Why the ruse, when I could have suggested the ride as my own idea? Easy. I yearned for something as normal and domestic as a note on the refrigerator. Alice had never left me a note on the refrigerator.
Also, I was staking my claim as sole worrier, shutting the blind men out of this current crisis. Alice’s new disappearance would be all mine. Not Evan and Garth’s, not Soft’s.
I helped them into my car, digging seat belts out from between seats. Evan gave me directions. It wasn’t far. My wipers cleaned a window out of the newly fallen ash, and we took off, in silence.
My thoughts were with Alice. I was pretty sure I knew where she was.
But she couldn’t get into the chamber. I had the key. Soft had given it to me.
“Is time subjective or objective?” said Garth from the backseat, his voice droning in the darkness.
Evan and I were silent.
“I mean, if my watch says five-thirty, and I go around all day believing in that, and then I run into you and your watch says five o’clock, half an hour difference, and we’ve both gone around all day half an hour different—your two, my two-thirty, your four-fifteen, my four-forty-five, half an hour in the past relative to me, and certain of it, just as certain as I am, and we begin arguing, and then, at that moment, the rest of the world blows up, huh, just completely disappears, and we’re all that’s left, there’s no other reference point, no other observer, and for me it’s five-thirty and for you it’s five, isn’t that a form of time travel?”
“Time travel?” said Evan.
“Five o’clock is successfully communicating with five-thirty,” said Garth.
We pulled up in front of the address Evan had given me. It was an ivy-covered brick house, lacking a shingle or plaque to identify it as a proper site of therapy. The blind men clambered out. I followed, feeling protective. What sort of therapy was this, anyway? Evan and Garth could be duped into all kinds of abuses. Having fooled them five minutes before with the refrigerator-note gag, I knew how vulnerable they were. I’d go and meet this therapist. Then back to rescue Alice.
Garth rang the bell. A buzzer sounded and we stepped into a carpeted, high-ceilinged foyer. It smelled faintly musty. Garth turned a doorknob at the right, and he and Evan went in to a consulting room that was reassuringly bland and clean, free of instruments of torture.
As I peered in after them a voice behind me spoke my name. I wheeled to find Cynthia Jalter, holding a jet-black clipboard, still tall, still darkly attractive, still smiling knowingly.
She looked in at the blind men, who nodded together at the sound of her step, then shut the door, isolating us two in the foyer.
“I didn’t mean—,” I said.
“I understand,” she said. “You didn’t know. You were just dropping them off.”
“Yes,” I said, slowly grasping that this wasn’t the wrong house, wasn’t some dream or practical joke. Cynthia Jalter was their therapist.
“You pay them to come here,” I recalled, inserting it in the place of a thousand apologies.
“They couldn’t possibly afford it themselves,” she said. She stood, her back to the consultation room, her clipboard hugged to her chest, eyeing me curiously. “I’m well funded, as you guessed the other night, Philip.”
“Your research is into blindness, then.”
“Coupling,” she said. “Obsessive coupling.”
“Ah. The way they are together, you mean. The private world. Twins, invented languages, that sort of thing.”
“Yes.”
“You help them separate, I guess. A Siamese-twin surgeon of the soul.”
“I help them understand it,” she said. “They can make their own choices. The goal is to develop an awareness, from inside, of how dual cognitive systems form, how they function, how they respond to hostile or contradictory data. Threats to stability, inequal growth by one member. Cognitive dissonance. I’m sure these concepts are familiar.”
“Oh, yes.”
“In the larger sense my research is into the delusory or subjective worlds that exist in the space between the two halves of any dual cognitive system. It applies to any coupling, from obsessive twins all the way down to a chance momentary encounter in public, between two strangers.”
“Ah.”
“The therapy can serve as a catalyst for change, sure. As the inherent limitations of two-point perspective are exposed. It’s inevitable. But the research is pure. Perhaps sometime we’ll have a chance to talk at length.”
“Oh, yes.” I said this stupidly, too fast.
“Good.” Her smile was wry.
“You knew my name, just now,” I said. “Not the fake name from the bar. Dale Overling.”
“Evan and Garth—we talk about their situation, too. Daily life stuff.”
“So you knew it was me, the other night.”
“Not right away,” she said. “But it dawned on me. And I drive them home sometimes. So when I dropped you off, I knew for sure.”
I wanted to flee. I felt like an idiot. Anyway, I had to go search for Alice, rescue her.
“We’re keeping Evan and Garth waiting,” I said.
Her smile was knowing. “You have somewhere to go.”
“Actually, yes.”
She straightened, and lifted her clipboard as if to weigh it. She looked at me and I saw that she had science gaze. The look that seemed to encompass my whole life inside theoretical brackets. Paradigm Eyes.
Alice used to freeze me with that look. Before she lost it, surrendered it along with everything else, to Lack.
“Well, I hope we get that chance to talk,” she said, still smiling.
“Right.” I was panicked. I thought of last time, my jaunt from the apartment while Soft dragged Alice home. Why was I always with Cynthia Jalter at these moments? Alice’s vanishing belonged to me this time, if I hurried. I had to go claim it.
“And Philip?”
“Yes?”
“I know about Alice. They talk about her.”
“And Lack?”
“And Lack.”
I winced. I didn’t want Cynthia Jalter to take a professional interest. The possibility that she might view Alice and me, or worse, Alice and Lack, as a fascinating and absurd example of obsessive coupling was horrifying.
And yet here I was, rushing away to attend a new phase of the crisis. I felt exposed.
“Well,” I said. “I hope you take all they say with a grain of, as the saying goes, salt.”
“Yes.”
“I have to go. You’ll drive them home, I guess.”
“Yes.”
“Oh, good.” I slipped back through the front door, then ran stumbling down the porch steps and back to my car. I was panting, as if after some vast exertion. I seat-belted myself into place with difficulty, my fingers numb.
Dual cognitive system?
Two-point perspective?
New data, threats, unequal growth?
I drove back to campus, to the parking lot of the physics facility.
20
Alice sat, slumped, elbows on knees, against the padlocked doors of Lack’s chamber. She was a human mite in the machine, an insect sucked up in a vacuum cleaner. Her head was ducked between her shoulders, blond hair shining in the dim, steely light of the corridor. She looked up forlornly when she heard me coming.
“Alice.” I panted. “I’m here.”
“I see.”
“You’re okay.”
She smiled. “Yes.”
“So.” I peered around the curve of the hallway. We were alone. The doors to the lab were still locked, and I had Alice’s copy of the key. “So, I guess you’re just waiting here, huh?”
“I guess.”
“Sort of staking out a position, is that it? An encampment?”
“I don’t know, Philip.”