“In short,” said Sydney, “this is a desperate time, when desperate games are played for desperate stakes. Let the Doctor play the winning game; I will play the losing one . . .”
—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
WHERE JANIS CORDELIA PLUMTREE finally wound up was in a chair in the TV lounge. She had visited people in hospitals where the lines on the linoleum floors led you somewhere—“Follow the yellow line to OB” or something—but the black lines in the gray floors of Rosecrans Medical Center just led around in a big dented loop, with frustrating gaps where hallways crossed. Maybe the point was that you were free to pick your own destination . . . the TV lounge, or the meds station, or your “room” with two unmade beds in it and no bath or shower and a door that couldn’t lock.
There were wire-reinforced windows in the halls and the lounge, but the views were only of fenced-in courtyards, shadowy in the late-afternoon sunlight and empty except for picnic tables and dome-topped swing-door trash cans; and you generally couldn’t get out there anyway.
The pictures on the walls—vapid reproductions of watercolor flowers—had rectangles of Plexiglas over them in the frames, rather than real breakable glass. She couldn’t remember how she knew this, she didn’t recall having touched one in the . . . nine days she’d been living here.
“I think he’s like you,” Dr. Armentrout went on. The rotund white-haired psychiatrist had dragged up a chair next to the one she’d collapsed into after finally stepping off the floor-line circuit and wobbling into the TV lounge. He had been talking to her for a minute or two now, but she was looking past him.
On the TV, hung behind a clear Plexiglas shield up above head-height on the wall beyond Armentrout, Humphrey Bogart was showing his teeth, talking mean and ruthless as he told the fat man, “We’ve got to have a fall guy.” There were no colors—all the figures, the Fat Man and Bogart and Joel Cairo and “The gunsel,” were in black and white, like a memory for someone else.
Plumtree shifted on the vinyl chair and tucked her denim skirt more tightly around her knees but didn’t take her eyes off the screen. Murder had been done, apparently, and a scapegoat would have to be . . . turned over.
“What a flop,” she said; then added, absently, “Who’s like me?”
“This man Cochran, who’s being transferred here from Metro in Norwalk,” said Armentrout. “His wife was killed last Sunday, New Year’s Day, at dawn—dressed herself up in a bedsheet and tied ivy vines in her hair and ran out into traffic on 280, up in San Mateo County.” Plumtree didn’t look at the doctor or speak, and after a few seconds he went on, “She was pregnant, and the fetus died too, do you suppose that’s important? Last week he flew her ashes back to her family estate, in France. He appears to have had a delusional episode there, and another when he got off the plane at LAX, in Los Angeles.”
“Rah rah rah,” said Plumtree.
“What happened on that Sunday morning?” he asked, as casually as if he hadn’t been asking her that question every day.
“This guy’s wife was run over by a bus,” Plumtree said impatiently, “according to you. Cockface.”
The doctor’s voice was tight: “What did you call me, Janis?”
“Him, not you. Wasn’t that what you said his name was?”
“Cochran.”
The vinyl seat of Armentrout’s chair croaked as he shifted, and Plumtree grinned, still watching the movie. “Cochran,” Armentrout repeated loudly. “Why do you say it was a bus? I didn’t even say she was hit by a vehicle. Why should it have been a bus?”
The TV screen went dark, and then flared back on again.
It was a Humphrey Bogart movie; apparently The Maltese Falcon, since Plumtree saw that Elisha Cook and Mary Astor and Sidney Greenstreet were in it too. She was surprised to see that it was in color, but quickly reminded herself that they were colorizing all those old movies now. She couldn’t remember how long she might have been sitting here watching it, and was startled when she glanced to the side and saw Dr. Armentrout sitting in a chair right next to her. She unfolded her legs and stretched them out, with the heels of her sneakers on the floor and the toes pointed upward.
“So what do you say, Doctor?” Plumtree said brightly. Partly to delay further talk, she dug a little plastic bottle of Listerine out of her shirt pocket, twisted off the cap, and took a sip of it.
On the screen on the wall, Bogart had agreed to Peter Lorre’s proposal that the Mary Astor character be turned over to the police. “After all,” Bogart said, “she is the one who killed him.” He mumbled something about miles, and an archer. Had the murdered person been killed from a distance, with an arrow? Hadn’t it been up close with a spear?
But Plumtree had seen this movie before, and this was not how this scene went; they were supposed to pick the Elisha Cook character to “take the fall.” Perhaps this was an alternate version, a director’s cut or something.
Plumtree looked around for something to spit in, then reluctantly swallowed the mouthwash. “I’m sorry if I haven’t been paying attention,” she said to Armentrout. She glanced again up at the screen, and added, “I love Bogart movies, don’t you?”
Armentrout was frowning in apparent puzzlement. “Why should it have been a bus?” he said.
“Why ask why?” said Plumtree merrily, quoting last year’s Budweiser ad slogan.
All the characters in the movie were startled now by a knock at the door. Plumtree recalled that the story took place in San Francisco—a knock at the door could be anything. She held up one finger for quiet and watched the screen.
The colorized Bogart got up and opened the door—and it was Mary Astor standing in the hallway, apparently playing a twin of herself. Clearly this was some peculiar alternate version of the movie. Perhaps it was well-known, perhaps there were alternate versions of all sorts of movies. The Mary Astor twin in the open doorway was wearing a captain’s cap and a peacoat spotted with dried blood, and her face was stiff and white—she was obviously supposed to be dead; but she opened her mouth and spoke, in a sexless monotone: “Forgive me. Madame has forgotten that we agreed to play in partnership this evening.”
Bogart stood frozen for only a moment, then turned and lifted up in both hands the newspaper-wrapped bundle that had lain on the altarlike table; Greenstreet and Lorre didn’t say anything as Bogart handed it to the dead Mary Astor—they certainly didn’t want it, the severed head of a murdered king. The live Mary Astor was just sitting on the couch, staring wide-eyed at her dead double in the doorway.
Plumtree’s new wristwatch beeped three times. She didn’t even glance at it.
Armentrout chuckled. “Are you being paged, Janis?”
Plumtree turned to him with a smile. “That’s my zeitgeber,” she said. “Dr. Muir gave it to me. Zeitgeber means ‘time-giver’ in German. Dr. Muir suspects that—”
“He’s not a doctor, he’s just an intern. And he’s not your primary, I am.” Dr. Armentrout leaned forward abruptly, staring at Plumtree’s legs. “Is Muir also the one who strapped a mirror to your knee, Janis?” His good cheer was gone. “Is that so he can look up your skirt?” Plumtree paused, and the TV picture flickered; but a moment later she gave him a reproachful smile. “Of course not, silly!” She reached down to unbuckle the plastic band that held the two-inch metal disk to her bare knee. “I had a dozen of these on this morning, I must have forgotten to take this one off. It’s for the—” She paused, and then recited proudly, “the Infrared Motion Analysis System. Dr. Muir has me sit at a computer and take a test, and while I’m doing that the computer measures how much I . . . move around. I move fifty millimeters a second sometimes! Doct—Mr. Muir suspects that my circadian rhythms are out of whack. The zeitgeber watch is set to beep every fifteen minutes; it’s to keep me aware of the . . . the time. When’s now.”
Armentrout leaned back in his chair. “When’s now,” he repeated. After a moment he waved at the television. “You’re missing your Bogart movie, talking.”
“That was the end,” she said.
He opened his mouth, then apparently changed his mind about what he was going to say. “But you’ve had these zeitgebers all along, Janis. I’ve noticed that you bring the front page of the newspaper to bed with you, so you’ll know in the morning what day it is; and you hardly answer a ‘howdy do’ without looking around for a clock, or sneaking a look at that waitress pad you keep in your purse.”
Her watch beeped again, and the television set went dark.
Plumtree sat stiffly; somehow her watch was . . . making a noise; she could feel the vibration on her wrist. She didn’t touch the watch, or look at it. Maybe it was supposed to be making a noise. She would watch for cues.
Dr. Armentrout was sitting beside her, looking at her speculatively. “So,” he said, “do you feel that you’ve been making progress, now that you’ve been a patient here for two years?”
Her stomach went cold, but a deep breath and a fast blink kept tears from flooding her eyes. It’s okay, she told herself. It’s like Aunt Kate’s funeral again, that’s all. “I reckon I have,” she said stolidly.
“I was lying, Janis,” Armentrout said then. “You’ve been here only nine days. You believed me, though, didn’t you?”
“I thought you said . . . ‘with your fears’,” she whispered. Her watch was still beeping. The doctor wasn’t remarking on it. Maybe all the patients had been given these stupid noisy watches today, as part of some bird-brain new therapy. What a flop!
At last Armentrout was looking away from her, past her, over her shoulder. “Here’s our Mr. Cochran now,” he said, getting laboriously to his feet and smoothing the skirt of his long white coat. “Just in time for the self-esteem group. Maybe he’ll have some funny stories about his visit to France.” Without looking down, he said, “Have you ever been to France, Janis?”
She shrugged. “I wouldn’t be surprised.”
She shifted around in her chair and squinted at the man standing with Dr. Muir by the nursing station. The new patient looked a bit like Bogart, it seemed to her; a hassled Bogart, tall but stooped, and gangly and worried-looking, with his dark hair combed carelessly back so that it stood up in spikes where it was parted.
She smiled, and the television came back on, and she wondered who the stranger by the nursing station was. Were they expecting a new patient? Would he be staying here?
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” she said, dimly aware that she was echoing a statement someone had made here very recently.
“Scant?” said Dr. Armentrout.
Cochran sat up in his chair and blinked at the doctor, who was seated at the desk and leafing through the file of Cochran’s transfer notes from Norwalk Metro.
At first Cochran had followed him to what the doctor had described as the conference room, which had proved to be just a back office cluttered with stacked plastic chairs and a blackboard and a bulky obsolescent microwave oven; but the patient sitting at the table in there, a bald, round-faced old fellow with only one arm, had just grinned and begun quoting dialogue from the tea party scene in Alice in Wonderland when Armentrout had asked him to leave, so the doctor had given up on it and led Cochran down a hall to this locked office instead.
Now Armentrout raised his bushy eyebrows and tapped the stack of transfer notes. “Why does it say ‘scant’ here?”
“Oh—it’s a nickname,” said Cochran. “From when I broke my leg as a kid.”
“So is that leg . . . shorter than the other?”
“No, Doctor.” Armentrout was staring at him, so Cochran went on, helplessly, “Uh, I limp a little in bad weather.”
“You limp a little in bad weather.” Armentrout flipped a page in the file. “You don’t seem to have been limping on Vignes Street Sunday. After you broke the liquor store window, you took off like an Olympic runner, until the police managed to tackle you.” He looked up at Cochran and smiled. “I guess it wasn’t bad weather.”
Cochran managed to return a frail grin. “Mentally it was. I thought I saw a man in that liquor store—”
“You probably did.”
“I mean this man—a man I met in Paris. A couple of days earlier. Mondard, his name was . . . unless I hallucinated that whole thing, meeting him and all. And he changed into a bull—that is, he had a bull’s head, like the minotaur. I imagine it’s all in those notes, I told the doctor at Metro the whole story. And I thought that policewoman was—” he laughed unhappily “—was going to kill me, that is tear me to pieces, and take my head back to him.” He took a deep breath and let it out. “How is she?”
“You knocked out two of her teeth. Hence the Ativan and Haldol . . . which I’ll leave you off of, if you behave yourself.”
“I’ll tell you the truth, Doctor, I don’t know if I’ll behave myself. I didn’t mean to go crazy on Vignes Street, Sunday.”
“Well, you left the airport during your layover. You were supposed to catch a connecting flight back up to San Francisco, right? And you ditched all your ID.”
“It . . . seemed urgent, at the time. I guess I thought he might find me . . . he did find me, at that liquor store.”
Armentrout nodded. “And you had seen this man before.”
“In France, right. In Paris. On Friday.”
“No, I mean . . . where is it.” The doctor flipped back a couple of pages. “Four years ago last April, in 1990. Also on Vignes Street—hmm?—right after you had a ‘breakdown’ on your honeymoon.”
Cochran’s heart was pounding, and he wanted to grip the arms of his chair but his hands had no strength. “That was him too?” he whispered. “He had a wooden mask on then, that time. But—yeah, I guess that was him, that time. Big.” He shook his head. “Wow,” he said shakily. “You guys are good. And I didn’t remember that it was on the same L.A. street. I guess the police report’s in there from that time too, right?”
“What happened on your honeymoon?”
“I . . . went crazy. We got married on the sixth of April in ’90, at a place on the Strip, and—”
“The Strip? You mean on Sunset?”
“No, the Las Vegas Strip, Las Vegas Boulevard. We—”
“Really? Well well well! And here I’d been assuming you were married in Los Angeles!”
“No. Las Vegas. And—”
“At the Flamingo?”
“No.” Cochran blinked at the doctor. “No, a little place called the Troy and Cress Wedding Chapel—”
“Oh, better still!” exclaimed Armentrout happily. The fat doctor looked as though he wanted to clap his hands. “But I should shut up. Do go on.”
“I’m not making that up. It’s probably in your file.”
“I’m sure you’re not making it up. Please.”
Psychiatrists! thought Cochran, trying to put a tone of brave derision into the thought. “And—at dawn the next day, it was a Saturday, I guess a car honked its horn right outside our motel-room door, a loud car horn; the chapel was a motel too, see, with rooms out in the back. They told me later that it was just a car horn. But I was hungover, or still drunk, and in my dream it was the man in the mask, very big, roaring like a lion, and blowing up a building he’d been locked up in, just by the force of his will. A loud noise. And he was loose, and he might do anything.”
Armentrout nodded and raised his eyebrows.
“So . . . we left Vegas. I was in a panic.” He looked at the psychiatrist. “Having a panic attack,” he ventured, hoping that conveyed it more forcefully. “I made Nina drive back, across the Mojave Desert.” He held up his right hand. “I was afraid that if I drove, we’d go . . . God knows where. And then when I did go ahead and drive, after we’d got all the way back to California, we wound up in L.A.—on, I guess, Vignes Street.”
“Where you saw him.”
“Right. On the other side of the street. Right. He was wearing a wooden mask, and . . . beckoning, like Gregory Peck on Moby Dick’s back.” Cochran looked up and saw that the psychiatrist was staring at him. “In the movie,” he added.
“And you punched a store window that time too, and cut your wrist on the broken glass. Intentionally, the police thought, hence your 51-50. Standard with suicide attempts.”
“I wasn’t trying to kill myself,” said Cochran defensively. “This was nearly five years ago, and I don’t really remember, but I think I was trying to cut off my right hand.”
“Oh, is that all.”
Armentrout put down his file and got up and crossed to a filing cabinet against the far wall. He pulled open the top drawer and came back to the desk carrying a spiral notebook and two fancy purple velvet boxes. He sat down again and put the boxes down by his telephone, well out of Cochran’s reach, and then flipped open the notebook.
“You were married on the sixth of April,” he said.
“Ri-ight,” said Cochran, mystified.
“That’s very interesting! A week later a lot of people went crazy there. Well, at Hoover Dam, which is nearby. Most of them recovered their senses by the next day, though two gentlemen fell to their deaths off the after-bay face of the dam.” He sat back and smiled at Cochran. “We’ve got a woman on the ward here who also had a nervous breakdown in Las Vegas in April of 1990—on the fifteenth, Easter Sunday.”
“Uh . . . did she also go crazy in L.A.?”
“Yes! Or nearly. In Leucadia, which is . . . well, it’s almost to San Diego. But she called the police nine days ago and told them that she’d killed a man. She said he was a king, and that she killed him with a speargun spear. Do you believe in ghosts?”
“Shit, no,” snapped Cochran impatiently. He shook his head. “Sorry—I thought you’d be showing me Rorschach ink-blots here, or having me interpret proverbs, like they did at Metropolitan in Norwalk. No, I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“Have you ever seen anything that seemed to be supernatural?”
“Well, I saw a man turn into a bull, on Vignes Street, day before yesterday.”
Armentrout stared at him for several seconds with no expression. “You’re getting hostile.”
“No, I’m sorry, I—”
“You were being cooperative a few moments ago. You may be too labile right now to participate usefully in group.”
“Too what?” Cochran wondered if he meant lippy.
“The charge nurse showed you your room? Where the cafeteria is, where you shower?”
“Yes.”
“That was your roommate, the one-armed man I couldn’t roust out of the conference room. John Beach—we all call him Long John. It’s almost certainly not his real name; I think he chose it just because he was found in Long Beach, get it? He’s been with us since November of ’92.”
Cochran felt empty, and hoped the one-armed old man didn’t recite from Alice in Wonderland all the time, at all hours.
“He’ll be in group. So will Janis Plumtree—she’s the one who had the breakdown in Vegas in ’90, and who believes she killed a king nine days ago. You may as well participate. I’ll ask you to leave if you start acting out or getting too gamy.”
Gamy? thought Cochran, involuntarily picturing tusked and antlered animal heads on the stone floor of an old smokehouse.
Armentrout led him back up the hallway to the TV lounge, but Cochran hung back in the entry when the doctor strode out across the shiny waxed floor and lowered himself into one of the upholstered chairs around the conference table near the window. Four men and two women were already seated around the table, visible only in silhouette from the hall entry—Cochran thought it must almost be time for the lights to come on, or curtains to be pulled, for the evening sun was throwing horizontal poles of orange light into the room through the shrubbery that waved outside the reinforced glass.
“My civil rights are being violated,” a young woman at the table was saying harshly. “I haven’t signed anything, and I’m being held here against my will. What’s nine days’ impound fees on a car in the San Diego County municipal lot? I bet it’s more than my car’s worth, it’s just an ’85 Toyota Celery, but I need it for my job, and I’m holding you people, you soy dissant doctors, responsible.”
“It was a Toyota Cressida, Janis,” said Armentrout, and the backlit blob of his head turned either toward Cochran or toward the window. “Unless you’re thinking of some other vehicle. Perhaps a bus?”
“Fuck you, Doctor,” the woman went on, “you’re not scaring me away. It was legally parked, and—”
“Janis!” interrupted another man sharply. “Personal attacks are not permitted, that’s non-negotiable. If you want to stay, be good.” He raised his head. “Are you here for the self-esteem group?”
Cochran understood that he was being addressed, and he shuffled forward uncertainly.
“Come in and sit down, Sid,” said Armentrout. To the group he said, “This is a new patient, Sid Cochran.”
Cochran broadened his stride, squinting as he walked through the brassy sunbeams to the nearest empty chair, which was at the end of the table, next to the angry young woman, with the windows to his right and slightly behind him.
“Hi, Sid,” said the man who had rebuked the angry woman; he was wearing a white coat like Armentrout’s, and seemed to be another doctor. “How are you?”
Cochran stared into the man’s youthful, smiling face. “I’m fine,” he said levelly.
“Ho ho!” put in Armentrout.
“Well, my name is Phil Muir,” the younger man went on, “and we’re here this evening to address problems of self-esteem. I was just saying that you have to love yourself before you can love someone else—”
The young woman interrupted: “And I was just saying, ‘Fuck you, Doctor.’” She pointed at Armentrout. “To him. ‘Ho . . . ho.’ You big fat fag.”
Cochran looked at her in alarm—then found himself suppressing a grin. Under the disordered thatch of blond hair her sunburned face had a character he could only think of as gamin, with a pointed chin and wide mouth and high cheekbones, and the humor lines under her eyes and down her cheek made her outburst seem childishly valiant, just tomboy bravura.
Hoping to prevent her from being ejected from the group, he laughed indulgently, as if at an off-color joke. But when she whipped her head around toward him, he quailed. Her pupils were tiny black pinpricks and too much white was showing around her irises, and the skin was tight and mottled on her cheeks—
Abruptly, an old man who a moment ago had seemed to be asleep hunched forward and hammered a frail fist onto the table. “The . . . rapist!” he roared as the pieces of a forgotten dominoes game spun across the tabletop. “That’s what it spells! Don’t pronounce it therapist! You’ve raped me with your needles!” He twisted in his chair and suddenly smacked both of his palms around Muir’s throat.
Muir was able to struggle to his feet with the old man’s weight on him, but he wasn’t succeeding in prying the hands free of his throat, and tendons were standing up like taut cables under his straining chin.
“Staff!” roared Armentrout, shoving back his chair and thrashing to his feet. “Code Green! Help, get a chemical here!”
The nursing-station door banged open and two nurses came sprinting out, and with the help of a couple of the patients who had leaped up from the table they pulled the old man off Muir and wrestled him face down to the floor.
“I’ll be snap-crackling pork chops with Jesus!” the old man panted, his cheek against the linoleum tiles. “You sons of bitches! Bunch of Heckle and Jeckles!”
Armentrout was standing beside the table. “Thorazine,” he told the charge nurse, “two hundred milligrams I.M., stat. Put him in four points in the QR till I tell you different.” Two uniformed security guards hurried in from the outer hallway; after taking in the scene, they slung their nightsticks and knelt on the old man so that the patients could return to their seats. The overhead fluorescent lights had come on at some point during the commotion, and as the doctors and patients sat down again the group seemed to be only now convening.
Cochran felt a touch on his shirt cuff, and he jumped when he realized that it was the woman Janis; but when he looked at her, she was smiling. She couldn’t, he thought, be as much as thirty years old.
“With his hands and feet tied down,” she said, “at the four points of a mattress, in the Quiet Room, he’ll be back to himself in no time.”
Cochran smiled back at her, touched that she had worded her remark so that he would understand the psychiatrist’s jargon without having to admit ignorance; though in fact he himself had spent time in four points in a QR back in 1990.
“Ah,” he said noncommittally. “I hope so.”
Two mental-health workers had rolled a red gurney into the room, and the old man was lifted onto it and strapped down. Cochran saw a nurse walking away with an emptied hypodermic needle.
Muir was kneading his throat. “And I think Janis—” He looked across the table at her and stopped. “Janis,” he said again, “maybe you’ll be good now.”
“I do apologize to everybody,” she said. She watched the gurney being wheeled out of the room. “I hope Mr. Regushi is going to be all right . . . ?”
“He just flipped out,” said Armentrout shortly, settling into his chair. “Very uncharacteristic.”
“We feel vulnerable, threatened,” said Muir hoarsely, “and we get defensive and lash out—when we don’t feel good about ourselves. We feel like bugs on a sidewalk, like somebody’s going to step on us.” He gave the patients a wincing smile. “Janis, I think your recurrent dream of the sun falling on you from out of the sky is indicative of this kind of thinking. How do you feel about that?”
Cochran braced himself, but the woman was just nodding seriously.
“I think that’s a valuable point,” she said. “I’ve always been frightened, of everything—jobs, bills, people. I’ve wasted my whole life being afraid. My only constellation is that I’m finally getting good, caring, state-of-the-art help now.”
“Well,” said Muir uncertainly. “That’s good, Janis.” He looked at Cochran. “I’ve, uh, looked at your file, Sid, and I think you’re afraid of being hurt. I noticed that when poor Mr. Regushi attacked me, you didn’t get up to help. I suspect that this is characteristic of you—that you’re afraid to reach out your hand to people.”
Cochran shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Reach out your hand, you get it cut off, sometimes.”
Belatedly, he noticed old Long John Beach at the other end of the table. The one-armed man bared his teeth, and a domino on the table in front of him quietly flipped over . . . as if, it seemed to Cochran, he had flipped it with a phantom hand at the end of his missing arm.
No one else had noticed the trick, and Cochran quickly looked back at Muir. Long John probably tied a hair to it, Cochran thought, and yanked on the hair with his real hand. He’s probably got a dozen such tricks. And he’s my roommate! And now I’ve probably offended him with my get-it-cut-off remark. Swell.
Muir had apparently followed Cochran’s brief glance. “Long John can’t remember how he lost his hand,” he said. “His whole arm, that is. But he’s okay with that, aren’t you, John?”
“In some gardens,” said Long John Beach in a thoughtful tone, as if commenting on what had been said before, “the beds are so hard that the flowers can’t even put down roots—they just run around—right out into the street.”
“The dwarves in Snow White,” put in Janis, “came home every night—because their little house was fixed up so nicely. Snow White made them keep it just so.”
Cochran thought of his own little 1920s bungalow house in South Daly City, just a few miles down . . . the 280 . . . from Pace Vineyards on the San Bruno Mountain slope; and he reflected with bitter amusement that these doctors would probably consider it ‘valuable’ for him to ‘share’ about it here, ideally with hitching breath and tears. Then all at once he felt his face turn cold with a sudden dew of sweat, as if he were about to get sick, for he realized that he wanted to talk about it, wanted to tell somebody, even these crazy strangers, about the tiny room Nina had fixed up in preparation for the arrival of the baby, about the teddy bear wallpaper, and the intercom walkie-talkie set they had bought so as to be able to hear the baby crying at night. Their whole lives had seemed to stretch brightly ahead of them; and in fact he and Nina had even bought adjoining plots at the nearby Woodlawn Cemetery, just on the other side of the highway—but now Nina’s ashes were in France, and Cochran would one day lie there alone.
Janis touched his hand then, and he impulsively took hold of her hand and squeezed it—but his vision was blurring with imminent tears, and Armentrout was probably staring at him, and the mark on his knuckles was itching intolerably; he released her hand and pushed his chair back and stood up.
“I’m very tired,” he managed to pronounce clearly. He walked out of the room with a careful, measured stride—not breathing, for he knew his next breath would come audibly, as a sob.
He blundered down the hall to his room and flung himself face-down onto the closer of the two beds, shaking with bewildered weeping, his hands and feet at the corners of the mattress as if he were in four points again himself.
“She’s DID,” said Muir to Armentrout. He was sipping coffee and still absently massaging his throat. The two of them were standing by the supervision-and-privilege blackboard in the nursing station, and Muir waved his coffee cup toward Janis Plumtree’s name, beside which was just the chalked notation SSF—supervised sharps and flames—which indicated that she, like most of the patients, was not to be entrusted with a lighter or scissors.
“Degenerate Incontinent . . . Dipsomaniac,” hazarded Armentrout. He wished the pay telephone in the lounge would stop ringing.
“No,” said Muir with exaggerated patience. “Haven’t you read the new edition of the diagnostic manual? ‘Dissociative identity disorder.’ What we used to call MPD.”
Armentrout stared at the intern. Muir had been resentful and rebellious ever since they’d heard the news about the overweight bipolar girl Armentrout had treated and released last week; the obese teenager had apparently hanged herself the day after she had gone home.
“Plumtree doesn’t have multiple personality disorder,” said Armentrout. “Or your DID, either. And I don’t appreciate you running tests on her circadian rhythms, and giving her . . . zeitgebers! That silly watch that beeps all the time? You’re not her primary, I am. I’m on top of her—”
“The watch is a grounding technique,” interrupted Muir. “It’s to forcibly remind her that she’s here, and now, and safe, when flashbacks of the traumas that fragmented her personality forcibly intrude—”
“She’s not—”
“You can practically see the personalities shift in her! I think the patients have even caught on—did you hear Regushi mention Heckle and Jeckles? I think he was trying to say Jekyll and Hyde. . . though I can’t figure out why he seemed to resent her.”
“She’s not a multiple, damn it. She’s depressed and delusional, with obsessive-compulsive features—her constant demands to use the shower, the days-of-the-week underwear, the way she gargles mouthwash all the time—”
“Then why haven’t you got her on anything? Haloperidol, clomipramine?” Muir put down his coffee cup and crossed to the charge nurse’s desk.
To Armentrout’s alarm, the man picked up the binder of treatment plans and began flipping through it. “You don’t know enough to be second guessing me, Philip,” Armentrout said sharply, stepping forward. “There are confidential details of her case—”
“A shot of atropine, after midnight tonight?” interrupted Muir, reading from Plumtree’s chart. He looked up, and hastily closed the binder. “What for, to dilate her pupils? Her pinpoint pupils are obviously just a conversion disorder, like hysterical blindness or paralysis! So is the erythema, her weird ‘sunburn,’ if you’ve noticed that. My God, atropine won’t get her pupils to normal, it’ll have ’em as wide as garbage disposals!”
Armentrout stared at him until Muir looked away. “I’m going to have to order you, Mister Muir, in my capacity as Chief of Psychiatry here, to cease this insubordination. You’re an intern—a student, in effect!—and you’re overstepping your place.” The pay telephone in the patients’ lounge was still ringing; in a louder voice he went on, “I’ve been practicing psychiatry for nineteen years, and I don’t need a partial recitation of the effects of atropine, helpful though you no doubt meant to be. Shall I . . . dilate! . . . upon this matter?”
“No, sir,” said Muir, still looking away.
“How pleasant for both of us. Were you going home?”
“. . . Yes, sir.”
“Then I’ll see you—you’re not working here tomorrow, are you?”
“I’m at UCI in Orange all day tomorrow.”
“That’s what I thought. You’re going to miss our ice cream social! Well, I’ll see you Thursday then. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, right?”
Muir walked out of the nurses’ station without answering.
Armentrout looked after him for a moment, then made his way around the cluttered desks to the window and looked out into the TV lounge at the patients, who couldn’t be bothered to answer the telephone. Plumtree and Long John Beach had stayed at the conference table after the foolish self-esteem group had broken up—Armentrout favored the quick ‘buying the pharm’ attitude toward mental illness over the long, tormenting, dangerous routines of psychotherapy—and he saw that Sid Cochran had got over his sulk and rejoined them. They appeared to be playing cards.
You’ve got a busy day tomorrow, he told himself; coordinating the paperwork on the nurse anesthetist and the attending nurses, and then dealing with Plumtree after she recovers from the procedure. A busy day, and you’ll be lucky to get a few hours of sleep tonight. But tomorrow you may very well find out what happened on New Year’s Day, and learn how to make it happen again.
Atropine, Philip—you fool—is used for more than just dilating eye pupils; it also dries up saliva and nasal secretions, which is desirable in the administration of . . . of what the patients sometimes call “Edison Medicine.”
At first, they had tried to play for cigarettes, but after Long John Beach had twice eaten the pot, snatching the Marlboros and shoving them into his mouth and chewing them up, filters and all, Cochran and Plumtree decided to play for imaginary money.
They were playing five-card stud, listlessly. To make up for the tendency of any sort of showing pair to automatically win in this short-handed game, they had declared all queens wild; and then Long John Beach had proposed that the suicide king be taken out of the deck.
“I second that emotion,” Janis had said.
“What’s the suicide king?” Cochran had asked.
The one-armed old man had pawed through the deck, and then flipped toward Cochran the King of Hearts; and Cochran saw that the stylized king was brandishing a sword blade that was certainly meant to be extending behind his head, but, with the token perspective of the stylized line drawing, could plausibly be viewed as being stuck right into his head.
“Sure,” Cochran had said nervously. “Who needs him?”
Janis had just won a “multi-thousand-dollar” pot with two queens and a king, which according to the rules of this game gave her three kings; Cochran had folded when she was dealt a face-up queen, but Long John Beach idiotically stayed to the end with a pair of fives.
“Hadda keep her honest,” the old man mumbled.
“I almost dropped out when you raised on third street, John,” Janis told him. “I was afraid you’d caught a set of dukes.” Cochran realized that her doubletalk was a charitable pretense of having seen shrewdness in the old man’s haphazard play.
Of course, Beach couldn’t shuffle, and Cochran had dealt that hand, so Janis gathered in the cards and shuffled them—expertly, five fast riffles low to the table so as not to flash any cards—and then spun out the three hole cards.
“Have you had your PCH scheduled yet?” she asked Cochran. “That’s probable cause hearing,” she added, “to authorize the hospital to keep you for longer than two weeks.”
“Longer than two weeks?” said Cochran. “Hell no, not even.” He had an eight down and an eight showing, and decided to keep raising unless a queen showed up. “No, I’m just in on a 51-50, seventy-two hours observation, and that’s up late tomorrow night, which I suppose means they’ll let me go Thursday morning. I don’t know why anybody bothered to have me transferred here from Norwalk. I’ve got a job to get back to, and Armentrout hasn’t even got me on any medications.”
“I bet a thousand smokes,” said Long John Beach, who was showing an ace. The tiny black eyes in his round face didn’t seem to have any sockets to sit in, and they were blinking rapidly.
“We’re playing for imaginary dollars now, John,” Janis told him, “you ate all the cigarettes, remember?” To Cochran she said, “Has he talked to you yet? Dr. Armentrout?”
“For a few minutes, in his office,” said Cochran. “She calls,” he told Long John Beach, “and I raise you a thousand.”
“She calls,” echoed the old man, still blinking.
“He’ll want to talk to you more,” Plumtree said thoughtfully. “And he’ll probably give you some kind of meds first. Do cooperate, tell him everything you know about—your problems, so you’ll be of no further use to him. He—he can keep anybody he wants, for as long as he wants.”
“I been here two and a half years,” said the old man. “My collapsed lung’s been okay for so long now it’s ready to collapse again.”
Collapsed brain, you mean, Cochran thought. But he stared out the window, and shivered at the way the spotlights on the picnic tables in the fenced-in courtyard only emphasized the total darkness of the parking lot beyond, and he thought about the wire mesh laminate that would prevent him from breaking that glass, if he were to try, and about the many heavy steel, doubly locked doors between himself and the real world of jobs and bars and highways and normal people.
The telephone was still impossibly ringing, but Cochran was again remembering the intercom he and Nina had bought to be able to hear their expected baby crying, and remembering too Long John Beach’s hollow echo of She calls, and he wasn’t tempted to answer it.
“Have you,” he asked Plumtree, “had your . . . PCH, yet?”
“Yes.” A rueful smile dimpled her cheeks. “A week ago, right in the conference room over yonder. You’re allowed to have two family or friends from outside, and my mom wouldn’t have come, so my roommate Cody came. Cody hasn’t got any respect for anybody.”
“Oh.” The one-armed old man had not called Cochran’s raise, but Cochran didn’t want to say anything more to him. “What did Cody do?”
Plumtree sighed. “I don’t know. She apparently hit the patient advocate—the man had a bloody lip, I recall that. I think Dr. Armentrout was teasing her. But!—the upshot!—of it all was that I’m now 53-53 with option to 53-58—the hospital was given a T-con on me, a temporary conservatorship, and I might be here for a year . . . or,” she said with a nod toward the distracted Long John Beach, “longer. I’m sure my waitress job, and my car, are history already.”
“That’s . . . I’m sorry to hear that, Janis,” Cochran said. “When I get out, I’ll see if there’s anything I can do—” He could feel his face turning red; the words sounded lame, but at this moment he really did intend to get her out of this hospital, away from the malignant doctor. He reached across the table and held her hand. “I’ll get you out of here, I swear.”
Plumtree shrugged and blinked away a glitter of tears, but her smile was steady as she looked into Cochran’s eyes. “ ‘All places that the eye of heaven visits’,” she recited, “‘are to a wise man ports and happy havens’.”
Cochran’s arms tingled, as if with returning circulation, and he laced his fingers through Plumtree’s. Those lines were from Richard II, from a speech his wife Nina had often quoted when she’d been feeling down, and he knew it well. The lines immediately following referred to being exiled by a king, and Cochran recalled that Plumtree had been committed for having claimed to have killed a king; so he skipped ahead to the end of the speech: “‘Suppose the singing birds musicians,’” he said unsteadily, “‘The grass whereon thou tread’st the presence strewed, the flowers fair ladies, and thy steps no more than a delightful measure or a dance—’”
Long John Beach opened his mouth then, and his harsh exhalation was a phlegmy cacophony like the noise of a distant riot; and then, in a woman’s bitterly mocking voice, he finished the speech: “‘For gnarling sorrow hath less power to bite the man that mocks at it and sets it light’.”
—And then Cochran was standing on the linoleum floor several feet back from the table, shaking violently, his chair skidding away behind him and colliding with the wall—the woman’s voice had been dead Nina’s voice, and when Cochran had whipped his head around he had seen sitting beside him a massive figure wearing a wooden mask, and the golden eyes that stared at him out of the carved eyeholes had had horizontal pupils, like a goat’s—and Cochran had instantly lashed out in an irrational terror-reflex and driven his right fist with all his strength into the center of the mask.
But it was Long John Beach who now rolled across the floor off of his overturned chair, blood spraying from his flattened nose and spattering and pooling on the gleaming linoleum.
Plumtree was out of her own chair, and she ran around the table to kneel by the old man—but not to help him; she drew her fist up by her ear and then punched it down hard onto a puddle of the blood on the floor. The crack of the impact momentarily tightened Cochran’s scalp with sympathetic shock.
“Jesus!” came a hoarse shout from the nurses’ station. “Staff! Code fucking Green, need a takedown!”
Plumtree had time only to meet Cochran’s frightened gaze and smile before the hallway doors banged open and an upright mattress was rushed into the room, carried by two of the security guards; then the guards had used it to knock Plumtree over backward on the floor, and had jumped onto it to hold her down.
“She,” choked Cochran, “she didn’t hit him, I did!”
Armentrout was hurrying in, and he glanced angrily at Cochran. “Look at her,” he snapped.
Plumtree’s bloody fist was thrashing free of the mattress for a moment, then one of the guards had grabbed her wrist and pressed her hand to the floor.
“And what hand did you hit him with?” Armentrout asked sarcastically.
Cochran held out the back of his right hand and saw, with a sudden chill in his belly but no conscious awareness of surprise, that the skin of his knuckles was smooth and unbroken, the old ivy-leaf discoloration not distended by any swelling at all.
“No chemicals for her,” called Armentrout sharply to the charge nurse, who had sprinted into the room with a hypodermic needle. “Not tonight, she’s, uh, due for a dose of atropine in a couple of hours. Don’t argue with me! Put her in four points in the QR for tonight, with five-minute checks.”
One of the security guards looked up at him desperately. “You’re not gonna sedate her?” he asked, rocking on the mattress as he held down Plumtree’s spasming body.
“I’m the one who hit the old man!” shouted Cochran. “She didn’t do it, I did!”
“You’ve bought yourself a meds program,” Armentrout told him, speaking in a conversational tone but very fast, “with this . . . display of childish gallantry. No,” he called to the guard, “PCP tactics. You’re going to have to just wrestle her in there.”
“Terrific,” the man muttered. “Get hold of her other arm, Stan, and I’ll get this busted hand in a hard come-along.”
“Watch she don’t bite,” cautioned his partner, who was groping under the mattress. “I got her hair too, but she’s in a mood to tear it right out of her scalp.”
The guards dragged Plumtree to her feet. Her teeth were bared and her eyes were squinting slits, but the come-along hold on her wounded hand was effective—when the guard who held it rotated her wrist even slightly, her knees sagged and her mouth went slack. The three of them shuffled carefully out of the room. The charge nurse had got Long John Beach into a chair, where he sat with his face hanging between his knees and dripping blood rapidly onto the floor, while she talked into a telephone on the counter.
“Do you remember the way to your room?” Armentrout asked Cochran. “Good,” he said when Cochran nodded, “go there and go to sleep. Your roommate is apparently going to be a bit late coming in.”
Cochran hesitated, not looking the doctor in the eye—his first impulse had been to tell Armentrout that he had just had a recurrence of the hallucination that had landed him in the state’s custody, but now he was glad that Armentrout hadn’t let him speak. Any shakiness he exhibited now would be considered just a response to this noisy crisis.
For his self-respect, though, he did permit himself to say, just before turning obediently away toward the hall, “I swear, on the ashes of my wife and unborn child, I’m the one that hit him.”
“I will heal you, Sid,” he heard the doctor say tightly behind him. “That’s a promise.”
The door to the Quiet Room was open, and Cochran waited until the yawning psych tech had glanced in and then walked away down the hall before he stepped out of his own room and tiptoed to the open door. It would be five minutes before the man would be back to look in on Plumtree again.
She was lying face-up on a mattress in the otherwise empty room; and she rolled her head over to look at him when he appeared in the doorway.
“Mr. Cochran,” she said wearily, “of the dead wife. Rah rah fucking rah. You did hit him, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Cochran. “I had to sneak in here and thank you for taking the blame, but I—I can’t let you do it. I tried to tell Armentrout tonight what really happened; I’ll make him . . . get it, tomorrow. Even though it’ll probably mean I get a—” What did she call it, he thought nervously, the highway through Laguna and Newport, “—a PCH. My God, Janis, your poor hand! You shouldn’t have done that, not that I don’t—not that I’m not grateful—I do.” I’m not making sense, he thought. But how can they leave her tied down on the floor like this? “But I meant what I said, earlier—even if they keep me for two weeks, I’ll get you out of here one way or another. I promise.”
“I punched the floor, didn’t I? For you. Shit. You’d better get me out, I hope you can pull strings and you’re not just a, like a burger-flipper somewhere. And see you do tell ’em what really happened—first thing tomorrow, hear? I’ve got troubles enough, in the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost. They’re gonna give me some kind of shot here in a couple of hours, Christ knows what for.” Her mouth was working, and he wondered if she was about to start crying. “This is just like twit Janis, to fall. for some dorky tuna in the nut hatch.” She opened her mouth and licked her lower lip, and flexed her arms uselessly against the restraints. “You want to have been of some use on Earth? Scratch my chin for me, it’s itching like to drive me . . . sane.”
Cochran stepped into the room and knelt by her head, and the lights dimmed for a moment. He reached out, with his trembling left hand, and gently drew his fingernails over the side of her chin she had apparently been trying to reach with her tongue.
She surprised him by lifting up her head and kissing his palm. “I was sorry to hear about your wife’s death,” she whispered. “How long were you married?”
“. . . Nearly five years,” Cochran said. He had stopped scratching her chin, though his fingertips were still on her cheek.
“How did you meet her?”
“She . . . fell down some steps, and I caught her.” He pulled his hand back self-consciously. “I’m a cellarman at a vineyard up in San Mateo County, by Daly City, Pace Vineyards, and she was visiting from France, touring all the Bay Area vineyards. Her family’s in the wine business in the Bas Medoc—the Leon family, they’ve been there since the Middle Ages. And she was looking at the casks of Zinfandel, in fact she was just in the act of tasting the young vintage with a tâte-vin, thing like a ladle, and at that moment the big earthquake of ’89 hit—5:04 in the afternoon—and she fell down the steps.”
“And you caught her,” Plumtree said softly. “I remember that earthquake. Poor Sid.”
“He,” exhaled Cochran, finally nerving himself up to broach the point of this midnight visit, “the old one-armed man, he—I thought he talked with her voice, there, when we were quoting the Shakespeare. My dead wife’s voice. And then he looked like a, a man who chased me in Paris. That’s why I hit him, it was just a shocked reflex. But it was her voice, it was her—unless I’m a whole lot crazier than I even thought.”
“I’m sure it was her. He can channel dead people like a vacuum cleaner, and you were sitting right by him.” She glanced at the open doorway, and then back at Cochran. “You’d better go. I’m not supposed to have visitors here.”
He managed to nod and stand up, though he was even more disoriented now than he’d been when he’d walked in. As he turned toward the door, she said quietly behind him, “I love you, Sid.”
He hesitated, shocked to realize that he wanted to say that he loved her too. It wasn’t possible, after all: he had met this woman only a few hours ago, and she did seem to be some genuine variety of crazy—though that only seemed to be something the two of them shared in common, actually—and in any case Nina had been dead for only ten days. And her . . . ghost might be . . .
He forced that thought away, for now.
“My friends call me Scant,” he said, without turning around; then, though he was aching to say something more, he made do with muttering, “I’m as crazy as you are,” and hurried out of the room.