Carmichael: “I want seven by way of sixteen and forty-three.” Translation: Didilos, a short squat Spanish patient, with bipolar disorder, had just slashed his wrists again, and they were tired of the histrionic attention-getting outbursts. He was about to be put down like a rabid dog with a feisty dose of electroshock.”
The exchanges between Fontanegro and Carmichael were better than the police band back home.
Perhaps Saverly had the best formula of all, Manny conceded, a big heart together with a big mind. First, empathize deeply in order to get inside his patients’ heads like no one else could, then engage that big brain of his to strategize how to help the patients out of the mazes of their own minds. No wonder Manny liked him.
The staff all relied heavily on coffee to ensure their reaction times and neural processing speeds were a good deal faster than the over-medicated patients. They were only a half hour in to the swing shift and each person on duty had already hit the coffee drip machine at least twice. He could see the coffeemaker clearly from where he was sitting; all part of Manny’s master gamesmanship.
The proof of the coffee-logic was in the pudding. Vasquez, a six-foot-four Sasquatch of a patient, with enough greyish-white hair to certify the abominable snow man was no legend, raised his hand to sneeze. Before he could complete the motion, two orderlies tackled him to the ground. Realizing their mistake, instead of apologizing, Stoneman, the taller one said, “Watch yourself.” His sidekick, Bravarro grunted.
Most of the staff either hit the gym, or went the other way, over-ate to the point of obesity, so come show time, they had either strength or weight as an advantage, if not both. Yes, all in all, control meant a lot around here. So long as the inmates outnumbered the jailors, Manny could see why. One never knew what would spark an upheaval. It could be some maniac shouting “Fire!” in response to a conflagration that was only burning in his mind’s eye.
“You gonna lay down a piece?” Jim said. “You seem distracted today.”
“Just people watching. You can learn a lot from watching people,” Manny said.
“I find you can learn more from just talking to them.” Jim’s confession had an ominous ring to it, and Manny wondered if he was on the same information gathering mission he was, before letting the thought slip from his mind. Jim, himself one of the big orderlies, differed from the others in that intimidation wasn’t his thing, but he certainly wasn’t any more complicated. None of these guys had to bother with Machiavellian schemes; in this world, they were the ruling lords. And the slave must know the master better than the master, the slave.
NINETEEN
Robin decided to return to work, if only on a partial basis, to see if adjusting the stress level in his life up a notch would trigger anymore breakdowns. It was a form of desensitization therapy. Hanging around the boys and enduring their heckling would give them the time they needed to adjust to him, as well. The theory was sound. Didn’t mean it was going to work. So far, nothing had really worked to mitigate his PTSD. The police department provided counseling, of course, but even if he was tempted to use that approach, Drew was better than anyone they had on hand, and he lived with her. So in a sense, he’d been tapping that well, also, to no avail. Though his recent catatonic state could certainly be counted among his coping mechanisms; he found the condition, ironically, calming.
His first day back on the job after his little “vacation,” Robin walked in to the police precinct—dressed as a female. The high heels didn’t help. He was six foot two in bare feet.
The laughter rang out ahead of cue.
“Oh, girl, you should have thought about the height thing before you had them cut into you.” Paolo, in his twenties, buff and just out of the academy, spoke in Brazilian-accented English. The cocktail was enough of an aphrodisiac that women drank him down faster than a Vodka Collins. He looked up at Robin from the vantage point of his five-ten frame. Still, he wasn’t exactly looking away.
“I’d still date you,” Emmett said. Emmett, in his twenties, was the practical joker and ringleader of their little posse. Robin could count on him to glue a target on his ass the second he turned his back to him.
“Hell, yeah,” Ethan, a naïve bumbler, crowed.
“You’re fifty-something,” Paolo replied, directing the comment at Ethan. “You’ll date anything that’ll have ya.”
“Don’t see as that tarnishes the sentiment any.” Ethan grabbed a stack of papers from his desk, about as much as he could fit in his hands.
“Don’t worry about the height thing,” Robin said. “It’s my intent to replace you all with basketball and volleyball players, as soon as I get Carmichael’s position, which oughtn’t to be a problem now, not in this politically correct town. Transsexuals are favored over most any other minority group as their disenfranchised act is tough to beat.”
“Ouch.” Ethan dropped the stack of papers on Emmett’s desk. Robin thought, there went the last of his hopes of ever getting promoted.
“Bitch got that right.” Paolo flexed for him, perhaps unconsciously, perhaps just to screw with him. “If I want to jump in front of the line, guess I’ll have to chop my dick off and brush up on my Spanish.”
“Just talk your president into dropping more boat people on our shore, Paolo, and you’ll be fine with the Portuguese you speak now,” Robin said.
“Ha-ha.” Paolo straightened his hair absently. “And I think we should have sex as soon as possible or I’ll spend the rest of my days just thinking about it.”
Robin smirked. “I’ll think about it. I know how much your sanity means to you.”
“Better wait until Robin’s all the way changed over.” Ethan, busy neatening up his desk, threw a wad of paper in the waste basket. “He’s still got the dick, you fool.”
“No shit. Yeah, I guess I better wait,” Paolo said, still clearly debating it in his head. He put his legs up on his desk and his hands in his pocket in such a way as to get the bulge in his crotch to stand out more.
“Be more politically correct to screw her now.” Emmett threw the tube of spermicidal gel which landed on Paolo’s lap. “Don’t forget the captaincy’s at stake.”
“Shit, I didn’t think about that.” Paolo was going through his drawers, keen on finding something. “You okay with getting this on video?” Paolo probably was no longer able to tell himself if he was being serious or not.
“Keep it up, and I’ll request the regents insist on you guys taking sensitivity classes,” Robin chided.
“Trust me, you’ll know what it’s like to have your dicks cut off, too, if that happens,” Ethan said. “Not that it left any lasting impression on me.” Brushing by Robin with the paperwork, he added, “Get back to work you mooks. We have to justify our salaries somehow. Since Berkeley doesn’t mind everyone being crazy, cops included, it really cuts into the need for any of us.”
The gang made a mock effort to look busy, having no intention of doing a damn thing until word came in a crime spree was unfolding. Not when they had Robin to focus on. He should have thought of that and of taking enough time off to undergo this metamorphosis in private. But if they didn’t feel included, there’d probably be even more hard feelings.
Robin took his seat to, “Pretty,” the comment voiced by the whoopee cushion Emmett had stuck under his regular cushion. He smiled, stealing some of Emmett’s thunder. No doubt Robin had just provoked him to try harder next time.
***
Later, towards the end of his shift, Robin caught Paolo staring at him, living up to his promise of not being able to get doing Robin out of his mind. Must be a macho thing.
Ethan noticed Paolo’s eyes on Robin. “Give it up, Paolo. Besides, that black klepto bitch, Bermuda, on night shift has you beat for the captaincy. She’s blowing the head of the Regents’ board of directors to boot. You aren’t about to compete with that.”
Paolo frowned, and gave up messing with his own head based on the merit of Ethan’s logic. “Still think dating a tranny can’t hu
rt,” he mumbled.
Robin smiled. He felt he was handling things pretty well. Signs of a strong ego. And a healthy distance on himself, not to mention a good sense of humor. Maybe the combination would be enough to see him through. Then again, the day-shift crew had all worked together for some time, so they knew the value of having one another’s backs trumped most everything else. He couldn’t expect to fare so well with the rest of the department. But it was Berkeley, for Christ’s sake. Could anyone possibly stand out in this town? There must be three trannys per square block, all blending a lot less well. All in all, he probably had it too easy. That just made him wonder about Manny, the hell he must be going through adjusting in his rendition of Stranger in a Strange Land.
Then again, maybe Robin’s self-image was correlated with the reality in which he found himself. More self-hate and voilà, more hell in which Manny found himself. Robin thought, Let’s hope the New Age meme had infiltrated his mind only long enough to be digested by common sense.
TWENTY
Today was a day for assessing body types and body language for clues they might be hiding about his jailors, for bringing stuff Manny may have processed about people with his peripheral attention front and center, where he could make more use of the information. Breaking his sensory influx of information into separate wavelengths also made for more fun and games passing the time. Otherwise he’d be sitting around most of the day with nothing to occupy him.
Manny let his eyes run rampant over the room.
Fontanegro and Carmichael were clearly struggling to keep moving. Small wonder they had found one another, so they could cover for each other. When one was having a good day, she’d take on more of the physical activities that required mobility, the other one would pick up the extra paperwork. With Fontanegro, it was hips and arthritis slowing her down. She was currently using her med cart on wheels as a walker, leaning on it for support. She never knew when she was going to have a flare up. With Carmichael it was heart, her fluid retention rising and ebbing with the waxing and waning moon. Manny watched as Fontanegro did a tissue rebound test, squeezed her forearm, and waited for the fluid to fill the cavity of the depression left there. Shaking her head unfavorably, she absently dispensed a med to Fenton, more concerned with her health than his.
Mostly, Fontanegro and Carmichael sat well away from the patients, and let the orderlies handle the physical care, including the stuff they should have been overseeing, such as the drainage of catheter bags, and the turning of the patients to check for bed sores. Manny learned from watching the younger nurses all the duties the older ones were dodging.
Jim had a bigness to him that might have explained why he developed such a disarming personality; he was but a slighter version of Hartman, scaled down a few notches. He never hit the gym, because he didn’t have to in order to have all the advantage he needed in a skirmish. His long reach was like having a crane on hand for when, like now, a patient trapped himself in the corner, using furniture to build a makeshift moat between himself and the staff. It took Jim all of five seconds to extricate Sutro. His hug was both reassuring and calming, his embrace as sheltering as a cave for the bearlike Sutro.
Renee, mistress of staff-splitting, used her good looks to her advantage. She was probably a borderline personality, to hear Saverly go on about the type, albeit a high functioning one. There were many—staff and patients alike—who wanted to feel they were in tighter with her than with the others, to which her flirtatious nature played perfectly. She often had every male on the floor fighting among themselves for “property rights” to her. Her consciously refined movements were clearly born of realizing that eyes were always on her, playing out sexual fantasies. The overly feminine gestures were meant to play up her attractiveness all the more, and squeeze the predator out of the most passive personality. If her onlooker only had a drop of it in him, she’d summon it to the surface, like bleeding a turnip.
Renee was making up a patient’s room. She made sure to bend over, exposing her ass, for longer than necessary to spread the linens properly, the same way she passed her hand like an iron to smooth out the wrinkles in the sheets with all the loving care her admirers no doubt wished she’d lavish on them.
Stephanie, who should have been a newscaster, given her love of promulgating fear, spoke with exaggerated facial expressions, like a true histrionic. Everything was a big drama, everything required reacting with ten times the adrenaline response and a sense of fight or flight, from the absence of dispensing-cups on her med tray, to someone forgetting to open the blinds. At the moment, she was going on about the puddle on the floor on which she had nearly slipped and broken her neck. She would have played well as a turn-of-the-century aristocratic countess.
Manny surmised that Stephanie’s histrionics had evolved from the same need to compensate for boredom and the grinding regularity of her shifts. He was certainly empathetic about finding alternatives to chemical stimulants, having long since worn out their value himself.
With Stephanie, it was how lost in her head she looked, her vacant expressions and delayed responses, that suggested that creating hell around her was the only true escape from the quagmires of her own mind.
Ronald, master of mixed signals, was plying his craft in the corner of the rec room. He’d just finished chumming it up with Harold, one of the schizophrenic patients, who had clumps of hair falling out from sleeping on the floor and exposure to the particularly virulent fungi that survived the ammonia washes. Ronald had presented Harold with a perfectly formidable plan for foiling the devil-beast standing in the corner, replete with horns, hooves, a spiky tail, and tangerine skin. It was the tangerine skin neither of them could explain. When Harold had returned for a report on the progress of their plan, Ronald denied seeing any such devil-beast, or that they’d had any such conversation.
Manny, not possessing the necessary psychological acumen, was torn as to whether Ronald was one of Saverly’s high functioning borderlines, or just a sadist who enjoyed fucking with his patients’ heads. He suspected his earlier diagnosis of antisocial personality may have been off the mark, if only by being not specific enough. When Ronald seemed overly satisfied with the long-term reaction of being left alone, Manny landed back at antisocial personality. Manny was also growing a lot more sympathetic for these doctors and their misdiagnoses.
Ronald had a perfectly round head like a basketball that was oversized for the rest of his frame, perched as it was on narrow shoulders, and a scant skeleton. Manny was convinced, at first, Ronald’s orange-yellow skin was merely an aberration of the overhead lighting, but he had since come to believe it was on account of beta-carotene build up in his system. The guy was forever eating carrots. Manny never saw him eating regular food. Honestly, he looked like an alien from another world, down to the eyelids that were devoid of eyelashes and the oversized eyeballs. It was probably why the patients approached him so much, determined as they must have been to make peace with the alien before their paranoid fantasies grew any worse.
Ronald, on some level, must have been conscious of triggering such reactions in people since birth, and so, on some level, these were all passive aggressive revenge tactics for him, to borrow one of Robin’s clever little turns of phrase. Manny had learned passive-aggressive as a term on day one. He’d never known what label to give the behavior before his internment exposed him to the psychologically sophisticated – patient and staff alike – but he was certainly all too familiar with the psychology. Most cops had it in spades.
Atterman, the woman who was forever sticking her hands in people’s mouths, certain they were cheeking their meds, had a fixation with oral cavities that went beyond being strictly thorough with her work. Maybe she was inspecting tongue shape and size, and dentition or lack thereof to play into her fantasies of being orally satisfied. She had a burly body type, walked about as well as those bodybuilders pumped up on androgen precursors did bumping into their own muscles.
She was always the one securing the
patients to beds by locking in their wrist and ankle restraints. The S&M overtures weren’t exactly effaced by the smiles of satisfaction she took from the activity. Maybe Manny could play to the dominatrix fetish in order to get control of her when the moment was right.
Margie was startled by one of the patients running up to her and standing in her personal space. So she did what she always did in such situations, spun lies faster than Charlotte could weave her web. She was the stuff of which politicians and storytellers were made. “No, I wasn’t lying when I said drinking the water from that particular fountain would give you super strength. Did you sip it, or did you just guzzle? Well, now you know why it didn’t work, silly. You need to mix it with your saliva very thoroughly, otherwise the special enzymes can’t unlock what’s inside the water.” Faced with this undeniable logic, Charlie calmed down immediately, and returned to standing in line at the drinking fountain.
Margie had a frail build that a strong wind could easily blow over, and an angelic beauty to go with it. She relied on her fast-talking ability to defuse others a little too heavily.
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 53
