I was curious about the out-of-routine message left by the Unknown Number, but by the time I’d peed, combed my hair and had a sip of water, the clock read 3:01 PM, and Morrie was still plastered to the door. He charged past me and threw himself on the couch.
“Twenty-three seconds late.” He jabbed at the face of his watch with each word.
It sounds horrid to say, but I took pleasure in knowing it had been more like sixty-six. Yes, this hateful reaction was my countertransference to Morrie. Psychoanalysts are prone to push such feelings off on the patient. The analyst wants to torture a patient? Probably the patient wants to be tortured, they’d say. Or wants to torture the analyst. The truth is that an analyst can be sadistic for her own reasons. How does one apportion the blame? Hadn’t Morrie sucked me dry with his demands? Hardened me with his absolute lack of gratitude for the minimal fee I charged him much less for my patience with his exasperating habits? Hadn’t he devalued me with his inability to show the slightest bit of empathy?
Of course, I knew that these were all symptoms of his Asperger’s Syndrome or whatever yet-to-be-named disorder he has. But understanding someone doesn’t just translate into liking or caring. I understand Richard, for example. Understand how his father Stu made a passionate hobby of demeaning his son, how his mother Esther considered him her possession. Understand that Richard treated me the way they treated him. And I resented the hell out of him in spite of my flawless insight.
“I don’t do seconds, Morrie,” I said.
“But I do. Twenty-three seconds times one-hundred-eighty sessions. Sixty-nine minutes a year. Adds up.”
“What about when we start a few seconds early?”
“That’s not my fault,” he said.
Oh, my god! Not my fault. Close to a feeling! A therapeutic opening!
I settled back in my chair.
In psychoanalysis, the patient has to say whatever comes into his head. Freud instructed analysands to report their thoughts as if those mental images were changing landscape through the window of a train. Most patients will start off talking in session, saying this happened, that happened, surface conversation. Then something appears that’s like a door ajar, an invitation to a deeper place, an opening that leads into a disowned part of the self. This happens seamlessly with most patients, but there are few such opportunities with Morrie.
“Tell me about fault,” I said.
I still consider that the right response, even though fault was a topic I was primed to pick up on in the wake of Howard’s death. Not that I felt to blame in a way that I’d ever be called to account on, of course. But an analyst respects the deeper workings of the mind and the ultimate power of the Unconscious. The Unconscious, that subterranean place where there is no such thing as forgetting. No such thing as coincidence. No such thing as accident.
“Bor-ing.” Morrie shook his head. I kept silent.
Freud, his brows elevated, glared down at me from the bookshelf. I heard him pointing out my mistakes: Don’t you remember how Howard fell apart at your lateness? Didn’t you register that he experimented with volatile substances in his lab? A tiny slip, a bit of distraction, a whiff of an emotion would have been enough to disorder his overly ordered mind. Ka boom. And then there was Camille. You encouraged him to be vulnerable to her, to open his fragile heart to a conniving woman who wanted him gone. You hammered away at his defenses, assuming he could manage his emotions with your help. Suicide isn’t always a conscious act. Ka boom.
“Okay. You win,” Morrie finally said. “It’s all about fault.”
“Do you know that a young child assumes that he is the cause of everything? It’s a normal stage of development.” I often get pulled into trying to educate Morrie about basic human psychology. The information usually rolled off him like rain from a slick metal roof. “What did you think was your fault when you were a kid?”
“I told you. Everything.”
“Everything like?”
Morrie gave a disgusted snort. “Like my dog left fur all over the furniture. Like I got dirty and needed a bath. Like my mother needed to drink too much. Like my father had to work so hard to pay the bills. Like my brother died.”
I questioned my memory. “You have a brother?”
“I don’t have a brother,” he said. “He’s dead.”
“Hello, Morrie,” I said. “We’ve been together for five years. You’ve never mentioned a brother.”
“There’s nothing to mention. He doesn’t interrupt my life.”
These moments happen with Morrie, head-on collisions of our internal realities. The messages he leaves me, announcing himself—This is your patient, Morris Viner—as if we’re strangers, are a prime example. It’s a constant struggle for a human being, even for a psychoanalyst, to keep in mind that the other person has a separate and distinct subjectivity, that we each occupy a unique mental world. Our minds default to the assumption that The Other operates like we do. Morrie runs on very different psychic software. His inner life is about numbers, routine, repetition, compartmentalization. About anything but emotion or meaning. These moments are my signal to go back to the beginning.
“I need to know the story of your brother,” I said.
“Dr. Goodman, this is not what is coming to my mind. This is what’s coming to your mind.”
“You’re right. This is one of those important emotional things we need to pay attention to.”
“I’ll give you two minutes. Then we’re talking about what I want to talk about.” Morrie set the timer on his oversized, multifunction watch. “I was three when he was born. He didn’t grow right. He had asthma, and one of the attacks suffocated him. That’s enough.”
“Two minutes aren’t up,” I said. Everything about Morrie fell into place for me, and I, perhaps for the first time, felt tender toward him. “No wonder you constantly worry about getting cheated. And about fault.”
“I have no idea what you are talking about, Dr. Goodman.” His right foot, wagging a hundred miles an hour, suggested otherwise.
“You had a sick baby brother who demanded all the attention. When he died, your parents were devastated. Your mother drank to drown her grief, and your father buried himself in his work. No one had time for a lonely little boy.”
Morrie’s jaw twitched. “Are you going to raise your fee in January? I need to know. My trust officer has to plan the withdrawals for next year.” His watch buzzed.
“Did you hear anything I just said?” I asked.
“Your time is up, and our time is up.” Morrie sat and stacked the pillows in descending order by size as he did at the end of each session. “The Simpsons start at five. I don’t like to miss the beginning.”
Chapter Six
The garbled message on my machine was from the San Antonio Police Department. I replayed it five times, trying to distinguish the undistinguishable, trying to hear above the worried ringing in my ears. “Please return the call,” a male voice said. Detective Somebody. Something like Slater. Something about a suicide.
So. Howard’s death had been ruled a suicide. An odd sense of relief swept through me, as if I’d known it all along. I dialed the number right away. A chirpy female answered the phone. “San Antonio Police Department.”
“Detective Slater, please.”
“No Slater in the directory.”