The Analyst

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 child, because that doesn’t specify gender.

“… When my father sailed away…”

The father left. Sail could be either literal or symbolic, but in either case, the father left the family. Whatever the causes of the abandonment, Rumplestiltskin must have harbored his resentment for years. It had to be further fueled by the mother, who was left behind. He had played some part in the creation of a rage that had taken years to turn murderous. But which part? That’s what he needed to figure out.

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 Rashomon, where the same event is examined from diametrically different positions, with wildly disparate interpretations. Into a situation ripe for murderous anger, he’d played a role, but on which side, he couldn’t tell. Regardless, Ricky thought the time frame would necessarily have happened between twenty and twenty-five years earlier, because Rumplestiltskin had to grow into the adult of means necessary to plan the elaborate details of the game.

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 granite.

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.