Earthquake Weather

by Tim Powers

  He smiled now at the thought; and he tried to pay attention to the occupational therapist’s cheery explanation of how to do a “single cordovan” stitch, and not to think about the book.

  But he realized now that the story he’d read on the airplane must have started to diverge from the remembered text very early on. In the scene in the Old Bailey courthouse in London, for example, in which the Frenchman Charles Darnay was on trial for treason, Cochran seemed to remember having read that the court bar was strewn with herbs and sprinkled with vinegar, an apparently routine precaution against “gaol” air … but in this text the bar was twined in living ivy, and splashed liberally with red wine.

  And just because of the rhyme he had remembered “Cly the spy,” whose death had been a hoax and whose coffin had proved to contain only paving stones—but he had remembered Cly as a man, and certainly the name had not been short for Clytemnestra.

  His hand shook as he pushed the needle through the holes. In the book he’d read on the plane, Madame Ariachne’s cloth had flexed and shivered as she had forced each new, resisting name into the fabric.

  “You’re not quite getting the hang of that one, are you?” said Tammy Eddy.

  Cochran looked up at her. “It’s hard,” he said.

  “Hard to remember what I said?”

  “Hard to remember anything at all. But I can do it.”

  He thought of the scene at the end of the book as he had read it years ago, in which the dissolute Englishman Sidney Carton redeemed himself by sneaking into the Conciergerie prison to switch places with his virtuous double, the Frenchman Charles Darnay who was condemned to die the next morning; and then Cochran made himself remember the scene as he had read it on the airplane three days ago—

  In that variant version it had been a woman who furtively unlocked the cell door—the woman Clytemnestra, who was somehow the classical Greek Clytemnestra from Aeschylus’ Oresteia, come to atone for having killed the high king Agamemnon.

  And in this crazy version the prisoner was a woman too, though still the visitor’s mirror-image double; and when she demanded to know the reason for this visit, this exchange of places, Clytemnestra had said, “Forgive me. Madame has forgotten that we agreed to play in partnership this evening.”

  Tammy Eddy was speaking sharply to him—and he realized that she had been repeating herself for several seconds. He looked up at her, and saw that she had retreated to the door and pulled it open. “Put,” she said, obviously not for the first time, “the needle … down, Sid.”

  “Sorry. Sure.” He opened his fingers and the needle dropped to the tabletop. “I wasn’t listening.” He looked at the vinyl squares and saw that he had stitched them together and then with the blunt needle torn a hole in the center of each square. “I guess I wrecked your … your test,” he said lamely. And no doubt failed it, he thought. She’ll probably testify at my PCH.

  “They’re not expensive. That’ll be all for today, Sid.” She stepped back a yard into the TV lounge as he pushed his chair back and sidled around the table to the door. “What,” she asked him as he walked past her toward the cafeteria, “were you making, there at the end?”

  He stopped for a moment but didn’t look back at her. “Oh, nothing,” he said over his shoulder. “I just got bored and … distracted.”

  Perhaps she nodded or smiled or frowned—he kept his eyes on the cafeteria door as he strode forward. He might or might not tell Armentrout, but would certainly not tell this woman, that he had been unthinkingly making a frail mask in which to face the mask that the big bull-headed man would be wearing.

  Probably because of his having hit Long John Beach the night before, the knuckles of his right hand stung, and he alternately made a fist and stretched his fingers as he walked through the cafeteria and back out into the lounge without having seen Plumtree or Armentrout—Tammy Eddy was nowhere to be seen now either—and then started down the hall, past the Dutch door of the meds room, to the wing of patient rooms.

  At every corner and intersection of hall there was a convex mirror attached to the ceiling, so that anyone walking through the unit could see around a corner before actually stepping around it. At L-corners the mirror was a triangular eighth of a globe wedged up in the corner, and at four-way crossings it was a full half-globe set in the middle of the ceiling. Cochran didn’t like the things—they seemed to be whole spheres, only part-way intruded here and there through temporary violations of the architecture, like chrome eyes peering down curiously into the maze of hallways, and he couldn’t shake the irrational dread of rounding a turn and seeing two of them in the wall ahead of him, golden for once instead of silver, with a single horizontal black line across each of them—but he did reluctantly glance at a couple of them to get an advance look around corners on the way to Plumtree’s room.

  But when he finally arrived at her room he saw that her door, in violation of the daytime rules, was closed. He shuffled up to it anyway, intending to knock, and then became aware of Plumtree speaking quietly inside; he couldn’t hear what she said, but it was followed by Armentrout’s voice saying, “So which one of you was it that took the shock?”

  The question meant nothing to Cochran, and he was hesitant about interrupting a doctor-and-patient therapy session; and after a few moments of indecisive shuffling, and raising his hand and then lowering it, he let his shoulders slump and turned away and plodded back down the hall toward the TV lounge, defeatedly aware of the wide cuffs of his bell-bottom trousers flapping around his bare ankles.

  “Somebody went flatline ten seconds after the shock,” Armentrout went on when Plumtree didn’t immediately answer. “We dragged the Waterloo cart into the treatment room, but your heart started up again before we had to put the paddles on you.” He was smiling, but he knew that he was still shaky about the incident, for he hadn’t meant to call it a “Waterloo cart” just now. Waterloo was the brand name of the thing, but it was known as a crash cart, or a cardiac defibrillator; the incident would probably have been his Waterloo, though, as soon as the idealistic Philip Muir heard about it, if Plumtree had died undergoing electroconvulsive therapy with forged permissions while just on a temporary conservatorship. Muir was surely going to be angry anyway, for ECT was not a treatment indicated for multiple personality disorder—or dissociative identity disorder, as Muir would trendily say.

  And Armentrout couldn’t pretend anymore that he didn’t know she was a multiple—the ECT had separated out the personalities like a hammer breaking a piece of shale into distinct, individual hard slabs. Armentrout could have wished that it was a little less obvious, in fact; but perhaps the personalities would blend back together a little, before Muir saw her tomorrow.

  “Valerie,” said the woman in the bed. “She always takes intolerable situations. It caught Cody by surprise.”

  “And who are you?”

  “I’m Janis.” She smiled at him, and in the dim lamplight her pupils didn’t seem notably dilated or constricted now.

  “How many of you are there?”

  “I really don’t know, Doctor. Some aren’t very developed, or exist just for one purpose … like the one called—what does he call himself?—‘the foul fiend Flibbertigibbet!’ What a name! He got it … from Shakespeare, according to him. Is there a play called Leah? He claims to have been a Shakespearean actor. I—don’t want to talk about him, he’s who we’ve brought up when we’ve had to fight, to defend our life. He makes our teeth hurt like we’ve got braces on, and he gives us nosebleeds. I don’t want to talk about him.” She shivered, and then smiled wryly. “We’re like the little cottage full of dwarves in Snow White—each of us with a job to do, while the poisoned girl sleeps. I used to sign my high-school papers ‘Snowy Eve White’ sometimes.”

  “Snow White, Eve White—you’ve seen the movie The Three Faces of Eve? Or read the book?”

  She shook her head. “No, I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Hmm. I bet. And one of you is a man?”

 
She blinked—and Armentrout could feel the hairs standing up on his arms, for the woman’s face changed abruptly, as the muscles under the skin realigned themselves; her mouth seemed wider now, and her eyes narrower.

  “Valerie says you had all my clothes off,” she said in a flat voice. “I’d be pissed about that if I didn’t know you’re a total queer. What did you hit me with?”

  “Cody,” said Armentrout in cautious greeting, suddenly wishing Plumtree had been put back in restraints. She had recovered from the succinylcholine amazingly fast, and she didn’t seem to be dopy and blurry, as patients recovering from ECT generally were for at least the rest of the day.

  “You’re the one,” he went on, “speaking of hitting, who hit Long John Beach last night, aren’t you, Cody?”

  “I don’t know. Probably.” Plumtree’s forehead was dewed with sweat, and she was squinting. “Was this while I had my clothes off? He probably asked for it, he’s got a frisky spirit hand to go with the flesh-and-blood one. And I saw that Cockface guy’s hand—I don’t like his birthmark. A lot of tricky hands around here, and this place is a stinking flop.”

  She was breathing through her open mouth, and she looked pale. Altogether she was acting like someone with a bad hangover, and it occurred to Armentrout that the Janis personality had been unimpaired because it had been Cody who had taken the shock treatment. Cody was the one who had given him the finger. Ten seconds had gone by before the Valerie personality, the one who took “intolerable situations,” had taken over. He leaned forward to look at Plumtree’s face, and he saw that her pupils were as tiny as pores. She definitely looked dopy and blurry now.

  “What we’re going to try to do is achieve isolation, Cody,” he said. “We’ll decide which personality is most socially viable, and then bring that one forward and … cauterize the others off.” This was hardly a description of orthodox therapy, but he wanted to draw a reaction from her. She didn’t seem to be listening, though.

  “How many of you are there, Cody?” Armentrout went on. “I’ve met you and Janis, that I know of, and I’ve heard about Valerie.”

  “God, I am still in the psych hospital, aren’t I?” she mumbled, rubbing her eyes. “I suppose a cold beer is out of the question. Shit. But no hair of that dog, thank you—that was the goddamn Wolfman.”

  “That was ECT,” Armentrout said, leaning back in the chair beside the bed and smiling at her, “electroconvulsive therapy—shock treatment, Edison Medicine.” He smiled reminiscently and said, “Generally a course of treatment is six or twelve shock sessions, three a week.”

  All the worldly weariness disappeared from her face, and for a moment Armentrout thought the Cody personality had gone away and been replaced by a little girl, possibly the core child; but when she spoke it was in response to what he had just said, so it was probably still Cody, a Cody for once frightened out of her sardonic pose.

  She said, “Again? You want to do that to me again?”

  A genuine reaction at last! “At this point I’m undecided.” Armentrout’s heart was beating rapidly, and a smile of triumph kept twitching at his lips. “I’ll make up my mind after our conference later today.”

  “Don’t you need … my permission, to do that?”

  “One of you signed it,” he said with a shrug. She would probably believe that, even if shown the bogus signature. “How many of you are there?”

  “Oh, sweet Jesus, there’s a lot of kids on the bus,” she said wearily, leaning back against the pillows and closing her eyes, “all singing ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat,’ and crying, with a smashed-up crazy man holding a gun on the driver.”

  Armentrout recognized the image—it was from the end of the Clint Eastwood movie Dirty Harry, when the battered and hotly pursued serial killer hijacked a schoolbus full of children.

  “Where is the … the ‘foul fiend Flibbertigibbet’ sitting?”

  Plumtree’s eyes were still closed—her eyelids were as wrinkled and pale as paper wrappers bluntly accordioned off drinking straws—but she managed to put derisive impatience into the shake of her head. “He isn’t sitting,” she said.

  Then she was snoring through her open mouth. Armentrout reached out and switched off the lamp, then got up and opened the door to the hallway.

  His belly felt hollow with anticipation as he pulled the door closed behind him—We’ll surely get some tasty therapy done, he told himself smugly, in our therapy session at three.

  An hour after lunch Cochran stood in the fenced-off picnic yard, smoking his third-to-last Marlboro, which the charge nurse had lit for him with her closely guarded Bic lighter when she had let the patients out here for the hourly smoke break. The afternoon sunlight shone brightly on the expanse of asphalt and the distant palm trees outside the iron-bar fence, and Cochran was squinting between the bars at two men in the parking lot who were using jumper cables to try to start a car, and he was envying them their trivial problems.

  Long John Beach was leaning on the fence a couple of yards to Cochran’s right, gingerly scratching the corner of one swollen eye under the silvery nose brace. Cochran remembered the old man eating nine cigarettes last night, and he tried to work up some resentment over it; and then he tried to be grateful that the one-armed lunatic seemed to have no memory of, nor even any interest in, how his nose had been broken; but these were just frail and momentary distractions.

  Cochran threw the cigarette down and stepped on it. “Nina,” he said, loud enough for Long John Beach to hear but speaking out toward the parking lot, “can you hear me?”

  The old man had jumped, and was now craning his neck around to peer across the sunny lot at the men huddled under the shade of the car hood. “You’ll have to shout,” he said. “Hey, was I snoring real bad last night? I got coughing when I woke up, thought I’d cough my whole spirit out on the floor like a big snake.”

  Cochran closed his eyes. “I was talking to my wife,” he told the old man. “She’s dead. Can you … hear her?” After a moment he looked over at him.

  “Oh—” Long John Beach shrugged expansively. “Maybe.”

  Cochran made himself concentrate on her bitter voice as he had heard it last night.

  “Nina,” he answered her now, as awkwardly as a long-lapsed Catholic in the confessional; he was light-headed and sweating, and he had to look out through the fence again in order to speak. “Whatever happened, whatever—I love you, and I miss you terribly. Look, goddammit, I’ve lost my mind over it! And—Jesus, I’m sorry. Of course you were right about the Pace Chardonnays—” He was talking rapidly now, shaking his head. “—they are too loud and insistent, and they do dominate a meal. Show-off wines, made to win at blind tastings, you’re right. I’m sorry I called your family’s wines flinty and thin. Please tell me that it wasn’t that silly argument, at the New Year’s Eve thing, that—but if I am to blame—”

  He paused; then glanced sideways at his attentive companion.

  Apparently aware that some response was expected of him, Long John Beach shuffled his feet and blinked his blackened eyes. “Well … I was never much of a wine man,” the old man said apologetically. “I just ate smokes.”

  Cochran was clinging to a description of lunatics a friend had once quoted to him—One day nothing new came into their heads—because lately he himself seemed to be able to count on at least several appalling revelations every day.

  “ ‘Think not the King did banish thee,’ ” he said unsteadily, quoting the lines he’d skipped last night, “ ‘but thou the King.’ ”

  Long John Beach opened his mouth, and the voice that came out was not his own, but neither was it Nina’s; and it was so strained that Cochran couldn’t guess its gender. “ ‘The bay trees in our country are all withered, and meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven,’ ” the voice said, clearly quoting something. “ ‘These signs forerun the death or fall of kings.’ ”

  “Who are you?” Cochran whispered.

  “ ‘I am bastard begot,’ ” the eerie voice droned
on, perhaps in answer, “ ‘bastard instructed, bastard in mind, bastard in valor, in everything illegitimate.’ ”

  Cochran was dizzy, and all at once but with no perceptible shift the sunlight seemed brassy amber, and the air was clotted and hard to push through his throat. “Where is my wife?” he rasped.

  “ ‘Her bed is India; there she lies, a pearl.’ ”

  “Wh—India? Are you—talking to me? Please, what do you mean—” He stopped, for he realized that he was looking up at Long John Beach, and the base of his spine stung. He had abruptly sat down on the pavement beside one of the picnic tables.

  There had been a startled shout from out in the parking lot, and the power lines were swinging gently far overhead. When Cochran peered out at the men, he saw that the car hood had fallen onto one of them; the man was rubbing his head now and cussing at his companion, who was laughing.

  “Whoa!” said Long John Beach, also laughing. “Did you feel that one? Or are you just making yourself at home?”

  Cochran understood that there had been an earthquake; and, looking up at the power lines and the leaves on the banana tree in the courtyard, he gathered that it was over. The sunlight was bright again, and the jacaranda-scented breeze was cold in his sweaty hair.

  He got to his feet, rubbing the seat of his corduroy pants. “I suppose you’ve got nothing more to say,” he told Long John Beach angrily.

  The one-armed man shrugged. “Like I say, I was never a wine man.”

  The charge nurse was standing in the lounge doorway, waving. The smoking break was apparently ended.