“I’m telling you, it’s following me.”
“Cars don’t follow people . . .”
“Lemme guess: people follow people.”
“Well . . .”
“What do I pay you for, anyway?”
“Have you looked through the window to see who’s driving, Kate?”
“It has tinted windows.”
“Have you contacted the police?”
“I have contacted the police, like, 75 times.” I took out the Kleenex and wiped my hands against any germs that might’ve floated onto my fingertips in the last couple a minutes, then incanted in my thoughts: Bacterium, virus, leave me please, and clenched my eyes and closed my nasal passages and then shot air through my nose and coughed to eject any germs that may have gathered in my breathing passages. Candace waited until I finished.
People make fun of OCD on sitcoms, in books, plays. They think it’s cute, or endearing. But it’s not like that. It means driving around the same intersection over and over to make sure you didn’t hit that little boy on his bicycle. It means washing your hands until they’re red and raw. Not stepping on lines in tiles in public restrooms, and if you do, then stepping on another tile border to make sure the number of borders you’ve stepped on stays even. Odd numbers are bad.
It borders on delusion, sometimes. Thinking people know that you’re attracted to them, that you fantasize about them. I’d been seeing Candace for six years over this shit. Six years? And the best she could do is prescribe me Zoloft to cleanse me of the thoughts that I wasn’t clean enough. That I could catch any disease on the wind at any time. That things like cancer and MS would eventually be found to have contagious transmission vectors. That I forgot to turn off the stove and would need to come back home again and again just to make sure. That made me two hours late for work once. I couldn’t get out of the house some days, I’d have to go back and check it so often. And I lost job after job because of this, because of the handwashing, the phone calls to make sure my mother hadn’t died of a heart attack even though she was only 56.
The compulsions were aimed at reducing or counteracting the obsessive thinking. Only they didn’t work. I only hoped they would, one day. I’pe. I’pe was one of my magical contractions, for ‘I hope.’ I had to say it to make sure that what I hoped for came true, and that it’s opposite, what I hoped wouldn’t happen, didn’t happen.
“You’re not helping me, Candace,” I griped as I grabbed my purse. Our hour was up.
“Let’s titrate the Zoloft up a couple notches,” she said in her colorless voicemail voice. “Take 80 milligrams instead of 60. I’ll write it up.”
“It’s not that. The meds, they’re OK. It’s the talk therapy that’s not getting to the bottom of things. And you said it would. Not wood,” I whispered. ‘Would’ sounded like ‘wood.’ Otherwise, my mind may cast that wood intention into the universe and well, I didn’t want to run into any wood or get a splinter or get hit over the head by wood or fall through a wood staircase. Whenever I used a word that had a homonym, I had to negate the homonym for that word, to make sure my mind knew the difference, to make sure I wasn’t intending the alternate phoneme for the word, because intentions had power, and the universe was like a maddeningly literal copy machine that gave you what you put out, however unintentionally. The Akashic record, and all that. So, “not wood.” If I was in public, around people who wouldn’t understand, I’d think the negative of the homonym to myself. If I was around someone safe like Candace or Mother, I’d whisper it. If I was alone, I’d say it in full voice.
Candace and Mother were the only people I felt safe with anyway. Candace, she was a saint. I took out all my frustrations on her. She was a Jungian, I made sure. They used the blank slate technique where they were the sounding board (not bored). I’d tried therapists trained in CBT, DBT, IDDT. I’d tried groups (a disaster), family therapy (Mother would [not wood] not stop talking). I tried half-a-dozen drugs, Zen, men, the mountains, rebirth therapy, and a therapy parrot. Whenever my bird, Cortez Charlie, uttered a word, I had to counteract it with a word that began with the letter in the alphabet as far away from the opposite end of the beginning in the word Charlie used. Whenever animals talked, I did that. If he said boy¸ I had to say yellow. Then he’d say ‘boy’ again, in response to my ‘yellow,’ and I’d have to say ‘yellow’ again. Pretty soon, it was me and an African gray parrot, going: Boy. Yellow. Boy. Yellow. Boy. Yellow. Boy. Yellow, until I got hoarse (not horse). Charlie lasted a week. I gave him to a coworker.
Some of this may make you laugh, but it really makes me cry. Living like this leads to cutting by the time you’re 15, suicides often follow a couple decades later. You get straight ‘A’s’ in grad school because you’re a perfectionist, but it also leads to the psychiatric breakdowns in grad school. It leads to living alone in a studio apartment, because that’s the only thing you can keep clean enough. It leads to isolation. It leads, eventually, to delusion. And that’s what I faced now.
In extreme cases, the OCD patient becomes psychotic. I’m sure that the Police Department already suspects me of that. I work for them, or with them, actually. I work more precisely for the Illinois State Police Crime Lab, who often analyze samples for local PD’s. I’m a forensic blood splatter expert. I used to be terrified of blood borne pathogens, but odd as it may seem, it was the right career for me. The gloves, the gown, the mask; it all makes me feel safe and even a little powerful. I’m not scared of blood anymore, or of anything in it.
The local PD is familiar with me in another way. They have names for me: Krazy Kate, or Double K. I hold the record for greatest number of 911 calls in the State, I was told: 447. Oh, I mean, I don’t call every day for just anything. Noises are my specialty. Any noise I hear (not here), late into the night might not (not mite) be a burglar, or a serial killer. So, I dial it in.
An attorney from the Village tried to have me prosecuted for misuse of public resources and even telephone harassment, but my defense was that I had a disabling mental condition. It wasn’t difficult to prove.
So, I kept calling them. The thing about obsessions and compulsions is that you can’t help yourself. You know it’s wrong, that you’re frigging crazy, but you have to do it anyway. Have to do it. I mean, that’s the definition of a compulsion, isn’t it? Something that overrides the will. So, by now it went like this—
“9-1-1, what’s the nature of your emergency?”
“There’s someone following me, in a black BMW.”
“How’s it going, Kate?”
“Oh, I’m alright. What about you, Frank?”
“Fine. License number of the vehicle?”
“That’s the thing. It doesn’t have any license plates.”
“What’s your location?”
“I’m at home.”
“That’d be 547 Morning Dew Lane?”
“I don’t know if you’d call it a home. It’s only a condo.”
“That’s alright.”
“The Association’s still trying to have me removed for night vacuuming the common areas.”
“U-huh. Is the vehicle in the vicinity of your unit right now, Kate?”
“Yes. It’s down in the visitor parking area. I think,” I said as I peeked (not peaked) through my blackout curtains. I was hypersensitive to light. My great aunt (not grate not ant) had that and she went into dementia 20 years before she died.
“Can you describe the vehicle in greater detail?”
“It’s a black Beemer, a sedan, with tinted windows. Looks brand new (not knew). It’s been following me around for over a week (not weak).”
“You want us to send someone out, Kate?”
“Well, I’m not sure. I don’t want to be a bother.”
“It’s no bother. It’s what we do. Just stay in your unit and don’t confront the driver of that vehicle in any way, okay?”
“Yes, Frank, I know the drill. Bye bye (not by by and not buy buy).”
“Take care, Kate.”
Sometimes, I think the dispatchers thought I called because I was lonely. But that wasn’t it. Really, it wasn’t.
I glanced at my wall calendar. “Oh, I’m late for Candace.” So, I walked down the rear steps of the building and to my car.
I got in my Prius, checked in back of me three times: first in the rearview mirror, the second time in the side mirrors, right and left, and the third time in the rearview camera. Then, I inched out and listened for the ping of the threat detector.
I drove the 1.75 miles to Candace’s office. I bought a condo near her office to minimize driving. I checked my mirror. That black BMW was following me.
“Fuck.”
I slowed through the school zone. The Beamer slowed behind me. I stopped at a yellow light. It stopped. I turned left when the green arrow came on. It turned left.
“I mean, just too coincidental,” I mumbled.
I pulled into Candace’s office parking lot, and you know what happened next? It turned in there, too.
I parked. It parked on the far end of the lot. I pulled out my cell phone to call the police again.
“No,” I whispered. “It’ll be safer to do it from Candace’s office.”
I hurried from my car into the stairwell and up the half-flight of stairs to her lobby, a tiny affair with just a few seats. Candace had a solo practice, and she worked seven days a week. Very dedicated. I’d heard from some other client that she did forensics work – you know – evaluations for the courts. She was written up in the papers for profile work that helped catch serial killers.
I stood in the waiting room, breathless from the climb, sweaty from the layers of coat, sweater, long-sleeved wool blouse I wore. Poor circulation. Candace’s receptionist, Becky, an older woman with a Brooklyn accent, smiled from behind the glass.
“Dr. Owen will be with you shortly, Kate,” Becky said with her dentured smile. She did her Sudoku. I sat in the far chair, the one (not won) least likely to have been sat in in the last hour. Candace had broken me of using disposable toilet covers when I sat in public chairs. It was one of the reasons I still came to see (not sea) her: the slow progress we seemed (not seamed) to be making over the last half-dozen years.
Becky picked up the phone and buzzed Candace. “Your next appointment’s here.” She listened. “Okay.” She turned to me: “Dr. Owen will see you now, Kate.” And I went in.
“He’s out there now,” I whispered before Candace’s office door even closed. I went to the window and Candace followed and we peeked between her blinds. The car was gone!
“Where?”
“It’s moved.” She looked in the wrong direction. “No, there (not their, not they’re)!” I said, pointing to the parking lot for the Jewish funeral home that connected with Candace’s. “It’s parked over there (not they’re, not their) now, all by itself. Believe me now?”
“I do,” she mumbled back in some astonishment as we kept spying at it through her dark, metal miniblinds, which we bent irreparably.
“It followed me all the way from home and straight into your lot.”
“And you’re sure it’s the same car?” Candace said from behind her thick bifocals and smooth, middle age cheeks.
“When will you have faith in me?”
“I’m just making sure. In case we need to call the police.”
“Yes, it’s the same car. Tinted windows all the way around. No license plates. You come across many cars like that? Without any license plates?”
“No. Though I can’t see the back of the car to see if there’s a plate.”
“Well then let’s go out and look.”
I started for the door. She set her fingers on my sleeve. “Kate, I don’t think that would be wise.”
“No? I’ve never been all that wise anyway.”
“Kate.” But I was already out the door.
I stepped fast over to the funeral home lot which adjoined Candace’s. You couldn’t actually drive into it from hers, but you could step across the parking barriers, through the hedges and into that lot. The black Beemer was parked, the engine still running, the exhaust billowing out in the cold, gray winter air.
“Excuse me! Excuse me!” I said, approaching my reflection in the driver’s window. “Why are you following me?” I knocked on the window.
I pointed to Candace’s office window. “See that office right there? In there are two people who know I’m out here right now. They are watching you, buddy. They’ve been told everything about you following me around for the last 10 days. They’re calling the cops right now! So you, sir, better knock this shit off!” I didn’t dare pull on the door.
It backed away and drove off. I stormed back into the office. I felt like this great exhaust blew clear out of me. People didn’t think that little, skinny, germaphobe Kate with all the hang-ups could possibly have the balls to do what I just did. But OCD didn’t mean lack of courage. It meant the opposite. If normal folks knew what I had to do to just to get out of bed, a lot of them would give up trying.
And it wasn’t something I’d asked for: I came from a long line of obsessives on my father’s side. They went all the way back to Eastern Europe. A farmer who refused to pick up the eggs of his chickens unless the egg was pointing toward Jerusalem. A great aunt who placed plastic coverlets on top of her doilies and on the bathmat in her tub.
It took guts for me to go to school and learn how to analyze – of all things for someone terrified of contagion – blood. Yeah, I had courage. And every once in a while, it flew out of me like dragons. When I finished talking down that driver, I felt like I stood on top of a mountain.
I exploded back into the waiting room and pretended to flex my biceps. Becky was on the other line.
“I’ll let her in in a moment, Candace,” and she hung up. “She’s calling the police,” Becky told me. “Please wait a moment,” she said to me.
I looked at all the seats, and then sat in the germiest chair I could find, the kiddy chair next to a picnic basket full of toys. I picked up a virus-riddled children’s book – Who Moved My Cheese? – and licked it. I wasn’t scared! I almost took a bite from the cover just for the hell of it. But, that’d qualify me for another diagnosis, wouldn’t it? Pica.
“You know that a black Beemer’s been following me for two frigging weeks; to my mom’s, to the dentist, and then, it followed me here. It knows where I live, where I work, where I shop, and where I therapize. But I got rid of it. I chased it away!”
“Sounds like real progress,” Becky said in a patronizing way, and went back to her Sudoku.
After about a minute-and-a-half, she got a buzz from Candace. “She’ll see you now,” she said with those overdone red lips.
I rushed in to her office. Candace was still on the phone. “Yes. Yes she’s right here. I’ll let her talk to you.” She handed me her cell, and I wasn’t even afraid of the bacteria.
“Hello?”
“Kate?” the voice asked.
“Yes.”
“This is Westfield 9-1-1. We’re sending someone out right away. Can you give me a description of the vehicle?”
“Is this Frank?”
“Yes.”
“I already told you all that, from my condo.” I peered through the blinds again. “It’s gone. It’s gone, Frank.”
“You really should stay inside the building until a unit gets there.”
“I will. I will. I promise.” I hung up and faced Candace. ‘Now you believe me, right?”
“Of course,” she said in her stiff, aloof way, as if she’d believed me all along, which, of course, she hadn’t.
“So what do we do now?” I asked.
“We wait for the police.”
I sloughed my coat off on the floor, plopped down on her couch and spread my arms across its back as if it was mine, which it should’ve been, being as I came here three times a week. “I think this is a breakthrough, don’t you?”
“I do.” Her voice was so soft, almost a whisper, yet always clear.
“I mean, I went right out there and confronted him.”
“You did.”
“I feel so… free. Triumphant. In the moment.” I pumped a fist. I shot up and paced, startling the professorial Doctor Owen. I had so much energy exploding out of me, all at once. I snapped my fingers. “And you know what else? I’m not having any obsessions right now. My head’s clear. Look.” And I knelt down on the carpet and rubbed my hands all over her couch and her Kleenex box. I never, ever used anyone else’s Kleenex box. I brought my own. “Breathe on me.”
“What?”
“Breathe on me. Go on. All over me.” I was on all fours in front of my therapist like a manic beagle, asking her to breathe on me. I stuck my nose up toward hers, my shoulders between the slacks of her dark blue pantsuit from decades back. Candace didn’t know how to dress. She let out a couple awkward huffs and I snorted them right in.
“I’m not even afraid. And listen to me: ‘Hear, would, hair, there. They’re, their.’ Those are all homonyms. And I’m not negating their opposites because I’m not hearing those incessant commands in my head to do that. ‘I hope.’ Listen.” And I stilled my thoughts and listened to them. “I didn’t even hear I’pe! Know why, ’cuz I’m not obsessing. That’s the answer. That’s the answer, Candace. I just have to confront my fears, like, all the time. Gimme your wastebasket.”
“What?”
“Your garbage basket. I gotta keep doing this.”
I crawled over to her desk and grabbed a small, wicker basket filled with snotty Kleenex.
“Kate, I wouldn’t do that if I were you. My clients cry a lot.”
I waded my hands into it, feeling all the curst and boogers and damp. And I laughed. I cackled as I licked my fingers. I didn’t care. “This is it. This is it. This’s been the secret the whole time. Why didn’t I think of this? It’s so damned simple.”
Candace smiled in her icy, distant way.
“And you didn’t have a thing to do with it.” I got up, strutted around her office, picked up the receiver to the phone on her landline and smelled it, felt it, licked it as she grimaced. “Remember that story I told you, about when I was four and I almost drowned, and so Mother sent me to the YWCA for swimming lessons, and I had a phobic reaction to the water and I screamed and froze up? And so they gave me Mrs. Hoggie, who they only gave to the special cases, the obsessive, phobic kids who were terrified of the deep end?”
“I remember, Kate,” Dr. Owen said with that soothing voice that seldom varied its tone or pitch or volume. She, the voicemail lady, retreated to the safety of her desk chair while I wandered madly around her office, which was appointed with matching busts of Freud and Jung. “And I would ditch swimming class, and fake cramps, and those Japanese girls would tease me until I rolled up into a ball, and I would pretend to lose my Y membership card so I could surpass that great, weekly ordeal.”
She nodded. “Yes,” she said. She’d only heard the trauma tale umpteen times. A knock came on the door. Candace rose, leaned over and opened it a crack. Then she turned to me: “It’s the police. Is it alright to breach confidentiality?”
“Never mind. I don’t need ’em.” I brushed my hands in the air for her to send them away, and after a few more mumbles through the doorway, they left and she closed the door.
“And I never learned to swim that way.” I picked up Candace’s cell phone from the coffee table and placed a call to 911.
“911, what’s the nature of your emergency?”
“Hello, Frank?”
His sigh crackled over the phone. “Yes, Kate.”
“Just calling to let you ‘n the guys know: I won’t be calling anymore.”
“Really?”
“Really. Thanks for all your patience.” And I didn’t even think of the word patients as I hung up.
“May I have my phone back, please?” Candace insisted with an outstretched palm. “There are some confidential numbers on there. Other patients.”
“Remember how I learned to swim?”
Candace recited my story: “About a year after you quit the lessons at the Y, you were in the Welles Park swimming pool, in the shallow end with your friends, Angela Simic and Caroline Wenglass.”
I snapped my fingers and pointed at her. “That’s right! Playing. That’s the piece I’ve been missing: play. Pushing that envelope. Living beyond the boundary, past the edge, but in a playful way. Not taking myself so damned seriously. Doing crazy things like confronting the unfriendly stranger in the black sedan.”
I grabbed my coat.
“I am going to go home, and,” I said as I found my coat sleeve with my hand, “and toss all my pills. And then, I’m gonna empty my shelves of useless self-help books. And then, I’ll take down my blackout curtains, and book a trip to Oregon. I always wanted to go to Southeast Oregon. I hear it’s pretty empty.” I grabbed the doorknob and slathered my fingers all over it, and then put those same fingers in my mouth. “And then I’m gonna look up Billy Kapplinger on Facebook. He had a crush on me in 7th grade. My fear of making out has been removed! Do they still say that?” I opened the door. “I’d like to cancel next week’s appointment, and try things on my own for a while.”
“You may need training wheels,” she warned.
“I am sorry, Dr. Candace Owen, but neither you nor anyone else in the mental health profession has helped me all that much. Take care,” and I blew her a kiss and walked out, never to return.
As Kate closed the door, Candace fired up her desktop and got to work on her discharge summary.
Becky walked in, leaning on her cane. “Boy, she sure shot out of here quick,” Becky said.
Candace smiled slightly. “I don’t think she’ll be back.”
“That murder profile you’re scheduled for in Colorado. Saul called and said your flight leaves tomorrow at 9:00. He’ll pick you up.”
Candace nodded and typed: Client successfully terminated.
“You know you missed your 10 o’clock this morning,” Becky went on, picking up Kleenex and straightening out miniblinds. “Doris Homan. She sat here for 25 minutes and then said she had to reschedule. Why were you so late today, Candace?”
“Traffic.” No follow-up needed, she typed.
“You’re always early. You were two weeks early in the delivery room.”
“Your point being?”
“My point being that you came in through the back door, which you never do, a minute before your patient did.”
“The back door seemed quicker.” Her voice breathless, her erudition perfect,
Becky sat on the couch with a groan. She eyed the private entrance to her daughter’s office, which led straight out into the parking lot from the back of the building.
“I know more about what goes on in here then you think, Candace,” Becky said, staring at the reflection of Candace’s eyes in the monitor’s screen as it went black, cast even more inscrutable by the bifocals. “Kate thought someone was stalking her, in a black BMW.”
Candace readied her fingers on the keyboard and lit up the screen as she continued with progress note, glancing at her wall clock. “I have the Lewis’s at noon?”
“You know you do. That door,” Becky went on, pointing to the private entrance with her cane, “That door’s a separate entrance into this building that only you use. And no one else can see you using it because it’s in the rear of the building, on the opposite side of the parking lot from the public entrance. It’s right next to that funeral home.” She poked through the blinds with her cane and peered through them at the parking lot.
“I’m going to try and finish this documentation before the Lewis’s arrive,” Candace said in her soft, small voice.
“No windows in your waiting room. I wonder. I could be paranoid, but I wonder.”
Becky struggled up and walked over to the window, splayed the blinds open with her wrinkled fingers. She saw a half-wall, made of brick, in the loading zone behind the funeral home. “I suppose that’s where they dump off the bodies, and where they put them back in the limos before they take them to the cemetery.”
Above the top course of brick, she saw the roof of a black sedan, and could just make out the top quarter of the driver’s side window. It reflected back the light. It was tinted.
Becky left Candace’s office. Rain had started to thrum the floor-to-ceiling window, a percussive accompaniment to Candace’s soft typing. Becky came back a few minutes later with a manila folder.
“You left this for me to file under Business Expenses,” she said, and she flopped it on Candace’s desk. “Open it.”
Candace opened the file. The yellow, carbon papers were a rental agreement; a car rental. For a black BMW right off the factory lot, a fleet vehicle with temporary tags. No plates. The contract was made out to NEWDAY, PC, Dr. Owen’s Professional Corporation.
“So?” Candace demurred.
“So, you followed your client from her house here. You parked at the end of the lot, far away from her car. In the time it took Kate to walk up the stairwell, up the half-flight of stairs, and into your waiting room, you raced the car over to the funeral home lot just the other side of this lot. You left the car running. You raced through your private entrance straight into your office.”
Candace seemed nervous. She blushed.
“Then, you waited for your client to come back into the building after she confronted the driver of that car. You had me keep her waiting in the waiting room, which, I repeat, has no windows. While she waited, you rushed back outside and parked in back of the funeral home behind that wall over there so no one could see the car. You stalled Kate and me while you snuck back in through the back entrance, which doesn’t require you to come through the waiting room.”
“I think that timeframe’s not possible.”
“And then you called the cops.”
“What happens with my clients in this room is privileged. You know that. What you suggest I did would be highly unethical.”
“She told me. It was a black Beemer, she said. No plates, just like this one.” Becky held up the rental agreement.
Candace wouldn’t look at her now. She signed the discharge summary electronically.
“Do you know all the things she could do to you if she found out?” Becky said.
Candace thought about it, and took off her glasses. “She could file a complaint to the Department of Financial and Professional Regulation. She could sue me. She could call 911 and report me for harassment.”
“You promised you wouldn’t do this kinda thing anymore, Candace,” Becky said as she ripped up the rental agreement. “They could suspend your license, and a lot of people depend on you.”
“It worked, didn’t it?”
“Ends don’t justify means.”
She printed out the Discharge Summary. “It’s also unethical for me to continue to work with people if I’m not helping them. I worked with her for six years.”
“Well, I’ve said all I’m going to.” Becky turned and headed for the door.
“You remember what NEWDAY stands for, don’t you?” Candace asked.
“If Nothing Else Works, Do Anything You can.” She opened the door. “My daughter, the superhero,” she said before she stepped out and closed the door.
Dr. Owen reached into her desk drawer, pulled out a file marked LEWIS, and opened it.
© 2024 by Michael C. Just
Mike’s short story collection, Canyon Calls, was published by Zumaya Publications in 2009. Mike’s novel, The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy, is available in softcover or eBook formats through Amazon.
Mike’s other titles, including his novels, The Crippy and The Mind Altar, as well as Canyon Calls, are available through his websites, https://justmikejust.com and https://canyoncallsthebook.com or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002
Five of his short stories have recently been published online:
Lies, Ltd. has been published by The Mystery Tribune @ Lies, Ltd.: Literary Short Fiction by Michael C. Just (mysterytribune.com)
The Obligate Carnivore has been published by the Scarlet Leaf Review @ Category: MICHAEL JUST – SCARLET LEAF REVIEW
I See You, Too has been published by the 96th of October @ I See You, Too – 96th of October
Offload, has been published by The Worlds Within at Offload – The Worlds Within
You Get the Two has been published by Hellbound Books and is available in print, eBook, kindle or audio format at Kids are Hell!- Anthology (hellboundbookspublishing.com)