“Where are you guys going?” he asked.
“Burger King.”
Tom’s dark brown eyes flashed up at his colleague.
“Burger King? Are you serious? Christ, you guys eat there every other day of the week.”
“I know, but its Rick’s birthday and that’s where he wants to go.”
Tom’s colleague shrugged and looked at his watch. “So, are you in?”
“No,” Tom said, shaking his head. “Can’t today. I’ve got too much work piling up.”
“Suit yourself, man,” his coworker replied, backing out the door. “Should I tell everyone you’re working a serious case? Maybe closing in on an illegal taco stand, or hot on the trail of a pack of rogue landscapers trying to sneak black-market piñatas through Nogales?” He smiled at Tom and winked. “Hey, who knows… if you keep it up, you might just get a promotion like Rick did.”
Tom opened a case folder on his desk and waved his hand dismissively.
“Go eat your fucking Burger King.”
“Right. Later.” His colleague spun and disappeared down the hallway as the steel door to Tom’s office closed loudly behind him.
Tom stared blankly at the case documents in front of him for a few moments before closing the folder and carefully returning it to the stack on his desk. He then glanced at the wastebasket. The discarded memo was sitting upright on its edges on top of the other trash in a way that annoyed him. He reached over and quickly poked it onto its side.
“Fuck you,” he muttered.
He poked it several more times before suddenly punching it deep into the wastebasket with his fist.
“Fuck you!”
Tom sat up and took a deep breath. He shrugged embarrassingly at himself as he opened the top drawer of his desk and grabbed a small bottle of antibacterial lotion. After methodically wiping his thick hands with the lotion, he turned to his computer and pecked “Impulse Control Disorder” into an online search engine. A second later, the first 10 of 340,000 results appeared on his screen. Tom scanned the first page of results and clicked on the first one that had any resemblance to English. The link flashed to a medical website with the image of a doctor smiling compassionately. Tom winced at the bold ‘Understanding Psychological Disorders’ headline on the page and scrolled down to read the text.
Impulse Control Disorder (ICD) is a set of psychiatric disorders including intermittent explosive disorder, kleptomania, pathological gambling, pyromania, trichotillomania, and dermatillomania.
Impulsivity, the key feature of these disorders, can be thought of as seeking a small, short term gain at the expense of a large, long term loss. Those affected with impulse control disorder repeatedly demonstrate failure to resist their behavioral impetuosity.
Impulse control disorders are considered to be part of the obsessive-compulsive disorder spectrum.
The page included several links to related disorders, treatment options, and mental facilities with calm-inducing names like Pleasant Acres and Heritage Ridge, but Tom ignored them and quickly closed the web page with an irritable click of his mouse.
There was no point in investigating the matter further, he concluded, because the whole idea was completely and utterly ridiculous. Kleptomania? Not possible. The only thing Tom had ever stolen in his life was a toy from a department store when he was a kid, and that was only because it was Superman, his favorite super hero. He’d been six-years-old for chrissake. Pathological gambling? A few weekends in Vegas years ago with his ex-wife and the occasional lottery ticket were the extent of his gambling history – certainly nothing in the pathological category. Pyromania? Give me a fucking break he thought. He couldn’t remember the other disorders that had been listed, but it didn’t matter. He didn’t have any form of this “ICD” bullshit. Period.
The more he thought about it, the more obvious the answer became – the examiner that interviewed him must have grossly misread his psychological condition.
Tom thought back to the day of the evaluation. He remembered the examiner – a short, fair-skinned, mid-fortyish woman with a beaked nose, heavy make-up and a demeanor that had been friendly to the point of flirtatious. Was that it? he wondered. Did he not give her enough attention and she had decided to retaliate by pinning a disqualifying “disease” on him? The questions during the evaluation had been easy enough; he’d been concise and polite in his responses, and he even recalled her smiling warmly as she noted his responses. God knows how, but he must have pissed her off in some way. But how could he explain the written test results that apparently pointed to the same conclusion? Were they trying to weed him out for other reasons? Am I too old? Tom thought. Am I too aggressive? Is this memo itself a test?