The words were sweet, but to Kevin’s hypersensitive ears, they rang as counterfeit as his cautious small talk. He looked into her dark eyes and saw an abused stranger— looked deeper, and saw another stranger—the miniature reflection of himself and his uncertainty in her dilated, coffee-black pupils.
* * *
“Where’s Nordstrom?” Kevin demanded afterward.
“You don’t want to see him?” Turner asked incredulously.
“No, not now. I’d throttle him. Where are you keeping the bastard? Is it secure?”
“In a new room like hers,” Turner said, “two-way mirror and restraints. We’re watching him around the clock, believe me.”
“But you weren’t when you sicced him on Jane, were you?”
“No. We had no reason to. What do you think?”
“Think? I think you’ve done inestimable damage in an incredibly brief time. She’s completely regressed.”
Kevin began pacing the fake corridor in the fake hospital. He’d been driven here in a car with blacked-out windows, so he didn’t even know where they were. “Jane herself admits to amnesia of recent events. I’ll have to find out how far back it goes. I told you her powers were defensive, not destructive.”
“What about my men?” Turner interrupted bitterly. “They’d knocked me out, and I was Jane’s only link to any safety. Besides, I’m still not sure exactly what she did. It was an accident at best; self-defense at worst.”
“Don’t you know, Doctor?”
“No. No one will ever know but Jane, and she developed amnesia about the specifics even then. That’s why it’s tough to figure what happened here. Even Nordstrom’s nutritionless saline solutions can’t account for a twenty- pound loss in a few days! God knows she can’t say.” Kevin paused before leveling Turner with the guilt he himself felt.
“And her weight and memory aren’t the only losses she’s suffered—maybe they’re the lightest. Emotionally, she’s light-years behind where she was. My God, all the humanity, the growing strength of her assembling personality, her special vulnerability—” Kevin spun on his heel, his hands hitting his sides. “It’s as if I were talking to a cipher again. It’s Day One all over again, Turner.”
“But she remembers you?”
“Yeah.” Kevin spun away again.
“Does she still love you?”
Kevin stopped. “I don’t know. Can’t tell yet. Look, Turner, whatever the government wants from Jane, I don’t need that, what you think I do. If the price of getting back the person she was becoming is Jane not loving me anymore, fine—I’ll pay it. But I will not be made to use her, even by myself.”
Turner’s smile was bleak. “You always had the profile of a crusader. I believe you, Doctor.”
“Believe something else. If I can get her back—and away from you and this godforsaken warehouse in human byproducts you’ve brought us to, I will.”
“We’d have to stop you.”
“Maybe,” Kevin said, smiling grimly himself. “Maybe you can’t.”
Chapter Thirty-four
* * *
What’s the last thing you remember before you forgot things again, Jane?”
She and Kevin sat in chairs in a room other than her so-called hospital room. Jane was dressed. Clothes had been the second thing Kevin had ordered for her, after food.
Like the food, the clothing had appeared as if wafted forth by invisible hands in a fairy tale—slacks, sweater, and wear-scuffed Western boots, trendy outcasts of some urban cowgirl’s wardrobe.
Jane’s fairy godmother probably had been one of the women agents cleaning out the dregs of her closet. Kevin didn’t care how Jane’s wardrobe had arrived. The building, whose vastness he had glimpsed in passing, seemed equipped to support comfortably a large number of people for an unspecified amount of time. He had gotten used to seeing only its insides, and thought of it as a huge bomb shelter.
Jane looked better already, lipstick and eye shadow brightening her gaunt face courtesy of the “nurse,” her hair combed. Right now she was twirling a loose strand around her forefinger, like the girl in the poem who could be very, very good, and was considering Kevin’s question with flattering intensity.
“What do I last remember before I forgot?” Jane sipped one of the health-food milk shakes Kevin had ordered. “Dr. Nordstrom!” Jane declared, letting the impromptu curl slide through her fingertips. She waited for Kevin’s approval.
“Dr. Nordstrom.” Just saying the name slimed his lips.
He forced his voice to remain neutral—or what could pass for it. “What about… him?”
“He had strapped me down again—” She looked up quickly as Kevin’s chair squeaked. “Why did he do that, Kevin? I wasn’t going to go anywhere, except to the bathroom.”
“He… he’s a weak person, Jane. He thinks people only do what they have to do. He doesn’t understand.”
“I didn’t like it.”
“I know.”
“But he was so fast. I didn’t expect him to do it, not even the second time. That was wrong of me. I should have been… ready.”
“What would you have done, if you had been?”
Jane regarded him with a crystalline gaze. “Stopped him.”
Her reply stopped Kevin cold. She meant it. Jane knew how to aim her powers now, the ones he kept swearing were purely defensive, and—what was worse—possessed the inner rage to do it. A mental chill amplified Kevin’s despair of ever resurrecting the Jane he had known—and loved— from this skeletal mockup of her.
“But you didn’t stop him,” he reminded her, and reassured himself. She still had free will and a moral hierarchy. “So that’s the last thing you remember, Dr. Nordstrom… restraining you.”
“No.”
“No?”
“No. I lay there and thought for a while. A long while. I thought I saw myself… waking up. As if I finally knew what to do. I thought of you, Kevin, of finding you. And then it was night and Dr. Nordstrom came back.”
Kevin studied his white knuckles. “Did he touch you, Jane?”
“A little. Mostly he talked.”
“Talked?”
“About someone named Julie.”
Kevin’s breath hissed out. “What about someone named Julie?”
“I don’t know. That’s not anyone I knew at the dorm. There was Melanie, and Glenda. And Kim and Connie. Armajane and—”
“Arma-what?”
“Armajane. She was from New Prague. It’s a town. I looked it up on a map. Kevin, what are you thinking?”
“That I didn’t know much about your dormmates. If there was a Julie among them, I don’t think Dr. Nordstrom meant that Julie anyway.”
“What Julie did he mean?”
Kevin hesitated, then reached for one of the manila folders stacked on a table behind him. He extended the photograph of Julie to Jane, watching, watching hard… like a shrink. He wished he could watch himself.
“Oh.” Jane tilted her head to study the picture. “I’ve never seen her before. Or this photo. She looks all stiff and funny.”
“It’s the pose. She was a dancer.”
“Was?”
He smiled. Post-Nordstrom or not, Jane still had a lightning-swift uptake. “She’s dead now.”
“Oh. Like Lynn Volker. Then I don’t understand why Dr, Nordstrom was talking about her the way he was, as if she were still alive. He said that she—I?—a woman could never be too thin or too cold. What do you suppose he meant?”
“He’s sick.” Kevin took back the photo, gazed into Julie’s distant black-and-white eyes. He thought of bone and dirt. The wrinkles Nordstrom had crushed into the shiny paper still defaced the image, aging Julie’s eternally young face. Kevin brooded on what hidden wrinkles Nordstrom had managed to pleat into Jane’s psyche over the last several days.
“Maybe Dr. Nordstrom doesn’t get enough to eat,” Jane speculated, drawing noisily on her milk shake straw. “He didn’t believe much in food.”
&
nbsp; Her analytical dispassion chilled Kevin. She seemed like the machine the aliens had intended her to be, that he had never been willing to see before.
He tried again. “And that’s the last thing you remember —Dr. Nordstrom coming into your room at night and talking about Julie?”
“Yes,” said Jane.
“Jane, I’d like to hypnotize you.” He couldn’t miss the way her body tensed. For an instant, she looked like a dancer about to dance.
“Why?” she wanted to know.
“Why not?” He had to find out how deep the new aggression she had unleashed at Nordstrom ran.
“Dr. Nordstrom tried to do it.”
“Did he?” Very casual.
“Yes.”
“Did you let him?”
“Of course. But—”
“Yes?”
“But he needed to know the word, you know. And—”
“So you gave it to him.”
“Yes, but—”
“But?”
“It didn’t work. Dr. Nordstrom didn’t seem very happy.”
Kevin sat forward. “It didn’t work? But it had to, even for someone else. Why not?”
“I don’t know. He asked for the word I thought of when I thought of you, and I said ‘Zyunsinth’—”
Kevin laughed then and grabbed her hands. “You always did confuse me with the Missing Link! Listen, Jane, you gave Nordstrom the wrong word, that’s why it didn’t work. Don’t you remember the word we used? What you called the ambulance by mistake?”
“Oh.” Jane frowned, then smiled back at Kevin, as if his loosening up had released her somewhat. “Now I do. The… ec-na-lub-ma.”
“Right. I could use that word and I could hypnotize you. Would that be all right?”
She thought about it, sliding her dark eyes sideways, looking to her hidden, eternally internal left. Such gestures activated the right, intuitive side of her brain. “All right.” Her retreat to intuition rather than logic relieved him.
Jane herself was still in there, somewhere. Time, she needed time. He began the hypnotic ritual, being as reassuring as a sensitive shrink could be. He even allowed some love to leak into his voice, damn unprofessional thing to do. She went under like a charm.
“Jane, after Dr. Nordstrom left, what did you do?”
“I waited. And thought.”
“What did you think about?”
“About how he’d said I was to provide a demonstration of my power. I didn’t want to, but then…”
“Then—?”
“Then I thought about Dr. Nordstrom. About how he came and went and how there was something in his eyes that sharpened itself on me. And he tried to contain me. This probe must not be contained.” Her voice had hardened.
“This probe—?” Good lord, she was reverting to her original programming! Even at the University Hospitals, she’d never referred to herself in that cold inanimate way…
“This probe must remain at liberty to fulfill its function,” she recited at his prompting. “It must be free to Call and Recall. So it… so Jane—Jane thought. Jane thought through walls, through time. Then Jane made the room dance for Dr. Nordstrom. She did as he said. She provided a demonstration. And Dr. Nordstrom went away. Now Kevin is here. Kevin will not stop Jane. Kevin is… useful. Kevin is remembered. It is all… all right now.”
Kevin let her warm fingers slip through his cold ones. He leaned back in his chair to rub a hand over his chin. His spine ached and he could use a shave. Funny. He had completely adapted to being beardless now. Odd how new habits so quickly assert themselves, and old ones desert one. No wonder Jane had changed, with all she’d been through.
He studied her as she sat before him in the serene expectancy of hypnotic trance. This… appalling disassociation between her current self and her old self, this reversion to probe status—it indicated regression so deep it pained him to contemplate it.
And now she had done the unthinkable—attacked without provocation. True, she’d been goaded by the sick baiting of Eric Nordstrom. Anyone would have responded to such a stimulus, himself included, but then “anyone” didn’t have access to Jane’s brand of electromagnetic mayhem.
Perhaps he was the fool for believing that Jane’s lethal side was pure programming, Kevin told himself. Perhaps it was inherent, engineered into her genes. Perhaps Turner and the government knew what they were doing, and Jane was just the one to do it for them. Perhaps she had always been only a tool, and he was the evergreen optimist for believing she could be answerable only to herself, that he could love a being as bizarrely constituted as she, a biological probe first and a person second.
A thousand questions writhed to birth in his brain before he finally leaned forward and whispered the word that released Jane to waking consciousness.
* * *
“The man’s a basket case.”
“Dammit, I won’t see him!” Kevin leaned back on the bed that was his. Turner had assigned him a pretty innocuous room—no Wonderland mirror, no hospital furniture. Kevin never believed he was alone in it for a moment, not even in his dreams.
“You’re a shrink,” Turner argued. “Maybe Nordstrom knows something that will help us. Or help you. Her.”
“Yeah. I might look at the guy, but I can’t! I’m much too… tied up in Jane’s case. And Nordstrom’s a counterforce in her treatment. Don’t you see what he’s done to her?”
“You can’t be with Jane Doe every hour of the day!”
“Oh, but I am,” Kevin said. “When I’m not with her, I’m thinking about the next stage of treatment. I’m wondering how to bring her along—or whether my own involvement is objective enough for her own good. Maybe even for yours, Turner.”
“And—?”
“Some progress. She talks more like the old Jane—or rather, the new Jane treatment pried from her shell once before. I can’t risk my relationship—my professional relationship—with Jane by mucking around in Nordstrom’s twisted psyche. You don’t know how personally involved I am in this. Not just with Jane. With Nordstrom, too.”
“I know Nordstrom knew you at Harvard, and apparently hated your guts.”
“Do you know why?”
Turner shrugged. “You’re likeable; he isn’t. It figures.”
“Thanks, but you’re a lousy judge of human nature. I was the outsider, the ‘unwashed phenomenon’ from northern Minnesota. The scholarship student. Oh, I survived, but Nordstrom had all the aces hand-dealt to him.
“I suppose he gave you that ‘poor me’ routine. Don’t believe it. He had it all. So did all the guys like him. That’s really why Julie Symons picked me. I was the perfect antithesis to her successful father, guaranteed to drive old man Symons crazy. They call it adolescent rebellion.
“Julie was a little old for that, but her development had frozen somewhere in a preteen limbo, emotionally. I didn’t ‘take’ Julie from Nordstrom like he imagines—she did! She picked me as bedside companion for her slow death from anorexia nervosa.”
“Some honor.” Turner shuddered a little, maybe not just for effect. Nordstrom had attuned him to degrees of sickness.
“Maybe it was a compliment,” Kevin mused. “I wasn’t threatening like her father, or predictable like the guys she grew up with—the rich, neurotic Nordstroms of the East Coast. I was good enough for her to kiss good-bye. Which she did.
“It took me a long time to figure out that Julie was giving her world the finger the only way she knew how. I was incidental. Nordstrom could never accept that, because that would have made him even more incidental. So he fixated on Julie, fixated on her death, on her way of death.”
“And he’s a shrink?” Turner sounded shocked.
“Ever hear the expression ‘Physician, heal thyself’? It was custom-made for Nordstrom. Finding someone like Jane simply intensified his delusions. You don’t know half of what he put her through—starving her, restraining her so she’d have to soil herself. Trying to infantalize her, really.”
&nb
sp; “Blake—say, that’s why… the feces, the vomit in his room. He ate it, did you know that? He licked it up like a dog”
Kevin digested the revulsion on Turner’s face. “Don’t feel too sorry for Nordstrom. He probably enjoyed it. The technical word is coprophilia.”
“I’ll never understand you shrinks.”
“You’ll never have to understand what we have to. Count your blessings and, in the meantime, do us both a favor and ship Nordstrom off to another head-shrinker. You and I’ve got our hands, hearts and minds full with Jane.”
“It sounds like you’re committed to… helping her, helping us.”
Kevin grinned wearily. Turner wasn’t so bad, if he hadn’t had his job to do. “Watch your choice of verbs,” was all he would answer.
Chapter Thirty-five
* * *
Would it be all right if I taped our sessions?”
Kevin waved the tiny Japanese recorder under Jane’s nose, then drew back internally to watch her. She eyed the mechanism, wrinkled her forehead, started to speak, then hesitated,
“I… suppose so.”
“You still don’t like recorders, do you?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I’m—” He saw her mind searching for the right words. “They give me… bad vibes.”
“Hmm. Sounds like another dorm phrase.”
“But it fits. That… machine makes me feel like Dr. Nordstrom did.”
“Which is—”
“Twitchy.” Jane demonstrated by trying to outshrug her baby blue wool sweater.
“Okay. I just wanted to see where we stood. We’re back to Square One, like I figured.”
“I’ve disappointed you?”
“No, I’ve disappointed myself. I keep expecting life to pick up right from where it left off, like a comic strip. Nothing’s like that. Everything is going back and back until we get it right enough to go forward.”
CounterProbe Page 28