Woman on the Edge of Time

A doctor came onto Ward L-6, a youngish doctor with pale hair and bloodshot pale blue eyes. He arrived two hours after the time when the doctor raced through, speaking only to the nurse and attendants, while patients touching that day chased after him pleading for attention, changes in medication, furloughs, privileges, a change of ward. Calling them bird dogs, the attendants ran interference. This pale doctor was showing Fargo some papers and Fargo and the nurse were going over the patient’s ward records with him, all those comments written on each of them that could get her sent to shock or raised a niche or two nearer the gates.

Even the patients not talking, not supposed to be in touch, knew something was up. Excitement rose like a hot dry wind and the women began chirping. Mrs. Martínez crawled into a corner and pushed her face against the wall. Joan began talking in what the staff called a word salad about her mother and God and the FBI. “They come and come and come again. Scrape it off the ceiling. Bad girl. Bad! Eat it for breakfast. Knock, knock, who’s there. Across it up and cross it off. A double cross. Come in and come out. All over, ugh, dirty. Dirty girl. Knock, knock. It’s a dirty bird. The pigeon did it. Bad, bad, ate it again! All comes out. Knock knock knock. Hot cross buns. Bang you again. Bang on the bum. Hot, hurt. Bad again! Bad!”Her voice rose high in a shriek of fury but her expression did not change.

From the side of her mouth Sybil asked, “What do you suppose the young inquisitor searches for? Are they hunting witches with needles today?”

Indeed, both the doctor and Fargo looked straight at them and they shut up. Connie turned away, but when she cautiously glanced at the station again, the two of them were still under surveillance. Had they been acting too intimate? Fargo jogged over and hoisted Sybil by an arm. Sybil tried to whip her arm free, but Fargo expertly pinned her. When Sybil got mad she could hold her off easily till she was hypoed, but she was more curious than angry. She drew herself up to eye the doctor along her narrow nose, making him instantly aware that she had two inches on him. “Do you enjoy visiting the zoo? Do you want to be a veterinarian when you grow up?” she cooed.

“She’s on the large side,” the doctor said. “I don’t think she’ll do.”

Fargo dropped Sybil neatly, knocking her legs out from under her, and hauled up Connie instead. “This one been acting okay. She help some. She trying to cope. But she hang out with that big-mouth.”

“Any outbreaks lately?”

“Not since she got on my ward. She was pretty wild when she arrive, but we straighten her out.”

The doctor turned away and Fargo let go of Connie. Weak through and through, she felt as if her bones had turned to wet rope. Her knees crumpled and she sat abruptly beside Sybil. She started to speak to Sybil, but Sybil shushed her and crept closer to the glassed-in station where the doctor and Fargo were once again looking over the ward book. Sybil was trying to lip-read through the glass. Finally they emerged and the outer door was unlocked with the usual clatter.

“All right, clean that one up Monday morning and bring her down for Dr. Redding … . Oh, she speaks English? I mean reasonably?”

“Sure, no problem, Dr. Morgan. Wouldn’t I tell you right off if she couldn’t talk?”

“Righto. Clean her up and trot her down early Monday.”

Sybil and she looked at each other in the ward boiling with tension. Sybil whispered, “All I could make out was that doctor he mentioned—I never heard of him before—Dr. Redding this, Dr. Redding that. And the phrase ‘possible subject.’”

“Oh! Oh!” Joan muttered. She got off her bed and darted over to peer into Connie’s face. “Knock, knock! Watch out!” Joan fled back to her bed and pantomimed the locking routine she seemed to hope would protect her.

“What do you think they’re going to do to me Monday?”

Sybil shook her head, frowning. “They like you because you’re small. They expect to push you around easily.”

She was scared but alert. Maybe it was a new kind of therapy? Usually they didn’t pull patients out of L-6 for group therapy, the only kind in the hospital. If it was shock, they wouldn’t make such a fuss. Maybe they were testing drugs, as they had on Claud. Claud’s friend Otis said they had given hepatitis, the dirty disease that had killed Claud, to a whole lot of little kids in Willowbrook, a state institution. Some doctor had injected little kids who hadn’t done anything wrong except to be born dim witted, and got a big reward for it. What would they do to her?