"The Analyst" - читать интересную книгу автора (Katzenbach John)Chapter SevenZimmerman’s ghost seemed to be laughing at him. It was the morning after a fitful night. He had not slept much, but when he had, he had dreamed vividly, fantastically, of his dead wife sitting by his side in a vibrant red two-seater sports car that he did not recognize, but knew belonged to him. They were parked by the edge of the ocean in deep sand on a familiar beach near their vacation cottage on the Cape. It had seemed to Ricky in the dream that the gray-green Atlantic waters, the color they took on in anticipation of a storm, were sweeping ever closer to him, threatening to overtake the car in a flood tide, and he struggled madly to open the door, but when he tried to work the handle he had seen a bloodstained and grinning Zimmerman standing outside the car, holding the door closed, and he’d been trapped inside. The car would not start and somehow he knew the tires were dug down into the sand anyway. In the dream, his dead wife had seemed calm, beckoning, almost welcoming him, and he’d had little trouble interpreting all this, as he stood naked in the shower, letting lukewarm water that was neither warm nor cold flow over his head in a mildly unpleasant cascade, but one that fit his dreary mood. Ricky dressed in faded, ratty, khaki trousers that were frayed at the cuffs and which showed all the signs of longtime use that teenagers would ordinarily have paid extra for at the mall, but which in his case were the results of years of wear and tear during the summer vacation, the only time he wore them. On his feet he placed an equally tattered pair of boat shoes and over his torso an old blue button-down shirt too worn for wear anytime other than the weekend. He dragged a comb through his hair. He looked up at his face in the mirror and thought he wore all the outward appearances of a man of accomplishments dressing down for the beginning of his vacation. He thought how for years he had awoken on the first of August and gleefully put on the old and comfortable battered clothes that signaled that for the next month he was stepping away from the carefully constructed and regimented character of the Upper East Side Manhattan psychoanalyst and into something different. Vacation was defined by Ricky as a time to get his hands dirty in the garden up in Wellfleet, to get some sand between his toes on long walks down the beach, to read popular mystery or romance novels and drink the occasional disgusting concoction called the Cape Codder, an unfortunate marriage of cranberry juice and vodka. This vacation promised no such return to routine, even though, in something he might have characterized as stubbornness, or maybe wishful thinking, he was dressed for the first day of the holiday. He shook his head and dragged himself into the small kitchen. For breakfast, he made himself a solitary slice of dry wheat toast and some black coffee which tasted bitter no matter how many spoonfuls of sugar he dropped in. He chewed the toast with an indifference that surprised him. He had absolutely no appetite. He carried his rapidly cooling coffee into his office where he put Rumplestiltskin’s letter on the desk in front of him. Occasionally he would sneak a glance out the window, as if he hoped to catch a glimpse of the naked Virgil lurking on the sidewalk, or occupying a window from an apartment in the building across the narrow street. He knew she was somewhere close, or, at least, believed her to be, based on what she had told him. Ricky shuddered once, involuntarily. He stared at the words of the clue. For a moment, he felt a dizziness mingled with a flash of heat. “What is happening?” he demanded of himself out loud. Roger Zimmerman seemed to enter the room at that moment, as irritating and demanding in death as he was in life. As always, he wanted answers to all the wrong questions. He dialed the dead man’s apartment number again, hoping to reach someone. Ricky knew he was obliged to speak with someone about Zimmerman’s death, but precisely who, eluded him. The mother was still inexplicably unaccounted for, and Ricky wished he’d had the sense to ask Detective Riggins where the woman was. He guessed with some neighbor, or in a hospital. Zimmerman had a younger brother who lived in California with whom he’d connected infrequently. The brother worked in the film industry in Los Angeles and had wanted nothing to do with taking care of the difficult and partially invalided mother, a reluctance that had caused Zimmerman to complain constantly about him. Zimmerman had been a man who reveled in the awfulness of his life, preferring to whine and complain than to change. It was this quality that made him such a poor candidate for suicide, Ricky thought. What the police and his coworkers had seen as despair, Ricky had recognized as Zimmerman’s true and only joy. He lived for his hates. Ricky’s task as analyst was to empower him with the ability to change. He had expected the time to eventually arrive when Zimmerman would have realized how crippled he actually was, traveling impotently from anger to anger. That moment when change was possible would have been dangerous, because Zimmerman would likely have fallen into a significant depression at the idea that he didn’t need to lead his life in the way that he did. He would have been vulnerable then when the number of wasted days finally occurred to him. That understanding conceivably might have created a real and possibly lethal despair. But that moment had been many months, and in greater likelihood, years away. Zimmerman still had arrived at his session daily, still considering analysis to be nothing more than a fifty-minute venting opportunity, like a steam whistle on the side of an engine waiting for the conductor’s tug. What little insight he’d gained he mostly used to pave new avenues of anger. Complaining was fun for him. He wasn’t boxed in and encircled by despair. Ricky shook his head. In twenty-five years, he’d had three patients who killed themselves. Two of those had been referred to him already displaying all the classic warning signs and had been in treatment only briefly before taking their own lives. He had felt helpless on those occasions, but a helplessness that didn’t carry blame. The third death, however, he did not like to think about because the person had been a longtime patient, whose downward spiral Ricky had been unable to arrest, even with prescriptions for mood elevators, a course he rarely took. It had been years since he’d thought of that patient, and he had not liked mentioning him to Detective Riggins, even if he had withheld the details of the case from the rude and only mildly inquisitive detective. Shuddering briefly, as if the room had suddenly grown cold, Ricky thought: That was a portrait of suicide. Zimmerman wasn’t. But the idea that Zimmerman was pushed in front of a subway train to send Ricky a message was far more horrifying. It struck at his heart. It was the sort of idea that was like a spark landing in a pool of gasoline. It was, equally, an impossible idea. He envisioned himself walking back into Detective Riggins’s overbright and modestly filthy office and claiming that some strangers had deliberately murdered a person they didn’t know and didn’t care about in the slightest in order to force Ricky into playing some sort of death game. He thought: It’s true, but not believable, especially to some underpaid and overworked Transit Authority detective. And, in the same moment, he realized that they knew that. The man who called himself Rumplestiltskin and the woman who went by Virgil understood that there was no hard evidence whatsoever that might connect them to this random crime other than Ricky’s bleating protests. Even if Detective Riggins didn’t laugh Ricky out of her office-which she would-what incentive did she have to pursue a wild story from a physician whom she quite accurately believed would far prefer some crazy mystery novel explanation for the man’s death rather than the obvious suicide that reflected so poorly on him? He could answer that query with a single word: None. Zimmerman’s death was designed to help kill Ricky. And no one would know it, except Ricky. The thought made him dizzy. Sitting back hard in his chair, Ricky realized he was at a critical moment. In the hours since the letter appeared in his waiting room, he’d been caught up in a series of actions that he had absolutely no perspective upon. Analysis is about patience and he’d had none. It is about time, and there was none available. His glance caught the calendar Virgil had provided him. The fourteen days remaining seemed an impossibly brief time. For a second, he thought of a death row prisoner, told that the governor had signed his death warrant, specifying date, time, and place of execution. This was a crushing image, and he turned away from it, telling himself that even in a prison, men fought hard for life. Ricky breathed in fiercely. It is, he thought, the greatest luxury of our existence, no matter how miserable, that we don’t know our allotted span of days. The calendar on his desk seemed to mock him. “It isn’t a game,” he said to no one. “It’s never been a game.” He reached out and seized Rumplestiltskin’s letter and examined the small rhyme. It’s a clue, he shouted to himself. A clue from a psychopath. Look at it closely! “… Mother, father, and young child…” Well, he thought to himself, it’s interesting that the letter writer uses the word “… When my father sailed away…” The father left. Rumplestiltskin, he believed in that moment, was the child of a patient. The question was, what sort of patient? An unhappy and unsuccessful patient, obviously. Someone who’d cut short their treatment, possibly. But which direction did the patient occupy: the mother left behind with resentment and children, or the father, who’d abandoned the family? Had he failed in his treatment of the woman cut adrift, or had he been the impetus for the man to run out on his family? He thought this was a little bit like the Japanese film How long, Ricky wondered, does it take to create a murderer? Ten years? Twenty years? A single instant? He did not know, but suspected he could learn. This gave him the first sense of satisfaction he’d felt since he’d opened the letter in his waiting room. A feeling not precisely of confidence hit him, but one of ability. What he failed to see was that he had been adrift in the real, grime-streaked world of Detective Riggins, overmatched and out of place, and that once he was functioning back within the world he knew, the world of emotion and action defined by psychology, he was comfortable. Zimmerman, an unhappy man who needed much help that was too slow in coming, faded from his thoughts and at the same time Ricky did not make the second realization, the one that might have stopped him cold: that he had begun to play a game on the playing field designed uniquely for him, just as Rumplestiltskin told him that he would. An analyst is not like the surgeon, who can look at the heart monitor attached to his patient and recognize success or failure from the blips on a screen. Measurements are far more subjective. Cured, a word with all sorts of hidden absolutes, isn’t attached to an analytic course of treatment, even though the profession employs many medical connections. Ricky was back at the creation of a list. He was taking a period of ten years, from 1975, when he began his residency, through 1985, and writing down the name of everyone he’d seen in treatment during that space of time. He discovered that it was relatively easy, as he went year by year, to come up with the names of the long-term patients, the ones who had engaged in traditional analyses. Those names jumped out, and he was pleased that he was able to recall faces, voices, and more than a few details about their situations. In some cases, he could recall the names of spouses, parents, children, where they worked and where they grew up, in addition to his clinical diagnosis and assessment of their problems. This was all very helpful, he thought, but he doubted that anyone who’d had a long-term course of treatment had created the person now threatening him. Rumplestiltskin would be the child of someone whose connection had been more tenuous. Someone who left treatment abruptly. Someone who had quit coming to his office after only a few sessions. Remembering those patients was a far more difficult enterprise. He sat at his desk, a legal pad of paper in front of him, free-associating, month by month right through his past, trying to picture people from a quarter century earlier. This was the psychoanalytic equivalent of heavy lifting; names, faces, problems came back slowly to him. He wished that he’d kept more-organized records, but what little he’d been able to find, what few notes and documents he had from that ancient period, were all of the people who’d stuck with the course of treatment, and had, in their own way, over years of flopping down on the couch and talking, left marks in his memory. He had to find the person who’d left a scar. Ricky was approaching the dilemma in the only way he knew how. He recognized that it wasn’t particularly efficient, but he was at a loss as to how else to proceed. It was slow going, the morning’s minutes evaporating around him in silence. The list he was creating grew haphazardly. A person staring in at Ricky would have seen him bent over slightly in his chair, pen in hand, like some blocked poet searching for an impossible rhyme to a word like Ricky labored hard and alone. It was nearing noontime when the buzzer on his door rang. The sound seemed to rip him from reverie. He straightened up abruptly, feeling the muscles in his back tighten and his throat suddenly grow dry. The buzzer rang a second time, unmistakably someone unaware of his patients’ assigned ring. He rose and crossed his office, crossed the waiting room and cautiously approached the door he so rarely locked. There was a peephole in the middle of the oaken slab, which he couldn’t recall the last time he’d used, and he put his eye to the circle to stare through as the buzzer sounded one more time. On the other side was a young man wearing a sweat-stained blue Federal Express shirt, clutching an envelope and an electronic clipboard in his hand. He looked mildly irritated and seemed about to turn away, when Ricky unlocked the door. He only loosened the dead bolts, however, leaving the chain fastened. “Yes?” Ricky asked. “I have a letter here for a Doctor Starks. Is that you, sir?” “Yes.” “I need a signature.” Ricky hesitated. “Do you have some identification?” “What?” the young man asked with a grin. “The uniform isn’t enough?” He sighed and twisted his body to show a plastic encased picture identification that was clipped to his shirt. “Can you read that?” he asked. “All I’m looking for is a signature, then I’m out of here.” Ricky reluctantly opened the door. “Where do I sign?” The deliveryman offered him the clipboard and pointed at the twenty-second line down. “Right there,” he said. Ricky signed. The deliveryman checked the signature, then ran an electronic tabulator across a bar code. The machine beeped twice. Ricky had no idea what that was about. Then the deliveryman handed him the small cardboard one-day express envelope. “Have a nice day,” he said, with a tone that implied that he didn’t really care one way or the other what sort of day Ricky had, but that he’d been taught to say it, and he was following designated procedure in any case. Ricky paused in the doorway, staring down at the label on the envelope. The return address was from the New York Psychoanalytic Society, an organization that he was a longtime member of, but had had precious little to do with over the years. The society was something of a governing body for New York’s psychoanalysts, but Ricky had always shunned the politicking and connecting that accompanied any such organization. He went to an occasional society-sponsored lecture, and he flipped through the society’s semiannual journal to keep up with his peers and their opinions, but he avoided participating in the panel discussions the society held just as much as he avoided the holiday cocktail parties. He stepped back into his waiting room, locking the doors behind him, wondering why the society had written to him at this point. He suspected that close to a hundred percent of the society was taking off on August vacations anyway. Like so many aspects of the process, in the psychoanalytic world, the summer month was sacred. Ricky found the tab and pulled open the cardboard envelope. Inside there was a regular letter-sized envelope bearing the society’s embossed return address in the corner. His name was typed on the envelope, and along the bottom there was a single line: by overnight courier-urgent. He opened the envelope and withdrew two sheets of paper. The first bore the masthead of the society. He saw immediately that the letter was from the organization’s president, a physician some ten years older than he, and whom he knew only vaguely. He could not recall ever conversing with the man, other than perhaps a handshake and forgettable pleasantry. He read swiftly: Ricky barely glanced at the signature, as he turned to the second sheet of paper. This, too, was a letter, but addressed to the society’s president, with copies to the vice president, ethics committee chairman, each doctor on the six-person ethics committee, the society’s secretary, and treasurer. In fact, Ricky realized, any physician whose name was attached in any way to the society’s leadership had received a copy. It read: The letter was unsigned, but contained the name of a lawyer with a midtown address, and a psychiatrist with a suburban Boston listing. Ricky’s hands shook. He was dizzy, and slumped against a wall of his apartment to steady himself. He felt like a prizefighter who has absorbed a pummeling-disoriented, in pain, ready to drop to the canvas when the bell leaves him utterly defeated, but still standing. There was not a single word of truth in the letter. At least not one that he could discern. He wondered whether that would make even the slightest bit of a difference. |
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