“There’s no known treatment for his condition,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do.”
“So we’re waiting for him to die?” Hoskins asked, and the doctor had to have heard the anger in his voice, the fear, or maybe he didn’t notice it at all. Maybe the doctor had heard so much of it over the years that he’d become deaf to it.
“I suppose we are,” he said. “But you could say the same thing about everyone. We’re all waiting to die, aren’t we?”
*
His father was going to lose his mind, had possibly been losing his mind over his entire life, slowly, one piece at a time, and this was a curious thing, that a disease had hidden in the structure of his DNA and decided to finally make itself known; it’d been there all along and no one had ever noticed it, because everyone loses their keys and forgets to turn off the oven, maybe Joe did it more often than most people, but how was that supposed to be a reliable sign of what was coming? But Hoskins, he was losing his mind because he was a cop and he’d seen terrible things and it happened a lot, cops went apeshit all the time, but that felt like a half-assed excuse, because it was his job, wasn’t it? He’d signed up for the whole damn thing and he’d known exactly what he was walking into; he’d been trying to get into Homicide since the day he’d been sworn in and it’d driven him to the brink and still he missed it, he sometimes wanted back in so bad he could taste it.
Or, Hoskins thought, he was losing his mind for no reason at all.
He finds ways to keep it together. Just one way, really, although there might be more ways, methods he hasn’t yet discovered. Not drink, he’d tried that, most cops have found their way to the bottom of a bottle at one point or another, but it didn’t work for him. He was a lousy drunk. He didn’t smoke and he didn’t sleep with whores and he didn’t shoot up and he didn’t gamble. He didn’t take the prescription the department psychologist had prescribed for him either; they made his tongue fuzzy and his hands tingle in a way he didn’t like, and he didn’t care much to talk about his feelings, but he still went to the head doctor once a month, partly for show, because people thought you were trying to get better when you went to the doctor, although that wasn’t entirely true in his case.
“Avoidance behavior,” this woman had immediately said, not ten minutes after they’d first met. She’d been asking all sorts of questions, one after another, and marking his answers on her notepad, although she held it so he couldn’t see what she’d been scribbling. “You don’t care for conflict, so you avoid it.”
“That’s what you think?”
“I think it’s interesting that you’d choose to go into law enforcement, when confrontations clearly make you anxious.”
“Can I ask you something?” he’d asked, and she’d smiled, but sourly, so he knew that she had to let him speak but she wasn’t happy about it.
“Of course.”
“Isn’t there some sex thing called the pearl necklace?” he’d asked, and she’d flushed in embarrassment, because she was wearing a blouse that had been left mostly unbuttoned and a thick rope of pearls that hung low, so your eyes were drawn down, way down into the cleft of her cleavage. Her name was Angelica Jackson, but Hoskins couldn’t stop calling her Ms. Jackson, like the old song. Ms. Jackson if you’re nasty.
None of that shit made anything better for him, and he might’ve gone bananas if he hadn’t started walking when he felt himself losing it. It sounded like the most fucking stupid thing on the planet, he was like one of those old guys who show up at the mall before business hours in a sweatband and tennis shoes to cruise the perimeter, but it worked; it was the only thing that did. He couldn’t run—well, he could run, and sometimes he did run at the gym, hopped on the treadmill and cranked it until his eyeballs felt ready to burst like pimples and ooze down his face—but running only made it worse, his brain would start working overtime, like it was trying to keep up with his legs, and when his head got working like that he’d think about going out onto the street and grabbing someone, anyone, and shooting them right in the face—not between the eyes but right in the face, so there’d be nothing left and then he’d do the goddamn mashed potato in the mess it left behind. But when he walks he doesn’t have thoughts like that, everything becomes soft and distant and vague, like he’s looking at the world through gauze.