Day 54: Doctor's Office 5 (Dr. Venkman) [Fourth Shift]
It was amazing how much better one could feel after venting about suspicious goings-on at work with someone who shared said suspicion. Granted, that only upgraded Venkman from "annoyed" to "annoyed and vindicated," but it was still a step better than he'd been at that morning
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Venkman had called him 'Joshua', just like the nurses and the soldier that had read the roll this morning. He wasn't entirely sure of the reasoning behind it; 'Joshua Takahashi' was not and had never been an alias he'd used before, so it wasn't a matter of being admitted under a false name... at least, not a false name that he had selected. And then there was Fai, too, who had been called 'Robin' by a nurse, and a 'Mr. Peace' that Izaya could only guess was supposed to be Shizuo. If everyone, or at least some portion of the patient population, was being called by an alias...
"No, 'Josh' is fine," Izaya said, taking a seat in a chair across from the desk. If Venkman already knew his real name, so be it... but it had sounded more like he was fishing for information.
Of course, two could play at that game, even if Izaya's foremost question was rather direct. He gave Venkman a thin smile, shifting in his seat as though he were trying to get comfortable. "May I ask why I'm here? The nurse was surprisingly unhelpful."
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No matter. Maybe he could try the name thing some other time. Or even later in the session, depending on how things went. "What, here as in this office?" he answered, gesturing up over his shoulder at the room. "Or here as in the whole of Crazytown, USA? I'd think you'd have figured out the latter one, at least, but hey, you're right about the nurses. I wouldn't be surprised if they told you you were here on an all-expenses-paid vacation from sanity for all the useful info they give out."
No, Venkman wasn't frustrated at all. What gave that impression?
"If you mean here, then it's nothing too surprising. We're just here to talk, 's all." Supposedly, he thought, folding his fingers together on the desk and leaning forward on his elbows. "We're gonna try and get a sense of what it is that's touched you in the head and how we're gonna fix that."
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The question, though, was if there was some other purpose behind the hospital... why all this playing pretend?
"I see," Izaya said calmly once Venkman had finished. He had not, in fact, figured out why exactly he was in the hospital in the first place (as well as why Celty was here, and Kida, and Shizuo), but he kept the question to himself. It would be better to find out what he could without revealing too much of his own hand.
He laced his fingers together in his lap. "And how do you propose we 'fix' that? As far as I'm aware, I'm perfectly sane... That is, I don't think I'm crazy."
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He realized he wasn't going to get too far on rhetorical questions alone, so he didn't dwell on that point. "As for the whole 'fixing' thing, that all depends on how these sessions go. Some people? All they need is talk. The human brain can do some amazing things on its own sometimes, under the right conditions," he started to explain, still on a bit of a "brain" kick following Hunk's session. "And some end up needed prescriptions - again, which ones depending on specific needs and diagnoses and whatnot."
He regarded Joshua with a nod, noting the way the boy's calm never once broke, even slightly. "So what, I'm curious, makes you so sure you're perfectly sane?" he asked, careful to keep his usual judging tone out of the mix for the moment. Mostly, anyway. He couldn't help a slight raise of an eyebrow even with that in mind.
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"Touché," Izaya commented, smiling to himself. Such a man would hardly be common, but Izaya couldn't say that there was no one in the world who could recognize and acknowledge his own insanity. There could be, and Izaya wanted to see it if there was.
Venkman went on to answer Izaya's question, and he felt a jolt of delight shoot through him when the doctor mentioned how amazing the human brain could be. He was right, of course: the human brain (and the human it belonged to, by extension) was incredible under the right conditions, when provided with the right stimuli... But even ordinary things could get the most extraordinary results, as well.
He was quiet for a few seconds when Venkman turned the conversation back to him. He didn't particularly think he needed any "fixing" (though he was sure others might say differently), but talking was something he could certainly do.
"Well, to start: sanity is simply rationality. Setting aside theories about whether humans are naturally prone to be rational or irrational, if they at least possess the ability to make rational decisions, that would make them sane. With that in mind, I believe that I'm fully capable of rational thought," Izaya said, laying out his reasoning. He privately admitted that he could and would go to extremes-according to certain points of view-for his hobbies, but that was a choice to be made every time, not an inescapable impulse or a lack of reason. But it was still a choice he would make every time for his love of humanity.
Izaya paused as another thought occurred to him, and then continued, "-Ah, unless we're discussing 'sane' and 'insane' as the presence or absence of a mental disorder... though I'm sure some people could remain sane even when acting under mental illness, or even insane without the influence of one-as you said, the human brain can do some amazing things. But if I'm supposed to explain why I believe I don't have a mental illness, I'm afraid you have me at a disadvantage: it seems that it would be much easier to prove the presence of a disorder over the absence of one."
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In all seriousness, Josh was fitting the pattern of intelligent, entirely lucid patients he had been seeing. The only thing wrong with any of these people had been a wrong name and a convoluted, made-up backstory. Fugue states were the most likely to match these situations, right down to the spontaneous recoveries many Landel's patients experienced, but dissociative fugue was so rare. Could it really be affecting this many people at once?
Well, this is a possibly a top secret conspiracy hospital. You never know.
"Try Door #2 there, wise guy," Venkman answered after Joshua was done his little treatise on the human condition. "Yeah, I mean a mental disorder. We're not in Philosophy 101 here. You're standing there in the world's most embarrassing t-shirt, c'mon."
He took a pause there, switching gears. "Let's try this from another angle, how 'bout?" he suggested, flipping open Joshua's file and scanning the page for notes on the boy's condition before and after arrival. Ah, there it was. "What does the name 'Izaya Orihara' mean to you? Wanna tell me a little bit about him?"
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He hadn't expected his name to be mentioned after that, though. The sudden use of it answered one question-that yes, Venkman (and probably the nurses as well, if not the soldiers) did indeed know his true name-but it also created a plethora of others. The use of another name when speaking with him was deliberate, not ignorant, but what was the purpose of it? Were they trying in some half-hearted way to try to lead him into thinking that he was crazy? Until the soldiers had arrived he might have excused them if they truly believed that he was, but today seemed to confirm, if nothing else, that the hospital was merely for show. There was more going on here than there seemed to be.
Still, he wasn't going to give Venkman the satisfaction of anything that might have resembled the answer, or reaction, he was likely expecting. All Izaya did was give a casual shrug.
"It doesn't mean much," he answered, turning his head to look away. He'd already committed to being 'Josh' for Venkman, so he'd stick to that... See where it got him. "I won't claim that I've never heard of him-you must know that would be a lie or you wouldn't have known that name in the first place-but the name doesn't have any particular significance. It's merely an alias that I picked at random, that I've used once or twice-all in good fun, of course. I thought it might be interesting to pretend to be someone else as a joke, but all I can tell you about 'him'"-he emphasized the word, and then paused for a couple of seconds-"is that 'he is no different from me, since we are one and the same."
He looked back at Venkman, giving him a thin smile. "Of course, the whole thing was in terribly bad taste. I can assure you I've learned my lesson," he added, trying to test the waters to see if Venkman knew anything about his actual aliases.
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