Tom O'Bedlam

  3

  MORNING rounds, one of the regular chores. Routine was important, a key structural thing, for them and sometimes even for her. Right now especially for her. Go through the dorms, room by room, check all the patients out, see how well they were doing as their minds returned from their morning pick. Cheer them up if she could. Get them to smile a little. It would help their recovery if they’d smile more. Smiling was a known cure for a lot of things: it triggered the outflow of soothing hormones, that little twitch of the facial muscles did, sending all sorts of beneficial stuff shooting into the weary bloodstream.

  You ought to smile more often yourself, Elszabet thought.

  Room Seven: Ferguson, Menendez, Double Rainbow. She knocked. “May I come in? It’s Dr. Lewis.”

  She hovered, waiting. Quiet inside. This time of morning they often didn’t have a lot to say. Well, no one had said she couldn’t come in, right? She put her hand to the plate. Every doorplate in the building was set to accept her print, Bill Waldstein’s, Dan Robinson’s. The door slid back.

  Menendez was sitting on the edge of his bed with his eyes closed. There were bonephones glued to his cheeks, and he was moving his head sharply from side to side as if he were listening to some strongly rhythmic music. Across the room, Nick Double Rainbow lay stretched out belly-down on his vivid red Indian blanket, staring at nothing, chin propped up on fists and elbows. Elszabet went over to him, pausing by his bed to activate the privacy screen around it. A crackle of blurry pink light leaped up and turned Double Rainbow’s corner of the room into a private cubicle.

  In that moment, just as the screen went shooting up around them, Elszabet felt her mind invaded by a green tendril of fog. Almost as if the energy of the screen had allowed the greenness to get in. Surprise, fear, shock, anger. Something rising out of the floor to skewer her. She caught her breath. Her spine tightened.

  No, she thought fiercely. Get the hell out of there. Get. Get.

  The vagrant greenness went away. Once it was gone Elszabet found it hard to believe that it had been in her just a moment ago, even for an instant. She let her breath out, commanded her back and shoulders to ease up. The Indian didn’t seem to have noticed a thing. Still belly-down, still staring.

  “Nick?” she said.

  He went on ignoring her.

  “Nick, it’s Dr. Lewis.” She touched his shoulder lightly. He jerked as if a hornet had stung him. “Elszabet Lewis. You know me.”

  “Yeah,” he said, not looking at her.

  “Rough morning?”

  Tonelessly he said, “It’s all gone. The whole thing.”

  “What is, Nick?”

  “The people. The thing that we had. Goddamn, you know we had a thing and it was taken away. Why should that have happened? What the hell reason was there for that?”

  So he was on his Vanishing Redman kick again. He was lost in contemplation of the supreme unfairness of it all. You could pick and pick and pick, and somehow you could never pick down far enough to get that stuff out of him. Which was what had dumped him into the Center in the first place: he had come here suffering from deep and abiding despair, the thing that Kierkegaard had termed the sickness unto death, which Kierkegaard said was worse than death itself, and which nowadays was called Gelbard’s syndrome. Gelbard’s syndrome sounded more scientific. Double Rainbow had lost faith in the universe. He thought the whole damn thing was useless and pointless if not actually malevolent. And he wasn’t getting better. There were holes in his memory all over the place now, sure, but the sickness unto death remained, and Elszabet suspected it didn’t have a thing to do with his alleged American Indian heritage but only with the fact that he had been unlucky enough to have been born in the second half of the twenty-first century, when the whole world, exhausted by a hundred fifty years of dumb self-destructive ugliness, was beginning to be overwhelmed by this epidemic of all-purpose despair. Bill Waldstein might actually be right that Double Rainbow wasn’t an Indian at all. It didn’t matter. When you had the sickness unto death, any pretext was enough to drag you down into the pit.

  “Nick, do you know who I am?”

  “Dr. Lewis.”

  “My first name?”

  “Elsa—Ezla—”

  “Elszabet.”

  “That’s it. Yeah.”

  “And who am I?”

  A shrug.

  “You don’t remember?”

  He looked at her, an off-center look, dark eyes focusing on her cheek. He was a big heavy-set man, thick through the shoulders, with a blunt broad nose and a grayish tinge to his skin, not exactly the coppery hue his alleged race was supposed to have, but close enough. Since he had taken that swing at her a couple of weeks back he had never quite been able to look her in the eye. So far as anyone could tell, he had no recollection of having gone on a rampage, of having hit her and hurt her. But some vestige of it must remain, she suspected. When he was around her he looked rueful and embarrassed and also sullen, as though he felt guilty about something but wasn’t sure what and was a little angry with the person who made him feel that way.

  “Professor,” he said. “Doctor. Something like that.”

  She said, “Close enough. I’m here to help you feel better.”

  “Yeah?” Flicker of interest, swiftly subsiding.

  “You know what I want you to do, Nick? Get yourself up and off that bed and over to the gym. Dante Corelli’s got the rhythm-and-movement workshop going down there right now. You know who she is, Dante?”

  “Dante. Yeah.” A little doubtfully.

  “You know the gymnasium building?”

  “Red roof, yeah.”

  “Okay. You get down there and start dancing, and dance your ass off, you hear me, Nick? You dance until you hear your father’s voice telling you to stop. Or until lunch bell, whichever one comes first.”

  He brightened a little at that. His father’s voice. Sense of tribal structure: did him good, thinking about his father’s voice.

  “Yeah,” he said. In his heavy way he started to push himself up from the bed.

  “Did you have any dreams last night?” she asked offhandedly.

  “Dreams? What dreams, how? I got no way of knowing.”

  He had dreamed Blue Giant, the harsh and piercing light: that was this morning’s pick-room report. He seemed sincere in not remembering that, though.

  “All right,” Elszabet said. “You go dance now.” She grinned at him. “Make it a rain dance, maybe. This time of year, we could use a little rain.”

  “Too soon,” he said. “Waste of time, dancing for rain now. Rains don’t come till October. Anyway, what makes you think dancing’ll bring rain? What brings rain, it’s the low-pressure systems out of the Gulf of Alaska, October.”

  Elszabet laughed. So he’s not completely out of things yet, she thought. Good. Good. “You go dance anyway,” she told him. “It’ll make you feel better, guaranteed.” She kicked the switch to knock the privacy screen down and went over to Tomás Menendez’ side of the room. He was sitting just as he had been before, listening to his bonephones. When she activated his privacy screen she braced herself for another touch of the green fog, but this time it didn’t come. Just about every other day now she had a whiff of it, an eerie sensation, that hallucination circling her like a vulture waiting to land. It was getting so that she was afraid to go to sleep, wondering whether this would be the night when the Green World finally broke through to her consciousness. That continued to terrify her, the fear of crossing the line from healer to hallucinator.

  “Tomás?” she said softly.

  Menendez was one of the most interesting cases: forty years old, second-generation Mexican-American, strong hulking man with arms like a gorilla’s, but gentle, gentle, the gentlest man she had ever known, soft-spoken, sweet, warm. In his fashion he was a scholar and a poet, as profoundly involved in his own ethnic heritage as Nick Double Rainbow claimed to be with his, but Menendez seemed really to mean it. He had turned the area around his bed
into a little museum of Mexican culture, holoprints of paintings by Orozco and Rivera and Guerrero Vasquez, a couple of grinning Day of the Dead skeletons, a bunch of lively brightly painted clay animals, dogs and lizards and birds.

  The year before last, Menendez had strangled his wife in their pretty little living room down in San José. No one knew why, least of all Menendez, who had no memory of doing it, didn’t even know his wife was dead, kept expecting her to visit him next weekend or the one after that. That was one of the strangest manifestations of Gelbard’s syndrome, the motiveless murder of close relatives by people who didn’t seem likely to be capable of swatting flies. Tell Menendez that he had killed his wife and he would look at you as though you were speaking in Turkish or Babylonian: the words simply had no meaning for him.

  “Tomás, it’s me, Elszabet. You can hear me through those phones, can’t you? I just want to know how you’re getting along.”

  “I am quite well, gracias.” Eyes still closed, shoulders jerking rhythmically.

  “That’s good news. What are you playing?”

  “It is the prayer to Maguali-ga.”

  “I don’t know that. What is it, an ancient Aztec chant?”

  He shook his head. He seemed to disappear for a moment, knees bobbing, fists banging lightly together. “Maguali-ga, Maguali-ga,” he sang. “Chungirá-He-Will-Come!” Elszabet leaned close, trying to hear what he was hearing, but the bonephones transmitted sounds only to their wearer. The jacket of the cube he was playing with lay beside him on the bed. She picked it up. It bore a crudely printed label that looked homemade, half a dozen lines of type in a language that she thought at first was Spanish; but she could read a little Spanish and she couldn’t read this. Portuguese? The label had a San Diego address on it. Tomás was always getting shipments of things from his friends in the Chicano community: music, poetry, prints. He was a much loved man. Sometimes she wondered if they ought to be screening all these cubes and cassettes that he received. They might deal with things that could impede his recovery, she thought. But of course whatever he played was picked from him the next day, anyway; and it obviously made him happy to be keeping up with his people’s cultural developments. “Maguali-ga is the opener of the gate,” he said in a firm lucid voice, as though the phrase would explain everything to her. Then he opened his eyes, just for a moment, and frowned. He seemed surprised to have company.

  “You are Elszabet?” he asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “You have a message from my wife? She is coming this weekend, Carmencita?”

  “No, not this weekend, Tomás.” There was no use in explaining. “What was that, what you were playing?”

  “It is from Paco Real, San Diego.” He looked a little evasive. “Paco sends me many interesting things.”

  “Music?”

  “Singing, chanting,” Menendez said. “Very beautiful, very strong. Tell me, did I dream last night of the other worlds?”

  “No, not last night.”

  “The night before, though?”

  “Are you asking me or telling me?”

  He smiled sadly. “The dreams are so beautiful. That is what I write down: the dreams are so beautiful. Even though I must lose them, the beauty is what stays. When will I be allowed to keep my dreams, Elszabet?”

  “When you’re better. You’re improving all the time, but you aren’t there yet, Tomás.”

  “No. I suppose not. So I must not know, when I dream of the worlds. Is it all right that I write down that the dreams are so beautiful? I know we are not supposed to write things to ourselves, either. But that is a small thing, to tell myself about my dream, though I do not tell myself the dream itself.” He looked at her eagerly. “Or could I write down the dreams too?”

  “No, not the dreams. Not yet,” she said. “Do you mind if I hear the new cube?”

  “No, no, of course, here. Here.” He put the bonephones to her cheeks, pressing them on lightly, with a tender, almost loving touch. He tapped the knob and she heard a deep male voice, so deep it sounded like the booming of a great bullfrog, or perhaps a crocodile, chanting something steady and repetitive and vaguely African-sounding, a little barbaric, very powerful and disturbing. She heard the words that Menendez had been murmuring: Maguali-ga, Chungirá. Then there was a lot of what might have been Portuguese, and the sound of drums and some high-pitched instrument, and the noises of a crowd repeating the chant.

  “But what is it?” she asked.

  “It is like a meeting, a holy prayer. There are gods. It is very beautiful.” He took the bonephones from her as tenderly as he had put them on. “My wife, she will not this weekend, eh?”

  “No, Tomás.”

  “Ah. Ah, it is too bad.”

  “Yes.” Elszabet switched off the screen. “You might want to go down to the gymnasium. There’s a dance group there now. You’d enjoy it.”

  “Perhaps a little while.”

  “All right. Do you happen to know where Ed Ferguson is?”

  “Ferguson, no. I think he goes off walking in the woods.”

  “Alone?”

  “Sometimes the big woman. Sometimes the artificial one. I forget the names.”

  “April. Alleluia.”

  “One of them, yes.” Menendez took Elszabet’s hand carefully between his own. “You are a very kind woman,” he said. “You will visit me tomorrow?”

  “Of course,” she said.

  The strange discordant chanting still rang in her ears as she walked up the hallway to finish her rounds. Philippa, Alleluia, April. Alleluia wasn’t there. All right, off in the woods with Ferguson: that was an old story. They deserved each other, she told herself, the cold-blooded swindler and the cold-blooded artificial being. Then she chided herself for lack of charity. Some hell of a healer you are, thinking of your patients that way. But as quickly as she had assailed herself Elszabet let herself off the hook. You’re entitled to be human, she thought. You aren’t required to love everybody in the Center. Or even to like them. Just to see that they get the treatment they need.

  She broke into a slow trot and then into a jog, heading back up the hill toward her office. The morning was lovely, clear and warm. It was that time of the year when one golden day followed another without variance or interruption; the summertime fog season was over, and as Nick Double Rainbow had so thoughtfully reminded her, the rainy season was still more than a month away.

  I’ll go to the beach this afternoon, Elszabet thought. Lie in the sun, try to make some sense out of things.

  It bothered her enormously that these strangenesses were creeping into the Center: the shared dreams, puzzling not only because they were shared but also because of their bewildering content, all these other suns and worlds and alien monsters. And the spread of the dreams to the staff: Teddy Lansford and Naresh Patel and just yesterday Dante Corelli, too, bewilderedly confessing a Nine Suns dream. Elszabet suspected that other staff members might be concealing space dreams of their own, too, just as she had not yet been able to admit to anyone that she was now and then being invaded—while actually awake, no less—by strands of imagery that seemed to come out of the Green World dream. Everything was turning strange. Why? Why?

  For Elszabet the Center was the one place in the world where she felt at peace, where the crazy turmoil outside was held at bay. That was why she had come here, to do her work and be of service and at the same time to escape the harshness and sorrows of that burned-out world beyond the Center’s gates. There were times here when she almost managed to forget about what was going on out there, although the steady influx of Gelbard’s syndrome victims, twitchy and hollow-eyed, constantly reminded her of that. Still, the Center was a peaceful place. And yet, and yet, she knew that was foolishness, hoping she could ever escape the real world here. The real world was everywhere. And now the real world was getting unreal and the unreality was sliding through the gates like a fog.

  As she approached her office Bill Waldstein came down the path from th
e GHQ building and said, “Where is everybody?”

  “Who? Staff? Patients?”

  “Anyone. Place seems awfully quiet.”

  Elszabet shrugged. “Dante’s got a big dance group going. I guess just about everyone must be over at the gym. Who are you looking for? Tomás and the Indian are in their room, Phillipa and April are in theirs, Ferguson’s fooling around in the forest with Alleluia—”

  Waldstein looked drawn and weary. “Is it true that Dante had a space dream night before last?”

  “You’d better ask her that,” Elszabet said.

  “She did, then. She did.” He scuffed at the ground with his sandal. “Can we go into your office, Elszabet?”

  “Of course. What’s happening, Bill?”

  He didn’t speak until they were in the little room. Then, scrunching down against the data wall, he gave her a haggard look and said, “Confidential?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “You remember when I was saying the space dreams had to be frauds, that the patients were making them up just to bedevil us? I haven’t really believed that for a while, I guess. But I certainly don’t now.”

  “Oh?” she said.

  “Now that I’ve had one too.”

  “You?”

  “I had Double Star Three last night. The whole thing, all the bells and whistles, the orange sun high and the yellow one down by the horizon, the double shadows. Then the yellow one set and everything turned to flame.”

  Elszabet watched him closely. She thought he was going to burst into tears.

  “Wait,” he said. “There’s more. I improved on it. When April had it last week there were no life-forms, right? I got life-forms. Blue sphere-shaped creatures with little squid tentacles at the top end. Isn’t that cute? Strolling around in a sort of amphitheater like Aristotle and his disciples. Cute. Very cute.”