Primary Obsessions. Charles Demers
a newsroom, Annick—what are we supposed to do? Every day it’s something like this. You know how it is, you hear this stuff all day long.”
“I most certainly do not.”
“Whatever, you know what I mean. You’ve gotta defend yourself against taking it all on too intimately, caring too much. Get some sushi, okay? And leave me some? Farmed salmon.”
“For fuck’s sake, Phil, I’m not getting farmed salmon. You’re a scientist, you should know better.”
“I prefer the taste of farmed salmon. It’s Atlantic, and it’s got just the right amount of fat. Like Acadian tail,” he said, pinching the back of her pants. She smacked the back of his head, then leaned down and kissed him on the temple. As she stood, she scanned the newsroom again, shaking her head.
“I don’t know how you guys do this. It would kill me.”
“You’d survive.”
3
“Did you happen to catch the news last night?” she heard, the exaggeratedly singsong Jamaican accent stopping her as she tried to make it to her office unnoticed. Annick cringed.
“Please don’t start, Cedric,” she said, putting on convincing airs that she was in the midst of a particularly difficult morning. Cedric was standing now at the door to his office—no one had ever successfully arrived earlier than him, and there was no empirical proof that he ever went home—with a condescending smile. He loomed over Annick like a beautiful sunrise, invisibly firing carcinogenic UV rays.
“You know, cognitive behavioural therapy is very different from talk therapy—but the viewing audience certainly wouldn’t have known that yesterday evening.”
Annick smiled. “You’ve got me all wrong, Dr. Manley. My approach yesterday was purely Freudian—I was showing that screenwriter that mine was bigger than his.”
It was no easy thing to send a ripple of shock and surprise across Cedric’s implacable Zen features, but she had managed to score an unambiguous point.
“Alright then, whatever’s in that coffee, I want some—it’s working,” he said, deadpan. “I’ll take the next few panels.”
“You know, the whole time I was on TV I kept thinking to myself, ‘If being here gets through to just one person, convinces just one of my colleagues that he should be doing these things instead of me, it’ll all be worth it.’”
“However,” Cedric said, ignoring her joke with exaggerated dignity, “this does not absolve you of your public relations responsibilities in their entirety. We still need the new pamphlets taken care of, with the proper website information and the group programs.”
“Say no more. New pamphlet duty for no more TV or radio spots, that’s a steal in my book.”
“‘No more’ might be putting it just a touch strongly. No more for now.”
“You know, for a Zen master, you can be very ominous.”
“Even Buddhists have limits. Shall we celebrate the arrangement with lunch, then? The Thai place?”
“Actually, can we rain check? I have a lunch date—Philip has the morning off, so he’s bringing sandwiches to the park up the block.”
“He’s a lovesick fool.”
“Absolutely hopeless case. You can’t reach some people—they’re just fucking nuts.”
Annick sat at her desk and went over notes from the last session with her next patient, the deeply depressed Catherine, but she found her mind wandering to thoughts of Sanjay. Over the years, Annick had gotten used to the fact that some patients got under one’s skin more than others; burrowed in and made their suffering one’s own. There was also the fact of his youth—not so much that it made him boyish and sympathetic, although there was that, but that she really had the chance, if they could crack his case together, of giving him back the next fifty years. Catherine, who would be here soon, was in her mid-sixties, and though of course she was entitled to just as much sympathy, just as much help, there was part of Annick that realized that their work together would always be maintenance. It was unlikely that someone who had suffered from depression or anxiety on and off for half a century would ever completely shake either of them; by middle age, the game was survival, and God knows that was no mean thing. But Sanjay was barely through life’s overture; he was just about to get started. Annick could do exponentially more for him. She could save his life.
After Catherine with depression at ten and Benson with panic attacks at eleven, it was suddenly noon, and Philip, who had used his free morning to full advantage, showed up with sandwiches, an adorable haircut and a brand new travel mug filled with caffeinated reinforcements just in time to ward off a midday headache.
“What’d I ever do to deserve you?” asked Annick.
“You really want me to remind you what you did? In public?”
In the wake of the previous day’s rain, Vancouver had gone back to baking, with a smell that was not quite good but not quite bad, like a fruit-laden brie. The park was a welcome respite. At this point in the year, the grass had not yet turned brown. The city was built on top of a temperate rainforest, but the mountaintop winter snows and spring melts had decreased with the rising temperatures, leaving a town that had been granted a natural abundance of water bone-dry for long stretches of summer. The couple chose a bench accented with both the least and least fresh bird droppings. Philip produced a pair of simple brisket on focaccia sandwiches with spicy mustard and sprouts. He pulled two cans of cold brew coffee, still icy and wet with condensation, out of the bag, and handed one to Annick. She put it down next to the half-empty travel mug.
Annick took a bite of her sandwich, grabbed Philip’s forearm and moaned.
“That good, huh?”
“See, farmed beef I have absolutely no problem with.” They sat and chewed in a silence of easy intimacy, and Annick watched as a pair of seagulls pecked and screeched at each other over the remaining parts of a discarded bagel.
“What happened with that story last night? The murder?”
“Sad case,” Philip said after swallowing. “Like Bonnie said, some kid murdered his roommate.”
“Oh,” Annick said, immediately regretting that she’d brought it up, and mourning the lighthearted sexiness of the lunch date, now departed. “Wait, a kid? With a roommate?”
“Young man in his twenties. The upstairs neighbours, I guess the landlords, heard a scream from the basement, called the cops. The victim was slashed across the throat, and they found the roommate in the bathroom wearing noise-cancelling headphones, giving his hands and forearms an industrial scrubbing. Creepy as shit.”
“Oh, God that’s awful,” she said. And then: “Wait…”
“Yeah, it’s brutal. The cops say they searched the roommate’s room, and right out on the desk is this journal full of just, like, the most insanely violent imagery, stabbings, throat-slashings. The kid’s a psycho. Bonnie said the VPD sergeant, some guy named Bremner, he was practically on the verge of cracking jokes at the press conference, he was so cocky. Had a look on his face like he’d just sunk a three-pointer.”
The bottom of Annick’s stomach somehow fell out from underneath her at the very same instant it leapt into the back of her throat. She stopped herself because it couldn’t be right; it couldn’t. It was too big a city for that; it couldn’t be him.
Furthermore, patients with primary obsessions OCD never did it—they never, statistically, never acted on their thoughts. That statistic, that fact, was one of her most powerful therapeutic weapons, marshalled constantly to remind her suffering charges that there was no inherent link between thought and action, that there was no chance that they would snap under the pressure one day and actually do any of the horrible things