LITMIR.BIZ

      The Monday that my patient, Howard Westerman, blew himself to kingdom come started out like any ordinary workday—like the kind of everyday day that feeds our communal delusion that everyone we care about will live forever. I’d felt my standard urgency to be at my station for Howard’s eight o’clock session. Once, early on in my work with him, I’d dawdled over the newspaper, reluctant to plunge into my routine, only to emerge from my back door to find him pacing the balcony of my converted carriage house office. He’d flat refused to use the couch that session, circling the room instead, talking in fragmented sentences, rolling a cat’s eye marble—the “lucky” one he always carried in his pocket—around in his fingers. I got the message about his desperate need for order. From then on, I’d done my best not to disrupt him.

      This in mind, I’d pushed through the weekend’s worth of stale air in the waiting area that day to switch on the lamp and straighten the magazines before closing myself into the consulting room. I’d registered my usual irritation at the sight of the glass-paned door, a choice Richard had insisted upon for aesthetic reasons. It was that wavy kind of glass—some fancy Italian something, totally opaque of course—but it always struck me as posing too permeable a barrier for a therapeutic sanctuary.

      I’d gone about my morning ritual: making coffee, adjusting the blinds for the morning sun, fluffing the pillow at the head of the couch, and covering it with a fresh tissue. When I finally looked up, the clock read 7:56, which was late for the painfully punctual Howard. I held my breath, anticipating the strike of his heavy black wingtips on the metal staircase. As if to provide a substitute sound, the resident redheaded woodpecker started pounding the tree by the window. The clock rolled to 8:00. I poured some coffee, burned my tongue on the first sip and thumbed through a psychiatric journal full of articles on schizophrenia, PET scanning and the thirty-one flavors of bipolar disorder before tossing it in the trash. There was no possibility of missing Howard coming up the stairs. I’d checked the waiting room anyway. Empty.

      In theory, a patient coming late constitutes resistance to treatment. Not necessarily a big deal, just something to talk about once he or she arrives. Part of the process. Grist for the mill. Under ordinary circumstances, the analyst can even afford to experience a patient’s tardiness as a small gift. There are always calls to return, letters and bills to open, private thoughts to savor, fingernails to file. But I knew deep down this event was far too un-Howardly to consider ordinary.

      Howard came seeking analysis when his socialite wife Camille put the divorce gun to his head. Their twin boys would be off to college in the fall, and she’d told him she didn’t fancy spending the rest of her life with a human robot. Howard, having grown up in rural West Texas, came by his lack of emotion honestly. He’d survived the bleakest of childhoods—seventh child of twelve, an emotional cipher for a mother, a hellfire Pentecostal minister for a father—by making feelings irrelevant. I‘d immediately understood Camille’s complaints about Howard. The man possessed no vocabulary for feelings, much less a clue as to what might require one. He was maddeningly and irrationally rational. All the same, I’d come to be quite fond of him, certain there was a tender guy inside awaiting rescue. My rescue.

      I paced around the office as Howard’s minutes ticked by

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