Brain Storm (52 page)

She smiled. “On the other hand, as you know, even chimpanzees display altruistic behaviors. Right?”

“There is almost always
some
explanation, isn’t there?” said Watson, mocking her with lines from the speech she had given him on the mats in the storage room. “The brain almost never says, ‘I don’t know,’ when asked about its own perceptions.”

“You got me,” she said. “But you still need to take your cue from the rest of your body and obey your cortex, instead of your limbics. Go back to the family where your brain keeps sending you.”

“And where does your brain send you?” asked Watson.

“Where I need to go right now,” she said, with a tight smile. “To the lab.”

H
e could remember a time when he was flush with family and fatherhood. He could make love to his wife. And after George, the father of his country, had slaked his standing lust, maybe Benjy would wake up during the night, and Watson could shift into Dad Mode. He could swing Benjy aloft, feel him drool in his ear, and hear his one-year-old son say, “Bwah, gabah, dah.” Poetry, biological music, vocal cords from his descendant, pure preverbal human affection, untainted by lies, guile, artifice, and self-aggrandizement.

“May it please the court,” Watson could say to the learned judges of the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, “this case hinges upon a complex interaction of state and federal law, of statutory construction and constitutional hermeneutics, of federal jurisdiction and esemplastic common-law theory, but I can sum it all up, your honors, in one simple locution: Bwah, gabah, dah. See, op. cit., id., passim, ibid.,
In re Bwah, Gabah, Dah
, 708 F.3d 115 (8th Cir. 2002).”

Now, abandoned on the eve of oral arguments, the only stable operating system left was Warrior Mode. He booted into it with a vengeance, shunning all contact with females. Abstinence. Fasting in preparation for oral combat with the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri.

He stayed at his office until 10:00
P
.
M
., then drove home to his big, empty house. He parked the Honda in his gravel driveway (the one that should have been paved by now with his Stern, Pale bonus). He fetched snail mail from the box and walked up the sidewalk to his front door, picking up newspapers along the way. He was trying to read the urgent warning on the envelope of another payment-due notice, but it was too dark. He looked up to take the first of two steps onto his front patio. Someone had scattered rocks, chunks of gravel on the cement. Kids? Not
scattered
, he realized with a shudder, as a pattern of letters emerged in the penumbra from the yard light. Letters, written in gravel:
D
-
E
-
L
-
I
-
V
-
E
-
R
-
Y
-? He spun around and scanned the dark suburban landscape for snipers and car bombers; maybe Alpha or Beta were sitting in a gray Ford Taurus? He peered again at the message:
DELIVERY
?

“Shit!” He spilled mail and dropped his key ring trying to jam the house key into the lock.

He called Myrna at home. One of her little girls answered the phone. He swallowed panic and rage, and became a well-behaved, solicitous adult. “You’re watching TV with Mom? That’s nice. That sounds like fun.”

“Yes,” said the little girl. “It’s a show about some mean policemen who are trying to put people in jail. They just want to be mean and arrest people and get them to confess before they can talk to their lawyer.”

“Oh,” said Watson. “You
are
watching TV with Mom. Listen, this is Mr. Watson. I need to talk to your mom. It’s very important.”
Before we are all dead or in jail
, he thought.

“Joey,” said Myrna, “I knew you couldn’t stay mad at me.”

“Myrna, there’s a message on my front patio written in gravel. They are still looking for the delivery. Big capital letters. It says ‘Delivery question mark.’ ”

“Hold on,” she said. “I gotta tell you something very important. This is big. Huge! It could get everybody put away for natural life. Are you ready?”

“What?” he asked. He heard a high-pitched trill, like a computer logging on. It cycled through a series of high- and low-pitched codes, then stopped.

“OK,” she said. “We have a clean line. No taps. Go ahead. Wait, you ain’t using a remote are you? Are you hardwired into the wall?”

“Yes,” he said. “What? What’s so important?”

“Important?” she asked. “Oh, me? You mean the very important la,
di, da? I only said that in case they were listening, in which case they would stay on the line while I checked it with the sniffer, because you were starting to talk about stuff that could get us all in trouble.”

“Delivery,”
he said, gritting his teeth. “Written in gravel.”

“In gravel?” she said. “Those clever motherfuckers. That’s how they got around the vandalism statutes at the abortion clinics. You’re the hate crime expert. If there’s no underlying crime, there can’t be any enhancement for the hate, right? So instead of spray painting the clinic sidewalks and committing vandalism, they snuck in at night and rearranged the mulch and pea gravel or whatever they could find and spelled “Baby Killers!” Like I said, clever motherfuckers.”

“I don’t care if they are clever or fuck their mothers,” shouted Watson. “They were at my house! Got it? They want to know what happened to the delivery. Whatever was in the briefcases. Did you talk to Buck?”

“Calm down, Joey,” she said. “They won’t fuck with your house. The wife and kids ain’t back yet, are they?”

“No,” he yelled, “but I want to live to see them come back home if possible.”

“Don’t freak, dude,” she said. “If they knock on your door, tell them to meet me at my office in the morning. I talked to fucking Buck, for Christ’s sake. According to him, the briefcases were full of hate literature and militant pro-life shit. How to make bombs out of fertilizer. How to drop ATF agents with deer rifles. Mary and the black dude were doing all the print work for the national organization and several of the regional offices, to boot. Acrobat Printing and Graphics, remember? Major print jobs for the Order of the Eagles. Buck says the black dude didn’t care about working for racists because the money was so good, but after he made his nut, he started wanting out.”

“So they killed him?” asked Watson shrilly.

“Did I say that?” she asked. “I’m telling you what Buck said, OK? We don’t know what was going on with the deaf black dude. Maybe we will never know. We still don’t know what his priors were, because Dirt’s source in the Bureau is on vacation. He has at least one alias, but the priors are federal and hard to get. We should have it well before trial, but in the meantime, we don’t know shit about him except he was deaf and into engraving and printing and computer graphics. According to Buck, this was just a regular drop-off, until Mary Whitlow set up your client for a murder. Did you get the machine looked at? That VTD dealybob?”

She slipped the inquiry smoothly into the conversation, trying to seduce him back into Teamwork Mode.

“I did. I’ll tell you about it tomorrow. If I live till then. I have oral arguments at nine-thirty.”

“I know that,” she said. “Frank Donahue’s probably deep into scotch down at McGurk’s Pub, waiting to get his beard plucked and his ass kicked. You’ll show him, Joey.”

“So these lessons Mary is talking about,” he said, thinking out loud. “ ‘I’m ready for another lesson. I have the money for the lessons. The lessons are too expensive.’ That’s—”

“Probably code,” said Myrna. “They were smart enough not to talk about their business over the phone lines, especially when TDD printouts come out the other end.”

“So then why
two
briefcases? Did he bring two briefcases full of literature?”

Myrna paused. “What if he brought the pamphlets and newsletters and shit in one. Then, she’s got the money in the other. They switch.”

“And where’s the money?” he asked.

“Good question,” she said. “Beat’s the Buck out of me. He claims he don’t know either. Buck’s story is that the Order of the Eagles is breaking up. Too much heat and notoriety. Factions are forming. And he and Jimmy Whitlow are blood brothers or some shit. Maybe they are going off to start another Cub Scout Den, or something.”

“Something’s not right,” he said. “Why do those guys want the delivery so bad if it’s just a bunch of newspapers? Can’t they print some more? I mean, who cares?”

He could hear her exhale cigarette smoke. “Well,” she said, “maybe there was membership stuff and minutes of meetings and all kind of militia business printed up in there. Enough to get them all walloped on conspiracy charges and socked away on hate crimes. I don’t know. But they do seem to want it bad, don’t they?”

“And where is it?” asked Watson.

“Buck claims he don’t know,” said Myrna. “His story is either Mary Whitlow has it, or the cops have it.”

“He’s lying,” said Watson, “and maybe you are, too.”

“Joey,” she protested. “Stop that.”

“Remember the impound lot inventory sheet?
Two
briefcases. Not one. Two in the trunk when Dirt visited the lot. Mary goes to get the car out of the lot with the two lugs who visited us in the office. When they
open the trunk, they find one almost empty briefcase. Because Buck hopped the fence and got the other one. Which is what Whitlow was talking about when he told me, ‘Never mind about the impound lot. We took care of the impound lot.’ ”

“Possible,” said Myrna. “Without getting into it, I think it makes more sense that the cops took it. And they don’t want us to
know
they have it, because they are downtown huddled around a pile of militia publications figuring out how many Eaglers they can nail on conspiracy charges.”

“But why would they wait?” he protested.

“What’s the rush?” she said. “It’s like staking a dealer’s house and putting tracers on his lines. Pretty soon you’ve got more criminals than you know what to do with. Let me tell you something else, if we wind up in a small room with some Eagle Scouts, don’t be making cogent arguments about how Buck has the other briefcase.”

“Because he’s your client,” Watson said acidly.

“That’s right,” she said, “and Jimmy Whitlow is
your
client.”

“And they’re paying us with the money Mary Whitlow was using to pay for the delivery, right?” asked Watson.

Silence. “That’s what I’m talking about,” she said finally. “That kind of talk will either get us killed or thrown in jail. The scenario that makes the most sense based on the evidence we’ve seen so far is that the cops have the other briefcase and whatever was in the briefcases.”

Watson heard Whitlow’s voice playing in his mind’s ear:
“We took care of the impound lot. Which reminds me of the most important thing. Buck found some money. Some good money, actually.”
Then he flashed to Mary Whitlow, sitting in Myrna’s office:
“Tell him I get my half back and maybe …”

“I’ll see you at the office,” said Joe.

He felt mortal terror for the third time in as many days and again wanted only to go home—home being wherever his wife and kids were. How did the Bible put it? “That is why a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and the two of them become one body.” If only, and one brain, too? How consoling it would be to leave mother militia and father Stang and just go cling to his wife. Maybe Sandra had opened his letter today?

He peeked out the blinds while drinking a Budweiser nightcap, took a warm bath, and reread his fifty-page brief. If he closed his eyes he could almost recite it word for word. Every sentence had been honed and polished before he’d filed it in the Eighth Circuit. It was an essay
and a legal brief, stuffed with case law and quotes from First Amendment scholars, George Orwell, Clarence Darrow, Floyd Abrams, Demosthenes, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Nietzsche. Afterward, he drank milk, counted sheep, and then stared up at the ceiling, as quotes echoed in the chambers of consciousness.

He put the covers over his head and listened for lurking militiamen. Alone again in his big, empty house, he manfully tried to convince himself that he did not need sleep.
I do not need to sleep
, he told himself, over and over, until the glowing tumblers on his digital alarm whirred and rotated from 12:59
A
.
M
. to 1:00
A
.
M
.
The loss of a single night’s REM is irrelevant the night before a stressful event. Adrenaline will take over during battle, and sleep won’t matter
, he thought, calling to mind the various articles he had read on sleep.

As the wee hours crawled by, he issued several more imperatives, commanding himself to believe that he did not need sleep. Why? So he could go to sleep, that’s why. Some part of his brain still believed it needed sleep for optimum performance, even though it didn’t. He did not need to rehearse his presentation or review the briefs. That was all done. It was already in place in his neural networks. No need to disturb it. Preparation was finished and only the battle itself left to endure.

If he were Henry V on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt, he could sneak among the encampments of his neurons and neural networks, his neuroses and phobias; creep among the various grumbling factions of his unconscious, his preconscious, and his subconscious; visit fortifications in the neocortex and talk to the brutes manning his limbics; drop down to the brain stem and inspect the autonomic nervous system; eavesdrop on an argument between his Id and Superego:

Superego: “We must acquit ourselves with valor in the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals on the morrow.”

Id: “And then celebrate afterward in the primate labs by feeding the dumb glutton a plaster of warm slickness from the Venus de Neuro.”

At first light, he could give a St. Crispin’s Day speech to rouse the rest of himself to battle.

But alas he was not an army of neural networks or a commonwealth, or a parliament, or a symphony of brain cells, he was himself. And after oral arguments, he would be either victorious or vanquished. Sleep? He did not need to sleep.