Come Out Tonight (16 page)

No fancy restaurants, though.
 
Sherry loved the greasy spoons with the plastic tablecloths, the dives with chipped dishes and unmatched chairs, the hole-in-the-walls with cheap good food and no atmosphere.
 
Why pay for marketing? she’d say.
 
I can’t tell you how many evenings we must have spent at joints with linoleum floors, Formica counters, two rickety tables in the back and a menu scribbled on the wall. Talking and eating:
 
that’s what Sherry loved.

Like the time we met at the
New
China
Palace
, and she told me what had happened over dumplings and double-cooked pork.
 
Or rather, Sherry talked and I ate.
 
She said she was too upset to eat.
 
She was still angry about Vandenberg’s refusal to undertake large-scale testing of the Somnolux
anomalies
, as Ryan called them.
 
And now this.

“They just shot down my theory about why it’s happening,” she said, banging the tea cup down on the table, tea sloshing over onto the clear plastic table liner.
 
I pushed over my napkin, and she absentmindedly mopped it up.
  
She continued mopping at the spot, lost in thought, even though the puddle was no longer there.

“You were saying,” I said.

She looked up. “Oh, yeah.”
 
She poured a slow stream of tea into her little cup, and sighed.
  
“Well, the mind is emergent.
  
It arises from the parts of the brain, which connect and compete in such complex ways, that what emerges is some other thing altogether.”

“The whole is more than the sum of its parts,” I offered.

“Yeah.
 
Trite but true,” she said, picking up the cup.

Sometimes Sherry treated me like an idiot.
 
She didn’t really mean it to hurt me; she was just a little too wrapped up in herself, I think.
 
I tried not to let it bother me.
 
“Go on,” I said.

“The brain is very complex.
 
The three pound universe, they call it. So complex, it’s still a bit of a black box.
 
I mean the brain isn’t a big monolithic lump, and it’s not a series of independent modules.
 
We’re still trying to figure out what parts do what and how the mind emerges from the brain.”

“Emerges?” I asked.

“Yeah, emerges.
 
Through some transformation we can’t yet imagine, one arises from the other.
 
Like energy from matter.
 
Probably through the connections of the parts.
 
There’s this massive reverberating circuit that ties the cortex to the sensory and motor centers.
 
Sensory information flows in, it’s modified; motor commands are generated, they’re modified; sensory feedback from the motor responses is fed in...on and on, feeding forward, feeding back. The whole thing is so complex and interactive...but without beginning or end.
 
Then at some critical point, something totally unexpected arises.
 
Like Life from dirt.”

The waitress came with a vegetable dish, setting it down between the other two half-eaten dishes.
 
“Not good?” she asked, indicating the three plates.

“Good,” I assured her, picking up a wad of pea greens with my chopsticks, half of it falling on the table on the way to my mouth.
 

“You need fork?” she asked me.
  
She was an older woman, so nonstop and eager-to-please she must have been the owner.

I nodded no, mouth full.
 
Now the waitress turned to Sherry and her empty plate.
 
She looked for a moment, shaking her head.
  
“I get you fork,” she said.

“It’s okay,” Sherry shouted after her, but the waitress was halfway across the room by now, shouting orders at some poor cowering schmuck in Chinese.

“Life from dirt,” I prompted after the waitress had gone.

“Yeah.
 
A phase change.
 
Something qualitatively different from what it emerges from. At a critical point - the point of instability between one phase and another - something new takes off.
 
Life.
 
Mind.”
 
She took a long sip from the tea cup in her hand.

 
“But because these emergent entities are so exquisitely balanced, they’re fragile, like RAM in a computer.
 
Shut off the power and the whole thing collapses.
  
Change the chemical balance and you just might tip the brain into an unstable state.”
 

“You think Somnolux is tipping the brain into an unstable state?” I asked, figuring that was where she was going.

“Into a state which wouldn’t naturally occur, maybe.
 
Where some parts are on, that should be off, and some parts are off, that should be on.”

“Which causes the...”

“Anomalies, yes,” she replied.
 

“You told them that?”

“Absolutely.”

“And what did they say?” I asked, putting down my chopsticks.

“Ryan said the whole concept of an emergent mind is silly; the mind isn’t so irreducibly complex that we can’t figure it out.
 
He thinks we just haven’t figured it all out yet.”

“I always thought Ryan was a jerk.
 
Don’t worry about what he says.”

“Yeah, well.
 
The head of the Institute agreed with him.
 
He insisted there’s no way Somnolux is destabilizing the brain. All it’s doing, he said, is enhancing the GABA transmitter.
 
Simple as that. Then he told me I was very young and I should consider myself lucky to have such a cushy job at Vandenberg.”

“He said that?”

“Not in those words.”

“Meaning, back off or lose your job?”

“That’s what it sounded like to me, too.”

Just then, the waitress came back with a fork.
 
Sherry shook her head.

“You no want?
 
I go special to kitchen for you.”

“I’m sorry,” Sherry said. “Could you pack it all up, please?”

The waitress looked as if we had just slapped her in the face, letting loose with a burst of outraged Chinese singsong.
  
Then she disappeared into the kitchen, reappearing with four paper take-out containers and a big spoon, which she ceremoniously dumped on our table.
  
“You pack,” she said.

*
   
*
   
*

The first few bars of
Linkin
Park
startled me awake.
 
I grabbed at my cell and flipped it open. “Detective Sirken?” I shouted into the phone.

“Mr. Jackman, this had better be on the level.”

“It is.
 
It is.”
 
I told her the whole story about finding that Ryan O’Donnell lived at 119 West 96
^th
, about his connection to the two of them, about how he had motive - Sherry told him she was in love with me.
 
How I had told him she was awake, so he was probably on his way that very moment to the
Bronx
nursing home to snuff her out before she could tell anyone that he was the one who hit her over the head with the African statue.
 
I gave her the address of the home.

“Hmmm,” Sirken said.
 
“You realize all this is speculation, don’t you, Mr. Jackman?
 
Still, the fact that Ryan O’Donnell has some connection to both victims is new to us.
 
Okay, thank you.
 
We’ll take it from here.”

“You gonna station someone at the nursing home to protect her?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t want me to meet you up there?”

“No.
 
I think we can handle it now.”

“Uh, okay.
 
Can I have your cell number?”

“No.”

The phone clicked off.

Well, I thought.
 
That’s that.

The next day I called in sick and went to visit Sherry.
 
The one good thing about nursing homes is that there aren’t any real visiting hours.
 
You can go anytime you want without anyone making a big deal of it.
 
I took the subway up as far as I could, and then walked about fifteen blocks.
 
This place was a bitch to get to.
 

I walked in.
 
No one even noticed I was there, except for one old codger who asked who I was and who I was going to see.
   
He wasn’t the type to work there; I figure he was just an old busybody resident.
 
After I had given him Sherry’s name, he waved me on, like a traffic policeman.
  
If that’s the type of security they have here, I thought, Ryan could get in and out with no one the wiser until someone walked into Sherry’s room and found her dead.

So, I walked on down the hall.
 
A few old people were shuffling around, some with canes, others under their own steam.
 
A couple of aides chatted in the corner.
 
I just walked on past them, rounded the corner and entered Sherry’s room.
 
She was in bed in her pajamas, groaning a bit.
 
As many times as I’ve asked them to dress her and move her to the chair, just so she gets some kind of exercise and change of scenery, they don’t do it.
  
I felt her diaper, and it was wet.

I went out to complain, but couldn’t find anyone to complain to.
 
I went to the head desk, and waited for fifteen minutes till the nurse came back, dressed as if she was about to leave.
 
I gave her hell about Sherry, and her wet diaper, and whether they were going to dress her and move her out of bed or what.
 
She said she had been there all night, and now she was goin’ home.
 
It was someone else’s job to get them up.
 
Anyway, she said, hands on her hips, they were super busy, because there were cops there all night, messin’ up the schedule and upsettin’ the residents.
 
Was I the person who done that?

“Well, yeah,” I said.
 
“I was protecting Miss Pollack.”

“Protectin’ her?
 
From what?”

“I can’t tell you what.
 
That’s police business.
 
But did Sherry have any visitors last night?”

“No, except if you mean them cops.
 
Who was you expectin’?”

“Forget it.
 
I guess he didn’t show up.
 
Maybe the cops scared him off.
 
Could you please get someone to change and dress Miss Pollack?”

“You’ll have to take it up with the next nurse. My shift’s over.”

So I gave hell to the day nurse.
 
Eventually, they washed Sherry and changed her and stuck her in a chair.
 
I sat there all day watching and waiting and daydreaming....

I could almost hear her high heels clicking up the steps to my apartment.
 
She’d come through the door in her little dress-for-success suit, classy and beautiful.
 
She’d kick off the heels at the door, leave the jacket in the hallway, the skirt on the bedroom floor: a kind of reverse treasure hunt, the clues on the floor leading up to the person who set them down.
 
I’d follow the trail and fuck her wherever I found her: the living room couch, the bathtub, a closet.
  
Oh, yeah.

I couldn’t believe my good luck.
  
How could someone so smart and sexy want to be with a shlub like me?
 
I was okay looking: tall enough but still gangly, with too little hair on top but a carpet on my back and arms.
 
I wasn’t brilliant or rich or famous or high society.
 
In fact, you might say I was fairly dumb and poor and unknown and blue-collar.
  
I only asked her
why
once, not wanting to rock a boat that was still in the water.
 
She gave me this sly smile and said, “I can’t resist you when you’re naughty.”
   

Sure she was lying there in a hospital-issue gown, eyes open but blank, hair in a tangle, but in my mind I saw her kicking off her high heels.
 
“Sherry, Sherry baby,” I sang.
 
“Sherry, can you come out tonight?”
  
At the sound, she turned her head toward me, but her eyes wouldn’t focus.
 
Maybe some other night....

I must have drifted off.
 
Then, suddenly, around six, Ryan showed up.
 
He stuck his head in the door, saw her sitting there and shouted, “Sherry!
 
You’re all right!” But she didn’t respond, of course.
 
He bounded in.
 
“Sherry?” he said.
 
No response.
 
He shook her slightly, and she opened her eyes.
  
“It’s me!
 
Ryan!” he shouted.
 
All of a sudden, he seemed to notice me in the corner.
 
“What’s going on? You said she was all right.”