Skeet was already wearing socks, and Martie knelt beside the bed, jamming his feet into his sneakers.
“Martie,” the kid said, “I’m still in my pajamas.”
“No time to change here, honey. Your mom is really sick.”
With a note of bright wonder in his voice, Skeet said, “Really? Claudette is really sick?”
Throwing Skeet’s clothes into the suitcase as fast as he could pull them out of the dresser drawers, Dusty said, “It hit her so suddenly.”
“What, a truck or something?” Skeet asked.
Jasmine Hernandez heard the note of almost-delight in Skeet’s voice, and she frowned. “
Looking down at his pajama bottoms, Skeet said, with complete sincerity, “No, I’m clean.”
The doctor checked in at the station on the second floor to let the nurses know that neither he nor his patient in Room 246 were to be disturbed while in session.
“He called me, saying he intends to discharge himself in the morning, which would probably be the end of him. I’ve got to talk him out of it. He’s still in deep addiction. When he hits the streets, he’ll score heroin in an hour, and if I’m right about his psychopathology, he really wants to overdose and be done with it.”
“And him,” said Nurse Ganguss, “with everything to live for.”
She was in her thirties, attractive, and usually a consummate professional. With this patient, however, she was more like a horny schoolgirl than an RN, always on the brink of a swoon from cerebral anemia, insufficient circulation to the brain, as a consequence of so much of her blood flooding into her loins and genitalia.
“And he’s so sweet,” Nurse Ganguss added.
The younger woman, Nurse Kyla Woosten, wasn’t impressed by the patient in Room 246, but clearly she had an interest in Dr. Ahriman himself. Whenever the doctor had occasion to talk with her, Nurse Woosten performed the same repertoire of tricks with her tongue. Pretending to be unaware of what she was doing — but, in fact, with more calculation than a Cray supercomputer could accomplish in one full day of operation — she frequently licked her lips to moisten them: long, slow, sensuous licks. When considering a point that Ahriman made, the vixen sometimes stuck her tongue out, biting on the tip of it, as if to do so assisted thoughtful contemplation.
Yes, here came the tongue, questing into the right corner of her lips, perhaps seeking a sweet crumb lodged in that ripe and tender crease. Now her lips parted in surprise, tongue fluttering against the roof of her mouth. Again, the moistening of the lips.
Nurse Woosten was pretty, but the doctor wasn’t interested in her. For one thing, he had a policy against brainwashing business employees. Although a mind-controlled workforce, throughout his various enterprises, would eliminate demands for increased wages and fringe benefits, the possible complications were not worth risking.
He might have made an exception of Nurse Woosten, because her tongue fascinated him. It was a perky, pink little thing. He would have liked to do something inventive with it. Regrettably, in a time when body piercing for cosmetic purposes was no longer shocking, when ears and eyebrows and nostrils and lips and navels and even tongues were regularly drilled and fitted with baubles, the doctor couldn’t have done much to Woosten’s tongue that, upon waking, she would have deemed horrifying or even objectionable.
Sometimes he found it frustrating to be a sadist in an age when self-mutilation was all the rage.
So, on to Room 246 and his star patient.
The doctor was the principal investor in New Life Clinic, but he didn’t regularly treat patients here. Generally speaking, people with drug problems didn’t interest him; they were so industriously wrecking their lives that any additional misery he could inflict on them would be merely filigree atop filigree.
Currently, his only patient at New Life was in 246. Of course, he also had a particular interest in Dustin Rhodes’s brother, down the hall in 250, but he was not one of Skeet’s official physicians; his consultation in that case was strictly off the record.
When he entered 246, which was a two-room suite with full bath, he found the famous actor in the living room, standing on his head, palms flat on the floor, heels and buttocks against a wall, watching television upside down.
“Mark? What’re you doing here at this hour?” the actor asked, holding his yoga position — or whatever it was.
“I was in the building for another patient. Thought I’d stop by and see how you’re doing.”
The doctor had lied to Nurses Ganguss and Woosten when he had said that the actor had phoned him, threatening to check out of the clinic in the morning. Ahriman’s real purpose was to be here when the midnight shift arrived, so he could program Skeet after the too-diligent Nurse Hernandez went home. The actor was his cover. After a couple hours in 246, the few minutes that he spent with Skeet would seem like an incidental matter, and any staff who noticed the visit would not find it remarkable.
The actor said, “I spend about an hour a day in this position. Good for brain circulation. It’d be nice to have a second, smaller TV that I could turn upside down when I needed to.”
Glancing at the sitcom on the screen, Ahriman said, “If that’s the stuff you watch, it’s probably better upside down.”
“No one likes critics, Mark.”
“Don Adriano de Armado.”
“I’m listening,” said the actor, quivering briefly but able to maintain his headstand.
For the name to activate this subject, the doctor had chosen a character from
The upside-down actor, who collected twenty million dollars plus points for starring in a film, had accepted little education of any kind during his thirty-odd years, and had received no formal training in his profession. When he read a screenplay, he often didn’t read anything except his own lines, and frogs were likely to fly before he ever read Shakespeare. Unless the legitimate theater was one day turned over to the management of chimps and baboons, there was no chance whatsoever that he would be cast in anything by the Bard of Avon, and so no danger that he would hear the name
Ahriman put the actor through his personal, enabling haiku.
As Martie finished tying the laces of Skeet’s athletic shoes, Jasmine Hernandez said, “If you’re checking him out of here, I’ll need you to sign a release of liability.”
“We’re bringing him back tomorrow,” Martie said, rising to her feet and encouraging Skeet to stand up from the edge of the bed.
“Yeah,” Dusty said, still jamming clothes into the suitcase, “we just want to take him to see Mom, and then he’ll be back.”
“You’ll still have to sign a release,” Nurse Hernandez insisted.
“Dusty,” Skeet warned, “you better never let Claudette hear you call her
“He attempted suicide only yesterday,” Nurse Hernandez reminded them. “The clinic can’t take any responsibility for his discharge in this condition.”
“We absolve the clinic. We take full responsibility,” Martie assured her.
“Then I’ll get the release form.”
Martie stepped in front of the nurse, leaving Skeet to wobble on the uncertain support of his own two legs. “Why don’t you help us get him ready? Then the four of us can go up to the nurses’ station together and sign the release.”
Eyes narrowing, Jasmine Hernandez said, “What’s going on here?”
“We’re in a hurry, that’s all.”
“Yeah? Then I’ll get that release real quick,” Nurse Hernandez replied, pushing past Martie. At the door, she pointed at Skeet, and ordered: “Don’t you go anywhere until I come back,
“Sure, okay,” Skeet promised. “But could you hurry? Claudette’s really sick, and I don’t want to miss anything.”
