The Analyst (16 page)

The patient paused again, then hung up the phone. The message seemed sliced off, short of what he wanted Ricky to respond to.

Ricky’s hand shook slightly as he again pressed the Play button on the machine. The next message was merely a woman sobbing. Unfortunately, he recognized the noise, and knew it was another longtime patient. She, too, he guessed, had received a copy of the letter. He quickly fast-forwarded the tape. The two remaining messages were also from patients. One, a prominent choreographer for Broadway productions, sputtered with barely repressed rage. The other, a portrait photographer of some note, seemed as much confused as she was distraught.

Despair flooded him. Perhaps for the first time in his professional life, he didn’t know what to say to his own patients. The others who hadn’t yet called, he suspected, hadn’t opened their mail yet.

One of the key elements to psychoanalysis is the curious relationship between the patient and the therapist, where the patient pours out every intimate detail of his life to a person who doesn’t reciprocate and very rarely reacts to even the most provocative information. In the child’s game Truth or Dare, trust is established by shared risk. You tell me, I’ll tell you. You show me yours, I’ll show you mine. Psychoanalysis skews this relationship by making it utterly one-sided. Indeed, Ricky knew, the patients’ fascination with who Ricky was, what he thought and felt, how he reacted, were all dynamics of significance and were all part of the great process of transference that took place in his office, where sitting silently behind his patients’ heads as they lay with their feet in the air on the couch, he symbolically became many things, but mostly, he came to symbolize to each of them something different and something troubling, and so, by taking on these different roles for each patient he could lead each of them through their problems. His silence would come to psychologically mimic one patient’s mother, another’s father, a third’s boss. His silence would come to represent love and hate, anger and sadness. It could become loss, it could become rejection. In some respects, he understood,is a chameleon, changing color against the surface of every object he touches.

He didn’t return any of the phone calls from his patients, and, by evening, all had called. The editor from the
Times
was right, he thought. We live in a society that has reformed the entire concept of the denial. Now the denial carries with it the presumption that it is merely a lie of convenience, to be recalled and subsequently tailored at some later point, when an acceptable truth has been negotiated.

Hours every day that totaled weeks that became months and turned into years with each of the patients had been savaged by a single well-constructed lie. He didn’t know how to respond to his patients, whether he should respond at all. The clinician within him understood that examining each patient’s response to the allegations would be fruitful, but at the same time, that seemed ineffectual.

For dinner that evening he made himself chicken soup out of a can.

Spooning the scalding mixture into his mouth, he wondered whether some of the famed medicinal and restorative powers of the concoction would flow into his heart.

He understood that he was still lacking a plan of action. Some chart that he could follow. A diagnosis, followed by a course of treatment. Up to this point, Rumplestiltskin seemed to Ricky to be like some sort of insidious cancer, attacking different parts of his persona. He still needed to define an approach. The problem was, this went against his training. Had he been an oncologist, like the men who’d unsuccessfully treated his wife, or even a dentist who was able to see the decayed tooth and pluck it out, he would have done so. But Ricky’s training was far different. An analyst, although recognizing certain definable characteristics and syndromes, ultimately lets the patient invent the treatment, within the simple context of the process. Ricky was being crippled in his approach to Rumplestiltskin and his threats by the very nature that had stood him in such fine stead over so many years. The passivity that was a hallmark of his profession was suddenly dangerous.

He worried for the first time late that night that it might kill him.

In the morning, he crossed another day off Rumplestiltskin’s calendar and composed the following inquiry:

Ricky realized that he was stretching Rumplestiltskin’s rules, first by asking two questions instead of one, and not exactly framing them for a simple yes or no response as he’d been instructed. But he guessed that by using the same nursery school rhyme scheme that his tormentor did, Rumplestiltskin would be prompted to ignore the violation of the rules and might answer with slightly more detail. Ricky understood that in order to deduce who had ensnared him, he needed information. Much more information. He was under no illusion that Rumplestiltskin would give away some telltale bit of detail that would tell Ricky precisely where to look for him, or might actually instantly provide an avenue for a name, that could then be given to the authorities-if Ricky could figure out which authorities to contact. The man had planned out his adventure in revenge too precisely for that to happen quickly, Ricky thought. But an analyst is considered a scientist of the oblique and of the hidden. He should be expert at the hidden and concealed, Ricky thought, and if he was to find the answer to Rumplestiltskin’s real name, it would have to come from a slip that the man, no matter how intricately he had schemed, did not anticipate.

The lady at the
Times
who took the order for the single-column front-page ad seemed intrigued in a pleasant way by the rhyme. “This is unusual,” she said lightly. “Usually these are just happy fiftieth anniversary mom and dad ads, or else come-ons for some new product that someone wants to sell,” she said. “This seems different. What’s the occasion?” she asked.

Ricky, trying to be polite, replied with an efficient lie, “It’s part of an elaborate scavenger hunt. Just a summertime diversion for a couple of us who enjoy puzzles and word games.”

“Oh,” the woman replied. “That sounds like fun.”

Ricky didn’t respond to this, because there was little of fun in what he was doing. The woman at the newspaper read the rhyme back to him one last time to make certain she had the wording correctly, then took down the necessary billing information. She asked whether he wanted to be billed directly, or to put the charge on a credit card. He elected for the credit card response. He could hear her fingers clicking the computer keyboard as he read off his Visa number.

“Well,” the ad lady said, “that’s it, then. The ad will run tomorrow. Good luck with your game,” she added. “I hope you win.”

“So do I,” he said. He thanked her and hung up the phone. He turned back to the piles of notes and records.

Narrow and eliminate, he thought. Be systematic and careful.

Rule out men or rule out women. Rule out the old, focus on the young. Find the right time sequence. Find the right relationship. That will get a name. One name will lead to another.

Ricky breathed hard. He had spent his life trying to help people understand the emotional forces that caused things to happen to them. What an analyst does is isolate blame and try to render it into something manageable, because an analyst would think of the need for revenge to be as crippling a neurosis as anyone could suffer.would want the patient to find a way past that need and beyond that anger. It wasn’t uncommon for a patient to start a therapy stating a fury that seemed to demand an acting-out response. The treatment was designed to eliminate that urge, so that they could get on with their life unencumbered by the compulsive need to get even.

Getting even, in his world, was a weakness. Perhaps even a sickness.

Ricky shook his head.

As his head spun, trying to sort through what he knew and how to apply it to his situation, the telephone on the desk rang. It startled him, and he hesitated, reaching out for it, wondering whether it would be Virgil.

It was not. It was the ad lady at the
Times
.

“Doctor Starks?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry to call you back, but we had a little problem.”

“A problem? What sort of problem?”

The woman hesitated, as if reluctant to say, then continued, “The Visa card number you gave me, uh, it came back canceled. Are you certain you gave me the proper number sequence?”

Ricky blushed, alone in the room. “Canceled? That’s impossible,” he said indignantly.

“Well, maybe I got the number wrong…”

He reached for his wallet and pulled out the card, reading off the sequence of numbers again, but slowly.

The woman paused. “No, that’s the number I submitted for approval. It came back that the card had been recently canceled.”

“I don’t understand,” Ricky said with mounting frustration. “I didn’t cancel anything. And I pay off the entire balance every month…”

“The card companies make more mistakes than you’d think,” the woman said, apologetically. “Have you got another card? Or maybe you’d just prefer me to send you a bill and you can pay by check?”

Ricky started to remove another card from his wallet, then abruptly stopped. He swallowed hard. “I’m sorry for the inconvenience,” he said slowly, suddenly working hard to keep himself under control. “I will have to contact the credit card company. In the meantime, please just send me the bill as you suggest.”

The woman mumbled an agreement, double-checking his address, then adding, “It happens all the time. Did you lose your wallet? Sometimes thieves get numbers from old statements that are tossed away. Or you buy something and the clerk sells the number to a crook. There are zillions of ways cards get screwed up, doctor. But you better call the issuing company and get it straightened out. You don’t want to end up fighting over charges you don’t make. Anyway, they’ll probably just overnight you a new card.”

“I’m sure,” Ricky said. He hung up the phone.

Slowly he extracted each of the credit cards from his wallet. They’re all useless, he told himself. They have all been canceled. He didn’t know how, but he knew by whom.

Still, he started the tedious process of calling to discover what he already knew to be true. The telephone customer service clerks at each credit card company were friendly but not very helpful. When he tried to explain that he hadn’t actually canceled his cards, he was informed that he indeed had. That’s what their computers showed, and whatever the computer showed, had to be right. He asked each company exactly how the card had been canceled, and each time he was told that the request had been made electronically, through the bank’s Web sites. Simple transactions of that sort, the clerks dutifully pointed out, could be accomplished with a few simple swipes at a keyboard. This was, they said, a service that the bank offered, to make financial life easier for their clients, although Ricky, in his current state, might have debated that. All offered to open new accounts for him.

He told each company he would get back to them. Then he took some scissors he kept in his top drawer and cut each of the useless pieces of plastic in half. It was not lost on Ricky that this act was precisely what some patients had been forced to do, when they allowed themselves to get overextended with their credit and into debt.

Ricky did not know how far into his finances Rumplestiltskin had managed to penetrate. Nor did he know how.
Debt
is a concept close to the game the man had created, Ricky thought. He believes I owe him a payment, and not one that can be paid by check or credit card.

A visit in the morning to the local branch of his bank was in order, Ricky thought. He also placed a telephone call to the man who handled his modest investment portfolio, leaving a message with a secretary, asking that the broker call him back promptly. Then he sat back for a moment, trying to imagine how Rumplestiltskin had entered this part of his life.

Ricky was a computer idiot. His knowledge of the Internet and AOL, Yahoo, and eBay, Web sites, chat rooms, and cyberspace was limited to a vague familiarity with the words, but not the reality. His patients often spoke of life connected to the keyboard, and in that way he’d gained some appreciation of what a computer could do, but more of what a computer did to them. He had never seen any need to learn any of this himself. His own writing was scrawled in pen in notebooks. If he had to compose a letter, he used an antique electric typewriter that was more than twenty years old and kept in a closet. He owned a computer, in a way. His wife had purchased one in the first year of her disease, then upgraded it a year before her death. He had been aware that she had used the machine to electronically visit cancer support groups and to speak with other cancer victims in that curiously detached world of the Internet. He had not joined her in these sorties, thinking that he was respecting her privacy by not intruding, when another might have suggested that he was simply not showing enough interest. Shortly after she’d died, he’d taken the machine from the desk in the corner of their bedroom that she’d occupied when she was able to gather the energy to get out of bed, and packed it away in a box and stuck it in the basement storage rooms of his building. He had meant to throw it out or give it to some school or library, and had just never gotten around to it. It occurred to him that he might need it, now.

Because, he suspected, Rumplestiltskin knew how to use one.

Ricky rose from his seat, deciding in that instant to recover his dead wife’s computer from the basement. In the top right-hand desk drawer, he kept a key to a padlock, which he grabbed.