by C. P. Boyko
“If you believe that,” Melanie muttered.
“Will you two wash up?,” Strickland asked. “At least run them under the tap. Then it’s easier later.”
Q. What exactly is your specialty, Professor? You do have a specialty?
A. I am a clinical psychologist.
Q. So you run a clinic?
A. I use the word ‘clinical’ to distinguish it broadly from so-called experimental psychology, which is the sort generally done in a university setting, usually on undergraduate students, and usually with some form of pencil-and-paper multiple-choice questionnaire, to determine for instance whether men or women have better willpower and burning questions like that.
MR. MASSICK: Now Your Honor, I think I must object. Ms. Lattimann has already agreed to accept Doctor Strickland’s credentials as an expert witness.
MS. LATTIMANN: These questions, Your Honor, are not about the doctor’s credentials but his method. I am trying to get a clearer picture of what his general method is when assessing someone.
THE COURT: Which I do not doubt you will use to shed light on the particular method of this particular case, Ms. Lattimann. Objection overruled.
Q. Now, I don’t think you answered my question, Professor.
A. I’m sorry, I’ve quite forgotten your question.
THE COURT: I think the doctor can be forgiven for that. Let the record reflect that there was laughter in the courtroom, Miss Reporter. Not a lot, but some. And would you kindly read out Ms. Lattimann’s last question.
REPORTER: You run a clinic.
A. Thank you. No, I do not run a clinic per se. I see patients in various settings, and these meetings are all clinical in the sense that I provide a form of cognitive and behavioral therapy, or counseling, but I do not have a clinic, no. To answer your question.
Q. People who are insane or who have mental disorders come to you and you cure them.
A. Ah. That is a mouthful. I would perhaps object to the term “insane” and to the concept of “cure.” But otherwise, in general, you could say that yes, people with mental disorders or psychological disturbances come to me for help and I try to help them.
Q. You help people.
A. I do my best.
A frail, perspiring young man with thinning hair sat slouched over a tidy kitchen table and said rapidly, “I even explained it to her, I said very clearly—I know I can have a tendency to mumble but I said it quite clearly—I said Hi, my name’s Robin but most people call me Coby, she said All right I’ll call you Coby, I said Actually I prefer Robin, she said Okay I’ll call you Robin, but now already she’s calling me Coby like everyone else.”
Strickland frowned and nodded.
“That doesn’t matter I realize, but it gets under my skin. I try not to let it get under my skin but I can’t help thinking about what I could have said differently. It’s the same as at the grocery store last week. I have to park out at the edge of the parking lot—I told you about this—where there aren’t any cars around or I feel hemmed in, but then on the news the other day I heard there was this warning to women about some guy who was going around supposedly selling perfume and when you smell it it’s actually chloroform, I couldn’t get it out of my head even though it was broad daylight and I’m not a woman.” He gave Strickland a quick defiant look. “Actually to tell you the truth I think I get all worked up because I’m actually afraid women will think I’m the guy, one of these guys going around trying to abduct them with a bottle of fake perfume. But what can I do? I need groceries,” he finished miserably.
After a long pause, Strickland said, “I think that’s probably an urban myth. Chloroform, to the best of my knowledge, does not operate so quickly.”
“That doesn’t matter. That’s not the point. It sounds true.”
Q. As a doctor of psychology—I’m sorry, as a clinical psychologist, you do your best to help people.
A. That is correct.
Q. And is that what you’ve done in this case?
A. I beg your pardon?
Q. Shall I have the reporter read back the question?
A. I heard the question correctly, but I do not understand the question.
Q. What you have said to Mr. Massick’s questions, what you have told the jury and the honorable judge and everyone else in this courtroom—it will help Mr. Burger, won’t it?
Massick stood up.
A. I don’t know what will help Mr. Burger, Ms. Lattimann. I am a doctor, not a lawyer.
Massick sat down.
Strickland sat at his desk, thinking.
Mike, as a child, holding his mother’s hand, waiting with his mother and her friends for a table in a posh restaurant.
The maitre-d’ saying, I’m sorry, but we have a table for only eight at the moment.
His mother dropping Mike’s hand and laughing, That’s okay, we’ll take it, the boy can wait, I’m starving!
Mike, as a child, being left behind.
“Ridiculous,” Strickland muttered, rubbing his neck.
A crash came from the living room.
Martie told her daughter, “Well, that wasn’t a very intelligent thing to do.”
Melanie stomped out of the room.
“What was that about?,” Strickland asked. Glass shards were scattered across the floor.
“That girl has a serious punishment complex. She needs to be told that she’s doing everything wrong. You know, her father was always correcting her posture …”
“But what’s it all about?”
“Oh, evidently I was insufficiently appalled to learn that my daughter is a bisexual. Or thinks she is. Or wants to think she is. Or wants me to think she is.”
Strickland tapped on Melanie’s door, then opened it. The room was empty.
He tapped on the closet door, then opened it.
She was standing there, almost hidden by clothes.
“Hey,” he said.
She groaned.
“Look,” he said. “Your mother …”
“Aw, fuck my mother!” she said, and slammed the door in his face.
Strickland wandered the halls of the courthouse.
“Excuse me,” he asked a sharply dressed woman pulling a trolley stacked with boxes of files, “is there a list somewhere of the cases, the court cases, currently in session?”
They stood before a list posted to the wall.
“What are you in the mood for?”
In a small courtroom with mahogany paneling, a police officer in uniform sat in the witness box, his face pressed against the microphone, and read tonelessly from a report he held in his lap.
“At which juncture Officer Daniels and myself—it says Officer Miller here, but that is myself—Officer Daniels and Officer Miller proceeded to question the suspect, period. New paragraph. The questioning began at seventeen fifty-four—that is written as one seven, uh colon, five four—and continued until one eight four five, that is one eight colon four five, open parenthesis five one minutes, close parenthesis period. The suspect gave the officers—and here is a typo, it says notal, N O T A L, but it should say—well, I’ll just read what it says. The suspect gave the officers notal cooperation in answering the questions put to him by officers Daniels and Miller, comma …”
Strickland stood and, with little gestures of apology and gratitude, shuffled out past the other spectators.
The corridors were suddenly bustling. He heard his name called. But there was no one here he knew.
Someone shouted “Dan!” again, right in his ear, and grabbed his arm.
“You!” he said.
Trace smirked at him. “‘You,’” she mimicked, then sighed. “You, he said. He remembered where she worked, but not her name.”
“Actually,” he grinned guilelessly, “it’s exactly the opposite.”
*
“I never told you I was a court reporter?” She bit her lower lip. “Then it’s just a coincidence.”
She sat on folded legs, leaning over the table. With the ba
se of her cup she made little overlapping circles of coffee on the tabletop.
Strickland sat stiffly upright, one leg draped neatly over the other, knee atop knee. “Is that so bad?” he said.
As if changing the subject, she said, “I thought you were going to call me. After all …”
“But I don’t have your number,” he protested.
“I left you that note.”
“But no number!”
“You were supposed to track me down. That was supposed to be the whole fun of it. Really, with your big brain …!”
“I’m actually not very smart sometimes.”
She withdrew a pen from her purse and scribbled on a napkin. “There,” she said, sliding it across the table like a poker bet. “Now you don’t have to be smart anymore.”
“Come on,” she said.
“Should we be in here?” he asked, entering the courtroom cautiously.
“It’s a public building. Anyway, I work here. Right here, as a matter of fact.”
She showed him the equipment she used.
“And you can get down everything everybody says?” he asked.
“We use a kind of shorthand. And you always got to compare it with the tapes before filing anything officially. But yeah, mostly everything.”
“Show me.”
Her fingers hovered above the typewriter. “Say something.”
“Uh … The world is too much with us. Uh, late and soon, getting and spending, we uh, lay waste our powers. Little we see in … nature that is ours.”
She rolled her eyes. “Say something quick.”
With an effort, Strickland babbled, “Once upon a time there was a boy who got his foot stuck in a radiator and some cats then came along and jousted one another with the footballs in the heart-attack revelation of the final days of September and all the mothers were whimsical so whimsical in their summer dresses. How’s that?”
Trace read it back to him. He clapped his hands and she curtsied.
There was a moment of silence. They looked away.
“You know, it’s funny,” he said.
“What?”
“It’s only now that I feel like … Although technically …”
“Yeah?”
“Never mind.”
“Well, hell’s bells. I gotta go.” At the door she turned back and said, “When you call …”
“Yes?”
“If you call … let it ring once, hang up, then call again. That way I’ll know it’s you.”
“All right. When I call.”
He sat in the witness box. Furrowing his brow, he leaned forward and said, “That is correct.” The loudness of his voice in the empty room startled him. He smirked, allowed the smile to grow cold, then said sarcastically, “Yes, I suppose you could say that.”
In the cafeteria, Strickland said, “And potatoes and the steamed vegetables.”
“It’s only zucchini today, that all right?”
“That’s fine. I don’t mind.”
Strickland stood at the front of a small classroom, listening to a debate among his students.
“Yes, but self-reflectiveness can be conceptualized as a self-organized subject-object relation where both the subject and the object of attention are the self.”
“We all know what introspection is, there’s no need to define it.”
“What I would like defined is this suicidal ideation. Why not just say thoughts of suicide?”
“So … he killed his family because he was depressed and wanted to die?”
They looked at Strickland, who said, “It’s not a true story. You tell me.”
After a pause, a girl in a black turtleneck said, “Quite probably his ego boundary had expanded to include his family, so naturally suicide would include them as well.”
Strickland raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips.
She said, “He just never got around to himself.”
Strickland sat in his office, watching a video. On the screen, Orson Welles said, “Well thank you, Doctor. Now uh, can you tell us how far this tendency to what you call schizophrenia had progressed with Artie Strauss?”
The distinguished, goateed man on the witness stand crossed his legs and said forcefully, “Not with any degree of exactitude. We do know that the habit of lying, indulging in fantasies, and telling stories which the boy developed in infancy had progressed to the stage where he himself was having difficulty distinguishing between what was true and what was not true …”
The girl in the turtleneck appeared in the doorway.
“Oh, hi!” Strickland jumped up and fumbled for the remote control just as the phone rang. They both laughed. “Sorry, Marianne, I’ll just—hello?”
“Come now,” cried the television, “you are an expert and under oath, is your diagnosis insanity or not!”
He gestured for her to wait but she shook her head, mouthed an apology or a promise, and was gone.
“Under oath I cannot answer that, sir. Insanity is a legal term, not a medical one. I am a doctor, not a lawyer.”
“Yes, sorry, hello?”
“Daniel Strickland?”
He trotted up the wide steps of the school. “I must have gotten my days mixed up. Howdy, Sarge.”
“Hi.”
The boy’s teacher, a young woman in a yellow floral-print dress, wrung her hands in satisfaction at this successful reunion. “He was no trouble, Mr. Strickland.”
“What’d you learn today, Benderson?”
“Buts.”
“I often stay a bit late on Tuesdays over my correcting.”
“Butts?”
“Conjunctions,” she explained. “Ands and buts and what else?”
“Ors,” said Ben.
“Very good. One little matter,” she said, dropping her voice. “Since you’re here.”
Ben went on ahead to the car, alternately clomping and scuffing his feet like a zombie.
The teacher wrung her hands. She had a smattering of freckles across one clavicle.
“Ben,” she said, “likes to eat … dirt.”
“Yes. We know.”
“Oh!”
“It’s called pica.”
“I thought that was only pregnant women.”
“Apparently not.” After a moment he elaborated: “We think perhaps it came about as a result of little tidbits left in some of the houseplants by his half-sister. She believes in composting.”
“Tidbits?”
“Teabags and carrot tops and egg shells and things.”
She looked with dismay at the boy buckling himself into the back seat of the car.
“Egg shells too?”
“My wife assures me it’s a phase.”
“Yes, but is it … healthy?”
“Oh,” Strickland sighed, “a lot of them at that age toy with the idea of saving the world. Especially the ones from so-called broken homes. Form of compensation, presumably … But she’ll grow out of it. We all do.”
“Melanie? Martie?”
Ben said, “Nobody home.”
Strickland said into the phone, “Is Stephanie there? Daniel Strickland. Yes, Ben’s … No, it’d be for now. Yes. No. Thanks anyway.”
He looked at his son.
He stopped the car but did not get out.
“It won’t be more than a couple of hours,” he said.
“Okay,” the boy said.
“Just be … nice to her, all right?”
“I’m nice to everyone.”
“All right. Good man. And stay away from the pool.”
Beryl cooed, “What a lovely surprise. Come in, young man, come in.”
Strickland said, “It won’t be more than a couple of hours.”
“That’s fine, of course it is, we’ll be just fine won’t we young man.”
“Well, see you later, Sergeant.”
“Okay,” the boy said. “Thanks.”
When Strickland was gone, Ben said, “This is a big house.”
“It was my hu
sband’s. He was a faaamous movie director. Do you like movies?”
“I like documentaries.”
“Good! I’ll show you some photographs.”
“Do you have a …” He gazed out the tall windows, then pulled himself away. “Anything to eat?”
Strickland walked along the narrow sidewalk, looking at addresses.
He noticed a young man proceeding methodically from car to car, trying the door handles. Strickland opened his mouth, closed it, then stepped out into the street.
“Excuse me,” he called. “Can I help you?”
The man looked over, his face blank.
“Are you … Are any of these cars yours?”
“… Yeah.”
“Well … which one?”
“I don’t know, man.”
Strickland came closer so he would not have to shout. “I’m afraid I don’t understand. You don’t know which is yours?”
“I forget where I parked,” the man said.
“But … This will sound stupid of me, but … that doesn’t make any sense.”
“I locked my keys inside.”
“But … is one of these cars yours or not?”
The man cast a thoughtful glance over his shoulder. “I might’ve parked on a different street, I guess.”
“Wait a second.”
“I’ll keep looking. Peace, man.”
He disappeared around a corner, and Strickland stood there, frowning at the parked cars.
As he came up the walkway, a child ran out the front door and across the street, calling out in a loud whisper to a group of others, “He’s coming!”
The building was even more rundown inside. The corridors were dim, the walls peeling. The sound of an argument filtered down the stairwell.
Mike’s wife, Roz, threw open the door, holding it for a moment at arm’s length as if ready to slam it shut again. “Oh good,” she said.
Strickland hesitated. “I’m …”
Mike’s bellow came from inside the apartment: “It him?”
“Well, come on in. He’s in the den.”
Mike came bounding across the cluttered room to shake his hand. “Well,” he said. “Sure enough.”
“Hello again, Mike.”