The Empowered

by Craig Parshall

  Dr. Schlosser had stopped writing in his notebook. He looked me in the eye and said, “And this is what you believe? God is everything? Without God, everything is nothing. Yes?”

  Hadn’t I just said that? I wondered. I nodded.

  Then he made his move. Pawn takes knight. “So you harbor a view of the world that necessarily requires the existence of demons and evil forces. God is good, and therefore everything else must be evil, and therefore you must fight such forces to the death. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  At that moment I had the sense, coming over me like a neurological shiver, that there was something foreboding about this mild-mannered psychiatrist. Among the dozens of mental health professionals I’d encountered during my years as a trial lawyer, most of them were honest, dedicated professionals, and some of them even brilliant. But just then, at Morehaven, sitting in the room with Schlosser, I was convinced of one thing. This psychiatrist was being influenced by an outside force. And his dark influencer from the underworld had a temporary visa to menace us.

  38

  I asked the psychiatrist a question of my own. “What do you believe, Dr. Schlosser?”

  Which prompted the expected response. “I’m not here to talk about myself.”

  “But you should.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Pure objectivity is impossible,” I said. “Psychiatrists like you, if you’re honest, try to identify your natural biases so they don’t affect your clinical judgment. True?”

  “Is objectivity important to you?”

  Oh no, I wasn’t going to let him off the hook that easy.

  “Let’s stop playing philosophical games,” I said. “Do you think I’m dangerous and therefore should be confined in a mental hospital against my will because of my spiritual beliefs about demons?”

  “Those who feel they are doing God’s work can sometimes be dangerous, yes.”

  I deserved an answer. “Am I dangerous? Yes or no?”

  “That is what I am trying to find out.”

  “What about doing God’s work, stopping human slavery of young girls? Opposing an evil cult? Are those things dangerous?”

  Dr. Schlosser’s eyes widened ever so slightly. “That’s a very interesting concern you have.”

  “It ought to be everyone’s concern; don’t you agree?”

  “I avoid generalizations.”

  I dug in deeper. “Dr. Schlosser, do you believe that when an occult group is engaged in the enterprise of abducting young girls and women and placing them into sexual slavery—videotaping them by coercion or outright force and sometimes even murdering them—such conduct is an evil that should be exposed and stopped at all costs?”

  “The way you put it tells me you are very concerned.”

  “Of course I am. I have objective evidence that it is going on, and if it weren’t for this commitment proceeding, I would be out there trying to stop it. So tell me, do you think my opinions on that subject make me dangerous?”

  “It’s your mental status that I am trying to explore.”

  “Oh, so then you think it’s okay for human monsters who are part of a voodoo cult to kidnap girls, drug them, and sexually abuse them on camera?”

  He smirked. “You oversimplify.”

  “How?”

  I had the intangible but irresistible feeling that I had just touched something deep inside of Dr. Schlosser.

  He said, “There is something to be said about men who are able to achieve a higher level of living, beyond the conventional categories of good and evil.”

  “The Übermensch,” I said.

  “So you are familiar with Nietzsche. The ideal of the superman. The Nazis took his ideas to an extreme, you know. Distorted them. And sadly, the Third Reich became Hollywood’s favorite villain. Which of course defamed Nietzsche’s genius along with it.”

  I looked into Dr. Schlosser’s eyes. A light was missing. I said, “Do you know something about these girls?”

  He smiled. “No. Not really. But what if I were to tell you that I know someone who you have already met. Someone very powerful. Someone involved in this criminal business you speak of. Would you like to know who that is?”

  At that precise moment, something happened. I was suddenly aware that a tall figure had entered that locked room with us. How, I didn’t know, and it was only for a few seconds, yet long enough for me to recognize him. The figure was standing behind Dr. Schlosser, with his hands on the doctor’s shoulders.

  It was the chauffeur from hell. The sinister figure I had seen out on the ocean and in the alley in New Orleans with the savage twins and then again standing on the water at Bayou Bon Coeur calling to me.

  Though not possessing this psychiatrist, the figure was there for a reason. Skewing his judgment. Moving him on the chessboard. Did Dr. Schlosser understand he was just a pawn in this game? Almost certainly not. Blind to his captivity.

  Sure, Schlosser must have told himself that he was exercising his professional judgment, shaped by years of training. But all the while, starting from a purely naturalistic premise, hedged in by unyielding presuppositions. And resistant, in the most extreme die-is-cast kind of way, to any evidence to the contrary.

  The demonic monster was there behind the therapist for only an instant, and then he vanished.

  I whispered a prayer. But it must have been audible because Dr. Schlosser acknowledged it. He said, “You’ve just had another one, haven’t you? One of your private visions? And you believe they are real. They must seem, to you, so very real. . . .”

  No response was necessary. Or wise. I kept silent.

  “Prayers can make you feel better,” he said. “But they don’t change reality. I am going to recommend strong antipsychotic medication. And possibly ECT. That’s how we can change you, Mr. Black, in a healthy way. You do want to get better, don’t you?”

  I knew about ECT—electroconvulsive therapy. Electric current sent through the brain, sometimes triggering seizures. Helpful to some psychotic persons and others with certain forms of mental illness. But with side effects: possible loss of brain function and memory.

  “I’m done with this, Doctor. This is a battle between light and darkness. I’m sorry you’ve picked the losing side.”

  He studied me with a calmness that was unnerving. “You’re a smart man. What if I could prove certain things to you?”

  I followed his lead, having no real choice. “Prove what things?”

  Schlosser settled back in his seat. “That the most important beliefs in your life, the things you hold most dear, are fundamentally untrue.” As he said that, he was drumming the fingers of one hand on the leather folder he had laid on the table.

  “Have at it,” I told the psychiatrist.

  So he did. “A few minutes ago, I told you that I knew someone you were familiar with. Someone powerful.”

  I nodded.

  “And when I said that,” he continued, “you visualized him. Standing right here in this room. For only a moment. But seemingly very real, nonetheless.”

  My expression must have given me away. He said, “That figure must have been a very menacing one for you. Very threatening. Do you deny that?”

  I couldn’t. But I wasn’t going to give him the pleasure of admitting it.

  “So,” he went on in a soothing tone, “that caused you to seek self-comfort and reassurance by praying to God.”

  By then, even though disturbed by the degree of Schlosser’s perception, I couldn’t soften. I stared him down and waited for more.

  “That figure, whoever it was, seemed very real to you. Until your cerebral cortex kicked in and corrected your emotional response with logic, causing you to abandon the image you had concocted.”

  “My imagination? You’re actually going down that route?”

  He smiled. “I have just used the power of suggestion on you, Mr. Black. Stage magicians and charlatans have used it for ages. It can be very effective. Especially when it is used on someone under a high level o
f stress.”

  “Oh, and you’re saying that’s me?”

  “The death of a spouse. The end of your successful career. Personal and professional humiliation. Followed by a series of violent encounters that suggest to me you may be dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder. According to the Holmes and Rahe scale of stress—the SRRS—you have had some of the top stresses a human can experience.”

  “You told me that you’d prove I was under the influence of lies. So far, I’ve heard only your psychological theories.”

  “To be precise,” he countered, “Holmes and Rahe were not psychologists. They were psychiatrists. Medical doctors specializing in the psyche like me. Psychologists, on the other hand—”

  Classic put-down. Queen takes bishop.

  “I know the difference,” I shot back. It was time for the banter to end. “Proof, Doctor. You said you had proof.”

  He smiled and unzipped his thin leather case. “Up to now we’ve been going into some of your more abstract ideas and beliefs,” he said. “God. Demons. Good. Evil. And the reason why you believe the way that you do. The things that motivate you to imagine that supernatural beings appear to you but to no one else. Have you ever wondered why that is? Why they make themselves visible only to you?”

  I sat in silence.

  “I know that in your criminal practice you represented clients who suffered from psychosis. Visual hallucinations. Professing to see and hear things that neither you nor anyone else could see or hear. Only them. That has a name, Mr. Black. It is called mental illness.”

  Dr. Schlosser was slipping some papers out of his black leather case as he spoke. “These images you see, they provoke you to joust with them. I know you are familiar with Miguel de Cervantes. You must be.”

  I could see where he was going. “Sure. Don Quixote, Man of La Mancha.”

  “The full title of Cervantes’s work was The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha. Or in the original Spanish, El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha.”

  More one-upsmanship.

  “Fascinating,” I said. “And I suppose that I would be Don Quixote, imagining windmills to be my mortal enemies, attacking me. Forcing me to fight back. But all the time, just windmills.”

  “You are getting close,” he said. “Good for you.”

  By then he was holding the papers and waving them in front of me. “You believe in objectivity. Yes?”

  I nodded.

  “You have a daughter?”

  I nodded again, slower.

  “Her name is Heather?”

  I wondered where he was going with this, but it didn’t sound good. I didn’t respond.

  “Please,” he said. “Humor me. You have a daughter named Heather?”

  “Okay, yes, I do.”

  With that, he shook his head. “No, Mr. Black. In fact, you don’t.”

  He handed me the papers. I scanned them quickly. I had been a criminal defense lawyer, not an adoption lawyer, so those kinds of papers weren’t usually in my area of practice, but I recognized soon enough what they were. Family court documents from a case in Virginia. Termination of parental rights, pending the adoption of the single mother’s infant girl. The papers read:

  Mother: Marilyn Parlow

  Marilyn, my high school crush, my sometimes girlfriend, with whom I had that ill-fated, one-night intimate encounter in college.

  My eyes scanned the form.

  Female Baby: Heather

  I read farther down the paper.

  Name of putative father . . .

  I expected it to be blank. I had heard, some twenty-odd years later, from my friend Detective Ashley Linderman, that Marilyn lied and told the paternity court she didn’t know who the father was, all the time hiding the birth from me, telling me she was having an abortion.

  I read that column in the court papers again. Then, as a numbing sense of shock engulfed me, I had to keep reading the next six words on the court document over and over.

  Name of putative father: David Fleming

  The world was tilting. Gravity was giving way.

  David Fleming. Captain of the high school varsity swim team at the same time that Marilyn was the captain of the girls’ swim team. I had heard somewhere that he entered Virginia Military Institute after high school. Not far from where Marilyn was going to college.

  I repeated a part of that in my head, this time connecting it to the heartbreaking end game. Not far from Sweet Briar, where Marilyn was attending college at the time she became pregnant.

  Dr. Schlosser had a look on his face that was almost compassionate when he said, “Mr. Black, this is what the truth looks like. I’m sorry.”

  39

  Stumbling through an unlit alley. All the while, being punched and kicked by the world, the flesh, and the devil.

  That was my feeling at that moment. Despite my onetime encounter with Marilyn and all my assumptions about her pregnancy resulting from that, I had been shown in black and white that Marilyn had been pregnant by another man. Heather was another man’s daughter.

  But equally stunning, Ashley Linderman, who had access to the juvenile court records through her law enforcement work, had lied to me. She must have known. Yet she told me, after researching it for me, that Heather was my daughter. Ashley, who had become a close friend and confidante during that case in Wisconsin. Ashley, the woman with whom I had found myself falling in love, until our time together on the island when we both finally agreed to call it off. Why had she hidden the truth from me?

  And then there was Marilyn. She was gone, of course. Cervical cancer. But when she had called me so many years ago as I sat in my college dorm room and told me that she was carrying my child, did she know she was lying? And if she did, why had she played such a twisted game of deception?

  I needed to make a call to Ashley Linderman. I was crazy with grief and anger. I needed to hear it from her own mouth.

  After that, I would have a second conversation. An even harder one. This one with Heather. But after everything we had been through, and all the years apart, then my stumbling attempts lately to earn her trust and make things right . . . what would I tell her now?

  Once the interview with Dr. Schlosser was over, I was led into the dayroom with the other patients. A television was blaring on the wall, but no one was watching. I strained to keep a handle on things as I walked slowly around the perimeter of the room. Trying to focus. I had become, to the idle observer, just one more patient, as I stared at the floor sorting things out in my mind, trying to avoid all the ghosts that had been summoned to plague me. All the doubts.

  I had a plan, didn’t I? Yes. I remembered it. I tried to tell myself that I might be down but I wasn’t out. I needed Heather’s help to execute the scheme. But how could I bring her into my plan without telling her what I now knew?

  I forced myself to organize. Emergency triage. First things first. There would always be time later to get into the painful details with her about David Fleming, her real father.

  I strolled up to Nurse Aldrich, the managing nurse who carried herself as stiff as the white starched uniform she was wearing. “I’d like to make a call out. Actually, two.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Black,” she said. “Calls out are not permitted for you right now.”

  “I know my rights. This is a legal matter.”

  “Are you calling a lawyer?”

  “Not exactly. But my calls are connected to my legal defense.”

  “I don’t think it’s possible.”

  “Who’s the director here?”

  “Dr. Manfred Touley.”

  “I’d like to speak to him.”

  “He’s not here today.”

  “Who has the authority to give me telephone privileges?”

  “Dr. Schlosser, whom you met. Unless he’s already left. He sees other patients at several other hospitals.”

  “Can you check? This is urgent.”

  Nurse Aldrich disappeared into her office.

&n
bsp; I dropped into one of the chairs in front of the television set. It was a program about genealogy. Finding your genetic and familial roots. Given the recent turn of events, I would have preferred anything but that. I looked around, foolishly, for a remote control. Of course it wasn’t there. Probably controlled exclusively by Nurse Aldrich. Yes, I had seen One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I thought I knew how things went down.

  An hour later, I noticed Nurse Aldrich stroll back into the dayroom, where she resumed her position at the far end. Before too long, Dr. Schlosser joined her and they talked together briefly before Schlosser disappeared.

  Nurse Aldrich motioned for me.

  “Mr. Black. You are being given an exceptional privilege. You may make one phone call. Five minutes in length. You can use the hall phone. I will put the code in and then hand the phone to you. If you abuse the privilege, there will be consequences.”

  I called my own cell number, hoping that Heather would pick up. She did.

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  “I tried to see you but they wouldn’t let me. I’m coming tonight during visiting hours.”

  “When you do, bring some pens and a legal pad. Do you have a tape recorder?”

  “Wow, that’s really old-school, Trevor. I have your smartphone—it has audio-recording capacity, remember?”

  I asked her to do something else. To call Detective Ashley Linderman and have her call me at the hospital. “It’s important that you tell her,” I said as I practically choked on the words, “that I have been involuntarily committed for observation. I’m a patient here. So it may be tough for her to get through. But she’s pushy. I’m counting on that.”

  There was a time when Ashley and I would have laughed at that last part. But not now.

  Dinner for me that night was in the dining hall, where one unfortunate soul had an explosive episode and had to be restrained and taken away. I shared a table with a short, white-haired gentleman who described himself as “Saint Sebastian.” He warned me that if I crossed him he would pump me full of arrows, just like they used to kill him under Emperor Diocletian. Either he was a time traveler or he was suffering from psychosis. I was betting on the latter.