Brain Storm (36 page)

“So when I say, ‘Fuck Arthur,’ that’s low serotonin talking,” he said.

She laughed. “Another neuroscientist called the brain a loose confederation of neural systems,” she continued. “People vary in their ability to achieve unity among the competing factions. Ask an alcoholic, ‘How much do you drink?’ Or ask a guy, ‘Hey, why do you cheat on your wife?’ and watch the many-chambered self swing into action. The brain will acquit itself. It will offer plausible denials, explanations, excuses, and promises. It will lash out in anger, make exceptions for itself, deny any data that does not comport with its view of itself, even pour itself a drink to help figure things out.

“Speaking of which,” she said, crawling off of him and reaching for the bottle of wine he’d brought her. She found her lab coat and fished a book of matches from the pocket, struck a match and lit a Bunsen
burner. Watson found the plastic corkscrew, tore the foil, and opened the wine. She poured two healthy servings into Gage Institute plastic cups. Then they crawled together in the penumbra of a blue tongue of light from the hissing burner she’d rigged up—the lab equivalent of a hearth—which cast deep, blue-black shadows in the curves and hollows of her marvelous skin.

Watson wondered if he might take another run at her but was afraid he would only embarrass himself again on the threshold of adultery, succumb to phantoms prefigured in nightmares and the circuit breakers and system BIOS interrupts installed by nuns, which locked up instead of processing urges to break the Seventh Commandment.

“Cheers,” she said, touching her cup to his and studying the NIH logo on the side. “We will now asphyxiate neurons by drinking fine French wine from Decade of the Brain cups.”

She curled up in the inverted V of his arm and torso. She set the rose he’d given her on his chest and started plucking petals off one by one.

“He hated him,” she said, “he hated him not. He hated him. He hated him not. He hated him.… Just what sort of professional alliance do we have here?”

He watched the fan spinning overhead, sipped from his cup, and considered his place in the universe.

“So, I won’t ask if you’re religious,” he said. “You don’t believe in … higher beings, or whatever.”

“You mean, does God exist?” she laughed. “Can’t we skip the petty shit and go straight to the big questions?” She sipped and licked a stray drop from the lip of the cup. “As a scientist, I pay God the highest professional compliment—I spend my life studying His work and I never concern myself with His personal qualities. Instead, I trust myself, and I ask myself: ‘Do I seem to have a soul?’ And so far, based on what neuroscience has taught me about the human brain, my answer is no, I do not have a soul.”

Watson drank and studied her half-lit curves swelling voluptuously out of the shadows. He wondered if he could shed his soul as easily as an old T-shirt, lose the capacity for guilt and self-doubt, stop worrying about adultery, and get on with the business of propagating the species. After that, he could return to his most recent chosen profession: defending murderers.

“Just how do a hundred billion neurons cooperate to produce the interior life of the mind?” she asked. “We don’t know yet. But when the
explanation comes, I assure you the pure science of it will be more magnificent than any soul.” She held her cup to his lips. “Besides, biology is more fun. Remember the MEG—the magnetoencephalography?”

“How could I forget?”

“OK, that device—the hair dryer—was
recording
magnetic fields from your brain. But we use another device to
create
magnetic fields, and we can aim them into your brain, use them to stimulate areas of the brain, produce or mimic cerebral activity, noninvasively.”

“So,” he said.

“So,” she said mischievously, “I aim my MEG stimulator at your lateral hypothalamus, and just when you start having an orgasm, I blast your limbics with a powerful magnetic field and it touches off urges so powerful they override your moral viruses.”

“Is it safe?”

“Harmless,” she said. “I’ve done it at least a half dozen times.”

Before he could think about that one, she leaned down suddenly, kissed him on the cheek, and murmured in his ear, “When we get to know each other a little better, after we reach a certain level of trust,” she said, “you’ll let me put a little canula down into your septal area so I can inject some acetylcholine in there while we’re doing it.”

“And what would that do?” he asked, suddenly aroused by her suggestive tone, but wincing at the thought of a hole being drilled in his skull.

“Oh, nothing much, really,” she said with a soft chuckle. “Multiple orgasms lasting thirty or forty minutes or so. Pleasure so intense you can’t stand it, and then we dial it back a notch to where you can just barely stand it. And then we do it again.”

“I’ll call for an appointment,” he said.

She regarded her cup again and sipped. “Why go looking for a soul when simple biology makes us stand back in awe?” She curled up again in the hollow between his arm and his torso.

“I talked to Whitlow this afternoon,” Watson said. “He has a lot of questions about what they are doing to him up there. He wants to know what they are looking for, and I was wondering the same thing. What are they looking for?”

She arched her neck, and her silhouette moved in the shadows cast by the Bunsen burner.

“To an extent,” she said, “the government is looking for the same thing we are, and they want to make sure they get to see it first.”

“Help me out,” said Watson. “I guess I understand why
we
want to test him, because we are looking for a mental defect, right? Something that made him unable to control himself or appreciate the nature of his actions, right?”

“Right,” she said. “But not something soft. Not abuse or Twinkies or insanity. We want something hard.” She reached down between his legs.

“We want a defect we can point to on a scan or an EEG or an MEG and say, ‘There it is—a structural defect in the frontal cortex, or decreased blood flow to the forebrain, which interferes with the normal mechanisms of impulse control or the ability to perform moral judgments—what you might call a
conscience.
That’s tangible. We can show it to the jury. I can explain to them how decreased blood flow to the forebrain or a lesion compressing the forebrain will impair executive function.”

“OK,” said Watson, “we are looking for a mental defect—that’s a defense, right? There’s no such thing as an insanity
offense
, is there? So how will the government use this data?”

“I work for prosecutors all the time,” she said. “I’m on your side this time, because I can double my exposure by taking either side of high-profile cases. Look at the underlying crime—murder. Think about this. I argue as a defense that the perpetrator has a biological or congenital defect, a structural malformation that makes him impulsive or antisocial or unable to appreciate the consequences of violence. OK, maybe the jury says, ‘Yeah, the poor guy didn’t know what he was doing because his brain is defective.’ Or, maybe they say, ‘This is voodoo science from experts paid to say this stuff and get the guy off. We don’t care if he has a brain tumor, he’s still guilty.’ Or worse, they say, ‘You know, that woman doctor is right. He’s a brain-damaged psychopath. Let’s put him away for life.’ ”

“OK,” said Watson, “then we would lose.”

“But we can lose twice,” she said, her eyes narrowing in dark slits. “At the penalty phase, the prosecutors will remind us that he’s a guy with a history of violent, impulsive behaviors. He hurt people. He painted swastikas. These days, he’s using the n-word and killing a black. A jury found him guilty of manslaughter or murder. Now the judge will sentence him. And what factors does the judge consider at sentencing? Probably the number one consideration is: Will this criminal be reformed? Or will he be back as a repeat offender? Did he make
a mistake? Or is this something chronic? What will the government do with all of your expert testimony about neurological defects at a sentencing hearing? Huh?”

She rose back up, astraddle his torso, and smiled down at him, waiting for him to make connections.

“Oh,” said Watson.

“That’s right,” she said. “Now the government shows your PET scans, your MRI scans, and your expert opinions to the judge, and says, ‘There’s no hope of rehabilitation here, Your Honor. This is congenital. It’s biological. It’s structural and nothing short of psychosurgery is going to cure this animal. He is a super predator. A hate machine. An automaton without a conscience, incapable of remorse for his crimes.’ ”

“Eeesh,” said Watson. “I never …”

“Think of Mr. Whitlow the way the government thinks of him, the way I think of him: He’s a big mouse with an advanced brain. He’s an unreasonably dangerous machine. Something has malfunctioned, causing his brain to issue socially unacceptable commands to the rest of his body. So now what? How best to remedy this essentially biological problem? Confine him? Why? So that all of his disordered mental processing will be turned inward on itself and on others with similarly disordered mental processing? Why? What a waste. It costs a lawyer’s annual salary to house an inmate in a federal prison.”

“What’s the alternative?” asked Watson.

“Well,” she said, “how about repair? Diagnose it like any other medical problem and fix it. And if they can’t be repaired, donate them to science. I don’t believe in the death penalty. Why punish somebody by killing them, when you can punish them by studying them, vivisecting them like guinea pigs, if necessary, to find out why they short-circuited? Killing only puts them out of their misery.”

“Let’s see,” said Watson, his tone not entirely humorous, “I took up with you because I thought you were a defense witness. Now it sounds like you want to open my client’s skull and take out the parts of his brain you don’t like. Is that what the Psychon Project is all about?”

“I can’t tell you about the classified aspects of the Psychon Project,” she said. “We are looking for genetic, biological, environmental, medical causes of violence. The sociologists have had their day and things have only gotten worse. It’s time for the biologists, the geneticists, the neuroscientists to take over.”

“But repair,” said Watson. “How does one repair violence?”

“The same way we repair excess stress,” she said, flourishing her cup and drinking from it, “medication. The animal studies aren’t classified, so I can tell you that we have created violent animals by raising them in hostile environments. And then we have repaired them, using drugs, microfine electrodes, noninvasive, pinpoint radiation via gamma knife resection. We don’t have to open the animals’ heads to fix them. Any more than I have to open yours to make you come.”

She poured the last of the bottle into their cups, the light from the flame lambent on her skin.

“What if you could know absolutely anything about anybody who ever lived?” she whispered in his ear. “What would you want to know?”

Having come this far, Watson thought about attempting sincerity. “I guess … I guess, I would want to know if Jesus Christ was really God,” he said, slurring his speech slightly in the throes of red wine and religious sentiment. “That would resolve more than a few major intrapsychic conflicts. It would absolve me of the rigors of faith. I could just bathe in certainty for the rest of my life and ascend into the bosom of God when I died.”

“Or live life as evolution’s crowning glory,” she said, “and never have to waste mental energy on superstition.”

“OK,” he said, “I’m done. Your turn. If you could know absolutely anything about anybody who ever lived, what would you want to know?”

She swigged. “Napoleon’s serotonin levels before and after Waterloo.”

“And if your serotonin level is abnormal,” he said, “then you’re a flawed android in need of repair?”

“Well,” she said, “look at the stats. Something like six percent of the criminal population commits something like seventy percent of violent crimes. Chronic recidivists. You tell me if that doesn’t suggest at least a biological component?”

“And,” he said, “free will, redemption, self-improvement, character building, spiritual renewal—those all go out the window.”

“Look,” she said, groggily snuggling again in the blue flame of the Bunsen burner, “speaking as a scientist, I don’t think there’s much you can do about it if you’re biologically predisposed to violence or sexual misbehavior. You just have to make the best of it, and try not to get caught. The way we do.”

Their heads lolled together in a doze. In the synaptic twilight of an
approaching dream, Watson imagined them walking naked out of their cave at dawn and sauntering out onto a savanna on the shores of Lake Turkana, waving at Lucy, Peking Man, Piltdown Man. Watson and the boys dropped a stray wildebeest by clubbing it to death and hurling stones at it. Later that night, they asked Cham and Elsa over for dinner and introduced them to cooked meat and fermented rice.

“Hey,” she murmured, rousing him from his neolithic slumber, “I think the settings on your cortical governor are too high; they’re overriding normal hypothalamic urges. Maybe I could get in there with some stereotaxic probes and tweak the options on the limbic gonkulator to resist guilt and release more lust.”

“Soul,” he said. “It’s inoperable. Beyond your expertise.”

T
he next day he spent some of Buck’s lawyer’s money and bought a computer, printer, monitor, phone, and answering machine, then stayed up all night in the room he’d rented from Myrna Schweich hooking them together, creating his very own shanty on the information highway and hanging out a virtual shingle. By dawn, he was in the usual trance, worshipping a screenful of sumptuous icons on an information warrior’s desktop, which bore a working resemblance to the setup he’d left at the big firm. He had his agents, browsers, spiders, and robots all reconfigured and standing by. He had purchased a worktable, a desk, two straight-back chairs—both of which were adjustable in the sense that you could tip back on two legs or scoot them forward, but neither of which had a single knob or lever for adjusting height, tilt angle, pneumatic bladder pressure, lumbar support, or any of the other features of his former chair-bound life. The only comfort this used office furniture offered was pride of ownership.