Saving Elijah

pointing.
    "Of the turtles?" I could smell the sweetness in his skin. I drank it in, tried to think of a word to describe it, a way to always have it with me.
    He nodded. "I want my lullaby, Mommy," he said.
    I sighed, picked him up in my arms, and carried him to his bed. Covering him with his quilt, I began to sing. I sang softly, trying not to cry:

    Wynken and Blynken are two little eyes,
And Nod is a little head,
And the wooden shoe that sailed the skies
Is a wee one's trundle-bed.

    When I was through, he insisted I sing it to him again, and again. His eyes were shining in the dark. He reached up and wound his arms around my neck.
    "Don't be afraid, Mommy."
    But I was afraid. Very afraid.

twenty-four
    I was really struggling in those last weeks of spring, yet I carried even with my work, though I was losing patients, for one reason or another, at the rate of about one a week. I had always written the checks for the household bills so I managed to hide the fact that my income was plummeting rapidly. Sam and I didn't talk much during this period, except about household matters. Didn't make love at all. Once or twice we started to, but the demon hovered behind me, lay beside me, licking its chops. My nakedness in front of my tormentor was a degradation I couldn't bear. It was like spreading my legs before an audience of leering old men. I wanted to cover myself, I wanted to peel out of my filthy skin. Although I tried to go on with it, Sam knew I wasn't there. We'd been married too long for him not to know. Worse, he tried to make a joke out of it, but humor wasn't going to fix this. I knew it, and he knew it. I had the feeling he was always watching me, expecting me to suddenly start foaming at the mouth.
    Just as bad as Sam's constant watching was my absolute inability to practice my profession properly. I never knew when the demon would show up in some new form or way to frighten or confuse me. Or would show up just to spew accusations, charge me with taking people's money for nothing, denounce me for charlatanism, wonder how I could listen to my patients' self-deluding blather.
    I was unable to separate my own feelings from the demon's screeds at that point. How's this for lack of restraint? I told a patient of four years, a woman who claimed only to want to get married and have some kids, but who dated only married men, that she was being "pretty stupid." Transference? Countertransference? Who knew, who cared? It was as if my patience had dwindled to nil and my tongue was a loose cannon.
    I was also losing faith in the therapeutic process itself, in the notion that we can even begin to understand the human mind, in the utter arrogance of diagnoses we presumptuously slap on people, infinitely complicated beings in a universe vast and complex.
    How did "personality disorder" explain or describe a mother's capacity to be cruel to her child and not even realize she was being cruel? How did "psychosis" explain why someone believes there are aliens poisoning him, hears voices, thinks himself possessed by the Devil? More important, how did we know there weren't voices, and aliens, and devils?
    My disillusionment with the profession grew, and I became obsessed with the nerve of it. What validity was there to a "science" where there was no general agreement among its practitioners on even its most basic assumptions? Or guarantee that the practitioners weren't dangerously playing out their own psychic disturbances on their patients?
    I even began to dream about this, snappy little nightmares attesting to my own conceit. In one dream, I am sitting in my office behind a desk. In walks a succession of my patients, some I recognize, some I don't. I sit behind my desk and touch each of them on the shoulder with a long wand I hold regally in my hand as they parade by. I even have a crown on my head.
    Was I the narcissist? I no longer knew.
    I did know I was a fake, and a failure. I should not have continued to practice, and I knew it. And yet I went on.

    *    *    *

    The day my piece about serial killers ran in the paper, I got a call from Peter. I wasn't surprised at his persistence. Nothing surprised me anymore.
    It was just after noon. My last patient of the day, in fact my only patient that day, had departed, and I was still sitting in my chair, sluggishly writing up my session notes. At least I hadn't alienated this one. Not yet, anyway. If I lost Maria Lessing, it would be some kind of a watershed. A phobic so