John Katzenbach - The Analyst

But he didn’t really have time to consider this.

He could get to the Cape. And get back, as well, he thought. It would take at least twenty-four hours. But in the same moment, he was overcome with a sudden sense of lethargy, almost as if he couldn’t move his muscles, as if the synapses in the brain that issued commands to sinew and tissue throughout his body had abruptly gone on strike. A black exhaustion that mocked his age flowed through his body. He felt dull, stupid, and filled with fatigue.

Ricky rocked in his desk chair, his head leaned back, staring at the ceiling. He recognized the warning signs of a clinical depression as quickly as a mother would know a cold coming on when her child sneezed. He held out his hands in front of him, looking for some quiver or palsy. They were still steady. How much longer? he wondered.

Ricky got an answer in the following morning’s Times , but not in the manner he’d expected it. His paper was delivered to his apartment door as it was every day except Sunday, when his usual habit was to walk out to the neighborhood delicatessen and buy the bulky paper before heading to a nearby coffee shop, just as Rumplestiltskin had so carefully observed in his opening threat. He had had more difficulty sleeping the night before, so when he heard the faint thump of the delivery service dropping the paper outside his apartment, he was alert, and within seconds had seized the paper and flung it open on the kitchen table. His eyes dropped immediately to the small ads on the bottom of the front page, only to see an anniversary greeting, a come-on for a computer dating service and a third small single-column box ad: specialized opportunities, see page b-16.

Ricky threw the paper across the small kitchen in frustration. It made a sound like a bird trying to fly with a broken wing as it slapped against the wall. He was enraged, almost choking and spitting with a sudden outburst of fury. He had expected a rhyme, another cryptic, teasing reply, at the bottom of the front page, just as his inquiry had been. No poem, no answer, he snarled inwardly. “How do you expect me to beat your damn deadline when you don’t reply in timely fashion?” he almost shouted, raising his voice to no one physically present but certainly occupying a significant space.

He noticed that his hands were shaking slightly as he made himself some morning coffee. The hot liquid did little to calm him. He tried to relax himself with some deep breathing exercises, but those only slowed his racing heart momentarily. He could feel his anger soaring through his body, as if it were capable of reaching into every organ beneath the surface of his skin and tightening every one. His head pounded already, and he felt as if he was trapped inside the apartment that he’d known as home. There was sweat dripping beneath his armpits, his brow felt feverish, and his throat was dry and sandy.

He must have sat at his table, outwardly immobile, inwardly churning for hours, almost trancelike, unable to imagine what his next step was. He knew that he needed to make plans, decisions, to act in certain directions, but not getting a reply when he expected one had crippled him. He thought he could hardly move, as if, suddenly, each of his joints in arms and legs had become immobile, unwilling to respond to commands.

Ricky did not have any idea how long he sat like that before lifting his eyes just slightly and fixing on the Times lying in a fluttered heap in disarray where he had flung it. Nor was he aware how long he stared at the clutter of pages before he noticed the small streak of bright red just ducking out from underneath the pile. And then, after taking notice of this abnormality-after all, in the past the Times was not called the Gray Lady for nothing-that he connected it to himself. He fixed on this small streak, and finally said to himself: There is no flagrant red ink in the Times . Mostly sturdy black and white delivered in seven-column, two-section format, as regular as clockwork. Even their color photographs of the president or models displaying the latest Parisian fashions seemed to automatically take on the drab and dull tinge of the paper’s past.

Ricky picked himself up out of his chair and crossed the room, bending over the mess of newspaper. He reached for the splash of color and pulled it toward him.

It was page B-16. This was the obituary page.

But written in dramatic, glowing fluorescent red ink across the pictures, stories, and death notices was the following:

You’re on the right track,

as you travel back.

Twenty certainly covers the base.

And my mother is the right case.

But her name will be hard to find,

unless I give you a clue in kind.

So I will tell you this, you would have

known her as a miss.

And in the days that came after,

you would never have heard her laughter.

You promised much, but delivered none.

That’s why revenge is left to her son.

Father left, mother dead:

that is why I want your head.

This is where I end this rhyme,

Because I note you have little time.

Beneath the poem was a large red R and beneath that, this time in black ink, the man had drawn a rectangle around an obituary, with a large arrow pointing at the dead man’s face and story, and the words: You will fit perfectly right here .

He stared at the poem and the message it contained for a moment that stretched into minutes and finally close to an hour, digesting each word the way a gourmand might a fine Parisian meal except that Ricky found this taste to be bitter and salty. It was well into the morning, another day x-ed away, when he noted the obvious: Rumplestiltskin had gained access to his paper in the moments between arrival outside his brownstone and delivery at his door. His fingers flew to the telephone, and within minutes he’d obtained the number for the delivery service. The phone rang twice, before being answered by an automated selection recording:

“New subscribers, please press one. Complaints about delivery or if you did not receive your paper, please press two. Account information, please press three.”

None of these options seemed to him to be precisely on target, but he suspected a complaint might actually draw a human response, so he tried two. This created a ringing, followed by a woman’s voice:

“What address, please?” she said without introduction.

Ricky hesitated and then gave the address of his home.

“We show all deliveries made to that location,” she said.

“Yes,” Ricky said, “I received a paper, but I want to know who delivered it…”

“What is the problem, sir? You don’t need a second delivery?”

“No…”

“This line is for people who didn’t get their paper delivered…”

“I understand,” he said, starting to become exasperated. “But there was a problem with the delivery…”

“They were not on time?”

“No. Yes, they were on time…”

“Did the delivery service make too much noise?”

“No.”

“This line is for people with complaints about their delivery.”

“Yes. You said that. Or, not exactly that, and I understand…”

“What is your problem, sir?”

Ricky paused, trying to find a common language to deal with the young woman on the line. “My paper was defaced,” he said abruptly.

“Do you mean it was ripped or wet or unreadable?”

“I mean that someone tampered with it.”

“Sometimes papers come off the press with errors in pagination or folding, was this that sort of mix-up?”