Saving Elijah

forty-four," came a hiss in my ear.
    Damn. What now?
    "Married a long time?"
    "Forever." She groaned. "Twenty-one years."
    "Just like you." Another hiss.
    Damn. Damn. Damn.
    "So," I asked my patient, "he hasn't told her you're in the picture?"
    "He said he would but then he didn't. And that was two months ago."
    She expected him to leave his wife of all those years after a few months with her? We definitely had some narcissism going here, unrealistic expectations, a touch of grandiosity. I did my standard intake, we made an appointment for the following week, and I walked her to the door, thankful the demon sabotage had been limited to whispers and suggestions. The receptionist handed me a stack of mail and gestured toward a small, brown stuffed bear that was sitting upright at one end of the desk.
    "That came for you too, Dr. Galligan." She smiled.
    Cute. The bear had on a little white coat, and spectacles, and a stethoscope around its neck. A card was pinned to the coat. I took it back into my office and opened it:

    Dear Dinah,
    I hope you don't mind that I looked up the address of your office. I think I offended you yesterday, and I wanted to apologize. I'm sure my behavior did nothing to change your assessment of physicians as arrogant egotists. But really. Moore notwithstanding, some of us are really nice guys.

    Best,
    Peter St. Clair  
    P.S.: The picture above your byline doesn't do you justice.

    I laughed. To tell the truth, I looked like hell. Lack of sleep had etched black circles under my eyes, I had hollows in my cheeks. Still, it was nice to hear. And actually I hadn't said anything about doctors and their egos. He had.
    I laid the card on a bookshelf in my office and put the little doctor bear on top of it.

    *    *    *

    That night I managed to fall asleep for a few hours, but I woke up every half hour or so beginning at midnight, until three a.m. when I finally gave up. I went in to check on Elijah, then went down the hallway to my office, where that afternoon I'd been playing around with a piece whose idea had been inspired by Peter St. Clair's little joke about being a "serial killer, for all you know." I'd always been interested in serious pathology myself, but in addition to nonfiction books on the subject, I used to read novels about serial killers, too. Those can-you-top-this-depravity contests, where the writer comes up with an incredibly sadistic and unheard of method of inflicting fatal damage on the human body, usually a female body, and then describes each successive murder in excruciating detail. I swore off them when I read that the number of serial-killer novels published each year is several times greater than the estimated number of actual serial killers on the loose. That can't be good, can it?
    I'd written a draft of my piece from the viewpoint of an alien on a factfinding mission who happens to crash-land his ship on earth at a mall. He goes in and stops in front of the best-seller rack, where each featured serial killer is billed as the most vicious, the most demonic, the most methodical killer ever. "Ah, so this is what these beings are all about. But how do they survive?" I thought I'd call it: "Take Me to Your ... Gulp ... Leader!"
    My study was dark except for the small lamp I'd left on. I turned on my computer and monitor, which added another element of light in the room, bluish.
    The screen should have been blank until I called up the serial-killer file. But it wasn't. There were words flickering on the screen. They were in the font I used, and they were words I had perhaps thought once, but they were not words I had ever typed in:

    These years I would watch him breathing,
day in and day out, in and out whoosh-pump
he would not watch me watch him
he would not be watching
he would not be
Elijah

    I swallowed a scream, clamped my hand over my mouth.
    "Mommy?"
    Turning, I saw Elijah standing there in his canary-yellow Big Bird pajamas. He was holding Tuddy and Creatures of the Deep.
    Quickly, I shut off the computer. Elijah was a long way from being able to read, but these days he was full of surprises. The screen turned black and the words disappeared, just as if they had never existed.
    Elijah didn't seem the least bit interested in what was or wasn't on the screen. He climbed up on my lap and opened his book. He began turning the pages until he got to something he wanted to show me, the extraordinary two-page photograph of sea turtles.
    "I dreamed," he said,