Kate Wilhelm in Orbit - Volume One (36 page)

Where was she, Christine? How had I got… I realized that I wasn’t actually there. Even as the thought formed, I knew precisely where I was, on my own terrace, leaning against a post, staring at the lights through the bare trees.

I looked at the letter, and slowly raised my hand and stared at it, both on the terrace and in the study. And the one in the study was tiny, tanned, with oval nails, and a wide wedding band…

“Eddie?”

Janet’s voice jolted me, and for a moment the study dimmed, but I concentrated on it, and held it. “Yes.”

“Are you all right?”

“Sure. I thought you were sleeping.”

In the study… who the devil was in the study? Where was
she
? Then suddenly she screamed, and it was both inside my head and outside filling the night.

“My God!” Janet cried. “It’s Christine! Someone must have—”

I started to run toward her house, the Donlevy house, and Janet was close behind me in her robe and slippers. In the split second before that scream had exploded into the night, I had been overcome by a wave of terror such as I had never known before. I fully expected to find Christine dead, with her throat cut, or a bullet in her brain, or something. Caesar met us and loped with us to the house, yelping excitedly. Why hadn’t he barked at a stranger? I wanted to kick the beast. The back door was unlocked. We rushed in, and while Janet hesitated, I dashed toward the study.

Christine was on the floor near the desk, but she wasn’t dead, or even injured as far as I could tell from a hurried examination. Janet had dropped to her knees also, and was feeling the pulse in Christine’s wrist, and I saw again the small tanned hand that I had seen only a few minutes ago, even the wedding band. The terror came back. How could I have dreamed of seeing that hand move as if it were my own hand? I looked about the study frantically, but it was back to normal, nothing distorted now. I had been dreaming, I thought, dreaming. I had dreamed of being this woman, of seeing through her eyes, feeling through her. A dream, no more complicated than any other dream, just strange to me. Maybe people dreamed of being other people all the time, and simply never mentioned it. Maybe everyone walked around terrified most of the time because of inexplicable dreams. Christine’s eyelids fluttered, and I knew that I couldn’t look at her yet, couldn’t let her look at me. Not yet. I stood up abruptly. “I’ll have a look around. Something scared her.”

I whistled for Caesar to come with me, and we made a tour of the house, all quiet, with no signs of an intruder. The dog sniffed doors, and the floor, but in a disinterested manner, as if going through the motions because that was expected of him. The same was true of the yard about the house; he just couldn’t find anything to get excited about. I cursed him for being a stupid brute, and returned to the study. Christine was seated on one of the dark green chairs, and Janet on another facing her. I moved casually toward the desk, enough to see the letter, to see the top lines, the long streak where the pen had gone out of control.

Janet said, “Something must have happened, but she can’t remember a thing.”

“Fall asleep? A nightmare?” I suggested, trying not to look at her.

“No. I’m sure not. I was writing a letter, in fact. Then suddenly there was something else in the room with me. I know it. It’s happened before, the same kind of feeling, and I thought it was the farmhouse, the associations there. But maybe I am going crazy. Maybe Victor’s right, I need care and treatment.”

She was very pale, her eyes so large that she looked almost doll-like, an idealized doll-like face. “Who is Victor?” Janet asked.

“Eugenia’s husband. She’s… she was my husband’s daughter.” Christine sighed and stood up, a bit unsteadily. “If it starts again… I thought if I just got away from them all, and the house… But if it starts again here…”

“Eddie, we can’t leave her like this,” Janet said in a low voice. “And we can’t leave the kids alone. Let’s take her home for the night.”

Christine objected, but in the end came along through the woods with Janet and me. At our house Janet went to get some clothes on. Her gown and robe had been soaked with dew. While Janet was dressing, I poked up a fire in the fireplace, and then made some hot toddies. Christine didn’t speak until Janet came back.

“I’m sorry this happened,” she said then. “I mean involving you two in something as… as messy as this is.”

Janet looked at me, waiting, and I said, “Christine, we heard from Pete and he seemed to think you might need friends. He seemed to think we might do. Is any of this something that you could talk to Pete about?”

She nodded. “Yes. I could tell Pete.”

“Okay, then let us be the friends that he would be if he was here.”

Again she nodded. “Lord knows I have to talk to someone, or I’ll go as batty as Victor wants to believe I am.”

“Why do you keep referring to him?” Janet asked. Then she shook her head firmly. “No. No questions. You just tell us what you want to for now.”

Christine shrugged. “Victor, I could start there. He worked with Karl, and he’s pressuring me for Karl’s papers. I was writing to him when…Anyway, he thinks I’m crazy. And maybe he’s right.” She didn’t look at us when she said that, and her hands were shaking so hard that Janet took the drink from her.

“Don’t talk about him. Tell us about your husband.”

“I met Karl when I was a student at Northwestern. He had a class in physiological psychology and I was one of his students and experimental subjects. He was doing his basic research then on perception. Three afternoons a week we would meet in his lab for tests that he had devised, visual perception tests. He narrowed his subjects down to two others and me, and we are the ones he based much of his theory on. Anyway, as I got to know him and admire him more and more, he seemed to take a greater interest in me. He was a widower, with a child, Eugenia. She was twelve then.” Her voice had grown fainter, and now stopped. Janet handed her the drink that she had hardly touched. She took a sip, and another. We waited.

“The reason he was interested in me, particularly, at least in the beginning,” she said haltingly, “was that I had been in and out of institutions for years.” She didn’t look up and her words were almost too low to catch. “He had developed the theory that the same mechanism that produces sight also produces images that are entirely mental constructs, and that the end results are the same. In fact, he believed and worked out the theory that all vision, whether or not there is an external object, is a construct. Vision doesn’t copy anything in the real world, but instead involves the construction of a schematic, and so does visual imagination, or hallucination.”

I refilled our glasses and added a log to the fire, and she talked on and on. Rudeman didn’t believe in a psychological cause to explain schizophrenia, but believed it was a chemical imbalance with an organic cause that produced aberrated perception. This before the current wave of research that seemed to indicate that he had been right. His interest in Christine had started because she could furnish information on image projection, and because in some areas she had an eidetic memory, and this, too, was a theory that he was intensely interested in.
Eidetikers
had been discounted for almost a century in the serious literature, and he had reestablished the authenticity of the phenomenon.

“During the year,” she said, “he found out that there were certain anomalies in my vision that made my value to him questionable. Gradually he had to phase me out, but he became so fascinated in those other areas that he couldn’t stand not starting another line of research immediately, using me extensively. That was to be his last year at Northwestern. He had an offer from Harvard, and he was eager to go there. Anyway, late in April that year I… I guess I flipped out. And he picked up the pieces and wouldn’t let me go to a psychiatrist, but insisted on caring for me himself. Three months later we were married.”

Janet’s hand found mine, and we listened to Christine like that, hand in hand.

“He was very kind to me,” Christine said slowly sometime during that long night. “I don’t know if he loved me, but I think I would have died without him. I think—or thought—that he cured me. I was well and happy, and busy. I wanted to take up photography and he encouraged it and made it possible. All those years he pursued a line of research that he never explained to me, that he hadn’t published up to the time of his death. I’m going through his work now, trying to decode it, separating personal material from the professional data.”

She was leaving out most of it, I believed. Everything interesting, or pertinent, or less than flattering to her she was skipping over. Janet’s hand squeezed mine; take it easy, she seemed to be saying. Christine was obviously exhausted, her enormous eyes were shadowed, and she was very pale. But, damn it, I argued with myself, why had she screamed and fainted? How had her husband died?

“Okay,” Janet said then, cheerfully, and too briskly. “Time’s up for now. We’ll talk again tomorrow, or the next day, or whenever you’re ready to, Christine. Let me show you your room.” She was right, of course. We were all dead tired, and it was nearly three, but I resented stopping it then. How had her husband died?

She and Janet left and I kicked at the feeble fire and finished my last drink, gathered up glasses and emptied ashtrays. It was half an hour before Janet came back. She looked at the clock and groaned.

“Anything else?”

She went past me toward the bedroom, not speaking until we were behind the closed door. “It must have been gruesome,” she said then, starting to undress. “Victor and Eugenia moved in with her. Karl’s daughter and son-in-law. And Karl’s parents live there, too. And right away Victor began to press for Karl’s papers. They worked together at the university. Then he began to make passes, and that was too much. She packed up and left.”

I had finished undressing first, and sat on the side of the bed watching her. The scattering of freckles across her shoulders was fading now, her deep red tan was turning softly golden. I especially loved the way her hipbones showed when she moved, and the taut skin over her ribs when she raised her arms to pull her jersey over her head. She caught my look and glanced at her watch pointedly. I sighed. “What happened to her tonight?”

“She said that before she finally had to leave the farm up in Connecticut, the last night there, Victor came into her third-floor room and began to make advances—her word, by the way. She backed away from him, across the room and out onto a balcony. She has acrophobia, and never usually goes out on that balcony. But she kept backing up, thinking of the scandal if she screamed. Her stepdaughter’s husband, after all. In the house were Karl’s mother and father, Eugenia… Victor knew she would avoid a scene if possible. Then suddenly she was against the rail and he forced her backward, leaning out over it, and when she twisted away from him, she looked straight down, and then fainted. She said that tonight she somehow got that same feeling; she thinks that that memory flooded back in and that she lived that scene over again, although she can’t remember anything except the feeling of looking down and falling. She screamed and fainted, just like that other night.” Janet slipped into bed. “I think I reassured her a little bit anyway. If that’s what happened, it certainly doesn’t mean she’s heading for another break. That’s the sort of thing that can happen to anyone at any time, especially where one of those very strong phobias is concerned.”

I turned off the light, and we lay together, her cheek on my shoulder, her left arm across my chest, her left leg over my leg. And I thought of Christine in the other room under the same roof. And I knew that I was afraid of her.

The next morning was worse than usual. Thank God it’s Friday, we both said a number of times. I had no desire to see Christine that morning, and was relieved that she seemed to be sleeping late. I told Janet I’d leave a note and ask her to go out by the side door, which would latch after her. But when the kids left to catch their bus, she came out.

“I wasn’t sure if you’d told them that I was here. I thought it would complicate things to put in an appearance before they were gone,” she said apologetically. “I’ll go home now. Thanks for last night. More than I can say.”

“Coffee?”

She shook her head, but I was pouring it already and she sat down at the kitchen table and waited. “I must look like hell,” she said. She hadn’t brought her purse with her, her long hair was tangled, she had no makeup on, and her eyes were deeply shadowed with violet. I realized that she was prettier than I had thought at first. It was the appeal of a little girl, however, not the attraction of a grown woman.

She sipped the coffee and then put the cup down and said again, “I’ll go home now. Thanks again.”

“Want a lift to your house? I have to leave too.”

“Oh, no. That would be silly. I’ll just go back through the woods.”

I watched her as far as I could make out the small figure, and then I turned off lights and unplugged the coffee pot and left. But I kept seeing that slight unkempt figure walking from me, toward the woods, tangled black hair, a knit shirt that was too big, jeans that clung to her buttocks like skin. Her buttocks were rounded, and moved ever so slightly when she walked, almost like a boy, but not quite; there was a telltale sway. And suddenly I wondered how she would be. Eager, actively seeking the contact, the thrust; passive? I swerved the car, and tried to put the image out of mind, but by the time I had parked and greeted Lenny, I was in a foul mood.

Lenny always left the mail to me, including anything addressed to him that came in through the lab. In his name I had dictated three refusals of offers to join three separate very good firms. That morning there was the usual assortment of junk, several queries on prices and information, and an invitation to display our computer cutting tool and anything else of interest in the Chicago Exposition of Building Trades. Lenny smiled. We talked for an hour about what to show, how best to display it, and so on, and finally came down to the question we’d both been avoiding. Who would go? Neither of us wanted to go. We finally flipped a coin and I lost.