Grimoire Diabolique

“Instead of stalking down James Street every day after work, you’ll be coming here.” She finished writing, handed him a small slip of paper. “Here’s a prescription for a drug called Hydroxyzine. Ten milligrams four times a day. It will help ease the physical aspects of your dependency. In the meantime, I’ll schedule you at Harborview for a physical: blood tests, histamine counts, and the like, and also your first atropine injection, which helps take the edge off too. Then we’ll set you up for a written battery—MMPIs, TATs and TEDs, the Baley Scales and the Rorschachs—these are tests which might seem frivolous to you, but their conclusions will help me get a better fix on the more systematized aspects of your psychological make-up.”

“I’ll do it,” Barrows said without pause.

“Try to control your urges. You’ll probably fail for now, and that’s all right.”

He took the prescription, looked at it as if gazing upon something dear. For a moment, he wanted to cry.

After all these years, he’d found someone who would help him.

Time to start going back to church, he thought.

Dr. Untermann’s regal face appraised him, and she smiled. “Have no fear, Mr. Barrows. You’ve made the first, most crucial step. You’ve come for help. And I’ll help you. So many other never do that. We’ll see this thing through…and fix it.”

Barrows felt choked up as he stood. “Thank you…” His gaze drifted from her face to the wall behind her, which was covered with degrees and certificates. “You must be…pretty good.”

“Not to sound pretentious, Mr. Barrows, but as for treating cases such as yours, I’m probably the best in the country. Go home now. Think about what we’ve discussed, and envision the end of your affliction.”

“I will.”

“Tomorrow at six, then?”

“Yes…”

“And get that prescription filled tonight.”

“I will.”

She lit another long slim cigarette: long and slim and refined like herself. “Goodnight, Mr. Barrows.”

Misty-eyed, Barrows left the office. Part of his psyche, of course, urged him to head right back down to his hunting grounds and search for the strange, tender morsels of his need.

But not tonight.

Because as he made his exit from the frosty, handsome woman’s office, he realized he was leaving with something he’d never had in the last two decades.

He was leaving with hope.

««—»»

It was like heroin. It was like high-grade crack or freshly distilled crystal meth. Extreme obsessive-compulsive disorders affected the same neurotransmitters that the most highly addictive narcotics affected. Marsha. Untermann had seen enough victims to know not only this but the ultimate implications.

You always start a patient off with a positive purview—that was essential—but the rest was never easy. Sometimes it was impossible, and Dr. Untermann knew impossible when she saw it.

She knew that Barrows wouldn’t make it.

Her black Bally high heels clicked along the clean cement of the parking garage beneath the twenty-story mirror-faceted Millennium Tower, and it was a nice, new black Mercedes 450 that she slid into. She lit another cigarette—a beastly habit, she knew—but didn’t yet start the engine and leave for her lakeside Fremont condo. Instead…

She thought.

Extreme obsessive-compulsive disorders—OCD’s? Especially the really radical ones?

The trichotillomanics, the aphasics, the dysgeusaics? The success rate was actually so low, it was scarcely worth treatment. It was actually less than the seven-percent success-rate for crack addicts. Much less.

The same went for the disorders akin to dritiphily.

Dr. Untermann had learned much in her nearly thirty years of abnormal clinical psychiatry. She’d learned that some things weren’t worth trying to treat.

She heard the footsteps even before the figure turned the corner. She powered down the driver’s side window.

“I got a lot this time,” a sand-papery voice told her.

“I’m pleased.”

Dirty hands passed in the parcel. Untermann took it and handed the figure a $100 bill. “Thank you,” she said. “See you tomorrow.”

Her purveyor said nothing in response. He simply took the money and walked away. The back of his coat read KING STREET GOSPEL HOMELESS SHELTER.

Untermann gave a hot sigh when she opened the parcel: a paper bag containing a plastic Zip-Loc bag, the one-gallon size. She unzipped the bag, inhaled the aroma, and nearly swooned; the bag was heavy with various vomit. Gritty. Fuming.

Like chunky, pink oatmeal.

No, some things weren’t worth trying to treat. But capitulation was a treatment of its own, wasn’t it? Sometimes you just had to surrender to the incontrovertible truth.

Be who you are, she thought in the ultimate Freudian nod. She flicked out her cigarette. Accept it, and adapt.

That’s what she had done. And it worked. The verity of the soul, however unseemly at times, must always be embraced. Not ignored or fought against.

Embraced.