Stephen White - Blinded

Her jaws were clenched. Despite my bluntness my words hadn’t dented her Kevlar facade. I hadn’t expected they would.

“They know who I am. Today on the noon news, Colorado’s fucking News Channel reported that the mystery woman who inconvenienced a million airline passengers-you know, the most selfish woman in America -they’re reporting that her name is Sharon, that she lives in Boulder, and-get this-they said she’s getting mental health treatment for her ‘condition.’ My ‘condition’! Jesus.”

The blood drained from my face. I guessed what was coming next. And I wasn’t disappointed.

Or I was.

“Did you tell someone?” She almost spat the words at me. “Did you tell someone about me?”

“You would like to blame me for the situation you’re in?” I thought I managed to ask the question evenly, with just the slightest hint of confrontation.

“Who else?” The subtext of her retort was You imbecile! Nobody else knows but you!

Yogi Berra once said that he couldn’t think and hit a baseball simultaneously. His point? Some things happen so fast that they must be done by instinct.

My reply to Sharon should have been one of those instinctive things. But it wasn’t. Why? Because I was absolutely frozen in place by the fact that one of my options was admitting to Sharon that I’d just had a listening device removed from the office in which we were sitting, and that it was likely that the little microphone and transmitter had carried her secrets out my windows or through my walls out into the world.

The fact that one of the local television news channels knew only her first name convinced me that the leak had been from one of our sessions. Rarely did I ever use a last name during treatment. But if I made the admission to Sharon about the listening device, I was certain that she would, rightly, accuse me of destroying her hope of confidentiality. Were she to accuse me in public, the notoriety of the case would bring me almost as much misery as she was about to suffer.

I sputtered to find words. Although I knew I’d eventually have to tell Sharon and all my other patients what I’d found in my cushion, I wasn’t ready to start right at that moment.

In ten quick seconds of therapeutic silence I saw my precious career vaporizing before my eyes.

What did I end up saying? I said, “I don’t know, Sharon.”

She actually started to cry. “I was going to turn myself in. I was. Now? It will look like I did it because they found out it was me. Hell, I’m screwed. Screwed! I’m leaving-I have to talk to a lawyer.”

A minute later I was on my way back out to the waiting room to retrieve Craig. I opened the door to discover that he was gone. I wasn’t surprised, and I began considering the words I’d use that evening when I called Craig’s home trying to repair some of the damage. I actually felt some hope that if he and I could deal with what had happened in the waiting room that day, it might ultimately be helpful in his psychotherapy. Nevertheless, I didn’t take much comfort in being the unwitting foil in the provocation he had suffered.

I spent the dead time before my final appointment of the day making a list of all my patients and all their recent secrets, big and small. I couldn’t keep myself from making tortuous detours as I imagined the admissions that I would have to make to each one about the possibility that their revelations to me were soon going to be in the public domain.

A few minutes before five Diane tapped on my open door. She was mugging a pouty face. “None of them wanted me. I got voir-dired to death on an arson case, but nobody wanted me. I’m crushed.”

“Hi,” I said. “It turns out you were right.”

“Of course I was. About what?”

“The bug in my office.”

“That? Right. Anyway, there was this one guy in the jury pool-”

“I’m not kidding.”

She snapped her mouth shut, and I explained about Tayisha and the listening device and about the continued revelations about my patients’ lives that were finding their way into public view.

She couldn’t tell whether to believe me. Finally, she asked, “How many is that total?”

In my head, I counted. Jim Zebid and his story about Judge Heller’s husband’s cocaine. That was one. Gibbs Storey and her accusations about Sterling. That was two. Sharon Lewis and her ignominious behavior at Denver International Airport. That was three.

“Three that I know of,” I said.

“That doesn’t make sense.”

Why it didn’t make sense escaped me. “What, Diane? You don’t like odd numbers?”

“Why would somebody plant a bug to discover something about one of your patients and proceed to broadcast information about three of them? It doesn’t make any sense.”

“I don’t follow.”

“One person walks into a park and paints a statue pink, you think there’s something wrong with the painter, right? A wacko?”

“Yeah.” Although I replied in the affirmative, my tone conveyed more doubt than assurance.

“But if three different people walk into the park at different times, and they each paint part of the statue pink, you have to begin to think that there’s either a conspiracy going on-”

“Yeah.” Less doubt that time.

“Or… there’s something weird about that statue. Does anything-anything at all-tie those three patients of yours together?”

The possibility of a conspiracy was novel to me. “I can’t see anything. As far as I know they don’t know each other. They’re all in different professions. Different social circles. They’ve never mentioned each other to me, that’s for sure.”

“Well, then take a look at the statue.”

“Me? I’m the pink statue?”

“Exactly.”

“What are you saying?”

“Somebody’s out to get you.”

“Me? What are they planning to do, Diane? Humiliate me publicly by revealing what I say to patients in therapy? I may not always be pithy, but I don’t think what I say is that bad.”

“Pithy? Did you say pithy? God, you’re something. Whoever planted that bug didn’t expect you to find it, Alan. Right? So why was it there? Not to embarrass you. A simple tape recording of your clinical wisdom would have embarrassed you. And I don’t think it was to learn some deep dark secret that one of your patients might be telling you. Don’t you see? Not with three different stories leaked already. Why would somebody do that?”

I’m sure I looked confused.

She went on. “If it was just one patient whose story was revealed, you could say that patient’s secrets were the target, but if there are three-with maybe more to come-you have to assume that you, and not your patients, are the target.”

“Then what? I don’t get it.” I was hoping we weren’t on our way back to the pink statue.

“What was it you once told me in one of your rare fits of perspicacity? You said that if I want to understand someone’s motivation for an act, then I should take a look at the consequences. Well, what are the consequences of all these leaks going public?”

“It’s going to ruin me.”

She walked close enough to me that she could rest a hand on my shoulder. “Exactly. Somebody’s been trying to set you up as a therapist who can’t keep secrets. You have an enemy, dear.”

I tried to inhale. I failed. “Diane, if somebody did that, it-”

“It sure would. Once people in town think you can’t keep secrets, you’re dead meat.”

“Hell.”

“Just a guess on my part,” she said. “But I would think that we’ve discerned the motivation. All you need to do is figure out who might want to destroy you.”

Want to know dead? Dead is the downtown of any major midwestern American city on the eve of Thanksgiving Day.