The Syndrome

by John Case

  Crumpling the picture in half, she laid it on the fire in the chiminea, then watched the paper flatten, even as the faces faded to black. Finally, the snapshot flared into flame, and sparks snapped from its surface, swirling into the chimney above it. One by one, Nico fed the fire with pictures from the album until, in the end, the only photos left were of herself and her surviving sister. Then she got to her feet, blinking the tears from her eyes. And as much to the walls as to herself, she muttered, “Ding dong, the witch is dead.”

  It was almost dark now, or as dark as it got in D.C., the winking lights of planes standing in for the myriad, invisible stars. She got a wire whisk from the kitchen and when the fire had subsided to a smolder, smashed up the ashes.

  This done, she went into the living room and removed an envelope from the top drawer of her desk. Written more than a month before, it had lain out of sight until the time was right—and that was now. Going into the kitchen, she glanced around for a place to leave it, and finally settled on the refrigerator. Clearing the door of everything on its surface—cartoons and take-out menus, a recipe for chicken saté and a picture of Jack—she tossed it all in the trash. Then she centered the envelope to Adrienne, and affixed it to the door with a magnet shaped like a tiny bottle of Tanqueray gin. She looked at her watch. Six-thirty. There was still more than an hour before Adrienne was due, so there was no hurry.

  Standing at the kitchen counter, she poured herself a cold glass of Russian River Chardonnay, and put on a Miles Davis CD. Sketches of Spain.

  Sipping the wine, she felt a shiver run through her as she walked into the bathroom. All that time on the balcony, sorting through the album had given her a chill. Removing the space heater from the linen closet next to the bath, she plugged it in and set it on the ledge that encased the tub.

  Flicking on the heater, she luxuriated for a moment in its bright and sudden warmth, then undressed slowly, tossing her clothes into the hamper. Standing there in the nude, she took a sip of wine, and, swaying slightly, gave herself over to the viscous, haunting slur of the trumpet, as Miles soared through “Concerto de Aranjuez.” Finally, she stepped into the water and, ever so slowly, eased herself into the cloud of bubbles that lay on its surface.

  The water was perfect. So hot she could just barely tolerate it. So hot, the warmth seemed to suffuse her. So hot it was just at the perfect intersection of pleasure and pain—in other words, just over the pleasure edge. She thought about that phrase—the pleasure edge—and smiled as she continued her glacial slide into the water. She could hear the tiny explosions of the bubbles, collapsing under the pressure of her back. She could feel them in the hair at the nape of her neck.

  Languidly, she sipped her wine and watched the coils of the space heater turn a deeper and deeper shade of orange. Then Miles hit a note so heartbreakingly pure that it brought a film of moisture to her eyes—and gently, almost tenderly, she extended her foot, and tipped the heater in.

  Chapter 5

  Duran’s apartment complex, the Capitol Towers, included an underground shopping center that made it more or less unnecessary for anyone who lived in the building to ever leave home. There was a supermarket, a drug store, a dry cleaners, a newsstand, and a travel agency, as well as a Starbucks. Each Sunday, an ad in the Washington Post featured a photo of the building above a cutline that read: “Capitol Towers—the Convenience of a Village in a Sophisticated Urban Setting!”

  Returning upstairs from the underground Safeway, Duran hefted three plastic bags of groceries with his left hand, while he struggled to open the door to his apartment with his right. Finally, the door swung open and, as soon as it did, he knew the telephone was about to ring.

  It was a trick of his. Or something.

  For whatever reason, he was peculiarly attuned to the pitches and hums of machines—the whir and chink of the icemaker, the somnolent hum of the air conditioner, the gush and gurgle of water in the dishwasher. Any change in the acoustics of his appliances, no matter how subtle, struck him immediately, the malfunction as apparent as a burglar’s sneeze at midnight.

  It wasn’t a particularly useful trait, and he didn’t know how he’d acquired it. But that it was real was certain. Kicking the door closed behind him, he sensed a kind of tension in the room as soon as he entered it. For a moment, he stood there, frozen, just inside the doorway, listening to the air. Then, he stepped toward the phone.

  And it rang.

  It was uncanny, and unquantifiable. If anything, it suggested that he was more in tune with his appliances, with refrigerators and phones, than he was with people—an unfortunate characteristic in a therapist. Still, he thought, reaching for the receiver, there was no mistaking a room in which the telephone was about to ring. The air trembled with expectation, like an auditorium on the brink of thunderous applause.

  “Hello!”

  “Jeff?”

  He didn’t recognize the voice. And the question—no one really called him that. He was always Duran, or Doctor Duran.

  “Hel-lo-oh? Anyone there?”

  “Yeah! Sorry, I—this is Jeff.”

  “Well, hi-iii! It’s Bunny Kaufman Winkleman? I’m so glad I got you! Mostly, I get machines.”

  “Really…”

  “Almost always, but… I didn’t really know you? At Sidwell? We were in the same class. Not English or anything, but—the class of ‘87? I was just plain Bunny Kaufman then.” She paused, then hurried on. “You must have been one of those quiet guys.”

  Duran thought about it. Had he been? Maybe. And Bunny? Who was she? A face didn’t come to mind—but then he hadn’t kept in touch. High school was ancient history. “Yeah, I guess,” Duran replied. “So… what’s up? What can I do for you, Bunny?”

  “Two things. You can promise me you’ll respond to the query I’m sending. You know, one of those ‘where-are-they-now’ things?”

  “Okay.”

  “And the second thing is: you could come to the reunion. Reunion avec homecoming, you know. You got the alumni newsletter, right? I’m calling to remind you—we need every body we can get.”

  “Well… “ He picked up a matchbook—de Groot had left his cigarettes behind at their last session—and rotated it through his fingers. The matchbook was embossed with concentric silver and black circles. An eye stared out at him from the center of the design. He flipped the matchbook over. The back showed the same concentric silver and black circles but instead of the eye, the center held the words: trance klub davos platz

  He opened the cover to see that the matches inside were European, made of thin flexible wood instead of paper, with bright green tips.

  “Jehh-eff?” said the voice on the telephone. “You still there?”

  Pay attention. “Absolutely.”

  “Well how about it?” Bunny said in her wheedling voice. “Come on. Just do it! Come. It isn’t just our class—there are two others. And there’s a sort of competition to see who has the best turn out. It’s dumb, but—can I count on you?”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Well, I guess I’ll have to settle for that. ‘I’ll try’ is better than ‘I’ll think about it’ (which, as we all know, means, ‘No way.’) So, put it on your calendar, okay?”

  “Will do.”

  “October 23rd.”

  “Got it.”

  “Great. And, Jeff?”

  “Yeah?”

  “If you can’t come to the reunion? I will not understand!”

  When they’d hung up, he repeated her name aloud, turning it over in his mind as he put away the groceries, half expecting a face to well up in his memory. But there was nothing. Not an image or an anecdote.

  High school was a long time ago, he reflected, putting the lemons into the vegetable bin. Even so: his class was only a hundred strong, half boys, half girls. So you’d think he’d remember something about her.

  He emptied the ground coffee into the Starbucks canister and pushed his thumb down on the metal clip to close it. Bunny Kaufman. When he s
hut his eyes and thought about it, he imagined a short, blond, featureless girl. And that was it. It was odd, in a way. After four years of classes and games, track meets and banquets, science fairs, dances, and field trips—the best he could do was ‘short and blond’?

  It was depressing. And the more he thought about it, the more he realized how little he remembered about school. Almost nothing, really. A couple of names and faces. The headmaster, Andrew Pierce Vaughn, his jovial face frozen in laughter. The front of the school. Commencement in the garden behind Zartman House. But of the friends he’d had, and the teachers… there was nothing.

  It was a little unsettling, actually. Enough so that, even though it wasn’t at all his kind of thing, he wrote the date on a Post-it and stuck it to his computer monitor: Sidwell reunion: Sat. Oct. 23. What the hell…

  His four P.M. appointment with Nico came and went—without her. He thought about calling, but decided against it. The responsibility for maintaining the connection between them had to be hers, or the relationship wouldn’t work. Like many children who’d been orphaned at a young age, Nico had a long history of dependence, of seeking parental surrogates who would care for her. As an adult, she needed to take responsibility for her own life, rather than relying on authority figures. Otherwise, she’d fall into new patterns of abuse, confusing sex with love, debasement with penance.

  So. When she didn’t show up, Duran wondered about it—but he didn’t call. Autonomy was important for Nico and he’d made a point of establishing from the very start that she, and she alone, was responsible for getting well. He could help her. But he was not her father, her husband, or her caretaker.

  And so he watched Ricki Lake until it became time for dinner. Going into the kitchen, he glanced around with a sense of hopelessness. The room was well outfitted, with pine cabinets and tumbled marble countertops, a magnetized bar holding a dozen sharp knives, and a queue of food processors and other appliances. But cooking wasn’t something that he did—or, at least, he didn’t do it much. Most of the time, he just ordered out.

  There was a small CD player on the counter, and he peered through its glass top to see what it held. Cowboy Junkies. He forwarded to the fifth song, pressed Play, and flipped through a sheaf of take-out menus as the singer lamented that she’d

  “rather smoke, and listen to Coltrane,

  than go through all that shit again…”

  He could order Thai food—that would be okay. But only if he had some beer and, preferably, Singha. Pulling open the door to the refrigerator, he glanced from shelf to shelf. There was Perrier, milk and Coca-Cola, and a bottle of Pinot Grigio, but no beer.

  He looked at his watch and frowned. He’d just been shopping. Why hadn’t he remembered beer? It was a little after seven, which meant that the Safeway in the basement was closed, and that if he wanted beer, he’d have to walk to the 7-Eleven. The thought made him queasy, as if in the corner of his eye he’d seen something skitter under the couch. Something dark and fast. A toxic sensation passed through him like a chill.

  With a sigh, he removed the Pinot Grigio from the refrigerator, pulled the cork, and poured himself a glass. Then he pushed the button on the telephone that automatically dialed Chiang Mai Garden. He gave his order, and the man on the other end converted it.

  “One numbah foh, one numbah twenny-two. Very good. Fifteen minute!”

  He tried to tell himself that wine was just as good with Thai food as beer. But the truth was, it wasn’t. As good as the Pinot Grigio was, he could almost taste the cold, hoppy beer that he longed for.

  It was only three blocks to the 7-Eleven. He ought to go, but… This is ridiculous, he thought. Sitting down at the kitchen table, he sipped his wine and shook his head.

  Had he always been like this?

  No. At least, he didn’t think so.

  Since when, then? When had it begun?

  He ministered to people with cognitive problems so he knew his own symptoms well enough. According to the DSM-IV, he suffered from agoraphobia. Or to be exact, because agoraphobia itself was not codable, he suffered from the malady listed in the DSM-IV as 300.27: Agoraphobia with panic disorder. Situations are avoided or endured with marked distress.

  In its most debilitating form, agoraphobes were prisoners of their fears, unable to venture out of their homes. Duran’s malady was less severe. If the need was great enough, he could resist it. He could go out, and he did. But less and less frequently, it seemed, and never with much enjoyment. In point of fact, if he were not living and working in an “urban village” like the Capitol Towers, the phobia might have been crippling.

  So it worried him. And not just the phobia, but the way he was handling it. In essence, he was ignoring the problem because it made him uncomfortable to think about it—which was ironic, given his profession. Indeed, it made him wonder if he was even functional. Could a therapist live an unexamined life, and still help others? Did he have any business dealing with patients as disturbed as Nico and de Groot? He drained the wine and poured himself another glass.

  A voice in the back of his head whispered, Therapist, heal thyself. And a second voice replied, Later…

  Chapter 6

  Nico’s sister, Adrienne, had made a pact with the Devil. It was as simple as that.

  Having graduated from Georgetown Law the year before, she’d made a Faustian bargain with Slough, Hawley, in the interests of paying down a mountain of student debt. In return for a whopping salary and the inside-rail on what everyone said was “the fast track,” Adrienne was expected to work eighty-hour weeks, doing mostly shitwork, in what amounted to a two-year bootcamp for baby lawyers. If, at the end of this period, she was still “viable”—which is to say, neither burned out nor canned—she’d be named an associate. Whereupon, things would get a lot easier, or if not easier, at least more interesting.

  For now, however, life was hell. That was the deal.

  At the moment, she was working on a memo for Himself. This was Curtis Slough, the name partner who was supposed to be her mentor, and the only one for whom she actually did any work. The client was Amalgamated Paving, a Maryland-based company in the business of building parking lots and roads.

  Four years earlier, Amalgamated had been sued by the District of Columbia, which contended that its work on the 14th Street Bridge had been shoddy. Specifically, the pavement had begun to crumble only six months into a projected, ten-year life span. Large and dangerous potholes had opened up, causing accidents and letters to the editor. Litigation was inevitable.

  When the District filed suit against Amalgamated, Slough, Hawley countered on behalf of the beleaguered paver by filing a continuum of hopeful motions. Each of these was accompanied by a memorandum of law in which it was argued that the facts did not entitle the plaintiff to relief. That the roadway had crumbled was not at issue; it was a mess. But it was not (necessarily) Amalgamated’s mess. In the considered view of Slough, Hawley the fault rested not with their client, but with the subcontractors and suppliers whose work and materials had been inferior. Or, if that could not be shown, then the fault might be attributed to an Act of God, i.e., to the weather (which everyone agreed had been harsh and bizarre), and/or to an unexpected increase in traffic. Finally, it was suggested that the blame might be ascribed to the salt used by the District’s road crews—an unusually corrosive formula whose impurities ate into the asphalt’s binder and destroyed “the integrity of the road.” That, in short, was the firm’s position: one of the above.

  Which is to say, they hoped to settle. But after four years of legal maneuvering, the District’s attorneys had yet to budge—and the judge had had enough. A court date had been assigned. There would be no further delays.

  Panic had ensued.

  And so it fell to Adrienne to assist the firm’s namesake, Curtis Slough. She’d spent two weeks assembling a document database, spending day and night with a team of paralegals, poring over thousands of documents: memos, reports, correspondence, receipts, and invoices.
It was mindnumbing work. Each piece of paper had to be read and categorized, after which it could be stamped with a number and logged in.

  Now, they were in the last stages of discovery, and quarreling over which documents should be released to opposing counsel. Some materials were attorney-client work product or proprietary secrets and, as such, privileged from disclosure. But others were not so easily protected, and it was Adrienne’s task to identify those, and then to suggest ways in which problematical documents might yet be withheld.

  Using her desktop computer, she typed in the corrections that she’d made in pencil on the rough draft of the memo she was writing. Then she added the references that she’d gleaned from Lexis, and read it over. There were typos all over the place. She was used to working on a laptop, and much preferred its keyboard to the clunky device in her office. But fixing the typos was easy with the spell-checker, and when it was done, she saved the file, hit the Print button, and sat back. As the memo rolled out, she sat back in the chair and closed her eyes…

  So nice… to just…

  Her eyes flew open. Yesterday, she’d pulled an all-nighter and, if she didn’t watch out, she’d zonk out, there and then. The night before, she’d been working at home, almost finished with the memo, when her laptop crashed, wiping out hours of work. She’d ended up going to the office at midnight, where she’d finished the memo on her desktop machine. Now, what she really wanted to do was to go home, soak in the tub until the water cooled, and air-dry on her big, soft bed.

  But… no. It was the second Tuesday of the month, and after the message Nikki had left on her phone, there was no way she could bag their dinner together.

  Sitting up in her chair, she stapled each of the four copies of the memo, and glanced through it one last time, looking for errors. There were three copies for Slough, and one for her file. She hit the speaker button, and tapped the great man’s extension, but of course he was gone, along with the secretaries and just about everybody else. So she put the memos into an interoffice envelope and headed upstairs.