The Girl Without a Name Read Free

then, leaning one hand against the frame. His gold wedding ring glints in the sun. “Zoe, you look beat. Rough night, champ?”
    This makes me think of a boxer dog we had when I was six years old, named Champ. My mom named him after some tearjerker boxing movie. Champ was forever sneaking into the laundry room and eating underwear, which is really all I remember about him. Until he was hit by a car a year later. So he’s probably up in doggy heaven snacking on a roomful of undergarments.
    “Zoe?”
    We are halfway down the hallway, though I don’t remember walking there. Night call and ADHD have never been a winning combination. “Sorry, I was just thinking.”
    He smiles. “Anything interesting?”
    “Not really. I once had a dog named Champ.”
    He stares at me, bemused. “Congratulations. I once had a dog named Lacy.” He pauses. “She was an Alsatian. Lacy the Alsatian.” An orderly walks by us, whistling. (I swear it’s “Jessie’s Girl” but I’m probably having auditory hallucinations by now.) “All right, Jason, who do we got?”
    “Let’s start with Mr. Gonzalez.”
    “Okay, what’s the bullet on that one?”
    “A nineteen-year-old Hispanic male with the known diagnosis of schizophrenia, brought in by his wife with an acute exacerbation.”
    “Okeydokey. Let’s go.”
    As we enter the patient’s room, the body odor is so overpowering that I have to breathe out of my mouth. He weighs in at 403 pounds, his blanket a mountain around him. The lines on his neck are caked with dirt, and his fingernails are tan with nicotine. “Daisy deals with daily deals, dozens of daily deals.” He pauses then, smiling, his eyes glittering with joy. “Don’t dally. Don’t dally. Daisy doesn’t dawdle, does she?”
    I have no answer to this. I don’t know any Daisy or if she tends to dawdle.
    “Mr. Gonzalez,” Dr. Berringer says, standing next to the bed.
    The patient looks up like the doctor is in on the joke. “Name, game, same, game, shame. No shame in a name game. Can’t tame the name game, said the same dame.”
    Dr. Berringer looks delighted. “Okay, what type of speech is this?” he asks, turning to Jason.
    “This would be clanging speech,” Jason answers.
    “Clang-a-lang-a-ding-a-dang,” the patient answers.
    “Mr. Gonzalez, have you been taking your medications?” Dr. Berringer asks.
    “Dead meds, Fred said, no meds to the dead dread head.”
    “Jason, get ahold of the wife. See what the pill bottles look like. I suspect our dear Fred hasn’t been taking his meds.”
    “Will do,” he says.
    Dr. Berringer pats the patient’s shoulder, and Mr. Gonzalez looks up at him with a convivial nod.
    “See you tomorrow, Mr. Gonzalez.”
    “The day has a way of making me say,” he answers as if this is his usual good-bye. We exit to the hall, able to breathe freely again.
    “Wow, that was a good one,” Dr. Berringer says, clearly a man who loves his job. “What are his meds again?”
    As Jason reels them off, my eyes wander to the window. The sun glimmers off the cars in the parking lot, tiny boxes in rows. Dew outlines a rectangle on the window.
    “Earth to Zoe,” Dr. Berringer bellows with a good-natured grin.
    “I’m sorry. What?”
    “Top three in the differential diagnosis of mania, I was asking you.”
    “Mania. Right, yes.” I swallow, pause, waiting for a list to lumber into my brain. “Hyperthyroidism.”
    “Good, that’s one.”
    I wait. “Steroid usage?”
    “Excellent. Another one?”
    I try to think. The harder I think, the blanker my brain.
    “Jason? Want to help her out here?”
    Jason takes a sip of coffee that I actually want to steal from him. “ADHD,” he says.
    “That’s right, Jason. ADHD. Can be a tricky one.”
    Alas, the bitter, bitter irony.
    “All right,” Dr. Berringer says. “Let’s see what our Jane is up to.”
    Jane is unchanged, like she’s stuck in a freeze frame. She sits staring on her throne, her toes sticking out of the blue