Panic, suppressed since my arrival, welled up and burst over. "Wait!" I said. "What about my things? I had a bag with me."
"Talk to doctor in morning," he said, gesturing with the hypo, fitting it with a needle-and-dosage cartridge and popping the sterile wrap off with a thumbswitch. "Now, for sleepink." He advanced on me.
I'd been telling myself that this was a chance to rest, to relax and gather my wits. Soon enough, I'd sort things out with the doctors and I'd be on my way. I'd argue my way out of it. But here came Boris Badinoff with his magic needle, and all reason fled. I scrambled back over the bed and pressed against the window.
"It's barely three," I said, guessing at the time in the absence of my comm. "I'm not tired. I'll go to sleep when I am."
"For sleepink," he repeated, in a more soothing tone.
"No, that's all right. I'm tired enough. Long night last night. I'll just lie down and nap now, all right? No need for needles, OK?"
He grabbed my wrist. I tried to tug it out of his grasp, to squirm away. There's a lot of good, old-fashioned dirty fighting in Tai Chi-eye-gouging, groin punches, hold-breaks and come-alongs-and they all fled me. I thrashed like a fish on a line as he ran the hypo over the crook of my elbow until the vein-sensing LED glowed white. He jabbed down with it and I felt a prick. For a second, I thought that it hadn't taken effect-I've done enough chemical sleep in my years with the Tribe that I've developed quite a tolerance for most varieties-but then I felt that unmistakable heaviness in my eyelids, the melatonin crash that signalled the onslaught of merciless rest. I collapsed into bed.
I spent the next day in a drugged stupor. I've become quite accustomed to functioning in a stupor over the years, but this was different. No caffeine, for starters. They fed me and I had a meeting with a nice doctor who ran it down for me. I was here for observation pending a competency hearing in a week. I had seven days to prove that I wasn't a danger to myself or others, and if I could, the judge would let me go.
"It's like I'm a drug addict, huh?" I said to the doctor, who was used to non sequiturs.
"Sure, sure it is." He shifted in the hard chair opposite my bed, getting ready to go.
"No, really, I'm not just running my mouth. It's like this:
"So, it's like I'm addicted to being nuts. I have a nonrational view of the world around me. An
The doctor ran his hands through his long hair and bounced his knee up and down. "You could put it that way, I guess."
"So tell me, what's the next step? What is my optimum strategy for providing compelling evidence of my repudiation of my worldview?"
"Well, that's where the analogy breaks down. This isn't about anything demonstrable. There's no one thing we look for in making our diagnosis. It's a collection of things, a protocol for evaluating you. It doesn't happen overnight, either. You were committed on the basis of evidence that you had made threats to your coworkers due to a belief that they were seeking to harm you."
"Interesting. Can we try a little thought experiment, Doctor? Say that your coworkers really
The doctor looked away. "It's in the protocol-we find it there."
"I see," I said, moving in for the kill. "I see. Where would I get more information on the protocol? I'd like to research it before my hearing."
"I'm sorry," the doctor said, "we don't provide access to medical texts to our patients."
"Why not? How can I defend myself against a charge if I'm not made aware of the means by which my defense is judged? That hardly seems fair."
The doctor stood and smoothed his coat, turned his badge's lanyard so that his picture faced outwards. "Art, you're not here to defend yourself. You're here so that we can take a look at you and understand what's going on. If you have been set up, we'll discover it-"
"What's the ratio of real paranoids to people who've been set up, in your experience?"
"I don't keep stats on that sort of thing-"
"How many paranoids have been released because they were vindicated?"
"I'd have to go through my case histories-"
"Is it more than ten?"
"No, I wouldn't think so-"
"More than five?"
"Art, I don't think-"
"Have
"Art, we're on your side here. If you want to make this easy on yourself, then you should understand that. The nurse will be in with your lunch and your meds in a few minutes, then you'll be allowed out on the ward. I'll speak to you there more, if you want."
"Doctor, it's a simple question: Has anyone ever been admitted to this facility because it was believed he had paranoid delusions, and later released because he was indeed the center of a plot?"
"Art, it's not appropriate for me to discuss other patients' histories-"
"Don't you publish case studies? Don't those contain confidential information disguised with pseudonyms?"
"That's not the point-"
"What
even
"I read
"That looks like a prescription, Doctor."
"It is. I'm giving you a mild sedative. We can't help you until you're calmer and ready to listen."
"I'm perfectly calm. I just disagree with you. I am the sort of person who learns through debate. Medication won't stop that."
"We'll see," the doctor said, and left, before I could muster a riposte.
I was finally allowed onto the ward, dressed in what the nurses called "day clothes"-the civilian duds that I'd packed before leaving the hotel, which an orderly retrieved for me from a locked closet in my room. The clustered nuts were watching slackjaw TV, or staring out the windows, or rocking in place, fidgeting and muttering. I found myself a seat next to a birdy woman whose long oily hair was parted down the middle, leaving a furrow in her scalp lined with twin rows of dandruff. She was young, maybe twenty-five, and seemed the least stuporous of the lot.
"Hello," I said to her.
She smiled shyly, then pitched forward and vomited copiously and noisily between her knees. I shrank back and struggled to keep my face neutral. A nurse hastened to her side and dropped a plastic bucket in the stream of puke, which was still gushing out of her mouth, her thin chest heaving.
"Here, Sarah, in here," the nurse said, with an air of irritation.
"Can I help?" I said, ridiculously.
She looked sharply at me. "Art, isn't it? Why aren't you in Group? It's after one!"
"Group?" I asked.
"Group. In that corner, there." She gestured at a collection of sagging sofas underneath one of the ward's grilled-in windows. "You're late, and they've started without you."
There were four other people there, two women and a young boy, and a doctor in mufti, identifiable by his shoes-not slippers-and his staff of office, the almighty badge-on-a-lanyard.
Throbbing with dread, I moved away from the still-heaving girl to the sofa cluster and stood at its edge. The group turned to look at me. The doctor cleared his throat. "Group, this is Art. Glad you made it, Art. You're a little late, but we're just getting started here, so that's OK. This is Lucy, Fatima, and Manuel. Why don't you have a seat?" His voice was professionally smooth and stultifying.
I sank into a bright orange sofa that exhaled a cloud of dust motes that danced in the sun streaming through the windows. It also exhaled a breath of trapped ancient farts, barf-smell, and antiseptic, the
that gradually numbed my nose to all other scents on the ward. I folded my hands in my lap and tried to look attentive.
"All right, Art. Everyone in the group is pretty new here, so you don't have to worry about not knowing what's what. There are no right or wrong things. The only rules are that you can't interrupt anyone, and if you want to criticize, you have to criticize the idea, and not the person who said it. All right?"
"Sure," I said. "Sure. Let's get started."
"Well, aren't you eager?" the doctor said warmly. "OK. Manuel was just telling us about his friends."
"They're not my friends," Manuel said angrily. "They're the reason I'm here. I hate them."
"Go on," the doctor said.
"I already
"Lucy," the doctor said patiently, favoring her with a patronizing smile. "That's not cool, OK? Criticize the idea, not the person, and only when it's your turn, OK?"
Lucy rolled her eyes with the eloquence of teenagedom.
"All right, Manuel, thank you. Group, do you have any positive suggestions for Manuel?"
Stony silence.
"OK! Manuel, some of us are good at some things, and some of us are good at others. Your friends don't hate you, and I'm sure that if you think about it, you'll know that you don't hate them. Didn't they come visit you last weekend? Successful people are well liked, and you're no exception. We'll come back to this tomorrow-why don't you spend the time until then thinking of three examples of how your friends showed you that they liked you, and you can tell us about it tomorrow?"
Manuel stared out the window.
"OK! Now, Art, welcome again. Tell us why you're here."
"I'm in for observation. There's a competency hearing at the end of the week."
Linda snorted and Fatima giggled.
The doctor ignored them. "But tell us
"You want the whole story?"
"Whatever parts you think are important."
"It's a Tribal thing."
"I see," the doctor said.
"It's like this," I said. "It used to be that the way you chose your friends was by finding the most like-minded people you could out of the pool of people who lived near to you. If you were lucky, you lived near a bunch of people you could get along with. This was a lot more likely in the olden days, back before, you know, printing and radio and such. Chances were that you'd grow up so immersed in the local doctrine that you'd never even think to question it. If you were a genius or a psycho, you might come up with a whole new way of thinking, and if you could pull it off, you'd either gather up a bunch of people who liked your new idea or you'd go somewhere else, like America, where you could set up a little colony of people who agreed with you. Most of the time, though, people who didn't get along with their neighbors just moped around until they died."
"Very interesting," the doctor said, interrupting smoothly, "but you were going to tell us how you ended up here."
"Yeah," Lucy said, "this isn't a history lesson, it's Group. Get to the point."
"I'm getting there," I said. "It just takes some background if you're going to understand it. Now, once ideas could travel more freely, the chances of you finding out about a group of people somewhere else that you might get along with increased. Like when my dad was growing up, if you were gay and from a big city, chances were that you could figure out where other gay people hung out and go and-" I waved my hands, "be
"So back when the New World was forming and sorting out its borders and territories, information was flowing pretty well. You had telegraphs, you had the Pony Express, you had thousands of little newspapers that got carried around on railroads and streetcars and steamers, and it wasn't long before everyone knew what kind of person went where, even back in Europe and Asia. People immigrated here and picked where they wanted to live based on what sort of people they wanted to be with, which ideas they liked best. A lot of it was religious, but that was just on the surface-underneath it all was aesthetics. You wanted to go somewhere where the girls were pretty in the way you understood prettiness, where the food smelled like food and not garbage, where shops sold goods you could recognize. Lots of other factors were at play, too, of course-jobs and Jim Crow laws and whatnot, but the tug of finding people like you is like gravity. Lots of things work against gravity, but gravity always wins in the end-in the end, everything collapses. In the end, everyone ends up with the people that are most like them that they can find."