Chase: Roman

possibility that you would be hurt or killed, and you must have subconsciously anticipated that agreeably enough.’
        ‘You're wrong,’ Chase said. ‘It wasn't like that at all. I had thirty pounds on him, and I knew what I was doing. He was an amateur. He had no hope of really hurting me.’
        Cauvel said nothing. Several minutes passed until Chase recognized the scene they were acting out and had acted out in a number of other sessions. When he apologized at last, Cauvel smiled at him. ‘Well, you aren't a psychiatrist, so we can't expect you to see into it quite so clearly. You aren't detached from it like I am.’ He cleared his throat, looked back at the blue terrier. He said, ‘Now that we have come this far, why did you solicit this extra session, Ben?’
        Once he began, Chase found the telling easy. In ten minutes he had related the events of the previous day and repeated, almost word for word, the conversations he had with Judge.
        When he had finished, Cauvel asked, ‘What do you want of me, then?’
        ‘I want to know how to handle it, some advice. When he calls, it's more than just the threats that upset me. It's - a feeling of detachment from everything, like I was in the hospital.’
        ‘Another breakdown?’
        ‘I'm afraid there might be.’
        Cauvel said, ‘My advice is to ignore him.’
        ‘I can't.’
        ‘You must,’ Cauvel said.
        ‘What if he's serious? What if he's really going to kill me?’
        ‘He won't.’
        ‘How can you be sure?’ Chase was perspiring heavily. Great dark circles stained the underarms of his shirt and plastered it to his back.
        Cauvel smiled at the blue terrier, shifted his gaze to a greyhound blown in amber, that smug, self-assured look drifting over his face like a mask. ‘I can be so sure of that, because Judge does not exist.’
        For a moment Chase did not understand the reply. When he grasped the import of it, he did not like it. He said, ‘How could I have hallucinated it? The part about the murder and the girl are in the papers.’
        ‘Oh, that was real enough,’ Cauvel said. ‘But these phone calls are all so much illusion.’
        ‘It can't be.’
        Cauvel ignored that and said, ‘I've noticed for some time that you have begun to shake off this unnatural desire for privacy and that you're facing the world a little bit more squarely on, week by week. You've felt yourself growing curious about the rest of the world, and you've become restless to do something. Is that correct?’
        ‘I don't know,’ Chase said. But he did know, it was correct, and it bothered him that it was so.
        ‘Perhaps you even felt a renewal of your sexual urge, but perhaps not that much yet. A counter-reaction of guilt set in, because you had not yet been punished for the things that happened in that tunnel, and you didn't want to lead a normal life until you felt you'd suffered enough.’
        Chase said nothing. He disliked the tone of smug complacency, of unquestioned self-assurance that Cauvel adopted for moments like this. Right now all he wanted was out of there, to get home and close the door and open the bottle. A new bottle.
        Cauvel said, ‘You couldn't accept the fact that you wanted to taste the good things of life again, and you invented Judge because he represented the remaining possibility of punishment. You had to make some excuses for being forced into life again, and Judge worked well in this respect too. You would, sooner or later, have to take the initiative to stop him. You could pretend that you still wanted seclusion in which to mourn but were no longer being permitted that indulgence.’
        ‘All wrong,’ Chase said, ‘Judge is real.’
        ‘I think not.’ Cauvel smiled at the amber greyhound and said, ‘If you thought he was real, why not go to the police rather than your psychiatrist?’
        Chase had no answer. He said, ‘You're twisting things.’
        ‘No. Just showing you the straight truth.’ He stood up, stretched, his too-long trousers rising on his unpolished shoes, falling when he finished his yawn. ‘I recommend you go home and forget Judge. You don't need an excuse to live like a normal human being. You have suffered enough, Ben, more than enough. For the lives you took, you saved others. Remember that.’
        Chase stood, bewildered, no longer perfectly sure that he did know what was real and what was