damned_institute | Day 40: Doctor's Office 6 (Dr. Wilson) [Fourth Shift]

Therapy. Really, Meche figured, she could probably use it, but what it really meant was a chance to try for some answers. But if it was going to be anything like the last time she'd seen the doctors here...

The truth was that she was afraid. The worst of the brainwashing seemed to take place at night--it wasn't too likely that this doctor was going to try to shove a gun in her hand, but she had to be prepared for the lies he was going to tell her. He might even believe them, if the story he'd heard about her was anything like the one Domino had to tell. She couldn't let her guard down. And if she was faced with an option she just couldn't risk not taking...well, she'd cross that bridge when she came to it.

Meche was half-expecting to find fire and brimstone as the dominant décor in the office, but she realized before the door had even opened all the way how far that was from the truth. The office was tasteful, cozy-looking, dominated by a big desk and an even bigger black sofa--a lot nicer than Manny's, even. She felt a bizarre sense of déjà vu.

Dr. Wilson, too, looked non-threatening--even friendly. But Meche couldn't afford to be totally at her ease here. "Good afternoon," she said quietly, crossing the office and taking the chair in front of his desk. She folded her hands in her lap and waited. Let the professional make the first move.

Well, he had made it to his last patient. If Wilson survived this encounter, then he would be in the clear for a while. (He was exaggerating, of course. Even though some of the patients were genuinely dangerous, it had never been a problem in the past; plus, the nurses were never too far away.)

Besides, as he watched the young woman enter the office, give it a once-over, and then head toward the seat, he could already tell that she would be easier to deal with than some of the other people who had walked through that door. She sat down without being asked, she said something to him -- this was shaping out nicely already.

"To you too," he greeted in return, clasping his hands on his desk in front of him. "In case you didn't know, I'm Dr. Wilson. This is your first time in therapy here, right?" He didn't remember seeing any note about a transfer, but he didn't trust the system here all that much.

"María Morales," she said, prepared to play along. "Although I guess you knew that already. Yes, this is my first session. It's nice to meet you." That was a rare outright lie, but again, if that was what it took.... She gave him a small smile and nodded slightly at her braced and bandaged right arm, watching for his reaction. "I'm sorry, I'd shake your hand, but..."

This was her chance, before he got started on any other tangents. "Would you mind if I asked you a question before we got started?" Meche asked. "There was a man admitted at the same time I was--kind of short, big smile; he would've been calling himself 'Manny Calavera.' I haven't seen him in several days and I've been told he's in the infirmary. I'm not asking you to break confidentiality or anything like that, but I've been worried about him. Can you tell me how he is, or is there any way I could see him?"

She didn't realize until she finished talking that she'd been leaning forward in dead earnest--she hadn't meant to be so obvious about her anxiety. Well, her cards were on the table. All she could do now was wait to see how fairly Dr. Wilson would play his own hand.

It was pretty hard to imagine how the woman had managed to do that to her arm, but Wilson had seen a good amount of odd injuries while here. He'd asked the nurses about it and they had told him about some of the brawls that had broken out, mainly in the cafeteria. It still seemed rather extreme, but Wilson also realized that some of these people weren't just insane; they were also criminals.

He doubted the woman had done that to herself, so it did make him worry about what kind of trouble she'd gotten into. He was about to ask her if it was set properly or if he should give it a look, but that was when she started in on her own question.

Wilson listened to her description, but he knew from the start that he wasn't going to be able to help her. His access to any information about patients that weren't assigned to him was limited (read: nonexistent). Once she'd finished, he gave her a slightly pained look. He wished he could help, but...

"They actually don't give me access to much of anything, so I don't know who is or isn't in the infirmary. The only information I have is about my own patients, and I don't think a Manny Calavera is one of them." His expression was apologetic now, and it wasn't forced. It was tough to worry about a friend.

"Oh," Meche said. "Yes, of course. I understand." Even if he knew, his telling her probably would've been a long shot, but he looked so sincere. Not that Domino couldn't play that trick too, when he wanted.

Well, getting an answer to those questions was really what she'd been hoping for out of this session. Now that it was obvious one wasn't forthcoming, Meche was at a loss for anything to try other than actually having a therapy session. She took a few seconds to sit quietly, looking at the little trinkets on his desk (she liked that), letting the disappointment sink in. Then she looked up again. "Well, then, I guess I'm ready to get started when you are. I'm afraid I don't know too much about how this process works."

The whole scene still reminded her overwhelmingly of that first visit to Manny's office. At least then the guy on the other side of the desk had really been on her side, even if she hadn't known it then. Then again, at least this time she didn't have to worry about disappointing anyone. All she had to do here was look out for herself.

It was obvious that the woman had been hoping for something more than that, and Wilson did regret that he couldn't help her. His patients always came into his office bursting with questions and it was rare that he could actually answer any of them. It made it hard to feel like he was ever really helping them, even though some of his sessions had gone well in the past.

"It's not too complicated," he assured María when she admitted that she wasn't too familiar with talk therapy. Wilson really had to wonder where all of this patients came from (seriously, did they live in the midwest or something?), but there was also a chance that their condition was to blame for their ignorance.

"We just talk, and you tell me about things that are bothering you, or just anything that you need to get off my chest. If you want my advice about anything, I'll try to give it, and hopefully we can work at helping your rehabilitation along." It felt like a well-practiced speech to me, and that was what it was becoming after a few weeks of his being here. Then again, how many speeches did he recite to his cancer patients? A whole lot.

So he wasn't going to ask questions. That was odd, Meche thought--didn't he have an agenda? What was it he wanted out of her?

She was going to have to give him something--better make it something not too important, for starters. "I'm really frustrated with the lack of communication around here," she said. "Just like that--my friend is obviously sick; he's been missing for days. But where is he, what's wrong with him? You don't know, and I certainly don't know. Patients get discharged--" because surely that was what they'd say had happened to Peter the first time, "--and they don't even get to say goodbye. For us, they just disappear.

"I know there probably isn't much you can do about it. It's just...it's hard to focus on getting better when we have these constant setbacks, you know?" she finished with a sigh.

She wasn't focusing this well. Maybe she should be trying to find out what they were supposed to have done, or how much Dr. Wilson was in on the monsters. She couldn't waste this time; who knew when she'd get another chance to be in the same room with one of the bosses?

A lot of the time the things that Wilson's patients talked about were impossible for him to connect to. It was steeped into the person's delusion, and Wilson just had to fight to sort through it and pick out the telling parts.

In this case, however, he could completely understand where the woman was coming from, seeing how he'd had his own problems with that lack of information exchange himself. "I definitely agree with you, even if you're right and there's nothing I can do," he started. "A lot of the time I'll come back into the office for the start of the week and find out that a handful of my patients have been discharged... and no one bothered to tell me."

He was supposed to be the one who made decisions like that; since he didn't, sometimes it was hard to know what purpose he was even serving by talking to the patients once a week like this.

Still, it was a cushy job and going back to Princeton apparently wasn't going to happen for a while, so he was going to make the best of his time here. Somehow.

He had to be lying. Almost had to be. Why would they keep the doctors in the dark? Why not just find unethical doctors, like they did at night? Didn't Dr. Wilson ever get suspicious of all the injuries?

He just looked so candid; it was starting to get to her. If he hadn't been working for Landel, Meche would've been tempted to trust him. But a bad guy was a bad guy, wasn't he, whether through intention or just negligence. Or did they have something on him too?

"What do they tell you?" she asked. "I'm not sure where to begin. It would help if I had a sense of what you know--about the delusions I was having when I arrived, about what's happened to me at Landel's. Then we could jump off from there." She couldn't risk asking about her "real life"--the goal was to sound as sane as possible, and that meant doing her darndest to be María.

Besides, with her luck, Domino would probably come back and tell her all about it in a couple of days. She wasn't even going to ask how they got him here.

Maria had a good point, and so without further ado Wilson open her file and started to page through it. Her physical health didn't involve anything out of the ordinary, but he did pause when he got to her history and the reasons for her admittance into the hospital.

He really should have looked it over in advance, but he hadn't had time. Or maybe he had, but he had ended up putting it off. When he made it back home (or as home as his place in Doyleton could be), the last thing he wanted to do was curl up on his couch and read about the depressing things that his patients had gone through.

But pulling a gun on someone? Maria really hadn't seemed the type. "You... threatened to kill your boss," he stated with slight disbelief. She already knew this, obviously (or she should, anyway), but it was new to him.

"Do you remember doing it?" he asked. She could have blocked it out, or maybe it was another personality disorder, but Wilson wasn't going to jump to conclusions. "Do you know why you did it?" Chances were the answer to that one was no, if she had ended up here.

Meche started. So he knew about that. Why? Hadn't they made up some kind of fake story for her? Was threatening Domino supposed to be what had landed her here in "real life," too?

"I was angry," she blurted out, completely honestly. "You don't know what it was like in that office, day after day, all his comments....Does it say in there that he used to lock me in the vault when he thought I was talking back a little too much for my own good? And there was no way out! The only thing I could do was try to keep my head down--but God, it was just so tough!"

She felt her fists clenching in her lap, tension in her left hand and outright pain in her right. Meche forced herself to loosen them and flattened her palms against her thighs. "So when I saw a way to fix things, I just--took it," she said, more quietly.

Where were her delusions supposed to come into it? Was it just the same story, except that they all had different names and they were alive? Maybe it was dangerous to make herself sound like she'd been too sane then.

She was probably allowed to sound like she'd come to her senses, though, so Meche took a deep breath, controlled herself, kept going. Made it sound good. "It wasn't a solution; I know that now. It didn't fix anything. But at the time, I was just at my wits' end." She left out her conviction that she'd do it again in a heartbeat, given the chance. She was really the queen of sins of omission today.

Wilson hadn't expected such a candid response, but once Maria started expressing herself he made sure to pay close attention. This was one of the moments that had pointed to her bad mental health, so getting her side of the story was definitely important.

It sounded like her boss was a pretty terrible guy, if Maria's word was to be trusted, but that didn't mean that she had gone about dealing with it in the right way. How had she even gotten hold of a gun?

The fact that she could admit that she had been at her wits' end seemed to suggest that she knew she hadn't been thinking straight. Wilson eyed her for a moment before speaking. "It does sound like your work environment was intolerable, but why do you think there was no way out? There must have been someone you could have reported your boss' behavior to..."

Unless the business had been something less than legal, in which case it was hard to sympathize with her. (He still did, of course, but it did make it more of a stretch.) Wilson knew that people did stupid things when they were desperate, but that kind of desperation could lead to making bad moves and having breakdowns, all of which Maria had learned the hard way.

Because we were on a deserted factory island at the edge of the world, Meche's brain spat out automatically. That must be another part of the "delusion." But there was more to it than that, even in the Eighth Underworld--the angelitos. And Hector. What could she say, how could she frame that honestly?

"To me, Victor was the hierarchy," she replied, thinking fast and catching herself before she could call him "Domino." "I couldn't go to his boss, and I didn't know anyone else I could turn to for help. And I had those two little children to try to take care of--what would happen to them if I quit?"

That was another thought. Were Pugsy and Bibi supposed to exist in "real life" too, and if so, where were they supposed to be? Were they delusions? Whatever the line was, she couldn't believe it, but she had to know. María would ask. "Does it say in there what happened to them?" Meche asked, leaning forward. "No one's been able to tell me. Are they all right?"

She watched Dr. Wilson carefully; the question of the children wasn't the only thing making her anxious. Meche wasn't sure how convincing all that sane honesty had been. What if she said she was illegal, that he'd get her deported if--but that was too easy to check, and Meche was a terrible liar. She'd better stick as closely as possible to the real story. María Morales was a saint gone astray, but she was also going to be well on the road to recovery. She just had to be here long enough to reconnect with Manny.

It was hard to believe that there was nothing Maria could have done to get out of that situation, but the important thing was that she had felt that way. When people felt that choked and confined, actually fighting their way to the surface and to safety was easier said than done. And if there had been children involved, that made it even more difficult.

Wilson wasn't surprised that she wanted to know about what had happened to her charges. There had been a mention of them in the general overview, but there had to be a more detailed note somewhere...

"One second," he said as he flipped through the file, and that was when he came across some paperwork having to do with moving the two children into foster care. That wasn't the best option by any means - foster care often messed people up pretty badly - but with their original caretaker here, apparently that had been the only place they could go.

It wasn't good news to deliver, but she had asked for a reason. "They're in foster care," he explained. He refrained from showing her the actual piece of paper since it had more details than she should probably know at this point. If she got better and was released, he was sure that she would be given all of the information at that time.

It wasn't true. Wherever the kids were, it couldn't be here, right? Foster care--surely even Landel wouldn't be cruel enough to take the angelitos from right off the train and dump them into foster care here, just to make things worse for her. Surely.

Then she remembered the virgin-eating birds.

"Oh," Meche repeated, feeling like she'd just been slugged. "Guess I don't exactly have visitation rights, do I?" She shook her head; she was reeling a little now. Getting her off-balance was probably exactly what he wanted, she reminded herself. But to put those little children in foster care, scared and alone....there were a lot of good foster parents out there, but the system also had a lot of problems. Meche doubted those had gone away in the last ten years.

"I'd never hurt them," she said. The earnestness in her own voice surprised her, and she caught herself raking her left hand anxiously through her hair. "Maybe that's hard for you to believe after what I've done, but those angelitos...they really mean the world to me. Do you think there's any chance--if I work hard in here, if I can get better...?" She wasn't sure whether María or Meche was asking the question, and at the moment, the difference didn't seem to matter all that much.

The sincerity with which she was speaking was hard to miss, and Wilson felt bad for her. He wasn't sure how she had ended up taking care of the two children, but she had obviously become attached to them; knowing that her illness was keeping her away from them had to be hard to deal with.

It sounded like she was even more eager to get better if only so that she could see them again. That was the kind of devotion that was usually only seen in parents towards their children. She wasn't their real mother, but that didn't always matter.

"I'm sure that if you recovered and were released, the matter would be looked at by a judge," he assured her. "I can't make any promises, but if it was established that you were well enough to take care of them and support them, then hopefully it would work out." She seemed like a good person who had just been pushed to the brink, so he did want it to turn out okay for her.

"As for visiting, I'm not sure if they would be allowed to come here," he said with a frown. It sounded like they were fairly young, so exposing them to this kind of environment might not be the best idea. Surely she would understand that, along with the fact that it would be hard for the children to see her in this state.

They wouldn't be allowed to come. Meche seized on that; it was a good sign. They couldn't come if they weren't here to begin with. And maybe Landel really wouldn't (or couldn't?) pull them here the same way he took her or Domino. Why would he have been so careful to mention that if they were somewhere nearby?

"I understand," she replied, feeling a little heartened. "This is a pretty scary place for anyone, let alone children. It's probably better if they don't see me until I come home."

But how long was that going to be, she wondered. Even if they--if she, since Manny was down for the count right now--could get everyone out of here, that was still no guarantee that they'd have an easy way back to the Ninth Underworld. Would they just have to live out their lives on Earth until they died naturally? If they worked hard (fortunately, Meche knew the formula), they could get tickets on the Number Nine, but fifty years would be too long for those poor kids to wait; they'd give up hope.

"I wanted to ask what I have to do to be released eventually," she continued. "I feel better, but it's important that we're all sure, of course. Normally I'd guess if I keep behaving well and proving that I'm not going to have any more outbursts...but it sounds like it's not really your decision, is it? Sometimes the releases feel a little arbitrary, to be honest."

Wilson was glad that Maria could at least see reason when it came to that. A mental institute was no place for children, and this would also give her incentive to really focus on her rehabilitation. She seemed to be doing really well so far, but that was, of course, only Wilson's opinion.

He wasn't surprised when she asked about the process of getting released. It seemed like she had already pieced together how the system worked, but Wilson still let out a sigh.

"I agree completely. I take it there's some sort of panel that evaluates the patients, but it's not like they come asking for my opinion. It seems like they just let out who they want when they want. If that's the case, then..." What was he even doing here? But he couldn't say something like that out loud to a patient. He was supposed to want to be here and to want to help these people. He did want to help them, but the fact was that he always ended up feeling like he was just here for show.

If that was the truth, he'd rather be back with his cancer patients, where he did actually make a difference sometimes.

"...then what are we all doing with ourselves, right?" Meche finished sympathetically. "It sounds like nobody really got the full orientation around here. I guess we'll all just have to keep doing the best we can, huh?" Even though he was ostensibly one of the bad guys, she felt kind of bad for Dr. Wilson. Maybe he really was just a nice guy whose biggest sin was not asking enough questions.

What next? She couldn't ask too many questions herself--he probably wouldn't know the answers to most of what she really wanted to know, and if he did, he probably wouldn't tell her. Well, she'd pick a safe one. It might not help much, but any information at all was something. At the very least, it might impress Manny a little.

"Sorry, I just have one more question, and then I promise I'll be a good patient and get back to what I'm really supposed to be doing here." She gave him a smile. "Do you know the Institute's address? I understand we can send and receive mail, and I have some friends who'd probably like to hear from me. I just don't know what return address I should put, and I haven't had a chance to ask any of the nurses."

"Do the best we can," Wilson repeated back as he glanced off for a moment. "Yeah, I guess that's right." It was the sort of uplifting thing that House would have rolled his eyes at, but Wilson understood what Maria was getting at. They were all stuck in this situation for one reason or another, so they'd just need to cross their fingers that something they did would make a difference eventually.

At Maria's question, Wilson looked back to her, his eyes brightening when he realized this was something he should be able to help her with. "Oh, yeah, of course." He actually hadn't heard of patients sending out mail before, but it would make sense that they could. People could send letters from jail, for Pete's sake.

"Let me just..." He trailed off as he started looking through the different papers on his desk for an envelope or letter where the address would be noted down. When he didn't have any luck, he started to resort to digging through his desk drawers -- and still, nothing. How could he honestly not have one scrap of paper with the address on it?

"That's weird," he remarked to himself for than to the patient. "I'm sorry, Maria, but it looks like I don't have it on me right this second."

Meche didn't buy it. Not for a minute. How could he not have anything with the address on it? And even if he really didn't, was it his plan or Landel's?

There was always the possibility that they really couldn't send mail, but then what was a mail room doing on the map? That might be worth exploring one of these nights.

"Oh, well, thanks for looking. I'll just ask one of the nurses the next time I think of it," she replied easily. "That's one of the pitfalls of keeping your desk neat--as soon as I clean it out, I'm guaranteed to need the exact paper I just threw away."

Well, it didn't look like she was going to get a lot of answers here. Probably she should just be grateful that he hadn't made her shoot anyone yet. Meche looked to the doctor, refolding her hands neatly in her lap. What a saint, she thought. "Did you have any more questions for me, Dr. Wilson? I'm happy to talk about whatever will help."

Wilson was glad that Maria wasn't holding his ineptitude against him, but he really did have to wonder at how he had managed to misplace everything that had the address on it. Asking a nurse would work just as well, though (which once again caused him to ask himself what he was doing here).

When Maria put the conversation topic back in his court, Wilson took a moment to consider. They had gotten through a good deal of the woman's questions and it was getting late, but they could probably go on for a little longer.

"I guess for now, all I would like to know is if you've had any problems or concerns while here at the hospital. I don't necessarily mean about the people waiting for you outside, but..." He shrugged. It wasn't like he was a mind-reader. If she did have any problems, she would probably know what he meant.

"The worst part has been not knowing how my friend is doing," she began carefully. She couldn't say Manny's name; she didn't know his real name. Meche was being very good and cautious about all this, trying to think of anything else she could give Dr. Wilson, and then all of a sudden she heard herself saying something surprisingly honest.

"Aside from that...sometimes I feel really--" She shook her head, alert to the still-unfamiliar sensation of her hair swishing against her cheeks. "I don't know. Really--uncertain, maybe that's the word. I used to think of myself as a good person, but after that incident, I'm not so sure anymore. I start to think, maybe he really did take that out of me." She looked down at her hands. "Pretty tough to point a gun at someone and still be the good guy, right? And then I catch myself wondering, well, what's going to happen the next time I get upset?"

The incident she was talking about wasn't her encounter with Domino, but Meche had nonetheless hit at the heart of what was bothering her.

"It's not too often," she added quickly, just in case she'd managed to convince him that she really was clinically insane. "I've met some nice patients in here, and talking helps a lot. Maybe you just always have that lingering doubt."

Wilson hadn't expected to get so much out of the patient, especially since they had touched on a lot of points already, but he made sure to hear her out. He noticed the way she backpedaled, as if worried she had said too much, but nothing she'd said struck Wilson as too strange.

"I think it's better that you have that doubt," he carefully replied. "If you weren't thinking about what you did and being bothered by it, that would be much stranger." It was slightly worrisome that she didn't feel like she had control of herself or her emotions, but that was one of the main things she was going to have to work on while here.

"Your boss probably made you feel like you didn't have a proper hold on your life, and you went to an extreme in order to fix that. Now you just need to figure out how to regain that control in a healthier way. You need to make sure it doesn't happen again," he said, feeling confident about his advice this time. He really wasn't half-bad at psychoanalyzing, considering how often he practiced it with House.

"The next time you get upset, you should be aware of it. See how you deal with it. If there's something wrong with your response, then try to figure out how to correct that. That's about all I can tell you," he finished.

It wasn't a magic fix, but probably nothing was, Meche reflected. The real problem might be being sure whether her response was wrong. Objectively speaking, hurting a child was a terrible thing, but what if you could save someone's life with just a few scratches on a kid's arm? Or what if they'd threatened you, like those two just before morning?

Had she been having trouble because they were tough moral calls? Because she'd been brainwashed? Or because she really wasn't anywhere near as saintly as she liked to pretend she was?

"You're right," she said. "I'll watch myself. He came to visit last weekend, actually, and I was okay then--I mean, I wasn't thrilled to see him, but I didn't get the urge to hurt him, even when he got insulting." She gave a little shrug. "That's progress, I guess."

"That's definite progress," Wilson agreed with a firm nod, not wanting Maria to downplay her accomplishments. It probably hadn't been the best idea to send the man who had set her off in the first place to come see her, though if she had been able to handle it then it said a lot about her recovery.

Personally, Wilson thought she might be well enough to leave this place soon, but hadn't the two of them just been discussing how he really had no say in that sort of thing?

Sending a glance down at his wristwatch, Wilson realized that they were nearing the end of their time, which meant Meche was off to dinner and he was headed home for a nice, long weekend. "Well, I think that's enough for today, Maria. Thank you for being so cooperative and I'm... sorry I couldn't be more helpful," he finished with a sigh.

Meche couldn't see the watch face, but she knew a nurse would be outside the office, waiting to take her back to her room. Probably better that she got out of there anyway, before she could do any more damage to her reputation as a sane, level-headed woman who was never going to have another episode of rage in her life.

"Not at all," she replied, getting to her feet. "It's nice just to have someone to vent to. You helped more than you think you did." He'd told her a little more about her "real life," for one thing, and some new things about how the Institute operated. And--well...it had felt good to talk to someone, even if she couldn't be completely on the level with him either.

As she reached the door, she turned back to give him another quick smile and a goodbye: "Thanks. Have a good weekend." I really hope you're one of the good guys, she added silently on her way out.

Day 40: Doctor's Office 6 (Dr. Wilson) [Fourth Shift]

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