“The ice is broken,” he said. “The best thing for a few days now will just be to give the truth, the real memories, a chance, so to speak.”
“Tomorrow,” I repeated.
“I don’t want to push hard again that soon.”
“Doctor, I have to know.”
He sighed.
“All right,” he relented. “In the morning. See the receptionist. She’ll fit you in.”
I looked at Cora.
“I suppose I ought to go to the police,” I told her.
Daggett made a noise. I couldn’t tell whether it was a snort or a chuckle.
“I am not saying that you should or shouldn’t,” he said slowly. “I would suggest, though, that if you can’t tell the police any more than you know now, about all they’ll be able to do is recommend you see a doctor.”
The Catch-22edness was not wasted. The receptionist, who must have been used to every variety of emotion among the clientele, batted not an eyelash at my expression’s inconsistency with lingering giggles. She fixed me up with the appointment and nodded me out. Exit pursued by clownsuited Furies tripping over one another’s heels.
It was several blocks before the reaction set in.
“I’m scared, Don,” Cora said.
She was driving. I was slouching and conjuring demons to wrestle with. They ignored me.
“I am, too.”
And it was true, so far as it went. There was more, though. It was apparent from her manner that she was more frightened than I was. My deepest feeling was one I had not known for so long that now its touch was almost unfamiliar: I was beginning to get angry.
Angels? I was dead and in heaven, maybe? No. The musical tones were not really harp-like, and departed spirits shouldn’t have the sour aftertaste of a six-pack in their mouths. I moaned and followed the notes back to the land of the living and the phone which was chiming. I had forgotten to switch the thing to Record before I’d gone to sleep, back when the demons might finally have stopped by. If they had, the final score was something like Demons Six, BelPatri Nothing. The clock flashed 8:32 and counting. I answered the phone.
The voice was sort of familiar. Yes. Daggett’s receptionist Something wrong about the way she sounded, though.
“…We have to cancel your appointment,” she was saying. “…Dr. Daggett passed away during the night.”
“He what?”
“Dr. Daggett passed away. We… I found him in the office this morning when I came in. He’d had a heart attack.”
“Sudden.”
“Very sudden. He’d no history of heart trouble.”
“He was working late, then?”
“Going over some patients’ records. Listening to recordings…”
There was little more that she could tell me. Of course I wondered whether the recordings he had been listening to when he died had been mine.
I got up and washed up and dressed and brought back some coffee from the bathroom unit. Cora accepted hers gratefully and gave me a questioning look over the cup’s rim. I told her what I had just learned.
She was silent for several heartbeats, then, “This thing is full of bad vibes,” she said. “What—How—Hell! Do we start again with another doctor, or should we try to see his file on you?”
I shook my head.
“We won’t get anything out of that office today,” I told her, “and another doctor would just repeat what Daggett did yesterday—which seems kind of redundant. He’d said that things should start coming back to me now. I’d rather wait awhile and see. I think that he was right. I do feel different, as if something might be rearranging itself, clearing up, somewhere in my head.”
“But—damn it!—we were so close—to something! This is almost too coincidental. Perhaps we ought to call the police. Let’s tell them what he said and see if—”
“Hearsay and speculation,” I said, “and from a psychiatric patient, at that. And even if they listened more than politely, there’s really nothing to go on. A heart attack’s a heart attack. He wasn’t done in with a blunt instrument, or anything like that. We have nothing for the police. They have nothing for us.”
She took a drink of coffee, set her cup on the bedside table.
“Well, what do you want to do?” she said then.
“Head down for the condo in Key West,” I answered. “The bank should be getting in my next payment the day after tomorrow. We can just relax and wait for the therapy to take its course.”
“Relax?” she said, swinging her feet over the side of the bed and sitting up. “How can we relax now, knowing as much as we’ve learned?”
’What else can we do?”
“We can wait for things at his office to settle and then try to see Daggett’s records on you. He might have recorded more than he told us.”
“We can check that out by telephone in a day or so, from my place. Get dressed and let’s go get some breakfast—unless you’d rather eat here. Then we can get our stuff together and check out.”
“No,” she said, brushing her hair back with a forceful gesture. “I mean, yes to the breakfast—and no to the checking out.”
“Well, get ready then,” I said, turning away. “We can discuss the rest while we eat.”
We wound up with a compromise. We would hang around for the rest of the day and stay over that night. We would try to get at my records that afternoon. If nothing came of it, we would be on our way in the morning.
Nothing came of it.
That is to say, Daggett’s office was closed. The answering service could not or would not reach his family. I could not get hold of his receptionist. We finally got in touch with his nurse. She told me that there was no way I could get what I wanted right away. Psychiatrists’ records, because of their sensitive nature, were sealed at the time of the physician’s death, until a patient’s new doctor requested them or a judge issued an order for their release. She was sorry, but—
Nothing came of it, on that front. However…
“Let’s get a court order,” Cora said.
“No,” I replied. “I don’t want to bring any more people into this than necessary. I kept my promise. We waited. We tried. Tomorrow we check out.”
“Without learning?”
“It’ll come back. I know it will. I can feel it now.”
“You felt Baghdad pretty strongly, too.”
“That was different.”
“Oh?”
It was a rough evening. To top it off, the demons came back for another round, bearing armloads of nightmares. Mercifully, most of them faded in morning’s light, save for the final war-dance of horrors around the Angra Energy pump while the earth opened before me as a fat man minced a gigantic holo of my brain with a blazing axe. All the little things that make sleep an adventure.
Cora was not overjoyed at our departure, but I’d kept my part of the bargain and she would not give me one up on her. A light rainfall pursued us much of the way as we drove on down. Pathetic fallacy. We were neither of us in good humor by the time we got there.
Once we were settled in at my place she started talking lawyers again. Didn’t I have a local attorney I trusted, one who could pursue matters from here?
“No,” I lied, because I was sure that Ralph Button, who I sometimes ran into, would handle it for me.
I simply did not want to go that route and I was sick of hearing about it. She wouldn’t let it rest, though. I felt that anger again, this time turning toward her, and I didn’t want it to come out. I told her that I did not care to talk about it any more, that I was getting another headache and that I wanted to be alone till it went away. I excused myself then to take a walk.
I wound up at a bar where I sometimes had a few. It was near Ernest Hemingway’s old house. Did Hemingway really steal a urinal from another bar, I wondered, rip it out and take it home with him to make into a watering trough for his cats?