Lisa Unger - Sliver Of Truth

“Oh, Ms. Jones. You must want your things,” he said. “Do you have your claim check?”

I reached into my pocket and (how about that?) retrieved a small ticket stub. I handed it to him without saying anything. I was afraid I might throw up on the gleaming wood. He nodded cordially and moved into the cloakroom, came back with the beat-up messenger bag I’d been carrying before all this (whatever it was) had happened. I took it from him and flipped it open. My wallet, notebook, passport, keys, makeup, cell phone were all inside. Somehow the sight of my stuff, benign and familiar, made me feel sicker and more afraid.

“I hope you don’t mind,” he said gently. I looked up at him. “But you don’t look well.”

I shook my head. The whole encounter was surreal; I couldn’t be sure if it was actually happening. The ground beneath my feet felt soft and unstable. “I’m not. I’m…not sure how I got here. Do you know? How I got here, I mean? How do you know my name? How long have I been here?”

He walked from behind the counter and put an arm around my shoulders, a hand on my elbow. I let him lead me toward a couch and lower me onto its cushions.

“Do you think, Ms. Jones, that I might call you a doctor?”

I nodded. “I think that might be a good idea.”

I caught him looking down. I followed his eyes and saw that the blood from my wound had soaked through its bandage again. A rose of blood bloomed in the snow white of my shirt. A shirt I didn’t recognize as mine.

“Ms. Jones,” I heard him say. He was looking at me with the most sincere concern; his voice sounded slightly panicked. He seemed like a very kind person.

“Ms. Jones, you sit right here and-” he was saying. But I never heard the end of his sentence.

Jung believed that one of the major reasons for violence against women was an unintegrated anima, or the archetypical feminine symbolism within a man’s unconscious. He believed that all men have feminine characteristics and all women have masculine characteristics. Men, however, have been taught that the feminine parts of themselves are shameful and must be repressed. The result of this suppression has been a kind of global misogyny, soulless sexual encounters, and whole cultures where women are unsafe in their own homes. It’s part of Jung’s theories about the shadow side, the dark part of ourselves that we strive to hide and destroy, only to be confronted by it again and again, usually in the form of an “other.” He believed that this aspect of the human psyche was the root of all racism, cultural bias, and gender hatred, that the us-against-them mentality was a thinking pattern exhibited by those who had not embraced their shadows, who projected the hated parts of their being onto a group of people they believed to be opposite to themselves.

I’m the girl with my homework done and my pajamas on, watching Max ride his bicycle up and down the street. It’s late and cold but I’m darkly envious of his freedom. I wonder if he’s darkly envious of my Howdy Doody pajamas and freshly washed face. Maybe we are the same. Maybe we are each other’s shadows.

I awaken to sirens and these strange thoughts and this image of Max in my head. New York City sirens and London sirens are so different. London sirens with their waxing and waning seem so much more polite. Coming through, they seem to plead. Stand aside. New York City sirens are boldly insistent, downright rude. What the hell are you waiting for? they want to know. Get out of the goddamn way. Can’t you see this is an emergency? When you live in New York, you live with the sound of sirens in the periphery of your consciousness. Ambulances, fire trucks, police cars-it seems like there’s always someone in trouble in the city, always someone racing to the rescue. You stop hearing it; it becomes part of the city music.

London sirens seem mournful. They seem to say Something awful has happened and we’ll respond the best we can, though it’s probably too late. New York sirens are brazenly sure that they can save the day.

It was a London siren I heard, waxing and waning, fading off into the distance. It took me a second to realize that I was in a hospital room, cool and quiet. It was dim, with some light coming in through a small glass window in the door and from between the drawn blinds and window frames-not from sunlight but from street lamps. I didn’t know what time it was.

I lay still, scanning the room with my eyes. As they adjusted, I noticed the thin-framed woman sitting in a chair by the door. A rectangle of light fell across her. She had white-blond hair and a wide mouth that sloped dramatically at both corners in a caricature of a pout. In spite of the fact that she was slightly slumped to the side, leaning her head on her hand, she looked put-together and officious in a navy blue suit and sensible low-heeled pumps. She stared at the wall, a million miles away.

I cleared my throat and shifted myself up a bit. I was aware of a terrible dryness in my mouth and reached for the water pitcher I saw by my bed. The woman quickly got to her feet to stand beside me. She poured me a glass of water and handed it to me.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

Under the circumstances, it was a difficult question to answer.

“It depends,” I said, my voice sounding hoarse and raw.

She looked at me quizzically.

“On where I am, on how I got here. On what’s wrong with me.”

I was trying for cool and smart-ass, but I felt hollow deep in my core.

She politely averted her eyes while I tried to drink from the cup in my shaking hand. Then she reached out to steady my wrist and things went better.

“I was hoping,” she said, “that you’d be able to answer some of those questions for me.” Her accent was thick, heavily Cockney though I could tell she struggled to keep that to a minimum.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“I’m Inspector Madeline Ellsinore. I’m investigating your case.”

“My case?” I said, putting the water down on the table and leaning back.

“Well, yes,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest and resting her eyes on my face. “An American woman shows up at a London hotel and checks herself in, hangs the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on her door for two days. The only time anyone hears from her is when she calls to find out where she is. She’s then discovered to be suffering from a badly infected gunshot wound when she stumbles into the lobby at the end of the second day. She collapses and is rushed to the nearest hospital. Though she has sufficient ID, passport, cash, and credit, there is no record of her arriving in London on any commercial flight in the past six months. I’d say that warrants an open case, wouldn’t you?”

I nodded slowly. She was official but not unkind. Her eyes were a pale blue. She was small, petite as she was thin; she looked like a runner, a fast and strong one.

“How did you get to England, Ms. Jones? And what are you doing here?”

I shook my head. “I have no idea.”

It’s a weird thing to admit. Have you ever woken up one morning after a night of drinking and found yourself in a strange apartment, a strange person sleeping beside you? It’s like that but much, much worse. I felt as if I’d woken up in someone else’s body.

She blinked at me twice. “That’s hard to believe,” she said finally.

“Sorry,” I said. “It’s true.”

She gave me a blank, assessing look. There was something cold and robotic about her in spite of her prettiness, in spite of her soft, smoky voice.

“Who shot you, then?” she asked matter-of-factly, as though she’d settle for that small bit of information as consolation.