The Reflection

by Hugo Wilcken

  I didn’t want to go home, didn’t want to be alone in that room, not yet. I found myself at the Public Library, half by accident, half on purpose. Climbing the stairs to the imposing entrance brought to mind the last time I’d been there, some years before. It had been when I was researching the patient who had obsessively drawn pictures of a cityscape he’d claimed had come to him in visions. And then, frustratingly, I’d frightened him off with my heavy-handed tactics before I’d worked out whether he was truly delusional—before, in fact, I’d been able to help him at all. It was an unresolved case, like so many others, but the one I’d always found peculiarly poignant. I could still see the drawings in my mind’s eye, of a city unvisited and yet intimately known, perfect in its way.

  That wasn’t what had brought me to the library this time, though. For some reason I’d wanted to see the paper Manne had written on Miss Fregoli. It was the first case history I’d had published, and perhaps the only piece I’d ever really been happy with. If there were some key to Manne, I reasoned, perhaps I’d find it there. I flipped through the cards in the catalogue until I came to “Manne, David.” Disappointingly, there was no record of the Fregoli article. Although I must have published at least a couple of dozen case histories, the library listed only one. I went to the stacks and found it, in an obscure university publication. I had no recall at all of writing this particular piece, although I certainly remembered the case. A married man had left his family and had gone missing for three months, only to return home one day, unable to remember where he’d been or what he’d done in the intervening months. But after a month of intense therapy, I’d managed to coax the details out of him. The fugue had been triggered by the discovery of his wife’s infidelity. He hadn’t gone far; he’d been living in a fleapit hotel only a few blocks from his house. By day, he’d keep watch on his family home. Sometimes he’d see his wife’s lover enter or leave the house. Little by little, it seemed the lover was insinuating himself into the household, even to the extent of taking the kids to school occasionally. My patient told me that he’d felt he was peeking into some sort of alternative world, as he saw his wife and her lover arm in arm, off to eat at a favorite local restaurant.

  I’d counted that case a success on my part, as I’d reached the root of the trauma and had banished the amnesia, but where had that left the patient? Had he reconciled with his wife? Was he any happier on account of my intervention? I didn’t know, and perhaps had never known what had happened to him, nor was there any hint in the paper I’d written. It was a disturbing experience, reading a piece I couldn’t even remember writing, and to my mind the author came off as pompous and obtuse. This was Manne as he’d presented himself to his academic audience, perhaps to his patients as well. It was a performance. Just one in a whole constellation of tiny performances that had made up his life. Wasn’t that what anyone’s life was, after all? A repertoire of roles, with no single guiding principle. There was also the Manne who had married Abby, for instance—surely a different creature. Now I was thinking about those early days after Abby’s departure. The despair of returning to the unchanged apartment. The futility of washing up after a meal, or even cooking it in the first place. With no witnesses, you weren’t really there at all.

  I had another idea. I put the journal with my article back in the stack and went to the catalogue cards to look up Peter Untermeyer. No doubt he must have published something down the years. But when I checked, his record seemed almost as threadbare as Manne’s. There was a longish article summarizing the works of the Viennese psychologist, Otto Rank. But only one paper of original work. It had been published soon after the war, at around the time I must have bumped into him in Murray Hill. I could feel a mounting excitement as I found the piece in the bound copies of Psychiatry Today, a prestigious journal that had never accepted a piece of mine. I sat down to read it, but was quickly disappointed. What Untermeyer was proclaiming to be a “revolutionary new treatment method” for personality disorders seemed to me merely an eccentric patchwork of notions, old and new, taking in transference techniques, therapeutic identities, and even at one point the “electromagnetic stimulation of the brain.” I was surprised that a reputable journal published the piece, and skipped ahead to the concluding paragraphs. The real shock was the biographical note tacked on to the end: “Dr. Untermeyer fought with the Twelfth Infantry Regiment in Europe, and subsequently headed a denazification unit in occupied Germany. Since his return to the United States, he has worked with the Stevens Institute in New York.”

  I scanned the vast reading room. Dozens of men, and a few women, were crouched over their books, scribbling notes, each in their own particular kingdom of exile. I glanced at the big clock suspended above: it was now past ten o’clock in the evening. Somehow, hours had passed by in the library. I was not quite ready to go: galvanized by my discovery of the Untermeyer article and the biographical note, I opened the latest issue of Psychiatry Today. I was wondering whether Dr. Peters might have written about me, as I’d once suspected. Almost at the same time as I had that idea, I noticed his name in the contents list. It was difficult to shake off the powerful sensation that I’d willed it there myself, by merely thinking of it. I found the page reference and ran my eye quickly over the piece, until I came to this:

  Case 4. S.S. is a white male in his midthirties, of no fixed profession or domicile. He had been brought to the emergency room with head injuries resulting from an attempted suicide in a subway station. While recovering from his injuries, S.S. acquired the strong delusional belief that he was a Park Avenue psychiatrist named Dr. M. This belief was of a direct transferred nature: a Dr. M. has offices at the address indicated by the patient, although he was on leave at the time of S.S.’s hospitalization. The patient presented typically for cases of monothematic delusional ideation: his thinking was observed to be well organized; he did not suffer from prominent or sustained hallucinations; there was little evidence of deterioration in mental functioning; there was no insight into his illness.

  In the initial treatment period, standard Saltmeyer procedures were followed. The patient was kept in seclusion; he was interviewed daily; the delusion was not directly challenged. Under Saltmeyer, patients with good functional performance begin recovery within two to four weeks. This was not the case for S.S. In fact, repeated interviewing had seemed to harden his delusion into a complex, self-contained system with an additional paranoid dimension.

  Approximately one month after the patient’s admission, enhanced scenario (ES) technique therapy was attempted. The objective was twofold. It was hoped that a well-directed ES would trigger the psychic annihilation of the delusional persona, and secondly, that it would shift S.S.’s suicidal ideation onto the now discarded identity. An ES was developed to encompass both these objectives, while accommodating other elements of the patient’s own psycho-ideational structure. S.S.’s delusion was now bluntly challenged. He was told, in brutal fashion, that the real Dr. M. had been traced, and that he had recently committed suicide. S.S. greeted this scenario with shock and bewilderment. There was a brief period of resistance, which was eventually followed by a full recovery. Within two weeks, S.S. had largely abandoned his delusional identity, and within four weeks, he no longer mentioned Dr. M. at all.

  There was quite a bit more, mostly theorizing, but I stopped reading at that point—an immense fatigue had invaded me, and I was too tired to concentrate. I contemplated tearing out Dr. Peters’s article and taking it with me, but then I realized that I had no need to read any of it again. The case history was much as I might have expected; I could have practically written it myself. Dr. Peters had disappointed me: he’d gone with the grain, offering up a story that fit too smoothly with prevailing psychiatric practice—like a jigsaw piece sliding perfectly into its place.

  Back on the street, I picked my way through the drifting snow. The cold had revived me a little. I mentally put Dr. Peters’s piece of fiction to one side, although I knew I’d have to examine its ramif
ications later. I was thinking about Mrs. Esterhazy, as I still called her in my mind. I conjured up some of the shadowy world in which I assumed she existed. She was a refugee, perhaps, like Marie. She was making a buck in any way she knew how. A little modeling work when it came her way. Maybe some bit-part acting too. And she wasn’t averse to being taken out for a meal and a drink sometimes, maybe more—after all, that’s how Marie had probably met Stevenson. Then one day, through a demimonde contact, she’d heard of a nice little job, earning her a hundred dollars for just a couple of hours’ work. All she had to do was pretend to be someone’s wife. She’d be given some kind of backstory, and told precisely what to say. It was all aboveboard. There’d even be a couple of cops there to prove it.

  I played out that scene in my mind, and it seemed plausible enough. I thought about Untermeyer. That thumbnail biography linking him to the Stevens Institute was a cornerstone on which I could build the edifice of the Esterhazy case. I was sure that Dr. Peters had told me that the Stevens Institute didn’t exist; I’d now found printed reference to it for the second time since my discharge. If I hadn’t yet understood what had happened to Manne, at least it now seemed that an explanation was possible. At the same time, I suspected that once everything was clear to me, it would actually resolve nothing at all. That if I shone a light on that side of the problem, it would merely cast shadows on the other.

  Once I reached home I was ready to collapse, nearly too exhausted to sleep. On the bed sat a scribbled note: “Miss Dora Morel called,” and under that a number. The handwriting wasn’t familiar, and for a minute or two I was flummoxed as to how this note could have found its way onto my bed. It seemed folded into a greater mystery, namely that of how Marie had known the name Dora Morel in the first place, before even I had learned the surname, and how she’d tied it in with me. In my tiredness it took me too long to arrive at the obvious, that the two mysteries dissolved when combined.

  In the subway, I’d come to the conclusion that Marie must have known Dora Morel—perhaps they both moved in the same expatriate circles—and that, more improbably, Marie must have guessed a connection with me. Now I could clearly see that this was nonsense. Instead, Marie had come home, found the note shoved under my door, and put it on the mattress. There was a phone in the hallway and the old lady—the one I’d never seen—must have taken the call and written the note. The corroborating evidence for this was that Marie’s things—her clothes and makeup—were all gone. She’d necessarily been here while I was out. Already, before I’d arrived at Stevenson’s apartment, she’d made her decision to leave me. Whether it had been to do with the Dora Morel note, or whether it had been around the corner anyway, there was no way of knowing. Why then, I wondered, had she been initially prepared to have sex with me on my arrival? I dismissed the question almost as soon as I’d formulated it. Behavior is never more unstable than at the point of heightened emotion. The most important thing was that Marie was always going to leave. Faced with that inevitability, it was as if the affair had never really happened in the first place.

  I stretched out on the bed. My throbbing shoulder prevented me from sleeping, for the moment at least. I could hear the faint sound of barrel-organ music, drifting in from somewhere—it was a funny hour for it. I was thinking not so much of Marie now, and more about the Dora note. How two mysteries could come together, and in so doing, annihilate each other. Something like that was about to happen in the Esterhazy case, what with the reappearance of Mrs. Esterhazy and the proof of the Stevens Institute. The question was at what cost. Would its resolution kill off Smith, entombing me within Manne? I was determined that it would not.

  9

  There was one place to which I hadn’t returned, not since the day I heard about Abby. I hadn’t even so much as walked down Park Avenue since my discharge from the hospital. The idea of taking a look at my old office had come to me as I lay on my mattress, staring at the Rigaut photo pinned to the wall, unable to settle into anything else. I’d spent a feverish morning trying to speak to Dora Morel, calling her number at half-hourly intervals. No doubt she was out for the day, working, which meant there was no point in calling until the evening. But I couldn’t stop myself obsessively dialing the number, and I knew that if I continued like that, my nerves would be completely shot by the end of the day. I had to get myself out of the apartment.

  I climbed the subway stairs on East Seventy-Seventh, already picturing the short walk to my office. Every inch of that journey was burned onto my brain, every facade and storefront, every fire hydrant. Seconds before passing a building, I would have a mental image of it, and then moments later, compare it with the real thing. I was prepared for things to be different; it would have been normal that, in the months that had passed, a wall might have been repainted or demolished, a tree might have grown or died. But no: everything was the same.

  Manne’s apartment block had been redeveloped, the Stevens Institute destroyed: I could only wonder what might have happened to the Park Avenue building. The one thing that hadn’t occurred to me was that it would be perfectly, preternaturally unchanged. The image of it, in sepulchral white stone, was a part of me, almost inside me. I walked past the entrance without stopping, but managed a quick glance at the brass nameplates lining one of the walls of the lobby. I had a sense that mine was still up there. There was a bench on the sidewalk, a couple of doors down. I’d walked past it a thousand times, but had never sat on it. No one ever did, apart from the occasional elderly man on return from his daily constitutional. But I sat down on it now, as it offered me a good view of my old building, without making it seem as if I were loitering.

  I’d pretend to look elsewhere, but it was hard not to stare, watching the people as they came and went from the building, with greater frequency than I would have imagined. Many of them I didn’t know, but some I recognized. They were the wealthy residents and their servants, who lived on the upper floors, and with whom I might have exchanged the occasional nod or pleasantry in the elevator. Contact had rarely gone beyond that, but by dint of repetition their faces would be forever there, lurking in the corners of my consciousness. They too were exactly the same, but insubstantial, ghosts, with no further relevance or existence in my life. And yet they lived on.

  The experience of sitting and watching was intense and boring at the same time. I didn’t want to go into the building, for fear of being recognized. I’d returned to my former life, only to observe it from the outside in. I imagined Manne coming out from the lobby, and me watching him from my third-person perspective, as he wandered around the corner to a delicatessen, where he sometimes bought sandwiches to take to the Park. What had once been quite ordinary now transformed. All sorts of unrelated ideas came to me. I thought of the old lady who lived opposite me, whom I’d never seen or communicated with, and yet who must have taken the phone call from Dora Morel. And I thought of Dora Morel. I wondered whether I wanted to go to bed with her, as Marie had supposed. Perhaps Marie was right; perhaps I did. It was impossible to know who Dora was. When we’d met, she’d been the distraught wife of a supposed psychotic. In the magazine ad, she was the stereotypical American mother. The man at the agency implied that she was an illegal immigrant getting by on her good looks. The mask changed: it would change again should I ever meet her.

  A man walked out of the lobby and stood by the curb, plainly waiting for a taxi. How many times had I done that myself? Judging from his appearance—the high polish on the shoes, the conservative, well-cut suit—he too might well be a doctor, with an office in the building, and although I vaguely recognized him, I couldn’t place him. A cab pulled up. The man took off his hat and readied himself to get in. But then he seemed to change his mind and waved the taxi on. In the brief moment I’d seen him with his hat off, I knew who he was, with absolute clarity. The man I’d known as Esterhazy. He wasn’t dead. He was there: tall, wiry, with dark eyes and that thick dark hair. He seemed to hesitate on the sidewalk, like an actor unsure of his lines. The
n he set off down the avenue, weaving his way randomly through the throng, as if he had no particular destination in mind.

  He wasn’t hard to follow. The problem was to avoid overtaking him, to keep back against the flow of people, because his pace was that of a country stroll rather than a city stride. I caught him looking up to the sky at one point, but most of the time he had his hand to his chin, even while he walked, as if deep in thought. Already we were in a stretch of Park Avenue that I didn’t know, had maybe never been down, despite the fact that it was so close to where I’d spent a decade of my life. We were in that hinterland between the two worlds of Manne, that of his office and that of his apartment.

  I’d quickly gotten the hang of the following game; I wasn’t going to lose Esterhazy. With the shock of seeing him receding, I found myself able to think, after a period in which my brain had gone blank. Impossible to know what Esterhazy was up to or where he was going; I’d just have to wait it out. I was struck by how different he was from the last time I’d seen him, comatose on my bed, pale, fragile, drugged. And although I was certain that it was him I was following, there was also a nagging voice in my head, reminding me that I’d only seen him a couple of times before, many months ago, in peculiar circumstances, so how could I possibly be so sure? I supposed that he would eventually stop somewhere, and at that moment, I might get a closer look.