"A Rusk-level dream": her name becomes the students' unit of measure for useless psych-talk

texture · 12-17 Nov YDAU

• When: 12 Nov YDAU (Rm. 204 Subdorm B, the Pemulis/Troeltsch/Schacht room, 1930h Thursday, n.321) and 17 Nov YDAU (Hal at the Inner-Infant meeting in Natick, scene 160)
• What: Two invocations that show what "Rusk" has come to mean in student idiom. Dismissing Hal's DMZ-and-Mildred-Bonk nightmare, Pemulis grades it by her scale: "A Rusk-level dream, Inc. A standard nobody-understands-me dream." Five days later and off-campus, Hal walks into the Inner Infant men's meeting braced by the same reference: "Inner Infant sounds uncomfortably close to Dr. Dolores Rusk’s dreaded Inner Child" — her needlepoint-sampler doctrine (event 7) now a dread-word — and when the teddy-bear-cradling leader speaks, Hal hears her exactly: his "high hoarse voice had the same blandly kind didactic quality as Rusk’s, as if always speaking to a not-too-bright child." (The leader has also, uncannily, "made a cage of his hands" — the 091 portrait's signature gesture, here on another continent of the recovery world.) Rusk functions in these scenes purely as a calibration standard: the known quantity of therapeutic uselessness against which other therapy is measured.