Chase (6 page)

‘Yes, and me.’

Then?’

‘In the tunnels, we found four dead men and parts of men lying in the foyer of the complex. Lieutenant Zacharia ordered a cautious advance. A hundred and fifty yards along, we came across a bamboo grate behind which a number of villagers, mostly women, were stationed.’

‘How many women, Ben?’

‘Maybe twenty.’

‘Children?’

Chase sank down in the heavy padding, his shoulders drawn up as if he wished to hide between them. ‘A few.’

Then?’

‘We tried to open the grate, but the women were holding it shut with a system of ropes. When we ordered them out of the way, they would not move. The lieutenant said it might very well be a trap, designed to contain us at that point until the Cong could somehow get behind us. It was dark. There was a smell in that tunnel I can't explain, made up of sweat and urine and rotting vegetables, as heavy as if it had substance. Lieutenant Zacharia ordered us to open fire and clear the way.’

‘Did you comply?’

‘Yes. Everyone did.’

‘Later, when the tunnel had been demolished, you ran into the ambush which earned you your Medal of Honor.’

‘Yes,’ Chase said.

Cauvel said, ‘You crawled across the field of fire for a distance of nearly two hundred yards and brought back a wounded sergeant named Coombs. You received two minor but painful wounds in the thigh and calf of your right leg, but you did not stop crawling until you had reached shelter, at which point you secured Coombs behind a stand of scrub, and having reached a point on the enemy's flank by means of your heroic crossing of the open field, accounted for eighteen communist soldiers. Your actions, therefore, not only saved Sergeant Coombs’ life but contributed substantially to the well-being of your entire unit.’ He had only slightly paraphrased the wording on the scroll which Chase had received in the mail from the President himself.

Chase said nothing.

‘You see where this heroism came from, Ben?’

‘We've talked about it before. It came from guilt, because I wanted to die, subconsciously wanted to be killed.’

‘Do you believe that analysis, or do you think it's just something I made up to degrade your medal?’

Chase said, ‘I believe it. I never wanted the medal in the first place.’

‘Now,’ Cauvel said, unsteepling his fingers, ‘lets extend that analysis just a bit. Though you hoped to be shot and killed in that ambush, took absurd risks to make it a certainty, the opposite transpired. You became a national hero. When you learned Lieutenant Zacharia had submitted your name for consideration, you suffered a nervous breakdown that hospitalized you and eventually led to your honourable discharge. The breakdown was an attempt to punish yourself, once you'd failed to get yourself killed, but it failed too. Well regarded, honourably discharged, too strong not to recover from the breakdown, you still carried your burden of guilt.’

There was a pause. Chase was silent.

Cauvel continued: ‘Perhaps when you chanced upon that scene in the park on Kanackaway, you recognized another opportunity to punish yourself. You must have realized that there was a strong possibility that you would be hurt or killed, and you must have subconsciously anticipated that agreeably enough.’

‘You're wrong,’ Chase said. ‘It wasn't like that at all. I had thirty pounds on him, and I knew what I was doing. He was an amateur. He had no hope of really hurting me.’

Cauvel said nothing. Several minutes passed until Chase recognized the scene they were acting out and had acted out in a number of other sessions. When he apologized at last, Cauvel smiled at him. ‘Well, you aren't a psychiatrist, so we can't expect you to see into it quite so clearly. You aren't detached from it like I am.’ He cleared his throat, looked back at the blue terrier. He said, ‘Now that we have come this far, why did you solicit this extra session, Ben?’

Once he began, Chase found the telling easy. In ten minutes he had related the events of the previous day and repeated, almost word for word, the conversations he had with Judge.

When he had finished, Cauvel asked, ‘What do you want of me, then?’

‘I want to know how to handle it, some advice. When he calls, it's more than just the threats that upset me. It's - a feeling of detachment from everything, like I was in the hospital.’

‘Another breakdown?’

‘I'm afraid there might be.’

Cauvel said, ‘My advice is to ignore him.’

‘I can't.’

‘You must,’ Cauvel said.

‘What if he's serious? What if he's really going to kill me?’

‘He won't.’

‘How can you be sure?’ Chase was perspiring heavily. Great dark circles stained the underarms of his shirt and plastered it to his back.

Cauvel smiled at the blue terrier, shifted his gaze to a greyhound blown in amber, that smug, self-assured look drifting over his face like a mask. ‘I can be so sure of that, because Judge does not exist.’

For a moment Chase did not understand the reply. When he grasped the import of it, he did not like it. He said, ‘How could I have hallucinated it? The part about the murder and the girl are in the papers.’

‘Oh, that was real enough,’ Cauvel said. ‘But these phone calls are all so much illusion.’

‘It can't be.’

Cauvel ignored that and said, ‘I've noticed for some time that you have begun to shake off this unnatural desire for privacy and that you're facing the world a little bit more squarely on, week by week. You've felt yourself growing curious about the rest of the world, and you've become restless to
do
something. Is that correct?’

‘I don't know,’ Chase said. But he did know, it was correct, and it bothered him that it was so.

‘Perhaps you even felt a renewal of your sexual urge, but perhaps not that much yet. A counter-reaction of guilt set in, because you had not yet been punished for the things that happened in that tunnel, and you didn't want to lead a normal life until you felt you'd suffered enough.’

Chase said nothing. He disliked the tone of smug complacency, of unquestioned self-assurance that Cauvel adopted for moments like this. Right now all he wanted was out of there, to get home and close the door and open the bottle. A new bottle.

Cauvel said, ‘You couldn't accept the fact that you wanted to taste the good things of life again, and you invented Judge because he represented the remaining possibility of punishment. You had to make some excuses for being forced into life again, and Judge worked well in this respect too. You would, sooner or later, have to take the initiative to stop him. You could pretend that you still wanted seclusion in which to mourn but were no longer being permitted that indulgence.’

‘All wrong,’ Chase said, ‘Judge is real.’

‘I think not.’ Cauvel smiled at the amber greyhound and said, ‘If you thought he was real, why not go to the police rather than your psychiatrist?’

Chase had no answer. He said, ‘You're twisting things.’

‘No. Just showing you the straight truth.’ He stood up, stretched, his too-long trousers rising on his unpolished shoes, falling when he finished his yawn. ‘I recommend you go home and forget Judge. You don't need an excuse to live like a normal human being. You
have
suffered enough, Ben, more than enough. For the lives you took, you saved others. Remember that.’

Chase stood, bewildered, no longer perfectly sure that he did know what was real and what was not. Cauvel put his arm around his shoulder and walked him to the door.

‘Friday at three,’ the doctor said. ‘Let's see how far out of your hole you've come by then. I think you're going to make it, Ben. Don't despair.’

Miss Pringle escorted him to the outer door of the waiting room and closed it after him, leaving him alone in the hallway.

‘Judge is real,’ Chase said to no one at all. ‘Isn't he?’

Four

Chase was sitting on the edge of his bed by the nightstand where the telephone stood, sipping at his second glass of Jack Daniel's, when six o'clock rolled around. He put the drink down and wiped his sweaty hands on his slacks, cleared his throat so that his voice would not catch when he tried to speak.

At 6:05 he began to feel uneasy. He thought of going downstairs to ask Mrs Fiedling what time her clocks read, in the event that his own was not functioning properly. He refrained from that only because he was afraid of missing the call if it should come while he was down there.

At 6:15 he picked up his drink again and sipped at it steadily, watching the phone as if it might try to move. His hands were damp again; beads of perspiration had appeared on his forehead.

At 6:30 he went to the cupboard, took down his whisky bottle of the day - which had barely been touched - and poured his third glass. He did not put it away again, but left it out on the waist-high cupboard counter where he could easily reach it. He read the label, which he had studied a hundred times before, then carried his drink back to the bed.

By seven o'clock he was feeling all the liquor in him. Everything had become softened, his movements lethargic. He settled back against the headboard and finally faced the truth: Cauvel had been correct. There was no Judge. Judge had been an illusion, a psychological mechanism for rationalization of his slowly lessening guilt complex. He tried to think about that, to study the meaning of it, but he could not be sure if this was a good or a bad development.

In the bathroom, he drew a tub of warm water and tested it with his hand until it was just right. He folded a damp washcloth over the wide porcelain rim of the tub and placed his drink on that, stripped, stepped into the tub and settled down until, seated, the water came partway up his chest. It was very nice, comforting. The whisky and the water and the steam rising around him had all conspired to make him feel as if he were floating, falling
up
into a stream of soft clouds. He leaned back until his head touched the wall, closed his eyes and tried not to think about anything -especially about Judge and the Medal of Honor and the nine months he had spent on active duty in Nam.

Unfortunately, he began to think of Louise Allenby, the girl whose life he had saved, and his mind was filled with a vision of her small, trembling, bare breasts which had looked so inviting in the weak light of the car in lover's lane. The thought, though pleasant enough, was unfortunate because it contributed to his first erection in nearly a year. That development, while desirable, was both startling and familiar enough to make him recall all the barren months when he had harboured no desire. It also brought back the reasons for his previous inability to function as a man, and those reasons were still so huge and formidable that he could not face them alone. The erection was short-lived, and when it was gone altogether, he could not be certain if it indicated an end to his psychological impotency or whether it had stemmed only from the warm water, a reaction of dumb nerves rather than sensitive emotions.

He only got out of the water when there was no more whisky in his glass, and he was drying himself when the telephone rang.

The electric clock read 8:00.

Naked, he sat down and picked up the phone.

‘Sorry I'm late,’ Judge said.

Dr Cauvel had been wrong.

‘I thought you weren't going to call,’ Chase said.

‘Would I let you down?’ Judge asked, mock hurt in his tone. ‘It was just that I required a little more time to locate some information on you.’

‘What information?’

Judge ignored the question, intent on proceeding in his own fashion. ‘So you see a psychiatrist once a week, do you? That alone is fairly good proof that the accusation I made yesterday is true - that your disability pension is for mental injuries, not physical ones.’

Chase wished that he had a drink with him, but he could not ask Judge to hold on while he poured himself one. For some reason he could not explain, he did not want Judge to know that he drank heavily.

Chase said, ‘How did you find out?’

‘Followed you this afternoon,’ Judge said.

‘You don't have the right to -’

Judge laughed. He said, ‘I saw you going into the Kaine Building, and I got into the lobby fast enough to see what elevator you took and which floor you got off at. On the eighth floor, besides Dr Cauvel's offices, there are two dentists, three insurance companies and a tax collection office. It was simple enough to look in the waiting rooms of those other places or to inquire after you, like a friend, with the secretaries and receptionists. I left the head doctor's place for last, because I just
knew
that's where you were. When no one knew of you in the other offices, I didn't even have to risk looking in Cauvel's waiting room. I knew.’

Chase said, ‘So what?’

He hoped that he sounded more nonchalant than he felt, for it was somehow important to make the right impression on Judge. He was sweating again. He would need to take another bath by the time this conversation was concluded. And he would need a drink, a cold drink.

‘Let me tell you why I was late calling,’ Judge said.

‘Go on.’

‘As soon as I knew for sure you were in the psychiatrist's office, I was aware of the necessity to obtain copies of his personal files on you. I decided to remain in the building, out of sight, until all the offices were closed and the employees had gone home.’

‘I don't believe you,’ Chase said, aware of what was coming, dreading to hear it.

‘You don't
want
to believe me, but you do. Now let me explain how it was.’ Judge took a long, slow breath before he continued: ‘The eighth floor was clear by six o'clock. By six-thirty I managed to get the door open into Dr Cauvel's suite. I know a little about such things, and I was careful; I did not damage the lock, and I didn't trip any alarms because there were none. I required an additional half an hour to locate his files and to secure your records, which I copied on his own photocopier.’

‘Breaking and entering - then theft,’ Chase said.

‘But it hardly matters on top of what the authorities would consider murder, does it?’

Chase had no reply.