Saverly studied Jim’s body, stiff from rigor mortis, his face twisted into a grotesque. “Where did he get the knife?”
“Sorry, doctor,” Julianne said. “I must have left the door open to the staff kitchen.”
Manny thought, Probably hoping one of the robots would get out, causing havoc among the patients, putting an end to the project. Julianne didn’t like anything or anyone she couldn’t control. The robots weren’t high functioning enough to be influenced by her schmoozing. That made them the enemy.
Ronald joined the staff gathering around Jim’s body like carrion birds. “He was in that locker room half the night. We have to assume he was able to place a call to somebody. If there’s so much as a voicemail in the system…”
Saverly stood. “So, the one man who can never leave, must leave. Maybe there’s still a way to salvage this.”
“There’s more than one ticket out of here, doc,” Ronald suggested helpfully.
After thinking about it, Saverly replied, “Yes, yes, there is.”
Hiding, back pressed against the wall of the adjoining hall, Manny listened in. He watched the scene with Saverly and entourage unfold in the overhead mirror designed to help one see around corners. After hearing what he needed, he absconded into the twisting labyrinth of the psych ward.
***
Manny stepped on a plastic-molded chair and reached into the overhead panel of the drop-ceiling, where he’d stowed a welding torch and goggles. He smiled at the door which read: “Staff Only. Patient Access Not-Permitted.” It led into the locker room – and to fonder times.
He recalled the treasure found inside Mr. Anonymous’s backpack, stuffed into his locker. So Moses, as Julianne had nicknamed him, was moonlighting as an arc welder.
After sliding the panel back into place, Manny hopped off the chair. He pondered the next conundrum: how the hell to make it from here to the escape hatch in the room down the hall and a ways further after that, while carrying a blow torch.
Upon relieving Rupert of his money belt, which, if it actually had money in it, would have been plucked clean by staff eons ago, he strapped the blow torch to his torso. Then he threw on the loose-fitting patient smock, which hid the blow torch and the money belt just fine, with room left over to cart off another body, as well.
And he was off.
***
Manny eyed the impregnable steel grate over the window, took a deep breath.
He started in with the blow torch.
He’d chosen the room because during his stay at the hospital he’d never seen anyone go in; it was as out of the way as he could get. Moreover, it was devoid of cameras. He hadn’t bothered to turn on the lights, preferring the cover of darkness. The full moon beyond the window, what’s more, was providing more than enough illumination. And inspiration. It exposed a darkness of unfathomable depth and dimension.
Five minutes later he heard a voice from behind him, “A blow torch? Really? I’m afraid to ask.” It was Saverly.
Manny turned to see Saverly was flanked by a full contingent of his cronies. Manny dialed up the intensity of the torch and aimed it at his attackers, meaning business.
“If I were you, I’d really chew the orderly out for moonlighting as an arc welder. Shows a definite lack of commitment, if you ask me,” Manny said, wise-assed.
“I’m so sorry. This is my fault. Relax, Manny.” Saverly held out his hands in a placating gesture. “You’re out of here as of right now. I promise.” He took the gun in his hand, fired it to demonstrate it was loaded, then handed the pistol to Manny. “Figured you might need a security blanket until you’re clear as to what was actually going on here all this time.”
Manny didn’t hesitate to grab the gun, or to check the clip to make sure he had enough bullets to get him to the exit.
Once his hand was around the grip of the reassembled weapon, he did in fact relax. Although he saw no reason to release the blow torch in his other hand. He clutched it tightly for safe keeping. There was no being too thorough around these people.
He took a cautious step toward the congregation, wondering what game his tormentors were up to now. He didn’t feel safe in the slightest. They were all professional actors first, psych staff second, evidently why Saverly had kept them around, no matter how twisted their psychologies. If they could convince a court it was all in Manny’s head, that dead body he left behind might just ensure he spent the rest of his life here. Maybe Saverly figured he’d come to the same conclusion and off himself with the gun, saving them a lot of explanations.
Manny gestured for them to squeeze out of the room. They did as instructed.
He kept the posse out in front of him until they were back in Saverly’s office, just him and Saverly. He locked the door. “If they call for reinforcements, you’ll be dead before anyone gets here.”
***
“I’m sorry we have to cut your treatment short,” Saverly said, sitting at his desk. “Your insurance has run out.”
Saverly took a few seconds to let that sink in. Time enough for Manny to realize that, in the middle of being scared out of his wits, he was having the time of his life. In that briefest of moments, Manny realized how much his life as a cop was meant to invoke the childlike terror experienced at the hands of his father, in order to feed the addiction. How much better Saverly was at providing the stimulus than his police work. All of a sudden, he was less than desirous of exiting the establishment. The realizations also made Saverly seem less the bad guy right now, no doubt, as he had calculated.
Saverly, reading his expression, took the blowtorch and gun from Manny. Manny just stood there like a robot at the end of its battery life.
Saverly dialed down the torch until the flame was extinguished. He stowed the gun in a drawer which he locked, pocketed the key.
Then he reclaimed his seat. He seemed hesitant to talk, as if unsure if the shock had worn off enough yet. “This may just be adding insult to injury,” Saverly said, emerging from the silence, “but I’m prescribing an experimental drug that might see you the distance.” He reached for the bottle, shook it. The rattle of the pills was insufficient to snap Manny out of his daze.
“It’s shown promise with helping people break down the barriers inside their heads.” Saverly tossed him the bottle, again as if to test his reflexes to see if the shock had worn off enough for his words to take. “Works at the synaptic junctions that facilitate neural network interactions, where presumably it wires neural nets to one another by repairing the damaged bridges.
“We’re not a hundred percent certain, but that’s the theory. Make sure you check in with me the second you have any untoward reactions.”
“What untoward reactions?” Fearing the worst had sparked some life back into him.
“Loss of impulse control,” Saverly explained. “Inability to distinguish between socially acceptable forms of behavior and alienating forms of behavior. If the walls in your mind fall too fast, your self-policing function might dissolve altogether, exposing your id and all its monsters to the world, if you’ll forgive the reference to dated psychoanalytical thinking.”
“Charming. If you’ll excuse my reference to timeworn sarcasm.”
“Since you carry a gun as part of your job, I can’t emphasize the importance of monitoring your own mind and checking in with me immediately the second you suspect something is awry. But if nothing else, you should have gotten from the scenario games the ability to get some distance on yourself under the most trying of circumstances.”
“What if this drug sabotages that, as well?” Right now, Manny felt like the only thing he’d gotten from Saverly was a real penchant for generating horror scenarios up in his head.
“Then you can count on your friends and enemies in the real world to let you know. Don’t worry, I’m starting you on a minimal dose, which’ll likely do absolutely nothing. We want to find a baseline before we decide how much more is actually better.”
“So I’m still cleared for work.�
��
“I don’t see why not. You held up better than most. Police work is only five percent terror, ninety-five percent boredom. Giving you plenty of time to recover between rounds, a luxury you didn’t have in here.”
Yeah, you don’t see a problem because details of my past remained safely sequestered away, Manny thought. I saw to that. There were enough subtle differences in your scenarios from my childhood reality, as a consequence, for me to avoid total meltdown, which was the point. All I need is for that meltdown to occur out there. Still, if I tell you the truth, I like my options even less.
***
Manny gazed up at Jim befriending a patient with a game of ping pong as if Manny had never knifed him in the chest.
Jim’s perennial presence on the floor had gone a long way to calming Manny down and winning him over to Saverly’s side once again. He had long since stopped swearing to what was real and what was imagined with the combination of drugs and his own adrenaline and flight or fight response.
***
Saverly conducted Manny’s exit interview just two days after his last session with him with the same grace and charm that carried him through the rest of his life.
He handed Manny the bottle of pills he’d shown him earlier. “As we discussed, this will help you to access and integrate those painful memories from your past. We were hoping the scenario games would accomplish that, but your stay here was shorter than expected. To reiterate, any untoward side effects, I want you to call me.”
Manny swallowed a couple of pills from the bottle, gulping them without the assist of water.
Saverly reached into his cigar box, handed Manny a cigar, and lit it, as he stoked the fire at the end of his. Perhaps they were celebrating the birth of the new him. “In a very real way, you have to travel to the lowest rung in Dante’s hell to find that instead of going down, you’ve actually been going up. And you’re suddenly in heaven, defined by freedom from letting any limiting self-image cobble you.”
“That does quell my fears of persecution from authority figures.”
Saverly set down his cigar. “Think you're ready to bolt on out of here if I raise the starting gate?”
“Are you sure I'm out of travel money?”
“Pretty much,” Saverly answered good-naturedly. “Your asshole boss, as you call him, took an early retirement after the Hartman case. Pressured by the UC Regents, no doubt. They needed a patsy. Makes it that much easier for me to sign off on your returning to work.”
Manny sighed. “Sure, what the hell? Gotta face whatever passes for reality these days sooner or later.”
Saverly extended his hand. “Now, I hope I won’t be seeing you any time soon.”
They shook hands and Manny saw himself out of the room.
***
Jim joined Saverly in his office. “He never figured it out.”
“What, that you had a twin? Hell, Atterman is a triplet. He could have killed two of her.”
Jim chuckled sarcastically. “Wish he had.”
“He’s a smart guy. He would have figured it out eventually. One more reason to open the doors for him.”
“Not that smart.” Jim watched Manny being escorted off the unit.
“In all fairness, we live and breathe the game. Poor guy was just out of his league.”
“Why did you let things get so out of hand with this one?”
“He needed a sense of self that could worm its way out from under the most oppressive circumstances. I had to keep pushing. Maybe if he hadn’t been such a tough nut to crack.”
Jim picked up the bottle on Saverly’s desk, scrunched up his face trying to wrap his mind around the name. “And the meds you gave him?”
“Just tying up loose ends. We don’t want to give him too much time to think. I’m afraid that strong healthy ego we helped to build up in him isn’t exactly going to serve us now.”
“A shame all our fine work goes to waste.”
“Nonsense. The game is all that matters. We learned from him as much as he learned from us. By that yardstick, everything was a success.”
FIFTY-ONE
Manny grabbed a slice of pizza from Blondie’s on Telegraph, and headed straight for the yogurt shop, where the flavors changed daily. He was determined to soak in the Berkeley ambiance as a way of grounding himself after his hospital stay. He got his face farted in at least three times by street people surviving too long on wheat grass juice throwaways from the health-food stores, a day past their expiration limit, mixed with vegie-burgers fished out of garbage cans.
Telegraph didn’t seem to have the spark it used to, or maybe it was just him. God forbid. Maybe it was an off-day. A store owner was hosing down the sidewalk where street people had relieved themselves the night before. The hippies in evidence had a listless look in their eyes, as if the burden of holding on to the ‘60s fifty years after the fact was just getting to be too much for them. On a good day, Telegraph was Venice Beach without the sand. On a bad day like today, it was Croatia at the height of the bombings.
Without the cheerful tourists, charmed by the carnival atmosphere of the avenue, to greet him with their big smiles, the lack of contrasts with the locals took some of the crispness out of the air. The unmedicated mendicants appeared even more forlorn than the crazies in the hospital he just left for not having anyone to check on them.
A flush vagabond was being dragged by his raggedy-assed Shar-Pei. He either bought it cash with money he’d begged on the street, or picked it up at the SPCA because some rich bitch had gotten bored with the idea of owning one and moved on. Shar-Pei Dude looked all the sadder for the image upgrade.
The city had sprayed a plastic coating on the sidewalk years ago so the slime could be more easily washed away. Great idea, poor execution. The now blotchy coating looked as if hell were bubbling up from down below.
After buying a bag of beer nuts from a vender on the sidewalk bordering the university, Manny stowed it in his jacket pocket for later. Salt cravings were his new thing. Perhaps a side effect of the latest medication.
Manny purchased a sixteen-ounce soft chocolate yogurt in a Styrofoam cup with oatmeal cookie crumbs from a shop on Durant. He was attended to by Wolfman, who evidently needed no full moon to strut his stuff. He seemed like he should be captaining an ice-breaking ship in the arctic with that built-in fur coat.
From there, Manny strolled through Cal Berkeley. What would a coming home party be without a stopover at his alma mater? As fate would have it, Robert Reich, one of the professors, was speaking to a General Assembly meeting of over four thousand, the largest in the Occupy Cal movement’s history.
"Moral outrage is the beginning,” he said. “The days of apathy are over, folks. And once it has begun, it cannot be stopped, and it will not be stopped." Those very same comments had made it into the papers prior to Manny being sent to the hospital. Evidently they were catchy enough that Reich felt they bore repeating. The precious few words, as a result, had the impact of making the past few months spent on the psych ward play like no more than a bad dream; as if no time had passed at all. They cushioned the impact of Manny’s return to reality.
The General Assembly broke up into groups of twenty to vote on whether or not to bring back the tents and park them on campus. The planting of tents in the first place was the incident that had led to violent baton beatings on where else but the Mario Savio steps, as they’d been renamed for the free speech movement figurehead in the ‘60s.
The sight of helicopters overhead and the hint of the U.S. devolving into martial law made Manny feel oddly calmer than usual. Better civil unrest than entrenched and institutionalized injustice. He welcomed the birth pains accompanying the emerging higher consciousness.
Manny ambled towards the park area on campus bordering University Avenue. The squirrels were familiar with him. Though, they’d approach most anybody for a handout. Probably the one place in the world where animals thought humans were harmless. One jumped on his shoulder from the Redwood
tree above, another scurried up his pant leg to plant himself in his palm. Manny reached for the peanuts in his pocket before they tunneled their way in there on their own. He was glad his salt cravings had prompted him to pick up the nuts from the other kind of peanut gallery on Telegraph.
“Hey, shit-for-brains. Watch where you’re walking.” The homeless man he’d mistaken for a fallen log evidently didn’t appreciate being stepped on. Some of them had those kinds of affectations. The birds were clearly every bit as fooled, having crapped all over him.
Those barricades Manny swore he’d never knock down crumbled on the words “shit-for-brains.” It was what his father used to call him. Manny literally could no longer see where he was walking, blinded by the waterfall of images from the past washing over him.
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 75
