The next day started well. Don slept better than he'd thought he would. People with better jobs than his decided to take a long weekend, so his commute was reasonable for once. It was Friday and he had no major cases eating up his weekend. He even got a cup of coffee before the office machine turned it to sludge. A good day, until he noticed that the big white board had been hauled from the conference room into the hallway and covered with names. His name was listed under "Group Five; Second Floor Conference Room." More enrichment stuff, this time in small groups. Don had tried to get out of today's program—not because he didn't think Terry would do a great job, but because he was absolutely swamped with reports. He hated being behind at work, hated having to sit in seminars and "empathize" while papers cluttered his desk, hated how that kind of disorder slowed him down, made him less efficient. He didn't understand how Charlie could work in the chaos of the garage.
He took his coffee and went to the second floor, figuring how long he'd have to work on Saturday to be caught up. David was already in the conference room, along with a few other field agents and a woman Don recognized from one of the labs. Group Five, in all its glory.
Ten minutes later, Terry arrived with a big cardboard box. "Morning, gang. Everyone got coffee? I've cut down the actual seminar time," she announced, "because I know we all have work to do. Our distinguished presenter yesterday was pretty thorough, so I'll be focusing exclusively on a schizophrenia symptom that might interfere with making an arrest." She didn't look at Don when she said this, but he knew she disliked the inefficiency of these seminars as much as he did. She characterized them as 'a little information and a lot of schmoozing'; much to David's delight, she'd called the distinguished presenter from DC a pompous windbag.
Terry reached into the box and started handing things out, tossing them to Don and David, who had been standing in the back doing some schmoozing of their own over the Lakers' scores.
"A CD-player?" Don untangled the headphones from the portable player and slipped them on. "Do the taxpayers of our great nation know this is how we're spending our education budget?" he teased.
Shut up, shut up! You don't know what you're saying. Don't tell them! They can't find out! It's a secret. Don't you know about secrets, idiot! NO, no, don't let them touch you…
The sheer panic in the voice, which was barely more than a whisper, made Don feel like something was crawling along his shoulder blades. He pulled the ear buds out and suddenly realized that the rest of Group 5, including Terry, was staring at him.
"Ready to get on with the seminar?" Terry asked
"Uhm, yeah," Don swallowed, "sorry—go on."
Terry did go on, explaining that auditory hallucinations were a characteristic of some full-blown schizoid episodes. Commands, instructions, random voices. A psychiatrist at UCLA had been asking patients who behaved violently to repeat what they heard the voices say, and Terry had burned some of his files onto the CDs in the portable players she'd just handed out.
"I can tell you about these hallucinations 'til I turn blue, but that won't really help you to deal with someone who suffers from them. Instead, I want you to wear these for a day—taking them off when you drive, of course—so you all will get some sense of what it's like to try to live normally when you have symptoms like these patients'. The standard procedure for a take-down involves lots of noise, lots of yelling, because you're trying to confuse the suspect and catch him or her unaware. However, if that suspect is in the middle of a schizo-psychotic attack, the extra noise might push him or her over the edge. The suspect might not mean to disregard your instructions or act irrationally, but they literally cannot hear you. In a case like that, the agent would be competing with other voices and those voices will win out."
Don listened with half an ear to Terry's question and answer session. Trust Terry to come up with something hands-on to help you really understand what was going through someone's head. The pompous windbag could take a few lessons in empathy from her, any day. He wondered what she'd say about his problems with Charlie; he wondered if he'd ever get up the nerve to ask her opinion.
"What do we do for the rest of the day?" asked one of the other field agents "I mean, while we're wearing these?"
This time, Terry did look at Don. "Oh, just go about your normal work." She smiled. "I'm sure we all have reports to catch up on.
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