The Nirvana Plague (29 page)

“Isn’t he there?”

Her answer came like an executioner’s farewell:

“I just told you he isn’t.” T-minus six, five.

Pause.

“Perhaps he checked himself out already.”

“Did you issue him a quarantine certification?”

“Well, no,” DeStefano answered, drawing out the
no
contemplatively. “He wouldn’t have been eligible till today.”

To the receptionist, Karen said: “Was he ever a patient here?”

She hesitated. “Well…”

“Within the last thirty days.”

“And you are?”

“His wife.”

The receptionist was beginning to look a little scared. “Do you have some identification?” she said defensively.

“Stay on the line, DeStefano,” she said into the phone, then put it down on the counter, and started pulling materials out of her shoulder bag. She slapped down her quarantine cert card, her national ID card, her driver’s license, and a copy of the court order committing Roger to quarantine.

The receptionist glanced at the materials nervously and turned back to her computer screen. Tap, tap, tap.

Karen picked up the phone.

“Still there?”

“Yes,” DeStefano said.

“No,” said the receptionist.

“No, what?”

“Roger Sturgeon has not been admitted to this hospital in the last thirty days.”

T-minus four, three…

“DeStefano, did you hear that?”

“No.”

To the receptionist: “Pick up your phone and conference into this call.”

The receptionist complied.

In a matter-of-fact tone, DeStefano told her who he was, and asked if she had any record of Roger Sturgeon’s “admittance.”

“No, sir.”

“That’s odd.”

T-minus two, one…

“Isn’t it though.”

“Hm,” DeStefano mused. “Perhaps he ran off again?”

Zero! She screamed into the phone: “He was never admitted in the first place, you lying pile of dogshit son of a bitch!”

The receptionist jumped. Everyone in the lobby who wasn’t too sick or delusional looked up.

Pause.

“Well.…” DeStefano said slowly, coldly: “I don’t know what else to say, Ms. Hanover.”

“I suggest you start thinking of something, DeStefano. I’m going to be in your office in about fifteen minutes.”

She clicked off the phone and threw it in her bag, swept her papers off the desk in after it, and walked out, hardly able to keep herself from breaking into a run.

She didn’t even know where the Board of Health administrative offices were, but it didn’t take her long to look it up. She was still shaking with anger when she screeched to a stop in the visitor’s parking lot, and drilled into the lobby like the Light Brigade into the Valley of Death.

The security guards were waiting for her. Two of them stopped her even before she entered the metal detector.

“It’d be best if you just went home,” one of them said.

“Mind your own business,” she snapped and started through the gate.

The guard put a hand on her, stopping her.

“Get your fucking hands off me!”

“Either leave now, or—”

“I want to speak to your supervisor.”

“You can phone him after you leave the premises.”

“I’m not leaving the premises until I see DeStefano.”

She took out her phone to call him again, but before she could dial the number, the guard grabbed her wrist, deftly twisted her arm behind her, spinning her away from him, and removed the phone from her hand.

“Goddamn it!” Karen yelled, flailing with her free arm.

He handed the phone to the other guard, caught her other arm, and pulled it down behind her back, then neatly handcuffed her. While everyone else in the lobby watched, the two guards marched her away from the security station through a door into a side room. There they sat her down in a metal chair, put her bag on a table next to it, and called the police.

One of the security guards sat in the little white security room with her, watching the news on a mini-tablet while they waited for the police. Karen silently boiled with rage and humiliation.

It was more than an hour before the police finally arrived. They formally arrested her in front of the security guards, cut off the plastic handcuffs the security guards had put her in, replaced them with an identical pair of their own, then marched her out to the parking lot and inserted her into the back seat of a squad car.

At the precinct, she was turned over to a jail matron who strip-searched her, watched her dress again, relieved her of all other personal effects, and put her in a holding cell with three jittery drug addicts and one sleepy prostitute.

When she asked how long she’d be there, the officer said, “Until we get our paperwork caught up.”

“How long will that be?”

“Busy day today.”

“When can I call my lawyer?”

“When we get our paperwork caught up.”

A twelve foot square. Three walls of concrete and one of bars. Walls, floor, and ceiling all a grimy battleship grey. A low steel shelf ran the length of each wall — too narrow for a bed, too broad for a bench. A lidless steel toilet sat inside a doorless cubicle off the back wall, the only break in the line of the shelf. The prostitute squirmed on one shelf, a dirty white glove draped over her eyes, trying to sleep. The addicts had spaced themselves evenly around the remaining space. They sat shivering and coughing. One of them emitted a tight, Tourette's-like grunt several times a minute.

Karen remained a long time standing against the barred door, afraid to invade the territories the others had so evenly apportioned. The place stank of urine and unbathed bodies. Worse than the stink was the constant, skull-rattling noise. Every sound from every cell rang like hammer blows off the hard walls — cell doors clanging, inmates cursing, toilets flushing, pipes knocking, and TV screens blaring.

Her first thought was: If I start screaming and don’t stop, they’ll have to come let me out. But she couldn’t trust that plan. More likely one of the addicts would lose it and shove a sock down her throat.

Then she thought: I can take this. I won’t be here long. — However, her cellmates looked anything but recently arrived. Assuming first in / first out, she could be here a good while.

Then she thought: The noise will soon drive me out of my head anyway, so I may as well start screaming now.

But she didn’t. She just stood there by the bars, watching the addicts shiver and sneeze, twitch and grunt.

After a while she settled on a plan for distracting herself by paying close attention to the video screen on the wall outside the cell. That was when her day advanced from extremely unpleasant to truly bizarre.

It was showing the news, of course. The whole world was watching the news. She really had to concentrate to hear it over the incessant din, but it wasn’t the sound that mattered in this case.

Kaufman shrank into a small box as the main screen cued up an over-lit scene of a clinically white room, a table, and two men sitting on opposite sides of the table. It looked like it had been shot behind a two-way mirror. One man was dressed in a lab coat over lime-green scrubs. The other man, in a white T-shirt and orange scrub pants, had his head down, bent over a piece of paper on which he was drawing or writing with great deliberation. Doctor and patient. Or was it interrogator and perpetrator? Karen thought the ambiguity looked less than coincidental. But maybe her present circumstances were affecting her judgment.

Karen stopped breathing. Her knuckles turned white around the bars.

The desire to start screaming came rushing back over her. This cannot be happening. This cannot be real.

The patient/perpetrator on the screen was Roger Sturgeon. The doctor interogating him was Carl Marley.

Karen realized that Roger was pointing at the mirror in the room.
But he’s really pointing at me.
— Out of the screen the finger of condemnation was leveled directly at her.
What are you doing in jail?

Roger sailed off again into peals of delighted laughter. His laugh was infectious, joyful, utterly without contempt. Karen hadn’t seen him laugh like that in ten years. She felt tears on her cheeks.

The clip shrank to an inset window, revealing the former NIMH director full screen.

Karen clutched at the bars.
No, not yet!

Karen’s knees folded under her as she slowly sagged to the floor, still clutching the bars of her cage, still fastening her eyes on the screen.

The addicts behind her took notice. Virgin. Lost it already.