“You sound just like him,” she whispered. She closed her eyes.
“Thank you,” I said. “That’s what V.’s father said, too.”
“I’ve been so lonely,” she said.
“Me, too,” I said. And then: “I bet there are some butterscotch cookies waiting for us back at your place.”
“No,” she said. She opened her eyes and took a step back, so that our chests weren’t touching anymore. “No, no, no, no.” Then she closed her eyes again and moved closer. Her chest touched mine again.
“Why not?” I asked. But K. didn’t answer. She just stood there, her chest against mine, her eyes closed. I closed mine. I wanted to see what she was seeing. But all I saw was what I saw with my eyes open: K. was standing so close to me she was touching me with her chest, but she wouldn’t let me come home with her, and I didn’t know why. I took a step away from her and toward the door. Then I took another and another and another. K. didn’t seem to notice. When I left the classroom, she was still standing there with her eyes closed.
Doctor’s Notes (Entry 17)
The end of the day, and I’m so fatigued I can barely focus on my final patient. The only thing I can focus on is M.’s mother: the memory of her voice on the phone, the promise of seeing her in person two days hence. And when I “take a break” from focusing on M.’s mother, I focus on M. It is fifteen minutes before six. On Tuesdays at six, M. teaches his father’s literature class at Jefferson County Community College (JCCC, in the native tongue). Or so he claims. I had always assumed this was merely another fantasy of his: because after all, what college allows a nine-year-old boy to instruct its students? But then again, he also claims that K. is one of his students, just as she’d been one of his father’s students. And then I remember M.’s mother’s reaction to my saying K.’s name — “No. Shit.” That reaction wasn’t to a fantasy. That reaction seemed real enough.
“ ‘I’ve got human life — do you understand that? Human life! — in my hands,’ ” I say to my patient, and rise from my chair. She looks startled. As well she might. She is not like M.; she, as with my other patients, expects me to speak like myself. Although we, too, have a “groove”: each Tuesday, she wonders what might be causing her late-onset bed-wetting, and I explain that it is not actually bed-wetting if you have dreams about wetting the bed but don’t actually wet it, and that in any case it’s probably connected to her fear of the ocean. Not of the actual ocean water, but of the ocean floor and all the “yucky stuff” one might step on. I myself have the same fear and have had it since boyhood, and, as I tell her, “Look how I turned out!” Curiously, after the session the patient doesn’t seem to feel demonstrably better. I suspect she is a late-onset healer, as well, and any day now will find herself all at once healed.
“Must run,” I say to the patient, and I run out the door, into my Subaru, and drive to the college. On the way to the college, I notice a stone house. I remember that according to M., K. lives in an apartment in a stone house on the way to the college. I wonder if that’s the house until I pass another stone house, and then another one, and still another. By the time I’ve reached the college, I’ve passed seven stone houses. The North Country is known for its numerous limestone domiciles, but still, I don’t think I’ve seen so many of them together before. Drat, I think, because this means that in order to find K., I’ll have to search seven houses instead of just one. It’s as though M. (and his father?) have chosen to have a relationship with this woman in this kind of house only to make my life, as a detective, more difficult. This, of course, is a most juvenile way of thinking, “ways of thinking” being as contagious as any other sort of disease.
Anyway, I reach the college, follow the signs, and park in the lot by the Humanities Building. Fortunately, M. is most specific in our sessions. Just as he told me the number of the room in which M.’s dad is hospitalized, so, too, has he told me his classroom number: H-134. I find the room. The door is closed. There is a rectangular window in the door. I peer through it and see M. standing at the front of the room, just to the left of a lectern, which is resting on a table. His eyes are closed; his lips are moving, although I do not hear his voice. The window is wide enough so that I can see the whole classroom: other than the chairs, the table, the lectern, and M., it is empty. I look at my watch. According to M., his class starts at 6:00 p.m. It is now two minutes after. I look back at M. He seems so small, standing next to the small lectern, in front of an empty classroom. Last evening I was peeved at him for telling his mother I had said one thing to him, when in fact I had said another. I was prepared to remain peeved until our session tomorrow. But I look at him with his eyes closed and his lips moving in an empty classroom, and I am not peeved at M. any longer. Poor kid, I think, even though pity is not more productive in a mental health professional than peevishness. We mental health professionals are not put on this earth to pity our patients; we are here to heal them. I have put my hand on the door’s knob, which is more of a handle than a knob, when I hear a deep voice behind me tell me, “Don’t.”
“What the.,” I say, and turn to face the voice. It has come from a security guard: a large, scarlet-faced man wearing a blue uniform and a golden badge and a large belt with a baton dangling on one hip, a firearm holstered on the other. He is reminiscent of the guards in the Veterans Affairs hospital, and my left arch begins to throb in their memory. “Don’t what?”
“Don’t bug him,” the guard says.
“But I’m his mental health professional,” I say.
“Oh,” the guard says. His face relaxes somewhat, more concerned than distrustful. “Is the little guy”—and I suspect the guard is on the verge of uttering something adjectivally offensive, “nuts,” “loony,” “bonkers,” something for which I will have to scold him mentally — “sick?” he finally says.
“I’m not really at liberty to divulge that.” I am preparing to lecture him — I am in a hall of higher learning, after all — about doctor-patient confidentiality when it occurs to me that the security guard might be able to help me. “Is he always in there alone?” I ask.
“Always,” the guard says. “Every Tuesday.”
“No one is ever in there with him?” I say. “Not even a female named K.?”
“Not that I’ve seen,” he says.
“And you’ve never done anything about it?”
The guard’s face turns defensive, the brow descending toward the nose, the nose rising to meet it. “He’s not hurting anyone,” the guard says.
Except himself, I think but do not say, because I’m not certain it’s true. I look into the classroom. M.’s lips aren’t moving anymore, although his eyes are still closed. He has a grateful, shining look on his face, like someone is about to do something nice to him or for him. I am certain he’s thinking of his father or K. And then the look changes, and I know something has gone wrong: either someone hasn’t done the thing M. wanted him/her to do, or he/she has done the thing M. wanted, but it wasn’t so nice after all. Poor kid, I think again.