I Wearily look down at my lap. My slacks are speckled with tears and I make the inane connection that the drops are perfectly round because they fell at a ninety-degree angle. "I can never get away from it," I say in despair under my breath.
"Get away from what?" This has snagged Anna's interest.
"What I do. Everything reminds me of something from my work. I don't talk about it."
"I want you to talk about it now," she tells me.
"It's foolish."
She waits, the patient fisherman, knowing I am nudging the hook. Then I take it. I give Anna examples I find embarrassing, if not ridiculous. I tell her I never drink tomato juice or V8 or Bloody Marys on the rocks because when the ice begins to melt, it looks like coagulating blood separating from serum. I stopped eating liver in medical school, and the idea of considering any sort of organ as something for my palate is impossible. I recall a morning on Hilton Head Island when Benton and I were walking on the beach, and the receding surf had left areas of crinkled gray sand that looked remarkably like the lining of the stomach. My thoughts twist and turn where they will, and a trip to France unfolds for the first time in years. On one of the rare occasions when Benton and I ever really got away from our work, we toured the Grands Vins de Bourgogne and were received by the revered domains of Drouhin and Dugat, and tasted from casks of Chambertin, Montrachet, Musigny and Vosne-Romanee. "I remember being moved in ways I can't say." I share memories I did not know I still had. "The light of early spring changing on the slopes and the gnarled reach of cut-back winter vines, all holding up their hands in the same way, offering the best they have, their essence, to us. And so often we don't touch their character, don't take the time to find the harmony in subtle tones, the symphony fine wines play on your tongue if you let them." My voice drifts off. Anna silently waits for me to come back. "Like my being asked only about my cases," I go on. "Only asked about the horrors I see, when there is so much else to me. I am not some goddamn cheap thrill with a screw cap."
"You feel lonely," Anna softly observes. "And misunderstood. Perhaps as dehumanized as your dead patients."
I do not answer her but continue my analogies, describing when Benton and I traveled by train across France for several weeks, ending in Bordeaux, and the rooftops got redder toward the south. The first touch of spring shimmered an unreal green on trees, and veins of water and the bigger arteries aspired toward the sea, just as all blood vessels in the body begin and end at the heart. "I'm constantly struck by the symmetry in nature, the way creeks and tributaries from the air look like the circulatory system, and rocks remind me of old scattered bones," I say. "And the brain starts out smooth and becomes convoluted and crevassed with time, much as mountains develop distinction over thousands of years. We are subjected to the same laws of physics. Yet we aren't. The brain, for example, doesn't look like what it does. On gross examination, it's about as exciting as a mushroom."
Anna is nodding. She asks if I shared any of these reflections with Benton. I say no. She wants to know why I didn't feel inclined to share what seem like harmless perceptions with him, my lover, and I tell her I need to think about this for a minute. I am not sure of the answer.
"No." She prods me. "Do not think. Feel it."
I ponder.
"No. Feel it, Kay. Feel it." She touches her hand over her heart.
"I have to think. I've gotten where I am in life by thinking," I reply defensively, snapping to, coming out of uncommon space I have just been in. I am back in her living room now and understand everything that has happened to me.
"You have gotten where you are in life by knowing," she says. "And knowing is perceiving. Thinking is how we process what we perceive, and thinking often masks the truth. Why did you not wish to share your more poetic side with Benton?"
"Because I don't really acknowledge that side. It's a useless side. To compare the brain to a mushroom in court would get you nowhere, for example," I reply.
"Ah." Anna nods again. "You make analogies in court all the time. That is why you are such an effective witness. You evoke images so the common person can understand. Why did you not tell Benton the associations you are just now telling me?"
I stop rocking and reposition my broken arm, resting the cast in my lap. I turn away from Anna and look out at the river, feeling suddenly evasive like Buford Righter. Dozens of Canada geese have congregated around an old sycamore tree. They sit in the grass like dark, long-necked gourds, and puff and flap and peck for food. "I don't want to go through that looking glass," I tell her. "It isn't just that I didn't want to tell Benton. I don't want to tell anyone. I don't want to tell it at all. And by not repeating involuntary images and associations, I don't, well, I don't…"
Anna nods again, deeply this time. "By not acknowledging them, you don't invite your imagination into your work," she finishes my thought.
"I have to be clinical, objective. You of all people should understand."
She studies me before replying. "Is it that? Or might it be that you are avoiding the unbearable suffering you most certainly would invite if you allowed your imagination to get involved in your cases?" She leans closer, resting her elbows on her knees, gesturing. "What if, for example"_she pauses dramatically_"you could take the facts of science and medicine and use your imagination to reconstruct in detail the last minutes of Diane Bray's life? What if you could conjure it up like the footage of a film and watch_watch her being attacked, watch her hemorrhage, watch her being bitten and beaten? Watch her die?"
"That would be unspeakably awful," I barely reply.
"How powerful if a jury could see a film like that," she says.
Nervous impulses boil beneath my skin like thousands of minnows.
"But if you went through that looking glass, as you refer to it," she goes on, "then where might it end?" She throws her hands up. "Ah. Maybe it would not end, and you would be forced to watch the footage of Benton's murder."
I shut my eyes. I resist her. No. Please, Lord, don't make me see that. A flash of Benton in the dark, a gun trained on him and the ratcheting sound, the snap of steel as they handcuff him. Taunts. They would taunt him, Mister FBI, you 're so smart, what are we gonna do next. Mister Profiler? Can you read our minds, figure us out, predict? Huh? He wouldn't answer them. He would ask them nothing as they forced him into a small neighborhood grocery store on the western fringes of the University of Pennsylvania that had closed at five in the afternoon. Benton was going to die. They would torment and torture him, and that was the part he would center on_how to short-circuit the pain and degradation he knew they would inflict if they had time. Darkness and the spurt of a match. His face wavering in the light of a small flame that trembles with each stir of air as those two psychopathic assholes move about in the plenum of a shitty little Pakistani grocery store they torched after he was dead.
My eyelids fly open. Anna is talking to me. Cold sweat crawls down my sides like insects. "I'm sorry. What did you say?"
"Very, very painful." Her face melts with compassion. "I cannot imagine."
Benton walks into my mind. He wears his favorite khakis, and his running shoes, Saucony running shoes. Sauconys were the only brand he would wear and I used to call him a fussbudget because he was so particular if he really liked something. And he has on the old UVA sweatshirt Lucy gave him, dark blue with bright orange letters, and over the years it has gotten very faded and soft. He cut off the sleeves because they were too short, and I have always liked how he looks in that old, worn-out sweatshirt, with his silver hair, his clean profile, the mysteries behind his intense, dark eyes. His hands lightly curl around the armrests of his chair. He has the fingers of a pianist, long and slender and expressive when he talks, and always gentle when they touch me, which is less and less with time. I am saying all this out loud to Anna, speaking in the present tense about a man who has been dead for more than a year.