Lois served cognac, asked questions. The doctor lectured, told instructive anecdotes of cases he had been associated with — the patients referred to as “X” or “Y”—fascinating stories of fetishes, obsessive attachments, paranoia, dementia, divided personalities. Peter listened with horror; each aberration the doctor described seemed to him in some way an extension of one of his own. Peter wanted to declare a truce, but since the war itself was undeclared, to ask for a truce would be an act of aggression. And wasn’t it — the doctor merely telling stories — coincidence (madness?) that Peter saw what he saw? When he glanced at her, Lois smiled at him warmly, a lover’s smile. He had the sense, without knowing why, of being trapped between the two of them.
The last of the stories, an especially interesting case to the doctor, seemed to Peter, even more than the others, an attempt on Patton’s part to expose him. The doctor told about a man, a patient of a friend of his, who was obsessed with the notion of retaining the past exactly as it was. The man (Mr. Y, he was called), woke one morning of his life in terror of losing his memory, unable at the moment of waking to remember the details of some incident in his adolescence.
“Mr. Y had the feeling,” the doctor said, “that in losing the past — even this very minor incident he was trying to recall — he was losing himself, the very structure of his life, his identity as an adult human being. You can imagine what a nightmare this was to him.” The doctor puffed thoughtfully on his pipe, sucking in the vapor of truth, giving it back to the air again, wiser, filtered. “This is not as uncommon as it sounds. It was the extent to which Y carried it that made it a disorder.” The doctor paused, looked around benignly at his audience to see if there were any questions.
“How far did he carry it?” Lois asked dutifully.
“Not very far at first,” the doctor said. “At first it was just a matter of writing everything down in a journal so as not to lose contact with his experiences. Every detail of his day, even the most casual of conversations, was put into the journal. He would even chronicle the times he went to the bathroom. Sometimes, I understand, he would write in his journal about what it was like to write in his journal.” The doctor refit his pipe, looked around.
Lois laughed belatedly. “That’s really very funny.”
The doctor puffed on his pipe a few times, nodded solemnly. “This satisfied Y for a while,” he said, “but then he got to feeling that writing this one journal wasn’t enough. It left too much of his life — his childhood, his relationship with his parents, his early encounters with sex — unaccounted for. It was at this time he began, on top of his regular journal, to keep a journal of the past.”
“How old was this man, Oscar?” Lois asked.
The doctor concentrated, took sustenance from his pipe. “I believe the man was forty-eight when he went into analysis,” he said, nodding to confirm his judgment. “His obsession with the past had been active, in varying degrees of intensity, for something like fifteen years before that. The pressure of maintaining the past with flawless accuracy — Y was a bug about accuracy — finally became too much for him and he sought help as a matter of survival. At that point, I understand, he had written something like fifteen volumes of notes about his own life. Think of it. Fifteen volumes, over two hundred pages each. And he was constantly revising them. In the interest of accuracy he went around interviewing people who had shared experiences with him; he would call strangers up in the middle of the night and quiz them about a detail of an incident that might or might not have taken place twenty years before. In his journal he would sometimes have three or four versions of the same incident and then attempt to synthesize them in some scientific way to get at the truth. But of course, poor Y could never be sure he had it absolutely right, and as you can imagine, that frustrated the hell out of him. When things got too much for him to do alone, he hired a foundation to help him with his research. Fortunately for him, Y was a fairly wealthy man and had been able through most of this period to keep a profitable business running. He was a man of enormous energy.” The doctor glanced at Peter, who obligingly squirmed in his seat, his pants sticking to him.
“Peter,” the doctor said, pinning him with a smile, “it was only when Y began to invest all his energy into the reconstruction of the past that he finally collapsed, as much from exhaustion as anything else. In many ways he was an extraordinary man. What he wanted — that is, what he believed he wanted — was a kind of total knowledge insofar as his own life was concerned. Impossible, but you couldn’t tell him. The analyst had great difficulty reaching him. At their second meeting, Y accused the doctor of advocating imperfection. Of advocating imperfection.” He laughed. “Can you imagine that?”
Peter nodded.
“That’s very interesting,” Lois said, muffling a yawn. “Did you cure the man, Oscar?”
Patton looked at his watch. “I’d completely lost track of the time,” he said. “This man’s under treatment with another doctor, Lois. He’s been making progress, I understand, but a cure — what I think you mean by a cure — is out of the question.”
“Why is it out of the question?” Peter asked. He discovered that his right leg was asleep and he was gradually working it back into circulation.
“It just is,” Patton said, smiling patiently. “You can’t uproot the habit of a lifetime in a few years of analysis. At best, Y will learn to compromise a little with the demands he’s made on himself.” He tapped out his pipe in an ashtray. “I think we’d better go,” he said to Peter, winking, returning the pipe absently to his mouth. “Lois is tired and she’s been having some trouble sleeping, she says.”
“I’m not a baby, Oscar,” Lois said.
“Nobody said you’re a baby,” the doctor said, “but you have a tendency to get run-down, as you know.”
“I’ve never been healthier in my life,” she said. “I’m old enough to take care of myself.”
The phone rang. Lois looked anxiously at Peter, as if appealing to him to stop the sound of the phone before it reached Patton’s ears. “Who can it be?” she said.
Patton stood at attention. “The only way to find out is to answer it,” he said with a father’s amused tolerance, his smile like a bruise on an overripe peach.
Peter pulled himself to his feet. Lois backed out of the room, taking a last look, waving, as though she were going away for a year or two on a cruise.
“Well,” Patton said, glancing at his watch. With Lois gone, the two of them were like otters out of water. “It’s getting late.” What else was there to say? They waited, each second an hour, for Lois to return. The murmur of her voice carried through the closed door of the kitchen, but it was difficult, without actually eavesdropping, to get anything but an occasional word of what she was saying.
“Is she what you expected?” Patton said.
“What?” Peter held the question — not quite sure he had heard it right — at arm’s length, nodded. Patton, red-faced, breathing liquor, a breath away from him. “Look, Dr. Patton …” he said.
“Oscar,” Patton corrected him.
“Oscar, that man you were telling us about, the one who kept all those notebooks, did that have something to do with me?” It came out — Peter bleary with too much food and drink, memories, the exhaustion of being unable to remember — not quite the way he meant it. He meant — what?
Patton had the grace not to laugh at him. He smiled close-mouthed. “That’s interesting,” he said. “You felt that the story, which was an actual case — I didn’t make it up — had something to do with you?”