Mr. Garcia’s brain was not happy. Blood flow was disrupted by the finger, resulting in both ischemic and hemorrhagic strokes. That is, the blood was cut off from some areas and flowing into the intercellular space in others. Blood is a great thing to have. Can’t live without it. But if it doesn’t stay where it belongs—in its capillaries—it’s toxic. Deadly, in fact.
When the thin-section micrograph came up on the screen, everyone in the observation room leaned forward. What we saw didn’t seem possible. The tissues of the two patients were merged, apparently at the molecular level, and the doctors would be unable to save the finger.
The surgeon decided, and Craig agreed with her, to amputate Jane Doe’s pinkie then dig out the merged tissue from Mr. Garcia’s head. The first was accomplished quickly, and when Craig wheeled Ms. Doe out of the operating theater, he looked up and caught my eye. <
Meet me in the ICU.>
* * *
I got to the ICU just after Craig and Ms. Doe. I’d done a lot of consults there, so no one was surprised to see me. The nurses transferred her from the gurney to the bed and hooked her up to columns of monitors and IV bag supports.
Flowing dark hair emphasized her delicate face like black theater curtains drawn back from a cozy snow scene. A hint of a smile above her elegant chin suggested she enjoyed being in a coma. Her unusually long nose might have been troublesome on a more common face, but for her it added character. It was one of her best features, in fact.
She looked European or perhaps Russian. I could picture her opening her huge eyes and saying “Vat are you starink at, dahlink?”
She aroused such a curiosity in me I vowed to discover her story. I didn’t trust others to figure out who she was, but that’s nothing new. I’m not a trusting person. I usually try to take care of things by myself.
I put my head right next to hers. Craig widened his eyes and leaned his head forward. “
Well?
”
If someone is brain-dead, I get nothing. I may as well be standing next to a statue covered in bird shit. Yes, an EEG can tell you whether someone is brain-dead; you don’t need a mind reader for that. But for patients with some activity, I can assess who’s home and what they’re doing in there. I can also estimate when or if they will come back to the land of the living.
For some, I get a kind of static. None of those recover. Others have scattered, disorganized thoughts. The kind you or I might have when falling asleep, in what’s called a hypnogogic state. I’ll get things like <
More Afro-Cuban mouse lies, please,>
or <
No equipment is really comfort-proof.>
The thoughts have a clear syntax but make less sense than Bob Dylan on LSD.
In my doctoral research I came across a number of patients with “locked-in syndrome.” These poor souls are in there having normal thoughts but are paralyzed with no way of communicating with the outside world. Some can move their eyes or blink, but occasionally their physicians don’t realize they are conscious. In those cases, I’d whisper in the guy’s ear, “Don’t worry, buddy, I know you’re in there. We’ll figure out a way for you to communicate.” Of course, I’d get everyone else out of the room first. Wouldn’t want people to think I’m some kind of weird psychic.
Where was the woman-from-nowhere on this continuum? Somewhere in the middle. I could sense the disorganized words she was thinking, but they were in no language I’d ever heard. A little like Italian. Martian, maybe? But I was convinced she would regain consciousness soon.
I made a show of examining the EEG traces collected so far, frowning and putting in some “hmm” noises, then announced, “She should regain consciousness within the next five days.” I’ve become an expert at hiding my ability. Can you imagine if my secret got out? They’d turn me into a twenty-four-seven lab specimen.
“How can you be so sure?” David Cassini, the head of neurology, crossed his arms.
Uh-oh, right? No, don’t worry. I’m used to deflecting these kinds of questions. I flipped through the EEG traces some more. “Well, it’s an overall impression based on lots of experience. You see this theta wave pattern, here? Taken together with the rest of the chart …” blah blah blah. I felt a little bad because when Natasha Weirdenov did wake up, Cassini would pore over the EEG records looking for theta wave patterns. Oh, well. Can’t be helped.
The hospital’s chief surgeon, a Dr. Angela Carter, took over and examined our patient from head to toe. Carter was a stunning woman in her late fifties, with thick white hair pulled back in a ponytail. Her pressed lab coat was open in the front, displaying a turquoise silk blouse.
The exam was pretty ho-hum until Carter came to the woman’s mouth.
She froze. “We’re going to need a dental consult here. Take a look at this, Craig, and tell me what you see.”
Craig moved over and peered in. “Huh. She must have taken good care of her teeth, because I don’t see a single filling or crown, but … huh. That doesn’t make sense. The teeth aren’t in great condition.”
“But look here, Porter. This tooth.” Dr. Carter held Weirdenov’s mouth open, pressed a tongue depressor against a particular tooth, then moved her head out of the way so Craig could see.
“Ah. I get it.” Craig said.
“Right.” Carter turned to the others. “I’m no dentist, but it looks like she had a big filling there. It’s gone now. Ms. Doe seems to have had dental work done, but all the fillings and hardware have been removed.”
“Or they just failed to materialize.” I said.
All the docs looked at me.
“Well,” I said, “we know something unprecedented happened. Unless we’ve been duped somehow, we know this woman materialized out of thin air. So please don’t call me a kook. She was beamed here in a transporter, sent from a time machine in the future, or something we can’t imagine. My guess is her fillings simply didn’t come along for the ride.” I pictured her lying on her back on a stainless steel table. Someone flips a switch. She disappears, and six or seven fillings clatter down onto the empty table.
I got some nods and a few frowns. Dr. Carter paused, then continued her exam.
“There’s an old bullet wound here. A through-and-through.” She pointed to the scars on the left side of the abdomen. “It wasn’t treated well.” She palpated the exit wound. “Perhaps treatment was delayed, or the doctor wasn’t very good.” Carter started turning the patient over.
“Hold on. What’s that?” I moved in and pointed to a lighter area on the skin on one side, above her waist.
“Just a pigmentation irregularity, but …” Carter’s voice trailed off.
I pulled the swing-arm magnification lamp over. It held a huge magnifying lens with bright LEDs around its perimeter. I moved it right over the anomaly: a small pattern drawn with lighter skin, as if someone had doodled with a sharp-pointed bleach pen. It looked like the squiggly outline of the head and neck of a person who was lying down. Or maybe a fish. “I’d say her tattoo ink stayed behind, too.”
Craig looked through the lamp. “Not a very interesting tattoo. It’s nothing I recognize.” He almost fell onto the woman but caught himself. The IV bag started swinging.
A nurse yelled, “Earthquake!”
The building rumbled and some glassware jingled, but it was just a small quake. We’d been having a lot of them recently—foreshocks, maybe?
While the others were looking around, I snapped a photo of the tattoo pattern with my phone. Probably breaking a bunch of bullshit privacy regulations. I didn’t care.
Things settled down, and the physical exam confirmed that her organs were indeed on the wrong sides. Heart on the right and liver on the left, for example. Carter explained that although it was extremely rare, people born with this condition had no more medical problems than the general population.
I suspected her travel somehow produced a mirror image of her former self. If her molecules were reversed, she wouldn’t survive long. She wouldn’t be able to metabolize normal glucose, for example. But maybe above a certain size threshold, everything was mirrored, fingerprints included. I made a mental note to reverse the tattoo photo.
The rest of the exam was unremarkable. Time to wait and see what this woman would have to say for herself when she woke up.
CHAPTER TWO
The next morning, in my PI office, I sat with my feet up on the desk, checking the latest news about the mysterious mademoiselle, as the press had come to refer to her.
Peggy, my receptionist-slash-assistant, opened the door to my inner office and leaned in with one hand on the doorknob and the other on the jamb. “Well, boss—”
Some sobbing from the outer office interrupted her, sounding like noises from a distraught hoot owl. Peggy shut the door and walked over to my desk.
“Well, boss, looks like you actually, and against all odds, have an honest-to-goodness case on your hands, and it looks like a humdinger.”
Peggy Barbera was a humdinger herself—five foot seven with dazzling blue eyes. Her bouffant hairdo rose high above her head before crashing down below her shoulders. It would have been stylish had this been 1963. She wore a wraparound skirt and a pink turtleneck that hid her prominent Adam’s apple.
That’s right, Adam’s apple. Peggy was a dude. A cross-dresser. She occasionally performed at Dreamgirls, the top drag show venue in San Fran. I was her day job. When I interviewed her, she’d thought,
“A humdinger as in … what?” I cocked my head and frowned.
Peggy glanced at the door as if checking that no one could see through the frosted glass. She turned back to me and made the twirling cuckoo sign by her ear with one hand and mimed taking a drink with the other.
“Okay, show her in.”
I checked my desk to ensure it told a convincing I’m-a-busy-investigator lie: solid wood with a thirty-inch tablet strategically placed to cover the scratches and water stains. I’d decorated the whole office in Mid-Century Film Noir, with an oak floor that pleaded with me to refinish it. It was barking up the wrong tree. One that didn’t have money growing on it.
My office was on the second floor of a building that had somehow avoided the wrecking ball. Maybe the owner was waiting for San Francisco’s next earthquake. It wouldn’t be long considering the recent cluster of quakes we’d had.
A paying client would be a good thing. I would have liked to spend all my time on the case of the mysterious mademoiselle, but I had to earn some money. And I wanted to succeed as a private investigator.
Thoughts of my dwindling bank account balance triggered the memory of my close brush with fame and fortune. In grad school, Craig and I had almost joined the ranks of the sinfully rich. Together we’d developed a machine that would—no, will—cure insomnia. Sorry, not cure it but treat it effectively. The concept was simple. The user puts on a comfortable cap that covers the eyes and ears. Electrodes read in the insomniac’s EEG, and pulsing light and sound entrain their brain waves.
It works great. Within minutes the user drifts off to sleep. We called it the EZ-Sleeper.
In the early stages of development, a med-tech company offered us twenty million for all the rights. I was reckless back then. Still am, people tell me. I was sure we could do much better ourselves. I argued Craig over to my point of view, and we turned the offer down. For a while, it looked as if we’d made the right decision.
Then the class-action lawsuit hit. Some of our experimental subjects claimed it induced epileptic seizures and even caused epilepsy in normal individuals. That was bullshit. Not one seizure had been established.
The device would require a prescription, and we’d done rigorous testing related to photosensitive epilepsy, but that didn’t stop the lawsuit from those enrolled in the early trials. Our lawyer told us it was frivolous—someone was a gold digger. We’d eventually win, since the enrollees had all signed agreements saying the treatment would probably kill them. But that would take time. And money. That was years ago, but everything was still working its way through the courts.
Bottom line, I needed to make a living. Sure, I could use my weird talent to, say, win at poker, but that wasn’t right. I’d be stealing from others. Cheating. Okay, I’ve done it now and then, I’m no saint, but I wanted to find a kinder way to make a living.
As a PI, I could make money with my special talent and still look myself in the mirror. The only ones I’d hurt would be the bad guys. A win-win. And I’d always wanted to be a PI. Sam Spade, Phillip Marlowe, Inspector Gadget, that kind of thing. Plus, it wouldn’t all be mind reading. I’d have to learn other skills. I figured it might even be fun—more fun than chasing medical research grants.
Peggy cut off my trip down the avenue of broken dreams by leading a Ms. Beatrix Winkel into my office. She was a knockout, but only in the sense that she could probably knock me out with her big fists and muscular arms. She looked as if she spent mondo hours in the gym, sparring, jumping rope, and lifting weights.
But today, she wasn’t in fighting trim. Her hair was disheveled, and mascara outlined the tracks of her tears. She wore expensive, stained yoga clothes and her shoes didn’t quite match. Peggy looked at the shoes then at me. I gave a little nod.