With Avril, Rusk shunts the bereaved Hal into professional grief-and-trauma therapy

pivotal · April-May YTSDB (2004)

• When: the weeks after Himself's felo de se — "He stopped living on April First" (scene 064); the therapy runs "right in the April-May gearing-up-for-summer-tour period"
• What: Rusk's one act of real narrative consequence. Within hours of Himself's microwave suicide, the machinery moves: "It turns out Rusk and the Moms had begun interviewing top-flight trauma- and grief-counselors for me within hours after it happened," Hal tells Orin — "Trauma seems to have been the consensus," and Hal is "shunted directly into concentrated grief- and trauma-therapy," four days a week for over a month, at real cost to his ranking (two spots on the 14's ladder). Orin's gloss assigns the motive to Avril: "The Moms had Rusk shunt you to a top grief-pro so she wouldn’t have to feel guilty" — Orin's reading, as printed. The episode also yields the brothers' twin verdicts on Rusk's own craft, by way of contrast with the "one tough hombré" grief-professional: "He made a Rusk-session look like a day on the Adriatic" (Hal), and "Rusk always reminded me of a freshman fumbling with some Subject’s bra, the way she’d sort of tug and fumble at your head" (Orin). Even here her role is conduit rather than clinician — she refers Hal out, and relays progress reports inward: "Rusk told deLint the grief-therapist’d told the Moms that it was starting to work, that I was starting to grieve, but that it was a long process."