I remained silent, thinking.
“Your brain,” she continued, “understands now that the world isn’t as safe as you thought it was. So, it says, I have to train. Practice. When you dream, it’s actually practicing the skills necessary to get you out of those situations. So that if they ever happen again, it can react automatically.”
“You think so?”
“I do. I’m just surprised your therapist hasn’t brought this up with you. Any psych undergrad knows these things. Please tell me you’re not going to walk around thinking you were attacked by a couple of Jewish fairy tales; I don’t want to have you committed.”
I laid back down and covered my face with my hands. I wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight.
“You know what I’m starting to think?” She asked, laying back down.
“What’s that?”
“Maybe this Dr. Koenig isn’t such a great therapist after all.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m starting to wonder that myself.”
19.
I had come to doubt Dr. Koenig’s effectiveness as a therapist. But I kept my next appointment.
“I really dig this time of year,” I told him. “You can’t go to the beach or anything, but I think I like it even more than summertime.”
Thanksgiving had yet to arrive—the turkeys had begun stuffing the freezers at every grocery store, but no one had bought one. Although it was still only mid-November, the air had turned cold this morning with an abrupt snap that I almost heard as I lay awake staring at the ceiling, eyes bleary from too little sleep. Sleep deprivation notwithstanding—along with the very real possibility that a supernatural being with the ability to create bat and knife-wielding golems was after me—I felt a familiar tickle of enthusiasm and pleasure at the apple cider chill I smelled when I first stepped outside.
“Why’s that?” Dr. Koenig asked, sitting down in his leather chair and removing pad and pen from his Italian leather briefcase.
The cover of Southern Rifleman was coming loose—I’d need to tape it up when I left here so that it didn’t disintegrate. I had developed a habit of slipping a hand into my own briefcase and fondling it as I waited in court or talked on the phone or completed any number of other tasks that comprised my day. I gently laid it on the coffee table that had no business in an atmosphere of sophistication and luxury—and laced my fingers between my knees.
“Allie and I started dating in September of 1994,” I said, “pretty close to the beginning of our freshman year. But it took a few weeks for her to really fall for me the way I fell for her, so I spent all of September and most of October staring at the underside of my roommate’s bunk and wondering how long it was going to be before she dropped me.”
“I thought it was love at first sight.”
I straightened up. “For me, yeah. Of course. But for the first couple of weeks, it was kind of touch-and-go on my end. I didn’t know what I was doing—I’d never had a girlfriend before. So I felt pretty sure I’d screw it up. Throughout September and into October, anyway.”
“What happened in October?”
“She just warmed up to me,” I said. “Suddenly it wasn’t just me calling her anymore, or me sending her letters to her campus mail box or me coming up with things for us to do together. She started to… participate. And that happened about this time of year.”
I looked out the picture window at the bare dogwood trees flanking the bench. I stretched. Dr. Koenig stared down at his notepad, decorated with scribblings from our last session.
“Speaking of Allie,” he said.
I tensed.
“Where is she?”
I sighed. “She didn’t want to come.”
“Why not?”
“Burlington Women’s Club is serving dinner to the homeless at Loaves and Fishes tonight. She’s helping set up. You know, peel potatoes, boil potatoes, boil pasta. Chop up cabbage. I asked her to come meet with you and she said she’s too busy. She asked me to help her feed the homeless and I said I’m too busy. Guess we’re even.”
Bullshit. Allie would indeed help out at Loaves and Fishes this evening, but not until four this afternoon. I simply hadn’t asked her. The idea of seeing her in here with Dr. Koenig bothered me, and it wasn’t just a reluctance to show her too much of my vulnerability. Things, I had realized, were getting worse for me, not better. I didn’t want him getting under her hood, too; he hadn’t helped me worth a dime.
Yet here you are, Bobby observed.
Because I’m a narcissistic prick, I replied, and all we do in here is talk about me.
“I find your fixation on getting my wife in here a little misplaced,” I said. “There’s a lot going on with me that I think we need to focus on. Especially now.”
“Such as?”
“Pinnix and Ramseur. And that guy I whacked the other day, the one who tried to mug me.”
“Yes. When you suddenly transformed into Kevin the Ninja Lawyer.”
“Right. Notice I don’t know his name.”
Dr. Koenig nodded once.
“I don’t know his name because the police don’t know his name. No record, nobody recognizes the guy. I can understand that, now, but you know what else? Nobody knows who Pinnix and Ramseur are, either. We’ve got these names for them, but nobody in the police department could tell Craig exactly how they figured out those names. Because the only ID either one of them carried were membership cards to some adult video store in Durham. And those cards have only numbers, no names.”
I leaned forward.
“So help me out here, Doc. How did the cops ID them? Where did those names come from?”
“Fingerprints. The state’s DNA database.”
“Negative and double-negative,” I said, shaking my head. “No entries for either man on either the fingerprint or DNA database. These guys busted into my house, tried to kill me, had it in their heads to rape my family, but they’d never been arrested. They’d never set foot in a jail or anywhere else they could have been fingerprinted. Isn’t that strange?”
“It is,” he agreed. His face remained impassive, unintrigued. I wondered if he, too, might be a golem.
“So I’ve got this crazy idea,” I said.
I licked my lips. This was harder than it sounds, with my tongue all dry and tacky.
“You ever heard of a golem?”
He blinked at me.
“I have.” His gaze felt, his voice sounded, as flat as old Coke.
I took a deep breath.
“This is just an idea, now,” I said, “just me thinking out loud. But what if… what if these guys were sent?”
“Sent by who? By someone out to get you?”
“Yes.”
“Who would that be?”
“I don’t know, but he calls himself the Bald Man.”
He looked down at the paper, scribbled. His lips pursed, and his goatee twitched. I noticed that his beard stubble continued only to a point on his cheeks where it suddenly disappeared, giving way there to older but smooth-shaven skin. He had shaved his beard stubble to accentuate the angles of his face, making him look thinner than he perhaps was. Even kale-eating psychotherapists, I observed, aren’t above a touch of baloney.
“Why would the Bald Man be out to get you? Why would anyone want to send golems after you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I thought of Angela then, her catatonic voice, her stumbling walk. “Why do bad things happen to anybody? How does God pick the ones who make the rest of us feel lucky and flock to Him for protection? Can’t say I understand how that works. Just that I’m blessed.”