Expiration Date

  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?”

  “No, sir,” said Muir, still looking away.

  “How pleasant for both of us. Were you going home?”

  “… Yes, sir.”

  “Then I’ll see you—you’re not working here tomorrow, are you?”

  “I’m at UCI in Orange all day tomorrow.”

  “That’s what I thought. You’re going to miss our ice-cream social! Well, I’ll see you Thursday then. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, right?”

  Muir walked out of the nurses’ station without answering.

  Armentrout looked after him for a moment, then made his way around the cluttered desks to the window and looked out into the TV lounge at the patients, who couldn’t be bothered to answer the telephone. Plumtree and Long John Beach had stayed at the conference table after the foolish self-esteem group had broken up—Armentrout favored the quick “buying the pharm” attitude toward mental illness over the long, tormenting, dangerous routines of psychotherapy—and he saw that Sid Cochran had got over his sulk and rejoined them. They appeared to be playing cards.

  You’ve got a busy day tomorrow, he told himself; coordinating the paperwork on the nurse anesthetist and the attending nurses, and then dealing with Plumtree after she recovers from the procedure. A busy day, and you’ll be lucky to get a few hours of sleep tonight. But tomorrow you may very well find out what happened on New Year’s Day, and learn how to make it happen again.

  Atropine, Philip—you fool—is used for more than just dilating eye pupils; it also dries up saliva and nasal secretions, which is desirable in the administration of … of what the patients sometimes call “Edison Medicine.”

  At first they had tried to play for cigarettes, but after Long John Beach had twice eaten the pot, snatching the Marlboros and shoving them into his mouth and chewing them up, filt
ers and all, Cochran and Plumtree decided to play for imaginary money.

  They were playing five-card stud, listlessly. To make up for the tendency of any sort of showing pair to automatically win in this short-handed game, they had declared all queens wild; and then Long John Beach had proposed that the suicide king be taken out of the deck.

  “I second that emotion,” Janis had said.

  “What’s the suicide king?” Cochran had asked.

  The one-armed old man had pawed through the deck, and then flipped toward Cochran the King of Hearts; and Cochran saw that the stylized king was brandishing a sword blade that was certainly meant to be extending behind his head, but, with the token perspective of the stylized line drawing, could plausibly be viewed as being stuck right into his head.

  “Sure,” Cochran had said nervously. “Who needs him?”

  Janis had just won a “multi-thousand-dollar” pot with two queens and a king, which according to the rules of this game gave her three kings; Cochran had folded when she was dealt a face-up queen, but Long John Beach idiotically stayed to the end with a pair of fives.

  “Hadda keep her honest,” the old man mumbled.

  “I almost dropped out when you raised on third street, John,” Janis told him. “I was afraid you’d caught a set of dukes.” Cochran realized that her doubletalk was a charitable pretense of having seen shrewdness in the old man’s haphazard play.

  Of course Beach couldn’t shuffle, and Cochran had dealt that hand, so Janis gathered in the cards and shuffled them—expertly, five fast riffles low to the table so as not to flash any cards—and then spun out the three hole cards.

  “Have you had your PCH scheduled yet?” she asked Cochran. “That’s probable cause hearing,” she added, “to authorize the hospital to keep you for longer than two weeks.”

  “Longer than two weeks?” said Cochran. “Hell no, not even.” He had an eight down and an eight showing, and decided to keep raising unless a queen showed up. “No, I’m just in on a 51-50, seventy-two hours observation, and that’s up late tomorrow night, which I suppose means they’ll let me go Thursday morning. I don’t know why anybody bothered to have me transferred here from Norwalk. I’ve got a job to get back to, and Armentrout hasn’t even got me on any medications.”

  “I bet a thousand smokes,” said Long John Beach, who was showing an ace. The tiny black eyes in his round face didn’t seem to have any sockets to sit in, and they were blinking rapidly.

  “We’re playing for imaginary dollars now, John,” Janis told him, “you ate all the cigarettes, remember?” To Cochran she said, “Has he talked to you yet? Dr. Armentrout?”

  “For a few minutes, in his office,” said Cochran. “She calls,” he told Long John Beach, “and I raise you a thousand.”

  “She calls,” echoed the old man, still blinking.

  “He’ll want to talk to you more,” Plumtree said thoughtfully. “And he’ll probably give you some kind of meds first. Do cooperate, tell him everything you know about—your problems, so you’ll be of no further use to him. He—he can keep anybody he wants, for as long as he wants.”

  “I been here two and a half years,” said the old man. “My collapsed lung’s been okay for so long now it’s ready to collapse again.”

  Collapsed brain, you mean, Cochran thought. But he stared out the window, and shivered at the way the spotlights on the picnic tables in the fenced-in courtyard only emphasized the total darkness of the parking lot beyond, and he thought about the wire mesh laminate that would prevent him from breaking that glass, if he were to try, and about the many heavy steel, doubly locked doors between himself and the real world of jobs and bars and highways and normal people.

  The telephone was still impossibly ringing, but Cochran was again remembering the intercom he and Nina had bought to be able to hear their expected baby crying, and remembering too Long John Beach’s hollow echo of She calls, and he wasn’t tempted to answer it.

  “Have you,” he asked Plumtree, “had your … PCH, yet?”

  “Yes.” A rueful smile dimpled her cheeks. “A week ago, right in the conference room over yonder. You’re allowed to have two family or friends from outside, and my mom wouldn’t have come, so my roommate Cody came. Cody hasn’t got any respect for anybody.”

  “Oh.” The one-armed old man had not called Cochran’s raise, but Cochran didn’t want to say anything more to him. “What did Cody do?”

  Plumtree sighed. “I don’t know. She apparently hit the patient advocate—the man had a bloody lip, I recall that. I think Dr. Armentrout was teasing her. But!—the upshot!—of it all was that I’m now 53-53 with option to 53-58— the hospital was given a T-con on me, a temporary conservatorship, and I might be here for a year … or,” she said with a nod toward the distracted Long John Beach, “longer. I’m sure my waitress job, and my car, are history already.”

  “That’s … I’m sorry to hear that, Janis,” Cochran said. “When I get out, I’ll see if there’s anything I can do—” He could feel his face turning red; the words sounded lame, but at this moment he really did intend to get her out of this hospital, away from the malignant doctor. He reached across the table and held her hand. “I’ll get you out of here, I swear.”

  Plumtree shrugged and blinked away a glitter of tears, but her smile was steady as she looked into Cochran’s eyes. “ ‘All places that the eye of heaven visits,’ ” she recited, “ ‘Are to a wise man ports and happy havens.’ ”

  Cochran’s arms tingled, as if with returning circulation, and he laced his fingers through Plumtree’s. Those lines were from Richard II, from a speech his wife Nina had often quoted when she’d been feeling down, and he knew it well. The lines immediately following referred to being exiled by a king, and Cochran recalled that Plumtree had been committed for having claimed to have killed a king; so he skipped ahead to the end of the speech: “ ‘Suppose the singing birds musicians,’ ” he said unsteadily, “ ‘The grass whereon thou tread’st the presence strewed, the flowers fair ladies, and thy steps no more than a delightful measure or a dance—’ ”

  Long John Beach opened his mouth then, and his harsh exhalation was a phlegmy cacophony like the noise of a distant riot; and then, in a woman’s bitterly mocking voice, he finished the speech: “ ‘For gnarling sorrow hath less power to bite the man that mocks at it and sets it light.’ ”

  —And then Cochran was standing on the linoleum floor several feet back from the table, shaking violently, his chair skidding away behind him and colliding with the wall—the woman’s voice had been dead Nina’s voice, and when Cochran had whipped his head around he had seen sitting beside him a massive figure wearing a wooden mask, and the golden eyes that stared at him out of the carved eye-holes had had horizontal pupils, like a goat’s—and Cochran had instantly lashed out in an irrational terror-reflex and driven his right fist with all his strength into the center of the mask.

  But it was Long John Beach who now rolled across the floor off of his overturned chair, blood spraying from his flattened nose and spattering and pooling on the gleaming linoleum.

  Plumtree was out of her own chair, and she ran around the table to kneel by the old man—but not to help him; she drew her fist up by her ear and then punched it down hard onto a puddle of the blood on the floor. The crack of the impact momentarily tightened Cochran’s scalp with sympathetic shock.

  “Jesus!” came a hoarse shout from the nurses’ station. “Staff! Code fucking Green, need a takedown!”

  Plumtree had time only to meet Cochran’s frightened gaze and smile before the hallway doors banged open and an upright mattress was rushed into the room, carried by two of the security guards; then the guards had used it to knock Plumtree over backward on the floor, and had jumped onto it to hold her down.

  “She,” choked Cochran, “she didn’t hit him, I did!”

  Armentrout was hurrying in, and he glanced angrily at Cochran. “Look at her,” he snapped.

  Plumtree’s bloody fist was thrash
ing free of the mattress for a moment, then one of the guards had grabbed her wrist and pressed her hand to the floor.

  “And what hand did you hit him with?” Armentrout asked sarcastically.

  Cochran held out the back of his right hand and saw, with a sudden chill in his belly but no conscious awareness of surprise, that the skin of his knuckles was smooth and unbroken, the old ivy-leaf discoloration not distended by any swelling at all.

  “No chemicals for her,” called Armentrout sharply to the charge nurse, who had sprinted into the room with a hypodermic needle. “Not tonight, she’s, uh, due for a dose of atropine in a couple of hours. Don’t argue with me! Put her in four points in the QR for tonight, with five-minute checks.”

  One of the security guards looked up at him desperately. “You’re not gonna sedate her?” he asked, rocking on the mattress as he held down Plumtree’s spasming body.

  “I’m the one who hit the old man!” shouted Cochran. “She didn’t do it, I did!”

  “You’ve bought yourself a meds program,” Armentrout told him, speaking in a conversational tone but very fast, “with this … display of childish gallantry. No,” he called to the guard. “PCP tactics. You’re going to have to just wrestle her in there.”

  “Terrific,” the man muttered. “Get hold of her other arm, Stan, and I’ll get this busted hand in a hard come-along.”

  “Watch she don’t bite,” cautioned his partner, who was groping under the mattress. “I got her hair too, but she’s in a mood to tear it right out of her scalp.”

  The guards dragged Plumtree to her feet. Her teeth were bared and her eyes were squinting slits, but the come-along hold on her wounded hand was effective—when the guard who held it rotated her wrist even slightly, her knees sagged and her mouth went slack. The three of them shuffled carefully out of the room. The charge nurse had got Long John Beach into a chair, where he sat with his face hanging between his knees and dripping blood rapidly onto the floor, while she talked into a telephone on the counter.