CounterProbe

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Jane sensed his reticence and pulled him into the vortex of her urgency, the ebb and flow of her hands, mouth, body spinning him into co-conspiracy. Beyond her erotic motions he sensed the deeper, darker shadow dancers of her emotions—her isolation, her unique oneness. He felt again—for her—the Volkers’ bruising rejection, the cold, dreary days of flight, the icy unremembered mysteries of the Crow Wing bluff.

  Compassion flared into fresh passion. Their flesh warmed in conjunction. Feeling became incarnate. Penetration was his surrender, not hers. He moved into her, with her, forgetting everything, especially his regrets, his damnable responsibility.

  Jane came first, stiffening in that stillness before the storm, then quivering her fulfillment. Despite the sexual high, Kevin couldn’t stop himself from withdrawing before his own orgasm spilled into the funnel of her vagina.

  He was an M.D., for God’s sake; he knew such precautions were feeble protection. He denied himself anyway, letting the act’s thunder dwindle and pulse away.

  He felt green and foolish, and guilty again. Jane moaned sleepy satisfaction and drifted away, whispering his name, not Zyunsinth’s. In aftermath, love built its own irrational erection within him. Whatever she was, whatever he was— and he was beginning to wonder—Kevin knew they belonged together.

  He forced himself through a relaxation exercise, made his jumping skin, twitching muscles and overrevved mind slow one by one. Kevin drifted in the tingling, disconnected state between sleep and consciousness.

  Suddenly, he knew what he would do. The psychiatrist in him had surfaced again. Tomorrow, when the sun rose and after they’d breakfasted at some hick coffee shop on some anonymous Main Street and he’d bought some fucking contraceptives in some faceless K-Mart corner, he’d take Jane home.

  “Lost? Is this certain?”

  “Unable to contact, certainly.”

  “But the control.”

  “Dis… abled.”

  “Destroyed?”

  “Dis… engaged.”

  “For what reason?”

  “An… experiment.”

  Jane dreamed, hearing voices. Jane dreamed, not of other men, but of those other than men—or women, other than mankind, than humankind, than human.

  The susurration lulled her—the “esses” of their speech. It was sound and pause between. Rasp and click, roll and hiss. She received it as English and rocked in the undulating ebb and flow of the sounds.

  “Losssst. SSSSSertain… sssssertainly. Dissssssss… Disabled. Destroyed. Disengaged. Dissssssssssssss… exxxxssss. Experiment.”

  The words hummed down her veins, sparked from cell to cell, nucleus to nucleus. She heard them, saw them, smelled them, felt them… words throbbing through her with an almost sexual sense of possession.

  Posssesssssion. Esses, exes, excuses, experiments. Esss. Ssssss.

  Hissing in the corner, under the window.

  She sat up in the dark. The machine across the room hissed icily at her. Beside her, Kevin slept. She looked down at him, on his night-hidden features that she saw anyway in her indelible mind’s eye. She touched the fingers of one hand to his face, feeling the roughness of his skin where new beard was trying to outgrow the scythe of his morning razor blade.

  His skin was cold and the heating unit hissed and something in her hurt. Not her head, not her limbs. Not even the quiescent walls of her empty vagina.

  She knew words. There had been words within her, to begin with, and then she had scanned the big, too-heavy book in the university and all the words in the world had rushed into her. Why should these most recent words, overheard in her own head, discomfort her?

  She almost asked Kevin. She was used to asking Kevin, and he was nearby, which made her happy, which was a word she had never truly understood before. There were many such words, she sensed, and they made her afraid— another newly felt word.

  But she paused. His cheek was warming to the presence of her fingertips. He was rough and quick and bewildering and so, so… separate. But he was sleeping and he didn’t hear the hissing, as she did, and he would worry if he did. Or knew that she did.

  Her fingers slipped away and she lay down, listening and trying not to listen. The buzzing came again, sawing at the edges of her awareness, endlessly gossiping.

  “The over-others may disagree.”

  “It is small this place. The unit can be traced and disconnected permanently.”

  “Obviously. But now there is no means of gleaning…”

  “Other means, like means, if they are used.”

  “Who gives the instructions?”

  “All or none. It is the purpose.”

  “It is the necessity…”

  Incessant. Purpose. Necessity. Incessantly.

  If she was careful, and concentrated in strange, hidden ways, she could mute the sounds that surged through her. She let them ebb to a barely perceptible rasp along the pathways of her nerves.

  By the window, the heating unit expelled a sputtered arpeggio, shaking her solitude. Jane turned her head to locate its featureless bulk against the faint light. Her calming ritual ran liquid through her, antennae of sensation feeling their way in the dark.

  Jane’s breath, misting in the icy room, sent tentative tendrils to the window. They gleamed blue-white like opaline fingers of gasflame in the dull light, then fisted and wrenched the heat control off.

  The hissing died abruptly, within her and outside her, at once. The room grew colder in almost discernible stages from second to second.

  Jane curled herself into the curve of Kevin and forgot it all.

  * * *

  He lay awake on the black leather couch and dreamed.

  He always scheduled Monica Chapman as the day’s last patient, so twilight was darkening his office as Manhattan’s firmament of sky-high windows slowly sparkled into overtime life.

  He let himself do what he seldom allowed his patients to do—relax on the psychiatric couch. The layman equated black leather with male potency, but he, being a psychiatrist, knew better. It represented female skin, the smoothness, the smell. Men liked it because it broadcast their masculine wants to the world; women because it attracted men.

  He had always been attracted to other… things.

  He let his eyes focus on the stark black-and-white photograph of the dancer, let them caress the shadows etched into her serene facial planes, into her attenuated neck, into the delicate ladder of chest bones descending from the sharp horizon of her collarbones to the décolletage of her costume where no breasts overflowed.

  His breath caught at the splendid flatness of her form. Last, he fondly studied the fine shadow lines from elbow to wrist, ankle to knee, his perusal stripping her to the bones beneath the barely intervening skin.

  Finally he sighed and let himself picture Monica Chapman naked. He mentally tallied her ribs, dwelled on the hollows of her hipbones, the bony geography of her knees and feet, hands and elbows. Almost enough for him, almost enough to assuage that bottomless gnaw that no analysis no matter how deep could reach.

  It amused him to flirt with her chronic bulimia, lashing her into spasms of starvation, then flogging her into a more proper frame of mind only to unleash her abysmal lack of self-esteem and let her demons consume her for a time. He hated her sick complicity, and the fact that he dare not push her to the final self-consumption.

  But she had her points; she was far, far too maladjusted to break free, to report him. And he kept her on the razor’s edge of survival until she had come to expect it. Best of all was the complete submissive starvation in her eyes—that burning hopelessness, that numb painfulness that made her so vulnerable to his rather… unique… needs.

  She was a good patient.

  He came again, simply from dwelling on the ballerina’s distance, on Monica Chapman’s helplessness. It always helped, that removal from the source, the stimulus. He needed to fuck from afar, by proxy. His semen spurted neatly into one of the large white Irish linen handkerchiefs he ordered b
y the box from an exclusive men’s shop on 57th Street. His initials occupied one corner. He would never taint his pleasure by emptying it into the charnel house of a woman’s body. Not now.

  He needed something else, he finally admitted in that somber New York dusk. He needed release of another kind, a job with no limits, something that would allow him to dig his fingers into the human psyche and knead it like the malleable dough it was.

  The pressure was tightening around his skull, sucking him into the black hole that was the eye of his emotions. He knew he was sick. He knew he was dangerous. He needed to know that those attributes were needed—somewhere.

  The phone rang and he turned his head slowly to it. His rimless glasses winked soberly in the twilight.

  He needed a new assignment.

  Chapter Five

  * * *

  Dirty winter roads unraveled beneath the van’s balding tires.

  Let them trace these tracks, Kevin thought. Sometimes the greatest safety can be found in a lack of safety. Beside him in the van’s passenger seat, Jane hummed unmelodiously, as if eavesdropping on an atonal cosmic radio.

  “Does ‘home’ mean those people?” she asked out of nowhere.

  “They’re called parents,” he answered dryly.

  “You said they weren’t my parents,” she reminded him.

  “I was wrong. Don’t look so surprised. The great Dr. Blake can be wrong. Look, I wanted to reject the Volkers even more than you did. They were interfering with my tidy little scenario for self-interest and your… independence. We were kinda rough on them, you and I. I knew you were more than just another amnesia patient, another Jane Doe for the newspapers to cluck over, but I didn’t even begin to guess what you really were then—”

  He saw anxieties rising in Jane’s eyes that he wasn’t ready to assuage. He cupped her face in the quieting warmth of his palm.

  “I only knew that you were… special,” he soothed. “Unique. I tried to deny any ordinary claims that had a right to you. Like parents, if their claims are ever ordinary. I was wrong. Don’t you want to know how you came to be, Jane? Where exactly… you came from? Don’t you remember anything of what happened on the bluff top this last time? Or the first, for that matter. You came into our world naked, do you want to live in it that way? Surely your amnesia must be ebbing a little now. Don’t you remember anything of… them?”

  Jane’s face wrenched from his hand. She was staring out the window, but fields of white snow refused to mirror her reflection. In the sideview mirror, Kevin glimpsed only the tips of her eyelashes and a slice of uncompromising cheekbone.

  “I remember… being brought to the hospital in the screaming ecnalubma. I remember you stopping by my room the first time—a little. And then I remember our sessions—everything about our sessions, about living with the student nurses in the dorm with Mrs. Bellingham. I remember you holding me. And I remember… the Volkers, coming and wanting to take me away, saying they’d seen my picture in the paper and that I was their lost daughter,” Jane conceded at last. “They were… silly.”

  Kevin paused. “And you are still mired in adolescence. Cruel Jane. You can blow parents away with one word more effectively than any rebellious teenage punker safety- pinned from earlobe to belly button.”

  “You’re angry with me?” Anxiety edged into her tone.

  “That goes with the territory sometimes. With being human,” he added with deliberate provocation. She ignored his challenge.

  “I will… try to like them,” she resolved fiercely, her hands fisting in her lap.

  “Do you like anybody?” he asked, amused.

  Startled, she considered. “No.”

  “Not even me?”

  The length of her slow sum-uppance was disconcerting.

  On occasion, Jane acted like an idiot savant—blissfully brilliant and aggravating^ dense.

  “Sometimes I even dislike you,” she confessed.

  “You can still like me in-between.”

  “No. I love you in-between.”

  He felt strangely cheated. He began to ask himself honestly if he “liked” Jane, if it was possible to like anyone as unformed and yet inherently and totally herself as Jane.

  “You’re sure they are my parents?” She sounded anxious again.

  “Biologically, yes.”

  “Before, you proved that they weren’t and they went away.”

  “Yes.”

  She considered. “Everyone thought you were smart.”

  “I am. Too smart.”

  “What about her?”

  “Who?”

  “The… other one they found. Like me. Only dead.” For a moment he was lost. “My God, did you hear about that? I didn’t know you knew the details. She was your… sister, I guess. That’s where we all went wrong. We thought that you had to be the girl your parents raised, Lynn Volker, and that she had to be you. If Lynn Volker was proven dead beyond a doubt, you were not her, beyond a doubt. But there were two of you, products of the same ovum and semen, the same cell, maybe. So the Volkers didn’t raise you, but they’re still your parents. Your biological parents.”

  “And I am a clone.”

  “What?”

  “You called me a ‘coed clone’ in the store. I know what coed means and I know what clone means. You think because I have not lived a word that I don’t understand it.” His hands hit the steering wheel. “That was a figure of speech. I don’t know for sure how or why—”

  “I was only gleaning efficiently!” she flared. Tears brightened her eyes.

  Gleaning. The word pinged alarm in his mind, as surely as Zyunsinth did. Jane had used it repeatedly under hypnosis when he’d tried to unearth the secrets of her forgotten past.

  His voice grew professional, which was to say, calm, interested and nonjudgmental. “When were you gleaning, Jane?”

  “In the store! It is vital to glean efficiently—and, and all the girls in the dorm took pride in getting their clothes on sale—”

  “The nurses in the dorm are twits!” he exploded. “Look, shopping is the opiate of the masses. It’s a shallow, unimportant pastime meant to turn women into consummate consumers to fuel our incestuous national economy. Buying things on ‘sale’ is an illusion, the act of wringing value from a valueless pursuit. It doesn’t really matter.”

  Jane was silent. “Perhaps it did once,” she answered finally. “You took me to the big store downtown to shop, the place where I gleaned…” Her voice wavered. “… Zyunsinth. And now you said we needed new clothes after the light burned everything but Zyunsinth away. I don’t understand.”

  “I just don’t want you picking up the wrong values. Buying things for necessity’s sake is different from buying them for amusement.”

  “You said I should like things, choose things. That they should reflect the I-ness of me.”

  “Ye-es…” She had him. “But that was during your imitative stage. God, Jane. I don’t know how to help you understand this crazy world of ours.”

  “Before, you said I was right to say the Volkers were nothing to do with me. Now you say—”

  “I know, I know! I’m inconsistent. Now I think you might need—want—to know that someone, somewhere here on earth, has a legitimate claim on you. Besides the…” He sighed. “… the others.”

  She didn’t answer. She didn’t want to remember them any more than he did. That was why he had to pick at the memory still oozing beneath the scab.

  “Jane, what do you remember of the bluff top when the light came down?”

  “Brightness. Lightness. My… clothes melting away. Zyunsinth fallen in the snow. You… as far away and small as a snowflake. Many snowflakes of light. Cold, then heat, then nothing. And, and… being drawn within, my insides being pulled further inside. With… them.”

  “Do you remember them at all?”

  Her head shook, violently. Jane suddenly scooted toward him, leaning across the dirty-floored gulf between their seats, her hands clutching his arm, he
r face buried in his sleeve.

  “I believe it now. They are my parents. The Volkers. Kevin says so. I want… to see them again. I want to remember them… me. Please, Kevin, I must see the Volkers!”

  “You will,” he promised, fighting to keep the van from swerving at her tug on his arm.

  Already the roadside signs had reduced the speed limit from fifty-five miles per hour to forty. He meticulously slowed the van to legal limits. Just ahead, the town of Crookston and the home of Adelle and Jack Volker loomed in the late-afternoon grayness.

  The last—and first—time Kevin had driven these unassuming streets he had come clutching at a straw. Now he clutched the needle in the haystack in his hand, and only needed to locate the right thread. Maybe it would be the Volkers, he hoped, stopping the van in front of their simple frame house.

  The street was quiet, deserted. Jane accompanied him up the walk with excited dread, fidgeting like a schoolgirl about to confront the couple who had accused her of stealing apples.

  Volker himself answered the doorbell, looking lumbeijack-solid in his plaid shirt. After flaring in surprise, his eyes grew relentlessly neutral, even when they rested on Jane.

  “What are you doing here again, Dr. Blake?” he asked flatly.

  “She wanted to come.”

  “She did?” Volker acted as if Jane were invisible. “Didn’t want much to do with us when it really mattered.”

  “Maybe things are different now. Maybe she needs you.” Maybe he needed the Volkers now, Kevin admitted to himself. “She changed her mind. That’s kids for you,” he added sympathetically.

  Volker’s face undammed like river ice. He stepped back and swung the door wide.

  “Don’t want Mother hurt again like the last time,” he muttered. He followed Kevin and Jane through the icy, unheated porch into the front room.

  The living room wasn’t much warmer. In the kitchen archway, Kevin could see a mellow light beaming.