Running the House at night: head-counts, the Log, the meds locker, and the Suicide Contracts

texture · Wed 11 Nov YDAU (2009), ~2300h

• When: Wednesday 11 Nov YDAU (2009), ~2300h — the fracas night, before midnight
• What: The institution as a managed system, cataloged on the night it will be overwhelmed (imported from the blind re-derivation; A had used the scene only in passing). The night-Staffer's apparatus: hourly head-counts and Log-entries on who's in and what's going on, Chore-patrol off the weekly sheet (non-performers told they're on a week's Restriction), unlocking Pat's cabinets for the key to the meds locker — "Residents on meds respond to the sound of the meds locker the way a cat will respond to the sound of a can-opener." — dispensing insulin, Virus-meds, antidepressants, lithium; the buzzer-and-shout "Male on the floor" protocol before a male Staffer may climb to the women's floor; and the ideation-monitoring machinery — Kate Gompert's comments parsed against her Suicide Contract, because "A resident at Ennet had hung herself from a heating pipe in the basement a couple years before Gately arrived" (the narrator's later verdict on such contracts: event 16). The night's small domestic omen: the fridge shows another rectangle cut from Gately's carefully wrapped meatloaf — the "secret admirer" who is Lenz baiting dogs (ev12). See the Gately timeline for the Staffer's-eye texture; here it is the House's operating layer on record.