#009: Mirror Image 

A woman was screaming and the patio area was filling rapidly with excited people in formal attire.

The guys in dinner jackets were standing by at poolside with hands outstretched to offer help at a distance and a third, whom I recognized a moment later as one who had been stocking the inside bar when I went through earlier that day, jumped in with more direct assistance. He groaned, "Oh no, it's Mrs. Kalinsky," as we hoisted her onto the deck.

The guy just stood there, fully clothed in waist-deep water, and watched with horror as I pulled myself out and went to work on the victim.

Someone brought a stack of towels and someone else yelled, "Get Powell—get the doctor!"

I had cleared Marcia's throat and produced a gush of water from the air tract when I became aware of the arrival of Kalinsky on the scene. I guess I half expected the guy to start moving among the guests and reassuring them because I was really surprised by his reaction. He came totally unglued, trying to get into the action and fighting me for position on the body.

I growled, "Cool it, Terry, she's okay!"

Someone wrestled him away, but still he lay there beside her, stroking her forehead while she coughed and gasped into the resurrection.

Carl Powell made the scene then, and smoothly took over. I was impressed by the guy's professionalism and situation management. He had her blanketed and stretchered and moving away from there before I could get my breathing under control.

Someone handed me a lighted cigarette and someone else put a glass of whiskey in my hand. There was a lot of crowding around and congratulating and slaps on the back, and I overheard one awed voice exclaim, "Yeah, they say she dove off of that balcony over there!"

I looked, myself, at the balcony under discussion and shuddered at the height and distance.

It was at about that moment that I became aware of a pain in the leg and a burning sensation inside the sodden dinner jacket. The tux was a disaster, split and scraped at several points; it was then I realized that I hadn't gotten off quite as cleanly as I'd thought. A finger was beginning to throb like hell and a warmth inside the trouser leg told me I was oozing blood somewhere.

Then Karen appeared, calmly beautiful in a chiffon-and-lace dinner gown. She took my hand without a word and led me through the crowd and into the house and up the stairs to her apartment, quietly and carefully undressed me to the skin and toweled me dry, applied stinging antiseptics to what turned out to be minor scrapes—apparently I had either touched bottom or grazed the side of the pool as I went in—then she put me to bed, pulled the sheet up over my chest, gently kissed me on the lips, and went away.

Without a single word between us, all that.

But, at the risk of sounding nerdy, words had not been necessary. Some sort of nonverbal communication had been passing between us all that while—from which I received sympathy, gratitude, admiration, concern, love—all of that.

I had felt neither the need nor the desire to resist the sweet ministrations. Actually, I felt like hell. There had been damned little sleep the night before, the day had begun early and with a bang, and it had been constant stress without letup ever since. I had eaten, during the preceding twenty-four hours or so, a raisin Danish and two cold chicken legs, and I guess I had used all the steam I had left on that twilight dunk in the Highland pool.

So I am not overly ashamed to admit that I simply let it all go and went to sleep in Karen's bed. I learned later that she had gone below and rescued the dinner party—which may seem a bit coldblooded but, what the hell, that's the way things are done in high society—the show must go on, and all that.

Besides which, Marcia was apparently none too much the worse for her misadventure. She was "doing fine" and "resting comfortably," or so I was advised by Carl Powell when he roused me from my nap at about nine-thirty.

"You undoubtedly saved her life, though, you know," he told me soberly. "It was a real stroke of luck that you spotted her from your window. The lights had not been turned on yet in the pool area, so fifty people could have been standing around down there and never noticed her. Actually I understand that several guests were on the patio and thought it was just some kind of stunt when you came sailing overhead fully clothed. That was a hell of a nervy thing to do, I have to tell you."

He was inspecting my hurts during that little monologue.

"Damned lucky, I'd say, that this is all you got out of it. One inch less stretch and you would have ended up a leaky bag of bones at poolside."

I winced at that analogy, but let it pass without comment.

He flipped the sheet back over me and repeated, "Damned lucky."

I asked him, "Are you finished?"

He sighed as he replied, "Yeah. Just wanted to check you out, firsthand. Don't get much chance to play doctor around here, you know."

I sat up and reached for the cigarette he was then lighting. He passed it over and lit another for himself. I said, "Thought doctors are against smoking."

"Sure we are," he replied. "Damned things will kill you. But then so will sex, booze, airplanes and automobiles, and just plain food if you eat too much. Actually we start dying at conception. It would be just as valid to describe living as controlled dying. It's always in process."

"Matter of spatial relationships," I suggested.

"More or less," he agreed.

"Why was Marcia in the pool? I saw her at about a quarter after seven, at which time she had not yet dressed for dinner. Thought that's where she was headed when she left me."

"Too much to drink, no doubt. Happens every week. Probably wanted to take a little dip and sober up. Guess she just passed out in the pool."

I reminded him, "She was naked."

He informed me, "Nothing unusual about that. Soon as the sun goes down ... Marcia prefers nature in the raw."

"She was wearing half a bikini and a hip-length robe when I saw her earlier."

"Yes. We found them in a chair on the patio. Also the dregs of pure whiskey in the bottom of a water glass."

I made a guilty face and told him, "It was still half full when she carried it away from my room. And a fifth of Jim Beam was half empty."

He asked, casually, "Did you two get it on?"

"Not at all. She was in my face over Karen. Called me a slut and a con woman, ordered me out of the house."

Powell grinned. "Well, that's Marcia."

I asked, casually, "What is Karen?"

The grin faded. He took a thoughtful pull at his cigarette and told me, "I studied your portfolio quite thoroughly, you know. I recommended your contract. You should accept it. I feel that you can be very helpful with Karen, maybe decisively so, lord knows more helpful than I have been."

I grunted.

He continued without pause: "I like your background, Miss Naru. Nicely rounded, and you've gone into areas I've only recently begun to think about. I believe that could be Karen's out, perhaps her only out."

"Out of what?" I wanted to know.

He ignored my curiosity. "Indirectly, at least, I suppose I'm responsible for you two getting together in the first place. I sent her to Zodiac."

That one surprised me. I told him so.

He ignored that too, went on to say: "Reality can be very elusive any time you try to pin it down. I have spent the past twenty-two years studying the mind and, hell, I still usually feel like a blind man trying to lead the blind."

The guy was reaching me. I found myself wondering more about him than about my client. I asked him, "Is that why you sold your soul to the Highlands?"

The grin came back as he inspected that query. "Don't make the mistake of thinking that your soul is an island, Miss Naru. It's as much a part of the continent as your body is. It is immune to being bought and sold because the original owner will not release the title."

Well, anyway, that was an alternate point of view to the one offered by Kalinsky. Or was it?

"Which original owner is that?"

"Good and evil are mere states of mind, aren't they? I know I don't have to tell you that because I know where you've been, but just so you'll understand that we are more or less on the same wavelength. They are simply alternate views of the same reality."

"We live in an asymmetrical universe," I pointed out, testing him.

"Ah yes," he replied instantly, "but it was pure symmetry before the bang."

I thought, bingo, but said aloud, "Which side of the mirror image do you suppose we inhabit?"

"Does it really matter?"

"Maybe not."

"Suppose for the sake of argument," he said soberly, "that both God and Satan do indeed exist, co-equals, each ruling his own half of the image. We, you and me, do not know which side of reality we inhabit. Do we not run a hell of a risk, then, in choosing sides?"

I grinned and told him, "You are suggesting, then, that we do have that choice."

"Quite the opposite. This is for the sake of argument, remember. God or Satan, whichever rules here, is a cosmic force with absolute power. If God is on our side, as we are constantly being implored to believe—which means, in the same sense, that we inhabit God's side of reality—then how can Satan manifest power here? And if Satan does not manifest power in our reality, then where do we get all the agony, all the greed, all the brutality?"

I suggested, "Reason from the other end—start with agony, greed, brutality, and tell me which reality that describes. Sounds to me, in that argument, like we came down on the wrong side."

"Exactly."

"But maybe asymmetry is purely a mathematical concept, and maybe our math models have the same limitations as the dimensioned minds that fashion them. Maybe we have asymmetrical minds, Mister Carl. Could we ever then see true symmetry—and would we even recognize it if we did?"

He slapped his leg and said, "Jesus! You've struck a nerve!"

I suggested, "We all are a bit premature in handing down judgments on cosmic questions. We can't even find cosmos, can we? So how the hell do we circumscribe it?"

"Exactly!"

"What kind of sick is Karen?"

"Dreadfully."

I pointed out, "If I am going to help ..."

He got up and left the room, returned a minute later with a bottle and two glasses, sloshed some whiskey into each and handed me one, belted his, wiped his lips with the back of his hand, said, "It's a violation of ethics, but I am going to regard this as a consultation, so I'm holding you to confidentiality too."

I said, "Okay," and belted mine.

He refilled the glasses, peered into his, said, "She has an unresolved sexual conflict."

"Tell me about it."

"Electra complex. Well ... I don't really buy Freud's whole bag of tricks, especially not as they would apply to the general population, but I guess that is the basic Freudian weakness; he tried to extend clinical psychology—that is, mental pathology, into an explanation of the whole psychogenetic and sociopathic structure of mankind. As much as to say that the diseased mind presents a valid diagram of mankind in general. I don't buy that, never did. But Freud was a genius, let's not sell him short. And Karen's personality profile fits perfectly into the Freudian complex characterized by an unnatural love for her father."

"But Freud himself did not buy the Electra complex."

"Touche," replied the good doctor, "but it does not change anything. Freud did elaborate the Oedipus complex, which is simply the reverse case. I have always found that the sauce for the goose is equal sauce for the gander. But if you want to get picky, call Karen's sauce an Oedipus complex and I won't get mad at you. Point is, there is this unresolved conflict that is simply eating her alive."

"Would you consider it characteristic, then," I mused, "that she now claims to have very little feeling for either parent?"

"If not characteristic," he replied, "then certainly not destructive to the theory. Such complexes are caused by feelings prisoner to the subconscious realm. That is where they do their dirt. She could consciously hate her father while still gripped by the guilt generated within the subconscious."

"You see it as a guilt trip, then."

"That is the destructively moving force, yes. And, of course, in this case compounded by feelings of guilt over the untimely death of both parents."

"Why would she feel guilt over that?"

"Because," he replied, pausing to belt the second shot, "she thinks she killed them."

I said, dumbly, "What?"

"Thinks she put a bomb on their boat. TJ had been in bed, sick with the flu. Elena had already made plans to take the boat out that day. TJ began feeling better and joined her at the last minute. Karen backed out at the last minute, tried her best to keep TJ home too. The boat exploded in flames forty feet out of the slip. Karen thinks she did it."

I said, "Shit." Then I belted my second and added, "So what do you think?"

"I think," said my new drinking buddy, the mystic shrink, "that it is all very tragic."

Enter, now, our mutual good buddy and keeper of souls, Terry Kalinsky. He is in a hell of a dither.

"Thank God I found you guys here!" he yelled. "We got a hell of a problem!"

Powell placed the bottle on the floor beside the bed and surged to his feet. "Is she ?"

"Naw, shit, it's Karen again! She came in to see how Marcia was doing and Marcia flipped out, said all kinds of crazy shit. Karen ran out into the goddamn night and is right now wandering around the neighborhood somewhere all alone in the damned dark. I sent all the men out looking for her—very quietly, we don't want the guests in on this and ..."

Powell was already moving toward the door. I was staggering around trying to find some clothing.

"... I'm just hoping you guys have some idea where she may have gone. Jesus Christ, it's pitch dark out there and that kid—"

I grabbed him by the chin to shut him up. "What did Marcia say to her?"

"Aw, some crazy shit about—said Karen tried to kill her, said she saw Karen watching her as she dived into the pool—crazy, it's crazy!"

"How did Karen try to kill her, Terry?"

He laughed, almost hysterically. "By psychic force, I guess, if you want to believe that shit. Marcia said Karen held her under by psychic force. Can you believe that shit?"

I could, yes.

I could believe that shit.