This Dog for Hire

murder I had been hired to solve, alive through the miracle of modern technology.
    The technique had been around for ten years or so, predicated on the idea that watching the tape would let the patient see and understand things he had missed during the session, that seeing yourself respond, and not respond, would continue the process of education at home, between sessions.
    Why not? Everything was on tape nowadays. People being born now would, in years to come, be watching themselves sally forth into life. What would they think, hearing those first cries at leaving the paradise of the womb for the harsh lights of the delivery room? What would they think, seeing themselves pop naked and greasy into the hands of a stranger?
    I had pulled a tape from the middle, not paying too much attention to the dates. Waiting as patiently as Dr. Kleinman for Clifford to troll within and come up with something else to say—God, how I hated those blank moments early on in my therapy—I picked up the box and looked at the dates, four of them, four sessions on each tape.
    Waiting, I began to think about Clifford’s work, about the painting of Magritte at the window, the rain coming down indoors, inside Cliff. Those others, the gray paintings.
    Now suddenly my mind was moving fast. I looked at the box in my hands, at the dates, then rewound the tape and looked for another, and another, all around the time that Dennis had said Clifford had come to see him and he was wild, pacing, he had found out something about someone, wasn’t that w hat Dennis had told me? And that it had to he exposed, at any cost.
    Exposed.
    I had to look at the film, too, the slides, it was dark enough in the den, but first I had to find the tape, I was sure there’d be one, where Clifford found out whatever it was he’d found out, trolling within, I was sure now that that’s where the discovery had been made.
    Three hours and twelve minutes later, the Mallomars long gone, the dogs asleep on Clifford’s big white bed, I finally found what I had been looking for.

31
    Man, I Couldn’t Stop

    HE WAS WEARING a navy blue turtleneck, the golden-brown curls like a halo around his face, his eyes no longer pinched and small but as round, open, and vulnerable as a child’s.
    It had been coming for months, for ages, hour after hour, talking about low self-esteem, about his lack of confidence, about feeling ugly, this beautiful child of man, sweet-faced, sad, trying to make the bad feelings go away, trying to find out why, why some people could feel comfortable, even happy, but he couldn’t.
    “What would you like to say?” Bert asked as Clifford attached the microphone, pinching up a piece of his sweater and clipping it in place. “You look so sad today.”
    “I kept thinking about what you said, when I brought in the album, about how happy I had looked as a baby and as a young boy, and then the change, you saw the change, that later I never looked at the camera, only down, and that I looked so sad, almost frightened, you said. I kept thinking about that.”
    He wiped his palm over his lips.
    He sighed.
    “So I looked at the pictures at home, not the tape this time, the photographs,” and his round, brown eyes began to shine with tears, his cheeks flushed, his nose and chin became pink, “and I kept seeing what you saw, I can see it now, I can’t understand that I didn’t always see it, and I kept asking myself why, and the more I did that, the worse I felt.” Clifford sat still for a moment, nothing moving except the tears running over his wet lashes and down his cheeks, falling onto his hands and lap.
    “One day I’d paint for twelve hours, the next I d stay in bed, keep my dog with me under the covers, not answer the phone, not go to Louie’s house. I felt I didn’t deserve to see him.”
    Clifford turned away, his lips pursed, brow knit, eyes closed. And waited. We all waited.
    “That’s how I feel,” he said, his voice hoarse with emotion, “that there’s something wrong with me, that I deserve to feel like shit.”
    Tears fell.
    “But I don’t know why,” he shouted. “I don't know why.”
    “What are you feeling now?”
    “Nothing.” Sullen.
    “You look angry now.”
    “I’m not.
    Silence.
    “That’s not true, I am. Do you know what I did?”
    “No, what?”
    “I was taking out the pictures, so I could look at them better, first when I was happy, like you said, then later, when I was . . . not, like you said, when I was not