Acting on operational intelligence, however, after the grandmother of the runaway revealed certain details of the traumatic effects of a recent bereavement on the girl, a city-wide all-points police broadcast to patrolmen swiftly resulted in the subject of the search being traced.
Since the tragic death of her parents, both killed instantly in a fatal multi-vehicle expressway crash in November last year, the teenager it was understood had become profoundly affected by her loss and she had vanished from her home. Investigators believed that the girl, due to profound grief, had lost her memory and according to latest reports this appears to be the case.
The fact that the girl wore mourning attire of a distinct character meant that a large number of witnesses came forward who remembered vividly her last movements, as it unusual to see a young girl dressed deeply in black, and her whereabouts were soon known to close the case without undue delay, or distress to the missing teenager.
Anti-Chekhovian Sentiments.
‘Why do you always wear black?’
This question recalled Masha’s famous opening line in the first act of The Seagull, Jane Doe later reminded a policewoman (she had studied Chekhov’s play at junior high school).
‘But don’t think for all that I am in mourning for my own life,’ she insisted. ‘Let there be no doubt it is the lives of my devoted parents I devoutly mourn.’ In detention the grieving girl had also stated, ‘I can’t be treated as if I were any normal girl of fourteen.’
Curiously, this run-in with a police squad, so early in Jane Doe’s formative years, would come to be seen as a significant precursor to a later encounter with NYPD patrolmen on the occasion of her sensational disappearance, age twenty-four, in the case once popularly known as the Nuke-Shelter Spy Nest Affair.
In 2008, when a notice heralding the authorised account of the notorious case first appeared (Thought Police, see page 414 of Catherine Eisner’s Sister Morphine published by Salt), the announcement concluded that ‘. . . when, even the Press have so far failed to uncover clues to solve the mystery of her disappearance, tantalisingly, the publication of a full account of her astonishing story must be delayed until the next edition of this work [i.e. A Room to the End of Fall Salt 2014].’
This earlier commentary observed that, frustratingly, the occasion of Jane Doe’s disappearance, corroborated by a number of witnesses, had been more closely documented and reported more faithfully than the bizarre circumstances of her discovery.
The Second Disappearance . . . Burrowing Under the Floor . . .
In Thought Police there is a sketch of the scene outside Jane Doe’s city apartment house, the day before her disappearance, that gave rise to the narrative’s title. A police patrol car halts beside her as she stands immobile in an unseasonable flurry of snow, dressed in a thin housecoat, staring fixedly at a drain cover where the snowfall had melted in a perfect dish-shaped concavity.
The cops are friendly and polite.
They had merely put to her one question: ‘Something on your mind, maybe?’
‘No. It’s nothing,’ she answers dryly with a false smile. ‘Unless, perhaps, you’re a deputation from the Thought Police.’
A day later she vanishes without a trace to reemerge half a decade later.
In Thought Police in 2008 there are quoted a few key passages from her diary into which she had copied extracts from Chekhov’s sinister cautionary tale, The Bet, whose unnamed young hero has himself incarcerated voluntarily for fifteen years in a well-stocked library – in solitary confinement – to win a bet of two million roubles wagered by a banker.
‘The prisoner (writes Jane Doe), amazingly, in four years, reads over six hundred volumes and when, after fifteen years of confinement in which he imbibes the world’s classics, he emerges into daylight, his appearance is almost spectral. His face is yellow, his cheeks are hollow, his hair is streaked with silver, and no one can believe that he is only forty! He is a skeleton with the skin drawn tight over his bones and long matted curls like . . . like, well, like my own, if I’m honest. But what does the prisoner declare upon his release that I would not myself assert were I to meet that hateful unconscionable banker!?
‘ “Your books have given me wisdom. All man’s unresting thought from the ages is compressed into the small compass of my brain. I know that I am wiser than all of you. And I despise your books, as I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world. It is all worthless, fleeting, illusory, and deceptive, like a mirage . . . as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor . . .” ’
Anomie and related neurotica.
‘Jane Doe’ evidently empathised strongly with Chekhov’s disillusioned bookish captive, but she herself denied at the time a Freudo-Marxist view of alienation to explain her own anomie and other related neurotica.
Despite admitting to severe psychological adjustment problems, she claimed her sense of dislocation from a once familiar world was due, essentially, to the extreme mistrust and suspicion with which she regarded her literary agent, Sherman Seymour Dane. Specifically, she falsely accused Dane of ghostwriting the major portion of her novel, An Auroral Stain, which was published to mixed reviews during her enforced absence. ‘For Seymour, it was more than a case of corpus delicti when I disappeared,’ Jane Doe alleged, ‘it was a case of a missing opus whose inconvenient absence was remedied when he presumed to “complete” the work without my authorisation.’
That she was wholly misguided in this belief the narrative A Room to the End of Fall now happily remedies. See her unredacted text in A Bad Case, 2014. Please note: To allay suspicions of editorial tampering (spelling, punctuation, usage, etc.), which for very sound reasons this American narrator maintains, her native US orthography in this account remains unchanged.
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Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence,
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
