‘Everything happens for a reason,’ said Saul, holding the silver straw delicately between his thumb and forefinger, ‘but unfortunately, when it really matters, we don’t know what the reason is.’
Saul had always spoken rapidly, but on that Monday morning he was sprinting to the next full stop like an athlete trying to break a record.
‘For instance, the exact nature of the correlation between electro-chemical activity in the brain and the experience of being conscious is entirely obscure, and since everything we know depends on being conscious, the description we give of reality, however coherent it seems, hangs over an abyss.’
He leant down and sniffed up the softly gleaming powder; perfect cocaine with the texture of crushed pearls, its curving lines like claw marks across the glass surface of a silver-framed photograph of Barry Goldwater. All the presidential candidates, Democrat and Republican, going back to Nixon’s failed contest against JFK in 1960, had given Hunter’s father signed photographs. He hadn’t had to wait for Wall Street to teach him about hedging his bets, he just used to totter into the library and read all the warm messages inscribed to his father by America’s bitterest rivals.
‘An abyss …’ Saul repeated. ‘God, this stuff is really good … Where was I? Oh, yeah, I mean, experience accuses science of being reductionist and authoritarian, while science dismisses experience as subjective, anecdotal and self-deceived. We have an absurd situation where the first-person narrative of experience and the third-person narrative of experiment shout insults at each other from either side of an explanatory gap, that huge, huge explanatory gap.’
He threw his arms apart to give Hunter some idea of just how huge this explanatory gap was, and then sank back into his creaking wicker chair, puffed out his cheeks and stared from the rosewood deck at the interlocking golden hills of Apocalypse Now, Hunter’s ranch in Big Sur, sloping steeply down to the silent Pacific. Out at sea a fog bank drifted towards the shore, swallowing the lazy glitter of the swell, but however thick the fog grew, Hunter knew that it would never reach the house, only generate a sea of hoary mist beneath his feet.
‘Looking at this view,’ said Hunter, ‘I’m having a complex experience of perceptions, reflections and memories. What I’m not experiencing is neurons firing, even though none of this could take place without firing neurons—’
‘It’s a tormenting question,’ Saul interrupted. ‘I mean, what is the matrix that transforms one into the other? I’m a materialist, don’t get me wrong—’
‘I’m pleased to hear that,’ said Hunter. ‘Maybe developing Brainwaves can help reduce your torment.’
‘Sure,’ said Saul, ‘but materialism still has a lot of explaining to do, not just about consciousness but about a ton of other things as well …’ He trailed off, overwhelmed by pleasure. ‘God, I feel so high without being wired. Can I buy some of this off you? Sorry, maybe that was inappropriate.’
‘It was,’ Hunter confirmed.
‘Are we cool?’ said Saul nervously.
‘Well, one of us is cool and the other isn’t,’ said Hunter, with a guffaw.
One thing Saul Prokosh was not and never would be was cool. He and Hunter hadn’t really been friends at Princeton, but at least Hunter never gratuitously insulted him, unlike some of their more lock-jawed contemporaries whose grandfathers still sighed longingly at the memory of the golden days when Jews were not admitted to the best hotels in New York and Palm Beach. Saul was now The Lafayette Smith and Bathsheba Smith Professor of Chemical Engineering, Artificial Intelligence and The Realisation of Human Potential at The California Institute of Technology, as it said on his unusually large business card. Currently, he was scanning the brains of people in various allegedly desirable states of mind in order to reconstruct those states in other volunteers, using trans-cranial magnetic stimulation. It was proving fiendishly difficult to reverse engineer these correspondences and replicate the effects in the minds of others, who seemed set on having their own thoughts, even when the scans of their brains, after trans-cranial stimulation, showed many similarities to the original neuroimaging. There were no completely clear results up to now, but Hunter had been so impressed by the addictive potential of this new technology that he impulsively offered to make Saul a Senior Vice-President of Digitas and put him in charge of Brainwaves and New Projects.
‘Maybe I’m a visionary,’ said Hunter, texting ‘Wagyu Ragu’ in answer to his cook’s lunch suggestions, ‘or maybe I’m suffering from survivor’s guilt, but I’ve decided that it’s time to give something back. Perhaps “back” isn’t exactly the right word. I’m not talking about refunding the investors who bought my hedge fund for $1.6 billion a few weeks before the stock price tanked; and I’m not giving the five hundred former employees of Midas their jobs back.’
‘It sounds like “back” is definitely not the right word,’ said Saul, looking longingly at Barry Goldwater.
‘In any case,’ said Hunter, ‘I want our products, Brainwaves, YouGenetics, and all the other great ideas we have, to be based on intellectual property that makes a fundamental contribution and wins all the science Nobels across the board.’
‘We gotta leave them some of the prizes,’ said Saul, like a lawyer pleading for clemency.
‘They can have Peace and Literature,’ said Hunter.
For some reason, the two men just cracked up and couldn’t stop laughing.
‘Peace and Literature,’ said Saul, trying to control himself. ‘Why is that so funny?’
‘We’re stoned,’ said Hunter.
‘I know, but it’s still just inherently …’ He couldn’t go on, except to howl ‘Peace and Literature’ one more time.
‘You’ve pretty much nailed the Focus and Relax programs,’ said Hunter, ‘but we’ve gotta do more work on the Bliss algorithm and then, once we’ve got a global craze on our hands, we’ll release the Nirvana helmet.’
‘Totally,’ said Saul. ‘In fact, I should head back to Pasadena; we’re scanning Matthieu Ricard’s love, joy and compassion this afternoon.’
‘The French lama—’ said Hunter.
‘Right,’ said Saul. ‘This guy is phenomenal. You could waterboard him and his vital signs wouldn’t shift, he’s so deep in the Alpha State.’
‘Here, have one for the road,’ said Hunter, handing Saul a signed photograph of Ronald Reagan on which he had been chopping a couple of long lines. ‘We shouldn’t really have carried our weekend into Monday morning, but when you’re brainstorming, you’re brainstorming.’
‘Definitely. Brainstorming,’ said Saul, snuffling up one of Ronald Reagan’s trouser legs.
‘You’d better go scan your lama. I’ve gotta make a call to Lucy Russell, the new head of Digitas in London.’
‘How’s she working out?’
‘We’ll see, but you know me – easily bored – and I’m not bored by her. Most people are falling over to agree with me, but she’s not afraid to point out if I’ve missed a beat,’ said Hunter, snorting his way up Reagan’s red tie, across his creased and grinning face and into his incongruously inky hair.
The two men parted with back-slapping hugs and Saul set off on the six-mile drive from Hunter’s ranch down to the meandering ribbon of road along the coast.
Left alone, Hunter returned indoors and after cleaning the photos with screen wipes, hung Senator Goldwater and President Reagan back on their hooks against the oak-panelled walls of his magnificent study, which looked entirely traditional, except that two of the walls formed an arrow head of thick glass pointing out to sea, making the masculine gravitas of the room seem to float in air and light. He was fired up and ready to talk to Lucy. The call was scheduled for fifteen minutes’ time. He took up his position in a red leather chair opposite the gleaming scabbard of a priceless samurai sword, cradled among the bookshelves on the other side of the room.
Saul and Lucy and the rest of the team were his consiglieri as he laid claim to the crucial neighbourhood of human endeavour known as science, so often neglected by the billionaire community in favour of art, animals, opera, Mars, orphans and famous diseases. It was hard to make a splash when Bill Gates already had malaria and the Metropolitan Museum was growing more philanthropic wings than a mutant fruit fly, but he had endowed a Foundation devoted to finding scientific solutions to the world’s manifold problems. The trouble was that whenever he came across a good idea it somehow ended up in Digitas. Still, for a man as rich as him to show his face in society without a Foundation would be like a construction worker not having a hard hat on a building site. At the dinner party where he had met Lucy, he had mentioned his Foundation, quite casually, only to have her say, ‘To a foreign eye, America has so much philanthropy and so little charity. Most people have to kill themselves to prove that they deserve ordinary kindness, while a tiny group of people never stop boasting about how generous they are – as long as it’s tax-deductible.’ That’s when he’d decided to hire her.
Eight minutes left and he was beginning to feel the encroachment of that old catastrophe: comedown. He glanced up at Jimmy Carter (it was his turn) but realised it was too late to organise himself and he would screw up the call. Punctuality and control mattered to him immensely – perhaps because part of him was so out of control. He had been living this way since he was a teenager; now only in occasional bursts, but with the threat always there in the background. When he had first become vaguely aware of Saul at Princeton, Hunter invariably wrote his essays through the night, just before they were due. The exchange rate was about twenty lines of writing for one line of coke; writing that started out with declamatory confidence and degenerated into convoluted confusion. He must stop. It was no way to carry on for a man in his late forties, but despite all the therapy, there was something he couldn’t reach, a bomb he hadn’t disposed of, a part of him that wanted to smash everything up. He thought of using these last painful minutes to check the stock market on his phone, or check the schedule Jade emailed him each morning, but instead he glazed over, looking bleakly at the perfection of his surroundings until the digits on his clock finally flicked to the right number. He punched his fist into the palm of his other hand and brought himself back before he tapped Lucy’s number.
‘Lucy! How are you doing?’
‘Hi, Hunter! I’m loving your flat. Are you looking forward to your visit?’
‘I can’t say I’m looking forward to it,’ said Hunter, ‘except for seeing you and the great schedule you’ve lined up. I spent twelve years on those damp islands, until I managed to graduate from Westminster to Princeton. Returning to the States was like going to a Super Bowl game after visiting your grandmother in her twilight home. We moved to London when I was six. When my father gave me my first five-pound note, I thought they’d named the currency after my family – five pounds Sterling. Shrinks always love that: early signs of narcissistic grandiosity.’
‘You’ve still got a little bit of that in you,’ said Lucy, tentatively exploring the boundaries of a new relationship.
Now that he was on the call, Hunter could hear the coke speaking through him, but there was nothing he could do to stop it.
‘You know, Lucy,’ he said, ‘the world is divided between the mediocrity of committees, the paralysis of checks and balances, and the merciful megalomania of the rich. Everybody else is just shouting in a bell jar while the air gets sucked out – however close you lean in you can’t make out what they’re saying: “I’m sorry, what was that? I can’t hear you!” Historical “process” is for human debris, drifting on the tides of fashion and fate. I believe in extraordinary individuals, Lucy; I believe in game-changers and I hope you’re one of them, because that’s the only type of individual I want working on my team. So, what have you got for me?’
‘I’ve set up all the meetings you were interested in,’ said Lucy, ‘with the heads of most of the Oxford science departments. The Psychiatry department have a promising psychotherapeutic virtual reality program called Avatar, which apparently is helping people with schizophrenia—’
‘I’m not interested in schizophrenia,’ Hunter interrupted her. ‘It only affects one per cent of the population and most of them are poor.’
‘Most of any population is poor.’
‘You should see my address book!’ said Hunter.
‘I can’t wait,’ said Lucy impatiently.
‘The higher your socio-economic status,’ said Hunter, ‘the more likely you are to be diagnosed with “bipolar disorder” than with “schizophrenia”, while exhibiting the exact same psychotic symptoms. Not that I’m hostile to Avatar and a human-machine synthesis: internet contact lenses, the world’s knowledge in just one blink. Forget verbal dictation, what about thought dictation? Straight from the synapses on to the screen, we’ve got a sensational start-up that’s making real progress with that, we’re calling it SignApps – patent pending. Anyway, your schizophrenia thing is too specialised, but if it works for bipolarity, we could look into it.’
‘Everything in science is too specialised,’ said Lucy. ‘People assume that scientists are intellectuals, but very few of them have an overview, or a critical approach to their methodologies, they’re just too busy securing funding or tenure or zapping individual cells in the Caenorhabditis elegans nematode worm with laser beams – this is a one-millimetre worm, so we’re talking about precision work – looking for that single-cell death-inhibitor.’
‘A single-cell death-inhibitor – do you know the guy in charge of that research? I want to meet him. Get it on the schedule.’
‘What time shall I meet you?’ asked Lucy, with strenuous neutrality.
‘The plane lands at Farnborough at seven a.m. – isn’t it strange the way people more often say “my plane lands” when they’ve rented a seat on a commercial flight and more often say “the plane lands” when they own it?’
‘Amazing,’ Lucy confirmed.
‘Meet me there. The driver can pick you up on the way.’
Before Lucy could say anything, she realised that Hunter had ended the call.
‘What a wanker,’ she said, chucking the phone on to the cushion beside her – on to Hunter’s cushion. Staying in his flat made her anger more inhibited and more compelling at the same time. Her pulse was throbbing in her neck and wrists. He had been so seductive during the recruitment period, making her feel that her science background would be put to better use, that she would be bringing all sorts of benefits to the world and, of course, by offering to double her income. That combination, and the severance package, if she were dismissed for any non-criminal reason, made her ignore all the warnings she heard about Hunter’s ‘colourful’ past and his ‘explosive’ character. Now she was living under the tyranny of his whims and his threats … Oh, Christ, it was happening again.
The signs were subtle for the moment, but she knew with absolute certainty that she was starting to have another panic attack. She managed to sit down next to her discarded phone just as the heaviness took over. Gravity seemed to have suddenly been multiplied in one place, dragging her attention to the right side of her body while the rest of her looked on helplessly from above, like a mother watching her child screaming to be released from the adhesive wall of the spinning barrel in a fun fair. Then the spasms came, slowly at first, but picking up pace as the attack reached its peak. Midway through, she felt an alien effervescence rushing down the right side of her body, as if a soda syphon had been discharged into her lower back. It was over in a minute, but Lucy was left feeling dazed, with an enfeebled and shaky leg and a foot that remained numb for several minutes.
If this was a panic attack, thought Lucy, it was really working. She was in a total fucking panic. As soon as she had recovered enough, she rang her kind, clever doctor friend, Ash, who immediately offered to come over. He ran some tests, making her push her legs against his hands, and also asking her to walk in a straight line, and to stand on one leg at a time. Lucy succeeded in all these tasks and her reflexes responded to his rubber hammer in the expected way.
‘Listen, it’s almost certainly all the stress you’ve been under,’ said Ash, ‘but, since the attacks keep showing up in the same place, I’m going to call in a favour from a neurologist I know and see if we can get you an MRI tomorrow, in case there’s any nerve damage affecting your leg. I’ll give you a Zopiclone to make sure you get a good night’s rest.’
After Ash had reassured her, Lucy felt much better and since she almost never used sleeping pills, she soon fell into a deep, long sleep.