Post-Trauma 2/?
Today's production of the "Post-Trauma" story. Ends in the middle of a thought.
“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.”
“It’s not your fault.”
James shakes his head with a disgusted look.
“That’s a literal truth, not a psychological one. House’s previous psychiatrist…” Is evil, Temas wants to say. “Did…something…to him.” It’s almost, literally, unspeakable. Temas has certainly thought it before, but he isn’t sure that he has said it out loud-that Luerssen harmed his patients, deliberately. He didn’t just fail to help them, he made them worse.
“What do you mean? What did he do?” Wilson comes further into the office.
“I don’t know, exactly.” Temas realizes he had been hoping Wilson knew something he didn’t. “Has Greg told you anything…?”
“No. I’ve asked him how his therapy was going…he just says it’s fine. He’s getting better. What do you know? About what happened?”
Temas really shouldn’t tell him. It’s confidential patient information. “I really don’t know anything about what happened. With Greg.”
James, somehow, catches what he’s not saying. “But you do know what happened. With someone else.”
“Yes. But I can’t tell you. It’s confidential.” Temas closes the file he’s been working on, stacks up the papers on his desk, squares them, and locks them in a drawer. “As it happens, I’m about finished here, and I always go to the diner across the street when I work late.”
James nods slowly. “I think I happen to be a bit peckish too.”
“Say, I have an idea, why don’t you come have a sandwich with me?”
James shrugs. “Why not?”
Temas puts on his coat, and they make inane small talk until they’re out of the building.
“You think someone has your office bugged?” James asks, as soon as their feet hit pavement.
“After what went on in that office before I came, I think I’d blame them more if they didn’t,” Temas says grimly. They cross the street and go into the diner. Once they’re seated, he continues, “One of Luerssen’s patients. Isabelle D., white female, age nineteen, in treatment for an eating disorder. She started out in a month-long residential program somewhere out west, and started seeing Luerssen when she graduated to outpatient care-or when her parents’ insurance company got tired of paying for the residential program.” Temas realizes he’s going off on a tangent. “Anyway, by any objective measure, she was making a lot of progress-gaining two and a half to three pounds a week--which is huge for someone as sick as she was-eating dinner with her family, going to classes at the junior college, she was even able to return to her waitressing job. According to her chart, all Luerssen was doing was cognitive-behavioral therapy and weekly weigh-ins-the psychotherapeutic equivalent of ‘take two aspirin and call me in the morning.’ Nothing innovative to suggest why she was doing so well, especially since her charts from the residential program suggests she was noncompliant with treatment. Any of this sound familiar?”
“House was in a residential treatment program out west too, but I can’t imagine it was the same one. He doesn’t have an eating disorder. But I’m sure he was noncompliant with his program, too. Until he came home.”
“Yeah. Most of Luerssen’s patients have a history of noncompliant behavior, mostly in residential programs or with previous therapists. He had a few adolescents, too, whose primary presenting symptom was noncompliance and antisocial behavior. Anyway, Isabelle D’s parents were glad enough about the progress she was making to ignore some rather…disturbing personality changes. She stopped seeing her friends, her boyfriend-she said they were a bad influence, they had supported her eating-disordered behavior. Which is,” Temas shrugged, “fairly reasonable. She also stopped initiating conversation with her family, although she’d answer direct questions if asked. Except for work, school, and meals, she spent most of her time in her room, sitting at her desk, staring at her college textbooks-although she’d come out and participate in family activities if her parents asked. Her family reported that she was cooperative around the house, always did her homework, never missed a shift or a class, never talked back to her supervisor at work. All of which sounds good, but none of which was usual behavior for her. Her brother says, if you told her to go jump in the lake, she’d go and get her swimsuit. The parents were mildly concerned, but the brother was very concerned. He’s fourteen, so instead of talking to his parents about his concerns, he put a recording device in her purse before her therapy sessions with Doctor Luerssen.”
“Can I take you guyses order?” A waitress appears at the table and asks.
Temas hasn’t even opened his menu, but he answers, “I’ll have the hot turkey sandwich, with fries instead of mashed.”
“Gravy on the fries?”
“Please.”
She turns to James, who says, “Uh…do you have a reuben?”
“I can getcha a roast beef with kraut.”
“Close enough.” She leaves, and James continues, “So, the brother recorded her sessions?”
“Yes. He was even more concerned after he listened to the recordings, but didn’t disclose what he’d heard until his sister committed suicide.”
“Shit.” James sounds impressed.
“He happened to find her-overdosed on pills and choked on her own vomit. And he found her suicide note. After he shared both the note and the recordings with his parents, they sued the Center, Luerssen was fired, and they brought me in to help his patients recover from what he did to them.” Nearly all of what he’s said so far was covered in the newspaper article. He hasn’t violated anyone’s confidentiality-yet.
“So what was on the tapes?”
“It was a digital recording device,” Temas stalls.
“Whatever.”
“Isabelle D’s sessions with Dr. Luerssen, from what I could tell, consisted entirely of him weighing her, giving her an injection, asking five or six questions about her behavior over the week, and then haranguing her for the other forty minutes. I don’t think she said twenty words, total, in any of the sessions I listened to. He told her that she didn’t have a real disease, she was selfish, and ungrateful for what her parents provided for her, that they had sent her away, not to help her recover from her illness, but because of the inconvenience her behavior was causing them. He told her she was a stupid, spoiled bitch who stopped eating in order to get back at her loving parents for not letting her have her way. He told her that her disclosure, at the residential center, of sexual abuse by an uncle was simply another ploy to get her parents’ attention.
“Her suicide note said the same things, in much the same language.”
James is silent for a moment. When he finally speaks, he asks, “What did he inject her with?”
“Nobody knows. There’s nothing about it on her chart-on anyone’s chart.”
“Did he give House…?”
“Yes. Well, he gave him something. It could have been something different, but since we don’t know what the first thing was…”
“What does House say it was?”
“He doesn’t know.”
“He let this guy inject him with something without knowing what it was?”
Temas shrugs. “Apparently.”
“Did you do tox screens? On any of the surviving patients?”
“Unfortunately, no. I didn’t know about the injections until some patients started asking for them-then I figured out what the sounds on the recording must have been. By then it had been two weeks since any of them had seen Luerssen, so whatever it was had had time to work its way out of their systems by then.”
“Then shouldn’t he be getting better? If he’s not getting any more?”
Temas shrugged. “We don’t know that the drug, whatever it was, caused the personality changes. It may have just been a sedative, something so that the patients would sit quietly and listen to him.”
James makes a sound that is half amusement, half despair. “This would be right up House’s alley, if he was still with us. He’d figure out what the mystery poison is.”
Temas hesitates. He had assumed that physical traces of the drug were irrecoverable, that the only place the secret could still be hiding was inside his patients minds. “How would he do that?” he asks cautiously.
“Hair samples would be one place to start. And a lot of toxins are stored in fat cells. A liver biopsy might reveal something.”
The food comes; both men ignore it.
“He’d do an fMRI, maybe, to see if there are any physical changes in the brain. And he always searches the patients’ homes-it’s just possible that this Luerssen guy sent some of the stuff home with one of them, although that seems unlikely.” Wilson straightens up, the defeated slump coming out of his shoulders. “His team always runs the tests anyway, and they’ll have more ideas. It’s worth a shot. If we can find out what the stuff was, maybe…”
“Maybe we can figure out how to fix it,” Temas agrees. “Do it. If you start making progress, I’ll try to get you some other patients to test. It’s not like it’ll be hard to get them to consent.”
House’s appointment comes around a few days later. He drifts toward the shelf where the checkers set is, starting guiltily when Temas says, “Let’s do something different today.”
He scuttles to the chair, and sits with his hands folded. His eyes are downcast, but there’s an expectant tilt to his head.
“I talked to your friend James the other day.” Temas isn’t sure whether James told Greg about their meeting or not, but he wants to avoid even the impression that they’re keeping secrets from Greg.
“He’s not my friend,” Greg says automatically.
“No?”
Greg explains, “A real friend wouldn’t enable my addiction by supplying me with pills. Besides, junkies don’t have friends.”
Temas isn’t sure where to start. “He seemed quite concerned about you,” he suggests.
“He doesn’t really want me to get better,” Greg replies.
“What makes you think that?”
Greg looks stymied. “He’s an enabler?”
“Well, he told me he wanted to help you get better.”
“He’s lying. You can always tell when Jimmy’s lying.”
“Yeah? How can you tell?” Temas hopes the answer isn’t, “Because his mouth is moving.”
“I…don’t remember.” Greg thinks. “He…rubs the back of his neck. Like this.” He demonstrates. “And stammers a lot.”
“He didn’t do any of that,” Temas says.
Greg doesn’t answer.
“He thinks he might be able to find out what Dr. Luerssen was giving you in your shots.”
Greg’s eyes narrow. “I knew he wasn’t my friend.”
“How’s that?”
“He…” He looks baffled. “I don’t think I need the shots anymore. I’m better now.”
Temas realizes the misunderstanding. “No, I don’t think you do either. As a matter of fact, I think they might have been doing more harm than good, which is why I’d like to find out what they were.”
“Why don’t you just ask him?”
“Doctor Luerssen, you mean?”
Greg nods.
“He won’t say.”
“That’s strange. Doctor Luerssen wants me to get better.”
“Uh-huh.”
Temas’s skepticism must show in his tone-Greg retreats, looking abashed and guilty.
“Do you want to play something?” Temas asks.
Greg looks up. “I don’t think playing checkers is going to help me be better.”
It’s the first sign of anything approaching noncompliance that he’s seen from Greg. He wants to cheer, but instead says, “Maybe not. What should we do instead?”
Greg stares at his hands.
“Should we talk about Wilson some more?”
Shrug.
“How long have you two known each other?”
“ ‘Bout…ten years.”
“So you were friends before you hurt your leg.”
“Yeah.”
“Sometimes when someone gets sick, their friends don’t know what to say, or do, so they just stay away,” Temas suggests.
“Wilson’s an oncologist. He doesn’t mind being around sick people. He came to see me almost every day, kept bringing me food and making me walk places.”
“Sounds like a good friend.”
“Yeah.” Greg twitches slightly. “That was before I was an addict.”
Temas nods. “How’d your addiction start, anyway?” he asks casually. There’s a version of it in his chart, but he wonders what Greg will say.
“I was prescribed Vicodin for post-surgical pain after I had my infarction. I continued to take the medication after I recovered because I had developed a physical and psychological dependence,” he recites.
“I see.” He nods at Greg’s leg. “Does your leg still hurt at all?”
“I experience some psychosomatic pain because of my addiction.”
“How long has that been going on?”
“Five and a half years.”
“What are you doing for pain management now?” He should have asked James, but he hadn’t realized at the time that he was the same Dr. Wilson who had prescribed for Greg before.
“Nothing,” Greg answers suspiciously. “I have control over my addiction. I’m better now.”
“Does your leg still hurt?”
“It’s all in my head.”
Temas isn’t sure he believes him-Greg doesn’t walk like a man whose pain is all in his head-but he’d better not press his luck. “If you want to explore some non-narcotic pain management options, let me know and I’ll make some referrals. Have you tried acupuncture?”
“No.”
“It might be worth trying.”
“I’m not in any pain.”
“Okay. So, after you’d recovered from surgery, what were things like with James?”
“Wilson? I don’t know.”
“Well, what kinds of things do you do together?”
“I don’t associate with him anymore.”
“Right. What did you, I mean?”
“I don’t know. He bought me lunch. A lot. He’d come over to my place, watch TV. He stayed over with me for a while last year. He cooks.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. He used to make these macadamia nut pancakes, they were really good.” Greg looks wistful. “Sometimes we throw things at people off the balcony.”
“What kinds of things?”
“Grapes. Cherry tomatoes. Things like that.”
Temas had been imagining bricks, for some reason.
“It’s kind of fun. We used to play golf together, before my leg. I don’t know. He works right next door, so we didn’t make plans much. We just, you know, hang out. Used to.”
“Sounds like you miss him,” Temas observes.
“Yeah. Well. I can’t see him anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Because he supports my addictive behavior,” Greg recites.
“How’d he do that?”
“He prescribed narcotics that were not medically necessary.”
Of course he had. “How much were you taking, toward the end? How fast would you go through 30 pills?”
“Two or three days.”
“What did James say about that? Did he ever encourage you to take more pills, try to get you to take something stronger?”
“Wilson? No. He was always telling me not to take so many. Couple of times I even had to forge the scrip on his pad because he wouldn’t give me any more.”
“So he didn’t always give you pills when you asked for them.”
“No, not always. I’d have to limp around for a couple of hours, telling him how I was in pain, and Stacy mutilated my leg, and eventually he’d give me some.”
Temas wonders who Stacy is, but decides not to pursue that yet. “Why do you think he kept giving you the pills?”
“Because he doesn’t want me to get better.”
“Why do you think he doesn’t want you to get better?”
Greg looks at him like he’s said something very stupid, and says very slowly, “Because he kept giving me the pills.”
“So he kept giving you the pills because he doesn’t want you to be well, and you know that he doesn’t want you to be well because he kept giving you the pills.”
“Exactly.” Greg doesn’t seem to realize that doesn’t make any sense.
“Can you think of any other reasons why he may have kept giving you the pills?”
“I don’t know.”
Temas lets the silence stretch out. They’ve gotten a lot of work done this session; there’s no hurry. “Do you think it’s possible that he believed you were still in pain?”
Greg rubs his thigh and thinks. “Maybe?”
“Maybe,” Temas agrees. “I’m not sure I’d know what to do, if I saw my friend becoming addicted, but I knew he was legitimately in pain. I might do exactly what James did.”
Greg shrugs.
“Well, our time’s about up. Give it some thought, okay?”
Greg nods, and shambles out.
“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.”
“It’s not your fault.”
James shakes his head with a disgusted look.
“That’s a literal truth, not a psychological one. House’s previous psychiatrist…” Is evil, Temas wants to say. “Did…something…to him.” It’s almost, literally, unspeakable. Temas has certainly thought it before, but he isn’t sure that he has said it out loud-that Luerssen harmed his patients, deliberately. He didn’t just fail to help them, he made them worse.
“What do you mean? What did he do?” Wilson comes further into the office.
“I don’t know, exactly.” Temas realizes he had been hoping Wilson knew something he didn’t. “Has Greg told you anything…?”
“No. I’ve asked him how his therapy was going…he just says it’s fine. He’s getting better. What do you know? About what happened?”
Temas really shouldn’t tell him. It’s confidential patient information. “I really don’t know anything about what happened. With Greg.”
James, somehow, catches what he’s not saying. “But you do know what happened. With someone else.”
“Yes. But I can’t tell you. It’s confidential.” Temas closes the file he’s been working on, stacks up the papers on his desk, squares them, and locks them in a drawer. “As it happens, I’m about finished here, and I always go to the diner across the street when I work late.”
James nods slowly. “I think I happen to be a bit peckish too.”
“Say, I have an idea, why don’t you come have a sandwich with me?”
James shrugs. “Why not?”
Temas puts on his coat, and they make inane small talk until they’re out of the building.
“You think someone has your office bugged?” James asks, as soon as their feet hit pavement.
“After what went on in that office before I came, I think I’d blame them more if they didn’t,” Temas says grimly. They cross the street and go into the diner. Once they’re seated, he continues, “One of Luerssen’s patients. Isabelle D., white female, age nineteen, in treatment for an eating disorder. She started out in a month-long residential program somewhere out west, and started seeing Luerssen when she graduated to outpatient care-or when her parents’ insurance company got tired of paying for the residential program.” Temas realizes he’s going off on a tangent. “Anyway, by any objective measure, she was making a lot of progress-gaining two and a half to three pounds a week--which is huge for someone as sick as she was-eating dinner with her family, going to classes at the junior college, she was even able to return to her waitressing job. According to her chart, all Luerssen was doing was cognitive-behavioral therapy and weekly weigh-ins-the psychotherapeutic equivalent of ‘take two aspirin and call me in the morning.’ Nothing innovative to suggest why she was doing so well, especially since her charts from the residential program suggests she was noncompliant with treatment. Any of this sound familiar?”
“House was in a residential treatment program out west too, but I can’t imagine it was the same one. He doesn’t have an eating disorder. But I’m sure he was noncompliant with his program, too. Until he came home.”
“Yeah. Most of Luerssen’s patients have a history of noncompliant behavior, mostly in residential programs or with previous therapists. He had a few adolescents, too, whose primary presenting symptom was noncompliance and antisocial behavior. Anyway, Isabelle D’s parents were glad enough about the progress she was making to ignore some rather…disturbing personality changes. She stopped seeing her friends, her boyfriend-she said they were a bad influence, they had supported her eating-disordered behavior. Which is,” Temas shrugged, “fairly reasonable. She also stopped initiating conversation with her family, although she’d answer direct questions if asked. Except for work, school, and meals, she spent most of her time in her room, sitting at her desk, staring at her college textbooks-although she’d come out and participate in family activities if her parents asked. Her family reported that she was cooperative around the house, always did her homework, never missed a shift or a class, never talked back to her supervisor at work. All of which sounds good, but none of which was usual behavior for her. Her brother says, if you told her to go jump in the lake, she’d go and get her swimsuit. The parents were mildly concerned, but the brother was very concerned. He’s fourteen, so instead of talking to his parents about his concerns, he put a recording device in her purse before her therapy sessions with Doctor Luerssen.”
“Can I take you guyses order?” A waitress appears at the table and asks.
Temas hasn’t even opened his menu, but he answers, “I’ll have the hot turkey sandwich, with fries instead of mashed.”
“Gravy on the fries?”
“Please.”
She turns to James, who says, “Uh…do you have a reuben?”
“I can getcha a roast beef with kraut.”
“Close enough.” She leaves, and James continues, “So, the brother recorded her sessions?”
“Yes. He was even more concerned after he listened to the recordings, but didn’t disclose what he’d heard until his sister committed suicide.”
“Shit.” James sounds impressed.
“He happened to find her-overdosed on pills and choked on her own vomit. And he found her suicide note. After he shared both the note and the recordings with his parents, they sued the Center, Luerssen was fired, and they brought me in to help his patients recover from what he did to them.” Nearly all of what he’s said so far was covered in the newspaper article. He hasn’t violated anyone’s confidentiality-yet.
“So what was on the tapes?”
“It was a digital recording device,” Temas stalls.
“Whatever.”
“Isabelle D’s sessions with Dr. Luerssen, from what I could tell, consisted entirely of him weighing her, giving her an injection, asking five or six questions about her behavior over the week, and then haranguing her for the other forty minutes. I don’t think she said twenty words, total, in any of the sessions I listened to. He told her that she didn’t have a real disease, she was selfish, and ungrateful for what her parents provided for her, that they had sent her away, not to help her recover from her illness, but because of the inconvenience her behavior was causing them. He told her she was a stupid, spoiled bitch who stopped eating in order to get back at her loving parents for not letting her have her way. He told her that her disclosure, at the residential center, of sexual abuse by an uncle was simply another ploy to get her parents’ attention.
“Her suicide note said the same things, in much the same language.”
James is silent for a moment. When he finally speaks, he asks, “What did he inject her with?”
“Nobody knows. There’s nothing about it on her chart-on anyone’s chart.”
“Did he give House…?”
“Yes. Well, he gave him something. It could have been something different, but since we don’t know what the first thing was…”
“What does House say it was?”
“He doesn’t know.”
“He let this guy inject him with something without knowing what it was?”
Temas shrugs. “Apparently.”
“Did you do tox screens? On any of the surviving patients?”
“Unfortunately, no. I didn’t know about the injections until some patients started asking for them-then I figured out what the sounds on the recording must have been. By then it had been two weeks since any of them had seen Luerssen, so whatever it was had had time to work its way out of their systems by then.”
“Then shouldn’t he be getting better? If he’s not getting any more?”
Temas shrugged. “We don’t know that the drug, whatever it was, caused the personality changes. It may have just been a sedative, something so that the patients would sit quietly and listen to him.”
James makes a sound that is half amusement, half despair. “This would be right up House’s alley, if he was still with us. He’d figure out what the mystery poison is.”
Temas hesitates. He had assumed that physical traces of the drug were irrecoverable, that the only place the secret could still be hiding was inside his patients minds. “How would he do that?” he asks cautiously.
“Hair samples would be one place to start. And a lot of toxins are stored in fat cells. A liver biopsy might reveal something.”
The food comes; both men ignore it.
“He’d do an fMRI, maybe, to see if there are any physical changes in the brain. And he always searches the patients’ homes-it’s just possible that this Luerssen guy sent some of the stuff home with one of them, although that seems unlikely.” Wilson straightens up, the defeated slump coming out of his shoulders. “His team always runs the tests anyway, and they’ll have more ideas. It’s worth a shot. If we can find out what the stuff was, maybe…”
“Maybe we can figure out how to fix it,” Temas agrees. “Do it. If you start making progress, I’ll try to get you some other patients to test. It’s not like it’ll be hard to get them to consent.”
House’s appointment comes around a few days later. He drifts toward the shelf where the checkers set is, starting guiltily when Temas says, “Let’s do something different today.”
He scuttles to the chair, and sits with his hands folded. His eyes are downcast, but there’s an expectant tilt to his head.
“I talked to your friend James the other day.” Temas isn’t sure whether James told Greg about their meeting or not, but he wants to avoid even the impression that they’re keeping secrets from Greg.
“He’s not my friend,” Greg says automatically.
“No?”
Greg explains, “A real friend wouldn’t enable my addiction by supplying me with pills. Besides, junkies don’t have friends.”
Temas isn’t sure where to start. “He seemed quite concerned about you,” he suggests.
“He doesn’t really want me to get better,” Greg replies.
“What makes you think that?”
Greg looks stymied. “He’s an enabler?”
“Well, he told me he wanted to help you get better.”
“He’s lying. You can always tell when Jimmy’s lying.”
“Yeah? How can you tell?” Temas hopes the answer isn’t, “Because his mouth is moving.”
“I…don’t remember.” Greg thinks. “He…rubs the back of his neck. Like this.” He demonstrates. “And stammers a lot.”
“He didn’t do any of that,” Temas says.
Greg doesn’t answer.
“He thinks he might be able to find out what Dr. Luerssen was giving you in your shots.”
Greg’s eyes narrow. “I knew he wasn’t my friend.”
“How’s that?”
“He…” He looks baffled. “I don’t think I need the shots anymore. I’m better now.”
Temas realizes the misunderstanding. “No, I don’t think you do either. As a matter of fact, I think they might have been doing more harm than good, which is why I’d like to find out what they were.”
“Why don’t you just ask him?”
“Doctor Luerssen, you mean?”
Greg nods.
“He won’t say.”
“That’s strange. Doctor Luerssen wants me to get better.”
“Uh-huh.”
Temas’s skepticism must show in his tone-Greg retreats, looking abashed and guilty.
“Do you want to play something?” Temas asks.
Greg looks up. “I don’t think playing checkers is going to help me be better.”
It’s the first sign of anything approaching noncompliance that he’s seen from Greg. He wants to cheer, but instead says, “Maybe not. What should we do instead?”
Greg stares at his hands.
“Should we talk about Wilson some more?”
Shrug.
“How long have you two known each other?”
“ ‘Bout…ten years.”
“So you were friends before you hurt your leg.”
“Yeah.”
“Sometimes when someone gets sick, their friends don’t know what to say, or do, so they just stay away,” Temas suggests.
“Wilson’s an oncologist. He doesn’t mind being around sick people. He came to see me almost every day, kept bringing me food and making me walk places.”
“Sounds like a good friend.”
“Yeah.” Greg twitches slightly. “That was before I was an addict.”
Temas nods. “How’d your addiction start, anyway?” he asks casually. There’s a version of it in his chart, but he wonders what Greg will say.
“I was prescribed Vicodin for post-surgical pain after I had my infarction. I continued to take the medication after I recovered because I had developed a physical and psychological dependence,” he recites.
“I see.” He nods at Greg’s leg. “Does your leg still hurt at all?”
“I experience some psychosomatic pain because of my addiction.”
“How long has that been going on?”
“Five and a half years.”
“What are you doing for pain management now?” He should have asked James, but he hadn’t realized at the time that he was the same Dr. Wilson who had prescribed for Greg before.
“Nothing,” Greg answers suspiciously. “I have control over my addiction. I’m better now.”
“Does your leg still hurt?”
“It’s all in my head.”
Temas isn’t sure he believes him-Greg doesn’t walk like a man whose pain is all in his head-but he’d better not press his luck. “If you want to explore some non-narcotic pain management options, let me know and I’ll make some referrals. Have you tried acupuncture?”
“No.”
“It might be worth trying.”
“I’m not in any pain.”
“Okay. So, after you’d recovered from surgery, what were things like with James?”
“Wilson? I don’t know.”
“Well, what kinds of things do you do together?”
“I don’t associate with him anymore.”
“Right. What did you, I mean?”
“I don’t know. He bought me lunch. A lot. He’d come over to my place, watch TV. He stayed over with me for a while last year. He cooks.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. He used to make these macadamia nut pancakes, they were really good.” Greg looks wistful. “Sometimes we throw things at people off the balcony.”
“What kinds of things?”
“Grapes. Cherry tomatoes. Things like that.”
Temas had been imagining bricks, for some reason.
“It’s kind of fun. We used to play golf together, before my leg. I don’t know. He works right next door, so we didn’t make plans much. We just, you know, hang out. Used to.”
“Sounds like you miss him,” Temas observes.
“Yeah. Well. I can’t see him anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Because he supports my addictive behavior,” Greg recites.
“How’d he do that?”
“He prescribed narcotics that were not medically necessary.”
Of course he had. “How much were you taking, toward the end? How fast would you go through 30 pills?”
“Two or three days.”
“What did James say about that? Did he ever encourage you to take more pills, try to get you to take something stronger?”
“Wilson? No. He was always telling me not to take so many. Couple of times I even had to forge the scrip on his pad because he wouldn’t give me any more.”
“So he didn’t always give you pills when you asked for them.”
“No, not always. I’d have to limp around for a couple of hours, telling him how I was in pain, and Stacy mutilated my leg, and eventually he’d give me some.”
Temas wonders who Stacy is, but decides not to pursue that yet. “Why do you think he kept giving you the pills?”
“Because he doesn’t want me to get better.”
“Why do you think he doesn’t want you to get better?”
Greg looks at him like he’s said something very stupid, and says very slowly, “Because he kept giving me the pills.”
“So he kept giving you the pills because he doesn’t want you to be well, and you know that he doesn’t want you to be well because he kept giving you the pills.”
“Exactly.” Greg doesn’t seem to realize that doesn’t make any sense.
“Can you think of any other reasons why he may have kept giving you the pills?”
“I don’t know.”
Temas lets the silence stretch out. They’ve gotten a lot of work done this session; there’s no hurry. “Do you think it’s possible that he believed you were still in pain?”
Greg rubs his thigh and thinks. “Maybe?”
“Maybe,” Temas agrees. “I’m not sure I’d know what to do, if I saw my friend becoming addicted, but I knew he was legitimately in pain. I might do exactly what James did.”
Greg shrugs.
“Well, our time’s about up. Give it some thought, okay?”
Greg nods, and shambles out.