A Tightly Raveled Mind

by Diane Lawson

  “How about you?” I said. “Ever fallen in love with a client?”

  “No,” he said, a little too fast, then excused himself and disappeared into the guest bathroom.

  I drained the last few drops of wine out of my glass. And then, when he still hadn’t come back, I started clearing the table. The process of doing the dishes, the pots, the pans, always made me feel exploited. Cleaning up was beneath Richard—if he was even around—and it was never worth the effort to get the kids to help. But feeling exploited was better than just sitting there, feeling like I’d blown an opportunity with Mike. Like I’d missed my chance to know him better, to matter to him. I have to admit that mattering to him was mattering more and more to me for reasons that at that alcohol-enhanced moment had less and less to do with the problem of dying patients. I scrubbed with a vengeance, trying to reconstruct the conversation, trying to remember the exact point he’d gotten antsy. When I’d asked about his falling in love with a client? Yes, then. But even before that. About our making our own fate. And I thought for the briefest time about his leaving the SAPD, but I didn’t want to connect those dots.

  I needed a hero.

  Mike took his spot at the counter again upon his return and observed my labor.

  “So what’s next?” I asked. “Are we getting anywhere?”

  “Should get updated copies of the preliminary reports on Westerman and Forsyth from Slaughter tomorrow. Pays to have a friend downtown. Otherwise it would be Monday at the earliest. Despite your conviction about Sniperman Lance, thought I’d follow him around for a while tomorrow. You can give me the info, or I can drive by in the morning and run his plates. Whatever sustains your illusion of being ethical. The meter is running.”

  “The meter is running,” I said, “but you decide what needs doing.”

  “Do you let your patients direct their treatment?”

  He had a point, but I wasn’t inclined to acknowledge it. Instead I said, “Your time might be better spent checking into the ex-husband of your so-called Mrs. Rich Bitch. I learned something interesting in her session today.”

  “Renee Buchanan, former blushing bride of M. King Buchanan III?”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I just happened to be passing by this afternoon. Couldn’t stop myself.” He shrugged, tapping on an invisible keyboard. “What’s the deal?”

  “Renee said King hates me because I refused to take him on as a patient years ago. She says he holds a grudge.”

  “Hard for me to see why MKB the Third would waste his time.

  “Pathological narcissism knows no bounds.”

  “Let’s think this through. M. King got rid of Renee, has more power and money than most countries and somehow is so upset about how his life is going that he wants revenge on you? Obviously, you haven’t seen the current Mrs. Buchanan.” He made curvy moves with his hands.

  “Look, Miguel…”

  “Mike,” he said, like a slap to my face.

  I hadn’t meant to call him that. But it was how I’d been thinking of him. Miguel. Softer than Mike. More musical. Miguel. A name to be whispered in an ear.

  “I just think this is taking too long. Another Monday is four days away.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s the other approach I was talking about. There is a pattern here. Not enough to be sure about. First Monday, Howard Westerman, your eight o’clock patient dies. Second Monday, Allison Forsyth, your nine o’clock patient dies.”

  “So it would be John Heyderman.”

  “He’s your ten o’clock.” Mike rubbed his hand over his scalp and walked toward the family room. “Mind if I put some music on?”

  “Are you suggesting I warn him?” I had to raise my voice to be heard.

  “I asked if I could put some music on.”

  “This is your profession. What do you think I should do?”

  “I’d say the odds are low, but the stakes are high.” He flipped through the rack of CDs. “Your call.”

  The idea of telling John made everything take on another layer of reality. Like Howard’s and Allison’s deaths and meeting Detective Slaughter and hiring Mike Ruiz had in some odd psychological way been a game until that moment. Our mental hold on reality is an illusion, a slippery rascal at best. When someone dies you know they’re cold in the ground. Know intellectually. The next minute you swear you see them on the street or pick up the phone to give them a call. The psyche resists full awareness of the traumatic, protects us from a head-on collision with what we yet can’t bear to know. Reality. I straddled two realities at that moment. My right foot planted on what I’d known—the benign world where everything works out and nice people only act mean. My left foot taking root in a sinister landscape—a place where intentions were evil and cruel people only appeared to be kind. The tectonic plates began to separate, demanding I declare allegiance.

  The Grateful Dead shook the house.

  “Whoa,” I heard Mike say before the volume came down. The maxed-out level fingered Alex as the last person to use the stereo system. Richard would have had a fit.

  I ignored the commotion and focused on the sensation of the warm sudsy water through yellow rubber gloves. Alice at the looking glass, I didn’t notice Mike had come up behind me.

  His voice was off key, but he had the lyrics right:

  Truckin’

  Like the do-da man…

  I scrubbed at a piece of linguini stuck on the bottom of the pot. His breath was on my right ear. His skin sent off a subtle smell. Cinnamon? Cardamon? The warm liquid feeling in my hands spread through my body.

  “Guess I’ll have to tell John,” I said.

  “Not right now, you don’t,” he said, tracing the neckline of my blouse with the tip of his nose from below my right earlobe around to the same spot on my left.

  A faint voice in my head suggested that I should be offended. Mike Ruiz is in your employ. You, Nora Goodman, are married. His advance is unquestionably inappropriate. Even disregarding those annoying facts, rational thinking signaled it was too soon for any such goings-on with a man I hardly knew. These all-too-relevant considerations scolded me from a distance. Meanwhile, I stood there, dumbly enjoying the sensations, teetering on the edge of my desire to ditch the rubber gloves, leave the pasta pot in the dishwater that would fast become greasy-cold and turn round to bring my face to his.

  Before I could move, the front door flew open, setting the security system chiming. The dogs, having abandoned hope of table food and gone to sleep on the rug, woke into a barking frenzy.

  “You pushed me!” It was Tamar, red-faced and panting, one braid evolving into a pigtail.

  “You stepped in front of me, Stupid.” Alex appeared in the doorway, an ugly pout on his face that changed into a huge smile as soon as he spotted Mike. “Hey. The detective’s here.”

  Tamar came directly to me and spoke in my ear. “Pugsley peed on my backpack.”

  “So? Pugsley’s old. He’s demented. You shouldn’t have put it by the umbrella stand,” I said. And you shouldn’t have been at home for another two hours. “Did your dad give you dinner?”

  “He said we could eat with you,” Alex answered. “He has work to do.” The edge in his voice warned me away from criticizing his father.

  “There’s some pasta left,” I said.

  “I’m sick of pasta. All we get here is pasta and low-fat shit.” Alex slipped a look at Mike. “Can’t we ever have real food?”

  Tamar had her head in the freezer. “There’s a Hot Pocket. I call it.” She waved the frozen glob in Alex’s face.

  “It’s mine,” he said. “You had the other three.”

  He grabbed for the freezer-burned prize, knocking it from her hand and onto the floor. Gizmo had it on the bounce and dove under the couch.

  “Guess I should take off,” Mike said.

  “It’s their bedtime,” I said. Don’t go. I tried to make my eyes speak. We weren’t finished. My yellow rubber gloves dripped cold dishwater on m
y skirt.

  “No, it’s not, Mom,” Tamar said. “It’s not even dark.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  John Heyderman scooted ahead of me into the consulting room, like a child whose mother follows behind him with a switch. He was poised to slide onto the couch when I said, “I need to talk to you. Maybe you should sit in the chair today.”

  John complied, but averted his head. “It’s hard to look at you. Are you going to stop seeing me?”

  “What would make you think that?”

  “You’re probably tired of me. I never get any better.”

  “We do need to understand those feelings, but there is something I need to discuss with you.” I took a breath. “In the past several days, two of my patients have died.”

  John was looking at me now. I could see his pupils dilate.

  “I didn’t do it,” he said. “I know I’m strange. But I’m not strange like that.”

  “That possibility didn’t occur to me. I’m bringing it up because there may be a pattern. A day sequence: Mondays. A session-time sequence. If so, my ten o’clock slot would be next.”

  “That’s me.” He crossed his left leg over his right. “You think this person is going to kill me next.” He was swaying ever so slightly.

  “I’m afraid of that.”

  “On this coming Monday?” He seemed to be calculating.

  “I need your permission to provide you protection. It would be private and undercover.”

  “No.” John shook his head. He scrutinized the books on the shelf by his elbow. A slight smile flitted across his face.

  “What?’

  “I don’t give my permission.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You should,” he said. “Death by murder would be my meaningful moment. I’d be noticed. Have my flash in the newspaper.” His cheeks took on a rosy glow. “Can you tell me how it might be done?”

  “This isn’t about a fantasy. This is about your life.”

  “Exactly,” John said, a creepy look coming over his face. “It’s about my life. I think you owe it to me to tell me how it might happen.”

  “Unfortunately, the killer—if there even is one—may have accessed my case notes. He could be playing on vulnerability.” I noticed that I’d said he. Why not she? Or they?

  “I like that.” John nodded his head slowly. “So it will be my perversions. Very nice.”

  “Please let me provide you some protection.”

  John closed his eyes, clamped his lips together and shook his head like a child refusing a spoon of foul-smelling potion.

  “This is my business. I don’t want to hurt you, Dr. Goodman. We don’t agree on what life is about. You have this idea that I can straighten up, marry some ordinary woman. The kind of woman who would have a guy like me. That we’d make kids and live in some sprawling suburban monstrosity. Close it all out in a retirement center.”

  “That’s not it,” I said, though in essence it was. “I would like you to have some happiness.”

  “My happiness would be about making a spectacle. My fifteen minutes of fame. I thought you understood this about me. Imagine. I could be found hanging upside down from the ceiling fan dressed in my red lingerie.” He smiled and put his head down. “Or in my diaper and plastic pants with my adult-sized pacifier rammed down my windpipe.” He rubbed his hands up and down his thighs. “Or slashed to pieces by someone disguised as Her. Yes.” He seemed increasingly pleased with each evolving scenario.

  “You understand that I’ll be subpoenaed if something happens to you,” I said. “You’ve worried yourself sick about being exposed.”

  “That’s if I’m alive. You have my permission to tell the press all about me when it’s over. No! I insist that you tell everything once I’m dead.” John stood up and shook himself like a dog released from his bath. “I’m going to go. I have some things to get in order.”

  “I have a legal obligation to protect you.”

  “You have an ethical obligation to respect my wishes. The real me, not the person you’ve dreamed up. Everything is in place for now. I don’t want to be difficult. But if you try to interfere, I could just do it myself. I am grateful. You’ve helped me more that you know.”

  I followed John to the door. I called after him, but he sprinted down the stairs.

  I dialed Mike’s cell phone.

  “I’m in the office. Why are you calling my mobile? You’re running up my minutes.”

  “He won’t give permission.”

  “Did you make it clear to him that he could be dead meat?” I could tell he had the phone pinched between his shoulder and his ear.

  “He likes the idea. It fulfills some kind of twisted fantasy of grandeur.”

  “I told you he was a loony.”

  “Calling names doesn’t help.”

  “You don’t let insane people make decisions. There’s some kind of law about that.”

  “He’s not psychotic. He just sees things differently. He says if anyone tries to interfere, he’ll kill himself.

  “You believe that?”

  “Yes,” I said, although I wasn’t sure.

  “This is too damned weird for me. I’m going back to tracking unfaithful spouses for a hundred bucks a Polaroid.”

  “No you’re not,” I said, suddenly afraid that he just might bail on me. Part of that worry had to do with needing him professionally. But too much had to do with some other need of mine, some need that I just wanted taken care of without having to name.

  “But I could,” he said. “Don’t think you’re the only deal in town.”

  The clock read 2:58. Two minutes of peace before I had to let Morrie in. Morrie Viner, the last patient of my day for the preceding seven years, awaited his daily sessions, nose pressed to the wavy glass pane of the consulting room door. Literally. No matter how I tried to gird myself before opening the door, I never failed to startle at the sight of his frantic face in mine.

  I used my free time to stare at my appointment book. With Howard Westerman and Allison Forsyth gone, the pages were already too empty. Now there was more than a good chance John Heyderman wouldn’t be back. I felt sick to my stomach.

  At the top of the hour, I walked to the door, took a deep breath and turned the knob. A vacuum on the other side threatened to pull me off balance. Morrie wasn’t there. For a moment, I thought I’d faint. Had Mike and I been wrong about the pattern? I was well on the way to panic when the door from the outside imploded. Morrie stormed past me and was on the couch before I could get back into the room.

  “Don’t ask what I’m thinking,” he said. “All that goes through my mind is that I have to pay for three whole minutes of time that I am not going to get, and it is not my fault. How can they close Hildebrand without telling people? At least put up a warning sign or something. Inform the public. People have appointments. People don’t have time to be detouring on Fresno and streets they don’t even know.” He rocked up and down, doing mini-crunches, as the words shot out of his mouth.

  Morrie Asperger’s Syndrome accounts for his psychological rigidity, as well as his complete lack of empathy and social skills. Psychoanalysis isn’t considered the treatment of choice for these deficiencies of psychic hard drive, but in his case all other potential remedies had failed. I’d initially agreed to see him as a favor to an internist colleague, a friend of the Viner family, who was at his wit’s end. In the wake of his mother’s death, Morrie had, in very short order, gone through seven psychiatrists, two inpatient units and some twenty-seven heavy-duty psychotropic medications to no benefit.

  “I’m just glad you’re here,” I said.

  “What does that have to do with my psychoanalysis? You’re not supposed to talk about you.”

  “Would it occur to you that I might be relieved to see you?” I said. “You’re never late.”

  “Uh oh, uh oh.” Morrie was shaking his head like he could scramble his brains. “That was an even bigger technical error. Are you sick?”
He stole a look in my direction. Perspiration beaded his high pale forehead. The pupils of his small eyes called out like hungry black holes. “Why should you be nervous about whether I’m here? You have some selfish investment in my analysis. Great. So now it’s your treatment and I’m paying for it. I really think I’m going to get a consult with Dr. Richard F. Kleinberg. He’s a genuine Freudian analyst. I’m serious. Could you have my records ready by tomorrow?”

  My mind stalled. My stomach knotted even tighter. Morrie was a hermit. I couldn’t fathom how he’d know of Richard.

  “For example, Dr. Richard F. Kleinberg would want to know what came to mind about having to pay for three minutes that I missed through absolutely no fault of my own. You shouldn’t be saying your feelings. You should be asking what that means to me.” He took an exasperated breath. “I will tell you even though you didn’t ask. It means that you are exactly like my father, making me pay for every crumb of attention. This is not that transference thing.”

  “Hold on,” I said, “What does Dr. Kleinberg have to do with all this?”

  “Lucky for you, Dr. Kleinberg isn’t taking new patients right now. Someone as excellent as Dr. Richard F. Kleinberg wouldn’t just have open time sitting around. But he says he might be able to take me on in six months. It was so lucky that I saw Dr. Richard F. Kleinberg on the television this morning. I never watch the news. All those car wrecks and crimes and air quality warnings make me nervous.”

  Of course! That damned show: Expand with a Shrink, Richard’s seven-minute segment of fame every Friday on Channel 4’s Wake Up San Antonio! I smiled to myself. The reality was that Richard saw as few therapy patients as possible. There wasn’t enough money or adoration in it for him. I imagined the look of disgust on my spouse’s face at the sight of this scrawny, middle-aged guy in a faded Spiderman tee shirt and geeky white Keds. Even if Richard had time, he wouldn’t put up with Morrie Viner on a daily basis at any fee, much less at the extremely reduced rate I’d agreed to accept. On the other hand, wouldn’t Richard get a huge kick out of knowing my patient was less than satisfied with me? He’d see Morrie in consultation just for spite. The smile left my face.