The rest of the time between them was a mixture of business-as-usual debriefing and a suffered, mutual embarrassment of long silences. So much for shared intimacy with this little snow queen, he thought. In truth, however, he saw himself as absurdly out of control. It was an alien experience for him and it added nothing to his mounting discombobulation.
If the ride out had seemed long, the ride back had been a mini-eternity, but both of them had the consolation of their thoughts. The irony was that as Jack and Donna sat there on the bench seat while their wheeled enclosure made its way through the Big D traffic, they were subtly aware of the man or the woman sitting nearby, where before the relationship had been different. And if not consciously each of them now wondered about the other, and the age-old curiosity was there, subliminally, and it had changed everything, or perhaps nothing.
And nothing was what Eichord had come away from the day with, a stack of nothing notes, nothing observations, nothing scraps of random nothings, nothing non sequiturs, nothing squared and nothing microscoped. He bought a fifth and some dog food (what did the clerk think?) and finally made his way back to the motel room. The dog was excited at seeing him. That was something, anyway, and he gave it a pat on its scruffy head as it walked close beside him, shooting into the room as he unlocked it and leaping up into the sling chair by the door.
Jack had taken to letting him, Dog, come in the room against both the motel strictures and his own good judgment. And they'd become fast pals, thanks to Eichord now feeding him. Jack was oblivious to the dog's presence as he hung up his coat, put his piece away, and was now scattering scraps of paper and copious notes all over the bedspread. Jeez, he thought, looking at the yellow-lined sheets of scrawled, sometimes indecipherable shorthand, matchbooks, cocktail napkins, Kleenex, note pads, balls of equate cryptography, all of which would doubtless vagarious, capricions to the sum of the nothing day—I gotta get organized! Crumpled balls? You bet.
Jack sat on the edge of the bed, “his” dog curled up on the floor near the door, kicked off his shoes and started putting his random notes in some kind of order.
Little scraps of paper pulled from eight, ten different pockets and notebooks. Graffiti: the back of a receipt with the word “illusory” but no other comment. Something had struck him but he hadn't had time to finish the note. He wadded it up and filed it. A matchbook with a doctor's home phone number in Chester, Illinois. He transferred it to his telephone book. Graffiti half of a torn Kleenex tissue, the words OZ/Wizard in cryptic blue ballpoint. He thought of the death of Ray Bolger at first then remembered that he'd scrawled on the Kleenex to remind himself to look into something.
Legible and surprisingly coherent, he found the following memory of a viewed surveillance video:
WALLY SAYS DON DUNCAN SAW SURV OF TWINS. REUNION JOE/U. LOOKING AT EACH OTHER. NO AUDIO. JOE LAUGHS. DUNCAN SAYS “MIRTHLESSILY” AS IF F.U., BOTHER SLIDES CHAIR BACK, LEAVES, NO GOOD-BYE. And a the tape and even on the giant monitor the shot was not sufficiently close-up to reveal any details, only the noted silence and the abrupt bark of laughter. He made a note in a dossier and threw the other note in the round file.
Eichord found a crumpled scrap with the words “WHO SAYS?” which didn't ring any bells. He let the note sit beside him on the bedspread while he poured four fingers of Daniel's into a coffeecup full of ice and took a sip.
“What's to it, pal?” he asked the dog.
The dog flipped its tail a couple of times in response.
On a single piece of paper were abbreviations and numbers and letters which comprised Eichord's shorthand code summarizing the rigorous testing of Ukie Hackabee with respect to disorientation, perception of respiratory, circulatory, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, neuromuscular, and genitourinary functions and dysfunctions. Illusions, distorted perceptions, hallucinations. Taste, smell, auditory, sight, and tactile sensory systems. The range and depth of moods: rage, fear, jealousy, paranoia. The extent of Ukie's emotional control or the lack of it, his subconscious and expressed anxieties, the kinesiological match-ups.
Was he impulsive, sulk evasive, hyper, belligerent, pugnacious, self-pitying, obstreperous, unpredictable, incoherent? (He had told Wally Michaels he was “tired. tuckerd out, fucked over and worthless as a Chinese private in the Peoples’ Army two days before payday.” Mandel he expressed the worry that his “red corpse-suckles” were devouring his “white cop-suckles” faster than he could manufacture their replacements. All of this in jest, but reflective of the new Ukie.) He was being clocked for nail-biting, speech defects, swings of self-effacing fake humility or wild brags, shyness and boisterousness, placidity, and hyperactivity.
His every move, mood, motion, mannerism, was scrutinized. His constant pleas, posturing, negativism, suggestibility, resistance to authority—every sign of perspiration, irritation, indignation, was sought observed, labeled, filed, catalogued, measured, reviewed, assessed, and collated.
Ukie got the Babinski plantar test and Hoffman finger test, the Bender-Gestalt. A Rorschach. A Szondi test. Ideational concept tests and a Thematic Apperception—and it was all poured into the big blender at MCTF.
Tomorrow or the next day, soon as he could, he'd see if the guy named Sue was willing to commit himself professionally—or even off the record—to some sort of premature findings. Insofar as the “new Ukie” went Mandel's only comment about the tests was inconclusive. He'd even like some inconclusive conclusions, he thought, and took a very large swallow of straight Jack, holding it in his mouth and feeling the minute slivers in it, the melting fragments of ice, and looking at the micomprehensible page of shorthand as he swallowed the whole mouthful.
He glanced at some stuff on twins that he'd photocopied. He started to read it and later he would wish he had. But he kept hitting words like “follicle” and “ova” and polyovular’ and ‘homologous” and he scanned a page or two of it, half-assed speed-reading it, until the phrase “Multiple pregnancy monstrosities” hooked him for a secon. He read:
“Double-ovum twins are biologically not twins at all” (Noel would be crushed to hear it) “but are due to the fertilization of two ova in a single period of ovulation. Single-ovum twins represent twinning in the precise definition of the word, dividing an individual into two. This twinning can also be produced experimentally in animals and fish, but is fundamentally associated with the production of monstrosities, these being imperfect forms of the divisional process.” Eichord had no way of knowing that the book he had photocopied had been written years before the famous experimentation that resulted in the cloning breakthroughs.
He continued to read about the births of double-headed and four-legged monsters, and then he started hitting those words again: “teratomas” and “blastoderms” an-"placentation.” When he got to “fission of the bilateral halves of a single embryonic axis” he let tile paper slide to the floor where Dog sniffed over it for a moment and also found it of no interest.
The next page had the goodies on it but he hit the word “telegony” and let it slip through his fingers. The next page caught his eye and for a moment he read about how the pair of Siamese twins, born with a single vagina but separate uteri and cervices, had given birth to a child. It boggled his mind so badly that he just sat there trying to recreate the possible relationship out of which the event had occurred, but he made himself snap out of it, turned the page, and then poured another glass of the golden glow juice.