The Analyst

by John Katzenbach

  That was why he was so blocked, he thought. His step down the stairs was energized by the idea that he could assault these memories like some World War II dam buster; simply lob a big enough explosion at the concrete of repressed history and it will all burst through. He was confident that with Dr. Lewis’s help he could perform this attack.

  The country sunlight and warmth infiltrating the house seemed to dispel all the doubts and questions that he might have had about the old analyst. The unsettling aspects of their prior conversation dissipated in the morning brightness. Ricky poked his head into the study area, searching for his host, but saw the room was empty. He walked down the center corridor of the old farmhouse toward the kitchen, where he could smell the aroma of coffee.

  Dr. Lewis wasn’t there.

  Ricky tried a “hello?” out loud, but there was no response. He looked at the coffeemaker and saw that a fresh pot was warming on the hot plate, and that a single cup had been left out for him. A folded piece of paper was propped up, with his name written in pencil on the outside. Ricky poured himself a cup of coffee and opened up the note as he sipped at the bitter, hot liquid. He read:

  Ricky:

  I have been called away unexpectedly and do not

  expect a return within your time frame. I believe

  you should examine the arena you left for the

  critical person, not the arena you entered.

  I wonder, as well, whether by winning the game

  you will not lose, or, conversely, by losing, you

  can win. Consider strongly the alternatives that

  you have.

  Please never contact me again for any reason or

  any purpose.

  S/ M. Lewis, M.D.

  He reeled back sharply, almost as if he’d been slapped in the face.

  The coffee seemed to scald his tongue and throat. He flushed, filling instantly with confusion and anger. He read through the words on the page three times, but each successive instance they grew fuzzy and less distinct, when he thought they should have sharpened. He finally crumpled the page of notepaper and stuffed it into his pocket. He walked deliberately to the sink and saw that the pile of dishes from the prior evening had been cleaned and stacked in an orderly fashion on the counter. He dumped the coffee into the white porcelain basin and then ran the water and watched the brown mess swirl down the drain. He rinsed the cup and set it to the side. For a second, he gripped the edges of the counter, trying to steady himself. In that moment, he heard the sound of a car coming up the gravel driveway.

  His first thought was that this was Dr. Lewis, returning with an explanation, so he half ran to the front door. But what he saw, instead, surprised him.

  Pulling to the front was the same cabdriver who had picked him up the day before at the Rhinebeck station. The driver gave him a little wave and rolled down his window as the taxi stopped.

  “Hey, doc, how you doing? Look, we better get a move on if you’re gonna catch your train.”

  Ricky hesitated. He half turned back toward the house, thinking he needed to do something, leave a note, speak with someone, but as best as he could tell the house was empty. A glance at the reconditioned stable told him that Dr. Lewis’s car was gone, as well.

  “Seriously, doc, there’s not all that much time, and the next train isn’t until late this afternoon. You’ll be sitting around all day if you miss this one. Jump in, we gotta make tracks.”

  “How did you know to pick me up?” Ricky asked. “I didn’t call . . .”

  “Well, someone did. Probably the guy who lives here. I got a message on my beeper says get right over here and pick up Doctor Starks pronto and make certain you make the nine-fifteen. So I burn rubber and here I am, but if you don’t toss yourself in the back there, you ain’t making that train and trust me, doc, there ain’t a lot to do around here to keep you occupied for the whole day.”

  Ricky paused one more moment, then grabbed the door handle and thrust himself into the backseat. He felt a momentary pang of guilt for leaving the house wide open, then dismissed this with an inward screw you. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  The driver accelerated sharply, kicking up some rocks, gravel, and dust.

  Within a few minutes, the cab reached the intersection where the access road to the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge that crosses the Hudson cuts across River Road. A New York state trooper was standing in the center of the roadway, blocking travel on the winding country road. The trooper, a young man with a Smokey the Bear hat and gray tunic, had a typically steely-eyed, seen-it-all look on his face that contradicted his youth, immediately began waving the cab to the left. The driver rolled down his window and shouted across the roadway to the trooper, “Hey, officer! Can’t I get through? Gotta make the train!”

  The trooper shook his head. “No way. Road’s blocked about a half mile down until rescue and the wrecker get finished. You need to drive around. You hurry, you’ll make it.”

  “What happened?” Ricky asked from the backseat. The cabbie shrugged.

  “Hey, trooper!” the driver called out. “What happened?”

  The trooper shook his head. “Some old guy in a rush lost it on one of the turns. Wrapped himself around a tree. Maybe had a heart attack and blacked out.”

  “He dead?” the cabdriver asked.

  The trooper shook his head as if to signify that he wasn’t sure. “Rescue’s there now. They called for the jaws of life.”

  Ricky sat forward sharply. “What kind of car?” he asked. He leaned forward, shouting through the driver’s window. “What kind of car?”

  “Old blue Volvo,” the trooper said as he waved the cabbie to get moving to the left. The driver accelerated.

  “Damn,” he said. “We gotta go around. Gonna be tight on that train.”

  Ricky squirmed in the seat. “I’ve got to see!” he said. “The car . . .”

  “We stop to sightsee, ain’t gonna make the train.”

  “But that car, Doctor Lewis . . .”

  “You think that’s your friend?” the driver asked, continuing to pull away from the site of the wreck, tantalizingly out of Ricky’s sight.

  “He drove an old blue Volvo . . .”

  “Hell, there’s dozens of those cars around here.”

  “No, it can’t . . .”

  “The cops won’t let you down there. And even if they would, what you gonna do?”

  Ricky didn’t have an answer. He slumped back in the seat, as if he’d been slapped. The cabdriver nodded, pushing the car so that the carriage rattled and the engine roared. “You get back to the city, then call the Rhinebeck State Trooper barracks. They’ll have some details. Call emergency at the hospital, they’ll fill you in. Unless you want to go there now, but I wouldn’t advise it. Just sit around waiting out the ER doctors and maybe the undertaker and the cop doing the investigation and still not know much more than you do right now. Haven’t you got someplace important to be?”

  “Yes,” Ricky said, although he was unsure of this.

  “The guy with the car, he a real good friend?”

  “No,” Ricky replied. “Not a friend at all. Just someone I knew. I thought I knew.”

  “Well,” the driver said, “there you have it. I think we’re going to make the station on time.” He accelerated again, pushing the cab through a yellow light, just as it turned red, then laughing a little, as they plowed ahead. Ricky leaned back in the seat, just once glancing over his shoulder through the rear window, where the accident and whoever it involved remained hidden, tormentingly out of sight. He strained to see flashing lights, and tried to hear sirens, but they all eluded him.

  He made the train with a minute or two to spare. The need to hurry seemed to obscure any opportunity to assess what had happened to him on the visit to the old analyst. He ran frantically through the empty station, his shoes making a clattering echo, as the train pulled down to the platform with the assaulting sound of its air brakes. As when he rode the train north, the
re were only a handful of people waiting for the midweek, midmorning trip back to New York City. A couple of businessmen speaking on cell phones, three women apparently on a shopping trip, some teenagers in jeans—that was all. The growing summer heat seemed to demand a leisurely pace that was alien to him. He thought that there was an urgency to the day that was out of place, and wouldn’t seem normal until he returned to the city.

  The train car was almost empty, with just a smattering of folks spread out through the rows of seats. He went to the rear and scrunched himself into a corner, immediately turning his head and pressing his cheek to the window, watching the countryside slide by, once again sitting on the side where he could inspect the Hudson River.

  Ricky felt like a buoy cut loose from its mooring, what was once a sturdy and critical marker of shoals and dangerous currents, now adrift and vulnerable. He did not precisely know what to make of the trip to see Dr. Lewis. He believed he had made some progress, but wasn’t certain what that progress was. He felt no closer to breaking through and recognizing his link to the man pursuing him than he had before he traveled up the river. Then, in a second thought, he realized this wasn’t true. The problem he understood was that there was some mental block between him and the right memory. The right patient, the right relationship seemed to be just out of his reach, no matter how hard he stretched for it.

  Of one thing, he was sure: All that he’d become in his life was irrelevant.

  The mistake he’d made, that lay at the core of Rumplestiltskin’s anger, came from his initial foray into the world of psychiatry and psychoanalysis. It came right from the moment that he’d turned his back on the difficult and frustrating business of treating the disadvantaged, and headed into the intellectually stimulating business of treating the intelligent and wealthy. The neurotic rich, as one doctor he knew used to term his clientele. The worried well.

  This observation enraged him. Young men make mistakes. This is inevitable, in any profession. Now he was no longer young, and he wouldn’t have made the same error, whatever it was. He was infuriated at the idea that he was being held accountable for something he’d done more than twenty years earlier and a choice that he’d made that was no different from the choices made by dozens of other physicians in his same circumstances. This seemed unfair and unreasonable. Had Ricky not been so battered by all that had happened, he might have seen that his entire profession was more or less based on the concept that time only exacerbates the injuries done to the psyche. It rechannels these injuries. It never heals them.

  Outside the train window, the river flowed past. He was at a loss as to what his next step would be, but of one thing he was certain: He wanted to get back to his apartment. He wanted to be someplace safe, if only momentarily.

  Ricky continued to stare through the window, throughout the trip, almost trancelike. At the various stops, he barely looked up and hardly shifted in his seat. The last stop before the city was Croton-on-Hudson, perhaps fifty minutes from Pennsylvania Station. The train car was still ninety percent empty, with dozens of vacant seats, so Ricky was startled when another passenger came up from behind and slipped in beside him, dropping into the seat with a heavy thud.

  Ricky turned sharply, astonished.

  “Hello, doctor,” the attorney Merlin said briskly. “Is this seat taken?”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Merlin’s breathing seemed a little labored and his face a touch flushed, like a man who’d had to run the last fifty yards in order to catch the train. A slight line of perspiration marked his forehead, and he reached inside the breast pocket of his suit coat and removed a white linen handkerchief, which he dabbed at his face. “Almost missed the train,” he said providing an explanation where none was needed. “I need to do more exercise.”

  Ricky paused to take a deep breath, before asking, “Why are you here?” although he thought this was a fairly stupid question, given his circumstances.

  The attorney finished drying his face with the handkerchief, then slowly spread it out on his lap, smoothing it before folding and returning it to his breast pocket. Then he stowed his leather briefcase and a small waterproof carryall in the area at his feet. He cleared his throat, and replied, “Why, to encourage you, Doctor Starks. Encourage you.”

  Ricky discovered that his initial surprise at the lawyer’s appearance had fled. He shifted about, trying to get a better look at the man sitting next to him. “You lied to me, before. I went to your new address . . .”

  The attorney looked mildly bemused. “You went to the new offices?”

  “Directly after we spoke. They hadn’t heard of you. No one in the building had. And certainly they had no office space being rented to anyone named Merlin. So, who are you, Mr. Merlin?”

  “I am who I am,” he said. “This is most unusual.”

  “Yes,” Ricky said briskly. “Most unusual.”

  “And a bit confusing. Why did you go to my new office space after we’d spoken? What was the purpose of that visit, Doctor Starks?” The train picked up some speed as Merlin talked, lurching slightly so that the two men rubbed shoulders together in an uncomfortable intimacy.

  “Because I didn’t believe you were who you said you were, nor did I believe anything else you said. A suspicion I shortly discovered to be true, because when I arrived at the location printed on your business card . . .”

  “I gave you a card?” Merlin shook his head, and broke into a small smile. “On moving day? That explains much.”

  “Yes,” Ricky said with irritation. “You did. I’m sure you recollect that . . .”

  “It was a difficult day. Disorienting. What is it they say? Death, divorce, and moving are the three most stressful events for your heart. And your psyche, too, I’ll wager.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “Well, the first batch of business cards I ordered from the printer came back with the wrong address embossed on them. The new offices are a single block over. The fellow in the shop got one digit wrong and I’m afraid we didn’t notice right away. I must have handed out a dozen or so before recognizing the error. These things happen. I understand the poor guy got fired from his job, because the printing company had to eat the entire order and do up new cards.” Merlin reached into his jacket and removed a small leather card case. “Here,” he said. “This one is right.” He handed it to Ricky, who stared at it dully, then made a sweeping gesture of refusal.

  “I don’t believe you,” Ricky said. “I’m not going to believe anything you say. Not now, not ever. You were also there, outside my apartment, with the message in the Times a couple of days later. I know it was you.”

  “Outside your apartment? How strange. When was this?”

  “At five in the morning.”

  “Remarkable. How can you be so certain it was me?”

  “The deliveryman described your shoes perfectly. And the rest of you adequately.”

  Merlin again shook his head. He smiled, with a catlike quality that Ricky remembered from their first meeting. It was the sensation that the attorney was confident in his ability to remain just slippery enough so that he couldn’t be pinned down. An important capability for any lawyer. “Well, I suppose I like to think that my dress and my appearance are unique, Doctor Starks, but I imagine the truth is a little bit more mundane. My shoes, nice as they might be, are available at dozens of shoe stores and not all that uncommon in midtown Manhattan. My suits are off-the-rack blue pinstriped standard business in the city fare. Nice, but still available to you or anyone else with five hundred bucks in their pocket. Perhaps in the near future, I will join the custom-tailored crew. I have aspirations in that direction. But, at least for now, I’m still in the fourth floor, men’s wear segment of our populace. Was this deliveryman able to describe my face? How about the thinning hair, alas? No? I can tell from your look what the answer is. So, I would have my doubts about any identification you think someone made standing up under any professionally intense scrutiny. Certainly an identification that ha
s persuaded you so completely. I think this is more a byproduct of your profession, doctor. You take what people tell you and value it too highly. You see words spoken as a means of getting to truths. I see them as methods of obscuring truths.”

  The attorney eyed Ricky with a half grin. Then he added, “You seem under pressure, doctor.”

  “You would know about that, Mr. Merlin. Because it is either you or your employer who has created this.”

  “I am employed by a young woman that you took advantage of, as I’ve said before, doctor. Really, that is what has brought me into contact with you.”

  “Sure. You know what, Mr. Merlin?” Ricky said with the first harsh tones of anger sliding into his voice. “You know what? Go find another seat. That seat is being used. By me. I don’t want to speak with you anymore. I dislike being lied to as much as you do, and I won’t listen to any more. There are plenty of seats on this train . . .” Ricky gestured wildly at the nearly empty car, “. . . take one of those and leave me alone. Or at least stop lying to me.”

  Merlin did not budge.

  “That would not be wise,” he said slowly.

  “Perhaps I’m tired of behaving wisely,” Ricky said. “Maybe I should behave rashly. Now leave me alone.” He didn’t expect the attorney would act upon this demand.

  “Is that how you’ve behaved?” Merlin asked. “Wisely? Have you contacted an attorney as I recommended? Have you taken steps to protect yourself and your possessions from lawsuit and embarrassment? Have you been rational and intelligent about your choices?”

  “I’ve taken steps,” Ricky answered. He wasn’t certain that this was accurate.

  The attorney obviously didn’t believe him. He smiled. “Well, I’m delighted to hear that. Perhaps we can discuss a settlement, then. You, your attorney, and I?”

  Ricky lowered his voice. “You know what the settlement demand is, don’t you, Mr. Merlin, or whatever your real name is. So, please, can we dispense with the charade you persist in employing, and get to the reason you are on this train and sitting beside me?”