June 5th
Greg sits with his back pressed into the corner. His arms rest on his knees, his head rests on his arms. The observation room is stark and spare, with bland gray walls. He digs his toes into the navy blue carpet and feels the resultant sharp uptick of pain in his thigh. He has been here for two days now since his recovery from his overdose. Contrary to popular opinion among staff and patients, it was not an attempt at suicide. He hasn't come here just to wipe himself out of existence. Not yet, anyway. It's a last resort, and he's not quite there, not today.
"Sure about that?" Amber says. She sits opposite him. "Saving up Lortabs without hiding a slice of bread to take with them, pretty stupid."
Greg ignores her and remembers the first wave of relief, the familiar release of clenched muscles, his loosened breath. The meds hadn't really done anything to dull the pain, but they'd made it so he didn't care. He'll take that, it's better than nothing.
"Yeah, and then they pumped your stomach." Amber rolls her eyes. "Drama queen."
He looks around the room. Am I reduced to this? To nothing but blank walls and empty space? Will I be here for good? The thought is not new, but it holds the same terror as it did when he first had it. He pushes the knowledge away and wonders what his team is doing right now. On the return from lunch, most likely; ready to order tests, schedule appointments with specialists-everything he had once found irksome and clumsy, a hindrance to his process. Now he would give anything to have it all back, or so he likes to tell himself.
But he won't have it back, not anytime soon. Everything he was, everything he had, it's all sunk in quicksand. The only firm ground left is this place, a chop shop where people are taken apart to be put back together again in ways that made them more acceptable to society. Here he is stripped to essentials-he is only Greg, a man with a broken mind and nothing more.
"How the mighty have fallen!" Amber laughs. "The medical world's greatest diagnostician, wallowing in self-pity and longing to return to minutiae." She savors the word, draws it out. "You and I know what you would sell your soul for." She holds up a small white caplet. He sees it, can't help but see it. He tightens his fingers to keep from reaching out. Amber laughs again.
"It's amazing, the power a chemical can wield over a human being," she says softly. "People are nothing but skins of filthy seawater with sticks poked inside to keep them upright, make them mobile, and yet they all think they're simply glorious creatures. But put one of these in them . . . " She wiggles the caplet. "A single drop of poison makes you feel sooooo good. You're nothing but a joke."
"Go away," he says out loud, and closes his eyes. Amber's soft, malicious amusement fills the room that is now his kingdom, his exile, his prison, his crooked sanctuary. He loathes it and at the same time he wishes he could draw it close around him, a shell for a puddle of seawater in need of protection.
June 20th
"Your talk-therapy hours have been assigned to another colleague," Nolan says. He sits back in his chair, regards Greg with that calm, dispassionate gaze, shrewd, assessing. "You're ready, I think."
How his shrink arrived at that conclusion is a complete fucking mystery. Greg has said maybe five words in both private and group sessions since he got here. Nolan enlightens him. "You've taken your meds in the correct order with no cheeking for ten days under general supervision, and you've made it through five hours of group therapy without deliberately disrupting proceedings. In your case, that tells me you decided to try other means to get out of here sooner than would be . . . advisable."
"So you're dumping me on someone else." Greg finds his voice is barely more than a croak; he hasn't spoken aloud in days.
"I'm offering you the opportunity to work with a psychologist who's able to keep up with your advanced mental gymnastics," Nolan says. "I'd welcome the chance to do so myself, but my other patients need help too."
The implied criticism is both annoying as hell, and funny. "Lazy."
"I can be, yeah," Nolan says with a brief smile. "But not in this case. This is doing what's best for you and me too, in the long run."
'Best for you'. Those words burn him like fire. How many times had his parents seared him with best intentions?
"He's dumping you on someone else because he can," Amber whispers. She sits next to him, close enough for him to feel her hair tickle his skin. "Sign yourself out of here now. There's a bottle of bourbon and your stash waiting at home. You'll feel better in no time."
"—name is Doctor Sarah Goldman," Nolan is saying. "She's been with us for a number of years. I think you'll find her enough of a challenge to keep you entertained. You might even find some healing, though I know that disturbs you."
Greg doesn't bother to answer this piece of impertinence; he'll go to a new doctor because at this point he has no choice, but he'll decide for himself if she's worth his attention.
June 27th
Doctor Goldman sits at her desk and pages through a case file. It could be his, or some other idiotic, benighted soul stuck in the belly of the beast; he hasn't had a chance to spy out the name on the folder, not yet anyway. Instead Greg looks at the prints hung in a neat row on the wall behind the desk, then at the doctor herself. She's on the short side, slender, sports a thick crop of bright auburn curls held back from complete riot with a simple black elastic holder. The hair's the real thing, anyway; she has the pale, creamy skin of the natural redhead, with a faint sprinkle of freckles across her nose and cheeks. Her suit is a simple gray two-piece with a white blouse-office camouflage, and yet somehow she doesn't seem the type to hide behind bland colors and conventional fashions. In fact it reeks of what's expected of her, rather than her true personality. He is reminded strongly of Wilson's office, with its solid-wood knee-hole desk and dark walnut bookshelves loaded with all the tomes a physician of note should own, as well as knick-knacks and mementos from various patients. Goldman's space isn't full of dust-catchers in that way, but it's just as inauthentic.
He has maintained complete silence for the last five sessions. Much to his chagrin and interest, so has she. She hasn't tried to talk to him, at him, with him; no questions, lectures, pleas, rants. In their first session she said quietly "How are you this morning, Doctor House?" and waited for him to speak. When nothing happened after half an hour, she took a file from the stack on her desk and read it.
She's playing me, he thinks. Just like I knew she would. And that is the biggest problem he has encountered during his stay: he can run rings around any doctor in the place. He's smarter than all of them, knows the literature, the language, the processes. It makes it impossible for anyone to help him, because he can't turn off his mind. And yet even if he could, it would utterly defeat the entire purpose of his being here.
"You don't need this," Amber says. She sits on the doctor's desk, one shapely leg crossed over the other so her skirt rides up on her thighs. She looks bored and resentful. "You're wasting your time here, and you know it. So does she." She leans over to glance at the case file. "She's using your sessions to catch up on her paperwork. Are you gonna put up with that? Call Wilson. Tell him you're ready to leave."
Greg stares at his feet. His gaze follows the stitched pattern on his left sneaker. This is a favorite old pair, broken in and comfortable despite the lack of laces. Wilson suggested he bring them, had said "You might need a little comfort now and then." His tone had been carefully neutral, but the worry was there all the same. It induces guilt, just as Wilson had probably intended, but also offers a different perspective. No one forced him into rehab, it was his decision. His best friend brought him here to help him get better because it was the only course left, aside from suicide; silence is a form of self-defeat.
So Greg draws in a deep breath, lets it out, gathers together the rags of his courage. He's not sure what will come out of his mouth, but he has to try to make sense, to do something before he goes . . . well, insaner. If that's even a word.
"I had a dream last night." He hears himself speak aloud; he wishes he could take the words back, they sound stupid. Doctor Goldman looks up from her file with an expression of mild interest. He waits for her to say something but she just watches him, her brows raised a little now. Her eyes are a clear, changeable green-grey, the color of a sea-wave, bright with intelligence and a hint of curiosity. Somehow he finds that encouraging, though he suspects it's just desperation's influence on his judgment. Despite that knowledge, to his horror more words tumble out. "We were moving furniture. Hot day, big heavy pieces."
She stays silent for a few moments. "'We'?"
"I'm just telling you in case you need something to put in the session notes. You know, significant symbolism and all that," he says, and winces inside because now he is babbling and can't seem to stop. His voice is hoarse, with an edge of urgency he never intended. "I'm sure you'll find all kinds of repressed sexual urges, which is weird because I don't really repress anything, especially if it involves sex."
She still looks at him, her expression wry. But it's humor Greg sees in her sea-green eyes, not amusement. Apparently she's doesn't yet know him for the pathetic joke he is. He drops his gaze to his hands. "There was an old black woman," he says with reluctance. "She was small, tiny actually, but she lifted a sofa as if it was weightless." He walks through the sequence of images, pulls out details. "We took a chair down to the basement. It was dark. There was a coal chute-haven't seen one of those since I was a kid. She showed me something, a loose board. She moved it with her hand. There were broken braces under the floor." He stops, now run out of dream. "Then I woke up."
Goldman sits back, file in hand. For a long moment she is still; her gaze rests on him, steady, measured. Then she stands and goes to the door, calls an orderly. He curses himself for this inadvertent gift of a chance to break him when she says "Go sit outside for the rest of the session, Greg. It's a nice day. We can talk about this tomorrow." Her words hold a faint accent, a soft twang he is fairly sure indicates she's from the Plains-somewhere south of Nebraska but not Texas. Kansas, or more likely Oklahoma. He gets to his feet.
"A treat for the performing poodle," he says. Humiliation rises in his throat like bile. "Wow, I'm impressed. Truly innovative technique. Bet I know what happens if I pee on your rug."
"Enjoy the sunshine," is all she says in reply, and offers a smile. To his surprise it is genuine. "Wish I could join you."
As the orderly escorts him out of the office and to the yard, he ponders her responses. He knows everything he says and does is recorded, word for word, in her case notes. But he can't be sure of her intentions because he can't read her well, at least not yet, and that is worrisome.
She's right though, it is a beautiful summer day, hot and sunny with a cool breeze in the shade, and lower humidity too. The air is laden with the scent of green growing things and a faded reek of cigarettes from the staff's illicit smoke breaks. He feels the earth beneath his feet and wonders why it doesn't shift and ripple, full of fissures and fire. With a sigh he sits on a picnic table and watches the trees toss their restless shadows over the grassy lawn. Occasionally he's seen some of the patients and staff play games of catch out here. No bat of course, but a softball and two mitts, and plenty of jokes and silliness, though the paranoids take it pretty seriously. They probably think someone watches, keeps score . . . and in this case at least, they'd be partially right.
Greg thinks of the feel of a leather mitt, the cold, stiff leather as it turns supple when body heat softens it; the sweet shock of the ball as it hits, the bunch and release of muscles and the snap as it leaves his hand . . . Some part of him wants that familiar exercise, to stop his thoughts as they bang around inside his head, and allow him to move awareness down into his body. But the pain stops him, the pain that never goes away. If he crawls out of his mind he has to deal with the endless shrill alarm in his thigh, and the very idea of it makes him cringe in fear. He hates that damn alarm with everything in him, but he hates himself even more for his inability to deal with it.
"You've let the cat out of the bag now, telling that quack about your dream," Amber whispers. "She's going to expect you to talk at every session. We can't have that now, can we?"
Hot, relentless sunlight flickers through the leaves as he tries hard to think of nothing at all.
