Mad Dogs Read Online Free Page A

it without… the protection of judgment.”
    â€œDoesn’t matter what you think I have to do: I’m dying.”
    â€œHow convenient. But you look fine.”
    â€œAppearances are deceiving,” she snapped.
    The therapist said: “So who are you fooling?”
    Her ebony skin glowed with anger.
    I said: “In the land of the blind, the one eyed person is crazy.”
    â€œAll our eyes work, Victor,” said Dr. F, “but good diversion. I was done with Hailey anyway—unless she’s got something new to say to us.”
    She glared at him.
    Dr. F swung his gaze to Eric. That bespectacled, pudgy engineer stiffened to attention in his chair. Waiting. Ready. The therapist opened his mouth—found no words, closed it. Knew he had to say something about everyone or no one would listen.
    â€œEric, two days ago, Victor said he agreed with Mark Twain that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes, and then pointed out that Eric rhymes with Iraq .”
    Dr. Leon Friedman’s shaking head broke free his smile.
    â€œIf I were a poet like Victor,” said Dr. F, “maybe I’d have more than a notion of the connected sense of all that. But notions are key now—for you. You beat Saddam Hussein’s Iraq way back before our first war there, but they turned you into a robot. Yet I have to believe that somewhere in you, there’s a notion of Eric as a free human being.”
    Dr. Leon Friedman told the pudgy hero in thick glasses: “This is not an order, but try to imagine a notion of space between commands of do or don’t .”
    â€œâ€™Xactly what the hell does that mean?” said white-haired Zane.
    â€œ Exactly is what you’ve got, right soldier?” replied our therapist.
    As Eric frowned. Took Dr. F’s suggestion as an order. Eric’s hands cut a square frame in our circle’s air like a mime building the notion of space.
    While Eric mimed his work, Dr. F worked on Zane.
    â€œAll you’ve been through,” Dr. F told that white-haired soldier. “Bombs. Heroin. Slaughter beneath your boots. Jungle heat that now makes you melt down. You fought since Vietnam so you can carry that weight and never cry. That’s exactly who you are.”
    â€œWhat’s your point?” snapped Zane.
    â€œCongratulations. You won. Look what you got. Exactly .”
    Zane angled his head toward Eric: “I’m not him. You can’t tell me what to do.”
    â€œI wish I could,” said Dr. F. “We’d drive out of here together.”
    â€œBut now it’s time for you to scoot back to the real world,” I said.
    â€œBefore I get to you, huh Victor?”
    I became ice. He was only an image in my eyes. A sack of red water.
    As he said: “Zane, you and Vic here rhyme.”
    Zane argued: “He ain’t my generation. Plus, I never tried to kill myself uselessly. And I don’t zone out.”
    â€œBut you’re both crazy from responsibility,” answered the therapist. “Though you cling to your weight and Victor uses his to dig his own grave.”
    â€œI did what I did,” I said.
    â€œAnd if you did anything differently,” Dr. F asked me, “in Malaysia, with 9/11, would anything be different now?”
    â€œThe names of the dead.”
    â€œMaybe. Maybe not. But you did what you could .”
    â€œSo that’s not enough to justify me going crazy?”
    â€œThat’s more than enough. But you’ve got to move off of paying for what was possible then to buying what’s possible now . You’ve got to look for that.”
    â€œOr get shocked into seeing it? Like this little ‘blitz therapy’ session, Doc? Shock therapy—sorry, Eric—call it whatever you want, didn’t work. For any of us.”
    We stared at the doctor who’d spent two weeks doing his best.
    Russell said: “We’re here.”
    â€œAnd