He struggled to hold his head up and his eyes open. You didn't get any benefit out of the Group's sessions unless you participated. The way to participate started with keeping the appearance of alertness and proceeded through talking (when you didn't really want to talk at all), to discharging emotion (when you were almost certain you had no emotion left to discharge). This he knew. Dr. Shugart had told him, in private analysis and again before the entire Group.
The old man sighed internally. Sam Krabhe could be relied on to interpret everyone's motives for them; he was doing it now. Short, squat, middle-aged . . . well, "middle-aged" by the standards of Dr. Sidorenko. Actually Sam Krabbe was close to 70. Sidorenko glanced up at the attentive, involved face of his nurse and let the conversation wash over him.
Sam: "What about that, Maureen? Do you have to focalize your aggressions on us? I'm getting damned sick and tired of it, for one."
Nelson Amster took over (35 years old, a bachelor, his life a chain of false steps and embarrassments because he saw his mother in every other female he met): "It's a stinking female attention-getting device, Sam. Ignore it."
Maria Reynolds: "That's fine talk from a pantywaist like you!"
Eddie Atkinson (glancing first at the bland face of Dr. Shugart for a cue): "Come on, you old harpies. Give the girl a break. What do you say, Dr. Shugart? Aren't they just displacing their own hostilities onto Maureen and the doctor?"
Dr. Shugart, after a moment's pause: "Mmm. Maureen, do you have a reaction to all this?"
Maureen, her eyes lively but her voice serious: "Oh, I'm sorry if I've made trouble. I didn't think we were late. Honestly. If there was any displacement it was certainly on the subconscious level. I love you all. I think you're the finest, friendliest Group I ever—-and—well, there just isn't any ambivalence at all. Honestly."
Dr. Shugart, nodding: "Mmm."
The old man tinned restlessly in his chair. Pretty soon, he thought with a familiar and tolerable ache, they would all start looking at him and prodding him to participate. All but Dr. Shugart, anyway; the psychiatrist didn't believe in prodding, except in a minor emergency as a device to pass along the burden of talk from himself to one of the Group. (Though he always said he was part of the Group, not its master: "The analyst is only the senior patient. I leam much from our sessions") But the others would prod, they had no such professional hesitations, and Sidorenko didn't like that. He was still turning over inside himself the morning's fiasco; true, he should voice it, that was what the Group was for; but the old man had learned in nearly a century to live his life his own certain way, and he wanted to think it out for himself first. The best way to keep the Group off him was to volunteer a small remark from time to time. He said at the first opportunity: "I'm sorry, ladies and gentlemen. I didn't mean to upset you."
Everyone looked at him.
Ernie Atkinson scolded: "We're not here to apologize, Sidorenko. We only want you to know your motives."
Maria Reynolds: "One wonders if all of us know just why we are here? One wonders how the rest of us are to get proper attention, if some of us get first crack at the doctor's thought because they are more important."
Sidorenko said weakly: "Oh, Mrs. Reynolds—Maria—I'm sure there's nothing like that. Is there, Dr. Shugart?"
Dr. Shugart, pausing: "Mmm. Well, why are we here? Does anyone want to say?"
The old man opened his mouth and then closed it. Some evenings he joined with these youngsters in the Group, as demanding and competitive as any of them, but this was not one of the nights. Energy simply did not flow. Sidorenko was glad when Sam Krabbe took over the answer.
"We're here," said Sam pompously, "because we have problems which we haven't been able to solve alone. By Group sessions we help each other discharge our basic emotions where it is safe to do so, thus helping each other to reduce our problems to dimensions we can handle." He waited for agreement.
"Parrot!" smirked Ernie Atkinson.
"The doctor doesn't like our using pseudo-psychiatric double-talk," Maria Reynolds accused the air.
"All right, let's see you do better!" Sam flared.
"Gladly! Easily!" cried Atkinson. He hooked a thumb in his lapel and draped a leg over the arm of the chair. "The institution is a place where very special and very concentrated help can be given to a very few." ("Snob," Nelson Amster hissed.) "I'm not a snob! It's the plain truth. We get broad-spectrum therapy here, everything from hormones to hypnosynthesis. And the reason we get it is that we deserve it. Everybody knows Dr. Sidorenko. Amster created a whole new industry with mergers and stock manipulations. Maria Reynolds is one of the greatest composers—well, the greatest woman composers—of the century." ("Damn some people!" grated Maria). "And I myself—well, I need not go on. We are worth treating, all of us. At any cost. That's why the government put us here, in this very expensive, very thorough place."
"Mmm," said Dr. Shugart, and considered for a moment. "I wonder," he said.
Ernie Atkinson suddenly shrank a good two sizes. His dark little face turned sallow. The leg slid off the aim of the chair. "What's that, Doc?" he asked dismally.
Dr. Shugart said: "I wonder if that's a personal motivation."
"Oh, I see," cried Atkinson, "it's what each of us is here for that's important, eh? Well, what about it? How about your motivations, Sidorenko?"
The old man coughed.
It always came to this, reliably. He would put out the weak decoy remarks but it would do no good, one of the Group would pounce past the decoys to reach his flesh. Well, there was no fighting it.
"I—" he began, and stopped, and passed a hand over his face. Maureen was close beside him, her eyes warm and intent. "I know I shouldn't apologize," he apologized, "but it has been a bad day. You know about it. The thing is, I'm an old man, and even Dr. Shugart tells me that the old cells aren't in quite the shape they used to be. There was," he said mildly, as though he were reading off a dossier from a statistical sample, "a stroke a few years ago. Fortunately it limited itself; they're not operable, you know, when you get to a certain age. The blood vessels turn into a kind of rotten canvas and, although you can clamp off the hemorrhage, it only makes it pop again on the other side of the clamp, and —I'm wandering. I apologize," he finished wryly.
"Mmm," Dr. Shugart said. "There's no such thing as totally undirected speech."
"Of course. All right. But that's why I apologize, because I'm not getting around very rapidly to an answer.
"I had my—trouble—a few years ago. I don't remember much about it, except that I gather I was delusional. Thought I was God, was the way it was expressed to me once. Well, if I had been a younger man I suppose I could have been treated more easily. I don't know. I'm not. Time was, I know, when most doctors wouldn't bother with a man of ninety-five, even if he did happen to be," he said wryly, "celebrated not only for his scientific attainments but for his broad love for mankind. I mean, there's a point of obsolescence. Might as well let the old fool die."
He choked and coughed raspingly for a second. The nurse reached for him, but he waved her off.
"Mmm," said Dr. Shugart.