Ah, stop griping, Robin thought. He had to remember, somebody somewhere always had it worse: Platitude number two. Like Manny. His situation couldn’t be that bad by comparison. Even if it got a hundred times worse.
TWENTY-TWO
It was time for Manny to find out which rooms were used least often by staff, and which the most. One day soon, he’d need to duck into an underutilized, out-of-the-way space. What he needed most was a rarely visited room without any cameras. He was probably just dreaming, but there were plenty of rooms to choose from, spaced evenly apart, like a tree farm. An equipment room would be ideal.
One thing for certain: The staff loved their kitchen area. There was more movement in and out of there than at the Hyatt Regency at convention time.
To help him see around corners, Manny used Camouflage Tank, the toy tank made of reflective mirrored-plastic panels given to Grately by his mom. He couldn’t always rely on the circular mirrors placed high in the corners.
Manny threw a glance back at Grately, who, mercifully, was still asleep. Not even the staff moved him, letting him sleep the night on the couch sitting up if that’s how they found him. Waking Grately, pursuant to his PTSD, could mean the loss of a head or other cherished body part.
***
Manny slogged past staff doing their rounds, checking each room to make sure no one had committed suicide in the last fifteen minutes since the prior door check. He auditioned his Thorazine shuffle for them; that was a real staff pleaser around here. The orderlies seemed impressed, and sauntered past him without a second glance.
The door to Rupert’s room hung open. He was an elderly man with an artificial leg, which he was currently fitting to his stump. He was half blind, so despite sensing a figure at the door, he really couldn’t tell if there was someone there or not. “Hello?” He was also hard of hearing, so when Manny didn’t respond loudly, he quickly dismissed his hunch about being spied on, returned his attention to his stump. Rupert was a really nice guy, ninety-nine percent of the time. The rest of the time, he tended to indulge in relationship-ending activities, like taking an axe to the back of a person’s head. The fire hose stored behind glass, meant for firemen attempting to rescue their pathetic asses from a fire, was his weapon of choice; or rather the brass nozzle at the end.
The fire hoses connected to the hospital’s plumbing were located in the halls between locked units, and to get to one also required getting past staff taking patients on walks to the vending machines or perhaps out into the courtyard. Manny was curious to find out how Rupert had pulled off liberation of said fire hose under the circumstances. Without additional details, he surmised the artificial leg was involved somehow, probably in another of Rupert’s infamous blows to the back of the head.
Curious. Rupert’s room segued into the staff locker room. The entrance had been permanently locked. Staff didn’t use it, and a sign barring patient entry, in addition to the knob that wouldn’t turn when he tested it, telecast “stay out.” The locker room must have been added as an afterthought on this wing, or had expanded beyond its original dimensions so that the proximity to a patient room couldn’t be avoided. Serendipitous was the word, Manny believed.
A book on Rupert’s bedside table caught Manny’s attention. He picked it up. The title read: THE GOD-MEN: Saints and Sages Throughout History. He cracked the book open. “Flight” was the first word that greeted him. He turned the pages. The heading of “Teleportation” jumped out at him next. He flipped to the next chapter. “Healing and Staving off Attacks with Thought Projection.” And the next, “Being in Two Places at Once.”
Hope for the hopeless, Manny thought. You need a more down-to-Earth way out of here.
He returned the book to the bedside. Your daughter has a strange idea about what bedtime stories she reads you, old man. Still, when you’re down a leg and a couple of eyes, and the rest of your sense organs are failing, I imagine miracles hold a certain cachet.
He ambled on before staff caught him in Rupert’s room and got any ideas.
As it turned out, the Thorazine shuffle was hard to sustain, requiring more mental energy than needed to pull off most crimes. Manny was sweating from the ordeal, and ready to hit the showers. Nothing like an unnatural gait to tax the mind and the muscles.
Before he had relinquished the safari, however, the labyrinth of halls offered up one more treasure for his efforts: an unmarked room. He’d have to keep an eye on it to see if anyone ever went in. That would take more than around-the-clock surveillance over the course of a day. He’d need to keep an eye on it over the next few weeks. By then, the Thorazine shuffle would have him in shape for the Olympics.
TWENTY-THREE
Moses. At least that was what they called him. Otherwise, he was the man with no name. No nametag. No identity past or present. And that’s how he liked it. Saverly tolerated him for the same reason he tolerated the patients and his own staff. They were all odd balls, all part of his menagerie of fools, Julianne included. Though she preferred to think of herself as entirely normal, with a way of driving other people mad.
Moses was affixing the head to his robot. Besides his insistence on turning their kitchen into a Jetsons cartoon, his only other peculiarity was his love of BBC America shows, most notably Dr. Who. He absently watched the “Cracks in Time” episode as he tooled away on his pet project. He’d managed to get her hooked on the series, to her consternation. As a consequence, she was now forever late getting back to shift, and accordingly had been written up for improper breaks.
“You’re going to like this, missy,” he said in a southern drawl, his tone more sycophantic than Saverly could manage with his own well-seasoned ass-kissing (maybe Saverly’d prefer the term “schmoozing” or “ego-inflating.”)
Julianne had gone from befriending him, figuring he’d be the perfect ally with his robot army to protect her during hospital uprisings, to thinking better of it. He could barely control them, and they were more likely to cause her harm when their wires got crossed, which they often did.
“You get that one from Japan, too?” Julianne inquired in an effort to be nice. She really didn’t like him. He was just way too weird for her.
“Yep.”
“Where do you get the money for these things? They look expensive.”
“Saverly. Told him it’d be great for the staff to, you know, have some place to be waited on hand and foot. That way, when they go back to seeing patients, they’d be more rested after being pampered. Should have a positive effect on their attitude.”
After bumping into one of them every time she tried to take a step, she barked, “Christ, it’s getting so crowded in here, you can hardly move.”
“I explained my crowded ecosystem idea to Saverly, all different kinds of robots doing all different kinds of things… however poorly, being as they’re first generation prototypes. He loved it. That way, he says, if they’re like busted people doing screwy things in an effort to find their place in the world, we’d learn to better empathize with the patients. They’re therapy for the staff, he says.”
“Bullshit.”
“Just so he keeps writing the checks on my favorite hobby. Don’t really care.” He applied some decals to the robot.
“You’re weird, Moses.”
Microwave Man took the microwave dinner out of her hands, stuck it in his stomach—which was a microwave—pressed the automatic three minute timer, and started to whistle like a songbird to help her pass the time. Friggin’ irritating. They were all starting to drive her nutty. Therapy for staff? Yeah, right. Microwave Man squatted strangely. He did that whenever he stuck something in his belly. “Why does he act like he’s taking a shit whenever he’s got something in his stomach?”
“Ah, don’t really know,” Moses said, sounding embarrassed. “Doesn’t say anything about it in the instructions.”
“Can’t he tell you?” Julianne realized she sounded as entitled as one of her patients, and just as whiny.
“He’s dumb
as shit, missy. He can quote T.S. Elliott like nobody’s business, though. Go ahead, ask him.”
“No, thanks.”
“‘Let us go then you and I—when the evening is spread out against the sky—’” Microwave Man volunteered, holding a hand up with an index finger pointed to the sky.
“Great, now what’s he doing that for; pointing, I mean?”
“That’s a long flight here from Japan. I’m thinking he got bounced around in midair.”
“Just so he doesn’t try to hump me. I see him leering at me out the corner of his eye.”
“They’re programmed to study you in order to second-guess your next request,” Moses explained. “I admit, it’s kind of creepy. I already wrote them an email.” Moses attached the first arm to his latest robot, and tightened down with his Phillips-head screwdriver.
“What they say?”
“Something about ironing it out in the next edition,” Moses answered absently, more focused on fine-tuning the parameters on his newest robot from the control panel in its back. He had a cockeyed way of working, Julianne thought. One arm remained to be put on.
Microwave Man dinged. He retrieved the microwave meal, and handed it to her. She immediately dropped the plate on the floor because it was so damn hot. “Now look what you did, you imbecile!” she screamed. He looked very guilty and forlorn at the mess on the floor but beyond that, did nothing. “Why won’t it clean up the mess?”
“Ah—”.
“You suck at robots. Maybe you should pick another hobby,” Julianne suggested pertly.
“There, there. Don’t worry, pal. All’s good,” Moses said. He came around and put his hand on Microwave Man’s shoulder.
“What about me? Where’s my solace? And I have to go back to shift, too, with no food in my stomach.”
“I think you were supposed to be grateful for the extra serving of humanity. But I see you passed on that too.”
“Thank God you mostly keep to yourself, you whack job and a half,” Julianne screeched.
“Inside voice, missy. Inside voice. You don’t have to say everything going through your head.”
“Trust me, if I did, you’d bleed out your ears.” Julianne stomped out of the kitchen.
“Don’t forget the slice of cheese for Jim!” Moses shouted after her.
She stomped back in, ripped open the fridge door, grabbed the giant cylindrical block of cheese, cut a quick slice, placed it on a small serving plate, returned the block-cheese to the fridge, slammed the door, tucked the knife in the lock-drawer, and stomped back out again.
“You can’t win everyone over, you may as well start with the Jolly Green Giant,” Moses mumbled amusedly in her wake.
Now that he was finished assembling it out of the box, Moses concerned himself with finding the “ON” button on his latest robot.
After walking entirely around the android and not seeing it anywhere, he lifted up its arm and found it tucked inside the right armpit. “Well, that’s clever. I think.”
He pressed ON.
“Call me Ishmael!” the mechanical man exclaimed, and then forcibly plopped Moses down in the chair. Out of his left hand came a stream of air jettisoned from the middle of his palm, a hole opening where there was none before, the jet-stream directed at Moses’ head. Ishmael’s right hand morphed into a comb he used to disentangle Moses’s hair. “Am I doing a good job?”
Moses made a sour face, and retrieved the owner’s manual from the box.
Jim walked in, observed Moses with Ishmael for a second with a deer-caught-in-the-headlights look. “You planning on turning this into a beauty salon?”
“Hey, the better the staff feels about themselves, the better they’re likely to treat the patients, you know?”
“Sit down! I’ll be with you next,” Ishmael said, sounding daft as a bat unable to tell magnetic North.
“How come it’s so commanding?” Jim asked.
“I’m hoping it’s on the wrong setting. I’m thinking it talks loud and succinctly in deference to hard-of-hearing customers.”
“That makes sense.” Jim opened an overhead cupboard.
“Sit down, please!” Ishmael said in a louder voice. He used sign language on Jim when that didn’t work.
“Looks like you’re on the right track there, boss,” Jim said.
Jim retrieved a microwave meal out of the freezer. “Hey, will you let me do that?” Microwave Man chirped. Jim desisted so MM could feel some purpose in life.
“I’ll try two minutes this time,” MM said, guiltily eying the mess on the floor.
“Oh, I get it. How come Cleaning Boy doesn’t sweep that up?” Jim asked.
Moses sighed. “We need to call him something besides Cleaning Boy. Too diminutive.”
“I think you mean too condescending.” Jim slammed another cupboard door. “I thought you said they don’t have any feelings.”
“Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t.” Moses, finding the setting for “Afro” at last, screamed as Ishmael rooted out a swath of hair with the hair pick. He quickly changed the setting, found his Afro being scissored into a heart-shaped cypress fit for a garden of geometrically-shaped “shrubs.”
Jim stifled a smirk. “I see your point.” He turned to face Cleaning Boy. “Hey CB, what’s up with you?” He added, directing the remark at Moses, “I think CB cuts out all the condescension, don’t you? Besides, I think you can view an acronym as a term of affection.”
Moses ignored him, read his user’s manual.
CB finally rolled into action. He was a squat dwarf-sized robot, all mid-section with long bony burnished-steel arms that could extend at odd angles to help him sweep refuse into himself from places humans, even rats, couldn’t reach. “Sorry. I think there’s something wrong with my reaction time.”
“I’m on it,” Moses declared. “You just have to wait your turn.”
“I’m just saying,” CB said. He made alarmingly short work of the spilled food. Seeing the sausage disappear before CB’s lightning fast motions, Jim covered his dick with his hands, lest there was some misunderstanding over what else needed cleaning up.
Ronald entered, and promptly gave CB a swift kick.
“What did you do that for?” Jim asked.
“Because I hugged him last time,” Ronald said.
“You run your psy-ops campaigns on the robots, too?” Jim said, flabbergasted.
“It’s all one and the same to me.” Ronald flopped down at one of the tables.
Jim retrieved his microwave dish out of MM for himself.
“Will you let me do that?” Microwave Man protested.
“Fine.” Jim stuck the meal back in Microwave Man’s belly.
After taking his seat, he waited forever for MM to complete the task. He checked his watch.
MM set the plate down with a little too much attention to detail and getting the job done right. “God, I think he’s got OCD,” Jim said.
“I’m on that, too,” Moses said, turning the page on his instruction manual. “I’m a one-man army in case you haven’t noticed. They may be making your lives easier, but they’re making mine hell.”
Fontanegro sauntered into the kitchen, and collapsed heavily on a fiberglass chair. Moses was surprised it hadn’t cracked.
A robot named ER—short for Emergency Room—slid into position around Fontanegro. Stuck her arm in a blood pressure cuff. Inserted a thermometer in her mouth. Plopped her feet up on an ottoman. He whistled for help when he could see he was getting overloaded. ER2, his assistant, took over for him on the blood pressure cuff and the thermometer, so ER could focus on massaging her feet.
“Go easy, you fool. You’ll break my foot! Ah, that’s it,” Fontanegro acquiesced, calming down as ER found her soft spot. Moses wasn’t surprised it was on the bottom of her feet. She stepped on everyone else’s soft spot, why not her own?
Fontanegro raised an eyebrow as ER2 darted about, refused to stand in one place for two seconds, and piled ever-more chores on himself. He
did depression checks on Fontanegro’s arm and timed how long it took for her tissue to respond, watched the blood and fluids fill the cavity. Not happy with the result, he said, “No, no, no! Can’t have that!” He scurried to get the pharmacopeia, a tome several sizes bigger than a city phonebook, and started flipping pages.
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