Walk on the Wild Side - By Karl Edward Wagner Page 0,13

the walls, stained asbestos tiles for the floor. Marlowe wondered how such a manufactured environment could still stink of human filth and hopelessness.

Marlowe paused, not breathing. It was 4 in the morning, the hour of the cockroach, an hour before the keepers of the graveyard shift began to prompt their cares into a semblance of reality to greet their breakfast and the day shift at 7. He listened.

The roaches here were larger than any Marlowe had seen since an age when dinosaurs were but a fanciful gleam in a tree fern’s eye. He could hear them as they scuttled along the worn tiles of the long long corridor. Some, intent upon a smear of feces lodged within a missing bit of broken floor tile, were reluctant to flee his approach.

Marlowe stomped at them, withheld his foot at the last instant. The roaches scattered halfheartedly. It was, perhaps, an old game. Marlowe heard the silky rustle of their reconvergence as he silently passed by.

As he passed a snack vending machine, he could hear a mouse feasting within.

“Dr Marlowe never sleeps.”

“Can’t spare the time, Mr Habberly. Surely you’ve heard that there’s no rest for the wicked.”

Habberly chuckled. “Never going to sleep long’s you keep drinking my coffee.” He handed Marlowe his cup—a gift from the Sandoz rep, featuring a smiling yellow Happyface and the wish to “Have a Happy Day” from “Mellaril.” Pudgy and greying, Habberly was nearing state retirement age; he had been an orderly and later ward supervisor at Graceland since it opened. He and an aging male nurse, occasionally joined by a ward attendant on break, were the only inhabitants of North Unit’s administrative section during the graveyard shift.

“Careful, Doctor—that’s fresh poured!”

Marlowe ignored his warning and swallowed without looking up from his admissions notes. “Thank you, Mr Habberly.”

“Never could understand how some folks can drink coffee when it’s hot enough to scald your hand carrying it.”

“Practice deadens all feeling, Mr Habberly, and because there’s too little time to wait for it to cool. But I can still taste: you brew the best cup of coffee in Graceland.”

“Thank you, sir. Well, now, that’s practice again. I don’t fool with that big urn the day shifts use. Got me a three-four cup percolator just right for night shift. Been using it for years. And I don’t fool with state-purchase coffee.”

Marlowe finished his coffee and handed Habberly a sheaf of triplicate forms. “Here’s the commitment papers for tonight’s involuntaries. With luck you won’t have any more admissions until day shift comes on in an hour.”

Habberly thumbed through the forms, making certain that all had been signed and notarized as the law required. A patient could only be committed involuntarily if he constituted an immediate threat to others or to himself in the opinion of local magistrates and the admitting physician. Marlowe had had three involuntaries on North Unit tonight.

Habberly paused over the commitment papers for Frank Carnell. “Is this the patient who was causing the fuss about someone stealing his suitcase?”

Marlowe craned his neck to see which patient Habberly meant. “Yes. Which reminds me that I told Macafee I’d look in on him. By the way, you didn’t happen to notice whether Carnell had any sort of bag or anything with him when he was admitted, did you?”

“Why, no sir. He didn’t have any personal belongings with him at all. The deputies carried him up here straight from the emergency room at Franklin Memorial. I let them into the ward when they brought him here ’long about midnight.”

The admitting ward for each unit was a locked ward, and it was hospital policy that every patient admitted after hours or on weekends must be kept on the admissions ward until such time as the psychiatrist to whose service he was assigned had had an opportunity to interview him. The rule applied to voluntary and involuntary patients alike. Patient advocates complained that this rule was only intended to discourage voluntary admissions after office hours, but hospital administration pointed out that the rule had come into being after a Korean resident blithely admitted a seemingly depressed voluntary patient to an open ward one night, who quietly strangled and raped the retarded teenage boy who shared his room and passed it off the next morning as the work of Mafia hitmen.

Marlowe let himself into North Unit Admission Ward. It was, he reflected, a bit of a misuse of terms in that patients judged not suitable for the open wards might linger in a unit’s admission ward