The Chemistry of Death

AUTHOR’S NOTES

Sometimes it’s tough to tell what’s fact and what’s fiction in Joe Tesla’s world. I thought I’d clear that up for you here.

The saddest fact in the book is the statistic that Vivian tosses off early on: someone dies every week in the subway. According to The Atlantic around fifty people die every year in the New York City subways. Even without Ziggy, too many people jump or fall in front of the trains.

When Ziggy talks about his apprenticeship with a chemist who researched and invented many mind-altering chemicals, it sounds too crazy to be true, but there was a chemist named Alexander Shulgin who did just that. He created and tested more than two hundred different mind-altering compounds and was known as the “godfather of psychedelics.” The drug Algea exists only, hopefully, in Ziggy’s mind.

Joe’s research in brain mapping is cutting edge, but it’s not beyond the limits of what’s going on today. I based the giant brain in his office on the glass brain used to model brain activity by Neuroscape Labs. They even have a video on their web site of an actual “glass brain” thinking.

I did fudge a little bit on the thought-controlled wheelchair, but only a little. Thought-controlled wheelchairs do exist. Here’s a video of one that works, complete with cap like in the book. But, as the video states, the user has to spend time training the device to his or her own brainwaves, so it wouldn’t work if Joe just picked it up off the floor and put it on.

Research has shown that serial killers do have different brain activity than non-serial killers, although it also shows that serial killers are both born and made — that is, they have a genetic predisposition to be killers, but it is only triggered if they have traumatic experiences in their early lives. I discovered this while reading about James Fallon, a mild-mannered psychologist who was studying the brain scans of serial killers and discovered that one of the scans of the control group was very similar to those killers. When he looked it up, he discovered that particular brain was his own.

I used as many real locations in the book as I could. Joe’s office isn’t in Grand Central yet, but I called the real estate manager and he said that they would indeed rent him one should he come along with enough cash when there was a vacancy. I guess I’ll leave that one up to Joe. Other than that, Grand Central Terminal does have a secret door in the middle of the clock. They say it leads to a storage room, and not a secret elevator, but isn’t that what they would have to say?

Joe plays tennis at the real Vanderbilt Tennis and Fitness Club in Grand Central, and he could easily get there without going outside. Likewise, the Campbell Apartment and the Grand Hyatt are within Joe’s inside world.

If you ever visit them, take a picture for me!