“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 added.
“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:”