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 Wosten 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.
