Stephen King's N. (2 page)

What about knives, I ask, and he shakes his head at once.

“Never knives. Not in the dishwasher.”

When I ask why not, he says he doesn’t know. Then, after a pause, he gives me a guilty sideways look. “I always wash the knives by hand, in the sink.”

Knives in the silverware caddy would disturb the order of the world, I suggest.

“No!” he exclaims. “You understand, Dr. Bonsaint, but you don’t understand completely.”

Then you have to help me, I say.

“The order of the world is already disturbed. I disturbed it last summer, when I went to Ackerman’s Field. Only I didn’t understand. Not then.”

But you do now? I ask.

“Yes. Not everything, but enough.”

I ask him if he is trying to fix things or only trying to keep the situation from getting worse.

A look of unutterable relief fills his face, relaxing all the muscles there. Something that has been crying out for articulation has finally been spoken aloud. These are the moments I live for. It’s not a cure, far from it, but for the time being N. has gotten some relief. I doubt if he expected it. Most patients do not.

“I can’t fix it,” he whispers. “But I can keep things from getting worse. Yes. I have been.”

Again I have come to one of those branching points. I could ask him what happened last summer—last August, I presume—in Ackerman’s Field, but it is probably still too early. Better to loosen the roots of this infected tooth a little more first. And I really doubt that the source of the infection can be so recent. More likely, whatever happened to him last summer was only a kind of firing pin.

I ask him to tell me about his other symptoms.

He laughs. “That would take all day, and we only have…” He glances at his wrist. “…twenty-two minutes left. Twenty-two is a good number, by the way.”

Because it’s even? I ask.

His nod suggests I am wasting time with the obvious.

“My…my symptoms, as you call them…come in clusters.” Now he’s looking up at the ceiling. “There are three of these clusters. They poke out of me…the sane part of me…like rocks…rocks, you know…oh God, dear God…like the fucking rocks in that fucking field…”

Tears are coursing down his cheeks. At first he doesn’t seem to notice, only lies on the couch with his fingers laced together, looking up at the ceiling. But then he reaches for the table beside him, where sits what Sandy, my receptionist, calls The Eternal Box of Kleenex. He takes two, wipes his cheeks, then crumples the tissue. It disappears into the lace of his fingers.

“There are three clusters,” he resumes, speaking in a voice that isn’t quite steady. “Counting is the first. It’s important, but not so important as touching. There are certain things I need to touch. Stove-burners, for instance. Before leaving the house in the morning or going to bed at night. I might be able to see they’re off—all the dials pointing straight up, all the burners dark—but I still have to touch them to be absolutely sure. And the front of the oven door, of course. Then I started touching the light switches before leaving the house or the office. Just a quick double-tap. Before I get into my car, I have to tap four times on the roof. And six times when I get to where I’m going. Four’s a good number, and six is an okay number, but ten…ten is like…” I can see one tear-track he’s missed, running a zigzag course from the corner of his right eye to the lobe of his ear.

Like going steady with the girl of your dreams? I suggest.

He smiles. He has a lovely, weary smile—a smile that’s finding it increasingly hard to get up in the morning.

“That’s right,” he says. “And she’s got her sneaker laces tied at the bottom so everyone knows it.”

You touch other things? I ask, knowing the answer to this. I have seen many cases like N. during the five years I’ve been in practice. I sometimes picture these unfortunates as men and women being pecked to death by predatory birds. The birds are invisible—at least until a psychiatrist who is good, or lucky, or both, sprays them with his version of Luminol and shines the right light on them—but they are nevertheless very real. The wonder is that so many OCDs manage to live productive lives, just the same. They work, they eat (often not enough or too much, it’s true), they go to movies, they make love to their girlfriends and boyfriends, their wives and husbands…and all the time those birds are there, clinging to them and pecking away little bits of flesh.

“I touch many things,” he says, and again favors the ceiling with his weary, charming smile. “You name it, I touch it.”

So counting is important, I say, but touching is more important. What is above touching?

“Placing,” he says, and suddenly begins to shiver all over, like a dog that’s been left out in a cold rain. “Oh God.”

He suddenly sits up and swings his legs over the edge of the couch. On the table beside him there is a vase of flowers in addition to The Eternal Box of Kleenex. Moving very quickly, he shifts the box and the vase so they are diagonal to each other. Then he takes two of the tulips from the vase and lays them stem to stem so that one blossom touches the Kleenex box and the other the vase.

“That makes it safe,” he says. He hesitates, then nods as if he’s confirmed in his mind that what he’s thinking is the right thing. “It preserves the world.” He hesitates again. “For now.”

I glance down at my watch. Time is up, and we’ve done quite enough for one day.

“Next week,” I say. “Same bat-time, same bat-station.” Sometimes I turn this little joke into a question, but not with N. He needs to come back, and knows it.

“No magical cure, huh?” he asks. This time the smile is almost too sad to look at.

I tell him that he may feel better. (This sort of positive suggestion never hurts, as all psychiatrists know.) Then I tell him to throw away his Ambien and “the green moth pills”—Lunesta, I assume. If they don’t work at night, all they can do is cause trouble for him during his waking hours. Falling asleep on the 295 Connector won’t solve any of his problems.

“No,” he says. “I suppose not. Doc, we never discussed the root cause. I know what it is—”

Next week we may get to that, I tell him. In the meantime, I want him to keep a chart divided into three sections: counting, touching, and placing. Will he do that?

“Yes,” he says.

I ask him, almost casually, if he feels suicidal.

“The thought has crossed my mind, but I have a great deal to do.”

This is an interesting and rather troubling response.

I give him my card and tell him to call—day or night—if the idea of suicide begins to seem more attractive. He says he will. But then, almost all of them promise.

“In the meantime,” I say at the door, putting my hand on his shoulder, “keep going steady with life.”

He looks at me, pale and not smiling now, a man being pecked to pieces by invisible birds. “Have you ever read ‘The Great God Pan,’ by Arthur Machen?”

I shake my head.

“It’s the most terrifying story ever written,” he says. “In it, one of the characters says ‘lust always prevails.’ But lust isn’t what he means. What he means is compulsion.”

Paxil? Perhaps Prozac. But neither until I get a better fix on this interesting patient.

June 7, 2007

June 14, 2007

June 28, 2007

N. brings his “homework” to our next session, as I fully expected he would. There are many things in this world you can’t depend on, and many people you can’t trust, but OCDs, unless they are dying, almost always complete their tasks.

In a way his charts are comical; in another way, sad; in another, frankly horrible. He is an accountant, after all, and I assume he’s used one of his accounting programs to create the contents of the folder he hands me before proceeding to the couch. They are spreadsheets. Only instead of investments and income-flow, these charts detail the complex terrain of N.’s obsessions. The top two sheets are headed COUNTING; the next two TOUCHING; the final six PLACING. Thumbing through them, I’m hard put to understand how he finds time for any other activities. Yet OCDs almost always find a way. The idea of invisible birds recurs to me; I see them roosting all over N., pecking away his flesh in bloody nibbles.

When I look up, he’s on the couch, once more with his hands laced together tightly on his chest. And he’s rearranged the vase and the tissue-box so they are again connected on a diagonal. The flowers are white lilies today. Seeing them that way, laid out on the table, makes me think of funerals.

“Please don’t ask me to put them back,” he says, apologetic but firm. “I’ll leave before I do that.”

I tell him I have no intention of asking him to put them back. I hold up the spreadsheets and compliment him on how professional they look. He shrugs. I then ask him if they represent an overview or if they only cover the last week.

“Just the last week,” he says. As if the matter is of no interest to him. I suppose it is not. A man being pecked to death by birds can have little interest in last year’s insults and injuries, or even last week’s; he’s got today on his mind. And, God help him, the future.

“There must be two or three thousand items here,” I say.

“Call them events. That’s what I call them. There are six hundred and four counting events, eight hundred and seventy-eight touching events, and twenty-two hundred and forty-six placing events. All even numbers, you’ll notice. They add up to thirty-seven hundred and twenty-eight, also an even number. If you add the individual numbers in that total—3728—you come out with twenty, also even. A good number.” He nods, as if confirming this to himself. “Divide 3728 by two and you come out with eighteen-hundred and sixty-four. 1864 adds up to nineteen, a powerful odd number. Powerful and bad.” He actually shivers a little.

“You must be very tired,” I say.

To this he makes no verbal reply, nor does he nod, but he answers, all the same. Tears trickle down his cheeks toward his ears. I am reluctant to add to his burden, but I recognize one fact: if we don’t begin this work soon—“no ditzing around,” as Sister Sheila would say—he won’t be capable of the work at all. I can already see a deterioration in his appearance (wrinkled shirt, indifferent shave, hair badly in need of a trim), and if I asked his colleagues about him, I would almost surely see those quick exchanged glances that tell so much. The spreadsheets are amazing in their way, but N. is clearly running out of strength. It seems to me that there is no choice but to fly directly to the heart of the matter, and until that heart is reached, there will be no Paxil or Prozac or anything else.

I ask if he is ready to tell me what happened last August.

“Yes,” he says. “It’s what I came to do.” He takes some tissues from the Eternal Box and wipes his cheeks. Wearily. “But Doc…are you sure?”

I have never had a patient ask me that, or speak to me in quite that tone of reluctant sympathy. But I tell him yes, I’m sure. My job is to help him, but in order for me to do that, he must be willing to help himself.

“Even if it puts you at risk of winding up like I am now? Because it could happen. I’m lost, but I think—I hope—that I haven’t gotten to the drowning-man state, so panicky I’d be willing to pull down anyone who was trying to save me.”

I tell him I don’t quite understand.

“I’m here because all this may be in my head,” he says, and knocks his knuckles against his temple, as if he wants to make sure I know where his head is at. “But it might not be. I can’t really tell. That’s what I mean when I say I’m lost. And if it’s not mental—if what I saw and sensed in Ackerman’s Field is real—then I’m carrying a kind of infection. Which I could pass on to you.”

Ackerman’s Field. I make a note of it, although everything will be on the tapes. When we were children, my sister and I went to Ackerman School, in the little town of Harlow, on the banks of the Androscoggin. Which is not far from here; thirty miles at most.

I tell him I’ll take my chances, and say that in the end—more positive reinforcement—I’m sure we’ll both be fine.

He utters a hollow, lonely laugh. “Wouldn’t that be nice,” he says.

“Tell me about Ackerman’s Field.”

He sighs and says, “It’s in Motton. On the east side of the Androscoggin.”

Motton. One town over from Chester’s Mill. Our mother used to buy milk and eggs at Boy Hill Farm in Motton. N. is talking about a place that cannot be more than seven miles from the farmhouse where I grew up. I almost say, I knew it!

I don’t, but he looks over at me sharply, almost as if he caught my thought. Perhaps he did. I don’t believe in ESP, but I don’t entirely discount it, either.

“Don’t ever go there, Doc,” he says. “Don’t even look for it. Promise me.”

I give my promise. In fact, I haven’t been back to that broken-down part of Maine in over fifteen years. It’s close in miles, distant in desire. Thomas Wolfe made a characteristically sweeping statement when he titled his magnum opus You Can’t Go Home Again; it’s not true for everyone (Sister Sheila often goes back; she’s still close to several of her childhood friends), but it’s true for me. Although I suppose I’d title my own book I Won’t Go Home Again. What I remember are bullies with harelips dominating the playground, empty houses with staring glassless windows, junked-out cars, and skies that always seemed white and cold and full of fleeing crows.

“All right,” N. says, and bares his teeth for a moment at the ceiling. Not in aggression; it is, I’m quite sure, the expression of a man preparing to do a piece of heavy lifting that will leave him aching the next day. “I don’t know if I can express it very well, but I’ll do my best. The important thing to remember is that up til that day in August, the closest thing to OCD behavior I exhibited was popping back into the bathroom before going to work to make sure I’d gotten all the nose hairs.”

Maybe this is true; more likely it isn’t. I don’t pursue the subject. Instead, I ask him to tell me what happened that day. And he does.

For the next three sessions, he does. At the second of those sessions—June 15th—he brings me a calendar. It is, as the saying goes, Exhibit A.

3. N.’s Story

I’m an accountant by trade, a photographer by inclination. After my divorce—and the children growing up, which is a divorce of a different kind, and almost as painful—I spent most of my weekends rambling around, taking landscape shots with my Nikon. It’s a film camera, not a digital. Toward the end of every year, I took the twelve best pix and turned them into a calendar. I had them printed at a little place in Freeport called The Windhover Press. It’s pricey, but they do good work. I gave the calendars to my friends and business associates for Christmas. A few clients, too, but not many—clients who bill five or six figures usually appreciate something that’s silver-plated. Myself, I prefer a good landscape photo every time. I have no pictures of Ackerman’s Field. I took some, but they never came out. Later on I borrowed a digital camera. Not only did the pictures not come out, I fried the camera’s insides. I had to buy a new one for the guy I borrowed it from. Which was all right. By then I think I would have destroyed any pictures I took of that place, anyway. If it allowed me, that is.