Sole Survivor

You asked me where Nina is. You want to know about your family. I gave you the photograph so you could see. So you could see.”
        Her will was stronger than his, and after a while he found himself picking up the photograph.
        “Remember the feeling,” she encouraged him. “Let it come to you again.”
        It did not come to him again, however, although he turned the photograph over and over in his hands. He slid his fingertips in circles across the glossy image but could not feel the granite, the bronze, the grass. He summoned the blueness and the brightness, but they did not appear.
        Tossing the photograph aside in disgust, he said, “I don't know what I'm doing with this.”
        Infuriatingly patient, she smiled compassionately and held out a hand to him.
        He refused to take it.
        Although he was frustrated by what he now perceived as her New Age proclivities, he also felt that somehow, by not being able to lose himself a second time in the phantasmal blue brightness, he had failed Michelle and Chrissie and Nina.
        But if his experience had been only an hallucination, induced with chemicals or hypnosis, then it had no significance, and giving himself to the waking dream once again could not bring back those who were irretrievably lost.
        A fusillade of confusions ricocheted through his mind.
        Rose said, “It's okay. The imbued photograph is usually enough. But not always.”
        “Imbued?”
        “It's okay, Joe. It's okay. Once in a while there's someone… someone like you… and then the only thing that convinces is galvanic contact.”
        “I don't know what you're talking about.”
        “The touch.”
        “What touch?”
        Instead of answering him, Rose picked up the Polaroid snapshot and stared at it as though she could clearly see something that Joe could not see at all. If turmoil touched her heart and mind, she hid it well, for she seemed as tranquil as a country pond in a windless twilight.
        Her serenity only inflamed Joe. “Where's Nina, damn it? Where is my little girl?”
        Calmly she returned the photograph to her jacket pocket.
        She said, “Joe, suppose that I was one of a group of scientists engaged in a revolutionary series of medical experiments, and then suppose we unexpectedly discovered something that could prove to your satisfaction there was some kind of life after death.”
        “I might be a hell of a lot harder to convince than you.”
        Her softness was an irritating counterpoint to his sharpness: “It's not as outrageous an idea as you think. For the past couple of decades, discoveries in molecular biology and certain branches of physics have seemed ever more clearly to point toward a created universe.”
        “You're dodging my question. Where are you keeping Nina? Why have you let me go on thinking she's dead?”
        Her face remained in an almost eerie repose. Her voice was still soft with a Zen-like sense of peace. “If science gave us a way to perceive the truth of an afterlife, would you really want to see this proof? Most people would say yes at once, without thinking how such knowledge would change them forever, change what they have always considered important, what they intend to do with their lives. And then… what if this were a revelation with an unnerving edge? Would you want to see this truth-even if it was as frightening as it was uplifting, as fearsome as it was joyous, as deeply and thoroughly strange as it was enlightening?”
        “This is just a whole lot of babble to me, Dr. Tucker, a whole lot of nothing-like healing with crystals and channelling spirits and little grey men kidnapping people in flying saucers.”
        “Don't just look. See.”
        Through the red lenses of his defensive anger, Joe perceived her calmness as a tool of manipulation. He got up from his chair, hands fisted at his sides. “What were you bringing to L.A. on that plane, and why did Teknologik and its friends kill three hundred and twenty people to stop you?”
        “I'm trying to tell you.”
        “Then tell me!”
        She closed her eyes and folded her small brown hands, as though waiting for this storm in him to pass-but her serenity only fed the winds of his tempest.
        “Horton Nellor. Once your boss, once mine. How does he figure in this?” Joe demanded.
        She said nothing.
        “Why did the Delmanns and Lisa and