CounterProbe

by Carole Nelson Douglas

“I think it has everything to do with it. I don’t like this room, this tube in my arm, this funny white gown with the strings up the back—”

  Nordstrom was flailing for the constraints, pulling canvas webbing taut and buckling Jane into it.

  “I don’t like these straps, the food you don’t let me eat, I don’t like—”

  He was cinching her into place, drawing the webbing so tight it cut grooves in the meager flesh of her arms and thighs.

  “—these straps.”

  “Life is full of things we don’t like.”

  “I don’t like people who say ‘we.’ I like ‘I’.”

  Sweat seeped from Nordstrom’s brow and leaked down into the wells of his eyeglasses.

  “I like ‘I’ too,” he taunted back. “And I am in control. You will do as I say. You will starve and soil yourself and waste away doing what I say! That’s all there is to it. You are… programmable. You will use your powers because to not use them is to perish. You don’t want to die, Jane Doe. You don’t want to cease to be. After all, you love Kevin. You don’t want to lose him. If you lose yourself, you lose him. Forever.”

  Nordstrom paused at the stainless steel water carafe on Jane’s nightstand. He poured himself a glass of water.

  “That tube you hate is your lifeline, Jane. Look at it drip on the floor. You disconnected it yourself. You disconnected yourself. You are trying to play suicidal games, but you don’t want to go all the way. You can’t fool me. Make the tube rise. Play a snake charmer’s tune and pipe it back into your arm. It’s your only salvation. In the meantime, lie there and think about it. I want a verifiable demonstration of your powers, or you will die of your own individuality. Think about it.”

  He left the room.

  * * *

  Jane doesn’t think of death, but rather of herself, her life.

  Calm beyond feigning, she lies still in her bonds, slowing her body’s furnace to a glow instead of its normal burning. This confinement is not so different in its way from existence in the holding tanks of the alien vessel.

  What memories she retains of that experience parade through her mind. She had been far less sentient than this in the aliens’ hands, in their cold scientific storage—her senses muted, subnormal, her metabolism dormant. She suspects she had spent years in that semisuspended state.

  Dr. Nordstrom is threatening her with mere hours.

  Some of that suspended animation must have regulated her body in the hours—days even—after the aliens had deposited her atop the Crow Wing bluff.

  Like any newborn thing, she had lain helpless yet protected by the very muted metabolism that made her oblivious to her surroundings. She had been like a hibernating mammal—sheltered from hunger and cold by her laggard circulation, her numbed brain.

  No wonder her weight had been low; less bulk meant less energy to support life. Of course, had she not been found, she would have… dwindled in time. She would have been lost, surrendered to the earth that had spawned her kind. No doubt others of their probes had suffered just such a fate, never to be found…

  Even now a tingling along her limbs—perhaps caused by the tight straps, perhaps not—fills her with an electric sense of self-communion. She sees herself reflected in a shadow box of mirrors, duplicating to infinity.

  The image of herself marooned in the cold and snow— Dr. Nordstrom insisted that was how she had been found this time, saying that only his dedicated examination had located the telltale pulse to show she lived—no longer frightens her or seems to challenge her own existence.

  For cold can be overcome. Her extremities buzz with possibilities, as if even now the blood is stirring in veins and then capillaries, as if blood were catching fire and life and surging through the body’s frozen wastes like life- giving lava…

  Even without Dr. Nordstrom, Jane sees, she could have saved herself. She can save herself. She is not one, fragile disposable being but a resurrectable chain of selves. If the aliens can empty her, she can fill herself again. If the snow can freeze her, she can accept it—and ultimately reject it.

  She feels it thaw around her, the cold. She feels some remote stiffness loosen, as if physiological bonds were breaking. She feels her eyes open (although they are open already), her mouth part in an ah of surprise as air/ oxygen/breath suffuses her being (although her mouth is closed). She feels her mind swell, like music, and scale an endless empty expanse of cold into the warmer upper air (although it should be colder there).

  She feels herself draw together, as if she is watching someone else—some other stronger/weaker self—accomplish it. She feels herself sitting bolt upright in the lonely cold that surrounds her, rising from the dead. Now that would impress Dr. Nordstrom…

  Jane wants to sit up as revelation opens a window on her mind. The darkening room seems illuminated with a honeycomb of new corners, all producing a multiplicity of angles, all leading someplace new… In some odd way, she feels her body—or the distant pale white ghost of her body—levitate like Lazarus (she had read of him somewhere, once).

  Her bonds hold her supine, but the thoughts will not be restricted. Perhaps. Perhaps she, Lynn Elizabeth Volker, the one Jane was supposed to have been and was not… perhaps she had been a probe, too. A probe that had failed, that had died and lain under snow and summer wind in the Montana wilds before she could be retrieved after twenty- one years of silent, secret gleaning.

  Jane lets her limbs relax against the tight straps. Kevin would be so interested to know that. Kevin would be sorry to know that Jane sometimes thought better without him there. When he was with her, somehow he became the quester of her fate, her past. Alone, she posed and answered her own questions, confronted her own selves.

  Kevin. The name produces the same fondness as Zyunsinth did, and the same vagueness. For a brief moment, Jane senses the irresistible call of him stirring her being. She must rise and go now, and see Kevin, find Kevin. No, it is mere memory she feels, pseudofeeling. Kevin remains something she knows she liked, without quite remembering why.

  Time may have passed. While she had been thinking, dreaming, someone had extinguished the lights in her room, perhaps from a distance. She had heard no one come or go, had heard nothing but the crack of her ice-bound thoughts breaking free, so slowly they seemed motionless.

  Time had passed, for the door to her room opens now. Jane’s eyes, closed, refuse to open in response. She is deep, deep in her own inner seas, free of the voices that sometimes come, free of everything.

  “Julie ”

  The name echoes hers enough to buffet her free-floating consciousness. She ignores it.

  “Julie.”

  The voice is only a whisper, but it hovers too close. Her glorious sense of immortality, of self-extension, shrivels. She feels dead again. Ghosts pluck at her winding sheet. Ghouls tug at her cerements. Her mind spins, revolves, her body seeming to roll with it as she feels the brush of disembodied hands on her limbs, feels the creep and crawl of hidden things clinging to her skin and bones.

  Jane’s lethargic consciousness stirs. It battles its way to the surface of the sensate world, drags her up, up toward light and clarity and feeling.

  It is dark when she at last breaks contact with her inner self, dark when she comes to herself in the dark room, alone. She had not been alone until just recently, some instinct sharper than memory told her. Dr. Nordstrom had been in the room, while she had absented herself in her self. He had… touched her.

  Jane’s skin crawls with goose bumps, as if every hair follicle shrinks at the idea. She has never experienced such physical revulsion, such emotional upheaval. Her muscles gather against the taut restraints even as her mind unerringly finds and follows a line of electromagnetic energy—the disturbed air where Nordstrom had recently passed.

  A band of the same energy coils around her temples and squeezes hard, until she feels her dormant blood pounding through her veins as if it has just awakened. She shuts her eyes. Upon the darkness energy scribes its shadow forms.
Atoms swarm like insects as her vision passes through layers of separating walls. The corporeal disintegrates into a veil of a billion flyspots, then fades. As her instincts hone on her object, an image seesaws into focus—a room, a bed, a figure upon it surrounded by hand-sized leaves… no, by papers. Photographs.

  Everything is etched in lines of black and shades of gray, like a bad black-and-white snapshot. The figure on the bed is an unarticulated lump emitting an aura of living, breathing energy. It is not restrained.

  For a moment, Jane’s outreaching consciousness becomes self-bound again. She senses the straps confining her. Her energies poise to snake the canvas tongues back through their stainless steel buckles. She knows how to do it, knows that she can do it. She can do anything.

  But what does she want to do? Kevin, distant byword that he is now, had always said it was important to find out and do what she herself wished, not what others expected of her.

  In this instance, Jane decides, she wishes to do exactly what Dr. Nordstrom has asked her to do. He has demanded an exhibition of her powers, as Dr. Swanson had also required in her own coercive way.

  Jane will oblige under his terms—without freeing herself in any way but the psychological. Dr. Nordstrom will find his wishes fulfilled beyond his wildest dreams…

  Kevin wanted to wake up, and he couldn’t. The door to dreamland was bolted tight. Behind it, he was copulating endlessly.

  Anonymous women rushed him like enemies in a war zone. He received them with ritual thrusts, businesslike as bayonet strokes. They fell away and were replaced in turn. Each one engendered a successor, each woman wore a hymen like a shield.

  Aghast, feeling overwhelmed, he took them murderously. Only tearing through the hymen freed him—then only long enough for a new virgin to spring up in the former one’s place.

  The hymens got tougher, the job more distasteful. He was losing the battle. He seemed to thrust against fleshless bone now; skeletons hurled at him, engaging him in an endless dream of death.

  He wanted to wake up more than anything in the world.

  He didn’t.

  Chapter Thirty

  * * *

  Eric Nordstrom lay alone in his room. It seemed he had always been alone in his room.

  This room was borrowed, inadequate. The furnishings were exquisitely anonymous—home rent-a-care and hospital practical. Nobody but institutional business managers bought bureaus like the chest-high example on one wall. Stained anemic maple, it upheld a solitary box of Kleenex.

  And the bed… Nordstrom tossed atop coarse sheets and pillowcases. The springs didn’t give at all and the pillows gave too much, at the slightest pressure, like some of his patients.

  For a reading light, he had the glaring ceiling fixture. For nightstand amenities, he had a stainless steel pitcher of water and a squat glass tumbler.

  It was more than Jane Doe had this night, Nordstrom reminded himself. He checked his watch, a Piaget with a lizard strap. Five o’clock in the morning. Usually when he couldn’t sleep—which was often—he played solitaire and studied certain of his collection of books. He wondered why he bothered to wait up and watch so long, do nothing, but he knew.

  She would crack, soon and massively. He didn’t want to miss it. She would split her seams, spill her guts, shatter her selfhood and sink into his control.

  Not that Nordstrom expected to uncover any astounding powers in Jane Doe. She was all hype and no go, typical of a Blake project. Flash up front and vacancy behind. It would be a pleasure to expose her as a pathetic fraud… to dispose of her and leave the wreckage for Blake to piece back together. If he could.

  Nordstrom rose and went into the small adjacent bathroom, his kidskin slippers whispering over the tiles. Ail the rooms on this hall were arranged in classic hospital style— spare, clean and possessed of an empty feeling whether occupied or not.

  It amused him to picture these mock rooms from a bird’s-eye distance—from above they would resemble cell after cell of stage settings, parading like model rooms in some vast department store of government duplicity.

  There were rooms here Nordstrom had not seen: where Turner and his staff slept, probably a crude dormitory except for private accommodations for the few women; where the labs and communications centers were installed; empty chambers where the building’s original function had once taken place. Nordstrom wondered briefly what that was, then forgot about it. People were so much more interesting than places and things. People reacted. Places merely… witnessed.

  He leaned over the extradeep bathtub and started a stream of water pounding into the shiny porcelain. In a small medicine cabinet mirror—the like of which he hadn’t confronted in years—he saw himself lit harshly from above. Shadows dripped down the furrows of his face from his eye sockets. He looked ghoulish, dangerous. Even criminal.

  Blake had looked like this, he reminded himself—still did on some police blotter. Such a comedown for the mighty doctor. A police record. Thanks to Nordstrom. A shattered patient. Thanks to Nordstrom. Nights of no sleep. Thanks to Nordstrom. Nordstrom hardly ever slept.

  He opened the mirrored door and took his electric razor from the metal shelf. Everything in the room seemed to be either black or white—white for walls, fixtures, floor; black for the objects Nordstrom had imported—shaver, hairbrush of European boar bristles, eelskin eyeglass case.

  His insomnia had improved of late. He had actually drifted off between midnight and four am. He attributed his newfound serenity to an interesting case load. First Monica Chapman, coming along so nicely. And now Jane Doe. If Blake’s credibility was decimated, as Nordstrom hoped, perhaps Jane Doe would be assigned to Nordstrom for rehabilitation when the government was done with hen…

  He plugged the shaver into a chrome-covered outlet, the reflection of his hand flashing across the shiny surface. A blue spark discharged into the air. Something buzzed like an angry bee.

  Nordstrom retracted the plug to study the prongs. Everything seemed all right. He plugged it in again and sent the shaverhead buzzing across his jaw.

  This night should have done it, he congratulated himself. She’d be seriously dehydrated by now—not enough to harm but enough to hurt. That was always the key. Gratuitous harm was stupid—and it seldom accomplished anything. Hurt, though…

  It reminded him of a hotel, this sparse bathroom filled with the whine of his electric shaver. Nordstrom liked hotel rooms. He liked the whispers of passing lives and secret sins that hotel rooms buffeted between themselves and the grinding elevators in the hallways beyond the rooms. He liked imagining the train of events rattling from room to room, an endless stream of cattle cars full-up with the stacked ghosts of every room’s collated occupants. Hurry up, please, it’s time.

  The reverie had distracted him. The shaver hit his chinbone and ricocheted off. Nordstrom huffed out his disapproval of himself. He was invariably neat to the point of tidiness, and prided himself on the trait.

  Beside the sink, the toilet seat, tidily shut, recoiled against the porcelain tank with a bang. Somehow the water had backed up. Feces swam in a soup of urine.

  Nordstrom stared into the mirror. In his hand, the shaver lurched. It buzzed his cheek, ploughing a new furrow across his skin. Tiny flowers of blood sprouted in neat rows from every hair follicle.

  He dropped the shaver. It plunged into the filthy toilet bowl and began lashing back and forth on the end of its black cord, spewing contaminated water.

  Nordstrom reached for the plug, then froze. It could electrocute him—or at least transmit a nasty shock… He looked to the mirror again, just in time to see its shiny chrome edge swinging sharply toward his face, like a slap. Foreseeing the impact didn’t blunt it. The cabinet door hit Nordstrom so hard he felt his cheekbone crush the mirror like an eggshell.

  Pain needled into his sinuses as shattered glass ground into his face. The door never rebounded from the blow, but remained pressed to his cheek. His hands grasped the unbroken edge and tried to push it away. N
othing gave. It was as if a concrete wall had grown behind it.

  Nordstrom used his hands, shaking now, to push himself off the medicine cabinet door. At the side, he heard a familiar sound—the flush of a toilet. He glanced down to see the small chrome handle jerking back upright, to watch the water in the bowl whirling around and the shaver bobbing on the maelstrom’s surface like a boat. The place smelled like a sewage treatment plant.

  “Crazy!” Nordstrom backed out of the room, slamming the door shut just in time to dodge his eyeglass case as it came hurtling toward him.

  The other room was undisturbed. Nordstrom paused at the bureau to snatch tissues from the box and dab at his raw face.

  A series of sudden, disabling blows to his torso and legs drove him back on the bed before he could determine what had done it. He stared. Across from him, bureau drawers gaped open, their swaying metal pulls chiming against the brass backplates.

  Nordstrom gasped, trying to pull his breath back up from his feet, where it seemed to have retreated. His ribs screamed their agony. As he rolled sideways to relieve the pressure of gravity, the manila folders spread across the bed began flying at his head, sharp pasteboard edges slashing into his exposed face and neck. He lifted his arms but the folders fell into him like bats—a blind force flapping into any barrier.

  “Stop it!” he shouted. “Stop it, you controlling bitch!”

  The bed jerked out from under him. He collapsed to the floor, then looked up to see the mattress and metal frame separating as they fell toward him in concert.

  Nordstrom scrambled across the vinyl tile, keeping his upper body free of the falling bed. A metal edge ground its teeth into his calf. Reality blurred. Color drained from his cognition.

  He dug the heels of his hands into the floor, seeking purchase. The tiles lifted—lifted, one by one, under his hands and floated there, a few inches above the floor. Nordstrom stared at the tarry black adhesive beds they had torn loose from.

  All the tiles were lifting in dominolike sequence, lifting and falling like waves, so the entire room seemed aswim. Nordstrom’s stomach lilted with the illusion—it had to be an illusion—and spewed the contents of his stomach into a salmon-pink puddle on the lurching floor.