- Chapter –

6

Thank God it was Tuesday. Canceling last night’s date with Sara was the last thing I thought I’d do when I dropped her off that Sunday night, but Ms. Sobel’s call had left me unfit for company. I was angry with myself. I couldn’t believe I’d let her off the line without getting her phone number. I was reduced to waiting for paperwork she said would be here in a week.

I was staring at the ceiling and listening to the surf outside the window as I mumbled my way through a session with Mathews. “You did the right thing, Charles. We need to determine if all you heard is really what she said, or perhaps... “

“Perhaps what?” I rose from that frumpy couch. After I’d shared not only the Sobel incident, but the whole Death Valley experience, he was sticking my nose in it by suggesting that I may have imagined Sobel.

“What’s bothering you, Charles?” he asked.

I walked to the window. I wanted to let him have it, but he knew too much about me, whatever there was to know, and I couldn’t afford to risk losing the only confidant I had. I groped for the right words that would convince him that I hadn’t imagined any of it. “You don’t need to take my word for it. Call Sobel yourself. Tell her you’re my doctor and that you want to confirm what I’ve told you. That would be the simplest and most expedient way to go forward, right?”

He sat there, toying with his beard. “Have you forgotten?” he said. “She called you.  We don’t have her number.”

He was as frustrated as I was, but he wasn’t deterred. No. After 35 years of medical practice, Mathews had his own particular way of dealing with patients. He continued to be everything he told me he would be some five months ago, the day I wandered in off the street and asked if he could help.

His beach-front office was inside a professional building on Ocean Ave., right off the Pacific Coast Highway. I’d walked up to the security guard and asked if any of the doctors listed on the directory were psychiatrists. The guard had reluctantly dialed the secretary to Dr. Charlton Mathews, to make sure it was all right to send me up.

After he’d finished a session, he’d invited me into his office and spent the next few minutes finding out I didn’t have much to talk about because, well, I’ve already said all that.

His last words at that first meeting had been, “You’re going to do all the work, and I’m going to do all the listening. I don’t give up and I don’t keep patients who do.”

That had been my first impression of him, and it had come only a couple of hours after I’d woken up on the beach and realized I couldn’t handle the nightmare alone. Now, the same confident, calm demeanor he’d displayed five months earlier was once again showing me he had to have things his way.

His fingers continued toying with his beard. “Tell me, Charles. Is it possible you invented the phone call from Sobel?”

I spun away from the window. “Do you always have to suggest there’s another layer under everything that happens to me? The call happened. I’m not imagining it!” I grabbed the phone and shoved it toward him. “Call the hotel. Have them check the phone records.”

He glanced at it a moment. “OK. Assuming the call happened, we need to find out who gave her instructions and how she knew you were living there, right?”

I threw myself down on the couch. “God help me! That’s why I’m here!”

“So,” he said, in the tone of voice that always preceded one of our hypnotic journeys, “We’re going to try and find out, aren’t we? Keep the phone call right there in front of you. Let yourself go back. Remember her voice. You’ve heard it before. You’ve talked to her in the past. Let the tension leave your body now. Let yourself drift...drift... “

I closed my eyes and sensed the curtains being closed. I was going. I was going back to the high-rise floor again.

“Drift,” he said again. “Let yourself drift into that familiar warm place you like, Charles. Drift.”

I went there easily after months of repeated returns. I had a microscopically accurate understanding of that morning. Now the voice of the woman on the phone telling me my family was gone was confusing me. Was it the voice of Sobel?

Mathews must have sensed my anxiety, because he asked me to try and remember the night before that morning, the night during which I had previously only remembered going to bed on the couch. I had been tired, very tired, sitting at my desk in the dim light of a small lamp. He asked me again if I had been drinking that night.

“I don’t remember.”

“What’s on your desk?”

“The usual. Storyboards, some ‘key client’ files, a couple of commercial tapes.”

He stopped me. “You never mentioned the commercial tapes before. What’s on them?”

That was true. My eyes were seeing a label, the agency label on the box, but I couldn’t make out the subject.

“Think back, Charles, you must have played the tapes before. They’re on your desk with the client files. Are they commercials for one of those clients?”

“I don’t know,” I muttered.  “The box is open.  It’s empty.”

 “The tape’s gone, Charles?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Where is the VCR, Charles?”

“I can’t make out the labels.”

 “That’s OK, Charles. The video tape deck—where is it in your office?”

My mind focused on the walls. The room was dark except for my desk. The paneled walls revealed nothing. “I don’t know.”

“Yes you do. Remember the next morning. You told me you had on the ‘Today Show’ when you received the phone call. Remember where the TV was on the wall. It’s probably right next to the VCR.”