Open and Shut

“Are you there?” She yells impatiently. “God-“ She’s already late and this is getting irritating “It’s me, damn it!” She stands there with her feet planted to the road right through her old boots. ‘I knew that fucker wouldn’t show up’, she thinks, looking around.

It’s a grey day made to look bright only in contrast with her black-on-black outfit. Same shirt, different day. She has business to attend to across town. She slowly turns around looking down each of the four roads. She doubts she’ll see anyone coming even on these straight aways. She thinks of the cigarette that she would have been smoking in this situation a few years back. It’s less poetic without the prop. This is preposterous. ‘Early is on time, on time is late, and late is unacceptable.’ She thinks. This is especially true when you are the one that asked for the meeting.

This is it, she’s leaving. She’s got no time to play devil’s advocate; she’s due in court. She turns up her music, spins on her heel, and heads to her car. She’s parked it off to the side, half in the grass facing the intersection. The silver antique had a touch of menace that you can’t quite put your finger on. This is for the best, if you put a finger on it, she’d break it.

Her long NY stride complements her resting bitch face. A smile that she can feel, but that no one would notice creeps over her mouth and slithers away as she reaches the door to her ‘57 Morris Minor Saloon. It’s a strange antique that you might hear about but will never get a chance to see. As her fingers grasp the handle a car comes out of nowhere and parks across the road from her. She’s got more than half a mind to get in and leave, but the other half wants to see what will happen. This meeting is a rather odd request, frankly a strange location, and he was…late. Still, curiosity prevails. He opens his driver’s side door and gets out quickly, he seems to have left his usual bravado in his other coat.

He opens his mouth to apologize but she dismisses it with a wave of her hand before he can utter a wasted word. She walks around to the front of the Morris and leans against the hood in a way that ensures you won’t be tempted to join her. Black nails on silver paint tap like they are being driven down by a hammer. She looks up at him as he approaches, stopping just out of arms reach. Her head cocks to the side and her face says, ‘get on with it’. Dust covers his previously shined shoes and the undercarriage of his black ’17 300. This is why you get a car the color of dirt she muses, Morris always looks clean.

The truth is Morris always looks clean because Morris always stays clean. Her nails don’t make a dent anymore than the dust settles on the car. There’s something about Morris that no one ever asks about because they wish it wasn’t there. Something is protecting it, something stronger than scotch guard. It’s not refurbished; everything is stock. Scratch that, its original, eternal. It is an urban legend in its own right, its reputation is the victim of conformation bias in the best possible way.

The ageless woman leaning against the car is not pleased that her time is being wasted, even though she has been untouched by time as long as he has known her. It certainly hasn’t noticed her since ’57, the year Morris was ‘born’. He thinks of the car as being born because he can’t come up with a better word for it.

He tries to shake of the eerie musings about the old Saloon and focuses instead on the woman in black. This request is going to cost him more than he can imagine. He knows that asking is a risk in and of itself, but he’s in a bind, and he’s out of time. She exists as a walking anachronism.

He has limits that he cannot cross that she does not share. She has a power that hadn’t existed when he came to being. It is a power that he has given her. To be fair, he gave it to everyone to take, to use to shape…but so few had. The majority take it for granted, and even think they are using it, while they cast it aside, nonetheless.

He waves his hand and a cigarette appears in her mouth, half smoked. She takes it out. ‘I quit.’ And puts it out in the gravel. ‘Yes, but you still wanted to do that.’ Says the man late to the meeting. He’s not wrong.

The clock is ticking. Death is on the horizon. There is only one thing that the woman in black wants, and he knows it. A manilla folder is placed in her outstretched hand. Looking down she sees a picture of a man with a bewildered look on his face; confused yet angry. Behind the image is a good-sized stack of papers. She thumbs through the story of his life. Her face is unreadable, lacking emotion, even as the pictures come into view.

“What haven’t you done?” She asks him without quite looking his way. “Nothing good.” He responds, alluding to his current predicament. He had made a deal without doing his due diligence, and now he had to turn to…her.

She looks down at the bloodbath in her hands. Hands she has kept clean for a long time. Now she stands in the dust looking at the file of a killer. His bio reads like a VCR manual, until three years ago when his demeanor started to change. The man seems to have gone through more than the traditional ‘mid-life crisis’. His behavior seems to have begun to devolve.

It started with little things, most having been pointed out only after hindsight became 20/20 and the damage was done. There were out of character comments followed closely by petty theft. Then the massage parlors started. Hookers followed shortly behind. Then there was the divorce. Once upon a time you’d have wondered if he was out of his mind. You didn’t need to wonder any more, not now.

The first crime scene photo, accompanied by a school picture, was that of a 12 yo girl. She lay on the floor in her frog nightgown, a pool of blood encircles her head. Her underwear were showing, pulled down but not removed.

She could see it coming but she still gave every page a cursory glance. In a blaze of irony, the page directly before the scans in the file said that he was competent to stand trial. It didn’t sit right with her. The gradual changes happened slowly as his character eroded. She could already see his imaging films without even looking, so she didn’t.

“Do you want him, or do you want him out?” he was known for punishing the damned unless they were of use to him. She had left the imaging under the papers because she already knew, but if she actually saw it, he would know it too.

So, he wants the man free. The bloody handprints, the broken glass of the shattered lamp, the underwear. The woman at the foot of the stairs pushed down as she tried to run to her daughter’s aid. One bloody old banister support was broken and had followed her to the tile floor below. It seems that she had grabbed it hoping to stop her fall, but it was too old to hold.

‘He wants the man out’ Freedom for an accused killer, a rape/lust killer the file accused. So, she smiled. She had a secret, the man’s vanity would mask the truth behind her smile. He has always suspected that she liked to take a trip on the dark side here and there, he attributes her change in demeanor to the only one that he is familiar with. Fun and power…

“W-hell, buttercup.” She says, she’d never been much for names even if she knew them. If you’re not Rumpelstiltskin, she couldn’t care less. “This is no small game.” As far as he knows she’s going to pull magic out of her newsboy hat, but her magic comes from a place a little lower. “I will play, quid pro quo.” She closes the file and raises her eyebrows at him like he is going to pay dearly, and she’s going to enjoy it. “I do you a solid…” She said. “I do you a solid.” the man with the black 300 said it back. She knew he didn’t like it, that’s why she always made him say it, even though they both new the rules by heart. This was a ritual, a tradition.

She continues leaning against her car and the man walks away kicking up dust. He wouldn’t always be so dirty if he would just pick up his feet as he walks. Shambling man lowers himself into his vehicle, he knows that his plan can move forward. He starts his car and rolls away, erratically kicking up dust.

She slides down the front hood and walks over to the driver side door. Now that he’s out of sight, she is free to see the pictures she had left out of her ‘minds eye’. The pictures that told the whole story. They had been included to make the file look like it had been brought together with diligence and all bases were covered. There was no medical expert listed to complement the brain imaging that seems to have been tucked in as an afterthought. This is a ‘miscarriage of justice’ level oversight. His current behavior did not fit the type he had historically been, and he had a growing list of personality changes over the last 3 years. Many may have overlooked these changes, but this is what she looked for. She inhales slowly taking out the scans and flipping through them like a magazine you are skimming to pass the time in the check out line.

They read like a familiar book, you know what is going to happen, and yet you keep reading because this is the good part. There it was, just as she expected, Clivus chordoma; a bone tumor that pressed on the optic chiasm causing his recent vision issues. The pituitary, OFC, and hypothalamus were all also compressed. If you are in the know, then you know that this was a ‘grow your own pedophile’ starter kit if she had ever seen one, and she had. She’d seen three to be precise.

The truth is sitting right there in black and white, and backlit for scrutiny. The tumor cast its influence on the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) which is in the prefrontal region of the brain above the eyes, adjacent to the optic chiasm where visual information from each eye’s optic nerve traversed the optic chiasm and proceeded to the brain along the optic tract. The OFC was considered one of the great seats of executive function in the brain. It ascribed value to choices, it quelled your impulses, it allowed for flexibility when making a choice, it tempered aggressive responses, and it allowed for prosocial behavior and attentional switching.

Many of the impulses that are moderated in the OFC come from evolutionarily older drives. Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn, Feed and Fornicate are generally implicated, though sometimes the names differ depending on the field and specialty of the researchers. This string of ‘F’’s is under the purview of the hypothalamus,

The impulses of the hypothalamus grow stronger when not properly balanced and eventually the frontal cortices may give in. They can ‘tire’ after all of this response inhibition and then these underlying drives come forward. Let’s take a look at a modern American guy who has been socialized in the normal manner. He knows that it is inappropriate to sexualize a minor, however evolutionarily speaking, this female individual is displaying secondary sexual characteristics. He can know it is wrong and try to distract himself other ways including hookers and child porn, but eventually that young woman is going to be available at a time when no one is looking. The male may have been trying to avoid this issue for a long time and has finally rationalized doing it. Or perhaps it just finally bursts forth.

This man had compromised response inhibition and had also given away to aggression. It turned out that when he approached his stepdaughter and tried to go too far she pushed him away and jumped off the bed. He grabbed her leg to stop her, realizing that this could be trouble. And it was trouble. She fell forward and hit her head on the corner of her wooden nightstand. The crack made him cringe, but the light sucking sound emanating from the hole in the side of her head was worse yet.

At this point he was reeling over what had happened. He had been her father for most of her life, having married her mother and adopted her eight years prior. He was collapsed on the floor when his wife rounded the corner and began screaming. ‘Oh my god!’ She shrieked and stumbled back from the doorway, “I’m calling 911! What happened, Don?” The operator answers as she asks him again.

Don pulls himself up from the floor and begins toward his wife, tears streaming down his face, his forgotten pants around his ankles.

“Stay away from me!” She stumbles back through the doorway. “Get away from me!” She brandishes the phone like a weapon.

The operator has called in an emergency. The police and EMTs are on the way. She heard the thumping down the stairs, the separate clatter of the phone no-longer in the caller’s hand. The worst thud, was the last. It happened just in time to hear the police at the door. If only she had been a littler faster.

This is when the cops and EMTs came in, the pictures she held were taken still later. Now here we have a likely murderer and rapist in 2D right before her, and she has been tasked to set him free. This is one of those rare situations in which a person would weigh the pros and cons. She’s basically been asked to retrieve this man by the devil himself. Why did he need him? Why was he so important? Was it something else entirely? Perhaps this man had to go free so that the devil could get access to his real target?

Today she had court; speaking the truth would make her the devil’s advocate. She stops by the bathroom before entering the courtroom, just to be sure she looks passable. She took a seat on the bench outside the courtroom. It wasn’t long before she was called in to testify.

The devil wanted the man who was arrested for these crimes to be free. That was just fine. But he doesn’t know how she is going to do it. She follows the court traditions and promises not to lie. The conversation moves forward, and she reiterates what the jury has already heard from those who came before her.

Finally, with a question placed at the end to extort the ‘recency effect’ for all it could give, she was asked about the subject’s brain. The other side had brought this upon themselves when they introduced neuroscience to the court. They had a recent graduate looking to impress his family while home for x-mas by bragging about being an expert witness on a murder case. She would now prove that he wasn’t.

She pulled up her good old black and greys and hung them onto a vertical light board used to show x-rays during the legal proceedings. She told the story of the brain regions involved in the incident, she pointed them out, making sure they note the main locations and features of the control brain. Then right next to it, she hangs the brain of the accused. “What do you see?” The jury was looking back and forth at each other when one hand raised, tentatively. She looked to the man and nodded. He pointed to the center of the second picture. “That shouldn’t be there, should it?” He asked, a little nervous to speak in court. “No, it shouldn’t, you’re absolutely right.”

She explained the Clivus chordoma and how the pressure it put on the brain as it grew interrupted the normal neurological processes from impulse control, to violence, to stealing post-cards at the gas station. How it got worse and harder to control, and how the inescapable thoughts moved to his own daughter and not a blurred face on a screen.

After explaining how terrifying and painful it would be to suddenly wake up with these drives controlling you no matter how hard you tried to keep them inside the air in the room changed.

The accused became the first victim. A victim of biology, genetics, and the role of the dice. The jury-elect read their decision. The man would be treated. He would be evaluated. If all was well, he would be free. He would go back to that house alone. The jury said, ‘time served’.

There you have it. She set him free. Just as she was asked. She also freed him from being of use, the man pardoned was guilty the one that left the hospital was innocent. Or was he? Being unable to stop these behaviors proves that they were hiding there all along, doesn’t it?