Why lie?
To protect Neil?
But why? Not only had the guy flipped his lid, he'd been screwing Nora. Screwing
him
. Why protect Neil now?
Back in Princeton, he and Neil had once rented
The Exorcist
as a lark, expecting to be more amused than anything else. The movie had scared them shitless, even though neither believed in God, demons—or even priests for that matter. After smoking several bowls contemplating the contradiction, they came up with what they called the 'Exorcist Effect', the disconnect between knowing and conditioning. They knew demonic possession was bullshit, but they had been conditioned to be terrified—habitualized.
So much of therapeutic psychology, Thomas would later discover, involved resisting the Exorcist Effect.
So much of what it meant to be human.
My closest friend
…
He protected Neil out of habit. Goddamn habit.
And yet, even after he realized this, he continued listening to Sam rattle off fact after fact. Amiable. Attentive. Once, when a pinch in traffic forced her to fall silent, he fairly screamed at himself to come clean.
Just tell her
! he inwardly cried.
Just say, 'Samantha, I lied… Your SUB just happened to pop by last night'
Instead he said, 'Traffic's a bitch.'
Somehow they had found their way to the West Side Highway. As they paced the Hudson River, Thomas stared at the far shore, watched Jersey sulk beneath a senescent sun. It seemed impossible that mere centuries ago that shore marked the limit of literate civilization. The limit of
knowledge
. He could see them, the Dutch and then the English, wandering into the emerald deeps, between trees like temple pillars, across a continental Karnak.
How many had gone mad? How many, like Neil, had repudiated everything they had known, had adopted first the ways and then the horrors of what lay beyond knowledge?
Neil as Kurtz
, he thought wryly.
Me as Marlowe
…
How flattering was that?
Not very, he realized a moment later. Not at all.
'You were only able to identify Neil,' Thomas found himself saying, 'because he wanted you to.'
'What do you mean?' Sam asked.
'What you said before, about Gyges's brain remembering Neil, even though Gyges didn't. I'm no neurosurgeon, but my guess is that it's far easier to wipe out face recognition altogether rather than selectively.'
'So what are you saying?'
'That Gyges is part of Neil's argument. He's saying something.'
'Saying something. Saying what?'
'You've read Gyges's statement, I take it.'
'Only about fifty fucking times.'
For some reason it thrilled him every time she swore. Probably because he'd spent his entire adolescence chasing chicks who swore. Or trying to, anyway.
As bad as people were at unconscious first impressions, studies showed they were astonishingly accurate when they paused to actually think about the stranger before them. Special Agent Logan, Thomas knew, had been raised in a working-class household. Non-religious. Stable. She had become conscious of her sexuality at a young age—had probably lost her cherry to a neighbor kid in her early teens. Like him, she was part of the so-called 'Webporn' generation, that crop of sex-desensitized kids who found wanton intercourse an irresistible short-cut to status and adulthood—giving rise to the recreational promiscuity that Thomas's Gen-X father had openly envied, and destroying what used to be sound psychological generalizations regarding teen sexual activity.
She was a post-party-girl woman, Thomas decided, goal-oriented and rule-averse, cynical and hang-up-free, who would use the tools God gave her, tradition-be-damned. That was the role that she had chosen from the rack of identities modern society offered. Even so, there was a reserve to her manner, an earnest anxiousness that belied her brassy talk. A whiff of naive idealism. For whatever reason, being cool and conscientious never seemed a comfortable fit.
'Does Gyges recall any mention of the Argument?' Thomas asked.
'No. But then we never asked.'
'So there's a chance…'
Her eyes probed her mirrors, and she tapped her blinker. 'There's one way to find out,' she said.
Gyges, it turned out, lived in The Beresford, on the Upper West Side overlooking Central Park. Thomas found himself craning his neck like a yokel as they walked to the entrance, intrigued by the uneasy marriage of industrial dimensions and Italian renaissance motifs. When Sam flashed her FBI badge, the doorman simply shrugged as though he were a palm-reader confronted by yet another extraordinary inevitability. People were hard to surprise, nowadays.
'Do you get air miles with that?' Thomas quipped as they marched through the posh lobby.
Sam smiled, once again rummaging through her purse for charitable change: a UNICEF box had been set on a table between the lifts. 'Just miles,' she replied, punching the elevator pad with pennies in hand.
The air was scented—the smell of rich wives, shopping to and fro, Thomas imagined. He studied his distorted reflection in the elevator's brass doors, wondered whether the motto set into the ornamental shield,
Fronta Nulla Fides
, wasn't some kind of joke on the residents. A screen in the elevator featured CNNet clips of all the top stories, from the chaos in Europe, the Iraqi civil war, to the latest Chiropractor details. Apparently another spineless body had been found, this time in Queens. Live. On-the-scene. It was like watching murder through a fish tank, Thomas thought.
The man who greeted them at the penthouse door was short, barrel-chested, and sported one of those dark, heavy beards that always made Thomas think of hairy backs. His eyes were red-rimmed. He wore his blue jeans pulled up too high on his waist. Thomas knew instantly he was one of those guys who spend far too much time sucking in their gut in front of the mirror.
'Thank you, Mr Gyges. I know—'
'Hello, Agent Logan.'
Thomas raised his eyebrows. He hadn't been sure what to expect—certainly not decisive recognition.
'I never forget a voice,' Gyges said, reading his mind. 'Otherwise, I've never seen her before in my life.'
'But you have,' Sam said.
Gyges shrugged. 'If you say so… And you? Have I seen you before?'
'No, Mr Gyges. I'm Thomas Bible.'
Gyges nodded warily.
'Dr Bible is a psychology professor over at Columbia, Mr Gyges. He has a few questions he'd like to ask.'
'Do you now? Forensic or therapeutic?'
'The two can sometimes be the same. But I'm not a boo-hoo grief counsellor, if that's what you mean.' Thomas paused, licked his lips. 'I'm a friend of Neil Cassidy.'
Gyges's face went blank. 'Please come in,' he said.
They followed him through a marbled foyer into a palatial living room designed and decorated in the archipelago style all the rage among the rich and famous: monumental rooms broken into various 'intimacy convergence zones'. But the effect—whatever it was supposed to be—was undone by the trash scattered about the furniture. The man certainly liked his local Subway outlet.
'You must forgive the Spartan inhospitality,' he said, motioning to a U-shaped sofa. 'I dismissed all of my staff. I found them… unrecognizable.'
Thomas joined Sam opposite the ailing billionaire. There was something anti-climactic about the moment, as if the billionaire and his environment had fallen short of his expectations. Too many movies, no doubt. The whole world fell short now that CGI was waving the cinematic yardstick. Not even the super-rich could measure up.
'Drink?' Gyges asked. 'All I have is Scotch, I'm afraid.'
Sam waved no. Thomas asked for one on the rocks.
'So,' Gyges asked on his way to the bar, 'what questions could a friend of Mr Cassidy have for me?'
Thomas breathed deep. Given Sam's description in the car, he had decided to strike a conciliatory note, something that would set the man at ease. 'Many. But I thought you might have questions of your own.'
Gyges smiled bitterly.
So it's therapy after all
, his look said. 'And what might those be?'
Thomas shrugged. 'Why? For starters. Don't you want to know why he did this to you?'
The man turned back to the drinks. 'Oh, I know why.'
'You do?'
'But of course. I'm being punished.'
Thomas nodded carefully. For some reason he said, 'For your sins…'
'Yes. For my sins.'
'And what sins are those?'
Gyges gave the Scotch a curious swirl, as though soaking the ice cubes. 'Are you a priest?' he asked as he handed Thomas his drink. For the first time Thomas noticed how assiduously the man avoided looking at either of their faces.
'No,' Thomas replied.
'Then my sins have nothing to do with you.' He turned abruptly, not toward Sam, but in her general direction. His mannerisms were beginning to remind Thomas of a blind man. 'Psychologists,' he said, with easy contempt. 'They want all your sins to be symptoms, don't they?'
'I apologize, Mr Gyges,' Thomas said, setting down his drink. 'Would you prefer—'
'Professor Bible thinks Cassidy is making some kind of argument,' Sam ventured. 'We need your help, Mr Gyges.'
The billionaire finally looked her full in the face. His eyes reflected a peculiar horror. 'Argument? What kind of argument?'
Sam glanced at Thomas. 'That nothing has meaning,' she said. 'This might sound hard to believe, but Neil Cassidy believes that there's no such thing as… as…'
'People,' Thomas finished for her. 'He thinks that much of what we believe, things like purpose, meaning, right and wrong, are simply illusions generated by our brains.'
Gyges's eyes glistened with tears. 'Well he's certainly wrong there, isn't he?'
'Wrong where?' Thomas asked.
'About none of this having meaning.'
'I'm not sure I understand.'
'Of course not,' he snapped without explanation. He shook his head. 'Just what is it you want?'
Thomas and Sam exchanged a nervous glance. The man possessed a peculiar presence, something at once awesome and pathetic. Thomas thought he finally understood what Sam had said earlier regarding men who piss two paces back from the urinal. 'Did Neil say anything to you about a… about a
premise
?'
'Neil?'
'I mean Cassidy. Did he?'
Gyges stood quietly for what seemed a long while.
'I want to say, yes,' Gyges finally said. 'But I really can't remember.'
'Are you sure?' Sam asked.
Gyges scowled. 'Do you know where my favorite place is, Agent Logan?'
Thomas put a hand on Sam's knee—whether to warn or to reassure her, he couldn't say.
'No,' she said. 'Where?'
'The subway,' the man replied with a pained smile. 'The fucking subway is where I feel the most at home. The most… normal. At first it was just a… a comfort, you know? But it's become far more. Far, far more. Now it feels like Christmas with dead relatives or something. Just sitting there, swaying with strangers.'
He turned to refill his tumbler. 'Pathetic, huh?' he called over his shoulder.
'Would it be better,' Thomas ventured, 'if we did this by phone?'
'Oh, now he humors me,' Gyges said to the vaulted ceiling. He turned, hesitated, then looked at them as though on a dare. He smiled warmly and said, 'Get the fuck out.'
Thomas and Sam could only stare.
'Which word seems to be the problem?' Gyges asked. 'Get? Fuck? Out?'
The two of them hurried to their feet. 'Can we call you, Mr Gyges?' Sam asked. 'We really—'
'Jeeesuss!' the burly man cried. 'Get! The fuck!
Out
!' With each word he stomped forward, like a silverback broadcasting an imminent charge.
Thomas stumbled on the curled edge of a Persian. Sam steadied him. His arms wide, Gyges herded them toward the foyer. They paused before the door.
Thomas looked up, saw the three of them reflected in a heavy, rococo-framed mirror.
'Three strangers,' Gyges said with a calm that seemed frightening given the savagery of moments before. 'Do you know what it's like, Dr Bible, to live nowhere? To look and look and find yourself nowhere?'
In a curious sense, Thomas did, but he wasn't about to say so. 'You're standing right here, Mr Gyges.'
'Am I? I'm not so sure.' A contemplative scowl. 'But you don't realize what it's like, do you? You think I see you, that I know you, that the problem is that every time I look away I forget who you are. But it's not like that. Not at all. When I stare at you—like this, like I'm staring at you right now—I don't recognize you from one second to the next. And it's not like your face becomes something
new
every moment, something that I've never seen before. It's just unknown. Unknowable…'
Gyges turned from the mirror to Thomas.
'When I look into the mirror, Dr Bible, I'm not there. But the kicker is that
you aren't either
. For me, there is no
you
. Just a voice. A voice from the dark.'
For a moment Thomas could only stare at him. 'You're suffering a brain injury,' he said lamely. 'You need to underst—'
'Brain injury?' the bearded man replied. '
Brain injury
? Is that what you think this is?' Shaking his head, he strode past them and yanked open one of the oak-stained doors.
Thomas turned as he crossed the threshold. 'Then what is it?'
'You're not a priest,' Gyges snapped.
The door pounded shut, swallowed the world before Thomas's face.
Neither of them said anything until the elevator doors closed.
'What do you make of that?' Sam finally asked.
'I don't know. He was drunk, for one. But beyond that? Could be he's suffering some post-traumatic stress…' he trailed, struggling to make sense of what had just happened. 'One thing's for sure.'
'What's that?'
'Did you notice how he behaved around us? The utter absence of any eye contact. His body language. Almost cringing from our presence.'
'So?'
Thomas breathed deeply. 'So, we were monstrosities to him. Faceless monstrosities.'