The Reflection (9 page)

From then on, the doctor-caricature with the pince-nez disappeared from my life. I was strapped to a gurney and wheeled to the operating room to get the staples out. When I came to from the anesthetic, a different doctor was leaning over me. Later, I found out his name: Dr. Peters. A man of around my own age and build, he came every morning and afternoon. For a few days I’d refused to talk to him, at first out of shock, then from anger and confusion. Once I’d regained some equilibrium, though, I changed tactics. By now it was clear enough that I was in a psychiatric hospital and I was more than familiar with the setup. There would be the padded cells for violent patients. The next step up would be my current situation: confined to one’s room. But patients who were docile and cooperative enough could spend their time in a communal hall, where there might be books, magazines, newspapers, perhaps a radio set or gramophone player.

“So. Where did you say you were you born?”

“Hackensack, New Jersey. A couple of years later I was sent to live with my aunt and uncle, on Long Island.”

“Why was that?”

“My parents died.”

“How did they die?”

“A theater fire. Here in Manhattan, if that’s where I am. Quite a few people died in the fire. It was reported in the
Times
, if you’d care to check. I’m fairly sure the date was April 17, 1919.”

Dr. Peters scribbled on his pad, although whether he was noting the date or something entirely different, I didn’t know. He was making me go through the whole story of my life again. I’d wearily protested that I’d already done that, at some length, with the previous doctor, but he’d been adamant. And, like before, there’d always be some detail that interested him—my parents’ death, for example—and we’d go over it again and again. I recognized the technique from police interrogations I’d seen with D’Angelo. I’d also occasionally used it myself. I’d make a patient obsessively go over some aspect of his narrative—it almost didn’t matter which—until eventually, in the retelling, and the retelling of the retelling, its fault line would reveal itself.

The same story, told in the same words. But after a while it isn’t the same. With repetition, a story loses its flavor, stops feeling like the truth, stops
being
true. It’s just another performance. Why had I been so keen to give the date of the report on the theater fire in the
Times
? I’d once discussed the subject of police interrogations with D’Angelo: if there are
no
holes in a story, he’d said, then generally it’s not true. People who are telling the truth tend to be slipshod about it; they contradict themselves, forget crucial details. They have no ready answers when pulled up on their inconsistencies. The seamless narratives, where every loose thread is
carefully woven back into the fabric—those are the suspect ones.

The doctor left. Later, there would be lunch, followed by a trip to the bathroom accompanied by an orderly—a brief yet intoxicating glimpse of the world beyond my room. But right now there was the bed, the white walls, the window, and myself. In the solitude of it all, my mind spun back. Faces of old patients from years ago returned to me, so clearly, and I wondered what had happened to them, how they’d fared in life, following my intervention. Why had I so rarely had the curiosity to find out? I recalled one of the few instances when I had indeed tried to follow up. A man in his fifties, excessively polite, who’d spent years working on intricate ink drawings of an imaginary city. They had a peculiar, ghostly quality, and he’d claimed that the images came to him in visions. I’d asked him where he thought the city was, and he’d said he didn’t know, but that he imagined it was somewhere cold, and in Europe. He’d believed that he had a telepathic link with a person in this cold, European city. His theory had been that as he was having his visions, this other person would in turn be having visions of New York, seeing the city through his eyes. They would be mirroring each other.

Then one day a colleague who was originally from Sweden had come to see me. I had one of the drawings on my desk. “It’s Stockholm,” he’d said, and he’d pointed out landmarks he recognized. “And yet this building here, I remember it only as a boy. It was pulled down at least twenty years ago.” For a few weeks, I’d become obsessed with this patient. I’d ascertained that he had no family connections with Sweden. That he had never been to Stockholm, had in fact never been out of the United States. I’d gone to the New York Public Library, taken out illustrated books on Stockholm, identified for myself various buildings in the drawings, mapped them out to
persuade myself that there was a common viewpoint from which they’d all been executed. I’d entertained all sorts of increasingly far-fetched ideas about my patient and where the drawings had come from, ideas that went beyond mere psychiatry. I’d gotten myself in too deep: I was beginning to buy into my patient’s story.

Eventually I’d managed to pull out of it, pull back. It had occurred to me that if I had been able to go to the library and look up images of Stockholm, then so had my patient, and that I needed no other explanation than that. The rest really was psychiatry. It was simply a question of whether my patient was a charlatan, or whether he actually was deluded, and if so, what to do about it. All this had struck me in a second, with the force of revelation.

I’d changed tack with my patient. Up until then, I’d been going along with him. I’d allowed him to tell his story without contradicting him, without passing judgment, without letting him know what I thought of it. Now I’d felt the time had come to take a more aggressive stance. As my secretary had shown him into my office, I’d scattered my desk with the pictures he’d drawn, together with some illustrated books on Stockholm, open on panoramic city views. I’d wordlessly pointed to various illustrations that were evidently models for his drawings.

“Amazing, amazing,” he’d muttered under his breath.

“What’s amazing? You’ve simply copied out these photographs, haven’t you? Admit it!”

He would admit nothing. All he’d do was continue to shake his head and mutter, “Amazing!” A frustration rose in me; I’d abruptly stood up and berated him: “You know you copied these photographs! Admit it to me now! If you don’t admit it, there’ll be trouble!” My patient had looked up at me in fear and surprise, then clammed right up. I knew I wouldn’t get anything more out of him that session, so I’d eventually called
a halt twenty minutes early. All week, my failure had gnawed at me. It had been a silly idea to confront him like that. Of course, it was always a temptation to challenge one’s patients. But it was rarely productive. Best to hold back, to approach things from oblique angles, to guide the patient slowly toward his error, as if he were discovering it by himself.

In preparation for his next appointment, I’d concocted an apology. I’d been too impatient; now I wanted start afresh with him, as it were, step back and take things at a slower pace. He’d always been a punctual man, and when he still hadn’t turned up fifteen minutes into his session, I’d understood. He’d broken off the treatment. That happened often enough—patients suddenly disappearing, never to be seen again. It always left me feeling hollow, somehow forsaken, as if it had been me and not them who had been seeking therapy. These abandonments would normally take me days to recover from. I took this one even harder: for weeks, this patient had remained at the forefront of my mind, until one day I couldn’t take it any more and I’d decided to take a trip out to where he lived, according to his file. I’d found myself outside a rooming house in a desolate corner of Red Hook. He wasn’t there. The landlady had told me that he’d left a few weeks back, in other words at around the same time as he’d walked out on me. He’d simply taken off without a word, after years of living there, keeping pretty much to himself the whole time. He’d been scrupulously honest, though, pushing an envelope under the landlady’s door with the rent he owed in it. “Did he leave anything behind?” I’d asked. The landlady had shaken her head. The room had been spotless; it was as if he’d never been there at all.

I’d sat there on my bed for some time, thinking about this former patient, a sadness once again invading me, eating into me. That last act, of leaving the money for the landlady even
though he would never see her again, seemed so poignant, it nearly had me in tears. Curious how these faces from the past loomed up, crowding my mental theater, and were clearer to me than the actual people I saw every day—the doctor, the nurse, the orderlies. Why had I suddenly thought of the Stockholm man again, after all these years? I’d been wrong about him, and the core of his mystery remained.

My life since the subway accident had the dull passivity of a dream, with its unconnected events simply washing over me, one after the other. The long interrogation to which I’d been subjected over the days and weeks was an elaborate fiction. The doctor purported to believe what I was telling him, and I purported to accept that he was believing it. We’d become entrenched in our respective roles and the longer it went on, the harder it would be to break out of them. I recalled yet another case history. It was when I’d been at City Psychiatric. A long-term patient on my ward had died. He’d had no visitors for years, but we checked his file for next of kin, and found he had a sister. She’d been astonished to receive my call. Once she’d recovered from the shock, she’d told me that her brother had indeed been briefly detained at a New York mental hospital, but he’d been discharged years ago, and was now living somewhere out on the West Coast. What had happened, it transpired, was that at some point, probably during admission, our recently deceased patient’s papers had been mixed up with this other person’s. Why the patient had never protested, why he’d simply gone along with the sudden name change, would forever remain an enigma, since the error had gone undetected until his death.

From the reverse perspective, I could now see how easily such things could happen. There was something narcotic, almost hypnotizing about being a patient on a mental ward, whatever your state of mind. In this infantilizing context, you
quickly became who and what people told you you were. The longer you were there, the less strength you had to stand up for any competing reality. It certainly shook me up, thinking about this old case. It sent a frisson of dread through me. Until now, I’d been content to leave things as they were with the doctor, to simply ride it out until I knew how I was to go on, confident that the truth would, in any case, eventually manifest itself. Now, I wasn’t so sure.

The day had passed in the usual haze of memory and introspection, over before I’d been properly aware that it had even begun. It was twilight now. I always liked this half hour or so when the day was fading but they hadn’t put the lights on in my room yet. It had been a favorite moment of mine in my Park Avenue office as well. I’d swivel around in my chair, staring through the blinds to the street below, with the eerie play of dying rays over the buildings. It spoke to something fundamentally ambiguous within me. Across the courtyard now, the light snapped on in the woman’s apartment. Her curtains were drawn, but I could glimpse her body moving behind them, like some kind of shadow game. She appeared to be naked or in her underwear, as I could make out the scissor movement of her legs, the exaggerated curve of her breasts. Her figure seemed magnified, silhouetted against the fabric, by some trick of the light, each ripple of the curtain veiled with erotic possibility. Where was her child, her husband? Why did I never see them? I thought of the way she’d fixed me with her stare that one time, and wondered when it would happen again.

The doctor was back. I must have slept; it must be a new morning: the days ticked over, without my noticing. He was questioning me yet again about my parents—a strange
subject to be stuck on, it seemed to me, since everything I knew about them was secondhand. I answered in automatic mode, my mind elsewhere. I noticed how the doctor would always move the chair in the room so it was just so, always at exactly the same angle to the bed, and then at the end of the interrogation, he’d move it back to how it had been, despite the fact that no one other than himself used it.

He had a neutral, professorial air to him and a disconnected manner, without it being overtly hostile. In some ways he was a version of myself, of what I might have been. When I’d been working at City Psychiatric, I’d been offered a full-time post, and I probably would have accepted it, but for Abby’s influence. She’d pushed me into renting the Park Avenue office and getting myself started in private practice, despite my youth and lack of experience. She’d idealized my possibilities and talked me out of the safe route. If it hadn’t been for her, I probably would have ended up pretty much like this Dr. Peters. A job in a teaching hospital, which would have eventually led to a more senior position, then perhaps research or lecturing work with a university, ultimately a professorship … How very different things might have been, I mused, had I never met Abby.

“What’s the point of continuing with this, Doctor? Why go over and over the same ground?”

“I’m trying to help you. And if you can help me, by answering my questions, then the sooner we’ll be able to …”

I cut him off. “I think we should be straight with each other. I don’t understand why you replaced the other doctor without a word. Did he tell me something he shouldn’t have? What does the name Stephen Smith mean to you?”

“Well … what does it mean to
you
?”

“I’ll play that game, if you want. When you brought me in, you found a wallet in my pocket. In the wallet was the photo
of the young woman you see over there. Also, I’m guessing, a social security card, in the name of Stephen Smith. Actually, I don’t have a social security card. They don’t issue them to doctors, as you know. The wallet was someone else’s. A patient of mine, in fact. I imagine he can be easily traced. What I don’t understand is why you simply accepted that I was this person. Why didn’t you check further? It’s unprofessional.”

The doctor blinked. I could see him toying with his answer, wondering whether it was too late to guide our relationship back to safer waters, or whether the spell had been broken for good.