Had she been in that much trouble? “Great.”
Keene tipped forward in his chair, putting his elbows on the desk. “Let’s forget that for a moment. Tell me what’s in your head.”
Cass hesitated, confused. “I’m not happy, naturally. Sheryl and I didn’t work together, but I liked her. And you don’t have to like someone to be horrified. To die out on the ice . . . alone, in a storm? It’s terrifying. It’s exactly what everyone fears the most down here.”
“Yes, of course,” Keene said. There was an impatient note in his voice. “But what were you thinking ?”
“I . . .” Cass struggled to understand what he wanted from her. His words technically made sense, but they didn’t fit the conversation. It was as if he were speaking to a third person in the room. “I was thinking how terrible it was to die like that, how much I didn’t want it to be me, how glad I was that it wasn’t me. If someone with her experience could die out there, then I could, too. Then I felt ashamed, I guess, because my second thought was that I wondered if we’d all be sent home even before we started and what a waste that would be . . .”
Cass trailed off. A change had come over Keene’s face as she spoke. It was subtle, a soft unwrinkling around his eyes and relaxation of his mouth. Now that he’d leaned closer, she could see a fine spray of perspiration along his forehead, glistening over his eyebrows. She had the strange sensation that the third person in the room had suddenly disappeared.
Keene cleared his throat, then reached for a stack of folders resting on a corner of his desk. “Of course. Those are all perfectly natural emotional reactions. Anger, fear. Frustration at the waste of life, of time and effort. Yours and everyone else’s. If you haven’t already, you may find yourself blaming her, as well. You’ll wonder why Sheryl wasn’t more careful. What was she doing out there, risking herself and others? And, lastly, there will be some survivor’s guilt, as well. You’ve had some experience with that, I believe?”
There it was, the cannonball to the gut, the simple reminder that nothing would ever be normal for her. Cass fought to keep her voice steady. “Why am I here, Dr. Keene?”
But he’d already opened a manila folder stuffed with printouts and forms. It wasn’t difficult to read JENNINGS, CASSANDRA typed across the tab. Keene leafed through the dossier like a deck of cards. In the hands of the station’s psychologist, she could only assume he was looking at her psych evaluations, all of the comments and judgments and pronouncements that experts had made about her mental state. Maybe even from before she’d submitted her application for Antarctica.
He raised his head and held the folder up, giving her a smile that she supposed was meant to put her at ease. “Strange, isn’t it, seeing your mental and emotional makeup boiled down to a few sheets of paper? I’ve always despised my colleagues’ crude renderings of something so complicated as the human psyche, but what can you do?”
She stared at him.
Unperturbed, he carried on in a light, conversational tone. “Your SOAP scores are remarkable. Not to mention the other battery of tests you took. Your MMPI and 16PF are fine, although I have to admit, those two are of limited use. Would you believe that real estate agents and violent sociopaths score almost identically on the MMPI? Now, the FFI—sorry. I’m using a lot of lingo. The FFI is a personality survey—”
“I know what it is.”
The Five Factor Inventory was the psychologist’s scalpel, the tool with which they flensed a patient’s emotional core. It was the most popular of the tests that revealed where a subject landed in terms of the psychological Big Five: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism. OCEAN, for those fond of acronyms.
Following the accident, when she couldn’t sleep, couldn’t hold on to a relationship, grew simultaneously bored and frantic at every job, she’d been subjected to a dozen different tests and batteries, many of which TransAnt had repeated. She’d managed to sneak a look at one of the summaries. Even now, she found herself remembering the words from the report. Closed to experience . . . chronically introverted . . . unwilling to extend herself emotionally or intellectually . . . has turned to intense physical exercise as an emotional crutch . . . a classic neurotic .