by S. T. Joshi
The doorbell rang, and he went to his office to await the first patient of the day. But his first patient wasn’t the first person to arrive. Instead, Leah ushered in a small middle-aged woman with penciled eyebrows, dark red lipstick, a little too much rouge, her black hair tightly caught up in a bun. She wore a pink slicker, her rose-colored umbrella dripping on the carpet as she said, “I know I shouldn’t come without an appointment, Doctor Cheski…” Her cadences tripped rapidly, her voice chirpy, the movements of her head, as she looked back and forth between Fyodor and Leah, seemed birdlike. “But he was so insistent—my son Roman. He said I had to see him here or not at all, and then he hung up on me. God knows he’s been a lot of trouble to you already. Has he gotten here yet?”
“Here? Today?” Fyodor looked at Leah. She shrugged and shook her head.
“He said he’d be upstairs…”
There was a thump from the ceiling. Squeaking footsteps; brisk pacing, back and forth.
Leah put a hand to her mouth and laughed nervously. Quite uncharacteristic of her. “Oh my gosh, he’s broken into the house again.”
Roman’s mother looked back and forth between them. “Not again! I thought he’d made an appointment! He said he didn’t trust anyone else… He barely knows me, you see…” Her lips trembled.
Leah’s brows knit. “Did you—give him up for adoption?”
Another thump came from above. They all looked at the ceiling. “No-o,” Mrs. Boxer said, slowly. “No, he… claims to not remember growing up with us. With his own family! I show him photographs—he says they’re ‘sort of familiar.’ But he says it’s like it didn’t happen to him. I don’t really understand what he means.” She sighed and went quickly on, “He just keeps wandering around Providence—looking for something… but he won’t say what.”
Fyodor knew he should call the police. But when Leah went to the phone, he said, “Wait, Leah.” Claims to not remember growing up with us. With his own family.
SEQ10 was a hypnotic drug for treating, among other things, hysterical amnesia.
Fyodor looked at Mrs. Boxer. She had some very high-quality jewelry; new pumps, sensible but elegant. A rather showy diamond bulked on her wedding ring. She had money, after all. She could pay for therapy. Insurance wouldn’t cover SEQ10.
Fyodor took a deep breath, and, wiping his clammy palms on his trousers, went up the stairs.
He found Roman in the guest room right over the office. Roman was sitting on the edge of the four-poster bed, nervously turning a glass of wine in both hands, around and around—he’d put the wine in a water tumbler from the upstairs bathroom.
“Brought your own wine this time, I see,” Fyodor said.
“Yes. A California Merlot. Still trying to learn how to drink.” Roman smiled apologetically. He wore the same suit as last time. Neat as a pin. “Strange sensation, alcohol.” After a moment he added, “Sorry about the door. No one was here when I came. I needed to get in.”
Fyodor grunted. He planned to rent the room out as an office, and now this guy was damaging it—the door to the outside stairs stood open, the wood about the lock splintered. There was a large screwdriver on the bedside table.
“Why?” Fyodor asked. “I mean—why the urgency about getting in? Why not make an appointment?”
Roman swirled his wine. “I’m… looking for something here. I just—couldn’t wait. I don’t know why.”
* * *
IT WAS AN EVENING SESSION, AFTER FYODOR WOULD normally have gone home. Roman’s mother had already had the broken door replaced and paid a large advance on the therapy. And Roman was more interesting than most of Fyodor’s patients.
Leaning back on the leather easy chair in Fyodor’s office, Roman seemed bemused. Occasionally, he smoothed the lines of his jacket.
“Your mother gave me some background on you,” Fyodor said. “Maybe you can tell me what seems true or untrue to you.”
He read aloud from his notes.
Roman was twenty-one. An only child, he’d had night terrors until he was nine, with intermittent bedwetting. Father passed on when he was thirteen. They weren’t close. Roman had difficulty keeping friends but was likable, and elderly people loved him. He loved cats, but his mother made him stop adopting them after he accumulated four. One died, and he gave it an elaborate burial ritual. Good student in high school, at first, friends mostly with girls—but no girlfriends. Not terribly interested in sex. Bad last year in high school when some sort of Internet bullying took a more personal form. Reluctant to talk about it. Refused to attend the school. Finished with home schooling, GED. Two years of college, attendance quite patchy. Autodidact for the most part. Tendency to have unusual difficulty with cold weather. No close friends “except in books.”
“All that sound right to you, Roman?” Fyodor asked, getting his laptop into word processing mode.
Roman looked vaguely about him. “Not very flattering, is it? Sounds like someone I knew—but it doesn’t feel like it happened to me personally. Apparently it’s me.”
Fyodor typed in his laptop, Possible dissociation due to unacceptable self-image.
“But since last year—your memories seem like… you?”
“Yes—since last year. All that seems real. I can’t remember anything before that unless somebody reminds me, and then it’s… like remembering an old television episode. Except I can’t really remember those either…”
Roman’s eyes kept wandering to the Victorian fixture hanging from the ceiling. “That fixture’s been here a hundred years.”
“I would have thought it’s older than that, really, as this house was built in the early nineteenth century,” Fyodor said absently, adjusting his laptop to make sure Roman couldn’t see what he was typing.
“No,” Roman said firmly. “Installed early twentieth century. But it was made in the nineteenth.”
Fyodor made a note: Possible grandiosity? Faux expertise syndrome? “Your mother says you feel your name is not Roman. Although she showed you a birth certificate. Do you feel the birth certificate is…”
“Is faked, unreal—part of a conspiracy?” Roman chuckled. “Not at all! What I said was, I feel my name is not Roman. I answer to it for simplicity’s sake. And as for what my name really is—I truly don’t know. Roman Boxer is correct—and incorrect. But don’t waste your time asking why that is, I don’t have an answer for you.”
“And this started when you took a walk on a beach…”
“Yes. Last September. We went to Sandy Point. Myself and… well… Mother. She has a little place at Sandy Point… so I have learned. My real memories start—really, as soon as I arrived on the beach that day. Before that I don’t remember much. She’s prompted a few memories, but…” He cleared his throat. “Well, I was feeling odd from the moment I stepped onto the sand.” He smiled dourly. “Not ‘feeling myself.’ And then—it’ll take some telling…”
“Tell me the story.”
Roman brightened. “Now that I enjoy. I’ve got half a dozen notebooks filled with my stories. But this one is true. Very well: It was a fine Indian Summer afternoon. I was in the mood to be alone… this woman who insists she’s my mother—even then, she often put me in that mood… so I went out to Napatree Point. Big sandy spit of land, you know. The sea looked blue, fluffy clouds scudding in the sky, a real postcard picture. Just me and the gulls. Now, I don’t much care for walks by the beach. Rather dislike looking at the unidentifiable things that wash up there. And the smell of the sea—like the smell of some giant animal. I’d rather go to the library. But I keep hearing people talk about how inspirational the sea is. I keep looking to connect with that Big Something out there. So I was walking on the beach, trying to shake the odd feeling of inner dislocation—I did manage to appreciate the way the light comes through the top of the waves and makes them look like blue glass. I shaded my eyes and gazed way out to sea, trying to see all the way to the horizon—and I got this strange feeling that something was looking back at me from out ther
e.”
Fyodor repressed a smile, and typed, Enjoys dramatization.
“All of a sudden I felt like a giddy little kid. Then I had a strange impulse—it just charged up out of my depths. I felt it go right up my spine and into my head, and I was yelling, ‘Hey out there!’” Roman cupped his hands to either side of his mouth, mimicking it. “‘Hey! I’m here!’ I don’t know, I guess I was just being spontaneous, but I felt truly very impish…”
Fyodor typed: Odd diction, archaic vocabulary at times. It comes and goes. Possibly clinically labile? Showing agitation as he tells the story.
“…and I yelled ‘I’m here, come back!’ and it’s funny how my own voice was echoing in my ears and a response just came into my head from nowhere: They tolled—but from the sunless tides that pour… And I yelled that phrase out loud! I’m not sure why. But I’ll never forget it.”
Auditory hallucination, Fyodor typed. Feelings of compulsion.
Roman squirmed in his chair, licked his lips, went on. “It was a curious little thing to think—like an unfinished line of poetry, right?”
Use of antiquated expressions comes and goes: e.g., curious. Affectation?
“And as soon as I said it I heard gigantic big bells ringing, like the biggest church bells you ever heard—and it sounded like they were coming from under the sea! A little muffled, and watery, but still powerful. It got louder and louder, the sound was so loud, it hurt my head, like I was getting slapped with each clang of the bell, and each time it rang it was as if the sea, the stretch of the sea in front of me, got a little darker, and pretty soon it just went black—the whole sea had turned black…”
Hallucinogenic episodes, possible seizure—drug use?—
“…And no, I don’t use drugs, doctor! I can see you thinking it!” He smiled nervously, straightening his tie. “Never have got into drugs! Oh fine, a few puffs on a bong once or twice—barely felt it.”
Fyodor cleared his throat—strangely congested, it was difficult to speak at first—and asked, “This vision of the sea turning black—did you fall down during it? Lose control of your limbs?”
“No! Well… I didn’t fall.” Roman licked his lips, sitting up straight, animated with excitement. “It was as if I was paralyzed by what I was seeing. The blackness sucking up the ocean was holding me fast, you see. But it was really not so much that the sea was turning black—it was that the sea was gone, and it was replaced by a… a night sky! A dark sky full of stars! I was looking down into the sea, but in some other way I was gazing up into this night sky! My stomach flip-flopped, I can tell you! I saw constellations you never heard of, twinkling in the sea—galaxies in the sea!—and one big yellow star caught my eye. It seemed to grow bigger, and bigger, and it got closer—till it filled up my vision. Then, silhouetted on it, was this black ball… a planet! I rushed closer to it—I could see down into its atmosphere. I saw warped buildings, you could hardly believe they were able to stand up, they seemed so crooked, and cracked domes, and pale things without faces flying over them—and I thought, that is the world called…” He shook his head, lips twisted. “Something like… Yegget? Only not that. I can’t remember the name precisely.” Roman shrugged, spread his hands, and then laughed. “I know how it sounds. Anyway—I was gazing at this planet from above and I heard this… this sizzling sound. Then there was a flash of light—and I was back on the beach. I felt a little dizzy, sat down for awhile, kept trying to remember how I’d gotten to that beach. Could not remember, not then. The memory of what I’d seen in the sea, the black sky—that was vivid. And what was before that? Arriving at the beach. Notions of escaping from some bothersome person.”
“Nothing before then?”
“An image. A place: I was lying in a small bed, in a white room, with this sweet little nurse holding my hand. Remembering it, I had a yearning, a longing for that bed, that nurse—that white room. For the comfort of it. I could almost hear her speak.
“Then, on the beach, I felt this scary buzzing in my pocket! I thought I had a snake in there, and I was clawing at it, and then… something fell out. This shiny, silvery, petite machine fell onto the ground. It was buzzing and shaking in the sand like it was mad. I could see it was some kind of instrument—a device. It seemed strange and familiar, both at the same time, right? So I had to think about how to make it work and I opened it and I heard this tiny voice saying, ‘Roman, Roman are you there?’ It was the… it was my mother.” He stared into the distance. His voice trailed off. “My mother.”
“But you didn’t recognize the thing as a cell phone?”
“After she spoke, I remembered—but it was like something from a science-fiction movie I’d seen. Star Trek. I couldn’t recall buying the thing.”
Fyodor made a few notes and nodded. “And since then—the persistent long-term memory issues, your own name seeming unfamiliar. And you had feelings of restlessness?”
“Restlessness. An inner… goading.” Roman settled back in the chair, staring up at the antique light fixture. “I would have trouble sleeping. I’d go out before dawn for these long rambles… in the old section of Providence—with its mellow, ancient life, the skyline of old roofs, Georgian steeples…”
Archaic affectations cropping up more frequently as patient reminisces.
“You said you felt like you were looking for something—?”
“Correct. And I didn’t know what. Just this feeling of ‘It’s right around the next corner, or maybe around the next one’ and so on. Till one day—I was there! I was standing in front of this house, looking at your sign. It was closed—I took a cab to a Target store, just opening for the day. I bought a little crowbar. Went back to the house—the rest is history. I still don’t know exactly what it is about this house. You just bought the place, right? How’d you find it, doc?”
“Oh, my mother suggested it to me, actually. She was in real estate before she…” Fyodor broke off. Not good to talk about personal matters with a patient. “So—anything else? We’re about out of time.”
“Your mother! She was committed, right?” Roman grinned mischievously. “The inspiration for your career! And you an only child, too, like me—imagine that!”
Fyodor felt a chill. “Uh—exactly how—”
“Don’t get spooked, doc,” Roman chuckled. “It’s the Internet. I googled you! The paper you wrote for the Rhode Island Psychiatric Association—it’s online. Tough childhood with sick mother led you to want to understand mental illness…”
Fyodor kept his expression blank. It annoyed him when a patient tried to turn the tables on him. “Okay. Well. Let’s digest all this.” He saved his notes and closed his laptop.
“No therapeutic advice for me, Doctor Cheski?”
“Yes. Something behavioral. Don’t commit any more burglaries.”
Roman came out with a harsh laugh at that.
* * *
ROMAN BOXER WENT HOME WITH THE WOMAN HE doubted was his mother. Fyodor watched through a window as they got into her shiny black Lincoln.
An unstable young man. Perhaps a dangerous young man—researching his doctor’s background, breaking into his office… twice. He should not be seen here…
Roman refused to be committed. “I won’t take those horrible psychiatric meds. I don’t wish to be a zombie. I’ll just run off, end up back here again. This is the place. It took me a long time, wandering around Providence, to find it. I know, Mom says I never lived here. But I was happy here once. I have to get help right here…”
Roman and his mother were both amenable to the use of SEQ10, to search out the core trauma, since it was something the patient only took on a temporary basis, with the doctor in the room. There were forms to be filled out, approval from the APA.
Fyodor went to his office, feeling restless himself. He wished he’d tucked a bottle of brandy away in the house. But he was trying to keep his drinking down to a dull roar.
Too bad the wine in the basement was off. Be crazy to drink the stuff anyway…
HE PUTTERED AT HIS DESK, ORGANIZING HIS COMPUTER files, sending out e-mails to colleagues who might want to rent office space. Making the occasional note on Roman Boxer. The late November wind hissed outside; the windows rattled, the furnace vents rumbled and oozed warm air. He wished he’d asked Leah to work late. The big old house felt so empty it seemed to mutter to itself every time the wind hit it.
About 9:30, Fyodor’s cell phone vibrated in his pants pocket, making him jump. Like a snake.
Fyodor reached into his jacket and fumbled the phone out—his hands seemed clumsy tonight. “Hello?”
“You forgot me…” It was his mother’s smoky voice—a bad connection, other voices oscillating in and out of a sea of static in the background.
“Mom. How did I…? Oh. It’s that night?” It was his mother’s night to call him. She must have called his home first.
“You bought the house…”
“Yes—thanks for the tip. I sent you a note about it. You’ve got a good memory. So long ago you were selling houses. I’m hoping if I can rent out the other rooms as offices it’ll more than pay for the mortgage… You still there? This connection…”
“I was born…” Her voice was lost in the crackle. “…1935.”
“Right, I remember you were born in 1935—”
“In that house. I was Catholic. Lived there till I got married. Your father was Russian Orthodox. Father Dunn did not approve. Father Dunn died that year…” Her voice sounded flat. But it was difficult to make out at all.
He frowned. “Wait—you were born in this house? I’m sure you showed me a house you were born in—it was in Providence, but… it was an old wreck of a place… I don’t recall where… I was a kid… But then the agent said they restored it…” Could this really be that house?
