"Perhaps. But I want to talk about it."
She pouted in a rather pretty way, and said, "How did a lovely girl like you get into anything like this? Isn't that a very trite question, Trav? Aren't you and I worth better conversation than that?"
"Do you know that old joke, what the lovely girl answers?"
"Surely. Just lucky, I guess. Darling, it is really very adolescent of you to want to pry. Just accept me. As if I was born an hour ago, just for you."
"All clean and fresh and sweet and virginal." She looked down at her hand. She examined the nails. It reminded me of Bonita Hersch's hand, except that the nails were longer. She looked across at me. This time the whore look was frank and apparent.
Under all that tasty trimming was a basic coarseness which would gag a goat. I didn't have to know how she got into the business. It had been invented for her.
"If you can wait here an hour, someone will come who might suit you better. One of the newer ones, I think. Younger and possibly a little nervous about everything."
"I wasn't trying to offend you, Rossa."
"My dear fellow, it would stagger the imagination to think of any way you could possibly offend me. I was merely thinking of making things more agreeable for you."
"You are agreeable."
Suddenly her smile was dazzling. She was a fashion model facing into an imaginary spring breeze in a professional studio. "I will suit you very very well. Never fear. You are an exciting man, Trav. I shouldn't want to give you up at this point. Now we can forget all that and this will be a date for us. You came in to buy a ticket. You asked me to have a drink with you after work. I am a very proper girl and I am wondering if you are going to make me feel too reckless." She reached with a small gold lighter and lit my cigarette and then, as she started to hold the flame to her own, fumbled with it and it dropped into her lap and clattered onto the floor. She laughed and said, "See? You are actually making me a little bit nervous, darling."
I sat on my heels beside our small blue booth and peered under the table for the lighter. I saw the glint of it back against the wall and reached and picked it up, sat back in the booth, lit her cigarette with it and handed it to her.
"Thank you, dear," she said, with a splendid imitation of fondness.
We finished our drinks, ordered another.
I felt incomparably shrewd. I would take her to the Plaza. I would take her up to Terry's suite and suddenly Rossa Hendit would discover that it was not the sort of evening she had anticipated. All we wanted from her was conversation about Charlie, and Terry was set up to pay well for it. The tape would furnish Terry's very good lawyer with enough background to enable him to go after a court order to get Charles McKewn Armister hospitalized for observation, with Joanna Armister signing the commitment papers. After they had taken him off whatever they had him on, Charlie would be able to blow the whole scheme sky high.
My date began to seem slightly absent minded. It was a quiet bar, and thinning out. She went to the ladies' room and seemed to be gone a long time.
Reality is a curious convention. It is the special norm for each of us. Based upon the evidences of our own senses, we have each established our own version of reality. We are constantly rechecking it with all sensory equipment. In the summer of 1958 I was in Acapulco when a major earthquake struck that area. I was awakened by the grating of roof tiles and a thousand dogs howling. I went barefoot to the window. There was a cool tile floor under my bare feet. Suddenly I realized that the tile floor was rippling. There were waves in the solid tile, throwing me off balance. Such a thing could not be. Tile floors were solid. To have such a floor rippling in such a way destroyed the validity of all sensory impressions, and gave me a feeling of black and primitive terror I had never felt before. I could no longer depend upon my evidences of reality.
She came back from the ladies' room. She sat and smiled at me. I said, "Let's get another drink up at the Plaza."
That is what my mind told my mouth to say. But the fit of the words in my mouth felt strange. I heard, like an after-echo, what I had said. "Let's get a down with the ending ever.
She was leaning toward me, with a narrow and curious avidity. "Darling," she said. "Darling, darling." It had an echo-chamber quality. She opened her mouth wide enough so that I could see the pink curl of her tongue as she formed the d.
I saw a tiny mark appear at her hairline, right in the center of her forehead. It moved slowly down her forehead, and as it did so the two flaps of flesh folded away at either side, bloody pink where they were exposed, displaying the hard white shine of ivory bone. The moving line parted her brows, bisected her nose and lips and chin, and the halved damp soft flesh fell away leaving the white skull, the black sockets where the eyes had been. The jaws and teeth were exposed in a white death grin, but the jaw still worked and the pink tongue was still moist within that sepulchral dryness, curling, saying, "Darling, darling."
I closed my eyes tightly, both hands clamped on the edge of the table. Under my hands the table edge turned wet and soft and full of roundnesses. I squinted down, fighting for control, and with vision it turned back into a table edge. But as I closed my eyes again all the softness was under my hands. This was the earthquake terror again, roaring through my mind like a black wind. In some far corner of my mind I was trying to make an appraisal. She had dropped the lighter and kicked it over against the wall. It gave her time enough.
I tried to hang onto a tiny edge of reality. I knew the words. I wanted the whole room to hear the words. Call the police.
I heard the words come out. A wet, brutish howling. "Can Paul bury shit anything." My muscles were knotted. I risked a glance at the skull. She was gone. She seemed gone. I could not be sure she was gone. I could not be sure of anything.
Then the room tilted abruptly, thudding my shoulder against the wall. I tried to see them. They were in a half-circle standing on that steep slant, looking down into the booth, the tallest narrowest people I had ever seen, with tiny little heads no bigger than oranges. One of them was a policeman. "Hadda!" I yelled at him. "Hassa hadda," and began to vomit with fright. A snake looked at me out of a door in the cop's narrow belly.
Then there were white things, white grunting things, running at me and pulling, and I fought them in a dream, and was yanked and mashed face down and felt a little stinging bite in my buttock.
I rolled under a night sky and saw a thousand tiny peering faces at either side, atop tall in-leaning bodies. There was a thump, a sliding, a bang of doors. Motor roar. High city lights moving by. A sinking deepness, somebody close by and fingers on my wrist. The thing I was in turned on its side and we went off into dark country, scraping swiftly along on the side, leaving a shower of sparks...
* * *
For a long time I could not tell whether I was awake or asleep. I was in a bed in a white room. Daylight came through a window screened with heavy mesh. I could move my head, and that was all. I could see a white wall. Things kept happening to that wall. For a long time I could not stop them from happening. In sleep you cannot stop things from happening. Places would open in the wall. I could see into horrid places and see horrid things. Grotesque copulations. Huge rotting bugs. Ghastly things eating each other. Things would open the wall from the other side and come through and disappear as they got too close to the bed, and I would go rigid waiting for them to get me. Once hundreds of people started laughing at me. They were behind the bed where I could not see them. It was deafening.
After an interval of time I could not measure, I began to be able to exert control over the wall. I could close it up and make it white and blank. It was like making a fist with my mind. If I let the fist relax, the things would come again. After a long time I began to be able to relax the fist little by little without anything appearing. I became convinced that I was awake. Later I was able to make ghastly things appear only by an effort of will, a kind of reaching to make them happen. They lost color and solidity. Finally I could make nothing happen. I was
in a white room. I was in bed. I could move only my head.
Two men came in. They stood by the bed and looked down at me. One was in a business suit. He had a bald head and a young face. The other was tall, young and husky, dressed in white.
The one in the business suit said, "How do you feel?"
"Who are you?"
"I am Doctor Varn. I'd like to know if you are still hallucinating."
My mind seemed to take a long time to grasp the question and find the answer. "No. There aren't any things in the wall any more."
"Do you hear any strange sounds?"
"Not any more. Where am I?"
"Toll Valley Hospital, Mr. McGee, just south of New Paltz, New York. It is a private institution for the treatment of mental and nervous disorders."
"Why am I here?"
"Because you are ill, Mr. McGee. Jerry, please go tell Dr. Moore we can schedule Mr. McGee for hypnotherapy at two o'clock."
The one in white left. I heard the door close. "I'm not sick."
"You were very ill, Mr. McGee. You were irrational and violent in front of witnesses, including an officer of the law. In New York State any officer of the law can commit you for observation if he is a witness to dangerous and irrational behavior, if, in his opinion you are endangering public safety."
I wished my brain did not feel so slow and tired and muddy. "Then... wouldn't I go to a public hospital?"
"Usually, yes. But I have been treating you for some time now, Mr. McGee. When you began to behave oddly, your friend, Miss Hendit, became alarmed and phoned me. I arranged to have you brought out here."
"You have been treating me for some time?"
"According to my office files. My nurse can verify it, of course." He shook his head. "Until last evening, I really thought we were making progress."
He was so plausible it frightened me as badly as the things in the wall. I forced myself back toward reality. "What did that whore put into my drink?"
"That's an irrational question, Mr. McGee."
"So give me an irrational answer. Humor me.
"In the past several years we've made some very interesting discoveries regarding the relationship between blood chemistry and mental disorders. In order to get the extreme reaction you experienced, she would have had to give you quite a dangerous dosage of a complex chemical compound which can, in a normal human being, temporarily duplicate all the physical and mental and sensory symptoms of violent schizophrenia."
"But she didn't have to do that because I was already nuts."
He looked down at me with mild surprise and a certain amount of approval. "Mr. McGee, you have astonishing recuperative powers, mental and physical. You broke the arm of a very highly-trained attendant."
"Good."
"I expected you to be slightly incoherent, but your word choice seems controlled. We can schedule you sooner than I expected."
"For that therapy you told him about?"
"Dr. Moore uses a combination of mild hypnotic drugs and hypnotic technique. You see, we need to know a great deal more about you, Mr. McGee. We are particularly interested in all of your activities during the past several days."
"I won't tell you a damned thing."
"That is an irrational statement. But perhaps I made an inaccurate statement. We are not particularly interested in your activities. We have a request for an accurate report of your activities. We are far more interested in your responses to the psychotomimetic drugs."
"The what?"
"Our resident organic chemist, Doctor Daska, had been achieving some interesting variations in the Hofmann formulae, creating more directive compounds in the psilocybin and D-lysergic acid diethylamide areas. The experimental compound the girl gave you has the lab designation of Daska-15. A single odorless tasteless drop. Approximately three-millionths of an ounce, actually, in a distilled-water suspension. Harvard University's Center for Research in Personality has done some basic work in this area, but Daska can achieve more predictability. Daska-15 gives consistently ugly hallucinations, and mimics highly psychotic disturbances of the sensory areas, communication and so on." He seemed to have forgotten he was talking to me. His enthusiasm and dedication were apparent.
"What the hell kind of a place is this?" I demanded.
His young face firmed as he brought his attention back from the misty distances of research.
"Eh? Oh, this is the Mental Research Wing of Toll Valley Hospital, Mr. McGee. We're concerned with psychotomimetic techniques, surgical techniques, electrical and chemical stimulation of areas of the brain-in fact the whole range of the mechanical rather than the psychiatric approach to mental disorder."
"What the hell kind of a doctor are you? You know I don't belong here."
"We're making significant progress in several directions. Important progress." He seemed strangely apologetic, and anxious for me to understand.
"So what?"
"We have chimps and monkeys and rodents who didn't ask to come here either, Mr. McGee."
My mind was quickening a little. "Are you trying to tell me I'm some kind of an experimental animal?"
"All this work is generously supported by foundation money."
Were I a character in a funnypaper, a lightbulb would have appeared over my head. "One of the Armister foundations?"
He looked sad and apologetic. "Crash programs are essential in this area, Mr. McGee. It is... a very difficult thing to weigh a few isolated instances of... questionable ethical behavior against the greatest good for the greatest number. Also..." His voice trailed off into a troubled silence.
"Also what?"
"It would be illegal to attempt to solicit healthy volunteers. And the few cases we can get from the main hospital, with all necessary permissions, are generally so hopeless we can't accurately appraise results." He shrugged a mild sadness away and smiled down at me, his features clean and remarkably handsome under the sheen of his hairless head. "We're not monsters, Mr. McGee. There won't be anything as unpleasant as what you have already been through. Many of the Daska compounds have extremely pleasant side effects. This will merely be a case of taking you through the experimental series, and then, under hypnosis, getting your detailed verbal report of the experience and sensations. You'll be physically checked and checked against the electroencephalograph and given a detailed multiphasic personality inventory test between each segment of the series to determine any area of deterioration."
"You are so comforting, Doctor. Was Charles Armister here?"
He hesitated and said, "He was with us for ten weeks." He looked at his watch. "I'll send in some medication, and some people to get you cleaned up and fed, Mr. McGee."
"You want to keep me healthy."
"Yes, of course," he said, and smiled and nodded and went out.
I had ten minutes alone. McGee, the suave shrewd operator. In retrospect I could marvel at the heights of blundering stupidity I had reached. It was as if a team of experts were systematically looting a bank, and I had come bumbling onto the scene to ask them how they were making out.
Certainly Mrs. Smith of Arts and Talents had checked with the other account. It gave them the time, place and opportunity to get me out of their hair. Probably before that they had become aware of my buzzing around, drinking with Bonita, leaving her a note at the office, getting in contact with Terry Drummond, talking to the law about Howard Plummer, getting close to Plummer's fianc‚. So when my buzzing became a little too annoying, they had swatted me. And I hadn't even taken the very elementary precaution of leaving some record of what I had learned, where it could get into the hands of the law.
Suddenly I felt a fear quite different from the terror of any distortion of reality. I was afraid for Nina Gibson and what they could do to her if she tried to do anything about my inexplicable disappearance.
A square sandy woman in white came in, bared my shoulder, held a hypo up io the light, then injected me in the shoulder muscle. She did not speak when spoken to. She swabbed the spot with a
lcohol before and after the injection and went away. In a little while I chuckled. I felt very very good. What the hell, let them have their fun. It was for the good of mankind. Way down in my mind a little lizard-head of fright kept opening its cupboard and looking out, but I kept shoving it back. I locked the cupboard door.
Two husky attendants came in. They got me up, took me out of the canvas jacket. I wanted to apologize for mussing my bed. I didn't want to be a burden to anybody. They were arguing with each other about the season bets they were going to make on profootball. I wanted to tell them a joke to make them laugh with me, but I couldn't think of one. They took me into an adjoining tiled bath. I stripped on request and they put me into a shower and gave me soap and a brush. I hummed as I showered.
When I came out they gave me a coverall suit to wear, a lightgreen garment zippered from throat to crotch. It seemed the most wonderfully practical and comfortable thing I had ever worn. I couldn't understand why everyone didn't wear exactly the same thing. They gave me straw slippers. Instead of telling me what to do, they tended to give me a shove in the direction they wanted me to go. I didn't mind. They were busy talking to each other. One of them thought the Packers could do it again.
John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 02 - Nightmare In Pink Page 12
