He
should not be here. He should not be about. He should not be here when your mother is out!” ’ ”

Boron with Spike McGinnis on speaker, going ahead with the summary judgment motion. “What about cases analyzing whether transsexuality—wait,” said Boron the Moron. “Which is he, Spike?” he asked, his voice fading as he turned from the speaker. “Which one has to do with clothes?” His voice came back full: “Yeah, not the clothes one, whether the other one, transsexuality, is considered a handicap under Illinois law? Since we can’t find favorable stuff on trans-, trans-, whatever. You get the idea. Would those be relevant?”

“No, ass-wipe!” said Watson. “We talked about that at the Code Orange briefing.”
SKIP
.

“Who are you swearing at down there?” Sandra asked shrilly. “Are you on the phone again? Will you stop the language!”

“No one,” he said. “No! Yes, I will stop the language.”
I’ll get a Glock 19 semiautomatic instead.

“Did you feed the dogs?”

The next message began. “Attorney Watson? This is James Whitlow. They don’t let me use the phone much. I got cut off from you. I did not hang up. I don’t know if they tape or bug these calls, but I had another idea to tell you why I ain’t guilty of discrimination. I have seen many Afro-Americans and many hearing-impaired people and have never tried to kill them, until I seen one trying to fuck my wife. Plus my own boy is hearing-impaired and I ain’t tried to kill him yet. Are they saying I only try to kill people who are
both
hearing-impaired and African-American? In fact, I had seen the deaf … I mean, the hearing-impaired African-American several times before and had never tried to kill him, but I guess they would say it was because when I seen him it was in church.

“Anyway … Oh, yeah. I talked to Buck and some of my friends, and I think I told you we got some good money. Anyway, even though Buck has good money, Buck’s lawyer says I might be better off with you as my lawyer, at least until we get to trial, because there are so many legal theories on this hate stuff that need sorting out and lots of research, which would be very expensive, and, what do you call them? Motions, yeah, motions. I wrote this stuff down. And, anyway, Buck’s lawyer said you might be pretty good at that part of the business being as how you were on law journal and because you work at such a big firm, and you would be free, too. They said worry about trial later. Or maybe, they could get
another lawyer to help you later, a good criminal lawyer. And Buck and his lawyer said to let them know if you need extra money for investigators or medical experts or whatever, or maybe even some extra money for yourself. Whatever. But of course if the government asks, we both know I ain’t got no money. Right? And even if I could get some money, I might forget that because of that traumatic amnesia we was talking about. I’m running on, so, never mind, I will call tomorrow in the morning if they let me.”

Watson’s spider sense tingled.
“Buck’s lawyer says I might be better off with you as my lawyer”?
Sap alert! Now he was being used as a patsy to do research!
“And you would be free, too”?
“Shit,” he said, and promptly heard his wife’s foot stomp over his head.
“Extra money? Or maybe some extra money for yourself”?

“Oh, yeah,” Whitlow’s message continued, “I’m getting pills for the infection, and they are giving me the Dilantin, too. They said something about could they get the medical records from the doctor who prescribed the medicine for the infection when I was still … before I was in jail. I don’t think they should have those because that is private shit. So can we just tell them no?

“I have thought about what you said about how you don’t want to know nothing yet, but I still say, what would you do if you come home to that one day? Anyway, I will see you in the morning.”

Watson pushed
PAUSE
, then replayed the message. The other lawyer, the extra money, the medical records. And, there it was again—Whitlow asking him, “What would you do?”

He resumed voice mail where he’d left off.

A message from Rachel Palmquist, whose voice tripped a circuit and opened his pores, so he could bathe in the sebaceous slime of the guilty. A power surge in his autonomic nervous system triggered irregular heart rhythms. Pitter-pat and butterflies for the young and single; mortal terror and angina for adulterers with children.

“I’m not chasing you,” she said. “I called to tell you I got a slot for your man. I called the Psychon Project director in Minnesota. I made a place for your guy, and I’m supposed to provide any support you need for your Rule Twelve motion. As for your own criminal, neurofunctional profile, I reviewed the films of the big event right after you left. Hot pink and electric orange, high magnetic fields in the medial preoptic region of your hypothalamus, indicating extremely aggressive, male-typical
sexual behavior—mounting, pelvic thrusting … I think you need a doctor to take a look at it for you. Permission to seek confirmation with a PET scan and functional MRI? See ya.”

While his cheeks burned, he heard his wife’s voice again.

“ ‘Then our mother came in and she said to us two, “Did you have any fun? Tell me. What did you do?” ’

“ ‘Should we tell her about it? Now, what
should
we do? Well … What would you do if your mother asked
you
?’ ”

It was too late to go up and offer token assistance. The Battle of Putting the Kids to Bed was over; the vanquished had surrendered in tears, taken baths, brushed their teeth, relinquished toys, fallen under the spell of reading. Now Papa, a pacifist and stranger to the toils of bedtime civil war, had shown up for the spoils and the goodnight kisses, and lessons in the use of foul language. Instead, he went through the mail and discovered that some of the concerned citizens and
Post-Dispatch
readers had looked up his home address in the phone book: