by A. F. Brady
Richard’s cursive handwriting is small and, at times, illegible. Quick scribbles are interspersed with deliberate block letters. The crossword puzzle and sudoku boxes are filled with information. There are a few xeroxed pages taped along the insides of newspaper pages. The language is stark and clinical on the copied notes. And the Post-its seem to have come from various locations, as some have prescription drug names emblazoned at the top. Some of the notes are shorthand and I can’t tell what they mean. I steel myself and prepare to read the details. As I’m shuddering out a deep breath, I see David’s dirty Converse All Stars appear in front of me.
“Hey. I finished the dishes. What’ve you got going on down here?” He lowers himself to the floor next to me, kisses me on my forehead and picks up the amNewYork.
“This is why I asked you to come over. These papers are Richard’s. These are the papers he carries around with him everywhere he goes. He left them on my desk on Tuesday and I took them home with me.”
“So this is the big mystery, huh?”
“He’s not reading these for the news.”
“No? What’s he reading them for?” David starts flipping through the amNewYork, sees the cover story about Mayor Bloomberg, checks the date on the front page, and confusion registers on his face. “Why is this from 2012?”
“Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m trying to figure out. Look—” I show him the inside of my paper: the notes, the stickies, the memos. I show him that Richard has been studying his own writing inside the newspapers, not the editorials, not the stories.
“What is that?”
“This is data. It’s information. Notes that Richard and someone else have written that he has hidden inside of these newspapers that he reads every day.”
“Notes about what?” David is riffling through all the papers, too fast to see the details or make out the actual words, but slow enough to see that all the newspapers have hidden writing inside.
“Notes about me.”
MARCH 12TH, 2:39 P.M.
All of Richard’s newspapers are spread out in front of us, and David has moved a desk lamp onto the floor to illuminate our research. He has a notebook to keep a tab of themes and bullet points that we find hidden in the pages of the newspapers. His headings so far are “Sam,” “BPD,” “Typhlos” and “Recovery.”
“There’s a photocopy of a ripped-up psychosocial evaluation on page A6 of the Times,” David is saying. “It hasn’t been filled out, but it’s got the Typhlos seal at the top. There’s other intake stuff in here, too. Blank copies.”
I can’t figure out what he decided to save and what he may have tossed. Why were some documents in here but not others?
“Here’s one, in the Financial Times.” He drops the corner of the page and scoffs at me. “I can’t believe you thought he was reading the Financial Times.” He refocuses on the note and slides his glasses back up his nose. “He’s got all the diagnostic criteria for BPD written out, in order. Some of them are circled with red pen.”
“Which ones are circled?”
“Most of them, and there are initials next to the circles. S.J. and F.W. S.J. is obviously you, but who’s F.W.?”
“Frances Williams, his mother.”
“Oh, shit. He’s got notes about both of you in here—which criteria you exhibit and which ones she did.”
“Read them. Tell me.”
“Okay, for number one, and I’m quoting the DSM here, ‘Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment’—he has your initials and his mom’s. For number two, ‘A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships,’ blah, blah, blah, ‘alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation,’ he has his mom’s initials, and then yours, but with a question mark. For the third, ‘identity disturbance,’ he just has his mom’s. For the fourth, ‘impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging,’ he has yours and his mom’s, and then there’s an arrow to some detailed notes.” David squints at the bottom of the page. “I can’t read that, can you?” He hands me the paper and pulls the light closer.
“It says ‘F.W. drinking, men, smoking, not eating.’ Next to S.J. it says ‘drinking, men, drugs?’ with a question mark.” I shove the paper back in David’s direction. I’m pissed to read what Richard thinks of me.
“How did he know you were drinking so much? And how did he know about the guys you were with?”
“This must be how—look at this one.” I hand David the Metro I’ve been reading. There’s a list of bars I go to, which days I usually go in, the names of the bartenders and the drinks I usually order. Next to it, there’s a list of delis in my neighborhood, and liquor stores. He has Chablis misspelled next to Miller Lite. “Remember when you found that Post-it with my name on it? It had my address and the route I take to work in the morning. Do you think it fell out of here? It was Richard’s note?”
David lets the paper droop into his lap and looks to me. “It must have been. But why would he have that?”
I look at David, apprehensive. Richard’s words pop into my head like a shining marquee: you might not like everything you find.
I shake his words out of my head and continue the investigation. “What about the rest of the BPD criteria? Where was that one?”
“Here—” David hands me the Financial Times and moves on to analyze the other records.
Richard marked my initials next to three more criteria: number six, “affective instability due to marked reactivity of mood”; number seven, “chronic feelings of emptiness”; and number eight, “inappropriate, intense anger, or difficulty controlling anger.” His mother’s initials were next to those three as well, but he also put her down next to nine, “paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms.” He didn’t consider either of us to be suicidal, so he didn’t circle criteria number five. Did he figure out my symptoms just by watching me? Did he learn so much about this in prison that he was able to qualify my behaviors?
He has lists of books and references, shorthand notes with numbers and decimal points. Is it library reference sections? The Dewey Decimal System? Did he go to a library and look this up? As I uncover more hidden scrawls among the pages, I see he hasn’t just been jotting down borderline symptoms and treatments, but also the symptoms of depression and PTSD. There are check marks, but no initials next to the diagnostic criteria for both disorders. Depression and PTSD, the disorders Richard was diagnosed with in prison.
“Okay, wait a minute, what the hell is all of this? Was he stalking you before he came to Typhlos? How does he know about Nick’s? And Sid? Did he go there and talk to him?”
“It certainly seems like it, don’t you think? I mean he wrote about drinking, so he must have seen me drinking. And then he found the ziplock bag of booze in my office, so that confirmed it.”
“But what about the men? He wrote men next to your initials, right? How did he know about men? You were with Lucas for like a year, right? Did you cheat on him? I mean, other than AJ?”
“There was AJ, and I may have made out with a couple of other people. How could he possibly know that, though? How long has he been watching me?”
“I’m not as interested in how long as I am in why, Sam. Why does he need all of this information about you?”
“I don’t know, David.” I expel a huge breath. “Keep going.” I put my reading glasses back on and sip from a cold bottle of Sprite. You may not like everything you find.
We flip pages and decipher cryptic logs and reports scrawled throughout the papers. We’re filling up sheets of David’s notebook with organized thoughts and something beginning to resemble a timeline. Along blank portions of the papers, we find several doodles in black pen that look like scaffolding.
“Holy shit.” David’s face goes white and he sits up ramrod straight. “Sam. He has your performance review in here.”
“What? From when?” I snatch the paper from his hands and look over the familiar document, signed in Rachel’s familiar handwriting. Porti
ons have been circled in red pen. Individual words are triple underlined. It’s a copy of my annual performance review from 2012.
“What did he underline?” David asks, craning his neck to see.
“All the parts that make me sound competent. The stuff about me being ‘exemplary’ at managing the difficult patients. ‘Natural leader,’ ‘charismatic, understanding and empathic.’ In the section regarding potential for promotion, Rachel gave me the highest ratings on all the criteria, and Richard put red exclamation points next to them. How the hell did he get ahold of this?”
“Don’t you keep a copy? I have copies of mine in my office.”
“You do? We get to keep them?” I can’t remember ever walking out of Rachel’s office after these meetings with copies. Then again, there’s a lot about the past that’s fuzzy.
I remember leaving her office after the reviews feeling like a fraud, like I was Wile E. Coyote and a huge Acme anvil was going to fall on my head and I would have only a tiny umbrella to protect me. But now, as I picture that scene, I remember that as the anvil crushed my cartoon self into oblivion, the performance review floated down like an errant leaf in the dust cloud. Maybe I did have copies. What could I have done with them? “Jesus, I mean if he could go through the shit in my office and find the stash of booze, I’m sure he could find all of this, too.”
“Except this is from 2012. Why would he have chosen this particular year? And how could he have had time to go through all the pieces of paper? The airplane bottles were in a big ziplock bag, right? That’s easy to spot. This would have taken forever to find—with all the other documents and files you have in your office. And why would he have known to take this in particular? It doesn’t make sense. He must have had this since 2012.”
“I don’t… I don’t understand this.” I collapse the papers down between my knees and look up to David for comfort. This is surreal. We can entrench ourselves in the excitement of this discovery and temporarily displace the feelings that this is completely insane. Why the hell has my patient been following me? When did this start? There’s so much information in here, but there are no answers.
“There’s a whole section here on forgiveness. Look—” David has moved on, too enthralled with his discoveries to waste too much time on each finding. He scoots closer to me. “He drew over these words so many times they’ve bled to the next two pages. It says ‘forgiveness,’ ‘self-absolve’ and down here it says ‘exonerate.’ And it looks like a how-to book, some kind of self-help mumbo jumbo. It’s so blurred from all the overwriting; I can’t make it all out. And look in the crossword puzzle—‘self-forgiveness is freedom.’ He even made it fit in the boxes.”
Self-forgiveness. It’s a manifesto. It’s the gospel according to Richard. It’s a series of insights into his psyche. It’s the real answers to all his evaluation questions.
“Whose is the other handwriting? It’s so clinical.” David is holding most of the papers now.
“Yeah, that’s what I’m trying to figure out, too. I’ve got the Post, and it’s filled with recovery-oriented stuff. But not self-directed stuff, I’m talking treatment protocols, emotion regulation techniques, all sorts of shit. It’s got details about dialectical behavioral therapy, for Christ’s sake! What the fuck is going on with this?” I am trying to keep my emotions separated from our investigation, but I’m getting frustrated and scared.
“Well, DBT is the most effective therapy for treating personality disorders.”
“Thank you, Dr. Bloomfield!” I holler sarcastically with my hands up in the air. “Why does my patient have a list of treatment protocols for personality disorders shrouded in a newspaper from fucking years ago? Huh? I get that he is interested in all of this. I get that his mother had BPD, and he has enormous guilt associated with killing her and not helping her! I get that. I understand he needs to find forgiveness and peace. But why am I all over these pages? What does this have to do with me?”
“Oh, my God. I know whose handwriting it is.”
“Whose? How do you know?” I scramble to my knees to see what David has found.
“It’s the prison shrink. Mark something-with-an-S. The guy from Ogdensburg who we dug up? The one who figured out what Richard went through even though they never spoke?”
“Dr. Sloan? How do you know that?”
“Look—” David holds up the Daily News. “There’s a note card with ‘M.S.’ on the letterhead over the photocopy of this letter, right? And it’s clearly a letter responding to a question, see? Because the opening line says he’s got the information Richard was looking for. And the letter has a pretty comprehensive list of BPD treatments. It’s fuzzy in some spots, but that’s what it looks like, right? And the date in the corner says March 27, 2012. Just before the dates on these papers.”
I’m reading over the letter, faded from photocopy and wear, with Richard’s handwritten blurbs in the margins. At the bottom of the page, the original letter was folded over, so only a piece of the last sentence was copied. It was written in flourished handwriting: “good luck finding…” But the last words are gone.
MARCH 13TH, 9:22 A.M.
I’m sitting in the morning meeting, staring out the dirty window. The sun is peeking out from behind a building; it’s illuminating all the grime and dust pasted to the outside of the windows, and it’s obscuring the view completely. It looks like a wall of dried cat vomit.
My knees are bouncing erratically. I skipped breakfast because I have a nervous stomach, and I’m afraid if I eat anything, it’ll fall directly out of my ass. I’m pounding coffee, and it’s making me grind my teeth and clench my jaw.
I have Richard’s papers in my bag, and I keep looking down and checking on them under the conference table, as if they would jump out and slip away if they saw an opening. I’m willing Rachel to fly through the morning meeting so I can get the hell out of here and go find Richard.
I’m not paying attention to anything, and I see the staff and Rachel drone on about mundane happenings on the unit. I feel like Charlie Brown watching the teacher’s ankles and hearing nothing but a vibrating murmur. I’m stuck in slow motion and the room is going at its usual pace.
I see my colleagues start to pull their piles of stuff together; they stack notebooks on top of other notebooks, wiggle keys out of tight pockets and begin making moves to walk out the door. David gives me a nod, and I slam back the last drops of my second coffee and throw the strap of my bag over my shoulder. Before anyone can bother to make niceties at me, I fly out the conference-room door, down the hall to my office.
I remove Richard’s file from the wire letter organizer next to my computer and gently lay it in front of me. I look down at my shirt and see my heartbeat pulsing the space between the buttons. My fingers are trembling from the caffeine.
The first loose page in his file is a photocopy of his daily schedule, and I place it on top, blink away the floaters in my eyes and look for Monday at 10:00 a.m. Try as I might, I have never memorized a patient’s schedule, and as I focus on the 10:00 a.m. box on Mondays, I see he should be only a few short steps from my office in the computer room. My desktop clock tells me I have six minutes until ten.
I use the time to set the scene. I slowly pull the newspapers from my bag, careful not to cause any more damage to the pages. David and I ensured that we didn’t disturb the placement of the notes and records within the papers, and I tried to remember the order of the stack. Richard is meticulous, and the edges of the newspapers were always perfectly lined up and even. I shift and tuck and reorganize until it looks like he laid the hoard on the corner of my desk closest to his chair, my patient’s chair.
Not since I first met him, while we were all speculating about his crimes, his demeanor, whether or not he would kill one of us, have I felt so nervous to see him. I’ve been setting up my office for this confrontation for what feels like hours, and I look at the clock to see it’s just four minutes to ten.
I open my bottle of water and take slow
, deliberate sips while breathing deeply through my nose to bring a sense of calm and serenity that never comes. Although time feels at a standstill, the seconds are passing, and when I see the tiny, white digital numbers click from 9:59 a.m. to 10:00 a.m., I push my chair back and stand up.
I find Richard sitting in a chair with his eyes squinted at the computer screen. There are only two other patients in the computer room—Barry and Tashawndra. Tashawndra is sitting in front of a computer, pushing the mouse around, but the monitor isn’t on. Shirley is supposed to be in here, but she’s nowhere to be found.
Richard’s head turns to me, but his expression stays as it was while he strained to see the screen. He points a heavy finger to his chest and mouths, Me? I nod and tilt my head toward my office. He takes a last glance at whatever he was researching on the computer, clicks the page closed and switches off the monitor. As he scoots his faded blue plastic chair back, the scraping sound on the linoleum alerts Barry.
Barry twists at the waist and clutches the back of his seat to see who’s moving around. He locates Richard and watches him rise to come meet me. Understanding registers on Barry’s face, and he offers me an enormous wave. I smile tightly and usher Richard out of the room.
MARCH 13TH, 10:04 A.M.
I have been rehearsing this conversation in my head since David and I stayed up until sunrise trying to piece together the mystery of Richard and his newspapers—but all the words get stuck and bottleneck in my throat.
Richard sits in the chair in my office and looks at me with hesitation. “Were we supposed to be meeting now?”
I stare at him as I try to dislodge the sentences and inadvertently shift my gaze from him to the newspapers.
“Oh.” He sees me looking at the papers, inspects them himself, returns to me. “Oh, those.”
“Yes. Those.” All the brilliant comments and questions I crafted so meticulously in my head fall out of my ears into a pile on the floor.
