Primary Obsessions. Charles Demers
franchise in the lobby of the building for a triangle samosa wrapped, for reasons that weren’t immediately apparent from an ethnocultural standpoint, in a spinach tortilla.
Instead, she would spend her remaining moments of leisure and replenishment going back over the session notes about Jason MacGregor—Jason, whom Sanjay hadn’t liked at all, but whom Supriya, it seems, found not just unlikable but “odious.”
But the notes weren’t any different than they had been in the morning. Besides the arguments over the bathroom, mid-compulsion confrontations and the dopey muscle-head friend, there were contamination fears having to do with the shared kitchen space. Jason, apparently, handled raw meats with something less than a religious adherence to FoodSafe guidelines. There was at least one instance, having to do with racial insensitivity, which Sanjay had brought up and then, seeming to regret having done so, just as quickly dismissed; when she had pressed him for details, he had kept things vague, and she hadn’t felt it appropriate to squeeze any harder. Finally, and most frequently, there were the complaints about loud fighting and, even louder, reconciliatory sex between the roommate and his girlfriend. Jason’s mercurial relationship with his lady had been enough of a passionate irritant that Sanjay had invested in a pair of noise-cancelling headphones. After that, his mentions of the subject tapered off. What was Annick looking for? Why had she dived back in?
She realized, without noticing when it had started, that she was looking for it—looking for confirmation that he could, in fact, have done it. In the same way that her patients scanned for presence in order to confirm absence, Annick was looking for wells of rage. That way, when she didn’t find any, she’d know that he was innocent.
At least that’s what she told herself, shouting it internally to drown out another idea: maybe she did want to find some confirmation because that just wouldn’t be as messy. And that wouldn’t be her responsibility to fix.
And the fact was, she hadn’t been there. Sanjay could have killed him.
Annick stood and chewed her bottom lip, and stared at the wall where her degree hung framed, with pride of place. Her years in Montréal had been her own chance for experimenting with copacetic and disagreeable roommates, stovetop-borne salmonella threats and sex-related noise violations, from the perspective of both offended and offending parties. Could she have killed any of them?
McGill was also where she had learned and honed her therapeutic philosophy and practice, her fanatical commitment to professional ethics and her exhaustive, encyclopedic knowledge of anxiety disorders. In nearly every conversation, she knew two or three times as much about her interlocutors as they made a point of telling her. With human beings both aware and oblivious of their position on the spectrum of anxiety behaviours, Annick brought a vast understanding of human failings and limitations, social obstacles and emotional motivations. She wondered, now, if she knew too much to see straight.
Dr. Annick Boudreau had studied this particular disorder in minute, all-encompassing detail; Dr. Annick Boudreau had spent about a dozen hours sharing a therapeutic presence with a young man named Sanjay Desai, but Annick Boudreau, human being, hadn’t been in the apartment when Sanjay Desai’s roommate had been killed. Before she threw herself into helping him, didn’t she owe it to herself, to Sanjay, to the departed Jason MacGregor, to even contemplate the possibility that her patient had opened his throat? She caught her reflection in the corner of the glass framing her degree.
She stood nodding, looking herself in the eyes, as much because she didn’t have any idea of where to start as anything else.
“No.” She surprised herself by speaking out loud, surprised herself with her certainty. “Sanjay didn’t do it. He did not kill that man. Now he’s being held, in part, because of a clinical exercise that I asked him to engage in—and I was right to do it.”
She rushed back over to the computer, and went back over her memories of her last appointment with Sanjay, and felt a surge of confidence as she remembered the story of the customer ejected from the nightclub—the East Side craft brewery and pizzeria owner who had been disciplined out of proportion to his social station, and who the bouncers had been worried might pose a problem.
Annick turned to her computer with electric excitement, opened her search engine and began combining search terms—“pizza,” “craft brewery,” “east side,” “East Van,” “chain”—until a profile began to emerge in the shape of Trevor Manning, a mid-thirties multimillionaire, in the mid-forties of the Vancouver Magazine “Power 50” rankings, smiling through brilliantly white teeth underneath the glow of a deep tan and the unmovable assurance of generational wealth.
Manning came from a major political family in the British Columbian interior, who over the course of 150 years had gone from leather-faced settlers to fruit and farming magnates to right-wing political dynasty; Trevor, unlike either his father or his grandfather, had never held provincial office, but there was still time. On page three of his search results was a news item about a fistfight in his late twenties, as well as an impaired driving arrest.
So here was a guy, almost certainly, from the sounds of it, an outright prick, with violence in his history and a grudge to nurse. Couldn’t he have done the killing? Didn’t it stand to reason?
Annick tried to think what an investigator might do beyond googling. She remembered a news story about an ICBC employee who sniffed out a several-hundred-thousand-dollar insurance fraud scheme using nothing but publicly visible social media posts. She checked the main sites, but Manning’s Facebook account was private, and his Twitter had nothing but business tweets written in an anodyne, impersonal corporate style, alongside occasional postings from back home in peach country, which tended towards the conservative but stopped well short of customary online belligerence. Even then, there’d been nothing for almost a week.
The phone on her desk rang, and Annick recognized the number of Carl, a long-time patient with OCD, who had a tendency to phone looking for reassurance. Carl had a litany of ritual compulsions that were linked, in his mind, to the well-being and safety of family and friends. Like many patients with OCD, Carl ascribed to himself a kind of magical omnipotence, wherein it was within his power to keep everyone he knew safe from harm simply by performing his elaborate and time-consuming rituals—and the corollary of that power was that, if he didn’t, and something were to happen, it would be his fault.
Carl knew that he shouldn’t call Dr. Boudreau to seek reassurance, but he often felt as though he couldn’t resist phoning anyway. They had a system: she would never pick up the first time. If he phoned again in thirty seconds, she would pick up and talk him down. These days he almost never did. And this time, he didn’t either.
Annick laughed at herself, shaking her head, feeling suddenly cynical about her burst of detective enthusiasm. She had a skill set—several, in fact. But surely this wasn’t it.
And moreover, what had made her feel like it was up to her? How different was her desire to prove her patient’s innocence than Carl’s quest to magically keep everyone who surrounded him healthy and safe?
She was Sanjay’s therapist, and it was up to his lawyer to get him out of jail. After that, it would be up to her to walk him back from the trauma.
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