“I thought you didn’t believe in the resurrection.”
Wise crouched down, pulled the hood off Carlton’s moon suit, and laid a pair of fingers on Carlton’s jugular. “God damn it! I told you we wanted him alive!”
“He is alive. He’s just sleeping.”
“Yeah, sleeping like those corpsicles back there.”
“No…I had it on stun, see?” I turned the gun to show him, but the dial was on the MI setting. “Oh shit…”
“Oh shit what?”
“This must be his gun. I picked it up back there, and…Christ, I must have confused it with mine.”
“Good job.”
“Look, I’m sorry. It was an accident.”
“Yeah, you’re prone to those, aren’t you?” He stood up. “All right, let’s get out of here.”
“What about him?”
“Leave him. He’s useless to us now.”
“And what about…?” I gestured in the direction of the cryostasis rooms.
“Nothing we can do.”
“The organization doesn’t have some kind of crack repair team that could get the power back online? What about the Good Samaritans, isn’t this right up their alley?”
“Nothing we can do,” Wise repeated. “Now come on.” He stepped through the door into the dying garden. “We can’t stay here.”
white room (vi)
“ARE YOU READY TO TALK ABOUT what happened to Phil?” the doctor asks.
Yet another evidence folder lies open on the table, turned so she can read the top page of the police report inside. But she refuses to look at it. She hunches back in her chair, keeping her eyes downcast, fixed on the cuffed hands in her lap.
“Jane,” the doctor prompts her.
“It’s a free country,” she finally says. “You talk about whatever you like.”
“All right…Let’s start with what didn’t happen. Your brother wasn’t swept up in some comical marijuana raid. And despite what you seemed to be suggesting in our last session—”
“I didn’t suggest anything.”
“—he wasn’t in an accident. Your mother thought you had done something to him—that’s what she told the 911 operator when she first reported him missing, and it’s why she attacked you in the police station. But she was wrong, too. According to witnesses, your brother left the community garden in the company of a man whose description matched that of a recently paroled felon, a convicted child molester and suspected child murderer named John Doyle.
“A child molester,” the doctor says. “But I doubt the police would use that expression in front of a fourteen-year-old girl, particularly one who was wracked with guilt. They’d probably just refer to him as a bad man…or a bad monkey.”
She still won’t look up, but her lips curl in a bitter smile. “Theory number 257,” she says. “Jane’s psychotic break begins with euphemism.”
“Well you tell me, Jane: is it just a coincidence that all your missions for the organization somehow involve threats to children or young men?”
She doesn’t answer.
“Something else I found interesting…” He lays a hand on the folder. “The reporting officer: Buster Keaton Friendly. That really was his name…But you’ve been lying about yours, haven’t you? Or at least, not telling the whole truth. Charlotte is your middle name. Your full name is Jane Charlotte—”
“Don’t,” she says, at last raising her eyes to meet his. “Just don’t. That’s not my name. She made that very clear.”
“She?”
“My mother. Last thing she told me before she sent me packing, I wasn’t ever to use that name again. Which was ridiculous, since it wasn’t her name either, it was my goddamned father’s, and she hated him almost as much as she hated me…But that didn’t matter, she said. What mattered was it was Phil’s name, so it couldn’t be mine. She said she’d kill me if she ever caught me using it: ‘I’ll choke the life out of you,’ quote unquote. So no, I wasn’t lying.”
“OK. But the story you first told me about your brother and the marijuana patch. You do acknowledge now that that was false.”