There was one timeless frozen instant in which I could close my eyes and murmur, "Oh, shit." Then Karen and I were both in motion. We got the unconscious woman to a couch. We laid her out gently. Karen loosened her uniform collar. It has been my experience that fainters usually revive at this point, but she showed no signs of recovery at all. Her color remained pale. The pulse in her throat fluttered. Her breathing was shallow.
"Jesus, Joe," Karen said. "Jesus." Her eyes were wide.
There was too much in my head. I was dangerously close to fainting myself, and dared not. "You sure can pick 'em." I turned slowly round, looked at the room and everything in it. "Oh, my, yes."
"Joe, she's—"
"—big trouble, right. No telling how big." I went to the table and sat down. "Not until she wakes up—and before then we have to decide which way to jump."
"I—what do you mean?"
I wanted to bark, kept my voice low with an effort. "We are engaged in a criminal conspiracy to wreck a billion-dollar industry. We require darkness and quiet. This client of yours has taken me for someone she knew and believed dead—someone who obviously meant a great deal to her."
"Her ex-husband, Norman. She talked about him a lot."
"Oh, fine. So as soon as she wakes up she is going to turn on all the searchlights and sound all the alarms. 'Oh, you're not my dead husband, Norman? Who are you, then? Can you prove it? What a terrific coincidence this is—I must get to know you better, there must be dozens of little nuances of irony here. I can't wait to tell all the girls down at the hospital.'" I frowned. "We need this like an extra bowel. You know what—"
"Joe!"
I trailed off.
"How do you know you're not Norman?"
My face must have turned bright red. I could feel my nostrils flare as I sucked in enough breath for a bellow. My teeth ached. It took all the strength I possessed to keep my vocal cords out of circuit while I exhaled. A shout might wake the sleeping nurse.
I gazed at her across the room.
Her uniform cap was askew. Her blonde hair was mussed. Now that she was unconscious, her face looked petulant. I scrutinized the face very carefully, and then the generous body. I was prepared to swear that I had never seen her before in my life.
Which meant nothing.
Or did it? It depended on which theory of amnesia you bought. Amnesia the way it is in the movies, or amnesia the way you think it really must be, or amnesia the way it really is.
Movie amnesia: if this blonde fem really was my wife once, I would unquestionably have remembered her at once, regaining my memory on the spot. Love is stronger than brain damage. Hate, too—since she was alleged to be an ex-wife.
Amnesia as one imagines it: no such pat, instant abreaction—but at least some few small bells should ring. A spouse becomes familiar on so many levels that you almost relate to them from your spinal column—the way a pianist will remember his way around his instrument, regardless of whether or not he can recall his name at the moment. This woman was a stranger. In odd hours I have tried to guess what kind of woman I would want, if I wanted women. As far as I could tell, this ex-wife was not even my type.
Amnesia as documented: in 1924, baker Benjamin Levy disappeared from his home in Brooklyn. Two years later a Catholic street sweeper named Frank Lloyd flatly refused to believe he had ever been a Jew, a baker, or named Levy—even when they proved it to him with fingerprints and handwriting analysis. He was quite suspicious, and only when other relatives were able to pick him out of a crowd did he decide there might be something to it. Reluctantly he moved back in with his wife and daughter in Brooklyn. He had to get to know them all over again, and to his dying day he claimed he had no recollection of his early life as Levy.
The mind is stranger than it can imagine.
I had myself back in control now. I looked up, saw Karen staring at me.
"What if I am?" I asked her calmly.
She started to explode.
I overrode her. "We are stalking some very dangerous game, and we are committed now. Maybe they know someone is angling for them, maybe they don't. We could be on borrowed time right now. Suppose this woman does hold the key to the missing half of my brain—is now the time to get into it? Either way it blows my cover, jerks me off the rails." I grimaced. "In fact, there's a mighty funny smell to the way she popped up just at this time in our lives. A nurse could be involved in wireheading . . ."
"But if she was sent here she wouldn't have fainted—and that faint is genuine."
"True . . ."
"You don't recognize her at all?"
I shook my head. "Proves nothing, though."
"Jesus Christ, Joe, aren't you curious?"
"Not half as much as I am scared. I want to defuse this one, fast. If there's anything to it, I can always come back to it when the job's done."
"You could die! You could die never knowing!"
"So what?" I snarled. "Maybe she was the whole world to me once—but right now she's a live grenade on my sofa. Let's try and get the pin back in." I got up from my chair. I took the headset off the phone and laid it down on the end table. I punched my New York number and put my portable terminal next to the headset. I told the computer to record audio from this location at maximum gain. I told it to transmit a constant dial tone to the phone's earpiece and filter it from both the recording and the extension phone in my bedroom here in Nova Scotia. I gave the computer a one-syllable audio-disconnect cue, which could wipe the whole circuit and all records save for the recording in its own impregnable memory. Then I switched off the terminal and put it away. The phone now looked and sounded as if it had been left off the hook for privacy, rather than for the opposite.
"I'm going into my room, so the shock of seeing me when she comes to doesn't start a loop. And so I can eavesdrop on the extension. When she comes around, convince her she made a mistake—and pump her for everything you can get on this Norman."
"She'll want to see you."
"And I won't want to upset her. But when she really insists, I'll have to come out and persuade her I'm not Norman. Which is why you have to get every drop of information you can first, so I can do a convincing job. Keep her talking."
"How do you keep someone talking?"
"Be fascinated. You can't fake it. Find her every vagrant thought interesting. Make small involuntary sounds of wonder and sympathy. Nod slightly from time to time. This fem could get us both killed, honey; be fascinated."
Karen took a deep breath. "I guess you're right. We play it your way." She shook her head slightly. "But I just don't know . . ."
"The most probable answer is coincidence. There's nothing unique about my face. Remember your last client in New York? Lots of people, not enough faces to go around."
The reminder jarred her. "Yeah. All right—split. I think she's coming around."
I slipped into my room and closed the door.
I knew the beginnings of the conversation would be rather predictable and of no value to me. I found the Irish and poured a stiff one, and drank it down before I did anything else. My pulse was racing. I hoped the whiskey and the adrenalin would meet in my bloodstream and strike a bargain. That damned nurse bothered me, scared me. And the reasons I had given Karen were not the whole of it. I did not know the whole of it myself. I was only intellectually sure that I wanted to.
The whiskey helped. I picked up the phone.
Karen:—him a long time, honey. I'm telling you, this is the first time he's been north of Boston in his life.
Nurse: (pause) Then—(pause) God, how weird. I'd have—no, of course he isn't. He didn't know me—and Norman never could act worth a damn.
K: (laughing) That describes Joe, too.
N: Listen, I'm sorry for the way I—
K: No, no, that's cool—
N: Some prize customer I turn out to—
K: Really, it's all right.
N: Look, can I give you a little extra for your—
K: It's real nice of you to offer, no, thanks.
N: But I feel as though I—
K: Look, if you want to do something for me, help me kill my curiosity. How come you flipped?
N: I told you, he looks just like—
K: —a dead man, right. You told me about him before, you even told me what he looked like when you buried him. If I buried a burned roast and a few years later I saw a guy that looked just like him, I'd think, 'Gee, he looks just like my ex.' But what you said was, 'Norman—you are alive.' Like the idea wasn't new to you.
N: (long pause) Karen, can I trust you?
K: Look at me. I've hurt a few people in my time. Now watch my lips. I. Have. Never. Hurt anyone who didn't hurt me first. And you ain't hurt me. You made me feel good. Real good.
N: Do you have any pot? (sounds of a joint being lit, then a longer pause) I don't remember how much I told you. Eight or nine months after he threw me out, his sister, Madeleine, came home from Switzerland.
K: When was this?
N: Just as the '06 school year was starting, it was. She'd been working in Switzerland for years. A very beautiful woman. (long toke) Then a few weeks later she just . . . disappeared. All her things left behind, she just didn't come home one night. It was all in the papers and such, Norman did an excellent job of beating the bushes, but no trace of her was ever found. He took it badly. I went to talk to him one day, let myself in, and he . . . had a woman tied down on his bed, all naked and . . . he . . he changed, you know? He turned cold to me, and he got strange.
K: You think he had something going with the sister?
N: Perhaps. I'm not sure. But her disappearance affected him deeply.
K: And then?
N: A few months later, during Semester Break, he knocked on my door, unannounced, at one o'clock in the morning. He woke me up. He wanted me to return some of his old jazz records.
K: What kind of records?
N: Oh, really old things. Charlie Parker, Jack Teagarden. Lester Young. Ray Charles Trio. Obscure people—King Pleasure, Lord Buckley, Jon Hendricks.
K: You gave them back?
N: There wasn't much else I could do. He wouldn't explain. Then he borrowed my car to transport them. The son of a bitch. A few hours later they called me up and told me he was dead. He and the car both burned to the frame. The ruins of the record collection were in the trunk.
K: They didn't burn?
N: Oh, there was plastic soup everywhere. But these were rare; Norman had sprayed the jackets with preservative, and it turned out to be fireproof. The jackets weren't entirely destroyed.
K: So why aren't you sure he's dead?
N: The last thing he ever said to me was, 'Thanks for all the good times,' and then he left. I thought it was a little odd at the time. Like an exit line in a movie. Norman Maine goes for a little swim. So when I heard he'd crashed I thought the bastard had decided to use my car to suicide in. I'll tell you the truth, my initial reaction, I wanted to kill him. He could just as easily have jumped off the roof of his building. That little Chrysler cost me six months of Neuro Ward.
K: What changed your mind?
N: Little things at first. That plastic soup in the trunk had scraps of charred labels floating in it—and I happened to notice that one of the labels was from a ghastly disco album one of his students had given him, worthless from any standpoint. That stuck in my mind. Later that day I let myself into his apartment, and I looked for the jacket to that record. It was gone. Then I noticed that there were too many empty spaces on the shelves. He'd had about twenty other rare records, in addition to the eight I returned—and there were many more than that missing. Maybe twice as many. And the other missing records were utterly ordinary, of no value.
K: So you figured he swapped jackets and tried a switched-package con? And maybe it blew up in his face?
N: Actually, I did think something of the sort. You're very quick. I almost went to the police, but . . . I decided not to.
K: Sure.
N: Then a day or two later I went back to work and the rumor was that some crazy intern had swiped a pauper's body from the morgue. Things like that go on all the time. One time . . . anyway, we all waited for a few days for the other shoe to drop—for the corpse to turn up nude in the ladies' room, or in Maternity, or fully clothed with a magazine on its lap in the lobby. Nothing happened. After a few days, just as everyone else was beginning to forget it, I happened to remember that the key ring I'd lent Norman that night had held all my keys.
K: Oh.
N: He knew that hospital as well as anyone. Better than some. Once, just after we were married, we . . . used to meet down in the morgue, in the small hours, and make love. Anyway. So I accessed the coroner's report on Norman, and tried to compare it to his X-rays and things.
K: Yeah?
N: I couldn't be sure. Not enough data. It might have been Norman that burned. It might have not been him. And I couldn't get more data without giving a reason. You can picture that: "You say you think your dead ex did what? He had a set of keys? You gave them to him?" Dentals would have sewn it up, but there were none on file for the burnt corpse and I didn't have access to Norman's.
K: Wow. What did you do?
N: I thought it over, and I went to see a policeman I knew. A Sergeant Amesby at Missing Persons. I met him when Madeleine vanished, a very good-looking man in an odd sort of way. He impressed me a good deal, and I trusted him. I brought my suspicions to him.
K: How'd it turn out?
N: He heard me out, and then he slapped his forehead and said something about a wild-goose chase. He called the front desk and asked if Norman had been in looking for him on the day he died, and they said yes. He pulled the file on Madeleine and nothing was missing. He frowned and thought for a while. All of a sudden he jumped out of his chair and yelled and dove at the wastebasket. I thought he'd gone bug. He took a used-up IBM typewriter ribbon out of it and began unreeling the ribbon on the floor and squinting at it. After a while he growled and unreeled more slowly.
K: You mean—?
N: Norman had used Amesby's typewriter to copy off some information from Maddy's file. Information about a man she'd worked with named Jacques LeBlanc.
K: Worked with where? Here or in Switzerland?
N: Switzerland. Not in her firm, some related group. Uh, Psytronics International, I think. Did I say something wrong? No? Well, Norman decided, for some reason, apparently, that this LeBlanc character was involved in Madeleine's disappearance.
K: I don't get it. Norman thought this guy had his sister snatched. So he switched some records, snatched a stiff, and died?
N: This LeBlanc is apparently a very wealthy man. If Norman decided to go after him, he'd need a new identity, and untraceable cash. And some way to account for his own disappearance.
K: Jesus. That's brilliant. You're really smart.
N: Well, Sergeant Amesby did most of the deduction.
K: After you got him started. Your subconscious was smarter than his conscious. Well? What happened?
N: Well, Amesby cautioned me to keep quiet, of course, and said he'd check into it. A few days later he called up and said we were wrong. He'd checked dental records, and it was definitely Norman I had buried. He'd investigated LeBlanc, and positively cleared the man.
K: You didn't believe him.
N: (long pause) I didn't know. I still don't. He was very convincing. He offered to show me the dentals.
K: But you couldn't help wondering if maybe a phone call came down from on high: lay off the rich guy.
N: Exactly. You are quick.
K: (slyly) Not as quick as you were . . . an hour ago.
N: Oh! (pause) A tribute to your talent, darling. and your beauty.
K: Why, you sweet thing! (rustling sounds) Come here.
N: But—I—
K: Come on. A friendly freebee, okay? I've been on my own time for the last half hour. And you could use some cuddling.
N: I—
K: Couldn't you?
(sounds of embrace, wet slow kissing, whispering fabric)
N: Wait.
K: Uh? Are you kidding?
N: Wait. Before we . . . God, I'm inhibited. Verbally, I mean. Before you suck me off and make me crazy again, I want to see him. Meet your Joe, I mean. Then maybe I can get all this tangled old karma out of my mind. May I?
K: In the morning, maybe?
N: Please, darling. I'll be able to relax better. I'll make it worth your while. (gasp) Oh! Not with money, I mean—I mean—damn my primness! What I mean to say is, I believe I could make you crazy—once I get this out of my system.
(rustles)
K: (groaning) Oh, you naughty bitch. All right, you've convinced me. Just a second while I—(rustles, sigh) There. Don't take long on this, now, you've got me all hot.
N: I won't, darling—
K: Mmmm, yes.
N: Stop, now. Say—won't Joe object to a freebee, as you put it?
K: Naw. I told you, he's more of a friend than a pimp. In fact, I got him into the business. Joe's a sweetheart. HEY, JOE!
I answered her second call, "Just a sec," I yelled. I drank more whiskey from the bottle. I turned the TV on, yanked out the earplug so they could hear me turn the set off, and joined them.
The room smelled of pot and of girl. It made me edgy. "I'm terribly sorry I frightened you, Miss . . ."
"Mrs. Kent," she murmured automatically. "God, this is fantastic! Oh—forgive me. You didn't frighten me, Joe. I frightened myself. Excuse me, but would you mind stepping over here into the light?"
"Sure." I moved closer. She rose and approached me.
"Fantastic," she said again. "I can see the differences now, but—Joe, I mistook you for my ex-husband. He's been dead for almost five years now, and you look remarkably like him. The corpse I saw could have been anyone, it was that bad. I mean, it was just barely possible—"
I looked astonished. "No wonder you keeled over. Uh . . . how close is the resemblance? Now that you can see me better."
"Startlingly close. I can see now that you couldn't possibly be him, of course. For one thing, you're much more than five years older than he was when he died. But you could be his older brother. Could you bend your head down?"
I did so.
"Fantastic. You both have scars on your scalps. Yours are in different places, of course. His were from an old war wound."
"Mine are from a less official war."
"Could I ask you a terribly personal question?"
"You can try."
"Well . . . are you circumcised?"
An impulse uncommon to me made me answer truthfully. "Yes."
She nodded. "That settles that forever. Norman wasn't. And not for any reason can I imagine him disguising his penis with a knife. Not that it wasn't settled already, Joe . . . I just meant—"
"Look, Miz Kent—"
"Call me Lois, please."
I grinned. "Lois Kent? Like Mrs. Superman?"
She burst out laughing. "Now that settles it. Norman always said if he heard that joke one more time he was going to end up on Neuro with hysterical deafness. Thanks, Joe—you've put even my subconscious at rest."
We laughed with her. I made my excuses and left.
There was a chance that Karen might get something more from her. I went to the phone again.
Lois:—to bring this up without asking you about it first, but . . . is there some way I could persuade Joe to join us? It would be so much like a fantasy I've had.
Karen: (startled) Wow. Hey, I see what you mean. Sorry, honey—Joe doesn't go for girls.
L: Damn. What a shame. Uh . . . (long pause, rustle of clothing) Karen? Couldn't he be persuaded . . . well, to just watch? That'd be almost as—
K: Sorry, honey. I don't think so.
L: I just don't understand monosexuals. It just isn't natural.
K: Well, there you go. (pause) And there you go. And there . . .
I put the phone down. The room was very hot. I undressed and sat naked on my bed. Something was wrong with my stomach. I took a long gulp of whiskey and sat on the bed clutching my knees and shivered. The world closed in around me and shimmered. It was very much like a bad drug experience, too much strychnine in the acid, and that made it a little less scary. I found that if I concentrated, I could make the world shimmer at the same cyclic rate as my shivering. Somehow that helped.
After a few hundred years the door opened and Karen slipped in. She looked and smelled well used. "She's gone," she murmured, and found my whiskey. I began to calm down.
"I think I convinced her to keep her mouth shut, Joe—"
"Great. She won't tell more than fifteen other fems. I probably won't hear the story in a bar any sooner than the day after tomorrow."
She frowned but said nothing.
"I'm sorry, Karen. You done good. Weird little fem—maybe she will keep her mouth shut. It must be tough to be a gay nurse—or she wouldn't have had to come to you in the first place. Hell, she's probably wishing she'd kept her mouth shut herself, right now. You pumped her good, Karen."
"That's an awful pun, friend."
"Well . . ." I scratched my bare thighs.
"You want to talk about it now or later?"
I sighed. "Now. You caught the name of the outfit this LeBlanc character worked for?"
"Catch it? I thought I'd shit."
"Psytronics International. Our target. I wonder why there's no Jacques LeBlanc on our hit list?" I reached out, got the phone, and asked the computer. We watched the readout on the terminal together. "Retired, huh? Shortly after this Norman Kent business. Hey, look! Lives in Nova Scotia, by God. Where the hell is Phinney's Cove? Aha. Fundy Shore. Maybe a hundred miles from here. Hey!" Something struck me. "Remember that old army buddy I told you about that used to live in Nova Scotia? The Bear?"
"Sure. You tried to look him up when you got here."
"Yeah. No joy. Maybe he never came home from the jolly green jungle. But he used to live not far from where this LeBlanc is supposed to be." I scowled. "The more I pick at this, the more it bleeds. And the worse it smells."
"Joe? You can't be Norman, right? No bells ring at all? Different scars, no foreskin?"
"None of these things are conclusive. You disguise scalp scars with a skin graft that leaves new scars. Circumcision's a simple operation. There are just too fucking many coincidences. I look enough like Norman to fool his wife in fairly bright light. We both took head wounds in the war. We both like vintage jazz. We're both tricky—that switched-bodies scam was a beaut." I scowled again. I was uncomfortable; I slipped into tailor's seat. "And in the end, we may have both met our ends by trying to tackle Psytronics." I finished my drink. "I don't like this. If I am . . . if I used to be Norman Kent, then this Jacques has something that scares me to death. The world's first genuinely effective method of washing brains."
Karen was staring at the wall. "I can't think of anything that's more obscene."
"Neither can I. Until half an hour ago I would have said that was a meaningless word. But if what happened to me . . . was . . . was done to me, by a human being—"
She turned to me, and gasped. "Joe!"
I looked at her, followed her gaze.
I had a powerful erection.
I stared at it for a long time. It did not seem, did not feel, like a true part of me. Then as I watched, it started to. I was fascinated, repelled. It swayed rhythmically with my pulse, like an old tree in gale winds. I had the idiot impulse to throw my hands up and cry, Don't shoot.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Karen's hand gingerly approaching, fingers forming the ancient shape—
"Leave it!"
She started at the volume and jerked her hand back.
We sat in silence for a while, watching the phenomenon together. Gradually, but steadily, it subsided. Each pulse raised it less than the last, until it was only the familiar flaccid appendage. After a while she rose and went to the door.
"Karen?" I called after her.
She turned.
"We're going to kill that motherfucker. You and I."
Slowly she nodded. "Yes. We are. Get some sleep."
She left, to sleep in her work-bed.
I found it surprisingly easy to take her advice.