Vortex (6 page)

So she tried to shrug off the unanswerable questions and get a decent night’s rest.

Come dawn she had managed, she reckoned, at most three hours of useful sleep, which meant she would go through the day sandy-eyed and irritable. And the day would be another hot one, judging by the haze tinting the view from her living room window. The kind of smog only August in Houston could brew up.

She tried to call Bose from the dashboard phone in her car but the number bounced to voice mail. She left her name and work number and added, “Is it possible you sent me the wrong file? Or maybe I ought to be interviewing
you
for State Care. Please call as soon as you can and clear this up.”

*   *   *

Sandra had been employed at the Greater Houston Area State Care facility long enough to have a feeling for the place—the flow of its internal politics, the rhythm of daily business. She could tell, in other words, when something was up. This morning, something was up.

The work she did had a certain moral ambiguity even at the best of times. The State Care system had been mandated by Congress in the messy aftermath of the Spin, when homelessness and mental illness had risen to epidemic levels. The legislation had been well intended, and it was still true that for anyone with a full-blown psychiatric disorder State Care was better than life on the street. The doctors were sincere, the pharmaceutical protocols were finely tuned, and the communal housing, while basic, was reasonably clean and well policed.

Too often, however, people were swept into State Care who didn’t belong there: petty criminals, the belligerent poor, ordinary folks who had been driven to chronic bewilderment by economic hardship. And State Care, once you were given involuntary commitment status, wasn’t easy to leave. A generation of local pols had campaigned against inmates being “dumped back on the street,” and State’s halfway house program was forever under attack from NIMBY activists. Which meant the State Care population was continually rising while its budget remained fixed. Which led in turn to underpaid staff, overpopulated residential camps, and periodic scandals in the press.

As an intake physician it was Sandra’s job to short-circuit those problems at the front end, to admit the genuinely needy while turning away (or referring to other social welfare agencies) the merely confused. In theory it was as simple as checking off a patient’s symptoms and writing a recommendation. In fact her work involved a great deal of surmise and many painful judgment calls. Turn away too many cases and the police or the courts would get testy; accept too many and management began to complain about “overinclusiveness.” Worse, her cases weren’t abstractions but people: wounded, weary, angry, sad, and occasionally violent people; people who too often saw State Care as a kind of prison sentence, which in a real sense it was.

So there was a certain inevitable tension, a balance to be maintained, and within the institution itself there were invisible wires that vibrated to the right or wrong notes. Coming into the wing where she had her office, Sandra noticed the nurse at the reception station giving her covert looks. A vibrating wire. Wary now, she paused at the warren of plastic cubbyholes where staff kept paperwork on pending cases. The nurse, whose name was Wattmore, said, “Don’t bother looking for the Mather chart, Dr. Cole—Dr. Congreve has it.”

“I don’t understand. Dr. Congreve took Orrin Mather’s case file?”

“Isn’t that what I just said?”

“Why would he do that?”

“I guess you’ll have to ask him.” Nurse Wattmore turned back to her monitor and clicked a few keys dismissively.

Sandra went to her office and put in a call to Congreve. Arthur Congreve was her superior at State. He supervised all the intake staff. Sandra didn’t like him—he struck her as aloof, professionally indifferent, and far too concerned with producing a smoothly trending flow of statistics that would impress the budget committees. Since he had been appointed last year, two of the facility’s best intake physicians had elected to quit rather than submit to his patient quotas. Sandra couldn’t imagine why he might have pulled the Mather file without warning her. Individual cases were usually far below Congreve’s personal radar.

Congreve started talking as soon as he picked up. “Help you, Sandra? I’m in B Wing, by the way, about to go into a meeting, so let’s make this quick.”

“Nurse Wattmore tells me you took the Orrin Mather file.”

“Yeah … I thought I saw her beady little eyes light up. Look, I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you beforehand. It’s only that we have a new intake person—Dr. Abe Fein, I’ll be introducing him at the next general meeting—and I thought I should walk him through a safe case. Mather’s the least troublesome candidate we’ve got on hand, and I didn’t want to start out the new guy with a hostile subject. Don’t worry, I’ll be backstopping Fein all the way.”

“I didn’t know we had a new hire.”

“Check your memos. Fein did his internship at Baylor in Dallas, very promising, and as I say, I’ll keep him on a short leash until he gets a handle on what we do here.”

“Thing is, I already put in the preliminaries with Orrin Mather. I think I established a little bit of rapport with him.”

“I assume everything pertinent is in the file. Is there anything else, Sandra? I don’t mean to be rude, but I have people waiting.”

She knew it would be useless to push. Despite his medical degree, Congreve had been hired by the board of directors for his managerial talents. As far as he was concerned, the intake psychiatrists were nothing more than hired help. “No, nothing else.”

“Okay. We’ll talk later.”

Threat or promise?

Sandra settled behind her desk. She was disappointed, obviously, and a little angry with Congreve for his preemptive behavior, not that it was uncharacteristic.

She thought about the file on Orrin Mather. She hadn’t entered anything into her notes about Officer Bose’s interest in the case. She’d promised Bose she would be discreet about the sci-fi narrative Mather had allegedly written. Was that promise still binding, under the circumstances?

She was ethically required to divulge to Congreve (or the new guy, Dr. Fein) anything that might be relevant to the evaluation. But intake evaluation was a weeklong process, and she guessed there was no need for full disclosure just yet. At least not until she had a better sense of why Bose was interested and whether the document she had been reading had in fact been written by Orrin Mather. She’d have to ask Bose about that, and as soon as possible.

As for Orrin himself … there was no rule against paying him a social visit, was there? Even if he was no longer her patient.

*   *   *

Nonviolent patients awaiting assessment were encouraged to socialize in the supervised lounge, but Orrin wasn’t the sociable type. Sandra guessed he would be alone in his room, which proved to be the case. She found him sitting cross-legged on his matttress like a bony Buddha, staring at the cinderblock wall opposite the window. These small rooms were pleasant enough, if you ignored the evidence that they were effectively prison cells: the shatterproof window panes threaded with fiberglass, the conspicuous absence of all hooks, hangers, and sharp edges. This one had been recently repainted, disguising the generations of obscene graffiti scratched into the walls.

Orrin smiled when he saw her. His face was guileless, transparent to every emotion. Big head, high cheekbones, eyes pleasant but open too wide. He looked like he would be easy to lie to. “Dr. Cole, hi! They told me I wouldn’t be seeing you again.”

“Another intake physician has been assigned to your case, Orrin. But we can still talk, if you like.”

“Okay,” he said. “That’s fine.”

“I spoke to Officer Bose yesterday. Do you remember Officer Bose?”

“Yes, ma’am, of course I do. Officer Bose is the only policeman who took an interest in me.” Poe-
lease
-man, in Orrin’s trailer-park accent. “He’s the one who called my sister Ariel. Is she in town yet, have you heard?”

“I don’t know, but I’ll be talking to Officer Bose later—I can ask.” She added, not knowing how to approach the subject except bluntly, “He mentioned the notebooks you were carrying when the police picked you up.”

Orrin seemed neither surprised nor upset that Sandra knew about the notebooks, though his sunny expression dimmed a little. “Officer Bose says the police have to keep them for now but I can have them back sooner or later.” He frowned, buckling a V under his high hairline. “That’s true, isn’t it? No matter what they decide about me here?”

“If Officer Bose says so, I think it’s probably true. Are the notebooks important to you?”

“Yes, ma’am, I suppose they are.”

“May I ask you what’s written in them?”

“Well, that’s hard to say.”

“Is it a story?”

“You could call it that I guess.”

“What’s the story about, Orrin?”

“Well, it’s hard for me to keep in my mind. That’s why I like to have the notebooks, so I can refresh my memory. It has to do with a certain man and a certain woman. More than that. It’s about … you could say God? Or at least the Hypotheticals.” Hah-poe-
thet
-ickles.

“Did you write the story yourself?”

Peculiarly, Orrin blushed.

“I
wrote it down,
” he said finally, “but I don’t know I can say for sure I
wrote
it. I’m not much of a writer. Never was. A teacher at Park Valley school—that’s back in North Carolina—told me I don’t know a noun from a verb and never will. And I guess that’s true. Words don’t come easy to me, except—”

“Except what, Orrin?”

“Except
those
words.”

Sandra didn’t want to push it any harder. “I understand,” she said, though she didn’t. One more stab at it: “Turk Findley … is that someone in your story, or is he a real person?”

Orrin’s blush deepened. “I don’t guess he exists, ma’am. I guess I made him up.”

It was obvious he was lying. But Sandra left it at that. She smiled and nodded.

When she stood up to leave, Orrin asked her about the flowers growing in the small garden outside the window of his cinderblock room: did she know by what name they were called?

“Those? They’re called ‘bird of paradise.’”

His eyes widened; he grinned. “That’s their real name?”

“Mm-hm.”

“Huh! Because those flowers surely do look like birds, don’t they?”

The yellow beak, the rounded head, the single drop of crystalline sap that glinted like an eye. “Yes, they do.”

“It’s like a flower that has the idea of a bird inside it. Only nobody put it there. Unless you could say God did.”

“God or nature.”

“Maybe comes to the same thing. You have a nice day, Dr. Cole.”

“Thank you, Orrin. You too.”

*   *   *

Bose finally returned her call midafternoon, though his voice was hard to hear, coming through a background of what sounded like mass chanting. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m down at the ship channel. It’s some kind of environmental demonstration. We have about fifty people sitting on the railroad tracks in front of a string of tanker cars.”

“More power to them.” Sandra’s sympathies were entirely with the demonstrators. The environmentalists wanted to ban the import of fossil fuels from beyond the Arch of the Hypotheticals, in an attempt to keep global warming under five degrees Celsius. Sufficient unto the planet are the carbon resources thereof, they believed, and to Sandra it was ridiculously obvious that they were right. As far as she could tell, the exploitation of the vast oil reserves under the Equatorian desert was a disaster in progress, enabling a mad prosperity purchased at the price of redoubled CO
₂
emissions. The generation that had grown up in the wake of the Spin wanted cheap gas and boom times and no cavilling voices at the table, and the whole world was (or would be) paying the piper.

Bose said, “I’m not sure having an activist crushed by a freight train would be absolutely helpful. You got the document I sent?”

“Yes,” she said, wondering how to proceed.

“You read it?”

“Yes. Officer Bose—”

“You can just call me Bose. My friends do.”

“Okay, but look, I still don’t know what you want from me. Do you honestly believe Orrin Mather wrote the text you sent me?”

“I know, it hardly seems plausible. Even Orrin is a reluctant to take credit for it.”

“I asked him about that. He told me he wrote it down, but he wasn’t sure he actually
wrote
it. As if somebody dictated it to him. Which I guess would explain a few things. Anyway, what do you want from me exactly? Literary criticism? Because I’m not much of a science fiction fan.”

“There’s more to the document than what you’ve seen. I’m hoping I can send you another batch of pages today and maybe we can get together face-to-face, like say lunch tomorrow, to talk about the details.”

Was she willing to take another step into this strangeness? Oddly, she discovered she was. Put it down to curiosity. And maybe compassion for the bashful child-man she had discovered in Orrin Mather. And the fact that she had found Bose to be reasonably pleasant company. She told him he could send along more pages but she felt compelled to add, “There’s a complication you ought to know about. I’m not Orrin’s case physician anymore. My boss turned him over to a trainee.”