Vortex

Chapter Five Sandra and Bose

Sandra booked off two hours for lunch, making creative use of a free hour she had originally scheduled for her next consultation with Orrin Mather. The restaurant where she had arranged to meet Bose was crowded with employees from the carpet wholesaler across the highway, but the table she snagged was out of the way and screened from the worst of the noise by a hedge of plastic ficus. Quiet enough for conversation. Bose nodded approvingly when he arrived.

He wasn’t in uniform. He looked better out of police drag, Sandra thought. Jeans and a white shirt that set off his complexion. She asked him whether he was on duty today.

He said he was. “But I don’t always wear the blues. I work out of Robbery/Homicide.”

“Really?”

“That’s not as impressive as it sounds. HPD went through massive reorganization after the Spin. Departments were dismantled and put back together like Lego blocks. I’m not a detective. I just do grunt work. I’m relatively new in the division.”

“So how does that connect you to Orrin Mather?”

He frowned. “I’ll explain, but can we talk about the document first?”

“I notice you call it ‘the document.’ Not ‘Orrin’s document.’ So you don’t believe he wrote it?”

“I’m not saying that.”

“You want to hear my opinion before you give me yours, in other words. Okay, well, let’s start with the obvious. The pages you sent me appear to constitute an adventure story set in the future. The vocabulary is way beyond anything I’ve heard from Orrin. The story isn’t especially sophisticated but it displays a grasp of human behavior more nuanced than anything Orrin demonstrated in the short time I had to speak with him. And unless it was corrected in transcription, the grammar and punctuation are a big notch up on Orrin’s verbal skills.”

Bose nodded at this. “But you’re still reserving judgment?”

She considered the question. “To a degree, yes.”

“Why?”

“Two reasons. One is circumstantial. It seems obvious Orrin isn’t the author, but then why is he being cagy about that, and why are you asking for my opinion? The second reason is professional. I’ve talked to a lot of people with personality disorders of various kinds and I’ve learned not to trust first impressions. Psychopaths can be charming and paranoiacs can appear sweetly reasonable. It’s possible Orrin’s mannerisms are a learned reflex or even a deliberate deception. He may want us to think he’s less intelligent than he really is.”

Now Bose was giving her a peculiar and annoyingly cryptic smile. “Good. Excellent. What about the text itself? What did you make of it?”

“I don’t pretend to be a literary critic. Looking at it as a patient’s production, however, I can’t help noticing how concerned it is with identity, especially mixed identities. There are two first-person narrators—more like three, since the girl can’t decide who she really is. And even the male narrator is essentially stripped of his past. Beyond that, there’s the grandiosity of the story’s concern with the Hypotheticals and the possibility of interaction with them. In real life, when people claim they can talk to the Hypotheticals, it’s a diagnostic indicator for schizophrenia.”

“You’re saying Orrin—if he wrote this—might be schizophrenic?”

“No, not at all; I’m just saying it’s possible to read the document that way. Actually, my first impression of Orrin is that he might be somewhere on the autistic spectrum. Which is another reason why I can’t entirely dismiss him as the author of the text. High-functioning autistics are often eloquent and precise writers even though they’re profoundly inhibited in social interactions.”

“Okay,” Bose said thoughtfully. “Good, that’s useful.”

Lunch arrived. Bose had ordered a club sandwich and fries. Sandra’s Cobb salad was limp and disappointing and she slowed down after a few bites. She waited for Bose to say something more enlightening than “okay.”

He polished a dab of mayonnaise off his upper lip. “I like what you said. It makes sense. It’s not all psychiatric jargon.”

“Great. Thanks. But— quid pro quo. You owe me an explanation.”

“First let me give you this.” He pushed a manila envelope across the table. “It’s another installment of the document. Not a transcript this time. A photocopy of the original. A little hard to read but maybe more revealing.”

The envelope was dismayingly thick. Not that Sandra was reluctant to take it. Her professional curiosity had been piqued. What she resented was that Bose was still being cagy about what he wanted from her. “Thank you,” she said, “but—”

“We can talk more freely later on. Say maybe tonight? If you’re free?”

“I’m free now. I haven’t finished my salad yet.”

Bose lowered his voice: “The problem is, we’re being watched.”

“Excuse me?”

“Woman in the booth behind the plastic plants.”

Sandra canted her head and nearly laughed out loud. “Oh, god!” Whispering now herself: “That’s Mrs. Wattmore. From State. One of the ward nurses.”

“She followed you here?”

“She’s a hopeless busybody, but I’m sure it’s a coincidence.”

“Well, she’s been taking a pretty deep interest in our conversation.” He mimed a cupped-hand-to-ear.

“Typical…”

“So—tonight?”

Or we could move to a different table, Sandra thought. Or just keep our voices down. She didn’t suggest it, however, because it was possible Bose was using this as an excuse to see her again. And she wasn’t sure how to interpret that. Was Bose a colleague, a collaborator, a potential friend, maybe even (as Mrs. Wattmore no doubt suspected) a potential lover? The situation was ambiguous. Perhaps exciting for that reason. Sandra hadn’t been involved with a man since she broke up with Andy Beauton, another State physician who had been fired in last year’s downsizing. Since then, her work had eaten her alive. “Okay,” she said. “Tonight.” She was reassured by the smile he gave her. “But I still have an hour on lunch.”

“So let’s talk about something else.”

About each other, as it turned out.

They laid out their life stories for inspection. Bose: Born in Mumbai during his mother’s ill-fated marriage to an Indian wind turbine engineer, raised there until the age of five. (Which explained the ghost of an accent and his manners, just a touch more genteel than the Texas average.) Brought back to Houston for grade school and subsequently imbued with what he called his mother’s “well-honed sense of injustice,” he had eventually qualified for police training at a time when HPD was in a hiring frenzy. He talked about himself with a sense of humor that struck Sandra as unusual in a cop. Or maybe she had been meeting the wrong cops. In return she gave him the pocket version—to be honest, the carefully edited version—of Sandra Cole: her family in Boston, med school, her job at State. When Bose asked about her choice of career she mentioned a desire to help people; she didn’t mention her father’s suicide or what had happened to her brother Kyle.

The conversation evolved toward triviality as they lingered over coffee, and Sandra left the restaurant still unsure whether she ought to treat this as a professional exchange or a boy-girl size-up. Or which she wanted it to be. She found Bose at least superficially attractive. It wasn’t just his blue eyes and teak-colored skin. It was the way he talked, as if he was speaking from some calm and happily reasonable place deep inside himself. And he seemed equally interested in her, unless she was overinterpreting. Still… did she need this in her life?

Not to mention the inevitable gossip that would ensue in the parched social universe of the State Care staff. Nurse Wattmore beat her back to work by half an hour, time enough to spread the word that Sandra had been lunching with a cop. She got a set of knowing glances and half-smiles from the nurses at Reception. Bad luck—but Wattmore was a force of nature, as unstoppable as the tides.

Of course, the tide of gossip flowed both ways. Sandra knew that Mrs. Wattmore, a widow, forty-four years of age, had slept with three of the four former ward supervisors. “That woman lives in a glass house,” one of the nurses confided in Sandra when they crossed paths in the staff commissary. “You know? Lately she’s been taking her breaks with Dr. Congreve.”

Sandra hurried to her office and closed the door. She had two case summaries that needed writing up. She gave the folders a guilty look and pushed them aside. Then she took the envelope Bose had given her from her purse and tugged out the sheaf of closely written pages and began to read.

She was brimming with fresh questions when she met Bose that evening.

This time he had picked the restaurant, a Northside theme pub, shepherd’s pie and Guinness and green paper napkins embossed with pictures of harps. He was waiting when she arrived. She was surprised to find another woman sitting at the table with him.

The woman wore a blue flower-print dress that was neither fresh nor in good repair. She was skinny to the point of emaciation and she seemed both nervous and angry. When Sandra approached the table the woman looked at her warily.

Bose stood hastily. “Sandra, I’d like you to meet Ariel Mather—Orrin’s sister.”