Death Match (10 page)

“We’ve got a long day ahead of us. If at any time you have questions or concerns, I’ll do my best to address them.”

Lash nodded as the man slipped a hand into his lab coat and pulled out a palmtop computer. He plucked a stylus from its groove and began scrawling on the pad. After a moment, he frowned.

“What is it?” Lash asked quickly.

“Nothing. It’s just—” the man seemed surprised. “It’s just that you’re showing up as pre-approved for the evaluation. I’ve never seen that before. You had no initial screening?”

“No, I didn’t. If it’s a problem—”

“Oh, no. Everything else checks out.” The man recovered quickly. “You do understand, of course, that you won’t be formally accepted as a candidate until after today’s evaluation?”

“Yes.”

“And that if you are not accepted, your application fee of $1,000 is nonrefundable?”

“Yes.” There had been no application fee, of course, but the man didn’t have to know everything. Lash was relieved: clearly, Vogel didn’t know his real purpose in being here. Lash had told Mauchly emphatically that he wanted to be treated as a real candidate, see everything the Thorpes and the Wilners had seen.

“Any questions before we begin?” When Lash shook his head, Vogel drew a card from around his neck, strung on a long black cord. Lash looked at it curiously: it was pewter-colored, with an iridescence that did not completely hide the gold-green of microprocessing inside. Eden’s infinity logo was embossed on one side. Vogel ran the card through the reader by the nearest door, and it sprang open with a click.

The room beyond seemed little wider than the hallway. There was a digital camera on a tripod inside, and a painted X on the floor beyond the camera.

“Please stand on the cross and look at the lens. I’m going to ask you two questions. Answer them as completely and as truthfully as you can.” And Vogel took up position behind the camera. Almost immediately, a tiny red light glowed on its upper housing.

“Why are you here?” Vogel asked.

Lash hesitated for just a moment, remembering the tapes he’d watched in the Flagstaff house.
If I’m going to do this at all
, he thought,
I should do it right
. And that meant honesty, avoiding easy or cynical answers.

“I’m here because I’m searching for something,” he replied. “For an answer.”

“Describe one thing you did this morning, and why you think we should know about it.”

Lash thought. “I caused a traffic jam.”

Vogel said nothing, and Lash went on.

“I was on I-95, coming into the city. I’ve got an E-ZPass unit for the windshield so I don’t have to pay cash at the tunnels and toll roads. I get to the bridge leading into Manhattan. It took a little time, because one of the three lanes at the toll plaza was down. The reader scans my card. But for some reason, the wooden gate doesn’t lift. I sit for a minute until an attendant comes. She tells me my E-ZPass is invalid. That it was revoked. But that’s not the case, I’m fully paid up. The thing had worked fine half a dozen times just this week. Clearly their system was messed up. But she insists I pay the six dollars to get across the bridge in cash. I say no, I want her to fix the error. Meanwhile, now there’s only one good lane onto the bridge. The line behind me is growing longer. People are honking. She insists. I stick to my guns. A cop takes notice, starts to walk over. Finally she calls me an unpleasant name, opens the gate manually, and lets me through. I give her my most endearing smile as I pass.”

He stopped, wondering why this of all things had come to mind. Then he realized it was, in fact, in character. If he’d been here for himself, for real, he’d have said something equally mundane. It wasn’t like him to cough up a teary-eyed story about how he’d embarked on a quest for the woman of his dreams.

“I guess I mention this because it reminds me of my father,” Lash went on. “He was very combative over the little things, as if it was a personal grudge match between him and life. Maybe I’m more like him than I realized.”

He fell silent, and after a moment the red light went out.

“Thank you, Dr. Lash,” Vogel said. He stepped away from the camera. “And now, if you’d follow me, please?”

They returned to the small central hallway, and Vogel swiped his card through the reader of the adjoining door. The room beyond was larger than the first. It contained a chair and a desk, on which sat a small Lucite cube holding sharpened pencils. Once again, the room was unrelievedly white. The ceiling was entirely covered in squares of frosted plastic. All these little rooms, identical in color and lack of decoration, each being used for a single purpose: they seemed to Lash almost like a genteel version of an interrogation suite.

Vogel motioned Lash to sit down. “Our tests run on a clock, but only to make sure that you complete the necessary battery by the end of the day. You have one hour, and I think you’ll find it plenty of time. There are no right or wrong answers. If you have any questions, I’ll be just outside.” He laid a large white envelope on the desk, then left the room, closing the door quietly behind him.

There was no clock, so Lash removed his watch and laid it on the table. He picked up the envelope, upended it into his hand. Inside was a thin test manual and a blank score sheet:

Lash scanned the questions quickly. He recognized its basic structure: it was an objective personality test, the kind made famous by the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. It seemed an odd choice for Eden; because such tests were primarily used as psychoanalytical diagnostics, they arranged personality into a series of scales, rather than ferreting out particular likes and dislikes. This seemed an unusually long test, too: while the MMPI-2 consisted of 567 questions, this test had precisely one thousand. Lash decided this was probably due to authentication factors: such tests always included a number of redundant questions to make sure that the subject was answering consistently. Eden was being extra-cautious.

He became aware of the ticking of his watch. With a sigh, he took one of the pencils from the Lucite cube and turned to the first question.

1. I enjoy watching large parades.

Lash did, so he shaded in the
o
in the “agree” column.

2. I sometimes hear voices other people claim not to hear.

A smoking gun if ever he’d seen one.
No right or wrong answers—yeah, sure
. If he answered in the positive, the ranking on his schizophrenia scale would increase. He shaded in the “strongly disagree”
o
.

3. I never lose my temper.

Lash recognized this question type by its use of the word “never.” All personality tests contained so-called validity scales: questions that could indicate whether the test-taker was lying, or exaggerating, or faking something like bravery (for police department applicants) or mental illness (for disability compensation). Lash knew that if you claimed too often never to feel fear, never to have told a fib, never to be moody, your lie scale would become elevated and your test thrown out as invalid. He shaded in the “disagree”
o
.

4. Most people tell me I’m an outgoing person.

This question skewed toward the extrovert/introvert scale. In such tests, extroversion was looked upon as a favorable trait. But Lash preferred his privacy. He again shaded the “disagree” oval.

The pencil point snapped and he cursed under his breath. Five minutes had already passed. If he was going to do this, he’d have to take the test like a typical person, filling in the answers instinctively rather than analyzing each one. He reached for a fresh pencil and reapplied himself to the task.

By ten o’clock, he had completed the battery of questions and been given a five-minute break. Then Vogel seated him again at the desk, left for a moment, and returned with another white envelope and the coffee Lash had requested: decaffeinated, the only kind offered. Lash opened the new envelope and found it contained a battery of cognitive intelligence tests: verbal comprehension; visual-spatial; a memory battery. Once again, the tests were longer and more thorough than he’d experienced before, and by the time he was done it was nearly eleven.

Another five-minute break; another cup of decaffeinated coffee; and a third white envelope. Rubbing his eyes blearily, Lash opened it and pulled out the stapled pamphlet within. This time, the test consisted of a long set of incomplete sentences:

I wish my father _________________________________

My second favorite food is _______________________

My greatest mistake was __________________________

I feel that children are __________________________

I’d like it if other people _____________________

I believe that mutual orgasm _______________________

I feel that red wine _______________________________

I would be completely happy if only _______________

Some areas of my body are very ___________________

Mountain hiking in spring is _______________________

The book with the greatest influence on me was ____

Here they were at last: the personal, intimate questions that had been noticeably lacking from the first test. Once again, Lash guessed there were close to a thousand. As he scanned the unfinished sentences, his instincts—both professional and personal—warned him to be disingenuous. But he reminded himself half-measures would not work here: if he was to fully understand the process, he had to experience it with the kind of commitment that the Wilners and the Thorpes had made. He took a fresh pencil, considered the first sentence, then completed it:

I wish my father had taken the time to praise me more often.

It was almost twelve-thirty by the time he filled in the last sentence, and Lash felt the beginnings of a headache creeping along his temples and behind his eyes. Vogel came in with a long, narrow sheet in his hand, and for a terrible moment Lash thought another test was coming. Instead, it was a lunch menu. Although he felt little appetite, he dutifully made his choices and handed it back to Vogel. The man suggested Lash take a bathroom break, then stepped out of the room, leaving the door open.

By the time Lash returned, Vogel had brought in a folding chair and placed it perpendicular to his own. Where the cube of pencils had been was now an oblong box of black cardboard.

“How are you feeling, Dr. Lash?” Vogel asked as he sat in the folding chair.

Lash passed a hand across his eyes. “Sandbagged.”

A smile flitted briefly across Vogel’s face. “It seems grueling, I know. But our studies have shown that a single, intensive day of evaluation yields the best results. Please sit.” He opened the box, revealing a stack of large cards face down.

The moment he saw a small number printed on the top card, Lash knew what lay ahead. He’d been so engrossed in the first three tests he’d almost forgotten about what he himself had examined in the blind just a few days before.

“We’re now going to do an inkblot test, known as the Hirschfeldt. Are you familiar with it?”

“More or less.”

“I see.” Vogel drew out a blank control sheet from the box, made a notation. “Let’s begin. I’ll show you the inkblots, one by one, and you tell me what they look like.” He lifted the first card from the box, turned it over, and placed it on the table, facing Lash. “What might this be?”

Lash looked at the picture, trying to empty his mind of prior associations—especially the terrible images that had jumped unbidden into his mind back at the Audubon Center. “I see a bird,” he said. “Up at the top. It’s like a raven, the white part is its beak. And the whole card looks like a warrior, Japanese, a ninja or samurai. With two swords in scabbards—you can see them sticking out there, left and right, pointed downwards.”

Vogel scribbled on the control sheet, taking down—Lash knew—his remarks verbatim. “Very good,” he said after a moment. “Let’s go on to the next one. What might this be?”

Lash worked his way through the cards, fighting a growing weariness, trying always to make the responses his own rather than what he knew to be common replies. By one o’clock, Vogel had finished both the response and inquiry phases of the test, and Lash’s headache had grown worse. As he watched Vogel put the cards away, he found himself wondering about all the other applicants who had streamed into the building this morning: were they all squirreled away somewhere on this floor, in their own little testing suites? Had Lewis Thorpe felt as exhausted as he himself did now, as tired of staring at the blank white walls?

“You must be hungry, Dr. Lash,” Vogel said as he closed the box. “Come on. Your lunch is waiting.”

Though he felt no hungrier now than before the inkblots, Lash followed him across the small central space to one of the doors in the far wall. Vogel swiped his card through the reader, and the door sprang open to reveal yet another white room. This, however, had prints on three of its walls. They were simple, well-framed photographs of forests and seacoasts, bereft of people or wildlife, yet Lash’s gaze rested hungrily on them after the sterile emptiness of the morning.