William Rabkin - Psych - A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Read

Shawn hadn’t thought it would be difficult. He first realized what she was thinking while they were waiting in the hospital for news of Gus’ condition. She was so attentive to all Shawn’s needs, so considerate of his concern for his best friend, he assumed she was simply a kind woman who felt understandably worried about a man she’d seen leap off a cliff. But as the night wore on, Shawn began to realize she was actually too quick to respond to his desires, or what she believed were his desires. He gave her a simple test by making his stomach growl loudly-a skill he’d perfected in fifth grade. She jumped up and offered to get them food.

When she returned with BurgerZone burgers, Shawn asked her a few leading questions. She immediately admitted she was following his psychic orders.

Shawn knew he should try to get rid of her. The last thing he needed in his life was a mental patient obsessed with him. But she did seem genuinely concerned about Gus. It didn’t seem right to cast her out before the doctors declared him out of danger. And, while Shawn would never admit this to Gus, it was good to have someone around to talk to in the hospital. A way to keep him from getting too frantic over his best friend.

Not that he let his guard down around her. Well intentioned or not, she was still nuts. But Shawn spent the next hours studying her, and couldn’t find a hint of malice, cruelty, or danger in her.

He assumed that once Gus was awake, he’d simply command her to leave them alone. And while the need for a ride from the hospital postponed that plan a little, he still intended to send her away once they got back to the office.

Once they were back in her car leaving the crime scene, however, Shawn realized that the longer he let this drag out, the harder it would be to stop. He couldn’t let it wait even the short time it would take to get back to the office. He had to let her down gently. “I am not sending you orders with my brain,” Shawn said.

“I know,” Tara said cheerfully as she accelerated through a crosswalk, cutting off two women pushing strollers. “I’m waiting for my next command.”

Shawn turned back to look over the seat at Gus, who was listening helplessly. Gus shrugged, and Shawn turned back to Tara. “When exactly did I start sending you orders?” he said.

“It’s hard to say.”

“Really? If someone were pushing into my brain and telling me what to do, I think I’d have a pretty good idea who it was.”

“That’s because you’re a great psychic,” she said. “I’m just a follower. So when I started hearing your voice in my mind, I didn’t know where it was coming from. Can you imagine it? For a few weeks, I thought I was going crazy.”

“That is hard to imagine,” Shawn said.

“I can’t tell you how many false leads I tracked down. And then one day I turned on my radio to listen to Artie Pine and heard your voice coming out of it. And I knew.”

“I knew it!” Gus said. “I knew you should never have gone on Artie Pine’s show.”

“So why didn’t you ever mention it, if you’re so smart about everything?”

In fact, Gus had done more than simply tell Shawn not to go on with Artie Pine, whose late-night radio show was nationally syndicated to an enormous audience of shut-ins, paranoids, alien abductees, friends of Bigfoot, and fanatics who’d discovered that their friends and family had started to cross the street rather than hear the newest revelation that the ether had beamed into their brains. Gus had nagged. He had preached. He had urged. He did research on Pine’s topics cross-referenced by frequency, starting with flying saucers and extending all the way to the inevitable conquest of the United States by citizens of Atlantis. Finally, with no other option, he even violated the airspace in the Echo by turning on the show while he was driving Shawn back from a midnight pizza crisis.

And after all that, Shawn couldn’t understand why Gus didn’t want him to do the show. So there were a bunch of fruitcakes who listened in every night? How could that hurt them? Especially since any one of those fruitcakes might have a case that needed solving, and a couple of extra bucks to spend unraveling some deep, dark mystery.

“Anyway, once I heard your voice on the radio, the one I heard in my head just kept getting louder and louder, telling me to come to Santa Barbara and follow your every order,” Tara said, tipping the wheel slightly to the left to avoid clipping a bicyclist who’d been riding under the mistaken assumption that the thick white line separating his dedicated lane from the rest of traffic gave him some kind of permission to slow her down.

“And how did the orderlies feel about that?” Shawn said.

Tara laughed, and Shawn grabbed the wheel to keep her from steering into an oncoming UPS truck. “I always forget how funny you are in person,” she said. “When I hear you in my head, you’re much more stern.”

“Well, it takes a lot of effort to project one’s thoughts into the mind of another person,” Shawn said.

Gus reached up and slapped the back of his head. “Maybe you should stop using so much energy and use your words to tell her what to do,” Gus said. “As long as we’re all together in the car like this.”

“I suppose I could try,” Shawn said. “Tara, are you ready to receive my order?”

“I’m always ready for your orders.” She turned to him, her wide eyes boring directly into his. “Please, direct me. I am now under your complete control.”

“Maybe you could direct her to look at the road!” Gus squeaked, folding himself into the crash position as he saw the back of a stopped Hummer rushing up to meet them.

“Yes, I think that would be a good idea,” Shawn said. “Tara, I order you to look at the road.”

Tara tore her eyes away from Shawn’s face and stared out at traffic. The Hummer seemed to fill the entire windshield, and it kept getting bigger.

“Tara, stop!” Shawn screamed.

She slammed her foot down on the brake and the Mercedes fishtailed to a stop an inch away from the Hummer’s “My Child Is an Honor Student at Some School You’ve Never Heard of” bumper sticker. Gus clawed at the door handle and threw himself out of the passenger’s side, nearly slamming into the bicyclist they’d almost hit just moments before.

“You can do what you want, but I’m not letting that crazy woman drive me anywhere!” he shouted to Shawn.

Shawn’s window glided down silently. “Don’t you think that’s a little discriminatory?” he said. “The mentally handicapped deserve our respect, too.”

“And I deserve to live long enough for my muscles to stop hurting,” Gus said.

“That brings up an important point,” Shawn said. “So far, you haven’t been seriously injured as long as you’ve been inside Tara’s car.”

Gus glared, but he couldn’t find fault with the logic. He opened the door and bent back in. “I’m here, but I’m not happy about it,” he said. “You have to do something.”

“I’m going to, right now,” Shawn said. He turned to Tara. “I am giving you an order. You will obey this order. Is that clear?”

“Yes.”

“First of all, you’re going to drive us back to our office,” Shawn said.

“Safely,” Gus prompted.

“You’re going to drive us back to our office safely, obeying all the traffic laws. All the important ones, anyway. You don’t have to worry about stopping at yellow lights. No one does that, anyway.”

“Shawn!”

“And once you’ve dropped us off at our office, you don’t have to obey me anymore.” Shawn looked back at Gus. “Isn’t this like throwing away a perfectly good toy?”

“Yes, if the toy happens to be insane and a potential threat to everyone you hold dear,” Gus said.