His hand shook as he pushed the needle through the holes. In the book he’d read on the plane, Madame Ariachne’s cloth had flexed and shivered as she had forced each new, resisting name into the fabric.
“You’re not, quite getting the hang of that one, are you?” said Tammy Eddy.
Cochran looked up at her. “It’s hard,” he said.
“Hard to remember what I said?”
“Hard to remember anything at all. But I can do it.”
He thought of the scene at the end of the book as he had read it years ago, in which the dissolute Englishman Sidney Carton redeemed himself by sneaking into the Conciergerie prison to switch places with his virtuous double, the Frenchman Charles Darnay who was condemned to die the next morning; and then Cochran made himself remember the scene as he had read it on the airplane three days ago—
In that variant version it had been a woman who furtively unlocked the cell door—the woman Clytemnestra, who was somehow the classical Greek Clytemnestra from Aeschylus’ Oresteia, come to atone for having killed the high king Agamemnon.
And in this crazy version the prisoner was a woman too, though still the visitor’s mirror-image double; and when she demanded to know the reason for this visit, this exchange of places, Clytemnestra had said, “Forgive me. Madame has forgotten that we agreed to play in partnership this evening.”
Tammy Eddy was speaking sharply to him—and he realized that she had been repeating herself for several seconds. He looked up at her, and saw that she had retreated to the door and pulled it open. “Put,” she said, obviously not for the first time, “the needle…down, Sid.”
“Sorry. Sure.” He opened his fingers and the needle dropped to the tabletop. “I wasn’t listening.” He looked at the vinyl squares and saw that he had stitched them together and then with the blunt needle torn a hole in the center of each square. “I guess I wrecked your…your test,” he said lamely. And no doubt failed it, he thought. She’ll probably testify at my PCH.
“They’re not expensive. That’ll be all for today, Sid.” She stepped back a yard into the TV lounge as he pushed his chair back and sidled around the table to the door. “What,” she asked him as he walked past her toward the cafeteria, “were you making, there at the end?”
He stopped for a moment but didn’t look back at her. “Oh, nothing,” he said over his shoulder. ‘T just got bored and…distracted.”
Perhaps she nodded or smiled or frowned—he kept his eyes on the cafeteria door as he strode forward. He might or might not tell Armentrout, but would certainly not tell this woman, that he had been unthinkingly making a frail mask in which to face the mask that the big bull-headed man would be wearing.
Probably because of his having hit Long John Beach the night before, the knuckles of his right hand stung, and he alternately made a fist and stretched his fingers as he walked through the cafeteria and back out into the lounge without having seen Plumtree or Armentrout—Tammy Eddy was nowhere to be seen now either—and then started down the hall, past the Dutch door of the meds room, to the wing of patient rooms.
At every corner and intersection of hall there was a convex mirror attached to the ceiling, so that anyone walking through the unit could see around a corner before actually stepping around it. At L-corners the mirror was a triangular eighth of a globe wedged up in the corner, and at four-way crossings it was a full half-globe set in the middle of the ceiling. Cochran didn’t like the things—they seemed to be whole spheres, only part-way intruded here and there through temporary violations of the architecture, like chrome eyes peering down curiously into the maze of hallways, and he couldn’t shake the irrational dread of rounding a turn and seeing two of them in the wall ahead of him, golden for once instead of silver, with a single horizontal black line across each of them—but he did reluctantly glance at a couple of them to get an advance look around corners on the way to Plumtree’s room.
But when he finally arrived at her room he saw that her door, in violation of the daytime rules, was closed. He shuffled up to it anyway, intending to knock, and then became aware of Plumtree speaking quietly inside; he couldn’t hear what she said, but it was followed by Armentrout’s voice saying, “So which one of you was it that took the shock?”
The question meant nothing to Cochran, and he was hesitant about interrupting a doctor-and-patient therapy session; and after a few moments of indecisive shuffling, and raising his hand and then lowering it, he let his shoulders slump and turned away and plodded back down the hall toward the TV lounge, defeatedly aware of the wide cuffs of his bell-bottom trousers flapping around his bare ankles.
“SOMEBODY WENT flatline ten seconds after the shock,” Armentrout went on when Plumtree didn’t immediately answer. “We dragged the Waterloo cart into the treatment room, but your heart started up again before we had to put the paddles on you.” He was smiling, but he knew that he was still shaky about the incident, for he hadn’t meant to call it a “Waterloo cart” just now. Waterloo was the brand name of the thing, but it was known as a crash cart, or a cardiac defibrillator; the incident would probably have been his Waterloo, though, as soon as the idealistic Philip Muir heard about it, if Plumtree had died undergoing electroconvulsive therapy with forged permissions while just on a temporary conservatorship. Muir was surely going to be angry anyway, for ECT was not a treatment indicated for multiple personality disorder—or dissociative identity disorder, as Muir would trendily say.
And Armentrout couldn’t pretend anymore that he didn’t know she was a multiple—the ECT had separated out the personalities like a hammer, breaking a piece of shale into distinct, individual hard slabs. Armentrout could have wished that it was a little less obvious, in fact; but perhaps the personalities would blend back together a little, before Muir saw her tomorrow.
“Valerie,” said the woman in the bed. “She always takes intolerable situations. It caught Cody by surprise.”
“And who are you?”
“I’m Janis.” She smiled at him, and in the dim lamplight her pupils didn’t seem notably dilated or constricted now.
“How many of you are there?”
“I really don’t know, Doctor. Some aren’t very developed, or exist just for one purpose…like the one called—what does he call himself?—’the foul fiend Flibbertigibbet!’ What a name! He got it…from Shakespeare, according to him. Is there a play called Leah? He claims to have been a Shakespearean actor. I—don’t want to talk about him, he’s who we’ve brought up when we’ve had to fight, to defend our life. He makes our teeth hurt like we’ve got braces on, and he gives us nosebleeds. I don’t want to talk about him.” She shivered, and then smiled wryly. “We’re like the little cottage full of dwarves in Snow White—each of us with a job to do, while the poisoned girl sleeps. I used to sign my high-school papers ‘Snowy Eve White’ sometimes.”
“Snow White, Eve White—you’ve seen the movie The Three Faces of Eve? Or read the book?”
She shook her head. “No, I’ve never heard of it.”
“Hmm. I bet. And one of you is a man?”
She blinked—and Armentrout could feel the hairs standing up on his arms, for the woman’s face changed abruptly, as the muscles under the skin realigned themselves; her mouth seemed wider now, and her eyes narrower.