Mind to Mind: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (2 page)

And I had that same eerie feeling while my
eyes were locked with Jane Doe's. I got no pictures, no images of
any kind, just that feeling of energy surging between the minds. It
shivered me, spooked me. There was a person in there somewhere,
locked behind those eyes. But how "fully human" a person?

I did not—could not—stay long. Jim jumped
straight down my throat the instant we got outside. "What the hell
kind of interview was that?" he growled, very unhappy with me.

"Sony," I told him. "I can't help you with
this one."

"Sorry, my ass! You didn't
even
try
!"

I said, “Look, you asked
me to give her a look. Okay. I gave her a look. And I'm telling you
I can't help you.”

He leaned against the wall, lit a cigarette,
said very quietly, "Spooked you, didn't she?"

I admitted it.

After a moment of silence he said, "Well,
I'll grant you, she may have the intelligence of a three-year-old
child, but I believe she understands what we want, and I believe
there's a way to get it out of her."

"Give it some rest," I suggested. "She'll
improve with therapy. They're doing some amazing—"

"Oh, bullshit, Ash," he
interrupted impatiently. "She hasn't moved an inch after four weeks
of therapy. Chances are she never will. There just isn't much left
to her. But, dammit, she's alive, and I think she can finger the
guy that did it. I want that guy, Ash. I
really
want that guy."

I said, "Yeah. I
understand how you feel. But I ..."

After a moment he said, "You didn't even
try, Ash."

I told him, "Well ... let
me sleep on it. Call you tomorrow."

He said, "No fee, pal, for today. You didn't
earn it."

I knew I hadn't earned it.
I had not come for the fee, anyway. I came because a friend asked
me to. That did not, however, obligate me to become involved in the
case. And I really did not want to do so. I watched my friend the
cop walk away, then I lit a cigarette while wrestling with my
conscience. Could I walk away from this one? Sure I could. The same
way I had walked away from the San Diego Zoo. I had long ago
decided that some things were just better left alone. I did not
conduct séances or otherwise attempt communications with "the
dead." I did not "exorcise demons," and I had no truck with haunted
houses. I did not attempt mental telepathy with dolphins or
gorillas. So why should I ...?

That line of thought was
interrupted by the sudden appearance of Jane Doe herself. A candy
striper pushed her wheelchair through the doorway and on toward the
terrace. I was standing off to the side, sucking my cigarette, and
Jane's left-deviated eyes swept me as she passed by. I experienced
the eerie feeling again, a sort of tingle deep within the brain. Or
was it deep within the
right
brain? Certainly it was something nonverbal,
almost primitive ... a shiver of the soul?

Could that be the
explanation? Not just this time but for all the eerie, shivery,
nonverbal encounters of the mind? Had Jane Doe's nonverbal right
brain just been in communication with my nonverbal right
brain?

Perhaps it is true that some things are
better left alone. But, after all, this was County General
Hospital, not the San Diego Zoo—and that was a human being over
there, not a gorilla. And I had the damnedest, most shivery feeling
that this human being was screaming at me in the silence.

I could not walk away from that.

Chapter Two:
Connecting

I took over from the candy
striper and pushed the wheelchair across the terrace, down the
ramp, onto the lawn. It was a nice day, a bit warm but with gentle,
cooling breezes. There were squirrels out here and a variety of
birds, and there was a sweet smell to the air. I made no attempt to
connect with her verbally, since I knew that she could not respond
in kind, and I was not sure that she could deal intellectually
with anything I might say, anyway. Obviously she could and did
respond to simple command statements, such as, "Raise your
arm—blink your eyes," and so forth, but much of that response could
be coming directly from the brain stem, so it did not necessarily
indicate intellectual activity.

She seemed to be enjoying
the communion with nature, though, appreciatively sniffing the air
and cocking the good left ear to the songbirds. And she seemed
totally at ease with me. I began softly whistling "Summertime" as I
moved her toward the trees. She swiveled her head to look at me and
smiled with the left side of her face, began humming the tune in
perfect key with my whistling. As I was launching into the fourth
repeat of the chorus, she laughed softly and reached back with her
good left hand to touch me—and God, did it touch me!—as if to say,
"That's enough of that."

I wheeled her to a good level spot where the
grass was thick and dry, took the blanket off her lap and spread it
on the ground, then moved her onto the blanket and left it up to
her to find the most comfortable position. That proved a bit
awkward. She would shift about, glare at the uncooperative side of
her body with something like bewilderment, push at the dead leg as
though trying to shoo it away from her, try again and again without
much improvement. I was reminded of a dog I once had who liked to
lie down with a stuffed toy but never could seem to get the darned
thing positioned properly against his body—and I was aware of what
was happening with Jane Doe. She had no sensory connection to that
dead leg. It was just a "thing" that always seemed to be in her
way.

I let her fight it alone
for a couple of minutes before I knelt beside her and lent a hand.
It then became obvious that she knew what she wanted to do; with my
help she ended up lying on her good left side, arm bent and elbow
supporting the torso at a slight elevation, legs drawn in a loose
fetal curl. I lay down facing her in a mirror-image attitude, with
plenty of separation between us. Because her eyes were fixed
leftward, she had to swivel her head toward the right shoulder in
order to look at me.

I positioned her head straight on with one
hand and said to her, "Look at me." Her head fought my restraining
hand, trying to comply, but I held firmly and kept repeating, "Look
at me."

The only evidence that she
was trying to do so was in the muscles of the good left side of her
face as she squinted, scowled, twitched the cheek, curled the lip.
After about twenty seconds of that she exploded with a frustrated
expletive: "Shit!"

I laughed. She laughed. I
released her for a moment, showed her how I did it with my own
eyes, positioned her straight on again, said, "Now, dammit, look at
me."

Again she yelled, "Shit!" But there was a
movement there—a twitch, anyway. We kept at it. After a minute or
so she was starting to get the hang of it, but I was not sure that
the eyes were tracking together. Curious thing about the visual
fields. Each eye has two of them, left and right field in each eye,
each field wired to the corresponding control side of the brain.
Right brain, left visual field; left brain, right visual field.
Since Jane Doe had no left brain, she also had no right visual
field in either eye. Which would indicate, I gathered, that she
could not take in a whole image with a single glance; she would
have to "scan" the object with the single field available to her
and reconstruct the fractured pictures thus gained into a whole
image. I had already noticed that she "saw" in somewhat this
fashion, evidenced by a slight quivering of the eyes while locked
leftward.

But don't get the idea
that I was dabbling in physical therapy. I lay no claims to
expertise in that area. I presumed that someone was working with
this woman to restore all possible bodily functions. My interest
was in her mind itself and how it worked through only half a brain,
the surviving nonverbal side. It had immediately become obvious
that she was processing information and trying to respond
intelligently—"thinking," in other words. But thinking how and
with what? It had been scientifically demonstrated that the right
cerebral cortex is superior to the left in certain areas of human
consciousness, but virtually all that we regard as intellectual
processes are typically handled by the left hemisphere.

For example, if Jane Doe had lost her right
hemisphere instead of the left, her closest friends would see
little noticeable difference in her personality. Her speech may be
a bit flat, unemotional, and tending toward the literal—no
appreciation for metaphor or delicate shadings of meaning. Ask
left-brained Jane, "What time is it?" and she may well respond,
"What time is what?" Or ask her how she feels and she may tell you
that she feels with her hands. She may get lost inside her own
home, not be able to find the bathroom, have difficulty fitting her
arms and legs inside her clothing, and never dream again, but she
could sit and chat with you for hours without demonstrating any
loss of intellectual ability.

But I was dealing with a
right-brained Jane—a person whose memories were largely sensory and
emotional impressions and whose thoughts were not structured
through language. So how the hell were they structured, in what
kind of format did she think, and how could I tap into those
thoughts? I was not all that concerned about her fixated eyes; I
was going for the mental reaction to all that.

What I got, though, was
quite a bit more than I had been going for. I had been patiently
wrestling with her head for about five minutes when she snarled,
"Well, fuck it!" just as clearly and with the same level of disgust
experienced by any normal person. She kissed my hand, then
maneuvered herself close against me and nuzzled my throat, moaning
softly and agitating her pajama-clad body against mine.

I thought, Oh shit! and
was trying to gracefully extricate myself from the situation when
an obviously very angry woman in hospital-white slacks and tunic
came charging across the lawn with fire in the eye. "Just what the
hell do you think you're doing!" she cried.

Jane Doe rolled onto her back with a soft
little laugh as I struggled clear.

"Let's get her into the chair," I said to
the angry woman, trying to be very cool while feeling entirely
foolish. I noticed the candy striper, then, in my peripheral
vision, all but wringing her hands in the background.

Then I saw the hospital security cop
hurrying our way.

So okay, I decided, I had invited this one.
Common sense should have warned me. A guy simply does not take over
a female patient of questionable mental status and lay her on a
blanket in the grass.

The woman grabbed my arm with both hands, as
though to restrain me from running away.

I smiled and asked her, "Is this your
dance?"

But then the cop arrived, gun drawn,
wary.

I told him, "There has been a
misunderstanding. I'm here on police business, examining this
patient at the request of Lieutenant James Cochran, Hollywood
Division. Call him and confirm it."

But this guy was not too swift. He looked at
the woman for instructions.

She snapped, "Arrest him!"

The guy was fumbling with his cuffs.

I told him, "Forget the cuffs, pal, or
you've got more trouble than you really need. I'll go to the
security office with you while you call Cochran." And I told the
woman, "Your sense of duty is commendable, but don't you think
you're being just a tad ridiculous? Will you please let go my
arm?"

Not that I was mad at her.
Actually I admired her for the ballsy defense of her patient. Quite
attractive, even under the circumstances—blond, petite, curvaceous.
But enough was enough, and I'd had enough.

She released me, seemingly a bit embarrassed
to realize that she was still clinging to me.

Jane Doe had been lying on her back and
giggling through all of that. I put her in her chair and arranged
the blanket across her lap. The security cop still had his gun in
his hand, looking very confused.

The woman in white asked me, "Do you have
some identification?"

I showed her my driver's license and handed
her a business card. Her eyes were on that card as she told the
cop, "It's okay, Harry. There's been a misunderstanding."

Harry looked very grateful about that. He
grinned at me as he holstered the pistol and walked away.

The woman gave me her
hand, said very calmly, "Sorry I missed you inside, Mr. Ford. I'm
Dr. Saunders. Lieutenant Cochran did mention your name, but I'd ...
I'm sorry if I interfered with your ... investigation."

"No interference at all," I muttered.

Jane Doe had me in her
sights. And she was looking at me straight on. We'd connected, yeah
... some
where
.

Chapter Three: A Gross
Perception

Alison Saunders, it turns out, is a doctor of
philosophy, not medicine. She is a clinical psychologist who
specializes in the rehabilitation of persons suffering brain
damage—not very long a doctor of anything, I guessed, unless I'd
missed her age by several years. As I said, she is very pretty—even
more so now, with the strain of hostile confrontation gone. I am
finding myself fascinated by her hands and their artful movements
as she talks; they are very delicate little hands with beautifully
tapering fingers and just enough nail extension to indicate an
awareness of, and attention to, their appearance.