The Blind

by A. F. Brady

  “Oh, I don’t know. He left or retired or something while I was still in the can. I don’t know where he went. He would come visit me in the general population after I stopped seeing him for therapy. Sometimes we would eat together. But I never spoke a word to him. Now I wish I could say thank-you.”

  “You don’t remember his name?”

  Richard hesitates. “It’s been a long time. I just knew him as Dr. Mark.”

  “Great,” I say sarcastically. “That’s very helpful.” I flippantly toss my pen onto my desk. “You really don’t remember his last name?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it was Scharf, or Stein or something Jewish like that.”

  “Okay, that’s a start. Did you ever try to contact him?”

  “After I left prison? No, I don’t want to bother anybody.”

  “Richard, this man helped you. You said you wanted to thank him. Even with all the opening up you’re doing with me these days, I would still like to talk to someone else who knows you!”

  “I’m fifty-five years old; he must be sixtysomething by now. He doesn’t want some ex-con knocking on his door.”

  “Do I have your permission to try to find him?”

  “For what?”

  “For help in your continued care! So I can talk to anyone who knows anything about you. I’m shooting blanks here, Richard. I would love to have some professional discussion about your case.”

  “My case? Is that all I am to you? You want to get to the bottom of ‘my case’? See? That’s exactly what I was talking about when I took your booze. You agreed that you wouldn’t treat me like a patient.” He huffs out a loud sigh, throws himself backward and glares out the window.

  “You told me that if we went through with this deal, and we both shared our secrets, that I could give you the therapy you need to get better,” I say sympathetically. I reach out and put my hand on the busted crook of his left arm. “Isn’t that still part of the bargain? Isn’t that still my job?”

  He breathes in a deep lungful and slowly exhales out his mouth with his eyes closed. He puts his right hand on top of mine, and the hugeness of his hands and their softness and warmth startle me. He pats my hand gently.

  “Fine. Go ahead. But you might not like everything you find.”

  FEBRUARY 21ST, 2:37 P.M.

  I’ve just left a meeting in Rachel’s office, and I’m walking down the back stairs with my handbag, my water bottle, a cup of coffee and two patient files. Every step I take, I seem to plant on the outside corner of my foot and wobble like a newborn fawn. The top of my water bottle has flown off, and the gravity in the stairwell is wonky. I tuck the patient files I’m carrying into my handbag and clutch on the railing for support.

  The stairs are getting smaller and smaller, and by the time I reach the first floor and look for the big emergency-exit bar to push, I am twice the size of the door. I shake open the door and squeeze through, to find myself in a brightly lit hallway with Christmas decorations around the doorways. I could’ve sworn it was nearly spring. As I walk to my office, the bounce in my gait turns comical, and the gushes of water that slosh out of my bottle stay suspended in the air in front of me. As I walk through them, they soak my face and hair. It feels cold and refreshing and I shake the water bottle to release more.

  My office door appears down the hall, and the doorframe is as big as a mountain. It’s colorful and shining, as if it were inlayed with gemstones and mirrors. There is a small gray horse in front of my office. A spider monkey sits on his back, holding a martini and smoking a Marlboro Light. He laughs as I approach the door. I look down at him, and I see that the monkey is Lucas, and the horse is Sid, the bartender from Nick’s. They push open my door, and I follow them in. Once we’re inside, my office looks completely normal. The handbag that I just carried down the stairs is neatly hung from a coat hook behind the door, and a full water bottle and cup of coffee sit waiting for me on my desk. The patient files that I had in Rachel’s office are back in the wire rack next to my phone.

  Sid the gray horse jumps onto my patient chair and curls into a sleeping position. All four of his hooves are clumped tightly at his middle, and he yawns and settles his horse face over them to sleep. Lucas the spider monkey drains his martini, takes a last drag of his Marlboro Light and plops the butt into the remnant liquid at the bottom of the glass. He pats Sid’s sleeping head and hops onto my desk.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask him.

  “I’m here to kill you. Something in this office has been poisoned, and when you find it, you won’t survive.” Monkey Lucas picks up my phone and starts dialing my mother’s house.

  “How can I find out what it is?”

  “You’ll have to test everything and see.” He pulls the tangled cord of the phone straight and climbs up the wall. He pops one of the dirty tiles out of the ceiling and hangs by his feet with the giant phone propped in the crook of his neck. I scramble through my drawers, looking for something that has been tampered with. Looking for an old pharmacy bottle with the skull and crossbones from Saturday morning cartoons. I can hear monkey Lucas cackling on the phone, conspiring with my mother.

  I feel the sense of panic come over me like a heart attack and I frantically dig through endless black holes in my office. I sip and spit from my water bottle and coffee cup. I take a partially eaten bagel from the garbage can and test to see if it’s poison. Nothing. Nothing is killing me; nothing is making the panic abate. The more I search, the more items appear in the room. It’s getting filled faster than I can test everything. All I can hear is the static on the other end of the phone and the sickly cackling coming from the monkey.

  I seem to be getting to the end of the piles. I can see the carpet beginning to show again beneath the heaps of patient files that I’ve been licking, the office supplies covered in sticky saliva, the drinks, the cigarettes, the garbage—all the things I’ve tested for poison in my office. I finally get to the bottom of the pile and I haven’t found it. I haven’t found the poison. I look up to the Lucas monkey to ask him what I missed, where it is, and as I turn my eyes upward I see a giant guillotine blade dripping with a toxic green liquid coming down too fast to dodge.

  I immediately wake up with wet hair pasted to my cheeks and a pounding headache. I could feel myself crying in the dream, my chest heaving up and down in agonizing fear, and I touch my face to see that the tears were real. My subconscious must have known something because I have a text from Lucas waiting on my phone. Sam, I need to talk to you. I’m sorry. I pull open my drawers and look up to the ceiling to see if anything else remains. Everything from the dream is gone. But my morning coffee cup and my bottle of water sit at the edge of my desk. I delete the text.

  FEBRUARY 24TH, 5:41 P.M.

  I’ve called David into my office to help me locate the elusive Dr. Mark.

  “David, you have to help me look through all of this.” I’m on the floor with papers strewn about, flipping through intake materials and Richard’s file, trying to see if I missed anything.

  David sits down next to me. “What are we trying to find?”

  I’m still having trouble looking directly at David, now that he knows everything, so I keep my eyes down on the papers. “I need to find out if we can locate this psychiatrist who treated Richard while he was in prison. Richard was telling me about him this morning, and this shrink seems to have some kind of insights into him that we have never been able to access before. We can find out if these stories are bullshit or not. Find out what the fuck got him here to begin with! I have got to talk to this guy.”

  “Which prison?”

  “He was in Ogdensburg, and he saw a staff psychiatrist there. Mark something-with-an-S. He doesn’t know his last name; he just called him Dr. Mark.”

  “Did you look at Ogden’s website? See if there’s any clinical-staff record?” David asks.

  “No, I didn’t bother because Richard said the doctor left sometime before his sentence was up. So, he got to Ogden in—what, �
��84? When did he go to Green Haven? Do you have that paper?”

  “Umm…” David shuffles through the documents in his hands. “Yeah, hold on. Looks like he was arrested in May of ’79, and then the trial started in September, also in ’79. He went to Green Haven in February of 1980, and then went to Ogdensburg in September of 1982.”

  “Okay, so he said he was at Ogden for a while, and then he got depressed, and then they sent him to see a psychiatrist. I’m not sure of the dates. Doesn’t it say?” I ask.

  “No, there’s nothing in the discharge info about any psychiatric treatment. It just states the terms of release and parole, some legal jargon that I don’t understand, but there’s nothing psychiatric here. Not in these documents.”

  “How the hell do you get transferred from one prison to another?” I flop the documents into my lap and look up to David.

  “Didn’t he tell you anything about that?”

  “Yeah, he said something about overcrowding. Then he said it was a first-time offense, so they chose him? Something like that.”

  “I’ve never heard of someone convicted of murder getting transferred to a medium-security prison.”

  “Neither have I, but maybe it’s because it was manslaughter. They didn’t have motive during the trial, so he got convicted of manslaughter. Does that make sense?” I don’t know anything about the legal system, sentencing, anything.

  “Find this doctor, Sam. Something about this story is off.”

  “I know. Something’s not right. The man is an enigma, a walking question mark. He’s been telling me stories about prison, about his upbringing, but it doesn’t clear up what the fuck he is doing here. Do you realize that I’ve been working with him for months, and I still have no idea what’s wrong with him or why he’s in a mental institution? We need to find this guy!”

  Anxiously, David and I continue to shuffle and dig for anything that might lead us to this doctor.

  “I’m gonna do some preliminary searches on the internet. It seems stupid to not try that.” David pushes himself up off the floor and into my desk chair.

  “Okay, it’s Mark something-with-an-S, probably one syllable, like Stein. I’ll keep trying to find answers in all this crap.”

  After typing only a few words, David has hundreds of hits. “Well, I’ve found every inmate at Ogdensburg.” He gives the page a closer look, scanning for answers. “And I can write to them! There’s a prison pen-pal site!”

  “David, focus.”

  “Here’s an OMH site related to forensic populations.” He reads and rereads. He clicks through various pages that I can’t see from my seat on the floor. “This is really unhelpful. They only list one clinician and it’s the head of the department—hold on.” David picks up my phone and dials a number he found on the screen. I’m holding my breath, losing hope that I will ever discover what Richard is actually doing at Typhlos.

  “Hello, my name is David Bloomfield. I’m a staff psychologist calling from Typhlos Psychiatric in Manhattan. With whom am I speaking?” I strain to hear the other end of the conversation. “Hi, Kathy, how are you? I wonder if you can help me with something. I’ve got a patient here who was incarcerated with you at Ogdensburg, and I am looking to contact a physician he worked with there. Can you help me find him?” He looks at me, covers the receiver and whispers, “I’m on hold. Ugh, there’s Muzak.”

  I take off my glasses and massage the bridge of my nose. “Okay, I’m going to keep looking for something in all this nonsense.”

  David grabs a pen and snaps at me for paper. I reach into the garbage can and hand him the paper bag that held my morning bagel, with grease stains on the corners. He begins to scribble down whatever Kathy from Ogdensburg is telling him.

  “Mark, the only name I have for him is Mark. I believe he was a psychiatrist, sometime in the early to mid-1980s.” He continues scribbling. “Um, how far back do they go?” He covers the receiver and mouths to me, They don’t have pre-internet records of clinicians.

  I whisper back, “Well, how the hell did they do payroll? Weren’t there computers in the fucking ’80s? Tell Kathy to keep digging.” David nods dramatically with wide eyes and dismisses me with a wave of his hand.

  He listens attentively and nods along with me, understanding that this is our only lead, our only chance of finding out what’s going on. David is on hold again while Kathy presumably digs up the answers we need. I’m continuing to riffle through the papers on my office floor, trying to find the needle in the haystack. Richard’s file is nebulous, confusing, disorganized.

  “Yes, a staff psychiatrist, I believe,” David nearly shouts into the phone. “He treated our patient sometime in the early 1980s, probably starting around ’82 or ’83?” David covers the receiver, looks to me and whispers, “How long did Richard keep seeing this guy?”

  I shrug and shake my head.

  “I’m not sure, Kathy. Are you finding anything?” Pause, he listens. “That would be great; a name would be great. Thank you.” He looks at me and crosses his eyes. He’s leaning back in my chair with his feet up on the desk, his head lolled back with the receiver pinched between his shoulder and ear. I’m trying, he mouths at me.

  David suddenly pops up and drops his feet to the floor, grabs the paper bag and begins furiously scribbling.

  “No forwarding address, okay. No problem. How do you spell that? O-a-n. Okay, great.” He stands and holds up his pen in triumph like the Statue of Liberty. “Got it!” he whisper screams at me.

  Before we can celebrate, he turns his attention back to the phone, “I’m sorry, what?” Confusion and defeat register on his face. “Oh, I see. Okay. Well, why don’t you give me the rest of the information, as well?” He holds a finger gun to his temple and pulls the finger trigger. He sits back down in my chair, exhales harshly and continues to write. After a series of mmm-hmms, it’s over. “Thanks so much, Kathy. You have a great day.” He hangs up the phone and spins in the chair to face me. “There’s three of them. Three doctors named Mark something-with-an-S who worked there in the ’80s. Do you have any more information from Richard?”

  “No. Something short. Something Jewish. That’s the best I can do.”

  “Well, great, because Woody Allen must have hired these guys. I’ve got a Mark Sloan, Mark Schiff and Marc Steele. Kathy gave me the last known phone numbers for all of them.”

  “Three guys named Mark something-with-an-S who all worked at Ogden in the ’80s? All psychiatrists?” I shuffle the papers on the floor into a sloppy pile and pull the patient chair up to the desk next to David. “Either Mark was the most popular name in the world or Kathy fucked something up. We better start Googling.”

  FEBRUARY 28TH, 10:32 A.M.

  Richard and I are sitting in my office, sharing a bagel with scallion cream cheese. He came earlier than expected, and I was midbreakfast when he walked in, looking hungry. We started this deal where we’re both supposed to break down our walls because he had stolen my stash as leverage. I haven’t had a drink in weeks, so the stash has become inconsequential. He knows my secrets and I know his.

  “You have cream cheese on your lip,” he says as he hands me a napkin.

  “Thank you. So, back to business. Believe it or not, I still want to work on your file. Same shit I’ve been trying to get you to finish since you started here: psychiatric history, health information, previous arrests or hospitalizations.”

  “And what, my file didn’t have any of that?” He has a mischievous grin on his face.

  “No—why are you smiling?”

  “I’m not smiling. Look, you know how I ask that you never write anything down? Well, I ask that a lot. I don’t want to have records.” He doesn’t look at me as he says this; instead he fidgets with his cap on top of his stack of papers.

  “What about at Ogden with Dr. Mark? Didn’t you have to sign consents and release papers—anything?”

  Richard shakes his head. “He never made me sign anything. He never even asked me to. I spent my l
ife under the radar. I don’t want paper trails.”

  “Were you formally diagnosed with depression in prison?”

  “I suppose. Dr. Mark told me I had symptoms of depression, and shell shock, although I thought that was bullshit because I’m no combat veteran.”

  “Interesting you say that.” I’m writing notes despite his protests and finally filling in the diagnostic sections.

  “Interesting, how?”

  “After living with Frances, I’d characterize that as some form of lifelong combat.”

  “Huh. Well, I still never had to fear for my life and carry weapons and follow orders and kill people.”

  “You sure ’bout that?”

  Richard doesn’t respond. His silence is pensive.

  “What do you need to finish my file? I know I have my end of the bargain to keep up.” He pulls himself to sit up straight.

  “Well, we can start the family-history section of the psychosocial evaluation. The one you adamantly refused to complete.”

  “Family history, huh? Well, don’t you know everything already? My father is a mystery. A dead mystery. I guess so is Frances, but we know her name and everything, so what else do you need?”

  “Was Frances ever formally diagnosed with borderline?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “It wasn’t called ‘borderline’ back then anyway. Do you know if she ever saw a doctor for treatment? Or took any medications?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Do you know anything? “Okay. Any kids?”

  “Just me, I think.”

  “No, I mean do you have any kids?”

  “You don’t think I would have mentioned that?” He glares at me, shocked I would even ask.

  “Okay. Any pregnancies that didn’t go to term?”

  “I don’t know!” He throws up his hands and leans back. “Women didn’t tell you that sort of thing if it happened. They just took care of it. Sometimes they asked for money.”