April 1984
So, I said to myself, how about if the locus ceruleus gets burned to the ground because a burst of electricity – an epileptic seizure – hits it head on, like lightning striking a house? That made a lot of sense. But, if it’s a seizure that brings on all the damage, where does it come from, what makes it happen? Not to speak of how does a smoking, gutted locus ceruleus translate itself into a spur-of-the-moment suicide?
The way I began to figure it, we’re all born with a suicide center, only it’s equipped with a safety switch that is permanently in the “off” position. With almost everybody, the center has zero function all our lives, and dies the same time we do. But in some people – oftentimes blood relatives, which means they share some genes – there’s an electrical storm, a seizure, in the center. In all the excitement, the safety switch gets unlocked. The countdown starts right then for the index finger to pull the trigger, for the legs to take their last ever jump.
There was only one way to show if this theory of mine wasn’t just another pretty face. What I had to do was talk a suicide center into doing its specialty fire-swallowing act, then let the brain take care of the rest.
I still had some grant money for the Beethoven and Babe Ruth project. This meant I could cheat for a while, use the money to finance the suicide project instead. I knew there’d be hell to pay afterwards, when the Genius Foundation (no kidding, that’s what it’s called) found out I’d siphoned off their dough. Sort of like using the in-laws’ wedding present to buy a diamond bracelet for the girl you’re fucking on the side.
My lab was in the basement of the County. Not an elegant address, but enough out of the way to discourage drop-ins. I also had an office up on the neurosurgery floor of the hospital. That’s where I worked at my official job, holding the hands of the trainees. The grimy halls and weak lighting in the basement made you feel you were walking into an old-time coal mine. Inside, not too bad. In a little anteroom, Marian, my long-time devoted lab assistantreceptionist, had her desk. It was also a waiting area, with a few chairs lined up against the wall. Most afternoons her four children sat there. Too young to go home after school, and the County doesn’t pay enough to cover babysitters. The lab was good-sized, with an alcove up front that had plenty of room for the animal cages. That still left some space for the electrical equipment.
It didn’t take long to get going, starting off on the cheap: a hundred high-grade white rats, plus some variable voltage electrical stimulators. I didn’t even have to hire any extra personnel. Which was good, seeing as I didn’t want too many people knowing what I was up to. Marian could feed the rats and serve as an extra pair of hands.. No worry there.
Rats have a locus ceruleus, same as humans. But whether they have a suicide center was up for grabs when I started the experiment. The idea was to zap one or the other locus with enough electricity to set up a seizure, then see what happens.
Over the next couple of months, I tried all kinds of combinations. So much and so much voltage to one locus or another – or both – for each rat. But what if I came in one morning and found one of the rats dead? How would I know if it was just a rat thing, or that it killed itself? The Genius Foundation had to come up with even more money, so I could buy a video system for 24-hour surveillance of the rats. For a while, that didn’t pay off. They kept sitting around looking cheerful, eating up the feed, and not doing what they were supposed to do; namely, knock themselves off. I had to find a better way to spark the seizures.
Up in the OR, we’d been fiddling around with high-voltage lasers to loosen up scar tissue and stop the bleeding from tiny little vessels in the brain, the one you can’t get at with a clamp. The discharge from a laser comes in focused bursts, not all at once. That way the area where the beam hits doesn’t get damaged. Like staying in the hot sun all day long, versus ducking in and out of the shade. One’ll get you a hell of a sunburn; the other, a nice tan.
Louie Rosenkrantz is in charge of lasers at the County. If you need one, or the one you have goes bad, he’s your man. A balding beanpole in his thirties, he comes to work with a lunch pail, the kind little kids used to carry to school. Never left home, still lives with his mother. But when he’s working with lasers, he’s John Wayne and Einstein put together. I explained my problem to him and he came through like a champ. He made some changes in one of the lasers they used for eye surgery, and pretty soon I was in business. Not only did he lend me a machine, but he also pointed me in the right direction. Explained that the wavelength of the beam the laser sends out can be adjusted. He suggested I use different voltages and different wavelengths when I aimed the beam at the rats’ heads.
Pretty soon I had to buy another two hundred rats. This voltage, that frequency, to the right or left focus. The bookkeeping alone, what I gave to each rat, took a couple of hours a day. Marian had to work overtime just to feed the rats, water them and clean the cages. If anything good was going to happen, now was the time.
One morning, we found one of the rats dead. Blood on his fur, and a broken neck. Buying the TV camera turned out to be a good investment. The tape showed everything that happened. During the night, he stayed quiet. Until, all of a sudden, he started running full force at the bars of the cage. Kept banging his head against them. To me, it looked a lot like the amateur suicides. No warning; then deadly violence aimed inwards. I pulled out the records and checked animal number, voltage, and wavelength, and whether it was the right or left locus. My notes showed four hundred volts with a wavelength of 3904 Angstroms. That measurement put it in the range of ultraviolet light. The locus? The right one, just like the amateur suicides we’d worked on at the ME!
You wait a long time for something to happen, and when it finally does, you’re still surprised. Research has a way of biting you in the ass, so it’s only beginners who make the mistake of getting excited too soon. The first thing I did was remove the rat’s brain. No need for a big pizza sack. This time, a little Bloomies shopping bag was all I needed.
Murray came in for a lot of kidding from his staff when he scheduled an emergency MRI on the rat brain. Without waiting for the reading, as soon as Murray had finished, I rushed it over to the ME. Peter Bishop pretended it was a human brain I was bringing him; couldn’t understand why it was so small. “Maybe the owner of this,” his gloved right index finger pointing at the tiny brain lying before him, “visited a shrink just before dying?”
While Peter was dissecting and cutting the slices for the microscopic, I gave Murray a call to get the results of the MRI. He couldn’t come to the phone, but the message he sent through the secretary, “you’re right on the button,” said it all. That meant the rat’s right locus ceruleus must have had that peculiar mottled and gray look on the MRI, just like the amateur suicides. Much could still go wrong, but the message from Murray gave me a big lift. The MRI and the microscopics had gone hand-in-hand 100% of the time in the human suicides. So it stood to reason that it wouldn’t be any different in the rat. Sure enough, when the slides came back, the rat’s right locus showed the same destruction we’d seen in the ME cases. No question about it, that day’s results brought me a lot closer to proving what I’d figured to begin with: that an electrical fire in the right locus ceruleus set up a chain of events which ended up as an inside job. No forced entry. The victim knew his killer. Himself.
I knew what I had to do next. Shoot the laser beam, four hundred volts and wavelength 3904 Angstroms, at the right locus of another fifty rats. Just to double-check what we found in the first one.
Now that I was so close to figuring out what makes the suicide center tick, I had to do something about Louie’s laser. It was way too big, the size and weight of a sixteen-inch TV. Also, the probe, the business end that sends off the beam, was hard to maneuver. It had the heft of a Polish sausage. Wrestling with this cumbersome equipment and a squirming rat took up a lot of time. What I needed was a hand-held laser gun, like the ones they use to zap people in those intergalactic soap operas. I wanted the probe in place of the barrel, and the ultraviolet energy generated in what would be the handle of a conventional pistol. That way, I could hit whatever spot I was aiming at on the head of the rat from outside the cage, while it was sitting inside minding its own business.
Louie didn’t say yes, and he didn’t say no. He just said he’d get back to me. In the meantime, I continued the experiment with the fifty rats. No time off, except for some late-night sessions with my latest kinky-haired social worker, Eileen II, who always carried a camera around wherever she went. An old Rolleiflex, really small. It had to be, considering some of the nooks and crannies she got into before she shot off the flash. She took pictures before, during, and after. She picked out what she called “the best” and made a little album for me. Not the kind of collection you’d leave lying around on your coffee table…
I kept going to the weekly conferences, but didn’t have much to say. Just about getting some data together, and that I’d be making a progress report soon. Meanwhile, my landlord kept threatening me, the jerk. He’d found a crack in the outside wall of the building, next to my windows. Claimed the weight of my books was making the place tilt. He was already after me on account of the bookworm misunderstanding. So now he had two reasons to kvetch about me at Housing Court.
Forty-eight of my rats did what I expected. They threw themselves against the bars, anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks after getting hit with the laser. Also their MRIs and microscopics were exactly the same as the ones from the first rat and the amateur suicides from the ME; meaning I was right on the money in making the suicide center do its number. There were just two brains I couldn’t use for my statistics. They were too damaged from the strength the rats used in throwing their heads against the bars. But you gotta admit, a 96% success rate is not exactly chopped liver.
But the experiment wasn’t over yet. Now I had to make sure large animals did the same as my rats. Someday, I was going to make use of what I found out for the sake of people like Eva, innocent bystanders killed by a fire that went out of control. Learn to screen who’s at risk and check out the genetics. Medicines against seizures, tailored to hit just this one center? Gene transfer therapy? As soon as I found the time, I was going to get back to the pure science.
I’d been leaving him messages, off and on, for a couple of weeks. No answer. But he finally showed up at my lab one afternoon, carrying a shoebox. He apologized for not coming up with the gun I asked him for. The batteries he needed to power the laser wouldn’t fit into the grip. So he removed the guts of an old 35mm Nikon SLR – that’s how he found room for the ultra-high intensity rechargeable batteries, and the machinery which translated their energy into a laser beam. He fitted the laser beam generator into where the telescopic lens usually sits, but kept the viewfinder and the inner lens. That way I could focus where I wanted the beam to hit. Now I was getting ready to do my final testing. On primates.