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.
Suddenly all was misery and agony, as if each of Thomas's innumerable pores gave birth to white-hot pins. Something mewled and screamed, bucked against iron restraints. Somewhere, something defecated.
Click. Then he was happy again.
Neil smiled. 'Try to avoid changing the topic,' he said.
Through a fog of good humor, Thomas could feel his body shivering, as though he had frozen bones. 'Sure thing… Where were we?'
'I was explaining how the brain simply isn't equipped to keep track of itself, how it lacks the processing power, the evolutionary pedigree, so that even though it's remarkably proficient at modeling its external environments, the best it can do is scribble cartoons of itself.'
'Ah yes,' Thomas said. 'You mean the mind.'
'Exactly. The cartoon extraordinaire.'
'But it doesn't seem that way.'
'Of course not. It
has
to seem as deep as deep, as wide as wide, as sharp as sharp, simply because "deep", "wide",' and "sharp" are part of the cartoon. We can't step out of our minds and take a walk around them, like we can the brain.'
'Which is
why
,' Thomas cried with what he could only describe as drunken good humor, 'you'll never convince anyone that you're anything but crazy!'
'Who said anything about convincing anybody?'
'But then why do any of this?'
'Why?' Neil repeated. Once again, he began thumbing through Thomas's book. '"Our brains,"' he read aloud, '"are able to track their own prospective behavioral outputs, but are entirely blind to the deep processing that drives them. Rather than doing things because of this or that feed forward mechanism, we do them 'for reasons', which is to say, for desired outcomes. Causality is turned on its head for consciousness. Results and consequences—goals—become the engine of our actions because the neural correlates of consciousness have no access to the real neurophysiological movers and shakers down below."'
He popped the pages shut as though snapping at a fly. Thomas flinched. 'Purpose?' Neil said. 'Point? These things are ghosts, Goodbook, hard-wired hallucinations. They only seem real because we're riding the neural horse backward.'
Thomas snorted, equally amused and unimpressed. 'So then what's your
illusory
point? What does the cartoon called Neil think it's doing?'
These words seemed to catch Neil by surprise. For a heartbeat, he stared at Thomas with almost lunatic intensity, 'Neil,' he repeated, as though his name were some absurd Chinese expression. 'That cartoon no longer exists.'
Thomas would have shaken his head if he could. 'Then what does exist?'
'I've disconnected certain performance-inhibiting circuits,' Neil said with what seemed to be reluctance. 'What you folk-psychologists call anxiety, fear; all that bullshit. They're little more than memories to me now. But I've also shut down some of the more deceptive circuits as well. I now know, for instance, that I
will
utterly nothing. I'm no longer fooled into thinking that "I" do anything at all'
Thomas could only stare at his friend in wonder. Where did he find the
balls
to do the things he did?
'And I've gone deeper,' Neil continued. 'So much deeper.'
Pause.
'You see through the cartoon,' Thomas said. The words tingled on his tongue.
Neil nodded, as though at some inevitability only he could fathom. 'Only partially. I still experience things, after all. It's just a radically different experience, one far more sensitive to the fragmentary truth of our souls. One without volition, purpose, selfhood, right or wrong.'
Thomas frowned and whistled. Part of him understood the monstrous implications of what Neil was saying, but it seemed little more than an amusing abstraction, like boys with sticks playing guns. The greater part of him wondered, even
revered
. What would it be like to walk without self or conscience, with plans indistinguishable from compulsions, one more accident in the mindless wreck that was the world? What would it be like to act, not as something as puny or wretched as a person, but as a selfless vehicle, a conduit for everything that came before?
'Fucking wild, Neil. Too fucking wild.'
Neil's grin was genuine and contagious—one brain communing with another through the ancient choreography of facial cues. Looking at him, Thomas thought of the intervening years, the fine chiseling about his eyes and dimples, the painstaking brushwork of his salting hair. And it seemed to Thomas that he always knew this moment would come, from their first meeting in their dorm room. From Neil's first sly and appraising smile.
It was so good to see him!
'I'm the world's first neuronaut, Goodbook. And you're about to join me.'
Neil bent over the keyboard, peered into a computer screen. 'As much as I'd like to keep you in a happy place,' he was saying, 'some things have to be done the old-fashioned way.' An affable glance. 'Especially if you want them to
stick
.'
Clickety-click-click-tap-tap…
Thomas's ebullient mood slowly faded away. Then the dread came, slowly, oddly, as though some inner, oxygen-starved limb were prickling back to life. What was happening? What was going on? The memories of moments ago suddenly seemed impossible, like a graft from some more innocent chapter of his life. But they were real: the thoughts, the feelings, all of them as real as real could be. The words…
Frankie! Frankie? No-no-please-dear
—
'Neil!' he cried.
'Shhhh,' his old roommate said. 'It's totally natural that your brain's in high alert. All it has are its evolutionary defaults, and lord knows the environmental stressors have been piled high—'
'You didn't!' Thomas cried.
'Right now it's cycling through million-year-old circuits, producing various failsafe behavioral outputs. Grief. Panic. Christ, it wasn't designed to recognize itself for what it is, so how could it possibly recognize its own potential? As far as it's concerned, this is nothing but a stone-age confrontation.'
'Tell me you didn't
kill my boy
,'
Neil pinched his brows in a friendly frown. 'There you go. A perfect example of those defaults in action. The brain generates bonding outputs, or "parental concern", because those outputs once assured the replication of its genetic material. We're just stinky Xerox machines in the end, Goodbook. Only we use spunk and love instead of ink and paper.'
'Where is he? Tell me where he is! Neil!
Neil
!'
Shrug, followed by a drowsy smile. 'These are just facts, Goodbook. If you want to embarrass yourself arguing against them, be my guest.'
Though Neil had him clamped face-forward, though he could see nothing beyond the oblivion of his periphery, in his mind's eye he could see Frankie splayed across the basement floor, his eyes dark, his tongue dry, his face grey against the crimson pool. Like Gerard. Like Sam.
'Jesus, Neil! Oh my God!
What have you done
,'
Neil glanced back at his flat-screen. 'Your brain's fight or flight systems are in full arousal. It's testing the restraints now, realizing the futility of physical behavioral outputs. Now the frontal cortex is processing hypothetical alternatives, doing its best to inhibit and cope with signals it's receiving from its more primitive limbic cousins below. Now it's starting to realize that linguistic behavioral outputs are its—'
Thomas gagged in panic. He needed to think—think! There had to be some way—some way to reach him!
'Neil,' Thomas said, trying to squeeze the terror from his voice. 'Just take a step back, buddy. Just ask yourself
what you're doing
.'
'But I already told you, Goodbook. I'm just along for the ride, same as you. The only difference is that I know which way the horse is pointed.'
'Neil! This is my
family!
My family! This is Frankie we're talking about!'
But the madman had turned back to the bright, computer-screen schematic. 'Now if I dampen the linguistic circuits, your brain should return to its most basic failsafe output…'
Tap-click-click…
Suddenly talking didn't matter. Crying out, Thomas threw himself at the restraints again and again. He wheezed, blew spittle through clenched teeth.
'Physical struggle,' Neil said.
It was like trying to lift the floor. It was like warring against his own bones. The grip was seamless, as though he had been fused to the world's implacable frame, as though the meat of him had been wrapped around mountains.
Neil drawled on. 'Now it's registering the futility of its efforts, beginning to form what you psychologists call negative generalizations.'
An inarticulate roar. He was trapped—trapped! It was hopeless. Frankie! Frankie! Dear sweet Jesus, what was he going to do?
Desolation yawned, swallowed him whole. He let go. He simply hung, like clothing stapled to the wall, sobbing.
Frankie's dead.
His boy, smiling, clean, and safe. The horrible Scottish accent. The obsession with everything 'sooper'. The dog hair on tiny T-shirts. The band-aids pressed across the carpet in front of the TV. The wide-wondering eyes. The farts on Ripley's pillow. The words,
I love you, Daddy
, pinned to a million different expressions, a thousand different events.
I love you, Daddy
, scribbled in clumsy crayon, declared through a hundred skinned-knee sobs. The one sure thing…
Gone.
'And there we have it,' Neil said, his face graphed by the cross-sectioned brain on the screen before him. 'The neural fingerprint of learned helplessness.'
Through the roaring, watery blur, Thomas saw the monster turn and smile.
'Beautiful,' it said with his best friend's voice. 'Textbook.'
My little boy.
For a time Thomas simply breathed, leaned against his absolute immobility. Everything seemed distorted, as though viewed through a fisheye lens. Neil flicking through handwritten notes, scratching the corner of his eye with the butt of his pen. The luminous brain on the computer screens, slowly revolving beneath windows of text. The overhead fluorescent lights, casting haloes over the dark slots between ceiling joists.
A kind of claustrophobia gradually overcame him. It was more than the simple fact of his paralysis, more than the suffocation of hope or movement. Neil had nailed him to a single, myopic perspective, and for some reason, it rendered the ring of nothingness that encircled his visual field
palpable
. Ordinarily he need only twitch his head and it would be shattered—what was peripheral would become focal, and the world would be better known. But now it seemed as though he carried the void itself on his shoulders, that a great disc of blackness leaned against him like a slaver's yoke, choking him with insinuation and implication.