Ch 15: The Scientist

Tell me your secrets
And ask me your questions
Oh let's go back to the start ...

Nobody said it was easy
It's such a shame for us to part
Nobody said it was easy
No one ever said it would be this hard

Oh take me back to the start

I was just guessing
At numbers and figures
Pulling your puzzles apart

Questions of science
Science and progress
Do not speak as loud as my heart

"The Scientist," Coldplay

I regretted changing rooms. If I hadn't changed rooms, I wouldn't have humiliated myself with Bobby last night. I wouldn't be lying with my head tucked under my pillow dreading the moment he returned from the shower and wanted to talk to me. I'd have given my right arm for a bottle of vicodin at that moment, not because my leg hurt, which it did, but for the more general drugged feeling it could induce. The world had too many sharp edges at that moment and I couldn't avoid getting cut with every move I made. I groaned at the thought of getting up, facing Bobby and knowing that he would never see me as anything but pathetic.

I sighed when the bathroom door opened. He crept quietly through the room to avoid disturbing me as he prepared for the day. Someone knocked lightly on the door. I turned my head to get a look at the clock; it was still a half hour before we were supposed to be awake.

He was whispering. "Would you give him this?" Another voice responded unintelligibly. "Thanks. I wasn't expecting anything." The unintelligible voice came again. "Great. Tell him I can walk next week."

The door closed. He sat down on the edge of his bed. Paper rustled. Silence followed. He sighed and began mumbling to himself. "A few more weeks. Maybe two. That's not as bad as it seems." Paper rustled again; he was pushing a note back into an envelope. He crossed the room and nudged me a couple of times. "I'm done with the shower if you're ready," he said.

I pretended I was still half-asleep and waved him away. I might spend the day in bed. There was no real reason to get up anyway. No patients to save or cases to solve. In fact, that part of my life was probably over permanently. Which left no life at all. "Go away," I muttered before pulling the pillow more firmly over my head.

He nudged me again. "I can't go away. I'm supposed to stay in here for another half hour. Besides, if you don't get ready, you aren't going to be able to swipe all of the candy from the pharmacists' counter before he opens up."

"Don't care," I answered from under the pillow. I felt shitty. I wished I could smoke another joint -- this time alone.

There was a pause of significant length. "I want to hypnotize you."

Not what I'd expected.

I considered the iimplications of his statement, wondering what Goren hoped to achieve with hypnosis. My curiosity got the better of me. I pulled the pillow off my head and turned onto my side to look at him. "Why?" I asked, trying to assess whether pity or disgust predominated after my whining about my childhood the night before.

"Honestly?" he asked rhetorically. "I have a theory, I'm crazy enough to test it and I think you're crazy enough to let me. So why not?"

I sat up. "Do I get to hear the theory?" I had no new ideas about what might be wrong with me. My shrink wasn't offering anything, at least to me. Bobby was smart. Whatever he had in mind would be worth hearing at least.

"I wonder...maybe if you can get back to the place...with your father? With a solid memory of what happened and the palming of your anti-psychotic, your brain might conjure a hallucination of him." He frowned and raised his eyebrows. "If you can talk to him...maybe you can deal with it. Maybe we can fix you."

"You want to create a hallucination of my father?" I was stuck at step number one.

He shrugged. "I have a hypothesis. If we can conjure a hallucination - which I don't know that we can...." He sighed. "Yes. Yeah, I want to create a hallucination of your father."

"I used to say that the only good thing about this psychotic break was that at least I wasn't seeing my dead father. And now you want to ruin even that?" I started to laugh and the more I thought about Bobby's idea, the harder I laughed.

Bobby was unamused. "I can't...force you. I don't want to ruin anything. You're...he's the root of all of this. I just want to help."

"I never wanted to see or talk to the bastard while he was alive. What if he won't go away once you've 'conjured' him up?" I was horrified at the thought of my father haunting me til my dying day -- and certain that day would come fairly soon if there were no other way to get rid of him.

He shrugged. "I don't know." We sat in silence for a moment. "It's up to you. There's no guarantee that you're going to have the hallucination. This is guesswork." More silence. "Here's what I know: I'm responding to the anti-psychotics. My ghosts are gone. My time is finite. You're caught in your brain's own vortex and I'm not sure they make pills for that. If you never come out of this...you lose control. If you hallucinate him and he never goes away, you lose control. In either scenario, you've still lost what's most important to you. Six of one, half a dozen of the other."

"And what's supposed to happen if you're successful with this little magic trick? How does this help me exactly?" I was still hazy on the details of how seeing and talking to my dead father was supposed to cure me -- as opposed to sending me around the bend once and for all.

"You can take him to the mat. Have it out with him finally."

"If only it were true." He was dead. I could duke it out with myself, not with him. If it were him, he'd beat the snot out of me before he'd consider allowing himself to lose an argument.

He sighed and nodded, lowered his head and put his hand to his temple. After a second, he lowered his hand and stood. "That's O.K.," he said as sat on the edge of his bed and picked up the book on the table beside it.

"What's OK?" I asked in irritation, not sure what to think of Bobby, his plan, what happened the night before or anything else.

He shook his head again. "I'm reminding myself that it's O.K. that you said no. I'm reminding myself I'm probably better. That I don't actually need this to get out of here." He paused, staring at the wall across from him. He went back to his book.

"I didn't say no!" I yelled in frustration. "I just asked you to explain what you have in mind before I let you mess with my brain."

He threw the book to the end of the bed and stood up. "And I explained it!" he boomed. "You say it isn't true! You can't fight him. What the hell do you have to lose? You think he's never going away? So what? You're not getting better. You're thinking...what? That you're going to leave here with your hallucinations and lead a normal life?" He turned around and picked his book back up. After a few seconds of pacing, he laid down on the bed. "Good luck with that." He opened the book and started to read.

I decided to ignore his negative predictions for my recovery and focus on his proposal. "Do they teach hypnosis in detective school these days?" I asked, substituting ironic detachment for the anger I'd vented a moment before.

He sighed and tossed the book down beside him. He looked up at me. "A girlfriend taught me."

"And who taught her? A magician who used hypnosis to liven up his act?"

He was annoyed. "A professor in college."

"Ah. That's a little more promising than The Amazing Dave." I bit my lip and considered my next move. His attitude was really pissing me off. "If I let you practice medicine on me without a license, will you let me solve your next murder case when they take you back at the NYPD? Which I gather is going to happen any minute now...."

"Two weeks," he said, cutting me off. "They're letting me off the leash next week. If I'm not...." He paused and took a breath. "The depression is waning. The shrink told me I should be getting out of here in two weeks." He stood up and put his book down on the nightstand. He chuckled. "Suddenly hypnosis and psychiatry are 'medicine'," he said as he rubbed his temple. He went to the door and turned to take his parting shot. "You can think your way out of anything. Why don't you try to think your way into something for once?" We stared at each other for a second. With another sigh and a shake of his head, he turned and left the room.

He'd be leaving the room permanently in two weeks. It was all I could think about. I pulled the pillow back over my head and tried not to think at all.