Brain Storm (30 page)

“The four-wheel drive needs service,” she said.

“Runs great,” said Watson. “Don’t service it.”

“The CD player skips on rough pavement. Sheila broke the cruise control. The memory settings for the custom seat position erase themselves
on start-up. We owe taxes and fees for the auto license renewal. Sheila can’t ride her bike in that driveway without falling over. Nobody else in the whole neighborhood has a gravel driveway.”

“We are bleeding money,” he said, showing her the fisted, bloody towel. “The car payments. The loan payments. The real estate taxes. I load my financial software, I get short of breath. We are headed for shock due to loss of blood volume. My bonus will be ten grand. That’ll get the driveway paved and keep us out of Chapter Seven until after Christmas.”

“If we need money, I could …”

“Aaagh!” Watson screamed. “Two more months. Two months! That’s all I ask. Then we’ll decide what to do.”

Hannibal bit Lilith. Lilith skirted Sheila in an evasive maneuver. She was between them.

“Sheila,” said Watson.

Hannibal barked and lunged. Lilith growled and snapped. Hannibal bit Sheila.

Watson took two bounds across the kitchen, where he kicked both dogs and sent them skidding across the floor on their scrabbling claws. Sheila’s face turned purple in a soundless, terrified windup to a scream. She held her hand out and watched the white dents in her skin turn blue, and then darken with blood.

He was suddenly calm, as if fuses or circuit breakers had melted somewhere in his overloaded nervous system. He saw himself, a stock character in a modern travesty. He carried his shrieking daughter to the sink and put her hand under running water. Sandra handed him disinfectant soap. He cleansed the wounds while she cooed soothingly into Sheila’s ear. He carried Sheila to the family room and put
The Lion King
on the VCR, something stately and patriarchal to calm her.

He ran upstairs to the little alcove off the bedroom that he used as a makeshift office at home. He switched on the subnotebook to print the Clarence Darrow quote before going into work. He watched the stylish operating system logo dancing with animated little Java applets come onto the screen. Very snazzola. He raised his coffee cup and sipped, put his fingers on the keypad, and looked back at the screen, expecting to see his carefully configured, colorful, efficient, tweaked-to-optimum-performance desktop, and instead saw a mask of death. A black screen with white letters:

On another day, he would have screamed an obscenity aloud. But this message was so grave and so ominous and had appeared at such a juncture of personal and professional upheavals that it filled him with dread and darkest foreboding, like those breaches of nature attending the death of kings in Shakespeare’s plays. He did not fear for his data or his desktop or his programs—he was Mr. Backup and made daily incrementals and weekly fulls. Instead he feared for his life, his mental health, his marriage, his children, his very being. Suddenly, all of nature, all of reality, seemed a seamless web of psychic and physical events.

His undergraduate flirtation with anthropology asserted itself again. He was swept up in the same fearful, troubling events—disorder, domestic discord—that have plagued men and women in all cultures for centuries. The houseplants were probably dying. Ball lightning and prodigies would appear in tonight’s firmament. All caused by adultery. But this was the modern world, wasn’t it? Adultery couldn’t corrupt his hard drive, could it? Disrupt the kernel of his operating system?

He’d once done a paper on various tribes in Borneo for his anthropology professor at Ignatius University. He reached up and pulled down his abridged version of Frazer’s
Golden Bough
from his bookshelf over the desk and went in search of some Borneo authority for the proposition that adultery was a modern, Western crime, a transgression added only recently in human evolutionary time, probably caused by overdeveloped property instincts and the sexual possessiveness of males in developed nations. Incest he knew was almost always taboo, but he could not remember how the tribes of Borneo had felt about simple adultery, for instance with a beautiful brain scientist.

The index led him to the Kayans, a tribe in the interior of Borneo, who seemed unwilling to support his theory. According to Frazer, the Kayans believe that adultery is punished by the spirits, who visit the whole tribe with failure of the crops and other misfortunes. He read
the passage, vividly imagining himself and Rachel Palmquist called to task for exposing their village to the wrath of nature gods:

S
aturday morning. Face time for Stern, Palers. Watson took a stroll and said hi to litigation partners. Then he printed his Darrow quote from a backup file and hung it on his bulletin board. He listened to his voice mail: routine discovery matters; firm luncheons; departmental meetings; then a woman’s voice, hoarse, slurring and drawling in an Ozark twang …

“Mr. Watson? If they give me the right Watson that is James Whitlow’s lawyer? If it’s against the law for me to call you, I guess I’ll get sued or arrested.” She was drunk, or medicated, and he thought he heard someone—a man? Two men?—talking in the background. “But anyways, this is Mary Whitlow, and I need for you to tell my husband, the murderer, that we are both going to be dead if he don’t give back what he took. They don’t believe the story that he’s got Buck spreadin’ around that I hid it somewheres. They know it’s him that took it. Des Peres County jail ain’t going to protect him. They got people in there who can kill him six ways to Sunday and not get caught. Don’t call me, Mr. Watson. I will call you from a pay phone. Tell fuckbrain that they know it’s him who took it, and they will kill him if he don’t give it back.”

Watson replayed the message. Time-stamped at 1:34
A
.
M
., with traffic noise in the background.
“I need for you to tell my husband, the murderer
,
that we are both going to be dead if he don’t give back what he took.… Des Peres County jail ain’t going to protect him. They got people in there who can kill him six ways to Sunday and not get caught.”

He wanted to start making the phone calls necessary to find his client in Minnesota, but Arthur would be coming around, his patience exhausted, looking for him and the rush project for Ben Verucca. So Watson hunkered down over his monitor and wrote and then proofread his memo on appearances of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a tight, well-crafted piece he hoped would palliate Arthur’s Whitlow-induced irritations. The memo included bulleted summaries of Fatima; Lourdes; Guadalupe; the tears of blood from the Little Madonna of Civitavecchia; weeping statues in County Wicklow, Ireland; a wooden Madonna at a convent in Akita, Japan. But the body of the memo dealt with an amped-up, gnarly rendition of the alleged appearance of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Medjugorje, Bosnia and Herzegovina, June 24, 1981, on Apparition Hill. Six local children reported that the Virgin had appeared and revealed images of Heaven and Hell, messages pertaining to world events, and instructions that pilgrims and believers should pray for peace.

In his memo, Watson suggested that if the Virgin were to make another spontaneous appearance in a Subliminal Solutions product, the multimedia presentation could include some 3-D graphics in 65,000 colors of infernal torments and carnal delights, followed by some carnal torments and infernal delights, perhaps dwelling somewhat on selected, worldly, dissolute, sensual enchantments, before portraying the wages of sin in the form of graphic, Inferno-type violence, followed by a proclamation that the civil war of the 1990s in Bosnia had occurred because the world had disregarded Mary’s messages. Could the Virgin be demanding and avenging? A goddess of love and war, like Ishtar? A shapely, sex-charged Valkyrie? A voluptuous houri with an hourglass figure? Maybe she could be a goddess for the new millennium—empowered, assertive, ready to break through celestial glass ceilings in Olympus, Heaven, Valhalla? Could her multimedia persona (if it appeared) achieve self-actualization, autonomy, and equality rights? Could she exercise power—compassionate, maternal, divine, omniscient—exceeding the cliché brutishness of the male gods? High concept publicity and marketing hook here. She could be the antidote to Barbie. Instead of starving themselves to perfection, women everywhere
could be bulking up to achieve the Virgin Mary’s new, heroic proportions, roaring with godlike self-esteem and liberated sexual appetites. A Venus of Willendorf after six months on StairMaster and NordicTrack. That’s it! A Norse goddess on NordicTrack 2000! All of which might fold into the industry push to establish a female niche in the largely male multimedia gaming market.

It was quick and slightly dirty, but that’s what the boss had ordered. Now, he thought to himself, after despoiling the religion of his youth, he could get back to work drafting a fusillade of motions to rain down on the head of Mr. Harper, his opponent in U.S. v. Whitlow.

“Courier envelope, sir,” said one of the messengers from Office Services. A sporty youth in a tie and white shirt handed Watson a bulky ripstop envelope from the mail delivery cart.

“Thanks,” said Watson, puzzled because the package felt lumpy—clearly not the usual documents.

No return address. He couldn’t tear it open, so he moved stacks of documents around until he excavated a long-lost pair of scissors from beneath hate crime research strata on his desktop. The first slice released a puff of air from inside the pouch. He smelled it before he saw it: Money. A stack of bills thicker than his fist, five bundles of twenties bound together in a bale with thick brown rubber bands.

He dropped it on his desk and saw someone walk by in the hallway. He dodged around the end of his computer table and soundlessly closed the door to his office, then ran back, planting a clenched fist on his sternum to suppress a string of breathless arrhythmias. He caught his wind and stared at a very fat stack of twenty-dollar bills, which was so far nicely complementing his haphazard office decor.

He shook the floppy envelope, and a note typed on plain white stationery fell out:

Tell our client?
Part of him resisted even touching the money. Can they dust money for fingerprints or do DNA tests? Another part felt the need to know the amount in question before he could adequately address the moral and legal questions chasing each other’s tails inside his skull. He fanned one of the bundles and started counting, entering a trance as he watched twenties swarming through his fingertips.

Buck’s lawyer was familiar with the IRS reporting requirements: 499 twenty-dollar bills, $9,980.00. Cash. Buck’s lawyer? Was he really a lawyer? Was Buck really a person? A former prisoner?

A soft tap on his door. “Joe?”

Arthur’s voice!

Watson rubber-banded unbundled stacks of newly counted cash and dropped them and the note in his satchel-type briefcase and toed it under his desk.

“Yeah?” said Joe. “Arthur? Good morning. Come on in. Sorry, I shut …”

Arthur opened the door wide enough to admit his head and smiled.

“I was hoping to transmit the Virgin Mary memo to Ben Verucca, and then come back for a … chat?” he said, a peculiar smile distending the corners of his mouth.

“Sure,” said Watson. “I’m just finishing it.”

Another tenuous smile made Watson tingle. Was Arthur behaving strangely? Or had cash-money paranoia infected his perceptions of others?

“Is it anywhere close?” he urged. “Handwritten edits are OK. I’ll just have Marcia put them in before she sends it. She comes in on Saturdays to help me out.”

Watson grabbed the Virgin Mary memo. “Just a few pencil edits,” he said.

“That’s fine,” said Arthur, stepping all the way into Watson’s office and taking the memo.

When the door swung open, Watson saw a small crowd standing behind Arthur—the head of information systems, Inspector Digit; Drath Bludsole, domestic relations specialist and junior partner in charge of associate evaluations; a security guard? Why were they here? The smile left Arthur’s face.

“What …?” began Watson, feeling blood throb in his head, synched to a sudden rhythmic squirming in his chest. Was the money traced?

“I wish I could be sorry, Joe,” said Arthur solemnly. “You know better.”

“Better?” said Watson, giving the briefcase another shoe shove. “I don’t …”

“Loading third-party software on the firm’s computer local-area networks is a terminating offense,” Arthur said gravely. “You know that. You know the dangers. The viruses, the firewall hazards, the threat to sensitive client information, and the compromised integrity of our systems and networks. It’s part of every associate’s orientation. It’s written bold in the personnel manuals.”