Page 25 - Effable Encounters

Fantasy and Fugue
(Fantastic Transactions 1, 1990)

It was Thursday, the day on which Dr. Douglas Wheelhouse saw
patients at State Hospital. As in his private practice, he scheduled one
appointment an hour, limiting each session to forty-five minutes; in
the interim he made notes and reviewed the next case to be seen. His
fees for this service were set by the government; certainly his uptown
clientele represented a much higher financial return on time invested,
but they also demanded a commensurately greater degree of
deference. In the hospital he was free to impose whatever regimen of
psycho-pharmacopoeia and talk therapy struck him as appropriate to
a patient’s particular problem, with little concern for the latter’s
medical sophistication or ethical objections.
The first two inmates passing through the stark white consulting
room were elderly women Wheelhouse had been treating for
years. His success in managing them with a high dosage of dormalin
had encouraged him to prescribe smaller amounts of the drug to his
own private patients. At this point, he was ministering to his guinea
pigs primarily by monitoring their vital signs and vegetative faculties
for side effects; the ladies could not formulate intelligent questions
concerning their cases, and their regular staff physician undoubtedly
would not. The third appointment, however, was not routine at all: a
man had recently been committed by the courts, and was being
brought in for a preliminary examination and evaluation. The
committal papers bore a noncommittal diagnosis: schizophrenia,
accompanied by delusional fantasies and fugal episodes.
Wheelhouse scanned the brief and ill-written case history attached
forever to Albert Chesterton by an invisible and unbreakable
electronic umbilicus. His eye found what most concerned its
controlling intelligence: the man was not violent. This piece of
information was crucial, since the ground rules for a first visit
stipulated that the patient not be drugged; restrained, if necessary, but
psychically translucent.
Chesterton, a 37-year-old, married-with-three-children department-
store shoe salesman, had lost his freedom following a psychotic
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