They cooked it up between them. The Jersey customers, Fede, and Linda. I should
have known better.
When I landed at Logan, I was full of beans, ready to design and implement my
war-driving scheme for the Jersey customers and advance the glorious cause of
the Eastern Standard Tribe. I gleefully hopped up and down the coast, chilling
in Manhattan for a day or two, hanging out with Gran in Toronto.
That Linda followed me out made it all even better. We rented cars and drove
them from city to city, dropping them off at the city limits and switching to
top-grade EST public transit, eating top-grade EST pizza, heads turning to
follow the impeccably dressed, buff couples that strolled the
pedestrian-friendly streets arm in arm. We sat on stoops in Brooklyn with old
ladies who talked softly in the gloaming of the pollution-tinged sunsets while
their grandchildren chased each other down the street. We joined a pickup game
of street-hockey in Boston, yelling "Car!" and clearing the net every time a
fartmobile turned into the cul-de-sac.
We played like kids. I got commed during working hours and my evenings were
blissfully devoid of buzzes, beeps and alerts. It surprised the hell out of me
when I discovered Fede's treachery and Linda's complicity and found myself
flying cattle class to London to kick Fede's ass. What an idiot I am.
I have never won an argument with Fede. I thought I had that time, of course,
but I should have known better. I was hardly back in Boston for a day before the
men with the white coats came to take me away.
They showed up at the Novotel, soothing and grim, and opened my room's keycard
reader with a mental-hygiene override. There were four of them, wiry and fast
with the no-nonsense manner of men who have been unexpectedly hammered by
outwardly calm psychopaths. That I was harmlessly having a rare cigarette on the
balcony, dripping from the shower, made no impression on them. They dropped
their faceplates, moved quickly to the balcony and boxed me in.
One of them recited a Miranda-esque litany that ended with "Do you understand."
It wasn't really a question, but I answered anyway. "No! No I don't! Who the
hell are you, and what are you doing in my fucking hotel room?"
In my heart, though, I knew. I'd lived enough of my life on the hallucinatory
edge of sleepdep to have anticipated this moment during a thousand freakouts. I
was being led away to the sanatorium, because someone, somewhere, had figured
out about the scurrying hamsters in my brain. About time.
As soon as I said the f-word, the guns came out. I tried to relax. I knew
intuitively that this could either be a routine and impersonal affair, or a
screaming, kicking, biting nightmare. I knew that arriving at the intake in a
calm frame of mind would make the difference between a chemical straightjacket
and a sleeping pill.
The guns were nonlethals, and varied: two kinds of nasty aerosol, a dart-gun,
and a tazer. The tazer captured my attention, whipping horizontal lightning in
the spring breeze. The Tesla enema, they called it in London. Supposedly
club-kids used them recreationally, but everyone I knew who'd been hit with one
described the experience as fundamentally and uniquely horrible.
I slowly raised my hands. "I would like to pack a bag, and I would like to see
documentary evidence of your authority. May I?" I kept my voice as calm as I
could, but it cracked on "May I?"
The reader of the litany nodded slowly. "You tell us what you want packed and
we'll pack it. Once that's done, I'll show you the committal document, all
right?"
"Thank you," I said.
They drove me through the Route 128 traffic in the sealed and padded compartment
in the back of their van. I was strapped in at the waist, and strapped over my
shoulders with a padded harness that reminded me of a rollercoaster restraint.
We made slow progress, jerking and changing lanes at regular intervals. The
traffic signature of 128 was unmistakable.
The intake doctor wanded me for contraband, drew fluids from my various parts,
and made light chitchat with me along the way. It was the last time I saw him.
Before I knew it, a beefy orderly had me by the arm and was leading me to my
room. He had a thick Eastern European accent, and he ran down the house rules
for me in battered English. I tried to devote my attention to it, to forget the
slack-eyed ward denizens I'd passed on my way in. I succeeded enough to
understand the relationship of my legcuff, the door frame and the elevators. The
orderly fished in his smock and produced a hypo.
"For sleepink," he said.
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: *I* don't think I
have a problem here. I think that my way of conducting my life is perfectly
harmless. Like a speedfreak who thinks that she's just having a great time,
being ultraproductive and coming out ahead of the game. But her friends, they're
convinced she's destroying herself -- they see the danger she's putting herself
in, they see her health deteriorating. So they put her into rehab, kicking and
screaming, where she stays until she figures it out.
"So, it's like I'm addicted to being nuts. I have a nonrational view of the
world around me. An *inaccurate* view. You are meant to be the objective
observer, to make such notes as are necessary to determine if I'm seeing things
properly, or through a haze of nutziness. For as long as I go on taking my drug
-- shooting up my craziness -- you keep me here. Once I stop, once I accept the
objective truth of reality, you let me go. What then? Do I become a recovering
nutcase? Do I have to stand ever-vigilant against the siren song of craziness?"
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 *were* seeking to harm you -- this is not without historical
precedent, right? They're seeking to sabotage you because you've discovered some
terrible treachery on their part, and they want to hush you up. So they provoke
a reaction from you and use it as the basis for an involuntary committal. How
would you, as a medical professional, distinguish that scenario from one in
which the patient is genuinely paranoid and delusional?"