The Syndrome by John Case Page B

with cognitive problems so he knew his own symptoms well enough. According to the
DSM-IV
, he suffered from agoraphobia. Or to be exact, because agoraphobia itself was not codable, he suffered from the malady listed in the
DSM-IV
as 300.27:
Agoraphobia with panic disorder. Situations are avoided or endured with marked distress.
    In its most debilitating form, agoraphobes were prisoners of their fears, unable to venture out of their homes. Duran’s malady was less severe. If the need was great enough, he could resist it. He could go out, and he did. But less and less frequently, it seemed, and never with much enjoyment. In point of fact, if he were not living and working in an “urban village” like the Capitol Towers, the phobia might have been crippling.
    So it worried him. And not just the phobia, but the way he was handling it. In essence, he was ignoring the problem because it made him uncomfortable to think about it—which was ironic, given his profession. Indeed, it made him wonder if he was even functional. Could a therapist live an unexamined life, and still help others? Did he have any business dealing with patients as disturbed as Nico and de Groot? He drained the wine and poured himself another glass.
    A voice in the back of his head whispered,
Therapist, heal thyself.
And a second voice replied,
Later …

6
    Nico’s sister, Adrienne, had made a pact with the Devil. It was as simple as that.
    Having graduated from Georgetown Law the year before, she’d made a Faustian bargain with Slough, Hawley, in the interests of paying down a mountain of student debt. In return for a whopping salary and the inside-rail on what everyone said was “the fast track,” Adrienne was expected to work eighty-hour weeks, doing mostly shitwork, in what amounted to a two-year bootcamp for baby lawyers. If, at the end of this period, she was still “viable”—which is to say, neither burned out nor canned—she’d be named an associate. Whereupon, things would get a lot easier, or if not easier, at least more interesting.
    For now, however, life was hell. That was the deal.
    At the moment, she was working on a memo for Himself. This was Curtis Slough, the name partner who was supposed to be her mentor, and the only one for whom she actually did any work. The client was Amalgamated Paving, a Maryland-based company in the business of building parking lots and roads.
    Four years earlier, Amalgamated had been sued by the District of Columbia, which contended that its work on the 14th Street Bridge had been shoddy. Specifically, the pavement had begun to crumble only six months into a projected, ten-year life span. Large and dangerous potholes had opened up, causing accidents and letters to the editor. Litigation was inevitable.
    When the District filed suit against Amalgamated, Slough, Hawley countered on behalf of the beleaguered paver by filing a continuum of hopeful motions. Each of these was accompanied by a memorandum of law in which it was argued that the facts did not entitle the plaintiff to relief. That the roadway had crumbled was not at issue; it was a mess. But it was not (necessarily) Amalgamated’s mess. In the considered view of Slough, Hawley the fault rested not with their client, but with the subcontractors and suppliers whose work and materials had been inferior. Or, if that could not be shown, then the fault might be attributed to an Act of God, i.e., to the weather (which everyone agreed had been harsh and bizarre), and/or to an unexpected increase in traffic. Finally, it was suggested that the blame might be ascribed to the salt used by the District’s road crews—an unusually corrosive formula whose impurities ate into the asphalt’s binder and destroyed “the integrity of the road.” That, in short, was the firm’s position: one of the above.
    Which is to say, they hoped to settle. But after four years of legal maneuvering, the District’s attorneys had yet to budge—and the judge had had enough. A