Things do not look like they are going well for Parker. Have a listen to Part 6 of The Patient That Nearly Drove Me Out of Medicine by Jasper DeWitt.
The ten minutes it took to arrive at Dr. G-----‘s office were the longest ten minutes I’ve ever experienced. I had no idea what would happen to me, or even what just had. I kept replaying the things Joe had said in my own mind, then going back over Dr. G-----‘s warnings about his madness being contagious, wondering which was true, or if everyone had just been lying to me the whole time.
Was I going crazy? Had the stress of being caught simply made me snap? If I had been sane before getting caught, did that mean that Dr. G----- and her minions might still do something to me? If I hadn’t been, when had Joe’s madness spread to me? Was I insane even now? If I was, then why did everything still seem so grounded and real around me? And if I was sane, then how had Joe been able to laugh in exactly the right way to remind me of my worst childhood nightmare: of the nightmare that had made me realize what my worst fear was in the first place?
My frantic, confused, panicky thoughts were interrupted as Hank yanked the door to Dr. G-----‘s office open and shoved me inside without a word. My nose nearly made contact with the carpet as I fell forward from his push, and it took me a moment to steady myself and realize who was in the room with me.
Dr. G----- was there, of course, leaning on her desk and glaring down at me with an expression that made me think of a hawk regarding a rotting carcass and deciding it wasn’t worth eating. But she wasn’t the only one at the desk. Seated behind her, in the well-appointed leather armchair usually reserved for the Chief of Medicine, sat a wizened, tired looking old man in a heavily patched sport coat, regarding me with hard eyes over a pair of well-worn silver spectacles. I had no idea who this stranger was, but if Dr. G----- was letting him use her chair, then he was obviously someone important. He looked far too old to be a plainclothes detective, as his wrinkled face and thinning silver hair marked him as a man who couldn’t have been less than 70 or 80 years old. But who else could he be?
The man cleared his throat and spoke in a patrician sounding, Mid-Atlantic accent that seemed oddly familiar to me, even though I couldn’t place it.
“So this is the latest one, is it, Rose?”
Dr. G----- didn’t reply, but simply nodded. The gesture immediately struck me as out of place, and in a moment, I realized why. Her expression as she’d inclined her head had none of the curtness or haughtiness I’d seen her display toward me. Instead, it was almost girlish in its deference. Not caring about the cause at that moment, but simply glad to have scented weakness, I pushed myself to my feet and jabbed my finger at her accusingly.
“Alright,” I barked, “I don’t know if you’re planning to fire me, or do something worse, but before you do, I want some fucking…”
“Parker--,” began Dr. G-----, but I barreled right past her.
“…answers! Did you think you could mislead me about a patient and that I’d take it lying down? Is all that crap in Joe’s file just there to keep him here?”
“Parker—“
“And even if it isn’t, why did you send your two thugs to spy on me every chance they got if you’ve got nothing to hide? Why’d you have one of them drag me here like I’m a prisoner? And how much have you been spying on me, if you knew what I was—“
“PARKER.”
Dr. G-----’s white hot voice seared through the room and almost on instinct, I shut up. The old man behind the desk chuckled drily.
“He’s a feisty one. Reminds me of someone, Rose,” he said. Dr. G-----‘s pained expression gave me another momentary bit of courage.
“And that’s another thing. Who the hell are—“
“Parker, you are going to want to shut up and sit down right now before you say something we both regret,” Dr. G----- hissed at me, standing up from her leaning position. She was still barely taller than me in her heels, but her aspect and ramrod straight posture made her almost tower as she said it. Not wanting to push any luck I might have, I cast my eyes around for the nearest chair and sat down immediately. She exhaled slowly and leaned back on her desk.
“Now,” she said, “let’s get one thing straight before we go any further, Parker. I have no intention of hurting you. And, although you pushed your luck on this point very far, I am not going to fire you, either.”
My mouth fell open. She gave a scornful laugh.
“Quiet, I see. Good. Keep it that way, because as of now, you haven’t said anything that suggests you’ve done anything wrong, and therefore, whatever you might have been planning to do in Joe’s room tonight, we can both ignore it,” she said smoothly. “Now, to answer both your implicit and explicit questions, I sent my orderlies to watch you because that has been standard procedure for every doctor Joe’s had since 1983. Normally, we only send them to watch every few weeks, but the reaction you had after your first session with him convinced me we should keep you under more constant surveillance.”
I started to ask a question, but her hand shot up so quickly that I clapped my mouth shut as if on command.
“First off, you spent almost twice as long in Joe’s room as anyone else has on their first session. Secondly, you didn’t look afraid so much as queasy and uncertain, neither of which portended that you’d gotten the same experience as his other doctors. In fact, the more we watched you, the less like his other doctors you got. For one thing, you kept going back in for similarly long sessions, and sometimes you even looked happy or relieved when you walked out. It didn’t make any sense to the orderlies, or to me. So I did what any physician faced with a mystery does. I got a second opinion.”
“That’s where I come in,” said the older man.
“I’m coming to you,” Dr. G----- shot over her shoulder at the old man reproachfully. She turned back to me.
“I suppose this is as good a time as any to introduce the two of you. Parker, meet Dr. Thomas A------, the first man to treat Joe, and my earliest mentor as a psychiatrist.”
Suddenly, I realized where I recognized his voice from. It was, in fact, simply an aged version of the voice I’d heard on the tape of Joe’s first session. I almost had trouble believing it. If Dr. A------ was still alive, he must’ve been quite old, yet his mental lucidity was clearly not only intact, but evidently just as sharp as it had been 20 years ago. Though, I thought, however sharp Dr. A------‘s mind was, it couldn’t be as sharp as his eyes as he looked at me.
After surveying me for a moment, the older man nodded. “A pleasure, Parker,” he said. “Though I really can’t say I’m as impressed with you as I’d like to be. You might have the distinction of being the worst failure as a physician that Joe has ever had, given what we seem to have caught you trying to do.”
The words felt like acid poured over an open wound. I’d never heard such harshness delivered with such impersonal coolness in my life. My face must have fallen, because the old man gave me an even sterner look.
“Not used to being told you’re a fool, I see,” he said. “Well, you are, and thank God you’re a predictable one. Otherwise your idiocy might have done real damage. And to answer your question of how I knew what you were going to do, it’s simple. Rose told me that your greatest fear is not being able to save someone you care about. She also told me that there was no one on staff who mattered to you, and that everyone who did matter was likely well out of reach of anyone locked in this hospital. It followed from those facts that the only way for Joe to make you experience your worst fear was to make you care about – and fail to save -- him.”
He gave an exasperated sigh and looked up at Dr. G-----. “I don’t blame you for not seeing it, Rose, you fell victim to a similar bit of trickery, if I recall correctly.”
Dr. G----- flushed beet red, which made Dr. A------ roll his eyes.
“Yes, I know, you hate being told what a fool you can be just as much as our boy, here, but you were young. You grew out of it,” he said with slightly more gentleness, before turning back to me and resuming his stony demeanor. “Which is something you’ll have to do, and fast, after that stunt you attempted tonight, Parker. I’d have fired you on the spot, but Rose has a high opinion of your intellect and thinks you might be able to give us some insight into that walking mental plague we call a patient.”
“That’s enough, Thomas,” said Dr. G-----. “I don’t want to make the poor kid quit just yet. And anyway, even though you ended up being right, your hypothesis was only a guess. I know how you like to show off, but I think Parker is much more likely to learn his lesson once he finds out how we knew what he was going to do.”
Dr. A------ waved his hand irritably, as if to say, “Well, get on with it, then.” Dr. G----- turned back to me and cleared her throat.
“Parker, there is a reason I keep referring to what you were planning to do in the vaguest possible terms. It’s because I want to be able to keep plausible deniability. You see, we only have one person who claims to have heard you confess your intentions, and given who that is, we can dismiss it so long as you don’t say anything explicitly confessional. Now, I’m going to tell you who our witness is, but before I do, you have to promise that you’re not going to say something stupid that confirms their accusation. Deal?”
Feeling bewildered at what I might be about to hear, I nodded slowly. At that point, my relief at the lengths she was going to in order to let me keep my job was all that kept me from screaming with confusion. Dr. G---- gave me a brittle smile.
“Good. Parker, we brought you here because one of Joe’s orderlies told us he’d heard that you were planning to help Joe escape from the hospital. And when we asked how he knew, he said he’d been asked to tell us – by Joe himself.”
As the weight of those words slammed into me, I realized that even if I’d wanted to confess, I couldn’t have. All of a sudden, my spine was ice, my mouth was dry, and I felt like I might throw up if I let myself try to speak. Seeing my expression, Dr. G----- opened a drawer in her desk and pulled out a bottle of what looked like Scotch, as well as a glass. She poured a generous helping and handed it to me.
“Drink that, you look like you need it,” she said. “Doctor’s orders.”
Despite the roiling feeling in my stomach, I did as she ordered. At first, it made me feel sicker, but then a numbing warmth spread over my brain and I felt my muscles relax ever so slightly. It was a welcome relief after what I’d just heard. Dr. G----- gave me a sympathetic look. Dr. A------, however, simply looked grimly amused.
“Rose, you disappoint me,” he said. “I never drank a drop of that stuff and I withstood what that little shit could do to people.”
“Oh shut up, Thomas,” said Dr. G----- as she pulled out another glass and poured herself a drink. “We can’t all be puritans.”
“Evidently,” said Dr. A------. “Nevertheless, I think you’ve done enough talking. This miscreant needs to tell us just what the hell he was thinking before we go any further. Despite being on the job only a month, he might have spent more time actually talking to Joe than most of the others. He needs to tell us what happened, and what he knows.”
Maybe it was the shock of what I’d just heard, maybe it was all my anger looking for a new outlet after everything that had motivated it had been stripped away, maybe it was the Scotch, or maybe it was all of the above, but something snapped in me then. I was sick of being talked about so dismissively, as if I were a naughty child who wasn’t even there. I was sick of having these revelations dumped on me without getting any chance to process them. But more than anything else, I was sick to my stomach at the thought that I might have just been set up to fail. I glared back across the table at Dr. A------, pouring enough contempt into my gaze to match his cool, disdainful look a hundred times over.
“Not a chance, old man,” I said, not even stopping in the face of Dr. G-----‘s gasp of outrage. “From what I’ve gathered, you and your ‘student’ here put me on a collision course with something you fully expected to hurt me, and didn’t even tell me everything you knew before I went in. I wasn’t supposed to cure him, was I? I was just a lab rat for you and her, because you wanted to see what he did to me. Well, I’m done with it. If you want to know what I found out talking to him, then you’d better let me in on what you know. All of it. Like why she tried to commit suicide, or why you gave up on treating him in the first fucking place, or why you kept putting vulnerable patients in harm’s way long after you knew what he was capable of.”
There was the sound of a dull thud, and I realized that Dr. G----- had dropped her glass in shock. Dr. A------, however, appeared unruffled, though I could tell that whatever air of geniality he’d tried to assume had dropped as soon as I’d finished speaking. The effect would’ve cowed me instantly if I hadn’t been so full of my own righteous anger. I’d felt like a small animal staring down a predator when facing Dr. G-----, but meeting the bloodless, icy gaze of that hunched over old man, I barely felt acknowledged as a living being at all. More like a statistic that had had the effrontery to talk back to him. But I didn’t back down. I met his eyes for a long, terrible pause before he finally settled back in his chair and gave an irritated snort.
“Well, there’s probably no harm in giving you a bit more information,” he said. “Lord knows I have little enough to do tonight. But understand this, Parker. If you want to hear all the details, then you’ll start by accepting this: There is no curing that horror downstairs. There is only containing him.”
I didn’t nod. “I’m his doctor,” I said with deliberate coldness. “I’ll be the judge of that.”
If looks could kill, Dr. A------‘s expression probably would have rendered my corpse unrecognizable.
“Yes, I suppose you will,” he said softly, and when he spoke again, his voice was cold enough to freeze the Atlantic Ocean. “But just as you were earlier this evening, you are wrong on a very important point: You are not his doctor. You are, and have only ever been, just a tool to get data on him. I am his doctor, and I have born that cross since he first entered this hospital. It took away my career, and it’s going to take away my retirement. It is my life’s work. It would be Rose’s when I’m gone, but I don’t intend to leave it unsolved that long. You do not, and will never understand what it is to be the last person standing between Joe and a world that cannot understand or resist him. So keep a civil tongue in your head from now on, or you’ll find yourself on the curb.”
Anger tempted me to reply, but some part of me knew it would be a terrible idea. This was all the concession I was going to get out of this bitter, proud man, and it was more than I had any right to expect. So, forcing my frustration down to a simmer, I gave him the most deferential nod that I could. It seemed to appease him.
“Well, then,” he said. “Rose, why don’t you tell him about the last smart, headstrong young doctor to try and treat our pet monster?”
I looked up at Dr. G-----, and to my surprise, she wasn’t looking at me with the aloof air she’d used before. Instead, her eyes were filled with sadness and pity.
“I’m so sorry,” she mouthed, so that only I could see. Then, she began speaking in the crisp voice of a physician presenting her findings.
“When I began to treat Joe, he was only six years old, and had been admitted to the hospital barely a month before being assigned to me,” she began. “At the time, as you know from reading my notes, my theory was simple: that he was showing the signs of sadistic personality disorder and sociopathy as a result of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder brought on by his years of untreated night terrors, which were able to disturb him so successfully because of their apparent comorbidity with sleep paralysis and acute entomophobia. His evident psychological progeria was simply a defense mechanism designed to make him seem as if he had more control over the situation than he did, and his monstrous behavior was an act designed to make him feel more confident in facing the monster he imagined. Frankly, I thought the whole thing was embarrassingly easy, and a waste of my time, as you probably guessed from my notes.”
She paused, to collect her thoughts, then continued speaking. “My proposed course of treatment was to get him to face the trauma of his night terrors through a combination of hypnosis therapy, talk therapy, and the usage of sedatives when he slept in order to prevent the nightmares from manifesting. This much you also know from the notes. However, what you may not know is that my treatment worked. Spectacularly. In fact, Joe barely showed any signs of the disorders I’d heard reported in Dr. A------‘s initial diagnosis after the first couple days. Rather, something else manifested. He became very…attached to me.”
She swallowed, and I could tell the memories were still painful. “It’s not an exaggeration, in fact, to say Joe began relating to me like a surrogate mother. I already knew from his reports of his own upbringing that his parents had been distant at best, so this was not much of a surprise, but the more attached he got, the more he seemed to heal, and the more and more devoted he became. He seemed less and less like a proto-sociopath, and more and more like a frightened young child.”
Her voice hitched. “You have to understand something before I go any further. I’d also had a very chilly relationship with my parents from early on, and I’d had almost no friends even through my medical school days. I’d rarely dated, and to this day I’ve never married or had any children, because I simply don’t let people get close to me if I can help it. However...something in the way Joe related to me brought out all my mothering instincts. For the first time in my life, I felt needed and loved unconditionally, and while I tried to keep my medical distance, there was just something about him that made my defenses against affection melt. And the more nurturing I became, the more his condition seemed to improve.”
The tears in her eyes were obvious now, and she blinked them back hastily, even as her voice became brittle with the strain. “I was sure I’d be able to get him discharged very soon around my fourth month, and so as a final experiment to test his ability to empathize, I let him have a pet. A little cat, because I’d grown up with cats, and I thought he might relate to them the same way I had, being someone who had trouble around other people. I don’t recall what he called her. Something about a flower, I think.”
“Fiberwood Flower,” I said softly. She looked at me, wide-eyed.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, exactly. How did you—“
“Just finish the story, Rose,” said Dr. A------. “We’ll be able to find out what he knows much quicker once you’ve finished.”
Dr. G----- sucked in her breath and nodded, her sharp veneer covering her previous vulnerability like a well-worn mask.
“Anyway,” she continued, “I gave him Fiberwood Flower, and made Dr. A------ agree that if he took care of her properly for a week, that would prove he’d been cured of his antisocial tendencies.”
Her face clouded over, but not with sadness this time. With anger. “He treated that poor cat like an angel for six days,” she said, “and then on the last day, when I walked into his cell, I found her corpse lying on the ground, with her head ripped off. And just above her corpse, he’d scrawled an arrow pointing down in her blood, with the inscription ‘for Nosey Rosie.’”
Her voice was now hard as diamonds. “Now, no one’s called me Nosey Rosie since I got teased on the playground at his age, and I don’t think he ever heard anyone call me by my first name. He shouldn’t have even begun to be able to guess at that name. But he had. And as soon as I walked in, he started laughing. And – and I’d still swear to this years after it happened – it sounded exactly like the laughter of kids who used to bully me when I was his age. And something snapped when I heard him. I ran out of that cell, filed my resignation and…well, you know the rest.”
Her face was a mask of cold fury, hurt, and rage now. I reached an arm up out of reflexive empathy, but she swatted it away before I could get very far, and gave me a look that said very clearly that no matter how much it hurt to remember this, she still had her pride and wasn’t going to suffer the pity of a subordinate. I settled for trying to give her a look that was both sympathetic and respectful.
Then I heard Dr. A------‘s voice from behind her.
“So, Parker, you still think you can cure the little bastard?” he asked. “Care to suggest a diagnosis for someone who was able to just instantly pull an old schoolyard taunt out of thin air to mock a woman whose vulnerable spots he’d been able to reach as if by magic? Well?”
Hating myself for it, I shook my head helplessly. “I didn’t know,” I said. “I didn’t…I…I don’t know.”
“Of course you don’t,” said Dr. A------, a bitter and cruel note of satisfaction in his voice. “You have no idea what’s wrong with him. What’s more, you’ve bought into all the mythology surrounding him because you’re young, you’re impressionable, and you don’t know any better. That’s why you’re not his Doctor. But don’t worry. I am his Doctor. And I’m almost certain that I do know better.”
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Otis Jiry