"Levinson, Paul - Dr Phil D'Amato 02 - The Consciousness Plague 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Levinson Paul)
"A real eye-opener, isn't it?"
I hadn't heard McNair come back in the room. My head must have been in the book for fifteen minutes.
"Yeah," I agreed.
"So what do you make of his theory that people in Homer's time were not really self-aware didn't have the same sense of self that all of us now take for granted, as part of our humanity and writing, the alphabet, somehow changed that?" McNair asked, setting himself carefully back in his chair.
"Pretty far-fetched," I said. "I can buy that at some point in our human past, we didn't have complete consciousness we were more like, I don't know, chimps or apes. But I'd expect (hat state of mind or lack of it to have been a lot further back than Homer. And I don't see how just the process of reading could have changed that, and made us fully ... self-aware."
"Jaynes thinks that reading and writing silenced the internal voices the communication that went from one side of the brain to the other," McNair said. "And the result was our unified consciousness."
"Could writing have been that important?"
"Oh, I doubt it," McNair replied. "Not to mention that it's hard to fathom how writing or the alphabet could have been invented in the first place by people who lacked our level of self-awareness."
I nodded.
McNair went on. "But assuming that Jaynes might have been right about at least the first part of his theory though maybe his dating was off what would your favorite candidate be for breaking down the bicameral mind, and making us fully conscious?"
I considered. "Something physical, I don't know some kind of powerful natural radiation, maybe a new type of food, maybe a virus...."
"A virus," McNair repeated. "So you think illness somehow made us conscious, and now it's making us lose our memory?" He started coughing, then wheezing. Rhonda hurried in from the next room with an inhaler. I helped get it on McNair's face. He seemed OK. Then my cell phone rang.
It was Jenna. "They have a suspect in the Riverside case. There was an attempted assault in the park last night. The victim got away, and Dugan says they just picked someone up on her description. He says it's connected to the strangling. They want you on the red-eye back to New York tonight."
ED MONTI WAS waiting for me at Kennedy. My mind was still focused on the memory loss, but I'd have to put at least a little of that aside now for the more prosaic puzzles of murder. Multitasking the spirit of our age.
I shook Ed's hand. "So we can cross off the lesbian-lover angle now?" I asked.
"The lover, but maybe not the lesbian," Ed replied.
"The suspect's a woman?"
Ed nodded. "And the victim got a point-blank look at her."
He filled me in on the details in a cab back to One Police Plaza in Manhattan. Carol Michosky lived on West End Avenue, a block from Riverside Drive and the park and the scene of the Murphy murder. Michosky was twenty-three, blonde, and looked a lot like Murphy. Michosky was walking to her apartment building around seven P.M. last night, arms full with two packages of groceries she had just purchased on Broadway, a block over from West End, to the east. She had a feeling that someone was following her. We've found that often those feelings come from the victim's actually having caught a glimpse of the assailant. Michosky said that as she entered the courtyard of her building, the feeling that she was being followed grew stronger, overwhelming. She wheeled around and confronted a woman who apologized for startling Michosky, and asked her how to get to a nearby theater. Relieved, Michosky gave the woman directions, turned to go into her building then suddenly felt some rough garment around her neck, cutting off her air supply. She dropped her packages, struggled. She began to get dizzy, and sank to the ground. "She was sure she was about to die," Ed said. But with her vision hazy, she spotted a package of Reynold's aluminum wrap on the ground. She grabbed it, and jabbed it into what she thought was her attacker's midriff. The assailant cried out and released her. Michosky turned around and the assailant was gone.
"Is Michosky one hundred percent certain that the woman who startled her with the question about the theater was her assailant?" I asked.
"She says yes she got a quick look at her would-be strangler in the struggle," Ed replied. "But that's obviously a weak link. She's certain that her assailant the voice that cried out after the tinfoil jab was a woman. And Michosky gave a detailed description of the woman who startled her Michosky is an evening art student at the Fashion Institute of Technology did I tell you that? so she presumably has a pretty good eye for visual detail. A patrol car spotted a woman who fit the description, about two hours later. They took her in for questioning. She has no alibi. She admits that she was in the area, was thinking of going to a movie there, and may have asked one or two people for directions."
"She didn't actually go to any movie?" I asked. "She "
Ed rapped on the glass partition to get the cabbie's attention. "Do you think that next time we pull up to an intersection with a yellow light, you could try going through it rather than stopping? We're in a little bit of a hurry here."
Ed turned to me, rolled his eyes. "The suspect says no about the movie the weather was so nice, she decided instead to just keep walking around."
"It was nice here last night?" Couldn't have been as nice as in California, I thought.
"Oh yeah, a real lovely evening for this time of year almost balmy," Ed said.
"Anyone examine her midriff for abrasions or black-and-blue marks?" I asked.
"Yeah, but she's clean there," Ed replied. "We don't know, of course, how hard Michosky jabbed her."
I nodded. "And whether there are any marks would also depend on what kind clothing she had on how many layers, how loose-fitting. Though if it was warm, she likely wouldn't have been wearing anything too heavy."
Our cab pulled up to One Police Plaza. "They're bringing Michosky in for a lineup in about half an hour." Ed looked at his watch. "Dugan says you can use the bathroom off his office to freshen up."
"Okay," I said. "This seems more or less cut-and-dried no worse than the usual complications in seeing if we have a true perp in hand. Why do you think they yanked me back here from California?"
"They were jealous?" Ed asked, with a laugh.
I looked at him.
"All right, here's a better answer: They're a little concerned with this memory business. You're the resident expert on that. They want to make sure it doesn't happen again and mess up this case assuming that we can see it coming this time and can do something to prevent it."
THE LINEUP WAS ready ninety minutes later. It consisted of five women, in their midto late twenties. One was Claudia Gonzales. Three others were also policewomen. The fifth was the suspect Sharalee Boland, a brunette, also in her late twenties. She had no record.
Dugan walked in, along with DA Tomahawk, and a few of the detectives who were investigating the case.
"Hello, Elaine." I smiled at her and Dugan.
Elaine nodded.
"Thanks for coming back on such short notice," Dugan told me. "The commissioner asked me to take a special interest in this case. No one likes college-girl assaults they're bad for the city's reputation. We'll talk about what you learned in California later."
"Sure," I said.
"Are we ready to get started?" Elaine asked.
"We're waiting for Boland's attorney," Dugan began, just as a man about forty in a blue Armani suit walked through the door.
"Albert Everett, attorney for the defense," he said with his patented panache. Everett was one of the best defense attorneys in town.
"Good to see that Ms. Boland is so well represented," Elaine said drily. But she forced a smile to Everett.
"Her father is himself an eminent copyright attorney," Everett replied. "We've been friends for years."
"Didn't know that," Elaine said.
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