The Analyst

“And you insist your patient is credible?”

“I do. I have been in therapy with her now for six months. Two sessions each week. She has been utterly consistent. Nothing she has said up to this point would make me doubt her word in the slightest. Doctor, you and I both know how close to impossible it is for someone to successfully lie to a therapist, especially over an elongated space of time.”

Ricky would have undoubtedly agreed with this statement a few days earlier. Now he was no longer quite so certain. “And where is she now?”

“She is on vacation until the third week in August.”

“Did she happen to give you a phone number where she could be reached during August?”

“No. I don’t believe so. We merely made an appointment for shortly before Labor Day and left it at that.”

Ricky thought hard, then asked another question. “And does she have striking, extraordinary, penetrating green eyes?”

Soloman paused. When he spoke, it was with an icy reserve. “So, you do know her then?”

“No,” Ricky said. “I was just guessing.”

Then he hung up the phone. Virgil, he said to himself.

Ricky found himself staring across his office toward the painting on the wall that had figured so prominently in the false recollections of the phony patient up in Boston. There was no doubt in his mind that Dr. Soloman was real, and that he had been selected with care. There was equally no doubt, Ricky understood, that this so beautiful and so troubled young woman who had come to seek out the well-known Dr. Soloman’s care would ever be seen by him again. At least not in the context that Soloman thought. Ricky shook his head. There were more than a few therapists whose conceits were so profound that they came to love the attention of the press and the devotion of their patients. They behaved as if they had some unique and altogether magical insight into the ways of the world and the workings of people, dashing off opinions and pronouncements with slipshod regularity. Ricky suspected that Soloman was closer in stripe to one of these talk-show shrinks, who embraced the image of knowledge without the actual hard work of gaining insight. It is much easier to listen to someone briefly and fly off the cuff, than it is to sit day after day, penetrating layers of the mundane and trivial in pursuit of the profound. He had nothing but contempt for the members of his profession who lent their names to opinions in courtrooms and articles in newspapers.

But, Ricky thought, the problem was, Soloman’s reputation, notoriety, and public persona would lend credence to the allegation. By fixing him on the bottom of that letter, it gained a weight that would survive just long enough for the purposes of the person who’d designed it.

Ricky asked himself: What did you learn today?

Much, he answered. But mostly that the strands of the web he found himself entangled in had been laid in place months earlier.

He looked back at the painting gracing the wall. They were here, he thought, long before the other day. His eyes cruised around the office. Nothing here was safe. Nothing here was private. They were here months ago, and I didn’t know it.

Rage like a blow to the stomach staggered him, and his first response was to rise, stride across the office, and seize the small woodcut that the doctor from Boston had mentioned, ripping it from its hook on the wall. He took the painting and dashed it into the wastebasket by his desk, cracking the frame and shattering the glass. The sound was like a gunshot echoing in the small office space. Obscenities burst from his lips, uncharacteristic and rough, filling the air with needles. He turned and grasped the sides of his desk, as if to steady himself.

As quickly as it arrived, the anger fled, replaced by another wave of nausea which slithered through him. He felt dizzy, his head reeling, the sensation one gets when one stands up too quickly, especially with a case of the flu or a severe cold. Ricky stumbled emotionally. His breathing was tight, wheezy, and one felt as if someone had looped a rope around his chest, making it hard to breathe.

It took him several minutes to regain equilibrium, and, even when he did, he still felt weak, almost exhausted.

He continued to look around the office, but now it seemed different. It was as if all the items that decorated his life had been rendered sinister. He thought he could no longer trust anything in his sight. He wondered what else Virgil had described to the physician in Boston; what other details of his life were now on display in a complaint filed with the state board of medical ethics. He remembered times patients of his had come in distraught following a break-in or a mugging and spoken about the violation, how unsettled it made their lives. He had listened to these complaints sympathetically, with clinical detachment, but never really understanding how primal the sensation was. He had a better idea now, he told himself.

He, too, felt robbed.

Again he looked around the room. What had once seemed to him to be safe was swiftly losing that quality.

Making a lie seem real is tricky work, he thought to himself. It takes planning.

Ricky maneuvered behind his desk and saw that the red light on his answering machine was blinking steadily. A message counter was lit up, as well, also red, with the number four. He reached down and pressed the switch that would activate the machine, listening to the first of the messages. He immediately recognized the voice of a patient, a late-middle-aged journalist at the New York Times, a man stuck in a well-paying but fundamentally repetitive job editing stories for the science section written by younger, more energetic reporters. He was a man who longed to do more with his life, to investigate creativity and originality, but was afraid of the disruption this indulgence might bring to a carefully regimented life. Still, this patient was intelligent, sophisticated, and making significant strides in therapy, beginning to understand the connection between his rigid upbringing in the Midwest, child of dedicated academics, and his fear of adventure. Ricky quite liked the man, and thought he was a likely candidate to complete his analysis and see the freedom it would give him as an opportunity, which is a great satisfaction to any therapist.

“Doctor Starks,” the man said slowly, almost reluctantly, as he identified himself. “I apologize for leaving a message on your machine during your vacation. I don’t mean to disrupt your holiday, but this morning’s mail brought a very disturbing letter.”

Ricky inhaled sharply. The voice of the patient continued slowly.

“The letter was a copy of a complaint filed against you with the state medical ethics board and the New York Psychoanalytic Society. I recognize the anonymous nature of the allegation makes it extremely hard to counter. The copy of the letter, incidentally, was mailed to me at my home, not my office, and lacked any return address or any other identifying characteristics.”

Again the patient hesitated.

“I have been placed in a substantial conflict of interest. There is little doubt in my mind that the complaint is a worthy news story, and should be turned over to someone on our city reporting staff for additional investigation. On the other hand, this act would obviously severely compromise our relationship. I am troubled deeply by the allegations, which I presume you deny…”

The patient seemed to catch his breath, then added with a touch of bitter anger, “… Everyone always denies wrongdoing. ‘I didn’t do it, I didn’t do it, I didn’t do it… ‘ Until they’re so caught by events and trapped by circumstances that they can no longer lie. Presidents. Government officials. Businessmen. Doctors. Scoutmasters and Little League coaches, for Christ’s sake. Then they finally are forced to tell the truth and expect everyone to understand they had to lie, earlier, as if it’s okay to keep lying until you’re so goddamn caught you can’t lie effectively anymore…”

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,