Neuropath (16 page)

'How so?'

The roguish eyes clicked to Sam, then back. 'Everyone knows psychologists are simply madmen turned inside out. All that glamor. We neuroscientists, on the other hand; we're just mere technicians.'

Somehow Thomas knew it was another eye-twinkling lie.

'You envy me?'

Another draw on his cigarette, deep enough to rim the bags beneath his eyes with orange light. The glow shined across both irises.

'In my way.'

Then he was gone.

CHAPTER EIGHT

August 18th, 2.58 p.m.

Coming along had been a mistake, Thomas realized as they walked back to Sam's Mustang. He was too close to the principals to bring much more than an alienating intensity to the table. And Mackenzie? The man was obviously a player from way back—and connected as well. Sam might as well have been a mail carrier for all the respect he showed her position.

'So what the hell was that all about?' Sam said as she started the car. The way she kept her eyes fixed on the street made him certain she was thinking the same thing he was.

'A narcissistic demonstration of entitlement,' Thomas replied.

'Which means?'

'He blew us off to prove to himself that he
could
blow us off. By showing us he didn't need us, he was affirming a congratulatory self-image.'

'Well, he should trim the old nostril hairs before congratulating himself too much. Did you see how
orange
they were?'

Thomas hadn't noticed. 'I thought he was quite dapper.'

'It was like taffy or something,' she continued in a ranting monologue tone, 'only with nicotine.' Thomas imagined that this was how she sounded when driving with Gerard. This was
Sam
, he realized, uncut.

'Gawd,' she exclaimed, 'I hate fucking smokers.' With a quick glance at her mirrors, she accelerated toward K Street. 'And what was that "I-envy-you-in-my-way" bullshit about?'

Thomas cleared his throat. 'You… I think.'

'Me?'

A tingling suffused his face. 'I think he thought I was going to… you know.'

Sam looked at him in shock, then burst out laughing—far harder than was necessary Thomas thought.

'Sorry, professor,' she said without a wisp of embarrassment. 'I like you and all, but…'

'But
what?'
Thomas cried.

'I
love
my job.'

'Yeah, well, I have my moments, you know.'

Sam braked at the intersection. Against an embattled retail backdrop, traffic whisked through the sun's glare, flashing as though through a searchlight. Thomas found himself staring down the treed rows of a Wal-Mart parking lot, twisting in the absence of any reply.

'So what's the plan?' he asked when it became apparent she had nothing to say.

'I'm not sure,' she admitted after a pensive moment. 'I need to talk to Shelley, to see if there's any way to apply real pressure.'

'On Mackenzie, you mean.'

'The man knows way more than he's letting on, don't you think?'

By chance, Thomas glimpsed the dome of the Capitol above the sliding streetscape. It seemed impossible that the soap opera on the nightly news was playing out right now,
there
, with real people who had hangnails and itchy asses just like everyone else.

Neil had said it himself: whether it was Washington,

Beijing, or the human brain, spies were drawn to the smell of decisions.

'Men like him always do,' Thomas said.

The drive back seemed far longer. They floated down the freeway, trading this cohort of vehicles for that. In the lulls between topics, Thomas found himself staring out the window, wondering whether he really had fumbled the ball with Mackenzie, and thinking about Nora… about the crash of anesthesia that had accompanied her confession, about the mechanical insincerity of his rage.

Revelations were strange things. They rewrote consequences, sure, but what really distinguished them from garden variety insights was the way they revised the past. True revelations never came all at once. No, they gnawed, and
gnawed
, working their way through the soft tissue of memory, redigesting everything relevant. Not an hour would pass, it seemed, without some memory of Nora returning, like some old piece of machinery requiring a retrofit in light of the latest technical information.

In the wake of Neil, everything about their relationship had been transformed. Nora had always been critical. After their divorce a number of his male and female friends had admitted thinking she was something of a bitch. But for whatever reason, he had never seemed particularly troubled by her complaints, perhaps because he had fooled himself into thinking he knew where they came from. There was nothing quite like 'understanding' when it came to plastering over character flaws for the sake of emotional convenience.

There had been no catastrophic turn in their relationship: it had seemed to shake itself apart rather than spiral down from the skies. But even before the divorce, in one of those rare, honest reveries that punctuate any marital breakdown, Thomas had put his finger on a crucial change in the character of her complaints. At some point, her criticisms had shifted from things he did to things he
was
. And now that Thomas knew she was using Neil as her measuring tape, the inventory of her accusations, which at the time had so bewildered him, became sinister with implication. Of course he couldn't 'make her feel desired'. Of course he was 'incapable of meeting her emotional needs'.

How could he be when she was bobbing for apples in his best friend's pants?

It was like Mackenzie said: everyone had a little rationalizer in their head, a gob of neural machinery devoted to getting them off the hook. Their very own blame-thrower. If Nora found herself attracted to Neil, well then, it simply had to mean something was wrong with their marriage: after-all,
happily
married women never strayed. And if their marriage wasn't happy, then it had to be Thomas's fault, because the Lord knows how hard
she
tried to make it work.

Another man's cock… Now that was a revelation.

'How are you doing, professor?' Sam asked once they made the Jersey Turnpike. 'You're awfully quiet over there.'

'Neil,' he said, knowing it would be enough.

It was strange the way names could become explanations.

Thomas reflected how odd it was, the way the hooks of sexual attraction had carried him so far only to drop him like a rock when she had made her lack of interest clear. Everything seemed fogged with irrelevance.

They drove in silence for quite some time. At first it was the kitchen-table quiet after a night of bad dreams—a kind of willful silence. Sam sorted through several satellite radio stations, but gave up after sampling a half-dozen different genres, everything from bluegrass to death metal. Nothing, it seemed, could trump the whisking roar of the highway. The sound of nature. It wasn't until the sun bellied in the west, drawing eighty-mile-an-hour shadows across the lanes, that the funk, or whatever it was Mackenzie had tainted them with, finally lifted.

Gazing forward, Sam slowly reached between their seats. 'Would you like some
Freeeeeeetos?'
she cooed, once again dangling the shiny little bag between them. She glanced at him, her eyes round with mock wonder.

Thomas sputtered with laughter. 'You're a nut-bar, you know that?'

'Is that your professional opinion?'

And just like that, everything was back to normal. They rehearsed the Argument a la Neil once more, trying to graph his possible motivations in the ether of conversation. But they only managed to paraphrase their conclusions from yesterday: Gyges had something to do with recognition, Powski had something to do with pleasure and/or desire, and Halasz had something to do with free will. Neil was stripping away the illusions, trying to reveal the meat puppet within.

'What about your book?' Sam eventually asked.

'My book?'

'Yeah, you know,
Through the Brain Darkly
.'

'You been researching me, agent?'

She cocked her head like a teenager. 'Uh, like, it's my job you know.'

Thomas smiled, looked out the passenger window. Night had fallen. An eighteen-wheeler towered over them, and he found himself peering past the running lights into its grime-greased recesses: the roaring wheels, as tall as his door; the black-iron linkages, clacking to the bounce and grind of impossible loads; the pavement, rushing like a crimson river beneath the tractor's taillights. He looked away, overcome by a peculiar sense of vulnerability, as though he had leaned too far over a balcony railing. All he needed to do was reach out his hand and he would be yanked from the world, stamped and spun into dripping oblivion.

'I don't know what to say,' he replied, scratching his eyebrow. 'I mean, the book got me tenure, but it was one of those things that only seem to impress the people who already know you. Hopes were high. The reviews were harsh. It went out of print.' Now it's little more than a joke passed down through generation after generation of graduate students.'

'Bible's Bible,' Sam said.

Thomas would have laughed, but there was a note of genuine pity in her otherwise rueful tone. 'What do you mean?'

'That's what they call it. The grad students at Columbia.'

'You've been
interviewing
people about me?'

Sam looked at him for what seemed a perilously long time, given her 80 mph cruising speed. A conspiracy of lights from the HUD and the dash made her seem almost supernaturally beautiful. Shining lips. Swales of blue and yellow along her cheek and neck. Suddenly the truck's headlights flashed through the rear window, bleaching all the inviting tenderness from her look. For an instant, she seemed more statue than human, with wet marbles for eyes.

'This is
for real
, professor. You do understand that?'

'It's starting to sink in,' Thomas replied.

Her gaze clicked back to the floating corridor of taillights before them. Several moments passed in encapsulated silence.

'So why the sudden interest in my book?' Thomas finally asked.

Sam shrugged. 'Because I find it curious.'

'Find what curious?'

'Well, the Argument is actually
yours
, not Neil's.'

Thomas snorted through his nose. 'Not anymore.'

'Why's that?'

Thomas frowned and smiled. 'Maybe someday you'll have kids.'

Sam laughed and shook her head.

'What's wrong with that?' he continued. 'A gun-packing momma. For a single-parent divorcee like me, it doesn't get much hotter than that.'

Sam beamed, but continued shaking her head. 'What did you make of Mackenzie's question?' she asked, obviously trying to change the subject.

Thomas studied her for a mischievous, tongue-against-the-teeth moment. 'Which one was that?'

'About the Argument. I mean, he
is
right, isn't he? Why would Neil bother making the Argument if there's no chance of convincing anybody?'

'Yeah…'

'You don't sound impressed.'

Thomas shrugged. 'It's a perfectly reasonable question.'

'And that's a problem?'

Thomas sighed, disappointed by this sudden return to seriousness. 'We're in way over our heads here, Sam. Who the fuck knows what Neil's up to? He was
NSA
, for Chrissakes, a neuroscientific spook, rewiring brains in the name of National Security. That's crazy enough…' They were sailing past another eighteen-wheeler, this one with lights proclaiming JESUS SAVES like a Christmas decoration. He resisted a strange compulsion to gaze into the roaring wheels once again. 'Now? He's off the map altogether, charting territory we probably can't even imagine.'

'Like an explorer,' Sam said, hitting the blinker.

They stopped at a Flying-J for fuel and dinner shortly afterward. 'My Dad was a trucker,' Sam explained as they pulled onto the exit ramp. 'Besides, I'm addicted to Krispy Kremes.' Once inside, Sam succumbed to the call of yet another donation box, this one for some obscure environmental coalition. Some celebrity whose name Thomas couldn't remember gazed up from the cardboard planes, the money-slot in the center of his forehead.

'I gotta ask…' he said as they trolled for a table. 'What's with all the impulse charity?'

She shrugged, seemed to make a point of avoiding his gaze. 'When you have a job like mine, mistakes have consequences.'

Something in her tone warned him not to pursue the matter.

They both spent thirty minutes or so on their palmtops, Thomas with Mia and the kids, who seemed to have fully recovered from the morning's mayhem, and Sam with Agent Atta, who seemed to be quite upset about Mackenzie turning into a dead end.

'I tried to blame you,' Sam said with an
okay-that-wasn't-so-good
grimace. 'But the boss isn't having any of it.'

His elbows on the lime-green tabletop, Thomas rubbed his temples. 'But it was my fault, wasn't it?'

Sam scowled. 'What do you mean?'

'I just, ah… assumed you thought it was my fault.'

'Mackenzie? Please. If the prick was stupid, I'd be inclined to assign blame—to
me
, not to you. But the fact is, he's smart, scary smart like you, and with people like that, it's either a total crapshoot or a foregone conclusion. Trust me.'

Thomas looked down to the tabletop, began counting crumbs. She was right. Mackenzie
had
been a foregone conclusion, almost as though the interview had been scripted. He was meeting his fears halfway, he realized, or 'negative scripting' as some therapists called it. He heard Sam sigh affectionately.

'Feeling down on ourselves, huh?'

Thomas smiled. 'No, thank you. I don't need any Fritos, Agent Logan.'

She regarded him with good-natured impatience. 'You're a good man, professor. A
good
man, and in a world that doesn't make any sense.'

His eyes actually burned. He blinked, made a point of not looking up.

'Call me Tom.'

'Okay,' she said, but reluctantly, as though the prospect frightened her.

Thomas dared glance at her eyes. The honesty of her smile embarrassed them both into silence.

Something changed after that. Sam did start calling him 'Tom,' though she slipped back into 'professor' now and again. But there was more—an air of familiarity, charged to be sure, but wonderfully relaxed all the same. Their dialogue took on an eager, exploratory air. At times it almost seemed a race to say, 'I know! Exactly!'

Sam, it turned out, not only had a past similar to his—he'd guessed and confirmed as much already—but also shared many of the same attitudes. She was skeptical by inclination, and sanguine by dint of work. She blamed herself more readily than others. She believed in hard work. She had never voted Republican, never would, but she couldn't stand the Democrats.