The wind whipped hard and cold. He got out, took a breath, had a smoke. The thought came to him that he could have left Daniel Lamotte somewhere back around that lodge. Buried in the ground, hanging from a tree, or burnt in another bonfire. The thing of it was, he felt sure that he’d have found the guy if he was there. Which, as thoughts go, hardly helped. For it meant that he was following a trail that had been laid down.
The high desert glowered beneath thunderhead clouds. Lightning flickered. Shadow chased shadow. Hard-driven sand abraded his face. He got back in the Delahaye, consulted April Lamotte’s foldout map.
He stopped again at the gas station—with the wall-eyed man and dog—back on the Pasadena road, and used the payphone inside the dark little store. He again tried the number for Nero Securities. Once more, there was no answer. Then he got the operator to put him through to the phone booth on Blixden Avenue. It rang for about half a minute. Then came a clattering pick-up.
“Yeah?”
“That you, Roger?”
“Who else, my friend, do you expect it to be but I?” He was doing a cruddy English-baddie accent.
“Anything happening there?”
“Like what?”
“Haven’t seen anyone around have you? Perhaps some tallish, thin guy—probably driving a black Mercury sedan with some kind of badge on the side, wearing aviator glasses and dressed in uniform. Police, or the utilities—”
“Uti… .?”
“I mean gas, power, water. Possibly a security firm. You understand?”
“Yeah. But the only guy in uniform we sees around here apart from those cops you got sniffing everywhere last night is Schmidt the postie. And Schmidt’s plain mad.”
“Okay. But if you do see anyone else, just keep out of their way, will you Roger? You, and your mates. I’m serious. And can you tell my friend up in the apartments the same thing? She’ll probably be in either room 4A or her own room next door.”
“You mean the kike piece of ass?”
“Wish you’d stop talking like that. Her name’s Barbara Eshel. And you can also tell her that I’m going to the Metropolitan Hospital?”
“The funny farm?” Roger laughed. “Sounds, my friend, like you’re heading for the exact right place.”
THIRTY TWO
HE TOOK LUNCH AS HE DROVE down from the mountains—a bottle of soda and a jerky-dry ham roll he’d bought at the general store—then back down Arroyo Seco, along Brooklyn, and past all the industries and warehousing around the Western Lithograph Building. He parked the Delahaye by a fence along the rail sidings beside Boyle Heights. He sat there for a while. Should have done this years ago, Clark, he told himself, when it was about something more than a will-o’-the-wisp. But, as it usually was for most things in his experience, it was way too late. Up the road, he bought a fifty cent return to Norwalk at the station booth, the same way you would if you were going anywhere. It was a few minutes gone one o’clock.
The Los Angeles Metropolitan Hospital, otherwise known as the Met or Metro, lay in farmland south and east of the city. Most of the people who worked there had to commute from the city as April Lamotte had said she’d once done. The Met ran a two shift day that went from early afternoon to early morning and back—that way, the busy times of wake up and bed were handled by separate teams—and most of the people waiting on the platform were recognizably hospital workers; females in faded caps and capes, bulky males in stained coveralls.
Pretending a deep interest in the posters on the corrugated walls—VOTE LIBERTY LEAGUE PROTECT AMERICAN PURITY; Uncle Sam pointing a finger to ask, ARE YOU LOYAL?—he wandered in the direction of a cluster of men in off-brown uniforms at the far end. When the train pulled in, he got in with them in a Whites Only carriage and sat down opposite a guy of about his height and age.
“How much you making at the Met today?”
The guy frowned and put his paper down. He had the sort of pencil-thin mustache Clark often thought of growing himself. “Waddya think, bud? It’s fifty cents an hour, bring your own lunch.”
“And that snazzy uniform…” Clark was already reaching for his billfold. “Bet you have to pay for that yourself as well?”
He kept with the main crowd outside Norwalk Junction, where a clocktower rose from the cluster of buildings amid a large expanse of grounds surrounded by a tall chainlink fence. Big iron gates set within an arched gateway bearing some Latin civic motto were already open to let the new shift in and the old shift out. Collar up and head down in his frayed uniform with its Los Angeles County Department of Health Cleaning Division badge on the breast pocket, and the only thing which might get him mistaken for Daniel Lamotte being the glasses—without which he was starting to feel oddly naked—he clicked through a turnstile and headed on along the cracked concrete path.
Security at the Met was even laxer than he’d expected and it didn’t look as much like a hospital as he’d feared. There were fields, orchards, clusters of bungalows, and he could even see how the relatives of inmates could kid themselves that this was a rural haven, although the concrete bungalows looked like army blockhouses, and the bigger cluster of buildings ahead would have stood in for a scary feelie staged in Dracula’s castle.
He aimed for the relative bustle of the main clocktower building. No sign of any inmates here, nor any of that obvious hospital smell, but business-suited admin staff, nurses and many lesser functionaries dressed in uniforms like his own were coming and going up the wide front steps. No one paid him any notice as he pushed through swing doors into a high-ceilinged hall, where someone had conveniently left a mop and trolley parked beneath an old portrait of some guy in a powdered wig.
“Say,” he asked, blocking the passage of a portly nurse as he steered the trolley across the checkered floor, “someone told me there’s a mess down in old staff records needs clearing up. Got any idea which way I should go?”
The nurse rolled her eyes as if his question was the final straw, but pointed toward an elevator and muttered something about basement before she waddled on. He clanked back the elevator gate, backed in the mop trolley, dragged the hooked brass lever down to B, then slid it shut. Just as he dropped from sight, he noticed that a big black guy was standing beneath the old portrait and staring right across at him.
The trolley wheels squeaked and the soles of his shoes made tick-ticking sounds as he followed subterranean tunnels. He clicked on lights and tried the door of every room he came to, and there were a lot. He found insect piles of ruined typewriters, massive drums of cleaning fluid, cockroaches dying and scurrying in the leaky pools which had formed around equally large drums of some unbranded soup … He even found heaped piles of stained, belted outfits which he took at first to be some weird kind of military uniform before he realized they were straightjackets.
The tunnels got lower and darker, although at least that ghastly ruined-soup smell became less prevalent. Then he reached a final door. Like all the rest, it was unlocked. He pulled the electric lever and the lights on the far side gave a reluctant flicker through shrouds of cobweb across tall avenues of file-racked shelves.
The prospect looked daunting. Thank the Almighty, though, for the predictabilities of bureaucracy. Each of the shelves was neatly labeled and dated. There was Requisitions of 1936 and Inventories of 1930, both of which sounded like the kind of musical that no longer got made. Not to mention Lobotomies of 1935 and Sterilizations of 1938. Easing out the tightly packed files from the grit of years to peer at them in the dim light, a curious muttering rose in his head. He stifled a sneeze, then glanced around, daring any of the shadows to move. But all he could sense was his own presence, and these long low passages lined with the lost history of the Met.
He ran his hands along sagging rows of Staff Records through coatings of dust and mouse droppings until he reached Salaries. If April Lamotte had worked here, it would have been—what?—before the turn of the last decade? He found January for 1928. The damp-warped volume crackled opened. Everything was still
hand-written in those days, the inks color-coded in neat columns for payments and deductions.
He took the book over to the thin pool of light cast by the nearest bulb. The names were alphabeticized, with any new recruits for each month added at the end. NSE obviously meant nurse. LW would probably be laundry worker. CLNR would be cleaning guys like himself. We decided he’d change his name to Lamotte, which is my name, rather than the other way around. It just sounded so much better than Daniel Hogg … If she’d been telling the truth, Lamotte would also be her maiden name, but there was no sign of any Lamotte in all 1928… Then, there it was in red copperplate just above the bottom columns of March 1929’s figures. Lamotte, April, Nse.
His breath quickening, he flicked on through the crackling pages. Add-ons for overtime and extra shifts. Deductions for uniform and laundry. Asterisks for small corrections. Approval stamps for some inspection by the IRS. She really had worked here. Then, in November of the same year, 1929, there were no entries for her. He flicked back. October. He tilted the page more carefully into the grainy light. There was writing at the bottom where the ink had gone spidery with damp. But there was a definite circle, and an arrow, pointing down. Sec—something… He struggled with the sense of it for a moment.
Seconded to
The final word was so thickly blacked out as to be impossible to read. He flicked on through the months, years, of the regular pay records, looking for more of April Lamotte. As far as he could tell, she’d never returned to the Met from wherever it was she’d been sent. He flicked back to the relevant few pages, tore them out, and stuffed them into his back pocket.
He spent some time longer picking his way along the dusty aisles, but there was no sign down here of the main patient records. Must be kept elsewhere, maybe up on the wards—but why look through old files when the guy Daniel Lamotte had been obsessing about was still here at the Met?
He wheeled the mop trolley back along the basement corridors to the elevator and set the lever to Up. He let the first floor—it seemed to be mostly offices—slide by. The second, though, presented a linoleumfloored corridor receding beneath rows of bright skylights to a steel door. He stopped the elevator, rolled back the gate. He looked in on empty nurses’ offices and rooms filled with sour heaps of laundry as he pushed his trolley on. The puke-green gloss-painted door at the far end was thickly impressive. So was its lock. He glanced back the other way, still hoping for some nurse or functionary to emerge with a set of keys, or maybe for a reason not to be here at all. But there was no one about. For want of anything better, he tried the heavy brass handle. The door swung in.
The hospital smell which had been slowly creeping up on his subconscious was suddenly as obvious as day. Rankness undercut with disinfectant. Dust and sour flesh and piss and that halfclean odor you got when you first opened a medicine chest—all combined. Then there was the sound as well. He’d forgotten about that. A lingering echo which, even though it currently seemed to shiver along the polished linoleum with nothing more than the wheeze of the trolley and his own footsteps, still seemed to resonate with lost screams. This place was almost empty though, whilst the wheeled gurneys had been lined along the corridors like railcarriages waiting in some ghastly station when he’d last visited his stepmom Jenny, and there had been glimpses everywhere of things better left unseen. Flesh weeping around loosening gray bandages. Tubes entering unknowable orifices. People coughing and moaning as if to drown out that undertow of echoing screams.
“Hi there Billy…” It had been Jenny’s voice, but somehow not her face. Flesh turned into grayed papier mache fallen loose and thin. A gumless smile and teeth red with what he thought for a moment was only poorly applied lipstick. But this wasn’t how Jenny was or could ever be. She was always pristine. Always neat. She smelled of soap and laundry and cooking. There were blood flecks on the sheets also, which were otherwise as gray as her face. He felt his father’s lumbering awkwardness as he stood beside him. Felt the hellbound heat of her fingers when she touched his face.
He forced himself back to the Met. Forced himself to walk on in what so obviously was nothing like the same place. That smell of soup, for instance, which he’d noticed down in the basement, seemed to fill this corridor, was now so strong that it almost cut out the undertow of bleach and unwashed flesh. There were no screams here, either. At least, not outside his own head. Carried instead on this green shining air were the calls of many voices which made him think of that bit in the Odyssey where Odysseus encounters the sirens. It was weird, but the sound really was that sweet. A large woman in a paisley shift breezed by in the hazed, metallic light. She gave a big smile and said hi handsome as she hummed her way past. He’d smiled and said hi beautiful back and pushed his trolley on before it occurred to him that he should have asked for directions.
Drawn on by the sound of voices singing, he passed through other unlocked doors. The Met was nothing like he’d expected. Where were the barred cells, the screams of tormented souls? Even the smell of this soup wasn’t such a bad thing—fact was, he found that he was actually salivating. Thick pipes ran across the ceiling above him, and he could hear, feel them humming. As for the other smells, the sounds—the clanging doors, the muffled grunts of some kind of struggle he caught when he glanced through a half-closed door and saw three big guys in a tiled white space holding another much smaller guy down on a leather bench whilst a forth straightened out a rubber hose—they were as natural in here as birdsong…
The wheels of Clark’s trolley whistled, and he whistled along with them, trying to find the right lilt for whatever song something inside his head was singing. He’d never have thought before that joy had any obvious color, but it hung here in a shimming pink mist above and around everything. It was a bit like seeing two places superimposed. On the one hand, he was pushing his way though a large, long room, with barred widows of wire mesh glass letting in gray light across a sprawl of metal-framed chairs and tables, a few orange boxes stuffed with jigsaws and magazines, and some heaped-up mattresses. On the other, there was a beauty to this scene which he might have associated with those fancy Italian paintings where centaurs and winged babies pranced to pipe music. Only this was better. This was for real.
The Met was all of a piece, and all just as it should be. It was just the way God Himself would have ordered it—if, that was, God had happened to be a doctor of psychiatry in a white coat and with a brown rubber hose draped around his neck instead of the usual stethoscope, and with maybe a couple of large crocodile clips attached to some kind of stand-alone generator dangling from his all-healing hands.
It was the people in here, he guessed, that made the difference. They were so happy they actually glowed like Chinese lanterns—and Clark, looking down at himself, realized that he was glowing as well. Greenish protrusions crackled out of him in flares of joy.
“Say, any of you folks know where I can find a guy called Howard Hughes… ?” Even as he asked the question, he knew that it was ridiculous. Already, he was laughing, and it was as if he’d told the funniest joke in history, for everyone else was cracking up as well.
Beyond the haze, outside the Met, he could see how some of these people might not be your first choice to share a streetcar bench with. Their mouths hung open, their bodies were lopsided, and they were wearing the kind of loose, white, ass-ventilating hospital shifts that didn’t leave much to the imagination. One guy had a pair of galoshes on as if to compensate, whilst another, sporting a striped railworkers’ cap, was holding his not inconsiderable dick out towards Clark as they drew closer to him.
Hands all over him now. Papery and meaty—soupily—scented, they swarmed across his face, sidewaysing his glasses and drawing him in and down. As he succumbed to their embrace, he looked up at the dimming ceiling, and saw once again those big pipes, and realized that what pulsed inside them wasn’t soup at all. For surely they contained actual joy—they must make the stuff here in the Met, and then just pump it out like the LAWAP pumped out water. J
oy wasn’t soupy brown or any other single color, but a mingling of all the shades of this swarming, tingling glow. Joy was warm and it was prickly and it was smooth and it was cold; joy was all of those things—and so many others he couldn’t even begin to express—as limbs and bright eager mouths joined with him in a single siren song…
“What ya’ll doin’?” a voice rumbled somewhere. “Fella like this, he ain’t like you, he important. He got the mop, he got the trolley. He got places to go …”
Broad arms took hold, drag-carrying him back out through swing doors into a corridor where the roseate light was so dimmed he could have cried for its loss as he slumped back against a wall.
“Why you gone stole my mop trolley?” The guy was black and bald and big. His smile was all gum, and his left eyebrow was stuck in a raised position which gave him a quizzical look.
“I’m sorry. I was just…” A sad, bitter residue washed over Clark. He straightened his glasses. His stomach looped. Then he tried to scratch at a weird itch in his skull. “… borrowing it to get something done.”
“Covering up for someone?”
“Not exactly. What the hell was going on in there?”
“Don’t know much about the Met, do you, if you ain’t heard of the moodies.”
“Moodies?”
“What you folk from the outside calls the feelies.” The big black guy waved a stubby-fingered hand. “But that word for what goes on in here ain’t anything like strong enough. Ain’t what you feel. Puts you in a whole fresh mood.”
Clark peered back into the room through a porthole. He could still sense a ringing backwash of the joy which had possessed him, but now it was it was like the cold echo of some ghastly bell. The feeling which had joined him to these sad extremes of humanity who wandered that big room with its vague, wan light was entirely lost to him now. One woman seemed to be thinking about eating another piece of jigsaw. Another was adding some extra knots to the ball of hair she was chewing. A third was hunched back in a corner and rocking back and forth. The guy with the railworkers’ cap still had his dick in his hand. But they were all so happy. They were all still smiling, laughing, singing. He could clearly see the haze of plasm now hanging and drifting like colored sea mist, but somehow the last thing of all he noticed about the room were the two dusty-wired enclosures at opposite corners of the room, although he could hear their fizzing electric hum even from here.
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