The Analyst (30 page)

Ricky locked himself into his apartment and slumped down into the armchair in his office. That was where he spent the remainder of that day and the entirety of the night, afraid to go out, afraid to stay still, afraid to remember, afraid to leave his mind blank, afraid to stay awake, afraid to sleep.

He must have nodded off sometime toward morning, because when he awakened the day was already blistering outside his windows. His neck was stiff and every joint in his body creaked with the irritation of spending the night in a chair. He rose gingerly and went to the bathroom, where he brushed his teeth and splashed water on his face, pausing to stare at himself in the mirror and to remark internally that tension seemed to have made inroads in every line and angle he presented to the world. He thought that not since his wife’s final days had he appeared so close to despair, which, he admitted ruefully to himself, was about as emotionally close to death as one could get.

The x-ed out calendar on his desk was now more than two-thirds filled.

He tried Dr. Lewis’s number in Rhinebeck again, only to get the same recording. He tried directory assistance for the same region, thinking perhaps there was a new listing, but came up with a blank. He thought of dialing the hospital or the morgue, to try to determine what was truth and what was fiction, but then stopped himself. He wasn’t certain that he really wanted that answer.

The only thing he latched onto was one remark that Dr. Lewis had made during their conversation. Everything Rumplestiltskin was doing seemingly was to draw Ricky closer to him.

But to what purpose, other than death, Ricky could not guess.

The
Times
was outside his door, and he picked it up and saw his question at the bottom of the front page, next to an ad seeking men for impotency studies. The corridor outside his apartment was silent and empty. The hallway was dim, dusty. The single elevator creaked past. The other doors, all painted a uniform black with a gold number embossed in the center, remained closed. He guessed that many of the other tenants were on vacations.

Ricky quickly flipped through the pages of the newspaper, half hoping that the reply would be somewhere within, because, after all, Merlin had overheard the question and presumably had passed it on to his boss. But Ricky could find no evidence that Rumplestiltskin had toyed with his paper. This didn’t surprise him. He did not think it likely that the man would employ the same technique twice, because that would make him more vulnerable, perhaps more recognizable.

The idea that he would have to wait twenty-four hours for an answer was impossible. Ricky knew that he had to make progress even without assistance. The only avenue that he thought viable was to try to find the records of the people who came to the clinic where he worked so briefly twenty years earlier. This, he believed, was a long shot, but at least would give him the sensation he was doing something other than waiting for the deadline to expire. He dressed quickly and headed to the front door of his apartment. But once standing there, his hand on the doorknob, ready to exit, he stopped. He felt a sudden wave of anxiety sweep over him, heart rate pitching high, temples starting to throb. It was as if an immense heat had dripped into the core of his body, and he saw that his hand quivered as he reached for the door. A part of him screamed internally, a massive warning, insisting that he not go out, that he was unsafe outside the doors to his apartment. And for just an instant, he heeded this, stepping back.

Ricky breathed in deeply, trying to control his runaway panic.

He recognized what was happening to him. He’d treated many patients with similar anxiety attacks. Xanax, Prozac, mood elevators of all sorts were available, and despite his reluctance to prescribe, he had been forced to do this on more than one occasion.

He bit down on his lip, understanding that it is one thing to treat, another to experience. He took another step back from the door, staring at the thick wood, imagining that just beyond, perhaps in the hallway, certainly on the street outside, that all sorts of terrors awaited him. Demons waiting on the sidewalk, like an angry mob. A black wind seemed to envelop him and he thought to himself that if he stepped outside, he would surely die.

It seemed in that immediate moment that every muscle in his body was crying to him to retreat, to hole up in his office, to hide.

Clinically, he understood the nature of his panic.

The reality, however, was far harder.

He fought the urge to step back, feeling his muscles gather, taut, complaining, like the first second that one has to lift something very heavy from the earth, when there is this instant measurement of strength versus weight versus necessity, all coming together in an equation that results either in rising up and carrying forward, or dropping back and leaving behind. This was one of those moments for Ricky and it took virtually every iota of power he had left within him to overcome the sensation of complete and utter fear.

Like a paratrooper jumping into unknown, enemy darkness, Ricky managed to force himself to open the door and step outside. It was almost painful to take a step forward.

By the time he reached the street, he was already stained with sweat, dizzy with the exertion. He must have been wild-eyed, pale and disheveled, because a young man passing by spun about and stared at him for a second, before picking up his own pace and hurrying ahead. Ricky launched himself down the sidewalk, lurching almost drunkenly toward the corner where he could more easily hail a cab working on one of the avenues.

He reached the corner, paused to wipe some of the moisture from his face, and then stepped to the curb, his hand raised. In that second, a yellow taxi miraculously pulled directly in front of him, to disgorge a passenger. Ricky reached for the door, to hold it open for whoever was inside, and in that time-honored city way, to claim the cab for himself.

It was Virgil who stepped out.

“Thanks, Ricky,” the woman said almost carelessly. She adjusted dark sunglasses on her face, grinning at the consternation he must have worn on his. “I left the paper for you to read,” she added.

Without another word, she spun away, walking quickly down the street. Within seconds, she had turned a corner and disappeared.

“Come on, buddy, you want a ride?” the driver abruptly demanded. Ricky was caught holding the door, standing on the curb. He looked inside and saw a copy of that day’s
Times
folded on the seat, and without thinking further, threw himself in. “Where to?” the man asked.

Ricky started to reply, then stopped. “The woman who just got out,” he said, “where’d you pick her up?”

“She was a weird one,” the driver replied. “You know her?”

“Yes. Sort of.”

“Well, she flags me down about two blocks away, tells me to pull over just up the street there, wait with the meter running all the time while she’s sitting back there, doing nothing ’cept staring out the window and keeping a cell phone pinned to her ear, but not talkin’ to nobody, just listening. All of a sudden, she says ‘Pull over there!’ and points to where you was. She sticks a twenty through the glass and says, ‘That man’s your next fare. Got it?’ I says, ‘Whatever you say, lady,’ and does like she says. So now you’re here. She was some looker, that lady. So where to?”

Ricky paused, then asked, “Didn’t she give you a destination?”

The driver smiled. “She sure did. Damn. But she tells me I’m supposed to ask you anyways, see if you can guess.”

Ricky nodded. “Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. The outpatient clinic at 152nd Street and West End.”

“Bingo!” the driver said, pushing down the meter flag and accelerating into the midmorning traffic.

Ricky reached for the newspaper resting on the cab’s backseat. As he did so, a question occurred to him, and he leaned forward toward the plastic barrier between driver and passenger. “Hey,” he said, “that woman, did she say what to do if I gave you a different address? Like, someplace other than the hospital?”

The driver grinned. “What is this, some sort of game?”

“You could say that,” Ricky answered. “But no game you would want to play.”

“I wouldn’t mind playing a game or two with that one, if you know what I mean.”

“Yes you would,” Ricky said. “You might think you wouldn’t, but trust me, you would.”

The man nodded. “I hear ya,” he said. “Some women, look like that one, more trouble than they’re worth. Not worth the price of admission, you could say…”

“That’s exactly right,” Ricky said.

“Anyways, I was supposed to take you to the hospital whatever you said. She tells me that you’d figure it out when we got there. Woman handed me a fifty to take you on the ride.”

“She’s well financed,” Ricky said, leaning back. He was breathing hard, and sweat still clouded the corners of his eyes and stained his shirt. He leaned back in the cab and reached for the newspaper.

He found what he was looking for on page A-13, written in the same red pen in large block letters across a lingerie ad from Lord amp; Taylor’s department store, so that the words creased across the model’s slender figure and obscured the bikini underwear she was displaying.

The simple rhyme, like before, seemed mocking, cynical in its childlike pattern. He thought it a bit like the exquisite torture of the kindergarten playground, with singsong taunts and insults. There was nothing childish about the results that Rumplestiltskin had in mind, however. Ricky tore out the single page from the
Times
and folded it up and slid it into his pants pocket. The remainder of the paper he thrust to the floor of the taxi. The driver was cursing mildly under his breath at traffic, carrying on a steady conversation with each and every truck, car, or the occasional bicyclist or pedestrian that crossed his path and obstructed his route. The interesting thing about the driver’s conversations was that no one else could hear them. He didn’t roll down the window and shout obscenities, nor did he lay on his horn, as some cabdrivers do, like some nervous reaction to the traffic web surrounding them. Instead, this man merely spoke, giving directions, challenges, maneuvering words as he steered his cab, so that in an odd way, the driver must have felt connected, or at least, as if he interacted with all that came onto his horizon. Or his crosshairs, depending, Ricky thought, how one saw it. It was an unusual thing, Ricky thought, to go through each day of life having dozens of conversations that couldn’t be heard. Then he wondered if anyone was any different.

The cab dropped him on the sidewalk outside the huge hospital complex. He could see an emergency entrance down the block, with a large red-lettered sign and an ambulance in front. Ricky felt a chill sweep down his back despite the oppressive midsummer heat around him. It was a cold defined by the last time he had been at the hospital, which corresponded to visits to accompany his wife, while she was still fighting the disease that would kill her, still undergoing radiation and chemotherapy and all the other attacks against the insidious happenings within her body. The oncologists’ offices were in a different part of the complex, but this still didn’t remove the sense of impotence and dread that resurfaced throughout him, no different from when he’d last been on the streets outside the hospital. He looked up at the imposing brick buildings. He thought that he’d seen the hospital three times in his life: the first time, when he worked in the outpatient clinic for six months, before going into private practice; the second time when it joined the dismaying array of hospitals that his wife trudged to in her futile battle against death; and this third time, when he was returning to find the name of the patient whom he’d ignored or neglected, and who now threatened his own life.

Ricky trudged forward, heading toward the entrance, curiously hating the fact that he knew where the medical records were stored.

There was a paunchy middle-aged male clerk, wearing a garish Hawaiian print sport shirt and khaki pants stained with what might have been ink or the remains of lunch, standing at the records storage bank counter who looked at him with a bemused astonishment when Ricky first explained his request.

“You want exactly what from twenty years ago?” he said with undisguised incredulity.

“All the outpatient psychiatric clinic records from the six-month period I worked there,” Ricky said. “Every patient who came in was assigned a clinic number and a file was opened, even if they only came in one time. Those files contain all the case notes that were worked up.”

“I’m not sure those records have been transferred to the computer,” the clerk said reluctantly.

“I’ll bet they have,” Ricky said. “Let’s you and I check.”

“This will take some time, doctor,” the clerk said. “And I’ve got lots of other requests…”

Ricky paused, then thought for a moment, finally picturing how easy it seemed for Virgil and Merlin to get folks to perform simple little acts by waving cash in their direction. There was $250 in his wallet, and he removed $200, placing it on the counter. “This will help,” he said. “Perhaps put me at the head of the line.”

The clerk glanced around, saw that no one else was watching, and scooped up the money from the countertop. “Doctor,” he said, with a small grin, “my expertise is all yours.” He pocketed the cash and then wiggled his fingers in the air. “Let’s see what we can find out,” he said, starting to click entries into the computer keyboard.