Post-Trauma 10.1
Things are looking up a bit for House...and down a bit for Luerssen....
Detective Whitley had been parked outside of the nondescript office building for most of the afternoon. She was starting to fear that Luerssen had snuck out the back somehow, when he finally emerged, wearing a long tan-colored overcoat and swinging a briefcase lightly from his left hand. Motioning to the uniformed officer who was accompanying her, she got out of the car and walked toward him.
“Detective,” Luerssen said, with a wolfish smile. “Can I help you?”
She doesn’t engage with him-one advantage of the long delay is that Dawson was able to get the arrest warrant while she’s been sitting on Luerssen’s office, so she doesn’t have to go into any nonsense about “asking a few questions” or “assisting with our investigation.” Instead, she takes her handcuffs off her belt and says, “Erich Luerssen, you’re under arrest for assault, witness tampering, and murder in the first degree.” That last charge will probably be reduced to willfully negligent homicide, or something along those lines, but it’s best to aim high. “You have the right to--”
Luerssen’s face contorts into a snarl. “Assault? Murder? What lies have you been listening to?” He lunges toward her.
Whitley continues reciting the Miranda warning dispassionately, as the uniform catches Luerssen and cuffs him. Still fuming, he’s stuffed in the back of the car. Whitley picks up his briefcase and puts it in after him.
Wilson sets a plate on the coffee table in front of House. “You should try to eat,” Wilson tells him.
House looks up at him, eyes vague and fearful. With a quick nod, he picks up his fork.
It’s painful to watch-House shouldn’t be afraid of him, shouldn’t be afraid of anything-but Wilson doesn’t know what to do except sit down next to him and eat his own meal, so that’s what he does. He’d hoped that House would start to show some improvement by now, but he seems, if anything, worse-less alert, more fearful and pliable.
“What do you want to do tonight?” Wilson asks casually.
“I’m watching television,” House points out.
Right. He’s been staring at the blank screen since they got home. “Do you want to, maybe…turn it on?”
House looks at him blankly. “Why?”
Ask a stupid question…. “Never mind.”
House finishes what’s on his plate. “Should I get more?”
“Are you still hungry?”
House’s brows draw together in confusion. “Am I?”
“Well, I don’t know,” Wilson tells him.
“I don’t know either,” House admits.
“Probably not, then.” Wilson finishes his own spaghetti and gathers up their dirty dishes.
As he’s rinsing and stacking them in the sink, it occurs to him that he could very easily get House to do the dishes in his current state. It’s even his turn-although the notion of turns is a little abstract when one party refuses to take his. But taking advantage of what Luerssen did to House, even to get him to engage in ordinary decent behavior, seems wrong somehow. With a sigh, Wilson fills the sink and washes the dishes.
When he goes back into the living room, House is sitting in exactly the same position he was before. It looks like he hasn’t moved the whole time Wilson was gone.
They sit quietly for a few minutes, until House breaks the silence by saying, “You should go.”
Wilson probably shouldn’t be surprised, but he is. “Why?”
“Grown men don’t have sleepovers at each other’s houses,” House recites dully.
“We do. All the time,” Wilson reminds him.
“It’s not normal,” House says doggedly.
“It is for us.” Luerssen must’ve told House to get rid of him-maybe he’d only come after House in the Clinic after failing to find him alone at home last night. That notion makes Wilson even more determined to stay. “I don’t even have a hotel room anymore,” he says. “Don’t feel like you have to entertain me,” he says, which is ridiculous on many levels-House, when he’s himself, does what he wants to do, regardless of whether Wilson’s there or not. And he’s being anything but entertaining tonight. “I’ll just read. Pretend I’m not here.”
House seems satisfied with that. He goes on looking at the blank TV screen, while Wilson reads a paperback novel.
Some time later, the phone rings. House startles pretty dramatically, jumping a little in his seat and looking around desperately, breathing hard.
Wilson picks up the phone. “House’s…residence,” he says cautiously. House doesn’t get a lot of phone calls at home.
“Wilson? It’s Foreman.”
“Hi, Foreman,” he says loudly, for House’s benefit. “What’s up?”
“I did a few more tests on House’s blood sample. There were some additional compounds that I couldn’t quite identify. I’m still not totally sure what they are, but I think they were meant to bind the drugs for a controlled release”
“Oh. I was wondering why they haven’t started to wear off.”
“The Thorazine and haloperidol will probably remain active in his system for four or five times longer than you’d normally expect.”
It’s a relief, in a way. There’s still a chance-a good chance-that House will come back once this latest dose starts to clear his system. “Thanks for letting us know. Is there anything else?”
A pause, and then, “No, that’s it. Is he….”
“He’s about the same,” Wilson answers.
“Okay. Bye.” Foreman hangs up, and Wilson does too.
House doesn’t express any curiosity about the phone call, but Wilson explains anyway. “So you should start feeling better in a few days,” he sums up. It’s not a sure thing by any means, but maybe the power of suggestion will have some effect.
“I am better,” House points out.
In his stubbornness, anyway, this House is not so different from the real one. “Right. More yourself, I mean.”
House doesn’t have an answer for that.
Luerssen lawyers up, as they say on TV, as soon as he gets to the station. They don’t have to wait too long to question him-his lawyer shows up remarkably quickly-but after that they don’t get anything out of him, except for a few outbursts about the police taking the word of a lying addict over that of a respected medical professional. He denies being anywhere near Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, and refuses to make any account of his whereabouts during the period in question. He doesn’t know why there are images of him on the PPTH security cameras. He offers the suggestion that there’s nothing particularly unusual about his appearance; is it possible someone is mistaken?
She’s thinking about taking a break anyway, when a uniform comes and tells her there’s a Doctor Temas on the phone for her. She’s glad for the excuse to go back to her desk and let Luerssen stew in the interrogation room for a while.
“This is Whitley,” she says into the phone.
“Detective. Hi. I got something in the mail today from a colleague, a psychiatrist who was one of Luerssen’s advisors in graduate school. He sent me a copy of a paper Luerssen wrote for an ethics seminar…he saved it all these years because it’s…kind of weird. I thought you might want to see it, or maybe the prosecutor….”
“Sure. Yeah.” She’s not sure what good one of his old school papers will be-if it will even be admissible-but they might as well have a look. “Bring it over when you have a chance.”
Temas brings it over right away, arriving less than fifteen minutes later. He really shouldn’t have gone to the trouble-it can’t possibly be that urgent-but she invites him into her office anyway.
“Do you have someplace you can make a copy of this?” he asks. “I’d like to keep a copy for myself.”
“Sure.” She shows him over to the copier. The paper itself is bulkier than she thought it would be-at least thirty or forty closely-typed pages. She puts it in the document feeder and presses “start.”
“Here’s the letter my colleague wrote to go with it. I don’t know if you want to look at it….”
She takes it and reads.
“Temas: A little bird told me you’re mixed up in this business with Erich Luerssen. I don’t know if you remember, but he was one of my graduate students when I was still at Brown. This whole mess reminded me of a paper he wrote for my Ethics seminar. Very disturbing stuff. I kept a copy for my files-actually, I kept it thinking that if he ever finished his degree and got board-certified I’d have to alert somebody what kind of person he is. But a few years went by and I forgot about it-not about the fact of it, but about how weird and creepy it was. We all had some funny ideas as students, didn’t we? But this is something else. Re-reading it today, I felt like throwing up. I can’t believe I sat on it for fifteen years and let him treat patients without telling anyone. I’ve highlighted some of the passages of most interest. Gorden.”
Temas watches her read. “I guess the highlighting won’t show up on the copy,” he says when she reaches the end. He picks up the finished pages of his original. “Here’s a good bit, from his abstract: ‘The central weakness, shared by all of the current treatments for mental illness, is that they rely on the patient’s desire to be well. As the old joke goes, the lightbulb must first want to change. People with abnormal minds often lack this essential desire to be well. They prefer their abnormality. What if the clinician’s will that the patient become well could somehow be substituted for this missing desire in the patient?’” He looks up. “Do you know that joke? How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb?”
“One, but the lightbulb has to really want to change,” Whitley supplies. She’s heard it from the police psychiatrist.
He shakes his head. “Yeah. What makes the joke funny, what it turns on, is the absurdity of applying the same principles to inanimate objects as to living, breathing human beings. Luerssen seems to have missed that completely. He sees nothing wrong with treating people like things.” He pages through the sheets. “There’s another part, where he uses the same metaphor…here it is. ‘A broken lightbulb isn’t allowed to stay broken simply because it prefers that state. It must be made useful to society, whether it likes it or not. So must our patients with broken minds. If they do not want to change, they must be changed.’ His emphasis.”
He picks up more sheets from the document feeder. “Here in the methods section, he starts outlining how he plans to go about it. ‘How can the sick individual’s will to remain sick be replaced with the clinician’s will that he become well? Hypnotic suggestion has shown great promise in replacing strong antisocial urges, such as those of addicts, with appropriate behavior. Drug therapy could be used to put the sick individual into a relaxed and receptive state.’ He goes on to talk about what drugs might work, and to outline a conditioning experiment he apparently conducted at home on some rats he bought at a pet store-which, you might not know, goes against all accepted practice for animal experimentation. Even faculty members, let alone students, are supposed to go through an ethics review board before conducting any experiment involving vertebrates of any kind. And he wrote about this in a paper for his Ethics class-which just goes to show you that even then, he had no idea that the rules apply to him.” He clears his throat and re-stacks the pages. “Anyway, it shows you what he’s like. How his mind works.”
“It sure does,” she agrees. Quoting some key passages from the paper might startle Luerssen into saying something he shouldn’t. He won’t have any idea how they got hold of one of his old school papers, so it’ll give her an aura of omniscience that can be very unsettling to suspects. “Thanks for bringing it. I think it’ll come in handy.”
“I’m glad I could help. I feel…pretty rotten about letting Luerssen get at Doctor House again. I guess you saw him; he’s a wreck. I’ve been wondering, if I’d called right after I saw him the other night, instead of waiting until the next day….”
“I don’t know,” Whitley says honestly. “We probably wouldn’t have picked him up any sooner. But I can’t tell you for certain that we wouldn’t have.”
At precisely 11 PM, House gets up and carefully places the remote control on top of the television set. “Goodnight,” he tells Wilson, and heads toward the bedroom.
“Goodnight,” Wilson replies, to his retreating back.
After a moment, he goes down the short hallway and taps on the door to House’s bedroom.
“Yes?”
“Can I come in?”
“…okay.”
Wilson opens the door. House is laying on the right side of the bed, flat on his back, dressed in blue-and-white striped pyjamas, the top buttoned up to the neck. Wilson’s walked past him on the way to the bathroom enough times to know that House usually sleeps sprawled across the middle of the bed, and wears boxers and a t-shirt. Wilson wonders if Luerssen’s control over him went to the extent of telling him how to sleep and what to wear, or if this is a notion, dredged up from the depths of House’s brain, of what normal better people do. “Are you okay?” he asks, lamely. He’s not sure why he came in, except maybe to reassure himself that House is still, if not okay, no worse than before.
House raises his head slightly. “Yes. I’m fine.”
“Okay. Goodnight. Yell if you need anything.”