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.Kevin shrugged.“Theory of mine.A couch intimidates, and those molded plastic jobs cut off circulation.You figure the average patient spends sixty to a hundred hours in a chair spilling his or her guts to you—more if it’s a Probe case.The least you can offer for sure is some physical comfort.Me—I get the bottom desk drawer if my blood kinks,” Kevin finished cheerfully, pulling out the drawer in question and propping up his feet.“Well?”Matthews mutely extended the manila folder.Kevin studied it.“Weight up, huh? Good.Blood count okay.Did you do a T-four to see if hyperthyroidism explains the emaciation?”“That’s down at the lab for analysis.As you see, all the gross signs are pretty normal.Nurses say she’s eating solids now.”“Ye gods! If she goes on like this, we may have to put her on a diet.Up to one hundred and six pounds already.She looks like a basically healthy girl, whoever she is.”“Too healthy.”‘What do you mean?”Matthews rose, grasped his chair back and leaned forward with professorial ponderousness.“Did you notice anything, any pattern, in that report? I know you shrinks don’t see physical exams that often—”“I’ve seen my share, and made them, Roger.What are you getting at?”Instead of answering, the man went to shut the door.“Perhaps we’d better keep this confidential.”As Matthews turned back into the room, a surrealistic Roiling Stones poster of a fleet of lascivious flying tongues slid scrimlike past his shoulders.Kevin kept the poster there as a background for his more pompous colleagues; it was a favorite game to maneuver the door open and the poster out of sight before the innocent visitor could spot it.For once, he cared more about what his staid colleague had to say than about sticking his—or the Rolling Stones’—tongue in cheek out at anyone’s pretensions.“What’s the problem?” Kevin paged through the forms.“All the numbers are normal.She’s doing great.No reason not to begin my sessions with her—”“No reason,” agreed Matthews, sitting again.“Maybe it’s what’s not there.”“Look, we’re doctors.We ought to be able to make a clear diagnosis.Quit dancing around and spit it out.”“Well, for one thing, look at the note on dental health.”Kevin flipped the page.“Yeah… nothing much wrong.”“Wrong, Doctor.Nothing wrong.There’s a difference.”Kevin leaned his elbows on the desk and scrutinized the page.He glanced up at Matthews, at a smug Matthews, but what was new? “No cavities at all? You’re sure?”Matthews nodded portentously.“Hell, Roger—this is great.You estimate she’s what—twenty-three, twenty-four years old.And no cavities.There’re only a few places in the country where there’s enough natural fluoride in the water to give protection like that.We’ve got a lead on where she’s from.”“How many places with good water also refrained from routine inoculation twenty-five years ago, Dr.Blake? That ought to narrow it down even more.”“Inoculation? Everybody got inoculated.If not against smallpox, then diphtheria, influenza…”Matthews’s head shook sourly.“Not our Doe.”Kevin frowned.“No inoculations? What about birthmarks, scars?”“Not a mark on her.No inoculations, no chicken pox scars, not even a pierced ear or two.Oh, and her vision’s twenty/twenty as well.” Matthews sighed.“It looks as if nothing’s happened to her since she was born.”“Except semistarvation, abandonment, memory loss,” Kevin enumerated sharply.“Abandonment and memory loss is your bailiwick, but I’m not sure even those should be taken at face value in this case.She wasn’t starving; she’d never bounce back this way, otherwise.Thin, yes.Say her metabolism was running on idle for some reason.But not to the point of bodily abuse.”“How can you tell?” Kevin jumped, determined to rattle Matthews in turn.“I had a patient once who’d been kept prisoner by a group of devil worshipers—I wouldn’t even tell you what they did to her.Sat there”—Kevin indicated the empty Eames chair—“in a polyester print dress and finally found her way back to remembering and telling me about it.Abuse doesn’t advertise, Roger.”“You still think this one’s a victim of some kind of abuse? Sexual?”“I don’t want to…” Kevin flipped the folder shut.“But when women or children turn up in suspicious shape, there’s usually that behind it, yes.”“Forget it,” advised Matthews.“Forget it?”“I told you; no one’s laid a hand on her—except for a few bruises some orderly probably put on her wrist in transport.No one; there’s one last… perfection… not mentioned in the report.No blank for it.Her hymen is intact.”“You did a pelvic?”“Not past that point.It sort of seemed like breaking the shrink wrap on somebody else’s record, if you’ll pardon the pun.” Matthews was on a roll now, enjoying Kevin’s confusion.“I haven’t seen an intact hymen in so long… well, only if I’ve got to examine a pubescent—like that case of hermaphroditism you were treating.”Matthews’s head shook gravely.“Tragic.How’d that finally come out?”“Surgery and lots of psychoanalysis.Fine.” Kevin dismissed what to Matthews was freakish anomaly and what to him had been business as usual.At least today hermaphrodites could be eased into one side of the sexual mainstream or the other, and weren’t left to sideshows.But too much perfection, now that was an anomaly.“If she’s a virgin—” Kevin began.Matthews rolled his eyes.“Okay.No argument.She has a hymen, ergo… Still, there’s no reason a twenty-four-year-old virgin should be a dying species.I mean, it has happened, that a girl… woman doesn’t—”“Be realistic, Kevin.The point is, a woman can be a virgin until twenty-four or forty-two or the end of time.But even with virgins the hymen usually is gone by the time of her first routine pelvic.Tampons, usually, or these days, even a little self-experimentation.You just don’t see hymens anymore.They’re socially extinct.When’d you last see one?”“Med school [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]