“But… Julie was always special,” Kevin began again, not sure exactly where to lead Nordstrom, yet aware that now—for the moment—he could do it. “Julie was one of a kind. I can see that… anyone would hate to lose her.”
Kevin hated exhuming Julie and exposing her—and himself—to this particular postmortem.
“Beautiful,” Nordstrom crooned to the photo. “Beautiful.”
Kevin nodded. Julie had once been beautiful to him, too, and sometimes silence makes the best crowbar.
Nordstrom continued to stroke the ragged white lines his fist had etched into the photograph. Kevin abstracted himself from the sight. Julie… maybe Dr. Cross had been right to call her death the turning point in Kevin’s life, his career. But Kevin knew that Julie was dead. He knew the difference between memory and reality. Nordstrom didn’t seem to—or care.
“You better get used to me having this, holding this.” Nordstrom brandished the photo again. “You don’t understand yet, do you, Blake? I’m the government’s most useful headhunter. I have total discretion to pry into any corner of your life that intrigues me, to probe every nook and cranny of your mind. I can make any disposition of your body that I deem necessary, including pumping you so full of my magic potions you would babble your soul to me for a season pass to the Buffalo Bills.”
“Truth serums are a lie,” Kevin said calmly. “You know that. They rely on environmental factors as much as any inherent power. They hang on the gullibility of the subject, the skill of the questioner. Sure, they knock inhibitions for a loop, but I know that it’s believing that truth serums work that makes victims vulnerable. It’s hard to hoodwink an educated consumer, Nordstrom.”
“Still, you’d find it… unpleasant to be out of control, to know that I was rummaging around in your subconscious.” Nordstrom elevated the photo of Julie. “Still beautiful, isn’t she?”
Wrinkles radiated through the paper, making it look as if glass had shattered across the photographic face. Kevin no longer considered Julie’s emaciated ballerina’s look beautiful, but a badge of pain and deprivation, of the distorted push for perfection that had driven Julie to the slow, dying fall of anorexia nervosa.
“Yes,” he told Nordstrom, keeping his eyes steady, “she was beautiful.” Then it hit him, the really wacko thing about Nordstrom’s fixation on Julie—not that it existed, but that it existed still. “Eric, what was Julie to you? What is she to you?”
“She is…” Nordstrom’s eyes radiated not lust, not even love beyond living with, but ingrown obsession. “—mine now, as she was never yours. You threw her away, all of you. I kept her. I was even the last to see her.”
“You? The hospital didn’t allow any visitors at the end, except her parents and brother. And me.”
“I didn’t see her there. It… irritated me, Julie sick and lying there, and me not allowed to see her; Julie literally shrinking and me not seeing it. The last I’d seen of Julie had been that fall—on campus—running across it, her pink dancing tights showing between her boots and her skirt hem. Julie swathed in scarves and jackets and thick wool skirts so I couldn’t see her. And all the time, shrinking, dwindling, melting—”
“A lot of us didn’t see it at first,” Kevin interjected roughly. “Is that it? So you blame yourself, Eric, for not noticing Julie’s illness, for not being able to help her? That’s very understandable—”
“Oh, if I had noticed… I would have been her dresser.” Nordstrom’s eyes grew dreamy. “I would have been content to stand in the wings and watch her on stage, pale tights clinging to every bone and hollow, the satin bodice so flat and stiff, her arms ladders of light—baby pink spotlights above—and the deep shadows, her face more dark with night than bright. Her eyes, lost. I would have waited in the wings, counting the vertebrae on her back as they etched sharper and sharper into the shadow. I would have waited in the shadows for her to sink into shadow, until her skin had worn as thin as her toe shoes, thinner than a withered leaf in the fall, that fall, and I would touch it and find my fingertips on the bone…”
“Did you love Julie, Eric, or did you—do you—love death?”
“Julie is death, Kevin.” Tears glazed Nordstrom’s eyes.
Kevin sat silent. He had learned more than he had wanted to. Despite his horror of Nordstrom, the professional fever pulsed in him—what a classic case the man was! What a challenge to delve the chronic alienation and envy that had formed the current sociopathic personality. What a… triumph to help, heal, so diseased a mind. It would take a sensibility that was healthy to the extent that Nordstrom was ill.
Kevin relinquished the fantasy for what it was.
“When did you see Julie last?” Kevin asked quietly, not because he could use the answer, but because, having descended into a loved one’s grave with a ghoul, he needed to exhume his own guilt.
“At the funeral home. Julie was at home to guests… dancing Sleeping Beauty. I wakened her with a kiss. She’s been with me ever since. I’ve been wanting to tell you ever since.”
“Is it making you happy?”
“Yes! Happier than standing ignored on campus, watching you and Julie play your own private version of Love Story. So sad, so tragic,” Nordstrom mocked. “Poor Kevin, going on without Julie. But you weren’t worthy of her.” Nordstrom waited for Kevin’s denial or anger. There was neither. He jabbed harder. “You were unfaithful to her. Look at you, forgetting Julie for this—”
He jerked open another folder and tossed the sketch of Jane down beside Julie’s photograph. Kevin tensed. It was one thing to psych yourself into letting an enemy manhandle your past; quite another to see him mess with your present.
“I’ve treated a lot of patients since Julie; I’ve had a lot of women since Julie.” Kevin was deliberately crude to depersonalize the subject.
Nordstrom leaned intently forward, his fingers gathering both images toward himself. “True enough. But have you ever really loved again, since Julie. And”—Nordstrom’s icy eyes warmed—“and lost? Again.”
Chapter Seventeen
* * *
Excuse me, miss, do you have the time?”
Jane stared at the woman in horn-rimmed glasses who’d laid a mittened hand on her arm. The woman clutched several packages under her other arm and seemed worried.
“No one has time,” Jane answered scrupulously. “Time is a myth of sorts. An appearance. Time is our own motions named and numbered. It really is a metaphysical problem. I read once—”
“No, no. I meant, a watch.” The woman spoke even more slowly than Jane, enunciating every word. “Are you wearing a watch? Can you tell me what time it is?”
“Oh.” Jane lifted her wrist, as Kevin used to do, and paused. “No, I’m not wearing a watch.” She thought a moment. “But it’s… six thirty-eight—”
“Thank you.” The woman turned, but Jane’s hand reached out to delay her.
“Eighteen thirty-eight oh-one-dot-eighty, exactly,” Jane finished.
“Fine! Jeez, sorry I asked. You could have just said no!” The woman huffed away, rattling her packages.
“I’m not sorry,” Jane said after her.
Alone, she hugged new self-knowledge to herself. No one had ever told Jane she knew the time automatically, internally. She would have liked to ask Kevin about it, but of course, she couldn’t. That disappointed her. It made the cold seem more efficient at slipping up her jacket sleeves and down its collar. It made the distance she had to go seem a little longer. Jane had never felt tired before.
She remained standing by the bus stop sign along with the other waiting people. She had just gotten off the last bus and had no intention of taking the next, but Jane liked the presence of this clot of people near the snowy street corner.
There was something cozy about their silent congregation, something almost conspiratorial. The dark evening and the hushed, falling snow felt like their voices. And their comings and goings intrigued her.
A bus snorted up to the curb. Its huge
headlights spotlighted dancing snow flurries. Jane stepped politely back while people surged past her into the bus’s packed interior. She had discovered she liked to guess who would embark and who would wait for the next bus. Three stayed she had thought would go, and two went she had thought would stay. Her estimates were getting closer.
She sighed and looked up at the streetlamps. Snowflakes flirted around the globes of light, thick as, as… falling dandruff. Pleased with her comparison, Jane turned and trudged alone down Franklin Avenue.
Kevin’s place was twelve blocks away, her inboard map told her. The distance was nothing like the three miles she had walked once before to get there. She kept her gloved hands in her empty pockets, lowered her face to the tickle of the wind-blown snowflakes, and kept walking.
Franklin Avenue was faced with two- and three-story buildings on either 9ide. Some were decaying apartment buildings, most were storefronts housing wholesalers, old- clothes dealers and basement gemologists.
By the time Jane turned from Franklin’s glare to the dark, curved residential streets south of Loring Park, her internal clock chimed half past seven. And she was hungry.
She’d never felt this kind of urgent hunger before, either, and wondered if she had to, or simply expected to. She lifted her face to the night and let snowflakes melt on her tongue. At least she wouldn’t be thirsty, she thought.
Kevin’s building finally hulked before her; she recognized it immediately. His apartment was on the third floor, reached by the wooden stairs lacing the building’s rear. Jane loitered among the trees bordering the parking area. Her eyes accurately picked Kevin’s from the patchwork of doors dotting the three stories, then raked across the windows that should be his.
One oozed a subtle incandescent glow through closed vertical blinds. Thin stripes of soft light cast a pattern like golden bars onto the night-darkened glass.
A strange feeling clasped Jane in its alien arms: it was composed equally of excitement and peace. She searched herself for the proper word and found it—not in the clearinghouse of her retentive memory dictionary, but in something she had absorbed in her sessions of whitelightning reading. This sense of aching familiarity, Jane thought, might resemble… coming home.
She started across the parking lot, her mind already resurrecting the rooms she had seen only once—three white-painted wails, one of age-dusted brick, bookcases, a stereo setup, the little kitchen, the big sofa…
Two men stepped from a parked van and stamped their feet. Near them, Jane sensed the eternal scan of electrical impulses, the watchdog machines that made her hackles rise.
Jane paused, caught in a pink-gold sodium iodide circle. She didn’t move. She didn’t move at all, not even to let air lift her lungs and then let them collapse. Instead, she listened. Her blood surged thickly in her ears. She slowed it to a meander through her veins.
“Crazy to check it out again!” one man grumbled. “Colder out than the balls on a brass monkey, and we’ve been cooling our heels all shift. We’d have seen somebody come. Why do we always get the dead-end stakeouts?”
“Ass-numbing is right,” the other answered, laughing. “Shut up and climb. We got all night. Might as well look busy.”
The men lumbered up the semilit stairs, dark forms as faceless as the men in the north woods, as any of the men Kevin had warned her against.
When they passed beyond even her acute earshot, she let her breath ease warmly into the snow swirling before her face. She skittered across the lot to shelter under the shadowed stairs at mid-building. Not long after, the clump of descending feet sifted snow like flour through the cracks in the stairs. Words sifted down, too.
“—wild goose chase, I told yah. Nobody’s comin’ back to that hole.”
“Hey, not a bad place!”
“Don’t like all that modem crap, though. Too empty.”
“Got a coffin nail?”
A small flame spit into life between the two men as they paused at ground level. Jane jumped as she saw it, then uncurled her fingers. The men walked on, talking. Jane no longer listened.
Later, much later, when falling snow had veiled the rear window of the men’s van, Jane slipped up the steps, treading carefully in their footprints. Kevin hadn’t liked leaving traces.
He had left the imprint of his snow angel in the north woods, Jane thought incongruously. She remembered her spell of amnesia in the woods, remembered beginning to feel real again and not lost in some remote part of her own body.
Then Kevin had appeared before her refocusing eyes—a dark blot on the snow, but moving as he lay there supine, sweeping his arms and legs in and out. He reminded her of a bundled, flailing infant she’d seen a woman on the bus lay on its back and fuss with. Did Kevin sometimes feel his self falling away, too? She wondered.
Jane confronted the door at the top, familiar from her previous visit, but locked. She stripped off a glove and touched a finger to the brass circle that had swallowed the key. She relived standing here with Kevin, remembering him talking and turning the key, remembering—if she thought hard enough, deep enough—remembering the nearly subsonic sound of the lock’s tumblers twisting to the lever of his key.
The sound’s recalled rhythm erected a physical model of the action in her mind. Her fingernail pressed into the tiny slot, adapting to its internal jigs. Jane poured into that empty mold with her mind, with something more than her mind, with something corporeal growing from her mind.
Her finger turned. Right—no, left. Her finger twisted left until the lock wrenched it. She heard the subsonic click in proper sequence. Her other hand turned the knob and pushed the door ajar. Jane slipped through.
The rooms were unlit except for the pale beam of a brass floor lamp near one window. Near another lay a pile of disheveled books. The brick-supported bookshelves themselves lurched against the wall—empty, sagging.
The long maroon sofa covered with a velvety stuff that Jane somehow remembered was called mohair looked as if it had erupted, spitting cushions to the floor. Perhaps Kevin’s kitten had played here, Jane thought, for long, ragged rents ripped the vintage upholstery. On the crowded floor, where fallen cushions didn’t lie, more discarded books did.
Jane waded through the tented volumes, some fallen agape with pages creased at random angles. Other refugees from the emptied bookcases peppered the chaos. No item had consciously claimed Jane’s attention when she’d spent her one night here, but each rang a note of recognition with some deeper sense as she saw it displaced now.
A glass cat lay whiskers-down on the rug, its severed tail a half foot away. A small bronze bust of a bearded man had fallen faceup to gaze sightlessly at the bland ceiling. Something glinted coin-bright in the wreckage. Jane instinctively bent to gather it.
“Oh.” She stared at a fresh ruby of blood on her forefinger, then pressed the cut shut with her thumb. All that glittered wasn’t gold, as the^ book had said. This glimmer was only glass, broken glass.
Jane found another gleam, one less edged, and picked up an empty brass picture frame. One like it had surrounded the photograph of her… other… self on the Volkers’ living room wall. Her memory couldn’t place this object in the room. She frowned, crouching over it, the vacant rectangle framing an abstract of blue-denimed knees.
Jane stared at the denim within the gold as if making a thread count. Some glint echoed in her memory, a faint, hidden glimmer among the books… Kevin would have called it a beacon from the subconscious. She glanced up to empty shelves, to a position her memory populated with— with… Jane stood, excited, cradling the empty frame to her chest.
Kevin would be so proud of her, so pleased with her memory now! She visualized the photograph her conscious mind had never really seen. Her mind’s eye focused so clearly that she could draw it if she had to: a half-obscured image of a long-necked woman with swept-back hair and an expression of haughty passion riding her angular face.
Jane didn’t like her, but then, perhaps people didn’t like the g
irl in the photograph the Volkers kept on their wall. Kevin had always cautioned Jane to be fair-minded.
Jane liked the portrait’s absence less, nor did she like the cold cutting presence of the empty frame in her arms. She didn’t like the broken-backed books on the floor or the scattered cushions, either. She had never disliked so much before. That she could remember.
Jane walked into the kitchen. The kitten’s stainless steel dishes lay there, empty. A rubbery ring of dried milk circled the bottom of one. She remembered the Zyunsinth- like feel of the tiny furred creature, its blue-gray sheen and the pricking, sudden surprise of claws striking from the heart of its softness.
“Blue Streak,” Jane called, and listened to the silence.
She went down the hall, peering into rooms she had never seen, had never imagined were there. Somehow, it had never occurred to her that there was more beyond what she saw at the moment. The bathroom was sleek, white and had a skylight. Jane liked it. She used it. The bedroom was painted white, too, the bed on a low base, paperback books marching across the wide headboard shelf.
A phone sat on the nightstand. Jane rested her palm on it. She had never talked on a phone, although she’d seen Kevin and the girls in Willhelm Hall do it often. Numbers snaked across her mind, all the phone numbers she had ever seen—printed on the dial at the hospital and dorm, or written on the official sheet where she’d glimpsed Kevin’s home address once by accident.
Jane plucked that number from the endlessly repeating string and picked up the receiver. She pressed the proper buttons in turn, comforted by the phone’s obedient chatter as she dialed. It sounded like one of the ground squirrels that chittered across campus and begged for candy bars.
She dialed Kevin and waited hopefully for him to answer. There came instead a sound—a raw, whining sound, like the siren of the ecnalubma… ambulance, Kevin said she should say now.
A harsh, impersonal voice told Jane that it was sorry, but that her call could not be completed as dialed. It told her to check the number and try again, or to remain on the line for operator assistance.
CounterProbe Page 14