Earthquake Weather (8 page)

“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 eye-holes 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.”