My Analyst Told Me

My Analyst Told Me

By Ella Walter

 

His demeanor was not what Dr. Crispin expected of a man who had fallen prey to lunacy. There were no tremors of trepidation, no frenzied speech, and no admissions of acrimony. In fact, the patient was quite self-possessed; he returned the doctor’s placid gaze of professionalism from across the desk with an even keel. Dr. Crispin allowed his standard minute of observational silence before speaking, during which the patient removed the weathered baseball cap from his head, revealing a smattering of wispy white hair. 

            “Mr. Wentzer, what made you want to kill your birds?” he asked. 

The patient waved a hand, loose with papery skin, in polite protest. “Call me Bill.” 

“Bill,” Dr. Crispin said. “Why did you kill your birds?” 

His response was swift and his stare unflinching. “I didn’t want to kill them.”

“Then why slit their throats?” 

Bill said nothing. 

Dr. Crispin modified his approach. “Tell me about the morning of February 5th.”

“It was cold.”

This was not untrue. The wicked Wisconsin winter of 1958 was alive and well. The previous morning, however, had been mercifully still and bright; a pleasant departure from the pitiless lashing of wind across the region’s flat landscape and relentlessly overcast skies. 

“I’m sure it was cold,” Dr. Crispin said slowly, his eyes darting down to his notes. Dozens of boxes describing symptoms sat unchecked. “But what was different about that morning?”

Silence. 

“Bill, your neighbors say you slit the throats of your five pet birds and laid them across your front lawn. My colleagues are of the assumption that your disturbance was a moment of hysteria, brought on by an acceleration of dormant dementia and life stressors” Dr. Crispin asseverated. “Could you attest to that?”

“That assumption offends me,” Bill replied calmly. “Hysteria. Ridiculous. I’ve always taken pride in maintaining my cool.” 

Dr. Crispin’s clinical reading of the patient made it difficult to ascertain whether the statement, delivered with a blank expression on Bill’s pockmarked face, was a distressed deflection of the diagnosis or merely a wry retort. 

“And if anything, I could use more stressors in my life,” Bill continued. “I’ve been retired for three years now and there’s not a ton to get up to.”  

“The stressors may be dormant.” 

Annoyance flickered across Bill’s face. “Parrots, not just ‘birds,’” he said. “They were Mexican red-headed parrots. Beautiful creatures.”

“Have you been experiencing difficulty in memory or carrying out your routine?”

Bill shook his head. He could recall the previous day’s events in high definition. His sleep had been gently interrupted by the glow of sunshine that seeped through his curtains and polished the frozen mass of optic white surrounding his home. A home kept quite tidy for a solitary old man. Sure, he was no aesthete. The rooms were sparsely decorated, the walls attenuated in color, and the furniture was drab and sagged with fatigue. He had pawned off many of his non-necessities in recent years, clinging only to those with the most utility and memory attached to them. Family heirlooms, photographs, and personal belongings of his wife, Vivian. Much of the profit from the pawning venture had gone to purchasing the exotic birds, which he had seen on a daytime television advertisement. 

He didn’t know what exactly drew him to the animals; he’d never had a penchant for extravagance or pets. But the parrots he’d seen fluttering across his screen just looked so sublime. There was such youthful vitality in the beating of their wings, the ease of their movements, their elegant synchronicity with one another. And their colors! He had never encountered such vivid shades of green and red in his life; especially not during the achromatic winter months he’d recently endured. Bill suddenly experienced the flash of a recollection. He saw crimson leaking across the Milo’s feathers and trailing onto the snow. The contrast of hues was cinematic, the sight itself ghastly. 

Dr. Crispin noticed Bill’s absentmindedness. “Could you tell me about your daily routine?”

“There isn’t much to tell,” Bill replied sheepishly. “Like I said, I’ve been retired for three years now, and…things can get a little slow. I liked having structure. I go on daily walks, and when it’s nice out, I take care of a vegetable garden.”

Dr. Crispin nodded. “What do you do on a day like today?”

Bill shrugged. “Read the paper. Watch old games. Sometimes I look for movie marathons.”

Dr. Crispin jotted down a few notes, which Bill strained his eyes to get a look at. “What’s your social life like?” 

Bill paused. “My wife passed a few years ago, and we were friends with a lot of other couples.”

There was silence. Dr. Crispin prompted him to continue. 

Bill spoke reluctantly. “Well, we were friends with couples as a couple. And now it’s different.” Bill seemed to withdraw in stature as he spoke. 

“Have you maintained many friendships since?” 

“Well, my daughter moved me here not long ago so I could be closer to her. I spent most of my life upstate. So I don’t know many folks in town.” 

“Do you see your daughter a lot?” 

Another pause. Bill averted his gaze from Dr. Crispin’s. “Not so much.”

Dr. Crispin sensed an area of sensitivity. “Are you two close?” 

“I believed we were,” Bill said solemnly. 

“What has made you think otherwise?”

Bill suddenly met Dr. Crispin’s analytical stare. “What does this have to do with the parrots?” he asked defensively. 

Dr. Crispin attempted to soften his expression but struggled to. There were too many variables, too much information to be extracted in their evaluative hour together. “Would you prefer to talk about the parrots?” he asked.

Bill nodded, not looking any less apprehensive to speak. “I loved those parrots,” he said. “They kept me company. They were talkative. I ordered them from one of those, what’cha ma-call-its. Informercials. They came here in a truck from the ‘rainforests of Mexico.’” He suspended his speech momentarily. He was not used to talking for this long. “Their names were Ginny, Nora, Milo, Ralph, Humphrey, and Gayle. They all had their own personalities.” Warm nostalgia dulcified his face. “They would repeat things from the TV. I would ask them questions, and they would mimic what they’d heard. It was, it was like having a classroom full of kids. I liked the chatter.” 

“There were only five parrots on your lawn yesterday.”

A muscle in Bill’s temple twitched. “Yes,” he said gravely. “Nora died the week before. That’s when the other birds stopped talking.” 

“They all stopped suddenly?” 

Bill nodded. “I suppose they were mourning. It was touching, but…hard.”

“And how did that make you feel?” 

Bill tensed again, disliking the direction of the conversation. The only word he could muster was “bad.” 

Dr. Crispin fastened a slight grip on his pen, preparing to take notes. “Would you say that you found it distressing?” 

“Distressing. Is that one of your psychology words?” 

“Well, yes,” Dr. Crispin said as he checked a box on the evaluative form attached to his clipboard. 

“Then yes, it was distressing.” 

Dr. Crispin grimaced as he watched Bill’s face harden. Those external walls, resistant to vulnerability, were solidifying once again. 

“Why exactly did you find it distressing, Bill? What did Nora’s death mean to you?”

Bill recalled the morning he had found Nora. He was usually woken by the birds’ cheerful prattle as he shuffled into the living room. He remembered feeling a twinge of apprehension at the eerie silence of the morning. The birds crouched in a circle, leaning over Nora’s unmoving, lateral form on the bottom of the cage. The prick of uneasiness had morphed into a wax of dread that seemed to spread quickly throughout Bill’s stomach. It settled into a heavy cement as he reached into the cage. The other birds looked up at him in search of guidance, the hazel ring around each of their eyes seeming to wane as their black pupils collectively dilated. He reached into the cage and gently prodded Nora’s feathers, brushing his finger against a cascade of green. There was no response. He paused before placing her delicate form in his hand. He did not want to inspect any further. He could just leave her there and go about his day in peaceful denial, couldn’t he? But it would be fruitless. He softly cupped his hands behind her back, so her belly faced upward. He performed the ritual of checking for a heartbeat, knowing it to be futile. Her formerly scintillant feathers had already lost their luster. 

Feverish panic heated Bill’s head as he racked it for words. Answer the question, he told himself sternly. The doctor needs you to answer the question. His mouth dried but his glands moistened. That fog of dark turbulence he had encountered the day before returned: a flurry of discordant emotions that crashed against one another like a vengeful swarm of bees. He wanted to leave that sterile office and scream at the man across from him for his imposing questions, his unruffled calm, his clipboard that resembled a prop in a dreadful four-act play. At the same time, he wanted to satisfy the doctor’s queries and receive that impersonal clinical praise that verified his own sanity. A sanity that was ambiguous to the several colleagues of Dr. Crispin he had encountered in the last twenty-four hours. He wanted to whip himself for what he had done to his beloved creatures despite barely being able to recall the bloody act. 

He wanted to go back to that glorious summer day when he sat on his lawn and watched his parrots chirp with glee as they hopped from tree branch to tree branch. It had been reckless to even let them outside; they were perfectly able to leave the bounds of his front yard and fly away into the great unknown. They were wild animals, after all. But he had considered the risk and decided to anyway. He wanted them to feel the sweetness of the sun and the splendor of freedom. Their potential departure would only be a return to the natural order of things. Yet they had chosen to stay, and Bill had seldom been so moved by a wordless gesture in his life. It was comparable to having watched his toddler daughter’s chubby legs rise to a wobbly upright position for the first time and fight with all their might to cross the living room to reach his open arms. She could have used her wondrous new power of vertical mobility to explore the rest of the house, but she had come to him. 

“Bill?” 

The pleasant memory allowed that dark cloud Bill had found himself under to dissipate into a light mist. His thoughts slowed to a manageable pace and his skin cooled. The shadowy splotches that had descended over his vision disappeared. He was back in the office and back to looking at the doctor, whose ginger brows had knitted with concern and were just now returning to their normal positions on his face. The patient’s gaze sharpened as he returned from what appeared a semi-dissociative state. Dr. Crispin allowed the silence to continue as he marked this sudden change on his form. Despite Bill’s relative return to calm, he still bristled with agitation toward its presence and the doctor’s preoccupation with it. 

“You have a lot of negative feelings around Nora’s death. Understandable.”

Bill scoffed incredulously. “Am I that obvious?”

Once again, Dr. Crispin awkwardly sidestepped the sarcasm. 

“Bill, let’s return to a previous subject.”

“My daughter?” 

Both men paused, equally taken aback. She had taken her place at the front of Bill’s mind. He thought of those rubbery child wrists. That moon-eyed curiosity endemic to one’s earliest years. Hardest to ignore was the girlish babbling that echoed through the caverns of his cortexes. The sound of it resembled the cheery prattling of his parrots; a memory he had sifted through just moments before. Dr. Crispin was impressed by Bill’s penetrative insight, especially because it had tumbled off his tongue without prior rumination. 

“You said she moved you here to keep in closer contact. Has that not panned out?”

Bill took a minute to collect his thoughts, which quivered and vacillated like a bowl of Jell-O. “She thought it would be better that I not grieve my wife’s death alone.” The emotion had drained from his voice and hardened from a wobbly Jell-O to a caramelized dessert. 

“And she wasn’t wrong about that. But after the first few months, I thought she would visit more. I-” another hesitation. “I thought that was part of the deal.” 

“Why do you think she hasn’t?” Dr. Crispin asked in a low voice.

Bill shifted his shoulders. “She and her husband have two kids and both have to work. I know they’re busy. And I know there’s not always a lot to talk about with her old man. Not much has changed with me in a while. But sometimes I think she’s put off by me. Watching me…deteriorate. It’s like she sees her future and it scares her.” 

Again, Bill was surprised by his own words and Dr. Crispin was shocked by his acumen. One could only imagine how many other patients were just a few questions from articulating the extent of their concerns. Worries that had seemed unreachable within those psychic depths that bubbled right beneath the surface. Whether Bill’s daughter’s repulsion to his age was true or a mere projection of his own fear of mortality was secondary. The fact that it was the conclusion he’d drawn was of more importance. 

“What makes you say that?” he asked. A trite inquisition, but worth investigating. 

Bill shrugged. “Little things. It’s more of a feeling I get.”

Dr. Crispin’s pen halted. A lack of tangible accounts of behavior complicated matters. He switched gears.

“Returning to the earlier question. Why did you kill the parrots?”

Bill was inclined to respond defensively but chose silence. He didn’t have a succinct reason, but he knew he had been angry. After Nora’s burial in the front yard beneath Bill’s oak tree, the birds embarked on something resembling a vigil. They went quiet for days. Bill was deeply disturbed by the profundity of the silence, which had become a foreign phenomenon since he brought those winged chatterboxes into his life. He was suddenly confronted with his utter solitude. He did everything in his power to engage them. He asked them questions, he made faces while waving his arms wildly, and he let the TV run for hours at a time.

“I was mad at them for going silent. After her death.”

“Why? Many animals have grieving periods, just like humans.” Dr. Crispin asked obtusely. 

Bill did his best to explain. “It was that silence. I felt alone, and they let me sit in it.” 

Dr. Crispin checked two more boxes.

“What are you writing?” Bill demanded, leaning to get a view of the clipboard. The man across from him sat unmoved. Bill was maddened by his phlegmatic comportment; his commitment to staying utterly unperturbed by all that entered that cool, administrative gaze. A gaze that would rest upon him until he gave it something to feed on. It would lie in wait, anticipating a behavior that could be checked in a box or graphed onto a chart, wouldn’t it? It would note the increased pace of Bill’s breathing and the stiffening of the purple veins in his neck. And Bill’s body, no longer as skilled in maintaining stoic bearings as it had once been, offered his secrets without his permission. Perhaps he should give the gaze what it wanted. Perhaps he ought not to.

“Say something!” he shouted in a voice that dropped to a gravelly snarl. He stood defiantly. He shoved a container of pens and a stack of files from Dr. Crispin’s desk. The doctor was acquainted with these kinds of outbursts and did not react. He suspected his placidity irritated Bill and allowed this to go on, as it could help reveal the breadth of his rage. 

He glanced at his report and circled the highest number on the scale for diminished impulse control. He added a provision in the margin. Likely due to age-related cognitive decline. Pharmacological therapeutic measures = prudent.