by Tim Powers
“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.”
Cochran stepped into the room and knelt by her head, and the lights dimmed for a moment. He reached out, with his trembling left hand, and gently drew his fingernails over the side of her chin she had apparently been trying to reach with her tongue.
She surprised him by lifting up her head and kissing his palm. “I was sorry to hear about your wife’s death,” she whispered. “How long were you married?”
“… Nearly five years,” Cochran said. He had stopped scratching her chin, though his fingertips were still on her cheek.
“How did you meet her?”
“She … fell down some steps, and I caught her.” He pulled his hand back self-consciously. “I’m a cellarman at a vineyard up in San Mateo County, by Daly City, Pace Vineyards, and she was visiting from France, touring all the Bay Area vineyards. Her family’s in the wine business in the Bas Médoc—the Leon family, they’ve been there since the Middle Ages. And she was looking at the casks of Zinfandel, in fact she was just in the act of tasting the young vintage with a tâte-vin, thing like a ladle, and at that moment the big earthquake of ’89 hit—5:04 in the afternoon—and she fell down the steps.”
“And you caught her,” Plumtree said softly. “I remember that earthquake. Poor Sid.”
“He,” exhaled Cochran, finally nerving himself up to broach the point of this midnight visit, “the old one-armed man, he—I thought he talked with her voice, there, when we were quoting the Shakespeare. My dead wife’s voice. And then he looked like a, a man who chased me in Paris. That’s why I hit him, it was just a shocked reflex. But it was her voice, it was her—unless I’m a whole lot crazier than I even thought.”
“I’m sure it was her. He can channel dead people like a vacuum cleaner, and you were sitting right by him.” She glanced at the open doorway, and then back at Cochran. “You’d better go. I’m not supposed to have visitors here.”
He managed to nod and stand up, though he was even more disoriented now than he’d been when he’d walked in. As he turned toward the door, she said quietly behind him, “I love you, Sid.”
He hesitated, shocked to realize that he wanted to say that he loved her too. It wasn’t possible, after all: he had met this woman only a few hours ago, and she did seem to be some genuine variety of crazy—though that only seemed to be something the two of them shared in common, actually—and in any case Nina had been dead for only ten days. And her … ghost might be …
He forced that thought away, for now.
“My friends call me Scant,” he said, without turning around; then, though he was aching to say something more, he made do with muttering, “I’m as crazy as you are,” and hurried out of the room.
CHAPTER 4
“All sorts of people who are not in the least degree worthy of the pet, are always turning up,” said Miss Pross. “When you began it—”
“I began it, Miss Pross?”
“Didn’t you? Who brought her father to life?”
—Charles Dickens,
A Tale of Two Cities
AT DAWN THEY AWOKE Plumtree by sticking another hypodermic needle into the vein on the inside of her elbow—this shot contained a potent mix of Versed and Valium, and she had only ten bewildered seconds to curse and swear at the two nurses and Armentrout, and strain uselessly against the damp canvas straps of the four-point restraints, before she collapsed into unconsciousness. After the nurses unstrapped the rubber tourniquet from around her biceps and unbuckled the restraints, Armentrout crouched beside her and held her swollen hand in both of his, rolling the bones under his thumbs and prodding between the knuckles with his fingertips; then gently, almost tenderly, he lifted the young woman’s limp body onto the gurney.
The ECT clinic was at the other end of the building, and Armentrout was pleased to see that the hallway lights didn’t dim as Plumtree was wheeled along under them. One of the nurses striding alongside was holding a black rubber Ambu face mask over Plumtree’s nose and mouth and rhythmically squeezing the attached black bag to assist the comatose woman’s weakened breathing.
The nurse anesthetist who was waiting for them in the fluorescent-lit treatment room was a bearded young man Armentrout had worked with many times before, and the man leaned back against a counter and frankly stared as the nurses unzipped Plumtree’s jeans and pulled them down past her hips and then unbuttoned her blouse and lifted her up into a sitting position to tug her limp arms back and pull the blouse free; Armentrout allowed himself only a glimpse—for now—of Plumtree’s pale breasts when the nurses removed her bra. When they had laid her back down, positioning her head carefully on the perforated plastic cushion, the anesthetist stepped forward.
“What happened to her hand?” the man asked as he looped a Velcro blood-pressure cuff around her left upper arm and then inserted an Intercath needle into the back of her bruised right hand and taped it down. The blush of red blood that backed up in the IV tube cleared instantly when he opened the valve to full flow.
“She punched a guy,” said Armentrout shortly. “Just soft-tissue damage to her hand, no crepitation.”
“I hope he’s not pissed off—very shortly now she won’t remember doing it.” He taped onto Plumtree’s right forefinger the pulse oxymeter that would shine a white light through her fingertip and
monitor her oxygen level by changes in the ruby red color of her flesh.
“This guy can’t remember his own name,” absently remarked the nurse who was peeling the backs off of the wire-tethered plastic disks that were the heart-monitor EKG electrodes. She began pressing the disks sticky-side-down onto Plumtree’s skin at each shoulder and hip and then in a cascade pattern around Plumtree’s left breast.
“Get her on the ventilator,” snapped Armentrout.
The anesthetist obediently pried open Plumtree’s mouth and pushed in past her teeth the steel shaft of a laryngoscope that was guiding a balloon-tipped plastic tube into her throat; and when he had got the tube far down her trachea and inflated the cuff to get an occlusive seal, the ventilator began chugging and sighing as it forced oxygen in and out of her lungs.
“And inflate the blood-pressure cuff,” Armentrout said; “it’s time to get the succinylcholine running.” Armentrout was hunched over Plumtree’s head now, ruffling the thatch of her blond hair and at measured intervals poking down into her scalp the tiny needles of the EEG electrodes that would measure her brain-wave activity.
Plumtree’s semi-nude body shivered under the monitor wires as the succinylcholine hit, then relaxed totally—Armentrout knew that the motor end plates of all of her voluntary muscle fibers had now subsided in depolarization, and only the insistence of the ventilator was even keeping her lungs flexing.
A nurse now leaned over the unconscious woman to fit a bifurcated foam-rubber bite block around the endotrachial tube and between the teeth of Plumtree’s upper and lower jaws.
Finally Armentrout smeared conducting jelly on the steel disks that would deliver the voltage, and he carefully stuck one onto each of Plumtree’s temples—this would be a full bilateral square wave procedure, not one of the wishy-washy unilateral with one of the disks stuck onto the forehead. Armentrout knew it wouldn’t damage her—he had undergone a series of full bilateral-wave ECTs himself, when he had been just seventeen years old, after his mother’s death.
“Low voltage tracing,” said the nurse who was watching the EEG monitor; “huh!—with some intermittent sleep spindles at about fourteen hertz.”
“That’s to be expected,” said Armentrout, not looking at the anesthetist. “You’ll see some biphasics, too, if we make a loud noise.” He looked at his watch—it had been two full minutes since the muscle-disabling succinylcholine had gone coursing down the IV tube. “Clear!” he called, and everybody stepped back from Plumtree’s electrode-studded body. For a moment Armentrout let his eyes play over her breasts, the exposed nipples erect in the chilly air of the treatment room, and the wisp of blond pubic hair curling above the elastic waistband of her TUESDAY-stitched panties, and then he twisted the dial on the plastic monitor box to two hundred and fifty joules, took a deep breath, and flipped the toggle switch.
Instantly Plumtree’s left hand twitched and clenched in a fist, for the tight constriction of the blood-pressure cuff had effectively prevented the neuromuscular blocking drug from getting into her forearm.
“Total chaos,” calmly said the nurse who was watching the EEG monitor. Plumtree’s brain waves on the screen were a forest of tight, wildly disordered peaks. “A ten on the Richter scale.”
Then, slowly, the middle finger of Plumtree’s tight-clenched left hand unfolded and extended out straight.
The anesthetist noticed it and laughed. “She’s flipping you off, Richard,” he told Armentrout. “I’ve never seen that happen before.”
Armentrout kept his face impassive, but his belly had gone cold and his heart was knocking in his chest. I can’t believe that’s not involuntary, he thought—but—who the hell are you, girl?
“Me either,” he said levelly.
Cochran put on yesterday’s clothes when he got out of bed—Long John Beach was in the other bed now, black-eyed and snoring like a horse behind a metal brace taped to his nose, and Cochran was careful not to wake him—but when he had sneaked out of the room he got one of the psych techs to let him rummage for fresh clothes in “the boutique,” a closet full of donated clothing; and twenty minutes after he had got a nurse to unlock the shower room and give him a disposable Bic razor, he shambled into the windowless cafeteria, freshly bathed and shaved and with his wet hair combed down flat for the first time in twenty-four hours, wearing oversized brown-corduroy bell-bottom trousers and a T-shirt with A CONNECTICUT PANSY IN KING ARTHUR’S SHORTS lettered on it. All the other shirts had been too narrow for his shoulders or were women’s blouses that buttoned right-over-left. He didn’t think the crazy people, or even the staff, would read the lettering, and he nervously hoped Janis Plumtree might be able to find it funny.
But when he took a tray and got into the line for oatmeal and little square milk cartons and individual-size boxes of cereal, he looked around the tables and saw that Plumtree wasn’t in the cafeteria.
He carried his tray to an unoccupied table and sat down, and began eating his cornflakes right out of the box, like Crackerjacks, ignoring the little carton of milk. He was breathing shallowly, and dropping as many cornflakes onto his lap as he got into his mouth.
He was wondering just how bad an infraction it was to break the nose of another patient; and he was giddily alarmed at his determination, even stronger this morning than it had been last night, to keep his promise to Janis Plumtree and get the true story across. Eventually Armentrout would be on the ward, and Long John Beach would be up to corroborate the facts. Cochran might very well even have to admit to having had another hallucination, and he supposed that would surely guarantee him a “PCH,” an unfavorable one—which would mean not being able to see the real PCH, Pacific Coast Highway, for at least two weeks—but Cochran would be able, finally, to … take the blame.
And she loves me, he thought as he licked his trembling finger to get the last crumbs out of the corn flakes box; or she did last night; or she said she did last night. I will take her out of this place.
But neither Plumtree nor Armentrout appeared in the cafeteria, and just as Cochran was reluctantly getting up to investigate the TV lounge, and brushing corn-flake fragments off the crotch of his ludicrous corduroy pants, a young woman in a white lab coat came striding up to his table.
“Sid Cochran?” she said brightly. “Hi, I’m Tammy Eddy, the occupational therapist, and if you’re free I’d like to get your dexterity tests out of the way. Kindergarten stuff, really—the patients are always asking me if I majored in basket-weaving!”
Cochran managed to return her smile, though her cheer seemed as perfunctory to him this morning as the HAVE A NICE DAY admonition printed on the “moist towelette” package on his tray, and she didn’t notice his shirt.
He opened his mouth to tell her that he had something important to say to Dr. Armentrout first—but instead relaxed and said, “Okay.”
“Let’s go to the conference room, shall we?”
Maybe we’ll meet him on the way, Cochran told himself defensively.
But there was no one in the sunny TV lounge as the young occupational therapist led him through it—Cochran noticed that the blood had been cleaned up, and the floor was a glassy plane again—and she had to fetch out her keys and unlock the conference room, for no one had been in it yet today.
“Sit down, Sid,” the woman said, waving at a chair by the table. “Can you find a patch of clear space there? Good, yeah, that’ll do. Today you’re going to get a lesson in—” She had been moving things on a shelf over the microwave oven, and now turned around and laid on the table in front of him two five-inch square pieces of blue vinyl with holes around the edges, and a blunt white plastic yarn needle and a length of orange yarn. “Can you guess?”
“Knitting,” said Cochran carefully, abruptly reminded of the book he’d read on the flight home from Paris three days ago.
“That’s close. Stitching. This is called the Allen Cognitive Levels test, and it’s just me showing you different ways to sew these two vinyl squares together. Here, the needle’
s already threaded—you go ahead and sew them together any way you like.”
Cochran patiently laced the things together as if they were the front and back covers of a spiral-bound book, and when he was done she beamed and told him that he’d just figured out the “whipstitch” all on his own. She took back the squares and unlaced them and began showing him a different stitch that involved skipping holes and then coming back around to them, but though his fingers followed her directions, his mind was on the book he’d read on the plane.
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?
