“Mechanically,” Ollie said. “Like a gun going off.”
“Yup. Except there’s no one to pull the trigger.”
“When I pull the trigger, it sure feels like I’m the one doing it.”
“Exactly—it’s a feeling,” I said. “It happens after the brain’s gone off. You think you’re in control, but that’s just the warm fuzzy of false confidence.”
“But if there’s no free will,” Ollie said, looking up at me, “then there’s no such thing as sin.” I was surprised by how steady her voice was. “If no one’s responsible, then there’s no morality.”
“You cannot prosecute a gun for murder,” Rovil said.
“You can if the gun’s complex enough,” I said. “Look, you can’t think of a person like it’s one thing, one ‘I’ that decides everything. The brain is a collective, a huge number of all these thinking modules. It doesn’t make a decision, it arrives at one.”
“Words,” Ollie said. “Something’s got to be responsible.”
I thought for a minute, trying to figure out how to explain this. “When the brain starts working on a problem, all those parts of the brain start working, using all the data they’ve got—personal experience, cultural rules, moral impulses … all those things go into the hopper,” I said. “The brain parts solve the equation of what to do—that’s what we call a decision, but it’s really just an answer. And each answer is input to the next equation. In fact, each answer changes the brain itself in minute ways, strengthening some connections, weakening others. That’s why people who think of the mind as software and the brain as hardware have it wrong—there’s nothing but hardware, jolts of electricity running down the wires, building up a charge, waiting for that emotional trigger to be pulled. The gun fires itself.”
“When you load it properly,” Rovil said.
“This is madness,” Ollie said. “We can’t have people murdering each other and then say, too bad, can’t do anything about it, no one fired the gun.”
“I never said that. We punish the gun.”
“What?”
“The gun is collectively responsible,” I said. “It’s like Congress, or a corporation. And when the gun breaks the rules, society punishes it.”
“But that’s not fair,” Ollie said. “The gun’s just doing what it was primed to do.”
“Maybe we’ve gone off track with the gun analogy,” I said.
“No, stick with it. Bang. The gun fires, and kills someone.”
“Okay, yes.”
“And then we put it in the electric chair,” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
“How is that fair?! We don’t execute mentally retarded people.”
“Except in Georgia,” Rovil said.
“Those are retarded guns,” I said. “We’re talking about fully functioning, complex guns that have the power to process all the information available. That includes the rules of society. That information about what’s ‘good’ and ‘bad’ is data the brain needs to make its decision. The next gun that comes along might think differently.”
“I can’t agree with this,” Ollie said. “You may be right about how the brain works, but I don’t want to live in a world where no one’s responsible.”
“I keep saying, we are responsible, just not in the way—”
“Stop,” Ollie said. “Please stop.” She took her hand from mine and looked out the passenger window.
I noticed Rovil looking at me in the rearview mirror, his eyebrows raised questioningly. I shook my head. I’d thought I was distracting her, relieving the tension, but I’d only packed the powder a little tighter.
* * *
We pulled off the interstate at Amarillo, short of the New Mexico border, an hour before sundown. It was Saturday night, and the instructions had been to wait until at least Sunday. I wanted to do the last leg of the trip so that we arrived at Edo’s place in daylight.
We found a motel a quarter mile from the interstate. When we stepped out of the refrigerated capsule of the car, the heat slammed us. We’d left spring up north; Texas was well into summer.
Rovil bought his dinner from a vending machine and said he wanted to hole up in his room and do work, leaving Ollie and me to find supper on our own. We started walking toward the nearest restaurant on our maps, and immediately began to sweat. In two blocks we reached La Cantina, a rundown brick building squatting between a Discount Gas & Liquor Drive Thru and a shop with a sign that said simply INCOME TAX.
Ollie thought the place looked sketchy, but I argued that it was impossible to get bad Mexican in Amarillo. And yet: enchiladas microwaved to hell, salsa from a can, Velveeta cheese coating everything. Only tequila could have saved the meal. Ollie, however, seemed to barely notice the food; her eyes were tracking the restaurant staff and the handful of other customers. She would not be surprised by the cowboy again.
She stayed on guard after we returned to the motel. She sat on the bed, turned sideways so she could watch the door, her pen screen unfurled across her lap. I was on my own pen, watching a free version of Pride and Prejudice. I flashed on a memory of Mikala and me lying beside each other like this, our minds somewhere else, our bodies touching, while we wondered whether certain cells were dividing and growing inside my body.
I said to Ollie, “I’m going to check on Rovil.”
She started to get up, and I said, “Please. Stay here. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
Her eyes narrowed.
“Don’t let the Clarity get the best of you,” I said.
She didn’t like this, but she let me go. Outside I half expected Dr. Gloria to be waiting for me with a disapproving frown on her face, but no.
Rovil’s room was to the left. I turned right, toward town. It was 9:40. I had twenty minutes to make it. It should be plenty of time, but I walked fast just in case. The night was still alarmingly muggy, and by the time I reached the Discount Gas & Liquor, sweat was rolling down my ribs.
The sign on the door said 10AM–10PM MON–SAT. I was there with minutes to spare.
I walked the aisles, considering the rows of glass bottles. Not a big bottle, I decided. Just enough to get me through the night. I circled back to the front of the store. The pocket sizes were on the shelf behind the cash register. The clerk was an old Latino with wild tufts of gray hair. His eyes tracked me from beneath the shelter of an imposing monobrow.
After a minute he said, “We are closing.”
“I know, I know.”
“Are you buying or not?”
“Just relax, okay? I’m deciding.”
He stared at me.
“Smirnoff is on sale,” he said.
“I fucking hate Smirnoff’s.”
Another minute passed.
“Wild Turkey?” he asked.
“Jesus fucking Christ!” I said.
I stalked out. The skies were as empty as my hands.
* * *
The human egg is a Mrs. Bennet, desperate to marry off her daughters. She starts life with as many chromosomes as any other cell in the body, but when hormones sound the alert she divides herself, making poor little daughter cells, impoverished things with only one set of chromosomes, each in great need of a long-tailed prince to make her whole. The male germline cells were just as desperate. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a sperm must be in want of a matching strand of DNA.
Well, fuck Mr. Darcy, and his sperm too. A couple of eggs could do the job on their own, thanks to modern science.
Mikala and I decided to make a child out of only ourselves, pairing up two half sets of chromosomes. The process was a few years old, created by a (female) scientist in Melbourne, Australia. It could create only daughters—and debt. The $85,000 bill was not covered by any insurance and was definitely not something Mikala could ask her family for. We emptied our savings and cashed in our 401ks, gambling on a long shot. The success rate was somewhere below thirty percent. But we were optimists.