Eureka by Jim Lehrer Read Free Book Online Page A

fuck-er
yourself,”
Tonganoxie said with a huge smile. He did not stand up.
    “Maybe it’s only boring,” he said as Otis arrived at the door. “All those numbers and risk analyses—reports to read, financial statements to ponder, meetings to conduct. Boring, boring, boring. You’re bored. That’s all it is. Not hate but boredom. More common among CEOs, even, than motorcycle fetishes.”
    Otis opened the door and screamed back at Tonganoxie, “Motor
scooter
, asshole!”
    “On second thought, Otis, maybe you’re nothing but a classic No Need Monster—”
    Otis slammed the door hard behind him as he left.
    OUT IN THE main hallway, there stood good Bob Gidney, trying to look like he was supposed to be there.
    “Well, that didn’t take long,” Bob said to Otis.
    “The man’s an idiot,” Otis said, still moving. “Did you know he owned four Jeeps? Nobody owns four Jeeps except the U.S. Army.”
    Bob, walking along with Otis, said, “He insulted you, right?”
    “You’re damned right he did.”
    “He always does that. What did he say?”
    “He said successful people are depressed, and insurance people like me are bloodsucking vultures who feed on the tragedies of humankind. He said I should and do feel guilty about it. Or maybe I’m just bored. Or that I hate being almost sixty and bald. He’s an asshole. He’s the one who needs help.”
    Bob strode alongside Otis out the front door, down the mansion’s steps toward Otis’s Explorer, parked in a small graveled parking lot.
    “That’s Russ’s technique—a form of eyeball-to-eyeball shock treatment, he calls it,” Bob said. “He first pisses off the patient and then waits for him to think about it awhile, to decide he might be right after all, and then to call for another appointment to continue the discussion.”
    “He’d better not hold his breath for
my
call,” Otis said, jumping into the Explorer and slamming the door with gusto. Then he rolled down the window and asked Bob, “Do you know a lot about Archimedes? The Greek who first said ‘Eureka’?”
    “All I know is that he was supposedly stepping into his bath with the king’s crown. He put the crown down in the water with him and made a discovery about the weight of gold being lighter than silver. Something like that. Also, late in his life, he helped invent geometry, I think. A Roman soldier killed him. Maybe for inventing geometry, who knows. What brought that up?”
    Otis didn’t answer. He put the Explorer in gear. “What’s a No Need Monster?”
    “It’s a very unprofessional nickname Tonganoxie and his fellow experts have for a particular type of depressed male.”
    Otis rolled up the window and gunned the engine. Bob Gidney waved goodbye.
    The Explorer didn’t move. Otis put the window back down and said, “Give me a thirty-second definition.”
    Bob said, “Ambitious young married man throws himself completely into his job so he can be a huge success, provide for his family. Wife and children are forced to make lives without him because he’s never there. Then, sometime in his late forties or early fifties, the man arrives at the top, turns around to have a family life, and discovers that nobody needs him for anything except as a provider. That turns him into a depressed monster of some kind—there are several different varieties—”
    Otis, without gunning the engine, eased the Explorer away at a very slow speed.
    BACK AT THE clinic, Tonganoxie was still thinking about Otis Halstead.
    Asshole, He called me an asshole. Maybe so
—
maybe right now I am. Of course, in the world of us shrinks, there is no one definition for asshole
.
    Russ Tonganoxie had come to Kansas alone, having left the second of two former wives and three children—two from his first marriage, one from the second—back on the East Coast in Baltimore and a Boston suburb. He had come here to the middle of nowhere mostly for professional reasons, because Ashland had offered him a deal he