Mind to Mind: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (3 page)

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—especially, 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.

I asked a nurse, "What
happened to the Jane Doe in four eighteen?"

A quick glance my way, a quick referral to a
chart, and the quick reply: "She's been moved. You'll have to speak
to a doctor."

But before I could find a
doctor, a couple of plainclothes security men quietly found me and
escorted me into a small lounge where I was offered coffee and
delicate questions. And before that could really get off the
ground, Alison Saunders made the scene and rescued me with a crisp,
professional air. She was one of the rhythms of the place, so had
a leg up on the situation. She identified me and vouched for me;
the cops went on their quiet way; Alison told me about Jane. Even
she did not know the whole story at that moment; she did know that
her telephone call had sent the nurse into a surprise confrontation
with a killer, she also knew that Jane was receiving emergency
attention, and she was curious as hell about the "vision" that had
alerted me to the life-threatening situation.