The Only Child

by Andrew Pyper

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s so . . . freaky.”

  “And you’re surprised? Look around. We’re in the freak industry.”

  It’s out before Lily can catch herself. The freak industry? The sort of thing Denise says and Lily voices her disapproval of. But this morning it’s her line.

  “You got that right,” Denise says.

  4

  * * *

  The man is waiting for her. The file has little to say about him other than his namelessness, the violent crime he was arrested for, his strange calm upon his arrest. He sits at the steel table, palms resting on his knees. In his mug shot, his even gaze was suggestive of considerations that couldn’t be guessed at. Now, three strides away, he looks at her and she has even less of an idea what his thoughts may be, even as she can feel him reaching into her head to find hers.

  Psycho.

  There were so many words you weren’t supposed to use that her second voice loved to whisper in her ear. Psycho, for one. You never called them that. Over the few years of her still relatively new career she’d watched the patients—no, that had changed too, now they were clients—and the words ascribed to them come and go as if borne upon a tide. Bipolar for what was once insane, high-risk for dangerous. But the truth is—the unspeakable truth, for someone in Dr. Lily Dominick’s position—is that the ones who come through the Kirby are all psychos, all dangerous in their ways.

  This one the same as the rest.

  Lily pulls the security door shut behind her and leaves her hand gripped to the handle a moment longer than necessary to avoid meeting his eyes.

  Freaky.

  You have to be prepared around people like this, even with their legs shackled to the table that’s screwed to the floor. They can be as tricky with the things they say as with the things they do. But this one—a number on a file ten seconds ago and now real—is a man who has done an awful thing and meets her eyes the moment she raises them, conveying something at once brutal and serene. Their shared gaze is weirdly intimate, the kind of look she imagines passes between lovers. It’s part of what makes this one different from the others. Which is what likely makes him dangerous, even more so than the other psychos she finds chained to the tables in these rooms that both smell like and are painted the color of boiled peas.

  Lily reminds herself of the job she’s here to do. This always helps. Once she’s in the room, she makes her own feelings disappear. There’s only the questions she asks and how they answer them.

  This is what drew her to forensic psychiatry in the first place: Lily doesn’t treat her clients, she assesses them. There’s no obligation to prescribe or heal, merely to categorize, arrive at a conclusion as to their capacity to do the terrible thing they’ve been accused of, along with their capacity to recognize it as terrible or not. She puts her queries to them and they offer a reply, or hold their silence, or spit yellow bile across the stainless steel table deep within a building more prison than hospital. Sometimes the spit finds her skin.

  She releases the door’s handle, takes a step into the room, and sees for the second time that it may not be so easy this morning.

  The man sitting at the table, half-smiling at her, is different from the rest. How can she tell? It isn’t his face or his body. Both are pleasing, however unconventionally. The lean strength and broad chest of a swimmer, a power Lily can see even in the interlocked fingers of his large hands. His cheeks and jawline and chin all defined, the skin taut against bone. She guesses he was born in a foreign country, but can’t think of any one place his features might belong to.

  What truly sets him apart are his eyes. Wide and deep, alive with animal cunning. Gray irises almost swallowed whole by black pupils. Eyes that speak of multiple thoughts happening at once, though they remain outwardly soft, twinkling at some shared humor. The eyes don’t make him better or worse than the others, or even necessarily sane. Certainly not innocent. Just different.

  “What name have they given me?”

  An unplaceable accent. Lily tries to line it up with a culture, a continent, but it sounds to her like a combination of locations and classes. There’s Eastern European at its foundation, then a worker’s Russian, along with a trace of northeastern American, the Ivy League debate club interpretation of Oxford English. She does all this puzzling over a half dozen words.

  He clears his throat. Lily hasn’t answered him. She won’t say anything until he speaks again.

  “Your papers,” he says, nodding at the file tucked under her arm. “I’m curious. How do you refer to those who have no names in this place?”

  “We assign them a temporary number. Until we discover the client’s identity.”

  “What if you don’t?”

  “Everyone has a name.”

  “You are mistaken, Doctor.”

  He reminds her of a professor she had in grad school. The way he would quiz her, nudge her toward new conclusions. In the case of the professor she’d realized, too late, that it was a subtle form of flirtation. With this man she’s sure it isn’t about that. Then again, she’d been sure it wasn’t about that with the professor too.

  “You had no identification with you when you were arrested,” she says. “And you’ve refused to assist investigators by saying who you are. That doesn’t make you nameless, though.”

  The man smiles. A single shift in his expression that makes Lily feel—what? Overwhelmed. Light-headed and heart-tripping in a way that starts out as a response to charm but quickly turns queasily unpleasant, the first lurch of motion sickness.

  “Perhaps you will help me,” he says.

  “Help you?”

  “You are a physician, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “That comes with professional obligations toward those like me.”

  “Like you?”

  “The accused.” He shrugs and his shoulders make a sound like smoothed bedsheets inside his shirt. “The wicked.”

  “How would you describe your illness?”

  “I said wicked, not ill.”

  “Your wickedness then.”

  “I’ve grown too accustomed to it to describe it.”

  “So you see it as my job to tell you?”

  “No. I wish your aid in another matter altogether.”

  “What would that be?”

  He smiles again. And again she feels overwhelmed in the same powerfully disorienting way as before.

  “Perhaps you could resolve the question of my missing name,” he says.

  It’s playful. A teasing invitation to a harmless game. But there is a commanding authority behind his words too. Soft, gentle, yet it comes to Lily as an order. His voice so persuasive it’s almost physical.

  Lily closes her eyes. Opens them.

  It clears his spell away. Not that she thinks this man is magic or anything like that. Spell is just the only word she can think of.

  “Can we talk about what brought you here?” she asks.

  “Of course.” He laughs in a smoker’s growl. “But it’s a little strange to speak to you like this.”

  “Like what?”

  He gestures at the empty chair across the table from him. “You standing and me sitting. It is, among other things, a situation I find ungentlemanly.” He shakes his legs and the shackles around his ankles rattle and clank. “I would rise but my constraints prevent it.”

  “Yes. I’ll sit then,” Lily says, but doesn’t move.

  Ungentlemanly.

  The word holds her. She’d bet it’s never been uttered in this room before. She would otherwise expect it to have the ring of sarcasm, given where they are, given the trouble he’s in, but it’s clear he’s serious. A gentleman. It’s how he regards himself, how he wishes her to see him. This alone would make him an interesting case if there weren’t a dozen other swirling observations in her head that have already made him so.

  “I’ll sit,” she repeats, and this time she does.

  She opens his file. He loo
ks at her. She’s so aware of him the print swims on the pages.

  Pull your shit together, her second voice tells her. You’re acting crazier than he is.

  Control. Lily regards it as her greatest talent. There have been men in this room with her who’ve told her how they would kill her, confessed to unspeakable acts between bouts of giggles, said things so vile they made her want to take a shower as soon as she left. One or two of these men might have fascinated her for a time until she finally found the slot they deserved in one of the diagnostic textbooks and she realized her fascination was only the passing fizz of professional challenge. Through it all, for every doomed one of them, she’d maintained control.

  But now, with this man, she feels something else altogether. Not frightened exactly, but the rush that came with being around someone capable of unpredictable violence. She can tell already that he’s intelligent, that she’ll have to be ready for curveballs. Yet her excitement isn’t of the kind that comes with raising your game in the presence of a worthy opponent. It’s the idea that this moment bears meaning for her in ways she couldn’t possibly understand now but may come to know if she proves deserving. Along with the unshakeable sense that he’s come here for her. Lily feels as if he has delivered a compliment just by sitting there, a prisoner, staring at her.

  Stop this. Pull it together. Now.

  “You understand the charge against you?” she asks.

  “I understand it, yes.”

  “Assault in the first degree. That’s a Class B felony.”

  “ ‘A person is guilty of assault in the first degree when, with intent to disfigure another person seriously and permanently, or to destroy, amputate, or disable permanently a member or organ of his body, he causes such injury to such person or to a third person.’ I believe that is the relevant subsection.”

  “You’ve memorized the criminal code?”

  “Not the whole thing. It lacks poetry, wouldn’t you say? But I asked to see their book and they let me read it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes what?”

  “I would agree that that’s the relevant subsection. ‘Intent to disfigure another person seriously and permanently.’ ”

  He wrinkles his nose and the word cute blinks through Lily’s mind. Sexy, her inappropriate voice corrects. Not cute. But most definitely sexy.

  “I might contest the ‘permanently,’ ” he says. “They can do such wonderful things with plastic surgery nowadays.”

  She considers writing Narcissistic personality disorder? => lack of compassion; primary injury inflicted to appearance, not victim’s body in her notes but doesn’t want to break the flow of words between them.

  “Could you tell me what happened?” she asks.

  “I tore a man’s ears from his head.”

  “There was no knife?”

  “It didn’t require a knife.”

  “That’s unusual.”

  “Is it?”

  He blinks. So slow, the room so quiet that she can hear it.

  “Ripping ears off with your bare hands,” she says. “Yes, I’d say unusual. How did you do it?”

  He shows his hands. Brings both forefingers together with the thumbs to make a pair of rings. “I took them like this, and pulled, like this.” He brings his hands down and the cuffs around his wrists clang off the table’s edge.

  “That’s all it took?”

  “The human body is more pliant than most seem to think. More fragile too.”

  “Did you approach the man from behind?”

  “No. He was walking one way and I the other.”

  “He didn’t resist?”

  “How can you resist what you have no reason to anticipate?”

  “Did you speak to him?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Breathe in.”

  “Why that?”

  “Because I knew he would do as I told him. And that by the time he breathed out I’d be done.”

  Once more Lily has to return her eyes to the file pages on the table, using them as an anchor to the world outside the room.

  “I’ve seen the photos,” she says, flipping the pages with her thumb. “With hands alone—I wouldn’t think it possible.”

  “Normally, no. I suppose not.” The man nods as if at an unexpected consideration.

  “And you’re not normal.”

  “Not remotely.”

  “So tell me,” she says, looking up at him again. “Share your ear-tearing secret with me.”

  He ignores her playfulness as easily as she succumbed to his.

  “It demands a certain amount of strength, certainly,” he answers. “And the absence of hesitation. That above all.”

  “You felt no hesitation because the man deserved what you did to him?”

  “No, no. You misunderstand.” She’s reminded once again of her grad school professor, this time of his impatience. “It’s that I feel no hesitation about any action I take.”

  She makes a note in the file. A scribbled shorthand. He watches her write and Lily is sure they both see the meaninglessness of what she does.

  “You think a statement like that brings you closer to finding a condition for me,” he says. “Something in the sociopathic family, I’d imagine.”

  “It’s an interesting aspect. That’s all. But I’d like to know more.”

  “I’m here for you, Doctor.”

  He tries to spread his arms wide in a gesture of openness but the restraints prevent him, so that he merely raises his hands clasped together in front of his face as if in prayer.

  When he lowers them she considers his face without looking away.

  You’d never mistake him for a pretty man, nor perhaps even handsome, but he’s unquestionably appealing. The long, flared nose, the scrubby islands of beard, the eyes downturned at the corners so that they convey a constant expression of what could be either empathy or gnawing grief. There are indications of strength in even the smallest of his motions. Not bulging, weight-lifted muscle, but sinewy, like braided rope. She was wrong in her initial impression of him as a swimmer. There’s an elegance to that sport—the progress of an individual body against a resisting element—he would have little interest in. Lily’s client has the physical presence of someone who has never done anything in pursuit of athletics, rather only to bring about immediate alterations to his environment, the delivery of pleasure or the infliction of pain. His nature strikes her as equal parts lover and street fighter.

  It’s the mouth. The other parts too, but Lily thinks it’s the mouth above all. Full and sharply etched. A mouth to kiss, to open yourself to. “I’m no expert,” Lily always says whenever Denise hands her a photo of some movie star in one of the magazines she brings to work and asks if Lily thinks he’s hot. “Good-looking, I guess, but I’m no expert.” As if expertise were required to respond to the way someone looks.

  “Why did you decide to hurt him, a stranger?” she asks, looking down at the file again.

  “Proximity.”

  “To what?”

  “The police cruiser parked on West Broadway.”

  “You wanted to be seen?”

  “Yes.”

  “To be arrested?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why his ears?”

  “I needed to do something out of the ordinary.”

  “Why?”

  “Aren’t those the kind they send you? The scary ones?”

  “So you did this because you want to be locked up in a forensic psychiatric facility?”

  “Not at all, Doctor. I did this because I want to be with you.”

  Lily leans back in her chair. The man hasn’t made any move toward her but she catches a scent of his skin as if he’d placed his hands on her cheeks. There’s woodsmoke in it, and some kind of grain alcohol. The sawdust and aged meat of the butcher shop.

  “You think you know who I am?” she asks, and immediately sees it’s the wrong question. If a client believes a
relationship exists between himself and his examiner, it’s important to point out that this connection is a side effect of their deviance, a false illusion of intimacy. A physician in her position has to either get things back on track or end the interview altogether and try again another time. Lily has made a mistake. She’s given this man the opportunity to confirm his convictions. Which he does.

  “Of course I know you,” he says.

  “So tell me.”

  “You are Dr. Lily Dominick. Thirty-six years old. Unmarried, no children. You completed your residency in forensic psychiatry at Brown, and prior to that graduated summa cum laude in biological science at the University of Michigan. All on full scholarship, give or take a part-time job here and there. The Kirby has been your sole place of employment since entering practice, which I can assume is because you chose it to be. You wanted nothing but the best. Which, in your field, means nothing but the worst.”

  “My name. That’s all you’re working from,” Lily replies, speaking with intentional force to cover the tremble in her voice. “It’s public knowledge who’s on staff here. My CV is on the web somewhere too, along with my birth date for all I know. A diligent Internet search. Quite a different thing from knowing me.”

  “Very true. As it stands, you are little more than a collection of facts to me. But I hope that will soon change.”

  “It won’t.”

  “Hold on to your doubt, Doctor. It will provide you some comfort for a time.”

  “Until what?”

  “Until it turns to dust. Until your old life ends and your new one begins.”

  She jots another note. This one to compose the right question, one that will allow her to slip away from his tightening knot of riddles.

  “If you really knew me,” she says, “you would know the names of my mother and father.”

  “Clever! You are setting traps for me!”

  “How so?”

  “Because you never had a father, at least one you ever knew. And your mother—what is the polite term in America? Not dead, certainly not! You’re allergic to the idea in this country, even the mention of it. Your mother has passed on. But it was she with whom I had an acquaintanceship. Before you were born and up until—”