stopped himself sharply. He plunged into a deep memory, recalling indecision and anxiety, remembering the first day he walked through the door to Dr. Lewis’s Upper East Side office. He glanced over at the old man sitting across from him, seemingly studying every flinch and twitch in Ricky’s posture and thought how much the man had aged and then wondered if the same was true for himself. Trying to recollect the psychological pains that stirred one to a psychoanalyst so many years earlier was a little like the phantom pain that an amputee feels; the leg missing, but the hurt remaining, emanating from a surgical emptiness, both real and unreal at the very same instant. Ricky thought: Who was I then?
But he answered carefully: “It seems to me that there were two sets of doubts, two sets of anxieties, two sets of fears, any of which threatened to cripple me. The first set of each category were those about myself and stemmed from an overly seductive mother, a demanding and cold father who died young, and a childhood filled with accomplishments instead of affection. I was, by far, the youngest in my family, but instead of treating me like some precious baby, I was given impossible standards to uphold. At least, that’s it in total simplicity. That was the set that you and I examined over the course of treatment. But the overflow from these neuroses impacted the relationships I had with my patients. During the course of my own treatment I saw patients in three venues: at the outpatient clinic at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital; a brief stint with the severely compromised at Bellevue…”
“Yes,” Dr. Lewis nodded. “A clinical study. I recall you did not particularly enjoy treating the truly mentally ill…”
“Yes. Correct. Dispensing psychotropic medications and trying to keep people from harming themselves or others.” Ricky thought Dr. Lewis’s statement had a provocative quality to it, a bait he didn’t rise to. “… And then, over the course of those years, perhaps twelve to eighteen patients in therapies that became my first analyses. Those were the cases you heard about, while I was in therapy with you.”
“Yes. Yes. These are figures I would agree with. Did you not have a supervising analyst, a gentleman who watched your progress with those patients?”
“Yes. A Doctor Martin Kaplan. But he…”
“He died,” the old analyst interrupted. “I knew the man. A heart attack. Very sad.”
Ricky started to continue, then thought there was an oddly impatient tone to Dr. Lewis’s voice. He took note of this, then went on. “I’m having trouble connecting names and faces.”
“They are blocked?”
“Yes. I should have excellent recall, and yet, I find, I cannot connect faces and names. I will recall a face, and a problem, but not be able to remember a name. Or vice versa.”
“Why do you think this is?”
Ricky paused, then replied, “Stress. It is simple. Under the sort of tension I’ve been placed, simple things become impossible to recall. Memory gets all turned around and twisted.”
The old analyst nodded again. “Do you not think that Rumplestiltskin knows that? Do you not think that he is somewhat expert at the psychology of stress? Perhaps, in his way, far more sophisticated than you, the physician. And would this not tell you much about who he might be?”
“A man who knows how people react to pressure and anxiety?”
“Of course. A soldier? A policeman? A lawyer? A businessman?”
“Or a psychologist.”
“Yes. Someone in our own profession.”
“But a doctor would never…”
“Never say never.”
Ricky leaned back chastened. “I’m not being specific enough,” he said. “Rule out the people I saw at Bellevue, because they were crippled far too immensely to produce someone this evil. That leaves my private practice and the people I treated in the clinic.”
“The clinic, then, first.”
Ricky closed his eyes for a moment as if this might help him picture the past. The outpatient clinic at Columbia Presbyterian was a warren of small offices on the ground floor of the immense hospital, not far from the emergency entrance. The majority of the clientele traveled up from Harlem or down from the South Bronx. They were mostly poor and struggling, working-class folks of a variety of colors and hues and prospects, all of whom saw mental illness and neurosis as oddly exotic and distant. They occupied the no- man’s-land of mental health, between the middle class and the homeless. Their problems were real; he saw drug abuse, sexual abuse, physical abuse. He saw many more than one mother abandoned by some husband, with cold-eyed and hardened children, whose career goals appeared to be limited to joining a street gang. In this crowd of the desperate and disadvantaged, Ricky knew, were more than a few people who had grown into criminals of significant proportions. Drug dealers, pimps, robbers, and killers. He remembered that there were some clients who came to the clinic who exuded a sense of cruelty about them, almost like a distant smell. They were the mothers and fathers diligently helping to create the next generation of inner-city criminal psychopaths. But he knew, as well, that these were heartless people who would direct their anger against their own. If they lashed out at someone from a different economic strata, it was by chance, not design. The business executive in his Mercedes who breaks down on the Cross Bronx Expressway on the way home to Darien after working late in the midtown office, the well-heeled tourist from Sweden who takes the wrong subway line at the wrong hour in the wrong direction.
He thought: I saw much evil. But I moved away from it.
“I can’t tell,” Ricky said, finally in response. “The people I saw at the clinic were all disadvantaged. People on the fringes of society. I would guess that the person I’m seeking is amongst the first patients I had in analysis. Not these others. And Rumplestiltskin has already told me that it is his mother. But she went by her maiden name. ‘A miss,’ he said.”
“Interesting,” Dr. Lewis said. His eyes seemed to flicker with intrigue at what Ricky said. “I can see why you would think that way. And I believe it is important to limit the spheres of one’s investigation. So, of all those patients, how many were single women?”
Ricky thought hard, picturing a handful of faces. “Seven,” he said.
Dr. Lewis paused. “Seven. Good. And now comes time for the leap of faith, Ricky, does it not? The first moment where you really must make a decision.”
“I don’t know that I follow you.”
Dr. Lewis smiled wanly. “Up to this point, Ricky, it seems to me that you have been merely reacting to the horrendous situation you discover yourself trapped within. So many fires that need to be stamped on and extinguished. Your finances. Your professional reputation. Your current patients. Your career. Your relatives. Out of this mess, you have managed to come up with a single question for your tormentor, and this has provided you with a direction: a woman who created the child who has grown into the psychopath who wants you to kill yourself. But the leap you must make is this: Have you been told the truth?”
Ricky swallowed hard.
“I have to assume so.”
“Is this not a dangerous assumption?”
“Of course it is,” Ricky answered slightly angrily. “But what option do I have? If I think that Rumplestiltskin is steering me in some totally wrong direction, then I have no chance at all, do I?”
“Did it occur to you that maybe you are not supposed to have a chance?”
This was a statement so blunt and terrifying that he felt sweat break out on his neck. “If that’s the case, then I should just kill myself.”
“I suppose so. Or do nothing, live, and see what happens to someone else. Maybe it is all a bluff, you know. Perhaps nothing will happen. Maybe your patient, Zimmerman, did jump in front of that train-at an inopportune moment for you and an advantageous one for Rumplestiltskin. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Perhaps the game is: You have no chance. I am just wondering out loud, Ricky.”
“I can’t open that door to that possibility,” Ricky said.
“An interesting response for a psychoanalyst,” Dr. Lewis said briskly. “A door than cannot be opened. Goes against the grain of everything we stand for.”
“I mean I don’t have the time, do I?”
“Time is elastic. Maybe you do. Maybe you do not.”
