The Secrets You Hide: A Mind-Blowing Thriller (The Psychosis Series) (2 page)

3: Robert’s Journal – Of Day 1

We live in a bungalow in the suburbs, away from the city’s noisy nights. The walls outside are painted in light blue–the color of the open sky, a color signifying unending possibilities. As I returned home today, I parked my car on the driveway like I always do. I stepped out with my briefcase, locking the car with the remote as I approached the door. I walked over the neatly trimmed grass that spreads outwards to the fence. As I moved forward, I heard Sarah call out to her mother over the faint and distant rumble of the television. “Daddy’s home.”

I walked up the stairs to reach the porch and halted there. I reached into the pocket of my coat to extract the keys. Then I stopped. I knocked at the door. I could have rung the bell…but I knocked. I prefer that over the loud chime of the bell. I find it more…serene. I guess I am old-fashioned that way.

I listened closely as I heard footsteps approaching the door. I focused on the rhythm of the sound. I knew it was Annie. She has a musical way of doing things. I noticed the peephole go dark and I knew that Annie was looking at me from the other side of the door. A smile took over my face as I leaned backward against one of the pillars that support the roof. I was holding the briefcase with both my hands and its weight pushed against my knees.

Annie did not open the door. She knew that I had the key. But I knew that she hadn’t walked away yet. She was standing right there, on the other side of the door, waiting to see if I gave in first. A few long moments passed.

I imagined her standing on the other side of the door, her hands crossed, and her head shaking, with a faint smile on her face. Her brown eyes probably reflected the fluorescent light of the corridor in a golden glow. She continued to stand there, patient. She wanted to win the game.

Both of us waited a moment longer…till we couldn’t anymore. We were longing to see each other. I reached into my pocket for the keys, but before I could extract them, Annie had opened the door.

We stood there smiling, looking at each other. “Looks like I won today.” I teased her.

“I almost had you,” she said, gesturing at my hand which was still in my coat’s pocket. I shrugged, the smile never leaving my face.

It’s a little game we play every day. A neat little ritual. Sometimes, she returns late from work. On those days, she is the one extracting the keys from her purse. But the rules are the same every time. They’ve been the same for the last six years since the day she moved in.

Both of them–Annie and Sarah–are now asleep as I sit before my computer capturing another memory in my journal, hoping to make it permanent. I am unsure what I should be feeling right now–A burst of happiness? A pang of nostalgia?

But I feel neither of those things. Instead, I am scared. I am scared because I do not know how long I can make this last. I am uncertain about how long I can protect them and preserve their happiness. And mine.

For them, I am willing to be whatever I need to be. But I feel like a different person when I am around them, different from what I am when I am out there in the world dealing with strangers and trying to make sense of their minds. I feel torn between the two personalities, unsure if they are both an organic extension of me or if one of them is fake.

And if one of them is fake–which one of them am I really?

Am I pretending when I am out there in the world? Or am I pretending when I am in this house with them?

4: Robert’s Recollection – Of Day 8

Jack sat in the same chair that he was sitting in during the previous appointment. I wasn’t using my notebook this time. Instead, I was recording the conversation on my mobile phone after taking his consent. The digital clock on the table next to me read 5:32 pm. We had spent most of the preceding thirty minutes talking about Jack’s colleagues. But towards the end, Jack had just fallen silent like he did not want to talk about them anymore. He was looking out of the window once again, lost in his own thoughts. He looked melancholy…isolated…detached…even afraid at some level.

“Who do you live with, Jack?” I asked.

He did not turn to look at me.

“I live alone, doctor.”

“Where are your parents? Family?”

No response.

“Girlfriend or Friends?”

Once again he did not respond as if he was denying the very existence of anybody close to him…of anybody who knew him for the person he was.

I waited, letting him think in silence and hoping that his thoughts would eventually boil over. But I wasn’t sure if he was thinking of anything at all. It seemed as if he was in a state of blankness. He seemed to be comfortable with the feeling of not having to think…the feeling of having an empty mind.

He turned to me a few minutes later signaling that he was ready to take the conversation forward.

“Do you ever feel lonely, Jack?”

He nodded. “Sometimes. Yes.”

“Maybe you should meet more people…outside of work. People can help you feel more connected…more involved.”

“People?” he smirked, mocking my suggestion.

“You disagree?” I asked.

I saw him take a deep breath before he continued.

“The only thing people are good at, doctor, is…disappointing each other. It is as if the only thing we have gotten better at through thousands of years of evolution…is that one single ability…the ability to break each other’s hearts, torment each other’s souls and tear each other apart at every opportunity we get.”

He shrugged. “Evolution gave us intelligence. It probably intended for us to grow together using our collective abilities…Instead, we have just grown apart.

“People, doctor...they never help. People never make you feel connected or…involved. They only make you feel more disappointed in what we have become. They only make you feel alone…fighting your own lonely battle. Have you never had that feeling, doctor? You are standing in the middle of a crowd…waves of unending humanity flowing all around you…but you know no one. And no one knows you. There is no connection, no bond. We are all together…and yet we are all alone.”

He fell silent, staring right at me.

“That’s umm…that’s a very grim way of looking at the world, Jack.”

“That’s the only way to look at reality, doctor. The only way you can look at the world unless you want to delude yourself that people actually care. Because they don’t.”

Silence.

“Have you been hurt, Jack? By someone close to you…someone you would like to talk about?”

Once again he did not respond. I felt as if he was concealing every detail about himself that really mattered. We were looking straight at each other and yet there seemed to be an invisible wall that he had carefully constructed to hide his real self from me.

I moved to a different question while at the same time making a mental note to return to the topic once he became more comfortable with sharing details of his personal life.

“Why do you think people don’t care, Jack?”

He shook his head in disappointment. I wondered if he was disappointed in me for asking that question or if it was an expression of disappointment at every human being he had ever met.

“Because we are all obsessed,” he said, “…we are so obsessed with ourselves and the things and the people we want to have in our lives…Each of us is so convinced that his or her story is the story of the world. Like we are the protagonists and everyone around us is a side-character that just…that just fades into a blur the moment we look away. And we forget, that there are billions of such stories in the minds of every person around us. And we forget, that at the end of it all…only one thing matters…the reality that we all conceive together. And in our ignorance, we have filled that reality with lies, betrayal, selfishness, greed, hurt, and hatred. A reality that is so scary that everyone of us…every single one of us…refuses to acknowledge it for what it is. We instead choose to live within the walls of our own limited perception, unbothered about what we are doing to the people around us.”

Jack’s words seemed to be churning a mixture of emotions inside me. I knew that what he was sharing was just a simple point of view, a way of looking at the world. But at some level, almost unconsciously, I was feeling a strange psychological resonance. It was as if he was describing the very thoughts that were buried deep inside my head, breathing life into them and suddenly making them come alive. I felt as if my self-control was slipping away. It was one of those moments when I needed my training to kick in. I knew exactly what I had to do when I found myself in situations like these. It was a conversation I needed to walk away from. Next time, I would be better prepared to deal with the ideas that Jack came in with. Next time, I would come with a mental armor ready to shield myself. But at that moment, I had to live to fight another day.

I looked at the clock from the corner of my eyes. It was 5:56 pm. The appointment was almost coming to an end.

Jack continued to say something but nothing registered. I had completely switched off. I remember nodding like I was processing his words, while in reality, I was just letting the words bounce between the walls of the room till they died away.

Prompted by the ring of the alarm clock at 6 pm, Jack immediately stood up and walked up to me to shake my hand.

“We should schedule another appointment tomorrow, Jack…to finish this conversation. Would that work for you?”

He nodded. “I will find some time tomorrow,” he said. Then he turned around and left.

I stopped the recording app on my cellphone and wrote down a quick summary of the interview into Jack’s file. After I had finished writing, I turned to the first page of the file and made a small star mark on the top right of it. It was a symbol that I had assigned to a few rare patients over the years. It was a symbol which served as a warning to me…a warning of a resonance of thoughts that could harm me if I did not handle them with care.

Then I walked to the door to usher the next patient in–a seventy-year-old lady suffering from clear signs of rapidly advancing dementia.

I don’t recall specifics from the conversation with her because I had spent a large part of that appointment fixated on the thoughts that Jack had expressed earlier. I felt an increasing urgency to get my mind away from that and as soon as the lady left, I picked up my cellphone and called Annie. Almost simultaneously, my secretary peeped into the room through the door. With the cellphone in my hand, I made a gesture to her requesting for a couple minutes before she sent the next patient in. She nodded and disappeared.

“Hey you,” I said into the phone.

“Hey. So…we are just driving out of the garage” said Annie. She and Sarah were heading out to visit Annie’s parents in San Francisco. I had planned to join them a couple days later over the coming weekend.

“Oh, okay. Drive safe. Call me when you get there.”

“I will. Can you tell your daughter to stop being a bad girl? She is jumping all over the backseat.” I could imagine Annie looking at Sarah with a fake expression of anger on her face. I heard a disturbance over the call as Annie handed the phone to Sarah.

“Daddy…” Sarah shouted into the phone.

“Hello. How is Sarah Walker today?”

“Sarah Walker is happy and smiling and jumping…Sarah Walker is the princess of this world.” She giggled on the phone.

I smiled, staring out into the street. “Yes, you are indeed Princess Sarah Walker. But do you know the secret of the most beautiful princesses?”

“No…no…what is it?” she snapped.

“Do you really want to know?”

“Yes! Tell me.” she exclaimed impatiently.

“The most beautiful princesses listen to their mommy. Are you going to do that?”

She chuckled. She understood my trick. “I will sit down. Happy?”

I laughed. “Call me when you are with nanna. And take care of mommy. Will you do that?”

“Yes. Bye daddy.”

“Bye sweetheart.”

I put the phone down and walked to the glass wall. Alone in the room, I spent a few seconds in silence, still recovering from the conversation with Jack. I was trying to compartmentalize it out of my active memory. Outside the room, there were a couple more patients waiting in queue.

I reached home a couple hours later at around 9 pm and parked my car in its usual place next to the house. I walked up to the door and knocked at it by habit before realizing that there was no one home. I laughed at myself before unlocking the door with my key.

As I closed the door behind me and entered the house, I found myself stepping onto a light blue envelope that someone had slipped in under the door. I picked it up and left it on the center table in the living room. I forgot all about it till I was forced to acknowledge its presence some time later.

I spent another twenty to thirty minutes freshening up before I returned to the living room to have dinner in the company of the television. I glanced at the clock, trying to estimate how far Annie and Sarah had reached. Maybe, I thought, they had stopped for dinner somewhere. Maybe, I debated, I should wait a bit longer before calling them to check.

I headed into the bedroom and switched on my laptop. I figured I could finish writing my journal for the day before I called Annie. I sat in the chair staring at the cursor that blinked incessantly on the screen almost drawing me into a state of hypnosis. It had always had a calming effect on me–a thin black line blinking on an empty white background, a clean digital slate waiting to be used. I rummaged through my memories of the day trying to decide what had had the deepest influence on me. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that it had to be the conversation with Jack. It filled me with anxiety because I did not want to remember how it had made me feel but I also knew I had to write it down to get it out of my mind. I placed my fingers on the keyboard and was just about to start typing when the phone in the living room rang, destroying the silence of the night in an instant. The ring of that phone, even though it had felt harmless in that moment, marked the beginning of what is the most significant memory I have of that day.