No Way Back (22 page)

‘Yes.’

‘In the same way, you attempt to destroy your relationship with your wife. You do this by... well, let’s call it
flirting
– with your receptionist.’

‘I see where you’re going with this.’

‘Do you?’ He stares at me. Finally he asks: ‘Have you talked to Gordon Kramer yet?’

‘About what?’

‘About what happened. About the kiss. About the drink.’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

Because I’m afraid Gordon will show up at my office with the grim face of a hangman, and that he’ll punch me in the jaw, and that he’ll handcuff me to a sprinkler.

But out loud I say, ‘Because I would prefer to talk to
you
about it.’

‘Good,’ he nods. He seems genuinely pleased, that we’ve reached a new level of trust.

But something is bothering me. I try to recall what Liago just said, try to replay his words in my mind.

‘That name,’ I say.

He looks at me warily, and – is it possible? – do I see a flash of fear in his eyes, that he’s been caught in some kind of mistake?

‘What name?’

‘Ghol Gadro... whatever.’

‘Ah,’ he says. He looks down at his pad again. ‘Ghol Gedrosian,’ he reads.

‘Did I tell you that name? I don’t think I did.’

He smiles. ‘Of course you did.’ He taps the precise spot on his yellow legal pad where he wrote the name.’

But his scribbling is quite small, and Liago’s chair is several feet from mine, and he doesn’t offer me the pad to see for myself.

‘How else would I know it?’ he asks.

‘I suppose you’re right.’

‘From the sound of it, Mr Thane, you’ve had a very exhausting week.’ A polite way of saying: You sound paranoid.

‘I
am
pretty tired,’ I admit. ‘And things will only get worse. Tomorrow I’m going to fire a lot of people. More than half of the people that work at my
company.’

‘How does that make you feel?’

‘Feel? I don’t feel anything. It’s my job. I have a list in a desk drawer. I fire whoever’s on the list.’

‘You enjoy that.’

I’m appalled. ‘Enjoy it?’

‘Having power. A power that you can’t exercise over your own life. You – a man who can’t refuse a drink at a party, who can’t keep his eyes from wandering down an
employee’s shirt, who can’t stop lying to his wife about where he goes at night – you suddenly have a chance to determine other people’s fates. Isn’t that
so?’

I squint. ‘That’s not very charitable, Doc.’

‘Perhaps. But is it true?’

Before I can answer, Dr Liago’s face widens in surprise. For an instant, I think he is incontinent, because suddenly he has an embarrassed look, and he reaches a hand down to his pants.
Then he fishes in his pocket, and finds a cellphone. It vibrates.

‘Forgive me,’ he says, looking at the screen of the phone. ‘This is very... ’ His voice trails off. ‘I’m afraid it’s an emergency. Can you wait
here?’

‘No problem, Doc.’

He stands, lays the yellow legal pad face-down on his chair, and walks halfway to the door. Then he stops, and – thinking better of it – returns to his chair, and retrieves the pad.
Without apology or acknowledgement, he removes the pad from his chair, and carries it with him out of the room. He shuts the door behind him.

I sit very still, trying to listen through the thick wood of the door.

I hear Liago’s voice, rising with emotion, but his words are muffled, and I can make out only the most general impression that he’s arguing with someone on his cellphone.

Maybe he knows I’m listening, because he says two quick words, and then there’s silence, and then I hear his footsteps on the uncarpeted floor in the entry, growing distant. The
exterior door of the house opens and shuts. I rise from my chair, go to the slatted window, and peek through.

Liago is walking away from his own house, down the long gravel driveway. He stops next to his Crown Victoria. His back is towards me; I can’t see his face. He presses the phone to his ear,
gesturing as he speaks.

This continues for a minute – Liago pantomiming, gesturing intently, arguing. When he turns around, though, and I see his expression, I realize something quite different: he’s not
arguing. He’s begging. His face is ashen. His hands shake.

I dart to the side of the window, out of his view, but it doesn’t matter; Liago has forgotten about me. He does not even look in my direction. His attention is rapt, held by that phone
call.

Which is most welcome, because it gives me the chance I’ve longed for – which is to snoop through Liago’s private belongings.

I have a rule: if you don’t want me to see your things, for God’s sake, don’t leave me alone with them. Especially if you’re my psychiatrist. After all, who doesn’t
want to know the secrets hidden by his own shrink?

Alas, Liago’s office doesn’t hold much promise for a man like me, being devoid of intimate personal effects. The top of his desk is bare – no pictures, no mementos – and
the room is decorated with that sparse movie-set quality that I noticed the first time I was here. It’s an office that conveys the
notion
of being a ‘psychiatrist’s
office’ without really seeming like a place where an actual human being works or lives. I’ve met men like Liago before – men who are more interested in portraying themselves to
the public, rather than actually living their lives. You see this a lot in the venture capital business, where the walls of private offices are adorned with lucite IPO plaques, listing lead
underwriters and the number of millions raised, but contain no pictures of little Johnny playing Pee Wee Football, or the venture capitalist’s wife wearing a wedding dress.

I walk to Liago’s desk. There are two drawers on the side, and a narrow one on top. I try a side drawer first. It is empty. The second drawer is empty, too.

I despair of finding anything interesting about this drab little man to whom I pay $125 per hour, and to whom I spill my own secrets. But then I pull open that final drawer – the thin long
one at the top of the desk.

And I’m glad that I do.

Because there’s a big black gun, which slides across the interior of the drawer when I open it, the way a chewed-up Bic pen might slide if you open a drawer too quickly.

Now
that
is interesting. A big black gun. How many shrinks keep big black guns in their desks?

I look at it, warily, from a distance. I wonder what kind of patients Dr Liago sees. They must be very dangerous men.

I close the drawer – much more slowly and gently than I opened it, to be honest – and begin to explore the other side of the room.

What attracts my interest now is the metal filing cabinet, the one with the oversized and intricate lock. This must be where Liago keeps his patient records. This is where, for example, he must
keep all those pages from his yellow legal pads – like the pad that he just removed from the office – the pad with all the notes from our conversations.

I am not expecting this cabinet to reveal much – not with that big lock securing the drawer – but I tug anyway. And wouldn’t you know it – the drawer glides open
easily.

The good news about Dr Liago, I now see, is that he keeps copious and detailed notes about all of his patients.

The bad news about Dr Liago is that he has only one patient. And that is me.

At least, this is the only way I can explain what I see in the filing cabinet. Inside the drawer is a single hanging folder, stuffed thick with yellow sheets of paper. The folder is labelled in
a neat hand. ‘Thane, Jim’, it says.

And that is all.

There is not one other folder. Not one other patient.

Just one: ‘Thane, Jim’.

I open the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet, to be certain. That drawer is empty.

Just one folder. Just one patient. ‘Thane, Jim’.

I feel a sickness inside me, a dark fear rising from the pit of my stomach, threatening to engulf me. There is something...
wrong
here. Something dangerous. A doctor with a gun. A
doctor with only one patient.

My fingers flit through the pages in the hanging folder. The sheets are thick with scribbles, tiny and intricate handwriting, the ravings of a lunatic. There is an impossible amount of writing
– too much information to be gleaned from the one session that I spent with Dr Liago.

I read the pages, flipping through them quickly, at random. ‘
Gordon Kramer
’, a paragraph begins, in that tiny crazed writing,
and Gordon’s name is underlined. The notes continue: ‘St. Regis. Garage. Handcuffs. Parking Area 4C. Sobers him up.’

Another paragraph starts: ‘
Hector Gonzales
. Bookie. What happened to Jim’s finger? Libby drives him to hospital. Bloody dish
towel around hand. Jack in the Box for hamburger.’

These are incidents from my own life. I remember them clearly. They are seared into my mind. But what I don’t remember is telling Dr Liago about them. About any of them.

‘Lantek, Ethernet networking – VP of Sales – made drunken pass at
Bob Parker
’s wife while high. San Francisco
loft.’

I want to read more about this incident – and all the others recounted in the doctor’s notes – but behind me, the door creaks, and I turn to see it opening. I know that I
can’t make it back to my chair in time. Instead, I return the folder, softly close the filing cabinet, and take just one step away, into the corner of the room, where I pretend to be studying
the diploma on the wall. ‘Dr George Liago, Doctor of Medicine, Cornell Medical School, 1972’, it proclaims.

‘Forgive me,’ Liago says, entering the room, breathless. ‘That was rude of me. I’m sorry, but I had to take that call. An emergency, you know.’

He sees me standing near his desk, which is clearly not where he expected to find me – and his eyes dart around the office, suspiciously, before they return to me.

‘No problem,’ I say. ‘Just admiring your diploma. I always wondered how they make the script so fancy. It must take them an awful long time to write each one by hand. How many
people were in your class?’

‘I think it’s a mechanical reproduction, Mr Thane,’ he says.

‘Is that right?’

‘Ah,’ he says, trying to smile. ‘You’re joking.’

‘Not much of a joke.’

‘No,’ he agrees. ‘Should we continue?’

I return to my seat.

He sits down in the chair across from me. I try to keep my face blank, try not to telegraph my distress.

For a moment, I think about confronting him – standing up, stomping to the file drawer, wrenching it open, and shouting, ‘Where are your other patients? What kind of doctor
are
you?’

But something tells me not to. Just to play dumb. Which isn’t terribly hard for a man like me.

‘I think I’ll just turn this off for now,’ Liago says, fiddling with his cellphone. He presses the power button emphatically, to demonstrate how sincerely he hopes we will not
be disturbed again.

‘Where were we?’ he says, looking down at his notes. ‘Oh yes,’ he says. ‘You’re going to fire people. Lots of people. Tomorrow. Tell me how that makes you
feel.’

Somehow I make it through the session. Liago must sense something is wrong, though, because after a few abortive attempts at conversation, he finally suggests we wrap up early,
since my mind ‘seems to be elsewhere’.

If my mind is anywhere, it’s in that filing cabinet, which holds just a single folder. Or it’s in his desk drawer, which contains a gun.

But I don’t say either of these things. I just nod mute agreement, and let him lead me from the office. In the foyer, he puts his hand on my arm, and he says he’ll see me next week.
Almost a question. I mumble agreement. He watches me warily from the front door as I back my Ford out of the driveway. I do it slowly – no flooring the accelerator, no gravel shooting from
beneath spinning tyres. I just back up, as if there is nothing wrong in the world, nothing odd in what I just discovered, nothing at all unusual about a doctor who lives alone in a house, and is a
specialist. A Jimmy Thane specialist.

I drive, keep my gaze straight ahead. When I get to the highway, I drive for another mile, and then I pull over into the brown grass on the shoulder of the road. Cars whizz by. The Ford
hasn’t even stopped rolling by the time I finish dialling Gordon Kramer’s number on my cell.

‘Hello, Jimmy,’ he rasps. ‘What the hell’s the matter now?’

‘Oh nothing, Gordon,’ I say, with false lightness in my voice. ‘Other than the fact that the doctor you recommended to me is a maniac.’

‘Maniac doctor, huh?’ he says. He doesn’t sound too concerned. ‘Why is he a maniac doctor, Jimmy?’

‘Let’s see, where to start? Well, there’s a gun in his desk drawer.’

‘I have a gun in my desk drawer, Jimmy.’

‘You’re an ex-cop, Gordon.’

‘That’s right. My job has me deal with a lot of cranked-up meth-heads. Guess what kind of patients Dr Liago sees.’

‘Funny you should mention that. That was my next point. Dr Liago apparently deals with only
one
patient.’

‘That’s right,’ Gordon says. ‘You.’

He says this as if it were an obvious fact, one that we’ve discussed before, and one that should come as no surprise to either of us.

‘You know that already?’

‘Of course I know that, you moron. I hired him.’

‘But—’

‘I got him out of mothballs just for you. He was retired. I had to call in a favour. He didn’t want to do it, but – well, you know how persuasive I can be.’

‘Oh,’ I say, suddenly deflated. ‘So you knew all about it.’

‘All about what?’ he says. He sounds truly mystified by this entire conversation. Then, his breath catches, and he has a realization. ‘Oh, shit,’ he says. ‘Oh,
shit, Jimmy. Are you tweaking? Are you getting paranoid again?’

‘I’m not paranoid. I’m not tweaking.’

‘Jimmy... ’

‘Gordon, he knows things about me. He has hundreds of pages of notes – things that I did not tell him.’

A long silence. When Gordon’s voice returns to the line, he sounds disappointed. ‘Aw, shit, Jimmy,’ he says, again. ‘You’re using.’