Read Online Earthquake Weather by Tim Powers - Free Book Online Page A

the two beds, shaking with bewildered weeping, his hands and feet at the corners of the mattress as if he were in four points again himself.
    “She’s DID,” said Muir to Armentrout. He was sipping coffee and still absently massaging his throat. The two of them were standing by the supervision-and-privilege blackboard in the nursing station, and Muir waved his coffee cup toward Janis Plumtree’s name, beside which was just the chalked notation SSF—supervised sharps and flames—which indicated that she, like most of the patients, was not to be entrusted with a lighter or scissors.
    “Degenerate Incontinent … Dipsomaniac,” hazarded Armentrout. He wished the pay telephone in the lounge would stop ringing.
    “No,” said Muir with exaggerated patience. “Haven’t you read the new edition of the diagnostic manual? ‘Dissociative identity disorder.’ What we used to call MPD.”
    Armentrout stared at the intern. Muir had been resentful and rebellious ever since they’d heard the news about the overweight bipolar girl Armentrout had treated and released last week; the obese teenager had apparently hanged herself the day after she had gone home.
    “Plumtree doesn’t have multiple personality disorder,” said Armentrout. “Or your DID, either. And I don’t appreciate you running tests on her circadian rhythms, and giving her … zeitgebers ? That silly watch that beeps all the time? You’re not her primary, I am. I’m on top of her—”
    “The watch is a grounding technique,” interrupted Muir. “It’s to forcibly remind her that she’s here, and now, and safe, when flashbacks of the traumas that fragmented her personality forcibly intrude—”
    “She’s not—”
    “You can practically see the personalities shift in her! I think the patients have even caught on—did you hear Regushi mention Heckle and Jeckles? I think he was trying to say Jekyll and Hyde … though I can’t figure out why he seemed to resent her.”
    “She’s not a multiple, damn it. She’s depressed and delusional, with obsessive-compulsive features—her constant demands to use the shower, the days-of-the-week underwear, the way she gargles mouthwash all the time—”
    “Then why haven’t you got her on anything? Haloperidol, clomipramine?” Muir put down his coffee cup and crossed to the charge nurse’s desk.
    To Armentrout’s alarm, the man picked up the binder of treatment plans and began flipping through it. “You don’t know enough to be second-guessing me, Philip,” Armentrout said sharply, stepping forward. “There are confidential details of her case—”
    “A shot of atropine, after midnight tonight?” interrupted Muir, reading from Plumtree’s chart. He looked up, and hastily closed the binder. “What for, to dilate her pupils? Her pinpoint pupils are obviously just a conversion disorder, like hysterical blindness or paralysis! So is the erythema, her weird ‘sunburn,’ if you’ve noticed that. My God, atropine won’t get her pupils to normal, it’ll have ’em as wide as garbage disposals!”
    Armentrout stared at him until Muir looked away. “I’m going to have to order you, Mister Muir, in my capacity as Chief of Psychiatry here, to cease this insubordination. You’re an intern—a student, in effect!—and you’re overstepping your place.” The pay telephone in the patients’ lounge was still ringing; in a louder voice he went on, “I’ve been practicing psychiatry for nineteen years, and I don’t need a partial recitation of the effects of atropine, helpful though you no doubt meant to be. Shall I … dilate! … upon this matter?”
    “No, sir,” said Muir, still looking away.
    “How pleasant for both of us. Were you going home?”
    “… Yes, sir.”
    “Then I’ll see you—you’re not working here tomorrow, are you?”
    “I’m at UCI in Orange all day tomorrow.”
    “That’s what I thought. You’re going to miss our ice-cream social! Well, I’ll see you Thursday