The doctor instructed the actor to get off his head and then to sit on the sofa.
Ever the exhibitionist, the heartthrob was wearing only a pair of black bikini briefs. He was as fit as a sixteen-year-old, lean and well-muscled, in spite of his formidable list of self-destructive habits.
He crossed the room with the lithe grace of a ballet dancer. Indeed, although his personality was deeply repressed and although, in this state, he was hardly more self-aware than a turnip, he moved as if performing. Evidently, his conviction that he was at all times being watched and adored by admirers was not an attitude that he had acquired as fame had corrupted him; it was a conviction rooted in his very genes.
While the actor waited, Dr. Ahriman took off his suit coat and rolled up his shirtsleeves. He checked his reflection in a mirror above a sideboard. Perfect. His forearms were powerful, thatched with hair, manly without being Neanderthalian. When he left this room at midnight and strolled down the hall to Caulfield’s room, he would sling his coat over his shoulder, the very picture of a weary, hardworking, deeply committed, and sexy man of medicine.
Ahriman drew a chair to the sofa and sat facing the actor. “Be calm.”
“I am calm.”
Jiggle, jiggle, the blue eyes that made Nurse Ganguss weak.
This prince of the box office had come to Ahriman the younger rather than to any other therapist because of the doctor’s Hollywood pedigree. Ahriman the elder, Josh, had been dead of petits-fours poisoning when this lad had still been failing math, history, and assorted other courses in junior high school, so the two had never worked together. But the actor reasoned that if the great director had won two Oscars, then the son of the great director must be the best psychiatrist in the world. “Except, maybe, for Freud,” he had told the doctor, “but he’s way over there in Europe somewhere, and I can’t be flying back and forth all the time for sessions.”
After Robert Downey Jr. was finally sent to prison for a long stay, this hunk of marketable meat had worried that he, too, might be caught by “fascist drug-enforcement agents.” While he was loath to change his lifestyle to please the forces of repression, he was even less enthusiastic about sharing a prison cell with a homicidal maniac who had a seventeen-inch neck and no gender preferences.
Although Ahriman regularly turned away patients with serious drug problems, he had taken on this one. The actor moved in elite social circles, where he could make rare mischief with a singularly high entertainment value for the doctor. Indeed, already, utilizing the actor, an extraordinary game was being prepared for play, one that would have profound national and international consequences.
“I have some important instructions for you,” Ahriman said.
Someone rapped urgently on the door to the suite.
Martie was trying to get Skeet into a bathrobe, but he was resisting.
“Honey,” she said, “it’s chilly tonight. You can’t go outside in just these thin pajamas.”
“This robe sucks,” Skeet protested. “They provided it here. It’s not mine, Martie. It’s all nubbly with fuzz balls, and I hate the stripes.”
In his prime, before drugs wasted him, the kid had drawn women the way the scent of raw beef brought Valet running. In those days, he’d been a good dresser, the male bird in full plumage. Even now, in his ruin, Skeet’s sartorial good taste occasionally resurfaced, although Martie didn’t understand why it had to surface
Snapping shut the packed suitcase, Dusty said, “Let’s go.”
Improvising frantically, Martie tore the blanket off Skeet’s bed and draped it over his shoulders. “How’s this?”
“Sort of American Indian,” he said, pulling the blanket around himself. “I like it.”
She took Skeet by the arm and hustled him toward the door, where Dusty was waiting.
“Wait!” Skeet said, halting, turning. “The lottery tickets.”
“What lottery tickets?”
“In the nightstand,” Dusty said. “Tucked in the Bible.”
“We can’t leave without them,” Skeet insisted.
In response to the rapping on the door, the doctor called out impatiently, “I am not to be disturbed here.”
A hesitation, and then more rapping.
To the actor, Ahriman said quietly, “Go into the bedroom, lie down on the bed, and wait for me.”
As though the direction he had just received was from a lover promising all the delights of the flesh, the actor rose from the sofa and glided out of the room. Each liquid step, each roll of the hips was sufficiently seductive to fill theater seats all over the world.
The rapping sounded a third time. “Dr. Ahriman? Dr. Ahriman?”
As he moved toward the door, the doctor decided that if this interruption was courtesy of Nurse Woosten, he would apply himself more diligently to the problem of what to do with her tongue.
Martie took the pair of lottery tickets out of the Bible and tried to give them to Skeet.
Clutching the blanket-cloak with his left hand, he waved away the tickets with his right. “No, no! If I touch them, they won’t be worth anything, all the luck will go out of them.”
As she thrust the tickets into one of her pockets, she heard someone farther down the hall calling for Dr. Ahriman.
When Ahriman opened the door to 246, he was even more dismayed to see Jasmine Hernandez than he would have been to see Nurse Woosten with pink tongue rampant.
Jasmine was an excellent RN, but she was too much like a few especially annoying girls the doctor had encountered in his boyhood and early adolescence, a breed of females that he referred to as The Knowers. They were the ones who mocked him with their eyes, with sly little looks and smug smiles that he caught in his peripheral vision as he turned away from them. The Knowers seemed to see through him, to understand him in ways he didn’t wish to be understood. Worse, he had the curious feeling that they knew something hilarious about him, as well, something he himself didn’t know, that he was a figure of fun to them due to qualities in himself he couldn’t recognize.
Since the age of sixteen or seventeen, when his previous gangly cuteness had begun to mature into devastating good looks, the doctor had rarely been troubled by The Knowers, who for the most part seemed to have lost their ability to see into him. Jasmine Hernandez was one of that breed, however, and though she had not yet been able to x-ray him, there were times when he was sure that she was going to blink in surprise and peer more closely, her eyes filling with that special mockery and the corner of her mouth turning up in the faintest smirk.
“Doctor, I’m sorry to disturb you, but when I told Nurse Ganguss what’s happening, and she said you were on the premises, I felt you ought to know.”
She was so forceful that the doctor backed up a couple steps, and she took this as an invitation to enter the room, which was not what he had intended.
“A patient is self-discharging,” Nurse Hernandez said, “and in my estimation, under peculiar circumstances.”
Skeet said, “Could I have my Yoo-hoo?”
Martie looked at him as if he had gone a little mad. Of course, when she thought about it, there was ample evidence that
“His soda,” Dusty said from the doorway. “Grab it and let’s get out of here!”
“Someone called Ahriman,” Martie said. “He’s here.”
“I heard it, too,” Dusty assured her. “Get the damn soda quick.”
“Vanilla Yoo-hoo, or the chocolate for that matter,” Skeet said, as Martie rounded the bed and snatched the bottle off the nightstand, “isn’t a soda. It’s not carbonated. It’s more of a dessert beverage.”
Shoving the bottle of Yoo-hoo into Skeet’s right hand, Martie said, “Here’s your dessert beverage, honey. Now
