CounterProbe

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  The bed shifted on his back, flattening him. Nordstrom’s face pressed the floor. His own vomit smeared his features, its odor poured back down his burning nasal passages.

  “Stop it!” he screamed. “I’ll do anything—anything!”

  The room’s motions suspended. Uprooted tiles hovered in the air—absolutely still.

  “What do you want?” he asked, lifting spattered lenses to the light high above.

  There was no answer, but somehow Nordstrom knew. He was sure he heard the answer articulated clearly in his brain.

  Sobbing, he gathered himself to his knees and, using his hands, began scooping the vomit back into his mouth.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  * * *

  Even Kevin’s jeans were wrinkled.

  He reclaimed them Wednesday afternoon with the rest of his clothes. They all lay at the bottom of the basket he’d dropped them into five days earlier.

  “Go on, put them on,” the cop ordered.

  Kevin returned to the cinder-block cubicle and exchanged his jail uniform—like a doctor who’s done for the day he dumped his used greens into a laundry basket—for what amounted to his personal uniform, his blues.

  It felt like he was dragging his own skin back on after someone had been on a six-day binge in it. His nose identified odors forgotten since his internship—urine and vomit, stale smoke and beer. In Massachusetts General Hospital he could always walk away from the transient stench. Here, this reek had infiltrated his clothes until it became a personal exhalation, like bad breath.

  He was led down a blue-carpeted corridor. Getting out of jail took as much paperwork as it did to get in—and more waiting. They checked his age again, and his next of kin. They even double-checked that the thumbprints on his record were his, as if he could have somehow slipped skins while inside.

  Two hours later Kevin stood again in the orange-walled waiting room, dressed in his own clothes, however nauseous, a free man again, however conditionally.

  Everyone was waiting for him—father, mother, Kandy, everyone but the lawyer, who’d said the release would be routine. It was. Apparently nobody wanted Kevin anymore.

  “Hey, stay back,” he ordered as they rushed forward like he’d won the bonus round on Wheel of Fortune. It didn’t work, at least not with his mother, whose embrace enfolded him in a whiff of permanent wave.

  “Kevin,” she rebuked, “I smelled a lot worse on you when you were a baby.”

  Parents invariably made the kind of jolly reminder that would plunge any adult offspring into serious depression. Kevin shrugged it off, shook hands with his father— another grave, silently rebuking ritual—and slapped Kandy on the arm.

  “I owe you.”

  “No sweat.”

  “They gave me the money back—and my watch.” Kevin flourished his wrist at his parents. “All safe and sound. If they’re not pressing charges, like Ruderman says, I should have access to my bank account again.”

  “Sure, but it’s under another name, remember?” Kandy objected. “More red tape.”

  Kevin’s parents blinked politely at the non sequiturs passing between their jailbird son and his hippie friend.

  “You know what I’d like,” his mother interrupted brightly. “I’d like for us all to go out to a good dinner tonight. Oh, you, too… Mr. Kandinsky. You’ve been such a help to Kevin, I understand.”

  “I’ll pass on dinner.” Kandy shook his fuzzy wuzzy head. “I bet you folks want to talk things over.”

  “No, Kandy—” Kevin began to protest.

  His parents remained mum.

  “Look, I’m double-parked, not too cool at police headquarters. I’ll be in touch.” Kandy loped into the hall with a farewell wave.

  “I’d like to go… home first,” Kevin said. His mother looked blank. Only one place would ever be home to him in her mind—her own house. “Wash up. Change. Then…” His parents’ faces looked old and drawn in the orange- reflecting fluorescent light.

  Kevin grinned his surrender. “Then dinner… a good dinner. Yeah, Mom, that’d be great.”

  “Murray’s Steak House,” his mother said, beaming. The Blakes always dined there when they visited the Twin Cities—Murray’s downtown steak house, noted for butter knife-soft steak and unpretentious service.

  “Murray’s,” Kevin seconded, still not feeling hungry. But maybe he ought to go. None of his ex-cellmates, he knew, would ever take butter knife to beef at Murray’s.

  * * *

  It is late Wednesday night, and Kevin is alone again, at last.

  His parents have returned to their motel room reassured. He’s wearing fresh jeans, shirt, everything. The old clothes lie in the icy dumpster at the back of his condo, exchanging essential scents with his neighbors’ garbage. A remnant of scent shadowboxes with his senses. He’s doffed his alien odor, but not the memory of it.

  Kevin leans against his living room wall, looking through the open blinds at the parking lot below. It’s an Art Deco abstract. He sees only black asphalt, grapefruit-pink sodium iodide lights and the streamlined humps of car roofs, hoods and trunks.

  He knows if any agents are still watching him—or ever were—they can spot his silhouette against the over-lit room. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t know what to think, but he knows what he doesn’t think.

  He doesn’t think he’ll sleep without a night-light for a while. He doesn’t think he’ll stop smelling himself for a while longer. He doesn’t want to think at all.

  But he does.

  He turns his head. His rooms comfort him. They haven’t changed. Except… his eyes rivet to the spot in his bookshelves where the photograph of Julie Symons sat half- hidden by his old Physician’s Desk Reference. Julie is gone now. Her gold metal frame sits in the same position. He wonders why his belongings look so undisturbed. He can’t imagine Nordstrom bothering to reinstate the pillaged frame. Perhaps Turner’s men were careful. Perhaps someone put things back.

  On the coffee table an empty lunch meat package, brown beer bottle, yogurt carton and stainless steel spoon form a homely still life.

  Nothing has been moved, touched, since Kevin came home, although his mother wanted to do it. No, he’d said, sounding sharp. No. Then he’d apologized and she’d said she understood. But she hadn’t. It offended her nature to leave something undisposed of.

  From purely housekeeping concerns, Kevin knows his mother is right. Mold is growing green along some yogurt slicks on the carton sides. Kevin knows he should throw the item away, along with the beer bottle and the curled plastic, but he can’t. He is a highly retentive personality, which is a psychiatrist’s way of saying stubborn.

  His memory won’t give up the ghost. Only Thursday night. Thursday night Jane was here, feeding herself, his memory tells him again. He calculates cumbersomely. Only… one hundred and forty-four hours ago.

  Tonight only Kevin is here, feeding his illusions. He wonders if Turner lied about having caught Jane. He hopes Turner didn’t, for what has she eaten since this pathetic picnic on his coffee table? At least in custody they feed you well.

  He wonders if he should have agreed to work with Jane, if being violated by loving hands and minds isn’t better than the alternative, although it doesn’t seem to be for most people. He wonders what he could have done better.

  Below his window sits a van. The parking lot lights pour onto its pale roof, buffing it to the color of wet cement. Kevin wonders if this is the van Kandy suspected of being a government watching post. Maybe the room is bugged. He looks around. It’s been silent here ever since his folks brought him back from the restaurant and—somehow satisfied by eating out as a return to normal family rituals—said good-night and went away.

  The snowbanks fringing the parking lot lie stark against the dark beyond it. Trees hunker along the street. Next to one stands a figure, a watcher.

  Kevin straightens and focuses harder.

  Not a furred figment of the imagination, not a particularly tall or heavy person, just
an ordinary, vague figure stripped to the essential human silhouette. Something about the posture is female, something about the look of it is, is… Jane.

  Kevin’s hands crush metal vanes, push the blinds together to force them apart. He presses his face to the icy windowpane. Spiderwebs of frost sparkle in the corners of the glass, looking like fissures.

  Jane, it is Jane! He knows it.

  The night shifts. He is watching a scene viewed through a glass more darkly than the viewer had wished. Only trees line the street. Only phantoms footprint the snowbanks. Only empty cars squat on the snow-quenched asphalt.

  She is gone. But he saw her…

  She is gone. Long gone. He’s dreaming.

  He saw her.

  If it was Jane, she saw him, too.

  She wouldn’t have come, seen him, and left again. Not Jane.

  She is not there, never was. Turner said so.

  Kevin has to know.

  But first, he has to know how to find Turner.

  * * *

  The mirror is still.

  Jane’s mind breaks its surface, diving into the chill silver—her face first feeling the icy brush of dissipating tensions, then shoulders, arms, hips. Legs and feet feel nothing, it is that cold in the mirror.

  But quiet.

  When she had tasted the full use of her powers before, amnesia had cleansed her palate afterward. This time an unpleasant aftertaste she calls “memory” lingers, but she is clean now, her mind rinsed of the recent episode.

  So she forgets herself in her own image. Beyond the shape in the mirror she sees another. Her own other self, stripped cold and clean. Naked. She watches it jerk into life, move down the spirit streets of her memory, past campus buildings and department store windows.

  It pauses, too. There are women in the windows— motionless, mute submerged women in holding tanks. Mannequins. Models. Dummies. Jane’s naked self lifts fists against the plate glass. It rends soundlessly.

  She is walking among the women on broken glass, stripping their frozen figures of everything weighted upon them. Sweaters, slacks, blouses, skirts. Like dolls they wear no underwear. Shoes and boots, though, they have, oversized and forced onto iron-stiff feet. Even those she takes.

  Their heads turn. She wrenches them off to take the clothing. Their hands fall and yearn up from the floor like drowning fingers. Their arms twist off and hang askew. Still they stand, rods of steel for a spine. Naked they wait under the undimmed fluorescents.

  She dresses there; crouching amid their shambled selves, she puts on pieces of them. The lights never dim, but no one comes to watch. Nothing is supposed to be happening here at night.

  She crosses a moat of shattered glass to leap to the sidewalk again. Their painted eyes scream farewell.

  At another window she stops again. The glass gives before her without waiting for her motion. She takes the long step up to the display window on chicly booted feet.

  Here is winter wonderland, a forest of tall, elongated figures swathed in furs. Their haughty heads are crowned with erections of satin and rhinestones. Spiders sit their eyelids. Among them she walks, her naked hands moving down their furred arms to touch the plaster flesh.

  Finally, she stops behind a mannequin clothed in amber fur and pulls the coat off the shoulders. The dummy’s arms come with it. She pushes and pulls the severed limbs out through the satin-lined sleeves, then dons the thing herself.

  For a moment she waits, one with them. Then she steps away, over broken glass—it is mirror glass, she sees now—into the dark, empty street. No one notices. There is no sound. There has never been any sound. It is a dream without a voice.

  Jane watches the woman in the mirror walk toward her. No longer naked, there is dignity in her movements. She has gleaned well. She knows what she needs and where she is going. She calls to Jane, as Jane calls to her. She is getting closer.

  Jane’s hand rests on her chest, over her heart. She feels the beat. Its rhythm matches the steps of the woman in the mirror. Her hospital gown feels coarse and flimsy at one and the same time, like a dishcloth. Her fingers clench in the fabric. It is not enough. It is not yet enough. Something more must be done. She must… assemble more of herself for—for something.

  Jane lies back slowly to go to sleep. The woman in the mirror marches on, her figure sinking below the frame’s horizon as Jane’s head sets on her pillow. Whiteness billows up, scattering sleep on its foam. Jane sleeps. Jane dreams. The silence finally stops.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  * * *

  I’m not going crazy—so help me, Freud.”

  “Of course you’re not going crazy,” Kandy soothed. “You are crazy, Kevin, just like the rest of us. Stop fighting it and enjoy.”

  Kandy, draped in the smoke of a slow-burning marijuana joint, was sitting cross-legged in his cluttered apartment, playing shrink.

  Kevin, the play patient, was nursing a Scotch as stiff as Johnny Walker’s cane and served in a chipped pottery mug that deadened all its bite.

  “I saw her!” Kevin insisted. “I wasn’t hallucinating. It wasn’t just wishful thinking. She was there!”

  “Look, you’ve just come off a pretty bad trip—five days in the county jail. And your preppie ex-classmate, Nordheim, injected you with God-knows-what before you went in, you admit that. You don’t even know what you said under the influence of his needles, much less what you saw… maybe she—Jane—was a flashback.”

  “It’s Nordstrom, and if he’d gotten anything out of me he’d have crowed to Kingdom Come about it. Besides, that was six days ago. You’ve ingested worse in the name of recreational drug use, for Chrissake, and lived to tell about it. I saw Jane last night, that’s all there is to it. In my condo parking lot.”

  “All right.” Kandy nodded, running long, double- jointed fingers through his Rasputin beard. “Then we’ll have to decide what to do about it, okay?”

  “Okay.” Kevin heard the tension drain from his voice. Here, in this crazyquilt Never-Never Land of Kandy’s apartment where the window shades were always drawn, sanity seemed oddly attainable.

  Something sprang from the eternal twilight. Kevin’s shoulder tightened to ward it off, then relaxed.

  “Hey, Kitty… this isn’t Blue?” Kevin uncurled the lithe furred body that had leeched onto his arm and was chewing ferociously. “He’s… grown.”

  “Kittens do that. Besides, it’s been a while since you dropped him off. Be glad he recognized you.”

  “Yeah.” The feline face was worrying at his jeans now, sharp white fangs advancing and retreating staple gun- style. Kevin swooped up the kitten and brought its tiny face to his. Its unfocused bluish eyes had resolved into sharp-sighted hazel-green. A lank, preadolescent body dangled from his loose grip. “I’ve only been gone—”

  “—almost three weeks. That’s a long time in cat development.”

  “Three weeks.” Blue, having fought and lost, curled into his lap and began indiscriminately licking its flanks and Kevin’s hand. “Three weeks and my whole life’s in the toilet. Probe’s gone—And now Jane.”

  “Let’s do personal inventory,” Kandy suggested, inhaling until his eyes closed. “All right. Your condo okay?”

  “I guess. A couple things are missing. Besides Jane.”

  “Your car?”

  “How do you think I got here? Bailed it out of impoundment this morning. What about your van?” Kevin remembered suddenly.

  “Got that back three days ago, as soon as they were done searching it. No sweat. And what about your folks?”

  “Oh, we had a nice family dinner in a restaurant. Mom said we should do it more often. They kind of mellowed out when no charges were filed.” Kevin looked at his wrist. “And when I got my goddamn watch back. They said they were sure it was a mistake and went home to Elk River.”

  “Cool. Then the only thing you’re out of is a job, and you would have quit anyway, over Jane Doe.”

  “So I’m okay, you’re okay. It still doesn�
�t solve anything.”

  “Like whether you saw Jane?”

  “Forget that. The real question is whether Turner—and Nordstrom—have her or not.”

  Kandy sighed. “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know.” Blue draped himself over Kevin’s thigh, purring. “I’m so bummed out I can’t think anymore.” Kevin leaned his head against Kandy’s Victorian sofa’s back, a throne-high swell of claret-colored velvet.

  “Let me think.” Long-legged Kandy, sitting lotus-style on the oversized ottoman, reminded Kevin of Alice in Wonderland’s caterpillar. His life lately reminded Kevin of Wonderland, period. “How would they have caught her?” Kandy asked.

  “Turner said… she was found like she was the first time.”

  “In Crow Wing?” Kandy sounded incredulous.

  “Not there. But… naked. Underweight again, which sounds really unlikely. In the open—near the downtown railroad tracks this time. Turner figures she’d been mugged, stripped and left for dead. Nordstrom revived her.”

  “He has his uses, apparently. So Jane reprised her debut. Verrry interesting. At least the last time she played Lady Godiva it was August and hot as hell—how do you suppose she survives all this?”

  A swallow of Scotch burned Kevin’s esophagus. He stroked Blue’s extended throat. “Maybe she’s got nine lives.”

  “Come on, Kev, I told you my theories—Russian spy, resurrected icewoman. Tell me yours. After all, you’re her shrink.”

  “Not anymore; maybe Nordstrom is now. Damn!” Kevin stirred on the couch, dislodging the kitten. It slid off him to the cushion, sprawling in sleep. “Okay, I might as well try my story on somebody.”

  Kandy jiggled his excitement like a kid. “This oughta be good.”