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.
Chapter 4
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.
Each of her organs was explored and assessed. As were the integrants of each organ. All the way down to the microcosmic landscape of her cells.
The cause of Janet's mental disorder was determined.
A concentration of nerve cells in two areas of the hypothalamus of her brain were abnormal, malformed. They had axons too short. That made the gaps across to other cells twice as wide as they should have been.
At times that were almost a schedule, the chemical neurotransmitter called norepinephrine accumulated at the ends of each of those short axons, like traffic jams at bridges that are out. The more the secretions of this substance ganged up, the more hell they raised.
As a result Janet experienced mania, phases of belligerence, and, ultimately, violence.
At other times the chemical neurotransmitter acetylcholine brought its inhibiting qualities to the brinks of those abnormally wide gaps and collected there in unmanageable batches. Overdoses of its squelching influence got to the mental system. Janet was then overwhelmed by a phase of depression, her every thought and action stifled with dark ingoingness.
A bipolar disorder of a major affective disorder.
That was the diagnostic label the doctors put on what Janet had. Manic and depressive to extremes. The doctors had no way of knowing that malformed axons in the hypothalamus were behind it all. And even if they had known, there was nothing they could do about it. Brain cells don't change or repair. How ironic that the great suffering of Janet was the penalty of such an infinitesimal mistake, a matter of a few millionths of an inch. Born with it, she was stuck with it.
Now, restrained on her bed in her room at High Meadow, she lay absolutely still, compelled to stillness for some reason. She was unaware of the energy oscillating within her. It traveled now as though in response to a call, gathered in her brain and then, more specifically, in the domain of her hypothalamus. Concentrated, it focused upon the malformed axons.
The changes that took place within Janet's brain during the next two hours would have been impossible for the unaided eye to notice. Perhaps even the most powerful scanning electron microscope might not have picked them up.
Changes on the molecular level.
The defective axons, all the millions of them, were ever so gradually perfected—increased in length, five millionths of an inch. Just enough to perfect the width of the gap from cell to cell. Within a short while the neurotransmitters, acetylcholine and norepinephrine, were gotten into line. Secreted in tiny quantas, they began firing across the gaps at a nice, normal rate.
Altogether, the Righting of Janet took four hours.
Which would be about average.
For Janet it was a lifting of miasmas. Layer after layer of all the old interposing mists and overcasts were dissipated. Diffusion gave way degree by degree to a mental clarity as pure as washed air.
Janet did not trust it. The feeling was too strange for her to trust. With her eyes yet closed she lay there, not believing in it, suspecting it was a cruel tease, that she was merely being given a taste of sanity. She thought perhaps this was the moment before death when utmost wants were granted—although it felt more like life, she had to admit.
Ten minutes passed.
She hung on to it, believed it tenuous, breathed gently not to disturb.
A half hour.
Her outlook improved.
Warily, she opened her eyes.
The afternoon light was mostly gone, the room in dusk. It was later than supper time. No one had come to look in on her, at least not that she knew of. Where had the time gone?
The window was in direct view. She saw outside, blessed outside, where the new green of the maples was black against a sky with some indigo and mauve in it. She loved the leaves, the sky, the lenient colors it was presenting in this hyphenation of day and night. Her chest and eyes were crying.
The incongruity of her hands took her attention to them. They were still fisted. There was something hard in her right fist. From the feel of it she believed she knew what it was. She unfurled her fingers. Her hand was still held by a restraint so she had to raise her head to look at it.
It was from tip to tip a smidgen longer than an inch. Three quarters of an inch at its widest point. Octahedral in shape, like a pair of pyramids fused base to base, forming eight triangular sides. It wasn't a geometrically perfect octahedron. All its sides were not precisely the same measure, but nearly. One tip of it was incomplete, apparently chipped off. Except for that tip its surface was whitish-opaque, as though hazed with frost.
A rough crystal.
A stone.
Her father's reminder stone.
It had been among the belongings of his she'd had on his old dresser. During her rampage she must have unintentionally grabbed it up.
Chapter 5
Forty-seventh Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues is not really a good place to walk a dog. Nor, for that matter, is it the best of places to walk a mistress.
Diamonds are why.
Rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and pearls too, but mainly diamonds. There are well over a thousand jewelry shops and concessions, counting from comer to comer along both sides of the street. Every window is arranged like an altar to avarice. On tier above tier in tray after tray precious stones are set, perfectly angled to wink and keep winking. They take such advantage, naked as they are against black velour. They are teasers, motionless Salomes. They flick their selves iniquitously on the stages of motives behind the eyes of in-lookers, suggesting the wantonness that might be given the giver in retum. Or, for the wanter, bringing up new resolves to accommodate old erotic persistencies, after which nothing could possibly be denied. Of course, the same is tme of such offerings at Cartier, Bulgari, Van Cleef's and other Fifth Avenue establishments, however, there the lust is rather oblique, more decently disguised and not so thoroughly atmospheric.
A fifteen-carat marquise diamond appears self-conscious of
its relationship to the word reduced. In the same window is a tray that contains twenty-seven apparently identical diamond rings, each set with three quarters of a carat, pear shape. A platoon of rings, their shanks sunk in separate slots in the black velour, five slots down, six across. Three slots are purposely unoccupied, stuck with red plastic buttons that have the word sold imprinted on them, three of thousands of lies.
The street.
People in the trade now even leave off the number when they speak or think of it. Pelikaanstraat in Antwerp is a diamond place, as is Hatton Garden in London. But 47th in New York is "the street." It handles, one way or another, over half the finished diamonds in the world.
Such industry is unbelievable — at nine o'clock at night. Come night the street looks depressed. Shop next to shop next to shop appears vacated, the windows stripped, empty, exposing fades and dust boundaries on the velour surfaces. And beyond in the unlighted interiors the shelves of glass display cases are barren. The impression is that everyone packed up every carat in a hurry and fled. Truth is, of course, the precious stuff has been given over to the deep dark of vaults and safes. But it never sleeps. Darkness is an imposition to facets, perhaps even a suffering.
Come the day, the street awakens, more instantaneously vigorous than any other commercial street in Manhattan. It flashes open. Store windows and display counters are swiftly kindled with cold blaze, and the pitch seems already under way before it starts.
Especially outside along the sidewalks. They are sidewalks as ample as those of most east-west New York blocks, but here they are too narrow. Here the sidewalk is a place for negotiation, where men pause and stand together to conduct business in a manner that really isn't as much happenchance as it appears. For many the sidewalk is office, pockets are vaults. Many of that many are Hasidim, the most pious of orthodox Jews, unmistakable in their long black coats and beards. No neckties, white home-laundered shirts buttoned at the collar. Beneath the crowns of their black wide-brimmed hats, long hair hides, except in front on both sides, where gathers of strands to the chin are braided or curled into tubelike locks with a curling iron. The Hasidim — or beards, as they are called — seem less arduous somehow and therefore more confident. Their black outfits probably enhance that; surely their legion does. Whatever, the scurry goes past and around them, such as the carrying of stones from place to place. Every moment lots of the precious hard things are being taken to be seen, being returned. Those who bear them cut and thread through the street traffic swiftly, avoiding jostle, never allowing contact, stepping off the curb so as not to be brushed. Incidents of pocket-picking have taught overcaution.
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