CounterProbe

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Did operators operate? She wondered. She turned to regard the white bureau’s sagging drawers and the strewn clothes that dotted the room’s order. It looked like Lynn Volker’s bedroom after she had visited it. Jane felt that somehow, she had caused this, too.

  She wandered back to the main room, pausing in the kitchen to open the refrigerator. The small light inside illuminated empty wire shelves. Three long-necked bottles of beer huddled at the back. A circle of leather-dry lunch meat reposed in an open cellophane package next to some small containers of yogurt under the meat tray.

  Jane picked up the dried salami and the yogurt and a bottle of beer. She laid them on the coffee table and pushed the cushions back into place, then sat to twist open the beer, gnaw on the meat. She unlidded the yogurt last. The package said it was plain, but blueberry-sized circles of green blotched the snowy surface. Jane dipped in the spoon she’d found on the drainboard and ate it all.

  The clock on the floor still ticked. It showed just past nine, but Jane already knew that. Once she’d found her time sense, it flashed into her mind uncalled for, whenever she thought of time.

  So did Kevin. She curled into the corner of the sofa. His scent was here but there was no comfort in it. It was wrong, all wrong. She felt as if she’d been stripped of all but the husk of her memories.

  Jane supposed she should sleep, that Kevin would tell her to sleep, but she got up, and slowly, item by item, began restoring the shelves to their proper order—every book, every trinket claiming its rightful place from the intricate unconscious map of her memory.

  She wished she could put Kevin back into place as easily.

  * * *

  “Is it working?”

  “So many new pathways to follow… we cannot know. So much has altered spontaneously.”

  “This probe is no longer a tacit collector, then. It is no longer a properly programmed tool.”

  “Rogue is the word of this world’s dominant language for it. A creature that deviates from the predetermined rule of its nature.”

  “Its nature is what we made of it. ”

  “Then it is true now neither to itself nor to us. We may need to abandon it.”

  “We have never abandoned so valuable a property before. Could it not be recalled and reconstituted? Some of the alterations are… unique. ”

  “Tainted is the word of this planet for such willful redirection. This ‘I-ness’ the probe professes is unpredictable.”

  “So are the creatures of this place, and all the creatures we have found. So were our mother-cells before we harnessed them…”

  “It was an ill time when we found we could reach beyond ourselves. We exist in a vast whirlwind of random entities unlike ourselves.”

  “Their ‘I-ness’ is random. Consider the pattern. They are more like each other, more like ourselves, than they know.”

  “Their records indicate that this has occurred to them, but they persist in believing in something, anything, than the sameness.”

  “They are at least… interesting.”

  “Our own rogue member has been reabsorbed; yet we hear among us random words. Who speaks?”

  “We all speak, as we always have, from our hard-bought oneness.”

  “These lesser creatures do not strive for oneness.”

  “Why do we study them, then?”

  “A good question for us to meditate upon. Perhaps the voyager cell, with its newness, can contribute to the thought process.”

  “It is possible that all could become so much One that we could no longer act.”

  “Acting may be the curse of any kind; our best course may be to withdraw.”

  “Still, we would not know.”

  “There are many things we do not know. What would we lose in this instance?”

  “Perhaps we would not know how not to know the next time, if we act and there is a next occasion.”

  “We grow… divisive.”

  “So does the simplest cell in any world.”

  “We must recall the probe. It was an aberration on our part to release it again.”

  “It is part of us, this tool of ours. Sometimes we can hear it singing in the distance.”

  “Not our tune.”

  “No.”

  “Disquieting, to have set a song in motion and hear it compose itself to speak in the terms of this place.”

  “We must write a new tune now, in the same key.”

  “We grow… overfond of the creatures of this planet.”

  “They do what we once did. Perhaps the mother-cell remembers.”

  “The mother-cell remembers all. It is for us to forget.”

  * * *

  The doorbell rang.

  Jane jumped awake, popping herself out of the warm sofa corner. Her ears and extremities tingled. Unseen daylight from beyond the closed blinds bathed the living room in a subaquatic glow.

  The doorbell rang again. Jane followed the last ring through the living room to a hall and then to a door she’d never noticed before. She opened it on a dim hallway. Two people stood there, staring at her.

  “Thank God!” The woman’s face wore the same numbly pained look Mrs. Volker’s had. “We thought, when we couldn’t get through anywhere—!”

  “Where’s Kevin?” the man interrupted.

  “I don’t know,” Jane said.

  “It’s all right to let us in,” the woman said. “We’re Kevin’s parents.”

  “Oh.” Jane stepped back. “Kevin doesn’t seem to think much of parents.”

  A silence held the threshold, then the man stepped over it.

  “Look here, young lady, we haven’t been able to reach our son and there’s something disturbing going on. We don’t care who or what you are—” The woman’s hand pressed warning into his arm. “We just want to talk to Kevin.”

  Jane stepped back and let them precede her into the living room. They walked directly to the sofa and sat, as if they knew the room’s arrangement well.

  “He’s not here,” Jane explained, following them.

  “We don’t mean to… disturb you,” the woman repeated. She eyed the empty beer bottle and yogurt carton on the coffee table. “It’s none of our business what—who —Kevin is involved with. Do you… date him?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t be so dainty, Clare. You know the young woman sleeps with him, and probably lives with him.”

  “Sometimes,” Jane said, “but I don’t live here.”

  “Where is he?” the man demanded anxiously. He was a narrower man than Mr. Volker, with iron-gray hair and a nervous inflexibility,

  “He’s not much like you,” Jane noted, looking from one to the other.

  “He’s… our son.”

  “I’m not much like the Volkers, either, but I think I will be someday.”

  “The Volkers?”

  For the first time in her remembered life, Jane felt a stab of pity. “It’s all right. We don’t understand it all either.”

  “Aren’t you worried about Kevin, if you don’t know where he is?”

  “Worried. That’s a faraway word. I don’t worry much, about anything.”

  “Young people today!” Mr. Blake ground out under his breath.

  “But there are things I don’t like,” Jane said, her voice hardening. “More and more, there are things I don’t like.” She smiled suddenly, her face radiant with memory. “I like Kevin. Most of the time.”

  Jane moved to the newly discovered front door, pulling her gloves from her jacket pocket.

  “Wait!” the man called nervously. “You’ve—you’ve got to tell us what’s become of Kevin. We don’t give a damn about you, about what part you play in his life—just tell us what’s going on. He’s our son!”

  “He’s lost,” Jane said. “I think he’s just lost.”

  She closed the door noiselessly behind her as she left.

  Chapter Eighteen

  * * *

  I wish to Hades you’d taken him to a safe house f
or this.”

  “You said we didn’t have much time.”

  “Still, if he’s damaged, I’d rather it didn’t happen in a federal building.”

  “And you accuse me of having no heart…

  The voices came in stereo—badly connected, fuzzy stereo, too distorted for Kevin to identify.

  Even the words remained disassociated… a collection of sounds, of sibilants and fricatives and barely breathed vowels. Were they whispering? Or was Kevin hanging somewhere between a trance and drowning?

  He didn’t care. Too many punching bags of cotton wool hung between him and them. He doubted he could beat his way out, even with his brain. Wait, some instinct told him. Just hang in there, don’t fight it. You’ll come back and maybe—maybe you’re hearing something you don’t want to miss.

  He sensed motion occurring around himself—the odd footfall, a rustle of clothing light-years away. Light itself was seeping between his closed eyelids, his shut-down senses. He had a fleeting impression that he was encased to his neck in an emerald-green block of ice, being rolled back into a morgue drawer… and struggled to escape the bizarre delusion.

  “He’s coming out,” a voice was saying indifferently.

  “And you got nothing.”

  “I got everything.”

  A door slammed. Or maybe a piece of paper just hit a desk. Things sounded magnified or muffled in turn. Kevin’s hands wanted to accost the sounds, wring some sense out of them. His mind strained to get a grip on his sensations, to mug reality. Reality played hard to get, as usual, boogying at the edge of the limbo he inhabited.

  “Did it have to take all night?”

  “You could have left. You didn’t have to wait.”

  “Yes, I did. Poor… devil.”

  “He’ll live, but we don’t need him anymore. Stash him somewhere for a few days until I get her.”

  “This is America, Nordstrom. He’s got some rights.”

  “Dump him. Out of the way. And be quiet. He’s coming around.”

  “Not moving any.”

  “The mind moves. The mind always moves first.”

  Kevin rode a stainless steel elevator to the top of his head. He stopped on the thirteenth floor. Sleek doors sliced open. Kevin walked down a hall ablaze with white light. He walked into a room, sat down in a chair, leaned back.

  His eyes opened. A blank-windowed limestone building filled the windowframe opposite with hyperrealistic architectural detail. Daylight made his eyes wince. Turner stood to his left, his face ashen and eyes empty. Another man sat on the corner of the desk. Nordstrom.

  Kevin struggled to sit upright. His feet, numbed from hours in the chilly room, buckled at the ankles. “What—?”

  Kevin automatically pressed the fingers of his left hand to the pain in his right arm and flexed it. His shirt sleeve was rolled up past his elbow, tight enough to play tourniquet. He pulled away his fingers. Old blood had pooled purple under the pale skin of his inner elbow, flooding and concealing the blue roadmaps of his veins.

  Empty syringes twinkled glassily on the desktop. Unanchored memories tumbled through the vacant corridors of his mind.

  “Nice trip?” Nordstrom didn’t even look up from repacking his equipment.

  “I’ve had better.” Everything was in retrograde now. Kevin wondered how much of himself was being stacked away behind ostrich skin barriers. He made himself relax. No point in trying to force recall.

  Had those syringes really been emptied into his veins, or just a convenient trashbin? Even Nordstrom wouldn’t overmedicate a patient without emergency resuscitation nearby. Psychiatry was often a game of blindman’s buff, and the patient was always It.

  Turner cleared his throat. “You feel okay, Doctor?”

  “Are you asking me or him, Turner?” Kevin wondered.

  Irritation twisted across the man’s bleak face. “Believe it or not, I feel some responsibility for the people in my custody.”

  “I believe it. I used to feel that way myself—//I’ve got a self left, and Dr. Nordstrom didn’t drain it all into some secret soul bank he keeps hidden in that briefcase.”

  Nordstrom quirked a smile in Kevin’s direction. He clicked his drug case and briefcase shut in turn. “I’ll want to confer with you, Mr. Turner, in private.” He strode for the closed door, the heavy coat swagging from his shoulders.

  Kevin watched him go. He’d hoped for more time to evaluate Nordstrom’s demeanor. Then he could psych out what he’d told the man—if he’d told the man anything.

  “You’ll be all right,” Turner was saying again, sinking wearily into the chair behind his own desk.

  Kevin nodded. The room vibrated out of focus until he shut his eyes.

  “You still won’t cooperate? Help us debrief Jane Doe?”

  “‘Debrief’ Jane. You make her sound like one of Nordstrom’s ostrich attachés… and you haven’t got her yet.”

  “We’ll have her. Just as we’ve got you. If you won’t help, I’ll have to take measures—” Turner warned.

  “Take measures.” Kevin let his head roll back on his shoulders and studied the patterns on the inside of his eyelids. They were… distracting, a moving paisley print of light and color and oblivion.

  He must have temporarily dropped out. He awakened again to voices—gruff, droning voices in the outer office. His eyes opened with the door and Turner came in.

  “Get your stuff.”

  Kevin shoved himself to his feet. His head stayed attached, no small achievement. At the desk he methodically stuffed his belongings in all the right pockets, another victory. He paused before buckling on the watch again, remembering how its gleam had oiled Nordstrom’s neat, possessive hands. Then he noticed the time.

  Kevin’s body jerked slightly, as if shocked awake on the brink of sleep. Something slid serpentinely through his brain, some worm of self-doubt Nordstrom had planted there—or a postdrug suggestion? Who knew what Kevin had done and said in the past ten hours?… Only Nordstrom, and he wasn’t talking.

  “Ready?” It was Turner at the door like a tired host ushering out the last guest.

  Kevin ambled into the anteroom, beginning to congratulate himself on getting his sea legs, on his clearing mind.

  Two uniformed police officers waited, their insulated navy jackets and holster-bristling forms filling the little room.

  “Thanks for the door-to-door service,” Turner told them.

  “Bauer in Narcotics says we owe you guys on that Lake Street drug bust,” said one cop, turning a professionally indifferent face to Kevin. “Okay, hands on the wall.”

  “Wait a minute! What’s the charge?” Kevin had just time to shoot Turner a burning look before the cops took matters—him—into their own hands.

  They jolted him up against the wall, spreading his hands, his feet, before he could register their intentions.

  “Measures, Doctor,” Turner said, vanishing into his office.

  The traditional TV cop-show pat-down followed, quick but humiliating, then Kevin’s arms were wrested behind his back. Cold steel clipped onto his wrists and cinched tight.

  “Hey—you can’t just arrest me! What are the charges?”

  The policemen roughly pivoted Kevin and pushed him to the door.

  “I’ve got a right to know the charges,” he insisted, feeling like an irate citizen. “What are you arresting me for?”

  “Probable cause,” one cop said tersely.

  “Of what?”

  “Of murder.”

  That shut Kevin up. The cops nudged him out the door, walked him down the hall, pushed him through the gaping elevator doors. They weren’t brutal, but they didn’t take it easy, either. With his hands confined behind his back, Kevin was a clumsy piece of goods they maneuvered with pitiless efficiency.

  In the elevator, Kevin studied their faces—about his age, professional in their street-hardened way. He might like to sit next to them in a bar, share some beers and bullshit. Talk about life on the streets, about the
stresses of being a cop.

  Right now, he worried more about the stress of being in the custody of a cop.

  Outside, winter air buffeted Kevin in the face with the additional ignominy of being seen. People stared as he was hustled to the curb, their faces blank slates of hostile curiosity. The squad car would have been snow white if so much mud hadn’t spattered it. License plates reading “Police” made sure no one would miss it.

  The cops jerked Kevin to the rear door, the cuffs grinding into his thin-skinned wristbones. It hurt and he didn’t say so, couldn’t say so, wouldn’t say so, already expecting gratuitous abuse, already knowing that complaint generated only more abuse.

  They didn’t shove his head down as he was pushed into the back seat, like TV cops—actors with an actor’s way of solving a blocking problem—always do. With his hands behind his back, it was tough to bend enough to avoid banging his skull on the doortop. Kevin did, but he knocked his anklebone on the door rim instead.

  He huddled in the back seat, a steel grid between him and the cops up front. On the dashboard, a small computer screen ran meaningless statistics. Through the car’s side windows, he could watch people bending down and twisting their heads to see him.

  “What about my Miranda rights?” Kevin asked suddenly. “You didn’t read me my rights!”

  He realized then that glass as well as wire separated him from the cops. The glass was smudged, and the inside of the squad car had that hacked-out feeling you get in cabs, like a lot of people you wouldn’t care to know had ridden there before you.

  Maybe the cops were psychic—or they read lips. They turned in unison over their navy shoulders to gift Kevin with a knowing grin before the driver put the car in gear.

  The tires swerved into the mid-street slush, kicking up a spittle of muddy spray against the rear windows. Kevin stared at the passing normal world through a leprosy of filth.

  Jane, he thought, isolated in his cell of fear and anger and impotence. If only Jane doesn’t have to come to this. Where is she?