Post-Trauma 8.5
The Mental Health Center’s small parking lot is reserved for patients, who often have to get in and out and back to their jobs in the space of an hour. Staff have to park in the garage around the corner. One night, Temas is the last to leave-he had a group session at six, and stayed another hour or so to finish up some paperwork before heading home. It’s already dark, and, though the Center is in a nice enough neighborhood, the deep shadows give the familiar sights a faint aura of menace. Temas stands in the doorway for slightly longer than is really necessary before setting off toward the parking garage.
He’s only gone a few steps before someone falls into step behind him. He quickens his pace, feeling slightly like the heroine in a horror movie. That impression is reinforced when the footsteps behind him quicken too.
Feeling faintly ridiculous, he stops and turns. He ought to feel reassured when he sees the man behind him-about his age or a little older, dressed in a business suit and greatcoat. Clearly not a mugger or a carjacker; just another professional man on his way home late. The streetlight glints off the wire frame of his glasses.
Except that the man grins ferally and says, “Doctor Temas, I presume.”
The animal part of his brain-oblivious to the class markers of his coat and tie-sends one message: run. Temas ignores it-Lee always says he’s oversocialized. “Yes. Can I help you?”
“Help me? I doubt it.”
Temas takes a step backwards. The other man counters with another step forward. “If you want an appointment, you’ll have to come back during business hours.”
“An appointment. What would we do? Play with dolls? Talk about my feelings?”
He takes another step back, and another, until he’s standing practically on the curb. If he keeps backing up, he’ll end up in the street, but the other man keeps advancing on him. “What do you want, then?”
“I want my life back,” he says, or rather, snarls.
Temas’s first thought is that he’s somebody’s father. Sarah’s, maybe, or another abused kid’s. He’s heard of colleagues being attacked in such circumstances; it’s one of the risks of the profession. The worst he’s ever had to deal with is one coming into his consulting room and throwing things around while yelling obscenities. That ought to have been scarier than this-this man hasn’t done anything but talk, so far, perfectly reasonably. But that had happened during the day, with other people around.
Other people. He looks across the street, where the diner is an oasis of light and normality. “Okay,” he says, gesturing toward it. “Let’s sit down, have a cup of coffee, talk about it.”
“Don’t be disingenuous.”
Some part of Temas thinks he ought to just walk away; go to his car. But another part of him doesn’t want to turn his back on this man. “Who are you?”
“Erich Luerssen,” he answers.
House is sitting at the piano, playing along to a record, while Wilson does the dishes. It’s cozy, domestic. Wilson feels as close to content as he has lately.
Suddenly, the House stops playing and slams the cover shut over the keys. Seconds later, the stereo shuts off too.
House stumps into the kitchen. He stands in the archway glowering at Wilson for a long moment. “I hate this,” he says quietly.
“What?” Wilson asks. There are plenty of things he could be referring to.
“I hate,” he amplifies, “that everything about my life is shit. There used to be things about my life that worked. My job. Music. You. Now it doesn’t matter what I’m doing, this shit can swim up out of my head and ruin everything. What’s inside of my head always belonged to me. And now it doesn’t.”
“It sucks,” Wilson agrees.
“Yeah. It sucks.” House laughs hollowly. “I got used to my fucking leg being my enemy. I don’t know if I can stand it if my mind is too.”
“I don’t think it’ll always be this bad,” Wilson says.
“Yeah. But you don’t know. I don’t know. Fucking Temas doesn’t know. This could be my life now.”
Wilson knows what this is. House reached the same point with his leg once-several times, actually. The point where he’s had enough of the pain and just wants it to be over. Wilson’s been there too, to a lesser degree. The difference is that all of his problems-his work, his divorces-were things outside himself. If he really tried, he could take his mind off of them for a couple of hours. Even with House’s leg, he could take a couple of extra pills and get something like relief if he really needed it. From this, there’s no escape.
No temporary escape, anyway.
House sees the thought on his face. “I’m not going to off myself,” he says. “I’m just…sick of it.” He straightens up. “Leave those and come sit with me.”
Wilson abandons the dishes. House gets their coats, and they go outside and sit on the stoop. House lights a cigarette and inhales deeply. “You know what I want to do?” he says, sounding much less intense, less weary, than he had a few minutes ago.
“What?” Wilson says, knowing it’s going to be something ridiculous and impossible, like build a time machine or go buy an elephant.
“I want to be able to call ‘times.’”
“Like time-out, you mean?”
“Times is different from time out,” House argues. “You do time-out when you’re playing kickball or one-on-one or something. A proper game with rules and keeping score. ‘Times’ is for when you’re doing let’s-pretend or one of those games that are just a lot of running around with no particular point. You could get really wrapped up in whatever you were playing. If you’re doing GIs and Commies, or Crusaders and Infidels, or whatever, you could really hate the kids playing the other side. It could really feel like a matter of life and death if the other kids captured one of your guys. But if somebody calls ‘times,’ everybody’s themselves again and it all just goes away. When you do a time-out in kickball, you’re still on the same teams, and the basic rules of the game still exist. But with ‘times,’ the whole universe you were playing in is just gone. I want to call ‘times’ on everything from when Tritter walked into the clinic on down, and just be who we were last year.”
Wilson thinks back to this time last year. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a lot better than now. Immediately, he tries to think of a way to make House’s wish happen. They could pretend, sure. But the rules of the game set by Luerssen and the rest are written in his central nervous system now; that’s the problem. They can’t pretend them away, even for a little while.
“We can’t do it,” House answers. “I know. I was just saying.”
“Yeah.” He tries to imagine House playing let’s-pretend with other kids. It’s hard to picture, and he says so.
“I played with lots of other kids. The thing about the kind of places my dad was usually stationed, is that there weren’t a lot of families there. You played with who was there, even if they were younger than you, or girls, or just kind of weird. It’s only in places with enough kids to form different cliques that…that you have the luxury of leaving certain people out.”
Wilson doesn’t need to be told who got left out, when that luxury was available.
“I was actually pretty happy, most of the time. Until I was about fourteen or so. I know that goes against my whole mystique.” House smiles wryly.
“I think I can handle the disillusionment,” he says.
“Good.” House takes another deep drag and tries to blow a smoke ring, which quickly scatters in the slight breeze. “Being outside helps,” he says. “Maybe because I was never outside, the whole time I was in rehab. Moving around helps-getting out of wherever I was when the flashback happened. Smoking helps-I thought that was just because it gave me something to do with my hands. But then playing the piano ought to help, and it doesn’t. I don’t know why not. It’s not like a Clockwork Orange thing. There wasn’t any music there.”
Wilson thinks he understands House’s earlier frustration now. Not that everything about his current situation isn’t frustrating, but the immediate cause was that he was working on a unifying theory of what kinds of activities helped him feel better, and the pattern he thought he saw had fallen apart. It’s a comforting realization, because frustration at a failed theory is more House-like than free-floating angst. “Maybe playing’s too complex,” he suggests. “You have to think about what you’re doing.”
House thinks about that for a moment, then shakes his head. “Sounds likely, except I don’t have to think about it, really. It’s mostly muscle memory.” Another pause, and then he says, “Oh. Got it. Muscle memory isn’t really muscular, of course. Procedural memory is in the brain, just like everything else. And my brain’s fucked right now.” He sighs heavily. “So video games are probably out, too.”
“Yo-yo might be okay,” Wilson suggests. And substantially less carcinogenic than smoking.
“Yeah, I already had that one.”
Obscurely disappointed, Wilson tries to think of other things that might help. Giving up, he says, “Why don’t you want to do like Temas said, and try to figure out what triggers them?”
House glares at him for a moment-apparently that’s one of the things Wilson is supposed to just accept, or maybe to get without being told-then relents. “Because if I start planning my day around avoiding triggers, those pricks own even more of my life than they already did. I’d rather just have the damn flashbacks, if that’s the choice.”
“Luerssen,” Temas says. “Nice to meet you.” Oversocialized, hell yes. He takes a deep breath and reminds his mammal-brain that Luerssen isn’t violent. He may be a predator-a murderer--but he didn’t club anyone to death on a street corner, and he isn’t likely to start now.
“Likewise, I’m sure.” Luerssen shows his teeth again, in a parody of a smile. “I understand you’ve been treating some of my former patients.”
“Yes.”
“I can’t say I think they’re in good hands. If you’ve any experience with those kind of people, you ought to know better than to believe their lies.”
“I’m pretty good at recognizing lies when I hear them,” Temas says boldly.
“Sending the police to my door. It’s ridiculous. Isabelle was a very sick young woman. There’s no way to establish that she wouldn’t have killed herself without my treatment. Perhaps she’d have even done it earlier.”
Luerssen’s tone is so reasonable, that Temas is on the verge of agreeing. Of course, no one can know what would have happened in other circumstances, and nearly every clinician who deals with seriously ill people has had a patient commit suicide at some point. It’s sad, but it happens.
But then he remembers Isabelle’s suicide note. I am an ungrateful liar. I make up lies to get attention and to get back at my parents. I don’t want to be a burden to them anymore with my lies and my ingratitude. He remembers the recording her brother took to the police, and that they let him listen to. This man’s voice, saying, “You refuse to eat to get attention and get back at your parents. You’re a burden to them. You’re nothing but an ungrateful liar. You make up lies to get attention and to get back at your parents when you don’t get your way.”
“Your treatment led directly to her death. You told her she was worthless, and injected her with drugs that made her believe it. There isn’t one of your patients who isn’t worse off now than they were before they met you,” Temas says.
Luerssen gives him a condescending look. “People like that don’t want to change. Addicts, cutters, anorexics-they enjoy their illness too much to want to get better. And people like you, who listen to their excuses and their whining and their denials--you don’t help them, you just indulge them. The only way, with people like that, is to make them get better. Whether they like it or not.” He shows his teeth again. “They usually don’t. Like it. But they do get better.”
“We have radically different definitions of what it means to get better,” Temas answers.
“You don’t agree that for an addict to stop using drugs constitutes getting better? Or for an anorexic to eat a normal diet? All of my patients go to their schools or places of employment, they refrain from criminal or self-injurious behavior, they cease associating with unsuitable people. You don’t think that these are good things?”
“They’re good things,” Temas agrees, feeling like the argument is slipping away beneath him. “But they aren’t worth the price.”
“And what price is that?”
Temas struggles to put it into words. “Their…free will. Their unique personalities.”
“These people don’t exactly make good use of their free will,” Luerssen points out. He shakes his head. “I don’t need to convince you. I do need to convince the district attorney. Or perhaps a judge, if it goes that far. Tell me, how much value do you think a judge will put on an addict’s free will? His unique personality? Especially if some of your patients end up on the stand. Who do you think a judge is going to believe?”
“It’s not just a matter of who’s more plausible. There’s physical evidence,” Temas points out. He knows better. He shouldn’t be engaging with this evil lunatic.
“There’s ways around that. What do you think they’re going to say, with me right there in the courtroom?” He laughs a little, and it sounds like someone sharpening a knife. “‘I destroyed my life with my addiction. Doctor Luerssen made me a normal-better person.’” His imitation of Greg’s speaking style is cruelly accurate. As himself, he continues, “Is it possible, Mr. House, that you administered these drugs to yourself? I’m an addict. You can’t trust an addict. I don’t really remember. I’ve stopped using drugs since Doctor Luerssen made me a normal better person.”
Later, Temas will wonder why Luerssen thinks that mocking very badly damaged people is threatening, or funny, or whatever he thinks it is. What is he, twelve? But right now, he’s strangely transfixed.
“I wonder if I could get him to accuse you of some kind of gross impropriety?” Luerssen muses. “I won’t be able to speak to him directly in court, that’s the only thing that might make it difficult. But perhaps if I have my lawyer ask just the right questions.” He shrugs. “It doesn’t matter, really. It would be nice to destroy you, but it isn’t necessary. What do you think it’s going to do to them when they get up on the stand and tell their story, and nobody believes them?”
He has a point-it’s a risk they’d talked about, when they first decided to go after Luerssen.
“Maybe I can even get Greg sent back to New Horizons. He’s still on probation, and your physical evidence includes proof that he had un-prescribed controlled substances in his system. And if I didn’t give them to him-and it’s pretty likely he’ll testify under oath that I didn’t-well, he must’ve stolen them.” With a final baring of his teeth and an ironic half-bow, Luerssen departs.