Rummies

  "Name's Twist."

  "I don't like nicknames, Khalil. I think they're escape mechanisms, ways of hiding who we really are. So I'd like to call you by the name God gave you."

  "No God gave me that dumb-ass name. Louis fuckin' Farrakhan gave me it, forced the old man to call me it. Mama called me Junius."

  "Fine. Junius, then. One of the—"

  "Name's Twist."

  Hector laughed and nudged Lupone.

  "—little changes we'll be making is that we're all going to try, honestly try, to clean up our language. Gutter language is lazy language. You don't want people to think you're just a lazy nigger, do you, Junius?"

  Preston saw Twist start, had a second's horror of Twist launching himself out of his chair and throttling the grinning cow.

  But all Twist did was straighten up and lean back in his chair and look at her and say, "Keep it up, honey-bun, and all people gonna be sayin' 'bout you is you're a dead cunt."

  "So it's threats now, Junius?" Smile, smile. Not a hint of fear.

  This woman is hard as spikes.

  "Well, I guess we have to wallow at the very bottom before we can reach upward for God's sweet light.'' She stepped around Preston and sat in Marcia's chair. "Now," she said, looking from face to face, "the quickest way for us to get to know each other is for us each to take a turn on the Hot Seat. Do we agree? . . . Scott?"

  "The what?"

  "Marcia didn't put you on the Hot Seat? Naughty. It's so effective."

  While she looked at the other faces, Preston sneaked a glance at his watch. Half an hour to go. Keep her talking. Keep her from doing anything. All he wanted was to get through the session, survive it, so he could get out of here and discover what had happened to Marcia.

  “Let's begin with you, Guglielmo," Gwen said.

  "Let's not," said Lupone.

  "Why do you keep scratching yourself?"

  "I don't."

  "Yes, you do." She pointed at him. "There."

  Preston had been in Lupone's company for twelve or fifteen hours a day, more or less, for a week and had never noticed it, but as soon as she pointed it out, it was as obvious as a goiter. Every few seconds, Lupone scratched a spot just above his belt on his right side.

  "It itches," Lupone said.

  "Why?"

  "The fuck do I know why it itches? It itches."

  "Are you allergic?"

  "Yeah," he snorted. "Allergic. To ninety-eight-grain thirty-eight police-special plus Ps."

  "What are they?"

  "It's a bullet hole, lady!"

  "I don't believe you."

  "I care."

  Lupone looked at Preston, then at Hector and Twist. They were all staring at him with a kind of strange reverence.

  He loves it.

  Gwen said, "Somebody shot you?"

  "No way." Lupones voice dismissed the very possibility as unthinkable lese-majeste.

  "What happened?"

  "I shot myself."

  "What ever for?"

  "I was in the shithouse." Offhand. Casual. No big deal.

  "The where?"

  "I had a tough day coming up, so I took a bunch of bennies, eye-opener, and after a while I had a few seven-and-sevens that put me in a shitty kinda no-man's-land, so when some guy said here, have a Valium, I had a coupla them, which put the brakes right on it, but just about the time I hadda go to work I was really fucked so I did a coupla lines. I don't even 'member thinkin' about it, but I was checking to make sure I had all six in my Smith and I musta said aw shit on it, 'cause next thing I knew I was in the doctor's office and he was diggin' the sucker out."

  Lupone looked at Preston and smirked, and Preston felt cool on his teeth and realized that his mouth was open.

  Gwen said, "You tried to kill yourself."

  "Hell no. An accident is all."

  Gwen said to Hector, "Do you believe him. Hector?"

  "Believe him?" Hector started. "You mean, believe him? He say that the way it is, that the way it is."

  "I don't."

  Lupone lurched forward and almost toppled off his chairs. "I give a fuck what you think, lady! Why would I lie?"

  "That's what we're here to find out, Guglielmo." Gwen smiled sweetly.

  Preston sneaked another glance at his watch. Its hands were paralyzed, quick-frozen by the menace of Gwen. My treatment is over. This woman has nothing to offer me but pain. He felt a sudden rush of anger at Marcia.

  How could you do this to me? She had broken him down and begun to build him up and then abandoned him. He began to salivate, and a familiar taste permeated his spittle. More than anything else right now, he wanted a drink.

  The flash of recognition made him sweat with fear. How could it be happening? One tiny frisson of fear, and the boozing reflex kicks into gear? If it could happen here, in this sanctum of sobriety, what would it be like the first time something went wrong in the real world?

  He would never make it on his own.

  "What do you think, Scott?" Gwen said. "Is Guglielmo telling the truth?"

  Marcia rode Dan as if he were a Brahma bull, bracing herself with her hands to keep from falling off as he bucked and whinnied.

  They hadn't made love in the morning for weeks, and she was tempted to roll away and tease him for a while, to prolong her pleasure. But she sensed no urgency to his writhing, he wasn't ready to fire quite yet. This was their second go-round in the past two hours, and his trigger wouldn't be as sensitive this time. If she was wrong, too bad; they'd try again in another couple of hours. They had plenty of time.

  They had nothing but time.

  The bulletin had come at six-thirty. She was up, had taken a shower and was having a cup of coffee when the doorbell rang.

  It wasn't a telegram, not a Federal Express envelope nor a UPS night letter. It was a plain white envelope with the clinic's logo in the top left-hand corner . . . delivered by a state trooper, for Christ's sake! (What, were they worried she'd attack a Western Union messenger?)

  As soon as she looked at the envelope, she knew what it was. She didn't have to read the message inside.

  It was addressed to her and Dan.

  Both of them.

  At her address.

  But the smokey insisted that she open it and read it in front of him, and when she had finished, he asked if she understood it, did she have any questions.

  Yes, she said, she understood it; no, she had no questions.

  The smokey tipped his hat and said, "Have a nice day," and left.

  She sat in the kitchen and read it again while she finished her coffee. She had to lay the sheet of white bond on the table, for her hands were shaking so badly that she couldn't hold it steady. At first her rage was wild and unfocused, like a hive of frantic bees. She tried an old trick and imagined that she was plucking her angers from the sky one by one and examining them and crushing them, and she was interested—and mildly amused—to discover that one of them was Martin Luther King. She was furious at him for leaving her.

  She went into the bedroom and sat on the bed and touched Dan's cheek and said, "Hey." When he was awake, she read him the message. It was in the form of a memorandum (to both of them, conspicuously at the same apartment number, let's not kid ourselves, we've known all along) from Lawrence Victor Tomlinson, chairman of the board of trustees of The Banner Clinic and (unnoted but well known) chief executive officer of a chemical conglomerate and bosom buddy of several U.S. presidents:

  You are, hereby and effective immediately, dismissed from the staff of The Banner Clinic for conduct unbecoming employees of the Clinic. You are banned from the Clinic grounds. Your personal effects will be sent to you. You will receive by mail two weeks' salary. Your health benefits will terminate at the end of the current month. You are reminded of the declaration of confidentiality signed upon your employment, any violation of which may occasion civil or criminal prosecution, or both.

  "Conduct unbecoming?" Dan said. "What does that mean?"

  "It mea
ns"—Marcia kissed him—"that in this white-bread world, nobody likes Oreo Cookies."

  "That's ridiculous."

  '"You tell me, then."

  Dan was silent, and Marcia imagined that she could actually see gears mesh in his head. After a moment he said, "What are we going to do?"

  "First thing, I thought we'd go downtown and find the scraunchiest dealer we can and buy all his worst shit and eat it, and when we got a really bad buzz going, we go machine-gun Mr. Lawrence Victor Tomlinson and the rest of the board. Is that a great idea or what?"

  Dan didn't smile.

  Mistake. Irony isn't his long suit. "Don't worry, baby"—she touched his cheek—"I'm kidding." She paused. "But we are gonna have to be there for each other. There's a little bastard inside me right now, and he's saying, 'C'mon, Marcia, let's go grab a couple of yellows, maybe a red or two, pop 'em down and forget the whole thing.' "

  "What about the Human Rights Commission?"

  "And say what? You think they'll admit they canned us 'cause I'm a jungle bunny? Forget it. They canned us 'cause we're living in sin, sets a bad example for unstable patients, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. They have the right."

  "We'll get married."

  "Sweet, Daniel, but too late." She leaned across his legs and propped herself up on one elbow. "You want to hear sick? We've just been run over, no prospects of anything, about six bucks between us, and I'm wondering how some of my drunks are gonna make it. They don't know how dependent they are, and they're gonna get a new counselor who could be Joan of fuckin' Arc and won't be able to get through to them, and they won't know why and she or he won't know why, and they're gonna think. Hey, I've just been shafted here, and they're right. There are some of them right on the edge, like Preston, they're just putting their bricks in place and there's no mortar to them yet. A little push, they can go either way."

  Dan said, "They've got to give us references. I mean, we're good.''

  "Good doesn't count, baby."

  "I don't get how you can be so damn cool." He was annoyed. "You're just gonna give up?"

  "No."

  "Aren't you mad?"

  "Sure."

  "So what are we gonna do?” He threw back the covers, but Marcia didn't move off his legs, so he was forced to he there, naked.

  "You're so pissed," she said and touched him, "let's see you loose the fateful lightning of your terrible swift sword."

  When they were finished, they sprawled on their backs on the bed. Marcia left a leg draped across Dan's midriff, and she stared at the ceiling.

  When her pulse had slowed to nearly normal, she said, "What's your pleasure—professionally, I mean-survival or revenge?"

  Dan considered. "We can't have both?"

  "Maybe. Probably not. I vote revenge. Survival is just survival. I gotta do something makes me feel good."

  "Like?"

  "What say we try to bring down the temple?'*

  "Dream on. How?"

  "You knew Natasha better than anybody. Did you swallow that line of Stone's?"

  "She was pretty together when she left. But you never know what—"

  "I think it stunk. Like he had a dead fish in his pocket. Where were you sitting?"

  "Last night? Off to the side. Why?"

  "I was way in the back," Marcia said. "I couldn't see too well. But the way he was fumbling, it sure looked to me that either he had a bad cold and was juiced on decongestants, or else he'd been putting some goodies up his nose."

  "Stone?" Dan huffed. "Be serious. You want to believe that. What're you saying? We should blow the whistle on him? We can't even set foot in the place."

  "True." She rubbed her foot on his stomach. "But we have spies. Oh my, do we have spies."

  "I don't think you people want to get better," Gwen said, her smile by now a caricature of a death rictus. "You know why? You're all still lying and still denying."

  Lupone had refused to retract his story about the source of his itching, despite Gwen's insistence that it was a fantasy made up to glamorize his drab life as a low-level marketing executive.

  By the time she turned to Twist, a tacit understanding had spread among the patients that since truth had no value in this forum, since Gwen had no intention of believing anything they said and was interested only in proving them all liars, they would each invent a fine lie that would be supported by all the others.

  All this they agreed with their eyes.

  Gwen asked Twist why he persisted in denying his Arab-African heritage, which was obvious to her because he had refused to accept either his Moslem name or his black name.

  Feigning remorse. Twist said that his drug problem was grounded in sex. "My aunt, she fell in love with my . . . weapon . . . took to callin' it Lawrence of Arabia 'cause it conquered all that come before it, and I knew God would strike me dead for porkin' my mama's sister so I started sniffin'."

  Preston attempted to corroborate Twist's story with a colorful description of Lawrence's magnitude, but Gwen cut him off and said, "Junius, your problem isn't sex. It's mendacity."

  Hector, confronted with the accusation that the reason he spent his life in treatment centers was that he was obsessed with the attention lavished on him by doctors, psychiatrists and counselors, that his problem could be reduced to one word—''egomania"—said, "Wrong. If you knew to read my record, you'd see my real papa is Cesar Chavez, and them grape pickers is worried that if it gets out he's been fuckin' around, no more huelga. So they gotta keep me locked up. You think I like it here?''

  Preston opted for simplicity. When Gwen asked him when he had first known he was an alcoholic, he said, "I'm not. I've been trying to tell people for three weeks, especially Marcia, but will she listen?" He spread his arms: Saint Sebastian at the stake.

  Gwen sat stonily and looked at each of them, and each of them looked at the floor, like twelve-year-olds caught peeping into the girls' locker room.

  "None of you," she said at last, "none of you will get your medallions. You'll leave here and go out in the world without that symbol of success, and I guarantee you within a week you'll all be in the gutter. I could give you that medallion, that comfort, but I won't. Do you know why? Because God is not pleased with you, not pleased at all." She stood up. "Now get out of here."

  At the door, Preston looked back and said, "Hey, Gwen, do me a favor? Next time you talk to God"— he winked—"give Him my very best. I think He's aces."

  "What an asshole," Duke said to Preston as he watched his new counselor—a young man in a dark suit, white shirt and dark tie, who looked like a Seventh Day Adventist canvasser—walk from Dan's office (now his) into Marcia's office (now Gwen's) and close the door. "The guy tried something called the Hot Seat."

  "Yeah, so did Use Koch."

  "You should've heard Priscilla. This dude gets on her case about being a rich bitch and all, and she gives him that look like he's something the toilet forgot to flush and says, 'Mr. Crippin, I don't know who you are or why you're here, but if you think you can intimidate me with your petty proletarian snobbery, you're very much mistaken.' "

  "You know what happened?"

  "You mean happened happened? No idea."

  "Let's go find out."

  Guy Larkin wasn't in his office.

  Nurse Bridget was typing labels for blood samples.

  Preston poked his head in the door and said, "D'you know what happened to Marcia?"

  Nurse Bridget kept typing. "Did something happen to her?"

  "Her and Dan," Duke said. "Where are they?"

  She shook her head. "Nobody tells me anything."

  She knows. Preston said, "What you mean is, they told you not to say anything."

  "Have it your way, dearie."

  They walked down the corridor of administrative offices, hoping to find an unsuspecting secretary they could surprise into revealing something.

  A voice behind them said, "You haven't been murdered in your bed yet."

  It was Sandra, the counselor-tech. She
wore slacks, not shorts, a blouse, not a T-shirt. But she still carried her dog-eared copy of Beyond the Chains of Illusion.

  "Hey," Preston said. "Working days now?"

  "Promoted. Assistant counselor." She smiled. "One more step and I’ll have a license to get inside your head."

  "Somebody leave?" Preston asked, all innocence.

  "Nice try, Scott." She punched him lightly on the shoulder.

  "C'mon, Sandra. Tell me what happened."

  "Not sure. All I know is they moved Crippin up and that Gwen, thank God. She was on me like fleas."

  "But you hear things," Duke said.

  "Everybody hears things."

  "Like what?"

  "Like"—serious now—"like, they're paying me more money and giving me more to do, and I don't want to blow it by shooting off my mouth. Have a great day."

  The psychologist was sitting at his desk, reading. Preston tapped on the open door and said, "Dr. Frost..."

  Frost looked up. "Ah! Preston, isn't it? Scott Preston?"

  "Right." Preston took a step inside the office. Duke followed.

  "And . . . ?" Frost looked at Duke.

  "Duke Bailey. Self-loathing. Probable suicide. You remember."

  "Of course. What can I—"

  "Two counselors," Preston said, realizing suddenly that he had never known Marcia's last name. "Marcia and Dan. Do you know what happened to them?"

  Frost hesitated, clearly—obviously, no question-deciding whether or not to lie.

  At last, he said, "I do."

  Bless the headshrinker's oath, Preston thought: I will dissemble, I will circumlocute, I will refuse to answer, but I will never lie.

  "Tell us."

  "No."

  Die, shrinks!

  "Why not?"

  "You don't need to know. All you need to know—"

  "She's my counselor!"

  "—is she's gone. You have a new counselor. Develop a relationship with her. You've become too dependent. Both of you."

  "How do you know?"

  "It's common. Everybody does."

  Duke said to Preston, "Shall we beat the shit out of him?"

  Frost tensed, and his hand went behind his desk.