Текст книги "Woman on the Edge of Time"

Автор книги: Marge Piercy

Соавторы: Marge Piercy
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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

“I like the Ms. thing,” Fargo told her with a big gap‑toothed grin. “‘Cause I got six kids and no man steady, and that puts me ass first to how it supposed to be. Ms. do me fine.”

Fargo talked to her almost humanly. When Fargo was working, she often waited around near the glassed‑in station and sometimes Fargo would ask her to sweep the floor or take a woman to the bathroom or hold a patient for an injection or sit with a patient coming out of electroshock. Then Fargo would give her extra cigarettes.

She hated being around the shock shop. It scared her. Regularly some patients from L‑6 were wheeled out for shock. One morning there would be no breakfast for you, and then you would know. They would wheel you up the hall and inject you to knock you out and shoot you up with stuff that turned your muscles to jelly, so that even your lungs stopped. You were a hair from death. You entered your death. Then they would send voltage smashing through your brain and knock your body into convulsions. After that they’d give you oxygen and let you come back to life, somebody’s life, jumbled, weak, dribbling saliva–come back from your scorched taste of death with parts of your memory forever burned out. A little brain damage to jolt you into behaving right. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes a woman forgot what had scared her, what she had been worrying about. Sometimes a woman was finally more scared of being burned in the head again, and she went home to her family and did the dishes and cleaned the house. Then maybe in a while she would remember and rebel and then she’d be back for more barbecue of the brain. In the back wards the shock zombies lay, their brains so scarred they remembered nothing, giggling like the old lobotomized patients.

On that Wednesday she was sitting there hopefully, but Fargo was deep in gossip with another black attendant. Connie had gone up once for a light–the only way inmates could get a match was to beg for one–and had been told to wait a minute, honey, half an hour ago. Four other patients were waiting too with small requests. She knew better than to approach again. On her lap was spread yesterday’s paper, a present from Fargo for cleaning up vomit, but she had read through it, including births and deaths and legal notices. Mrs. Martнnez approached her, eyes meeting hers and then downcast in a gesture that reminded her suddenly of Luciente’s orange cat. Several weeks had passed since she had been in contact with the future, although almost daily she felt Luciente’s presence asking to be let through. Here in the violent ward she was afraid to allow contact, for she had to watch her step. She was never alone, not even in the toilets without doors, never away from surveillance.

Mrs. Martinez stood almost in front of her but a little to one side and fixed her eyes longingly on the newspaper, met her gaze questioningly, then glanced away. For months Mrs. Martнnez had not spoken. The attendants treated her as a piece of furniture. Many of the withdrawn had their own ways of speaking without words to anyone who was open, and Connie never had much trouble figuring out what Mrs. Martinez wanted. She handed over the paper. “Sure, I’m done reading it. But give it back, okay? For me to sit on.” A paper like that made a good pillow and she had no intention of abandoning it.

Mrs. Martнnez smiled, her eyes thanked Connie, and carefully, as if bearing off a baby, she took the paper away to the corner to pore over. Connie determined to keep an eye on Martinez and make sure nobody strong‑armed the paper from her. Martinez would long ago have been transferred from this acute ward to a chronic ward and left to rot there, except that her husband was on a D.A.’s staff and came up to see her the last Sunday in every month with her children–never allowed inside, although she would stand at the window and weep and weep and hold out her hands to them. He would sign her out for holidays, but always, after a month or two, he would bring her back.

Connie was watching Martinez turn the pages slowly, when two orderlies brought in a woman handcuffed to a stretcher, trundling her past roaring muffled protest. A sheet was tied over her and only her hair was visible, long auburn hair clotted now with fresh blood. Her voice rose out of the sheet, her voice soared like a furious eagle flapping auburn wings.

“Sybil!” Connie cried out and half rose. Then she shut up. Give nothing away. She watched them wrestle Sybil into seclusion and heard the thump as they threw her against the wall. Her tall, bony body would be snapping its vertebrae, bucking with rage, until the dose took and she could no longer move.

Sitting quietly, Connie clasped her hands in her lap. Sybil was here. A slow warmth trickled through her. She had been lonely here, for few of the women on L‑6 had energy left to relate, in their anguish of dealing with mommy, daddy, death, and the raw stuff of fear. She hoped the orderlies had not beaten her friend badly and that Sybil would simmer down and get out of seclusion soon. She had to try to get a message to Sybil through the locked door. Patients were not allowed to communicate with those in the isolation cells.

Her last time here they had met, and in the strange twilit childhood of the asylum with its advancements and demotions, its privileges and punishments, its dreary air of grade school, they had twice been confined in the same ward long enough to become friends. Each patient rose and dropped through the dim rings of hell gaining and losing privileges, sent down to the violent wards, ordered to electroshock, filed away among the living cancers of the chronic wards, rewarded by convalescent status, allowed to do unpaid housework and go to dance therapy; but twice they had come to rest on the same step and they had talked and talked and talked their hearts to each other.

Patience was the only virtue that counted here. “Patients survive on patience,” she imagined embroidering on a little sampler, like “Dios Bendiga Nuestro Hogar.” A week wormed through her soul before they let Sybil on the ward.

That morning she sat away from the station for privacy. When Sybil entered, looking tall and drawn, Connie did not greet her except with her eyes. It did not do to presume too much or to impose. Sometimes the mad behaved toward each other with delicate courtesy. She did not want to intrude on a desperate inner battle or mind loop. Sybil met her gaze, strolled the length of the ward in wary reconnaissance, then let her long body down beside her.

“Hi, old darling! When shall we two meet again? In thunder, lightning, or in rain?”

“It looks like a good day to me, Sybil, seeing you again.”

“We’re two witches, I mean. With a coven, think what we could do!”

Sybil really did think she was a witch, that she could heal with herbs, that she could cast spells both black and white. They’d had an argument last time about those names. Connie had told Sybil that black magic for bad and white for good were racist terms. Finally Sybil had agreed to name the magics red, for blood vengeance, and green, for growing and healing. She wondered if Sybil remembered, or if she had gone back to the old names.

“How long you been in this time? Do you know?” she asked.

“I just arrived. I was hexing a judge.” Sybil held up her bony elegant hands with white marks for the rings she wore, which they always took from her over her roaring protests. “They take them because they sense how potent my rings are. They’re in a microwave oven, being bombarded with rays to destroy the power in them. When I recover them, it takes me weeks to restore their strength.” Gently Sybil touched a lock of Connie’s hair. “Did you just get here?”

She smiled at Sybil and began to tell her the story. “This time I did nothing I’m ashamed for–though like you hexing judges, maybe it wasn’t so smart for me to fight.” Her telling took them through the supper lines and the supper of what Sybil pronounced Toad Stew, through the evening medication line and the blank space of time until lights out.

“Tomorrow is your turn to bring me up to date.”

“Oh, that will take at least a week,” Sybil promised.

Sybil was her best woman friend except for Dolly, who was blood, but because she lived in Albany they never managed to see each other outside the hospital. Oh, Sybil was crazy, but Connie had no trouble talking to her. Sybil waspersecuted for being a practicing witch, for telling women how to heal themselves and encouraging them to leave their husbands, for being lean and crazily elegant and five feet ten in her bare long high‑arched feet, for having a loud, penetrating voice and a back that would not stoop and a temper that stood up in her, lashing the tail of a lioness. Sybil did not hesitate to take to her fists against anyone, so she had a scar across her high‑domed forehead coming down to take a white bite of her left eyebrow. Sybil had lost a front tooth and she had a little bald spot she could find when she wanted to show Connie where her hair had been pulled out by an attendant, the time before the time before last when she had been forcibly committed.

Why did she like Sybil so much? Her heart warmed when she saw Sybil’s long body writhing in fury. Sybil had high carved cheekbones and a square jaw, a haughty nose and eyes of a smoky umber. On the outside she wore outrageous makeup and ringed her eyes with black, but inside they would not let her near her precious kohl. Mainly, Sybil was a fighter and she fought those who threatened her, instead of hating her own self. She didn’t deny herself, she had not sold herself to any man. Connie adored the way she fought and wouldn’t give up or go under and wouldn’t be broken–not yet. All she could give anyone in here was to have survived this far, this long.

They talked passionately, sitting side by side against a wall, sometimes interrupting the flow by half an hour or an hour, sometimes muttering out of the sides of their mouths as if they were kids talking in school. Too much animation, too obvious a pleasure in each other’s company would bring down punishment. The hospital regarded Sybil as a lesbian. Actually she had no sex life.

“Who wants to be a hole?” Sybil asked her. “Do you want to be a dumb hole people push things in or rub against? As for sex, it reminded me of going to the dentist the only time I indulged. Now, when you look at it clearly from the outside, Consuelo, with some measure of detachment, you see how perfectly futile”–few‑tile, she pronounced it, loving vowel sounds–“futile it all appears, and how sordid besides.”

“But people do it ail the time, Sybil.” She was grinning. “Must be something in it, no?”

“Consuelo!” Sybil pronounced her name carefully and with a reasonable effort at the Spanish. “People play rummy and hearts and we both know how tedious those pastimes are. People put together jigsaw puzzles too. The attendants like it if you work jigsaw puzzles; they think that’s relating to reality, the poor boobs. Everybody who is presently touching”–their word for the state when inmates were responsive to things outside them–“has read every word of that newspaper under you. I know you have too, even the sports pages, although you can’t tell tennis from football!”

“It’s true, when a person is bored they … want to go to bed more. It’s like the jokes about the long winter night of the Eskimo. When you have nothing to do, you, yourself, are your own plaything. Look at all the … fooling around that goes on here.”

“I think we’re taught we want sex when we feel unhappy or lacking something. But often what we want is something higher.”

“For me, sex has more power than that,” Connie said a little sadly. “But I think we often settle for sex when we want love. And we often want love when we need something else, like a good job or a chance to go back to school.”

“People talk too much about sex,” Mrs. Perlmutter said, her hand inside her hospital‑issue dress, feeling her own breast.

At odd moments, the better days, the mental hospital reminded her of being in college those almost two years she had had before she got knocked up. The similarity lay in the serious conversations, the leisure to argue about God and Sex and the State and the Good. Except for college students, who else in the world was sitting around talking philosophy? Outside, whole days of her life would leak by and she wouldn’t have one good thoughtful conversation. Sybil was a smart person, not street smart like Claud but thoughtful about the way things were and the way they might be. Outside, who talked to her?

On Ward L‑6 every day smelled the same, looked the same, sounded the same. Patients rotated through their private cycles of night and day, touching and withdrawing, snowed by the heavy drugs. She was no longer Fargo’s favorite, because she spent too much time with Sybil. Today was Friday, a dangerous day, a day of doors opening and shutting.

A doctor came onto Ward L‑6, a youngish doctor with pale hair and bloodshot pale blue eyes. He arrived two hours after the time when the doctor raced through, speaking only to the nurse and attendants, while patients touching that day chased after him pleading for attention, changes in medication, furloughs, privileges, a change of ward. Calling them bird dogs, the attendants ran interference. This pale doctor was showing Fargo some papers and Fargo and the nurse were going over the patient’s ward records with him, all those comments written on each of them that could get her sent to shock or raised a niche or two nearer the gates.

Even the patients not talking, not supposed to be in touch, knew something was up. Excitement rose like a hot dry wind and the women began chirping. Mrs. Martнnez crawled into a corner and pushed her face against the wall. Joan began talking in what the staff called a word salad about her mother and God and the FBI. “They come and come and come again. Scrape it off the ceiling. Bad girl. Bad! Eat it for breakfast. Knock, knock, who’s there. Across it up and cross it off. A double cross. Come in and come out. All over, ugh, dirty. Dirty girl. Knock, knock. It’s a dirty bird. The pigeon did it. Bad, bad, ate it again! All comes out. Knock knock knock. Hot cross buns. Bang you again. Bang on the bum. Hot, hurt. Bad again! Bad!”Her voice rose high in a shriek of fury but her expression did not change.

From the side of her mouth Sybil asked, “What do you suppose the young inquisitor searches for? Are they hunting witches with needles today?”

Indeed, both the doctor and Fargo looked straight at them and they shut up. Connie turned away, but when she cautiously glanced at the station again, the two of them were still under surveillance. Had they been acting too intimate? Fargo jogged over and hoisted Sybil by an arm. Sybil tried to whip her arm free, but Fargo expertly pinned her. When Sybil got mad she could hold her off easily till she was hypoed, but she was more curious than angry. She drew herself up to eye the doctor along her narrow nose, making him instantly aware that she had two inches on him. “Do you enjoy visiting the zoo? Do you want to be a veterinarian when you grow up?” she cooed.

“She’s on the large side,” the doctor said. “I don’t think she’ll do.”

Fargo dropped Sybil neatly, knocking her legs out from under her, and hauled up Connie instead. “This one been acting okay. She help some. She trying to cope. But she hang out with that big‑mouth.”

“Any outbreaks lately?”

“Not since she got on my ward. She was pretty wild when she arrive, but we straighten her out.”

The doctor turned away and Fargo let go of Connie. Weak through and through, she felt as if her bones had turned to wet rope. Her knees crumpled and she sat abruptly beside Sybil. She started to speak to Sybil, but Sybil shushed her and crept closer to the glassed‑in station where the doctor and Fargo were once again looking over the ward book. Sybil was trying to lip‑read through the glass. Finally they emerged and the outer door was unlocked with the usual clatter.

“All right, clean that one up Monday morning and bring her down for Dr. Redding … . Oh, she speaks English? I mean reasonably?”

“Sure, no problem, Dr. Morgan. Wouldn’t I tell you right off if she couldn’t talk?”

“Righto. Clean her up and trot her down early Monday.”

Sybil and she looked at each other in the ward boiling with tension. Sybil whispered, “All I could make out was that doctor he mentioned–I never heard of him before–Dr. Redding this, Dr. Redding that. And the phrase ‘possible subject.’”

“Oh! Oh!” Joan muttered. She got off her bed and darted over to peer into Connie’s face. “Knock, knock! Watch out!” Joan fled back to her bed and pantomimed the locking routine she seemed to hope would protect her.

“What do you think they’re going to do to me Monday?”

Sybil shook her head, frowning. “They like you because you’re small. They expect to push you around easily.”

She was scared but alert. Maybe it was a new kind of therapy? Usually they didn’t pull patients out of L‑6 for group therapy, the only kind in the hospital. If it was shock, they wouldn’t make such a fuss. Maybe they were testing drugs, as they had on Claud. Claud’s friend Otis said they had given hepatitis, the dirty disease that had killed Claud, to a whole lot of little kids in Willowbrook, a state institution. Some doctor had injected little kids who hadn’t done anything wrong except to be born dim witted, and got a big reward for it. What would they do to her?

Monday morning she was taken from Ward L‑6 halfway across the grounds to the hospital building itself–the real hospital in the mental hospital. Normally it was a sleepy, understaffed building, but one floor seemed to have undergone changes. She got only a glimpse of maybe twenty other patients, men and women, waiting on chairs in the hall, before Fargo dragged her off. “Behave yourself now. I want to use the staff john. Now you keep quiet and don’t mess around.” Fargo installed her by the clean white sinks with liquid soap in a container that worked. Enviously she approached. Fargo was pissing. Over the liquid soap container with its yellow‑green ooze, she saw a drab, funny‑looking woman in the mirror. Quickly she looked away. Outside, no day passed without her seeing herself in mirrors, in shopwindows, everywhere reflected. The battered tin mirror in the bathroom on L‑6 gave up only ripples of distortion.

Her hair looked disgusting: not only uncombed, straggly, dirty, but with white roots grown out along her part. Her hair had turned white down the center like a skunk as soon as she had passed thirty. Dolly gave her money for hair dye, which she hid as carefully from her caseworker as a stash of dope. It was her secret vice, dyeing her hair, but also it was a small act of self‑affirmation. As long as her will kept her hair black as it had always been, as it should be, she was some part Consuelo who had won the scholarship to junior college, who had had the guts to depart Chicago for a strange city to get away from a rapist, who had broken Geraldo’s nose–yes, she was proud of that. Her definition of Connie included black hair.

Well, at least she was no longer overweight, but she was flabby. At home she had the exercise of running up and down four flights of stairs ten times a day, every time she needed something from the superette or the candy store, every time she checked the mail, took out garbage, got a pack of cigarettes, mailed a letter, went down to welfare, went out to those scrubwoman jobs welfare made her do. She carried her groceries, her laundry, her garbage. She walked many blocks. Here her only exercise was being herded to and from the showers.

Small particles of dead skin gave her flesh an ashy look. If only she had a brush, she could disentangle her hair, brush out the mats and clumps. Ah, she looked like a bundle of institutional laundry!

Fargo hauled her along. The young doctor was bustling around the hall, followed by a secretary and more attendants. Fargo turned her over to one of the new attendants, a fat red‑faced man, who inserted her into a row of green plastic chairs where the men and women had been placed to wait. As each new arrival was checked in, all the waiting patients stared in hope that something about the newcomer would make clear their mutual situation.

“Do you know what we’re in for? What they’re going to do to us?” she whispered to a young man in the next chair.

“I don’t know.” He was white, skinny, long‑legged and tall, with abundant kinky brown hair. “They came on my ward last week and they looked over five of us. That blond doctor and attendant. They only took him and me.” He pointed to a short black man beside him.

“They didn’t say what for?”

“Some kind of testing, we heard … . It looks to me like that room at the end of the hall is fixed up as a lab. Past the offices.”

“A lab? What kind of experiments could they do on us?”

He shrugged, “Man, I don’t know. Whatever it is, you bet it will hurt.” He sighed, combing back his nervous hands through his long, tangled hair. “My name’s Skip. This is Orville … . You don’t have any weed, do you? By some miracle? I can buy.”

“I’m Connie. I wish I did. Last time I was in, it was all over the place.”

“Some buildings it’s around, some it isn’t. In some you can get anything … . Not ours. God, can you imagine the incredible acts of brutality we might commit if we had a little dope? Monsters like us. You been in before, huh?” He waited for her nod. “Me too. Seven times in various spitals. One for each consecutive time I tried to off myself. Actually that was only five times.”

“And never made it?” She laughed.

“I’m persistent. Maybe I have a will to failure. Orville, here, he cut up his girlfriend. Did you do anything like that, maybe?”

Orville said flatly (probably for the sixtieth time, as she well knew), “I was overworked. I had this job as night watchman and then I was delivering pizzas weekends. I couldn’t cope with it all.”

“Sort of.” She clutched herself. “I smashed a bottle in the face of my niece’s pimp.” She grinned. “I wasn’t overworked. I just hated him.” Such a light feeling, like floating, to say that truthfully and let it hang there; at the same time the floating feeling was a cutting loose because she had been raised and had lived under a code where a woman never did anything like that, let alone speak of such actions.

“As far as I can tell, we all walk and talk,” the boy went on. “We’re functioning crazies. We all broke the law. I hope we aren’t about to get shipped to some maximum security place–not that this place isn’t pretty tight.”

“You got a record?”

“Yeah … possession. But the shrinks wrote up worse things on my record.” He poked her with his bony elbow. “That doctor’s the boss. The other’s just his lackey.”

Middling height, middling weight, brown hair, thick glasses, in his late forties, he exuded an energetic self‑importance like a big Harley‑Davidson gunning up 111th Street with a Savage Sheik on top. He washed his hands together with a brisk dry happy sound as he marched by the row of bedraggled patients on green plastic chairs, and in his wake bobbed the pale man, Dr. Morgan, a nurse, a man in student clothing, a woman in a white coat whose hand brushed the student type’s hand super‑casually, a male and female attendant, and a secretary, who stood holding a sheaf of records and pages and pages of other, ominous paper. Eventually Dr. Redding, as she heard him called, took various papers and cruised them, nodded and handed them all on to Dr. Morgan. “Fine, fine. Let’s get the show on the road. Morgan, Acker, and I will do the screening, and Patty and Miss Moynihan will sit in. We should zip through this batch before two, because I have to get back to the university to meet one of those foundation johnnies.”

Everyone but the attendants and the nurse bustled after him, as the patients looked at each other and the shut door. One at a time they were called in. The morning passed. No provision had been made for them to get lunch, which was brought in on trays for the staff, so they remained parked in the hall, grumbling, those screened and those not yet processed.

“It’s no different from a regular psychiatric interview,” said a woman in her forties, who also informed them she was a schoolteacher. “I teach auditorium,” she said. That sounded peculiar to Connie, like teaching garage or living room. “The doctors simply ask you the same old questions. They have your records right there, so they know the answers, or they think they do … . Perhaps I’m being reclassified, finally. They’re going to look into our cases.”

At about one, Connie was called in as Skip came out. Clearing her throat with nervousness, she sat in a chair facing them lined up behind a table. Doctors and judges, caseworkers and social workers, probation officers, police, psychiatrists. Her heart bumped, her palms dampened, her throat kept closing over. She could not guess which way to cue her answers. What were they looking for? Would it be better to fall into their net or through it? If only she knew. If only she knew what the net consisted of. She was taking a test in a subject, and she didn’t even know what course it was.

The young doctor who had picked her out of the ward did most of the questioning at first, with the type in the denim pseudo work clothes horning in from time to time. The same old stuff about Dolly and Geraldo, her daughter, her time with Claud, her drinking, her drug use, her difficulty in getting a job. It was like saying the responses at Mass. When what she said didn’t fit their fixed ideas, they went on as if it did. Resistance, they called that, when you didn’t agree, but this bunch didn’t seem that interested in whether she had a good therapeutic attitude. What were they listening for, inasmuch as they listened at all? How that Dr. Redding stared at her, not like she’d look at a person, but the way she might look at a tree, a painting, a tiger in the zoo.

They were on her brother Joe now. The holy ghost of poor Joe, who had died of a perforated ulcer just after he got out of the pen for a drugstore holdup. Now they were questioning her about the beatings her father had given her as a child. She kept her face frozen, her voice level. Inappropriate affect, they called that–as if to have strangers pawing through the rags of her life like people going through cast‑off clothes at a rummage sale was not painful enough to call forth every measure of control she could manage. Her mother, her father, her brother, her lover, her husband, her daughter, all fingered, sized up, dissected, labeled. Still, their white faces looked bored. The denim type, Acker, and Miss Moynihan in the lab coat were exchanging flirtatious glances. They could eat her for dessert and go on to six others and never belch. They were white through and through like Wonder Bread, white and full of holes.

Suddenly Dr. Redding came to life and took over. “Have you ever suffered headaches? pain anywhere in the head region?”

“Headaches?” Now what was this? “The medication does that sometimes,” she said cautiously.

“The medication?”

“The tranquilizers.”

“Other times. Outside the hospital. Haven’t you had headaches outside the hospital, Connie?”

One of those first‑name doctors who reduced you to five years old. “Not often.”

“How often?”

She shrugged. What was he getting at? Were they wanting to try out drugs on them? “My back aches. My feet sometimes. I’ve had female complaints. My eyes, my head never has troubled me much in my life. Knock on wood.”

“How about in connection with some of those incidents we’ve gone over? I notice in the incident where you used violence against your daughter there’s a mention in the record of your feeling unwell.”

“Doctor, I was hung over. Strung out. I was very bad. I’d been drinking for three months.”

“Connie, you’re diagnosing, aren’t you?” He seemed to suspect she was concealing headaches. “Dizziness? Blackouts?”

“Like fainting? No, I never fainted in my whole life.”

“Yet you say you were unconscious the night you were admitted to Bellevue.”

“Geraldo and Slick hit me in the head. Slick knocked me out.”

“Do you remember any blows to the head previously? Before the last accident when you were readmitted to Bellevue?”

“Sure, occasionally.”

“Why don’t you describe those occasions?”

“I don’t remember them all … .” She paused when she saw Dr. Redding making a satisfied note of that. “Eddie, Eddie Ramos, my husband, used to hit me in the head sometimes.”

“That’s the second husband, the one she’s still married to,” Acker, the denim type, said.

“He didn’t sign the commitment. Where is he?” Dr. Redding demanded of Acker.

“Whereabouts unknown, Doctor.”

“I suppose no one has tried too hard to find our pugilist,” Dr. Redding said with a slight smile. “Connie, do you remember your head being x‑rayed after any of these incidents with your second husband?”

“No. I never got beat up that bad, to go into the hospital and get x‑rays.” They had to be kidding. When she had been with Eddie she had not been on welfare and who would have paid for x‑rays and doctors? The only time she had gone in was when she had been bleeding after the abortion, and that had been terrible in its consequences.

“Not that badly,Connie? … Did he knock you down?”

“Sure.” She had noticed before that white men got off on descriptions of brown and black women being beaten. “Hay que tratarlas mal,” Eddie would always say.

“Get a set of x‑rays on her before we begin the EEG monitoring,” Dr. Redding said to Dr. Morgan. “We’ll go with this one in the initial stages. How many live ones does that give us today?”

“Seven, Doctor,” the secretary chirped.

“That’s all? Let’s get cracking. Okay, Connie. Take her out.” Dr. Redding was already rummaging through the next set of records as she was whisked out and dumped in her chair again.

At two the staff emerged, Dr. Redding looking irritated. “This won’t do. We need more. You’ve got to scan more records. We might even locate some subjects on the chronic wards.”