Reflex (6 page)

Her cheeks burning, Millie seriously considered dropping the bug in the nearest trash can as soon as she was away from the security station, but controlled the impulse.

Anders had made the flight arrangements, putting her on a 12:40 P.M. Delta flight into D.C. with one stop in Atlanta. It left fifteen minutes late and there was another delay in Atlanta, putting her into Reagan National over an hour late. Her appreciation for teleportation had risen to an all-time high by the time she touched down in D.C. She'd spent the flights trying to sleep but all she could do was worry.
Is he dead? Is he hurt? Where the hell is he?

By the time she stumbled out of her taxi at the State Plaza Hotel, she was truly exhausted.

The room they gave her was on the seventh floor facing north, away from the mall and the brightly lit landmarks of the Washington Monument and the Capitol building. She could, however, see what interested her far more: the sprawling mass of George Washington University Hospital, and the streets near it, where Davy had been snatched.

She ordered a light salad from room service and ate with the curtains open.
Tomorrow,
she promised the lighted streets.

Tomorrow.

She started early, buying a portable breakfast—egg-and-bacon-on-a-roll and coffee—then sitting on the stoop of a copy shop fifteen feet from where they'd found Brian Cox, dead on the sidewalk.

It was morning rush and she watched the crowds with unfocused eyes, trying not to filter anything, to absorb it uncritically. What surprised her were the number of homeless people out, working the crowd for change. A lot of them were women.

I thought we were getting a handle on this.
She shook her head.
Maybe in Stillwater.

The temperature dropped steadily through the morning and a thin gray fog drifted up the streets, dampening the sidewalks and the walls, and leaving drops of water hanging in her hair. She'd seen the forecast so she was wearing her powder blue raincoat. She pulled up the collar of the thick hand-knitted sweater she wore below the raincoat and sunk her neck into it, feeling like a timid turtle. She was grateful she'd chosen her Merrell Chameleon hiking boots—
even though they make my feet look like boulders.

She kept wiping her glasses off with her handkerchief.

Traffic, both wheeled and footed, lightened, and the number of homeless on the street seemed to increase, but she suspected there weren't more of them than this morning—just fewer "normal" people on the street to hide behind.

Hide? They're not hiding. You were just looking at the normal people instead of them.

She edged closer to the balustrade, using it to shield her from the mist. She felt cold, but it wasn't from the weather.

How cold are
they?

There was a group of four men talking at the mouth of the alleyway across the street, leaning against the wall. One of them had a ratty backpack, two carried bedrolls under their arms, and the fourth wore an indeterminate number of blankets, Indian style.

She could tell that most of the blankets had been brightly colored but now they were muted, the barest hint of pastels where once primary colors ruled. The man with the blankets wore old Nikes, ripped, showing bare, dirty skin beneath. He turned his head as a brightly colored BMW went by.

These people are nearly
always
on the street.

She looked in her purse at the picture of Davy she'd taken from the Aerie. She went down the street to Kinko's and had his half of the photo blown up, black and white, a little fuzzy at eight-and-a-half by eleven, but clearly recognizable.

She started to get a hundred run off, so she could post them, then stopped.
How will they contact me?

She rejected using her hotel room. The search might leave the area. She thought about putting the number of the NSA on there, but if they hadn't found him yet, she wasn't sure she trusted them to take the calls.

She asked the clerk, "Is there someplace around here that sells cell phones?"

Forty minutes later she had a local cell phone with several hundred pre-bought minutes. And, most important, a phone number.

On the way back to Kinko's, she stopped in a hardware store and picked up a hammer-stapler and a box of staples. When she left Kinko's, she had one hundred sheets with Davy's picture and the words, "Have you seen this man?" the new cell phone number, and the place and date he had last been seen.

She started at Interrobang and worked her way west on H over to George Washington University, putting them up on the phone poles and the occasional plywood fence that blocked off construction. At Twentieth she went north, first, up to Pennsylvania Avenue, then went back and did the stretch down to G street, then east as far as Eighteenth.

Every homeless person she saw she gave two bucks and a flyer. "Hi, I'm looking for my husband. This is his picture. Have you seen him?"

No.

Next person.

No.

She worked her way in a large square around the abduction site and the Interrobang. She'd almost completed the square, coming west on H back from Eighteenth when she tried a pair of men playing cards on a packing crate. One of them was clearly a recycler, leaning against three enormous plastic bags filled with aluminum cans. The other had a bedroll and a basset hound.

"Nah. Never seen him," said the recycler.

"Me neither," said the man with the dog as he laid down a card. "Gin. You oughta try Retarded Kaneesha. She sees everything." He tilted his head to the alleyway across the street.

Millie could just make out a woman in a maroon knee-length coat leaning against the alley wall just off the sidewalk. Her head and shoulders were in shadow.

Millie gave the men some money and walked slowly across the street. She could tell the woman
was
watching her, so perhaps she really did see everything, but Millie wasn't particularly heartened by the appellation "retarded." As she got closer, she noticed the woman's face was never still. Her lips were pursing in and out and occasionally her tongue would protrude. Her eyebrows kept rising as if she were being continually surprised. She'd blink, but it wasn't a normal blink. Both eyes would squeeze shut, then open again, on a regular basis, longer than a blink.

Blepharospasm.
Millie let out a deep breath of understanding.
Retarded Kaneesha! Ha.

"I like your coat," Millie said, and she meant it. It was heavy wool with a large hood that seemed to be lined in black satin. The rain was beaded on it, not soaking in.

The woman nodded. "Me, too."

Millie held out her hand. "My name is Millie."

The woman's face stopped twitching as she smiled slightly, but she wouldn't meet Millie's eyes. She did shake Millie's hand briefly. "My name is Sojee."

"Please excuse me for asking this, but you've got tardive dyskinesia, don't you?"
Retarded Kaneesha.

"Got it bad. You a doctor or something? Most people see it and run." While Sojee was talking and while she smiled, the twitching went away, but while she listened for Millie's answer, it started again, sudden jerks of her jaw to one side or the other, accompanied by lip smacking. Her eyes roamed the street past Millie's shoulder, watching purposefully in a way that contrasted sharply with the random movements of her jaw.

Millie shook her head. "I'm a psychotherapist. I've studied it in school. What were you on, that caused the TD?"

"I was on Haldol for paranoid schizophrenia." She said it like "I have brown eyes" or "I'm five foot eight."

"This is none of my business, so feel free to tell me to shove off. Did you change medications?"

Sojee shook her head. "Stopped taking it. Couldn't sleep on it. Plus this—" She gestured at her face. "They say it might never go away."

"They?"

"The people over at St. Elizabeth's Hospital." Sojee's tongue lunged out of her mouth and retreated. Her eyebrows arched. "You know, where they keep Hinkley, the guy what shot Reagan."

"How did they try to treat it, the dyskinesia?"

"They wanted to up my dosage of Haldol."

Millie shuddered. Taking more of a neuroleptic drug would probably stop the symptoms temporarily—until they returned even worse.

Sojee saw Millie shake. "Oh. Do you have TD, too?"

"No. Has going off of your meds caused your, uh, symptoms to increase?"

Sojee smacked her lips several times in succession and then her lower jaw jerked to the right. "Do you mean: am I crazy again? They come and they go."

Despite herself, Millie had to smile. "You don't mince words, do you, Sojee? What do you mean by 'they?' "

"Angels. Angels and demons. I hear them both. And
sometimes
I see them."

Millie nodded. "What do they want you to do?"

"The usual. The angels tell me I'm the chosen one. I'm their human champion in the angel/demon war here on Earth. The demons talk about my ex-husband and tell me to kill myself. I hear them all the time really, but there are days where I
believe
them."

Millie couldn't help herself. "And today?"

"Oh, this is a
good
day. They're just chattering at the back of the bus. I'm not letting them drive."

It was surreal, this discussion of mental illness, yet also liberating. Here was a person whose personal travails far eclipsed Millie's. One way or another, Millie would get past this crisis. Barring a miracle, Sojee would be stuck with schizophrenia and tardive dyskinesia as long as she lived.

Millie sighed and showed Sojee the picture. "I don't suppose you've seen—" She was expecting another negative, but she couldn't help holding onto a faint hope—a hope driven by the homeless men's assertion that "Retarded Kaneesha saw everything." What she wasn't expecting was for Sojee's eyes to roll back in her head and her knees to buckle.

Millie swore and lunged forward, dropping the stack of flyers and the stapler as she tried to break Sojee's fall. The woman was both taller and heavier than Millie, but Millie just managed to keep her head from hitting the asphalt.

What on earth caused that?
She stared down at the woman's face, which was suddenly different. The tardive dyskinesia had ceased with unconsciousness, and, relaxed, her face went from some caricature of madness to normalcy.
She's beautiful.
Millie wanted to weep, suddenly.

Millie snagged a discarded cardboard box from beside the recycling bin and dropped her knee on it, bursting it, then folding it one-handed. She slid it under Sojee's head.

The woman was stirring already. Her eyelids fluttered and she was moaning slightly. There were a hundred different possible causes for Sojee's blackout but Millie swore it looked like an old-fashioned faint.

Was it Davy's picture? What had this woman seen?

She heard steps behind her and turned her head. The two homeless men from across the street, the recycler and the man with the dog, had crossed the street.

"Jesus, lady! What did you do to her?"

"She fainted."

The rain was worsening, falling on Sojee's face. Millie shook her head. "Go flag down a cab. I need to get her some help."

They stared at her like she was from another planet.

"Well, can you? She lies here much longer, she'll get soaked!"

The recycler said, "Lady, cabs don't stop for people like us."

Millie blinked. "Right, then. You guys bring her. I'll get the cab." She snagged the stapler off the ground and put it in her pocket. She ignored the flyers—half of them were soaked and the others would be soon. It didn't matter. The original was back at Kinko's and she could have more made.

It took her ten minutes to find a cab. The rain was getting worse and the cabs were in demand. When she got it back to the alley, the two homeless men were helping Sojee stand.

When the woman saw Millie, though, she flinched and tried to pull away, nearly falling in the process. "Stay away from me!" Her facial motions were back, tongue thrusts and the prolonged blinks.

Millie spread her hands and tried to look as harmless as possible. "You need help, Sojee. You passed out. Let me take you to a doctor."

"No way! I was just surprised, that's all. And I ain't et today. Or slept—it's this rain."

"Well, then come with me and I'll get you something to eat. You don't have to do anything you don't want."

The bellhop at the hotel was clearly disturbed when Millie brought Sojee into the lobby. Millie almost walked her into the dining room out of spite, but instead took Sojee up to the room and ordered room service.

"They're kind of slow," Millie said. "Would you like to lie down and rest until it gets here?"

Sojee was staring past Millie's shoulder. She jerked at Millie's voice. "Sorry, what did you say?"

Millie turned around. The bathroom with its golden tile and gleaming chrome fixtures fairly glowed in the fluorescent light. She turned back to Sojee. "Or perhaps a bath?"

Sojee nodded. "Oh, yes, please. You can get showers in the shelters, but they'll steal your stuff, and the cold water's standing four inches on the floor and the water's never more than warm."

Millie nodded. "Lock the door, if you like. I don't mind."

Sojee took longer than room service. While she was in there, Millie removed the bug and turned off the microphone. The food was cooling when Sojee came out of the bathroom.

Millie was getting better at reading her facial expressions, at telling the random noise of her neurological condition from her true feelings. She was surprised at the degree of emotion. Schizophrenics were known for their flatness of affect—not too happy, not too sad. Sojee's expression seemed more than content when she came out of the bathroom.

Millie gestured at the food. "I hope you're not a vegetarian. I ordered the chicken."

Sojee inhaled sharply and licked her lips. "Chicken's great." She hesitated though.

"Go on, then. Help yourself. Please."

During the initial rush, Millie sat quietly, buttering a roll and eating it with small bites, small movements, waiting with intent. She didn't want to startle the woman.