could see through the window that streetlights were burning brightly and the air conditioner continued to hum merrily along. Then he told himself that it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that two different lightbulbs might have burned out simultaneously. Unusual, but possible.
Keeping one hand on the desk edge, he turned in the direction of the third lamp that he kept in his office. It was a standing light, a black, cast-iron design that his wife had purchased a number of years earlier to take up to the summer place in Wellfleet, but which he’d appropriated for the corner of his office, behind his chair, at the head of the couch. He used it for reading, and on rainy, dark days, to clear some of the city November gloom from the room, so that patients wouldn’t be totally distracted by the weather. The lamp was perhaps fifteen feet away from where he was poised at the desk, but it was a distance that in that moment seemed much farther. He pictured his office, knowing that it was merely a few paces away and that nothing stood between him and his chair, and once there, the lamp would be easily found. He wished, in that moment, that more light from the street filtered through the windows, but what little existed seemed to stop right at the glass, as if impotent and unable to penetrate into the small room. Four strides across, he told himself. Don’t bump your knee on the chair.
He stepped forward carefully, feeling the emptiness in front of him with his outstretched arms. He bent slightly at the waist, reaching for the reassuring feel of his old leather chair. It seemed to take him longer to cross the space than he would have guessed, but the chair was where it always was, and he found the arm, the back, and he lurched into the seat with a grateful welcoming squeak of leather. His hands located the small table where he kept his daybook and clock, then reached behind it for the lamp. The knob was up just beneath the bulb, and with a little twisting and fumbling, he found it. Without hesitation, he turned it with a decisive click.
The darkness remained intact.
He twisted the knob back and forth a dozen times, filling the room with clicks.
Nothing.
Ricky sat frozen in his seat, trying to arrive at some obvious and benign explanation for why none of the lights in his office functioned. This eluded him.
Breathing in deeply, he listened to the nighttime, trying to sort through the ancillary sounds of the city. His nerve ends were on edge, his hearing sharpened, every other sense gathered in an effort to determine whether he was truly alone. A part of him wanted to bolt for the front door, to escape to the corridor, and then to find someone to accompany him back into the apartment. He fought against this desire, recognizing it for the panic that it implied. He tried to force himself to remain calm.
He could hear nothing, but this did not reassure him that no one was with him in the apartment. He tried to imagine where someone might hide, which closet, which corner, beneath which table. Then he tried to concentrate on those locations, as if from the seat behind his analyst’s couch, he could see into those hidden regions. But this effort, too, was unsuccessful, or, at least, he realized, unsatisfactory. He tried to remember where he might have kept a flashlight or candlesticks, guessing that if he had any, they would be in the kitchen on a shelf, probably right next to the spare lightbulbs. He stayed seated for another minute, reluctant to leave his familiar seat, managing to force himself upward only by recognizing that pursuing some sort of light was the only reasonable response.
He stepped gingerly into the center of the room, keeping his hands out in front of him again, mimicking a blind man. He was halfway across the room when the telephone on the desk rang.
The sound seared through him.
He stumbled as he pivoted toward the noise, reaching out for the sound. His hand knocked into a jar of pens and pencils he kept on his desktop, scattering them. He seized the telephone just before the sixth ring, which would have triggered his answering machine. “Hello? Hello?”
There was no response.
“Hello? Is someone there?”
The phone went dead abruptly.
Ricky held the receiver in his hand in the darkness, cursing silently to himself, then not so silently, “Goddamn it to hell!” he said loudly. “Goddamn it, Goddamn it, Goddamn it…”
He hung up the receiver, and placed both hands on the desk surface, as if exhausted and needing to catch his breath again. He cursed again, though more softly.
The phone rang again.
He lurched back in surprise, then reached out and fumbling slightly, banging the receiver against the desktop, he grabbed the receiver and thrust it to his ear. “This isn’t funny,” he said.
“Doctor Ricky,” cooed Virgil’s deep, yet kittenish voice. “No one has ever suggested this was a joke. In fact, Mr. R. is fairly humorless, or so I’m told.”
Ricky bit back on the every angry word that leapt forward to the brink of his lips. Instead, he let some silence speak for him.
After a few seconds, Virgil laughed. The sound was awful over the phone line.
“You’re still in the dark, aren’t you, Ricky?”
“Yes,” he said. “You’ve been here, haven’t you. You or someone like you broke in here while I was out and…”
“Ricky,” Virgil suddenly cooed, almost seductively, “you’re. When you’re in the dark about something, especially something simple, what do you do?”
He didn’t reply. She laughed again.
“Come on, Ricky. And you think yourself to be a master of symbolism and interpreting all sorts of mysteries? How do you shed light where there is only darkness? Why, that’s your job, isn’t it?”
She didn’t allow him a response.
“Follow the simplest trail for an answer.”
“What?” he asked.
“Ricky, I can see you’re going to need my help considerably over the next few days if you intend to make an honest effort to save your own life. Or do you prefer to sit in the dark right up to the arrival of the day that you have to kill yourself?”
He felt confused.
“I don’t get it,” he said.
“You will in a moment or two,” she said firmly. Then she hung up, leaving him holding impotently on to the telephone. He took several seconds before he returned it to its cradle. The nighttime in the room seemed to envelop him, blanketing him with despair. He reviewed Virgil’s words, which seemed to him to be obtuse, cryptic, and unfathomable. He wanted to scream out that he had no idea what she meant, frustrated by both the darkness that surrounded him and the sense that his private space had been disrupted and violated. Ricky ground his teeth in anger, gripping the edge of the desk, grunting with rage. He wanted to pick something up and break it.
“A simple trail,” he almost shouted out. “There aren’t any simple trails in life!”
The sound of his own words disappearing into the blackened room had the immediate effect of quieting him. He seethed, on the verge of fury.
“Simple, simple…,” he said under his breath.
And then he had an idea. He was surprised that it managed to slide past his growing anger. “It can’t be…” he said, as he reached out with his left hand for his desk lamp. He felt the base and found the electrical cord emerging from the side. Holding this between his fingers, he traced the wire downward to where he knew it was plugged into an extension cord that ran against the wall to the outlet. He lowered himself to his knees on the floor and within a few seconds found the plug. It had been pulled from the extension. It took another few seconds of groping around for him to find the end of the extension, but he managed. He slid the plug into the receptacle and the room around him suddenly burst with light. He rose from the floor and turned to the lamp behind the couch and immediately saw that it had been unplugged, as well. He lifted his eyes to the overhead light and guessed that the bulb behind the sconce had merely been loosened.
On his desk, the telephone rang for the third time.
He picked it up, demanding “How did you get in here?”
“Don’t you think Mr. R. can afford a capable locksmith?” Virgil said coyly. “Or a
