“Is that what you mean by ‘regression’?”
“Sometimes. The Hindus call it reincarnation.” Kevin put the tape recorder away and kept his voice brightly professional. “So. What do you want to talk about? You don’t recall anything that happened after I took you to the Crow Wing bluff top and the… others came and assumed you into their vessel. I’d give a lot to know what happened before they returned you.”
“It’s all so clear until then—Kevin, I’d tell you if I could!”
“I know.” His hand tightened reassuringly on her arm, but his heart sank. He couldn’t seem to get a firm psychological grip on this new Jane. Their sessions were cold, sterile. Maybe he expected too much too soon. Maybe he needed too much too soon. “You don’t remember anything afterwards—oh, burying Zyunsinth, or the night in the motel?”
Jane shook her dark head, looking sad. Her fingers curled around his forearm, loosely. “Did I miss anything important?”
“No.” He leaned away, letting her hand slide from his arm. Her question had provoked a sequence of pungent memories—the cheap outstate motels, the companionship of the van as it swallowed miles like krill, the cold, and Jane warm in his arms—those were suddenly, irrevocably the good old days. “We had our first fight, that’s all.”
“I can’t imagine fighting with you.”
“You did. You talked back. Argued.”
“About what?”
“About clothes shopping. About… Zyunsinth.”
“Oh. It’s funny, I had a dream—” She stopped herself.
“About Zyunsinth?”
She studied him for a long moment, memory and calculation blending in her expression. “About… you.”
“Listen, they don’t pay me to hear about myself.”
“They pay you?”
“No. No one pays me anymore. What did you dream about me?” His heart was thumping hopefully. Maybe… was Zyunsinth now, the key to her memory?
“We were… together. You know. Like before. Maybe it would help if we could do it again.”
Jane broached his own unmentionable hope and he fled. “That’s… past for now, Jane. I shouldn’t have let it happen then. I have more reason to not let it happen now. We have to settle the present first.”
“I thought I was there, too.”
“You were. Only… I’m the responsible one.”
“But you said, you said that I was to become responsible, that what I did… wanted… was because I was I.”
“That’s true.”
Jane’s eyes grew stormy. “’I’ wishes to be that I again. I miss Zyunsinth and I don’t remember losing it. I miss you and you won’t help me.”
“Oh, God. Jane…” Now. Close up on Jane’s face. She remembers. Ecstatic embrace. Happy ending. Fade out. “Look,” said the psychiatrist in him, cold as mirror glass, “you’ve been through everything I once hoped you’d be spared. It’s hurt you terribly, though you don’t know it yet. It’s hurt me. We’re—we can’t just pick up from there. We have to give it time.”
“How much?”
“Enough.”
“You don’t like me anymore!”
“No—” But did he like her now that he doubted her? Could he possibly love her again, or not love her, without hating himself either way?
“You’re afraid of me!”
“No—Yes, afraid of damaging you! It’s my goddamn job not to!”
Jane settled into her vinyl-seated maple chair that looked like it had escaped from a cafeteria. She absently scratched her back by swaying against the top strut, a motion all the more sensual for its innocence.
“I thought you liked to sleep with me,” she said.
“I do! I did.” That wasn’t the answer. Life was never that simple, not even for clones. The image of Nordstrom’s room—of what Jane had done to Nordstrom’s room— surfaced in his mind, repelled him. He felt ashamed. “Things have changed.”
“Me. You think I’ve changed.”
“And me,” he admitted. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. That’s what you get for playing God.
“You always asked me to try to remember things, to think about them.”
“Yes.” He saw it coming.
“Think about that,” Jane told him. “Kevin, I miss you. You’re the one thing that made being here not seem right.”
“Oh, Jane, I’m here now.”
“Not the same.”
“You don’t miss Zyunsinth?”
“I’ve… forgotten Zyunsinth.”
“That’s wrong, somehow—”
“I haven’t forgotten you.”
“You’re weak,” he said, his fingers forgetting themselves long enough to brush her face.
She moved his hand to the side of her breast. His fingers felt only the ripple of ribs. “I’m getting stronger. A lot stronger.”
* * *
Kevin saw Nordstrom that afternoon.
“Well, the young lion,” the man greeted him.
Nordstrom had shriveled, everything but his head had shrunk. He looked like the fraudulent Wizard of Oz—a great, inflated bladder with no body.
“Apparently the tables have turned,” he admitted. “I’m in the cage and you’re the conquering hero.”
“Hardly a cage.” Kevin looked around the room.
“They took… my things.”
“They should have.”
“You’ve come to gloat? Or cure me, is that it? Dr. Schweitzer, I presume, come to minister to the poor ignorant savage—”
“Poor, no. Ignorant, hardly. Savage, yes. Nordstrom—”
“Doctor Nordstrom to you, Blake.”
“Nordstrom, what did you want from Jane?”
“Past tense. My, we are overconfident. When the government doesn’t need you anymore, they’ll put you out to pasture, too.”
“I’d have thought they’d have shipped you to a head joint in Virginia by now,” Kevin conceded.
“Can’t. Know too much. You do, too, Blake. Wait’ll you see how they discredit you.”
“You discredited yourself. What did you want from Jane?”
“Her… compliance.”
“Jane isn’t a terribly compliant person,” Kevin said.
“No, but you did all right.” Nordstrom’s eyes glittered as he shrank back against his bed’s metal headboard.
“I’m not going to hit you, Nordstrom. I’d like to, but I’m not going to. If you made me do it, you’d have won. I won’t hit you and Jane won’t—wouldn’t—comply, isn’t that right?”
“Yes, you’re a fucking coward and she’s a, a—free spirit.” Nordstrom started laughing, a smug giggle that grated like chalk on a blackboard.
Kevin waited for him to stop before speaking again. “She made you eat shit. She made you hit rock bottom in yourself and then glory in it.”
Nordstrom was silent, but near the nosepiece, his glasses fogged over with the fury of his seething breaths. Kevin automatically went to take his pulse, wary of hyperventilation.
The vast complex, whatever it had been originally, was habitually kept meat-locker cold, and the earth was still wrapped in the dead of winter outside this artificial miniworld.
Nordstrom jerked his wrist away. “Fast. I was hyperactive as a child. And I may be a… teensy… agitated now. So keep your filthy hands off me!”
Kevin watched the psychiatrist nurse his wrist, as if Kevin’s impersonal touch had bruised it.
“Did you keep your hands off her, Nordstrom? Or couldn’t you resist, another almost-dead body for you to fondle, as you did Julie’s?” Kevin prowled around the bed, aiming insight like weapons, being a bad psychiatrist.
“How long have you been screwing your patients, Nordstrom? Your female patients? Or is that all? You like women bone-thin, boyish almost. Is that what it is—not a fixation with death but an obsession with sex turned inside out? Maybe you don’t like women at all, in any shape or form. Maybe you like men and can’t face it—”
“What about your stabili
ty?” Nordstrom struck back. “You picked Julie and enjoyed it enough to see her through the long, slow fade—”
“Dr. Cross’s theories won’t wash. Julie seemed normal when I met her. Besides, anorexia stems from an individual’s desire for ultimate control, particularly for women—who are so often overcontrolled by environment and their culture. And Jane never was anorexic; she gains weight like a wrestler, given half a chance. You had to starve her to keep her at your needed perception of her. You’re a mean bastard, Nordstrom; I bet your female patients would have a few tales to tell—”
Nordstrom brooded icily, pushing his chin down on his chest.
Kevin walked to the wall, where a print of Van Gogh’s sunflowers hung too high and crooked. Someone had recently paid almost forty million dollars for the original that Van Gogh had never been able to sell. Kevin straightened the clone.
“There’s a theory—about women and weight and the way our culture sees them, forces them to see themselves. Maybe you’ve heard of it.” Silence. Kevin continued anyway.
“That theory is that the sight of those emaciated survivors of the Nazi death camps inspired the Western world’s postwar mania for cadaverous women models. It’s a fetish for death, sexualized into a cultural cliché. Extreme emaciation produces an asexual image, blurs gender, flattens womanliness. It’s the ultimate victimization, the ultimate depersonalization. You don’t have to answer to a corpse.”
“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” Nordstrom’s hands cradled his ears. “I won’t listen to your obscene fantasies! And no, I didn’t touch your precious Jane Doe; filthy, she was filthy.
“I’ve never really touched any of them, the stupid bitches. They all did what I said. They’re all filthy, carriers of hidden foulnesses. You can wallow in their steaming, diseased bodies, if you like. I… covet their minds. I take them without touching them. I am morally superior, Blake, morally superior!”
Kevin was at the door, fading fast, but he’d learned what he needed to know. He also understood why Turner had left Nordstrom’s room on the verge of retching after finding him. And he knew why Jane had done what she had done.
* * *
Kevin dreamed again that night. He was wearing rimless eyeglasses and screwing corpses. He flung the bodies from himself before each act could be completed. But corpse followed corpse, brides of Dracula and Poe, every embodiment of woman as death that the mind of man could conceive, monuments to the male sex’s perverse love affair with death and war and violence—monuments… and victims.
He woke up, grappling with enlightenment and one last entwining cadaver. Call it a dry dream.
“Jane!”
The room was dark, but he knew her touch.
“I was tired of being ‘I’ by myself,” she complained, wrapping her arms around him.
Kevin’s hands skimmed the warm skin of her spine between rungs of strings up her back; she wore a hospital gown still—apparently no one had dug up any conventional nightclothes for her.
She was ladder-thin, thinner than any Jane he had made love to before. He held her away from him like china and tried to think.
“Kevin. It’s not new. It helped me before; maybe it will help me now.”
“Is that why you want it, to help yourself?”
“No… I want it because I want it. I want… you.”
“Jane… I don’t want to be like him, like Nordstrom. Yet by caring for you, I somehow always risk exploiting you.”
“Maybe that’s always the way it is. I don’t feel exploited.”
She was snuggling expertly against him, her palms running down his sides, his thighs. He found his hands undoing the stingy bows along her back, then molding her fragile body to their warmth and hunger.
Her mouth fastened on his by some mutual impulse in the dark. It was warm and sweet and deep, nothing like the carnal pit Nordstrom feared. Kevin began to appreciate the wonder of what he was free to feel, of what he and Jane could weave between them. It was sex, but it was life, not death. It was desire, but it was love, not envy. It was right.
“Jane… I’ve missed you. God, I love you.” He rode the bare bucking back of his need now, forgetful of his profession, her supposed vulnerability. Jane responded in kind, her body twining with his, her words and gasps echoing his own.
The sheets twisted with them; even the spiraling dark seemed to merge in the dance. Jane’s hand found the spire of his erection. His penis prodded the archway to her vagina, retreated to advance—and encountered a thin, ungiving inner door of membrane.
Kevin felt caviar beads of sweat all over his body turn rock-crystal cold.
He balanced over the dark beneath him, poised to surrender to its unseen shape, to be shaped by it. His penis nosed forward. The barrier gave, then tautened. He rolled away, his fingers exploring with a physician’s expert dispassion even in the dark. They probed a satin-slick cavity— and met ungiving membrane.
A hymen. Again.
“Jane.” He whispered. “Jane, you remember the first time we—?”
“Of course. I’d never forget that, Kevin.”
“You had a—barrier in your body.”
“My hymen.” She sounded possessive. “You broke it and it hurt. But it hurt more not to have you inside me.”
“Once it’s gone, it stays gone. But you… have it again, and you’re not supposed to. A hymen isn’t a renewable resource.”
“Really? I wasn’t supposed to have it in the first place, was I? The girts in the dorm didn’t seem to know about ever having one.”
“But… you had one, and then you didn’t—not even when we last were together, in the motel, remember? Since then, it’s… grown back. Did you know that?”
“Motel? Remember? No… I don’t remember the motel. And how could I know it grew back? I wouldn’t feel it, would I? It’s not the kind of thing a woman feels. You are. Kevin, come in.”
“I know your memory’s grown new blanks since we’ve been separated, like a hymen, I guess. I can accept that: You don’t remember the motel, okay. I can’t accept a… brand-new hymen springing into place. I’ve got to know— when, how… why?”
“Oh, Kevin. Not now. You’ve always got to know. I just want to—”
“I know what you want. But—” His fingers slid from inside her. “I don’t know… you anymore. Maybe I never did.”
“Kevin,” she complained. “It’s not fair.”
“It’s not fair, but it’s life. I can’t now, anyway.”
“Can’t?”
“I’m… not operative. Listen, Jane, if you’ve regrown your hymen, it means you’ve felt damaged—far more deeply damaged than you think or I can begin to imagine. I can’t ignore that kind of trauma.”
“I told you! I didn’t even know!” Her hand hailed in the dark and finally captured his penis. “Oh.”
“I told you. I can’t.”
“But I’m all right. I feel fine. I want you to.”
“I’m not all right. I can’t do it again, can’t take responsibility for your virginity over and over, every damn time. Your body is unconsciously defending itself. There must be a reason, even if you don’t know it. That’s more important than this. Jane, let go. Give it up.”
He patted around in the dark until he found the discarded hospital gown. He stuffed her clinging arms into it and tied the strings shut up the back. At the end he embraced her shoulders, but she stiffened.
“All right,” Jane said, her voice husky with hurt. She didn’t know enough to feel humiliated, although she had a right to be. “All right. I’ll go.”
“Jane, please… the time’s not right, that’s all.”
He never heard her leave, just knew from the quality of silence that she had gone as quietly as she had come, that he was alone.
Kevin threw himself back down on the bed, angry with his recalcitrant body, surprised by his resurrected nicety. Why did Jane’s regrown hymen chill him more than anything else about this new, more potent, demanding Jane he simply didn’t
want or love as he used to, as he ought to, dammit?
He’d breached the barrier of Jane’s virginity once—not relishing the act but doing it. Why did a second time make it all seem so much more premeditated?
Why the hell did he have to care, when she obviously didn’t?
Chapter Thirty-six
* * *
Look,” Turner said the next morning, “I don’t want to interfere with Love’s Young Dream, but don’t you think it’s time to get down to the nitty gritty?”
“How’d you know?” Kevin asked. “Room bugged?”
“None of your business.“ Turner grinned. “Imagine me telling you that, Doctor. I believe you shrinks call that role reversal. If she’s well enough to get it on, she’s well enough to start coughing up her bag of tricks.”
Kevin went to the window—a frosted glass expanse the size of a two-story wall—and sipped his herbal tea. The big echoing room was a kind of employee lounge for the place’s government staffers. Kevin guessed he was a kind of government staffer by now.
“Blake, don’t go all broody on me. I’m counting on you to produce results. Why do you think I gave you so much rope? Now that you and Jane have kissed and made up, maybe we can all get our minds on business.”
“We haven’t,” Kevin said over his cinnamon-scented steam, trying to disguise his surprise at Turner’s ignorance of the particulars. Then his room must be bug-free… “It was no go. Nothing happened. Honest, daddy.”
“I don’t need to know the gory details, but why not? She visited you. That looks like clear consent, if you ask me.” “Nobody’s asking you!” Kevin turned so fast that hot tea sprayed his hand. He wasn’t about to let Turner in on another of Jane’s anomalies. “I’m not supposed to screw my patients, do you get it?! I wasn’t supposed to before and I’m not supposed to now. Maybe I can’t live with that, all right?”
“That’s all that went wrong—your conscience acted up?”
“Yeah.” Kevin tried to sound convincingly defensive. “’Course you wouldn’t know about that—”
“No need to get personal, Doctor.” Turner was brusque now, all business. “If you don’t feel yourself capable of eliciting your patient’s potential—”
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