We had to wait about half an hour. Francis filled out his chart and sat sullenly reading back issues of Smithsonian magazine. But when the nurse finally called his name, he didn't stand up.
'That's you,' I said.
He still didn't move.
'Well, go on,' I said.
He didn't answer. He had a sort of wild look in his eye.
'Look here,' he finally said. 'I've changed my mind.'
'What?'
'I said I've changed my mind. I want to go home.'
The nurse was standing in the doorway, listening to this exchange with interest.
'That's stupid,' I said to him, irritated. 'You've waited this ^ long.' 1 'I changed my mind.'
'You were the one who wanted to come.'
I knew this would shame him. Annoyed, avoiding my gaze, he slammed down his magazine and stalked through the double doors without looking back.
About ten minutes later an exhausted-looking doctor in a scrub shirt poked his head into the waiting room. I was the only person there.
'Hi,' he said curtly. 'You with Mr Abernathy?'
'Yes,' 'Would you step back with me for a moment, please?'
I got up and followed him. Francis was sitting on the edge of an examining table, fully clad, bent almost double and looking miserable.
'Mr Abernathy will not put on a gown,' said the doctor. 'And he won't let the nurse take any blood. I don't know how he expects us to examine him if he won't cooperate.'
There was a silence. The lights in the examining room were very bright. I was horribly embarrassed.
The doctor walked over to a sink and began to wash his hands.
'You guys been doing any drugs tonight?' he said casually.
I felt my face getting red. 'No,' I said.
'A little cocaine? Some speed, maybe?'
'No.'
'If your friend here took something, it would help a lot if we knew what it was.'
'Francis,' I said weakly, and was silenced by a glare of hatred: et to, Brute.
'How dare you,' he snapped. 'I didn't take anything. You know very well I didn't.'
'Calm down,' said the doctor. 'Nobody's accusing you of anything. But your behavior is a little irrational tonight, don't you think?'
'No,' said Francis, after a confused pause.
The doctor rinsed his hands and dried them on a towel.
'No?' he said. 'You come here in the middle of the night saying you're having a heart attack and then you won't let anyone near you? How do you expect me to know what is wrong with you?'
Francis didn't answer. He was breathing hard. His eyes were cast downward and his face was a bright pink.
'I'm not a mind reader,' the doctor said at last. 'But in my experience, somebody your age saying they're having a heart attack, it's one of two things.'
'What?' I finally said.
'Well. Amphetamine poisoning, for one.'
'It's not that,' Francis said angrily, glancing up.
'All right, all right. Something else it could be is a panic disorder.'
'What's that?' I said, carefully avoiding looking in Francis's direction.
'Like an anxiety attack. A sudden rush of fear. Heart palpitations.
Trembling and sweating. It can be quite severe. People often think they're dying.'
Francis didn't say anything.
'Well?' said the doctor. 'Do you think that might be it?'
'I don't know,' said Francis, after another confused pause.
The doctor leaned back against the sink. 'Do you feel afraid a lot?' he said. 'For no good reason you can think of?'
By the time we left the hospital, it was a quarter after three.
Francis lit a cigarette in the parking lot. In his left hand he was grinding a piece of paper on which the doctor had written the name of a psychiatrist in town.
'Are you mad?' he said when we were in the car.
It was the second time he had asked. 'No,' I said.
'I know you arc.'
The streets were dream-lit, deserted. The car top was down.
We drove past dark houses, turned onto a covered bridge. The tires thumped on the wooden planks.
'Please don't be mad at me,' said Francis.
I ignored him. 'Are you going to see that psychiatrist?' I said.
'It wouldn't do any good. I know what's bothering me.'
I didn't say anything. When the word psychiatrist had come up, I had been alarmed. I was not a great believer in psychiatry but still, who knew what a trained eye might see in a personality test, a dream, even a slip of the tongue?
'I went through analysis when I was a kid,' Francis said. He sounded on the verge of tears. 'I guess I must've been eleven or twelve. My mother was on some kind of Yoga kick and she yanked me out of my old school in Boston and packed me off to this terrible place in Switzerland. The Something Institute.
Everyone wore sandals with socks. There were classes in dervish dancing and the Kabbalah. All the White Level – that was what they called my grade, or form, whatever it was – had to do Chinese Quigong every morning and have four hours of Reichian analysis a week. I had to have six.'
'How do you analyze a twelve-year-old kid?'
'Lots of word association. Also weird games they made you play with anatomically correct dolls. They'd caught me and a couple of little French girls trying to sneak off the grounds – we were half-starved, macrobiotic food, you know, we were only trying to get down to the bureau de tabac to buy some chocolates but of course they insisted it had somehow been some sort of sexual incident. Not that they minded that sort of thing but they liked you to tell them about it and I was too ignorant to oblige.
The girls knew more about such matters and had made up some wild French story to please the shrink – menage a trots in some haystack, you can't imagine how sick they thought I was for I repressing, this. Though I would've told them anything if I thought they'd send me home.' He laughed, without much humor. 'God. I remember the head of the Institute asking me once what character from fiction I most identified with, and I said Davy Balfour from Kidnapped.'
We were rounding a corner. Suddenly, in the wash of the headlights, a large animal loomed in my path. I hit the brakes hard. For half a moment I found myself looking through the windshield at a pair of glowing eyes. Then, in a flash, it bounded away.
We sat for a moment, shaken, at a full stop.
'What was that?' said Francis.
'I don't know. A deer maybe.'
'That wasn't a deer.'
'Then a dog.'
'It looked like some kind of a cat to me.'
Actually, that was what it had looked like to me too. 'But it was too big,' I said.
'Maybe it was a cougar or something,' 'They don't have those around here.'
'They used to. They called them catamounts. Cat-o-the Mountain. Like Catamount Street in town.'
The night breeze was chilly. A dog barked somewhere. There wasn't much traffic on that road at night.
I put the car in gear.
Francis had asked me not to tell anyone about our excursion to the emergency room but at the twins'
