D-Zero Meson Oscillation, 6/10
Part VI. Freeze-Frame Psychology
“Hello, Katrina. My name’s Malcolm.”
Katrina didn’t disappear that night either. She showed up dutifully at the Embassy as arranged. Tom showed her into the interview room then returned to his office to examine some CCTV footage.
“Hello, Malcolm. Very pleased to meet you.” Katrina chose the diplomatic mode. Stilted, at times, curious at others. But cooperative, for sure.
“Please, have a seat.”
They sat down and Katrina finished getting the measure of him. Mid-thirties, she guessed. Tall, wiry, mousy brown hair, a little unkempt – which, she concluded, suggests an open-minded quirky nature, which bodes well for a psychologist. She decided to like him.
“Tom said you were on holiday. You didn’t need to disrupt it on my account.”
“That’s really not a problem. I’m actually quite fascinated by what Tom told me and, well, as you saw the weather isn’t particularly clement today.”
“That’s November for you. No offence but I am wondering why you chose this time of year for a vacation.”
“None taken. I’m an outdoors kind of person. I grew up in the Lake District.”
“Oh really?” Katrina perked up and liked him even more. “My grandmother was from the Lakes. I love it there.”
“Also, I’ll be honest with you, which is that I was here anyway. A significant part of my work is with the intelligence services.”
“Ah. That explains it. So you do, what, vetting? Counselling and so on?”
“I hope that doesn’t worry you?”
“Not in the slightest. In fact it’s better. It means you must have a high clearance level. Meaning I can talk freely, yes?”
Malcolm nodded. “Just assume I’m cleared for anything you might have to tell me.”
“Understood. Over to you.”
Malcolm smiled. “Ok. This is really just a preliminary interview to ascertain your state of mind.”
“Ah. You want to know if I’m a danger to myself or others, thus whether I should be confined somewhere. That kind of thing?”
“That kind of thing, yes. You don’t mind?”
“Not at all. It’s perfectly understandable.”
“Ok. Well, very simple question to start – how do you feel?”
Katrina didn’t feel like making any deliberate quips. She spoke a little slowly and sadly. It was the right question. She wanted to talk.
“I’m putting on a brave face,” she said. “Part of me thinks, or hopes, really, that I will go to sleep one of these nights and wake up back home again. The other part knows I won’t. So I feel sad, I guess. I miss my family.”
“I’ll ask you about your family in a minute, if I may. But my second question is a little different. I’m not going to question your assertion about the parallel world, or how you got here, but what I’d like you to tell me is what was the last thing you remember in the other world, then the first thing you remember in this world?”
Katrina paused slightly before answering. “The last thing I remember, I suppose, was going to bed as normal in my house in Cambridge with my wife, Anna. Do you want details, or shall I just say I turned the light out and fell asleep?”
Mal smiled. “That’s fine. So you essentially fell asleep then woke up here?”
“In a waiting room at the Gare de L’Est. As you do.”
He laughed. Help her with the brave face thing. “Was anyone else there?”
“Yes. Two people. One of them was playing with her phone, the other one was mostly hidden behind a newspaper.”
“So they didn’t register your sudden appearance, then? I mean did they show any response of any kind?”
“No. The woman with the phone glanced across at me for a second but then went back to whatever it was she was doing. Maybe she decided she simply didn’t see me enter. Avoidance of cognitive dissonance. That kind of thing.”
Mal laughed. “Then what did you do?”
“I got up and left. It didn’t take me long to realise I was in a parallel world so I, well, took some time to get my bearings. I’m trained not to panic, you understand?”
“Sure. How did you know it was a parallel world?”
“Well, for a start there’s no Maglev terminal. But then mainly because of the pollution. The air in this Paris is dirty. In our Paris public transport is free and 90% of private vehicles are electric. Same as most cities nowadays.”
“Hmm. Tom did mention you said your world was something of a utopia. So I presume you’ve solved all your environmental problems?”
“Most of them. We’ll have fusion power soon and that’ll be that. Perhaps I can tell you about that kind of thing another time?”
“Sure. So you remember nothing of your journey from your world to this one?”
“My transition, you mean? I think that’s a better term to use. No. I went to sleep, then I woke up again.”
“No dreams?”
“Ah. You mean did I awake after a night of uneasy dreams to find myself in a dystopian parallel world, like Kafka?”
Mal smiled. “Would you have preferred a gigantic insect?”
“That’s debatable. I think we’ll leave that one to the existentialists. When in Paris, you know.”
Malcolm also, like Tom, decided he liked her. And that he sympathised. He could sense her underlying sadness and he felt for her.
“You mentioned your family. You must miss them?”
Katrina seemed like she was about to cry. “Yes. All the time. Every minute. I try not to show it, but I miss them. Like hell.”
“Would you like to tell me about them?”
“There’s my wife, Anna. Although technically we’re in a civil partnership, but we like to think of ourselves as married. Having a civil partnership protects her legal rights as if we were married, and at the same time it’s acceptable to the Catholic Church.”
“Tom said you were widowed?”
“Yes. My husband, Sasha, died eighteen years ago. I don’t want to talk about that right now, if that’s ok?”
“Ok. And you have a daughter, Nikita?”
“Yes. She was born three months before Sasha died.”
“So she’s about the same age as you?”
“I suppose. A bit older. I also have a son, Yuri. He’s fifteen. He’s away at school. And my youngest daughter is Alice. She’s thirteen.”
“But your daughters live with you?”
“Yes. Although Niki will be leaving home soon.”
“To go to university?”
“No. She’s an actress like me. She’s been offered quite a few parts and she said she feels she’d like to have a place of her own.”
“And you’ll miss her?”
And then Katrina did start to cry. She only nodded slightly, managed a faint “Yes.”
Malcolm studied her, took his time before asking his next question. “Does Niki remember her father?”
“Yes. I mean, not really. She has impressions of him, I guess. She remembers his smell.” Katrina continued to cry. “She was only three months old. I remember she kept crying afterwards because he wasn’t there anymore. She didn’t understand why he wasn’t there. And I tried to comfort her but I was crying too. I’d tried not to in front of her because I know how formative that time is. You observe your mother and her expressions and that’s how you learn. I don’t think I would’ve coped if it wasn’t for Anna.”
“And now she’s ready to leave you?”
Katrina started to weep. And couldn’t answer.
“You don’t want her to go, do you?”
And then she wept openly, uncontrollably. “No! I don’t want her to go! She’s all I have left of him!”
But instead of being cold, like many psychologists would, Mal did what Katrina would’ve wanted him to do. He went over to her and held her. And Katrina let herself cry as much as she could, for the first time since she came here to your world. And for the first time in years.
For deep down she was just a girl, after all. A stray. Just a girl with big eyes who wanted to make the world a better place.
That’s all she’d really ever been.
Malcolm hurried excitedly into Tom’s office and sat down opposite. Tom raised his eyebrows at him questioningly.
“I think I’ve worked it out, what’s really going on here. I think she’s suffered some extreme trauma to do with her parents. Maybe they died and she witnessed it. And now she’s disassociated. It’s very similar to dissociative identity disorder, what used to be called multiple personality. Which explains the memory loss. She’s effectively projected herself onto her mother, taken on her personality, and is looking at herself from the other side, if it’s true that her mother has passed away. That’s where her parallel world fantasy comes from. The other side, so to speak. But the truth is she’s the daughter.”
“Oh?”
“She talked about her daughter Nikita, how she’s 18, about the same age as Katrina, and she’s about to leave home and Katrina will miss her. But that’s her mother’s perspective. She also talked about her husband, who is almost certainly her father, and how Niki is all she has left of him. And now Niki is going. She’s Nikita. If this is true then you might be able to find out who her parents are, and I can help Katrina come to terms with what’s happened and help her through the grieving process. Which she isn’t, she’s refusing to do it. But I believe I got through to her. She was very upset.”
Tom sighed a little but didn’t respond straight away. Malcolm noticed the concerned look on his face.
“What is it?”
Tom sighed again, and said, “Pull your chair around here. I have some stuff to show you.”
Mal was a little confused, but did as Tom asked. Tom turned his computer screen around and double-clicked a file.
“Woah!” Mal gasped. “Who is this?”
“You remember I told you Katrina said her mother’s name was Ursula? Maiden name Sugrue?”
“That’s her?”
“Yes. Aged about 50. This photo is from about twenty years ago, but it’s about how old Katrina would’ve been in her parallel world. Remember she said she’d de-aged thirty-one years?”
“The likeness is uncanny, sure. So that could be her grandmother, then? In reality, I mean.”
“Possibly. I ran this and Katrina’s picture through facial comparison and according to the computer there’s over a 90% chance they’re related. In this world this Ursula did come over from County Kerry, south-west Ireland, to study English in London and then Library and Information Studies, before working for a while in the British Library. Just like Katrina said. After a few years or so she moved back to Ireland and got married. Presumably she met someone on one of her trips back home. But clearly, because there was no Richard Meyer in this world, Ursula didn’t meet him.”
“Does she have children, grandchildren?”
“Yes. A son and two daughters.” Tom clicked open a few more images.
“Clear likeness.”
“Yes. But both the children and the grandchildren are all accounted for. Unless, of course, Ursula’s son had a daughter out of wedlock which, for obvious reasons, he never told anyone.”
“He might not even know.”
“Quite. Anyway. What I’m going to do is try and get DNA samples from Ursula and her family and run a comparison with Katrina.”
“Oh! Now I understand. Katrina says her husband died when she was a baby. So never knowing her father would, essentially, amount to the same thing. The same psychological loss, I mean. Just simply expressed in this dissociative way.”
But Tom continued to look concerned.
“You’re not convinced?”
“I’ll just show you this. Then you can, well, make your own mind up. This is the CCTV footage from the waiting room at Gare de L’Est. I’ve cropped the relevant portion.”
Tom clicked the file, pointed at the screen. “Keep your eyes on that seat there. In about five seconds. Four. Three. Two…”
One…
“Jesus Christ!” Malcolm started hyperventilating.
“Take three deep breaths. It helped with me.”
It was a case of now you don’t see her, now you do.
Mal just about caught his breath back. “I think that’s what you call cognitive dissonance,” Tom quipped.
Malcolm managed a very short, nervous laugh. Tom paused the footage. “It hasn’t been tampered with, before you ask.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Quite sure. The security guy at the station assured Peter that camera had been running non-stop for over a week by then.”
“That’s the really scary bit,” Malcolm said, nodding back towards the screen.
Freeze-frame Katrina. Staring directly up at the camera…
I LOVE the CCTV little twist at the end!!! I mean, I was inclined to believe her. As a multiple myself, I can see why Malcolm was prepared to diagnose her with a Dissociative disorder, but too much of her story overlaps with the reality of life, especially her top secret spy info. If she was a multiple in truth, how would she have gotten access to info about Sarah? I’m not saying it’s not possible she’s a multiple, and she somehow came across the information and assimilated it into a story about herself, but it feels unlikely. Her appearing in that chair calms all my fears. Perhaps she can help us change our world?