Earthquake Weather (7 page)

“Yes.”

“That was your roommate, the one-armed man I couldn’t roust out of the conference room. John Beach—we all call him Long John. It’s almost certainly not his real name; I think he chose it just because he was found in
Long Beach,
get it? He’s been with us since November of ’92.”

Cochran felt empty, and hoped the one-armed old man didn’t recite from
Alice in Wonderland
all the time, at all hours.

“He’ll be in group. So will Janis Plumtree—she’s the one who had the breakdown in Vegas in ’90, and who believes she killed a king nine days ago. You may as well participate. I’ll ask you to leave if you start acting out or getting too gamy.”

Gamy?
thought Cochran, involuntarily picturing tusked and antlered animal heads on the stone floor of an old smokehouse.

Armentrout led him back up the hallway to the TV lounge, but Cochran hung back in the entry when the doctor strode out across the shiny waxed floor and lowered himself into one of the upholstered chairs around the conference table near the window. Four men and two women were already seated around the table, visible only in silhouette from the hall entry—Cochran thought it must almost be time for the lights to come on, or curtains to be pulled, for the evening sun was throwing horizontal poles of orange light into the room through the shrubbery that waved outside the reinforced glass.

“My civil rights are being violated,” a young woman at the table was saying harshly. “I haven’t signed anything, and I’m being held here against my will. What’s nine days’ impound fees on a car in the San Diego County municipal lot? I bet it’s more than my car’s worth, it’s just an ’85 Toyota Celery, but I need it for my job, and I’m holding you people, you soy dissent doctors, responsible.”

“It was a Toyota
Cressida,
Janis,” said Armentrout, and the backlit blob of his head turned either toward Cochran or toward the window. “Unless you’re thinking of some other vehicle. Perhaps a bus?”

“Fuck you, Doctor,” the woman went on, “you’re not scaring me away. It was legally parked, and—”

“Janis!” interrupted another man sharply. “Personal attacks are not permitted, that’s non-negotiable. If you want to stay, be good.” He raised his head. “Are you here for the self-esteem group?”

Cochran understood that he was being addressed, and he shuffled forward uncertainly.

“Come in and sit down, Sid,” said Armentrout. To the group he said, “This is a new patient, Sid Cochran.”

Cochran broadened his stride, squinting as he walked through the brassy sunbeams to the nearest empty chair, which was at the end of the table, next to the angry young woman, with the windows to his right and slightly behind him.

“Hi, Sid,” said the man who had rebuked the angry woman; he was wearing a white coat like Armentrout’s, and seemed to be another doctor. “How are you?”

Cochran stared into the man’s youthful, smiling face. “I’m fine,” he said levelly.

“Ho ho!” put in Armentrout.

“Well, my name is Phil Muir,” the younger man went on, “and we’re here this evening to address problems of self-esteem. I was just saying that you have to love yourself before you can love someone else—”

The young woman interrupted: “And I was just saying, ‘Fuck you, Doctor.’ ” She pointed at Armentrout. “To him.
‘Ho … ho.’
You big fat fag.”

Cochran looked at her in alarm—then found himself suppressing a grin. Under the disordered thatch of blond hair her sunburned face had a character he could only think of as
gamin,
with a pointed chin and wide mouth and high cheekbones, and the humor lines under her eyes and down her cheek made her outburst seem childishly valiant, just tomboy bravura.

Hoping to prevent her from being ejected from the group, he laughed indulgently, as if at an off-color joke.

But when she whipped her head around toward him, he quailed. Her pupils were tiny black pinpricks and too much white was showing around her irises, and the skin was tight and mottled on her cheeks—

Abruptly an old man who a moment ago had seemed to be asleep hunched forward and hammered a frail fist onto the table.
“The … rapist!”
he roared as the pieces of a forgotten dominoes game spun across the tabletop. “That’s what it spells! Don’t pronounce it
ther
apist! You’ve raped me with your needles!” He twisted in his chair and suddenly smacked both of his palms around Muir’s throat.

Muir was able to struggle to his feet with the old man’s weight on him, but he wasn’t succeeding in prying the hands free of his throat, and tendons were standing up like taut cables under his straining chin.

“Staff!”
roared Armentrout, shoving back his chair and thrashing to his feet.
“Code Green! Help, get a chemical here!”

The nursing-station door banged open and two nurses came sprinting out, and with the help of a couple of the patients who had leaped up from the table they pulled the old man off Muir and wrestled him face down to the floor.

“I’ll be snap-crackling pork chops with Jesus!” the old man panted, his cheek against the linoleum tiles. “You sons of bitches! Bunch of Heckle and Jeckles!”

Armentrout was standing beside the table. “Thorazine,” he told the charge nurse, “two hundred milligrams I.M., stat. Put him in four points in the QR till I tell you different.” Two uniformed security guards hurried in from the outer hallway; after taking in the scene, they slung their nightsticks and knelt on the old man so that the patients could return to their seats. The overhead fluorescent lights had come on at some point during the commotion, and as the doctors and patients sat down again the group seemed to be only now convening.

Cochran felt a touch on his shirt cuff, and he jumped when he realized that it was the woman Janis; but when he looked at her, she was smiling. She couldn’t, he thought, be as much as thirty years old.

“With his hands and feet tied down,” she said, “at the
four points
of a mattress, in the Quiet Room, he’ll be back to himself in no time.”

Cochran smiled back at her, touched that she had worded her remark so that he would understand the psychiatrist’s jargon without having to admit ignorance; though in fact he himself had spent time in four points in a QR back in 1990.

“Ah,” he said noncommittally. “I hope so.”

Two mental-health workers had rolled a red gurney into the room, and the old man was lifted onto it and strapped down. Cochran saw a nurse walking away with an emptied hypodermic needle.

Muir was kneading his throat. “And I think Janis—” He looked across the table at her and stopped. “Janis,” he said again; “maybe you’ll be good now.”

“I do apologize to everybody,” she said. She watched the gurney being wheeled out of the room. “I hope Mr. Regushi is going to be all right …?”

“He just flipped out,” said Armentrout shortly, settling into his chair. “Very uncharacteristic.”

“We feel vulnerable, threatened,” said Muir hoarsely, “and we get defensive and lash out—when we don’t
feel good about ourselves.
We feel like bugs on a sidewalk, like somebody’s going to step on us.” He gave the patients a wincing smile. “Janis, I think your recurrent dream of the sun falling on you from out of the sky is indicative of this kind of thinking. How do you feel about that?”

Cochran braced himself, but the woman was just nodding seriously.

“I think that’s a valuable point,” she said. “I’ve always been frightened, of everything—jobs, bills,
people.
I’ve wasted my whole life being afraid. My only constellation is that I’m finally getting good, caring, state-of-the-art help now.”

“Well,” said Muir uncertainly. “That’s good, Janis.” He looked at Cochran. “I’ve, uh, looked at your file, Sid, and I think you’re afraid of being hurt. I noticed that when poor Mr. Regushi attacked me, you didn’t get up to help. I suspect that this is characteristic of you—that you’re afraid to reach out your hand to people.”

Cochran shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Reach out your hand, you get it cut off, sometimes.”

Belatedly he noticed old Long John Beach at the other end of the table. The one-armed man bared his teeth, and a domino on the table in front of him quietly flipped over … as if, it seemed to Cochran, he had flipped it with a phantom hand at the end of his missing arm.

No one else had noticed the trick, and Cochran quickly looked back at Muir. Long John probably tied a hair to it, Cochran thought, and yanked on the hair with his real hand. He’s probably got a dozen such tricks. And he’s my roommate! And now I’ve probably offended him with my get-it-cut-off remark. Swell.

Muir had apparently followed Cochran’s brief glance. “Long John can’t remember how he lost his hand,” he said. “His whole arm, that is. But he’s okay with that, aren’t you, John?”

“In
some
gardens,” said Long John Beach in a thoughtful tone, as if commenting on what had been said before, “the beds are so hard that the flowers can’t even put down roots—they just
run around
—right out into the street.”

“The dwarves in
Snow White
,” put in Janis, “came home every night—because their little house was fixed up so nicely. Snow White made them keep it
just so
.”

Cochran thought of his own little 1920s bungalow house in South Daly City, just a few miles down the …
the 280 …
from Pace Vineyards on the San Bruno Mountain slope; and he reflected with bitter amusement that these doctors would probably consider it “valuable” for him to “share” about it here, ideally with hitching breath and tears. Then all at once he felt his face turn cold with a sudden dew of sweat, as if he were about to get sick, for he realized that he
wanted
to talk about it, wanted to tell somebody, even these crazy strangers, about the tiny room Nina had fixed up in preparation for the arrival of the baby, about the teddy bear wallpaper, and the intercom walkie-talkie set they had bought so as to be able to hear the baby crying at night. Their whole lives had seemed to stretch brightly ahead of them; and in fact he and Nina had even bought adjoining plots at the nearby Woodlawn Cemetery, just on the other side of the highway—but now Nina’s ashes were in France, and Cochran would one day lie there alone.

Janis touched his hand then, and he impulsively took hold of her hand and squeezed it—but his vision was blurring with imminent tears, and Armentrout was probably staring at him, and the mark on his knuckles was itching intolerably; he released her hand and pushed his chair back and stood up.

“I’m very tired,” he managed to pronounce clearly. He walked out of the room with a careful, measured stride—not breathing, for he knew his next breath would come audibly, as a sob.

He blundered down the hall to his room and flung himself face-down onto the closer of the two beds, shaking with bewildered weeping, his hands and feet at the corners of the mattress as if he were in four points again himself.

“She’s DID,” said Muir to Armentrout. He was sipping coffee and still absently massaging his throat. The two of them were standing by the supervision-and-privilege blackboard in the nursing station, and Muir waved his coffee cup toward Janis Plumtree’s name, beside which was just the chalked notation SSF—supervised sharps and flames—which indicated that she, like most of the patients, was not to be entrusted with a lighter or scissors.

“Degenerate Incontinent … Dipsomaniac,” hazarded Armentrout. He wished the pay telephone in the lounge would stop ringing.

“No,”
said Muir with exaggerated patience. “Haven’t you read the new edition of the diagnostic manual? ‘Dissociative identity disorder.’ What we used to call MPD.”

Armentrout stared at the intern. Muir had been resentful and rebellious ever since they’d heard the news about the overweight bipolar girl Armentrout had treated and released last week; the obese teenager had apparently hanged herself the day after she had gone home.

“Plumtree doesn’t have multiple personality disorder,” said Armentrout. “Or your DID, either. And I don’t appreciate you running tests on her circadian rhythms, and giving her …
zeitgebers
? That silly watch that beeps all the time? You’re not her primary, I am. I’m on top of her—”

“The watch is a grounding technique,” interrupted Muir. “It’s to forcibly remind her that she’s here, and now, and safe, when flashbacks of the traumas that fragmented her personality forcibly intrude—”

“She’s not—”

“You can practically
see
the personalities shift in her! I think the patients have even caught on—did you hear Regushi mention Heckle and Jeckles? I think he was trying to say Jekyll and Hyde … though I can’t figure out why he seemed to
resent
her.”

“She’s not a multiple, damn it. She’s depressed and delusional, with obsessive-compulsive features—her constant demands to use the shower, the days-of-the-week underwear, the way she gargles mouthwash all the time—”

“Then why haven’t you got her
on
anything? Haloperidol, clomipramine?” Muir put down his coffee cup and crossed to the charge nurse’s desk.

To Armentrout’s alarm, the man picked up the binder of treatment plans and began flipping through it. “You don’t know enough to be second-guessing me, Philip,” Armentrout said sharply, stepping forward. “There are confidential details of her case—”

“A shot of
atropine,
after midnight tonight?” interrupted Muir, reading from Plumtree’s chart. He looked up, and hastily closed the binder. “What for, to dilate her pupils? Her pinpoint pupils are obviously just a conversion disorder, like hysterical blindness or paralysis! So is the erythema, her weird ‘sunburn,’ if you’ve noticed that. My God, atropine won’t get her pupils to
normal,
it’ll have ’em as wide as garbage disposals!”

Armentrout stared at him until Muir looked away. “I’m going to have to
order
you,
Mister
Muir, in my capacity as Chief of Psychiatry here, to cease this insubordination. You’re an intern—a student, in effect!—and you’re overstepping your place.” The pay telephone in the patients’ lounge was still ringing; in a louder voice he went on, “I’ve been practicing psychiatry for nineteen years, and I don’t need a
partial
recitation of the effects of
atropine,
helpful though you no doubt meant to be. Shall I …
dilate! …
upon this matter?”