Neuropath (24 page)

To see people in dead things.

Please… Give me back my boy.

Give.

Him.

Back.

He lay thoughtless for a time, drawing in oxygen, metabolizing. He stirred when images of Cynthia Powski began crowding his thoughts. Pouting pleasure, nipples pressed hard against sail-tight linen…

Somehow he found himself on the living room couch, watching news. There was nothing so desolate, it seemed, as watching the tube out of a sense of futility. The drying pupils, the nervous limbs. The stationary dementia, the world flickering so bright and so fast in rooms of silence and gloom. And the
screen
, as supple and as insidious as language, but without any truth-preserving rules, stacking image after image, wiring and rewiring a billion visual cortices.

His own included.

Once again, the Chiropractor dominated the leads, even though events elsewhere were murdering thousands. Apparently several blood-caked vertebrae had been found in a subway car. On the obligatory news conference clip, a task force official described the find as a 'major break'. They were compiling the biometric data even as she spoke, she said, and everyone who rode the car in question would be interviewed within a matter of days.

Thomas felt like spitting.

A quick search found him a forty-five-second piece on Peter Halasz. They were now treating the case as a homicide, a federal agent said. They now believed the 'telegenic congressman' had been the victim of a 'random act of violence'. Clever, as far as bullshit went. Few things had as little meaning as random acts of violence anymore. Thomas wondered if anyone in the Bureau appreciated the irony.

After bouncing around a bit, he stopped on CNN, arrested by some eerie post-apocalyptic footage of southern Moscow. The story covered the furor caused by a company called EA Games that was 'typing' the images for use in its latest 'real-time-topical' first-person shooter game. Soon, for $74.95 you could hunt Dagestanis (or Russians, depending on your sympathies) in the rubble before radiation sickness claimed the last real-world victims. He wondered what the earthly difference could be between that and the newscast itself, with its smoldering blue Volkswagen banner.

The following story chronicled the latest twist in the intellectual property dispute over
Lucille's Balls
, the wildly successful porno that used CGI versions of Lucy and Ricky to explore the mysteries of female ejaculation. Since the makers of the film couldn't be found, the plaintiffs were seeking damages from the sex-toy manufacturers who had paid, via blind offshore accounts, for product placements.

Something about that made him laugh.

He paused to watch Peter Farmer, MSNBC's notorious all-CGI anchor, interview some senator about the recent passage of the Biometrics Integration Act, which would link all public surveillance cameras to real-time online feeds. Certainly the recent Moscow disaster, the senator argued, underscored the need for even greater vigilance. 'Imagine,' he said, 'them making video-games of New York or Washington.'

Thomas lay breathless, pinned by the interplay of furious images and light banter, trying to summon the will to go collect Ripley. Marines with their SMAWS swinging heavy from their shoulders. Formations of drone helicopters sweeping across Iranian hillsides. Bottles of Coke morphing into extreme athletes. He did a search for something on Jackie Forrest and found a piece from a local Nashville station. Sure enough, a spokeswoman for the Nashville police insisted they were treating his case as a homicide. They feared the 'popular evangelical preacher' had fallen victim to a 'random act of violence'.

Thomas almost laughed. Why make the effort to be creative or ingenious, he realized, when you didn't have to?

When he was thirteen his mother had dragged him to church on several occasions, apparently overcome by the need to tame her precocious son. It seemed he could still smell the people and the pews. She forced him, as shy as he was, to sing the hymns with the others. The trick, Thomas had learned, was to pitch your voice low into the background drone—like humming with the tires of a car. That way no one could hear you.

Especially God.

Dreams of backbones and scalpels. He awoke disoriented, frightened.

Frankie?

'Shhh,' a warm voice said. 'It's just me. Everything's okay.'

Sam was kneeling beside the couch, stroking his hair, looking down into him as though he were a pool. She smiled sadly.

'Wha—' He cleared his throat. 'What time is it?'

'Five thirty or so,' Sam replied. 'What time did you fall asleep?'

'Dunno,' Thomas croaked, rubbing his face. He rolled onto his back. 'Oh-oh,' he said sheepishly. 'Everything's fucked up. Truly fucked up.'

'How so?'

'Piss hard-on first thing in the evening… See?'

She laughed and reached down, grabbed him through his Dockers.

'This is all wrong,' she said.

'Well, you're the FBI agent.'

'So?'

'So that's your job isn't it? Righting wrongs…'

They undressed, and she straddled him. Their love-making was tender in the way of weary people, excitement mellowed by familiarity, each movement for its own sake, each touch void of self-consciousness, the way bone-tired museum goers might trail their hands across ivory or diorite—not to get closer, not even to feel, but simply to confirm.

Then she began murmuring, 'That's it,' over and over, 'That's it, mmm,' as though he were a son uncertain of a long and frightening task. For some reason, this both angered and impassioned him. He began lunging harder, faster, until she gasped, 'Ugh… Not so deep, please Tom…'

He clutched her about the waist and sitting up, leaned and swept everything from the coffee table. He hoisted her from the couch and slammed her across it.

'
Tom
?' she cried.

But he was
fucking
her now, making her whimper and writhe around pounding iron. When she started crying out he clamped a hand across her mouth, rammed into her again and again.

Then she was slapping and clawing. He withdrew. He gripped the coffee table and dumped it. She flopped scrambling onto the floor.

'
Why aren't you wearing your underwear
?' Frankie asked.

'NEIL!' Thomas shrieked. '
NEIL
!'

Then he fell to his hands and knees, crumpled into the carpet, sobbing.

'
I was always just a project for Tommy, I think
…'

Sam curled on the recliner, wearing her blouse and panties. With swollen eyes, she studied the Scotch Thomas had given her. She wiped her tears away with her thumb.

'I've been hate-fucked before,' she said, 'but that was just too creepy.'

Thomas sat naked at the edge of the couch, elbows on knees, head hanging.

She looked at him, at once angry and indecisive. 'Just what are you doing, Tom?'

'I don't know,' he whispered.

'Don't know?' Sam exclaimed.'
You
don't know?'

'That's what I said.'

'But you're the fucking psychology professor, aren't you?'

He looked at her angrily. 'Heal thyself? Is that it?' He huddled against another shiver.

'Tom…'

'I'm losing my mind here, Sam.' He wiped his eyes on the back of his wrist. 'I'm losing my fucking mind.'

Sam set her drink down, clasped Thomas's hands. 'Look, Tom. You gotta get a handle on this. You gotta take a step back. You gotta look at yourself as a textbook anecdote, a case study or something.'

'I gotta get a handle on this?' he replied, rubbing the back of his neck. 'That's a fucking joke.'

'What do you mean?'

Thomas glared at her. 'You know
exactly
what I mean. The way for me to get a handle on this is for you, Atta, and that clown Gerard to catch Neil.'

'That's not fair, professor. You know it.'

'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.'