by Joe Derkacht
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I expected the hearing to take place in a courtroom. A stern, white-haired judge in black robes. A baleful bailiff and a demure court reporter. A crowded gallery of lawyers huddling with clients waiting to be arraigned. Instead I was in a cramped office, seated between Zell and Blackie on folding metal chairs, facing a man behind a beat up old steel desk. Chrome-framed reading glasses sat low on the bridge of his nose.
“The two of you are here to vouch for Mr. Raventhorst?” He asked, his gaze flickering at them for the briefest of moments over his glasses.
Zell and Blackie nodded in reply. The gray little man, sans any demure court reporter, et al., made a quick notation in the folder that lay open on the desk. Pinching the tip of his nose between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, he turned through several pages, brooding over them.
Gradually, I became aware of a tuneless hum filling the room, rising and falling every few seconds, the kind of sound you might hear if you were to sink your head back and forth into a beehive. Zell, her spine stiffening in alarm, searched the room with her eyes. Blackie leaned forward, catching her attention, gesturing discreetly with a nod of his head toward the man behind the desk.
“You felt like killing anyone lately, Mr. Raventhorst?” The weird humming ceased when he spoke.
No, I shook my head. In the interval, my own heartbeat filled my ears.
“I need to hear you say it,” he instructed me, pen held ready to record my answer.
“No,” I said.
He didn’t bat an eyelash at my stutter. He asked if I’d felt like killing myself lately.
“Sometimes,” I said. Zell and Blackie swiveled in my direction. To my left, Zell gripped my hand.
A slight grin crossed the man’s face. He turned a page and scanned down its length.
“The drugs they gave you can do that,” he said. “So can electroshock. Not unusual. Helps considerably to be aware of that fact. Side effects, you know.”
Zell loosened her grip.
“Hold your hands out straight.”
I did as instructed. Tremors jerked at my right hand and arm, then the left. Embarrassed, I folded them on my lap.
“We call that tardive dyskinesia,” he said, as if it were as common as the rising and the setting of the sun. “Sometimes it goes away.” He made another checkmark in the folder.
“Are you feeling better now?” He asked. “Incrementally better each day?”
“I think so.”
“Show me your arm.”
He meant my wound. I held it out, displaying the stitches in all their glory. He leaned forward for a closer look. The skin on either side was white and taut.
“Can’t have felt very good.” He returned to his humming, his nose once again pinched between thumb and forefinger. He scanned several more pages. Once I thought I heard him mutter the word ridiculous.
Zell took my hand again. As time went by, her grip grew tighter. I squeezed back to let her know I was okay.
“Very well,” he finally said, closing the folder and picking up another. “The judge will have my recommendation on his desk today. Just make sure you don’t come back here to embarrass me, Mr. Raventhorst.”
No battery of tests, no revealing questions or Rorschach blots? I felt frozen to my seat.
“You’re not even going to—?” Zell started to ask. Before she could say more, Blackie stood up, loudly scraping his chair on the floor.
“He’s free to go?” Blackie asked.
The psychiatrist stared at us, as if startled to see us still there, then nodded deeply and returned to the new folder.
Blackie hurriedly ushered us from the office. Thirty feet down the corridor, Zell asked, “Was that man really a psychiatrist?”
“The best kind,” Blackie said, his lips peeling back from his buck teeth in a scowl. I didn’t argue, though I knew he wanted to say more, probably something about the doctor being nuttier than me. We kept walking, Blackie still hurrying us. Alarm seemed to be draining from Zell’s face.