Dark Maze

friendly wave of his garden trowel and a “Hi ya’, how are ya?” in the manner of the late Governor Rockefeller. He said the same to a gaggle of nurses and fellow shrinks. And then we wound our way through one hall, down another, then another, all the while Reiser leading the way with friendly waves of his trowel and the “Hi ya” treatment to a small army of oversize security guards. Finally we reached a row of office doors with steel plates on them, one of which bore Reiser’s name and title: dr. RONALD REISER, SUPERVISING PSYCHIATRIST.
    The office was not much. I have seen better accommodations at some precinct station houses, even up in the Bronx. There was a big brown desk at the center of the room, overflowing with newspapers and telephone message slips and food crumbs and dried-up styrofoam coffee cups. To the side sat a brown leather couch you could not sit on because of all the stacks of medical magazines; and in the corner a brown file cabinet, which Reiser started pawing through.
    I sat down on a steel chair with cracked vinyl pads and scanned a wall of bookshelves. There were a lot of medical volumes mostly, but I spotted a couple of Robertson Davies novels and this told me that Reiser was probably all right.
    Two of the bookends on his shelves were human skulls that looked to be the real goods.
    On the edge of his desk there were pens and pencils standing up in a ceramic mug with the message, “You toucha my cup, I breaka you face” on its side. On the wall behind the desk was a framed photograph of Sigmund Freud.
    Reiser found what he was looking for in the brown cabinet and sat down with it at his desk. He opened a manila folder and riffled through years of notes inked on pale-blue lined paper. He made a few clucking sounds, then asked, “Would you be interested in knowing the very first words that on friend Picasso said to me?”
    I said I was interested.
    “This was at our first session, on the seventeenth of November, 1984. I wrote it down I was so impressed.” Reiser removed a piece of blue paper from his file. “He was sitting where you’re sitting now, and he looked up at the picture on the wall in back of me and he said, ‘I want to make one brief statement about psychoanalysis: Fuck Dr. Freud.’”
    “Picasso is not your hesitant conversationalist.”
    Reiser clucked again. “I respectfully disagree with that, Detective Hockaday. The way he operates, Picasso always starts by putting you way off-balance... ”
    In between that and the rest of what Reiser told me, I kept hearing Logue’s words from the other day as we stood over Celia Furman’s leaking body: "We have got here a case of somebody being out of circulation so long she was off-balance { about her prospects for longevity. Now, ain’t that evident —] and ain’t you seen it play that way before, Detective Hockaday?”
    “... and then in this way, he forces you to listen to what he calls his ‘observations,’ which are quite important to him; and then when he’s finished with you, he puts you off-balance again and you can’t quite get this bird out of your mind.
    “And the thing that really keeps you off-balance is that you never know anything about this guy. Well, not very much that adds up, let’s say. And he’s not about to tell you much, either. When he does give you something in the way of a fact, it may or may not be true; more than likely, he’ll toss you a riddle, then it’s up to you to reason it out.
    “Speaking as Picasso’s psychiatrist, and as a man of science, I would say our poor Charlie is wacko.”
    That was pretty straightforward for a doctor, I thought. “The other doctors here, before you took him on, did they think Charlie was wacko, too?” I asked.
    “Oh, I don’t think anybody ever diagnosed him in any serious way. Nobody kept notes like I do; nobody ever found time or had the motive to work out the riddles. Ah yes, the riddles...“
    Reiser opened a desk drawer and removed a box of cigars, good ones. We both lit up.
    “You see,” Reiser continued, “the way Picasso usually came in here was with a couple of cops who would find him howling in the street, usually outside some art gallery somewhere. They didn’t bother making it official since he never hurt anybody. They’d just run him in here, and the staff shrinks would go through the motions because they had enough hard cases to report on...“
    I interrupted with, “Why didn’t anybody ever take the man