The Clown's Graveyard
Chapter Eleven: Anything Can Happen

Discontentment stalks your days. You're haunted by a world you can never have, a place where the women are prettier, the men more decisive, the cars faster along more beautiful roads. Everyone there has it all figured out, whether it's sailing boats or solving crimes or chewing gum, working the red carpet or cycling across the Himalayas. They leer at you from all sides, on billboards, in magazines, on TV, bolted in a frame to the wall above the urinal, working their spell of disappointment and yearning. Not that your own life is so bad. You could be doing what you like to do, good job, nice wife, kids not bad. But you never stop wishing for what you'd be a fool to hope for.

Is it any wonder people got mixed up with something like Integrated Consciousness? Who was I to fault anyone else for following a false god when I'd fallen for anything that came up the pike? Whatever got them through the day, fine, it was no business of mine. Maybe Lou was right and hope, fear, and disappointment were all the same thing. It's a crummy formula for a world and it's every man for himself figuring it out. Anyway, the existential health of the general public was the last thing on my mind. All I cared about was making my separate peace.

A few hours remained before Blanston's ransom drop. Lou and I crossed town to Louis's at Seal Rock. Oblivious to the clear skies only a few miles away, the fog hung heavy over the concrete walkway overlooking the briny ruins of the Sutro Baths. At first glance this rocky corner appeared largely unaffected by the previous day's events. The diner was populated by unhurried bus drivers in brown polyester uniforms, old men in plaid shirts, and a handful of woebegone Golden Gate Park employees. Tourists had never much favored Louis's, preferring the dim lacquered history of the Cliff House a hundred feet away with the framed front pages of 1906 newspapers hung along the hallway to the restrooms. Early-bird tour buses out front discharged platoons of geriatric Midwesterners to line up along the railing in Golden Gate Bridge sweatshirts and snap photos of the crumbling pools in the gray light.

A fortyish woman in a blue uniform poured our coffee in thick brown mugs. Her manner was businesslike and unmemorable. She was no Brenda the Waitress.

I scalded my tongue on the overheated swill. I felt the long days since I'd slept and my body sagged like the eleventh hour on acid. The seals had all migrated to Pier 39 and only seagulls graced the rocks with their presence and their guano. It was tempting to submit to melancholy, but it was a luxury I could ill afford. Lou and I had to stage a national production of our San Francisco spectacular, a blockbuster big enough to finish Integrated Consciousness for good. It would be a challenge every step of the way, from publicity to logistics to coming up with an act in the first place, and we had eight days to pull it off.

We talked it over without making much progress and then gave it a rest. Lou pulled over a square glass ashtray and crumpled a cigarette pack wrapper into it. The cellophane rose slowly out of its crouch before shrinking at the heat of the discarded match.

"How's it going with the ..." I said, gesturing at Lou's forearm. His sleeves were rolled down, cuffs unbuttoned, as usual.

"Oh that?" He shrugged. "Might as well have saved our money."

"You haven't felt the need?"

"Need?" he said and laughed. He looked around the restaurant and out the windows for a moment, then pointed out a crowd of Japanese tourists jumping around at the overlook. They were gesturing frantically at something in the sea, blocked from our view by the Cliff House. Through the glass I heard a roar that began with an eagle's cry and ended with a dinosaur's brassy wail, then saw one of the tourists vaporized by a beam of yellow light. "I don't need a thing."

I watched as the crowd agitated a moment longer, then filed back into their bus and continued up the hill toward the Presidio. Our little scheme was playing out in ways I couldn't have imagined. It was hard not to wonder, even worry, where it might lead. I'd gotten pretty attached to the world I'd been living in, work-related stress aside. I didn't like everything about it but I understood it all well enough.

The food was surprisingly good. The bacon was lean and crisp and the eggs came with a sprig of parsley and an orange slice. "Remember the Fox Deli?" Lou asked me. "That's what this reminds me of. Without the view, of course." He peeled open a couple of jams and slathered the buttery toast. "I saw your dad there a couple of times."

"How did he seem?"

"He wasn't aging real well, but fine aside from that. Same as always, lonely but happy. About two-thirds there." I nodded, unsure how I felt to hear this, whether I felt anything at all. "How did your folks ever get together, anyway?"

"My dad helped her fix a flat," I said. "She bought him a drink to thank him and that was that. She never did get where she had been going."

"You never know about that," Lou said. "Maybe that's where she left for when she left."

You never knew, I thought. Anything could have happened. I had naturally wondered over the years but my thoughts had run to mundane scenarios: old boyfriends, traveling salesmen, a cabana boy on some distant beach. Or maybe she had been lured away by a traveling circus, or recruited for a secret mission, or swept off her feet by an exiled Inca prince. I quickly banished darker possibilities. There was no point in speculating. The truth was, I couldn't imagine what happened to her. Anything was possible.

The surf silently pounded the rocks outside, sending spray over the baths to fall in a fine mist and discolor the walkways. Louis's was largely empty, the last of the Muni drivers having saddled up and left.

"Now what?" Lou asked after a while, lighting a postprandial smoke.

I wrenched my thoughts with some measure of relief to the business at hand. "Time to build out the team," I said. A candidate had already come to mind.

Once the Joe Bananas experiments had helped us perfect the neuroelectronic circuitry for IC 2.0, the time had come to fine-tune its effects. The earliest simian prototypes had operated along crude lines, guesstimating the apes' state of mind based on the movement of their facial muscles and guiding them into new habits and attitudes by barking rough commands at their cerebella. Our human customers would require a more nuanced touch, a fuller understanding of the cranial sparks and juices that underlie the subjective experience of life. That's where Dr. Turezyn came in. As the world's leading psychochemist, her insights would be invaluable in optimizing the success of our product development.

I made my proposition on an uncharacteristically muggy March day. "It's not that you won't be compensated financially," I told her. "You will, and handsomely. But that pales in comparison with the project's intellectual rewards. Dr. Turezyn, you possess the most complete knowledge of anyone alive of the mechanisms of human experience, of hope and despair, belief and skepticism, love and hate, all that stuff. Now I'm offering you the opportunity to apply that knowledge in the real world."

Dr. Turezyn smiled enigmatically. "The real world, you say. What an intriguing prospect." I shifted uncomfortably. She was as elusive as a cat and as intimidating. She had wild reddish hair and a face that looked like it was assembled in haste, and eyes that turned anyone who questioned her to stone. She was content to sit sphinx-like while I ran through four or five different versions of my pitch, all the while giving me the distinct impression that her decision wouldn't have anything to do with anything I said.

Trained as a neurologist, Dr. Turezyn had been a pioneer of the field of psychochemistry. Her iconoclastic theories and her aloofness had won her few friends in the academic community but she had found great popularity among the general public. Her mental prowess was complemented by a powerful personal presence, and even pushing fifty from the wrong side she turned the heads of men half her age. She had a way with words, and her frequent articles in prominent pseudointellectual weeklies won her an invitation to create a series for public television. Her sixteen-episode Windmills of the Mind became a schoolroom video perennial. She did nothing to quell speculation of her involvement in clandestine projects with puzzling implications, nor allow any hint as to what went on in her lab or between her ears. She may have been well-versed in the machinery of emotion, I mused as I withstood her impassive gaze, but she seemed seldom in its grasp.

Finally she assented. "I will need complete control of the project from beginning to end," she said, "and I will brook neither interference nor publicity. Is that understood?"

"Of course, Doctor," I said, relieved. "I'm sure you won't regret it."

"Regret?" she said. The tone in her voice made me think she was about to laugh sarcastically but she didn't. Instead, she rose abruptly and left my office. I let out a breath and told Angela to hold my calls for a while.

I learned later that the time of our association had been a troubled one for Dr. Turezyn. While Integrated Consciousness 2.0 gave her a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to validate her most speculative theories through hands-on human research, it also provided conclusive evidence that certain realities she'd long suspected, regretfully, were true.

Dr. Turezyn had been drawn to the study of the mind by a whimsical notion she'd entertained as a young girl. It occurred to her one sunny afternoon in the house of her parents, a Brooklyn Heights brownstone with an obstructed view of the Statue of Liberty, as she examined a cut-away diagram of the human body. Lit by a shaft of mote-speckled glare, the brown, gray, and blue sausages looked almost three-dimensional. Most of the organs were straightforward enough to the mind of a precocious nine-year-old: the heart was a pump, the kidneys a filter, the colon a tube full of—well, the entire digestive tract was simply a septic system serviced by various ducts and hoses. But the brain, how did it work? What marvelous mechanism accomplished with such finesse the functions of thinking, feeling, dreaming, remembering? It seemed so noble, so delicate a task, it bestowed a certain prestige on the wrinkled plasticine loaf. Unloved by her classmates for her arrogant superiority, little Dr. Turezyn came to think of her brain as an independent being in itself, one with which she enjoyed a relationship based on mutual respect. She conceptualized it as a little creature that lived in her skull and looked out of her eyes, aloof as a rajah in an elephant's saddle. The thing pushed buttons and turned valves and moved levers to direct the body but its most important work was the alchemy of consciousness, processing the impressions and insights of the day in pursuit of the fundamental needs of existence.

She didn't notice until later that paper cuts from the glossy plate had smeared blood all over the cover of the Childcraft encyclopedia. Dr. Turezyn was a very odd little girl.

As she grew up, Dr. Turezyn remained fascinated by what went on inside people's heads. Her studies gave her the opportunity to satisfy her curiosity, but medical school left little room for illusions. Life is about hunger and procreation. You've got to eat to live, and you live to pass your genes to another generation of little eaters. The body does what it takes to get the brain to advance this agenda. The stomach is empty—it sends a hunger memo to the brain. The testicles needs to find a suitable receptacle for their load—they broadcasts love songs through the nervous system. Each urge comes wrapped in a thought. Some thoughts are more involved than others, but the thoughts themselves have no more significance than the day-old newspapers wrapped around an order of fish and chips. The only meaning to life is its stubborn self-perpetuation. The rest is so much light conversation.

Dr. Turezyn's career continued to build momentum as she delved deeper and deeper into the physiological chicanery that passed for consciousness, but her work brought her little joy. Her public life gave her opportunities to lose herself in the ignorance of the general public and to join in their games for a while, but she couldn't escape an overpowering sense of futility.

We drew our Integrated Consciousness 2.0 test subjects from diverse backgrounds representing a broad spectrum of psychographic profiles: college students, window washers, bankers, optometry store clerks, librarians, cops, telemarketers, even an out-of-work clown. We told them we were studying a certain type of brain wave activity and that their role was to do whatever they felt like and answer a few simple questions from time to time. We put them up in a reasonably comfortable compound in Livermore. The weekly stipend was an increase from their usual incomes to encourage experimentation. Separated from their jobs, homes, and loved ones, their personalities and lifestyles became as pliable as college freshmen, facilitating an accelerated view of the new system's effects.

Dr. Turezyn presided over the daily meetings of the IC 2.0 development team with strict authority that belied the charming manner she affected with the subjects. One moment she'd be seeing off the guests with a June Cleaver smile and wave, and the next she'd be lecturing the staff sternly, stabbing at flow charts and schematic diagrams with the rapier tip of a telescoping pointer. The dozen or so demographers, seminarians, nutritionists, and advertising creatives took notes as if their lives depended on it. Although they'd been hired based on exceptional credentials in their fields, it was all they could do to keep up. The scene was like a committee of cavemen being instructed on the workings of the wheel, the accordion, and the gas grill all in one morning. They furrowed their brows, humbled and humiliated, as she mapped the eternal human truths of their respective disciplines to a lexicon of crude hormonal cravings.

Dr. Turezyn insisted that I stay away from the staff meetings, calling my presence a distraction to the struggling brain trust, but I often eavesdropped, fascinated by her sharp mind. Each person, she explained as I crouched outside the window, was tuned to a particular and unique blend of adrenaline and endorphins and, daring anyone to so much as raise an eyebrow, sexual hormones synthesized in the gonads. It was this and only this exact formula that could produce unalloyed pleasure, and people spent their lives fumbling blindly with experimental combinations of stimuli in the vain attempt to divine and fulfill its directives. Rare was the person who succeeded, she intoned.

But it need not be so. In an age that had already cracked the genetic code of life itself, how much of a challenge could the code of happiness present? Although in this case the cryptic alphabet spells out not cell division and protein synthesis but passions and pursuits and their corresponding visceral connotations.

By this time the cowlicked seminarian would be exchanging desperate glances with the guy who wrote that raisin commercial jingle. Dr. Turezyn would sigh. Yet again her putative peers proved no more perspicacious than the mouth-breathing studio audiences at those dog-and-pony talk shows. But being a scientist, she persevered.

Songbirds woke me each morning and I rose at first light. In the stillness before our collegiate collaborators emerged from their nests I greeted the day from the porch of my cabin. Although I wasn't more than an hour's drive from my Russian Hill condo, the change of scenery felt like a great adventure. I reminisced fondly about that summer at camp when I was six, the bracing pine air of the lakeside bivouac, the vigorous camaraderie of my young chums. The hills to the East of the IC compound were sharp against the clear blue sky, rimmed with long rows of wonderful, graceful windmills, their long white blades turning majestically in the breeze to power blenders and blow dryers. The sod we'd laid in the quadrangle had taken wonderfully, sparkling emerald green in the loving mist of the irrigation system, interlaced with pristine concrete pathways.

One morning I came across Dr. Turezyn sitting on a park bench near an ersatz fountain the contractor had thrown in for free. She seemed to be lost in thought, perhaps enjoying a rare quiet moment. I hesitated, suddenly shy. She was too young for the nice-young-man routine I used on older women, too old for my wise older brother shtick, and too deep for my all-purpose Third Way double-talk. At the same time there was something about her that I found compelling. Not in a romantic way—I didn't need that kind of pressure. Something more subtle, like the awareness of a painted portrait's eyes following you from its frame as you move slowly through a neglected gallery that no one else visits.

She met me with a cold gaze that shook my conviviality but I recovered quickly. "Dr. Turezyn, I have to tell you, I've been extremely pleased with your work here. Everything I'd heard about you is true. I really admire your insight." Earnest gratitude infused my body.

She looked away. I thought she might be blushing. Then she turned and fixed me with dark eyes. "I feel like Albert Speer," she said.

Chapter Twelve: Strangening on Telegraph Avenue