Post-Trauma, 1/?
This story is an authorized sequel-in-progress to Diysheep's "Weird Creepy Story," here: http://diysheep.livejournal.com/8214.html
Another one of Luerssen’s zombies shambled into the office for his Thursday three o’clock. This one was more alert than some-he at least seemed to notice that the décor had changed. Luerssen had had a huge, highly polished desk with an enormous, throne-like chair-it looked like something the CEO of Evil Incorporated would use in a movie. His patients had, apparently, sat in straight wooden chairs in front of the desk, like naughty children called to see the principal. The wall of bookcases had been filled with thick, oversized books of antique appearance, the sort of thing that made you want to use the word “tome.” Temas, upon taking over the office, had first thought contemptuously that his predecessor had probably not so much as opened most of them. When he’d gotten a look at the titles, he hoped he hadn’t-Luerssen seemed to have a fascination with the gory history of the science of psychiatry, having acres of shelf space devoted to things like hydrotherapy, electroshock, and early-twentieth century neurosurgery. The shadow-box displaying his collection of trepanning equipment, along with a cross-sectional illustration of a human head and an 18th century woodcut of that new technology, the straitjacket, had apparently been the man’s idea of appropriate wall art.
The mental-health center had offered to send a maintenance man to clear out Luerssen’s belongings as soon as one was available, but Temas had decided that clearing his things out personally was preferable to seeing patients-particularly children--in such a disturbing environment. Once the place was cleared out, he’d put a colorful rug over the chipped tile floor, brought in an assortment of comfortable chairs and hung his pictures-a few innocuous landscapes and still lifes, and Van Gogh’s room-and stocked the shelves with board games, puzzles, puppets, and art materials for the child patients.
His few patients who were new to the center had responded to the inviting atmosphere he’d created, investigating the toys (some of the adults, as well as the children), and developing rapport. But the ones he’d inherited from Luerssen, they all came in, briefly took in the changes, sat in the seat closest to the one where Luerssen’s wooden chairs had been, and waited numbly for Temas to begin. He felt bad about thinking of them as zombies, even in the privacy of his own mind, but the images was disturbingly appropriate. All were compliant, as long as his suggestions didn’t require any initiative on their parts.
Thursday three o’clock, Greg House, looked even more like a zombie than the others because of his lurching gait. He leaned heavily on a cane held in his left hand, his shoulder canted up somewhere around his ear, shuffling inexorably toward the chair. About six steps in, he hesitated, swept the room once with his eyes, and resumed shuffling.
Temas expected, by now, that the patient was unlikely to ask where his previous doctor had gone-none of Luerssen’s had, so far-but he waited long enough to give House a chance to ask, if he was going to. Once House was settled in the usual place, Temas dragged a chair over and sat at an oblique angle to the patient, deliberately avoiding the confrontational face-to-face position that Luerssen seemed to have favored. “So,” he said.
Greg folded his hands in his lap and waited.
“Doctor Luerssen is no longer with the Princeton-Plainsboro Mental Health Center,” he began. “I’m Andrew Temas. I’ve taken over his case load for the present. Once we’ve had a chance to get to know each other, we’ll talk about whether you want to continue working with me, or transfer to another doctor.”
Greg nodded slightly.
“Do you have any questions?” Almost anyone, at this point, would want to know why their doctor had disappeared suddenly. None of Luerssen’s patients had asked.
“No.”
Temas struggled with whether to honor Luerssen’s patients’ expressed lack of curiosity, or whether to share the non-confidential portion of the story without being asked. He decided, this time, not to explain just yet. “What would you like to work on today?” He always starts with that question. Experienced patients, even the smallest children, have an answer-they want to talk about the worst day they had in the past week, or the best, or pick up where they left off last time, or get out the elephant puppet, or build something with blocks. New ones ask: Work? Like in school? Or You’re the doctor, you tell me. Or I don’t know, should I tell you about my childhood?
Lurssen’s patients look at him like he’s speaking a foreign language with the mouth on the second head he’s just grown. Or else they look through him with a sort of thousand-yard stare, roll up their sleeves, and say, “Aren’t you going to give me my shot?”
Greg does the latter.
“There’s nothing about an injection in your chart,” Temas says. There isn’t anything about an injection in any of them. He’d thought the first one was delusional. “Do you know what he was giving you?”
“No.”
“D’you think you’d remember the name if I told you some?”
“He never said.”
Of course he hadn’t. “Well, we’ll do without it today.”
“Okay.”
He knows Greg is just going to sit there and look at the wall until he says something, but he waits for a while, letting the silence stretch between them. The very first thing he learned, working with largely nonverbal patients, was not to talk just to fill the silence. Finally, he breaks. “Well, what were you working on the week before last with Doctor Luerssen?” It’s a dumb question. House will answer with whatever Luerssen has written in his chart as his primary diagnosis. Temas checks. Addiction.
“My addiction,” Greg answers after a slightly-too-long pause.
“D’you remember what you were saying about it?” Chances are, Greg wasn’t saying anything.
“That it’s destroyed my life.”
“Do feel like talking about that some more?”
Shrug.
That’s as close as he’s going to get to a “no.” Some of Luerssen’s former patients would say “If that’s what you think is best,” if he suggested boiling them in oil. “Let’s do something else, then,” he suggests.
“Okay.”
In some cases, he’d try waiting until the patient suggested something. But they only have fifty minutes, not all week. “Is there anything you’d like to talk about? Anything that’s on your mind?”
Shrug.
“It’s kind of scary, getting a new psychiatrist all of the sudden,” Temas offered.
Shrug.
They sit for perhaps five minutes. “If you’d rather not talk right now, how about we play a game?”
Greg tilts his head to one side slightly.
“I treat a lot of kids, so I have all kinds of good stuff. You’d be surprised how many adults like to play something during their sessions, too. I’ve got Clue, Monopoly, checkers…Asian-American checkers…” He glances at Greg out of the corner of his eye. No reaction. Everybody gets that joke. “Scattergories, Pictionary. Legos, if you want to build something.” He keeps the building toys around because adults and teenagers can often be persuaded to build something, and that often leads to useful work. Building suggests houses, houses suggest families, and families suggest…pretty much everything else that someone might want to talk about in therapy. Children are more like to get to the same place through pretend-play with the puppets or the doll family, but adults generally won’t do pretend play, except for the occasional woman who dresses the dolls if the last child-client happened to leave them naked. “Anything sound good?”
“Checkers,” Greg shrugs.
Checkers is not a very therapeutically useful game-Pictionary and Scattergories work much better-but it’s a place to start. Temas brings over the child-sized art table and sets the game up between them. Two of the red checkers are missing again. With kids, involving them in finding a solution to the missing-checkers problem can be helpful, but this time he just fishes two cinnamon candies out of the jar on his desk and puts them in place.
“What happened to them?” Greg asks.
It’s a good sign, but a very strange one-he doesn’t express any curiosity about what happened to his old psychiatrist, but he does about two checkers he’s never seen before? “I don’t know. Someone took them home, or they got mixed in with the legos, or they’re under the couch. I’ll buy more next time I go to the toy store.”
Greg looks like he’s about to say something else, but he doesn’t.
The third week after Temas has taken over Luressen’s caseload, five or six of Luerssen’s old patients call the Center to cancel their appointments, and a few more just don’t show up. Temas gets curious about why and calls around, but of course none of them are talking. Finally he gets the story from the mother of one of the adolescent patients who’s staying with the Center. “I wasn’t sure if we were supposed to come here or not,” she says. “Doctor Luerssen left a message on our machine, asking us to call for a new appointment time. I called back, and the receptionist said he still no longer works here. Then I listened to the message again, and he gave a new number.”
“That’s…strange,” Temas says.
“There’s more. I called that number-he has a new office, in that medical complex over by the mall. I told him if he thought I was bringing Karen to him again, after what I read in the paper about that other girl, he’s crazier than she is. He started ranting about how it’s unethical for you to steal his patients, something like that, how changing therapists so suddenly could cause Karen to decompensate…I just hung up on him. It was scary.”
“It sounds scary,” Temas agrees.
After Karen’s session, he calls as many of his Luerssen patients as he can reach. Most admit to having gotten similar calls. Some ask him what he thinks they should do (he ought to ask them what they think, but he knows that’s not what Luerssen is doing. He tells them that he and the rest of the Center staff have serious doubts about Luerssen’s treatment methods, and that he recommends either returning to the Center or seeking a different provider). A few say flatly that Luerssen has said not to speak to him and hang up.
Greg House is one of the ones who didn’t answer his phone, but he hobbles in on time, 3 o’clock Thursday afternoon.
“Hi, Greg, it’s good to see you,” Temas says sincerely. His previous two patients hadn’t turned up, so he’s spent two hours sorting legos and worrying about them.
Greg flinches and eyes him suspiciously.
“How was your week?” he opens, once Greg is seated.
He shrugs.
“What do you want to work on today?”
Shrug.
“How are things at your job?” Greg is a doctor, at Princeton-Plainsboro. Actually, a department head, although the scuttlebutt is that he won’t be one for much longer. Temas can’t really imagine this near-catatonic practicing medicine. He hasn’t tried to find out much about Greg-it’s nearly always better to let the patients tell their own stories, at their own pace-but his reputation as a brilliant diagnostician and a real son of a bitch is hard to avoid. He has a list of publications stretching back to his undergraduate days, and up to a few months ago-which is strange, considering that Luerssen’s case notes say he’s been an addict for five years. The patient in front of him might as well be a different man.
“It’s fine.”
“Good. Well, should we play checkers again, or do you want to do something else?”
Shrug.
“Doctor Temas.” There’s a young man standing in his doorway. “The receptionist said you’d still be here for a while after your last patient.” He steps in, and he’s not so young after all, about Temas’s own age, but puppy-faced enough that he looks like a kid dressed up in his father’s clothes. “I’m James Wilson.”
The name means nothing to him. “Nice to meet you, James.”
“You’re…treating House. Greg House. Aren’t you?”
“That information is confidential,” Temas points out. Who the hell is James Wilson?
“Which means you are. Hasn’t he mentioned me?”
“Who are you, to him?”
“His best friend.” James sighs heavily and half-turns away. Not leaving; embarrassed. “I assumed…we’re apparently not speaking at the moment, but I assumed you’d at least know who I am.”
“He doesn’t talk much,” Temas admits.
“I don’t…I know you can’t tell me…I need to know what’s going on, and he won’t talk to me.” James sounds like he’s trying not to cry.
“You’re right, that I can’t tell you anything about his therapeutic work, but you can talk to me. What’s been going on?”
“You’ve seen him. He…he wasn’t like that. Until I decided he had to go into rehab and made a deal with the deal with the devil to get him there. When he was just a drug addict, he was fine.” James laughs shakily. “Well, not fine, but better. He was happy, sometimes. Occasionally. We had fun together. And he was a genius. He could save patients when no one else could even figure out what was wrong with them. That meant a lot to him. Now-live, die, undiagnosable superbug or upper respiratory infection, it’s all the same to him. He might as well be d--” James stops, looking shocked by what he almost said. “I don’t mean that.”
Temas nods encouragingly.
“He’s just…it’s like he’s a Stepford House. Or worse. I could stand it if he was angry with me, but he’s not. He’s just…checked out. It’s horrible.”
Another one of Luerssen’s zombies shambled into the office for his Thursday three o’clock. This one was more alert than some-he at least seemed to notice that the décor had changed. Luerssen had had a huge, highly polished desk with an enormous, throne-like chair-it looked like something the CEO of Evil Incorporated would use in a movie. His patients had, apparently, sat in straight wooden chairs in front of the desk, like naughty children called to see the principal. The wall of bookcases had been filled with thick, oversized books of antique appearance, the sort of thing that made you want to use the word “tome.” Temas, upon taking over the office, had first thought contemptuously that his predecessor had probably not so much as opened most of them. When he’d gotten a look at the titles, he hoped he hadn’t-Luerssen seemed to have a fascination with the gory history of the science of psychiatry, having acres of shelf space devoted to things like hydrotherapy, electroshock, and early-twentieth century neurosurgery. The shadow-box displaying his collection of trepanning equipment, along with a cross-sectional illustration of a human head and an 18th century woodcut of that new technology, the straitjacket, had apparently been the man’s idea of appropriate wall art.
The mental-health center had offered to send a maintenance man to clear out Luerssen’s belongings as soon as one was available, but Temas had decided that clearing his things out personally was preferable to seeing patients-particularly children--in such a disturbing environment. Once the place was cleared out, he’d put a colorful rug over the chipped tile floor, brought in an assortment of comfortable chairs and hung his pictures-a few innocuous landscapes and still lifes, and Van Gogh’s room-and stocked the shelves with board games, puzzles, puppets, and art materials for the child patients.
His few patients who were new to the center had responded to the inviting atmosphere he’d created, investigating the toys (some of the adults, as well as the children), and developing rapport. But the ones he’d inherited from Luerssen, they all came in, briefly took in the changes, sat in the seat closest to the one where Luerssen’s wooden chairs had been, and waited numbly for Temas to begin. He felt bad about thinking of them as zombies, even in the privacy of his own mind, but the images was disturbingly appropriate. All were compliant, as long as his suggestions didn’t require any initiative on their parts.
Thursday three o’clock, Greg House, looked even more like a zombie than the others because of his lurching gait. He leaned heavily on a cane held in his left hand, his shoulder canted up somewhere around his ear, shuffling inexorably toward the chair. About six steps in, he hesitated, swept the room once with his eyes, and resumed shuffling.
Temas expected, by now, that the patient was unlikely to ask where his previous doctor had gone-none of Luerssen’s had, so far-but he waited long enough to give House a chance to ask, if he was going to. Once House was settled in the usual place, Temas dragged a chair over and sat at an oblique angle to the patient, deliberately avoiding the confrontational face-to-face position that Luerssen seemed to have favored. “So,” he said.
Greg folded his hands in his lap and waited.
“Doctor Luerssen is no longer with the Princeton-Plainsboro Mental Health Center,” he began. “I’m Andrew Temas. I’ve taken over his case load for the present. Once we’ve had a chance to get to know each other, we’ll talk about whether you want to continue working with me, or transfer to another doctor.”
Greg nodded slightly.
“Do you have any questions?” Almost anyone, at this point, would want to know why their doctor had disappeared suddenly. None of Luerssen’s patients had asked.
“No.”
Temas struggled with whether to honor Luerssen’s patients’ expressed lack of curiosity, or whether to share the non-confidential portion of the story without being asked. He decided, this time, not to explain just yet. “What would you like to work on today?” He always starts with that question. Experienced patients, even the smallest children, have an answer-they want to talk about the worst day they had in the past week, or the best, or pick up where they left off last time, or get out the elephant puppet, or build something with blocks. New ones ask: Work? Like in school? Or You’re the doctor, you tell me. Or I don’t know, should I tell you about my childhood?
Lurssen’s patients look at him like he’s speaking a foreign language with the mouth on the second head he’s just grown. Or else they look through him with a sort of thousand-yard stare, roll up their sleeves, and say, “Aren’t you going to give me my shot?”
Greg does the latter.
“There’s nothing about an injection in your chart,” Temas says. There isn’t anything about an injection in any of them. He’d thought the first one was delusional. “Do you know what he was giving you?”
“No.”
“D’you think you’d remember the name if I told you some?”
“He never said.”
Of course he hadn’t. “Well, we’ll do without it today.”
“Okay.”
He knows Greg is just going to sit there and look at the wall until he says something, but he waits for a while, letting the silence stretch between them. The very first thing he learned, working with largely nonverbal patients, was not to talk just to fill the silence. Finally, he breaks. “Well, what were you working on the week before last with Doctor Luerssen?” It’s a dumb question. House will answer with whatever Luerssen has written in his chart as his primary diagnosis. Temas checks. Addiction.
“My addiction,” Greg answers after a slightly-too-long pause.
“D’you remember what you were saying about it?” Chances are, Greg wasn’t saying anything.
“That it’s destroyed my life.”
“Do feel like talking about that some more?”
Shrug.
That’s as close as he’s going to get to a “no.” Some of Luerssen’s former patients would say “If that’s what you think is best,” if he suggested boiling them in oil. “Let’s do something else, then,” he suggests.
“Okay.”
In some cases, he’d try waiting until the patient suggested something. But they only have fifty minutes, not all week. “Is there anything you’d like to talk about? Anything that’s on your mind?”
Shrug.
“It’s kind of scary, getting a new psychiatrist all of the sudden,” Temas offered.
Shrug.
They sit for perhaps five minutes. “If you’d rather not talk right now, how about we play a game?”
Greg tilts his head to one side slightly.
“I treat a lot of kids, so I have all kinds of good stuff. You’d be surprised how many adults like to play something during their sessions, too. I’ve got Clue, Monopoly, checkers…Asian-American checkers…” He glances at Greg out of the corner of his eye. No reaction. Everybody gets that joke. “Scattergories, Pictionary. Legos, if you want to build something.” He keeps the building toys around because adults and teenagers can often be persuaded to build something, and that often leads to useful work. Building suggests houses, houses suggest families, and families suggest…pretty much everything else that someone might want to talk about in therapy. Children are more like to get to the same place through pretend-play with the puppets or the doll family, but adults generally won’t do pretend play, except for the occasional woman who dresses the dolls if the last child-client happened to leave them naked. “Anything sound good?”
“Checkers,” Greg shrugs.
Checkers is not a very therapeutically useful game-Pictionary and Scattergories work much better-but it’s a place to start. Temas brings over the child-sized art table and sets the game up between them. Two of the red checkers are missing again. With kids, involving them in finding a solution to the missing-checkers problem can be helpful, but this time he just fishes two cinnamon candies out of the jar on his desk and puts them in place.
“What happened to them?” Greg asks.
It’s a good sign, but a very strange one-he doesn’t express any curiosity about what happened to his old psychiatrist, but he does about two checkers he’s never seen before? “I don’t know. Someone took them home, or they got mixed in with the legos, or they’re under the couch. I’ll buy more next time I go to the toy store.”
Greg looks like he’s about to say something else, but he doesn’t.
The third week after Temas has taken over Luressen’s caseload, five or six of Luerssen’s old patients call the Center to cancel their appointments, and a few more just don’t show up. Temas gets curious about why and calls around, but of course none of them are talking. Finally he gets the story from the mother of one of the adolescent patients who’s staying with the Center. “I wasn’t sure if we were supposed to come here or not,” she says. “Doctor Luerssen left a message on our machine, asking us to call for a new appointment time. I called back, and the receptionist said he still no longer works here. Then I listened to the message again, and he gave a new number.”
“That’s…strange,” Temas says.
“There’s more. I called that number-he has a new office, in that medical complex over by the mall. I told him if he thought I was bringing Karen to him again, after what I read in the paper about that other girl, he’s crazier than she is. He started ranting about how it’s unethical for you to steal his patients, something like that, how changing therapists so suddenly could cause Karen to decompensate…I just hung up on him. It was scary.”
“It sounds scary,” Temas agrees.
After Karen’s session, he calls as many of his Luerssen patients as he can reach. Most admit to having gotten similar calls. Some ask him what he thinks they should do (he ought to ask them what they think, but he knows that’s not what Luerssen is doing. He tells them that he and the rest of the Center staff have serious doubts about Luerssen’s treatment methods, and that he recommends either returning to the Center or seeking a different provider). A few say flatly that Luerssen has said not to speak to him and hang up.
Greg House is one of the ones who didn’t answer his phone, but he hobbles in on time, 3 o’clock Thursday afternoon.
“Hi, Greg, it’s good to see you,” Temas says sincerely. His previous two patients hadn’t turned up, so he’s spent two hours sorting legos and worrying about them.
Greg flinches and eyes him suspiciously.
“How was your week?” he opens, once Greg is seated.
He shrugs.
“What do you want to work on today?”
Shrug.
“How are things at your job?” Greg is a doctor, at Princeton-Plainsboro. Actually, a department head, although the scuttlebutt is that he won’t be one for much longer. Temas can’t really imagine this near-catatonic practicing medicine. He hasn’t tried to find out much about Greg-it’s nearly always better to let the patients tell their own stories, at their own pace-but his reputation as a brilliant diagnostician and a real son of a bitch is hard to avoid. He has a list of publications stretching back to his undergraduate days, and up to a few months ago-which is strange, considering that Luerssen’s case notes say he’s been an addict for five years. The patient in front of him might as well be a different man.
“It’s fine.”
“Good. Well, should we play checkers again, or do you want to do something else?”
Shrug.
“Doctor Temas.” There’s a young man standing in his doorway. “The receptionist said you’d still be here for a while after your last patient.” He steps in, and he’s not so young after all, about Temas’s own age, but puppy-faced enough that he looks like a kid dressed up in his father’s clothes. “I’m James Wilson.”
The name means nothing to him. “Nice to meet you, James.”
“You’re…treating House. Greg House. Aren’t you?”
“That information is confidential,” Temas points out. Who the hell is James Wilson?
“Which means you are. Hasn’t he mentioned me?”
“Who are you, to him?”
“His best friend.” James sighs heavily and half-turns away. Not leaving; embarrassed. “I assumed…we’re apparently not speaking at the moment, but I assumed you’d at least know who I am.”
“He doesn’t talk much,” Temas admits.
“I don’t…I know you can’t tell me…I need to know what’s going on, and he won’t talk to me.” James sounds like he’s trying not to cry.
“You’re right, that I can’t tell you anything about his therapeutic work, but you can talk to me. What’s been going on?”
“You’ve seen him. He…he wasn’t like that. Until I decided he had to go into rehab and made a deal with the deal with the devil to get him there. When he was just a drug addict, he was fine.” James laughs shakily. “Well, not fine, but better. He was happy, sometimes. Occasionally. We had fun together. And he was a genius. He could save patients when no one else could even figure out what was wrong with them. That meant a lot to him. Now-live, die, undiagnosable superbug or upper respiratory infection, it’s all the same to him. He might as well be d--” James stops, looking shocked by what he almost said. “I don’t mean that.”
Temas nods encouragingly.
“He’s just…it’s like he’s a Stepford House. Or worse. I could stand it if he was angry with me, but he’s not. He’s just…checked out. It’s horrible.”