Mind to Mind: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective

by Don Pendleton

  But don't get the idea that I was dabbling in physical therapy. I lay no claims to expertise in that area. I presumed that someone was working with this woman to restore all possible bodily functions. My interest was in her mind itself and how it worked through only half a brain, the surviving nonverbal side. It had immediately become obvious that she was processing information and trying to respond intelligently—"thinking," in other words. But thinking how and with what? It had been scientifically demonstrated that the right cerebral cortex is superior to the left in certain areas of human consciousness, but virtually all that we regard as intellectual processes are typically handled by the left hemisphere.

  For example, if Jane Doe had lost her right hemisphere instead of the left, her closest friends would see little noticeable difference in her personality. Her speech may be a bit flat, unemotional, and tending toward the literal—no appreciation for metaphor or delicate shadings of meaning. Ask left-brained Jane, "What time is it?" and she may well respond, "What time is what?" Or ask her how she feels and she may tell you that she feels with her hands. She may get lost inside her own home, not be able to find the bathroom, have difficulty fitting her arms and legs inside her clothing, and never dream again, but she could sit and chat with you for hours without demonstrating any loss of intellectual ability.

  But I was dealing with a right-brained Jane—a person whose memories were largely sensory and emotional impressions and whose thoughts were not structured through language. So how the hell were they structured, in what kind of format did she think, and how could I tap into those thoughts? I was not all that concerned about her fixated eyes; I was going for the mental reaction to all that.

  What I got, though, was quite a bit more than I had been going for. I had been patiently wrestling with her head for about five minutes when she snarled, "Well, fuck it!" just as clearly and with the same level of disgust experienced by any normal person. She kissed my hand, then maneuvered herself close against me and nuzzled my throat, moaning softly and agitating her pajama-clad body against mine.

  I thought, Oh shit! and was trying to gracefully extricate myself from the situation when an obviously very angry woman in hospital-white slacks and tunic came charging across the lawn with fire in the eye. "Just what the hell do you think you're doing!" she cried.

  Jane Doe rolled onto her back with a soft little laugh as I struggled clear.

  "Let's get her into the chair," I said to the angry woman, trying to be very cool while feeling entirely foolish. I noticed the candy striper, then, in my peripheral vision, all but wringing her hands in the background.

  Then I saw the hospital security cop hurrying our way.

  So okay, I decided, I had invited this one. Common sense should have warned me. A guy simply does not take over a female patient of questionable mental status and lay her on a blanket in the grass.

  The woman grabbed my arm with both hands, as though to restrain me from running away.

  I smiled and asked her, "Is this your dance?"

  But then the cop arrived, gun drawn, wary.

  I told him, "There has been a misunderstanding. I'm here on police business, examining this patient at the request of Lieutenant James Cochran, Hollywood Division. Call him and confirm it."

  But this guy was not too swift. He looked at the woman for instructions.

  She snapped, "Arrest him!"

  The guy was fumbling with his cuffs.

  I told him, "Forget the cuffs, pal, or you've got more trouble than you really need. I'll go to the security office with you while you call Cochran." And I told the woman, "Your sense of duty is commendable, but don't you think you're being just a tad ridiculous? Will you please let go my arm?"

  Not that I was mad at her. Actually I admired her for the ballsy defense of her patient. Quite attractive, even under the circumstances—blond, petite, curvaceous. But enough was enough, and I'd had enough.

  She released me, seemingly a bit embarrassed to realize that she was still clinging to me.

  Jane Doe had been lying on her back and giggling through all of that. I put her in her chair and arranged the blanket across her lap. The security cop still had his gun in his hand, looking very confused.

  The woman in white asked me, "Do you have some identification?"

  I showed her my driver's license and handed her a business card. Her eyes were on that card as she told the cop, "It's okay, Harry. There's been a misunderstanding."

  Harry looked very grateful about that. He grinned at me as he holstered the pistol and walked away.

  The woman gave me her hand, said very calmly, "Sorry I missed you inside, Mr. Ford. I'm Dr. Saunders. Lieutenant Cochran did mention your name, but I'd ... I'm sorry if I interfered with your ... investigation."

  "No interference at all," I muttered.

  Jane Doe had me in her sights. And she was looking at me straight on. We'd connected, yeah ... somewhere.

  Chapter Three: A Gross Perception

  Alison Saunders, it turns out, is a doctor of philosophy, not medicine. She is a clinical psychologist who specializes in the rehabilitation of persons suffering brain damage—not very long a doctor of anything, I guessed, unless I'd missed her age by several years. As I said, she is very pretty—even more so now, with the strain of hostile confrontation gone. I am finding myself fascinated by her hands and their artful movements as she talks; they are very delicate little hands with beautifully tapering fingers and just enough nail extension to indicate an awareness of, and attention to, their appearance.

  She has very nice soft brown eyes, too, and it is good that they are soft because she has a tendency toward direct eye contact when she is talking to you, so direct that it could be discomforting to be thusly impaled by such an intense gaze. With her, though, the feeling is more that you are being bathed rather than impaled, and it is a nice experience.

  The mouth is nice, too; small, without seeming tight; sensuous, generous; altogether a proper mouth for a professional young woman who wishes to be pretty but not provocative. I am thinking, though, that this mouth could get provocative as hell under the right circumstances.

  The whole face is like this, everything properly proportioned and harmonized with just the right complementarity; I mean, the chin beneath that delicately sensuous mouth is the chin that should be there, the plane of the cheeks so fittingly flowing into the gentle lifting of that delicate nose, the brows and forehead providing such pleasingly subtle emphasis to the warm eyes—even her hair, softly lustrous, sort of ash blond with just the right shading to perfectly backdrop all that.

  If it sounds like I am a bit smitten, you are exactly right about that. Of course, I am especially vulnerable to beautiful women—sensitized, you might say, by a highly active libido that reflexively responds quite a few steps ahead of intellectual reaction. If the object of that reflex is especially alluring, then, of course, the intellect has a hell of a tussle on its hands. At this particular moment with Alison Saunders the intellect is already aware that it is locked in a losing battle, but it keeps trying, anyway.

  We have returned Jane Doe to her room and made sure that she is secure and comfortable. Doc Saunders and I are now at a small table in the cafeteria—facing each other knee to knee, as it were, and I am electrically aware of those knees that are almost but not quite touching mine, except now and then, as one of us "accidentally" makes contact. Although we are engaged in a very absorbing clinical discussion of Jane Doe, one little corner of my mind is still under libido domination and wondering if she is feeling what I am feeling beneath all the shoptalk.

  Alison has just finished summarizing the physical effects of Jane's hemispherectomy, and now we are getting into the psychological effects.

  "Of course," she has just told me, "the human brain is a highly complex organ. It is probable that no two are exactly alike in the way they are organized. This is the first hemispherectomy I have dealt with directly, and the literature itself is not all that rich. But there have been cases—e
specially, it seems, in women—where lateralization before damage or surgery was not all that marked, and therefore both hemispheres have developed verbal abilities."

  I was searching my mental textbook for that one. "Lateralization is, uh ..."

  "Hemispheric specialization," she explained. "This usually begins developing at about the age of six, after the neural connections between the left and right hemispheres have matured. For most of us the lateralization process begins favoring the left hemisphere for verbal and the right hemisphere for spatial development. It has been discovered that in general, females become less lateralized than males. Don't ask me why, but it surely has something to do with natural selection and sex roles. However, that does not appear to be the case with Jane. She has only the most primitive verbal ability, which indicates that her right hemisphere—the surviving brain tissue—was strongly lateralized—that is, specialized—for nonverbal functions."

  I said, "She cusses pretty well."

  Alison laughed softly and replied, "That's characteristic, I'm afraid. Swearing seems to be a right-brain specialty. Most right brains, it seems, develop a capability for emotional verbalization. To some extent, too, even in the marked cases of lateralization, there seems to be a rather rich right-brain store of prelateralized memories—even verbal memories, such as nursery rhymes and other words learned by rote."

  "Why can't Jane remember her own name, then?" I inquired.

  "Perhaps she does."

  "Then why has she not produced it?"

  "Possibly she simply cannot access it."

  "You mean, like ..."

  "A proper stimulus. She swears because of an emotional stimulus—frustration or anger. About ninety percent of what Jane is right now, Mr. Ford, is emotion. I mean, that is what her consciousness is at this point; a nonverbal, nonassociative, noncommunicative person-ality caught up in a nonlinear, almost purely sensory, world of spatial experiences and memories."

  "She's in a nightmare," I supposed.

  "Something very similar, I would say, yes."

  "Is that going to change?"

  She spread the dainty hands. "I don't know."

  "What do you know?"

  "I know you'd better watch yourself if you intend to spend any more time alone with her."

  "What does that mean?"

  "For most of us, Mr. Ford, sexual expression is almost entirely a right-brain experience."

  I said quietly, "See what you mean."

  She told me, "It was very stupid of me to leap at you the way I did awhile ago. I really feel ... foolish. Because I—I have been anticipating just such a—a complication from Jane. You see, she is almost purely reactive. You turned her on. She reacted."

  I said, even more quietly, "See what you mean, yeah."

  She said, "Just try to remember that she is highly susceptible to ..."

  I sighed and told her, "Actually I'm the one to feel foolish. I did a study a while back—even published a paper on it—on just that very thing."

  She said, "What very thing?"

  "Left-brain, right-brain sex."

  She said, "Oh." After a moment of silence: "I had understood that your field is ... Lieutenant Cochran said you'd solved a number of cases for them through your—"

  I told her, "Cochran would make a good press agent. Actually I've solved nothing for them. I get lucky with hunches sometimes."

  She seemed a bit confused. "You're not a... you're not ...?"

  I grinned and told her, "That's three."

  "Three what?"

  I replied, "Three times you've stumbled on ESP."

  I'd embarrassed her. Those silky cheeks had a new hint of color to either side as she fumbled to reassure me. "No, I—actually I'm very interested in parapsychology. It's just that I've never had the privilege to meet a professional psychic before."

  I told her, "You still haven't."

  She said, "I don't understand why—if you—your card said, 'consultant.' Lieutenant Cochran told me that you solve crimes psychically, that you sometimes work with them as a psychic consultant."

  I said, "Maybe. But I've never billed myself that way. Tell you the truth, Alison, I don't know what the hell I do. Until I do, I put nothing whatever on the marquee. The truth, I'm afraid, is that I do nothing. Things do me sometimes, and that's all I know. If I could do the things instead of the things doing me, then maybe I'd know what the hell I do."

  She was giving me an intent little smile. "Maybe you just don't want the responsibility to have to live up to something."

  I smiled and shrugged. "Okay."

  She laughed. "You can't be this perfect," she said teasingly. "Surely you're reactive about something."

  I said, "Lots of things, sure. Depends on the stimulus."

  "For example?"

  "For example ... if you brush my knee one more time with yours, I'm liable to just bear you to the floor right here in front of all these people."

  Forget about "hints of color." That one sent the blood pounding into that whole pert face, from the throat to the hairline. She immediately tried to cover with a napkin to the mouth, then giggled and said, "I sure hope you don't read minds."

  "No need to," I assured her. "Faces tell quite enough."

  "What is mine telling you?"

  I slowly found a cigarette, lit it, tried to release the smoke in a pattern that would avoid her, finally said, "You don't want to know."

  The color was slowly dissipating. She was showing me a contemplative smile. She told me, still teasing, "You're afraid of being wrong."

  I said, "Okay, that's a reactive, so just remember that you asked for it. You were thinking almost exactly the same thing about me but in a somewhat more delicate way. You blushed when I said it because I misrepresented your own thoughts in a gross way. What you were really thinking, just before I verbalized it, was coming straight from your right hemisphere. I believe you were visualizing my right knee clasped between your naked thighs."

  She said, "God!" and lowered the napkin, lowered also her eyes. The teasing mood ended right there. When she spoke again, it was in a coolly controlled voice. "You didn't get all that from my face."

  I said, "I wouldn't know. But was I right?"

  She said very quietly, "God."

  "What?"

  "Are you busy tonight?"

  I told her, "Not yet."

  "You are now. Can you pick me up here, at six?"

  I could, sure. The trouble with trying to control the libido by sheer will of intellect, you see, is that the whole effort is easily sabotaged by uncooperative environmental influences. Hell. I couldn't fight my libido and hers too. But I did not even have to try. Something else had crowded my mind, something very disturbing and maybe very ominous.

  Alison misread the look on my face. She was obviously highly embarrassed as she murmured, "Well, I guess it takes two to tango, doesn't it?"

  I was coming out of my chair as I told her, "It's not that. I believe Jane is in trouble. Call the floor and send someone in there and stat."

  I did not wait for a reply, or even a reaction, but left Alison sitting there with a stunned face as I took off in a full-out run for Jane Doe's room.

  Don't ask what I "got." I don't know what I got. Something from her mind to mine, I believe—a purely right-brain message, a nightmarish montage of frightening symbols and deadly intents.

  And apparently I "got" it just a couple of heartbeats too late.

  Chapter Four: Beyond the Detail

  A modern hospital is somewhat like the world in microcosm. Maybe that is why the setting is such a popular vehicle for movies and television. Get all that talent and organization assembled under one roof, infuse it with high purpose and the constant struggle for life against death, and the drama is just naturally there. The people who play out their lives within such an environment are cast in one of the greatest shows on earth.

  Of course, there are good actors and bad ones, inspired ones and bored ones. And sometimes we have to look beyond the
detail to find the grand purpose behind it all.

  All of which is preamble for the observation that hospitals, in their day-to-day routines, have evolved a way to cope with the high drama of their microcosm. They bureaucratize it, trivialize it, depersonalize it, anesthetize it, and ultimately deny it. In that movement there is also a tendency to dehumanize the entire experience.

  I make the observation not to knock what they do but to marvel at how well they can do it, to go on day after day and night after endless night in the throes of fear and suffering, illness and despair, death and sorrow, while providing hope, comfort, cheer, and very often triumph without ever really losing the dehumanized rhythms.

  Jane Doe was dead. She had died between Alison Saunders's tentative telephone alert to the nurses' station and my arrival on the scene after a heart-pounding run along endless corridors and up four flights of stairs. She had died beneath the smothering weight of her own pillow pressed determinedly onto her face by a person unknown. It had taken me no longer than three minutes to cover the distance between the cafeteria and that fourth-floor room, yet during that brief period a nurse had surprised the killer in the act and had fought with him, been bloodied, and knocked to the floor by him; a medical team had responded and whisked the victim somewhere for heroic resuscitation efforts, and the battered nurse had been relieved of her duties. In three minutes. And the overall rhythms of that floor had not been disturbed. Everything was business as usual when I arrived on the scene—bedpans and medication carts, orderlies with mops and aides with fresh linens, interns and nurses and volunteers processing the business of the day. Nothing remained behind to mark the passage of Jane Doe through that process, just the empty room and a slightly mussed bed, an orderly with a mop, a nurse's aide already preparing to change the sheets.