David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

“Do you know what is meant by the saying ‘People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones’?”

“Are you serious?” You mean, when it’s actually used by people who live in glass houses and throw stones for a living?

“Yes. What do you think it means?”

“It is a maxim encouraging introspection and warning that hypocrites are liable to criticize in others faults that they themselves display.”

The doctor only nodded.

“But it’s really quite meaningless,” continued Leo. “I mean bland. I mean, presumably it’s the throwing stones at houses that should be avoided. Or maybe living in a glass house. It would be so hard to keep clean.”

The doctor had already started speaking. “…mania and the paranoia that you exhibit is, I think, of such a degree — this conspiracy you saw involving the computer company and the Scientologists and the contact lenses from the drug company — that you would probably do better at a facility with a more psychiatric orientation.”

Facilities have orientations? “No. I should stay here. I want to try this thing, this sobriety.”

“Certainly, getting those drugs out of your system is the first step, and I imagine that that will be, ah, achieved at whatever facility we, as your care team, decide is best for you.”

The first step is admitting you are powerless — even Leo knew that. And who’s we ? You and that desk blotter? “You mean my sisters?”

He ignored the question. “So here’s what we’re going to do.” He had kept swiveling and was now actually looking out the window behind his desk, like Mr. Burns. “Tomorrow morning your sister will be here—”

“Which one?” interrupted Leo. “I got three.” He was trying to sound like Al. He held up three fingers.

The doctor swiveled back around and looked in his folder. “Daisy,” he said.

That made sense. Leo was somewhat less mortified that it was Daisy missing work for this shit rather than Heather or Rosemary.

“She will accompany you to a place that better suits your needs.”

Where’s that? A locked ward, or Amsterdam?

He thought he would attempt a straight-up approach. “So you’re really convinced I shouldn’t stay here?” He was going to try not to plead. This doctor seemed like someone who would take a certain pleasure in a patient’s pleading. “Look, I want what you’re selling.”

“We’re not selling anything.”

“Offering, whatever. Surely you’re supposed to treat people who want to be treated. I do like this sober and clearheaded thing, by the way,” he said to the doctor. “And I take that all on board. I think I will stop smoking and drinking. I think that’s just what’s needed.” Leo realized too late that he sounded like he was sucking up.

“But you said you were embarrassed to be here,” said the doctor.

“Well, of course I am. Isn’t that reasonable?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said the doctor. “Many of the people who get here are relieved to get here.”

“Okay, well, then I’m embarrassed and relieved. Those are both feeling words.”

But it was pointless now. Leo saw that he was being booted from rehab. It was like that morning in Sharon’s office. Too late, he saw that he wished to stay among these fallen men.

A kind of lightness was floating into his limbs. “Right, well, look, Doctor, you say I’m out of here tomorrow, right?”

“We’re currently arranging a space for you in a more appropriate facility.”

“Which might be called …?”

“When your sister gets here tomorrow, we can discuss all that.”

“Yes, we can.” Leo stood up. “Well. I’ve got some journaling to do.”

“You’re excused from all the afternoon treatment activities, Leo. Actually, you’ll be staying up here in the medical building tonight.”

Really? That is un likely to happen . “You think my borderline thing might be contagious, huh?”

Leo made his way across the quad and back to the men’s wing. It was another grand morning; the firs and aspens were shaking their green fists at the sky. He decided that he would just leave Quivering Pines. It was not a locked facility.

But it had a very long driveway, which led to the fuzzy edge of a lush outer suburb that Leo did not know at all. He would have to walk two miles to the Fred Meyer and call a taxi to get home. It would be an undignified escape. But it was weird, the way the doctor had said, You’ll be staying up here in the medical building tonight . Was there even a bed up there?

And there was the other weird thing, Leo realized. How had the doc known about the conspiracy, the Scientologists, and the contact lenses? All that had been only in the broadside. Would Jake have given that up to his sisters?

The drummer from Skinflute thought these rooms were bugged.

No, that was the paranoia, he reminded himself. But just to be safe, Leo should get out of here today. He could meet Daisy at his house tomorrow, deal with the fallout from there. Maybe she’d let him come live with her for a few months. Go to meetings, mind his nieces. He’d impress upon her that whatever he was supposed to have taken on board here — James Dean or Al or the doctor or the cautionary sight of broken lives or the glimpses of grace and mending — he’d absorbed it already.

The men’s wing was deserted; the others were still down there learning about neurons. Leo stopped in the kitchen and knocked back a couple of mini-yogurts. He went to the front desk, asked the nurse behind it to unlock the phone cabinet for him. It was a plain old desk phone inside an authentic wooden phone booth.

“I’m sorry, I can’t do that. That phone is for evening use,” she said in a honeyed, unkind voice. They seemed to think people here needed such explicit retraining. He got the point, but please.

“Yeah, but I think I’ve been eighty-sixed. So I’m really not a patient here anymore. I’m more like a guest. I just want to call my sister. She’s coming to get me.”

The nurse puckered her mouth a bit and scrunched up her key bracelet protectively. “Okay, well, I’m just going to have to call the doctor to see if that’s okay.”

“Knock yourself out.” Leo loudly ho-hummed while she rang interofficially; he fingered figure eights into the Plexi top of the desk, which was really a chest-high wall of the reception enclosure, where sweatered nurses rolled in chairs and consulted lateral files. The woman sat down at her station, which featured multiple Ziggy cartoons. “Hi, Doctor. Yes, it’s Brenda. Okay. Yes? I have Leo here. He says his sister’s coming to get him, and he’d like to make a call to her. Yes? Okay. Thank you, Doctor.

“Leo, go ahead and call your sister,” said the nurse. She handed him the key to the booth, which had as its outsize fob a child’s toy plastic telephone.

He used one of his mnemonics to recall Daisy’s mobile number. Seven seven four one nine one nine . Two giant green squids dining together in a pagoda; that was the seven seven four. Nineteen was a hot-air balloon over a lake; so two of those.

Her voice on the outgoing message comforted him. “Sis, it’s Leo,” he said. He couldn’t say, Don’t bother coming to rehab, in case Mata Hari out there was paying attention. He decided he would speak to Daisy’s voice mail as if he were speaking to Daisy, to stall for time. “Yeah. Good, good,” he said into the phone. The fake phone call was a pretty basic maneuver in the daily spycraft that Leo had had to use for a while there, back when he was trying to figure out what was real and what was random. He used it also to avoid Greenpeace canvassers on the street. He would have made a good stage actor.