“Zimmerman wouldn’t kill himself. He showed none of the classic conditions. You or someone like you pushed him in front of that subway train.”
“I admire your certainty, Ricky. It must be a happy life to be so sure about everything.”
“I’m going to go back to the police.”
“Well, you’re certainly welcome to give them another try if you think it will do you some good. Did you find them particularly helpful? Were they especially eager to listen to your analytic interpretation of events that you didn’t actually witness?”
This question quieted Ricky. He waited before he said, “All right. So, what’s next?”
“There’s a present for you. Over on your couch. See it?”
Ricky looked up swiftly and saw that there was a medium-sized blond manila envelope resting where his patients usually placed their heads. “I see it,” he replied.
“Okay,” Virgil said. “I’ll wait for you to open it up.” Before he could place the telephone down on the desktop, he heard her humming a tune that he vaguely recognized, but was unable to immediately place. Had Ricky been more of a television watcher, he might have immediately determined that Virgil was using the familiar music from the quiz show Jeopardy. Instead, he rose, crossed the room swiftly, and seized the envelope. It was thin, and he tore it open rapidly, removing a single sheet of paper.
It was a solitary page from a calendar. A large red X had been drawn through that day’s date, the first of the month of August. Thirteen days that followed were left blank. The fifteenth day was circled in red. The remaining days of the month had been blacked out.
Ricky’s mouth went dry. He looked in the envelope, but there was nothing else.
He moved slowly back to the desk and lifted the receiver.
“All right,” he said. “This isn’t hard to understand.”
Virgil’s voice remained even flowing and almost sweet. “A reminder, Ricky. That’s all. Something to help you get yourself started. Ricky, Ricky, I asked already: What have you learned?”
The question infuriated him and he was about to burst with outrage. But he bit back the fury gathering within him and, keeping tight rein over his emotions, replied instead, “I’ve learned that there don’t seem to be any boundaries.”
“Good, Ricky, good. That’s progress. What else?”
“I’ve learned not to underestimate what is happening.”
“Excellent, Ricky. More?”
“No. That’s it to this point.”
Virgil started to tsk-tsk like some caricature of a grade-school teacher. “Not true, Ricky. What you have learned, Ricky, is that everything in this game, including the likely outcome, is being played on a field uniquely designed to accommodate you. I think that my employer has been exceptionally generous, considering his alternatives. You’ve been given a chance, granted a slight one, to save someone else’s life and to save your own by answering a simple question: Who is he? And, because he doesn’t want to be unfair, he’s given you an alternative solution, less attractive for you, of course, but one that will give your sorry existence some meaning in your final days. Not many people get that sort of opportunity, Ricky. To go to their grave knowing that their sacrifice saved another from some unknown, but absolutely genuine horror. Why, this borders on sainthood, Ricky, and it’s being handed to you without the delightful three miracles that the Catholic Church usually requires, although I believe they’ll waive one or two on occasion for worthy candidates. How does one go about waiving a miracle, when that’s the standard for acceptance in the club? Ah, well, an intriguing question we can debate at length some other moment. Right now, Ricky, you should go back to the clues you have been given, and get started. Time is wasting and there’s not much of it left. Have you ever performed an analysis on deadline, Ricky? Because that is what this is all about. I’ll be in touch. Remember, Virgil is never far away.”
She took a deep breath, then added: “Got all that, Ricky?”
He remained silent, and she said it again, harsher.
“Got all that, Ricky?”
“Yes,” he said. But of course he knew that he didn’t as he hung up the phone.
Chapter Seven
Zimmerman’s ghost seemed to be laughing at him.
It was the morning after a fitful night. He had not slept much, but when he had, he had dreamed vividly, fantastically, of his dead wife sitting by his side in a vibrant red two-seater sports car that he did not recognize, but knew belonged to him. They were parked by the edge of the ocean in deep sand on a familiar beach near their vacation cottage on the Cape. It had seemed to Ricky in the dream that the gray-green Atlantic waters, the color they took on in anticipation of a storm, were sweeping ever closer to him, threatening to overtake the car in a flood tide, and he struggled madly to open the door, but when he tried to work the handle he had seen a bloodstained and grinning Zimmerman standing outside the car, holding the door closed, and he’d been trapped inside. The car would not start and somehow he knew the tires were dug down into the sand anyway. In the dream, his dead wife had seemed calm, beckoning, almost welcoming him, and he’d had little trouble interpreting all this, as he stood naked in the shower, letting lukewarm water that was neither warm nor cold flow over his head in a mildly unpleasant cascade, but one that fit his dreary mood.
Ricky dressed in faded, ratty, khaki trousers that were frayed at the cuffs and which showed all the signs of longtime use that teenagers would ordinarily have paid extra for at the mall, but which in his case were the results of years of wear and tear during the summer vacation, the only time he wore them. On his feet he placed an equally tattered pair of boat shoes and over his torso an old blue button-down shirt too worn for wear anytime other than the weekend. He dragged a comb through his hair. He looked up at his face in the mirror and thought he wore all the outward appearances of a man of accomplishments dressing down for the beginning of his vacation. He thought how for years he had awoken on the first of August and gleefully put on the old and comfortable battered clothes that signaled that for the next month he was stepping away from the carefully constructed and regimented character of the Upper East Side Manhattan psychoanalyst and into something different. Vacation was defined by Ricky as a time to get his hands dirty in the garden up in Wellfleet, to get some sand between his toes on long walks down the beach, to read popular mystery or romance novels and drink the occasional disgusting concoction called the Cape Codder, an unfortunate marriage of cranberry juice and vodka. This vacation promised no such return to routine, even though, in something he might have characterized as stubbornness, or maybe wishful thinking, he was dressed for the first day of the holiday.