'I will.' Thomas swallowed at a pang in his throat. 'Remember, lie low for a day or so. Keep away from cameras—anything connected. Then turn yourself in.'
A pensive nod—reluctant even. 'Watch out for that bastard. Remember the Neil you knew is dead.'
Thomas gazed at the man, found himself, in spite of everything, begging with his eyes. 'Tell me this is going to work.'
Mia flinched. For a moment, he managed to smile in reassurance, but his expression faltered, became slack with admission. He looked like someone turned inside out for giving.
'What the fuck do I know, Tommy.'
A numb and breathless nod.
Mia pulled his arms from the door, backed away. 'This is crazy,' he said, his eyes brimming with tears. He pulled a hand through his hair. Though he stood straight and motionless, he looked as though he might be falling. 'Crazy-crazy.'
Thomas clicked the window, watched the tinted glass swallow his Number One Neighbor. He dropped the shift into drive, began pulling away. He didn't notice that Frankie's eyes had popped open.
Not until he began screaming.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
August 31st, 8.26 a.m.
All that separated luck from grace, Thomas's grandmother had told him once, was the sincerity of the prayer beforehand.
Car after car slipped past the shining black BMW, weaving between the elephantine eighteen-wheelers. Beautiful coeds, yakking and laughing on their palmtops. Resentful punks with buttoned lips, staring and scoffing at the German engineered lines. Old women, eyes fixed religiously forward, their hands 10 and 2 on the steering wheel. Sleek mothers. Wizened golfers. Cockpit businessmen. All of them propelled by soundless engines, skating the lines of utterly disconnected lives.
All of them oblivious to the leather-padded sarcophagus that whistled in their midst, sucking up scream after scream.
The road was little more than a whisper, the countryside a wobble, the world a brief windshield glare. Thomas Bible reached back to soothe his only son. Little-boy limbs cringed from his adult hand.
'You are mine, you know.'
Screaming, his mouth pulled into a chimpanzee grimace.
'They used me as bait to find Uncle Cass. Do you remember Sam, honey? Daddy's friend?'
Coughing, convulsing.
'Sam was going to sacrifice me.' He swallowed hard. 'When it seemed I might die on the altar, she sacrificed you as well.'
Small, warding hands scraping the leather-backed seats.
'You are mine, you know. No matter what Uncle Cass might say.'
Eyes rolling in bovine horror. Screaming.
'Sacrifice,' Thomas wept. 'Sacrifice makes fathers.'
He called Neil when he was supposed to. He always did what he was supposed to. According to Nora, it was one of the reasons she had left him. He was too much a part of the machinery—the fucking machinery.
With the road an abstraction in his periphery, he scrawled down the directions to the new location on a Taco Bell napkin—some place in Connecticut. 'How can I trust you?' he asked the distorted voice.
'It all comes down to guesses, Goodbook,' Neil said. 'The trick is deciding which ones are worth dying for.'
Thomas hung up, glanced at his shrieking son. He looked back to the summer-shining road, stared at the passing promised land, the parallax of asphalt and brick. As always, the horizon held the distances motionless while what was near whipped into the funnel behind him.
Control was long gone. All he had was a weeping litany: 'Frankie-shh-shh-please-Frankie-shh-shh-please.'
Empty words. Pathetic words. Words that could only wheeze and grovel before his son's terrible scream, before the most ancient prayer of all. The first great transmission.
Everything. Everything was stuck on absolute transmit. The mountains. The oceans. Even the stars. Nothing listened. Nothing. The skulls of a million lambs cracked in the jaws of a million lions. A billion human screams, and each one unheard. Nothing more than a flicker in the abyss. Even less…
No consequences outside the inevitable. No point to yank short the knife's never-ending edge.
Only children died—Thomas understood that now. Small. Helpless. Uncomprehending.
Everyone was an infant in the end.
It seemed almost normal. An old, upstate friend, waving from the porch. A summer wind whisking through the trees. A child who had to be lifted from the back seat.
Whatever voice Frankie possessed, he had screamed away a long time ago. Now he simply rasped and twitched the way a dying addict might. Only rolling eyes and an old-man grimace spoke of the horror that cycled through his soul.
This could not be his son.
This could not be.
Thomas climbed the cement steps, looked up across the white, colonial facade, squinted at the sparking sun. He blinked at Neil, his thoughts beyond hope or hate.
Buff smile. Pained eyes.
Neil pressed open the door so that he could carry Frankie into the polished gloom. Thomas felt a reassuring hand fall on his shoulder as he passed. There was a faint prick against the nape of his neck. Thomas turned, too exhausted to be alarmed, let alone startled. He simply looked at the monster who was his best friend. His knees cracked like wax. Frankie slid from his arms. Everything swayed, dust bunnies dancing about a vast existential broom.
'Ah, Goodbook,' the shadow said. 'You should know by now. No matter what the rule…'
The world collapsed into milk and watercolor.
'I go sideways.'
'The central nervous system of homo sapiens,' Neil was saying (though just when he had started saying this Thomas couldn't recall), 'isn't like the heart or the stomach. It isn't a distinct organ with discrete functions. So much of our brains' structure is determined by other brains. In a certain sense, there's only one brain, Goodbook, sprawled across the face of the planet, busily rewiring itself into a key that will unlock the universe. One central nervous system with eight billion synapses.'
Thomas was bolted to some kind of apparatus, almost upright. Something held his head immobile—profoundly immobile. There was no play of skin or hair against restraints. It was as though his skull had been screwed or welded into a building's architecture. Looking up, he could see some kind of metallic rim beyond his brow, but nothing more. The room before him was spare and spacious: cinder-block walls painted white, an unfinished ceiling above glaring fluorescent lights. From the surrounding angles he could tell he occupied the center of the room, but he could see nothing behind him. Cases had been stacked in a corner to his right, next to a fat-wheeled dolly. Two tables filled the space immediately before him, crowded with flat-screens, keyboards, and several devices he could not recognize. Wearing sandals and shorts, Neil had turned to hunch over an open case. Tubes glinted from dark foam slots.
Neil walked up to him, holding a syringe upright in a latex-sheathed hand. 'And right now, my friend, you and I are the only synapse that matters.' He leaned forward and Thomas felt a brittle prick in his jugular. Neil rubbed the spot with a cottonball. He winked. 'A little something to quicken your recovery from the anesthetic.'
'Frankie…' Thomas croaked. It seemed the only language he knew.
The handsome face darkened. 'There's been a small change in plan, Goodbook.'
'Frankie!' Thomas screamed. He began spitting and straining against the vice that held him.
Neil's look silenced him. It was something without limbs or prehensile appendages, something belonging to a snake soul, as unreachable as a grinning Nazi commandant or a glaring Hutu machete-man.
'There's no need to worry.'
'Wuh-worry?' Thomas cried, tears spilling from his eyes. 'What-the-fuck-do—'
Neil turned to a keyboard on the nearby table, began tapping keys. Thomas heard the hum of something overhead, like a printer standing by.
'You son of a bitch!' Thomas raved. 'You fucking cunt! I'll kill you! Kill yo—!'
But he paused, first in confusion, then in dawning realization. Neil was right
. There was no need to worry. He breathed deeply and smiled. How could he be such an ass?
'Better?' Neil asked.
'Yes,' Thomas said, grinning. 'Much better. What did you do?'
'Not much. So you're not worried about Frankie?'
'Fuck him. He'll be fine.'
Neil shook his head. 'No, Goodbook, I'm afraid he won't.'
'No?'
'No. Actually he's dead.'
Thomas laughed. 'No kidding?'
'No kidding. There's only one procedure that can undo an affect feedback loop—at least the devilish way Mackenzie does it.'
'What's that?'
'A bullet to the head.'
Thomas snorted with genuine laughter. Intellectually, he knew it shouldn't be funny, but it was… And it seemed the most natural thing in the world that it should be. 'You always were crazy.'
Frankie. Poor little kid. He was going to miss the little bugger…
'So all this,' Neil asked curiously, 'seems normal to you?'
Thomas tried to shrug. 'Well, I suppose to an outsider it would seem strange, but it really is quite normal when you think about it.'
'How so?'
Thomas flashed him a bright Are-you-stupid? smile. 'We're longtime friends. We always play gags on each other. Though I suppose we're getting a little too old for this.'
Neil scratched behind his ear with a pen. 'But at some level you know what's happening, don't you? You know that I'm stimulating the neural circuits responsible for your feeling of normalcy and ambient wellbeing.'
Thomas frowned, happy and perplexed. 'What can I say? You always were elaborate.'
Neil shook his head the bemused way he always did whenever his cynicism was confirmed. 'This,' he said, wagging an I-told-you-so finger. 'This is the part that sold me, that made me realize'
'You've lost me, Neil.'
'The confabulations. I mean, think about it, Goodbook, I just shot your son in the head, and you genuinely believe everything is right as rai—'
'C'mon,' Thomas interrupted, trying to shake his head. 'You're over-analyzing again. I-know-I-know, listen to the neurotic psychologist talking about over-analysis, but sometimes it really is just that simple. Sometimes you just gotta—'
'It was the same with the first terrorists I tweaked in this way,' Neil continued. 'You know I actually spent two days arguing with one, trying to get him to see how dire his situation was? Two fucking days! It was like the guy only had two buttons, shuffle and repeat. Did you know the brain has an entire module dedicated to the production of verbal rationalizations?'
'Yeah-yeah,' Thomas said, realizing how much he missed shooting the cerebral breeze with Neil. 'Yeah, Mackenzie babbled about that for a bit.'
An appraising look. 'Well, trust me, if you want to get a sense of just how much consciousness—life—is simply a mechanistic output, try going toe-to-toe with a rationalization module. I could literally spend the rest of my life arguing with you, and you would just come up with reason after reason why me shooting Frankie in the head is the most normal, sensible thing in the world.'
What was he talking about? Life was filled with contingencies—demands—that no one had any control over. Even the craziest shit in the world could be reasonable, given the right circumstances. 'Look,' Thomas said, 'I understand how it looks. But Neil, you of all people know that there's always more than what meets the eye.' Even as he said this, Thomas realized it was for naught. Neil was watching him with inward eyes, the look he always had when he was busy thinking about what to say next rather than listening. 'There's always more! Neil. Neil! That's all I'm saying. Look deeper.'
Neil waited with mock politeness, as though wanting to make sure it was safe to continue. 'Would you believe it was dinner at my parents' that finally let me put it all together?' he said. 'You know my Pop, always railing on about this and that, never letting you get a word in edgewise, and never, never acknowledging that he could be wrong. I was just sitting there—Mom had cooked a turkey—and I suddenly realized that his rationalization module was on overdrive, that the only real difference between him and my subjects was that he'd been accidentally-wired. I realized he was just another machine. And Mom too, clucking about how she didn't baste the bird enough. I sat there watching them cycle through their behavioral routines. Can you imagine, seeing your mom as a machine?'
Thomas cackled. 'C'mon, Neil. Listen to yourself! Your mom is not a machine. She's too fucking nutty!'
But Neil wasn't listening. 'I'd reached some kind of threshold, I think, working for the NSA. It had been happening for a while: I would just notice certain behaviors, and think to myself, their caudate nucleus is lighting up, feeding information forward to the prefrontal cortex, yadda-yadda. But after that turkey dinner, I began understanding everything others did in those terms…'
His look drifted inward.
'That was when I reread your book.'
Thomas snorted, though the absence of the accompanying head and hand movement made it sound odd. 'Now you're really scraping the bottom, don't you think?'
Neil's smile was at once skeptical and genuine. He turned back to the nearest table, lifted a beaten hardcover from a sheaf of papers. Thomas glimpsed Through the Brain Darkly embossed in gold across its black fabric spine. Neil opened it to one of several orange sticky notes that drooped like tongues from the closed pages. Holding it out and up like a preacher, he read, '"If we know anything, we know this: the regions of the brain implicated in consciousness can only access a minute fraction of the information processed by the brain as a whole. Conscious experience is not simply the product of the brain, it is the product of a brain that can only see the merest sliver of itself."' He looked up, eyebrows raised. 'So you no longer agree with that?'
Another unsuccessful attempt at a shrug. 'Facts are facts. Look, Neil—'
But he had continued reading.
'"The magician's magic depends on the audience remaining oblivious to her manipulations. As soon as we look over her shoulder, the magic vanishes. Consciousness is no different. Oblivious to the manipulations that make it possible, experience makes do with what can only be called illusions. Consciousness is always 'now' because the neural correlates of consciousness, though quite adept at processing time, cannot process the time of this processing. Consciousness is always unitary because the neural correlates of consciousness, though quite adept at differentiating environmental features, cannot differentiate their own processes. Again and again, the fundamental features of experience only make sense when we construe them as the result of various incapacities…"'
Neil closed the book, recited the rest from memory. '"And this is why consciousness disappears whenever we dare look over the brain's shoulder. We are little more than walking, talking coin tricks."'
A silent moment passed between them, filled only by the drone of some fan buried in the machinery above Thomas's head. The smell of ozone and cooking rubber soaked the air.
'Um,' Thomas eventually said, 'is there any way I could get a beer?' Games were games, sure, but he was getting fucking thirsty.
'That,' Neil said, obviously referring to the passage, 'was the kicker. It was easy enough to see other people for what they were—even Mom and Pop. But how could I do the same with myself? I mean, look at you, trying to cajole the man who murdered your son into having a beer—and thinking it as natural as natural can be! Ultimately, I'm no different. I'm just as much a mechanism as you, just as much the output of processes over which I have no control. And back then I was just as apt to be deluded, to be certain that I knew otherwise, that if I were plugged in the way you were, things would somehow be different, that some spark or some residue of spirit would light up and allow me to transcend my neurology…'
Neil raised the book, shook it so that it wobbled in his hand. 'It just couldn't be. And yet, there it was…'
Thomas stared at him skeptically, even as he marveled at how good it felt to be hanging out and debating again. 'Am I actually allowed to talk now?' he said
smiling. 'Are you ready to yield the podium?'
Neil shot him one of his famous squinting scowls. 'By all means.'
A sudden itch afflicted Thomas's nose, reminding him of the restraints. But he knew the routine with Neil and his gags: so long as you ignored whatever it was, Neil would eventually relent out of boredom. That was why asking for a beer had been a mistake. 'So you're saying,' he began slowly, 'that all this craziness, the abductions and the mutilations and the recordings, is about my book,'
'The Argument is yours, Goodbook. You always were better at the theory.'
'And you're just a practical man, right?'
Neil shrugged. 'I prefer working with my hands.'
Thomas laughed, though the shaking jarred his skull. 'So riddle me this: how could you be interested in my argument, any argument, if you think reasons are illusory?'
Neil grinned and shook his head. 'You can do better than that. Reasons may be deceptions, the result of a brain stuck at the tail end of its own problem-solving, but they're still functional— as you might expect, given that they're a product of the real deal. While you and I argue, experience the world of meaning and justification, our brains are simply producing and responding to various auditory inputs and outputs, literally rewiring themselves in response to each other and their environments. That's where the real action is. The projector, as opposed to the screen. That's why we stare at an interpretative abyss whenever we try to use reasons to get behind reasons, while we find it quite simple to dismantle the machinery that makes it possible. That's why philosophy is bullshit, while science has transformed the world.'
Thomas chuckled. Were it not for the restraints, he would have held his hands out in surrender; instead he simply said, 'Ouch.' Neil had simply paraphrased his own response in Through the Brain Darkly. 'What page is that from again?'
'Three eighty-two, actually.'
'You memorized the fucking thing?'
Inexplicably, Neil frowned and reached into his pocket, withdrew a small black remote. Click.