Primary Obsessions. Charles Demers
she felt it might pull her lips, her whole face, in, and she took a swig of the cold brew coffee and felt it pour directly into her chest cavity, the centre of which was now pumping toxically and arrhythmically.
“Love, you okay?”
“I’m fine, just some sandwich went down the wrong pipe. I’m great. This sandwich… this sandwich is so good.”
Philip smiled; he’d gotten all the reassurance he needed. “I knew I’d found my soulmate when you told me you liked simple sandwiches. All that mayo, nine different vegetables—what are they trying to hide, man?”
“Sweetie, the suspect, in the murder?”
“I don’t think he’s a suspect, Annick. It’s pretty open and shut.”
“Did they—do they have a name?”
Philip furrowed his brow as he reached for his phone. “It’s something Indian,” he said, and Annick’s pounding heart seemed to stop as he scrolled through his newsfeed. “‘Police have arrested a suspect, Sanjay Desai, twenty-five…’”
Annick didn’t hear the end of the sentence.
4
She had no recollection whatsoever of walking the two blocks back to the office; no sense of whether or not she had kissed Philip goodbye, or how she had hidden from him the secret of her patient’s identity. If her fallen face, her slackened jaw, her swimming eyes had signalled anything, Philip knew her well enough not to pry into the ethical space that she reserved for her and her patients—she was a doctor as a first principle, and there were no personal intimacies that superseded that code. As a scientist, that was part of what Philip had fallen in love with.
When she came out of the fog, she was sitting at the desk inside of her locked office, her hand trembling over the mouse pad. She grabbed the mouse and shook her sleeping screen to life. Annick looked up at the wall clock and tried, and failed, to do the simple arithmetic necessary to determine how long it was before her next patient came in. She turned away from the computer, locking her eyes on the clock, and tried, again, to count the minutes. She had to use her fingers before she could be sure. She had fourteen minutes.
She leapt up out of her seat before having decided to, before having figured out what use she could be standing that she couldn’t be sitting down. If there was anything, she couldn’t think of it, so she sat back down in the seat closest to her, which was, this time, the chair she reserved for patients. The chair where Sanjay had been sitting just five days ago. The chair from which he had stood up before hearing her promise. He was not a killer.
Eleven minutes.
There were eleven minutes until another patient would come in through the door, a patient who needed her just as much as Sanjay did. But that was bullshit, wasn’t it? Sanjay was in jail, perhaps by now at the pre-trial centre, facing what would be, in all practical likelihood, the end of his life as a free man.
Nine minutes.
Annick thought of Cedric’s constant tips for attaining mindful calm, delivered promiscuously to patients and to colleagues, desperate people as well as those who hadn’t asked for advice. She tried to mimic his centred breathing, the calming embodiment of mindful consciousness that he taught to his anxiety patients; she tried to count her breaths.
In, one. Out, one.
In, two. Out, two.
In, three.
Fuck, this.
Bull, shit.
Eight minutes.
Annick sprang back up and stood at the computer. If Sanjay had spoken to a lawyer, which was likely by now, the lawyer almost certainly would have explained how confidentiality works in cases like these: there was nothing much that they could make Annick do, but nothing much that she could do, either, without Sanjay waiving his rights and bringing her in. But if she got to say anything, they could make her say everything; subpoena her notes, all of it.
If the journal of Sanjay’s intrusive thoughts was being used as a key piece of evidence, it was likely that both Crown and defence counsel would want to bring her in as a witness eventually, but both sides had every reason to play cat and mouse about it. The Crown could suspect that her testimony would actually hurt their case; that there was a perfectly benign, therapeutic reason for the grisly diary, which, of course, there was. The defence, for their part, could spring a trap for the Crown: let the prosecuting attorneys request a look at the psychological evidence, and then, when inevitably they didn’t use it, hold that up as proof that they’d seen the evidence and decided that it exonerated the accused.
Four minutes until her next patient arrived. Annick thumped her toes on the floor as though the answer to her problem had to be shaken up out of her feet. She shook her head. There was nothing that she could do in four minutes. Nothing beyond running to the window, sliding it wide open and screaming, ‘He didn’t do it!’ out towards Cambie Street.
But what if he had?
Annick felt the wind go out of her, and she sat back down in her own seat as her head began to swim. The thought hadn’t occurred to her, until now, that this could have been anything but a mistake. But—
There was a hard rap at her door, and Annick’s first impulse was to hide from it. She wanted badly to pretend that she hadn’t heard it, until the circumstances snapped back into focus. She took a deep, long breath, without counting; she stood, unbuttoned and then rebuttoned her lightweight summer suit jacket. She used her hands to straighten her hair before remembering once again that she didn’t have any, and strode to the door. When she opened it, she saw her one o’clock patient, a man about her own age with generalized anxiety disorder whom she’d been seeing clinically for just over a year.
“Dr. Boudreau? I am so, so sorry, but I didn’t have any change for the meter—your receptionist very kindly broke my five for some coins. Is it okay if I just quickly run up the street to feed the meter?”
“Yes!” she nearly screamed, which is not the preferred mode of communication for those suffering from generalized anxiety disorder, and her patient winced accordingly. “I’m so sorry, Paul. I’m sorry. It’s absolutely fine. Please go feed the meter. I’ll be right here.”
“Okay. Thank you,” answered Paul with some trepidation, before taking off at a trot, the coins jiggling in his shorts pockets.
Annick slumped down onto the floor, her back against the door. Four minutes had nothing to do with it; for the time being, there was nothing she could do, full stop. Even reaching out directly to Sanjay could endanger his right to keep his treatment confidential—she would have to wait until he got ahold of her, as his counsel would ultimately, inevitably, do.
Unless.
Annick pinched the bridge of her nose and spread the fingers hard under her eyes in an utterly futile massage. She thought of Sanjay, held together by nerves, shame and guilt, thought about the progress or lack of it that they had made over the twelve weeks they’d been seeing each other. He was a bright kid, no question, and he didn’t have a stitch of trouble understanding something conceptually, analytically or rationally.
But OCD didn’t come down to analysis or rationale. Primary obsessions was a disorder with all of the violent magical realism of a Colombian crime novel—a place where the rules of the world as it is were only in effect right up until the second that they weren’t; a place like the internet, where evidence was considered, but without perspective or scale. Sanjay understood how OCD worked, but he didn’t know that he had it. This was the dance with a huge number of patients at the beginning, often for months: their abiding belief in their own demonic nature outweighed any number of framed degrees, diplomas and certificates on the wall. You might be right about other people, they thought, but you’ve never come across a case as special as mine before. She understood that, viscerally, Sanjay still thought that whatever might be the case with her other patients he, Sanjay Desai, had these unceasing, blood-soaked thoughts because he was a monster.