Free Zod Wallop by William Browning Spencer

to blame.”
    “I should have been more supportive, should have been there to keep his courage up.”
    Gabriel stared at her psychiatrist as he shook his head, smiling that rueful, seen-it-all smile, and said, “Gabriel, Gabriel. You are saying that you should have encouraged him when, of course, that is precisely what—”
    Gabriel interrupted. “And, of course,” she said, “a court of law might find your involvement in the whole affair a little—well—unethical.”
    “I have done nothing unethical,” Lavin said.
    “You are such a hypocrite,” Gabriel said. “I don’t know how much money Marlin gave you, but I know the sum was a tidy one. You have too great a sense of your own dignity to go cheaply.”
    Lavin shook his head. “Really, Gabriel. Corwin-Smart is a perfectly reputable pharmaceutical house and my dealings with them have always been…”
    Gabriel was no longer listening. She saw, as though it were just yesterday, her husband, the distinguished Dr. Marlin Tate, crouched naked on the bathroom floor. She peered in at her husband, and he looked up at her. His face always looked vulnerable and naked without his glasses. He clutched the toilet bowl with his hands, elbows crooked, as though he might lift the bowl, and he grinned as he spoke. “You want to be very careful of your companions,” he said, his voice pontifical yet boyish, his child-prodigy history in every syllable. “You don’t share Ecknazine with just anyone because it tends to confuse ego boundaries. It has no…no respect for the envelope of self and so—”
    Her husband coughed, his shoulders rising, scapula flaring. “I…” He coughed again. And then he began to vomit.
    Gabriel pulled back from the bathroom door as her husband opened his mouth and showered silver coins into the toilet bowl. Some of the coins pinged against the rim and spilled out onto the tiled floor.
    They were silver dimes, a jackpot flood of silver dimes, and as Gabriel bent to pick one up, her husband’s laughter filled her ears.
 
     
    “I think,” Dr. Lavin was saying, “I had better be going.”
    “Two days before my husband died,” Gabriel said, “he vomited dimes, silver dimes. Quite a lot of them actually. Eighteen dollars and sixty cents worth. Or at least that’s what I recovered. That’s a lot of dimes.” Gabriel paused, her hands folded primly in her lap. “Quite a lot of dimes.”
    “You understand, of course,” Lavin said, “that your husband was almost certainly administering the drug, this Ecknazine, to you during those last months. Since it was taken orally, there are any number of ways he could have given it to you without your knowledge. That explains the hallucinations you experienced.”
    “When your husband vomits dimes,” Gabriel continued, “you ask him about it. If your marriage is not utterly dead, you try to keep the avenues of communication open. So I asked of course. You know what he told me?”
    “No,” Lavin said. “You have never described this incident to me before.”
    “Well, he was very pleased, very excited. He said that he had wanted a candy bar that afternoon, and he’d gone down to the vending machine but it wouldn’t take his dollar. The machine required exact change; there was a little blinking message to that effect. And my husband had no change. Not a dime. He yearned, briefly but intensely, for a pocket full of dimes.”
    “Delusional systems are often elaborate and possess an internal logic,” Lavin said.
    Gabriel stretched to her full length on the sofa and again regarded the chandelier. “My husband is dead. My son is psychotic. And my psychiatrist is as indifferent as an old whore.”
    “I am not indifferent, Gabriel. I am trying to help you. I would not be here if I were not.”
    “You are here,” Gabriel said, “because a children’s book has frightened you, Theo. That’s why you are here.”
    Theodore Lavin glanced nervously at the book that lay on the end table next to