Expiration Date

  “That was the end,” she said.

  He opened his mouth, then apparently changed his mind about what he was going to say. “But you’ve had these zeitgebers all along, Janis. I’ve noticed that you bring the front page of the newspaper to bed with you, so you’ll know in the morning what day it is; and you hardly answer a ‘howdy do’ without looking around for a clock, or sneaking a look at that waitress pad you keep in your purse.”

  Her watch beeped again, and the television set went dark.

  Plumtree sat stiffly; somehow her watch was … making a noise; she could feel the vibration on her wrist. She didn’t touch the watch, or look at it. Maybe it was supposed to be making a noise. She would watch for cues.

  Dr. Armentrout was sitting beside her, looking at her speculatively. “So,” he said, “do you feel that you’ve been making progress, now that you’ve been a patient here for two years?”

  Her stomach went cold, but a deep breath and a fast blink kept tears from flooding her eyes. It’s okay, she told herself. It’s like Aunt Kate’s funeral again, that’s all. “I reckon I have,” she said stolidly.

  “I was lying, Janis,” Armentrout said then. “You’ve been here only nine days. You believed me, though, didn’t you?”

  “I thought you said … ‘with your fears,’ ” she whispered. Her watch was still beeping. The doctor wasn’t remarking on it. Maybe all the patients had been given these stupid noisy watches today, as part of some bird-brain new therapy. What a flop!

  At last Armentrout was looking away from her, past her, over her shoulder. “Here’s our Mr. Cochran now,” he said, getting laboriously to his feet and smoothing the skirt of his long white coat. “Just in time for the self-esteem group. Maybe he’ll have some funny stories about his visit to France.” Without looking down, he said, “Have you ever been to France, Janis?”

  She shrugged. “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  She shifted around in her chair and squinted at the man standing with Dr. Muir by the nursing station. The new patient looked a bit like Bogart, it seemed to her; a hassled Bogart, tall but stooped, and gangly and worried-looking, with his dark hair combed carelessly back so that it stood up in spikes where it was parted.

  She smiled, and the television came back on, and she wondered who the stranger by the nursing station was. Were they expecting a new patient? Would he be staying here?

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” she said, dimly aware that she was echoing a statement someone had made here very recently.

  “Scant?” said Dr. Armentrout.

  Cochran sat up in his chair and blinked at the doctor, who was seated at the desk and leafing through the file of Cochran’s transfer notes from Norwalk Metro.

  At first Cochran had followed him to what the doctor had described as the conference room, which had proved to be just a back office cluttered with stacked plastic chairs and a blackboard and a bulky obsolescent microwave oven; but the patient sitting at the table in there, a bald, round-faced old fellow with only one arm, had just grinned and begun quoting dialogue from the tea-party scene in Alice in Wonderland when Armentrout had asked him to leave, so the doctor had given up on it and led Cochran down a hall to this locked office instead.

  Now Armentrout raised his bushy eyebrows and tapped the stack of transfer notes. “Why does it say ‘Scant’ here?”

  “Oh—it’s a nickname,” said Cochran. “From when I broke my leg as a kid.”

  “So is that leg … shorter than the other?”

  “No, Doctor.” Armentrout was staring at him, so Cochran went on, helplessly, “Uh, I limp a little in bad weather.”

  “You limp a little in bad weather.” Armentrout flipped a page in the file. “You don’t seem to have been limping on Vignes Street Sunday. After you broke the liquor store window, you took off like an Olympic runner, until the police managed to tackle you.” He looked up at Cochran and smiled. “I guess it wasn’t bad weather.”

  Cochran managed to return a frail grin. “Mentally it was. I thought I saw a man in that liquor store—”

  “You probably did.”

  “I mean this man—a man I met in Paris. A couple of days earlier. Mondard, his name was … unless I hallucinated that whole thing, meeting him and all. And he changed into a bull—that is, he had a bull’s head, like the minotaur. I imagine it’s all in those notes, I told the doctor at Metro the whole story. And I thought that policewoman was—” He laughed unhappily. “—was going to kill me, that is tear me to pieces, and take my head back to him.” He took a deep breath and let it out. “How is she?”

  “You knocked out two of her teeth. Hence the Ativan and Haldol … which I’ll leave you off of, if you behave yourself.”

  “I’ll tell you the truth, Doctor, I don’t know if I’ll behave myself. I didn’t mean to go crazy on Vignes Street, Sunday.”

  “Well, you left the airport during your layover. You were supposed to catch a connecting flight back up to San Francisco, right? And you ditched all your ID.”

  “It … seemed urgent, at the time. I guess I thought he might find me … he did find me, at that liquor store.”

  Armentrout nodded. “And you had seen this man before.”

  “In France, right. In Paris. On Friday.”

  “No, I mean … where is it.” The doctor flipped back a couple of pages. “Four years ago last April, in 1990. Also on Vignes Street—hmm?—right after you had a ‘breakdown’ on your honeymoon.”

  Cochran’s heart was pounding, and he wanted to grip the arms of his chair but his hands had no strength. “That was him too?” he whispered. “He had a wooden mask on then, that time. But—yeah, I guess that was him, that time. Big.” He shook his head. “Wow,” he said shakily. “You guys are good. And I didn’t remember that it was on the same L.A. street. I guess the police report’s in there from that time too, right?”

  “What happened on your honeymoon?”

  “I … went crazy. We got married on the sixth of April in ’90, at a place on the Strip, and—”

  “The Strip? You mean on Sunset?”

  “No, the Las Vegas Strip, Las Vegas Boulevard. We—”

  “Really? Well well well! And here I’d been assuming you were married in Los Angeles!”

  “No. Las Vegas. And—”

  “At the Flamingo?”

  “No.” Cochran blinked at the doctor. “No, a little place called the Troy and Cress Wedding Chapel—”

  “Oh, better still!” exclaimed Armentrout happily. The fat doctor looked as though he wanted to clap his hands. “But I should shut up. Do go on.”

  “I’m not making that up. It’s probably in your file.”

  “I’m sure you’re not making it up. Please.”

  Psychiatrists! thought Cochran, trying to put a tone of brave derision into the thought. “And—at dawn the next day, it was a Saturday, I guess a car honked its horn right outside our motel-room door, a loud car horn; the chapel was a motel too, see, with rooms out in the back. They told me later that it was just a car horn. But I was hungover, or still drunk, and in my dream it was the man in the mask, very big, roaring like a lion, and blowing up a building he’d been locked up in, just by the force of his will. A loud noise. And he was loose, and he might do anything.”

  Armentrout nodded and raised his eyebrows.

  “So … we left Vegas. I was in a panic.” He looked at the psychiatrist. “Having a panic attack,” he ventured, hoping that conveyed it more forcefully. “I made Nina drive back, across the Mojave Desert.” He held up his right hand. “I was afraid that if I drove, we’d go … God knows where. And then when I did go ahead and drive, after we’d got all the way back to California, we wound up in L.A.—on, I guess, Vignes Street.”

  “Where you saw him.”

  “Right. On the other side of the street. Right. He was wearing a wooden mask, and … beckoning, like Gregory Peck on Moby Dick’s back.” Cochran looked up, and saw that the psychiatrist was staring at him. “In the movie,” he a
dded.

  “And you punched a store window that time too, and cut your wrist on the broken glass. Intentionally, the police thought, hence your 51-50. Standard with suicide attempts.”

  “I wasn’t trying to kill myself,” said Cochran defensively. “This was nearly five years ago, and I don’t really remember, but I think I was trying to cut off my right hand.”

  “Oh, is that all.”

  Armentrout put down his file and got up and crossed to a filing cabinet against the far wall. He pulled open the top drawer and came back to the desk carrying a spiral notebook and two fancy purple velvet boxes. He sat down again and put the boxes down by his telephone, well out of Cochran’s reach, and then flipped open the notebook.

  “You were married on the sixth of April,” he said.

  “Ri-ight,” said Cochran, mystified.

  “That’s very interesting! A week later a lot of people went crazy there. Well, at Hoover Dam, which is nearby. Most of them recovered their senses by the next day, though two gentlemen fell to their deaths off the after-bay face of the dam.” He sat back and smiled at Cochran. “We’ve got a woman on the ward here who also had a nervous breakdown in Las Vegas in April of 1990—on the fifteenth, Easter Sunday.”

  “Uh … did she also go crazy in L.A.?”

  “Yes! Or nearly. In Leucadia, which is … well, it’s almost to San Diego. But she called the police nine days ago and told them that she’d killed a man. She said he was a king, and that she killed him with a speargun spear. Do you believe in ghosts?”

  “Shit, no,” snapped Cochran impatiently. He shook his head. “Sorry—I thought you’d be showing me Rorschach ink-blots here, or having me interpret proverbs, like they did at Metropolitan in Norwalk. No, I don’t believe in ghosts.”

  “Have you ever seen anything that seemed to be supernatural?”

  “Well, I saw a man turn into a bull, on Vignes Street, day before yesterday.”

  Armentrout stared at him for several seconds with no expression. “You’re getting hostile.”

  “No, I’m sorry, I—”

  “You were being cooperative a few moments ago. You may be too labile right now to participate usefully in group.”

  “Too what?” Cochran wondered if he meant lippy.

  “The charge nurse showed you your room? Where the cafeteria is, where you shower?”

  “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 therapist! 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 sh
irt 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.”