Cochran recalled that this was another of her supposed personalities, a male one. Janis had told him that she didn’t know much of what had happened at the therapy session with Armentrout today—she’d said she had “lost a lot of time” after he had showed her some miniature painting that she couldn’t bear to look at—but that she was pretty sure Flibbertigibbet had been out. Probably Flibbertigibbet had been the one who had reportedly broken the doctor’s desk lamp and bitten his finger, earning Plumtree her most recent stay in the Quiet Room. She had said that she was grateful that Flibbertigibbet hadn’t done anything worse.
“And…Flibbertigibbet—” Cochran was embarrassed to pronounce the foolish name. “—killed the guy?”
She shivered. “He sure did. The big earthquake hit right then, and I suppose the cops thought it was falling bricks that smashed his head that way. It was never in the papers, anything about a guy being murdered there. I ran to my car, and it took me two hours to drive the ten miles home. Nobody at my apartment building, what was left of it, said anything about the blood on me—a lot of people were bloody that day.”
“…I remember.”
The Franciscan shale of San Bruno Mountain hadn’t shifted much in that late-afternoon quake, and only a couple of Pace Vineyards’ oak casks had fallen and burst, spilling a hundred gallons of the raw new Zinfandel like an arterial hemorrhage across the stone floor of the cellar, which Cochran had eventually had to mop up; but when he and a couple of the maintenance men had immediately driven one of the vineyard pickup trucks down to the 280 Highway, they had found cars spun out and stalled across the lanes, and in the little town of Colma hillsides had toppled onto the graves in the ubiquitous cemeteries, and he remembered stunned men and women standing around on the glass-strewn sidewalks, many of them in blood-spattered clothes and holding bloody cloths to their heads. Paramedic vans had been slow and few, and Cochran had driven several people to the local hospital in the back of the pickup truck before eventually returning to the vineyard. The visitor from France, young Mademoiselle Nina Gestin Leon, had been stranded there, and had stayed for the subdued late dinner in the Pace Vineyards dining room. They had all drunk up innumerable bottles of the ’68 late-harvest Zinfandels from Ridge and Mayacamas, he remembered; the night had seemed to call for big wild reds implausibly high in natural alcohol content and so sharp with the tea-leaf taste of tannin that Cochran had thought the winemakers must have left twigs and stems in the fermenting must.
“I had blood and wine on my clothes when I went to bed that night,” he said now.
“Cody’s more of a vodka girl,” said Janis. She leaned back against the TV lounge wall and sang, “You can always tell a vodka girl….”
“That’s the tune of the old Halo Shampoo ads,” Cochran said. “That’s before your time, isn’t it? I barely remember that.”
“Geber me no zeitgebers,” she said shortly. She looked at the nearest of the other patients—poor old Mr. Regushi a dozen yards away, eating his ice cream with his hands—and then she said quietly, “We’ve got to escape out of this place.”
“I think it’d be better to get released out of here,” Cochran said hastily. “And I do think we can do it. I have a lawyer up in San Mateo County—”
“Who couldn’t get us out before tomorrow dawn, could he? Dr. Armentrout is going to give me the electroconvulsive therapy again tomorrow—I can tell, I was told not to eat anything after ten tonight. He says he’s elected me, Janis, to be the dominant personality inside this little head, and he’s going to…cauterize Cody away, like you would a wart.”
Cochran opened his mouth, wondering what he should say; finally he just said, “Do you like her?”
“Cody? No. She’s a, a bitch is the only word for it, sorry. She thinks I’m crazy to be—well, she doesn’t like you. And I think her story about being a security guard somewhere at nights is a lie—I think she does burglaries.”
“Well…I hope not. But if you don’t like her, why not let Armentrout…do that?” He could feel his face reddening. “I mean, he is a doctor, and you certainly don’t need—”
“She’s a real person, Scant, as real as me. I don’t like her, but I can’t just stand by and let her get killed too.” Her lips were pressed together and she was frowning. “’Cause it would be the death penalty for her, and that without an indictment or jury or anything. Do you see what I mean?”
Cochran doubted that Cody was any more real than a child’s imaginary playmate, much less as real as Janis. But, “I follow your logic,” he said cautiously. Then, recklessly, he added, “I’m ashamed of myself for saying just now to let Armentrout do it again. I can’t bear thinking that it happened to you even once.”
“I’m sure he’s got something planned for you, too,” she told him. “You and me and Long John Beach—we’re not specimens he’s going to let go of.”
Cochran still hoped to get some rational planning done here. “This lawyer of mine—”
“This what? This lawyer? You think old Dr. Trousertrout hasn’t got lawyers? He’ll sneak some meds into your food that’ll make you such a five-star skitz you’ll be running around naked thinking you’re Jesus or somebody, or even easier just show you a few tarot cards to do it.” She glanced around then looked back at him and noticed, and stared at, his T-shirt. “A Connecticut Pansy? Unbelievable. Unbelievable! Hell, you he could probably just show the instruction card to.” She flexed her jaw and winced. “My teeth hurt. I hope I’m not gonna have a nosebleed.”
One of the nurses had brought a portable stereo out and set it on the table and was now trying to get all the patients to sing along to “Puff the Magic Dragon.” Plumtree was humming something different in counterpoint, and after a moment Cochran recognized it as “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” “Listen,” she said suddenly, “—what we’ve got to do?—is escape—tonight.”
Cochran was still sure that his lawyer would be able to secure his release, and very possibly Janis’s too, with some routine legal maneuver; and the man might even be able to get some kind of stay-of-shock-therapy for her tonight, if Cochran could get him on the phone. He slapped the pockets of his corduroy bell-bottoms and was reassured to feel the angularity of coins.
“I’m going to call this lawyer—” he said, bracing himself to stand up.
Plumtree grabbed his upper-arm with her good hand. “It won’t work, we’ve got to escape—”
“Janis,” he said irritably, “we can’t. Have you seen the doors, the locks? How quick the security guards show up when there’s trouble? Unless your Mr. Flibbertigibbet can come up with another earthquake—”
Her hand sprang away from his arm, and she was gaping at him. “Has he…called you?”