Authors: Tony Strong
Greenridge Hospital. A residential mental health facility twenty miles upstate. During the year she's spent in New York, Claire's only been out of Manhattan twice, once with Christian and once when she rode in from JFK airport. Nothing in her experience of America has prepared her for the squalor of its public-access health institutions.
The ward she's been admitted to is protected by electronic combination locks. In theory, she and the other patients are secure while they're assessed for risk of injury to others or themselves. In practice, they're prisoners. One man, a huge Negro whom the orderlies call Meathead, is actually cuffed to his bed for twenty hours out of every twenty-four, for reasons she never discovers. The other patients are mobile, after a fashion, though they shuffle up and down the polished corridors as if hobbled by invisible leg irons, muttering in an urban patois she doesn't understand.
It's very hot on the ward, and none of the windows open. Many of the male patients go bare-chested, and even the medical staff wear nothing under their thin blue overalls. At night, men and women are separated only by a corridor. On her first night, she hears the screams as a girl across the hall is attacked in her bed. The staff pull her assailant off her, but two hours later he's back in her cubicle again.
Dr Bannerman comes to Greenridge twice a week, for what he calls his clinics. These involve a brief, mumbled conversation as he updates his notes, followed by a flurry of activity as he writes a new sheaf of prescriptions. Claire's made the mistake of telling him that fear of the other patients is disturbing her sleep, so in addition to all her other drugs she's given sleeping pills, small gel-filled capsules that leave her groggy for half the following day. She's being 'stabilized', whatever that means, with what the doctor refers to as 'attack' levels of Pimozide, Proverin and Iclymitol, drugs that he assures her have no side-effects, but which she's convinced are blunting her thought processes and coating her once-quick synapses in a thick, gluey syrup of medication. They also make her constantly hungry. She seems to spend her whole day in the television room, waiting like some lethargic, bloated fledgling for the orderlies to come round with yet another tray of stodgy hospital food.
It seems ironic that Bannerman is so obsessed with medication, since it's clearly drug abuse that has fried most of his patients' brains in the first place. They compare prescriptions with all the savvy of the gourmet — 'You got methadone? Fucking A, all the man gave me were two fuckin' Tueys and a scrip for some Deth' — and tell anyone who'll listen about the higher reality they've experienced on angel dust or PCP or crack.
Glenn Furnish finishes loading the autoclave, strips off his Nitrile overall and gloves and dumps them in the prep-room waste disposal. 'Good night, Harold,' he says politely, sticking his head into the office next door. 'I'm all done here. Unless you'd like for me to give you a hand with those burial licences?'
Harold waves him away. 'Go on, get out of here. You, too, Alicia,' he adds to his daughter. 'I can finish up here. You young folks probably got stuff you want to be doing.' Harold is not an overly observant man, but even he's noticed that his daughter seems quite interested in her co-worker. Perhaps if they get off work at the same time, Glenn will ask her out.
'I don't believe I'm doing much tonight,' Alicia says idly. But if she, too, is hoping that Glenn will suggest they do something together, she isn't in luck.
Claire's ward, Faraday, has an administrator's office with a computer. While the administrator's away on a supper break, she goes in there and takes a look. As she'd hoped, it's hooked up to the Net. She pulls up a search engine and looks for Dr Constance Leichtman.
More than a dozen matches come up. Claire was expecting links to sex offenders and serial killers, but what she gets, so far as she can tell, is a series of papers on social anthropology and the family structure of gorillas. Perhaps there are two Dr Leichtmans.
Instead, she goes into a site on Baudelaire and downloads a translation of
Les Fleurs du Mal.
I have more memories than if I had lived a thousand years.
She's certain there's an answer somewhere in the poems, if only she could see it.
===OO=OOO=OO===
Glenn stops by the store on his way home. As it's the end of the day the staff are busy restocking the shelves, clearing up the perishable goods and returning them to the chiller rooms out back. He goes over to the fish counter and asks to examine a red snapper. Wordlessly, the assistant gloves his hand in a plastic food bag, picks up the fish and proffers it to the customer. The eye is milky, cauled in a soft opaque substance. Glenn sniffs delicately, then nods OK. He puts the fish in his basket and goes over to the fruit display. An assistant, an attractive young blonde, is bent over the counter, pulling out all the over-ripe fruit. Glenn admires the way her hair, pushed up under the regulation hygiene hat, has worked its way loose during the course of the day; two or three coils brush her long neck and the collar of her store uniform. 'Excuse me,' he says softly. The girl straightens up. Yes, she's as nice looking as he'd thought. There are fine blond hairs on her cheeks and her forehead, like the soft furry mould that grows on a preserve. 'Can I help you?' she says.
He points at the bin of apples she was rummaging in. 'I'd just like some of those,' he explains.
The girl says, 'Oh, I'm afraid these are going bad.'
'Really?'
'Yes. There must have been a rotten one in there. We're going to have to throw all of them away.'
'Don't do that,' Glenn murmurs. He has pulled an empty bag from the dispenser and starts to fill it from the bin. The apples are pock-marked with ginger-coloured areas of bruising. Here and there the bruises have split, and the broken skin is covered with a soft grey rind. 'I like them ripe,' he says. 'It's an acquired taste. Like burned toast.' From her name tag, he sees she's called Marianne. 'What time do you get off work, Marianne?'
She looks confused at the sudden change of tack, then defensive. 'I'm, uh, working late,' she says.
'Perhaps another time, then,' he says. He reaches past her into the grapes bin, scooping up a handful of the loose over-ripe ones that have fallen off the bunches. He puts them in his mouth all at once, like a handful of peanuts.
Marianne doesn't answer. He walks off, dragging his basket along the edge of the counter so it rattles.
===OO=OOO=OO===
Returning to her office, the administrator, Sheryl, finds Claire fast asleep in front of the computer screen. A pile of printouts have slipped from her hand to the floor. The administrator picks them up and frowns.
'You shouldn't be doing this, Claire,' she chides gently. Claire wakes up with a start.
'What?'
'This machine isn't for patients' use. This material may not be helpful to your state of mind. I'll have to give it to the doctor so he knows what you've been doing.'
For no reason that she can discern, Claire starts to cry again.
===OO=OOO=OO===
An hour after he spoke to her, in the staff car park round the back of the store, Glenn watches Marianne coming out of the staff exit. She goes to a small Japanese car. He watches her unlock it -with a key, he notes; there's no remote alarm —
and pull her seatbelt on before she turns on the ignition.
He follows her to her house, a small post-war prefab in a run-down development about five minutes from the store. There are children's bikes and a baby walker in the yard. Marianne must be a few years older than she looks, or perhaps she just started breeding very young.
He's tempted to find an observation point and wait, but he doesn't really have the time. He decides to save it for another night.
===OO=OOO=OO===
'You've got to put all this behind you,' Bannerman is saying. He sounds uncomfortable. In his hand he has the sheaf of poems Claire had downloaded from the Internet. 'This is not, uh, appropriate reading for someone in your condition.'
'What is my condition?' she murmurs.
'How are you getting on with the Proverin?' he asks, ignoring the question.
She looks out of the window. 'Fine.'
'Ah!' For the first time in this afternoon's session the doctor shows real enthusiasm. 'As I thought, it must have been an abreaction between the Pimozide and the Iclymitol which was causing the nausea. Excellent progress.'
Glenn uncorks a bottle of wine, sniffs at it delicately and eats the first apple, crushing the soft, rotten flesh between his palate and tongue. It tastes vaguely sherry-like. The apple falls apart in his hands as he eats it, and he has to lick his fingers and rinse them before sitting down at his laptop. While he waits for the modem to connect, he hums tunelessly and licks his fingers again.
Welcome to Necropolis.
This is a members-only adult website which--
Even before the page has finished loading, he's typed in his password and hit the Enter button. The menu page comes up. Again he hits the link he wants before the whole page has appeared.
There's another screen now, an innocuous-looking list of sites on related topics. He positions the mouse arrow over the lower right-hand quadrant of the screen, and moves it in a circle until it turns into a hand, indicating that he's found a hidden link. He clicks.
You are in a dense grove of black poplar trees. They surround you in all directions, except one, the north.
Impatiently he types in, 'Charon'.
Recognizing you as a denizen of this place, Cerberus lets you pass.
You have three messages waiting.
Glenn scrolls down the list of messages. They are all from his customers —
his patrons, as he likes to think of them. One thanking him for delivery of his last piece and letting him know that payment has been made by transfer to an Internet bank account, another making some textural observations, and a third which says simply:
The Venus is unattainable at present.
You missed your chance. Will you be able to move faster next time, Charon? I shall contact you as soon as I have news.
Regards,
Helios
Glenn deletes all the messages, logs off and erases all the history files from his computer, wiping the record of which sites he has just visited. Then he picks up his battered copy of
Les Fleurs du Mal,
and turns once again to a page so well thumbed its corners have turned to lace: Vogler's introduction. He reads:
It is the job of the translator, not merely to transcribe from one language to another, but to
transfigure,
to liberate these dark captives from the dank and remote dungeons of history, and to assist their emergence, blinking and newborn, into the chilly, inhospitable air of the present. To be a translator is to be midwife to a bloody but triumphant rebirth.
The passage has been underlined once, in pencil. Beneath it, in the same pencil, Glenn Furnish has written a definition from the dictionary:
Transfigure: (vb. trans) 1) to alter the figure or appearance of; 2) to elevate or glorify, to transform from flesh to spirit.
He closes the book and carefully reaches for another apple. More rotten than the first, the soft, squishy sac drips its juices down his fingers as he transports it gingerly to his mouth. The skin, already shredding like a wet paper bag, is so soft that, when he puts his lips to it, he can simply suck and the pungent vinegary-sweet mush goes straight down his throat. When he has finished, he licks his fingers clean, then reaches for a pencil and his sketchbook.
Meathead sits in the television room, reading a comic. During the past few days his restraints have been removed, although he's clearly on an even stronger drug regime than Claire is. He seems friendly, though, and she assumes that now he's free to roam about he's no more dangerous than any of the other patients.
There's a box of tattered, ripped-up books at the back of the room and she looks through it for something her glued-up mind can cope with. They're mostly pulp Westerns and kung-fu books. A couple of hospital romances were presumably donated by the nurses.
Meathead looks up. 'Hey, Claire. Whatcha got?'
She looks at the title page unenthusiastically.
'Raging Pleasure.
You?'
He grunts. '
Judge Dredd
.'
'Swap?'
Meathead looks contemptuous. 'I don't read books that don't have no pictures.'
She looks at the first page. The words seem to wriggle and squirm. After a while she puts the book down and looks at the television. Fifty-eight per cent of viewers think the woman should give her straying boyfriend one more chance.
===OO=OOO=OO===
'Claire, you have a visitor.'
She must have nodded off. She looks up, startled, at the sound of the orderly's voice. Next to her, Meathead has abandoned
Judge Dredd
and is staring dopily at the television. Behind him, staring down at her, is Christian.
===OO=OOO=OO===
They go to one of the consulting rooms. Christian seems shocked at the way she looks. She's put on weight, and her skin has erupted in greasy spots as a reaction to the drugs.
'Christ,' he says, 'you look terrible.'
'You really know how to charm a girl,' she mutters. She stumbles a little as she gets a chair. The medication is affecting her balance.
'I'm so sorry,' he says. 'Claire, I'm so sorry.'
She knows he isn't referring to his remark about her appearance. She makes a gesture. She wants to say that none of this is his fault, but the words are hard to find.
'If it's any consolation,' he says, 'they fooled me, too. Dr Leichtman and that detective.' He sits opposite her and takes one of her hands in his.
'I'm OK,' she says. 'Christian, really, I'm OK.'