Elizabeth Hand - 12 Monkeys

“YES! YES! MASTERCARD! VISA! THE KEY TO HAPPINESS!”

One of the orderlies paused, brandishing a hefty key ring, and quickly locked the door before turning his attention to the raving patient.

“SEIZE THE MOMENT!” Jeffrey shrieked, bounding past Billings and the other orderly. Even from across the room, Cole could see his blue eyes glowing madly as Jeffrey waved his hands. “GET RICH! NOW’S THE TIME! GO FOR IT! ”

“Go for it,” Cole repeated. He looked down at the key in his hand and looked up in time to see Billings tripping over a chair as he tried to tackle Jeffrey.

“God damn you, Jeffrey, quit playing the fool!” Billings panted.

Cole hesitated. He glanced at the door, trying to get his eyes to focus. His hand tightened on the key in his palm as the orderlies finally grabbed Jeffrey and brought him crashing to the floor.

“LAST CHANCE! LAST CHANCE! Hey — ow !”

Before he had a chance to think better of it, Cole staggered to the door. Feebly he stabbed at it with the key, trying vainly to find the hole. He glanced nervously over his shoulder to where the orderlies were swarming Jeffrey. Suddenly the key slid in.

“Damn,” he whispered thickly: it wouldn’t turn.

“Hey.”

Cole jumped, turned to see an elderly man in flannel pajamas watching him with pale watery eyes. “Florida, now that would be the place to go,” the man said dreamily. “The Keys are lovely this time of year.”

Unnerved, Cole desperately tried the key again.

It turned.

“Be careful,” the old man said as Cole slipped through the door and into the echoing hallway. “J. Edgar Hoover isn’t really dead.”

Elsewhere in the county hospital, Kathryn Railly headed to her office. As she walked she riffled through the morning’s stack of messages: pharmaceutical updates, urgent messages from parents and spouses inquiring after patients, notice of a change in health club hours for members. As she rounded a corner, Dr. Casey’s head popped out of his office, waving a page torn from a magazine.

“Kathryn! Hang on—” She paused as Casey strode up beside her. “This was in my box, but I have a slight suspicion it wasn’t meant for me.”

Kathryn looked at the ragged magazine page in his hand, frowning as he began to read with exaggerated emphasis.

“You are the most beetifool woman I have ever sin. You live in a beetifool worl. But you don’t know it. You have freedum, sunshine, air you can breeeth.”

Her pale eyes narrowed and she gave him a sad smile. “Cole. James Cole, right?”

Casey held out a hand to silence her, adjusting his glasses as he continued, “I wood do anything to stay her, but I must leave. Pleese, help me.”

Kathryn’s smile faded. “Poor man…”

Thudding footsteps made them both turn in time to see Dr. Goodin racing around the corner.

“Hey, Kathryn!” he shouted, panting. “James Cole is one of yours, right? Well, he eloped! Last seen, he was up on nine!”

Kathryn and Casey stared, dumbfounded, then took off after him.

A security guard cornered Cole near Radiology, where he was backing out of the CAT-scan chamber. It took three guards and four orderlies to subdue him, but not without a fight. By the time they got Cole strapped to a gurney, additional security had to be called, and an ambulance.

“Please… you got to understand, it’s a mistake, okay?” he pleaded.

“Shut up,” ordered Billings.

Kathryn drew her breath in sharply when she saw them wheeling the gurney toward the isolation room. Billings’ right eye was badly swollen, and one of the security guards dabbed blood from a nasty gash on his cheek. On the gurney Cole struggled in vain with the restraints. His face was flushed and blotchy, his pupils dilated. She was stunned by how much urgency he could still pump into his slurred words — he’d had enough Halcion to trank out someone twice his size.

“Dr. Railly?” Billings’ voice broke her reverie. She moved aside to let them wheel Cole into the room.

“Yes,” she replied. She tapped the hypo, checking once more for air bubbles, then turned to Cole. He stared at her with wide mad eyes, and she thought back to a night last summer, when she’d accidentally run over a raccoon. It had looked at her like that, scarcely comprehending and numb with pain, its teeth bared in a bloody grimace.

“No more drugs. Please…” Cole whispered.

Railly swallowed, forcing herself to stare at his hand and not his eyes. “It’s just something to calm you,” she said as she pressed the needle against the skin of his upper arm. “I have to do this, James. You’re very confused.”

Before one of the guards could question her, she turned and fled, trying not to remember how, a year before, she had heard the raccoon snarling and thrashing at the side of the road as she drove away.

She made her rounds, then returned to her office. On her desk was a message for her to meet with Dr. Fletcher in the conference room.

“Shit,” she murmured, rubbing her throbbing temples. She gulped down several ibuprofen, chasing them with a mouthful of tepid Evian water, and hurried back into the hall.

In the conference room, Dr. Fletcher sat between Goodin and Casey. All three looked tense, Goodin bordering on outright anger. Kathryn felt herself grow hot, flashing back to high school visits to the principal’s office.

“Kathryn, sit down.”

Fletcher waved at the chair across from him. Kathryn glanced at it, then quickly moved another chair to the table and sat in it. Fletcher’s eye twitched as he reached for his pencil and exclaimed, “Four years! We’ve worked together for four years , Kathryn, I’ve never seen you like this before.”

Kathryn opened her mouth and Fletcher pointed his pencil at her. “Now please, Kathryn, stop being so defensive. This isn’t an inquisition.”

“I didn’t think I was being defensive. I was just—”

The pencil came down, hard, on the edge of the conference table. “ He should have been in restraints . It was bad judgment on your part, plain and simple. Why not just cop to it?”

Kathryn started to snap back, then thought better of it. Instead she stared at the table for a long moment.

“Okay, it was bad judgment,” she said at last. An unwanted vision rose before her: Cole’s helpless form strapped to the gurney with canvas-and-metal bonds. “Bu it have the strangest feeling about him, I’ve seen him somewhere and—”

“He’s already put two policemen in the hospital,” Fletcher interrupted angrily. “And now we have an orderly with a broken arm and a security officer with a fractured skull!”

“I said it was bad judgment! What else do you want me to say?”

Fletcher leaned back in his chair. “You see what I mean? You’re being defensive.” He turned to Dr. Casey. “Isn’t she being defensive, Bob?”

Before Casey could reply, there was a tentative knock at the door. Kathryn swung around and saw Billings holding an ice pack to his face as he said, “Uh, Dr. Fletcher? We got another — situation.”

“ Christ ,” Fletcher swore, slamming his hand against the table. This time the pencil snapped in two. “ Now that is it?”

Billings pulled the ice pack away from his cheek and winced. “I think you better see for yourself, Doctor.”

They filed into the hall behind Fletcher, Billings studiously avoiding Kathryn’s eyes as he led them toward isolation.

In front of the entrance to the padded cell a small crowd was gathered, several security guards and a day nurse. Fletcher bulled his way through them, shoved the heavy door open and stared inside.