Elizabeth Hand - 12 Monkeys

Kathryn stared at him. She felt her fear and rage fall away, her professional detachment rising like a shield. She nodded, very slowly.

“What made you think that, James?” she asked in a soothing voice.

Cole’s balled fists drummed nervously at his sides. He lifted his face and stared blankly at the moonlit sky. “Jeffrey Goines said it was my idea about the virus. And suddenly, I wasn’t sure. We talked about it when I was in the institution, and it was all… fuzzy. The drugs and stuff…”

Abruptly he looked at her, his fists bunched before his chest. “You think maybe I’m the one who wiped out the human race? It was my idea?”

Kathryn shook her head, smiling gently. She was in control again. “Nobody is going to wipe out the human race. Not you or Jeffrey or anybody else. You’ve created something in your mind, James —a substitute reality — in order to avoid something you don’t want to face.”

James nodded. Unbidden the image came into his mind of the airport, a blurred figure falling to the ground; something terrible he had seen, something—”

The image was gone. Cole blinked. “I’m… ‘mentally divergent’” he said, remembering L.J. Washington’s term. “I would love to believe that.”

Kathryn nodded. “It can be dealt with, but only if you want to. I can help you, James,” she added softly.

From somewhere in the near distance echoed the sound of voices in the woods, barking dogs. Cole’s gaze darted to where the road could be glimpsed at the edge of the clearing. “I need help all right. They’re after me! Chasing me!”

“Who, James? Who is after you?”

He gestured in the direction of the noise. “I think — I think some of the people at the party were — policemen!”

“ Party? ” Kathryn looked at him in disbelief. “You went to a—”

She ran a hand through her hair, grimacing. “Never mind. If that is the police, it’s important that you surrender to them, instead of them catching you running. Okay?”

Cole nodded, only half hearing her. Suddenly he brightened. “It would be great if I’m crazy. If I’m wrong about everything then the world will be okay. I’ll never have to live underground.”

A hound bayed unnervingly nearby. Kathryn glanced into the woods. Flashlights played against the bare trees, touched on a boulder only a hundred feet away. She took a deep breath. “Give me the gun.”

The gun!” Cole opened his hands, stared at them in dismay. “I lost it.”

Relief flooded Kathryn. “You’re sure?”

Cole nodded. He tilted his head back, gazing up at the glowing moon, the stars flung like handfuls of snow across the velvety sky. “Stars! Air!” he whispered reverently. “I can live here! Breathe!”

For a moment Kathryn watched him: a grown man, a psychotic ex-con in torn and bloodstained clothes, staring at the sky like a child on Christmas Eve. A sharp sad sense of loss swept through her, but she pushed it aside.

It’s better this way , she thought. It has to be better …

She started around to the front of the car. “I’m going to attract their attention, let them know where we are, okay, James?” She got into the driver’s seat and honked the horn — once, twice, again. A volley of frenzied yelps came in reply. “They’ll tell you to put your hands on top of your head,” she went on briskly. “Do what they tell you. You’re going to get better, James — I know it!”

Cole said nothing. He raised his arms to the sky, an instant later let them fall. He looked down at the ground at his feet, saw something poking up through the dead leaves. Awkwardly, trying not to put too much weight on his bad leg, he lowered himself, reaching tentatively for the pale blade that thrust up amongst twigs and oak mast. Moonlight drifted through the trees to touch a crocus, its tiny leaves peeling back to reveal the flower’s small bright heart. With heartbreaking gentleness Cole touched the blossom, its cool, slightly damp pressure like a tiny mouth meeting his finger. With a low moan his hands closed around dead leaves, brought them to his face and rubbed them over his cheeks. He inhaled their sweet must, opened his lips so that crumbled bits of leaf and earth and bark fell into his mouth, and swallowed them, half-mad with joy. As the Jag’s horn blared, he gazed up at the sky, the full moon and stars and trees and all the glory of it: this breathless wonder, this dream he had somehow awakened into. He began to weep, tears running down his face and mingling with the fragments of tree and leaf.

“I love this world!”

From the woods came a sudden shout. Cole stared rapturously at the sky as Kathryn hurried out of the car and started toward him.

“Remember, I’m going to help you,” she said. “I’ll stay with you. I won’t let them—”

She broke off in mid-sentence, staring stunned as policemen and yelping dogs raced into the clearing.

Cole was gone. Where he had been there was only a small mound of disturbed leaves, and the fragile finger of a yellow crocus thrusting from the earth.

They kept her all night at the station house. Periodically the faces around her changed, from the local police detectives to FBI agents to a kind-faced staffer who brought her coffee and, later, a small carton of orange juice.

Now, with early morning sunlight slanting in through windows gray with steel mesh and dead flies, the exhausted Kathryn found herself telling her story for the fifth time. Her listener was Lieutenant Halperin, a man approaching retirement whose lined face showed signs of not being able to wait for it much longer.

“…Then I said something to him about cooperating and he said he would do that, so I got in the car and started honking the horn. When I got out, he was gone.”

Halperin took a sip of his coffee, nodding. Behind him another cop entered the room and handed him an 8 X 10 photo.

“You lucked out,” Halperin said, his eyes darting from the photo to the bedraggled woman sitting across from him. She’d combed her hair and washed up, but her clothes were rumpled and stained, her face haggard from her ordeal. “For a while we thought you were a body they found downstate — mutilated.”

Kathryn shook her head resolutely. “He wouldn’t do something like that. He—”

Lieutenant Halperin interrupted her. “This is the man he attacked?”

He handed Kathryn the photo. She stared at it, a gritty black-and-white showing one of the men who’d attacked them in the crackhouse in Philadelphia. He was slumped against the alley wall, his head drooping at an unnatural angle against his shoulder. Kathryn gave a quick nod and pushed the photo back across the table.

“I’d like to hear about this,” she said firmly. “ That man—” she stabbed at the photo “—and the other one, were… severely beating us. James Cole didn’t start it. He saved me.”

Halperin leaned back in his chair, sighing. “Funny thing, Doctor — maybe you can explain it to me, you being a psychiatrist. Why do kidnap victims almost always try to tell us about the guys who grabbed ‘em and try to make us understand how kind these bastards really were?”

“It’s a normal reaction to a life-threatening situation,” she replied in a monotone. Suddenly her eyes brightened, and she looked directly at Halperin. “He’s sick . He thinks he comes from the future. He’s been living in a carefully constructed fantasy world and that world is starting to disintegrate. He needs help! ”