The Syndrome (9 page)

“I’ll try.”

“Well, I guess I’ll have to
settle
for that. ‘I’ll try’ is better than ‘I’ll think about it’ (which, as we all know, means, ‘No way.’)
So, put it on your calendar
, okay?”

“Will do.”

“October 23rd.”

“Got it.”

“Great. And, Jeff?”

“Yeah?”

“If you
can’t
come to the reunion? I
will not
understand!”

When they’d hung up, he repeated her name aloud, turning it over in his mind as he put away the groceries, half expecting a face to well up in his memory. But there was nothing. Not an image or an anecdote.

High school was a long time ago, he reflected, putting the lemons into the vegetable bin. Even so: his class was only a hundred strong, half boys, half girls. So you’d think he’d remember
something
about her.

He emptied the ground coffee into the Starbucks canister and pushed his thumb down on the metal clip to close it. Bunny Kaufman. When he shut his eyes and thought about it, he imagined a short, blond, featureless girl. And that was it. It was odd, in a way. After four years of classes and games, track meets and banquets, science fairs, dances, and field trips—the best he could do was ‘short and blond’?

It was depressing. And the more he thought about it, the more he realized how little he remembered about school. Almost nothing, really. A couple of names and faces. The headmaster, Andrew Pierce Vaughn, his jovial face frozen in laughter. The front of the school. Commencement in the garden behind Zartman House. But of the friends he’d had, and the teachers … there was nothing.

It was a little unsettling, actually. Enough so that, even though it wasn’t at all his kind of thing, he wrote the date on a Post-it and stuck it to his computer monitor:
Sidwell reunion: Sat. Oct. 23.
What the hell …

His four p.m. appointment with Nico came and went—without her. He thought about calling, but decided against it. The responsibility for maintaining the connection between them had to be hers, or the relationship wouldn’t work. Like many children who’d been orphaned at a young age, Nico had a long history of dependence, of seeking parental surrogates who would care for her. As an adult, she needed to take responsibility for her own life, rather than relying on authority figures. Otherwise, she’d fall into new patterns of abuse, confusing sex with love, debasement with penance.

So. When she didn’t show up, Duran wondered about it—but he didn’t call. Autonomy was important for Nico and he’d made a point of establishing from the very start that she, and
she alone, was responsible for getting well. He could help her. But he was not her father, her husband, or her caretaker.

And so he watched Ricki Lake until it became time for dinner. Going into the kitchen, he glanced around with a sense of hopelessness. The room was well outfitted, with pine cabinets and tumbled marble countertops, a magnetized bar holding a dozen sharp knives, and a queue of food processors and other appliances. But cooking wasn’t something that he did—or, at least, he didn’t do it much. Most of the time, he just ordered out.

There was a small CD player on the counter, and he peered through its glass top to see what it held. Cowboy Junkies. He forwarded to the fifth song, pressed
Play
, and flipped through a sheaf of take-out menus as the singer lamented that she’d

He could order Thai food—that would be okay. But only if he had some beer and, preferably, Singha. Pulling open the door to the refrigerator, he glanced from shelf to shelf. There was Perrier, milk and Coca Cola, and a bottle of Pinot Grigio, but no beer.

He looked at his watch and frowned. He’d just been shopping. Why hadn’t he remembered beer? It was a little after seven, which meant that the Safeway in the basement was closed, and that if he wanted beer, he’d have to walk to the 7-Eleven. The thought made him queasy, as if in the corner of his eye he’d seen something skitter under the couch. Something dark and fast. A toxic sensation passed through him like a chill.

With a sigh, he removed the Pinot Grigio from the refrigerator, pulled the cork, and poured himself a glass. Then he pushed the button on the telephone that automatically dialed Chiang Mai Garden. He gave his order, and the man on the other end converted it.

“One numbah foh, one numbah twenny-two. Very good. Fifteen minute!”

He tried to tell himself that wine was just as good with Thai food as beer. But the truth was, it wasn’t. As good as the Pinot Grigio was, he could almost
taste
the cold, hoppy beer that he longed for.

It was only three blocks to the 7-Eleven. He ought to go, but …
This is ridiculous
, he thought. Sitting down at the kitchen table, he sipped his wine and shook his head.

Had he always been like this?

No. At least, he didn’t think so.

Since when, then? When had it begun?

He ministered to people with cognitive problems so he knew his own symptoms well enough. According to the
DSM-IV
, he suffered from agoraphobia. Or to be exact, because agoraphobia itself was not codable, he suffered from the malady listed in the
DSM-IV
as 300.27:
Agoraphobia with panic disorder. Situations are avoided or endured with marked distress.

In its most debilitating form, agoraphobes were prisoners of their fears, unable to venture out of their homes. Duran’s malady was less severe. If the need was great enough, he could resist it. He could go out, and he did. But less and less frequently, it seemed, and never with much enjoyment. In point of fact, if he were not living and working in an “urban village” like the Capitol Towers, the phobia might have been crippling.

So it worried him. And not just the phobia, but the way he was handling it. In essence, he was ignoring the problem because it made him uncomfortable to think about it—which was ironic, given his profession. Indeed, it made him wonder if he was even functional. Could a therapist live an unexamined life, and still help others? Did he have any business dealing with patients as disturbed as Nico and de Groot? He drained the wine and poured himself another glass.

A voice in the back of his head whispered,
Therapist, heal thyself.
And a second voice replied,
Later …

Nico’s sister, Adrienne, had made a pact with the Devil. It was as simple as that.

Having graduated from Georgetown Law the year before, she’d made a Faustian bargain with Slough, Hawley, in the interests of paying down a mountain of student debt. In return for a whopping salary and the inside-rail on what everyone said was “the fast track,” Adrienne was expected to work eighty-hour weeks, doing mostly shitwork, in what amounted to a two-year bootcamp for baby lawyers. If, at the end of this period, she was still “viable”—which is to say, neither burned out nor canned—she’d be named an associate. Whereupon, things would get a lot easier, or if not easier, at least more interesting.

For now, however, life was hell. That was the deal.

At the moment, she was working on a memo for Himself. This was Curtis Slough, the name partner who was supposed to be her mentor, and the only one for whom she actually did any work. The client was Amalgamated Paving, a Maryland-based company in the business of building parking lots and roads.

Four years earlier, Amalgamated had been sued by the District of Columbia, which contended that its work on the 14th Street Bridge had been shoddy. Specifically, the pavement had begun to crumble only six months into a projected, ten-year life span. Large and dangerous potholes had opened up, causing accidents and letters to the editor. Litigation was inevitable.

When the District filed suit against Amalgamated, Slough, Hawley countered on behalf of the beleaguered paver by filing a continuum of hopeful motions. Each of these was accompanied by a memorandum of law in which it was argued that the facts did not entitle the plaintiff to relief. That the roadway had crumbled was not at issue; it was a mess. But it was not (necessarily) Amalgamated’s mess. In the considered view of Slough, Hawley the fault rested not with their client, but with the subcontractors and suppliers whose work and materials had been inferior. Or, if that could not be shown, then the fault might be attributed to an Act of God, i.e., to the weather (which everyone agreed had been harsh and bizarre), and/or to an unexpected increase in traffic. Finally, it was suggested that the blame might be ascribed to the salt used by the District’s road crews—an unusually corrosive formula whose impurities ate into the asphalt’s binder and destroyed “the integrity of the road.” That, in short, was the firm’s position: one of the above.

Which is to say, they hoped to settle. But after four years of legal maneuvering, the District’s attorneys had yet to budge—and the judge had had enough. A court date had been assigned. There would be no further delays.

Panic had ensued.

And so it fell to Adrienne to assist the firm’s namesake, Curtis Slough. She’d spent two weeks assembling a document database, spending day and night with a team of paralegals, poring over thousands of documents: memos, reports, correspondence, receipts, and invoices. It was mind-numbing work. Each piece of paper had to be read and categorized, after which it could be stamped with a number and logged in.

Now, they were in the last stages of discovery, and quarreling over which documents should be released to opposing counsel. Some materials were attorney-client work product or proprietary secrets and, as such, privileged from disclosure. But others were not so easily protected, and it was Adrienne’s task to identify those, and then to suggest ways in which problematical documents might yet be withheld.

Using her desktop computer, she typed in the corrections that she’d made in pencil on the rough draft of the memo she was writing. Then she added the references that she’d gleaned from
Lexis
, and read it over. There were typos all over the place. She was used to working on a laptop, and much preferred its keyboard to the clunky device in her office. But fixing the typos was easy with the spell-checker, and when it was done, she saved the file, hit the
Print
button, and sat back. As the memo rolled out, she sat back in the chair and closed her eyes …

So nice … to just …

Her eyes flew open. Yesterday, she’d pulled an all-nighter and, if she didn’t watch out, she’d zonk out, there and then. The night before, she’d been working at home, almost finished with the memo, when her laptop crashed, wiping out hours of work. She’d ended up going to the office at midnight, where she’d finished the memo on her desktop machine. Now, what she really wanted to do was to go home, soak in the tub until the water cooled, and air-dry on her big, soft bed.

But … no. It was the second Tuesday of the month, and after the message Nikki had left on her phone, there was no way she could bag their dinner together.

Sitting up in her chair, she stapled each of the four copies of the memo, and glanced through it one last time, looking for errors. There were three copies for Slough, and one for her file. She hit the speaker button, and tapped the great man’s extension, but of course he was gone, along with the secretaries and just about everybody else. So she put the memos into an interoffice envelope and headed upstairs.

Here, no expense had been spared. The reception area that led into the various offices was calculated to create a very particular impression, one of enormous gravitas and means. At once lavish and understated, the area was carpeted in a taupe material so dense that it dragged at the feet, as if the floor had been dusted with matter from a neutron star. A pair of travertine marble columns upheld a fourteen-foot ceiling from which shafts of indirect lighting tunneled to the floor.
Luminist oils hung from the walls within sight of a reception desk that was itself a work of art, a shimmering walnut crescent whose burnished surface glowed amid the blinking diodes of the telephone console. Here and there, some richly-grained leather chairs, a spectacularly tufted Chesterfield couch, a glass-and-brass coffee table with copies of
Granta
and the
Scientific American
on its surface.

Slough’s suite was locked, of course, so she put the envelope on the reception desk, and went back to her office for her purse. On the way out, she stuck her head in the cubicle across the hall.

“Hey, Bets—I’m outta here.” Bette was a first-year, too, and, like Adrienne immured in work.

With a wince and a moan, Bette got to her feet. “Jesus,” she said, “I’m seizing-up. I’ve got to remind myself to move once an hour.” She paused, and a hopeful look dawned on her. “What d’you say, Scout? Want to go out for sushi? I’m dying in here.”

Adrienne shook her head. “Got a date with my sister. Our once a month bonding session.”

Bette frowned. “How’s she doing, anyway?”

Adrienne shrugged. “Still crazy. Seeing a shrink, two or three times a week—though, if you want to know the truth, I think he’s as much a part of the problem as the solution. Anyway … she wants to talk. Says it’s
importante.”

“
Uhhh-oh
.”

Adrienne smiled ruefully. “Tell me about it.”

Ordinarily, Adrienne walked or used public transportation—as well she might considering that she was almost seventy-grand in the hole to various institutions of higher learning. But tonight, she was so tired, and late, that she looked for a taxi. And, in this, her inexperience showed; it took almost five minutes before her tentative wave was acknowledged as a summons.

The man behind the wheel was an attacking-style driver, and as they rocketed along, Adrienne squeezed her eyes shut
for blocks at a time. Then they were there, and the fare was seven bucks, about twice what she’d expected. For a moment, she was inclined to argue with the Nigerian behind the wheel, but there was no point in that. The zonal system that determined cab fares in the District was inscrutable, and meant to be.

As she entered the building, the doorman recognized her—sort of. “Hey—you’re Nico’s sister, right?”