“Don’t tell me, I know what you’re going to say,” Dr. Tuttle said. She picked a length of copper wire off her desk and put the tip to her cheek, poking in the soft flesh. Her skin looked suppler than I’d remembered it, and it struck me that Dr. Tuttle was probably younger than I had thought she was. She might only have been in her early forties. “It’s the Infermiterol. It didn’t work. Am I right?”
“Not really . . .”
“I know exactly what went wrong,” she said, and put the wire down. “The sample I gave you was the children’s dosage. That would only muddy up the waters, so to speak. The brain must cross a certain threshold before it can function abnormally. It’s like filling a bathtub. It means nothing to your downstairs neighbors until it’s overflowing.”
“I was going to say that the Infermiterol—”
“Because of leaks,” Dr. Tuttle clarified.
“I get it. But I think the Infermiterol—”
“Now just a moment while I pull your file.” She shuffled papers on her desk. “I haven’t seen you since December. Had a happy holiday?”
“It was all right.”
“Did Santa bring you something nice this year?”
“This fur coat,” I told her.
“Family time can put a strain on the mentally deranged.” She clucked her tongue as though out of pity. Why? She licked a finger and leafed slowly through the pages in my folder, too slowly. Maddening. “The blind leading the blind,” she said wistfully. “The expression has been misused for centuries. It isn’t about ignorance at all. It’s about intuition—the sixth sense, which is the psychic sense. How else could the blind lead? The answer to this question has more to do with science than you might think. Ever seen doctors try to revive someone whose heart has stopped? People don’t understand electroshock. It’s not like sitting in the electric chair. The shocker. Psychiatry has come a long way, into the spiritual realm. Into energies. There are deniers, certainly, but they all work for big oil. Now tell me about your most recent dreams.”
“I don’t know. I always forget them. And I’m not sleeping at all, I don’t think.”
“We don’t forget things, OK? We just choose to ignore them. Can you accept responsibility for your memory lapse and move on?”
“Yes.”
“Now let me ask you a technical question. Do you have any heroes?”
“I guess Whoopi Goldberg is my hero.”
“A family friend?”
“She took care of me after my mother died,” I said. Who hadn’t heard of Whoopi Goldberg?
“And how did your mother die? Was it sudden? Was it violent?”
I had answered this question half a dozen times by now.
“I killed her,” I said then.
Dr. Tuttle smirked and adjusted her glasses. “How did you achieve that, metaphorically speaking?”
I racked my mind. “I crushed oxycodone into her vodka.”
“That would do it,” Dr. Tuttle said, scribbling maniacally with a ballpoint pen to get the ink flowing. I couldn’t watch. Dr. Tuttle had never been so irritating. I closed my eyes.
It was true that my father had kept a white marble mortar and pestle in his study—an antique. I tried to imagine taking a leftover bottle of his oxycodone and crushing the pills in there. I could see my hands grinding, then spooning the white powder into one of my mother’s frosty bottles of Belvedere. I swirled it around.
“Now sit still for a minute,” Dr. Tuttle said, dismissing my confession. I opened my eyes. “I’m going to assess your personality shift. I notice today that your face is slightly off center. Has anyone pointed that out to you? Your whole face,” she held out her pen and squinted, measuring me, “is at approximately negative ten degrees. That’s counterclockwise to me, but clockwise to you when you go home and look in the mirror. A very minor slant. Really only a trained eye could pick it up. But it’s a significant deviation from when we started your treatment. So it makes sense that you’re having extra trouble sleeping now. You’re having to work that much harder just to hold your mind centered. It’s effort wasted, I’m afraid. If you let your mind drift, you’d find you can adapt quite easily to the deviated reality. But the instinct for self-correction is powerful. Oh, is it powerful. Proper medication should soften the impulse. You had no idea about your facial deviation?”
“No,” I answered, and raised my hands to touch my eyes.