Bullshit was Coates’s arch-enemy. Not that most people were friends with it, or even liked it, but they put up with bullshit, came to an understanding with it, and they dished up their fair share. Warden Janice Tabitha Coates didn’t bullshit. It wasn’t in her disposition and it would have been counterproductive anyway. Prison was basically a bullshit factory, call it the Dooling Bullshit Manufacturing Facility for Women, and it was her job to keep production from raging out of control. Waves of bullshit memos came down from the state that demanded she simultaneously cut costs and improve services. A steady stream of bullshit flowed from the courts—inmates and defense attorneys and prosecutors bickering over appeals—and Coates always seemed to get drawn in somehow. The health department loved to drop in for bullshit inspections. The engineers who came to repair the prison electrical grid always promised that this would be the last time—but their promises were bullshit. The grid kept right on crashing.
And the bullshit didn’t stop while Coates was at home. Even as she slept, it piled up, like a drift in a snowstorm, a brown drift made of bullshit. Like Kitty McDavid going nuts, and the two physicians’ assistants picking the exact same morning to go AWOL. That stinking pile had been waiting for her the moment she stepped through the door.
Norcross was a solid shrink, but he produced his share of bovine excrement, too, requesting special treatments and dispensations for his patients. His chronic failure to recognize that the vast majority of his patients, the inmates of Dooling, were themselves bullshit geniuses, women who had spent their lives nurturing bullshit excuses, was almost touching, except that it was Coates who had to wield the shovel.
And hey, underneath their bullshit, some of the women did have real reasons. Janice Coates wasn’t stupid and she wasn’t heartless. Lots of the women of Dooling were, above all else, luckless. Coates knew that. Bad childhoods, horrible husbands, impossible situations, mental illnesses medicated with drugs and alcohol. They were victims of bullshit as well as purveyors of it. However, it wasn’t the warden’s job to sort any of that out. Pity could not be allowed to compromise her duty. They were here, and she had to take care of them.
Which meant she had to deal with Don Peters, who appeared before her now, the bullshit artist supreme, just finishing his latest bullshit story: the honest workingman, unfairly accused.
When he had put on the finishing touches, she said, “Don’t give me that union crap, Peters. One more complaint and you’re out. I got one inmate saying you grabbed her breast, I’ve got another saying you squeezed her butt, and I’ve got a third saying you offered her half a pack of Newports to suck you off. The union wants to go to the mattresses for you, that’s their choice, but I don’t think they will.”
The squat little officer sat on her couch with his legs spread wide (as if his basket was something she wanted to look at) and his arms crossed. He blew at the Buster Brown bangs that hung down over his eyebrows. “I never touched anyone, Warden.”
“No shame in resigning.”
“I’m not quitting, and I’m not ashamed of anything I’ve done!” Red suffused his normally pale cheeks.
“Must be nice. I’ve got a list of things I’m ashamed of. Signing off on your application in the first place is near the top of it. You’re like a booger I can’t get off my finger.”
Don’s lips took on a crafty twist. “I know you’re trying to make me angry, Warden. It won’t work.”
He wasn’t stupid, was the thing. That was the reason no one had nailed him so far. Peters was canny enough to make his moves when no one else was around.
“Guess not.” Coates, seated on the edge of her desk, pulled her bag into her lap. “Can’t blame a girl for trying.”
“You know they lie. They’re criminals.”
“Sexual harassment’s a crime, too. You’ve had your last warning.” Coates rummaged in her bag, searching for her ChapStick. “By the way, only half a pack? Come on, Don.” She yanked out tissues, her lighter, her pill bottle, her iPhone, wallet, and finally found what she was looking for. The cap had fallen off and the stick was flecked with bits of lint. Janice used it anyway.
Peters had fallen silent. She looked at him. He was a punk and an abuser and incredibly fortunate that another officer hadn’t stepped forward as a witness to any of the abuses. She’d get him, though. She had time. Time was, in fact, another word for prison.
“What? You want some?” Coates held out her ChapStick. “No? Then get back to work.”
The door rattled in the frame when he slammed it and she heard him thudding flat-footed out of the reception area, like a teen doing a tantrum. Satisfied that the disciplinary session had gone about as she had expected, Coates returned to the matter of her linty ChapStick, and began to stir around in her bag for the cap.
Her phone vibrated. Coates set her bag on the floor and walked to the vacated couch. She considered how much she disliked the person whose ass had last been planted there, and sat down to the left of the dent in the center cushion.
“Hi, Mom.” Behind Michaela’s voice was the sound of other voices, some shouting, and sirens.
Coates put aside her initial impulse to skin her daughter for not calling in three weeks. “What’s wrong, honey?”
“Hold on.”
The sounds became muffled and Janice waited. Her relationship with her daughter had had its ups and downs. Michaela’s decision to quit law school and go into television journalism (as big a bullshit factory in its own way as the prison system, and probably just as full of criminals) had been a valley, and the nose job that followed had taken them way, way below sea level for awhile. There was a persistence to Michaela, however, which Coates had gradually come to respect. Maybe they weren’t as different as it seemed. Daffy Magda Dubcek, the local woman who had babysat for Janice when Michaela was a toddler, once said, “She’s like you, Janice! She cannot be denied! Tell her one cookie, she make it her personal mission to eat three. Smile and giggle and sweet you up until you cannot say no.”
Two years ago, Michaela had been doing puff pieces on the local news. Now she was on NewsAmerica, where her rise had been rapid.
“Okay,” Michaela said, coming back on. “Had to get someplace quiet. They’ve got us outside the CDC. I can’t talk long. Have you been watching the news?”
“CNN, of course.” Janice loved this jab and never missed a chance to use it.
This time Michaela ignored it. “You know about the Aurora Flu? The sleeping sickness?”
“Something on the radio. Old women who can’t wake up in Hawaii and Australia—”
“It’s real, Mom, and it’s any woman. Elderly, infant, young, middle-aged. Any woman who sleeps. So: don’t go to sleep.”
“Pardon?” Something wasn’t tracking here. It was eleven in the morning. Why would she go to sleep? Was Michaela saying she should never sleep again? If so, it wasn’t going to work out. Might as well ask her to never pee again. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Turn on the news, Mom. Or the radio. Or the Internet.”
The impossibility lingered between them on the line. Janice didn’t know what else to say except, “Okay.” Her kid might be wrong, but her kid wouldn’t lie to her. Bullshit or not, Michaela believed it was the truth.
“The scientist I just talked to—she’s with the feds, and a friend, I trust her—is on the inside. She says that they’re estimating that eighty-five percent of women in the Pacific standard time zone are already out. Don’t tell anyone that, it’s going to be pandemonium as soon as it hits the Internet.”
“What do you mean out?”
“I mean, they aren’t waking up. They’re forming these—they’re like cocoons. Membranes, coatings. The cocoons seem to be partly cerumen—ear wax—partly sebum, which is the oily stuff on the sides of your nose, partially mucus, and… something else no one understands, some kind of strange protein. It reforms almost as quick as it comes off, but don’t try to take it off. There have been—reactions. Okay? Do-not-attempt-to-remove-the-stuff.” On this last matter, which made no more sense than the rest, Michaela seemed uncharacteristically severe. “Mom?”