Yet Monk was ready to travel immediately to Germany despite his raging fears and phobias, and so was I, which should tell you how desperate we both were to resolve his plight. I also took his determination as a sign that we were doing the right thing.
The way I saw it, Monk was so determined to restore his mental health that he was overcoming one of his biggest fears to get the help he needed.
That had to be significant progress in his therapy, right?
Okay, maybe I was deluding myself, but who could blame me?
Dr. Kroger, maybe. But besides him, nobody.
I also had a couple of very good reasons of my own for not stopping Monk. Payback, for one. I was convinced that Dr. Kroger had encouraged Monk to intrude on my vacation to Hawaii, so I figured turnabout was fair play. I wanted to see the look on Dr. Kroger’s face when Monk showed up in Lohr.
Does that sound petty to you?
Me, too, but I’ve never held myself up as any kind of saint, which brings me to my truly selfish reason for not talking Monk out of chasing Dr. Kroger to Germany.
I deserved this trip.
The perks of this job are few and far between. In fact, they are nonexistent. But now Monk was willing to pay my way to Germany and, while it was hardly going to be a vacation for me, at least it would be an exciting change of scenery.
Was I taking advantage of a bad situation?
Probably, but I was sure that once we got there I’d suffer dearly for it and would regret going on the trip.
Did that stop me? Nope.
I quickly booked the tickets, arranged for Julie to stay with friends, bought some Germany guidebooks, and packed my bags.
The spur-of-the-moment plan was for Monk and me to catch the soonest, and cheapest, economy-class flight out of San Francisco to Frankfurt. Once we arrived, we’d rent a car and drive to Lohr, which according to the guidebooks was about an hour from the airport, on the river Main.
We didn’t know where Dr. Kroger was staying, but from what I could tell, Lohr was a small town at the edge of the Spessart Forest. I figured it wouldn’t take much detecting skill to find the conference he was attending. We’d worry about where we’d be staying once we got there.
Ordinarily, this lack of careful planning would have presented an intolerable level of uncertainty for Monk. But this was an unusual situation and he was willing to accept the unacceptable. I saw it as yet another encouraging sign of personal growth for Monk that was miraculously and ironically occurring in the midst of one of his worst psychological and emotional crises.
I hoped Dr. Kroger would see it the same way.
Under normal circumstances, just the prospect of packing for the trip would have been an insurmountable obstacle for Monk. He would have wanted to bring six months’ worth of food, water, eating utensils, dishes, and bed linens in addition to his clothes and toiletries. It would have taken a week of careful planning, another week of packing, and then he would have needed a freighter to transport everything to Germany.
So the only way that Monk could even contemplate this trip, much less actually embark on it, was if he was drugged up to his eyeballs. He knew it and I knew it.
As soon as I dropped him off at his place, he took Dioxynl, the wonderful experimental drug that relieved his obsessive-compulsive disorder and subdued his phobias. He was able to pack everything he needed into one suitcase and was ready to go when I picked him up an hour later.
But this Monk was a different man than the man I’d dropped off. He was sitting on his suitcase eating potato chips out of a big bag. His shirt was open at the collar and untucked.
I pulled up to the curb in front of him. He threw his suitcase into the back of the car and hopped into the passenger seat beside me.
“Ready to fly, babe?” he said with a big smile. Obviously, the drugs had kicked in.
“I wish you wouldn’t call me ‘babe,’ Mr. Monk.”
“You can call me ‘babe’ if you want to,” he said.
“I don’t,” I said.
“How about ‘boychick’?”
“How about ‘Mr. Monk’?”
He shook his head. “Why so formal? I’m not your geometry teacher. It’s me, the Monkster.”
“The Monkster?”
“Aka the Funster,” he said.
“Since when do you have an ‘aka’?”
“You really have to loosen up. If you were any stiffer, you’d be a sculpture. Want a chip?”
He offered me the bag. I stared at him in amazement.
Monk actually wanted me to stick my dirty hand inside the bag he was eating from and take a chip.
“Sour cream and onion,” he said. “They’re yummy. It’s like they are pre-dipped.”
“No thanks,” I said.
He shrugged, wiped his greasy hand on his pants, and set the bag between us.
“It’s right here if you change your mind,” he said and started whistling.
The only thing more horrifying than spending twelve hours imprisoned in an airplane with Monk was spending it with the Monkster.
That was why I’d brought sleeping pills. I intended to spend as much of the flight unconscious as I possibly could, blissfully unaware of whatever Monk was doing.
It was
