John Katzenbach - The Analyst

Clinically, he understood the nature of his panic.

The reality, however, was far harder.

He fought the urge to step back, feeling his muscles gather, taut, complaining, like the first second that one has to lift something very heavy from the earth, when there is this instant measurement of strength versus weight versus necessity, all coming together in an equation that results either in rising up and carrying forward, or dropping back and leaving behind. This was one of those moments for Ricky and it took virtually every iota of power he had left within him to overcome the sensation of complete and utter fear.

Like a paratrooper jumping into unknown, enemy darkness, Ricky managed to force himself to open the door and step outside. It was almost painful to take a step forward.

By the time he reached the street, he was already stained with sweat, dizzy with the exertion. He must have been wild-eyed, pale and disheveled, because a young man passing by spun about and stared at him for a second, before picking up his own pace and hurrying ahead. Ricky launched himself down the sidewalk, lurching almost drunkenly toward the corner where he could more easily hail a cab working on one of the avenues.

He reached the corner, paused to wipe some of the moisture from his face, and then stepped to the curb, his hand raised. In that second, a yellow taxi miraculously pulled directly in front of him, to disgorge a passenger. Ricky reached for the door, to hold it open for whoever was inside, and in that time-honored city way, to claim the cab for himself.

It was Virgil who stepped out.

“Thanks, Ricky,” the woman said almost carelessly. She adjusted dark sunglasses on her face, grinning at the consternation he must have worn on his. “I left the paper for you to read,” she added.

Without another word, she spun away, walking quickly down the street. Within seconds, she had turned a corner and disappeared.

“Come on, buddy, you want a ride?” the driver abruptly demanded. Ricky was caught holding the door, standing on the curb. He looked inside and saw a copy of that day’s Times folded on the seat, and without thinking further, threw himself in. “Where to?” the man asked.

Ricky started to reply, then stopped. “The woman who just got out,” he said, “where’d you pick her up?”

“She was a weird one,” the driver replied. “You know her?”

“Yes. Sort of.”

“Well, she flags me down about two blocks away, tells me to pull over just up the street there, wait with the meter running all the time while she’s sitting back there, doing nothing ’cept staring out the window and keeping a cell phone pinned to her ear, but not talkin’ to nobody, just listening. All of a sudden, she says ‘Pull over there!’ and points to where you was. She sticks a twenty through the glass and says, ‘That man’s your next fare. Got it?’ I says, ‘Whatever you say, lady,’ and does like she says. So now you’re here. She was some looker, that lady. So where to?”

Ricky paused, then asked, “Didn’t she give you a destination?”

The driver smiled. “She sure did. Damn. But she tells me I’m supposed to ask you anyways, see if you can guess.”

Ricky nodded. “Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. The outpatient clinic at 152nd Street and West End.”

“Bingo!” the driver said, pushing down the meter flag and accelerating into the midmorning traffic.

Ricky reached for the newspaper resting on the cab’s backseat. As he did so, a question occurred to him, and he leaned forward toward the plastic barrier between driver and passenger. “Hey,” he said, “that woman, did she say what to do if I gave you a different address? Like, someplace other than the hospital?”

The driver grinned. “What is this, some sort of game?”

“You could say that,” Ricky answered. “But no game you would want to play.”

“I wouldn’t mind playing a game or two with that one, if you know what I mean.”

“Yes you would,” Ricky said. “You might think you wouldn’t, but trust me, you would.”

The man nodded. “I hear ya,” he said. “Some women, look like that one, more trouble than they’re worth. Not worth the price of admission, you could say…”

“That’s exactly right,” Ricky said.

“Anyways, I was supposed to take you to the hospital whatever you said. She tells me that you’d figure it out when we got there. Woman handed me a fifty to take you on the ride.”

“She’s well financed,” Ricky said, leaning back. He was breathing hard, and sweat still clouded the corners of his eyes and stained his shirt. He leaned back in the cab and reached for the newspaper.

He found what he was looking for on page A-13, written in the same red pen in large block letters across a lingerie ad from Lord amp; Taylor’s department store, so that the words creased across the model’s slender figure and obscured the bikini underwear she was displaying.

Ricky narrows the track,

Getting closer, heading back.

Ambition, change, clouded your head,

So you ignored all the woman said.

Left her adrift, in a sea of strife,

So abandoned it cost her life.

Now the child, who saw the mistake,

Seeks revenge for his mother’s sake.

Who once was poor, but now is rich,

Can fill his wishes, without a twitch.

You may find her in the records of all the sick,

But is it enough to do the trick?

Because, poor Ricky, at the end of the day,

There’s only seventy-two hours left to play.

The simple rhyme, like before, seemed mocking, cynical in its childlike pattern. He thought it a bit like the exquisite torture of the kindergarten playground, with singsong taunts and insults. There was nothing childish about the results that Rumplestiltskin had in mind, however. Ricky tore out the single page from the Times and folded it up and slid it into his pants pocket. The remainder of the paper he thrust to the floor of the taxi. The driver was cursing mildly under his breath at traffic, carrying on a steady conversation with each and every truck, car, or the occasional bicyclist or pedestrian that crossed his path and obstructed his route. The interesting thing about the driver’s conversations was that no one else could hear them. He didn’t roll down the window and shout obscenities, nor did he lay on his horn, as some cabdrivers do, like some nervous reaction to the traffic web surrounding them. Instead, this man merely spoke, giving directions, challenges, maneuvering words as he steered his cab, so that in an odd way, the driver must have felt connected, or at least, as if he interacted with all that came onto his horizon. Or his crosshairs, depending, Ricky thought, how one saw it. It was an unusual thing, Ricky thought, to go through each day of life having dozens of conversations that couldn’t be heard. Then he wondered if anyone was any different.

The cab dropped him on the sidewalk outside the huge hospital complex. He could see an emergency entrance down the block, with a large red-lettered sign and an ambulance in front. Ricky felt a chill sweep down his back despite the oppressive midsummer heat around him. It was a cold defined by the last time he had been at the hospital, which corresponded to visits to accompany his wife, while she was still fighting the disease that would kill her, still undergoing radiation and chemotherapy and all the other attacks against the insidious happenings within her body. The oncologists’ offices were in a different part of the complex, but this still didn’t remove the sense of impotence and dread that resurfaced throughout him, no different from when he’d last been on the streets outside the hospital. He looked up at the imposing brick buildings. He thought that he’d seen the hospital three times in his life: the first time, when he worked in the outpatient clinic for six months, before going into private practice; the second time when it joined the dismaying array of hospitals that his wife trudged to in her futile battle against death; and this third time, when he was returning to find the name of the patient whom he’d ignored or neglected, and who now threatened his own life.