Stone 588 (2 page)

The passport was something of his that she had asked to have. As was the oval-shaped, shallow silver dish which, on his dresser top, had always held his ordinary incidentals: collar stays, shirt studs, cuff links, foreign coins, and his reminder stone. She kept the dish and its contents exactly as she believed she remembered. The only thing that had been on the dish that she wasn't allowed to have were several straight pins with round blue heads, removed by him from a new shirt, no doubt.

Janet thought of her room as territorial, divided and claimed by her psychological phases.

The sofa. It was where depression always drove her, where her face burrowed into the crevices of the cushions and she cringed to a shape that deserved being overlooked. The sofa was where her arms and legs and spine turned to iron and where she often stayed in one position so long she was close to paralysis. It was during sofa time that she'd put those crisscross scars on the insides of her wrists: death kisses, she secretly called them. She was no longer inventive or conniving about suicide. She'd take it if it was offered, of course, but there'd be no more scaffolding of furniture to get within reach of the wire-covered ceiling bulb so she could poke something in, jab, and shatter the bulb for a tiny shard of glass, for example.

The bed. It was where her mania always eventually carried her, where she was forced to lie like a Gulliver, her strength trussed, futility spewing from her in obscenities.

Situated appropriately between the sofa and the bed was the armchair. Good old stuffed friend. Its slick chintz-covered lap was as far as she ever got from her extremes, as close as she would ever come to being well, she believed. In the fat armchair was her between time.

It was running out on her again.

She brushed faster, spiked her scalp with the bristles, and then, in the middle of a stroke, stopped abruptly. Her hand was on its way to placing the hairbrush on the side table when her mind flung it anywhere. She heard the brush skitter across the floor and ricochet sharply off the baseboard beneath the bed, but she had no sympathy for it.

The rigidity left her body as she gave in.

She freed her other hand from between her thighs. She slid down in the chair, slouched way down so she was nearly horizontal, her head at a right angle to the rest of her, chin to collarbone. She extended her feet to the windowsill. There were no laces in her white sneakers. Their long tongues stuck out insubordinately. She dealt with them with snapping kicks left and right. The sneakers flew off. She brought her bare feet back into position on the sill, and that put New England springtime beyond her toes, half-developed leaves in the upper reaches of the maples outside. She focused on those momentarily and could easily make out their paler green underveins. Her eyesight was now keener than anyone who had eyes, she was a fucking human telescope, she told herself.

Cars were moving swiftly along the highway a half mile away. Through the small spaces in the branches of the maples Janet caught the speed of their colors. The briefest of flashes. Her thought was she didn't give a shit where they were going. Possibly they were headed for a crash, one crammed carload hitting another carload head-on. The image amused her, especially the prospect of explosion and fire, and it occurred to her that if she were able to concentrate intensely long enough she could probably will it. Supernatural her. Nothing she couldn't do. It was for her amusement and everyone's well-being that she pretended her limitations.

Her bare feet were jiggling, keeping time with some internal composition she didn't hear.

She stood quickly.

Her narrow figure had a hint of leftover lankiness to it, in keeping with the filling-out experiences she'd missed. She was also pretty, though that had to be appreciated through layers of agony. Tension had caused a discernible pull from the comers of her mouth to the comers of her eyes.

She moved about the room, darting as though she had purpose, hesitating as though she had destination. To the desk to the dresser to the chair and around again. The thought that she'd browse the latest issue of Vanity Fair

was lost to the thought that she'd try on some of the evening dresses Audrey had brought her last week was lost to the sound of the only door to the room being opened.

It was Mawson, the male attendant Janet disliked most. A tall, knobby-boned man with a pronounced Adam's apple and a neglected brush mustache.

"Pudding time," Mawson announced, singsongy. He was carrying a small laminated plastic tray. He placed it on the table next to the armchair.

Janet ignored him.

"Butterscotch today."

"Stick your prick in it," Janet suggested flatly.

Mawson wasn't fazed. He liked his job, the opportunities it gave him to be as condescending as he wanted, seeing usually privileged people at their worst.

Janet crossed the room. As though alone, she brought her bare foot up onto the arm of the chair and scratched her instep. The sound of fingernails to skin seemed loud. She scratched slowly, all the while looking off, apparently oblivious to her skirt hiked up, her thigh and crotch exposed.

Mawson knew better. He never refused a benefit and this was more than a mere flash. She wasn't wearing underpants.

Still not looking at him, not acknowledging his presence, Janet stopped scratching, but she kept her leg up. She moved her leg slowly from side to side, parting and closing, denying and offering.

Mawson told himself to be satisfied just knowing he could fuck her. Whatever she did would be all her own doing, none of his. No way they could fire him for seeing. He ran his tongue up into his mustache, shoved the fingers of both his hands into the tight rear pockets of his white jeans.

Janet continued her taunting. She glanced peripherally at Mawson.

He was coming at her!

She would scream when he got beyond stopping with his grabs. She had the scream ready, an alarm in her throat.

However, Mawson's movement was only a shift of his stance.

Janet was disappointed. Impatience poked at her. Damn him! Impatience broke through the delusive membrane of the situation and caused a measure of her own arousal. She would not have screamed. There were craving reaches in her pelvis. She brought her leg down. She disliked Mawson all the more now.

Across the chair she said, "Hand me my pudding."

Mawson was trained to think twice before responding to a patient's request, but this seemed harmless. The pudding was in a cardboard bowl on a cardboard saucer with a cardboard spoon and two Nabisco sugar wafers. He

picked it up, extended it to her. She reached across for it, and the moment it was transferred from his hand to hers she flung the bowl and all at him.

Mawson got most of the butterscotch pudding in the face. It looked like excrement on his brows and lashes and mustache. Glops of it stuck to his white shirt. "Fucking bitch!" he shouted.

Janet laughed as though she'd just been told a mildly humorous story.

Mawson was using the sleeve of his shirt to wipe pudding from his eyes when Janet crouched and got hold of the underframe of the large chair. She didn't look strong enough to do it, but in a sudden, single motion, she heaved the chair up and over at him. He jumped away quickly or would have gotten more than painfully bruised shins.

Mawson's anger now broke one of the clinic's primary rules: Never attempt to control a violent patient alone. He grabbed for Janet.

She was too quick for him.

He stalked.

She was more amused than fearful.

He lunged at her.

She evaded, threw magazines at him and newspapers. The sheets of the newspapers separated, opened up midair to be her protective obstacles, and when they were underfoot on the carpet, Mawson slipped on them and went sprawling.

He was furious. The television camera up in the corner of the ceiling didn't matter. He was on duty at the monitor. No one was watching. He'd catch her. He'd get her in a hammerlock and pressure just short of breaking her arm, and while he was at it, during the tussle, he'd shove his thumb up her cunt.

Across the room Janet took up something from the floor: the laminated plastic tray. She held it by its edge and let it go with a sidearm motion, like throwing a Frisbee. The tray scaled the air, came at Mawson so fast it was all he could do to hunch and protect his face with his arms.

The edge of the tray struck about six inches below his armpit. As it gashed in, Mawson let out a painful grunt. No doubt ribs were fractured. He pressed the panic button on the remote signaller attached to his belt. And retreated from the room.

Janet wasn't done.

Mawson had only been included in her enthusiasm. Now she gave her energy to the couch, flung cushions. She rampaged around the room, intent on shambling it, feeling her exhilaration soar as anything that came into sight was victimized. Neatness was most vulnerable. With merciless backhands she swept everything from every surface. She easily overturned her father's dresser.

Four attendants came.

They forced her down among the mess she'd made of things. It took all four to do it. They underestimated her strength at first and she managed to free one leg to kick a face and cause a nosebleed. They finally got good enough holds to lift her to the bed.

Mawson came bringing the Posey restraints. His shirt was bloodied and he was stiffly favoring his left side. He had wanted to use leather restraints, knowing they would be less comfortable and with them Janet would be more apt to hurt herself. Usually at least two sets of leathers were kept in the clinic's medical storage closet, but although no other patients had gone berserk, those restraints were not there today. Mawson thought it likely that someone on staff had taken the leathers home for a bit of kink. He had to settle for using soft restraints, made of a woven cotton material similar to a lightweight, supple canvas. Anyone seeing them for the first time would hardly guess their function. Each restraint was six inches wide and five feet long and had a reinforced slit into which one end was inserted and pulled through to form a loop.

As now, with Janet. While she was held down on the bed, front up, the loop of a restraint was drawn snug around her wrist, then wrapped once around and tied with a clove hitch, the prescribed knot for these circumstances because a patient's pulling at it only made it more binding. The two free ends of the restraint were led down and tied to the metal frame of the bed. When Janet's other wrist and both ankles were restrained in the same manner she was spread-eagled and no longer a threat.

Mawson volunteered to remain with her, on the pretense of overseeing that the restraints were properly taut and she didn't hurt herself. The senior attendant made him go have his injury cared for. One of the other attendants stayed on.

Janet screeched her repertoire of profanities, rapid and nonstop, as though they were on a string being pulled from her mouth. Her incessant adjective, of course, was fucking, but some of the other obscenities she combined were so impossible the attendant couldn't help but be amused.

From the struggle her skirt was twisted up around her waist. The attendant pulled it down and neatened it. He checked the restraints all around, adjusted the slack of the one that held her right ankle, and made sure she had adequate circulation. He plumped a pillow. Placing it beneath her head brought his face in range. Sure as a snake, she aimed spit at his eyes. He recoiled, wasted no further attention on her, left the room.

Janet alone.

Demonstrated that her ferocity was not performance. Rage came discharging from her with more intensity. All the stored storms within her churned

and gathered and riled, to come—a boiling flood—from her body. Beasts hunched in her most reptilian recesses flicked their tongues and lashed their scaly tails. She writhed furiously, bucked up, arched to the limit of her spine. Time after time she snapped her pelvis upward and twisted her buttocks, trying to shake herself loose. The restraints were lined with flannel to cushion them, but with all her pulling and straining, her wrists and ankles were raw. If she kept on they would bleed, but paroxysms are anesthetic and hardly self-preserving. An undriven body would have surrendered to exhaustion but she refused to let up, fought the restraints with vigorous heaves and wrenches, all the while shrieking the vitriol of mad whores.

For almost two hours.

It was then that Janet first felt within her the demand to hush. The space around her became a soft die that enclosed the precise shape of her with quiescence. Her will flared up, proposing that her struggle continue. This was swiftly damped—not by her, somehow, but for her.

There she lay, splayed, absolutely stilled. She was now able to admit to the ceiling and its familiar imperfections, and the well-known near wall, and the circumstances of her position. Also, now, she sensed a more equitable communion with her body and was told, it seemed, that something was happening to it. She thought perhaps she was dying. Perhaps all there was to dying was such an inner call to concede. Good. She would give in to it, would, for as long as it lasted, enjoy all its phases and nuances. She closed her eyes, the better to see inside where, naturally, death would occur.

The Righting of Janet had begun.

Her suprarenal glands, those two that sit cocked like floppy Robin Hood hats atop the kidneys left and right, had already been influenced to stop overproducing adrenaline. The hormone those glands had already sent into her bloodstream was offset, brought down from an incited level. Normally, the excess adrenaline would have been expelled over a dozen or more hours with no experienceable change such as the calming hush Janet had felt come over her. It was understandable, of course, that she thought it her choice when she surrendered to the hushing. Although, in fact, by then she was well infected with compliance.

Vibrations.

Vibrations of a magnitude more subtle than might be thrown from the glint of a prism from the angle of a crystal goblet were entering her. Gentle and too slight for our ways of measuring, yet they entered her with purpose. They seemed to know her weU, traveled the courses of her inner systems as though having been over them countless times, going by a perfect master pattern. Around and around with her blood, throughout the circuits of her nerves, to the finest farthest ends.