While there was no doubt in Jake’s mind that Mrs Miles was an attractive woman, there wasn’t much that was attractive about what Mrs Miles had to say to her interviewer about punishment. And the voice was too hectoring and insistent to make for easy listening. Jake didn’t like to remind herself that she had voted for this woman’s stiff-necked punitive policies. But being a police officer, she reflected, sometimes played havoc with your political inclinations.
A pictophone-call at three in the morning is not usually a source of much pleasure for a police officer. The best that Jake could normally have hoped for would have been an obscene caller, exposing his genitals to the camera in the hope of outraging some helpless spinster. Blindly thumping the headboard that controlled the lights and the speaking clock — ‘The time is 3 a.m.’ — Jake shook her head clear of sleep and reached out for the remote control handset that worked the pictophone. For a brief moment she thought that it might be the hospital and that the stakeout might have worked. But when she had thumbed one of the buttons to take the call, it was Sergeant Chung’s face that appeared on the small screen on her bedside table.
‘I hope I didn’t wake you up,’ he said with delighted insincerity.
Jake sneered sleepily. ‘Do you know what time it is?’
‘Do I know what time it is? Of course I know what fucking time it is. Listen, I’ve just had my wife on the box to tell me the fucking time. Wanting to know why I’m still here at the Brain Research Institute instead of at home, fucking her.’
‘Yes, well I bet she’s missing that,’ said Jake, adjusting the colour on the screen, turning up the yellow until Chung’s head looked like a large lemon.
‘You’re fucking right she is,’ said Chung, oblivious to Jake’s irony.
Jake reached for her cigarettes and lit one. ‘Look, Sergeant,’ she said, ‘if you’ve got something to report...’
‘I didn’t call just so as I could see you without your make-up,’ he snarled. ‘Or who you’re sleeping with.’
‘Sleeping with?’ Jake murmured. ‘Why the sudden coyness?’
‘Eh?’
‘Forget it. Look just tell me what you’ve got so I can get back to sleep, you little yellow bastard.’
‘You want to watch it, you know. I could report you to the Racial Harassment Unit for a remark like that. I’ve solved your problem, white lady.’
Jake sat up in bed. ‘You mean you can explain the breach of security?’
‘Not bad,’ said Chung, grinning at the sight of Jake’s suddenly exposed breasts. ‘Not bad at all. Tell you what: give me a quick flash of the rest and we’ll call it quits about the racism, okay?’
Jake gathered up her sheet and held it up to her neck. She wanted to tell Chung to fuck himself, to put him on a charge. At the same time she didn’t want to risk him becoming even more uncooperative than he was already. She knew him well enough to realise that he was capable of any amount of obstruction. So she gritted her teeth, ignored his sexist remark, and asked him to explain what it was that he had discovered.
‘If I were you, I’d get my white arse down here,’ he said. ‘Right now. See, it’s not something that’s easy to explain on the pic and I won’t be here if you come looking for me in the morning. I’ve been working solid on this thing for over twenty hours and as soon as I’ve explained things to you, I’m off home to get some fucking sleep.’
‘This had better be worth it,’ Jake growled, and hit the remote to end the call.
Naturally I was just a little concerned when I saw the evening paper. It only goes to prove what I was saying about encephalisation of function. I knew it was a mistake to shoot him in the anterior as opposed to the posterior of the brain. That’s what you get for being impatient.
Mind you I didn’t doubt that, at the very least, I would have left Russell visually impaired, the optic nerve and septal and preoptic areas all being located around that part of the brain. (Come to think of it, I might have also damaged his all-important hypothalamus, which is of course, where his, and my trouble started.) So the chances of his being able to identify anything more than the inside of his own eyelids were slim, despite what was written in the Evening Standard. You see how it doesn’t do to believe everything you read in the Evening Standard? All the same, in future I would have to be more careful and always aim for the cerebellum and cortex.
It’s a fascinating area, brain function. Anyone who doubts me should try and think exactly which part of his brain is doing the thinking at that precise moment. Try it: close your eyes and concentrate on a picture of your own brain. Easier if you have a Reality Approximation machine to help you, but if you don’t, let me try and describe it.
Viewed from the top, your brain most resembles something from Dante’s Inferno, a pit to which lost souls have been consigned, their fleshy bodies coiled together with hardly a space to separate their desperate agonies of damnation. It is a sight such as might have greeted the liberators of Auschwitz as they stared into the mass piles of naked, unburied corpses. A ghastly, pressed jelly of humanity, this pâté de foie gras of thought.
Seen from the side, your brain is a dancer, or an acrobat, impossibly muscled — will you look at those biceps and those pectorals — bent into a foetal position, the arm (temporal lobe) wrapped around the leg, the head (cerebellum) resting on the shins (medulla oblongata).
From underneath, your brain is something obscenely hermaphrodite. There are the frontal lobes meeting like the labia of a human vagina. And beneath them, the pons and the medulla oblongata that reminds you of a semi-erect penis.
Dissected, sectioned coronally from ear to ear, the imperfect symmetry of your brain is like a Rorschach inkblot, that diagnostic tool of unstructured personality tests once favoured by psychologists.
But where, you say, among all these lobes and hemispheres, stalks and tracts, fissures and bulbs — where are the thoughts, these logical pictures of facts? The plain fact is that we must think on an even smaller scale if we are to find their origin. We must come down to a measurement of one thousandth of a millimetre, to the simplest element of nervous action, the neuron.
Now can you picture them? So quick in their synaptic jumps from one to the other that you could be forgiven for missing it the first ten thousand times. And listen, can you hear the electrical energy that is generated as these synapses take place? You can? Congratulations. You’re thinking.
So now think of this: if you could lump all the true thoughts together, namely the logical pictures of facts, what you would have would be a picture of the whole world.
We cannot think what we cannot think; so what we cannot think we cannot say either.
6
Sergeant Chung was seated on a triangular stool at a grey perspex table in the main computer room at the Institute. Along one section of the circular table’s circumference was a keypad and, in the centre, a holographic projection of the data he was currently using. In the partly darkened room the machine had the appearance, to Jake’s eyes, of some ancient oracle.