Earthquake Weather (10 page)

The disquieting thing was that he had read Dickens’
A Tale of Two Cities
before; and though that had been a long time ago, he had eventually become aware that this book he was reading in the airplane seat by the glow of the tiny overhead spotlight—a Penguin Classics paperback, wedged between his cigarettes and the several little airline bottles of Wild Turkey bourbon—was a different text.

The variances hadn’t been obvious at first, for he’d only been able to read the book fitfully, especially the Parisian scenes; he had still been shaky from his encounter the day before—in the ancient narrow streets south of the river Seine, by Notre Dame cathedral, where fragrant lamb koftes turned on spits in the open windows of Lebanese restaurants—with the man who had called himself Mondard … and who had shortly stopped seeming to be a man, to be a human being at all …

Cochran forced himself to concentrate on pushing the foolish plastic needle through the holes in the vinyl—not knitting, stitching—

The woman in the book had been knitting,
and
stitching, weaving into her fabrics the names of men who were to die on the guillotine. He’d remembered her name as having been something like Madame Laphroaig, but in this text all the French revolutionaries called her Ariachne—a combination of the names
Arachne
and
Ariadne,
given to her because she was always knitting and was married to the “bull-necked” man who owned the wineshop. The notes in the back of the book explained that it was a
nom de guerre
of the revolution, like the name
Jacques
that was adopted by all the men. Cochran recalled that during the French Revolution they had even re-named all the calendar months; the only one he could remember was Thermidor, and he wondered what the others could have been. Fricassee? Jambalaya? Chowder?

He smiled now at the thought; and he tried to pay attention to the occupational therapist’s cheery explanation of how to do a “single cordovan” stitch, and not to think about the book.

But he realized now that the story he’d read on the airplane must have started to diverge from the remembered text very early on. In the scene in the Old Bailey courthouse in London, for example, in which the Frenchman Charles Darnay was on trial for treason, Cochran seemed to remember having read that the court bar was strewn with herbs and sprinkled with vinegar, an apparently routine precaution against “gaol” air … but in this text the bar was twined in living ivy, and splashed liberally with red wine.

And just because of the rhyme he had remembered “Cly the spy,” whose death had been a hoax and whose coffin had proved to contain only paving stones—but he had remembered Cly as a
man,
and certainly the name had not been short for
Clytemnestra.

His hand shook as he pushed the needle through the holes. In the book he’d read on the plane, Madame Ariachne’s cloth had flexed and shivered as she had forced each new, resisting name into the fabric.

“You’re not quite getting the hang of that one, are you?” said Tammy Eddy.

Cochran looked up at her. “It’s hard,” he said.

“Hard to remember what I said?”

“Hard to remember anything at all. But I can do it.”

He thought of the scene at the end of the book as he had read it years ago, in which the dissolute Englishman Sidney Carton redeemed himself by sneaking into the Conciergerie prison to switch places with his virtuous double, the Frenchman Charles Darnay who was condemned to die the next morning; and then Cochran made himself remember the scene as he had read it on the airplane three days ago—

In that variant version it had been a woman who furtively unlocked the cell door—the woman Clytemnestra, who was somehow the classical Greek Clytemnestra from Aeschylus’
Oresteia,
come to atone for having killed the high king Agamemnon.

And in this crazy version the prisoner was a woman too, though still the visitor’s mirror-image double; and when she demanded to know the reason for this visit, this exchange of places, Clytemnestra had said, “Forgive me. Madame has forgotten that we agreed to play in partnership this evening.”

Tammy Eddy was speaking sharply to him—and he realized that she had been repeating herself for several seconds. He looked up at her, and saw that she had retreated to the door and pulled it open. “Put,” she said, obviously not for the first time, “the needle …
down,
Sid.”

“Sorry. Sure.” He opened his fingers and the needle dropped to the tabletop. “I wasn’t listening.” He looked at the vinyl squares and saw that he had stitched them together and then with the blunt needle
torn a hole
in the center of each square. “I guess I wrecked your … your test,” he said lamely. And no doubt failed it, he thought. She’ll probably testify at my PCH.

“They’re not expensive. That’ll be all for today, Sid.” She stepped back a yard into the TV lounge as he pushed his chair back and sidled around the table to the door. “What,” she asked him as he walked past her toward the cafeteria, “were you making, there at the end?”

He stopped for a moment but didn’t look back at her. “Oh, nothing,” he said over his shoulder. “I just got bored and … distracted.”

Perhaps she nodded or smiled or frowned—he kept his eyes on the cafeteria door as he strode forward. He might or might not tell Armentrout, but would certainly not tell this woman, that he had been unthinkingly making a frail mask in which to face the mask that the big bull-headed man would be wearing.

Probably because of his having hit Long John Beach the night before, the knuckles of his right hand stung, and he alternately made a fist and stretched his fingers as he walked through the cafeteria and back out into the lounge without having seen Plumtree or Armentrout—Tammy Eddy was nowhere to be seen now either—and then started down the hall, past the Dutch door of the meds room, to the wing of patient rooms.

At every corner and intersection of hall there was a convex mirror attached to the ceiling, so that anyone walking through the unit could see around a corner before actually stepping around it. At L-corners the mirror was a triangular eighth of a globe wedged up in the corner, and at four-way crossings it was a full half-globe set in the middle of the ceiling. Cochran didn’t like the things—they seemed to be
whole
spheres, only part-way intruded here and there through temporary violations of the architecture, like chrome eyes peering down curiously into the maze of hallways, and he couldn’t shake the irrational dread of rounding a turn and seeing two of them in the wall ahead of him, golden for once instead of silver, with a single horizontal black line across each of them—but he did reluctantly glance at a couple of them to get an advance look around corners on the way to Plumtree’s room.

But when he finally arrived at her room he saw that her door, in violation of the daytime rules, was closed. He shuffled up to it anyway, intending to knock, and then became aware of Plumtree speaking quietly inside; he couldn’t hear what she said, but it was followed by Armentrout’s voice saying, “So which one of you was it that took the shock?”

The question meant nothing to Cochran, and he was hesitant about interrupting a doctor-and-patient therapy session; and after a few moments of indecisive shuffling, and raising his hand and then lowering it, he let his shoulders slump and turned away and plodded back down the hall toward the TV lounge, defeatedly aware of the wide cuffs of his bell-bottom trousers flapping around his bare ankles.

“Somebody went flatline ten seconds after the shock,” Armentrout went on when Plumtree didn’t immediately answer. “We dragged the Waterloo cart into the treatment room, but your heart started up again before we had to put the paddles on you.” He was smiling, but he knew that he was still shaky about the incident, for he hadn’t meant to call it a “Waterloo cart” just now. Waterloo was the brand name of the thing, but it was known as a crash cart, or a cardiac defibrillator; the incident would probably have been
his
Waterloo, though, as soon as the idealistic Philip Muir heard about it, if Plumtree had died undergoing electroconvulsive therapy with forged permissions while just on a temporary conservatorship. Muir was surely going to be angry anyway, for ECT was not a treatment indicated for multiple personality disorder—or dissociative identity disorder, as Muir would trendily say.

And Armentrout couldn’t pretend anymore that he didn’t know she was a multiple—the ECT had separated out the personalities like a hammer breaking a piece of shale into distinct, individual hard slabs. Armentrout could have wished that it was a little less obvious, in fact; but perhaps the personalities would blend back together a little, before Muir saw her tomorrow.

“Valerie,” said the woman in the bed. “She always takes intolerable situations. It caught Cody by surprise.”

“And who are you?”

“I’m Janis.” She smiled at him, and in the dim lamplight her pupils didn’t seem notably dilated or constricted now.

“How many of you are there?”

“I really don’t know, Doctor. Some aren’t very developed, or exist just for one purpose … like the one called—what does he call himself?—‘the foul fiend Flibbertigibbet!’ What a name! He got it … from Shakespeare, according to him. Is there a play called
Leah
? He claims to have been a Shakespearean actor. I—don’t want to talk about him, he’s who we’ve brought up when we’ve had to fight, to defend our life. He makes our teeth hurt like we’ve got braces on, and he gives us nosebleeds. I don’t want to talk about him.” She shivered, and then smiled wryly. “We’re like the little cottage full of dwarves in
Snow White
—each of us with a job to do, while the poisoned girl sleeps. I used to sign my high-school papers ‘Snowy Eve White’ sometimes.”

“Snow White, Eve White—you’ve seen the movie
The Three Faces of Eve
? Or read the book?”

She shook her head. “No, I’ve never heard of it.”

“Hmm. I bet. And one of you is a man?”

She blinked—and Armentrout could feel the hairs standing up on his arms, for the woman’s face changed abruptly, as the muscles under the skin realigned themselves; her mouth seemed wider now, and her eyes narrower.

“Valerie says you had all my clothes off,” she said in a flat voice. “I’d be pissed about that if I didn’t know you’re a total queer. What did you hit me with?”

“Cody,” said Armentrout in cautious greeting, suddenly wishing Plumtree had been put back in restraints. She had recovered from the succinylcholine amazingly fast, and she didn’t seem to be dopy and blurry, as patients recovering from ECT generally were for at least the rest of the day.

“You’re the one,” he went on, “speaking of hitting, who hit Long John Beach last night, aren’t you, Cody?”

“I don’t know. Probably.” Plumtree’s forehead was dewed with sweat, and she was squinting. “Was this while I had my clothes off? He probably asked for it, he’s got a frisky spirit hand to go with the flesh-and-blood one. And I saw that Cockface guy’s hand—I don’t like his birthmark. A lot of tricky hands around here, and this place is a stinking flop.”

She was breathing through her open mouth, and she looked pale. Altogether she was acting like someone with a bad hangover, and it occurred to Armentrout that the Janis personality had been unimpaired because it had been Cody who had taken the shock treatment. Cody was the one who had given him the finger. Ten seconds had gone by before the Valerie personality, the one who took “intolerable situations,” had taken over. He leaned forward to look at Plumtree’s face, and he saw that her pupils were as tiny as pores. She definitely looked dopy and blurry now.

“What we’re going to try to do is achieve
isolation,
Cody,” he said. “We’ll decide which personality is most socially viable, and then bring that one forward and … cauterize the others off.” This was hardly a description of orthodox therapy, but he wanted to draw a reaction from her. She didn’t seem to be listening, though.

“How many of you are there, Cody?” Armentrout went on. “I’ve met you and Janis, that I know of, and I’ve heard about Valerie.”

“God, I am still in the psych hospital, aren’t I?” she mumbled, rubbing her eyes. “I suppose a cold beer is out of the question. Shit. But no hair of
that
dog, thank you—that was the goddamn Wolfman.”

“That was ECT,” Armentrout said, leaning back in the chair beside the bed and smiling at her, “electroconvulsive therapy—shock treatment, Edison Medicine.” He smiled reminiscently and said, “Generally a course of treatment is six or twelve shock sessions, three a week.”

All the worldly weariness disappeared from her face, and for a moment Armentrout thought the Cody personality had gone away and been replaced by a little girl, possibly the core child; but when she spoke it was in response to what he had just said, so it was probably still Cody, a Cody for once frightened out of her sardonic pose.

She said, “
Again
? You want to do that to me
again
?”

A genuine reaction at last! “At this point I’m undecided.” Armentrout’s heart was beating rapidly, and a smile of triumph kept twitching at his lips. “I’ll make up my mind after our conference later today.”

“Don’t you need … my permission, to do that?”

“One of you signed it,” he said with a shrug. She would probably believe that, even if shown the bogus signature. “How many of you are there?”

“Oh, sweet Jesus, there’s a lot of kids on the bus,” she said wearily, leaning back against the pillows and closing her eyes, “all singing ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat,’ and crying, with a smashed-up crazy man holding a gun on the driver.”

Armentrout recognized the image—it was from the end of the Clint Eastwood movie
Dirty Harry,
when the battered and hotly pursued serial killer hijacked a schoolbus full of children.

“Where is the … the ‘foul fiend Flibbertigibbet’ sitting?”

Plumtree’s eyes were still closed—her eyelids were as wrinkled and pale as paper wrappers bluntly accordioned off drinking straws—but she managed to put derisive impatience into the shake of her head. “
He
isn’t
sitting
,” she said.

Then she was snoring through her open mouth. Armentrout reached out and switched off the lamp, then got up and opened the door to the hallway.