"The staircase is a deep Jungian metaphor, oh my God," Erran said in a faux-aggrieved tone, flopping back in his chair for a second, although he was smiling. "No, I realise that probably just sounds like a day in the life of having persecutory auditory hallucinations. And I'm not like, imparting wisdom to you or anything, I'm just kind of thinking today about the way this place fucks with everybody's sense of privacy and trust and friendship. But the meaning I took from it was that...if you want to get to the place in your life where you're really genuinely liked and respected, in any kind of way that really matters, you have to be okay with all the other possibilities. We can't make other people feel anything, we can't control it, and that's why it means something when we're liked and accepted."
At Marco's question about the books, he said, "Lobotomy-free, I promise. Nah, just if somebody comes in here and has a bad reaction or withdrawal to a psych med, or if somebody's so agitated that it seems appropriate to sedate them, I'd rather be super sure that we know what we're doing." He didn't prescribe, of course, but had often referred to the books to check up on a patient who was suddenly acting weird, in order to pass some slightly more useful information on to the health care team. "If I were at home and somebody handed me $250 for doing nothing I'd spend it on...Jesus, my honest answer is I would pay down my Mastercard balance, that's the most boringly adult thing I've said in awhile. The most frivolous thing I can come up with is taking the train into Manhattan for a day and eating somewhere overpriced, and that's also not applicable to Zenith. I guess there's nostalgic personal stuff—anything from the past that you'd want back, reminders of people or places you liked?"