After dreaming the dream, I knew what I had to do. Under the pretext of working late I stole through the empty offices to Personnel. In the filing cabinet I found his personnel folder. It revealed a deception more vile than I had expected. True, he had not deceived Personnel but he had deceived me and the others in the office who had a right to know about him. After all, sharing deceptions was part of our office mystique. Even I had contributed a deception to the office gossip — a false deception if that’s not a redundancy. I had invented an affair I supposedly had years ago with a married man. I shared this imaginary escapade with everyone so I’d appear more human.
My excitement at the discovery in Paul’s folder left me breathless. I slipped the folder back into the cabinet and sank into the Personnel Director’s chair. If I might resort to a bit of humor, Paul Mason’s case was to be my greatest balancing act.
But excitement, such a fickle sensation, ebbed almost immediately. Whom could I call? His wife? Hardly. She had to know the contents of his folder. My co-workers? Impossible. If I passed Paul’s data along, Sue Nelson, the Personnel Director, would know someone had peeked into the files, and she might remember I had worked late. I could not afford to lose my job. At fifty it’s not easy to get another one.
Then whom to call? I picked up a small flag that stood on Sue’s desk. I twirled it around and around like the pinwheel in my dream. Invoking the power of the dream, I sat back and waited. In minutes I knew whom to call.
But first I had to take a short ride. I drove to Paul’s street. Pretending the car had stalled, I glanced at the house next to his. In the middle of the grille-work on the storm door I read the name Barrett. My excitement returned. I drove home, sailing through yellow lights which I don’t ordinarily do. My hands shook as I picked up the telephone directory. Yes, yes, it was there — Paul’s neighbor’s listing: J. B. Barrett, 45 Dover Drive, 867-4259.
A child answered the phone. “Get your mother,” I ordered. After his mother said hello, I said, “Your next-door neighbor, Paul Mason, is a child molester who spent five years in Rutherford Prison.”
I hung up in the middle of a gasp at the other end.
A week after the phone call I met Paul’s wife. She came into the office to pick up his belongings, the photographs and other things from his desk that were of no value to anyone else. With the usual solicitude of good old Lorna, I helped her put them into a cardboard box. Collecting his office mementos proved to be too much for her. She slumped into his chair and cried, “Why did he have to slash his wrists? Things were going so well for us until the neighbors refused to let their children play with ours. They told their kids Paul was a bad man. And that he was cured.”
I gave her two aspirins and helped her to the elevator. I winced when she smiled through quivering lips to tell me what a good person I was. That night I stayed late at the office, but not to prowl through filing cabinets. I stayed to do some prowling through my mind.
The exultation I usually experienced for weeks after a phone call had disappeared. I realized I had gone too far. Rather than balancing Paul’s accounts, I had placed his liabilities on the first page of the ledger where they had overwhelmed him. That wasn’t good bookkeeping. And the anxiety that I might someday be caught had almost overwhelmed me. I had to stop making those calls.
From the office I called Dr. Kevin Adams, the first psychologist listed in the Phonebook. I hoped he could help me to stop. But on my first visit I detested him and sustained the emotion throughout all my visits. He sat behind a desk, puffing on a pipe, a thirtyish sandy-haired man with a studied poker face that reminded me of Paul Mason.
“Just tell me who you are,” he said on the first visit. “That’s always good for starters.”
“I’m Lorna Tyson,” I answered.
He puffed on his pipe for fifteen minutes, saying nothing. The clock on his desk ticked away my time and my money.
Finally he said, “Just who is Lorna Tyson?”
Unable to decide if he wanted a philosophical discourse on the concept of “person,” or if he simply wanted some background information on me, I sat silently for almost fifteen minutes. I finally settled on: “She’s a bookkeeper.”
“A bookkeeper.” He scribbled some words on a pad before telling me my time was up. I had spent $30.00 for the privilege of telling him my name and occupation.
During the next three sessions I told him about good old Lorna, everybody’s friend and confidante. He nodded once or twice before saying “umph” and telling me my time was up. Seething, I left his office. I was so upset I forgot my gloves. When I went back to get them, I saw Dr. Adams locked in a passionate embrace with his receptionist. I quickly closed the door. The next morning I called the Psychological Association and reported his unprofessional behavior. For the first time since Paul committed suicide, I felt relaxed.
Dr. Adams shattered that good feeling on my next visit.
“Tell me, Lorna,” he said, “about your compulsion to report people’s transgressions.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I stammered.
“Oh, come now, Lorna, let’s not play any more games. We’ve had four sessions together and not once have you indicated what’s bothering you. I saw your gloves on the table in the waiting room and knew you’d come back. I deliberately kissed my receptionist to see what your reaction would be. You called the Psychological Association to report me. That didn’t upset me or the Association. The receptionist is my wife. As a new patient, you wouldn’t have known that.”
Along with some other epithets that I didn’t know spiced my vocabulary, I called him Dr. God.
“You’re quite unprincipled, Dr. God,” I shouted. “You manipulate behind the scenes like some superior being so you can make lesser creatures squirm!”
“Then we’re very much alike, aren’t we, Lorna?” he said.
I was too stunned to answer. I dropped into the leather armchair across from his desk and watched as he emptied the ashes from his pipe into a large ashtray. He was waiting for me to speak. All my defenses had toppled, so I told him about the phone calls to Ellen’s husband and to Harry’s wife. He said nothing, but he knocked his pipe against his desk as if it were a judge’s gavel. On the following visit I told him about my call to Paul’s neighbor. The pipe hit the desk with metronomic frequency.
“Stop that, Dr. God,” I said.
“Stop what?” he asked.
“Stop passing judgment on me with your pipe.”
“Sorry, I didn’t realize what I was doing. You’re quite astute.”
“Quite,” I answered.
When I returned to my office, I doodled the number seven all over a memo pad. The next visit with Dr. God would be my last. I had seen him six times and poured all my deceptions into his gossip-pot. He had a great racket going. He sat on his chair, a dead-pan Father Confessor, consuming all the meat from the patient’s pitiful emotional stew as well as chomping on all the money in the patient’s pitiful wallet, and he offered nothing in return. My bookkeeper’s mind rebelled against the imbalance of it.
On the seventh visit, before I could say a word, he opened with, “Tell me about your dreams.”
I almost slipped off my chair. I had said nothing to him about my dream. Dr. God could read minds!
“How did you know about my dream?” I choked.
“Ah,” he said, “now we’re getting somewhere. I didn’t say, ‘Tell me about your dream!’ I said, ‘Tell me about your dreams.’ You heard the singular of the word, therefore I must conclude you have a recurring dream.”