Indefinite Renewal Read online

  At least I know that it’s real, he reminded himself as he walked. That’s something, anyway—since there’s a definite physical change there has to be a reason for it, and a mechanism that caused it. If I can locate those, that’ll put me that much closer to figuring out what’s going on here. And if you can’t? he asked himself, but he refused to consider that possibility yet. Give this a chance at least, he insisted, and then go from there. For once the memories in his head were completely silent—probably because they couldn’t find anything to match with this insanity, he thought. He sort of felt that way himself.

  Tuesday’s class was conspicuously quiet without Amy’s presence, and that afternoon Hillary asked him where his pet bon-bon was.

  “Even bon-bons get sick occasionally,” Nick replied, trying not to think of the pile of ash in the stairwell, “or maybe there’s some sorority thing going on.” He headed to the library that afternoon, and checked out a stack of books on genetic mutation and abnormalities—there were a couple on latent tendencies that had possibilities, and he started in on those first.

  He fell asleep while halfway through a chapter on pre-programmed switches, and dreamt of himself on a giant chessboard whose tiles had the double helix inscribed into them. Daniel was leering down at him and moving him haphazardly from square to square, and halfway through the game he turned into Amy and cartwheeled across the board.

  Nick woke screaming.

  The cop showed up the next day.

  Chapter Six

  “I’m looking for Nicholas Gordon,” she announced as she stuck her head in the door. At first Nick thought she might be a fellow TA, judging by the jeans, blouse, and black jacket. Then he saw the notebook in her hand and the bulge of the gun at her hip.

  “I’m Nick Gordon,” he responded, taking his feet off the desk and standing to shake her hand. “How can I help you?”

  She pulled a billfold out of her jacket pocket and showed him a badge. “Mr. Gordon, I’m Detective Linda Kanson—I’m with the Chicago PD, Missing Persons division. We’re checking on the disappearance of a student here named Amy Feldmar, and I was wondering if I might ask you a few questions.”

  “Sure, come on in.” Nick motioned her inside and offered her his chair, taking Gordo’s vacant one for himself—fortunately Gordo was teaching at the moment, and Hillary only hung around for a moment before quietly excusing herself and heading for the library.

  The detective glanced around the office, taking in the stacks of papers, the DNA mobile, the charts and posters. He, in turn, studied her, seeing a woman in her mid-thirties or so, straw-colored hair pulled back in a ponytail, pale-blue eyes, and a slightly weathered face. Then she focused on him again and he dropped his eyes, embarrassed at having stared like that.

  “Mr. Gordon, was Amy Feldmar one of your students?”

  Nick frowned and did his best to look surprised. “Was? She is, present tense—she’s in my intro to biology class, Tuesday and Thursday at one-thirty. Is she really missing?”

  Detective Kanson shrugged. “We’re not sure yet; her parents called us Sunday, saying they hadn’t seen her for several days, so we’re checking into it. It may be nothing, but it pays to be thorough. Have you seen Ms. Feldmar recently?”

  He paused as if trying to think, although the last time he had seen her was burned into his memory in an acid wash of pain and misery. “No, not recently. She was at class last Thursday, and she stayed after to ask me some questions.”

  “I see.” She made some notes in her little book. “How long did the two of you talk?”

  “Only for a minute or two.” He couldn’t help but smile at the memory. “I remembered I was late for a meeting and had to run off.”

  “And that was the last time you saw her?”

  “Excuse me, sir, are you all right?” Amy kneeling by him, then screaming, her flesh shriveling up—DRAININGMEDRY—this time the feeling was less intense, and he managed to avoid flinching.

  “Yes.”

  She consulted a previous page of notes; Nick could see that her handwriting was tiny and precise, neat marks covering the page. “A friend of hers said they were studying in the campus library together last Thursday night until around ten-thirty, at which point Ms. Feldmar said she was going to get a drink. The soda machine in the library was broken, so she went out to get one. That was the last the friend saw of her.” She glanced up and met his gaze, blue against blue. “The two nearest machines are in Gregors Building, on the other side of campus, and here, on the first floor. Mr. Gordon, were you here that night?”

  Nick nodded, afraid of what she might be getting at but unwilling to lie any more than he had to. “Yes, I was finishing grading some papers. I left at around ten forty-five.”

  “Did you see or hear anyone else in the building at the time?”

  Footsteps echoing down the hall, a burning hand . . .

  “Yes, I heard footsteps occasionally, but I didn’t see anyone.”

  “I see.” More notes. “I understand you tried calling her on Friday?”

  “That’s right.” Damn it, Suzie, you’re such a blabbermouth, came the thought, and for once he couldn’t fault it. “We had been talking about Mendel on Thursday, and she had just asked me a fairly complex question when I realized I was late and had to leave—I did some research on it, and called the next day to let her know that I hadn’t been blowing her off but actually had an answer for her.”

  The Lieutenant was watching him. “If you don’t mind my saying so, Mr. Gordon, that seems to be going out of your way —couldn’t you have mentioned it to her at the next class?”

  “Well . . . I suppose so.” He could feel the blood rushing to his cheeks, and knew there wasn’t any way to disguise it, so he decided to confess. “To be honest, Lieutenant, I liked Amy—perhaps more than is really proper for a teacher.” He raised a hand quickly. “I was always very careful to keep our relationship as professional as possible. I was hoping to ask her out next semester, when she was no longer my student.” If I didn’t really kill her, the accusation welled up. “But in the meantime, yes, I admit, I did go out of my way a little to answer her questions.” He shrugged to cover his embarrassment, and tried not to panic at the fact that Detective Kanson was writing quickly in her notepad.

  “And you then called her again on Sunday?” was all that she asked about it, and he smothered the sigh of relief he felt escaping.

  “Yes, I did—I wasn’t going to be in my office on Monday because I had some work of my own to do, so I called to tell her not to stop by. She wasn’t home, so I left the message with her sister.”

  Mr. Gordon, what is your assessment of Ms. Feldmar as a student, and as a person?”

  He leaned back in Gordo’s chair, struggling to channel feelings into words without seeming gushy or emotional. I can be such an airhead sometimes, came the recrimination from the echo, but he frowned and did his best to bypass that.

  “She’s very energetic, very curious, punctual, and hard-working.” Nick felt like he was filling out an elementary school progress report—“Amy is a delight to have in our class, always bright and cheerful”—but that was his honest appraisal of her, and he felt he owed it to her to be truthful.

  “She has a very positive attitude about everything, and she always struck me as very caring and considerate.” Remembering the price she had apparently paid for being considerate shook him, and he descended briefly into a fog of self-recrimination, but the detective’s next question snapped him back to reality.

  “Do you think she is the type to consider suicide?”

  “NO!” He snapped forward in his chair, and then forced himself to calm down, to slow his heart rate back to a more reasonable level. “No. She’s too full of interest, of life, of energy.” The vivid sensation of vitality coursing back through his veins came to him then, and he almost laughed at the morbidity of it all. Instead he clenched the arms of Gordo’s chair tightly for a moment, and then released them.

  “What abou
t just leaving, on a whim or out of anger, or being talked into it by someone?” Detective Kanson didn’t seem to have noticed his outburst.

  “No, I doubt it—Amy is far too level-headed for that. She might go on a trip with a friend or a family member, but her parents would have known about that. She’s not really the whimsical type, despite what some people think.”

  “Oh?” She paused in her writing to look up at him. “Do some people think she’s flighty?”

  He shrugged. “Well, she is a cheerleader, and you know the stereotype. Ditzy.”

  “But you know better?”

  He nodded. “Yes. She’s one of my favorite students, after all, and she never seemed ditzy to me. Perhaps a bit bouncy, but only in the sense of being energetic, not of being impractical.”

  “I see.” Detective Kanson made one final note in her book, flipped it shut, and stood up, dropping it in her jacket pocket as she did. “Well, thank you for your time, Mr. Gordon.”

  “Not at all.” He stood up to see her out. “If you need anything else, please call. Things aren’t the same without her and I . . . I worry about her.” I worry about what I’ve done to her, he corrected, but he didn’t say that out loud.

  “So do we,” the detective assured him. “Don’t worry, we’ll do everything we can to find her.” And with that she walked off down the hall. Nick watched her go, then dropped into his chair and laid his head against the cool metal of the desk, trying to will the pain away. It didn’t help much.

  Chapter Seven

  Two days later, Nick found himself walking back to the Psych department, cursing himself for his weakness even as he asked the secretary if Barb was available for another therapy appointment. A time was set for later that evening, and by the time he faced the psych student again she seemed as excited and optimistic as he felt depressed and defeated.

  “I knew you’d come back!” Barb announced proudly, twirling a pen between her fingers. “It was a pretty big shock, learning that you’re carrying around disassociative identities, but your dominant mind is too rational to ignore the possibility for help.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” Nick sank down on the couch and asked himself again why he had come back, and received the same answer as before—he didn’t have any real alternatives. The nightmares had faded a bit, but he was still wracked with guilt over what he had done, and this tall, somewhat foolish woman seemed his only chance to learn to cope with it. If he didn’t strangle her first.

  I suppose I can’t blame her though, he admitted to himself. Finding a fresh case of genuine multiple personalities while still in grad school—it would be like his locating a new strain of Parkinson’s Disease. A hell of a find, and certainly something that one would get excited about. But that didn’t change the fact that it was him she was getting so enthusiastic over, and that it was all due to a misdiagnosis anyway—although, he thought wryly, she’d flip if he told her the truth! How about the psychological makeup of a man who’s just discovered he’s some sort of energy vampire? That’d be one for the record books!

  “Is there something amusing, Mr. Gordon?” Barb’s voice, now calm and professional with only a hint of enthusiasm creeping through, broke him out of his reverie.

  “Sorry, no—just thinking of something else.” He dropped his grin. “I’m sorry about the way I acted last time.”

  “That’s all right.” She sounded sincere. “You get used to people taking out their frustrations on you, in this business. And you had a lot to take out.” She opened her notebook. “Shall we get started?”

  “Sure.”

  “Good. Now then, when did you first notice . . . Angie’s thoughts in your head?”

  “It was,” Nick shut his eyes and reviewed the days that had blurred by so recently, “a little more than a week ago.”

  “Hm. You can’t have formed such a distinct personality in that short a time . . .” he held his breath, hoping she would offer a new theory that better fit what had actually happened, “so it must have been developing quietly and been forced out into the open by some sort of trauma.” Damn!

  “Tell me, Nick, what happened to you a little more than a week ago? Did you meet anyone new, perhaps—someone who upset you in some way?”

  “Well, yes . . .” he hesitated again, and then chided himself for it. Even if she could only help a little that would be something, but he couldn’t expect even that much from her if he withheld information.

  “It was the same night I met Daniel.” Daniel, who obviously held the answers he needed. The problem was, Nick had only seen the man that one time, and he didn’t have a last name or an address with which to find him again. He was so wrapped up in his own thoughts that he almost didn’t hear Barb’s comment.

  “Aha!” Her voice carried a sort of quiet triumph, and he looked over at her.

  “You know him?”

  “Well, no, not him personally, but I know what he represents.” She sounded slightly smug, and that brought a sinking feeling to Nick’s stomach. Sure enough, she continued with, “Obviously, Nick, you have buried homosexual tendencies.”

  “What?”

  “Yes, and since your dominant personality is strictly heterosexual, you developed an alternate personality that would feel more natural possessing and expressing those feelings. A female personality.” Barb leaned forward in her chair now, her eyes bright with victory.

  “This Daniel obviously made a pass at you, and you couldn’t cope with the interest you unexpectedly felt, so you released ‘Angie’ to deal with it.”

  Nick climbed to his feet and stared down at her. “This is stupid! I’ve had about all I can take of your crap!”

  Barb looked up at him, obviously unfazed by his attack. “The fact that you feel so strongly about this indicates that I’ve hit a nerve, which suggests we’re on the right track. Why don’t you sit back down, Nick, and we’ll talk more about how you met Daniel and how he made you feel?”

  But Nick stepped away from her.

  “Why don’t you sit here and pretend that you’re me and that you’ve just met Daniel,” he snapped, “and you can let me know how it all turns out? Since I’ve got multiple personalities, there’s no reason why you can’t be one of them. Besides,” he admitted more quietly, “I can’t remember enough about him to serve any purpose, anyway.”

  “Perhaps not consciously,” Barb replied as he headed toward the door, “but we can regress you through hypnosis!” She may have said something more, but Nick didn’t hear her as he stormed out of the room and the building. He wondered again why he had thought he could find any help there, while simultaneously wishing he had. Unfortunately the therapist clearly had preconceived notions and solutions, and his problem wouldn’t exactly fit into those neat categories. He was on his own again. Unless he could find Daniel.

  The next day was Saturday. Nick took the L down to the lakefront, and then spent the afternoon walking about hoping to catch a glimpse of the elusive older man who had interrogated him and then subdued him so easily. But there were literally hundreds of buildings in that area, and without a better clue as to location he couldn’t possibly hope to find the right one. Especially with so little to go on.

  If only I’d seen more of it, Nick fumed. But I woke up already in that room. The most I saw of the outside—or the location—was that one glimpse through the window. Even that might help, if I could just remember it clearly enough!

  That reminded him what Barb had said as he was leaving, and Nick gritted his teeth at the mere thought of it. Am I doomed to be in therapy with this woman forever? he wondered as he returned home and reached for the phone and the campus directory beside it. But for once it seemed as if she might provide some genuine help in solving this puzzle, so although his fingers shook slightly Nick dialed the number of the Psych department and left a message for Barb to call him.

  Chapter Eight

  “Well, here we are again,” Barb remarked as Nick walked into the therapy room for the third time and headed toward the
couch. “I’m sorry you had to wait so long, but the office didn’t give me your message until yesterday and my Mondays are booked solid.”

  “That’s all right,” Nick replied, forcing himself to be polite. “I had some prep to do for my class this morning, anyway.” The sessions still felt unbearably empty without Amy’s shining face.

  “So, shall we continue where we left off on Friday?” Her voice showed no trace of anger about the way he had walked out of the session—again—or the way he had insulted her—again. Good.

  “Yes, please. Actually, I’d like to take you up on the suggestion you made as I was leaving.” He twisted around to glance at her. “I’d like to go back to that meeting so I can see it more clearly.”

  Barb frowned. “Are you sure you’re ready for that? It’s a big step, confronting the triggering episode so soon.” Again Nick felt sympathy for Barb, this time tinged with real respect. This was probably the case of her life, at least so far, and she must be as eager as he was to get into it, but she was more concerned with his well-being than with her own curiosity and success.

  “I think I need to do this,” he admitted, to himself as much as her, and the determination must have been evident in his voice because Barb nodded.

  “All right. Lay down.” Nick did so, stretching full-length upon the couch. “Comfortable? Good. Now close your eyes, and listen to the sound of my voice.” Her voice dropped even as she said that, the tones smoothing out, becoming deeper, slower, softer, rolling over him like a wave.

  “You feel yourself becoming very drowsy, your breath slowing, your limbs becoming heavy . . .” Nick’s head slumped onto his chest, “and you are drifting into a deep, relaxed sleep.” She paused for a moment. “Are you asleep?”