“I’d… hoped she’d be okay until I got out of here—”
“She might be, man.” Ruderman shrugged. “Look, I’m saying they could have got her. Doesn’t mean they did. They’re not gonna tell us, that’s for sure.”
Kevin nodded dully, visualizing the calendar. Friday the thirteenth. Then today and Sunday. Then Monday the sixteenth, the holiday; Tuesday, Wednesday… God, he’d go wacko waiting in here that long! He looked hopefully at Ruderman, who was shaking his head.
“No way. They got you good. There’s no way to shorten your thirty-six hours when the first four days don’t count.”
“What does count?” Kevin wondered.
“Keeping a low profile.” Ruderman almost hissed his intensity. “Don’t give these cops any lip. No name-calling, nothing. They’ll Simonize the floor with you. Just keep your nose clean and wait. Besides, we’re only assuming they’re filing you away to teach you a lesson. They could get serious and arraign you. You could be facing a whole lotta years in places much worse than this. Stillwater Prison, for instance.”
“Hey, Kev, worry about your own skin for a while,” Kandy put in. “I bet Miss Doe is doin’ okay. That girl always did have unsuspected resources.”
“Yeah. Thanks, Kandy. Ruderman.”
Kevin tried to give the lawyer a parting handshake, but a hand descended firmly to Kevin’s shoulder. He tightened, then steadied himself. A cop hovered as he rose and shrugged at the two men. Then the cop wordlessly escorted him back to the dorm cell, back to the routine of idle incarceration.
Jail was all routine, Kevin began to see, for the cops and for the prisoners, if not for him. His cellmates slumped on their bunks, acknowledging his return with leaden-eyed curiosity.
Big black Rollo—a knife artist, it turned out, and the cell’s natural leader—had accepted Kevin as an old-timer. His successful “tangle” with Jesús haloed him with lingering macho glory, just as the stigma of caving in would have dogged him.
The morose DWI, Harry, huddled against the wall, mulling the lesson his cellmates had punched home just last night. Wacko Waldo, slumped on a chair, was in for the duration, too. Nobody wanted him anywhere else.
Kevin could only lie on his bunk and watch TV—a rerun of The Beverly Hillbillies. Most of the men were leering dispiritedly at the buxom blonde in the cast. She was probably a grandmother by now.
He stared at the ceiling and listened to the laugh track, clocking the guffaw that came regular as a pendulum. He hoped Jane was somewhere warm and safe right now. He just hoped that she—somehow—was somewhere safe in good hands.
* * *
“Where is she now?”
Turner bent to pluck a dagger of shattered glass from the floor. On the other side of the wall, he could see the men fitting a new sheet of two-way mirror to the frame.
“Down the hall,” Nordstrom answered. “In another room. I didn’t think she’d turn this volatile. Rushton’s with her.”
Turner nodded. “The nurse.”
“Ex-nurse.”
“Ex-nurse.” Turner’s lifted foot swept some mirror shards from the seat of the folding chair. “You know, Nordstrom…” Turner managed to smile pleasantly. “If you’d been sitting in that chair”—Nordstrom’s glasses flashed in the dimness as he looked where Turner pointed —“that shattered glass might have nailed you.”
“But I wasn’t sitting there. Will you stop nursemaiding me?”
Turner smiled. Nordstrom was antsy to get the window repaired and Jane back to her “hospital” room without realizing that the mirror was a large-scale peephole.
“Besides,” the psychiatrist was adding icily, “Jane Doe had no idea about the existence of this room—how could she? She just panicked in the night, got disoriented, thrashed around her room, and knocked something into the mirror.”
“What?”
“How do I know what? The IV. It was torn loose.”
“The impact must have come lower than that, from the glass splinter pattern. Looks like a bullet came right through it—not just a neat one-holer, but a shot that sent out shock waves, like in a pond when you throw a stone in. Look, you can see the spiderweb effect edging the old mirror.”
Even as Turner spoke, workmen pulled the remaining glass free.
“You’re saying that she did it deliberately—threw a tantrum, threw something at it and broke the glass.”
“You sure are slow on the uptake for a shrink, Nordstrom. I’m saying that she did it by herself. Without using any intermediary. Any tool. Any thing.”
Nordstrom bit his lower lip, gnawing what was already raw and cracked white. “You mean her… powers. You’re saying she’s already demonstrated them. Here and now. Then, good! That’s… more progress than I’d hoped for.”
“Congratulations,” Turner said so slowly that Nordstrom searched his face in vain for irony.
Turner pussyfooted around the broken glass, then bent to claim another shard of glass. “Weird. Even the tint seems to have burned off. I’ll have my boys play jigsaw puzzle with this mess. Might be instructive.”
Turner cracked the door open on a well-lit slice of hall, making himself into a shadow man against it. He paused before leaving for a last word.
“By the way, Dr. Nordstrom, whatever Jane Doe did last night—and however she did it—she did indeed rip the IV loose. It was dripping that clear stuff you’re pumping into her all over the floor. I figured it was sugar water.” Turner waited, then made his point. “Then I tasted it. Doctor.” Turner shut the door, leaving Nordstrom alone in the windowless room’s eternal dusk, dead center of a bouquet of splintered glass, staring though a hole in the wall.
Chapter Twenty-seven
* * *
She is lost.
The room to which they returned her is the same she awoke in. It should not be.
The shadow named Keilehay has evaporated, but so has the broken glass that banished him.
So the room is the same, but it is not the same.
Dr. Nordstrom connects her again to the plastic tubing through which clear liquid flickers. He seems to be waiting for something, watching her and waiting.
Jane is indifferent. She has been linked to a similar apparatus before, she remembers, when she first came. It is as unnecessary now as it was then.
Across from her the mirror reflects the upper third of the room, its most characterless portions—ceiling and wall joints. Cobwebs.
Jane reflects, too—upon events. She knows firsthand now, from her own relived experience, that she expelled Keilehay out of the hospital window. She doesn’t think to the inevitable end of that action. She only knows that Keilehay is gone now, forever, and it is her doing.
What she remembers most is the feeling of Keilehay falling out of her life into his death. She recalls how the power had welled in her and overflowed until it simply crowded Keilehay out of reality as he knew it.
She has never thought about her power before, never seen it as something separate. A tool. She would like to hold it, her power. Turn it this way and that. Weigh it. Study it. It doesn’t seem to be that kind of thing.
She can only think it, dream it. It is flowering in her mind now, petal by petal. Its roots probe deep within her very nature, relentlessly fueling the pattern of her body’s biochemistry.
Some strands of it bear such labels as “instinct” and “reflex.” Others modify themselves, adapt. Still others respond to outside forces. One such force enters the room now.
Dr. Nordstrom is smiling, as he always seems to be when she sees him. He bears a tray. Dishes rattle as he pulls a blond wood hospital table over her bed, pinning Jane beneath the bland overshadowing arm. The position invariably makes her feel slightly trapped.
“Some dinner, Jane,” he says, grinning—but she remembers that they always grin in hospitals when they produce food, as perhaps they do when they produce babies.
“Soft foods,” he croons, foolish as a nurse, any nurse. He picks up the spoon—there is only a
spoon, no fork, no knife—and prods at puddles of soup and egg custard and other pale, gelatinous things in saucers.
Some of it is hot. Scents tickle Jane’s nostrils, triggering physical responses and more… memories.
“Sit up, Jane. Here, against the pillows, so you can see yourself in the mirror. You look much better already.”
Jane cocks her head at herself. She looks the same. She looks as she looked before Kevin put her in Willhelm Hall. Before she… adapted to the student nurses’ ways. Jane lifts a hand to her dark hair. It just brushes her shoulders and could use a combing.
Dr. Nordstrom is lying. Jane knows she looks awful. Gaunt. Pale. Dazed. She remembers the student nurses pushing small plastic trays of colored powders at her, banishing her pallor with small pointed sponges. Alarm vibrates through her consciousness. How did she come to look so dreadful again? And so quickly?
But she can’t remember. It’s becoming a habit. She remembers nothing of where she’s been, or with whom, or for how long. She remembers nothing since those who had created her returned her to the place that had created her kind. Jane knows what to label this strange lack of continuity. Amnesia… a medical term, but it would make a pretty name. It is as if her life—or what passes for it—has been a chain, and every other link is invisible.
Dr. Nordstrom is leaning so near that Jane can see a pale comma of eyelash pressed to the inside of one eyeglass lens. He is pushing a small bowl of pungent heat under her chin.
“Try some,” he’s saying, smiling, his eyes mirthless and shrunken. “It’ll bring back your strength. You must eat.”
Saliva pools in Jane’s mouth. Reflex again. The smell, the idea of eating provokes a string of memories. Breakfast in Kevin’s condo the morning after the night she went to find him; late-night Chee-tos parties in Melanie’s room at the dorm. “Food” means nothing to Jane. Memories of certain foods at certain times have their own associative power. Her stomach yawns and stirs.
Jane reaches for the shiny silver spoon Dr. Nordstrom has poised at the lip of her mouth.
“But perhaps it’s too soon.” He jerks the spoon and bowl away, shoves the table toward the bed’s foot and takes its place. “You probably don’t even feel hunger yet, do you?” He smiles.
Jane’s appetite, roused, subsides with a subterranean growl. Dr. Nordstrom pats her flat abdomen. “You’ll get food soon enough. Soon enough to grow fat on it. Perhaps we should work on food for thought, first.”
There is no perhaps in his tone. Memories of food shift into flashing visions of the people the foods were eaten with—chattering girls, Kevin… and raw, dripping food rendered over a fire. They are all sitting in a circle in the cold, wearing fur coats, clawing hunks of venison into their mouths. They? Who? That’s not what Dr. Nordstrom is asking in that deep, narcotic voice of his.
“What word did Blake use to hypnotize you, Jane?” he is saying. “His notes are unclear on that.”
“Word?”
“Word.” The smile congeals on the surface of Dr. Nordstrom’s face, just as the chicken fat skins the soup cooling on the tablearm just beyond reach.
Jane hoards the notion, then spits out the first word in her mind. “Zyunsinth.”
“Zyun—sinth?”
Jane nods.
“That’s Blake, always has to be different. I’m going to try hypnotizing you, all right?”
He doesn’t wait for Jane’s affirmative, but begins droning in his narcoleptic voice. “You are very tired, Jane. Very sleepy. You are relaxed and sleepy. Your eyes grow heavy, too heavy to keep open. You hear only my voice, give only my voice all that you know…”
Like the food, the words strike some chord in her suggestive center. Jane floats on a cold sea of white linen, clinging to the surface.
“Zyunsinth,” Dr. Nordstrom says, sounding embarrassed.
Jane enjoys hearing the familiar syllables; experiencing the familiar circumstances. If only Kevin were here! She smiles. In the gray haze beyond heavy eyelids, Dr. Nordstrom is no longer smiling.
“Jane! You do hear me, don’t you?”
She wishes Dr. Nordstrom would keep quiet; the ritual of hypnotism has sparked many warm memories that Jane had been carrying like cold seeds inside her skull. They scatter now, take root and stretch, shoot up past the soil line in her head into the sunlight on her hair.
“Jane, answer me!”
Jane opens her eyes. “Yes, Dr. Nordstrom?”
“Are you hypnotized or not?” His smile has wrung itself tight, like a cleaning rag.
Jane considers it. Seriously. “I… don’t think so, Dr. Nordstrom.”
“Why not? I used the word you gave me.”
“Yes.”
“Well?”
“I don’t know. I liked hearing the word. It’s my word. And I feel very rested. But I don’t think you took me to the place Kevin did. It’s all too much ‘here’ yet.” She looks at him limpidly. “Kevin would find that very interesting.”
Nordstrom’s arm backhands the food tray off the table onto the floor. Jane blinks. The presence of the food had agitated hunger. Its absence stirs another instinct into action. She feels her body float down the metabolic dial until it rests on “empty.” So she is and so she shall remain.
“There’ll be no more of that until you cooperate,” Dr. Nordstrom promises.
“I don’t understand. I’m doing what you tell me. What else can I do?”
He leans in, over her. He is like an ice-cold iron coming down on an ironing board.
“Tap your powers for me, Jane. Show me what you can do. You broke that glass last night—”
She glances to her image in the mirror. “It’s not broken—”
“We fixed it. Don’t play stupid. You will show me how you make things move.”
“I—I don’t always know.”
“You do it. You know. If you won’t unlock your subconscious, I’ll have to batter down your consciousness. That takes longer. And it hurts, Jane. There’ll be no more food until you produce results.”
“I’m not hungry now,” Jane protests logically.
“That’s the first symptom of starvation, Jane. You don’t have much to hang on by. Only a filament. I can keep you on the edge of life for a long time.” His eyes glitter behind the glasses.
“You are not like Kevin,” she accuses.
“No. I won’t coddle that arbitrary psyche of yours. I play hardball.”
Jane looks blank. Dr. Nordstrom pulls away. His teeth are sawing at his lower lip and a droplet of blood suddenly bursts into bloom on his mouth. He rubs his hand across it, spreading the crimson to his fingers. Jane watches, then speaks.
“Marlene at the dorm used to get cold sores all the time, Dr. Nordstrom. She used Blistex. She was really mad when she got them just before a date—”
“Shut up!” Dr. Nordstrom says in a way Kevin never would. Jane feels her face sadden. She misses Kevin. He would never let her be so confused. Why can’t she remember him clearly? Why does the bright colored light make everything around it fade to black? If only she could remember. Kevin always said it was important to remember…
Dr. Nordstrom has risen and is backing away from the bed. He pulls long canvas straps from below the mattress, begins buckling Jane immobile upon it.
“You want to eat, I know you do! Damn sluts always want to eat and ruin it. All right. You’ll use your powers.
He points to the dishes on the floor, toppled but not broken—made of thick creamy restaurant-grade pottery too heavy to break. Stepping-stone puddles of chicken noodle soup splatter the beige vinyl tile. Egg custard has broken into spittle-shaped globs.
“You want food,” Dr. Nordstrom says with a challenge in his voice. “Pick it up. Levitate it to your mouth, stuff yourself with the damn dishes, for all I care! Blake got somewhere with you, and I will, too. My way. It won’t be pleasant.”
Jane lifts her head from the pillow to study the scattered food. It doesn’t look very appetizing anymore. Neither
does Dr. Nordstrom. His eyes seem hollower than hers and the stubble Kevin complained of after he razored off his beard is beginning to freckle Dr. Nordstrom’s narrow lower jaw. Melanie at the dorm, Jane remembers, was crazy about Don Johnson on Miami Vice. Dr. Nordstrom is no Don Johnson, Jane decides. She knows that much.
“Either way, I’ll be happy in the morning,” he is telling her, telling himself. “If the food’s still there, I know you’ll be weaker by that much. If not, I’ll know how to force you to use your powers.”
Something occurs to her.
“What if I need to go to the bathroom?” she wonders. With the IV trickling endlessly into her arm, she feels a constant burn in her bladder.
Dr. Nordstrom finally smiles again. “Dirty yourself.”
He leaves without saying good-bye.
Jane lies in bed, the big straps tight across her chest and thighs, the little ones tight around her ankles and wrists. She finds Dr. Nordstrom highly inconsistent.
* * *
Wacko Waldo is crooning “Melancholy Baby” to himself in a decent imitation of a kazoo. He has perfect pitch.
The cell is dark except for the unearthly glow of light from the shower area. Kevin stares at the cinder-block wall where the light bathes it. He feels like a kid at camp. Maybe, if he visualizes what he wants hard enough and long enough, he can make it happen.
What he’s visualizing is a bit of heavenly intervention. In his mind, a figure darkens against the pale background.
It is vague and tall, and wearing one helluva big fur coat. There’s just enough light to reveal the glimmer of slitted eyes. It’s sort of a cross between a pimp and King Kong and it’s the only thing keeping Kevin sane as he listens to the snoring and the humming and the sound of his own brain quietly cannibalizing itself.
Zyunsinth lurks there, in person, ready to come in— level everybody, pull out an Uzi and bust Kevin out of jail.
Then where? He wonders. His inner self is irritatingly answerless. It is probably three in the morning by now, he figures, that classic hour for nocturnal angst.
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