Retrieving a small gold tub of something expensive and pink that ART zooms in on . . .
She dabs on Iridesse Kiss lip balm . . .
Before unscrewing the cap from some other pricy potion that she drips into her palm. One pale-blue drop at a time, handwritten on the eyedropper bottle’s label is (C14H21NO11)n . . .
The chemical composition of hyaluronic acid, used to hydrate the skin, reduce fine wrinkles and promote healing, ART informs me. I watch Neva rub the serum into her wrists, hands, her neck and décolletage. She disgustingly primps and moisturizes inside the grimmest of waiting rooms with its attempts at cozy furniture and pleasant printed landscapes from state surplus, its thoughtful placing of fake plants and silk flowers.
Outdated magazines with torn-off mailing labels are fanned out on a faux mahogany table between the Virginia and US flags. A clunky old flat-screen TV silently plays soothing nature scenes in a glitchy loop that at the moment is caught on a school of salmon almost leaping as they swim upstream.
Never completely in or out of the water, never getting anywhere, and boy do I know the feeling as I approach the sturdy redbrick guard gate I always use when going back and forth between the Air Force base and NASA. All but one lane is blocked with tire shredders, sawhorses, water-filled bright-orange barricades, and concrete blast barriers.
It’s just my sorry luck that military police officer Crockett steps outside the booth.
He holds up a hand to halt my vehicle, sort of a weird mixture of a stop sign and a wave, staring intensely at me.
“Okay, now you’ve gone too far,” under my breath as he approaches, and he can’t be serious.
“I’m sorry,” ART says through the speakers. “I don’t understand . . .”
“Not talking about you, I’m talking about him, a real first-class jerk,” I reply, using my ventriloquist trick, barely moving my lips. “Don’t say anything. He can’t know about you. Nobody can,” even as I realize how inane it sounds. “And nothing in the displays, please,” and every one of them blinks out.
I’m back to monitoring the OCME live feed and other data in the lenses of my SPIES and PEEPS as I was doing earlier. And I roll down my window before MP Crockett can rap on it with his knuckles.
14
IN CAMOUFLAGE and beret, an M4 carbine slung across his chest, a Beretta 9mm on his hip, he’s about to abuse his authority as usual, I can feel it coming.
“No way,” I mutter, and it’s one thing to harass me when I’m entering the Air Force base but quite another when I’m leaving.
MP Crockett doesn’t have the right, not that he ever really does, and I shift my truck into park, figuring I’m going to be sitting here for a while.
“What’s the problem this time, Officer?” I ask, and he floors me by grinning, unpleasantly bringing to mind a Cheshire cat or an opossum.
“You’re not too funny!” he replies with his weird backward sarcasm, saying the opposite of whatever it is he means, and I’m baffled. “I’m not wondering what you’re up to, Captain,” and it’s the first time he’s ever smiled, winked at me or acknowledged my rank.
In the three years I’ve worked for NASA, he’s given me no respect or credit, going out of his way to look for expired stickers, cracked windshields, glass too darkly tinted. It’s common for him to order me out of my truck, taking his time searching it with a K-9 or a mirror, and that would be an unfortunate development right about now, it occurs to me.
Reminded I’m no longer in my Silverado, I wouldn’t want him finding the M16s, or the water disrupter and flamethrower. But he doesn’t seem inclined to give me his usual crap, a spring to his step and a gleam in his eye that weren’t there before. He seems a little self-conscious and shy, kind of twitchy and nervous, now that I’m noticing. And I know all the symptoms when someone’s been exposed to my sister, catching her lovebug as Mom’s always put it.
“I’m trying to understand how it is you’re not coming in but going out,” he says in his peculiar twang.
Tangier Island, I’m pretty sure, where the name Crockett is as common as crab pots, and the natives talk like Jamestown.
“When I know for a fact I already saw you leave earlier,” tall and whippet-thin, he’s bent over awkwardly peering at me.
MP Crockett is careful not to bang his weapons and equipment against my truck’s chameleon skin, this moment the default matte gray, and splashed with road grit and salt. All the while I’m dealing with him, I’m remotely monitoring the cavernous concrete receiving bay in the back of the OCME.
I’m watching Joan in my smart lenses sitting inside, taking a load off as she likes to say. The rolling steel door is retracted all the way up, and I can see the consolidated lab building, its forensic evidence bay, the clearing afternoon showing through the huge square opening.
How weird to be spying on my death investigator friend like Big Brother as she sits in a folding chair. A brown ski jacket is zipped up over her scrubs, and she’s smoking in her makeshift break area at the bottom of the concrete ramp leading inside the morgue.
“. . . I mean, I’m not imagining things, am I?” MP Crockett is saying to me through my open window, and I smell peppermint, his jaw muscles bunching as he chews gum. “That was you who came through a couple hours ago, bringing me an extra-large coffee with extra sugar?” and it’s not me he’s been seeing, possibly chatting with, that’s for sure.
It’s not this Captain Chase who brought him an extra-large coffee with extra sugar (his salacious emphasis, not mine), and I’m up against another problem I didn’t anticipate. I don’t think Carme has yet to meet anyone she can’t cast her spell on, going all the way back to grade school when her name was spray-painted on the Fox Hill water tower. And mine never was.
We’re used to being mistaken for each other, and it can be awkward when one of her dates or smitten wannabes is on the prowl. But I’ve never had to follow up on her seductions as if they’re mine. Should someone get us confused, I’ve always clarified in a heck of a hurry, and it’s one more thing I can’t do going forward.
I can’t say I’m not her. Or that she’s not me. Neither of us can let on that we’re both and neither.