“Good. We’ll talk more next time.”
That was it for a week. Gradually, meaning returned to time. The next week it was more of the same. And the next. Tony hated the place, hated Freiburg, the orderlies, the meds, the stinking TV up on its perch, the smell of the ward. But he kept that to himself. Because he also liked being taken care of, liked the rest from having to make any decisions at all, liked not having to think, not having to be responsible. And all those things he liked he found repugnant, and he found himself liking their repugnancy. When he complained about pain and tremors in his leg, Freiburg interpreted it for him as a “physiological memory of being wounded brought on by his reimmersion into a pseudomilitary environment.” Still he controlled himself, outwardly. Again his dos
