The Reflection by Hugo Wilcken Page B

do … only now, it’s dime store stuff. Chandler. Hammett. Maybe Agatha Christie. Books that don’t require too much effort.”
    “I see.”
    The doctor made notes, seemed to ignore me for a minute or two.
    “Why ask me about movies and books? What possible relevance can they have?”
    “Has it ever struck you how your story might sound to someone else? Like something from a movie, a thriller. Or a crime novel.”
    “Maybe. Don’t you think your own version of my story is just as far-fetched? Just as much straight out of the movies?”
    The moment I said that, I realized something. Of course, in my doctor’s eyes, I
was
the perfect patient. The one in a thousand, the case history that could be written up into a truecareer booster. In which case, it was no longer simply a question of my trying to persuade the doctor of the truth. I’d also have to break down his self-interested resistance. In fact, I’d have to play him like a patient.
    “There are two views available to you,” the doctor was now saying. “The first is the one you are obstinate in believing. That you were a stooge for some mysterious ‘scheme for disappearing people,’ to use your own words. That you were tricked into committing a man to a hospital that doesn’t exist. That staff at this hospital then let you walk away with him, despite the fact that he was in a state of sedation. That you put him up in your apartment, that he fell into a coma, and shortly after died in your bed. And that for no good reason you’ve been the victim of a murder attempt. You haven’t come up with any sort of coherent picture as to how all this could be true: it’s just a string of bizarre fragments. Or there’s the other view. That you have suffered something, perhaps a cerebral lesion or some earlier psychic trauma, or a combination of the two, that accounts for your delusional beliefs. Objectively, which do you think the average person would find most likely?”
    “If you truly believe I’m deluded, then why on earth are you trying to reason with me? As a psychiatrist, you must know that you can’t reason the deluded out of their delusions. You have to find other means.”
    The doctor went back to scribbling in his pad. I was stupidly pleased with my riposte; something in me was keen to rattle the doctor, over and above any desire to leave the hospital. From a certain perspective, it occurred to me, our roles were interchangeable. Both believing the other to be deluded. Both with a personal stake in convincing the other of his unreason.
    “But really. Do I look or act in any way like a drifter fromOhio? Do I talk like one? Do you even think I have an Ohio accent?”
    “Things are learned, unlearned. You’ve been in New York a decade now. You claim you grew up on Long Island. You don’t have a Long Island accent either.”
    Even as I was speaking, even as I’d brought up the question of accent, I could hear a Midwestern twang creeping into my voice. Similar to the way a wrongly accused man can’t help acting guilty, it seemed that if you were treated as a mental patient, you’d ultimately end up behaving like one. Once, in an earlier session, I’d switched off and was in the middle of a daydream when the doctor had suddenly asked me something. Momentarily disoriented, I’d said: “Where am I?” before immediately recognizing it as the kind of thing disturbed patients were always saying out of the blue.
    After the doctor had left that day, I felt more unsettled than usual. With this talk of brain lesions and psychic trauma, he’d been blunter than ever before. As if he’d found himself at the end of one strategy, giving it a last shot before embarking on another. It was true that we’d reached some sort of stalemate. By now, I had a reply to just about anything the doctor could throw at me. I had begun to resemble long-term patients I’d known, who’d had all the time in the world to consider and construct an argument against every